Anna Louise Strong (November 24, 1885 – March 29, 1970) was an American journalist and activist, best known for her reporting on and support for communist movements in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. She wrote over 30 books and varied articles.

Biography

Early years

Strong was born on November 24, 1885, in a "two-room parsonage" in Friend, Nebraska, the "Middle West," to parents who were middle class liberals active in missionary work and in the Congregational Church. She lived with her family from 1887 to 1891 in Mount Vernon, Ohio, and in Cincinnati beginning in 1891.

Political career

thumb|upright|Anna Louise Strong at the time of her recall from the Seattle School Board in 1918.

In 1916, Strong ran for the Seattle School Board and won easily due to the support she garnered from women's groups and organized labor and to her work on child welfare.

<blockquote>...it is quite commonly felt in this vicinity that persons with personal grudges need only call in the Department of Justice and lodge complaint, in order to make life miserable for the person they complain against...it has become increasingly evident, however, at least in this vicinity, that the activities of the Department of Justice are doing more than any other one thing to create distrust, suspicion, and dissension among the American people...Wild accusations and attempts to injure persons and organizations who cannot be prosecuted because of lack of evidence does not tend to create confidence in the government...it is my hope that somewhere in your department I may reach some person who sincerely desires to create within this country the unity of democratic loyalty, rather than the hidden disunion of fear</blockquote>

The pacifist stance of the Wobblies led to mass arrests at the Seattle office where Louise Olivereau was a typist. Olivereau had been mailing mimeographed circulars to draftees urging them to become conscientious objectors. The strike shut down the city for four days and then ended peacefully and with its goals still unattained.

thumb|1921 in [[Samara Oblast|Samara, Russia, for the American Friends Service Committee.]]

Move to Russia

At a loss as to what to do she took her friend Lincoln Steffens' advice and in 1921 traveled to Poland and Russia serving as a correspondent for the American Friends Service Committee.

After remaining in the area for several years, Strong grew to become an enthusiastic supporter of socialism in the newly formed Soviet Union, supporting herself as a foreign correspondent for varying "radical American newspapers" and others such as The Nation. In 1925, during the era of the New Economic Policy in the USSR, she returned to the United States to arouse interest among businessmen in industrial investment and development in the Soviet Union. During this time Strong also lectured widely and became well known as an authority on "soft news" (e.g. How to get an apartment) about the USSR. As she continued to "wave the banner for the needy and downtrodden" wherever there was a revolution there was "Ms. Strong," and she became further convinced by what she experienced that socialism might be the answer to problems in the world.

Return to Moscow, Soviet writer

In 1930, she returned to Moscow and helped found Moscow News, the first English-language newspaper in the city. While Shubin often accompanied Strong during her return trips to the United States, the two were often separated due to work commitments. According to Rewi Alley's account, Strong later said: "perhaps we married because we were both so doggone lonely ... but we were very happy."

While living in the Soviet Union, she became more enthused with the Soviet government and wrote many books praising it. They include: The Soviets Conquer Wheat (1931), an updated version of China's Millions: The Revolutionary Struggles from 1927 to 1935 (1935), the best-selling autobiographical I Change Worlds: the Remaking of an American (1935), This Soviet World (1936), and The Soviet Constitution (1937).

Return to America

In 1936, she returned once again to the United States. Quietly and privately distressed with developments in the USSR (The "Great Purges"), she continued to write for leading periodicals, including The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, The Nation and Asia.

Further travels

A visit to Spain resulted in Spain in Arms (1937). Visits to China, including anti-Japanese "base areas," lead to her book One Fifth of Mankind (1938). Other books include The Soviets Expected It (1941); the novel Wild River (1943), set in Russia; Peoples of the U.S.S.R. (1944), I Saw the New Poland (1946) (based on her reporting from Poland as she accompanied the occupying Red Army); and three books on the success of the early CCP in the Chinese Civil War.

While in the USSR, she traveled throughout the huge nation, including Ukraine, Kuznetsk, Stalingrad, Kiev, Siberia, Central Asia, Uzbekistan, and many more. She wrote articles for newspapers and magazines, along with pamphlets as well, gaining "many friends and to become very popular throughout the world."

Break with USSR

In World War II, when the Red Army began its advance against Nazi Germany, Strong stayed in the rear following the soldiers through Warsaw, Łódź and Gdańsk. Her overtly pro-Chinese Communist sympathies, which had been fostered by her visits to China in 1925 and until 1947 in which she interviewed Chinese Communist leaders like Mao Zedong, may have led to her "arrest, imprisonment and expulsion" from the USSR in 1949, reportedly claiming she was an "American spy," a charge which reportedly was repeated years later, in 1953, by the Soviet newspaper Izvestia.

Strong became a celebrity in China because of her 1946 interview of Mao, in which Mao stated that American people should unite with the peoples of all countries to oppose U.S. reactionaries and their allies.

After this, she was cut off from the USSR, shunned by Communists in the United States, and denied a passport by the U.S. government, settling in California where she wrote, lectured, and "invested in real estate."

<blockquote>"I was 72 then, living in Los Angeles where I had more friends than anywhere else. I owned a town house, a summer lodge in the mountains, a winter cabin in the desert, a car and a driver's license to take myself about. I had income to live on for life. Should I go to China now?"</blockquote>

Cleared of Soviet charges, final move to China

In 1955, she was finally cleared of Soviet charges against her, which the CIA thought was a "gesture to the Chinese Communists." By 1958 her passport was restored, after a U.S. Supreme Court decision prohibiting the denial of passports to communists, and she immediately went back to China, where she remained until her death. She was one of the only Westerners to gain "the admiration of Mao Tse-tung ".

Final years in China

Strong met W.E.B. Du Bois, who visited China during the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, with a photograph of Mao Zedong, Anna Louise Strong, and W.E.B. Du Bois taken on one of Du Bois's trips in circa 1959.

Strong wrote two books supportive of the central government's policies in Tibet.

In 1961, Strong visited North Vietnam and Laos. Through all of this, she became "disaffected with political systems and people" but did not lose her zeal for justice, continuing to write, with Chinese publishers republishing "much of her writing as a Works set."

thumb|upright=0.9|Anna Louise Strong was buried at [[Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery]]

By 1970 she was staying at a hospital in Beijing (then Peking), where she had been pulling out her "intravenous tubes and had refused to eat and take medication".

Selected works

Fiction

  • (one-act play)
  • (poems, by Anise)
  • (novel, set in Ukraine)
  • (poems, by Anise)

Religious tracts and social work

  • (co-author with Sydney Strong, her father)
  • (co-author with Sydney Strong, her father), including The story of Jacob in words of the Scripture (found in Genesis) and likely the Song of the City.

Reportage and travelogues

  • (with preface by Leon Trotsky), also on Internet Archive.
  • , also available at HathiTrust.
  • , second printing in 1945.
  • , also in a PDF format.
  • , also on Internet Archive

Autobiography

  • (republished 1979 by The Seal Press, Seattle—the Introduction by Barbara Wilson contains the statement: "She left behind a second volume of autobiography which, so far, has remained in China.")

See also

  • Agnes Smedley
  • Edgar Snow
  • Mikhail Borodin
  • Rewi Alley
  • Helen Foster Snow
  • Tracy B. Strong
  • Dorise Nielsen

Notes

  • See Judith Nies. Nine Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition, University of California Press, 2002, p.&nbsp;166

References

Further reading

  • Cattoi, Louise, "Strong life, strongly written ," Milwaukee Journal, February 24, 1984, book review about the life of Anna Louise Strong.
  • Jackson, Rebecca, The Politics of Gender in the Writings of Anna Louise Strong, Seattle General Strike Project, 1999.
  • Anna Louise Strong Archive at marxists.org
  • Anna Louise Strong Papers, 1885–1971. Approximately 24 cubic feet (49 boxes, 2 packages, 2 tubes, 4 vertical files, 14 microfilm reels). At the Labor Archives of Washington, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.
  • Strong Family Papers, 1832–1994. 2.09 cubic feet. At the Labor Archives of Washington, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.
  • Sydney Strong Papers, 1860–1938. 5.75 linear feet plus 4 ephemeral items. At the Labor Archives of Washington, University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections.
  • Anna Louise Strong from the Communism in Washington State History and Memory Project, University of Washington.
  • The Papers of Anna L. Strong at Dartmouth College Library