PROLOGUE

"You belong to the middle class don't you?" Mao asked. I said,
"Many papers have called me a leftist." He laughed broadly .
Edgar Snow diary entry, July 1963,
referring to his meeting with Mao in 1960

Chapter 1
Setting

In the course of a grueling and hazardous overland trek from remote southwestern China to Burma in 1931, twenty-five-year-old Edgar Snow confided to his diary: "However well I readjust myself to life in America, my youth, the best part of it, lies ever in the Orient. This was the season of high adventure, experience, and unusual thrills." Snow, who had arrived in China three years earlier, would in fact not return to America for another ten years. His greatest "high adventure" was still to come with his famed pioneering journey to the Chinese Communist base in equally remote northwestern China. Not merely his youth, but a major portion of his life would be linked to China. After his death in 1972, some of his ashes would lie there forever.^[1]

In his early twenties Snow sought out the more distant and untraveled frontiers of the world; in later life he viewed himself and his origins in American frontier terms. A "child of a rich, open, frontier civilization," he somewhat romantically characterized himself in his autobiographical Journey to the Beginning (hereafter Journey ). Born in Kansas City, Missouri, July 19, 1905, Snow was a member of the first truly post-frontier generation in middle America. His life encompassed the unsettling transformations both of twentieth-century America and of the world outside. From its earlier, largely agrarian, small entrepreneur roots (epitomized in Snow's father's origins and career), the United States emerged as a corporate industrial and military giant playing an increasingly powerful and ultimately dominant role in a world battered by war and convulsed by revolution.^[2]

In his work as an influential, and often involved, recorder of these turbulent times in Asia and Europe, Snow took with him the democratic individualist values and outlook, as well as some parochial remains, of his quintessentially American family background. After 1928 in China, and elsewhere in Asia, he developed a growing awareness of—an "awakening," as he later described it—and an empathy for the miserable plight of the peoples of these lands. During the 1930s in China he became convinced of the necessity for radical (revolutionary) social and political change there, and for determined resistance to Japanese aggression—the two being interrelated. While he put his primary faith for this in the Chinese Communist revolutionaries, he did not discard his bedrock "American" convictions (which included strong aversion to imperialism) but instead linked them to the vastly different circumstances and imperatives of the struggle for human betterment and national survival he found in China and in colonial Asia. His own ingrained sense of compassion arid social justice served often as the cementing factor. Writing to his father in 1933 of his outrage and discouragement at the depressing state of affairs in China, he observed, "Perhaps this country is too much for anybody with a background of passionate faith in the idea of Justice and fair-play for every man as the keystone of the conduct of human affairs."^[3]

In sharp contrast to the corruption, greed, and demoralization he had witnessed in most of China, Snow found the Chinese Communists he first encountered in 1936 to be "men of probity and selflessness." The "plain fact was that the Reds were 'better' people than their enemies." For their part, China's Communist leaders regarded Snow (in the sense of the attributes and reactions noted above) as a trustworthy "honest bourgeois" journalist. Yet the exigencies of later Chinese Communist politics and policies could cause them to set aside the special relationship when Snow's independent views did not suit them. The 1950s decade of China's Soviet alignment and the xenophobia of the late 1960s Cultural Revolution were two such examples. In any case, it is probably fair to say that Snow, who arrived in China with neither a missionary zeal to save it nor a revolutionary passion to change it, had a greater impact on that country than any other nonofficial Westerner active there in the critical years of revolutionary and anti-Japanese conflict.^[4]

Through the 1930s and most of the 1940s, as Snow wrote of war and revolution in Asia and Europe, of Japanese and Nazi aggression, of Chinese and Soviet communism, and of the collapse of colonial empires, his viewpoint and sympathies, communicated in compelling and evocative

human terms, would find an influential place in "mainstream" America. This was best exemplified by the great influence of his classic pathbreaking account of Chinese Communism, Red Star , and by his subsequent decade-long role as a major wartime correspondent and associate editor of that most "American" of mass-circulation magazines, the Saturday Evening Post (hereafter, the Post ). Snow tended to view himself as a kind of intermediary between his American homeland and the revolutionary forces he felt he had come to know and understand. His American-style idealism and Asian-style radicalism proved a strong combination in this regard.

In the sharply changed situation of the 1950s, the linkages Snow symbolized were torn apart by the pressures of the new world of cold war. (As the China historian John Fairbank put it, Snow was "mugged" by the cold war.) Snow was turned off by, and isolated from, the zealously anti-Communist and illiberal American political-ideological climate prevailing in those years. He had been "professionally destroyed" by his "refusal to climb onto the cold war bandwagon all these years," he wrote Jim Bertram, his New Zealander friend from the China days. He was equally separated from a revolutionary new China now closely aligned with the Soviet-led "socialist camp." Not only were Snow's non-cold warrior views distinctly out of fashion in America; his "honest bourgeois" role was now also unwelcome in the seemingly monolithic and anti-imperialist Communist world. The fact that Snow early on could perceive the nationalist (or Titoist) potential of the Chinese revolution did not endear him to either contending side, and he saw himself becoming "persona non grata in all camps." Snow, in fact, continued throughout the postwar years to stress the long-term American national interest in a mutually beneficial relationship with a unified, independent, and modernizing China. He saw the new China as the logical culmination of the extended revolutionary process there. "It is a pity," he wrote his old friend in China, Rewi Alley, in 1955, "that so much unnecessary bitterness has prospered between China and the U.S. due largely to ignorance and monumental miscalculations on both sides." While the in-terplay of Snow's American and Chinese "sides" had made him a highly effective communicator of the Chinese revolutionary cause to his American audience in the 1930s and into the war years, this would be a much more daunting task in the dramatically changed setting of his return to China in 1960. And even the apparent validation of his Sino-American bridge-building efforts in the final year of his life would have its ironies for him.^[5]

For much of the 1950s Snow, in the domesticity of a fulfilling new marriage and family, occupied himself in his Hudson Valley home north of New York City writing his "me-moirs" as he called it. It "ended up as a kind of personal view of history more than personal history," he noted. "I putter around a great deal with such prosaic deeds as gardening and carpentering, read books, play with our two infants, and enjoy the company of ma femme, Lois," he informed Bertram. "Now I seem to be content," he wrote a boyhood friend in 1954, "to study the globe in an illuminated Rand-McNally version on my desk." In this more introspective mood, he investigated and pondered his family roots and an America that now seemed lost forever. As he did so, the effect of the frontier on those roots and on that America took on a special meaning for him.^[6]

Writing to his brother in 1954, Ed noted. that his research into the "frontier land" history of the Snow family, plus a recent reading of the historian Walter Prescott Webb's Great Frontier , "has given me a new conception of the Snow line of thinking as passed on by the old man." Its spirit of self-reliance and individual enterprise still had its impact and carryover "down to our own generation," he explained to Howard. It held its own despite the rise of a big-business-dominated America in which "the individual no longer really count[s] for much." Snow clearly felt all this most keenly in terms of his own situation in those years: one in which his nonconforming stance had cut him off from the establishment media and its sources of comfortable livelihood. "We are well but not prosperous," he informed Jim Bertram in 1958. "We live by our wits and our wits are in short demand."^[7]

Snow's vision of an earlier frontier America of enterprising, self-made citizens applied most convincingly to the history of his own pioneer forebears. The Snows had found opportunity and success in the settlement and development of the agrarian Midwest. But for many others, as recent revisionist historians of the American West have emphasized, there was a darker and seamier side of exploitation, injustice, and discrimination, and also often of personal failure. Nevertheless, it was through his own family background that Snow could find the verities and values he sought.^[8]

The Snow family went back to a founding ancestor of English stock, William Snow. Originally from North Carolina, he had settled in the Cumberland region of Kentucky, then still part of Virginia, in the late eighteenth century. It was there that Ed's grandfather, Horace Parks Snow, was born in 1849. By then the family owned a fine farm with pasture, orchards, and stables—but no slaves. Snow's great-great-grandfather

had freed his slaves, and the Snows were antisecessionist and pro-Union during the Civil War. There were some family claims of connection with a more distant forebear who had supposedly come to New England on the second voyage of "that capacious tub, the 'Mayflower,'" Ed wryly observed. Snow himself was tempted to lean on this tenuous claim when, in the early 1950s, he was apprised of a Captain Samuel Snow from Salem, Massachusetts, who had been appointed the first American merchant consul for the Canton trade in I799. Though Ed was unable to find any evidence of a direct family link, the possible China connection seemed too intriguing to ignore. In Journey , he thus somewhat ambiguously, though not inaccurately, wrote of Samuel Snow as "another Snow who had preceded me" to China.^[9]

After the Civil War Horace Parks Snow ("H. P.") moved west with the frontier to settle near Winfield, Kansas, in the 1880s, with his wife, Louisa (of an English-Irish Virginia family), and seven children. He farmed and also ran a general store and ultimately acquired extensive holdings in Kansas, Missouri, and Texas. His boast, as Ed was careful to emphasize, was that he had never worked for another man a single day in his life. H. P. was an egocentric and colorful character; a widower at the time of his death in 1933 at age eighty-four, he had a breach of promise suit on his hands, according to Ed, "which ate up quite a lot of a considerable estate." Ed remembered him as "a splendidly robust and picturesque old man, lord of the world he surveyed." Ed's middle name, Parks, which he never used as an adult, derived from H. P. (It was so unfamiliar that when his native Kansas City decided to recognize him posthumously with a day in his honor, the occasion was erroneously proclaimed as "Edgar A. Snow Day.")^[10]

Snow likened these westward migrations to his own youthful urge to see the world—"the pull of some frontier dream, some nameless beckoning freedom, ... beyond the sunset." In a less lyrical vein Helen, his first wife, had quipped, "his family have been moving west for generations; when [Ed] Snow began migrating he moved so far West he arrived in the Far East."^[11]

Snow's father, James Edgar (J. Edgar), was born in 1873 and was raised on the farm in Kentucky and then in Kansas. In 1899 he married Anna Catherine Edelmann, originally from Columbus, Ohio, a devout Catholic of mixed Irish-German immigrant background. Her mother, Mary Ann Fogarty, had come to this country with her parents from Ireland, and her father with his parents from Silesia. Snow later noted that though his grandfather Snow had been a wealthy landowner, his

mother's father had worked all his life as a bricklayer (although later establishing a small family construction business) and her grandfather was an Irish immigrant who had worked as a common laborer.^[12]

The Snows, Methodists and firmly anti-Papist, found this first Catholic connection most upsetting. J. Edgar, in marrying the lovely Anna, had agreed to study Catholic doctrine with a view to conversion and to have their children baptized and sent to parochial schools. He himself had attended Southwestern Methodist College in Winfield, Kansas, for two years and had come to Kansas City in 1893. He was a thoughtful, well read person of strongly independent mind, "a man of integrity and high principles," a sister described him. Versed in the literary classics, he was fond of reciting favorite passages. Snow remembered his father, apparently lost in his own thoughts, going about the house "muttering lines of Shakespeare to himself, or quoting from Dante." J. Edgar declaimed in similar fashion as he worked in his print shop on Cherry Street in Kansas City.^[13]

After editing a trade journal, J. Edgar had purchased a small printing business. This suited both his independent spirit and his love for the printed word. He operated this enterprise for over thirty years, content with a modest livelihood, and with pride in the quality and uprightness of his Snow Printing Company. "We were a middle class family with more respectability than money," Ed would recall, "though we had enough to eat and wear always and a comfortable home." His dad, Ed had earlier observed, "was a genius at making ends meet through thirty years of practice." J. Edgar "was not a hard-nosed businessman," remembered a close Kansas City friend of Ed's, but rather "a man of ideals and dreams, a thinker with "a soft but distant" personality.^[14]

Both Howard and Ed were often impatient at their father's lack of a strong money-making instinct. (The two youths went with "an upper middle-class crowd," according to their brother-in-law, Claude Mackey, and had talked their father into buying a Cadillac. Writing from the Orient in 1931, Ed reminisced to his sister about the "old days" and of "Dad driving the old Cadillac.") Howard, followed by Ed, left for New York in the mid-1920s, in part when it became clear that J. Edgar was unwilling and unable to finance expansion of his business. Later, in China, Ed would remain skeptical of his father's desire to modernize, even if money should come his way through inheritance from Horace Parks.^[15]

J. Edgar exemplified the ideals of the pioneer-agrarian life and culture that had nurtured him. In this, he reflected as well some of the themes of early twentieth-century rural midwestern progressivism. Very much his

own man, he distrusted the rising forces of big business and big government. As an insular, nativist American, he was also estranged from the country's burgeoning metropolises with their mix of new immigrant populations. Howard (who continued to live in New York until the mid-1930s) and Ed, on the other hand, found their life in New York exciting. To J. Edgar, however, New York seemed "a bunch of Jews and foreigners." It had "swept you fellows off your feet," and "you imagine it is America," he wrote to Ed in 1930. "When you get back to the United States, I suggest that you see America first." As the depression deepened in the early 1930s, he inveighed against Wall Street and bloated millionaires. Although a Republican, he was for a time rather taken with the ideas of Huey Long, though he called him "a sort of political brigand." His suspicion of the high-living temptations of places like New York surfaced when he was preparing to come east in 1941 (for the first and only time) with his daughter, Mildred, and her husband. They were to visit Ed, just back from the Orient and living in New York, and Howard in Boston. J. Edgar cautioned his sons not "to take us to expensive places to entertain us or buy us expensive meals or suggest costly hotels.... You know that we are not used to extravagance and I shall feel uneasy if you wasted any money."^[16]

Yet middle American insularity could be matched by a "sophisticated" New York provincialism. Famed Missouri-born regionalist artist Thomas Hart Benton pointed to the latter phenomenon when leaving New York in 1935 to live and work in Kansas City. In terms not very different from J. Edgar's, he wrote, "New York, stacked up against the rest of America, is a highly provincial place. It has such a tremendously concentrated life of its own," he added, "that it absorbs all the attention of its inhabitants and makes them forget that their city is, after all, only an appendage to the great aggregation of states to the north, south, and west."^[17]

In contrast to Ed's father's somewhat unbending qualities were the loving warmth and devotion of his mother, a woman of sweet and gentle nature infused by a strong religious faith. J. Edgar soon decided against conversion to Catholicism, a stance that grew into overt opposition. This became a major strain on family harmony, even taking such needling forms as J. Edgar's insistence on eating meat on Fridays while the rest of the family ate fish. Though he acquiesced in a parochial education for Mildred and Howard (who were five and three years old when Ed was born), he insisted on public school for his younger son. Ed, however, did receive full religious instruction after school and went

through the rituals from first communion to confirmation. As a running counterpoint to this, J. Edgar subjected Ed to Sunday afternoon "sermons" of his own—usually carefully selected readings from such authors as the celebrated orator and agnostic Robert Ingersoll. (In a letter to his father from China in 1929, in which he "went on at length on things Chinese and otherwise," Ed good-humoredly reminded J. Edgar of "all the verbosity to which you were wont to treat me when I was a young and helpless unsophisticate.")^[18]

While his father's views left their mark, it was equally Ed's naturally skeptical "from Missouri" temperament that kept him from adherence to any organized system of proclaimed truth and faith, religious or secular. (During his last, often troubling trip to China in 1970, Snow observed in his diary that the all-pervasive "Little Red Book" of Mao quotations was "like the cross and the rosary.") Out of devotion to his mother he attended mass while he lived at home; by the time he entered college, he later wrote, "I was indifferent to sectarian religion of any kind." He would occasionally allude to an attraction for the ancient Chinese philosophy of Taoism, presumably for its focus on the individual, its paradoxical-whimsical view of human experience, and its skeptical rejection of conventional beliefs. In a 1948 article on Gandhi's assassination, Snow characterized himself as "an agnostic and pragmatist, an ex-Catholic turned Taoist, a Hegelian fallen among materialists"—the last presumably referring to his bent for a Marxist-influenced dialectical approach to world affairs. In any event, while Mildred and Howard remained "fairly good" Catholics, he would be regarded on the maternal side of the family as "the lost black sheep."^[19]

Ed's mother's death in 1930, and the poignant circumstances surrounding it, ended any remaining links to the church for him. Hospitalized for surgery in the Catholic-run Evangelical Hospital in Kansas City, Anna contracted peritonitis after some three weeks there, went into a coma, and died. As his father wrote of these sad events to Ed in China, it seemed there may have been some neglect and incompetence by her doctors and nurses, compounded by the callous insensitivity of one of the nuns in dunning the family for payment of the hospital bill in the presence of the sick woman. In voicing his sorrow and bitterness at all this, Ed's father inevitably saw it as further vindication of his views. Anna had taught Ed to respect "all priests and nuns as good and kind," he wrote. Now "Fate chose a cruel and tragic time to disillusion her." Rereading this old letter in 1951, Ed found himself crying and still outraged at what had happened. With his mother's death, Ed was never

again to attend a mass. Her passing severed his closest bond to home and made an early return to America less urgent.^[20]

Snow continued to maintain an affectionate correspondence with his widowed father. Particularly in the earlier China years, he would write of his appreciation to J. Edgar for "the early shaping of my mind and habit under your tutelage," and for J. Edgar's "splendid qualities" as a father. The latter, on his part, took great pride in his son's writing accomplishments. He and Mildred kept a scrapbook of Ed's articles, and J. Edgar would often carry clippings around with him. Nevertheless, their worlds of experience and outlook grew increasingly far apart. As Ed's stay in Asia lengthened to almost thirteen years, followed by wartime and early postwar assignments abroad, he saw his father again only rarely.^[21]

Meanwhile, J. Edgar's predictable failure to keep up with the times was his eventual undoing as a businessman. "New machines and methods of production have nearly eliminated me," he wrote to Ed in November 1941. His major accounts, including the Kansas City Star , were shifting to cheaper providers. Business was bad, and he had neither "the strength or spirit to build it up again." It was now "too late to expand or get a modern shop." Embittered and dispirited, as his world of the independent small businessman and its values seemed to slip away, he went into a long decline with frequent mental lapses, until his death in 1958 at age eighty-five. Largely dependent in the final fifteen years of his life on the care and solicitude of his daughter and her husband, his sole source of income came from a 120-acre Butler, Missouri, farm property he had inherited from Horace Parks. Rented out to a tenant farmer, it provided the meager sum of $1,000 to $1,500 annually. On J. Edgar's death, Ed received a one-third share of the income of this property. Remarking in his diary in 1963 that this slim legacy was the only inheritance he had ever received in his life, Snow thought back on his own self-reliant Missouri boyhood.^[22]

Chapter 2
Kansas City

"I could claim to be a farmer, worker, businessman, intellectual," Snow summarized his background, which, aside from the final category, related to his youthful work experiences in early twentieth-century Kansas City. He worked first as an errand boy and "printer's devil" in his father's print shop after school hours and in summer vacations. The Kansas City Star was one of his father's customers, and he spent time "hanging around" the press room there. In his father's shop he learned to set type and feed a press, and "to like the smell of ink and freshly cut paper." Before entering college he "had determined to be a writer." Many good writers at the turn of the century started by working as apprentices in printing shops; according; to the literary critic Malcolm Cowley, that was "sounder training" than any professor of creative writing could offer. In high school Snow published a paper ("The Delt") for his fraternity, of which he was president.^[1]

Snow later recalled, perhaps half-facetiously, that when his father refused to give him a raise from ten to fifteen cents an hour, he went into "business for myself" selling subscriptions to the Post . He was also able to ride free on the streetcar while soliciting sales, thus saving himself the one-mile walk to school (his father did not provide the nickel for the fare). All this seemed quite in keeping with J. Edgar's lifetime code. His own much more affluent father had always insisted on his children making their own way; J. Edgar, for example, had repaid the money advanced him by his father for his college stint. Ed's other odd jobs during the school years included drugstore soda clerk, stock boy for a pump

company, mail clerk for a railway company, farmhand at harvest time, and a salesman of printing for his father. Money thus earned helped defray later college expenses. It was essentially the typical boyhood experiences of middle-class life in mid-America of that era. For a fuller flavor of the setting in which the Snow family functioned, it is useful to look briefly at Kansas City's history and development in those times.^[2]

Kansas City is situated in the center of the United States on both an cast-west and north-south axis. Located on the great bend of the Missouri River, at the edge of the Great Plains and at the head of the Santa Fe Trail, it was the jumping-off place for the great westward migrations of the nineteenth century. In the latter half of that century, Kansas City became a major crossroads and rail hub and emerged as a leading grain storage and milling center; in the extent of its stockyards and meat packing operations, it was second only to Chicago. Though meat and bread made Kansas City, it developed into much more than a cow town. By the mid-1920s the total value of its factory production (steel, clothing, paints, food processing, auto assembly plants) was dose behind that of Pittsburgh.^[3]

Kansas City's population grew from some fifty-five thousand in 1880 to just under two hundred fifty thousand in 1910, and four hundred thousand by 1940. The city became primarily a mercantile and financial center with a large middle class. It contained a greater proportion of native-born Americans than any other metropolitan center in the nation. Its small but diverse foreign-born population, mostly Irish, German, and Italian, were concentrated in poorer districts of the city, principally the West Bottoms and the North End. African Americans numbered under 10 percent of the population in the 1920s and lived mostly in the eastern section of the West Bottoms, with Irish, German, and native-born white laborers in the remaining portions. The West Bottoms (and later also the North End) was the original base and political stronghold of the Pendergast Democratic political machine that dominated the city until Boss Tom Pendergast's federal prosecution in 1939, a prison term, and his death in 1945. Harry Truman was the most notable example of a politician who emerged from the machine, though Truman himself was untainted by its corruption.^[4]

The machine-dominated politics of Kansas City further exacerbated the tensions already present in the Snow household over the religious issue. The Democratic party was identified primarily with its Irish Catholic base, and indeed some of Snow's relatives on that side of the family had links to the machine. An uncle served in the municipal ad-

ministration and was caught up in the scandals that later erupted. Ed himself, as a boy, had met Tom Pendergast through this uncle. While Snow's mother, Anna, was a Democrat, J. Edgar gave his support to the independent (and also Republican-backed) reform forces, and viewed the Catholic connections of the machine politicians as still another mark against the church.^[5]

In looking to the outside world in the early twentieth century, Kansas City and Missouri reflected the insularity of most of America. The nation's entry into World War I intensified the antiforeignism of native Americans. Though focused on German-Americans, it was felt and expressed more generally. The superintendent of schools in Missouri, for example, urged local boards of education to hire only native-born teachers. The postwar Red Scare in 1919-1920 both mirrored and reinforced these attitudes by targeting the foreign-born as sources of "bolshevism." The early postwar years also witnessed a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which, on a "100 percent American" platform of hostility to Jews, Catholics, and foreigners, in addition to African Americans, mushroomed into a powerful force. It garnered some 100,000 members in Missouri before its sharp decline there and elsewhere by the mid-1920s.^[6]

Many of the above currents provided fertile ground for those battling against Senate ratification of the Treaty of Versailles with its Wilsonian provisions for a League of Nations. Anti-League views were also popular in various ethnic groups, including the Irish, who with their animus toward Britain were disturbed at the power the League structure would give to the British empire with its dominions. (Snow's always strong suspicion of that empire, as well as his more general and deeply felt anti-colonialism, may have gained an early start from the Irish side of the family.) Missouri's Senator James Reed, a former Democratic mayor of Kansas City and a politician of considerable oratorical skills, was a leading and effective opponent of the League who found backing among ethnic Democrats and isolationist Republicans alike. In a rousing speech in September 1919 he expressed the prevailing mood. "The man who is willing to give any nation or assemblage of nations the right to mind the business of the American people ought to disclaim American citizenship and emigrate to the country he is willing to have mind America's business." ^[7]

Snow grew up in Kansas City in the two decades from 1905 to 1925 that witnessed many of the developments and patterns described above. The family lived in solidly middle-class neighborhoods of pleasant, tree-lined streets and neatly maintained homes. These were in one of the

early southern Kansas City residential districts developed by real estate planners early in the century. The Snows lived in comfortable homes first on Mercier Street, then on nearby Charlotte Street, the last and most important family residence. Though Snow had many warm memories of those years, and of Kansas City, he could also be negative. In later life, for example, he referred to a boyhood California summer adventure as "running away from home," and in a letter to Mildred in 1932 he talked of that "depressing Charlotte Street maison," adding that one of his "chief motives" for leaving Kansas City "was perhaps to get away from that house." Still he could at times be quite sentimental and nostalgic about the "homestead" and, particularly before his mother's death, wrote home frequently, always in the warmest and most loving terms.^[8]

Snow attended the local public schools—Norman Grade School and Westport High School, graduating from the latter in 1923. After a year at the Junior College of Kansas City, and still unsure of his ultimate career goals, he left school for a year and followed Howard to New York. Ed also seems to have had a connection with a Kansas City advertising executive and friend of the family (B. G. "Bunny" McGuire) who was transferring to New York. Snow apparently worked for him as his secretary for a year and gained some acquaintance with the advertising copy-writing field.^[9]

Snow returned to Missouri in the fall of 1925 and entered the University of Missouri's noted school of journalism. Despite its interior Columbia, Missouri, setting, the school had an international reputation under its founder and dean, Walter Williams. The latter had especially good connections in the Far East, and by 1928 there was an influential network of some fifty Missouri journalism graduates working in the Orient, the majority of them in China. Williams, later president of the University of Missouri, developed special links between his institution and American-sponsored Yanjing University on the outskirts of Peking and helped in establishing its journalism department. In welcoming Williams on a visit in 1934, the Yenching [Yanjing] News wrote that "people in the Far East have come to ask all American journalists stationed in this part of the world, 'What year did you graduate from Missouri?'" Although Snow spent only a year at the Missouri campus before returning again to New York, a letter from Dean Williams he carried with him when he reached Shanghai in 1928 would serve him well in launching his journalistic career there.^[10]

While at Missouri, Snow held his first newspaper job as a part-time campus correspondent for the Star . He mostly paid his own way in col-

lege, receiving little financial help from his father. Lukewarm toward formal education, he was never to complete college, in Missouri or elsewhere, though he took some evening extension courses at Columbia University after his return to New York. It was only "when I took Asia for a classroom" he wrote years later, that he began to discover "the joyful rewards of solid accomplishment based on hard study."^[11]

In the summer of 1919, at age fourteen, Snow had already experienced the great travel adventure of his youth. He and his slightly older pal, Charlie White, had been working for a week in the wheat fields of Kansas and each had earned $50. A third friend, Bob Long, was driving his 1917 Model T Ford to California to join his parents there, and the two boys decided to go along—without first informing their parents. It was an example of the new mobility and greater freedom of young people in the emerging age of the automobile. After many harrowing adventures and near calamities on the two-week trip over the mostly unpaved Santa Fe Trail, the inexperienced travelers arrived in southern California. With Bob Long and his car now gone, the other two were left to fend for themselves with $5 between them. The boys rode freights to San Francisco, earned some money serving meals to railroad workers, scrounged other meals, and bummed their way back home riding the rails.^[12]

Their many experiences hopping freight trains included a few nights in local jails and contact with migrant workers as well as with bums and hoboes. Snow's several brushes with accidental death through the years helped breed in him a fatalism often displayed in the chances he took and the dangers he accepted in the course of his work. "I have had such dose calls," he wrote a young friend in 1968, "that I think fate has most to do with our survival." He liked to cite a Chinese proverb, "A man's life is a candle in the wind." Snow's fatalism, though, was never of the passive, accepting variety he so strongly deplored of the Orient; on the contrary, it was the kind that suited his activist, risk-taking nature. "Many materials formed the fabric of his character," Lois Snow remembered of Ed; "daring-to-do is noticeable in the weave." As Snow wrote to Charlie White thirty-five years after their California escapade, "I have never forgotten the adventurous summer we spent together—which probably profoundly influenced my life, as it gave me a travel itch which eventually took me all over the world and around it a number of times."^[13]

In his boyhood years in Kansas City Snow conformed to the conventional patterns and standards of his social and economic milieu. He was a Boy Scout (reaching Eagle Scout rank), an active fraternity member in

high school and college, and a saxophonist in a jazz band he formed with his friends. (Kansas City in the 1920s, with its proliferation of prohibition-era clubs, had become a leading center of the new Jazz Age.)

Generally described as "nice looking," he was a soft-spoken "well-bred, natural kind of person," with a good-humored likableness Helen Snow called his "Irish charm." That Ed Snow was a member of the "right crowd" (the "better families," as his friend Charlie White phrased it) seemed reflected in his high-school yearbook characterization. Under the rubric Can You Imagine it supposed, "Edgar Snow mingling with vulgar mob."^[14]

All Snow's fellow students in grade school and high school, he later recalled, were white, and with rare exceptions were from native-born "upper-middle" and "middle-middle class" families. Segregation was taken for granted in both school and social life and applied to Mexicans and Asians as well as African Americans. Desegregation had never arisen for Snow as a "controversial question" before he reached college. His early contact with the Chinese was limited to a local laundryman whom he and the other neighborhood boys delighted in taunting. In high school, though Snow had one Jewish schoolmate as a "crony," he was apparently undisturbed at the exclusion of this youth, and of all others of "his kind," from the fraternities in which Ed was a prominent figure.^[15]

All in all, the America that Snow took with him when leaving Kansas City permanently in 1926 to begin to work at the (copy-) writer's trade was a mixed bag. Its elements included a self-reliant spirit, individualist values, a strong urge to succeed materially and otherwise, and a background (aside from his brief California lark) that left him still largely unaware of and uninvolved with the diversity of peoples not of his own kind. Years later he would write in his diary, apropos of a private meeting he had with President Truman in 1947, that "My own background had been the same as his. I knew nothing of foreign peoples. I didn't know a communist from a Catholic when I went to China."^[16]

Yet, perhaps above all, Snow also took with him special attributes of his own: a zest for travel and adventure, and a deep curiosity about and interest in people as individuals. His reading of books such as Hugo's Les Miserables had already awakened an innate empathy with the under-dog. In the "great classroom" of the outside world, he would begin to sort all this out.

Chapter 3
New York and Beyond

"After all," Calvin Coolidge pronounced in 1924, "the chief business of the American people is business," expressing in this oft-quoted and typically laconic remark the prevailing mood of mid-1920s America. "Under the beneficent influence of Coolidge Prosperity," Frederick Lewis Allen wrote in 1931, "business had become almost the national religion of America." And the high-pressure salesman and the advertising agency were its evangelists. Again in Coolidge's words, "advertising ministers to the spiritual side of trade." The soaring Wall Street bull market of the later 1920s seemed to offer unlimited vistas for riches to all who participated, including the growing multitude of smaller investors. New York, the nation's business and financial fulcrum and its publishing and advertising center, was the mecca for ambitious bright young men from the provinces seeking their fortunes. Howard and Ed Snow neatly fitted this description.^[1]

Howard, who had preceded Ed to New York, reflected both the spirit and the opportunities of the time. In New York, and then in Boston, Howard worked in public relations-promotional jobs with the American Bankers Association and later the National Association of Manufacturers. The two brothers were much alike in looks and personality. Howard, perhaps the handsomer, earned extra money in the earlier New York days by posing for ads, including a full-page one in the Post for Spur ties. He symbolized in key respects the business ethic and outlook of the Coolidge-Hoover era and retained much of this standpoint through the New Deal years. He believed firmly in business success and

enjoyed the aura of being part of the big business world. While Ed would move on for the next two decades to a vastly different, highly adventurous and eventful life and career, almost all of it overseas in the storm centers of the world, Howard would build a secure family-centered life in the Boston suburbs. In sharp contrast to Ed's wanderlust, Howard stayed put; in fact, he never in the course of a very long life (he died at ninety-two) ventured west of Kansas City.^[2]

Ed, on returning to New York in the summer of 1926, went back to work, now as a copywriter, for Medley Scovil and Company, a small advertising agency specializing in accounts with financial houses. Ed was very close to Howard, whom he looked to as something of a mentor. In New York they shared an apartment in mid-Manhattan, together with Bert Ord, a Kansas City friend. Another such friend, Buddy (Charles) Rogers, stayed with them for a time before going off to Hollywood to play the lead in the famous Paramount film Wings . Rogers was then on his way to stardom, and later to marriage with "America's Sweetheart," Mary Pickford. "Proximity to such grandiose success" could at times be discouraging, Ed wrote his sister, but he recognized that Buddy's case was indeed exceptional and that he (Snow) should be able to make "a milder success of my own." (Actually, before he left New York in early 1928, Snow for a time had been in the running for a lucrative position with MGM studios in California as a film scriptwriter and reader.) Though Ed had aspirations for success similar to Howard's, he saw it in literary as well as material terms. "I went to New York with the firm intention of making a hundred thousand dollars before I was thirty," Snow told a radio interviewer in 1946. With that amount in hand, he added, he could set himself up "to produce great masterpieces for which I felt the literary world was waiting." It seemed that easy then.^[3]

For the time being, however, the possibilities at Scovil's were much more modest. His income in the early months of 1927 ($60 per week) was adequate for the shared expenses of his living arrangements. He informed his father at that time that his weekly expenses (including tailor and entertainment) came to $41. He was also paying off debts to his parents and Howard and managing to save money. Such savings (which by then totaled a few hundred dollars), he told his father, "you may call for should an emergency present itself." Though careful in all his expenditures, he made an exception for clothing, "as I find this is an important asset both commercially and socially." And while life in New York was "no bed of roses," "I will succeed. I am determined to raise my head above the crowd and to amount to something in a larger way than at

present seems possible in Kansas City." Even earlier in 1926, when he still talked of "dear old K.C." as the place in the world he considered to be "home," he quickly added, "But how is one to be sure of it, until one has tried the other places?"^[4]

The Snow brothers, as attractive and eligible young men, had some entree to New York's young social set. But with their limited monetary resources and careful spending habits, it was a restricted access at best. Mother naturally kept warning them of the "pitfalls of sin, gin, [and] actresses," Ed complained to Mildred, adding that even were he to be tempted by "the drumbeat of night life, tinsel and jade," his financial situation would make indulgence impossible. In like vein, Ed assured his mother that the two youths avoided dates with girls of "extravagant taste," preferring instead those of the "better sort" who appreciated the "'intelligent comraderie' of youth with youth." This approach, Ed some.-what tongue-in-cheek acknowledged, brought more rejections than acceptances. Yet as the holiday season neared in December 1927, the two had invitations to a series of parties extending well into the new year; all at little expense to themselves, Ed was quick to inform his father. "You see," he explained impishly, "attractive, intelligent young men are in great demand just now on the New York debutante market. Pooh-pooh and tish-tish." On quite a different level, Ed spent evenings as a member of the New York National Guard "manicuring a horse over in Brooklyn."^[5]

New York, for young Snow, was an overwhelming experience. There "is about this town," he told Mildred in the inflated "literary" prose style he was then cultivating, "a power which asserts itself over all within its confines, that punctuates the lives of the millions that breathe its clamorous air, and controls the spirits and souls of its constituents." His inherently skeptical, humanistic outlook was also coming through. With Lent approaching, even should he try "to avoid all gaiety," he gently teased his devout sister, "who is there to stifle the joy of the skylark?" He wondered "why men should shut out the light of God, the better to love him."^[6]

Snow at first found his work at Scovil's interesting and reasonably challenging. He wrote ad copy for banks, was involved in the production end of the business, and garnered a few new accounts for the firm. He entered and won a promotional letter-writing contest sponsored by the Savings Bank Journal . The award was a Remington portable he had been "yearning" to own. He continued to think of a business career as the path to financial success and for a time considered enrolling in night law school, which would provide the most practical professional supple-

ment "to one's business pursuit." Snow had brought in as one of his accounts a Jersey City bank whose young and dynamic president, Kelley Graham, had also become a friend and counselor. Graham later strongly encouraged Snow in his 1928 travel and writing plans. (Throughout Ed's years in the Orient and after, he kept much of his funds in Graham's bank.) Snow was already exhibiting his ability to develop lasting friendships with many of the prominent, well placed people he met. They responded to his agreeable personality, quick intelligence, and adventurous spirit and were ready to befriend and help him.

But by the beginning of 1928, Snow was becoming increasingly restless and dissatisfied with his job. For one thing, a promised raise from Mr. Scovil had been deferred because of Snow's habitual tardiness (a lifetime tendency). Besides, he felt he was worth much more than Scovil would ever pay him and planned to move on in a couple of months to another ad agency, or to become advertising manager in a large corporation. (The fact that Howard was advancing rapidly probably played a part in these plans.) Beyond this, Snow was directing more and more of his thoughts toward broader horizons and a more creative writing career. "The truth is," he recalled (perhaps more from the perspective of a decade or two), "that I had learned to hate the money-grubbers of Wall Street." In the Manhattan apartment, he set up a "quiet nook" for his reading and writing and submitted occasional squibs to two literary contacts he had made, Charles Hanson Towne, editor of Harper's Bazaar , and Mrs. William Brown (Marie Mattingly) Meloney, editor of the New York Herald-Tribune Sunday magazine. Both would be of much help in advancing his writing career.^[7]

By the next month, Snow had taken dramatic steps that would alter the entire course of his life. His ad agency office was not only near Wall Street but looked out onto the docks and ships of the lower tip of Manhattan. Pursuing his dream to "see the world," he resigned from Scovil's and secured a job as a deck boy on the SS Radnor , a merchant ship operating under the Roosevelt Shipping Lines. Characteristically, he got the job through a personal contact with Kermit Roosevelt, president of the company and the son of Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt also gave Snow a personal letter of introduction to the various American consulates overseas and cautioned him to keep it confidential from the ship's captain and officers. Snow was indeed a very special deckhand! The "money-grubbers of Wall Street" also played a bit part in this unfolding scenario. With advice from his financial-banking contacts, Snow made a small "killing" in the overheated stock market in the months before he left,

coming out with an $800 windfall that would, he calculated, provide the necessary cushion for a year of world travel and of travel writing.^[8]

Snow had acted with typical independence reminiscent of his boyhood California adventure almost ten years earlier. By the time his detailed letter outlining his plans and actions reached home, he was already on his way. His wages on the Radnor would be the "prodigious sum" of $25 per month, he informed his parents; he planned to stay with the ship until it reached Shanghai by way of the Panama Canal. Then he would leave the Radnor , and "vagabonding and tramping" in whatever way "most happily offers itself," he would complete his "odyssey." All told, he expected to be away nine months, perhaps more. His round-the-world expectations were reflected in his request for addresses and letters of introduction to relatives in Ireland. The Radnor's itinerary included Panama, Hawaii, the Philippines, China, and possibly India. Ed had prevailed on a Kansas City fraternity friend, Alvin Joslin, to sign on with him as deck boy. Thus, he assured his parents, he would have the companionship of "a boy of my own Class." He had been inoculated against "all diseases of the Orient" and was "civilized enough to escape any corrosions of a venereal nature."

Snow's trip was hardly undertaken in a reckless manner; there had been careful thought and painstaking preparations. He had accumulated what he felt to be minimally necessary funds, had consulted with and received the enthusiastic endorsement of older friends and advisers such as Kelley Graham and Charles Towne, and had worked out arrangements with editors in Kansas City and New York to do travel pieces. He had made an agreement with the Kansas City Journal-Post to be their "roving correspondent" and had been encouraged by Marie Meloney to submit stories for the Herald-Tribune magazine—"the finest newspaper magazine published in the United States," Ed felt. Dean Walter Williams and others at the University of Missouri had provided him with names and addresses of their journalism graduates around the world, particularly in the Orient. He took with him also letters of introduction to "important people" in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, and "blanket" letters of introduction to American consuls along the way. Keep in mind that Snow was then all of twenty-two!^[9]

The Herald-Tribune and Harper's Bazaar were useful early outlets for Snow articles. Charlie Towne in particular, almost thirty years Ed's senior, proved to be an invaluable friend and informal literary agent. Far Eastern Front , Snow's first book, was dedicated to him. Towne was a prolific author, columnist, and editor, and even an actor in his later

years. When Ed eventually saw him again in 1941, he observed in his diary that Towne "is of the Oscar Wilde period of literature, and already and inevitably anachronistic." A "histrionic" figure, but "a grand person" and "a handsome old man with blue eyes, friendly, popping from his head."^[10]

In exuberantly romantic prose, Snow gave his parents the reasons for all these moves. He spoke of his "intense eagerness to visit the more interesting countries of the word ... before the imagination and spirit of my youth had dimmed.... Happiness at the moment meant but one thing. And that was travel!! Adventure! Experience" In an affirmation of his lifetime "free lance" spirit, he declared that he would not settle for a "monotonous existence" as a "cog in a gargantuan machine." "How could I labor over the lifeless little duties spread before me when this song of cities was beating in my brain!" In like manner, he wrote the editor of the Journal-Post that his purpose was "'a footloose, carefree ramble round the world.' I shall go where, when and as I choose." Surely here was a classic example of what the philosopher Joseph Campbell calls "following your bliss." (On a less rapturous level, the distinguished New York Times China correspondent Tillman Durdin later had much the same experience in getting to the Orient. He left a Houston, Texas, newspaper job in the early 1930s, took a deckhand job on an American ship that ultimately reached Shanghai, where he jumped ship to take a job with the American-run Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury .)^[11]

Snow, however, was not burning all his bridges behind him. He had been assured of a place with another advertising agency on his return; but first, he promised his folks, would come a visit to the family in Kansas City. It would be thirteen years before Snow was back in New York, and even longer for Kansas City. He was never to see his mother again.

Travel-adventure books, and world travel, were much in vogue in the United States in the 1920s. Snow had read Richard Halliburton's best-selling accounts of his spectacular and exotic travel feats. Interestingly, both of Snow's earlier California travel companions, Bob Long and Charlie White, also traveled to the Orient in the late 1920s. Bob Long visited China during a nine-month overseas college group trip; White, on summer vacation from medical school, toured the Far East as a member of a band playing aboard ship in the same summer that Snow arrived in Shanghai. Snow was well suited for travel writing. In the opening sentence of Journey , he described himself in 1928 as a youth "full of curiosity and wide open to the world." He had a flair for vividly detailed

description, though there were some callow tendencies toward purple prose to overcome. His people-centered writing was already infused with a warmly good-humored style and personality. As Snow moved on to the broader field of political reporting, he remained an appealing companion for the reader in an age of personal journalism.^[12]

As the Radnor pulled out to sea from Newport News in the predawn hours of February 26, two days after leaving its Brooklyn pier, young Snow stood on deck, fired and sleepy in the chill wind, anxious to see his first sunrise at sea. As he watched the now fully exposed sun, "looking like a great golden button," "I had a sensation of thrilling poignancy. This was the dawn of another life for me," he wrote in the diary he now began and kept up fairly consistently until the final year of his life. Though feeling slightly apprehensive, he was buoyed "at the thought of what new friends and new delights for my senses awaited me." A friend had remarked to Snow on an earlier occasion that perhaps it took "a certain kind of genius" to be able to know and fed "the drama" of one's life experiences. "If I had nothing else," Snow declared, "I have the kind of genius he speaks about! For I am always awake to the stimulus of the unusual things that do haply occur to one who looks for them." Indeed, Snow had this genius.^[13]

As a word-conscious budding writer, Snow was alert to the speech patterns of his crewmates. He found it a specialized and limited lingo. that he estimated to contain around one thousand words, some four hundred of them expletives, with two ("fuck" and "bastard") appearing in at least eight of every ten sentences. But, he soon discovered, when it came to the work at hand, that they, not he, were the "intelligent" ones. He came to appreciate the special skills and physical strength required by the demanding manual labor, as well as the satisfaction in a job well done. He euphorically noted that one could take the same pride in "a good job of sweeping" the deck that "one accords to any other business."^[14]

With his characteristic interest in people, he noted of his shipmates that "Each of them is an interesting study in himself," and for each he would always retain "vivid recollections." To Howard, he wrote of the "carefree blithesome spirits" and "utter content" of the crew, an "unselfish, generous, and simple-souled" lot. In contrast to this youthfully romanticized image, Snow later recollected that after sailing around Central America, about half the crew jumped ship, a reflection of the "wretched" morale and personnel of the American merchant fleet at that time. Under these circumstances, he found himself promoted first to or-

dinary and then to able-bodied seaman, "though still scarcely knowing a winch from a wench."^[15]

Snow spent his free time reading travel accounts of the East and working on Adventure Bound articles he sent to Charles Towne. He induced the ship's mate to let him steer the ship partway through the Panama Canal "for the thrill of it." Panama City, he wrote Towne with a touch of young masculine bravado, was "a town of infinite wetness." After a few beers (his first legal drinks), only "my dread of disease saved me" from the attractive young Spanish prostitutes lining the streets. In truth, he was much more taken with the city's lush tropical jungle setting.^[16]

The Radnor finally pulled into Honolulu with its boilers leaking and needing six weeks of repair. Now it was Ed and Al Joslin's turn to jump ship for an idyllic three months of loafing in Hawaii. It also gave Snow his first writing success, "In Hula Land," which Towne published in Harper's Bazaar , and for which he paid Snow the princely sum of three hundred dollars. Towne thought the "Hula Land" piece "a splendid article" and found it to be a "90%" improvement over the first three manuscripts Snow had sent him. "You have found your literary stride," he wrote Snow. "Hitherto, you have been feeling your way, working somewhat in the dark and now you have emerged into the light." From such praise, Snow told his mother, "my ears now resemble two boxes of over-ripe strawberries." He worried that he would be unable to repeat this success without the inspiration of "unearthly beautiful" Hawaii.^[17]

Snow's Hawaiian article was on the frolicsome side, befitting the subject matter and presumably well suited to the Harper's Bazaar audience. Yet it already exhibited the qualifies that helped give broad appeal to his later work: a warmly engaging personal style and sharply observant descriptive powers. Additionally, Snow showed a sensitivity to and sympathy for an indigenous people and culture (the native Hawaiians) submerged under foreign intrusion. This became a dominant motif in Snow's outlook as he reacted to Western colonialism and Japanese expansionism in Asia. At any rate, Snow had made a breakthrough as a promising travel writer.^[18]

Stimulated by this triumph, Snow found material for another successful article in the unorthodox manner in which he proceeded to Asia. Despite the beauty and pleasures of Hawaii, Snow was eager to continue to the Orient. But his attempt to find work on a ship headed that way proved fruitless, while his money began to run out. (He and Al Joslin apparently set up a pineapple stand to eke out some income.) Joslin decided not to go

on to Asia with Snow. He lingered on a while in Hawaii before returning to Kansas City for a successful career in the advertising business. Thirty-five years later, retired and on a European tour, he called Snow at the latter's home in Switzerland, and the two arranged to meet for a day or two in Nice. But just before Snow was leaving for the airport, Al phoned to say he had decided to cut his tour short and fly home immediately. As Snow recorded it in his diary, "It was too comical a repetition of our parting in Honolulu at that last moment 35 years ago to be believable." "That night I remembered 100 things about the 20's and early 30's. The intensity of life's appeal, the excitement of small pleasures, the thrill of strange sights and smells, sounds and people. I thought of men and women I had known then with a sudden vividness that astonished me."^[19]

Dan Crabb, a young American friend Snow had made in Honolulu, was leaving for Japan as a first-class passenger on a Japanese liner, the Shinyo Maru . With Crabb's enthusiastic cooperation, Snow decided to stow away by joining Crabb in his cabin, and staying on when the ship. sailed. He fully expected to be discovered by the purser, in which case, as he later wrote Towne, "I intended to let him in on the joke." One surmises that Ed already had an "adventure" article in mind. His first break into print, with its $300 windfall, had put him in a euphoric state in which anything and everything seemed possible. "I've been treading with winged sandals on clouds of pink bliss!" Add to this Snow's fascination always with the excitement of a risk-taking venture, particularly if it could be parlayed into a good story.^[20]

In fact, fortune continued on Snow's side, aided by his own resourcefulness. The "joke" incredibly lasted the entire nine-day trip to Yokohama. This was all the more remarkable since there were just seven American passengers in first class, only two of whom had come aboard in Honolulu. Further, the ship swarmed with security men, since the Japanese ambassador to the United States, Tsuneo Matsudaira, his wife, and daughter (betrothed to the Japanese crown prince) were also on board. While all these factors added greatly to Snow's tension, they also helped ensure an exciting story. Snow subsisted on breakfasts served in Crabb's cabin; he mingled with the passengers during the day, even playing bridge with the ambassador's wife and daughter, and wolfed ham sandwiches with his drinks at the ship's bar in the evenings. Special tips to the cabin boy and bartender helped keep the secret.

In Yokohama on June 22, the problems of disembarking and getting through customs seemed insuperable, but again fate was kind to Snow. The VIP media treatment of the ambassadorial party's arrival provided the

necessary cover. With the connivance of an English journalist, Snow was able nonchalantly to leave the ship, passing himself off as one of the local foreign reporters. Snow and Dan Crabb accompanied the newsmen to Tokyo, where the two were feted at the American Club. Ed's coup had made him something of a minor celebrity among the Western journalists in Japan. "There must be an odd streak in human nature," Ed wrote Towne, "which delights in seeing anyone defraud a public-service institution." Ed was even offered a job (politely refused) by the managing editor of the English-language Japan Advertiser . The newsmen agreed to delay breaking the story (as already written by Snow) until he and Crabb had left Japan. As a youthful American's rare adventure, with built-in ingredients of suspense and excitement in a somewhat exotic setting, it was the right stuff for the Herald-Tribune's magazine. Skillfully composed by Snow, with a focus on his own amusing and attractive persona, it appeared under the rifle, "A First Class Stowaway ." A version was also published in the Kansas City Journal-Post , highlighting the "Kansas City boy" angle.^[21]

After being questioned by a Japanese foreign affairs investigator, the two youths felt it expedient hurriedly to leave Tokyo. They traveled through central Japan (which Snow worked up into a Japan travel piece) and sailed from Kobe to the southern Japanese port of Nagasaki, and from there by ship to Shanghai, where they arrived in the steamy heat of early July. Crabb, in the spirit of the times for well-heeled American college youth, was continuing on to Port Said and a "darkest Africa" trek. Snow wrote Mildred that the stowaway "ordeal" had "destroyed much of the 'daredeviltry' spirit with which I had embarked from New York," and that it was "probably the most sensational thing I shall ever do." In this instance Snow proved a poor prophet.^[22]

Snow planned to stay in Shanghai no more than a few weeks or months or to leave immediately if he could find work on a ship bound for the Philippines or India. Attractive journalistic opportunities in Shanghai, and growing involvement in the China scene, kept postponing a departure date. "I could scarcely have chosen a more interesting period in which to arrive in China," he wrote home after less than a month in Shanghai. The onset of the Great Depression in 1929 greatly diminished the opportunities for business success back home. His mother's death in 1930 and Howard's marriage by the end of that year cut off his closest family ties. His own marriage on Christmas Day, 1932, to Utah-born Helen Foster, a talented and spirited young woman determined to make her own mark as a writer in China, completed the pattern. Snow stayed on, in time becoming the most notable American journalist in Asia.^[23]