On May 7, 1950, Agnes Smedley made headlines for the last time in the U.S. press, when a spate of stories sought to explain her death in England under seemingly mysterious circumstances. Congressman Harold Velde, a former F.B.I. agent and zealous member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, accused »the Communists« of murdering her. Smedley, he argued, was about to return to the United States under subpoena and publicly reveal to his committee her activities as an espionage agent on behalf of the international Communist movement.

By the time Agnes Smedley was leaving Yaddo under a cloud, the civil war in China had taken a dramatic turn. The Communist counter-offensive launched in late 1947 had proved more successful than anyone anticipated. Chiang Kai-shek's armies, badly overextended and poorly led, were quickly driven from Manchuria, and large numbers of Guomindang troops and their equipment were captured. The old guerrilla capital of Yan'an in the northwest was recaptured.

For Smedley, the period from 1945 to 1948 was relatively calm and productive. Most of her time was spent in upstate New York at Yaddo, where she stayed on at the personal invitation of its director, Elizabeth Ames, and managed to finish writing the first draft of her biography of Marshal Zhu De.[1] Her concentration seemed curiously aided by the growing Cold War atmosphere, civil war in China, and increasing attacks on her for her open support of the Chinese Communists.

The calm of Smedley's life at Yaddo ended in October of 1944, when President Roosevelt recalled General »Vinegar Joe« Stilwell, the U.S. commander of the China/Burma/India theater (C.B.I.), and Smedley's friend since her Hankou days in 1938. This extraordinary action would quickly draw Smedley into a storm over America's China policy.

By March of 1943 Smedley had decided that she could no longer afford to live in New York City while awaiting the publication of Battle Hymn. Her dream of lucrative feature-writing for publications like the Reader's Digest had fallen through. She had used up Knopf's advance on the book, and she could not face accepting more help from old friends like Julian Gumperz, Jo Bennett, and Mary Knoblauch. Her only income was from speaking engagements and publication of a few advance excerpts from Battle Hymn, which she placed in Vogue and the New Republic.

Smedley left California in a buoyant mood, optimistic about her prospects and excited by what she had seen of wartime America. The contrast between conditions in 1934 and 1942 was striking. The war had brought women into the work force and produced nearly full employment for men. For ordinary people such as her relatives in San Diego, the standard of living was appreciably higher.

A timeworn Agnes Smedley, now forty-nine years old, arrived penniless in Los Angeles in late May of 1941, wondering how she would be received by people she had not seen for seven years. In seeking a place to stay she had written to her ex-husband Ernest Brundin and his wife Elinor in the Los Angeles suburb of Montabello. She had maintained sporadic contact with them while in China, most recently to solicit funds for the Chinese Red Cross, and they agreed to put her up. For Elinor Brundin, Smedley's two-week stay was uncomfortable but revealing.

A few days before Hankou fell to the Japanese in October, 1938, Smedley headed south in a medical van. At Changsha, between bombing raids she conferred with Dr. Lin and pondered her next move. There seemed to be three alternatives. First, she could move further inland to the remote mountainous retreat of Chongqing, along with Chiang Kai-shek's government and most of the Hankou »gang« of international correspondents.

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