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.