Yan’an, Shaanxi: 36° 35' 54"N, 109° 29' 05"E
Look at Agnes Smedley.
See the girl-child in frayed calico. A daughter of 1890s dirt farmers in backroad Missouri. The ma so poor she walked through life barefoot. (Grandma puffed a corncob pipe.) Later raised by an alky father in Colorado mining camps. Still later, packing a revolver, the young girl teaches at country schools in frontier New Mexico. Self-taught writer. Budding social activist in California. Hayseed revolutionary among parlor socialists in Manhattan—the Ivy League radicals of Greenwich Village. Trailblazing feminist and birth control pioneer. Freedom fighter for British-colonized India. (She lived in Berlin with the Indian Communist firebrand Virendranath Chattopadhyaya.) Foreign correspondent in civil-war China. Once, she punched out Mao Zedong’s wife in a bunker in Shaanxi Province. “I feel like a person”—wrote Smedley—"living on the brink of a volcano crater.’
The Smedley family in 1899. Agnes is in the back row to the right of her father, Charles.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY ASU LIBRARY, AGNES SMEDLEY COLLECTION
I am trekking across northern China.
I am following in the ghostly footsteps of Smedley—among the most colorful and improbable crusaders of the 20th century, now largely forgotten. Under hail dropping like buckshot, I trudge into the wintry city of Yan’an.
The remote Chinese metropolis, set atop the dusty Loess Plateau, is a pilgrimage site for “Red tourism.” Yan’an served as headquarters for Communist forces under Mao. The Great Helmsman’s cave house has been rebuilt downtown as a shrine, as a museum. Smedley embedded here in 1937 with the fabled Eighth Route Army. She offered its peasant soldiers square-dance lessons. She taught Mao to foxtrot. “Agnes said that when the dancing was over,” recalled another war reporter of Smedley’s adventures, “she felt as if her feet had been trampled on by a whole army division.”
The rise of global Communism early in the last century launched the careers of iconic journalists and scholars.
The Smedley family in 1899. Agnes is in the back row to the right of her father, Charles.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY ASU LIBRARY, AGNES SMEDLEY COLLECTION
I am trekking across northern China.
I am following in the ghostly footsteps of Smedley—among the most colorful and improbable crusaders of the 20th century, now largely forgotten. Under hail dropping like buckshot, I trudge into the wintry city of Yan’an.
The remote Chinese metropolis, set atop the dusty Loess Plateau, is a pilgrimage site for “Red tourism.” Yan’an served as headquarters for Communist forces under Mao. The Great Helmsman’s cave house has been rebuilt downtown as a shrine, as a museum. Smedley embedded here in 1937 with the fabled Eighth Route Army. She offered its peasant soldiers square-dance lessons. She taught Mao to foxtrot. “Agnes said that when the dancing was over,” recalled another war reporter of Smedley’s adventures, “she felt as if her feet had been trampled on by a whole army division.”
The rise of global Communism early in the last century launched the careers of iconic journalists and scholars.
A photo of Mao Zedong hangs in a cave house where the Communist army sheltered in Yan’an, Shaanxi, during China’s civil war. Smedley made the arduous trip to this rugged headquarters in 1937.
Paul Salopek
John Reed, a wealthy Harvard graduate turned Red Guard, recorded the birth of the Soviet Union in Ten Days that Shook the World. In East Asia, Edgar Snow, a former New York advertising copywriter, hobnobbed with Communist and nationalist leaders to research his canonical Red Star Over China, a seminal portrait of Mao. Agnes Smedley was both a pioneer and an outsider in this elite band of revolutionary chroniclers.
She was a fiery anti-fascist, an unabashed partisan, and a life force.
Drawn to leftist causes by her hardscrabble background, in 1929 Smedley published a successful novel of the American underclass, Daughter of Earth, which presaged by a generation the candid treatment of topics like abortion, rape, the cruel degradations of women in poverty, not to mention rampant sexism in leftist intellectual circles. She sometimes muscled her way to her revolutionary work—in Europe, the Soviet Union, China—by crewing aboard third-class tramp steamers. Lacking a college degree, her vocabulary, she admitted, was shaped by a cowboy’s lexicon of “swearing and cursing.” Still, along her way she befriended a remarkable constellation of artists, political activists, and intellectual lights who helped shape our modern era: reproductive rights campaigner Margaret Sanger; Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India; and the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, to name a few.
“I have no country,” Smedley has the heroine of her autobiographical novel declare. “My countrymen are the men and women who work against oppression—it does not matter where they are. With them I feel at home—we understand each other. Others are foreign to me.”
Because she was a woman, and perhaps because of her working-class roots, it is Smedley herself who remains largely foreign in modern history.
In Yan’an I search for memories of Shi Mo Te Lai, as she is known by the Chinese.
Agnes Smedley (right) with Red Army General Zhu De.
Photograph courtesy of Xi’an Eighth Route Army Museum
Smedley arrived at the Communist headquarters by cargo truck and horseback: a firm-jawed American belted into a baggy Red Army jacket, her hair already graying. She interviewed generals and illiterate soldiers. She typed in a cave. She lectured Chinese village women on contraception. (“I have always detested the belief that sex is the chief bond between man and woman,” wrote the rebel who enjoyed scores of romantic partners. “Friendship is far more human.”) Importing hundreds of rat traps, Smedley waged war on local rodents. She spun a scratchy recording of “On Top of Old Smokey” on a phonograph to serenade her uncertain Chinese dance pupils. (The Western dances, sparking jealousy, were the source of Smedley’s fracas with Mao’s wife, He Zizhen.)
Apart from two blurry photos in the Yan’an museum, no signs of Smedley remain.
“Much of the original city is gone,” explains Wang Baocun, a historian at the local university. “It was bombed by the Japanese 17 times in World War II and rebuilt.”
As for Smedley, Wang says the Communists relied on “international friends” like her to explain their movement to the world—but preferred more mainstream foreign correspondents, such as Edgar Snow. Smedley, he says delicately, “wrote about smaller things.” Other scholars suspect she was too much her own woman.
A book by Agnes Smedley at the Xi’an Eighth Route Army Office Museum.
Paul Salopek
“I never believed that I myself was especially wise, but I could not become a mere instrument in the hands of men who believed that they held the one and only key to truth,” Smedley wrote in The Great Road, her biography of peasant general Zhu De.
Smedley’s denouement is familiar enough.
After leaving China for good in 1941, Shi Mo Te Lai was targeted during the postwar Red Scares in the United States and died, an exile with broken health, in Britain. She was 58. Today she is probably better known—when remembered at all—in feminist studies circles, rather than as a maverick witness to China’s epic struggles.
In chilly Yan’an, I order take-out coffee in a Kentucky Fried Chicken eatery. I set out for the Yellow River. The arid plateau of Shaanxi is rumpled and dun-colored like the American Southwest, a desert Smedley once described fondly as “closer to my spirit than has any place I have ever known” because it was so far from people.
This would be familiar terrain to Agnes Smedley, who joined Mao's Communist forces holed up on Shaanxi's rumpled Loess Plateau.
Out of Eden Walk
