Sentimental Journey

Her father was a Congregationalist minister from Seville, Ohio. He was progressive, and even accepted Darwin's version of Genesis. As a little girl, Anna Louise Strong believed in a lot of things. First, she recalls, she went for the idea that every human being has a soulmate; but she never found one. Then she believed that she could crowd a thousand lives into one lifetime--to be "a North Pole explorer, a great writer, a mother of ten." She turned out to be none of these things.

She was a lonely child. Once a tornado whirled her from her parents' porch in Friend, Neb. to a nearby cow pasture. "I was somewhat worried by the cows," she recalls. "I found the storms of nature friendlier than the whims of living creatures." Her teacher noted that "she always expects people to like her." Anna Louise Strong soon discovered that a lot of people did not like her. Says she: "I became very friendly with God."

Funny Things About the Stars. At 22, at the University of Chicago, she wrote a Ph.D. thesis entitled "A Study of Prayer from the Standpoint of Social Psychology." After arguing her thesis with the faculty, she ran out into the darkness and "threw a kiss to the stars. 'Your loveliness,' I cried, 'I've been proving the funniest things about you. I hope you enjoyed that nice debate.' "

Turning from God and the stars, she looked for other deities. She flung herself into the patronizing worship of the proletariat which came to be fashionable in the early 20th Century. Once she told a friend: "I want to find someone who will tell me just what I must do about everything, and then I will do it." When revolution came to Russia, Anna Louise Strong found her master. Said she: "For me the Party combines all the early gods of my youth."

The Restful Eyes. From the beginning, Anna Louise Strong was not quite happy with her Communist god. When she went to Russia as a relief worker for the American Friends' Service Committee, and later as a U.S. correspondent, her enthusiasm for the cause met with limited response. She tried to join the Russian Communist Party. She was refused.* Taunted a Russian comrade: "A sentimental bourgeois like you?"

While teaching English to Leon Trotsky, she fell madly in love with him. He was bored. Later, at 46, she married a colorless Soviet official. In 1930 she founded the first English-language newspaper in the Soviet Union, the Moscow News. But she could not get along with her Russian associates. One of the squabbles she got into was taken to Stalin himself for judgment. Said she: "His eyes were kind yet grave, giving rest and assurance."

The Larger Truth. From time to time she made trips to the Russian collectives, was appalled by the horrors which the kulaks suffered in the name of economic necessity. American friends in Moscow saw her come home from these trips and break down weeping. But for all her disappointments in Communism, she clung to it. Of the collectives which had horrified her, she actually wrote: "One hundred million of the world's most backward peasants almost overnight [swung] into ultra-modern farming . . . Their increased income [was] translatable into silk dresses, perfumes, musical instruments."

Between stays in Russia, she traveled from revolution to revolution; her favorite was China, where she denounced Chiang Kai-shek as a bandit, and extolled the Chinese Communist leaders as Marxist saints. During lecture tours in the U.S. she tried to convert everyone in sight to Communism, including Henry Ford. She noted with asperity that the only American organizations which refused to listen to her were the National City Bank of New York and the House of Morgan.

She became one of Communism's most devoted apologists; like the rest of her kind, she was always ready to twist or submerge the facts in the interest of "the larger truth." Said one of her friends: "She thought the blundering revolution needed her mothering and understanding."

But apparently the revolution had outgrown Mother Strong. Last week New York's Daily Worker glowingly observed that for her reporting on China, 63-year-old Anna Louise Strong really deserved the Pulitzer Prize. Four days later, the Kremlin made a curt announcement: "The notorious agent and American journalist, A. L. Strong . . . was arrested by organs of the state security on Feb. 14. Miss Strong is incriminated in espionage and subversive activities against the Soviet Union . . ."

Kremlin's Reward. No one was sure what Anna Louise Strong had done to get this stunning blow. It might be that the party line, which she had followed faithfully for so long, had left her behind somewhere in one of its sudden sharp turns. She might have swallowed her own propaganda, in which she had frequently explained that various Communist parties were simply national patriotic movements; as of the winter of 1948, that was known in Moscow as the "nationalist heresy." Whatever her offense,the Kremlin had in its own way rewarded Anna Louise Strong for a lifetime of devoted service. Her fate might or might not be a lesson to other willing tools of the larger Communist "truth."

This week Moscow announced that Anna Louise Strong had been deported from Russia. As with all her other idols and deities, Disciple Strong had lost the Communist god whom she had served so well.

*It is not known whether she ever came to hold a party card.

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