Borned in Missouri in 1892,
Agnes Smedley was the first of five children of a poor family. When she was 10
her father, Charles Smedley decided to move to Colorado searching for
prosperity but they just found more poverty. There, she started studying while
Charles was working in one of the many oil companies property of Rockefeller’s
family, Fuel & Iron Co.
After the abandonment of
family by her father in 1903 Agnes had to begin working and study at the same
time. In spite of the difficult it means, her young age and her limited
academic training she got pass the Teaching Exam in Terico, New Mexico. She
accepted the teaching position in New Mexico that led her to desire further
education. Because of her responsibility of taking care
of her brothers, she took the decision to move
to Temple, Arizona. From 1911 to 1912 she attended the Temple Normal School as
a special student. Apart from this, Agnes began her career as a journalist,
cooperating in the same center. There, she met and married Ernest Brudin and
moved to California where she explored socialist theories which influenced her
political direction and her social conscience. But six years after the marriage
she divorced and moved to New York City.
In New York City she worked for Margaret Sanger on the Birth Control Review and became involved with the movement to support India's independence from Britain. Smedley was relocated to Berlin and there she met Virendranath Chattopadhyaya (Chatto) and lived with the revolutionary leader for eight years studying Indian history and Chinese nationalism. The German republican government took the clinics over and established several others which flourished until the Nazis came to power and women were 'ordered back to the bedroom'. With Hitler threatening, Viren left Germany for the Academy of Sciences in Leningrad, and Agnes obtained a position with the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1928 as a special correspondent in China.These were tumultuous years with serious breakdowns both personally and politically. After psychoanalyses and the completion of her autobiography she broke away from Chatto and the Indian cause. She moved to Shanghai in 1929.
For years she chronicled the Chinese revolution as a war correspondent for Germany, Britain and later the United States. She told the story of the peasants, the Red army and the oppressed of China to the world. In October of 1937 she joined the Eighth Route Army in the field. As it became increasingly dangerous, she left the field in 1937 to organize medical supplies and continue writing. From November 1938 to April 1941 she visited resistance units under both the Communist and Guomindang leaders in the war zone, the longest tour of the Chinese war by any foreign correspondent, man or woman.
Convinced she could support the Far East in Washington D.C. she returned to the United States. Smedley remained an advocate of China, writing several books about China's revolution. She lived at a writer's colony in New York State known as "Yaddo" through the middle forties. She was a regular contributor to The Saratogian and wrote feature articles for The New Masses, The Nation and The New Republic. In 1947 during the McCarthy era she was accused of espionage and moved to England during the investigation. Although she longed to return to China, it was a year after her death before she was accorded her last wish: 'As my heart and spirit have found no rest in any other land on earth except China, I wish my ashes to lie with the Chinese Revolutionary dead.' She was buried in Beijing in 1950.
https://www.asu.edu/lib/archives/smedley.htm
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