Book Review | The Lives of Agnes Smedley

CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence
Studies in Intelligence, 2005

The Lives of Agnes Smedley

Ruth Price. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 498 pages, endnotes, photos, index.

Reviewed by Hayden B. Peake, curator of the CIA's Historical Intelligence Collection

During the 1976 budget crisis in New York, classes at City College were cancelled and graduate student Ruth Price used the free time to read a semi-autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth, by the controversial author Agnes Smedley. Thus began an interest that simmered until the mid-1980s when then-professor Price turned her full attention to Smedley’s life and made the decision to write this biography.

Born in Missouri on 23 February 1892, Agnes Smedley was the daughter of a failed cattle broker and sometime farmer and his part-Indian wife. Her birthplace was a two-room cabin without plumbing or electricity. In the early 1900s, the Smedleys moved to Trinidad, Colorado, the first of several towns where Agnes went to school and worked washing clothes after classes. It was a period of labor unrest and economic depression, but she managed to get part way though grade school, supplementing her formal education with voluminous reading. At 17, Agnes passed exams for a one-year secondary school teaching certificate, and began teaching for $40 a month. When her certificate expired, she accepted an offer to study in Phoenix, and with that she was on her way to becoming a progressive, a communist, and a writer. She would write mostly about China, teach at Berlin University, and later lecture at Harvard.

Price examines Smedley’s life in great detail, explaining how she became involved in the radical movement of the times and describing the many communists who played important parts in her life. Smedley traveled widely. In Germany, she worked for the COMINTERN under chief propagandist Willi Muenzenberg. In India, she participated actively in the left wing movement before going to China, where she met and was captivated by Mao and other communist leaders. It was her activity in China—working for Soviet military intelligence agent Richard Sorge—that brought her to the attention of the post- World War II anti-communist movement in the United States. Smedley denied US Army charges that she was or had been a Soviet agent, and she threatened to sue for libel if the army did not admit it was wrong and did not apologize. And that is what the army did. She had worked against the Nazis and the Japanese, not directly against the United States, they rationalized.

Nevertheless, in 1950, the House Committee on Un-American Activities, using the same evidence available to the army—supplied by Maj. Gen. Charles Willoughby, Gen. Douglas Macarthur’s G-2—upheld the charges and planned to have her testify. In London at the time, Smedley died after an operation for ulcers before she had to decide whether to return. For 50 years, Price notes, the political right maintained her guilt, charging that she was indeed a communist and had spied for China and the Soviet Union. With at least equal vigor, the “left has maintained that Smedley was an unblemished heroine, the tragic victim of a McCarthyite smear” (even though Smedley died before McCarthy began his crusade). Price writes that “as a self-identified leftist, I, too, initially dismissed the accusations against Smedley. My Smedley was an uncompromising liberal.”

Then, as her research progressed, Price discovered the Smedley archives in Moscow; interviewed her former colleagues in China, India, and the United States; examined contemporaneous FBI interviews with communists who worked with Smedley, including her Soviet case officer; and found Smedley’s arrest records in Germany. Furthermore, she came across statements by Sorge that she had been his agent. That is not all. When the British released the MASK decrypts of communist party pre-war message traffic, Smedley was mentioned frequently. All these sources supported the fact that Smedley has been Sorge’s agent and a COMINTERN agent, and had worked in the Chinese Bureau of Information as well. The right in this case was correct. Smedley had had a clandestine life and, to Price’s great credit, she documents it wonderfully, although she admits that “this was the last thing I wanted to establish.”[9]

[9]Not all readers agree with Price’s judgment. One from George Mason University writes: “I'm sorry to see that Price has acquiesced, to some extent, to cold-war anti-communism in failing to affirm Smedley's hard and dangerous work for anti-imperialism in India and in favor of the Comintern which, whatever its manifold failings, was at least on the right side—the side of those who opposed class exploitation and imperialism—as the US, UK, et al. were not (http://hnn.us/readcomment/). For another look at The Lives of Agnes Smedley, see the review by Prof. Harvey Klehr in The Weekly Standard, 31 January 2005.