Anna Louise Strong

  • Born: November 24, 1885
  • Birthplace: Friend, Nebraska
  • Died: March 29, 1970
  • Place of death: Beijing, China

Biography

Anna Louise Strong was born in Friend, Nebraska, on November 24, 1885. She was the daughter of a minister and her mother was an early advocate for the rights of women and African Americans. As such, Strong’s early upbringing and religious convictions influenced much of her writing. As a child, she lived in Nebraska, as well as Cincinnati, Ohio, and Oak Park, Illinois. In 1903, she attended Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, and she graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1905. She earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Chicago in 1908.

For several years, Strong organized programs called “Know Your City” in several cities on the Pacific Coast. Then she planned a series of exhibits on child welfare in the United States, Ireland, and Panama. Between 1914 and 1916, she arranged exhibits for the U.S. Children’s Bureau. She was a feature writer for the Seattle Union Record, a labor newspaper.

During her time at the Seattle Union Record, she became well known for her many political views. She wrote a number of verse poems that gave an individual perspective to the larger issue of labor politics. However, her most influential piece written for the paper was an editorial titled “No One Knows Where,” published shortly after the Seattle General Strike. In 1919, not long after the strike, she published a History of the Seattle General Strike. Eventually, she became disillusioned with the labor movement in the city and left to become a correspondent in Poland and Russia for the American Friends Service Committee.

During her time in Russia and Poland, Strong also served as the Moscow correspondent for the International News Service. Strong became an avid supporter of communism, and when she returned to the United States in 1925, she lobbied businessman to support industrial investment and development in Russia. In 1930, she returned to Moscow where she founded the first English language newspaper in the city, the Moscow News. She served as a managing editor, and then as a feature writer for the newspaper. In 1936, she moved back to the United States where she wrote for periodicals such as The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s.

In 1949, while traveling to China, Strong was arrested in Moscow on charges of espionage, and she was deported. She moved to China permanently in 1958 and had the respect and confidence of the Chinese government during the political upheavals of the 1960’s. Strong joined the Red Guard movement during the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

Strong was a gifted writer, and much of her work focuses on Russia and its experiment with communism. Her earliest books about Russia include The First Time in History (1924) and Children of Revolution (1925), based on her personal observations. She wrote about the communist revolution in Poland in I Saw the New Poland (1946), as she accompanied the occupying Red Army across the country. Strong’s later work reflects her interest in Chinese politics and the spread of communism across the Far East. Strong is recognized as one of the most influential writers chronicling the major political revolutions of the twentieth century.