Agnes Smedley Essay, Research Paper
The date of birth for Agnes Smedley is knid of unknown to
us. She was either born in 1892 or 1894 in the town of Osgood,
Missouri. She was a great jounalist and writer. SHe grew in a
mining town called Trinidad, Colorado. With hardly any school,
she left home at the age of 16 after helping to support her
family. Smedley went out and studied while she worked all over
in the west and southwest all while enduring a quick, unhappy
marriage.
The turning point of her life was 1917 when she moved to
New York City. Here she got a job at a magazine and she started
to go to New York University. Through the whole ordeal, this is
how she got invilved into political affairs. She got involved in
the Indian nationalism movement represented by Lala Laipat Rai
and was soon arrested in 1918 under the Espionage Act. She had
failed to register as an agent for the group and the group had
been taking funds from Germany which she had nothng to do with.
Her charges were dropped but her bitterness to the UNited
States lived on and she moved to Berlin from 1918 to 1928.
There she lived with the Indian nationalist leader Virendranath
Chattopadhyaya. WHile in Europe, she taught at the University of
Berlin while doing graduate work there. She also set up
Germany?s first public birth control clinic. While in Berlin, she
also wrote her first book, Daughter of Earth. To broaden her
international resume, she went ot CHina as a correspondent to
Frankfurter Zeitung. She traveled all over the world for him
and reported on how the Communistic government movement was
slowly catching on in the world. In 1930, she wrote a book for
Manchester Guardian which controversially supported the
Communist movement.
Probably in her mind one of the biggest acomplishments was
being able to travel with the Eight Route Army or the Red Army
during the Sino-Japanese war. From her experiences here, she
wrote antoher book, this one being called China Fights Back: An
American Woman with the Eighth Route Army. She stayed with this
army until they fell in 1938 but still went out to help another
Red Army while still writing for Manchester Guardian.
In 1941, she finally came back to the U.S. However, she
continued to write her pro-Communist articles for the Chinese
Communists. This was a bad time to be a Communist in America, and
she was eventuall charged with being a Soviet spy in 1949. The
officier who brought the charges soon dropped them, but she
was still outraged. She was basically kicked out of the country
for her views and died a year later in Oxford.
Agnes Smedley is a woman with strong beliefs. She was
willing to help the people in need when they needed it which was
very noble of her. Her communistic views are hard to swallow
but that was back when communism was still a good idea. It
sounded good on paper but now we know it just doesn?t work in
reality. I can?t condemn her for her views. She spread communism
around and got people informed which made her a great
journalist.