Agnes Smedley: The Life and Times of an American Radical

Agnes Smedley's (1894-1950) career as an activist journalist began in the 1910s and 1920s, with a commitment to the Indian Independence movement. Her anti-imperialism was based on the Jeffersonian tradition of the American Revolution. In New York, she was close to the Lion of the Punjab, Lala Lajpat Rai, writing for his publications until his death. In California, she was involved with the Sikh-led Ghadar party of insurrectionists. Her complicated relationship with the European movement leader Virendranath Chattopadhyaya in Berlin in the 1920s is better known. Smedley left Europe for China in 1929 in an effort to reach India through the backdoor. Once in China, she was struck by the poverty and oppression of ordinary people. Her new cause, in addition to anti-imperialism, became the Chinese peasant. For the next two decades she documented their plight in countless publications (including in the Indian press). Herself the product of rural poverty, she identified like few Westerners did with the plight of peasants, Chinese or Indian, and wrote biographies of Chinese peasant leaders such as Zhu De.