Pink Ladies
RODMAN, SELDEN
Pink Ladies Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical By Janice R. MacKinnon and Stephen R. MacKinnon California. 425 pp. $25.00. Words on Fire: The Life and Writing of...
...Nursed back to health in Seattle by Marie Equi-lesbian, abortionist and dispenser of (illegal) birthcontrol information for Margaret Sanger-she finally recovered after 10 years and returned to New York, where she spent most of the rest of her life as a Communist Party functionary...
...Still, there were more dramatic episodes to come in her life...
...I always say ver' frank: 'Don't trus' me...
...During the years when the Kuomintang was (minimally) observing a truce with the Communists in order to counter the Japanese invasion, she was in Shanghai...
...She weathered the Earl Browder cult and the flip-flop over the Nazi-Soviet Pact...
...In fact, she hit it off best with military men-Zhou and Marshal Zhu among the Chinese Communists, General Joseph Stilwell and the Leftist Marine Colonel Evans Carlson among the Americans...
...Flynn was not happy in this dutiful role...
...Only the 70-page biographical Introduction is worth reading, but not $35 worth...
...Eventually Mao put the developing relationship with Smedley's interpreter before the Central Executive Committee...
...Smedley's relationships with women were always uneasy...
...The peak of her influence came in 1913 when she convinced 25,000 workers to leave their jobs in the famous Paterson silk strike...
...When she returned to the United States in May 1941, she was 49 and physically spent...
...In 1912 she mobilized the women and children during the Lawrence textile strike...
...It was Carlson who facilitated Smedley's entry into the Chinese Red Army headquarters in Yan'an in 1937, and her escape from China after she had lost favor with both Mao and Chiang...
...In India and to a greater extent in China, however, she won a measure of acceptance and became a respected ally of several revolutionary figures...
...Both women, it turns out, were sincere, dedicated to their causes and physically fearless...
...But she stirred up trouble by introducing square-dancing among the puritanical officers, because their wives felt threatened-including Mao's wife, He Zizhen...
...and working with Sun Yat-sen's widow, who was trying to protect the interests of Mao's forces from the Japanese and from her devious Right-wing brother-in-law, Chiang Kai-shek...
...As a teenager-and a beautiful one -Flynn joined the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), then in its heyday, and became a flame-thrower for workers' rights and women's equality...
...Stalin, the Moses of the Jews" read the title of one of her Daily Worker'columns...
...The poems are awful...
...They make for fascinating reading, and provide as good an introduction to the enormously complicated Chinese revolution as there is...
...One was a confrontation at Yaddo with Robert Lowell and others who were trying to have Smedley and Elizabeth Ames, the director of the writers' colony, expelled as Moscow agents/sympathizers-which neither was...
...At the time Mao was beginning to cast eyes at Smedley's interpreter, the beautiful Lily Wu...
...An unfitting end," concludes her biographer sadly...
...Her ashes were deposited in the Kremlin Wall...
...She also endured expulsion from the American Civil Liberties Union (which she had helped found) on the basis of guilt by association-a principle that organization publicly decried as unconstitutional...
...Her complexity stemmed from an unhappy childhood in a dirt-poor Missouri-Colorado miner's family...
...I like one woman," he explained to Max Eastman (then editor of the Masses), "an' then time pass an' I like another...
...The months Smedley spent in Yan'an were the most fulfilling of her life, and the most exciting...
...Arift developed between her and Mao after a period of closeness, but she remained friends to the end with Zhou Enlai and Marshal Zhu De, Mao's military genius, whose biography she wrote...
...Shehad an affair -the most satisfying of her life-with a leader of India's Congress Party she met in Germany, and was influential withNehru forawhile...
...Her sister described her as "deadly serious...
...35.00...
...The Wobblies, who laughed a lot and tended to divide women into mothers or prostitutes, tolerated her for a while...
...In another she lambasted Eleanor Roosevelt-earlier a friend ("It's Eleanor and Not Whistler's Mother For Me")-as a "Wall Street Whore...
...Yet their 13-year affair went badly too...
...Smedley herself was obliged to leave a month later after the Marco Polo Bridge incident forced China to declare war on Japan and the Red Army was mobilized along with the Kuomintang...
...Mao sided with Smedley...
...I shall deal with the lesser figure and the lesser book first...
...having another with Richard Sorge, a gung-ho German Comintern agent later executed by the Japanese for setting up a spy ring in wartime Tokyo that supplied intelligence to the Soviet Army...
...My character ver' emotional...
...Gracing the site is a warm inscription by Marshal Zhu...
...He was granted a divorce, but Lily Wu was banished...
...Unlike Flynn, Smedley was not appreciated at home...
...I have gran' an' real passion now, but when dat gone, I gone too.'" In 1921, jarred by the failure of the Sacco-Vanzetti defense and Haywood's flight to Moscow to avoid imprisonment on sedition charges stemming from his opposition to U.S...
...The great love of her life was the charismatic anarchist Carlo Tresca, whom she had met in the course of the Lawrence strike...
...She and Carlson met in Shanghai before he organized "Carlson's Raiders" during World War II (with Jimmy Roosevelt on his staff) and seized the Marshall and Gilbert Islands from Japan...
...In addition to pursuing her journalistic activities, she was having an affair with Xu Zhimo, China's leading poet...
...Tresca, a womanizer, grew tired of Flynn's sermons...
...Words on Fire: The Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Edited and with an Introduction by Rosalyn Fraad Boxandoli Rutgers...
...Smedley's "real" life, both before and after analysis, consisted of throwing her immense energies into the struggle to win power for the world's oppressed...
...Eulogies were delivered by Harold Ickes and General Stilwell's widow, and her ashes were flown to Beijing, where they were interred...
...Reviewed by Seiden Rodman Author, "The Eye of Man, " "Tongues of Fallen Angels" Back in the 1930s and early '40s when I co-edited a radical, non-Marxist publication called Common Sense, the names Agnes Smedley and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn were familiar to me but peripheral to my consciousness...
...Flynn seemed to have second thoughts about her creed during an imprisonment in Virginia...
...If she discovered the answer, it did not enable her to make more of her relationships with men than fleeting diversions...
...Back in Shanghai, bruised yet unbroken, Smedley spent the next four years organizing medical relief for the Communist forces and reporting on the various fronts with characteristic gusto...
...On another occasion, Smedley was physically attacked by He with a flashlight in one of the loess caves that sheltered the Red Army...
...I assumed they were ordinary Communist Party apologists...
...Smedley's various sojourns in China form the dominant parts of this brilliantly researched biography...
...entry into World War I, Flynn suffered a mental and physical collapse...
...302 pp...
...Meanwhile her self-degradation proceeded apace...
...You're acting like a rich woman in an American movie...
...In her native land-which she truly loved -and in Germany, she failed: Her mannish features and overexuberant style did not go over well with the middle class majorities in either country...
...Mao intervened and rebuked his wife: "You're the one who has shamed us...
...Agnes Smedley was an American rebel too, but a much more complex one, and far more successful in terms of having an impact on world events...
...Ultimately, though, she opted to live in Moscow, where she died in 1964 at the age of 74...
...Though the embattled Smedley held her own during the postwar Red scare, her strength finally gave out, and she died on May 6,1950...
...she seldom laughed or even smiled...
...Soon thereafter Flynn married an agitator and had a son, but fared poorly as a wife and mother...
...Words on Fire is badly titled...
...Maybe Flynn's words seemed incandescent when she delivered them to her audiences, but on paper they're heavier than dough...
...Yes, she said, explaining that with her Indian lover the physical and the spiritual were linked as never before or since...
...Big Bill Haywood, one of the IWW's founders, taught the young Flynn to simplify her rhetoric and to speak to "immigrants as one would speak to children...
...Abused by her father, she had to be psychoanalyzed 30 years later in Germany to find out why sex turned her off...
...And Agnes Smedley-no Communist stooge, I now discover-was much more than that...
...He wrote poems to Wu during the long months of enforced relaxation, and once asked Smedley if she had ever experienced the strange "romantic love" expressed by Byron, Shelley and Keats...
...She was an American rebel...
Vol. 71 • April 1988 • No. 6
