A spy, indeed.(The Lives of Agnes Smedley)(Book Review)

The Lives of Agnes Smedley, by Ruth Price (Oxford, 498 pp., $35)

NOW almost forgotten, the journalist and activist Agnes Smedley (1892-1950) was a member of the pantheon of early-20th-century American radicals and feminists. Along with her friends Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger, Smedley was in the front ranks of those promoting birth control and women's rights, but she is best known for her activism in behalf of the Chinese Communist cause. Her 1929 autobiographical novel, Daughter of Earth, became popular again in the 1970s, when the women's-history movement was getting under way.

The author of this new and thorough biography of Smedley, Ruth Price, has been investigating her subject for 15 years. Using new sources obtained in archives in Russia, China, Britain, and America, Price reveals that Smedley was quite different from "the invincible rebel of [my initial] romantic imaginings." In Smedley's novel, she described herself as the dirt-poor daughter of a Colorado coal miner. In truth, her father was a ne'er-do-well who--as deputy sheriff--brutalized the miners. Far from poverty-stricken, her family was raised to the middle class by her father's work for the detested coal companies. (The family lost its money later, after her father descended into alcoholism.) Agnes Smedley moved to Berkeley, Calif., where she engaged in anti-colonialist activism with the revolutionary wing of India's nationalist movement. She moved to New York in 1917, and worked for a time with Margaret Sanger on birth control; then left for Germany in 1920. She went on to China as a journalist in 1928, eventually living in the caves of Yenan--where she befriended Mao Tse-tung--and traveling with the Red Army.

Smedley may have been, in Price's words, a "rebel in the largest and finest sense of the word," but she also was precisely what her most fervent enemies accused her of being: a Soviet spy. Price writes that the Left all along has viewed Smedley as an "unblemished heroine, the tragic victim of a McCarthyite smear." Indeed, Price herself started her book certain that the charges were false, and emanated from people who were scared of Smedley's "unbroken, independent spirit"; to Price, Smedley was an admirable figure, one to be resurrected as an inspiration for today's left-wing feminist movement. But being honest, and having carried out prodigious and unsparing research, Price found, "against [her own] wishes," that she had "succeeded in proving what [Smedley's] worst enemies failed to accomplish in half a century of trying": that Smedley was a major Soviet spy, a "master of deception, a skillful poseur" who got naifs to defend her as an "innocent victim of wartime hysteria."

Naturally, Price found that her "colleagues on the left wanted nothing to do with [this] discovery," namely, that "a martyr of the McCarthy era" had "actually engaged in espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union." The taboo against admitting the truth survived the end of the Cold War. It is to Price's lasting credit that while she identifies herself as a woman of the Left, she stands by the truth instead of seeking to bend it to fit a preconceived ideology.

The story Price tells is compelling. Smedley's abusive relationship in Berlin with her lover, the Indian revolutionary Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, sent her into deep fits of depression, and psychosomatic medical conditions that completely immobilized her. In despair about her health and sanity, she left Berlin in 1928 for China, where she hoped to continue her work against world imperialism and for the revolution being advocated by Sun Yat-sen and the Kuomintang nationalists, a cause that had gained the support of Moscow.

In Shanghai, most of Smedley's work was actually undertaken in behalf of the Soviet state and its security apparatus. She acted as a mail drop and liaison, and used her home for secret meetings--not to advance the world revolution, ...