Strong, Anna Louise

STRONG, ANNA LOUISE (1885-1970). Anna Louise Strong bore witness to, recorded, and participated around the world in most of the important political events. She wrote millions of words (thirty-three books; uncounted articles; nine years of a monthly Letter from China), trying always to persuade her fellow Americans that progressive social developments were to be celebrated and learned from.

Born in Friend, Nebraska, to a middle-class religious family, she attended Bryn Mawr College but graduated from Oberlin. Despite a PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago, she chose to go into public life, at first in progressive causes, then later in Seattle as a journalist. During the 1919 General Strike, she authored one of the most famous editorials in labor history, urging the strike: it is to go on “We Know Not Where.”

Dismayed by the strike’s failure, she traveled to the new USSR, writing mostly “soft journalism” and became close friends with Trotsky, who wrote a preface to her first book, Children of the Revolution (1925). In 1925, she covered the uprising in Canton (“Red Canton”) and became acquainted with Moscow’s representative in China, Mikhail Borodin, who remained a life-long friend.

Her articles appeared in both left and mainstream papers. Part of each year was spent in the United States on lecture tours, then in return to the Soviet Union. In 1927, back in China with Borodin, they had to escape the KMT oppression by driving across the Gobi desert. On the way, she produced China’s Millions, noteworthy for quietly pointing out that the revolutionary future of China lies with the peasantry rather than the urban proletariat.

As relations between America and the USSR worsened, her lecture tours in the United States became more difficult. FBI records total over 6,000 pages. Back in the USSR, she investigated the first Five Year Plan, saying little about the kulaks and focusing on legal reforms in tribal areas. In 1930, responding to the needs of Americans coming to the USSR, she started the Moscow Daily News. A meeting with Stalin proved necessary to resolve editorial conflicts: Stalin “was the best committee man.”

In 1936, she wrote a bestselling autobiography to legitimate her intention to join the CPUSA. There she argued that truths are correctly analyzed facts and correctly analyzed facts are those that enhance the movement towards peace and the progress of socialism. “I will not tell the ‘whole truth’, for truth is never ‘whole’… [There is the] truth that is dying and the truth that is coming into existence.” She sought to remake herself, although with an apparent brittleness in these discussions. The Party, however, never cashed her check and never made her a member.

More trips and more books followed. She married Joel Shubin, an agronomist and a Party “saint.” Quietly distressed by the purge trials, she reported on the civil war in Spain. After Strong returned to the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt urged her to write on the effects of the New Deal, for which she traveled across the country. Back in the USSR, she wrote more articles on the achievements of the Soviet experiment. As her contacts shut down, these articles veered close to hack work and gave no sense of the “great mental distress” she reported privately. Her focus increasingly shifted to China.

In 1938, she traveled with the (Communist) New Fourth Army. Later, Zhou Enlai would entrust her with documents giving the CCP version of a KMT ambush. Unable to publish in the mainstream press, she eventually gave them to her friend at the Saint Louis Post Dispatch, who published them under his own byline.

After the Nazi-Soviet pact, she continued to justify the Party line. The German attack on the USSR rekindled her hopes for US-USSR cooperation. By 1944, she wrote to Stalin, warning that there is “a golden opportunity for building American-Soviet understanding will not, if missed, easily appear again.” She continued, “I have been here two months without result.” She wanted to help “give the American people the knowledge they want about the USSR.” There was no response. This exchange marks the end of her hopes for the USSR: the future lies with China.

In 1946, she spent six months at CCP headquarters in Yen’an, which became her idea of a perfect political community. In an interview, Mao Zedong declared the atom bomb and imperialism to be a “paper tiger,” frightening in appearance but not deadly. His target is not the US, but mostly the USSR, which feared that the US might use atomic weapons. Her interview becomes one of the “Five Must Read” articles during the Cultural Revolution. An interview with Liu Shao-ch’i details the development of “an Asiatic form of Marxism.” Her publications are the key Western discussion of these issues.

After a stop in America, she returned to Moscow in 1948, expecting to join Lin Biao’s army for the victorious entry to Beijing -- and secure a scoop. Despite her Chinese Communist entry visa, the Soviets refused an exit visa. She protested to all and sundry, touting the virtues of Chinese communism. On February 14, 1949, she was arrested as an American spy, jailed for a week, then expelled. Back home, most of her left-wing friends toed Moscow’s line. Called up by the House Committee on Un-American Affairs, she is ritually asked: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” Her honest answer: “I don’t know.”

Only some West Coast left-wingers welcomed her. These were lonely times: her life project appears to have collapsed. In 1958, she recovered her passport and was welcomed in China, where she was installed in comfortable quarters as an “Honored Old Friend of the Chinese People.”

She published a monthly Letter from China: eventually 40,000 copies appear in seven languages. Most of her American friends judged it the propaganda of an old lady, but, ironically, a US State Department official indicated that it was always read seriously. Meanwhile, her life resumed. She saw important people and traveled widely including to Tibet and Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh gives her his cane). There were birthday parties, especially two with Mao, one on her eightieth birthday, and one in 1966 where Mao gnomically announced what becomes the Cultural Revolution.

Despite her being named an honorary member of the Red Guard, the Cultural Revolution became increasingly difficult for her. From loneliness and anxiety about the future of China, she sought to return to America, but no exit permission could be obtained. Her health declined. The day before Easter Sunday, Zhou Enlai visited her in the hospital and ordered her to eat: “You have important things to do for us and for the rest of the world.” She died the next day. Her last words were “Is it possible?”

Her life was lived in all the complexity and costs of acting on the belief that what she supported would, over the long run, further justice. In that faith, she persisted. In 1962, she wrote to a friend. “My motto remains: ‘I’m off to die with Odin,’ from a story in which it appears that the devil is winning, and the rich man and the virtuous man have deserted, but the rover keeps on, liking a good fight and liking Odin. That’s me.” Odin died, trying to prevent Ragnarok, the end of the world and of the gods. And so did she.

Mickenberg, Julia. American Girls in Red Russia: Chasing Soviet Dreams. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Nies, Judith. Nine Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Strong, Tracy B., and Helene Keyssar. Right in Her Soul: the Life of Anna Louise Strong. New York: Random House, 1983.

Anna Louise Strong Archive, Suzallo Library at the University of Washington.
Anna Louise Strong Archive at marxists.org