SMEDLEY, AGNES

born 1894?, possibly Osgood, Mo., U.S. died May 6, 1950, Oxford, Eng. journalist and writer whose articles and books centred on her experiences in China during the growth of Chinese communism. Smedley grew up from the age of 10 in the mining town of Trinidad, Colorado. She went to work at an early age to help support the family and received little formal schooling. She left home at 16, and over the next several years she studied and worked at a variety of jobs in the West and Southwest and went through a brief unhappy marriage. About 1916 or 1917 she moved to New York City, where she worked for a magazine and attended classes at New York University. She gradually involved herself in political affairs. Smedley became interested in the cause of Indian nationalism as represented by Lala Lajpat Rai, and in 1918 she was arrested under the Espionage Act and charged with failure to register as an agent for the Indian nationalists, who, unbeknownst to her, had accepted funds from Germany. She was held in the Tombs in New York for some time before the charges were dismissed, and she became thoroughly disenchanted with the United States. From 1919 to 1928 she lived in Berlin with the Indian nationalist leader Virendranath Chattopadhyaya. She taught English at the University of Berlin, did graduate work in Asian studies there, and helped establish Germany's first public birth-control clinic. In part as an aid to her psychoanalysis, she wrote the autobiographical novel Daughter of Earth (1929). In 1928 Smedley went to China as special correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. From her base in Shanghai she traveled widely and reported enthusiastically on the growing communist movement. Although she lost her connection with the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1930, she wrote for the Manchester Guardian and published books about China, endorsing the communist movement. In 1936 she began a journey to reach communist-controlled northern China. She was in Sian (Xian) in December 1936 and made English-language broadcasts on the brief capture of Chiang Kai-shek by rebellious Manchurian troops. Early in 1937 she reached Mao Zedong's headquarters in Yenan. She underwent great hardships to travel with the Eighth Route Army (the Red Army) during the Sino-Japanese War and in 1938 published China Fights Back: An American Woman with the Eighth Route Army, on her experiences in Shansi province. In Hankow she worked with the Chinese Red Cross Medical Corps, collected supplies for the Red Army, and served as a publicist for the communists until the city fell in 1938. She then traveled through central China with the New Fourth Army, a communist guerrilla force in Japanese-controlled areas, filing reports from time to time with the Manchester Guardian. Smedley returned to the United States in 1941 and continued to write and speak widely on behalf of the Chinese communists, although to an increasingly hostile country. In 1949 General Douglas MacArthur released an army intelligence report that charged her with being a Soviet spy. She responded with outrage and threatened legal action, whereupon the secretary of the army admitted that the charge rested on no evidence. Her reputation was irreparably damaged, however, and she could find no journalistic employment. Later that year she sought refuge in England, where she worked to complete The Great Road: The Life and Times of Chu Teh, her biography of the Chinese communist military leader, published posthumously in 1956. Smedley's ashes were interred in the National Revolutionary Martyrs Memorial Park in Peking.