PART 4
THE BATTLE FOR ASIA TO THE BATTLE FOR THE WORLD

Chapter 11
Gung Ho for a Wartime China

On a bleak January day in 1938 Snow walked with Rewi Alley beyond the perimeter of the International Settlement into war-ravaged Japanese-occupied Chinese Shanghai. He felt both depressed and angry as the two surveyed the human and material wreckage left by the protracted battle for the city. (Chiang had committed his crack divisions to the hard-fought battle for the city, which had lasted from August to November 1937, with a loss of two hundred fifty thousand Chinese troops.) "Miles of debris: bricks, stones and broken timbers. Hardly a house standing intact," a diary entry noted. Unburied and decomposing bodies of Chinese soldiers and of civilians caught in the intensive Japanese bombing and shelling lay everywhere. "Walking along one saw here and there a clenched fist sticking up from the soil or an arm or a leg." Half-starved people scrounged among the corpses for any money or valuables to buy food. In sharp contrast, at the Metropole Hotel in the settlement "silk-gowned, pomaded Chinese blades" were absorbed with the dancing girls in shimmering white silk that dung to them "like gauze." How "degenerate" the bourgeois Chinese residents of Shanghai, and how fine and courageous the peasant soldiers of China! China's hope, Snow wrote, lay not in corrupt, gangster-ridden Shanghai, but in the vastness of the land and people beyond it.^[1]

Snow was equally outraged that no provisions had been made to evacuate any of China's small modern industrial plants, mostly concentrated in or near Shanghai. There had been no advance moves to organize and prepare the workers to salvage their machines and move with them to the unindustrialized interior. "But any such advance arrange-

ments," Snow later dourly wrote, "were rendered impossible under a Government which feared Shanghai labor as much as, if not more than, the Japanese." The poignant sense of loss and of lost opportunity was accentuated for Snow by his New Zealander companion on these Shanghai rounds. Alley, then chief factory inspector under the International Settlement's municipal council, could reconstruct for Ed the histories of hundreds of such destroyed workshops and of their harshly exploited workers. Hundreds of thousands of industrial workers had been idled, and the foreign settlements were jammed with some two million refugees, most of them destitute.^[2]

This was the context and mind-set in which the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (CIC) took form in the early months of 1938. In his characteristically understated and self-effacing manner, Alley eloquently summed this up the following year: "We have brought together engineers and cooperators, and have started a chain of small industry throughout the country. We have made a few engines work that would otherwise have rusted. Put a few people to work who would otherwise have sat in refugee camps. Produced some of the necessities that a people must have whether they are at war or not." And as Ed wrote to a colleague of his own deep commitment to the project, "I could not any longer consider myself a bystander; there was too much work to be done; and without waiting for anybody's invitation, I threw myself in (as [the ample] Anna Louise Strong would say) where my weight counted most."^[3]

The cooperative movement was primarily the "invention" (Snow wrote in Journey ) of Rewi Alley and the two Snows. The original idea and much initial "energizing" of the other two carne from Peg. As Ed told the story in a graceful preface to Peg's 1941 book on the CIC, industrial cooperatives were "first of all the brain child of Nym Wales." The subject of cooperatives had come up at a Shanghai dinner party attended by the Snows. Their host, John Alexander of the British consular service, had enthusiastically pushed the cooperative cause as the solution to the world's ills. Peg vigorously rejected the idea: "As usual, she overwhelmed her opponent," Ed wrote. Yet within a day or so she came strongly around to the concept, but for producer rather than consumer traits, with particular applicability to China's grim wartime situation. Such industrial cooperatives could give productive work to refugees, mobilize idled. skilled labor, and create a decentralized chain of small workshops utilizing the resources of China's vast interior, away from concentrated urban areas vulnerable to Japanese occupation or bombing.^[4]

According to Helen Snow, the very next morning after her encounter with Alexander, "the solution to China's chief problem came to me in a flash. Why not organize the Chinese workers into cooperatives owned and managed by themselves, financed by labor hours instead of cash capital?" Under her "usual intellectual prodding," Snow related in his Battle for Asia , Alley and he soon saw the light on the great potentialities of industrial cooperation. Peg "stood over" him, Alley later recounted, and said, "'Now look here, Rewi, what China wants today is industry everywhere.... I tell you Rewi, you say you like China, you ought to drop this job of making Shanghai a better place for the Japanese to exploit, and do something that will be useful at this time. The Chinese are made for cooperation.' This she said and much more," he dryly added.^[5]

Alley, already working on ideas for building up industry in the interior, went home and typed up a plan based on the concept of a chain of small-scale producer cooperatives throughout unoccupied China. Ed then turned this into a finished version, which was printed in pamphlet form by J. B. Powell's Review . Snow came up with the term "industrial cooperatives" (which became known as Indusco abroad from its cable address), and Rewi with the gung ho logo, the Chinese equivalent of Indusco that could be literally rendered in English as "work together."

As I noted, Evans Carlson took on the Gung Ho slogan for his famed wartime Marine raiders. To him it represented the spirit of common resolve and equally shared burdens and rewards he had perceived in both the Communist Eighth-Route Army and the CIC movement. Through this avenue Gung Ho entered the American vocabulary to convey an attitude of rather naive "can do" enthusiasm. Truly, there was much of this latter spirit in the expansive claims and aspirations for CIC made by its founding trio. It was proclaimed to be the economic basis for unifying and strengthening resistance forces (including support for Communist-held guerrilla areas), for advancing political democracy, and promoting social and economic change. It was "a people's movement giving encouragement to progressive tendencies," Helen Snow declared, and a "healthy 'middle way' common economic program to prevent a civil war between the Right and the Left in China." Industrial cooperation, Ed wrote, "offered the possibility of creating a new kind of society in the process of the war."^[6]

The Snows and Alley gathered with eight others in a Shanghai restaurant in April 1938 and formally constituted the group as a preparatory committee to promote the cooperative project. A prominent Shanghai banker and patriot, Xu Xinliu (Hsu Sing-loh), chaired the committee.

His financial contacts and enthusiastic support were invaluable in these early months; his death that August when his plane was downed by the Japanese on a flight from Hong Kong into China was a serious blow. Snow had talked with Xu in Hong Kong on CIC business just a few hours before his departure. Xu's death "shocked me beyond expression," Snow wrote J. B. Powell. He was "a rare personality of his class indeed, a generous and sincere and honest man, and one of the few first class financial brains in China."^[7]

Just as Xu had been an exception to Snow's image of the "degenerate:" Shanghai bourgeoisie, he soon met a further exception of a different sort in the British ambassador to China, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr (later Lord Inverchapel), who subsequently served as ambassador in wartime Moscow and then Washington. As another early convert and ally in the cooperative cause, he clearly did not fit Snow's unsympathetic view of such representatives of the British Raj, or for that matter any other stereotype of the stuffy diplomat. "Archie" and Snow would become: trusting and lasting friends. Clark-Kerr had read Red Star before coming to China and looked Snow up on arrival in Shanghai in early 1938. Though then representing the highly conservative Chamberlain government, he was himself vigorously "anti-Axis, anti-Franco and anti-Japanese," in Snow's words. He confided to Ed in Hankou (also called Wuhan, for the tri-city complex of Hankou, Wuchang, and Hanyang) well before that city's fall to the Japanese in December 1938 that its Nationalist defenders needed some of Madrid's no pasarán spirit. (Snow was clearly of like mind.) A craggy featured, ruddy faced Scotsman ("all he needed was a feather in his head to be an Indian chief"), he impressed Snow with his infectious wit, kindliness, initiative, and self-confidence. "He stands for the highest type of British official—a rare diplomat," Snow entered in his diary.^[8]

Snow succeeded in convincing the ambassador of the merits and practicality of the Indusco plan, and of Alley as the ideal leader to make it work. Clark-Kerr then "sold" the package to the Nationalist government in Hankou—primarily through Madame Chiang and the Generalissimo's Australian adviser, W. H. Donald. They were probably the two people with the greatest influence over the Generalissimo and represented as well the staunchest anti-Japanese elements in the regime. Madame Chiang pressured her brother-in-law, Finance Minister H. H. Kung, to back the project with money. He in fact became president of the board of directors of the CIC Association under the executive branch of the government, of which he was then also president (pre-

mier). In this capacity, Kung "assumed active direction over all CIC policies, finances, and appointments."^[9]

In Hong Kong Snow gained the support of T.V. Soong, who agreed privately to back CIC with a substantial loan. T.V., the "liberal" member of the Soong family and a financial expert and banker, was then outside the government and on less than cordial terms with Kung. With Madame Sun's enthusiastic support also secured, the Snow-Alley trio of cooperators had managed to corral the full spectrum of the Soong clan, from the Chiang-Kung ruling branch on the right, to T.V. in the center, and Soong Qingling on the left.

Already in Shanghai the British ambassador had arranged for Alley's immediate separation from his post under the Shanghai municipal council administration. With his unconditional release and pension monies in hand, Alley gambled all on the CIC project. He was soon in Hankou where, with Madame Chiang's firm support, he was appointed chief technical adviser under Dr. Kung, of the now formally established organization in August 1938. (Alley would also wear a dual hat as field secretary under the CIC's international committee set up in Hong Kong in January 1939.) After many "wearying hours in Hankow talking about our cooperative scheme," Snow wrote Powell from Hong Kong later that month, "(I) had the satisfaction of seeing it launched." The movement was going ahead, he added, "despite all sorts of political intrigue and obstruction centered around it." In describing these developments more confidentially to Bertram (then in England) later that year, Snow wrote that "we had manipulated the fuehrers into compliance with a program which normally they would have regarded with shocked horrification as distinctly rouged."^[10]

The fact that the cooperative scheme could get off the ground with the backing of the Nationalist government attested also to the heady atmosphere then prevailing in Hankou. For a moment in time, that temporary capital became a somewhat romantic symbol of a seemingly politically united, all-inclusive, and optimistic spirit of determined resistance to the Japanese enemy. It had taken on (rather unrealistically) a kind of Chinese Madrid symbolism ("a genuine popular front capital," Bertram recollected)—an international focal point, especially for the left, in the worldwide antifascist struggle.^[11]

The auto tycoon Henry Ford and the Irish-American Presbyterian missionary Joseph Bailie were unorthodox links in the Indusco chain. The latter had first come to China in 1890 and had early on seen his mission in terms of "helping the poor as opposed to saving souls." In his

view, "hungry Christians cannot be good Christians." He had been a principal founder of and professor at the College of Agriculture and Forestry of the University of Nanking and took the lead in promoting rural reconstruction programs. He saw rural educational, medical, and economic development as the foundation for a productively self-supporting, independent Chinese nation and people. He stressed the dignity of labor and deplored those who treated the Chinese worker merely as a coolie. "My theory of life," he declared, in reference to the medical condition of the Chinese countryside, "is that we can never have real culture so long as the so-called cultured can look upon such degradation as we have here without doing all in its power to remove it." In all this Bailie was truly, as Alley said, "the ancestor of Indusco."^[12]

This was true in a broader sense as well. Among his many ideas and projects for human betterment in China, Bailie urged Henry Ford in 1920 to consider establishing one or more auto plants and support facilities in China, and in conjunction with this to take in groups of one hundred Chinese students for on-the-job practical engineering experience in a training program at his Detroit works. "I want you to go to China and open up," he told the Ford people, "and it will save you an immense amount of trouble to have a lot of tried men at hand." Ford duly provided such training to youths selected by Bailie, most of them graduates of American engineering colleges. These were to be a new breed of educated Chinese who combined theoretical learning with hands-on work experience at the factory level, not the usual returned student aspiring to and prepared only for a bureaucratic career back home. Bailie thus constantly agitated against what he considered "white-collar engineers." He tended to idealize Ford as a model entrepreneur and benefactor of the American worker, who would come to China to do equally well by the Chinese. "Is there no way," he somewhat naively wrote Ford's secretary in 1921, "whereby when whatever company is organized, the shareholder would receive no more than a definite interest on their money invested, while the balance of the profits after treating the workers as Mr. Ford knows how, would be used for giving elementary education to those villages where very often not a single literate person can be found?"^[13]

Though Ford eventually lost interest in a China auto venture, many Ford factory school alumni, most of them Christian and with engineering degrees, would become the core technical-engineering staff of Indusco. With the help of some Ford returnees, Bailie also conducted technical programs for poor factory apprentices and young workers in schools attached to major industrial plants in Shanghai. All these student protégés came to be known as "Bailie Boys."

Alley first met this unusual missionary in 1928. Bailie soon became a mentor and inspiration to the young New Zealander. (It was Bailie who had persuaded Alley to spend his summer vacation in 1929 in the northwestern famine area where he first met Snow.) Bailie "was a great American," Alley wrote in 1940, "standing out as a giant in this twilight where we grope so feebly and do so few of the things we are capable of doing." Discouraged, and ill with cancer, Bailie returned to America in 1935 to be with his family in Berkeley, California. After undergoing surgery, he knew he had at most a few bedridden months to live. "So he faced the issue as he had always faced issues," Alley recounted, "waited till people were away from home and quietly shot himself." The Bailie Boys' role in CIC, and Alley's work in connection with the cooperatives, including establishing a number of Bailie Schools for poor village youths modeled on the missionary's work-study Shanghai project, made a fitting memorial to the old man.^[14]

During the 1930s Alley befriended a number of Bailie's engineers in Shanghai, a few of whom worked at high-level jobs for the American-owned Shanghai Power Company. He recruited these skilled and experienced men—still imbued with the Bailie spirit—for CIC, at great personal cost to them of income and security. The secretary-general of CIC and the four administrative heads under Alley were all Bailie Boys, as were others who held key posts in the various regional field headquarters. Their extraordinary importance was underlined by the fact that CIC in those years had a total of only twenty "first-class engineers." The secretary-general, K. P. Liu, had been a model county magistrate in Anhui province where he had organized, as he proudly wrote Bailie shortly before the latter's death, cooperative societies for afforestation, fishing, and credit; built roads and a hospital; and ousted the racketeering local tax collectors.^[15]

The CIC planners had set an overly ambitious goal of thirty thousand field units by the end of 1940. (Carrying this further, Helen Snow declared in 1940 that CIC "could probably build 480,000 cooperative factories" for the cost of a one-hundred-million-dollar American battleship.) While such numbers were never even remotely achieved, at its peak in 1940 the movement did have 1,867 functioning societies with just under thirty thousand members, with perhaps a quarter million people in all dependent on Indusco for a livelihood. The "Indusco line," Helen Snow grandly wrote, "stretches in a vast crescent from the deserts of Central Asia to the southern sea." With five main headquarters and depots throughout the country these "vestpocket" industries (Snow's term) operated on three "lines": a first or front line of mobile "guerrilla

industries" in the battle zones and behind Japanese lines; a second or middle line of semi-mobile units in the fluid areas between the war fronts and the rear; and a third or rear line in unoccupied "Free China" of more permanently established basic industrial enterprises and the technical and other support services for all three zones.

CIC ran training and vocational centers, clinics, printing and publishing houses, and literacy classes for cooperative members and their families. It operated small mines, machine shops and refineries, chemical, glass, and electrical works and produced a broad variety of goods for both civilian and military needs. Using the wool-raising resources of northwestern China, Indusco units were able to produce some three million winter blankets for the Chinese army through 1942, though not without stretching the cooperative principle to include large numbers of hired contract workers.^[16]

CIC's organizational principles and procedures were incorporated in a model constitution drawn up in Chungking during 1939 by cooperative experts and CIC people. It was a lengthy legalistic document and, in Douglas Reynolds' words, "suffered from bureaucratic and intellectual excess." Essentially, as Snow described it, a cooperative unit was financed through low-interest loans and credits. Each worker became a shareholder entitled to a vote. Through deductions from wage earnings the workers bought over their shares, thus paying off the loans and establishing a genuine cooperative. Profits were to be allocated, in prescribed percentages, to reserve, welfare, and industrial development funds or, as bonuses to staff and workers, paid in shares and cash. Each factory unit: was envisaged, as Alley expressed it to Helen. Snow, "as one link in a coordinated chain of production," organized into local federations under each of the five regional headquarters. In the final analysis, as Reynolds. states, it was not "CIC's fine procedures and regulations" but only' proper leadership in the field that could protect and serve members' interests.^[17]

Despite the enormous obstacles it faced, and the inevitable deviations in practice from its ideals and principles, CIC had merits and workability and seemed to many a promising democratic prototype for the future—"tomorrow's hope," Snow called it in his glowingly Red Star-like portrayal of Indusco in Battle for Asia . CIC also attracted the attention of Nehru in India, who closely followed its progress. He avidly read both Ed's Battle for Asia (in its British edition, Scorched Earth ), and Helen's China Builds for Democracy (the latter a gift to him from Madame Sun). On Ed's volume, he wrote that "no part of it held me so much as the

chapters dealing with the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives." Nehru emphasized the applicability of the village industry concept to India as well as China. "Possibly the future will lead us and others to a cooperative commonwealth," he concluded in a foreword to the Indian edition of Helen's book in 1942. "Possibly the whole world, flit is to rise above its present brute level of periodic wars and human slaughter, will have to organize itself in some such way." With such shining vistas, so assiduously fostered by the Snows in their publicity work, CIC also became a banner for rallying foreign support for China's overall war effort. And garnering such support, particularly in the West, may have had a certain effect in bolstering the more steadfastly anti-Japanese and forward-looking elements in the Chinese government.^[18]

From the start CIC faced the financial and political problems that stemmed from its governmental connection. Kung released funds earmarked for CIC only in dribs and drabs; there were constant cash flow crises alleviated by bank loans and monies collected through committees organized in Hong Kong and the West, and among overseas Chinese in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. Alley and other key staff members lived on a pittance, often dipping into their savings for personal and CIC expenses. As of January 1939, for example, Alley had received only one month's salary since joining CIC the previous July. Snow devoted much of his time and energies to the project during his final three years in Asia, at considerable cost to his own work and to his financial and physical well-being. "End of my second month here, working on Indusco! What an ass!" he dejectedly recorded in Hong Kong in June 1939.^[19]

Kung, known irreverently to CIC insiders as "the Sage," for his reputed descent from Confucius (Kong [Kung] Fuzi) was both a plus and (increasingly) a minus for Indusco. On the down side were his penny-pinching, foot-dragging mode of support, his profit-oriented mentality, and his innate suspicion of the "popular front" character of the movement. Additionally, in partnership with his wife, the eldest Soong sister, he engaged in speculative and other nonproductive activities. Snow alleged in a July 1939 diary entry that Madame Kung was "fishing around" to get Indusco to help her establish "model factories," possibly in Shanghai, which would earn a "modest 10%" on her investment. Snow also reported that the Kungs still owned "immense properties" in Shanghai, though he added that most of their money was held abroad. These activities at the top reflected the pattern of self-enrichment prevalent throughout the bureaucracy, and which the cooperatives found it more and more difficult to stave off.^[20]

Yet in the early years Kung was also CIC's protector in high places. He was after all considered second only to the Generalissimo in the government hierarchy. "Dr. Kung is certainly to be congratulated," Helen Snow remarked in her book on the cooperatives, "upon the fact that he has not permitted the CIC to fall into the grasping hands of Chungking politicians." The "fulsome praise" accorded Kung and Madame Chiang in CIC publicity material, Snow unenthusiastically noted to Jim Bertram in March 1939, was "the necessary line." Kung, educated in American-sponsored missionary schools, and with degrees from Oberlin College and Yale University, savored such image-making publicity the Indusco promoters gave him in the West. To offset his work to guard the cooperatives from rival factional efforts to absorb or destroy them were Kung's own administrative shortcomings and obstructionism, and the "grasping" qualifies of many in his entourage. As a Christian convert and a former YMCA secretary, "Daddy" Kung had a "soft-hearted" (and Snow would add "soft-headed") side to him, which could also be a bit of a trial. He tended to view CIC in paternalistically philanthropic terms that misinterpreted its mission and trivialized its significance. He approved of such Gandhi-like "spinning societies," he told Snow, for they could keep virtuous village girls working at home, away from the evil influences of big city factory life.^[21]

At the same time, Indusco's founders had a left-leaning agenda of their own that was bound to collide with the entrenched political and economic interests and constituencies of the Nationalist regime. ("What is the color of your [CIC] organization?," W. H. Donald queried Ida Pruitt, who became executive secretary of Indusco's international operations.) The Snows and Alley aimed to use the cooperatives to advance the kind of popularly based and politically inclusive war effort they found lacking in Kuomintang policies. Donald had also already reacted negatively and sharply to Alley's suggestion of two Hankou-based Communist leaders (one of them Zhou Enlai) for membership on CIC's board of directors. Alley was merely (if naively) expressing his and the Snows' view of the cooperative movement as a united front operation encompassing and aiding both the Communist and Nationalist resistance effort.^[22]

Actually, as Alley much later revealed, he was in touch with Zhou Enlai and other Communist liaison people in Hankou in the organizing stages of Indusco. They advised a more politically circumspect CIC approach. It should seek out prominent anti-Japanese "patriotic democrats" for leading roles in the organization, work with and through the

Edgar Snow at age twenty-two, as he embarked from New
York in 1928 for the Orient.

Edgar Snow's mother, Anna Edelmann Snow. Date unknown.
Courtesy Mildred and Claude Mackey Papers, University of
Missouri-Kansas City Archives.

Edgar Snow and father, J. Edgar, in 1941. J. Edgar and Snow's sister, Mildred, and
her husband, Claude Mackey, were then visiting Ed in New York and Howard in
Boston. Ed had not seen his father and sister since leaving Kansas City in 1926.
Courtesy Mildred and Claude Mackey Papers, University of Missouri-Kansas City
Archives.

Edgar Snow and sister, Mildred Mackey, 1941. Courtesy Mildred and
Claude Mackey Papers, University of Missouri-Kansas City Archives.

Mildred Mackey and Howard Snow, 1941. Courtesy Mildred and Claude
Mackey Papers, University of Missouri-Kansas City Archives.

Chiang Kai-shek, J. B. Powell (China Weekly Review editor), and Edgar Snow,
probably 1929 or 1930, in Nanking. Powell, then correspondent for the Chicago
Tribune, had interviewed Chiang. Courtesy of J. B. Powell Papers, Western
Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri.

Peking student marchers, December 9, 1935 (December Ninth Movement). Photo taken
by Snow.

Helen (Peg) Foster Snow, in Peking in the mid-1930s. Showing her with her dog
Gobi, and her riding attire, the photo exemplified one aspect of the life-style of the
Peking "foreign set" in those prewar years.

Helen Snow in the Philippines, 1939, where the Snows resided
from late 1938 through 1940. She was deeply involved in Indusco
promotional work there. Courtesy of the late Polly Babcock Feustel.

Agnes Smedley, 1940s. Courtesy of Mary C. Dimond Papers,
University of Missouri-Kansas City Archives.

Edgar Snow on arrival in the Red district in the northwest, 1936.

Mao's preserved cave dwelling in Bao'an, where Snow spent long nights
interviewing the Communist leader in 1936. Photo by Evelyn Thomas.

Mao and wife, He Zizhen, Bao'an, 1936. Mao later divorced her to marry the actress
Jiang Qing.

Hillside cave dwellings of Mao and other Red leaders outside Yan'an, where Snow
interviewed the chairman in 1939. Considerably more "upscale" than Bao'an, it
remained Mao's headquarters until 1947. Photo by Evelyn Thomas.

George Harem (Dr. Ma Haide) and wife, Sufei. Inscribed on back,
"To dearest Rewi from George and Sufei in Yenan [Yan'an], 1945."
Courtesy of Mary C. Dimond Papers, University of Missouri-Kansas
City Archives.

Edgar Snow and Evans Carlson, in the Philippines, 1940.

James Bertram during visit with the
Snows in the Philippines, 1940.

Edgar Snow and Soong Qingling (Madame Sun Yat-sen), in later 1930s. Courtesy of University
of Missouri-Kansas City Archives; gift of Soong Qingling
Foundation, China.

Edgar Snow as a war correspondent at Stalingrad, February 1943, after the Russian
victory there. Courtesy of Smedley-Strong-Snow Society, China.

Edgar and Lois Snow with children, Christopher and Sian, 1954.
Courtesy of Lois Wheeler Snow.

Edgar and Lois Snow with China group in Geneva, 1961. From left to right, Chinese
consul general Wu, Lois Snow, Madame Wu, Chen Xiuxia, Gong Peng, Edgar
Snow, Qiao Guanhua (Ch'iao Kuan-hua), and Israel Epstein. Aside from the consul
general and his wife and the Snows, the others were in Geneva for the 1961-1962
international conference on Laos. Foreign ministry officials Qiao and his wife, Gong
Peng, were old China friends of Snow's. Courtesy of Lois Wheeler Snow.

Rewi Alley outside his Peking home, 1960s. In much the same garb he trekked
through China's hinterland in his wartime Indusco work. Courtesy of Mary C.
Dimond Papers, University of Missouri-Kansas City Archives.

Edgar Snow, Zhou Enlai, and Mao in Peking during Snow's 1964—1965 China trip.

Edgar Snow and Puyi, the last Qing emperor, in Peking during Snow's 1964-1965
visit.

Edgar Snow with friend and literary agent Yoko Matsuoka in Japan, at
a journalists' seminar she arranged for him in Tokyo, 1968. Courtesy of
Seiko Matsuoka.

Edgar Snow and Huang Hua, in front of Mao's Bao'an cave, during Snow's final
1970-1971 China visit. Note the diplomat Huang's "politically correct" cultural
revolutionary attire.

Lois and Edgar Snow at a Peking dinner party, 1970.

Edgar Snow at home in Eysins, Switzerland, September 1971, just months before
his death.

The Snows' home in Eysins. Courtesy of Lois Wheeler Snow.

Kuomintang, and develop as much international support as possible. CIC should not go into Red-controlled areas "except in the course of popular front work that covered all unoccupied regions," Alley related. This counsel seemed in keeping with the orthodox Communist interpretation of the united front line at the time—to avoid any moves that might undermine the joint Kuomintang-led struggle. It was a line with which Snow would have his differences.^[23]

In any case, the dynamics of the war, with its great expansion of Communist power vis-à-vis the increasingly conservative and debilitated Nationalists, could only heighten the inherent tensions between the two camps. The tiny CIC united front forces, relying heavily on foreign support and funding, could in no way set the course in China's increasingly polarized wartime politics. The reverse, as Douglas Reynolds's study of the CIC has demonstrated, was the case. CIC thus faced such formidable obstacles as continuous financial cutbacks and crises, anti-Communist vendettas against many of its staff, and persistent efforts at takeover ("reorganization") by rightist elements and time-serving and often corrupt bureaucratic hangers-on. As a crowning irony, what remained of the original CIC would find short shrift and internment under the Communists after 1949.^[24]

But in the relatively unified political climate of the early war years, and with an eye on CIC's interests, Snow conspicuously tried to emphasize the positive when writing on the Chiang-Kung patrons of Indusco. A 1940 item he did on the three Soong sisters, who were displaying their joint backing of CIC, was a case in point. In their support of the cooperatives, Snow rather transparently concluded, "One perhaps sees in best focus the generous instincts which all three sisters possess." Ed could hardly have put his heart into even so mildly likening his idol, Madame Sun, to Madame Kung. (Madame Sun, in passing on scandalous tidbits to Snow on the profiteering activities of H. H. and Madame Kung, herself cautioned Ed, for Indusco's sake, not to put any of it in print.)^[25]

In a Foreign Affairs article on the Generalissimo published in the summer of 1938, just as CIC was moving into place under Nationalist auspices, Snow showed a willingness, despite the past, to give the Chinese leader the benefit of his (Snow's) doubts, and to accord Chiang high marks for his stubbornly courageous, if autocratic, war leadership. "His outstanding virtues," Snow wrote, "are courage, decision, determination, ambition and sense of responsibility." (Snow had a personal interview with Chiang in Hankou that July, a meeting that could take place, he surmised, because the Generalissimo "did not know who I was.")

Snow took even what he considered Chiang's most pernicious past policies (appeasing Japan while waging ruthless war against the Reds) and managed to give them a considerably more affirmative twist. He thus declared, "we may be absolutely certain that Chiang exhausted every practical possibility of reconciliation with Japan before the current bloodbath began." And as for the Generalissimo's "implacable war against the Reds," it could be taken as evidence of Chiang's tenacious character, now put to better use against the Japanese. "This stubbornness," Snow argued, "is in fact one of Chiang's qualifies that make the Chinese Communists respect and support him today," expecting that he "can be made to fight" with equal determination against the Japanese. (In a Post article at this time, Snow stressed that Chiang had "faithfully adhere[d] to his united front pact" with the Reds.) With adroitness Snow concluded that the "objective conditions which are the instrument of Chiang's fate today are relatively dynamic and progressive, and it is because he continues to reflect their nature that his leadership remains secure."

In another piece on Chiang, over two years later, Snow pursued much the same line of reasoning, but by now raising warning signals for the future. He pointedly declared that the Nationalist leader "must soon either undergo a further transformation with the period or dwindle to a figure of relative insignificance." Chiang could retain his role as "the Leader by common consent only as long as he continues to symbolize the united national struggle against imperialism," and he would "lose his prestige overnight if he were to betray that trust," he asserted. Snow, however, was still ready to applaud the Generalissimo's "steadfastness" under that test, which "has helped to stamp China's fight for independence with the dignity of one of the heroic causes of our time." On the proposition that a man can be judged only against "the milieu and limitations" of his own time and place, Snow finally pronounced, "it seems likely that, despite his prejudices and contradictions and counter-revolutionary past Chiang Kai-shek will be remembered as a great leader." But, Snow emphasized, citing views he attributed to the Communists, the broader "the revolutionary mobilization of the masses," the "deeper would become the revolutionary mission of the war—and the more revolutionary a leader Chiang would be forced to become, if he wished to hold his place at `the center of resistance.'"

It was equally evident that, for Snow, CIC itself was a crucial element in the military and political dynamics of the China equation. In a Post piece in the spring of 1940, in which he appraised China's protracted resistance effort both positively and optimistically, the Indusco story was in

the forefront of this relatively sanguine picture. "I believe," he ended, that "a better nation" will emerge from "the valley of slaughter" than the one that entered it. This article even elicited a warmly commendatory letter from Chungking's vice-minister of information (and Missouri journalism alumnus), Hollington ("Holly") K. Tong. "I do not hesitate to say," Tong wrote Ed of his "fine article," that "it is one of the best analysis [sic] I have seen of the present situation between China and Japan."^[26]

Snow's public flirtation With the notion that the Generalissimo and his government could or would rise to the occasion of a popular revolutionary-style war effort had run its course by the end of 1940. With the unraveling of the united front and growing possibilities of renewed civil war, coupled with the correspondingly deteriorating situation of CIC, Snow's misgivings would be more openly expressed in his published views. In his personal opinions, as previously noted, Snow from 1937 on continuously took a much more pessimistic and skeptical view of Chiang's wartime stewardship. In this vein, in a letter to Jim Bertram in November 1938, shortly after the loss of Hankou to the Japanese, Snow acidly remarked that Chiang "will simply retire as far back as he is pushed, and it may be best for China that he is pushed to Tali or Bhamo [on the Burma frontier]. Certainly nothing can be done to organize the people, or to mobilize the resources of the hinterland, in areas he controls." Ed (and Helen) therefore saw CIC's primary mission to be one of sustaining the guerrilla-style war waged in the regions of Red military operations. Getting CIC support for "guerrilla industry" became a chief preoccupation of Snow's Indusco work. Though the Kuomintang areas might be the "physical base" of CIC, he told Alley in 1939, the "spiritual base and organizational base must be in guerrilla areas." As always, Snow was deeply influenced in these views by his intense compassion for and emotional attachment to the ordinary people of China and their lives. It is "the youth, the very young, and the farmers, the poor of China, the soldiers, the workers, the men and women, millions of them, who ask so little and give so much in return for it, that make China break your heart!" Snow entered in his diary at the time. The "picture of Chungking and the interior sounds so terribly hopeless from all angles," he added. "Why should it seem such a personal and psychological problem with me?" Perhaps, he pondered, the reason for his strong reaction to all this might be "a conflict between my desire to write the truth as I

see it and the loyalties which prevent me from writing that truth?"^[27]

Beyond this, of course, was Snow's continuously reiterated thesis on popular mobilization as the key to Chinese victory. According to his rea-

soning, as the Nationalist armies retreated further into the western China hinterland, their withdrawal gave Japan the opportunity to consolidate control over and exploit the resources of its occupied territories. Only Communist-organized peasant resistance could thwart this outcome, thereby making Japan's China conquests "a costly and entirely profitless venture which may ultimately bring ruin and defeat," Snow wrote Harry Price in November 1938. It would be "a race against time," he told Bertram, "to see whether the Xi'ans [Reds] can mobilize and train and arm the people, in the areas penetrated by the Nips, faster than the enemy can." And CIC was precisely the instrument to provide the essential mobile industrial backup for that effort. As Snow summed it up to Richard Walsh over a year later, "if nothing is done to strengthen the economic basis of guerrilla resistance, China. will probably be lost until such time as the fortunes of the Japanese Empire suffer a reversal through major war elsewhere."^[28]

In 1938 from Hankou Snow had sent Mao a letter describing the newly launched cooperative movement. The following year he made his second visit to the Red northwest to brief Mao on CIC and secure his personal endorsement. The Red leader told Snow he had fully supported the movement since receiving Ed's earlier letter. Mao especially emphasized to him that GIG "should devote first attention to the guerrilla areas." In a follow-up letter to Mao, Snow noted that "my own deepest dissatisfaction with C.I.C. is that it has failed, thus far, to give important help to guerrilla industry, although that is where the sympathies of nearly all its leaders lie." On his return from the northwest. Snow recommended to CIC's international committee in Hong Kong that it "devote all possible available funds" to develop cooperatives in. the guerrilla districts of the north. "Whereas industrial cooperatives are compelled to make all sorts of retreats and compromises to survive elsewhere, in the guerrilla areas alone they can enjoy the fullest co-operation of the government, the army, and the population."^[29]

Ironically, as in the case of Red Star , Snow was taking a more leftist position, again evidently in accord with Mao's, than the prevailing Communist orthodoxy on just where the political and military center of gravity in the China conflict lay. This was illustrated in an exchange of letters in early 1939 between the Snows and Israel Epstein on the question of CIC priorities and the principal purposes of its international promotional and fund-raising work. Epstein, who had been brought up in Tianjin and had known the Snows in Peking, was an able young journalist in charge of publicity for the CIC's Hong Kong promotion corn-

mittee, organized by Ida Pruitt in February 1939. Epstein argued for the conventional left line on the Kuomintang-led united front. He had strong reservations about Peg's outspoken views in her correspondence, on CIC's primary mission to help Communist forces in the field. ("Our underlying aim [in starting Indusco]," Helen responded to Epstein, "has been and is now more than ever to make Indusco a medium of helping the people's movement in China, and of securing foreign funds for this in as great a percentage as possible.") As Epstein put it in a rejoinder to the Snows, "if we are not to come to grief, there must be thorough discussion of how Indusco can serve its ends with maximum effect and yet with maximum adherence to UF [united front].... The UF, not some ideal UF but the pulsating and writhing thing that exists at the moment and must be the inevitable environment of our work." Ed, with some asperity, wrote back: if "your committee does not intend to devote its main energies" to raising money for the guerrilla areas "you are evidently under a misapprehension concerning the purposes of the founders of the movement." Snow listed as a fundamental objective of CIC, "to provide indispensable economic bases for the military and political forces of the democratic people's united front"—a distinctly different concept from Epstein's "UF." "Our allies are CDL [Madame Sun's Hong Kong-based China Defence League] and Era and Newfa [the Communist Eighth-Route and New Fourth Armies]," Snow continued, "and not ML and HH [Madame Chiang and H. H. Kung]—whom we must encourage and help, of course, without however dissipating our own slender energies."^[30]

Snow's formula for CIC—of working both with and around the Nationalist government—and essentially at political cross-purposes with it—surely had its own contradictory if not mutually exclusive character. (Ed himself seemed to acknowledge this in talking of "guerrindusco" as a discrete entity and undertaking.) For this formula to work at all called for financing and control largely independent of the Chinese government. This goal in turn required vigorous promotional and fund-raising efforts abroad, and the creation of influential externally based committees to flannel the monies raised, through Alley, straight to CIC in the field. As Snow bluntly framed this to Epstein, "I think there is no question that Alley can guarantee the use of all funds secured by us for use in guerrindusco if that is the will of the [Hong Kong promotion] Committee as it most certainly should be, in my opinion." At the inception of CIC in the summer of 1938, Snow had already indicated the semi-adversarial relationship with the Nationalist government he and his fellow Indusco

sponsors anticipated. "We may suffer rebuffs, we may be disowned," he had written Helen, "we may irritate and provoke the Gov., but there is no other way to make them act except to keep the movement going outside and push them along."^[31]

Snow worked hard in the next months to help organize an international committee for CIC. Its first meeting was in July 1939, with the respected and social-minded Anglican bishop of Hong Kong, Ronald O. Hall, as its chair. Chen Hansheng (Han-seng), a noted agrarian specialist and acute observer of the China political scene whose links to the Communist movement became known later, was secretary of the committee until the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong in December 1941. (Thereafter the committee was based in Chengdu in western China.) Snow was a member of its board of trustees and Alley held the post of field secretary under the committee, which had auxiliary status in Kung's central headquarters in Chungking. The committee had a continually uneasy, competitive relationship with Kung, who sought control over it and of the funds channeled through its hands. "It is fair to say," Alley wrote Ida Pruitt in August 1940, "that without foreign interest and help, the CIC would have been wrecked long ago."^[32]

Ida Pruitt had gone on to the United States to organize promotional-funding work there. With branch committees operating in various cities, Indusco, Inc., American Committee in Aid of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives, was established in New York in September 1940. Eleanor Roosevelt headed its advisory board, Admiral Yarnell (now retired) chaired the board of directors, with many luminaries (including Pearl Buck and her publisher husband, Richard Walsh) on the board. CIC "was fast becoming a major (and easily romanticized) factor in American thinking on China." In a March 1939 letter to Madame Sun urging her to join the board of the impending Hong Kong international committee, Snow emphasized that through fund-raising efforts around the world, "It seems likely that ten million dollars could be got under the control of this Trustees Board in a year or two. If [the board] is correctly constituted, in its membership, two million at least—let's be very conservative—can go to the guerrilla industry in which we're most interested." Actually, through 1945, the international committee had disbursed an estimated total of five million dollars (U.S.) to CIC, raised through promotion committees abroad. The American committee for Indusco itself provided some $3.5 million for CIC up to the Communist takeover in 1949—1950.^[33]

As to the extent of guerrindusco support, a CIC center was set up in Yan'an (initially sanctioned by Kung), following a visit there by Alley in

early 1939. Through 1941 (after which all such contributions apparently ceased), a total of some $1,500,000 in inflated Chinese currency—worth only a fraction of that in U.S. dollars—came to this office through CIC sources. Much of it came from fund-raising efforts by the Snows among the generally prosperous overseas Chinese business community in the Philippines. The latter were also the major source of funds to finance many highly useful CIC projects in areas of New Fourth Army operations. "In those days [in the Philippines] I thought nothing of asking Chinese millionaires for fifty thousand dollars or so for the Communist regions for Indusco work," Helen Snow later recalled.^[34]

However, by far the major share of financing for the Yan'an-based CIC operation (especially after 1940) came from the border region government there, and the great majority of the Indusco cooperatives had been organized by the government before their incorporation under CIC. This reorganization had apparently been carried out as a result of Snow's visit to Yan'an in September 1939. "I told them," Snow wrote Ida Pruitt, "if they would reorganize and adopt the CIC constitution I'd try to get some help for new capital from IC [international committee]." Evidently in anticipation of such funding, Alley designated the Yan'an CIC an "International Center." While the Indusco example and experience may have influenced the pattern of the major production movement launched under Mao in the border region in the early 1940s, it much more directly reflected Mao's own "new democratic" concepts of a less "statist," more decentralized, village-based, mixed economy of household, cooperative, and small-scale private entrepreneurial production units. In a long letter to Alley, written just days before Pearl Harbor from his new home in Madison, Connecticut, Snow summed up the results of all their work on behalf of guerrindusco: "I often grow discouraged about the results of our own efforts through these years. Except for the little money we raised in the PI [Philippines] we haven't done anything for the guerrindusco people and I am ashamed." In America, Snow added, "never a cent has been earmarked" for guerrilla industry, and the international committee "never remits a cent itself from our funds." Perhaps reflecting these disappointing results, as well as the gem eral decline of CIC after 1941 as it slipped away from its founding ideals, purposes, and leadership, Chinese Communist leaders themselves came to have little regard for or confidence in CIC.^[35]

In September 1938 the Snows left by ship from Hong Kong to Manila (with Helen's usual thirty-eight pieces of luggage), and from there by car to the "air conditioned" mountain resort of Baguio in northern

Luzon. They looked forward, in this mini-American setting, to an extended and much needed respite from their exhausting immersion in the China drama. The last three years, from the December 1935 student movement on, had been a period of particularly high intensity, physically and emotionally draining. "I feel so completely lousy," Ed had written Helen from Hong Kong, just weeks; before the two left for the Philippines. He had no appetite, had lost weight, and couldn't sleep in the summer heat, he told her. Helen herself was still recovering from her Yan'an-contracted dysentery. Baguio, at five thousand feet elevation, was an unexpected treat with its "pine clad hills and clear fresh crisp air," Snow recorded. "I had grown used to the China air so that I thought the smell was a chemical part of all air and a universal." The couple rented a four-room cottage at the country club, where Snow played a round of golf the next day. It all seemed a perfect recipe for recuperation. The food at the club was "marvelous: huckleberry, pie, hot rolls, baked beans, milk-fed chicken, American lettuce.... Everything is on the American scale." But they had not escaped world realities. A few days later came news of the Munich pact. "To me it appears to be the most cynical deal in human life and property ever made by a responsible self-respecting people to save its own neck," Ed bitterly noted of the roles of Britain and France. It was a reaction that would strongly color his thinking on the 1939 Soviet-German agreement and on the early stages of the European war.^[36]

Snow had arranged for a leave of absence from the Herald and planned to concentrate on his new book about the China conflict. He also looked into the current situation in the Philippines, produced a few articles on the U.S.-Philippines relationship in the context of a threatening Japan, and thought he might quickly turn out a short book on the subject to help defray living expenses. As it turned out, there was no market in the United States for such a work, and as he (and Helen) became ever more deeply caught up in CIC affairs, his big book on the war had to be put aside until 1940. "We came here for a vacation but haven't stopped working for a single day," Helen complained to Hubert Liang after a few months in the islands.^[37]

But most of this work brought them no income. They were soon thoroughly involved in committee-organizing and money-raising for CIC, principally among the Manila Chinese, but with much encouragement from the American political establishment there and valuable help from good friends they made in the American business community. It became one of the most successful of such overseas efforts on behalf of CIC, especially in support of the Snows' pet project, guerrindusco.

From the Philippines in 1940 they also drew up and orchestrated a petition to Roosevelt for a $50 million American loan for CIC. Sponsored by Indusco committees in the Philippines and the United States, the document was signed by an illustrious list of Americans. Snow pushed the idea in his first meeting with the apparently sympathetic president early in 1942. Roosevelt sidestepped these efforts on grounds of nonin-terference in Chinese domestic affairs. He did promise Snow he would personally put in a plug for CIC with the Generalissimo. "I suppose I should have told him that Chiang wasn't the man to take a hint; he had to be pushed," Snow ruefully related in Journey . Helen followed up Ed's visit with Roosevelt by sending the president a copy of her book on CIC. In writing the book, Helen wrote F. D. R. in her unsubtle "up front" style, "I had you back in my mind all the time as the great hope for trying to get some American support for the movement." Actually, the Snows' notion that the Chinese government could be effectively "pushed" on CIC through external pressure would turn out to be another less than successful example of foreign efforts to "change China."^[38]

Ed and Helen operated as a behind-the-scenes guiding and coordinating center for promotional activities in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, in England and North America, and for CIC work in China. They clearly regarded the cooperatives as their offspring and were intent on keeping it on the path they had charted, and on guarding it against a hostile takeover from central headquarters in Chungking. They engaged in lengthy, and often frustrating correspondence exhorting, advising, and occasionally badgering those in charge of CIC work, principally Ida Pruitt in America and Alley in China. The Snows viewed both, in their separate spheres, as indispensable to the success or even survival of a relatively autonomous and "progressive" cooperative movement. If "you lose the independence of your Committee," Snow warned Pruitt confidentially, "your work loses its value to RA [Alley] and all the CIC people who are fighting to keep the organization out of the hands of the machine politicians." Alley, Snow continued, "can only be helped through the International Committee, which exists primarily for the purpose of backing up his leadership." There was always another crisis to manage, as well as personality problems to iron out and ruled feathers to soothe. "No more now, I've spent a whole day on this bloody business," Snow irritably concluded another letter to Pruitt, after a particularly heavy and exasperating day of correspondence on such CIC problems.^[39]

Helen Snow carried on an even more massive CIC correspondence, which often tended to take on a "command" quality with long lists of

peremptory instructions. A few weeks after getting settled in Baguio, she sent Alley one of her missives. She launched into many pages of directions, under the heading, "Here is what must be done." For poor Alley, more than fully occupied in building the cooperatives from scratch, Helen ticked off a lengthy catalogue of promotional chores—letters, reports, and possible articles to write. Between Alley, the seat-of-the-pants, China-rooted builder, and the more politically focused Snows, differences in perspective were inevitable. "YOU HAVE GOT TO DO SOME PROMOTION WORK. Don't you know that 90% of getting started in China is political? PLEASE STOP WANDERING AROUND YOURSELF for a few days," she ordered, and write up "a full report" on the cooperatives. His "main job" was now organizational, she added. "Don't get lost in the mechanical details." (For Alley, of course, God was in the details.) Helen summed up her own standpoint: "The whole world needs fixing so badly that one hardly knows where to start or to stop."^[40]

Snow made extended trips back to Hong Kong and China from the Baguio base, on CIC business and for his regular China work—both now closely related. He spent most of 1939 in Hong Kong and Chungking, and in journeying along the "Indusco line" to the pioneering and thriving northwestern CIC center of Baoji, from there on to Xi'an and Yan'an, and back to Chungking. The account of these Indusco travels., and of CIC generally, became a central feature of his Battle for Asia . Virtually all his China writing in that period either directly or indirectly aimed to publicize and win friends abroad for the cooperatives. In so doing he sought to preserve a "non-official" status in the movement, in part because he felt his Red Star- tainted reputation would not play well in Nationalist circles (though it was an asset to CIC elsewhere). But probably more important, Snow was concerned to maintain his non-affiliated professional journalist role. He was "very annoyed," he wrote Pruitt in June 1940, that some Chinese Information Service material from Washington referred to him as "a leader" of CIC. "I am only a committee member, no official connection, won't be able to do anything for CIC if this goes on," he added.^[41]

But in truth, Snow was a leader at every stage of the CIC saga through 1941. Rewi Alley's later apt description of Ed as "standard bearer of Gung Ho" was closer to the reality than Snow's own disclaimers. What Snow's (and Helen's) nonofficial capacity did mean was that the enormous amount of effort, time, and expense put into their CIC work was uncompensated, with the exception of a few CIC-related articles Ed did

for the Post and other journals. "I have spent months of my time, and about all my surplus cash, working on this project," Snow wrote Ma Haide after his September 1939 Yan'an visit, which led to the creation of the international CIC center there. "We have spent all our money again, as usual," Helen told J. Edgar and Mildred, and by the time Ed got down to sustained work on his book in the spring of 1940 (again on leave from the Herald "sans pay"), he had "already spent most of the advance royalties, alas!" he wrote his father. In taking hours and days he could not afford to lose away from his book to do necessary CIC writing that summer, Snow reiterated his characteristic journalist philosophy. "I think it is our obligation to put in an oar on the side of decency when we can, if journalism is to retain any dignity or social usefulness," he wrote an editor. His involvement continued even after his return to the States. "I cannot run away from (CIC), as I long to," he wrote Richard Walsh in mid-1941. "I am too deeply committed to some fine people who have given up far more than my little time, and whose very lives are at stake. "^[42]

Kewi Alley, as a partner in starting CIC and as Ed's personal choice to run the movement, was essential to the Snows' internationally based strategy for keeping the cooperatives on course and out of the wrong hands. ("If RA [Alley] goes, the whole show goes," Snow told Ida Pruitt.) Alley thus became the "star" in Snow's writings on Indusco. The idea was not simply to give this extraordinary man his due. To portray him as the inspirational embodiment of all that CIC stood for was an effective way to rally international support and, it was thought, give Alley the clout he needed for the inevitable infighting over CIC control in China. It would thus be difficult for Chungking to discard him entirely without stirring up an adverse reaction among friends of China abroad—a result that would dry up aid funds not only for CIC but for other China causes as well. "The only thing that is now preserving CIC's leadership from wholesale liquidation [by Chungking] ... is fear of American and to a lesser extent of [other] foreign opinion," Snow explained to Walsh, then chair of the American Indusco board. By personalizing the CIC story through Alley, Snow contributed significantly to shaping that opinion.^[43]

"There is one hero in particular, Rewi Alley," Snow wrote Random House of work in progress on his Battle for Asia . Alley's effort to build guerrilla industry in China, Ed went on in an overblown comparison, was "as much of an epic as Lawrence's organization of guerrilla war in Arabia," and it provided "a kind of ribbon of hope" for the latter part of

his book. But probably Snow's single most influential writing on Alley and CIC was his Post article in early 1941 (a version of material included in his book) called "China's Blitzbuilder, Rewi Alley." It was a deserved paean of praise. and admiration for Alley but also an extravagant picture of CIC's achievements and potentialities at a time when the prospects in China, both for Alley and Indusco, were already quite bleak. Who can say, Snow concluded, that in the end Alleys achievement may nor "prove of more lasting benefit to mankind than the current battles for empire," and be "the most constructive result of the battle for Asia itself?" But such publicity did have its effect. Since mid-1941, Alley later recounted, "foreign contributions [to CIC] had taken a quantum leap," in part because of the "publicity about me and Gung Ho, especially in a Saturday Evening Post article by Edgar Snow." But Kung's central headquarters also redou-bled its efforts to gain control over these new funds.^[44]

In writing for the mass American readership of the Post , Snow dwelt much on Alley's unique foreigner role in China, a point Rewi himself liked to downplay. "Never before, I believe, had a foreigner been given such wide responsibility," Ed declared, "for the actual organization of a socio-economic movement in China." Alley's decidedly non-Chinese appearance was made to order for Snow. With his "fiery hair and hawk-like English nose," Alley was the perfect image of "the kind of foreign devil to frighten the wits out of Chinese children."^[45]

Alley was truly excellent material for Snow's promotional endeavors. A twice-wounded decorated hero of the western front in World War I, he had struggled for a bare livelihood in sheep farming in New Zealand before coming to Shanghai in 1927. He already had, in Douglas Reynolds' words, "an instinctive antipathy for the idle rich, and a natural sympathy for the struggling and disdained poor." His China revolutionary sympathies were galvanized by the miserable working and living conditions he tried to correct, as factory inspector in Shanghai. Alley's radical politics came directly out of his compassionate but hardheaded humanity expressed in unfailing respect for those who were poorest and most disadvantaged, especially the young. The China scholar Olga Lang, who accompanied Alley on an inspection tour of Shanghai facto-tics and workshops in 1936, recalled that the young boys and girls who worked in them "greeted Rewi as they would a friend and protector," as "an uncle and father." She was particularly impressed that Alley checked the children for signs of vitamin-deficiency beriberi disease by pressing their skin "without any trace of fastidiousness .... These were his own boys, not the objects of charity, not 'the poor heathens' whom one has

to help out of some abstract moral [or, we might add, political] considerations."^[46]

For Indusco, Alley exhibited a similar mode of on-the-spot personal contact with individual cooperatives and their members throughout the country. By 1941 he had logged tens of thousands of miles, "investigating Indusco in the field, creating it, and mothering and fathering it," in Snow's words. The American writer Graham Peck, who worked with CIC for a time and accompanied Alley to the CIC center at Baoji, related that "as soon as word spread that [Alley] had arrived, Co-op workmen, organizers, and administrators [each with a "special grievance or problem"] poured in to see him from dawn to bedtime." Alley was constantly on the go in his familiar khaki shorts, traveling by wheezing charcoal-fueled truck or bus jammed with every variety of passenger and baggage, by boat, bicycle, or more often than not trudging on his powerful trunk-like legs over the usually roadless interior. Cheerfully he shared and even savored the privations of everyday Chinese life and travel, stoically endured danger and disease, and seemed indomitable and indestructible. "This is my 20th day sick," he wrote Pruitt from a southeastern hinterland CIC base in June 1939, of a severe typhoid attack. "Do hope that other truck comes up so that I can bag it" for the northwest. On virtually all such trips Alley was but one of many hitchhiking ("yellow fish") passengers. "It was a crowded vehicle indeed that Evans Carlson [who was with him on a 1940 CIC trip] and I crawled into in Kanchow the other day," Alley reported. "I went in through the window, as that seemed the quickest and most popular way. Evans being tall, hit his head frequently as he wormed himself over the piles of luggage in the centre of the bus floor." Carlson (who had these same qualifies himself) wrote the Snows, "There is a spiritual quality about Rewi which triumphs over disease, fatigue, or any other element which might be expected to leave a mark on him. He is truly one of the anointed."^[47]

Whereas Snow was intent on building Alley's international reputation, Rewi himself preferred a less conspicuous role. He was inclined to understatement as opposed to the grand claims made for CIC and himself by its proponents abroad, including Snow. He adapted himself naturally to his Chinese surroundings, spoke fluent and pithily colloquial Chinese, and could regale his peasant-worker Indusco audiences with amusing and self-deprecating anecdotes on such outlandish foreign things as his extremely prominent nose. As he told Graham Peck, "the easiest way to get along with people who are suspicious of foreigners was to make the state of being a foreigner seem ridiculous." While the

Snows and others bemoaned the fact that Alley failed to exploit his international prestige ("face" in Chinese terms) in the political and bureaucratic infighting in Chungking, Alley instinctively understood the pitfalls this involved for him, not only as a foreigner, but as a suspected CCP sympathizer. He concentrated instead on trying to make things work—both people and machines, at the grass roots.^[48]

This focus became a source of some contention between Alley and Snow. Ed placed much more weight on the political and foreign publicity aspects of the CIC operation. Rewi put his faith primarily in a "demonstration in the field that will 'save' CIC in spite of opposition," Snow commented in his diary of an inconclusive discussion with Alley in Hong Kong in mid-1939. Alley "thinks he can get to 10,000 [co-ops] on present basis. I tell him we are building the movement in areas of political insecurity." Alley thought Ed greatly overestimated his ability directly to influence matters in central headquarters. "No use to say that I should have stayed in Chungking," he wrote from Jiangxi in June 1939. "Our own H.Q. very certainly did not want me there. And nothing would have happened in these regional H.Q. unless we had got out on the job." Snow had earlier written Pruitt that Alley's position in Chungking was "fundamentally very strong if he uses it but trouble is he's no good at [the] political wire-pulling and intrigue" essential to holding his own in "the rotten system" he was obliged to work with. All the more reason, Ed added in the Snows' familiar and continuous theme, "to strengthen Rewi's prestige abroad, and thereby in the Government." Alley must not "get lost in field work," Helen wrote Ed that May. He was expending all his energy, she complained, "walking around the country and setting up factories with his bare hands." Chen Hansheng put the issue succinctly, in the wake of a major "reorganization" of CIC by Chungking in 1940. "Rewi thinks that if we could build up a strong field force with good coops we will be all right," he told Helen. "I hold a different opinion because I think good coops are eggs of the hen, which, however, now approaches non-fertility."^[49]

There was in fact much merit in both positions. Without the organizing, publicity, and fired raising pushed by the Snows, CIC would very likely have withered on the vine early on, and without Alley's total hands-on commitment to the building process, the remarkable achievements of the early CIC years would equally have been impossible. Each side recognized and appreciated the other's contribution. But both had their illusions: Alley that he could safeguard the movement's vigor, purposes, and integrity in the field, and Snow that Alley's continued ability

to do so would depend to a good degree on international publicity-derived political capital Rewi could draw on in Chungking.

Ed's position reflected the pronounced foreign vantage point of Indusco, sometimes narrowed to the personal responsibility of the two Snows. "If it becomes impossible to cooperate with Chungking," Ed declared to Pruitt in early 1939, "we will continue it as a purely Era and Newfa responsibility, and for it can tap the same sources of [outside] help." Helen carried this idea a step further in her own letter to Pruitt. If Alley was "kicked out" by Chungking, CIC should not only operate "independently" of the government, but start a campaign to replace Kung by the more CIC-friendly T. V. Soong. "Rewi thinks the way to work with the Chinese," she followed this up to Pruitt, "is to give them the open control and do all the hard work himself." But the Chinese would probably interpret this "as being weak-kneed, especially from a foreigner." The key to influencing Chungking was "foreign approbation," she told Ed. Snow, reacting to CIC's recurrent reorganizational crises, urged Alley in August 1940 to take the lead in developing Western-style democratic mechanisms for shifting power from bureaucrats at the top to the co-op members themselves. He outlined an ascending system of elective bodies from village-level co-op units to a central council at the apex. This council, he declared, should eventually acquire "by whatever methods necessary, the right to approve and finally actually to appoint its own central administration." The people now in charge in Chungking, he pressed on, "must be made to represent the common will of the C.I.C. masses. If you do not recognize that," he admonished Alley, "you will simply be deceiving yourself and evading the responsibility—which is now historic—that a combination of circumstances has put upon you." Just how Alley was to accomplish this takeover from below, in the context of a repressively authoritarian and hostile regime at the head and a traditionalist society at the base, remained unclear.

In any event Alley's way was typically Chinese. In his view, the further away from central headquarters and the less direct contact between it and units in the field, the better. Out in the hinterland, "due to bad communications, one could get progressive administrators appointed more easily," he later explained. But rather contradictorily, he acknowledged that "Gung Ho also suffered many raids and arrests in various hinterland centers throughout 1941-44." Perhaps Alley came closer to the realities in cryptically pinpointing CIC's key problem to Graham Peck in 1941: "We're trying to do it at the wrong time. We are a thousand years too early for the officials and a thousand years too late for the

people." The notion of externally "moving" China forward was bluntly put by Helen Snow in her CIC book. "All that [China] needs is a good push from behind." She always identified CIC with her own Anglo-American Protestant ethos, and (with an intent also on garnering American support) underscored the Christian faith and American nurturing of Alley's Bailie Boy lieutenants. "They are the most Americanized Chi-nest one could imagine," she asserted in her book. "They like American slang and American food and American clothes and American methods."^[50]

This Western coloration and reformist-interventionist attitude predictably annoyed conservative Chinese nationalist sensibilities. It gave a semblance of plausibility to the "imperialist" allegations raised in hostile Chinese quarters that added to the threateningly radical image they held of the cooperatives. Alley could thus be painted both Red and imperialist, and Snow found himself labeled a British agent (presumably for his ties to Clark-Kerr) in the gossip of Chungking. (Snow later used the term "missionary"—which had its own Western intrusionist connotations—as best describing his own and Alley's CIC roles.) CIC was similarly accused of facilitating inroads by foreign capital into China. Nor did Alley's Snow-promoted international standing protect him from eventual dismissal as technical adviser by the executive Yuan in September 1942. On the contrary, as Rewi later wrote a CIC colleague, "the starring of my poor efforts have done me a good deal of harm with political people in CK [Chungking]."^[51]

Though Alley remained field secretary under the international committee, his title came to have little meaning in terms of overall responsibilities or control of monies. The committee itself, and Indusco's parent funding organization in the United States (United China Relief), increasingly gravitated into the orbit of Chungking. By 1945 Alley was hunkered down in the remote community of Shandan in the far northwestern province of Gansu on the edge of the Turkestan desert. There, he and a resolutely idealistic young Englishman, George Hogg, had built up a Bailie-type work-study center, enrolling peasant youths from this impoverished area. Hogg tragically died in 1945 of tetanus from an infected stubbed toe, and no vaccine available to save him. The Shandan enterprise, under Alley's direct management after Hogg's death, was a perfect example of the style Rewi always found most comfortable and satisfying: personally involved, youth-centered, away from the political spotlight. He had now, as he later recounted, "shifted my attention to training technicians at the Bailie schools to help build a New China

which I felt was surely to come." The Shandan school, with help from "progressive forces" abroad, reached a maximum of some four hundred students, with a thriving complex of technical workshops, educational, medical and agricultural facilities. It seemed to embody and demonstrate in microcosm the faith affirmed by Bailie, Alley, and Snow in the mostly untapped potentialities of China's poorest peasant millions.^[52]

CIC itself, facing a mounting combination of political-administrative, economic, and financial problems, declined steadily after 1940. Its downward spiral leveled off by 1945 at a total of somewhat over three hundred co-ops, where it more or less remained until Communist victory in 1949. Meanwhile Alley and his school, harassed by government agents, local militarists, and gangsters, ardently and expectantly awaited the arrival of the forces of revolutionary liberation. Ironically, however, the "struggle" tactics of Communist cadres proved no less meddlesome than the takeover methods of Kuomintang bosses. One such "political work" cadre assigned to Shandan by the new regime "set about very steadily to destroy the foundation of the school," Alley much later disclosed. "It was utterly crazy to try to undermine the good boys and say they were all gangsters and to promote the useless ones and send them off to relatively cozy jobs." The school was taken over by the Beijing government's ministry of fuel, Alley's training program for small village industry was "shelved," and Shandan's activities were shifted to the Gansu provincial capital of Lanzhou by 1952. There it concentrated on training technicians for the modern state-run oil industry. All of this was the antithesis of the autonomous, decentralized, small unit, rural-based cooperative network CIC's founders had envisioned. Symbolically, virtually all the buildings of the original Shandan school were destroyed in an earthquake at about that time. CIC was formally terminated by Beijing in 1951, not least for the international ("imperialist") links that Snow had so painstakingly worked to create specifically to ensure CIC aid to Red-controlled areas. CIC was simply "knocked out," Alley told me. The Communists said "it was just an imperialist dodge to get into China."^[53]

Thus in the end Indusco became yet another frustrated Western "reformist" attempt to remake China. In many respects CIC was a wartime follow-up of earlier efforts at rural uplift during the prewar decade, in which American Protestant missionaries and their Chinese associates played a large part. The activities of Joseph Bailie prior to that, his later influence on Alley, and the role of his Bailie Boys in Indusco, further underlined these continuities. (In 1933 Snow himself wrote very favorably

of the achievements of the widely acclaimed and influential model county project of Tinghsien [Dingxian], in northern China, initiated bit James Y. C. Yen, the renowned American-educated former YMCA secretary and initiator of the rural-oriented mass education movement.) As recounted in a study by James C. Thomson, these prewar reformers also) faced the daunting challenges posed by their "overly close association" with a government that "stood firmly in defense of the old social order." In terms equally applicable to the Indusco experience, Thomson notes "the grandiose aims and the inadequate instruments possessed by the Americans who attempted to influence the development of modern China in the Nanking [1928-1937] years." Even by those days, "gradual-ism had been outstripped by the Chinese revolution." Thomson cites one of the Chinese Christian reformers of that era, Y. T. Wu, who stayed on under the Communist regime after 1949. In a mea culpa on his American-linked reformist past, Wu declared in 1951, "All of us have been the tools of American cultural aggression [imperialism] perhaps without being wholly conscious of it." It was, evidently, the CCP's final verdict as well on the Indusco enterprise.^[54]

Alley, operating out of Beijing after 1952, became an active figure in China-sponsored international peace and friendship activities. He also traveled widely in and wrote extensively on the new China. He took on the kind of political-publicist role he had previously shied away from. He would no longer find a place in the rural industrial training and development work that had been his life in a decade and more of anti-Japanese and civil war. In response to a 1955 query from Ed on the state of the old cooperatives in China, Alley acknowledged, "In regard to the industrial cooperative movement, naturally it has to wait a bit until heavy industry and the vast agricultural program are attended to." During the Cultural Revolution in 1968, Alley wrote Snow that as "one who had so much to do with Gung Ho beginnings, you may be interested in knowing that amongst those without background of the old society, it is sometimes the fashion to call Gung Ho just a tool of imperialism." As for his original Shandan experiment of self-sufficient small-industry training, he now more frankly told Ed, "I could not get this point understood." But in the China political fashion of 1968, he was careful to place the blame primarily on a "lugubrious Russian" who back in 1951 or thereabouts, had "looked over everything anti turned it down."^[55]

In the post-Mao climate of economic reform and opening to the West, in 1983 Alley would become chair of a reactivated small-scale Gung Ho (with Helen Snow still doing the "energizing"). But he re-

mained scornful of all bureaucrats and wondered how the new Gung Ho would fare. Shandan had been both a last-ditch stand for Alley in Kuomintang-ruled China and an experimental model and holding operation for the socialist China of the future. Yet after almost four decades of life in that new China, Alley characteristically looked back on his years "with the youth in Shandan" as the high point of his experiences—"the richest and happiest in my life"—he wrote shortly before his death in 1987.^[56]

Snow, back in America and viewing the grim perspectives for CIC in December 1941, reiterated both his political approach to and democratic vision for CIC. "I always told you that Indusco could have no future in China independent of the total political picture," he wrote Alley, referring to their earlier divergences on the matter. Ed returned to his thesis that CIC could yet be an instrument for effecting change in that picture and, in a valedictory on the movement, put it in more general terms. Somber prospects notwithstanding, the cooperatives had "an educational value in inculcating democratic ideas among thousands," he concluded. But in truth, the ideals of Gung Ho, with its concepts of genuine empowerment—individual and collective, political and economic—were uncongenial to authoritarianism in China—of the right and the left. Snow summed up what Indusco had meant for him most aptly in human terms. "Your gang are the best people I know," he told Alley, "and have taught me a great deal and cannot be replaced in heart or mind."^[57]

Chapter 12
Final China Years

Aside from Indusco work during his sojourn in the Philippines, Snow delved into the local political scene. Searching out material for articles, and perhaps a short book, he soon discovered the extent of Japanese economic and political penetration in the islands, circumstances that disturbed him and further jarred his views on the desirability of American disengagement there. Filipino authorities tried to block a public meeting in Manila featuring a China talk by Snow. Only direct intervention with President Quezon by the U.S. high commissioner, Patti V. McNutt, succeeded in restoring the necessary police permit.^[1]

Snow's interview with McNutt a few days later was most enlightening on the above incident and much else. The American official confirmed that the Japanese consul in Manila had been behind the effort to stop the meeting. To Snow's rejoinder that it looked as if the Japanese already regarded the Philippines as their colony, McNutt answered that if "the U.S. flag went out the Japanese flag would soon replace it." Snow wondered whether events in China were causing second thoughts among Filipinos on independence. McNutt told Snow he personally favored continued commonwealth status for the islands, in contrast to full independence scheduled for 1946 under the Tydings-McDuffie Act—a measure spurred largely by special American economic interests fearful of competition from duty-free Philippine exports. McNutt tended to agree with Snow's impression that many Filipinos seemed to take a Japanese takeover for granted "and think that's okay." The Japanese, he

said, might assume control "without ever firing a shot." With Japan ensconced in the islands, the probable conflict with Tokyo would be a much longer and costlier affair, he added. He concurred with Snow's suspicion that Japan already had "some good friends" among Philippine politicians.^[2]

In Snow's follow-up interview with General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the Philippine defense forces, the latter agreed that with complete Philippine independence, the Japanese would inevitably become the dominant economic and political influence in the islands; Japan would have no need to occupy the country militarily, he asserted. In any case, his forces were designed to make such a venture extremely costly. And in the much longer term, the general declared, a greatly expanded Philippine force could handle any Japanese invasion force. To Snow, these optimistic predictions seemed "nonsense." Ed also talked with Emilio Aguinaldo, the legendary leader of Filipino resistance to the Spaniards and then to the Americans at the turn of the century. Aguinaldo was sixty-nine; "the one remaining passion of his life," Snow noted, was to see independence for his country before he died. The old warrior praised America for keeping its promises on independence and complacently assured Snow that a free Philippines could coexist on peaceful and friendly terms with Japan. Citing the China experience, Snow asked whether the Philippines could "stop the Japanese navy with friendliness"—a query Aguinaldo airily dismissed.^[3]

Along with the pervasive Japanese influence, and the intense nationalist pressures for independence reflected in Aguinaldo's views, Snow felt that Japan's China aggression had given Filipinos and their leaders— notwithstanding their public stance on the issue—some disquieting second thoughts on independence—as it had done for Snow's views as well. Somewhat at variance with the impressions reflected in his diary entries, he wrote Clark-Kerr from Baguio in January 1939, "Events in China have killed enthusiasm for both Japan and independence." Filipino politicians were now quietly lobbying Washington to retain links to the Philippines. Developments over the next two or three years, he prophesied, will "make it impossible for the Nips to walk in here without fighting America."^[4]

In a number of articles during 1939, Snow took up the Philippine question in the context of America's broader responsibilities and interests in the Far East. In the pages of the isolationist Post , Snow returned to the pros and cons for American involvement in Asia. He noted, as before, that no current or future American economic interest in Asia could justify

the cost of a war there, and that the United States would be fighting for a "phantom—for 'possessions' she no longer possesses or wants to possess." Americans had neither a moral nor material stake in defending the Filipinos who had chosen "separation with insecurity, fully aware of the consequences?' Having traversed this familiar ground, Snow then carefully backed away and listed the now compelling factors for a firm and long-standing American commitment to Philippine security. He cited arguments that sound eerily like those Americans would hear from their leaders in later decades for military intervention in Vietnam. The appeals to "political idealism," sympathy for the underdog, and national pride, and a "lingering paternalism" for the Filipinos could be "overwhelming." And beyond these were substantive reasons of "preventive strategy"—to deny the immense resources of the islands to a predatory Japan that would use them to construct "a mighty base of power" to dominate the South and West Pacific. Snow linked this looming threat to the "continued Anglo-American non-interference with the China campaign," thereby conceding "hegemony" in East Asia to the Japanese. The result, Snow direly wrote, would lead not only to the loss of America's Pacific outposts but "force the fight to the mainland for independence itself." Events themselves, Snow concluded on a noncommittal note, could shift American public opinion in the interventionist direction "evidently desired by the [Roosevelt] Administration." The Congress may then eventually "sanctify by law an American 'defense alliance' in the Pacific, the basis of which is really being laid out at this moment."^[5]

In further pieces in Asia later in the year Snow argued more directly and forcefully for American ties to the Philippines lasting beyond the 1946 independence date. He portrayed the U.S. record in the islands in highly laudatory terms. America, he declared, ruled the Philippines "better than she rules herself." Washington had the "warm thanks" of millions of loyal Filipinos, "not as conqueror but as friend and liberator. And yet more, as protector also." Though Philippine politicians could not openly say so, they now hoped the Americans would stay on, if not by a continuation of commonwealth status, then at least by strong military and economic ties to ward off Tokyo. Snow detailed the latter's "'peaceful' invasion" of the islands, including the buying off of corrupt politicians. If the Japanese were still stymied in China by 1946, they might take up their long-planned southward advance, which would likely include the Philippines. A continued American "union" with the islands, "military, economic, and political" was necessary to frustrate this. But all this was subordinate to Snow's larger and constantly reiter-

ated point. The best way to defend the Philippines and the United States, and avoid war with Tokyo, was to help China successfully resist Japan—by aiding the Chinese economically (especially CIC) and cutting off the trade with Japan that sustained the latter's aggression. (In the early years of the China war, Japan imported from the United States 80 percent of its oil products, 90 percent of its gasoline, 74 percent of its scrap iron, and 60 percent of its machine tools.) As the China war bogged down and the Nazis blitzkrieged western Europe, Snow's projections of Japanese expansionist plans would move into fast-forward.^[6]

Snow left the Baguio retreat in April 1939 for Hong Kong and the China mainland. After an extended stay in the British colony, mostly on CIC business, he went on by air to Chungking. In Hong Kong he had caught up with the China news and gossip, which only reinforced his private pessimism on the Nationalists' long-term war commitment. "The war would have ended long ago had it not been for the CPs [Reds]," he confided to his diary. With the Communists in the field, the appeasement elements in the government were "frightened" that their "power would collapse if a peace or compromise disadvantageous to China were made."^[7]

Snow arrived in Chungking in the steamy July heat, at a time when the wartime capital was under constant and intensive Japanese bombing. As described in those years by Hugh Deane, then China correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor , "When you walk through Chongqing [Chungking] you see shattered buildings, heaps of broken brick and tile, charred timbers, streets meandering meaninglessly through acres of devastation." Snow stayed at first with Peggy and Tillman Durdin in their small house. With the inevitable appearance of Japanese bombers, the three were forced to spend part of the night in the neighborhood air-raid shelter, a dugout cut deep into the rocky hills on which the city was built. When the alarm sounded again a day or two later, Snow resisted getting out of bed and taking cover—arguing, according to Peggy Durdin, that the "law of averages" made any direct hit highly unlikely. But she insisted. When they emerged after the all-clear, their house had been almost entirely demolished by a five-hundred-pound bomb that landed just outside the kitchen. The only personal possession he lost, Ed wrote his father, was a piece of underwear. He was "quite indignant" about this, he went on, since he was traveling with only two pairs, and replacements were hard to come by in the China interior.^[8]

While searching with Alley for Indusco units in a village on the outskirts of the city, Snow found "indescribable filth and squalor," with the

"stone steps everywhere lined with beggars, destitute, starving, opium addicts, and syphilitics." Yet he was "impressed" with the concentration of new government-built industry outside the city—though he felt as always that dispersed small plants h la CIC was still the better way to go.^[9]

Snow left Chungking in late August for his investigative tour of the Indusco line all the way up to the northwestern CIC center at Baoji, which he reached almost a month later. He traveled with fourteen other passengers in the rear of a Dodge truck, "hanging on for life at a corner arid sometimes hanging on nothing more substantial than a fellow-traveler's rifle." They stopped for the night (and for many more thereafter) at a "pigsty-like inn" in a "filthy town," where Snow spent a sleepless night battling lice. The next morning he observed the swarms of boys, begging, apparently orphaned or deserted, who lined the village street. It was just such "lost children," he commented in his diary, that the Reds had made into "soldiers and men." Snow had little use for the Chinese conservatives' "glorification of Chinese civilization." For the masses in these parts of China, the realities were quite different: "dirt, lice, fleas, flies, bugs, poverty, famine, filth, ... eating garbage for food, being kicked and battered here and there. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, worth preserving in this civilization." While Rewi Alley felt equal outrage at such conditions, there was always a sharp contrast in the way the two men reacted and adjusted to the privations and scenes of life on the road in the backwaters of China.^[10]

From Baoji Snow went on to Xi'an, and then to Yan'an for his second visit with the Communists. The 150-mile trip from Xi'an took ten days— rain and "loafing" drivers the chief culprits. The old walled town had been leveled by constant Japanese bombing. A new cave city had sprung up in the surrounding hills outside the walls, where the entire population of some forty thousand now lived. Snow was put up in a comfortable enough cave of the foreign guest house and soon met his old companions of the 1936 Bao'an trip, Ma Haide mad Huang Hua. It was late September when Snow arrived, barely a month after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, followed by Hitler's invasion of Poland and Anglo-French war against Germany. Ma and Huang briefed Snow on the current Communist interpretation of these events, which Mao elaborated on when Snow met with him a day or two later. Mao now lived in what Snow described as a "modern" three-room cave complex carved into the loess hills outside Yan'an. Floors were bricked, and Mao had acquired a spring bed with mattress, more to his southern taste than the typical northern China kang he had used in Bao'an. The "apart-

ment" had wicker furniture, there were flowers in the courtyard, and tea, cakes, and Chinese liquor were served. Snow was struck again by the "unusual repose" of the Red leader. "He seems gradually acquiring a kind of benignity that goes with power gracefully held," Ed observed in his diary, also noting that Mao now had two secretaries who "take down all his words of wisdom as from the oracle." Later the two men played bridge until three in the morning.^[11]

Mao spoke more explicitly about the ultimate social revolutionary direction and goal of the resistance war than in his 1936 talks with Snow. (After "a certain stage" the national and democratic revolution "will transform into a social revolution.") The chairman, now more confident of his control over internationalist rivals in the party, was poised for the final round in consolidating his "Sinified" leadership and policies. (This would occur in the "rectification movement" [and harsh purges] of the early 1940s.) On issues of the united front, Mao emphasized that the CCP "has never given up its independence for one day, one hour, or a minute. It has never submitted to any party or any group or any person."^[12]

As for the drastically altered international scene, Snow found that Mao had taken a sharp leftist turn in keeping with the new European alignments. He strongly defended and endorsed the Soviet-German agreement, condemned the conflict in Europe as "a pure imperialist war," and saved most of his disdain for the Western democratic powers he had previously courted. Such support of Soviet policy and of the world Communist line, however, did not in the least impede Mao's independent pursuit of Chinese Communist interests and goals on the domestic front. And at least in talking with Snow, even the Red leader's defense of the U.S.S.R. could take on a quizzical tone. To the journalist's close and skeptical queries regarding Soviet sales of wheat, oil, and other strategic materials to an imperialist Germany with whom Russia might yet find herself at war, Mao replied not to worry. "Hitler is in Stalin's pocket," he whimsically remarked. When Snow asked if he really meant that, the chairman said "fifty percent." (Snow privately wondered, what if it turns out "there is a hole in Stalin's pocket?") To Snow's questioning of Soviet leases of Sakhalin oil fields and fishing rights to Japan, Mao laughed and said Stalin had learned that from Roosevelt. Snow observed that Mao consistently referred to "Stalin" when talking of the Soviet Union.^[12]

Snow came away from his brief visit to the border region (he was back in Xi'an by the end of September) predictably reinforced in his

abiding belief that the Communists under Mao's guidance remained the key to victory and China's hope for a brighter future. "Everything I saw and heard [in Yan'an]," Snow wrote from Xi'an in one of his typical "fan letters" to the chairman, "increased my hope and confidence in the future. It is the only place in China where one can derive the feeling of the fundamental soundness and inevitable victory of the Chinese people." And buoyed by his apparent success in enlisting Mao in the CIC cause, he wrote Helen from the northwest, "Do not waste any more breath raising money for CIC in general." If the Philippine Chinese insisted on "sending their money to the New Life Movement and Mme. Chiang, or to non-guerrilla industry, wash your hands of the matter.^[14]

In Battle for Asia Snow detailed his visit to and impressions of the border region under the new conditions of united war against Japan. His enthusiastic account, a kind of compressed Red Star II, had an unavoidable déjà vu quality. It nonetheless gave a uniquely firsthand view of developments there since the start of war. (He would be the last outside journalist able to visit the Red district until 1944.) He emphasized the Communists' expanded military and territorial situation, progress in the economic, educational, and medical spheres, and the broadly representative structure of local government. (Within the next two years, however, the Red areas in northern and northwestern China would face their greatest economic and military crisis from a Japanese annihilation campaign and a tightened blockade and cutoff of financial subsidies to the Red forces by Chungking.) Snow underlined again that as a consequence of the CCP's history of self-reliant armed struggle (away from "the super-minds" of the Comintern), control of its own territory, and immense political experience, it "stands quite apart from all other offspring of the Comintern." But Snow was equally aware of the more orthodox internationalist side of Chinese communism. He pointed to the CCP's "loyal adherence" to the Comintern, and also rejected the notion that just because the Reds now fought for "democracy and national independence they cannot be bolsheviks but are 'only a peasant reform party.'" Those "liberals" who chose to believe that the Chinese Communists were "different" in these respects, he asserted, "were doomed to ultimate disappointment." The CCP would inevitably move from its current "minimum program" of democratic united front nationalism (which Snow described in shining terms) to its "maximum program" of "international socialism."^[15]

But Snow was no less at pains to separate the CCP from its counterparts in Moscow and the West. Mao, he declared, was beholden not to

Moscow but to his Chinese comrades and the army. And it seemed to him that the CCP took "the claims and counter-claims" of the Moscow trials and purges "with a grain of salt." He contrasted the revolutionary brotherhood of the Chinese Reds with the petty dogmatic infighting of the "armchair theorists" of the Communist parties in the West. Still evidently unaware of the simmering inner-party power and policy struggles in Yan'an soon to reach resolution, Snow stressed the "solidarity" of the CCP and "the comparative absence of cliques" within it. He attributed this in good part to the "fellowship" of the battlefield. The Chinese Reds, he rather dubiously reasoned, had been "too busy avoiding extermination by their enemies to work out on each other."^[16]

Earlier, Snow had mused in his diary on this theme of Chinese Communist "brotherhood" but had approached it from a different and considerably more questioning angle. The comradeship of the revolutionary army on the barricades, he speculated, could well disappear in another setting. Such Red leaders as Zhou Enlai and Bo Gu had acquired "all the mannerisms of bureaucrats" while stationed in the Nationalist capitals of Hankou and Chungking. And the key to the Reds' success in winning the support and trust of the masses in their areas, he added, was "to establish for them the paternalistic infallibility of a parent." A "personality helps to symbolize this," he noted.^[17]

Snow's admiring impressions of the border region would be amply seconded five years later by the first Western correspondents able to visit Yan'an since Ed's own 1939 trip. It was by then the command center of a vastly expanded network of "liberated areas" behind Japanese lines. A group of Chungking-based foreign correspondents were finally permitted by the Generalissimo to enter the Nationalist-blockaded Red base in the summer of 1944—an extended trip that resulted in a series of books and articles highly laudatory of the Communists. A. T. Steele, though not a member of this press party, talked with the returning journalists and read all they wrote. He later noted, "A trip from Chungking to Yenan was like going in one sense of the term, from hell to heaven because everything in Yenan looked so orderly and the people were practicing democracy, or so they said, and to a large degree they were. And the Communists seemed to have found a formula that might open the way to a new day in China." Whereas Snow had always stressed the authentically Marxist-Leninist character and goals of the CCP, these latter-day "Edgar Snows" (as the American ambassador dubbed them) tended to downplay this issue. Again as Steele related his conversations with these journalists, "some of them were saying, 'Well, these people are not Communists.

They're promoting a new democracy there,' which they were." (Harrison Forman, in his book on his stay in the border region, wrote that "today the Chinese Communists arc no more Communistic than we Americans are.") "We were reluctant to paint them as real Communists," Steele added, "because we knew that that would go against the American grain." To write favorably of Communists, he went on, would raise questions "in the eyes of the publisher," that the correspondent "was maybe pro-Communist." Ironically, this "agrarian democrat" image would itself later fuel the "pro-Communist" attacks on such reporting.^[18]

But the more important (and largely unheeded) message for American policymakers emanating from these encounters with the Chinese revolutionaries was articulated by John S. Service. As the foreign service's leading Chinese Communist-watcher, he came to Yan'an with the United States Army Observer Group (generally known as the Dixie mission) which had been reluctantly agreed to by Chiang under pressure from Washington. The small mission under Colonel David D. Barrett began arriving in Yan'an almost simultaneously with the journalists. In an October 1944 dispatch by Service to Washington, in which he cited the CCP's impressive wartime accomplishments, he wrote, "From the basic fact that the Communists have built up popular support of a magnitude and depth which makes their elimination impossible, we must draw the conclusion that the Communists will have a certain and important share in China's future ." It was substantively the crux of what Snow had first discerned nearly a decade before.^[19]

Sparked by a discussion with a disillusioned American Communist acquaintance in Manila, Snow pondered further on the issue of the bureaucracy as a new exploiting class under a Communist "proletarian dictatorship." If the revolution comes into power with only minority support, he meditated in his diary, it must use "terror" as an instrument of control and must "inevitably resolve into dictatorship of a small group controlling [the] party. It's neither democracy nor 'dictatorship of the proletariat.'" The regime had to rule through a bureaucracy whose loyalty it ensured by granting it special status and rewards. Thus, Snow went on, a "new privileged class" replaced the "exploiting class" of the old society. With its entrenched interest in the system, this new class "will not voluntarily, any more than any ruling class in history, carry out measures for its own destruction or liquidation." This ruling group inevitably itself became an "enemy of the people" whom it would come to view as a threat to its power and privileges. "Is all this what's happened in USSR?"^[20]

Seeking an alternative to the bleak scenario he outlined, Snow posed the notion that a revolutionary (proletarian) dictatorship could avoid taking such a path only if it quickly won the support of a majority of the people, who equally rapidly won control of "the political apparatus." He clearly had in mind his Chinese Communist friends whom he saw as good candidates for gaining the majority support that could translate into a "different" kind of dictatorship—a kind of Communist "exceptionalism." Snow's idea that popular control could somehow be shoe-horned into a dictatorial political system had curious resemblances (at least rhetorically) to Mao's 1949 oxymoronic description of his new government as a "people's democratic dictatorship," assertedly representing the interests of the vast majority of the people. Snow's 1939 reflections that only a broad popular base could keep a "proletarian" dictatorship from "going reactionary" resonated in a way with Mao's later theories on Soviet and Chinese "capitalist restoration." (Mao's goal, Snow wrote after his last 1970-1971 visit to China, was to overthrow the new "Mandarinate of cadres divorced from the people," and "to restore the purity of the revolution and involve the masses in its direction as never before.") These matters will be taken up further in the final chapters.^[21]

Though Snow gravitated toward the left in his overall world outlook, his unvarnished view of the Soviets in the late 1930s tended to give him a more unalloyed insight into the dynamics of Russian policymaking than was true of ideologues of the left or right, and of pro-Soviet liberals in the West. "Quite clearly," he wrote Helen after the 1939 Russian about-face on Germany, "the USSR is acting on the basis of its strategic national interests alone, like every other power." Any other way of judging the international Communist line would "involve idealism and muddled thinking." As early as November 1938, Snow had written Bertram that a "Soviet Russian agreement with Germany in Europe as a self-defense measure is possible, even probable; you must not rule out the possibility of a Russo-Japanese agreement out here." (Both of course would come to pass in 1939 and 1941 respectively.) In a private conversation with his friend Archibald Clark-Kerr the following May in Hong Kong, the British ambassador insisted that Chamberlain would "be forced" into an agreement with the Russians, and that the idea of a Hitler-Stalin get-together, which Snow had raised, was "impossible—Hitler would have to eat every hat on his head." "No more than Stalin," Snow rejoined. In a subsequent meeting of the two in Chungking in October (following Snow's return from Yan'an), the ambassador rejected the Communist allegation that Chamberlain had plotted to turn Hitler east against the

Soviets. The British prime minister "was simply a tired old man hoping by any conceivable means to keep out of the war," he told Snow. Snow reminded Clark-Kerr of their May conversation, and that he (Ed) had "proved a remarkably good prophet." Always sensitive to attacks from the left, Snow noted he would have been accused of "Trotskyism" if he had predicted this openly at that time. "If in the USSR," he added to Clark-Kerr, "I probably would have lost my head!"^[22]

On the China front, Snow was now taking a much kinder view of Stalinist policy than he had during the Xi'an Incident and its aftermath. Stressing as always the strategic security factor as uppermost in Soviet calculations, he now applauded the latter's sustained assistance to China's resistance cause, in contrast to Anglo-American policies favoring Japan. But still, he groused a bit that such aid went solely to the Nationalists. From Stalin, Snow wryly remarked in a 1940 Post article, the Chinese Reds get "only speeches." Obviously reflecting his own assessment as well, he added that "Chiang Kai-shek believes that Stalin is still more concerned with military security than with political evangelism."^[23]

On Europe, Snow essentially took the conventional leftist view of Anglo-French duplicity in dealing with the Soviets for an alliance against Germany. Stalin, in Snow's hard-nosed interpretation, had merely turned the tables on the Western powers in what was a "logical" expression of Soviet interests. Though dubious as to the longer-term consequences of Stalin's trafficking with the Nazis (expressed in Snow's 1939 talks with Mao), Snow was considerably more distrustful of the British and French. His animus against Chamberlain's earlier appeasement policies, and his long-standing conviction that Britain and France would be fighting solely to protect their imperial interests, left him with a thoroughly dyspeptic reaction to the onset of war in Europe. He leaned toward the Communist definition of the conflict as imperialist and wanted America to stay out. In the Xi'an guest house, while on his way to Yan'an, he had run into Jim Bertram who had also been heading for Yan'an. (Jim had shepherded up to Xi'an an overland truck convoy of medical supplies destined for the Red areas, from Madame Sun's China Defence League.) On news of the war, however, Bertram was rallying round the Crown in true New Zealander fashion and planning to return home to join up. Ed looked quizzically, Bertram recalled, and remarked, "Well, it's your war. Or Chamberlain's, don't forget. I wouldn't trust that old bastard an inch." Yet characteristically and contrarily, Ed added, "I suppose I might feel the same way if we were in it"—as of course would be the case. As it turned out, after a return to

New Zealand where his services for the forces were evidently then not in urgent demand, Bertram was persuaded by Madame Sun to come to Hong Kong to work again with her China Defence League. He would be there (interrupted by a stint with the British embassy in Chungking) when the Japanese attacked after Pearl Harbor. He finally had his chance as a volunteer fighter in the British defense of the Crown Colony and would spend the Pacific war years as a prisoner (and laborer) of the Japanese.^[24]

On the purely personal level for Snow, the European events that deflected Westerners' attention from the Far East further reduced chances of any major commercial success for the book he was writing. "Ed's new book will probably be a loss" due to the European situation, Helen wrote Mildred and J. Edgar while Snow was in the northwest. This "writing game is really gratuitous work in the interest of public service I guess." (She also told the two Snows in no uncertain terms that she had little time for such "social correspondence." As a final touch for the bitterly anti-Roosevelt elder Snow, she declared it would be "a major tragedy" if F. D. R.'s program were not continued in the coming election of 1940.)^[25]

In November 1939, after his return to Baguio from China, Snow provided the fullest exposition of his views on the European situation in a letter of over five thousand words to his good friend in Manila, Will Babcock. The latter, a liberal-minded businessman, had together with his wife, Polly, become staunch and active backers of the Snows' Indusco work in the Philippines. Babcock, a firm antifascist, had argued spiritedly with Ed in favor of early American entry into the war to forestall a Nazi victory and subsequent direct threat to the United States itself. (Coincidentally, the Babcocks would be With the Snows in Madison, Connecticut, on the Sunday of the Pearl Harbor attack.) By defending his own adamantly noninterventionist stand, Ed had an opportunity to sort out his thoughts on the current and future course of world events. There was an illuminating contrast between his detached, loftily Olympian approach to the European war, and his intense feelings on the conflict in Asia. Europe remained a distant, somewhat theoretical arena for him; Asia was personal. And he tended to see the Western powers from this Asian vantage point—primarily as colonial overlords. Asia was where he had lived and worked for over a decade, committed on both the human and political level. He had reacted to Japanese aggression with a sense of outrage and urgency now completely missing from his European outlook. Thus Snow declared that he did not see the Euro-

pean conflict as either "a moral issue" or "a war of ideas," but as a clash of "fundamental socio-economic forces which cause the ideas." Therefore, "I try not to view the war emotionally, or through subjective prejudice," but "to understand it realistically and dialectically." Snow's words did not quite fit this ideal: his judgments were colored by his hostility toward the British empire and distrust of its "ruling class." The current "phony war" stage of military inaction on the Western front only added to his suspicions. (The conflict at present, Snow wrote Helen, "is as uninteresting as a six day bicycle race.")^[26]

In brief, Snow asserted that a Nazi conquest of France and much the rest of Europe—let alone of Britain and the British empire—would be so immensely difficult and costly as to be a virtual impossibility. Just the defeat of France, he thought, would cost Germany more than the five million casualties it had suffered in the last war. As for the remainder of Europe (excluding the Soviet Union), "Is it imagined that Germany, at the end of a titanic struggle against France, would still be powerful enough to bully all those people into submission without struggle?" Snow added, equally wide of the mark, "nor has Hitler today got any Chamberlain to compel them to do so." And what prompts the belief, he asked, that "if Hitler took Paris, Moscow would be prepared to leave him there?" The Russians would "gang up" with the other European nations and even England to bring down "a ruined Germany."^[27]

In a flight of hypotheses Snow suggested that even should the Nazis surmount all these obstacles and become the new masters of the British empire, America need not necessarily worry. As a "have" power, Germany would mellow—"in John Bull's shoes [it] would become very much like John Bull himself," he imagined. "Is there any reason," he queried, "why we could not live and let live in a world of Pax Germania as easily as in a world of Pax Britannia?" (It sounded disquietingly like the sentiments Americans would shortly be hearing from the America-firster Charles Lindbergh.) In contrast to this, Ed had written Helen, "in the end," America "cannot watch Germany become triumphant in Europe." And "in the end," Snow would have very different answers to a "Pax Germania" as a war correspondent in Russia and as one of the first journalists to come across the horrors of the Nazi death camps in eastern Europe.^[28]

Arguing from his Asia-based anticolonial (and Marxist-influenced) perspective, Snow asserted to Babcock, "the war is simply the climax of the struggle between politico-social economic systems, and their rivalry for the earth's resources, raw materials, labor power, markets and the ap-

paratus of control over them"—in sum, an imperialist conflict. Returning to the thesis of his fascism lecture at Yanjing University in 1934, Snow proclaimed that "Hitlerism and British imperialism seem to me equally and both to be the rotting putrefact of an age and a system which is in its last poisonous hours of power." (He dismissed the Nazi führer as "the miserable house painter with an inferiority complex"—one of Ed's favorite psychological gambits.) To avert their mutual destruction, he conjectured, the two protagonists might yet join hands against a "greater antagonism"—the forces of "a new society awaiting—though but dimly perceived—to replace them." Stalin on his part, Snow de-dared, had already shown "sense enough" to avoid a war moving in his direction. Unable to get his strategic requirements from England (whose "treacheries" Snow detailed), "he took them from Hitler."

But Snow's attempt to portray Stalin as a sure-handed player in the dangerous European power game would soon be confounded by the Soviet invasion of Finland in December 1939. "Stalin was obviously badly advised and miscalculated the internal situation in Finland, as well as the international effect," he wrote Bertram shortly after the Russian action. "The whole move was stupid, clumsy and brutal." He thought it might change "the whole alignment in Europe." Bertram could end up "finding a Red on the receiving end of your machine gun," he needled.^[29]

Snow pursued this more disenchanted look at Stalin's European moves in Foreign Affairs in the spring of 1940. He wrote of the "Moscow-Berlin Axis," and Soviet anti-imperialist, revolutionary rhetoric as "simply a special terminology of power politics to any one but a devout Stalinist." No matter what the tactics of the moment, Snow insisted, Moscow's long-term interests and goals remained constant and always took precedence over those of Communist movements elsewhere. "No," Snow the "realist" declared, "it is not the Red Dictator but the disillusioned liberals who are inconsistent." Stalin, Snow continued, "taking advantage of a favorable world situation, is grabbing territories wherever possible without (he imagines) risking a 'serious' war." As a consequence of these Russian actions, the "little people" everywhere had lost sympathy for the U.S.S.R. Finland had provided "the anti-Communist standard bearers with a necessary moral slogan." It was now "at least thinkable" that the Anglo-French powers would "eventually find a modus vivendi with Germany and mobilize Europe against the Soviets." Snow was in essence exhibiting some of his own disillusioned, "more in sorrow than anger," reaction to the Stalinist realpolitik he claimed to find so logical and understandable.^[30]

In contrast to his dismal view of the European scene, Snow took a considerably more upbeat approach to Asia. He discounted the idea, in the same Foreign Affairs article, that Stalin might "sell out" China as part of a possible future deal with Japan. Moscow's stake in continued and effective united Chinese resistance to Japan—evidenced in the Soviet track record of aid to China—ruled this out, Snow reasoned. In this strategic picture, the Chinese Reds were "a valuable armed ally" of the Russians, Snow wrote, though he reiterated at some length his "Maoist" independent-nationalist interpretation of Chinese communism that so irritated Moscow. But this very independence of the Reds, Snow further argued, would be an added deterrent to any drastic change in Soviet China policy. Stalin, Ed remarked, was very likely aware that he could. not bank on the CCP's "approval" of any reversal of Russian policy "inimical to the interests of China" and of the Chinese Reds themselves.

But for the time being at least, Snow preferred to see no conflict of interest between Moscow and Yan'an, despite the Soviet's exclusive assistance to the Nationalists. Chiang, Snow declared, in the mode of his public assessment of the Generalissimo's role in those years, remained the "pivot" of the united front "which is still the [Chinese] Communists' basic condition for resistance to Japan." The war in Europe made Chungking even more dependent on Russian support. To "conciliate his Communist supporters—Russian and otherwise," Chiang had done "a surprising volte face ." He had backtracked from steps toward renewed civil conflict and had declared his intent to advance toward representative government. (The Chinese Communists, Snow had written J. B. Powell, were probably "the only Reds in the world" who could be said to have "benefited" from Stalinist moves in Europe.)^[31]

Snow's emphasis on the brightened prospects in China dovetailed with the more positively pro-China, anti-Japanese role he wished America to play—including, as we know, government financial support for the CIC. In January 1940 the United States had finally begun to restrict the export of some critical war supplies to Japan. "We are no longer passive objectors to Japanese aggression," Snow declared, "we are taking active steps to check it." He pushed for a Russo-American "pact of amity, restricted to the Pacific," which could have a salutary effect in ending Japanese "bellicosity." To this end, he urged Americans to overcome their "sentimentality and indignation" over Moscow's "stupid and clumsy" Finnish invasion. (In fact it was rather the U.S.S.R. and Japan that would sign a neutrality pact a year later, as the Russians girded for a German attack in the West, while Tokyo prepared for its "southern strategy" against the Western powers.)^[32]

Snow's call for a more positive American policy in the Pacific was designed to avert a Japanese-American conflict, in line with his concern to keep the United States out of war, in the Pacific as well as Europe. (American capitalism was faced with a choice between "survival by socialist measures," or the much more tolerable option, "a war to justify vast rearmament," he typically wrote his British agent in February 1940.) But this clashed with his own prognostication in his Foreign Affairs piece: "The world is moving With streamlined speed toward a cataclysm of which the current wars in Europe and Asia are but the preliminaries." And he was "inclined to think the casus belli" for American entry, he had also told his agent, "will be out here [in the Pacific], in the beginning."^[33]

The rapid Nazi conquest of France and the Low Countries in May and June 1940 presented Snow with dilemmas similar to those of so many of his compatriots equally opposed to being dragged once again into Europe's conflicts. An embattled Britain stood alone against a seemingly invincible and far from "ruined" Germany, now master of most of Europe. Japan had joined Germany and Italy in a Tripartite Pact and was poised, as Snow was well aware, for a move against the West.

He pondered these developments in a major piece published in Asia just as he was finally on his way home in January 1941. He acknowledged that European and Asian problems were "indissolubly connected," with the two war fronts seemingly about to converge. He modified his formerly adamant stand on the "imperialist war" and now affirmed his "complete" support for the British "in their struggle for freedom." He declared it important for America to "do everything we can to defend and regenerate democracy in England." However, he added, Britain and the dominions "are not the same thing as Britain the colonial power." Just as he had consistently seen China's resistance war as necessarily taking on a social revolutionary character, in like manner the looming worldwide conflict could be successfully (and justifiably) waged only as a war for colonial emancipation. "We will not have any peace and order on the earth until the subject peoples become free," Snow wrote—a rather millennial vision of a decolonized world.^[34]

Snow agreed that America had now adopted the only feasible option left to it in the Pacific—aid to China and active resistance against further Japanese expansion. By thus calling Japan's hand, "War may prove objectively unavoidable," he acknowledged. In offering his political prescriptions with that eventuality in mind, Snow was in the process of transforming his anticolonialism from a barrier to American involvement to a banner under which America could legitimately fight.

The United States, Snow thus urged, should sign a "Pact of Democracy" (with military clauses that could automatically kick in) with Britain and the dominions, China, perhaps the Philippines, and it could even be offered to the Soviets. If the British empire can be accepted as democratic, Snow wryly noted, then Washington can "stretch a point in the case of Soviet democracy." On China, he cautioned, Anglo-American aid must not go to "prop up the most backward elements" seeking to suppress "the democratic forces" (the classic dilemma of "good" versus "bad" interventionism). Snow's projected alliance would in fact begin to take shape in the events that brought both the Russians and Americans into the war by the end of 1941. But as a "pact of democracy,' it would have rough sledding, as Snow himself hinted of its imperial British, Soviet Russian, and Nationalist Chinese partners.^[35]

The Nationalist attack on the Reds' New Fourth Army in January 1941 was the final breaking point for Snow on the Chungking regime. Symbolically, it coincided with his own departure for home and served, as he later put it in Journey , "to cure me of my intensely personal sense of obligation to China." He would, however, still be for "the cause of China," for "any measure which might help the Chinese people to help themselves," but "I would be opposed to all uncontrolled charity to the rich-men's government," he added. Just a couple of months earlier he could still write of the Chinese army that, despite everything, "It may yet become a true people's army capable of emancipating eastern Asia." But just before the January attack on the Red forces, he evinced his increasingly pessimistic feelings while drinking in the New Year with Jim Bertram in Hong Kong. In the two friends' forecasts for 1941, Bertram remembered, "'Civil war in China' was on both our lists." A few days earlier Ed had sent off from Hong Kong a gloomy and revealing dispatch on "the gravest crisis since the beginning of China's resistance to Japan." It was "widely feared that civil war may be renewed on a large

scale early in 1941," he reported.^[36]

Snow had worked intensively in Baguio on Battle for Asia from early spring into the fall of 1940, finally completing it before he and Helen left the Philippines in November after a two-year stay. Helen was on her way back to America, with Ed's immediate plans still uncertain. Both of them felt it would be advantageous for Ed to return to the States via Europe. With that in mind, he was considering a Herald-Tribune offer of a. "roving assignment" through Siam, Burma, and India, after which he would continue on home through Europe—a kind of replay of his 1930 travel plans.^[37]

In Hong Kong, en route from Manila, there were farewell meetings and dinners for the Snows with Madame Sun, Jim Bertram, and other friends in China Defence League and CIC circles. Ed visited with the mercurial Agnes Smedley, who had spent time with the New Fourth Army south of the Yellow River. She was nervous and a bit paranoid, Snow thought. She labeled the New Fourth commander Xiang Ying (Han Ying) a "merciless and ruthless" dictator. As to Indusco units, there was "not a single one" there when she left a year before, she told Ed. Her glum outlook included Russia as well. She thought Moscow had in effect already joined the Axis. "Nothing more—but that from Smedley," Snow noted, perhaps ignoring that he himself had earlier written of the "Moscow-Berlin Axis." The Snows went on to Shanghai (the still unoccupied foreign settlement), where Ed saw Helen off on the President Taft . A sign of the tense situation for anti-Japanese Americans there: J. B. Powell met the Snows with a bodyguard, and the editor Randall Gould was at customs with Peg, "with hand on automatic in inside pocket," Ed recorded. Coming upriver into Shanghai was even more depressing than usual for Ed: "The unregenerate mud, the gray smoky skies, dirty unpainted buildings, Japs creeping about on shore, lines of coolies marching desolately about in the distance, and sampans swarming with young and old ready to leap into the filthy waters for one American coin."^[38]

While in Shanghai, Snow gleaned much additional "dirt" on the Kungs' financial dealings and profiteering. And American Marine brass he talked with bad-mouthed his good friend Evans Carlson, who (for the while) had resigned from the corps. Ed returned to Hong Kong in early December "to pick up threads" on the Chinese political situation and, inevitably, to be told of the latest CIC crisis. It was here that he would be the first foreign correspondent to learn, from his Communist contacts, of the New Fourth Army Incident of January 5, and to send the story abroad just before leaving the British colony on January 8. Snow's account of the incident differed sharply from the version soon put out by Chungking that attempted to lay full blame on the Reds. Whatever the complex background, circumstances, confusions, and motivations surrounding the Nationalist-ordered withdrawal of the New Fourth Army to north of the Yangtze River by the end of 1940, a heavy blow had been dealt to the Red forces and a devastating one to what remained of KMT-CCP unity. In its greatly outnumbered battle with Nationalist troops occupying the surrounding heights, the rear headquarters unit of the New Fourth, still south of the river, suffered losses of at least five thousand combatants and noncombatants killed or captured, with the

army's commander taken prisoner and its vice-commander killed. Snow labeled it a "massacre" in Journey . The adverse reaction in Western media and government circles to the Nationalist action probably helped dissuade the Kuomintang from further escalation of the internal conflict with the Reds. Snow's report had played its part in this, and it now placed him firmly in the enemy camp in Chungking's eyes. (Lauchlin Currie, who had been Roosevelt's lend-lease emissary to China in February and March 1941, told Ed later in the year in Washington that the Nationalist government considered him "an agent of the Third International.")^[39]

But as he continued to go about his business, Snow was gradually sinking into a crisis of his own. The seemingly final unraveling of the united front was but one of many factors that led to a growing personal malaise in the last weeks and days of his long stay in Asia. He had often been subject to low moods, but the accumulated physical and emotional toll and burnout of the China years, the frustrations and financial costs of his Indusco labors, and surfacing problems in his marriage, all contributed to a deeply despondent, distraught state bordering on breakdown. He was malnourished and severely underweight, had little money in the bank (under $2,000) to show for all the years of his China work and accomplishments, and he could see no real prospect of redeeming his fortunes through his new book. His hypercritical tendency to underplay his achievements now showed itself in a pervasive and debilitating sense of failure. Helen's caustic fault-finding propensities had not helped matters.

His diary entries from early December until his arrival in California the next month reveal him brooding and ruminating despairingly over his presumed shortcomings and troubled relationship with Peg. He recalled random derogatory remarks by her (Ed had "mined her life"), as he agonized over "the possibility of a genuine reconciliation." His distressed state was also manifested in drawn-out, depleting indecision on. whether to return directly to the States or go ahead with the southern. Asia-Europe plans. He descended into an extreme guilt-ridden stage, intensified by loneliness and sheer exhaustion. On Christmas Day, he recorded, "it has taken spending it away from Peg to make me realize what a complete skunk I have been about a dozen things important to her." Her criticisms of his personal habits (such as drinking and smoking) he now saw as "genuine solicitude for my welfare"; he promised himself he would "carry out a personal revolution: that really is what is needed, no less." Peg's departure for America had actually been under-

stood by both of them, Ed recorded, as a kind of temporary, informal attempt to live apart. He had given Peg an "invitation" to "separate if she liked and find another person who could come nearer meeting her perfectionist demands.^[40]

In a slightly more positive (though equally contrite) New Year's Day mood, Snow predicted that he and Peg "shall learn better how to live together." But he continued to castigate himself, cataloging examples of his "selfishness, vanity and egotism" as reasons for Peg "despising" him. "Instead of listening to her I have resented her criticism. I should have thanked her for it with every gesture of gratitude one knows." But beyond the obvious symptoms of stress, Snow's darkly tinted view of his marital relationship mirrored larger, more lasting problems of these disparate personalities who were also highly achieving, talented, and ambitious individuals, working as partners strongly committed to the same causes. It brought its strains, including an inevitable competitive edge. One of the reasons "for our recent difficulties is that we have been living in each other's laps all day long for a year. And at the same time writing," Ed added in his Christmas entry. And among instances of his "selfishness," Snow listed his failure to give Peg "full credit for first thinking of CIC" and "belittling" her contributions "on this and other important work on China."^[41]

Snow's inner turmoil was apparently not always discernible at the time even to close friends. Jim Bertram saw no special signs of tension during their New Year's get-together in Hong Kong. But just days later, in a Manila stopover out of Hong Kong, Snow's distraught state ("nervous, hands shaking, somewhat incoherent") was evident to the Babcocks, whom he saw there. (He also made frantic phone calls to Peg from Manila, berating himself as a "failure.") Polly Babcock afterward wrote soothingly to Peg that Ed "seemed a bit tired, but we know that a vacation with you in California will fix him up like new."^[42]

On the clipper flight across the Pacific to Honolulu, Snow stayed wrapped in misery and remorse. "Surely this whole period must remain the darkest in my life," he agonized during a Midway Island layover. "Never have I been through the depth of despondency and despair in which my own role has appeared so altogether despicable and contemptible." (Ed later tore this diary page out and handed it to Peg in California—"To show how he repented," she told this writer.) Decades later, Snow would recall his near-suicidal condition on this flight. "I seriously considered jumping out of the plane," he wrote a young friend who was going through a critical period of his own. In those "leisurely

days," Ed explained, the clippers had wide picture windows that could be raised or lowered, "think of that!" The captain sensed Snow's mood and, at an overnight stop in Wake Island, confided to Ed how he himself survived, and bounced back from, a suicide attempt induced by a love affair. Snow claimed this helped him "snap out of it." "I had been enormously exaggerating my own share of the guilt," he added in looking back on this dark interval in his life.^[43]

In Honolulu he seemed recovered enough for a busy round of activities—meeting with local Chinese community leaders on Indusco and visiting the Pearl Harbor base. There, he was briefed on the large-scale air and naval buildup then underway. "Some" of the naval people he talked with "have the impression U.S. could clean up the Jap Navy in six weeks," he noted. He found Honolulu, with its neon lights, hot dog stands, and Coney Island atmosphere on Waikiki, "hardly recognizable" from the place where he had begun his Oriental odyssey thirteen years earlier. But neither was Snow recognizable as the carefree, romantic, world-is-my-oyster youth who had frolicked there in 1928. In a few days, Ed boarded the President Pierce ("in a pickled state") for San Francisco. He read and slept en route but could not concentrate well on either. It was a drearily cold and rainy January day when they docked—"nothing Golden about the Gate" aside from amber lights on the bridge, he morosely felt.^[44]

Ed was soon reunited with Helen in the Los Angeles-Hollywood area, where she was already thoroughly immersed in Indusco organizing activities. With wholesome food (he gained thirty pounds in a month), the admiring reception from Hollywood celebrities, and a relaxing vacation at an Arizona dude ranch, Snow soon recovered. "One morning I woke up a whole man again," he later recounted. By mid-March the two were ensconced at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, where J. Edgar and Mildred and Claude Mackey came in by car from Kansas City for their first reunion with Ed since 1926. Mildred and Dad "scrutinized me most carefully and intently," Ed cryptically noted.^[45]

The couple's relationship, though stabilized for the time being, remained a problematic one. Helen's no-nonsense, single-minded, work-centered "energizing" style left little room for Ed's more self-indulgent traits—his unhurried and careless unpunctuality and his incorrigible "time-wasting" gregariousness, among others. (Snow's sociable "drinking companion" style and his forgetfulness were exemplified in a later incident recounted to me by Ed's nephew, John Snow. Ed was visiting with John and his wife, Freda, in San Francisco in the late 1960s, during

one of Snow's lecture tours. The two men sat drinking and reminiscing, with Ed in an increasingly relaxed and expansive mood. Suddenly, late in the evening, Snow recalled that he had been due hours before at a reception in his honor at a private residence in the city and insisted that John drive him there so that he could make his apologies in person. Unfortunately, the host loudly berated Ed and slammed the door on him.) In Helen's perception of their relationship, the Snows were "not trying to be happy, but to do and think worthwhile things." (During Snow's prolonged stay in Hong Kong in the summer of 1939, enmeshed in the tangle of CIC politics and personalities, she scolded him from Baguio: "EXACTLY WHAT IN HELL ARE YOU DOING THERE for three months? I cannot understand how you can waste so much time and never do a thing to show for it.") Among his New Year's resolutions for 1941 recorded in Honolulu during his emotional downturn, Snow had written, "Do not waste time on useless people when Peg is not willing or prepared—only at definite hours. Do not answer telephone before 5 P.M. "^[46]

Snow's wartime and postwar assignments abroad put their marriage and its strains on hold from 1942 on, though the two did draw up a separation agreement in 1945. Perhaps exaggerating, Ed wrote Helen in I946 that he had felt their relationship to be "hopeless" from the time he had left New York's La Guardia Airport for overseas in 1942—"in fact ever since Chelsea Hotel days." Snow halfheartedly offered to make a final try for a reconciliation, on the basis of what he defined as a "give and take" approach on both sides. But neither of them would or could change to satisfy the other. "If you still think you are perfect however," Ed ended this "conciliatory" letter, "there is nothing to do but get a divorce and the sooner the better." Sadly enough, it took years more of increasingly bitter personal and legal wrangling before the final divorce settlement in 1949.^[47]

Meanwhile Snow spent the 1941 year rediscovering America and waiting for the larger war he knew was coming. He had witnessed the beginnings of the great global conflict to come in Manchuria in 1931 and would soon be covering its climactic final years for the Post . As he waited, he thought much on the meaning of the upheaval, on America's role, and on a world beyond war. In so doing, he continued to grapple with his remaining doubts and inconsistencies on the looming war crisis.

Chapter 13
After China
Snow's Vision of a New World

Shortly after arriving in California, Snow met Theodore Dreiser, the crusty, temperamental old literary lion, whose vehemently anti-British, anticapitalist, antiwar opinions put Snow's in the shade. All the arguments Ed had used early in the European war Dreiser now threw back at him: the prewar anti-Soviet machinations and profascist appeasement policies of the British, the subjection of their colonial peoples, and so on. While Snow found much of this "true enough," it was "now 1941," he told the agitated writer. In relating this encounter in Journey , Ed stepped gingerly over some of the minefields in his own earlier thinking. "I was against nazism before the [Russo-German] pact," he told Dreiser. "If the Communists want to call it an 'imperialist war' that doesn't change nazism for me." But Snow understatedly acknowledged, "My position had its own contradictions, of course. I wanted us to help China and Britain yet I didn't want America to go to war." In what was a final "contradiction," Snow added that he knew "Japan was going to drag us into the war whether we helped anybody or not."^[1]

Actually Ed felt that American interventionists focused too narrowly on Europe and ignored or minimized the more immediate threat front the Pacific. At a Battle for Asia book-signing session in Philadelphia in early June, Snow told a reporter (who described Ed as "a curly-haired young man you might take to be British") he "would bet" the United States would be at war with Japan within four months, and "practically certain" war would come within a year. Much as he hated the idea of a "nearly self-sufficient" America having to go to war, "our future would

not be safe with Hitler in control of Europe, and Japan the master of Asia—and that is the fact we must face," he said. The statement was a good composite of Snow's own isolationist-interventionist mix—and of America's too. Of course, though Snow was surely telling it as it was and was going to be, by drawing attention to the East he also had an eye on the new book he was plugging. (Within days of the Pearl Harbor attack, Ed suggested a new ad campaign to Random House to "revive the sales of Battle for Asia by using present interest to call attention to the book"—and proceeded to sketch out a proposed ad with a good deal of hype.)^[2]

Battle for Asia appeared almost simultaneously with Snow's arrival in California. But otherwise the timing worked against the book, unlike that for Red Star three years earlier. Americans' attention was fixed on Britain's lone epic stand against a Nazi-dominated continent, and on their own country's gradual but steady immersion in the European war. Sales of the book in America over the first year were modest, totaling about 10,000 copies. As in the case of Red Star , the book did not become a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, losing out to the revelations of an anti-Soviet defector.^[3]

Snow's book kept to his lively and popular personal reportorial style. He took the reader with him through the early pivotal battles of the China war, the birth of Indusco, his travels along the Indusco line, and his 1939 visit to the Red northwest and reunion with Mao. There were vivid descriptions of key personalities ranging from the Generalissimo to Rewi Alley. There were outraged accounts of Japanese depredations and atrocities. (Nowhere "in the present world has the deliberate degradation of man been quite so thoroughly systematized as by the Japanese army.") The volume was interlarded with heavier analytical and background material, and a final section of prescriptions for winning the war and the peace in Asia and Europe. Though Snow had envisioned the work as a wartime sequel to Red Star , it inevitably lacked the special chemistry and circumstances, the drama and freshness of Snow's euphoric discovery of a society and people. The book "has the same vivid qualities, but cannot in the nature of things prove as exciting as its predecessor," a British reviewer remarked.^[4]

Battle for Asia incorporated the themes and judgments Snow had been putting out in his writings over the previous three years, and many of the chapters were only slightly reworked versions of articles he had produced during that period. The tone was sharply critical of the Nationalist war record to date, but still guardedly hopeful that events could

impel the Kuomintang under the Generalissimo to adopt the measures of democratic reform and mobilization needed to save itself and China. (Even so staunch a champion of the Nationalists as the Time-Life magnate Henry Luce could write Snow "how deeply indebted" he was to him for his "masterly" book, and hoped it would be read by "many tens of thousands of Americans.") As always, Snow gave full credit to the for-tirade of China's ordinary people and soldiery; it was the bureaucrats and generals, and the privileged strata they represented, who fell far short of the mark. To be victorious, Snow declared, China's cause "must carry in it not only the distant promise of improvement in men's lives, but an immediate fulfillment by the realization of a better, democratic, society." Snow added his usual caveats on the potentially disastrous consequences for China of the anti-Communist machinations of right-wing appeasement elements in the government who feared the Reds more than the Japanese. The New Fourth Army episode at that time gave immediate weight to Snow's warnings, as many reviewers noted.^[5]

Indusco loomed very large in Snow's account, a story he told in his most persuasively promotional terms. His description of this movement, one reviewer extravagantly declared, "is nearly as thrilling as his account of the famous Long March in his earlier book." Policy toward the cooperatives was a key litmus test of Nationalist intentions, Snow emphasized. If properly supported, Indusco could point the way to success in war and to a progressive future without violent revolution. Snow also championed the Communist war effort (in which. Indusco-style cooperatives were doing their bit) as the model of the popularly based policies needed on a national scale. The Red forces, he asserted, were far superior in combat effectiveness to all other Chinese armies. Should the Kuomintang's war resolve falter, national leadership would pass to the Communists. "Though the Nationalist Government is not democratic," Snow wrote, "this had nevertheless been a people's war imposed on the rulers at the beginning against their will." As such it has also "denied to the anti-democratic and defeatist forces the power to enforce a surrender."^[6]

Snow gave a chilling recital of Japanese savageries in China, including the infamous "Rape of Nanking" after its fall in December 1937. The occupying troops engaged in a frenzy of looting, rape, and slaughter that left hundreds of thousands of Chinese dead in the city and the surrounding countryside. Snow indicted Japan's feudal-dominated culture and society, and its military's "education for homicide," as the breeding grounds for such brutalities. He also expounded his pet "inferiority complex" thesis as a more "recondite" reason for such Japanese behav-

ior. Here his indignation spilled over into the racist-tinged assertion that "subconsciously" the "individual Japanese is aware of his unfortunate intellectual and physical inferiority to individual Koreans and Chinese, the two peoples subject to his god-Emperor." Yet Snow maintained that ultimately the Japanese people would rise in revolutionary overthrow of militarist imperialism. He cited Japanese leftist antiwar dissidents working with the Chinese as "reminders" that Japan "was full of decent people" who, if their minds could be divested of "Sun Goddess myths and other imperialist filth," and given access to "forbidden dangerous thoughts," could "easily live in a civilized, co-operative world—if any of us could provide one."^[7]

In his book Snow turned again to the empire versus democracy issue in Britain's fight for survival. He still saw the world conflict as essentially one of "'ruler' peoples fighting each other for control of subject peoples." Condemning the British record in India, he took a characteristic swipe at Gandhian nonviolence. India's nationalist movement had become so powerful, he maintained, that the British "have mainly to thank Mahatma Gandhi for not having on their hands an armed revolution."^[8]

Snow pinned his hopes on America. It was under "no serious danger from any one else" and, he insisted, was "under no obligation to fight any battles abroad on anything but our own terms." And such "terms" called for America to lead the way beyond the age of empire to an era of "truer" social and political democracy on a global scale. He contrasted favorably the progressive record of American rule in the Philippines with that of the British in India. The movement toward "social revolution," he proclaimed, was the order of the day everywhere. All this had the ring of an updated, more revolutionary version of the Wilsonian call to save the world for democracy. Indeed, Snow told the presidential assistant Wayne Coy in Washington that August, "I was for a new 14 points." At a dinner with Washington friends that summer, Snow recorded, "all seemed agreed the old order was rapidly passing." America was the "decisive force" that will either "prop up the corpse of capitalism abroad or bring it down more quickly.^[9]

Snow claimed that his strategy of "dynamic democracy" would not only "immobilize" the fascists, but very likely win over Russia. Surrounded by a "cooperative world, the Soviets could feel secure in fulfilling the promise of democracy inherent in their own system," he maintained. This would be particularly so if the Russians were offered "a friendly hand instead of an endless stream" of "holier-than-thou" crusading sermons "against the infidels." This notion of the transitional na-

ture of Communist dictatorship echoes again ideas Snow first voiced in his Yanjing University fascism lecture.

Snow pressed his scheme of a federated union of "democratic states of the world." He called on the British to take the lead in a program of colonial democratization and emancipation as the basis of such a world federation. With the aid of suitably invested Western, primarily American, capital, the developing economies and societies of the liberated colonies would bring benefits and opportunities to the West far transcending those of the imperial connection. Their freedom was "positively essential to the regeneration of external markets," he declared.^[10]

The interdependent global economy of today, and the vigorous role in that economy of the Asian nations of the Pacific Rim, attest to Snow's foresight. Yet his sketch of an integrated Western-initiated and constructed cooperative new internationalist order seemed to glide over the forces of nationalism that he himself always emphasized, whether as the mainspring for the subject peoples of the East, or as a pivotal factor in the Communist world. For him, evidently, the end of capitalist business as usual in the world arena would ensure a secure foundation for this new order. But as Michael Hunt observes of the United States, the multiplicity of forces, including noneconomic ones, driving American foreign policy, suggested that a "socialist America" might pursue a foreign policy no more benign than that of the "old capitalist America.^[11]

That "democracies based on capitalism" would see the light in time to recover the political initiative seemed improbable, he conceded. But the many-sided world conflict would itself doom both European and Japanese imperialism and seal the fate of capitalism "as we knew it." Snow pictured a future of "cooperative democracy" (or "democratic collectivism") for the West, which could be realized peacefully through the electoral process. (The alternative for America was "some variety" of expansionist fascism.) The liberated and revolutionized societies of the East could then find a place in "a new scheme of intelligent world planning" without challenge from a now more secure Soviet state. Thus global cooperation may become "a reasonably early possibility." With the West showing the way, a "broader and more responsible democracy" could "open up for mankind the limitless possibilities of a civilization based on science and truth."^[12]

All the diverse elements in Snow's makeup were present: the liberal democrat, the supporter of revolutionary social change, the colonial lib-erationist, the firm believer in rational-scientific planned progress. He would try to cast America itself in those roles, with Franklin Roosevelt

as its wartime personification (quite a transformation from his earlier skeptical image of the president as a not very successful tinkerer with a failed American capitalism and then as something of a warmonger). He would come to see the president as symbolizing America at its democratic, nonimperialist, world-liberating, and reforming best. Snow came away from his first meeting with the president, shortly after Pearl Harbor, convinced, he later wrote, that given the co-operation of Congress and the people, he would "lead us to victory and a wise peace." (On the day in April 1945 when Roosevelt died Ed was in New York with his publisher, Bennett Cerf, who remembered how shattered the two were at the passing of a man both admired very deeply. The driver of a cab they were riding in made a disparaging remark about the dead president, and Snow insisted they stop the cab and get out.)^[13]

Snow's commentaries on America had a peculiarly abstract quality that reflected his long absence from a country he had left as a very young man. In his views was the strong residue of his middle-American upbringing, the conviction, in Henry Kissinger's description, "that America should focus on affairs at home, and that she should promote democracy when she ventures abroad." As Snow himself put it soon after returning home, "For us, as democratic Americans," the policies the nation should pursue abroad could "only be an extension of the political doctrines for which we stand at home." Overlaying this conviction were the radicalized views Snow had developed abroad of America's moribund, depression-ridden, "barbaric" capitalist system. He sought to combine these positions by projecting a fundamental restructuring of American democracy as concomitant with and key to its external reforming mission. It resembles what James Thomson and his fellow authors call the American "sentimental imperialist" syndrome: a "national itch to reshape the world, especially Asia, in their own image." In Snow's case, however, the image was of an America transformed.^[14]

The British commentator Dorothy Woodman, in reviewing Battle for Asia , acutely pinpointed some of the difficulties in Snow's global "reflections":

Like many others who have championed the "popular front" and found themselves in the dilemma of all good democrats who cannot go all the way with the Communists and who yet see that Socialism is the answer to Fascism, [Snow] begins to build in his mind the structure of the world which might be if the democratic Powers in victory would leap beyond imperialism into internationalism. Whether or not his political speculations are Realpolitik or wishful thinking is a question that applies to a broader area than Asia.^[15]

Freda Utley, Snow's future nemesis, who by now had turned against Chinese as well as Russian Communists, dealt much more harshly with the issues raised by Woodman. Nevertheless, her review of Battle for Asin was still far from entirely hostile. (For 1941 Snow had privately predicted that Utley "will write a review attacking my book.") Snow was a "not yet disillusioned" Communist sympathizer who was "essentially a liberal and a humanitarian," Utley declared. But she found his book to be "the most exhaustive account" to date of the China war, praised its "intimate and realistic quality," its "power of dramatic description," and "generous human sympathies." Her criticisms of his "political chapters," Utley concluded, did not detract from the "essential value" of his China account, nor of the truth of his arguments for colonial emancipation.^[16]

Snow, Utley observed, could "still write of revolutionary movements with zest and youthful hopefulness," devoid of any "misgivings" over the Moscow connection. She acknowledged that he had made an "unanswerable case" for the measures needed for victory in China, exemplified by the policies of the "as-yet-uncorrupted" Reds. But Snow had failed to recognize that the revolutionary dynamic thus generated "may serve the interests of German and Russian National Socialism instead of the cause of liberalism and reform." How could Chiang trust a Chinese Communist ally whose moves were dictated by Russian interest? The Reds could reverse their stand overnight, aligning themselves "with instead of against the Japanese enemy" in proclaimed opposition to "the 'Anglo-American imperialist front' supporting Chungking."^[17]

Snow of course had opposite (and justifiable) fears that Western assistance to the Kuomintang would shore up the more reactionary pro-civil war faction in Chungking and saw the Communists as the best guarantee of a continued and effective resistance. In the months following the New Fourth Army Incident, Snow's public position on the aid question hardened. With American help finally beginning to flow to China under the new Lend-Lease Act and other credit arrangements, Snow was warning against a no-strings-attached aid policy that would only encourage Chungking in its anti-Communist moves and weaken its stance against Japan. The united front had been little more than a charade, Snow wrote in April 1941, and the Kuomintang now apparently aimed for a war of "quiet attrition" against the Reds. Such outcomes were made even more likely by the prospect that Anglo-American forces might soon carry the brunt of war in the Pacific.^[18]

In retrospect, Snow clearly had the better part of the argument with Utley. Stalin, in fact, would promote Soviet interests in the Far East by

a pact with the Nationalists in 1945 that to some extent undercut the Chinese Communist position. And Snow's more complex view of the ambiguities in the Moscow-CCP relationship, with its dialectical mix of internationalist loyalties and indigenously based independently determined nationalist priorities, was much closer to the realities than Utley's simplistic notion of total Soviet domination.

Utley's review contained a most telling statement. "It was the tragedy of the progressive movement in China," she remarked, that its close links to Moscow and its earlier "class war" policies "should have driven many of those who might otherwise favor reform into the camp of the reactionaries." This remark pointed along the path she too would traverse and could also be taken as a kind of text on the response by postwar America to social revolutionary nationalist upheavals around the world, seen as instigated and controlled by a Soviet-centered Communist empire.

But these were matters for the future. Snow soon found himself once again entangled with the political left in America, this time on a more personal level. Battle for Asia included his usual long-distance barbs at the American Communists for their servile responses to the political twists and turns by Moscow. Their ability "to put themselves out on limbs to be sawed off by Soviet foreign policy seems to be inexhaustible," he commented. He criticized the left for its clumsy attacks on Roosevelt and rearmament at a time when the vast majority of Americans favored a military buildup in the name of security. The Communists, Snow pronounced, "should go far enough with that opinion to mobilize it against the capitalist misuse of armament in organizing fascism at home for imperialist war abroad"—a fuzzy formula that said more about Snow's unresolved conflicts than about the policies of the American left.

As a further example of Communist political ineptness, Snow egregiously ridiculed the party's persistence in nominating a Negro (in the parlance of the time) for vice president, when neither the Negroes nor the working class were "yet prepared for such an advanced (and ultimately necessary) aspiration, any more than the Russians are yet prepared to impose one of their Eskimos as head of the Supreme Soviet." Snow undoubtedly believed he was sensitive and enlightened on the "color" issue—certainly as it applied to the colonial people of Asia he had come to know well. But his life and experiences in America and overseas included no such personal contacts with African Americans; he could hardly be called "ahead of his times" on racial issues at home.^[19]

Snow would soon regret these paragraphs. In California, he met American progressives in the flesh. He was lionized by the cultural elite

active in leftist circles in the Los Angeles—Hollywood region who showed keen interest in and sympathy for China—most especially for the Snows' favorite cause, Indusco. Helen had already organized a Hollywood Indusco committee headed by the noted left-wing actor John Garfield, one of the Hollywood celebrities the Snows socialized with. Helen and Ed also persuaded Theodore Dreiser to sign the Indusco loan petition to Roosevelt, though we might wonder at the benefit, given Dreiser's public tirades against F. D. R.

Snow was thus attracted and impressed by the many notable and welcoming literary and film people he met, with whom he shared a good deal of common ground. He became more aware of the attacks on the Communists, including the imprisonment of Earl Browder. Now as in later cold war days, Snow was uncomfortable at seeming to aid and abet "reactionaries" in their assaults on the left. In an odd minor replay of the Red Star scenario, Snow attempted a last-minute retreat from remarks in his new book that might offend left-wing readers. In a phone call and letter from Hollywood, he appealed to his agent to have the paragraphs on the American Communists deleted. This "now seems to me, after my arrival here, of exceeding importance," he wrote her. In "this hour of difficulty for the LW [left-wing] people I do not wish to add anything more to the calumnies against them." He did not realize, he added, "how tense the situation here in America is, ... or I would never have ventured such a remark at their expense." But it was in fact too late, and the offending paragraphs remained.^[20]

Snow's problematic relationship with the American Communists took a more direct turn later in that first year back home. On arriving in New York in April he was invited to be a main speaker at an American Writers Congress to be held in New York in early June. It was designed by the Communist-dominated League of American Writers as a protest against what it termed the Roosevelt administration's drive toward "war abroad and fascism at home." After glancing through the congress's manifesto, or call, Snow agreed to talk on a China-related topic. He de-dined, however, to sign the call (something the sponsors usually demanded of participating speakers), though he apparently expressed no open disagreement with its contents at the time. Perhaps the impressive array of progressive cultural celebrities sponsoring the congress influenced Snow's commitment. Among many others, they included Theodore Dreiser, Dashiell Hammett, Lillian Hellman, Rockwell Kent, Langston Hughes, Clifford Odets, Orson Welles, and Richard Wright. To Ed, still fresh to the American political scene, it may have seemed

more akin to the relatively broad political spectrum of cultural-intellectual sympathizers of the left he had known in China. Snow naively—especially in view of his earlier Red Star experience—thought he could "get along" without fully going along with the congress's line. As Snow later explained the point in Journey : though "troubled" by the congress manifesto's branding of Roosevelt as a "fascist," and its total defense of "every act of Stalinist opportunism," he was nevertheless "glad to take any opportunity to arouse people to the danger from the East." He rather lamely added that he had not "quite believed that the Communists were in charge" since he "knew" that many of the writers involved were not Reds.^[21]

Actually Snow had been moving steadily away from the adamantly antiwar position of the pro-Soviet American left. The opinions he voiced at his Philadelphia press interview just a few days before the writers' meeting were patently at odds with the avowed purposes of the New York conclave. And he planned in his prepared address to deliver a similar message—squeezed somehow into the antiwar motif of the congress. Nevertheless, he could still write to the executive secretary of the congress, after returning from Philadelphia, that he was "surprised and disappointed" to learn that his prepared speech had been rejected on the grounds that it "fundamentally contradicts the convictions" of the congress. Despite his differences with the call, he added, "That in no way affected my support of the main issues the Call raised nor my readiness to speak at the Congress." It was one of the stranger episodes in Snow's various encounters with the non-Chinese part of the Communist movement.^[22]

The text of Snow's undelivered congress address refuted the case he had made to Will Babcock a year and a half earlier. What he had then considered, with some equanimity, as the far-fetched possibility of Nazi conquest of Europe had come to pass, and with it the emergence of the full-fledged Berlin-Tokyo alliance that he had also discounted. He reminded his projected audience of its earlier antiappeasement, antifascist stance and affirmed his support for American aid to the Chinese and British peoples. An independent Britain, he declared, was "a more progressive political concept than a Britain dominated by German Nazism." Even without a decisive victory over England, Snow pointed out, the Germans could move against the Soviets "at any moment. Is it not possible that if Soviet Russia got no help from Britain or America she could be defeated by the armed might of the fascist world?" (When the Nazi attack came just two weeks later, the American Communists clamored

for just such aid in what was now proclaimed to be "the life and death struggle between fascism and democracy.") German-Japanese hegemony over most of the globe, Snow warned, would constitute a direct threat to the United States. America would be forced to retreat behind "a wall of arms" and await attack or accept a fascist way of life. But Snow tried to give his argument a "peace" twist. "I do not believe that we run as great a risk of war by giving all-out aid to the Chinese and British peoples as we would run by denying aid and hastening their defeat," he reasoned. Without these conquests, he added, "the Axis Powers have no real bases from which to attack us." Meanwhile, he went on in some tortuous antiwar logic, it was "our duty as writers to see that 'aid for resistance' is not perverted to serve the wishes of the war-makers who want us to enter the war directly ourselves." (As if in rejoinder to his own remarks, he had told his Philadelphia interviewer that America would be actively in the war while "some people are still arguing about whether the United States is going to war or not.")^[23]

In turning to China in his writers' congress text, Snow emphasized that "Americans who hope their country will never enter a war incompatible with democratic goals will naturally wish to see certain conditions laid down by Washington in further support of China." It was the CIC syndrome writ large: to reform China through benevolent foreign intervention. Snow ticked off the conditions America should set ("phrased, of course, in the language of diplomacy") in return for aid: no American money or munitions to be used to block internal political progress or to shore up "the present minority one-party dictatorship"; cooperation among the anti-Japanese parties rather than "the recent attempt by Kuomintang generals to destroy the heroic New Fourth Army"; American military supplies to go also to the guerrilla areas, with the Nationalist blockade against the Reds lifted; the Generalissimo to implement "in deeds his 14 annual promises of constitutional democracy"; American aid to be used to help enforce agrarian reform; arid finally, that American currency, commodity and industrial credits and technical help "be canalized through CIC, to ensure the democratic industrialization of China." It is interesting to contrast the relatively revolutionary (if "utopian") China role Snow advocated for America, with the China policy of Moscow. Soviet military assistance had been flowing to the Kuomintang since 1937, apparently with few if any of the stipulations Snow was asking of Washington. Snow would later look back ruefully on the China task he had assigned to America: "How earnestly this Candide-turned-reformer pleaded for comprehension in an America

which was, he supposed, about to 'take charge'! ... I was simply dreaming, as many people in China were dreaming, of a 'savior from abroad'— in my case, America."^[24]

Snow's remaining doubts on the war issue were being eroded by his steady, if reluctant, recognition that American entry into a war of global dimensions was virtually inevitable. He understood the threat posed by Japan, endorsed the firmest American measures to counter it—economic quarantine, joint defense alliances, and military buildup. He acknowledged that these policies were likely to trigger an attack by a desperate Japan faced with "catastrophe." Yet he portrayed these strategies as still having the possibility of giving the Japanese military pause. The people of Japan must be under no "delusion" that they would only be getting into a "Singapore incident," he wrote, in pressing his ideas for a "political battle of Asia." Stern Western resolve should be linked with an offer aimed directly at those people of "cooperation in the construction of a really progressive New Order." He prophesied that if Tokyo decided against taking on the Anglo-American powers and remained mired in China, "the situation would become so serious as to result in a social revolution in Japan within not more than two years." He conceded, however, that given these grim prospects, and the realization that Japan would only grow weaker relative to Britain and America as time went on, "the outcome might be somewhat different. The army and navy might prefer hara-kiri to surrender." In a mid-1941 Post article on the coming "Showdown in the Pacific," Snow emphasized that war was the more likely option for Japan, especially if the China front was neutralized by renewed civil war, and if the U.S. Pacific fleet was weakened by diversion of a portion to Atlantic duty. Japan could likely strike even without these two eventualities. "But we can be sure that if and when those two conditions are realized there will be a blitzkrieg in the Pacific." The Japanese, we know, had their own ideas for weakening the Pacific fleet.^[25]

But ambiguities remained. Shortly after the Post article appeared, his diary noted his response to the freezing of Axis assets in the United States, and to a recent sinking of an American merchant ship in the Atlantic: "Looks as though R's [Roosevelt's] policy is working out. We are entering war by degrees." In Washington a few weeks later, he described government officials he dined with as "rabid interventionists." There were other inconsistencies. Snow urged the government, as part of a new "propaganda" offensive, to take steps to stop Japanese and Nazi propaganda activities in the United States and its territories, and to "dis-

band" Japanese and Axis-controlled "political clubs and subversive organizations inside American territory." (Snow was concerned primarily with a Philippine "fifth column," but the scope of his proposal was considerably broader.) At almost the same time, he quoted in his diary, evidently approvingly, a letter from Evans Carlson, on the great expansion of FBI power following the fall of France. The bureau had "used the hysteria which followed to gain a cinch hold throughout the country." Strangely, as war with Japan came closer, Snow veered more to the belief that Japan would not "dare" attack. He apparently made such a prediction for 1942 for a Look article (which the magazine was able to change in time). As to why he had "abandoned" his earner analysis, "I'm inclined to believe it was because of the overwhelming front mobilized vs Japan," he recorded on Pearl Harbor day. "I could not believe— though economic interpretation had convinced me earlier of it—that Japan would dare defy such a combination." Just days before, in a letter to Alley, he remained troubled at the extent of the American defense buildup underway, and its global military implications. The country was "militarizing on a scale greater than anything ever dreamed of in history," and American troops will "certainly" be sent to Asia and Europe, and Americans would eventually control the skies in Latin America and Africa. "I don't like the picture and I don't know anyone who does." This sounded more like a presentiment of America's future as world superpower.^[26]

During his summer visit to Washington Snow had been offered a commission in Army Air Corps Intelligence. He was evidently expected to help determine bombing objectives in Japan, potential airfield sites in China, and other such matters. (The officer who contacted him on this believed "we would be able to make quick work of Japan," Ed noted.) Snow kept this option in abeyance over the next months, then gave it serious thought when the proposal was reactivated after the outbreak of war. He eventually decided, apparently with a prod of "orders" in that direction from his "Commander-in-Chief," the president, to take on instead a permanent Post overseas war assignment. "Oh they'll [the Air Force] manage without you somehow," Roosevelt assured Ed at their first talk early in 1942.^[27]

In July the Snows moved into their newly purchased home on some six acres in the Connecticut coastal town of Madison. Helen loved the small colonial-era house, built in 1752, and has lived there continuously for over half a century. (Ed would disparagingly refer to the house as a "shanty.") There was an occasional flare-up between the two in the next

months, which Snow brooded on in his diary. In one incident, during a visit by the Babcocks, Helen "screamed" at Ed for a deprecating remark he made on Indusco. "Sweet life," he jotted, "I withdrew." There was also, as previously noted, a warmly pleasant reunion with Ed's old mentor and champion, Charles Hanson Towne, who came up from New York where he was appearing on stage in Life with Father .^[28]

Snow was anxious, as earlier, to break out of his Asia niche into a wider field of European coverage. "People have put me in a hole marked Far East and they won't let me get out of it," he complained to Alley. He had long desired a Russian post and pursued it again after the Nazi invasion in June. He found no immediate takers, a situation compounded by his continuing Moscow visa problem. He tried also for a London assignment, with no better results. He met with the Chicago department store magnate Marshall Field, to seek a London berth with Field's new Chicago paper. "Have you ever done any writing," Field queried. "Such is fame," Snow noted of the interview. The Post put him off as well on the London idea but asked him to do some reporting on how the new draft army was faring—"morale and such. (How absurd—me writing about morale )," he told Alley. Nevertheless, he felt it was a good opportunity "to dig into my own country's affairs more deeply to discover what makes the wheels go round." He also hoped that "doing this domestic scene stuff" would help him escape his China pigeonhole.^[29]

Snow spent much of the summer and fall looking into army camps around the country, gathering information not only on soldier morale, but on the thinking of the generals, and on the state of American war preparedness. As to why "They Don't Want to Play Soldier," Snow made a point of the nation's anomalous "undeclared war" status. It led to uncertainties and confusions among these draftees as to when, where, and above all why they might be called on to fight. "Some columnists and the Fight For Freedom Committee declared war long ago, but the simple draftee still has peace in his heart." The "most important thing," he recorded, "is the creation of a reason for fighting." For "good or evil," he concluded, "the Army is going to be with us for a long, long time now, and in a more and more dominant role in everybody's life."^[30]

Snow cited "nearly all the Negro regiments" among those army units who did have "excellent" morale. "The average Negro soldier is living better than ever before in his life and is learning something, and there is the challenge of proving himself as good as the white boys." Somewhat at variance with this estimate, Snow also forthrightly wrote, "I should think the Army could get along without any officer who habitually refers

to black troops in a camp as 'niggers.'" He saw this, however, merely as manifestations of poor "psychology" and "terminology." In detailing the recreational-entertainment efforts of the Army's morale branch, Snow could not resist references to his Chinese Red heroes. "We may think there is nothing to learn from a backward country like China, but its famed Eighth Route Army really has a few lessons for us." He discreetly focused these "lessons" on the less politically charged uses of drama and song by that army. "One thing that explains the magnificent courage and endurance of this remarkable army is the fact that it never gets bored with itself or forgets the importance of humor," he explained.^[31]

Back home in Madison in the final months of 1941, Snow waited on events. "As for my personal plans (confidential!)," he informed Alley in early December, "I have none. I am living like the rest of the world, from day to day." Tokyo soon resolved these incertitudes and set the wartime agenda for him as it did for the nation at large. Snow's connection with the Post had solidified during that year, in which he produced four substantial pieces for the journal. With the outbreak of war, and a new internationalist-minded editor, Ben Hibbs, at the helm, Snow at long last was given the broader overseas assignment (as Post "world correspondent") he so coveted. Still lacking a Soviet visa, he left by clipper in early April 1942, across Africa and the Middle East to India. During the flight he would hear of the fall of Bataan and Corregidor, America's last footholds in the Philippines. Peg had seen him off, but by that time, he later wrote of his marriage, "it was clear to both of us" that its "creative possibilities" were exhausted. Over the next three years and more of the war, Snow would report from virtually every theater of the conflict including, most significantly, the Russian front, and produce two wartime books.^[32]

In a bizarre bit of symbolism, one of Snow's fellow passengers on the clipper flight was a navy lieutenant commander (later admiral), Milton ("Mary") Miles, on his way to China on a special navy mission that represented a diametrically opposite perception of America's wartime role in China (and by inference elsewhere) than the vision Snow was taking with him overseas. Miles was heading for a meeting with the notorious Dai Li, head of Chiang's feared secret police and of the fascistic Blue Shirts . By 1943 their collaboration resulted in the organization of the Sino-American Cooperative Organization (SACO) under the joint direction of the two men. It was a collaboration in an active anti-Communist program for the Nationalists that involved arming and training Chinese police, guerrilla, and commando forces for operations against the

Reds. SACO was also associated with the Happy Valley complex outside Chungking, where Dai Li's political prisoners were incarcerated, many of whom were apparently tortured and killed by his operatives. An increasingly obsessed and unstable Miles would finally be recalled home after the Japanese surrender, later to serve in naval capacities elsewhere in the world. Dai Li would perish in a plane crash in March 1946. SACO was an especially dark foretaste of the cold war-fueled counterinsurgency American interventionism to come. ("Much of what Miles did was opposed by his superiors," Michael Schaller writes, "only because it had been done both crudely and prematurely.")^[33]

For the time being, these eventualities were far from Snow's thoughts. On the Far East, Snow had written Edward Carter of the Institute of Pacific Relations before leaving for overseas, "The empires are collapsing and in the last hour the sahibs are discovering they need the people. Great progress may be expected and the old stagnating forms are broken and being plowed under to lay the ground for a broader future." It was a peroration to all he had been writing and thinking about Asia for a decade. As Snow began his new reporting activities, he saw them as an entirely new ("third life") stage in his career. His personal star, however, would always remain linked to the Red star of China.