²PARA ⌡PAR@ ` ⌡TEXT ` τSmedley, Agnes1894╨1950journalist and writerBorn in 1894 (or perhaps 1892), probably in northwest Missouri (and possibly in the town of Osgood), Agnes Smedley grew up from the age of ten 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 sixteen. Over the next several years she taught school in New Mexico, worked as a secretary and as a traveling book agent, attended the Normal School in Tempe, Arizona, in 1911╨1912, attended a summer session at the University of California at Berkeley, 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 Laipat Rai, and in March 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. She worked with the writers Lu Hsƒn and Mao Tun in preparing propaganda pieces. She lost her connection with the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1930 and began writing for the Manchester Guardian. In 1933 she published Chinese Destinies: Sketches of Present-Day China and in 1934, during a brief visit to New York, China╒s Red Army Marches, a glowing endorsement of the movement. She returned to China in 1935 and in 1936 began a journey to reach Communist-controlled northern China. She was in Sian 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 Tse-tung╒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 January 1938 she went to Hankow, where she worked with the Chinese Red Cross Medical Corps, collected supplies for the Red Army, and served as a publicist for the Communists. On the fall of Hankow in October 1938 she made her way to join the New Fourth Army, a Communist guerrilla force in Japanese-controlled areas, with which she traveled through central China until 1940, filing reports from time to time with the Manchester Guardian. After a period of illness Smedley returned to the United States in 1941. She published Battle Hymn of China in 1943. She wrote and spoke widely on behalf of the Chinese Communists, although to an increasingly hostile America. While she was an avid partisan, she was not a blind one, and she never joined the Communist party, her own political position being closer to anarchism than to disciplined socialism. In February 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. In November 1949 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 that was published finally in 1956. She died in Oxford, England, on May 6, 1950. Her ashes were interred in the National Revolutionary Martyrs Memorial Park in Peking. ▐styl ` $ ! ¬ 5¬ 5¬ 0 !I = 5¬ > !I J !I [ !I e 5¬ f !I Ñ !I ╕ !I ¥ !I ▒ !I ╙ !I µ !I !I 0 !I _ !I o !I p !I w !I
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