PART 1
INITIAL CHINA YEARS

Chapter 4
"New Influences and Ideas That Have Streamed into Me"

Truly, Snow had arrived in China at a momentous juncture in that nation's tempestuous modern history. The final imperial dynasty, the Qing (Manchu), had been toppled in 1911 and a republic proclaimed in 1912. Although the Cantonese revolutionary Sun Yat-sen had been the leading figure in the anti-Manchu movement, he and his new Nationalist party, the Kuomintang (KMT), were soon cast aside. China descended into a decade of dictatorships, warlordism, political fragmentation, and constant warfare among contending (and often foreign-backed) militarists. It was a bitter parody of Sun's "Three People's Principles" for China—nationalism, democracy, and people's welfare.

While in political exile in Japan, the middle-aged Sun married twenty-two-year-old Soong Qingling (Ching Ling) in 1915. She was one of the three famed Soong sisters, daughters of the Shanghai tycoon Charlie Soong. She had been educated at Wesleyan College for Women in Macon, Georgia, and after returning to China had gone on to Japan to work with Sun in his revolutionary cause. From 1918 through the early 1920s Sun ineffectually attempted to build a secure political and military base in southern China centered on Canton, in preparation for a campaign against the militarists to the north. In 1923, at a low ebb in his political fortunes, and spurned in his earlier efforts to gain support from the West, Sun turned to Soviet Russia for help. He agreed to an alliance with the Russians, to collaboration with the fledgling Chinese Communist party (CCP) organized in Shanghai in 1921, and to a radicalized program of mass mobilization of labor and the peasantry. The Soviets in turn provided Sun's movement with military and political ad-

visers and assistance and helped reorganize the Kuomintang and build a revolutionary army. The reinvigorated and immensely strengthened Nationalist movement, with effective input from dedicated young Chinese Communists, was soon poised in southern China for a northern expedition to unify China.

Sun died of cancer in March 1925, leaving a legacy of unfinished revolution to successors split into left- and fight-wing camps. The new National Revolutionary Army, commanded by Chiang Kai-shek, swept through southern and central China in 1926-1927, aided by a massive upsurge of the peasant and labor movements led largely by Communist cadres. (The Hunanese Mao Zedong was a central figure in organizing the peasantry.) But by the spring of 1927 the now anti-Communist Chiang had broken with the left wing of the Kuomintang and turned on his erstwhile Communist allies to massacre thousands of Communists and leftists in Chinese-ruled Shanghai. Spearheaded by gunmen of Shanghai's potent Green Gang, the coup crushed the powerful Communist-led labor movement in control there. Following the coup came a violent purge of Red elements throughout China, the suppression of radical peasant and labor organizations, and a total break with Soviet Russia.

After some futile and costly insurrectionary efforts, at the end of 1927 and in early 1928 the remnant Communist military forces took refuge in the hinterland of southcentral China. There, under the command of Mao Zedong and Zhu De, they would regroup, organize so-called soviet areas and a large Red Army, and wage a peasant-based mobile-guerrilla-style revolutionary armed struggle. Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek consolidated his power, based primarily on his military ascendancy and foreign support. He dominated the mercantile-industrial heartland of the lower Yangtze Valley and effected a series of uneasy and unstable accommodations with regional militarists in the rest of China. A national government was formed in October 1928 with its capital in Nanking. Chiang was president and also in command of the army and leader of a purged Kuomintang. His new links and status had been further enhanced by marriage in December 1927 to the younger sister of Madame Sun Yat-sen, the attractive Soong Meiling. The "Soong dynasty" connection was dearly a propitious one for Chiang. (The third Soong sister, Ailing, was the wife of China's wealthiest banker, H. H. Kung; a brother, Harvard-educated T.V. Soong, was a key Kuomintang financial and political figure.) Chiang had also embraced the Soongs' Methodist faith with his new marriage. As reported in the Shanghai Times , the wedding "was a brilliant affair and the outstanding

Chinese marriage ceremony of recent years." Held in the ballroom of Shanghai's plush Majestic Hotel, with some 1,300 invited guests, it followed by only eight months the April coup and massacre in the same city.^[1]

Soong Qingling (Madame Sun) remained fiercely loyal to her husband's memory, and to the policies he espoused in the years immediately preceding his death. She left for Europe (initially for Moscow) after the collapse of the left in China, in the summer of 1927. She returned briefly in 1929 for Sun's belated state funeral and the entombment of his remains in the newly constructed mausoleum on Purple Mountain in Nanking—symbol of the Nationalist government's proclaimed continuity with Sun as its founding father. In 1931 Madame Sun came back to live in her home in the French Concession in Shanghai. There she continued her determined and courageous opposition to Chiang's government, which she regarded as a counterrevolutionary reversal of Sun's goals and principles. In those Shanghai years until the Japanese attack in 1937, she would be a major influence in educating the young Snow on all the above matters from her own political perspective.

The city of Shanghai was then the most visible, and important, center of the foreign economic and political presence in China. Through the extraterritorial and other rights granted the foreign powers and their citizens under the unequal treaty system beginning in 1842, a Western-created city had sprung up adjacent to the original Chinese walled town. In time a greater Shanghai municipality emerged as a hybrid Sino-Western metropolis and the largest city in Asia. A "fascinating old Sodom and Gomorrah," Snow called the Shanghai he knew in the early 1930.^[2]

The city was situated along the banks of the Huangpu (then, Whangpoo) River, which converged with the great Yangtze as it emptied into the sea. Shanghai was divided in three parts: an International Settlement, an adjoining French Concession, and, extending in a semicircle around these two, a much larger Chinese-administered area. The International Settlement was governed by a municipal council controlled by the foreign. business oligarchy. In 1928 the council comprised British, American, and Japanese members, with the British predominating, while the French were in charge of their own concession. Though technically Chinese territory, these two areas were outside Chinese jurisdiction and were guarded by foreign naval, marine, and police forces. When the Japanese attacked Chinese Shanghai in 1932, they used the "neutral" International Settlement as a base for their operations. In his Far Eastern Front (1933), Snow sardonically remarked that the settle-

ment's "'neutrality' was completely smashed not from outside, whence foreigners had long feared Chinese invasion, but from the inside, and by one of the major powers pledged to uphold it." Both at that time, and in the greater battle for Shanghai in 1937, Snow and other foreign correspondents could follow and report on the course of the fighting from this foreign-controlled sanctuary. "From the border of the International Settlement," Snow recalled of the I932 action, "you could watch the fullscale battle, seeing the front lines of both sides." Snow was also able, at some risk, to visit the two sides, sometimes in the course of a single day.^[3]

About half of greater Shanghai's Chinese population of some three million lived in the International Settlement and French Concession, as did some fifty thousand foreign nationals, in addition to large numbers of stateless Russians. This area was the principal center of modern banking, commerce, and industry in China, symbolized by the imposing Bund, and was the port for most of China's foreign trade. Its opulent and gracious foreign residential districts, clubs, and racecourses were worlds apart from the teeming streets and overcrowded tenements and shanties where the balance of the Chinese population lived. In foreign and Chinese-owned factories and workshops alike, the Chinese labor force worked under exploitative conditions of long hours, subsistence wages, and deplorable working conditions. Young women and children from the poverty-stricken countryside made up a substantial part of the workforce. Theodore H. White recalled his first tour of Shanghai industry in 1938 in the company of a young Danish municipal factory inspector. At a textile mill, the inspector "poked with his toe to show a cylinder of bamboo mat in the dump of factory garbage by the canal. In the mat was wrapped the body of a little girl, a factory worker; two or three such mats were put out each night to be collected with the garbage." Shanghai held the bulk of modern industry in China, foreign and Chinese, and over half of its industrial workers. The city was also the center of China's gambling, opium, prostitution, and labor rackets. It was, in White's words, a "city of monsters and missionaries, of light and laughter, of gangsters and gardens," where "the despair at the bottom was as inconceivable to a poor boy from Boston as the delights of depravity at the top were inconceivable to Brahmins of Boston."^[4]

To some, Shanghai loomed as an alien entity divorced from the "real" China of the vast interior. It was also very much a center of key forces that had played and continued to play (albeit often underground) significant roles in the pressures for change and modernization in that nation.

Apart from its preeminence in industry and commerce, Shanghai was the focus of liberal and radical political and cultural currents (generally Western-influenced), and the heart of China's literary and media publications activity. The greater protections afforded by extraterritoriality contributed significantly to all these activities. In this Shanghai setting Snow began his education in "things Chinese, and otherwise."

On arriving, Snow contacted J.B. (John Benjamin) Powell, a Missouri journalism alumnus who was editor and publisher of the widely read and influential English-language China Weekly Review (hereafter Review ). When Powell offered Snow a job on the Review , Ed decided to stay on in Shanghai for the while. He liked Powell with "his warm friendliness, imported corncob pipe, [and] his wonderful knack of storytelling"; also, the salary seemed "princely" (400 Shanghai dollars per month), particularly in Snow's impecunious state. ("I was fiat as your Aunt Alice's hips," he told Mildred.) It was a sum, he exuberantly informed his mother, on which "one can become simply filthy with luxury out here on the fringes of the world." Nevertheless, he assured her, his world travel plans remained in place, and he expected to be back in New York by the following May "at the latest."^[5]

Snow's entrée into his journalistic career was not unlike most other American China journalists of the time. "Most reporters came to East Asia 'by accident—as wire-service people, freelancers, or student travelers prior to 1937," the historian James Thomson notes; many belonged to the "Missouri mafia," and "virtually none" had studied Chinese. Shanghai, an international city with a cosmopolitan and "sinful" reputation, served as a magnet. It was "an interesting place to be stationed," the China journalist A. T. Steele later remembered, where life "was comfortable, news plentiful, and communications good." Shanghai was then "the news capital of China," where the foreign press corps was based.^[6]

The Review had been founded in 1917 by another Missouri alumnus, Thomas F. F. Millard, with Powell, then thirty, sent by Dean Walter Williams from Missouri to assist Millard in the project. Millard and Powell held similar convictions on the Far East, but the two differed widely in style and personality. In contrast to Powell's comfortably down-home qualifies, the older silver-haired Millard cut a worldly, charming, and impeccably tailored figure. Powell's son, Bill, remembered Millard as still elegant and charismatic in his late years, "belting down martinis, and chasing and being chased." By 1923 Powell had bought out Millard and changed the name of Millard's Review of the FarEast to the new rifle. The Review appeared continuously up to its

pre-Pacific War issue of December 6, 1941. For most of this period, Powell served also as correspondent for the Chicago Tribune . Both Millard and Powell had become early champions of Sun Yat-sen's Nationalist cause, a stand highly unpopular with the British-dominated foreign community in Shanghai. Powell maintained his strong support of fine Nationalists both before and after Sun Yat-sen's death in 1925 and viewed the emerging Nanking regime under Chiang Kai-shek as the auspicious birth of a "New China."^[7]

Powell's deep interest in Chinese history and culture, and his good relations with local Chinese intellectuals and business leaders further separated him from most of the expatriate community. Advertisements for Chinese businesses appeared in the Review , and English-speaking Chinese students became avid readers and subscribers. The Nationalist regime, for its part, valued Powell's support. In the 1930s, according to Randall Gould, then editor of the American-owned Shanghai Evening Post and Mercury , the Nanking government bought up considerable quantifies of each issue and mailed them out to various people, mostly overseas. Consistently pro-Nationalist and anti-Communist, Powell was also a vigorous opponent of Japan's aggressive policies in China. Though Snow came to differ sharply with Powell on the Nationalist-Communist issue, the two retained friendly personal relations, reinforced by their common support for an independent and strong China, and for firm resistance to Japan. In actuality, the growing menace of aggressive Japanese militarism posed the greatest threat to Chinese nationalist aims and, ultimately, to the Western position in China itself. It was a point Snow quickly came to understand. In the mid-1930s Ed's wife, Peg, reported on the Peking anti-Japanese student movement for the Review , and portions of Ed Snow's 1936 interviews with Mao on the CCP's anti-Japanese united front policies and proposals appeared first in the pages of the Review . Even so passionately dedicated and emotionally charged a supporter of the Chinese Communist cause as the writer-journalist Agnes Smedley maintained an affectionate friendship with Powell despite their frequently explosive and expletive-sprinkled political arguments. Powell courageously continued publishing the Review until the eve of Pearl Harbor and suffered incarceration and torture by the Japanese following their occupation of the International Settlement. Repatriated in October 1942 (weighing only seventy pounds), he had had most of both feet amputated and remained hospitalized for years. He died of a heart attack in 1947, immediately after delivering an impassioned speech on Far Eastern affairs at a University of Missouri alumni luncheon in Washington, D.C.^[8]

Under Powell's expert tutelage Snow began his China journalistic career. Impressed by Powell's integrity and experience and his staunch defense of China's sovereign rights, Snow was quickly in accord with Powell's pro-Nationalist views, seen essentially as simply a "pro-China" position. Ed wrote admiringly of Powell to Mildred for "his fierce and courageous fight for fair-play and equality to the Chinese" against the opposition of the local foreigners. Snow later observed that his feelings at that time reflected also "latent sentiments" he shared with fellow-midwesterners Powell and Millard of identification "with the underdog in any struggle with the still mighty British Empire." He would finally conclude, however, that "the Kuomintang leaders were not so much dissatisfied with the way people in Shanghai were being 'eaten,' as by the fact that it was the foreign devil who was doing the eating."^[9]

But meanwhile Powell put Snow to work helping prepare a special "New China" issue of the Review , to appear in time for the inauguration of the Nanking regime in October 1928. Powell also assigned Snow to the thankless job of drumming up foreign business advertising for that issue. For this task, at least, Snow could call on his New York ad agency experience, and the personal qualifies that had won him accounts and friends there. Typically interested in new settings and people, he learned quickly. For the China portion of the work, he had the help of Chinese assistants and of Powell's large China library of several thousand volumes. It was "one of the best newspaper libraries in the Far East," Powell's son, Bill, later recounted. "The Review office became a gathering place for foreign newsmen and writers, partly because it was a good place 'to look something up.'"^[10]

In pursuing advertising accounts, Snow's "hard-nosed" business sense collided with his more idealistic regard for Powell's championing of the Chinese cause. "I have the humorless task of trying to convince American and English business men to advertise in a medium which upon numerous occasions has incurred their displeasure," he wrote his father a few weeks after beginning work at the Review. Powell's stance "seriously endangered the business future of his magazine, a thing which, unfortunately, so many idealists are apt to neglect in promoting their noble ambitions." Wealthy Chinese merchants' advertising support almost made up for the withdrawal of foreign support, though Snow ruefully noted that credit for the latter accounts went to the Review's Chinese advertising manager. Snow managed to secure a goodly number of important foreign accounts (many of them deemed unlikely prospects) for the special issue.^[11]

Snow still viewed himself as a transient observer of a mostly unappealing scene. He was also just a bit put off by his return to the "prosaic" business world. He remained determined to be on his way once he had amassed a few hundred dollars. Dean Williams, coming through Shanghai, pressed for Ed to apply for a newspaper slot in Singapore, where Williams had as yet not placed one of his Missourians. Snow had the offer of a lucrative editor's job on a new English-language paper upriver in Hankou; but, he confided to his mother in perhaps another facet of "latent" midwestern sentiments, he "had no fancy for being buried in a god-forsaken dump controlled by the slant-eyes." Yet Snow's ingrained sense of humanity was coming through as well. In a fairly early Shanghai diary entry, he remarked on the foreigners' practice of calling their rickshaw men "coolies." And they did have names—"one would not keep even a cow for a year and continue merely to call her 'cow.' It is stupid to do so, and the Chinese concludes the foreigner is stupid when he does the same with him."^[12]

The attractions of China that Snow did discover at this early stage were still largely those of the privileged foreigner with an income in U.S. dollars, who could buy all the amenities (and many luxuries) of life for a pittance. "One can live in such style over here on so little," he informed his mother. "For instance, I can have a rickshaw available day or night for $24 a month—$12 in our money .... Such are the allurements of the Orient." While Snow's China outlook, sympathies, and involvement were destined for very radical change, the fact that he (and his wife) could live comfortably and even in style (especially later in old Peking) on a very modest and uncertain dollar income would play its part in keeping him in China. It allowed him to function much more flexibly as a writer-journalist, mostly avoiding the daily routine and demands of a permanent full-time newspaper connection. As always in his career, he preferred such less confining and more independent—even if less secure—work and writing arrangements.^[13]

By the fall Ed was in a mellow mood. His advertising sales were going extremely well, removing any earlier "business" constraint on his now unalloyed enthusiasm for Powell's role as the nemesis of the "diehard" local British and Japanese, and "the American money-grabbers as well." He was also becoming better acquainted with the impressive list of Missouri-bred newspapermen in China, all of them "goddam good journalists!" He was proud of his part in the enlarged special issue of the Review . His name appeared both as assistant advertising manager and author of a well-researched article on road construction in China. "Thus

your brother enters into the field of Far Eastern journalism. Huzzahs and banzais!" he chortled to Howard.^[14]

Snow continued to work on articles he sent on to Towne, including one stemming from his Shanghai advertising experience that Towne placed with a marketing journal back home. Pursuing his penchant for freshly eyed "people-places" writing, Snow churned out shorter pieces on topics ranging from the silk and porcelain industries to fortune-tellers, and "China's Woolworth," and "Nanking Today," among others. These he sold to the Associated Press through their correspondent in Shanghai (a Missouri man, naturally), who found them "splendid" and "most interestingly handled," and asked for more. Ed was writing "like a house afire" and had developed "a remarkable style," Towne reported to Howard.^[15]

In an initial foray into the China political scene, Snow visited the Nationalist capital at Nanking in mid-October. With the special entrée afforded him by the Powell-Review connection, he met Chiang Kai-shek and other top officials and interviewed Sun Fo, Sun Yat-sen's son, who was the new minister of railways. This occasioned some thoughts on Snow's part about Sun Yar-sen, now "ambitiously" referred to as "the George Washington of China." Though probably a great man who had immeasurably benefited China, Sun was also, Snow judged, "a dreamer and an idealist, as well as a dangerous radical" who "strongly tended toward Communism."^[16]

At the beginning of 1929 Snow, substituting for the busy Powell, represented the Review (and also Powell's commitments to the Chicago Tribune and the British Manchester Guardian ) on a Nanking-sponsored select press expedition to the northern China rail junction of Jinan in Shandong (then, Shantung). Japanese military forces had moved in there in May 1928 in an effort to thwart the Nationalist advance on Peking. It was an expression of Tokyo's "strong China policy," a reaction to the potential unification of China, perceived as a threat to Japan's "special position" and further ambitions in Manchuria. Clashes had occurred, and the Japanese had occupied and continued to hold Jinan and to block rail traffic, while negotiations to settle the matter dragged on. An agreement on Japanese withdrawal was reached in April, though it involved also much backtracking by the Chinese on the terms of settlement.^[17]

Snow's Jinan reports spotlighted Japanese obstructionism and spurious versions of the prevailing situation. He focused as well on the human miseries and economic dislocations, and on the groundswell of

anti-Japanese sentiment it evoked among the Chinese. Snow raised the crucial question for Japan's China policy at this critical juncture in East Asian affairs: would Tokyo continue to "hold the mailed fist over the miserables of Shantung" in pursuit of its China interests, or would it renounce this approach "and make an effort to recapture the trade and goodwill which she has lost as a result of her actions here?" Though Japan ultimately retreated somewhat in the Jinan affair, a militarist-dominated Japan in the coming decade would opt for the "mailed fist" in China, with tragic consequences for both the Chinese and the Japanese peoples.^[18]

The Jinan trip turned out to be more exciting than anticipated, at least in print. Based on inaccurate reports that Ed and others in the press party had been detained by the Japanese, Powell cabled the news to the U.S., where it was carried by the Associated Press, the New York Herald-Tribune , and the Chicago Tribune , among others, as well as being widely circulated in China. "It was an extraordinarily lucky adventure for me," Ed wrote Howard, and "as a result of the jaunt I was No. I news in the Far East for several days." For his part, Howard typically remarked to the family, "I can't say I could go much for that sort of thing—I guess Ed has all the 'yen' for adventure in our family."^[19]

Again through Powell's connections, another "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity came Snow's way, once more postponing his China leave-taking. This was to be a trip over the restored eight-thousand-mile national railway system. The venture, organized by the ministry of railways (a leading advertiser in the Review ), was meant to publicize and promote the idea that such travel for tourists was now possible, safe, and comfortable. Snow's descriptive articles would appear in the Review and then as tourist informational brochures of the ministry and perhaps result in a small travel book as well. It seemed an ironic juxtaposition to Snow's just-completed experience with Japanese railway interference in Shan-dong. Actually, the proposed trip was delayed until mid-April by renewed infighting among Kuomintang factions in the south, and by war-lord rumblings in the north.

In recounting these matters to his father, Snow included some of his developing thoughts on China's deep and seemingly intractable problems. (The ten-page missive was a prime example of Snow's letter-writing style to the family in these youthful years: unrestrained accounts of his work and personal activities, contemplations of life in general and China in particular, and unabashedly sentimental yearnings for home and family.) China, he wrote, was in "a pitiable condition," lacked inspired lead-

ership, and needed a "crusader," a "practical idealist," Ed felt. The "stench and decay, the misery and sufferings and national agonies" cried out for a "Great Redeemer" to lead China "into the salvation of a spiritual materialism." This last had echoes of Coolidge-era rhetoric, and indeed Snow contrasted America's material progress with the "dimness of medievalism" in societies such as China and India. The conservative Confucian tradition had stifled initiative and innovation. Snow held up the Promethean model of the dynamic, nature-conquering civilizations of the West against China's centuries-long dreamlike passivity. Science, machines, industrialization—they were China's principal needs, he declared.^[20]

Snow would cast off much in these early formulations. Nevertheless, they contained seeds of his later responsiveness to revolutionary activism, in the form of the Chinese Communist movement, as the dynamic for China's revival. Marxism, of European origin, incorporated Western concepts of historical progression and unbounded material advancement based on ever-higher levels of productive forces and social organization. As Kenneth E. Shewmaker notes, Americans such as Snow were attracted by the Chinese Communists' untraditional ("un-Chinese") qualities of youthful idealism, optimism, and their "modern" rational-scientific approach to transforming China. These traits, as Snow observed in Journey , were in sharp contrast to the "inert fatalism of old China" and appealed strongly to him "as a Westerner." And while in Red Star he dismissed the "saviour" thesis for China, he immediately added that he nevertheless felt in Mao Zedong "a certain force of destiny." Conversely, when Snow met the extremely un-Western Mahatma Gandhi in India in 1931, he found him "a considerable bore" who "does not appeal to me." Much more on these matters later.^[21]

Prior to the start of his China railway journey, Snow was offered an associate editor post on the Review by Powell, as well as the opportunity to replace Millard as the Shanghai correspondent for the New York Herald-Tribune . But, as he told his father, he refused to be "harnessed" to, or "sidetracked" by such permanent commitments, "luscious" as they might be. He now hoped, following the railway assignment, to continue toward home via Russia and central Asia. In April he began the railway trip that he looked back on as a vital turning point in his growing awareness of and response to the scaring realities of Chinese life.^[22]

The four-month journey took Snow on "the grand tour" of China, from the scenic spots of the verdant lower Yangtze Valley, into central China, then north to Peking, and beyond the Great Wall to Manchuria

and Korea. It was mostly pleasant and comfortable, and with opportunities for good gift shopping for the family. Ed turned out the required travel pieces, appearing as special supplements in the Review , and later as booklets of the Chinese Tourist Bureau. He was accompanied as guide, interpreter, and coauthor by a forty-year-old recently returned student from Harvard named S. Y. Livingston Hu. Though the latter sported file title of technical expert of the ministry of railways, Hu's position was, as was often the case with the educated elite, a sinecure obtained through good connections. Devoid of railway expertise, Hu was a haughty individual who concentrated on the comforts and pleasures he considered his due as an official. Missouri-educated Snow chose to regard Hu's attributes as primarily the product of his Harvard background.^[23]

From Peking in June, Snow and his companion traveled west on the Peking-Suiyuan line to Zhangjiakou (then, Kalgan). Beyond that city in China's northwest lay a vast area then experiencing devastating drought and famine. At Snow's insistence they continued on into the famine zone, with their special car hooked to a freight-passenger train. Coincidentally Rewi Alley, a New Zealander who was a factory inspector for the Shanghai municipal council, was on that train, squatting on the floor of one of the wagons with the mass of Chinese famine refugees. A powerful, squarely built man, he was a twice wounded veteran of the western front in the great war and had come to Shanghai from New Zealand in 1927. He was now on his way to the famine zone to spend his vacation time helping to build an irrigation canal under the auspices of the International Famine Relief Commission. The project, directed by the legendary American engineer and China road-builder O.J. Todd ("Todd Almighty"), served also to provide work and grain for famine victims. Alley would spend the remainder of his long life in China; at his death in 1987 at age ninety he was an honored figure in the People's Republic. He worked tirelessly among China's laboring masses in the decades of war and civil war. Snow and Alley would later become fast lifetime friends and partners in their wartime efforts to aid China and its people. But it was here that Snow first met Alley fleetingly and as yet from different worlds.

When Snow and Alley first encountered each other on the crowded station platform along the famine route, the contrast in appearance of the two foreigners could hardly have been greater. Alley had developed a badly suppurating red eye, was dressed in crumpled khakis, and was dusty and bedraggled from rain pouring through the broken roof of his car. Snow, riding in his private VIP carriage, was attired in an immacu-

late white linen jacket, shirt, and shorts with long white stockings. To Snow, Alley seemed "a queer duck, but interesting." Hu superciliously refused Snow's request to allow Alley to share their comfortable accommodations. Alley cheerfully returned to his peasant companions and the two apparently had no further direct contact as the train moved on to the end of the line at Salaqi (Saratsi), south of the Gobi Desert in what is now Inner Mongolia.^[24]

Large areas of northwestern China had suffered drought and famine throughout the 1920s, in addition to the normal ravages of such human plagues as bandits, militarists, extortionate tax collectors, landlords, grain merchants, and moneylenders. But the great famine of 1929-1930, witnessed by Alley and Snow in Suiyuan, was the most calamitous of all and took at least two million lives. Salaqi, Alley later wrote, "was altogether a very shocking place," with its population swelled by famine victims who had walked there from faraway villages. As Alley described the scene, "Deserted villages were ransacked of timber, animals stolen or killed, and women sold to dealers who would ship them south, while the men, old women and boys existed on the charity of the soup kitchen until most died and were thrown into the city moat. These were scenes hard to forget."^[25]

This experience of horror, death, and inhumanity would haunt Snow the remainder of his life. It was a further jolt in the "consciousness-raising" process he was undergoing in China. From this ordeal, he subsequently recalled, he "began to doubt that the real revolution [in China] had begun." Yet Snow's reaction was still largely on the compassionate rather than the political level. He expressed it in an article he did on the famine. His graphic description of the scene focused on the Famine Relief Commission's canal-building project that could immediately save perhaps a quarter million lives by providing grain for work and solve the famine problem in the future. Snow placed blame for the tragedy on the drought, warlord battlings, and inadequate transport facilities. Aside from a brief questioning of the Chinese government's willingness to cooperate with international aid efforts (absent from the version published in the pro-Nationalist Review ), Snow's animus was directed more at the foreigners in Shanghai who spoke of "the so-called famine" and who even counseled their friends back home "not to be taken in by all this `starvation propaganda."' (An excerpt from Snow's article was included in a fund-raising appeal in America for China famine relief.)^[26]

In Shenyang (then, Mukden) on his railway trip, Snow interviewed Zhang Xueliang, the "Young Marshal" who had succeeded his warlord

father (assassinated by Japanese agents in 1928) as the military-political overlord of Manchuria—China's northeast (Dongbei). This proved to be Snow's only encounter with a man who was to have a special role in the destinies of both Snow and China. The interview, which Snow wrote up as a Herald-Tribune piece, came as a crisis was building in Sino-Soviet relations. The Young Marshal was attempting to oust the Russians from their management role in the jointly owned and operated Chinese Eastern Railway, the czarist-built line that ran across northern Manchuria from the Siberian frontier east to a junction point above the Russian port of Vladivostok on the Pacific. Zhang Xueliang had hitched his star to Chiang Kai-shek's Nanking regime, and the move against the Russians had both a nationalist and an anti-Communist connotation. It was also an indirect challenge to Japan's much more dominant and powerful "special position" in southern Manchuria. The Soviets responded vigorously, sending their troops across the frontier. A negotiated settlement followed the defeat of the Chinese forces, fully restoring the Russian presence on the railway.^[27]

Snow's talk with the Young Marshal touched on all of the above points. Despite the impending confrontation with the Russians, Zhang declared Japan to be the primary enemy and affirmed his patriotic support for a united China (including Manchuria) under a strong central government. Snow was impressed by Zhang's candor and forthright, confident defiance of Japan. Discounting the "rumors" (truthful) of Zhang's opium habit, Snow found the youthful warlord to be an appealing and popular figure, whether in mingling with the students on the large modern campus of Northeastern University in Mukden, or playing golf in his stylish plus-fours. However, in another article from Manchuria, Snow voiced skepticism at the probabilities of Chinese success in breaking Japan's stranglehold on southern Manchuria. The odds in the coming contest were "greatly in favor of the Japanese," and the chances of China "retaining, or rather regaining," control of her Manchurian provinces were "exceedingly remote."^[28]

The 1929 Sino-Russian conflict led to still another extended postponement in Snow's homebound plans, probably the critical one in his gradual abandonment of these intentions. Powell had wired him in Peking to cut short the railway project and return to Shanghai to take over the Review while he rushed up to Manchuria to cover the breaking story for the Chicago Tribune . Powell's absence stretched on to include a trip to the Soviet Union, and Snow remained in charge for some six months. Listed on the Review's masthead as assistant editor, he retained

this connection until the end of March 1930. He also took on Powell's chores as Shanghai correspondent for the Chicago Tribune and Manchester Guardian . Being "an editor and correspondent for two major world newspapers leaves little time for writing letters home," he rather grandly informed the family—in the course of writing just such an affectionate nine-page letter! Though impatient for Powell to return so that he (Snow) could be on his way, Ed was increasingly caught up in his budding China journalistic career. Never before had he been so well-informed on all current happenings, he wrote home. He was "enjoying the prestige" of his new jobs. "See my stories in the Chicago Tribune?" Ed wondered what that eminent paper (then ruled by the autocratic Colonel McCormick) would say "if they knew their Shanghai correspondent had never worked on a copy desk in his life and was still a little damp behind the ears?" Snow's task was eased by the friendly advice of Millard and other veterans in the Shanghai press corps. His growing fund of information and insight on China did not as yet extend to the Communists, whom he referred to as "numerous bands of Chinese Communist-bandits, who still exercise control of remote sections of the country." Hard, firsthand intelligence on the Reds was lacking, and Western journalists in Shanghai were dependent on government handouts that dismissed the Reds as "bandits." Snow himself would once and for all dispel the "bandit" myth in his Red Star .^[29]

In Shanghai, Snow participated in another government-sponsored public relations travel stint—this time in the air. He was a passenger in October 1929 on the trial run for the start of amphibian air service from Shanghai to Hankou. Operated by an American aviation firm under contract to the Chinese government, it marked the inauguration of Nationalist China's commercial air service under its official airline, China National Aviation Corporation. Snow wrote up the flight as a promotional piece for the Review in his now well honed travelogue style. The eight-hundred-mile trip, wonder of wonders, took only seven hours each way—"was such a feat possible except by the aid of that mysterious and fantastic creature of Chinese imagination, the omnipotent Dragon?"^[30]

During his tenure editing the Revi ew, Snow made local waves over the practice in many foreign buildings in Shanghai of barring Chinese from using front elevators and entrances reserved for Caucasians. He targeted the British-owned building in which the Review had its offices and excoriated such "ridiculous regulations humiliating to the Chinese." Snow's editorial provoked a "die-hard" reaction from the British-run North China Daily News . But the discriminatory policies were quietly

dropped, though the Review's lease was not renewed. Actually, Snow's views were in complete accord with the Review's policies under Powell and undoubtedly further enhanced its standing among its many Chinese subscribers and advertisers. According to Powell's son, "the incident later became one of [J. B.'s] favorite stories and he would jokingly claim that he got back just as the British were throwing Ed and his typewriter into the street."^[31]

Snow followed up his anti-segregationist mini-crusade with a piece in the New York Sun the next year noting with satisfaction the ending of discriminatory policies in Shanghai's foreign shops and hotels. Faced with growing competition from Chinese-owned enterprises in the more assertive Chinese Nationalist political climate, foreign investors and shopowners could no longer ignore the buying power of the Chinese customer. Catering to this clientele had become a matter of economic survival. "The policy of exclusionism reigns no more," Snow declared, "except in foreign clubs where the white-haired die-hards still gather to lament the passing of days `When these yellow men knew their betters and acted accordingly.'"^[32]

Howard and Ed missed each other dreadfully, with Ed nostalgically recalling their life together in New York, and Howard constantly importuning his brother to come home. At the same time they took pride and interest in each other's accomplishments in New York and Shanghai respectively. "Ed has certainly made the most of his travels," Howard wrote his mother in July 1929, and "is proving himself to be a cracker-jack reporter." That he has been able to do all this at age twenty-four and in less than a year "is almost unbelievable!" But "while proud of what Ed has done," he observed to the family in October, "I do wish he would come home. It would make us all so much happier and a little closer together." A few months later Howard was evincing understandable skepticism at Ed's constantly reiterated pledges to return home. "It doesn't phase me any more to read this in his letters," Howard commented to his mother on one such pledge. "He has written it so often that I begin to suspect him of putting it down for lack of any other news."^[33]

At the same time Howard fully supported. Ed's writing career and, through his advertising-publications connections, was instrumental in getting some of Ed's early pieces into print. Yet as Howard continued to move up to ever better positions and salaries in the business world, Ed felt further left behind and apart from that particular road to success. And while Ed was becoming more and more attuned to Chinese sensitivities and aspirations, Howard retained a stereotypical view of the

"slant-eyes," and a belief that "the climate there is not good for white people." As Ed's horizons broadened, Howard's focused more narrowly on his New York-based business career. Juxtaposed to the brothers' strong and enduring mutual affection was the widening gulf in their material and occupational goals and circumstances. Their dialogue through the succeeding decades was in many ways a fascinating paradigm of America itself, where traditional modes of thinking would be constantly challenged by a vast range of new problems and forces, domestic and foreign.^[34]

As Powell's absence stretched on through the final months of 1929, Snow resigned himself to another winter in Shanghai. (The chilly dampness did not help his chronic problem with sinus-related head colds, aggravated, he often felt, by his "inordinate" desire for cigarettes.) The de-dine in silver prices in the mounting world depression had its effect on Ed's plans. He had kept his money in silver (Mex) dollars; with the sharp drop in the exchange rate for gold (U.S. currency), he was "practically on my uppers," he morosely informed his mother. "What will happen when I have to buy gold before I start travelling I do not

know."^[35]

Yet in a number of ways, Snow was sinking deeper roots in Shanghai. Together with a young American friend, he rented a small well-furnished apartment and took on an "excellent" cook-housekeeper-valet. Lodging, food, and servant cost each of the two Americans a total of thirty dollars gold per month. Still longing for "the sparkling streets of New York," Ed could appreciate the fact that "a treasure" such as his new cook, even if available in New York, would have to be paid ten times more than the ten-dollar-a-month Shanghai wage.^[36]

Snow was also building a cosmopolitan circle of friends in Shanghai. "They include members of every race that is found in any numbers in the Orient," he told his mother, describing them in his usual colorful way:

There is a German newspaper man and a woman author of Deutschland; a Soviet Russian whose Polish wife has a voice like a bell; a Chinese who loves English poetry; an American marine officer [Evans Carlson] whose wife is a lovely southern girl whose specialty is tea with raisin crumpets; a Georgian from the Caucasus, and Georgians are the most entrancing of all women; a young Chinese couple who are my favorites, though they live like mice on a government salary that wouldn't buy your lettuce; a Japanese girl with gold teeth and a brain—a rare combination in Nihon—who is teaching me something of her language in exchange for my criticism of her English and applause for her divine sukiyaki; an Indian poet married to a Japanese, who to-

gether own a garden that is a miniature Arcadia; and an American Jewess who looks like an Irish girl—"all these," as Rupert Brooke would say, "have been my loves." Figuratively speaking, of course.^[37]

In December Snow accepted an offer to be the Shanghai correspondent for the Washington-based Consolidated Press Association (Con Press), a newly organized service representing a number of American newspapers, including the New York Sun and Chicago Daily News . The job called for Snow to send in mainly "mailers" (rather than routine spot cable dispatches) on interesting background stories he came across. Essentially part-time, at a modest monthly salary of eighty dollars, it suited Snow's footloose temperament, seemed a good stop-gap while he thought out his longer-term plans, and allowed time for other writing. As a "roving correspondent," he hoped to do stories for Con Press during a trip into Soviet Central Asia and beyond, which he planned to take in the spring of 1930. But his application for a Soviet visa was denied, presumably for his tics (severed at the end of March 1930) with the anti-Soviet Review . Ed turned instead to an alternate plan through southern China and Southeast Asia, to begin in the fall. Con Press approved the project, with Snow to receive three hundred dollars monthly for feature stories and pictures.^[38]

The heartrending death of his mother in March 1930 further reduced the pressure for an early return home. Ed continued to play with the idea of going back to New York in the fall, but his interest seemed halfhearted. The impact of the depression, and of his long absence, on job opportunities worried him. "Anxiously" he inquired of Howard on the possibilities of "a good advertising or publication job" in New York. A month later, June 1930, still voicing his intention to return, he aired his anxieties at the prospect—the dearth of good jobs in depression America, and his distaste at the thought of the "old 9 to 5 routine" after two years of "personal management freedom."^[39]

There was sadness in Ed's yearning to rekindle the old carefree times with Howard. "We will know many happy days again, many of them," he told Howard, "and recapture an old scent for living." But the past could not and would not live again. Howard's marriage in December 1930, closely followed by Mildred's, dashed any such illusions. Now almost all his close, and to him supremely important, family ties in Kansas City and New York were broken. ("Old faces, old times are forever haunting my waking hours," and "you never need fear that I shall not return," he had written his mother a few months before her death.) Ed

summed this up to Mildred from remote Kunming (Yunnanfu) in January 1931. "Since you and Howard are both fled up in marriage and domesticity, I see no reason for my early return now.... What a gap has been left in things for me, now that Howard has started a new life!!"^[40]

With the pull of his warm youthful family memories and connections now set aside, a maturing and more worldly-wise Snow affirmed the independence that would be the credo of his life. Writing to Howard from Shanghai at the end of 1931, after yearlong travel in southern China, Southeast Asia, and India, Ed felt that he preferred to stay on in China because "I do not wish at present to be confined to a desk job." Though only on a modest reporter's salary, "I have great freedom and no one can make so bold as to order me here or there," he added. "One has to make certain sacrifices in the world to be able to thumb one's nose at it."^[41]

In the longer term, Snow's changing perspectives were probably even more critical in loosening his ties to family and home. He had come to appreciate the people and culture of China, while gaining deeper insight into that nation's problems, politics, and aims. After two years away, by the early months of 1930, his views were beginning to clash with the conventional insularity, racism, and paternalism that most Americans (including his family) directed toward the non-Caucasian and "backward" regions of the earth. Additionally, a gap was now developing between his new thinking and experiences, and the culture of material success he had been part of in Kansas City and New York.

Given his sympathies for China's national cause and distaste for the Shanghai "die-hards," Snow voiced his hostility to the entire system of extraterritoriality, which gave legal sanction to foreign economic interests and privileges in the treaty ports and concession areas of China. In the spring of 1930 he wrote an apparently unpublished piece condemning the presence of American marines in Shanghai. He sent it on to Howard to place for publication, though he doubted its acceptability: a publisher "might be accused of being anti-marine, which is a cardinal sin in America I'm told." Howard himself, in what was often to be a contentious (though not unfriendly) dialogue between the two, found Ed's comments on the marines to be "critical, sarcastic." Ed rejoined that "Americans at home ought to know, or be reminded of, this offensive organization's presence on Chinese soil. To talk of Sino-American `understanding' while they are still here is to talk nonsense." Ed twitted Howard on the "color" issue as well. He hadn't seen "a good-looking American girl for months," he wrote his brother in June 1930. "You see, I draw the color line; I haven't been out with a white girl since last December."^[42]

Snow distanced himself further and more openly from Shanghai's foreign establishment in a mid-1930 article for H. L. Mencken's influential and iconoclastic American Mercury . He targeted the American businessmen and missionaries and gave evidence of his growing estrangement from the American milieu that spawned them. He took a caustic and telling look at the realities of the International Settlement ("a poorly camouflaged British colony"), focusing on the seamy and "wicked" side of Shanghai life. In the best debunking fashion, Snow zeroed in on the Americans' transplanted country club existence, their naughty dalliances and naïveté in their Shanghai world of Russian mistresses, exclusive brothels, and cabarets. In the process, they brought glitter to the settlement's night life—"it is American money and American laughter that enables all the joints to function profitably." Snow typically saved his sharpest barbs for the missionaries—not very successful in saving souls but doing very well in all other respects. Though written mostly in an irreverent and amusing style suited to Mencken's journal, Snow's article had a more serious point to make. It was the theme of the foreigners' isolation from, ignorance of, and lack of interest in the Chinese people around them, whom they saw as "so much background— necessary for trade and industry, but isn't it—ah—unfortunate that they couldn't all be like us?" Their knowledge of the Chinese, Snow commented, came principally from "solemn, pidgin-English conversations with their houseboys."

Snow also sensitively captured the empty sadness of such foreigners. In the green-lawned environs of the country club, he wrote, "the Shanghai American can sit in cloistered tranquility. Far from the sickly Orient, he lolls in cushioned ease, sips amber drinks, dreams lazily under a sky of deep velvet and misty chrome, hears Rudy Vallee come out of the orthophonic, feels the warm breath of the parched earth against his temples, and believes he is back in Evanston—and perhaps wishes to God he were."^[43]

Ed's article did not amuse the Shanghailanders, among whom he soon found himself in the doghouse, at least temporarily. According to Helen Snow, even Millard and Powell were unhappy with the piece. In Journey , Snow wrote that his comments on Christianity in the article had evoked a sharp response from the "town elders;" to the effect that "Christianity had made Shanghai what it was." Personally, Ed added sardonically, "I would never have gone that far." To Iris father, who took a dim view of Mencken, Ed defended the latter as "the Knighted adversary of ballyhoo, of which our American life is the credulous minion." "For

every line of satire he writes, a hundred are written in the pompous bourgeois publications to the effect that God's in his heaven and all's right with America.... We are afraid of the truth."^[44]

The hostility Snow engendered, particularly among the British, in championing Chinese rights probably contributed to the compilation of a dossier on him by the British-run settlement police. Apparently based on "information" supplied by a White Russian informer, it painted a lurid past for Snow as a clandestine and dangerous agent of the Third International. This, before young Snow had the opportunity even to discover the left, in China or elsewhere. But as always, the radicalism really at issue was the more substantive and threatening one of Snow's challenge to smug notions of white superiority and supremacy. He would find himself on further blacklists through the years for defying other powerful interests, imperial or political, including the Japanese, the Kuomintang, and the Soviets. The Shanghai files would crop up in various places and times, including American FBI files in the 1950s.^[45]

Snow was becoming disenchanted with the Nanking regime as the harbinger of an invigorated China, and of its capacity to unify the country under an effective and stable central government. The continuous and inconclusive conflicts between Chiang Kai-shek's forces and his many and varied military and political opponents throughout the country reinforced this view. Commenting to his father in December 1929, Snow marveled at Chiang's ability to "hang on." Largely uneducated, "personally unimpressive, and a man of narrow vision and with few scruples," Chiang remained in power because his enemies could not make common cause against him.^[46]

In a subsequent Herald-Tribune article, Snow criticized the Kuomintang for deifying Sun Yat-sen and building a cult around the man and his doctrines. It was blind idolatry that served the political purpose of the Nanking government. Sun's concept of "political tutelage," for example, was being used to avoid genuine steps toward constitutionalism and democracy. Snow quoted the prestigious Western-educated liberal scholar Hu Shih on this point: "Who are these men that head the government and would lead us through the gates of self-government? ... Do Chiang Kai-shek, Feng Yu-hsiang, and Yen Hsi-shan and other militarists have any conception of what a democratic government is? I think not." Sun, now no longer the "dangerous radical" of Snow's first months in China, emerged as an enlightened though far from infallible leader whose words had been twisted and who would have been the first to reject such worship. Sun had in fact sought to awaken the Chinese from

age-old superstition and intellectual passivity, Snow declared. Defending his criticisms of the National government to his father, Ed compared the Kuomintang's use of the Sun cult to Spain's use of "the incense and idolatry" of Catholicism to enslave the Americas centuries before. "Spain betrayed Christ; the Kuomintang may yet betray Sun Yat-sen."^[47]

Snow's growing aversion to the Kuomintang posed dilemmas for him on the subject of extraterritoriality and the restoration of full Chinese sovereignty. A simplistic "pro-China" position begged many questions. As Snow turned more sharply against the Nationalist regime and grew openly sympathetic to its liberal and leftist opponents, the protections of extraterritoriality became crucial to his own freedom to act and write as he did. "We couldn't have done anything if we'd been under Chinese law," Helen Snow later observed. "A Chinese would have been executed for even messing with such things as we did." (Nor could such Chinese even depend on the protection of the International Settlement. Alleged Communists among them were picked up by the settlement police and routinely turned over to Kuomintang authorities.) Nevertheless the larger issue remained. Extraterritoriality was the legal underpinning for imperialism in China, and a barrier to a fully independent China. It was interesting that Snow's article on Sun Yat-sen itself revealed some of these difficulties and contradictions. He noted that Hu Shih's critiques had appeared in the British North China Daily News , an organ bitterly opposed to the Nationalist government and its aspirations to end extraterritoriality. Publishing Hu Shih's articles obviously served the paper's ulterior political motives, but, as Snow made clear, such articles could not be printed in Kuomintang-ruled China. The extraterritoriality issue vis-à-vis the Western powers would ultimately be subsumed by the much more menacing Japanese threat and would be ended only in the course of the Pacific War. Indeed, extraterritoriality also protected American journalists like Snow (and Powell) from the Japanese—until Pearl Harbor. All in all, life in old China for American partisans of a new China had its anomalies.^[48]

Two years away from New York and almost four from Kansas City, Snow wrestled with his growing disaffection with American norms of success generally, and his brother's in particular. According to the "American credo," he propounded to his father in February 1930, money rather than intellectual or cultural attainment, was "the sole end of lift?' and the measure of success. Those who questioned this were thrust aside as violators of "the American duty of making more money than one really needs." (Snow had the advantage of living quite comfortably in

China on a very modest dollar income.) Applying these thoughts to Howard and himself, Ed underscored their differing perspectives but still harbored hopes of coming back to New York and the brother he adored. Howard's ambition, Ed observed, was to amass a fortune through business as rapidly as possible and only thereafter turn to the finer things of life. But Howard had an "artistic, sensitive heart," an impediment in "the American struggle for success." As a result, Ed felt, the odds were against Howard's "attaining the status he desires as quickly as he desires.^[49]

Continuing in this vein, Ed declared that he too had "suppressed the fires of other loves" in pursuing aims similar to Howard's. But he had rejected status and had "fled New York." When he sailed out of Manhattan harbor, he had sworn "to forget the necessity of emulating" the American "princes of business" he had been taught to worship. "An older pantheism beckoned to me from across sunlit seas, and I wished to investigate it." That Ed had exhibited a daring élan in leaving New York in 1928 is unquestionable; that he had turned his back on the possibilities of a later financially successful New York career (albeit as a writer) is much less clear. Recall that such "mini-princes" of the business and media world as the banker Kelley Graham and the author-editor Charlie Towne had enthusiastically spurred him on his way, on the assumption of the one-year jaunt Ed had planned. (Both in fact were importuning him to return, a year or so later.) Ed was looking back to 1928 with 1930 hindsight. Yet as he discarded old verities and goals, "The new influences and ideas that have streamed into me do not fuse coherenently; ... nothing orderly, definite, dependable evolves."^[50]

The buoyant, romantic youth who dallied on Waikiki and stowed away to Japan had become a more burdened and seasoned adult of twenty-five. His optimistic confidence and faith in the world he had known, and the comfortable assurance of his place in it, had been battered by traumas back home and the impact of a "pitiable" China. He had already proved himself an able journalist and talented writer and was poised for an adventurous journey to colonial Asia and remote Yunnan— China at its most scenic and medieval. Thus far, he had been introduced to an ancient world where human misery and poverty were endemic, and injustice and greed seemed the norm. He had become sensitized to people of color and aware of cultures and histories he had once thought of only vaguely as backdrops for colorful travel accounts. He had aligned himself with the national cause of China and the Chinese, but with shaken faith in the Nationalists as champions of that cause.

An anecdotal parable Snow recorded in his diary seemed apropos to his own quest. An American railroad builder in northern China sits with Chinese to discuss where railways should be built. "Each point he suggests is turned down because it is a 'sphere of influence' of either Russia, Japan, France or Great Britain. Exasperated, he finally emits, 'Then where in hell is China!'" In the years just ahead, new influences and ideas would continue to stream into Snow, further changing and radicalizing his image of China, and of the world.^[51]

In short, he was becoming Edgar Snow.

Chapter 5
Travel Is Broadening

As Snow prepared for his travels south in September 1930, he envisioned it as a first stage in his long-postponed journey home. From India he would go on to the Middle East, then Europe, and finally New York. But these vague plans hinged on his financial resources. In his arrangements with Con Press, it was apparently assumed that at some point he would return to Shanghai as part-time correspondent for the wire service, but Snow had no clear idea of the time required to complete the itinerary or the total expenses involved. During the project he was to receive three hundred dollars monthly plus very limited expenses and was to restrict himself to mail copy for his stories and to avoid expensive cable charges. Depression-era newspaper budgets were extremely lean, with foreign coverage, particularly from Asia, a low priority. "All the newspapers are tight," the general manager of Con Press, Horace Epes, wrote Snow the following year, "and a minimum of foreign news is crowding its way into print over protests from the city editors, sports editors and others fighting for their departments."^[1]

As it turned out, Snow's proposed five-month trip, originally to in-dude Persia and Arabia, had already stretched to nine months while he was still in India. And it became a much more costly venture than he had expected; since leaving Shanghai, he wrote Epes from Simla, India, in May 1931, he had been forced to spend some twelve hundred dollars of his own money. With the expenses of the projected Persia-Arabia leg of the trip still to come, "I shall be done for financially when I reach New York." Epes, for his part, replied that Snow's journey had already cost Con Press twice the budgeted amount (though Ed's copy had been

"worth the cost") and instructed him to abandon the Persia-Arabia plan. Ed then decided against going on to New York at his own expense and returned directly to Shanghai. He was back by the end of July 1931, ten months after his departure, and resumed his work for Con Press. Interestingly, if he had been able to continue on from India, Epes had considered asking him to join their European staff and go into Russia. Snow was "much agitated" to learn of this lost opportunity and felt it "ironic that, principally because the prospect at home was so unpromising, I had turned back from Bombay." China was thus destined to be the making of Snow as a journalist and author. Russia would wait until the momentous wartime year of 1942.^[2]

It had been an extraordinary year, surely all that Snow could have anticipated of adventurous travel and writing. He had traversed roadless areas of China that were bandit-ridden, opium-growing, and malaria-infested, encountered enchanting romance in Burma, and witnessed colonial rule and the growing resistance to it in Indochina, Burma, and India. The China portion of his travels dispelled any remaining notions that a genuinely progressive China might emerge under the Kuomintang, and his look at the Asian empires of France and Britain reinforced his strong anti-imperialist convictions. Though he returned to Shanghai debilitated and broke, "On the whole," he wrote Epes before leaving India, "I have enjoyed myself and have accumulated much of that item which constitutes the fortune of newspaper folk—experience." The East "holds few surprises for me now," he wrote Towne, "but its interest somehow deepens."^[3]

Snow's trip at least partially fulfilled his 1928 plans, though the goal of travel round the world and back to New York eluded him once again. But he now traveled as a sophisticated and hardheaded observer and reporter; he noted in his diary at about this time, "A newspaper correspondent in China is a doctor required to issue daily bulletins on the condition of a man with the seven year itch!" His skills as a travel writer were now enhanced by a deepening and critical political perception. The quality of his copy was soon recognized by editors back home, and the New York Sun asked for longer pieces for its syndicated travel feature, The World Today. Ed became a regular contributor to it during most of 1931, with articles on Formosa (Taiwan), the coastal cities of southern China, Indochina, Yunnan, Burma, and India. (The book Snow planned to do on his trek through Yunnan province—"South of the Clouds"— remained unfinished business in the press of work on his return, starting with Japan's Manchurian aggression in September 1931.)^[4]

As his ship steamed south through the China Sea after leaving Shanghai on September 25, 1930, Snow mused longingly over a romantic attachment in Shanghai. "I thought long of Chigeko," he recorded, "recalled our first days together on Scott Road, the sweetness and innocence of her, and I loved her very, very much." He pictured her "orange-like lips, her small flat nose and faint eyebrows, her rough, long hair, and her small neat hands." But he was soon caught up in the novel sights and encounters of his journey. His first extended stop was Formosa, under Japanese rule since 1895. He found the fertile semitropical island to be scenic, seemingly peaceful, clean, and efficiently run. Public services, education, and living standards were superior to anything he had seen on the China mainland. Under tight Japanese control, the Chinese population was being thoroughly "Japanized," he wrote. The Chinese were being treated essentially as subjects of the emperor, were taxed heavily, and compelled to send their children to Japanese-language schools. Perhaps a hundred thousand were engaged in the opium traffic, and prostination was legalized and widespread. The Chinese Snow talked with felt they should be ruling the island themselves. They had had their chance, Snow observed in his diary, but had made a "mess" of it, as was now the case with China itself. Snow cynically noted that "one obvious explanation" for the absence of any signs of approaching rebellion in Formosa was that "there are no Chinese warlords there. No warlords, no revolution."^[5]

Snow visited a reservation area of aboriginal tribespeople in central Formosa. It appeared a tranquil scene, with Ed treated to a concert of sorts on "instruments" of poles and stones. A week after his visit it was the site of a bloody aboriginal uprising against the Japanese. "Appearances are on brief acquaintance with a land deceptive," Snow later remarked. Yet his overall 1930 impressions were relevant to an understanding of the problems and tragedies associated with the Kuomintang takeover of the island in 1945, and of the persistence of an independence movement there.^[6]

Running short of cash, Snow took second-class passage from Formosa to the southern China coast, sharing a small cabin with six Japanese and Chinese men and women. (This made a good story for the World Today column.) "It's nice to be back in China," he noted in appreciation of Chinese culinary skills on arriving in Swatow on the China coast. In Canton, southern China's metropolis and the base of the Nationalist revolutionary movement of the 1920s, Snow found a bustling prosperous city—"the most up-to-date" one in China. It was also one of

the most corrupt. The major city services and tax collection were farmed out to private syndicates, with bribery, profiteering, and a squeeze on taxpayers and businesses the order of the day. (Snow was shocked to learn that Sun Fo, former mayor of the city, had been one of the most corrupt of all. In Nanking Sun had taken Snow under his wing, and Ed had liked and respected him.) There were no elections, nor much due process of law for accused prisoners, political or otherwise. Snow was particularly, and characteristically, struck by the plight of young women prisoners who had been the reluctant and unhappy brides or concubines of much older men, and who were accused of liaisons with young lovers. Thus while Canton appeared to be Chinese-ruled China at its best, it was far indeed from Sun Yat-sen's democratic vision that his Kuomintang successors claimed as their goal. Snow visited Sun's former home and shrine in Portuguese-ruled Macao ("the poor man's Monte Carlo"), and meditated that if Sun had lived on, "he certainly would have broken with the present government long ere now."^[7]

Proceeding on to Indochina, Snow observed the French-proclaimed mission civilisatrice in action. He recorded his "memory of French customs officials whipping and beating natives when our boat arrived at Haiphong. And of the natives slinking off like whipped dogs, only without a whimper or word of protest." He thought the Vietnamese to be mostly "a sorry looking lot," while the French merchants were all fat, "with sometimes fatter wives." As to why all colonial Frenchmen developed "large girths," he noted, "the very obvious answer [is] that they cat ten course dinners and drink wines freely without anything but carnal exercise to wear it off." Cautioned not to pay more than ten cents per ricksha ride, he noted, "Why is it that men who think nothing of being charged $1.40 for a whiskey soda worth ten cents are always careful never to overpay a ricksha themselves and warn others in the matter?" Physical mistreatment by the French seemed commonplace, whether of hotel employees by managers or train passengers by conductors. "Later I concluded," Snow commented in Journey , "that it was the triumph of the method and the system over the human personality that was degrading about colonial doctrine; few men could resist it."^[8]

Snow's visit to what is now northern Vietnam coincided with an abortive rebellion against the French, involving a native troop mutiny, scattered peasant uprisings, and student militancy and ending in massive reprisals and executions. Snow's "meagre" reports (smuggled out past the censors to Hong Kong) probably provided the only press coverage in America. The Vietnamese would inevitably be waiting for a later and

more propitious opportunity—the next world war, for example, Snow concluded. It all gave him a long head start in appreciating the revolutionary potential in that French domain. Burma and India would provide further illustrations. But first came the high tension (and colorful copy) of Snow's Yunnan expedition. He had determined to enter Burma through the virtually untracked overland "back door" passage from China into upper Burma, a route to be made famous with the wartime · construction of the Burma Road.^[9]

With no rail or motor road connections to the rest of China, the most feasible entry into Yunnan was by way of the French-built railway from Haiphong to the Yunnan capital of Kunming. The train journey took three days and passed through some two hundred tunnels to reach Kunming, situated on the elevated Yunnan plateau, 6,400 feet above sea level. The rickety rolling stock on this unprofitable line added to the "scenic thrills" of the steep upward climb, as recounted by Snow for The World Today. Burma lay four hundred miles to the southwest, over trails and across mountains accessible only on foot or by mule and horse. Such an expedition, over bandit-infested and tribal country, required well organized, provisioned, and guarded caravans under skilled and experienced leaders. Snow quickly realized he lacked both the expertise and resources to mount such an enterprise on his own.^[10]

Yunnan, a region of spectacular natural beauty, was mired in abysmal poverty. It was in the grip of militarist chieftains enriching themselves from the widespread opium cultivation and traffic, and from the province's finances and valuable tin-mining operations. The colorful and outspoken salt commissioner explained to Snow that in Yunnan "the only difference between a bandit and an official was that the official was a successful bandit." As for the new political dispensation under the Kuomintang, "it's just a new flag under old warlords." Numbing poverty led peasants to sell their daughters and even sons as slave labor, some twenty thousand children in Kunming alone. They worked in homes, workshops, and stores; boys labored under the most inhmnane conditions of all, in the primitive tin mines.^[11]

Snow was fortunate (up to a point) to meet up with Dr. Joseph F. Rock, a famed naturalist-explorer who had already shown Yunnan to be a botanical paradise of hundreds of plant varieties unknown elsewhere. Rock, then organizing a new expedition sponsored by National Geographic , the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and various scientific organizations, invited Snow to come along as far as Tali in western Yunnan. An Austrian-born naturalized American of fifty, Rock was a rather vain

and misanthropic man, contemptuous of missionary "soul-savers" and Chinese officialdom. While he could be a charmingly urbane and delightful companion, his mood swings could transform him into an abusive and altogether unpleasant person. Snow's relationship with him was stormy and unpredictable. He kept Snow waiting for over a month, until the end of January 1931, before finally deciding to start the journey. At one point he rescinded his invitation to Snow and then once again persuaded Ed to join him. All this proved a wearing ordeal for Snow, who worried that the long wait in Kunming for Rock to make a start might compromise his arrangements with Con Press. An "odd genius— or an idiot," Snow privately remarked of Rock. It was particularly galling for one of Snow's temperament to find himself subject to his partner's every whim. "I am thoroughly disgusted with being dependent upon someone else's movements; never again for me," he bitterly recorded. "I ought to have got beyond that stage in life, anyway."^[12]

Rock comported himself as a foreign potentate, traveling with a large retinue of retainers that included well-armed guards, cooks, and other housekeeping personnel, as well as muleteers, and occasional sedan-chair bearers. The caravan had sixty mules and horses, supplies to last for a year "in the wilds," scientific instruments, and a complete medical kit. The nightly stops were occasions for well-prepared meals served on a linen-covered portable table, complete with china and silver service. Temples, thoroughly scrubbed by Rock's staff, were frequent overnight layovers. Local magistrates along the way provided contingents of soldiers whom Rock paid well. He carried ten thousand dollars in silver; once near the end of their journey Rock expressed suspicion (soon retracted) that Snow might have attempted to steal from him. This was the last straw for Ed. "I knew that from this moment I could never regard him with sincere friendliness, and I was glad only that tomorrow was our last day together." Yet Rock in his own way had compassion for the Chinese and often shared his medicines with diseased villagers along the way.^[13]

After a three-week journey, Snow parted with Rock in Tali and turned south to Burma. He formed his own small caravan of mules and ponies, a cook, and a couple of muleteers. Attaching himself to a larger merchant caravan, Snow's entourage reached Bhamo on the upper Burma frontier after two more weeks of even more spectacularly scenic and fascinating travel. He had been one of a very few Westerners ever to "walk" from China to Burma. A decade or so later he would fly the same route by military plane in two hours. The forty-day Yunnan trip had

more than satisfied Snow's taste for novel "travel adventures." Perhaps of special interest was the diversity of minority nationalities and cultures in the mountains and valleys, plains and forests of the China-Burma border areas. In the region of the Kachins, a warlike border people, Snow had a harrowing movie-script experience, complete with a last-minute rescue. He had ventured into a jungle area in advance of his caravan and suddenly came upon a band of Kachins, armed with swords and apparently intent on disposing of him. He held them off with a couple of "demonstration" shots from his revolver until two soldiers from his party who had heard the firing appeared.^[14]

Less exciting but equally memorable was the exhilarating beauty of the unspoiled natural surroundings. "There is joy in this life; I understand Rock's love for it now," Snow noted in the early stages of the journey. "Today, as I rode over the mountain tops, with the azure sky an infinite ribbon over the rough horizon of sky-rubbing peaks, some of them snow-covered, I thanked God that I was doing this trip, as I had wanted, as I had planned." For Ed it was both justification and culmination of his three years abroad. Though cash in hand was low, "I would not have missed any of the things I've blundered into for the best advertising man's job in New York!" he exulted. "I have lived during these three years, and I have known many cities, felt often the. tremulous touch of unexpected wonder and sweetness in strange places and faces few men I know can have understood."^[15]

But a darker side to the experience also left its mark (including chronic bouts with malarial fever). Snow's immersion in the daily life of this backwater region of China, far from the amenities of the treaty ports, resulted in ambivalent feelings of sympathy and angry contempt toward its inhabitants. The filthy rat-infested inns, the ravages of diseases such as leprosy and syphilis, the universal opium habit, the poverty, sloth, and apathy appalled and repelled Snow. Above all, they violated his Western notions of energetic self-help and action to change intolerable conditions. "I say there is something fundamentally wrong with people who can live, year after year, in the midst of such squalor," he noted after a night in a typical inn. "I have seen pigstys kept far cleaner than some of the rotten holes into which these men climb for their opium pipe and dream bed." He was irritated at the people "who revel in the filth and discomfort in which they live." No beggar in America would sleep in the "mud dumps the people call their homes." He thought them "too lazy" to make the effort to improve these conditions. And in a final thrust, he summed up, "If anyone fancies that man has lost

his capacity to live without the benefits of modern science and invention, let him travel through Yunnan." Snow had yet to meet a new breed of young Chinese, in whom he found the qualifies lacking among the people he had thus far encountered in Yunnan and elsewhere in China. For the moment, as Snow disbanded his caravan and moved on to a sharply contrasting experience in Burma, he recapped his recent adventure: "At long, interesting, wearing, unforgettable journey."^[16]

Before leaving Yunnan, Snow had learned of Howard's marriage; "e[t] tu Brute!," he wrote back to his brother. "Now all my friends, and all my family fled up in new circlets of gold." In a poignant, remarkably frank, and amusing letter to his new sister-in-law, Dorothy, written from Rangoon three months later, Ed underlined the anchor role Howard had played in his life, the sole exception to his distrust of binding ties, marital or otherwise. "The truth is I did not write to you [sooner] because I was not glad that you were Mrs. Snow." There was no personal malice in this, only that Dorothy was "something which had upset the regular flow of my plans .... I was suddenly depressed and for a great many days I felt much older than I am." He had always thought of Howard "as an entity which figured more or less constantly, directly in my life." The future he had envisioned in New York "would be a lift with Howard." They would "know girls," but "nothing that would outlast its own first rapture." Ed, of course, was careful to add all the correct and gracious sentiments, in his most charming manner. ("Madame, I understand why my brother was weak.") In Burma, Ed found several nonbinding moments of rapture.^[17]

Bhamo, along the Irrawaddy River in upper Burma, became the setting of a delightful interlude for Snow, with a lovely young Burmese woman named Malami. He met her through a local Englishman whose hobby was photographing Burmese girls in the nude. Snow's few days in Bhamo were spent mostly with Malami, who ministered to Ed's badly inflamed knee where he had been kicked by one of his caravan mules. "She is like something in burnished copper, only softened, animated by some divine and mysterious power," he rhapsodized in his diary. Though she offered to accompany Ed to Rangoon, he felt it prudent not to risk "a fearful row" with the British officers and passengers on the Irrawaddy steamer. "As it was their noses were up at a high slant because Malami walked to the gangplank and kissed me."^[18]

In Rangoon, where he stayed for over a month, Snow met another Burmese girl, whom he described in equally alluring terms ("fragile and dainty," an "exquisitely modelled" face, "lustrous hair," etc.). In Journey ,

Snow combined the elements of his Burmese encounters into a much more pristine but no less spellbinding nurse named Batalà. In this version, Batalà treated his knee and fever in Bhamo and again in Rangoon. "Batalà and I had shared an hour or two `saved from that eternal silence' and that was enough," Snow reminisced. Not surprisingly, both at the time and later Snow waxed enthusiastic about Burmese women in general. He found them to be "among the most charming and emancipated in the world," with "a degree of social grace and freedom then unknown in China or India or anywhere in the Asia I had seen."^[19]

Snow extended his Burma stay primarily to report on a rebellion of landless peasants and their leader, Saya San, who was killed in the suppression of the uprising. More violent and bloodier than the Tonkin uprising against the French, the revolt voiced the discontent of the mass of Burmese peasants whose rice lands had been bought up largely by Chettyars, an Indian banking caste there. (By the mid-1930s, almost half the paddy land in lower Burma was owned outright or mortgaged to Indian landlords.) Young intellectuals in Rangoon were calling for separation from India and longing for full independence from Britain. As in Indochina, Snow filed the only detailed reports to appear in America.^[20]

With his already strong animus toward the pompous superiority of the British residents of Shanghai, Snow got more than his fill of this mentality in Burma and India. The condescension directed at Americans galled him almost as much as the racism toward "natives." At theater performances in Rangoon the playing of the British anthem always officially ended the proceedings. "It annoys the British extremely to see a white man walk out before this inevitable finale is played; for that reason I took exceeding delight in doing so," Snow snidely recorded. From the beginning Snow fully appreciated the critical importance of the color issue in arousing the nationalist sensitivities and bitter resentment of Asian intellectuals and other middle- and upper-class elements against white colonial rulers.^[21]

Snow arrived in Calcutta in April with dour preconceptions of India. In part they reflected his distaste for the business-minded Indians who had descended en masse on Burma and undercut the livelihood of the less competitive and laid-back Burmese—"easy prey" for the Indians, Snow thought. The Burmese could gradually be drawn into India's "vicious, uncivilized caste system," making them "the same slaves as [the Indians'] own women." Still, India would contribute significantly to Snow's ongoing political education.^[22]

In his four months in India Snow traveled the length and breadth of that vast and varied subcontinent. He met Gandhi (fleetingly) and had in-depth interviews with Jawaharlal Nehru, the president of the Indian National Congress, and other Indian nationalist leaders. He arrived in fine aftermath of Gandhi's famous 1930 salt march to the sea, in defiance of the British colonial government's monopoly and tax on Indian salt production and distribution. The march sparked a nationwide nonviolent civil disobedience movement, and a boycott of British goods, all part of the struggle for independence led by the Congress. Shortly before Snow's advent, Gandhi reached an agreement with the viceroy calling off the campaign. The accord called for formal negotiations at a London roundtable conference to chart a new status for India. This trace aroused much controversy and dismay among younger Congress leaders such as Nehru, who felt the Mahatma had given up too much for too little, in terms of the goal of full independence. Snow, too, felt Gandhi had "surrendered" to the viceroy on "the very edge of success."^[23]

Beyond the question of Gandhi's political judgment (though linked to it), was Snow's unsympathetic reaction to the Indian leader's methods and beliefs. He disliked the "passivity" of Gandhi's nonviolent philosophy, and his promotion of religiously based moral and ethical precepts as panaceas for India's ills and injustices. Nor did Snow think much of the Mahatma's "retrogressive" emphasis on self-sufficient homespun village industry, and seeming exaltation of asceticism and poverty—all symbolized by the Indian's spinning wheel, loincloth, simple diet, and spare living arrangements. Gandhi's vow (at age thirty-seven) of sexual abstinence likewise had no appeal for young Snow, perhaps most especially in the context of his Burma idyll. All in all, Snow considered Gandhi to be "the most enigmatic personality I have met in the Orient," and someone who "seems a ridiculous little showman who has hypnotized a nation with an epigram." Yet Snow could also see in him a "man of supremely fair and just mind—must be admired for wonderful power over men which derives from his kind of life." And in truth, Snow's personal values had much in common with those of the saintly Mahatma, though Ed saw his own as stemming from a "rational-scientific" base. "Truth, sincerity, devotion, and kindliness appeal to me as the standards by which men and their actions should be judged," Ed wrote his father from India in June 1931. Did these differ markedly from Gandhi's vision of truth, love, brotherhood, and "soul-force"?^[24]

In his last meeting with Gandhi in New Delhi in January 1948, shortly before the latter's assassination, Snow would make the connec-

tion. The shock of the subsequent tragedy, and Snow's presence at the cremation and ceremony added a further emotional element. In a moving testamentary article that William L. Shirer calls "one of the classics of American journalism," Snow wrote of the profound truths and revolutionary character of Gandhi's teachings: nonviolence for a world of war, cold war, and nuclear weapons; social and economic justice; religious tolerance; personal purity and morality; and the fundamental axiom that only good means lead to good ends. "For years I had felt out of sympathy for him," Snow wrote, "yet even in this dull clod, the avatar had finally struck a spark before he died, when, in my last visit, I became conscious of my size in the mirror of him, and I saw him as a giant."^[25]

Snow paid even more glowing tribute to Gandhi a decade later in Journey . As the concluding theme of that work, he pointed to Gandhi's "truth and message of brotherhood" as the indispensable beacon for the planet's survival. Nevertheless, Snow's "conversion" was hardly a complete and consistent one. He never, for example, abandoned his defense of armed revolutionary struggle as the ultimate recourse for an oppressed people. In Journey , he deftly left himself an "out" on the issue of violence when describing the Gandhi cremation scene. It had required police force to restrain the mass of people pressing against the funeral pyre. "Thus I saw Gandhi depart in a paradox as he had lived in one," Snow remarked, always himself aware of the Taoist inconsistencies and ironies of life.^[26]

It was Jawaharlal Nehru, the young, handsome, urbane Oxford-educated intellectual, whom Snow immediately took to in 1931 and thereafter. Nehru's democratic, modern-minded ("Western"), and socialist approach to India's problems and future development struck a responsive chord in Ed. Nehru was refreshingly free of the pervasive religiosity of other Indian leaders and was committed to the thoroughgoing reform of India's caste-ridden society. Snow was also meeting his first "live" Communists and reading for the first time some basic Marxist and Leninist texts. He had already observed imperialism in action in Asia and noted that it benefited foreign business interests first and foremost. Nationals of the mother countries enjoyed a privileged and profitable life in the colonies, while the mass of the indigenous population endured abject poverty and exploitation. Native capitalists and landlords were no better, and often worse, than their imperial counterparts. In Calcutta, Snow observed, "nine-tenths of the population live wretchedly and seldom with enough to eat; one-tenth lives comfortably or in wanton luxury."^[27]

The Leninist thesis that Asia needed both a national and a social (class) revolution seemed justified by what Snow had seen in China, and

in the French and British colonies. In Bombay Snow inspected tenements occupied by textile workers and owned by the mills. Some five hundred persons were crowded into the sixty rooms of each tenement. A single outdoor tap provided the drinking water for all five hundred. As Snow described the scene in his diary:

The rows of houses stand only about five feet apart. Down the center of the lane dividing them runs an open sewer, which carries off the urine, garbage and other filth from the thirty ground floor rooms in each tenement, and the thirty upstairs. Little emaciated children, naked, run up and down the center of this drain. They splash themselves with its filth and carry it on their little feet into their dark, dirty, windowless hovels, where they are forced to retire during the heavy rains of the day, and at night.

Meanwhile, at the luxurious Taj Mahal Hotel, Snow added, "their foreign and Indian mill-owning oppressors" quaffed drinks and reclined comfortably in their white flannels, "while making superficial comments about Bach and Brahms." (In the typical incongruities of these situations, Snow too was staying at the Taj Mahal.)^[28]

Snow's growing awareness of Marxist thought while in India came also from a well-publicized trial of Communists then taking place there. The thirty-one Indian and British defendants, many of them intellectuals, had utilized the lengthy proceedings to expound on all aspects of Communist theory and practice—all of which had been duly reported in the Indian press. "When one reads back through the newspaper files since the trial began," Snow noted, "it is an education in the economics of Karl Marx, and their revolutionary application by Lenin, his associates, and their successors." "Some of the most trenchant criticism ever directed at British rule in India has come forth at the Meerut trial," he added.^[29]

Snow wrote against the traditional degradation of women in India and gave prominent play to the growing role (the "revolt") of educated and politically conscious women as a potent new feminist force in the Indian nationalist movement. Such women fought, he wrote, both for the emancipation of women in the home and of India as a nation. In Bombay he had been taken in tow by a young Communist activist named Suhasini, from the remarkable and illustrious Chattopadhyaya family. Snow described her as "the most beautiful Indian woman I have ever met," and a "one woman revolutionary movement in herself." Her sister, whom Ed also came to know well, was the celebrated poet and Congress political figure Sarojini Naidu. There were two other sisters,

one a leading educator-philosopher and the other a dramatist and noted authority on Indian art. An elder brother, Virendranath (Chatto), was a major Indian revolutionary nationalist, active also in the European Communist movement. He had had a stormy common-law marriage to Agnes Smedley during the 1920s in Berlin. Interestingly, it was Snow, when covering the war in Russia in 1943, who obtained confirmation that Chatto had died at Stalin's orders in Russia in 1941 or 1942.^[30]

Suhasini, the first avowed Communist Snow had met, was one of Ed's guides through the Bombay worker tenements. She attempted to proselytize him on communism, but Snow was not about to embrace doctrinal absolutes, especially one with its own godhead in Moscow. Nonetheless, as Snow later put it, Suhasini and others "did make me realize there were two revolutions (i.e., national and social), not one, straggling for birth and power over men in India as in China." Thus, despite his great admiration for Nehru, Snow considered him to be "fundamentally an aristocrat; secretly he is shocked or frightened at the thought of power suddenly being wrenched from the present controlling elements and administered by Indian peasants and laborers." Ed confided similar misgivings to Mildred about the Indian Congress leaders. They were "not opposed to unlimited exploitation by capitalists and they have no program for the agrarians."^[31]

There is little doubt that the new intellectual and political horizons opened by his eventful 1930-1931 travel year pointed the way to Red Star . "All my experiences [of that year]," Snow recounted a quarter century later, "were going to shape my life and work beyond any capacity of mine as yet to appreciate." Meanwhile, fortified and chastened by his broadened outlook, Snow (with stops in Ceylon, Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies) headed back to Shanghai. There he would begin his personal discovery of the Chinese left, and in time of that deeper stage of Asian revolution he now considered both necessary and inevitable.^[32]

Chapter 6
Shanghai Again

While still in India, Snow had come down with another of his chronic head colds caught in the bitter chill of Simla, high in the foothills of the Himalayas. He had arrived there from the torrid plains below clad in summer shorts. This had in turn set off one of his low, homesick moods. But, he wrote Mildred from Simla, "my dilemma is that I can't quite decide whether it is nostalgia for China or America. I am strongly inclined to believe it is China." Still, the decision to stay in Shanghai was painful if pragmatic. "Often I get suddenly frantic and long to cry out against the necessity of this long separation," he confided to his father before leaving Bombay for China. But necessary it was. His travel year had been "a losing proposition." In Shanghai he could at least live cheaply while doing all the writing he had in mind. He reluctantly turned down a tempting offer from Charlie Towne to share the comforts of Towne's Manhattan lodgings and summer cottage. He could not allow himself to "abuse" such hospitality, Ed wrote Towne from Shanghai; he would feel obliged almost immediately to look for a job—probably some "silly stunt" like selling advertising. Beyond this, driven by a feeling of unattained goals as time raced by, Ed could not return home while still "far from achieving what I set out to do." Even more, he was acutely conscious of all that had changed for him in America. Were it not for the family and one or two others, he told J. Edgar, "the thought that I might not see America again for two or three years would not agitate me." There was no going back to the old life. "I have outgrown that— or it has outgrown me."^[1]

Back in Shanghai (for which he seemed to be developing a love-hate relationship) by mid-summer 1931, Ed was immediately laid low by a malarial attack that added to his rundown condition. Still convalescing, he met Helen Foster on the very day of her arrival in Shanghai from the States. She was twenty-three, unusually attractive, upbeat, and freshly American. Armed also with a portfolio of Snow clippings, she was a bracing tonic for Ed's malaise. Ambitious, keen-minded (and sharp-tongued), she was determined to make her name as a writer. Though born in Utah, she strongly identified with her Welsh-English, Puritan New England roots, summed up in the tenets of Morality, God, enterprise, and hard work. The contrast in personality and mind-set between the two was great indeed, but Ed was always drawn to strong-willed, brainy, and good-looking women. "There are many kinds of interesting minds;" he had earlier written Howard, "some of them have a soft curve at the hips." Peg (the nickname she used in those years) had a remarkable role in China over the next decade, both in her own right and in Ed's life and work.^[2]

By the fall of 1931 Ed resumed his part-time arrangement with Con Press, at eighty dollars a month. Though it left him free to write for other publications, Snow was annoyed both by the minimal compensation and the penny-pinching limitations imposed on him in doing his job. Newspapers at home generally relegated Asia news to the back burner. He argued for a much more substantial commitment to the Shanghai operation, an argument underscored by Japan's Manchuria aggression that September. "All evidence is that very deep social, economic, and political changes, of vital effect on the world, are soon to take place," he wrote Epes in October. The issue was not simply money. He could make a good deal more doing other things (such as ad agency jobs in Shanghai for which he had no stomach), "but that is not what will keep me here." However, budgetary constraints in the severely strapped newspaper field back home precluded greater outlays, Epes told him. Ironically Snow, who feared facing the bleak depression prospects in America, was feeling its fall-out in China.^[3]

Epes did prove slightly more generous with extra compensation and expense monies as the China situation and Ed's duties heated up—particularly in his eyewitness reporting of the Shanghai fighting in early 1932. He had also taken over Powell's relinquished post as correspondent for the London Daily Herald (as a stringer). Despite the shoestring character of his one-man operation, Snow's reportage of the Shanghai battle garnered rich praise. The managing editor of the Sun told Epes he

"had never seen a better job done by a correspondent working alone and with so little contact with the home office." The Daily Herald foreign editor equally wrote Powell that Ed's cables "during the Shanghai trouble have given great satisfaction here."^[4]

In early September 1931 Snow went up the Yangtze River with the press corps to view the vast devastation wrought by massive flooding along a nine-hundred-mile stretch of the lower Yangtze. It was one of the great natural disasters of the century and left some two million people dead and man), more millions homeless and destitute. Snow's Herald-Tribune article on the catastrophe was reminiscent of his 1929 piece on the great northwestern famine. Yet the two reports also gave a good measure of the distance Snow had come in his thinking and perspectives. In 1929 he had written of the famine victims through the eyes of a compassionate foreign observer. In the flood account, Snow put himself in the place of the individual peasant in all his agony, despair, and inner fury, for whom the flood was "the culmination of a long series of afflictions." Snow described these "affections": extortionate tax collectors, looting soldiers and merciless militarists worse even than bandits. Granaries were left bare, Snow went on, and only landlords and usurers re-rained any silver, which they hid as they trembled in fear of "the long range and thrust of the wild new cry of Communism." In 1929 Snow's criticism of the government had been virtually nil. In 1931 there was a searing indictment of "a militaristic regime which for callous indifference, tyrannous oppression and ruinous incompetence has not been surpassed anywhere in this era." "I have seen so much pain and suffering," Snow ended, "that it has entered my own blood." The Chinese peasants "merit better treatment than they have received from the elements and from man."^[5]

Snow had just returned to Shanghai from the flood areas to hear news of the Mukden Incident. A minor explosion on September 18 ripped the tracks of the Japanese government-owned South Manchurian Railway at Shenyang (then, Mukden), capital of Manchuria. This contrived pretext was the signal for the rapid takeover of southern Manchuria by Japan's well-prepared Kwantung Army operating out of the railway zone. Before the end of the year Japanese troops had conquered all of northern Manchuria (where they met more determined Chinese resistance). These events ushered in a period of continuous Japanese pressure against China, leading to the all-out attempt to subjugate that nation in the "China Incident" of 1937. Manchuria shattered the fragile structure of world order built in the 1920s, symbolized by the League: of

Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact renouncing war, and the Nine-Power Treaty affirming respect for China's independence and territorial integrity.

Snow went up to Manchuria with a press party in early November, by which time the Japanese conquest was a fait accompli. The newspaper-men arrived in frozen northern Manchuria (fill then considered a Russian sphere of influence) in the immediate aftermath of the fighting there. Chinese bodies lay everywhere, a testament to the courageous resistance by the local Chinese forces led by a plucky general. The manner in which these men had fought in the face of certain defeat, "is the most heroic thing I have seen in China," Ed wrote Howard. In Mukden he interviewed the commander of the Japanese forces, General Honjo, and the Chinese puppet governor. The latter, a classical scholar, had been forcibly installed by the Japanese. He acknowledged to Snow that "we are the last to hear of actions and policies credited to us" by the Japanese. In like manner the Japanese thrust the last boy emperor of the Qing dynasty, Pu-yi, into the role of chief executive of the Japanese-created state of Manchukuo the following March.^[6]

Snow, in Shanghai again by early December, was downhearted and contemptuous at the failure of the Young Marshal, Zhang Xueliang (in Peking with most of his Northeast Army), and of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, in Nanking, to resist the Japanese. Ed's mood was worsened by a bout of sinusitis, brought on by a severe head cold contracted in the arctic climate of northern Manchuria; it forced him to cut short his trip. In Shanghai he required hospitalization and then convalescence at home through the Christmas-New Year holiday period. This sinusitis, he told his father, "is the most vitiating thing I know." The only pleasant aspect of his illness, Ed further informed J. Edgar, was the attention he received from his "charming neighbor," Peg Foster. It was his first mention of Peg to the family. She was a "lovely child" (all of two years younger than Ed!), and they had become "warm friends." "It occurred to her that she would like to be Empress of Asia, so she put on her roller skates and came out. She is quite mad, but very cheerful and quite intelligent." Before coming to China, she had read everything he had ever written, and is "really rather splendid because she quotes to me from my own 'works.'"^[7]

It irked him, Snow wrote Epes at this same time, to be sidelined by illness "during these exciting days in China." But he was now recovered, and ready to go north again should the situation require. As it turned out, however, Snow would be in the right place at the right time when the Japanese launched their attack on Chinese Shanghai two weeks later.^[8]

Snow's frustration over the Manchurian events was directed also at the ineffectual response of the world community. "I suppose," he voiced his feelings to Howard, "there are still people in the West who will believe in the efficacy of prayer, and the Kellogg Pact, the Nine-Power Pact, and the League of Nations to outlaw war. All of them obviously are failures." (He took an equally jaundiced view of Washington's "non-recognition doctrine" in January 1932.) "What a farce" it all was. Neither did Snow show much sympathy for the ousted Manchurian overlords. He had no doubt, he told Howard, that the inhabitants of Manchuria would fare better under Tokyo's rule. But there remained "the ethical problem"—did any nation have "the right to take over the land, property, and government of another merely because that latter is hopelessly incompetent? And as a confirmed anti-imperialist (reinforced by his travels in colonial Asia), Snow knew that no people were truly "better off" under foreign conquerors—particularly ones as arrogant and ruthless as the Japanese military. The future for the Chinese people seemed dismal indeed, whether under Japanese masters or Chinese oppressors.^[9]

In a wide-ranging 1932 New Year letter to his father, Snow touched on topics from Chinese communism to American capitalism and much in between. The key targets of his stark and radical analysis of the state of the world were imperialism (Western and Japanese), militarism (Chinese and Japanese), and fascism (European and Asian) — all of them part of a collapsing capitalist global order. China entered the new year in a more "pathetic condition" than ever before. Chiang's "ruinous dictatorship" was toppling, but new leaders (who temporarily replaced the "resigned" Generalissimo) had nothing better to offer. Either way, the country remained in the hands of "war barons." "What a perennial tragedy poor China is!" There had not yet appeared a single man "with any real genius for leadership and statecraft"—a more restrained version of Ed's earlier call for a "Great Redeemer." Communism in China was now stronger than ever, an "accurate barometer of the people's despair, disgust and dissatisfaction with the record of the past three years," Snow continued. The Communist leaders possessed "a vigor and enthusiasm" that could soon carry them to important victories, barring some "revolution" in the Kuomintang. The world was in for a dark time. Japan's Manchurian conquest "squashes any hope of a pacific world for years to come." Liberalism was on the wane. The Western imperialist powers would be adopting "reactionary" foreign policies, including a tougher line toward their subject peoples. Fascists were on the rise in Italy and Germany. America might have made a difference the past year but has

had little better leadership than China's. ("Mediocre," "vacillating," "weak," "cowardly" were only some of the pejoratives Snow directed at the Hoover administration.) "Oh, for a man in the White House with courage and a clear mind and clean heart that would refuse to compromise with the stench of rottenness and corruption that pervades our national as well as local politics." Capitalism itself was in decay in Europe and America. It was "economically unsound, antiquated from our time, and moribund." Its overthrow in Europe was "only a matter of time." Even in America, where capitalism had been the "premise" of the country's unparalleled development, it was also running out of steam. An car-Her period of "freedom and comparative equality of opportunity" had vanished. "We are entering a period of consolidation of the forces of capitalism and imperialism against our rapidly increasing masses who are the victims of the system. The crisis in America will come more gradually and the outcome will take different forms than elsewhere, but I believe that fundamental changes in the economic machinery are clearly visible ahead." It was all pretty heady and heavy staff to go along with Ed's New Year greetings to J. Edgar! ^[10]

Snow's gloomy Weltanschauung carried over into his personal mood. He seemed quite at ease unburdening himself to his as yet unmet sister-in-law, Dorothy (Dotty). Perhaps the younger brother was also trying to project a sophisticated image of the world-weary veteran foreign correspondent. He was jaded with the Chinese, he wrote Dorothy in January 1932, and found the Europeans and Americans mostly stuffy or boring. Nor were prospects among the women especially enticing. (Peg, the obvious exception, was unmentioned.) "So you end up at a Chinese dinner listening to high-pitched singing girls and feeling a little sad because it is no longer as thrilling as it once was."^[11]

Snow's ennui was soon dispelled by Tokyo's move against Shanghai later that month. The city had become the center of intense anti-Japanese popular feeling over the "national humiliation" in Manchuria. It took the form of an effective boycott, and of labor strikes against Japanese-owned factories. The mayor of Shanghai, prodded by Nanking, capitulated to an ultimatum to suppress the movement. But despite this surrender Japanese naval and marine forces struck on the night of January 28. They sought to terrorize the Chinese and prepare the ground for penetration of the lower Yangtze Valley.

The Shanghai assault proved to be a serious blunder. Spearheaded by the strongly anti-Japanese Nineteenth-Route Army under its dauntless commander, Cai (Ts'ai) Tingkai, the Chinese waged a brave thirty-four-

day struggle against powerful enemy naval, air, and army forces. Casualties were heavy on both sides, and there was great loss of property and civilian lives from indiscriminate Japanese bombing—a new factor in modern warfare. The Chinese were finally forced to retreat, but for the Japanese government it had been a stunning embarrassment and for the Chinese people an inspiring act of resistance. After a truce, the Japanese withdrew in May. In effect, their plans for the Yangtze region were put on hold until 1937; meanwhile they concentrated on the takeover of Inner Mongolia and northern China. General Cai became a national (and international) hero, much to the Generalissimo's discomfort. Chiang shunted him off with his denuded army to more remote Fujian province. Cai continued through the years to be a maverick figure in Kuomintang politics and ultimately joined the new Communist regime in 1949.^[12]

Snow was in the center of the battle (his first real experience under fire), operating from his base in the adjoining International Settlement. His eyewitness accounts (including a first-day scoop), cabled to his American newspapers and the Daily Herald , got front-page play and much praise from his editors. Ed had been the first to alert the manager of the railway's north station in the Zhabei district about the imminent Japanese thrust, near midnight of the twenty-eighth. He thereby had a part in saving some ten million dollars of rolling stock from destruction. As Snow related the incident in Far Eastern Front , a Chinese officer soon arrived on the scene and confirmed Ed's news to the skeptical station manager. Years later, in Journey , Snow added. more drama and suspense to the story. The verifying officer disappears from the new account. The station master is forced to make an immediate and agonizing decision to move the equipment based solely on Ed's unofficial and unverified warning.^[13]

Snow's account of the Shanghai battle described its tragic human toll. He also stressed the inspirational impact of the struggle on the Chinese. "The lessons of the Shanghai war," he wrote in Far Eastern Front , "stimulated in all classes, particularly in the youth both in and out of the army, a new manhood, a self-reliance and self-respect, with an apparent determination to resist." Chiang Kai-shek, in contrast, moved his government farther inland to Luoyang out of harm's way during the fighting. It was becoming evident to Snow that China could be saved only by a national groundswell of the kind he had just witnessed in Shanghai. Later in Peking, he and Peg would themselves become part of that developing momentum among the educated youth.^[14]

For the while, however, Tokyo's inroads in the north and Nanking's acquiescence in them went on unabated. The prospect, Snow wrote Epes as the Shanghai fighting drew to a close, was that "Japanese operations in China will steadily expand in scope," with the aim of subjugating that country. The notion that the economic costs and sacrifices entailed could bring Japan down was simply an illusion, Snow added. "The Japanese people are capable of enormous sacrifices to uphold national honor or prestige." The vast territory of Jehol (later, Rehe; eastern Inner Mongolia) was invaded in February 1933, its conquest completed in but ten days. It was a further humiliation for the Young Marshal. While he stayed in his Peking headquarters, a substantial portion of his remaining Northeast Army was lost in the Jehol debacle. He resigned his northern China command and quietly left for Europe.^[15]

The Japanese followed up their victory by moving south into Hebei province, menacing the Peking-Tianjin (Tientsin) corridor. By May 1933 the infamous Tangku Truce had been signed with Nanking, creating a neutralized and demilitarized zone in northeastern Hebei. Chinese defense of the area was in effect abandoned, while Japan proceeded with plans to control all of northern China by orchestrating "autonomous" (puppet) movements there. Earlier, in March 1933, Tokyo had responded to the League of Nations' condemnation of its aggressions by withdrawing from that world body. A year later, Pu-yi was enthroned as emperor of the expanded state of Manchukuo. Chiang Kai-shek, Snow caustically noted, had achieved the "astonishing feat" of remaining supreme commander of China's armies during a de facto war with Japan, without once taking active command in defense of Chinese territory. Ed bitterly noted that some 400,000 of Chiang's best-equipped troops, and his air force, were engaged in fighting the Reds in central China, "when needed to defend the country against the Japanese."^[16]

With the end of the Shanghai war Snow was back to his part-time assignment with Con Press (plus his new Daily Herald connection). He had received an extra $500 from Epes for his work on the Manchurian and Shanghai stories and was now put on a $145 monthly stipend. Snow accepted appreciatively but remained disappointed at the limitations of the job, which once more restricted him mostly to mail copy features. Restive as always, he was anxious to get away from Shanghai and its Shanghailanders. "There is an unfathomable desire in us," he wrote his sister-in-law, to "travel and explore and exhaust everything in an environment and a person" until it was all utterly predictable and "no more fun." After four years in the East he felt "infinitely older" and "more re-

signed to the limitations of life," he told Mildred. He was "restless, discontented, dissatisfied." He had few truly close friends in Shanghai—"a suspicious city." This new bout of despondency, he thought, could be due to all the suffering, sorrow, and stupidity he had recently witnessed. His attitude and modes of thought had all been shaken. There seemed no sense or purpose to it all. Faiths, he averred, were "merely treacheries for the ensnarement of the naive"; nevertheless, he envied those "not troubled by questionings." But of course, precisely such questioning and seeking were the making of him.^[17]

In May Ed broached the idea to Epes of moving to Peking, where he could be closer to impending major developments in the north. He thought also of a trip to the central Yangtze region, with the aim of personally investigating Red-controlled areas south of the river. Snow's interest in the Communists had been further whetted by contacts he was making in left-wing circles in Shanghai. But the unexpected opportunity to do a fast book on the Manchurian and Shanghai wars caused him to put aside other plans. Howard and Dorothy had come up with a publisher, and a New York agent, interested in a book from Ed to be completed in time for fall publication. The publisher (Century Company) bowed out, but the agent, Henriette Herz, stayed with Snow for much of his writing career. Ed was doubtful of what he could produce in little more than two months to meet an August I deadline in New York. He nonetheless got to work, put aside his Yunnan travel book, and in June arranged for a forty-day unpaid leave from Con Press. (Given the extremely fight cash flow situation, Epes told him, "you couldn't have selected a better time to lay off.")^[18]

Once begun, the book became "an obsession" for Ed, and "a race against time." The manuscript, fifteen chapters and 76,000 words, was completed on July 19, his twenty-seventh birthday. "Earsplitting" renovation work going on in his apartment building, and an unbearably hot and humid Shanghai heat wave had been added obstacles. The heat left him "limp and with no desire but to lie still, exercising neither mind nor body." He vowed to make this his last Shanghai summer.^[19]

Snow, a writer who meticulously checked and painstakingly revised and polished his work, was dissatisfied with a product turned out under such frantic circumstances. He anticipated its rejection, which would not find him "sorry." In fact, it took almost another year of persistent effort by agent Herz to find another publisher. There was then even a greater rush to update, revise, and enlarge the original manuscript for its October 1933 publication. It was like doing a new book, Snow noted.

The final result was undoubtedly much stronger than the original effort, and one that he felt "will not hurt my reputation (if any) as a journalist." Once he shipped it off, he had no opportunity for any further changes, nor was he able to correct final proofs. He was dismayed at the inordinate number of typos and other errors ("some with rather tragic consequences") that marred the book. (It was a criticism made by many reviewers as well.) Ed was especially irritated that the dust jacket incorrectly identified him as correspondent for United Press. The book had no maps or index. The publishers, Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, operated on a shoestring, without publishing or distribution facilities of their own. (Smith later joined Random House, which became Ed's permanent publisher.) Public interest in Far Eastern conflicts was limited in depression-ridden America and there had been a flood of books on the subject. Nor did his publisher do much to promote Snow's book. Rather expensively priced at $3.75, the book sold fewer than 700 copies; Snow earned nothing beyond his $250 advance. Foreign editions later netted him a bit more.^[20]

Yet Far Eastern Front was an important, even extraordinary, work and had many of the hallmarks of future Snow books. It combined informative background and solid, prophetic analysis with striking depictions of major actors and events, all recounted in a vivid personal style. Snow occupied a conspicuous place in the drama, as an "in the thick-of-battle" eyewitness, and as an unsparingly frank commentator on the overall scene. There was outrage at Japan's aggressions, scathing notes on the puppet charade of Manchukuo, scorn at the nonresistance policies and oppressive venality of China's militarist rulers, admiration for the patriotic heroism of Shanghai's defenders, and empathy for the human cost of it all. Snow's writing and persona were still maturing. His prose could become overheated and melodramatic, and there was a penchant for the fancier word when simpler ones would do. His first-person mode might call for more quietly assured and less breathless handling ("the stirring adventures of Edgar Snow," one reviewer sarcastically remarked). But these were peripheral points to a style that already had Snow's punch, color, personality, and humanity.

American reviewers invariably used such descriptive terms as "riveting," "absorbing," "readable," "dramatic," calling Snow an exceptionally able and intelligent writer. In Shanghai, the Review's lengthy assessment saw Snow as a new breed of modern, liberal China expert—in sharp contrast to the treaty port mentality of old China hands. The noted Chinese literary critic and author Lin Yu-tang gave the book particularly high

marks, not only for its eminently readable qualities, but its "heartfelt sympathy for the Chinese people." There was "no humbug, no heaviness, no Shanghai mind, no capitalist bias," Lin wrote. A dissenting view came from the China Forum , a pro-Communist journal published in the International Settlement in the early 1930s. It was an anomaly Snow would often face from the orthodox left, despite (in this case) his vigorous condemnation of the anti-Communist Kuomintang regime and his essentially sympathetic assessment of the Chinese Communists. Harold Isaacs, the reviewer and the youthful American editor of the Forum , had come to China three years earlier after graduating from Columbia College in New York and would shortly break with the Stalinist Communist movement. Isaacs later continued to take a jaundiced view of Snow, but from an opposite standpoint—that of a disenchanted former "insider" who now saw Snow as a naively sympathetic "outsider".— or "fellow traveler."^[21]

But Isaacs's chief complaint against Snow in 1933 was of his typically "liberal" failure to deal with events in Marxist class struggle terms. Snow thus offered a purely "ocular narrative"—he "sees all but knows nothing." Isaacs reluctantly granted that Snow had described the Shanghai fighting "with some power." There were also "a few passages of interesting facts," especially on the evils and weaknesses of the Nanking regime. Snow deserved "some credit" for this, since most "bourgeois" journalists ignored such matters. Isaacs reserved his greatest scorn for Snow's proposed "solutions" to the Far Eastern problem. In truth, Ed himself doubted they would be acted upon. Other reviewers had also (though much less disdainfully) dismissed them as little more than a forlorn hope.

In the concluding "Destinies of Asia" chapter of his book, Snow grappled with the dilemmas and contradictions stemming from his analysis of the realities of the Asian and world scene. (He also presumably kept in mind the noninterventionist attitudes of his American audience.) In the main this analysis continued to be key to his thinking, as well as a point of departure for his later perspectives. In this sense, Snow's ultimately more realistic stance incorporated the visionary reflections of 1933. The picture Snow drew was discouraging. Japan, propelled by its militarists' sense of national destiny and prestige, would inexorably continue its offensive against China. Further, Tokyo's expansionist drive would eventually challenge the entire Western position in Asia. "The rise of an Eastern Power great and daring and determined enough to defy the European Powers and America," Snow concluded

on a Spenglerian note, "probably marks the twilight of Western mastery."

The "new" imperialism of Japan, Snow argued, was essentially no different from that of the earlier European empire builders. In any impending contest with Japan, the Western powers' primary concern would be self-preservation of imperial interests, not self-determination for Asian peoples. But the West, defensive, passive, and beset by a rising tide of colonial unrest, lacked Japan's push and spirit. The latter had the additional great advantage of the color issue, a potent factor in an Asia dominated by white racial supremacy and prejudice. Snow thus faced the dilemma of his "damned if you do and damned if you don't" view of the Western position in Asia. Failure to stand up to Japan inevitably meant Japanese ascendancy. But if the West ultimately confronted this challenge, it would do so only out of unworthy imperialist motives. As for America, while Snow had earlier derided the efficacy of the Hoover-Stimson (and the League's) nonrecognition stance, he now reasoned that neither the relatively small American economic stake in China nor the defense of the treaty system justified what would be an "absurd war" with Japan. Even should the United States prevail, at great and calamitous cost to both sides, America would end up in the role of Japan—the dominant, and highly unwelcome, imperial presence in China. (Snow here gave a foretaste of America's unhappy role in China following Japan's defeat in 1945.) The problem of Japanese militarism was primarily one for the Japanese people to resolve. A pacific Western posture might help encourage the "moderates" there.

China itself, divided, weak, and engaged in internal strife, was an easy prey for Japan. Preoccupied with its campaigns to suppress communism in the hinterland, and imposing a "White Terror" on radical and liberal elements in the cities, the Nanking regime had neither the will nor capacity to take on Japan. Under these conditions, no effective national resistance movement had emerged. China could even end up as a subservient partner in a new Japanese East Asian order. In brief, in its "present condition," China was both unable to save itself and unworthy of external rescue. America's only option for restraining Japan, Snow concluded, would have to be diplomatic. Here nonrecognition of Manchukuo needed to be supplemented by equal determination to move on with the liquidation of America's own "imperialist adventure" in the Philippines. This in turn should be the lever to pressure the European powers into adopting a twenty- to thirty-year plan leading to full self-government for their Asian colonies. If the Japanese managed to

break the militarists' grip, Snow saw a "faint hope" that Japan might respond by similar moves in Manchukuo and possibly Korea. These measures would, for the first time, attack the fundamental causes of all conflict in the Orient. "It would require the Western Powers to yield up themselves that which they deny to Japan." The alternative was continued advance by "a triumphant and belligerent Japan," a race among the powers for markets and military primacy in the Pacific, and the "fatal progression" toward another world war, "this time to be fought on a Far Eastern Front." His proposals would be regarded as "visionary," Snow acknowledged. Yet his glimpse of the end of empire in Asia would become the reality, but it would take "a series of bloody conflicts" also envisioned by Snow. Japanese militarist wreckers, American power, and Asian revolutionaries would all play their parts.^[22]

Snow had shown an interest in the Communist movement in China even before embarking on his 1930 Asian travels. He had made an initial foray in print on the subject in a piece for Current History that appeared during his journey. It displayed a fair amount of information (secondhand and not always accurate) secured from Shanghai sources. Snow's approach to the Reds was uncertain and ambivalent. He alternated, in somewhat schizoid fashion, between two images of the Communist-led peasant uprising. On the one hand, the Reds “looted and pillaged" captured cities and towns, "ravaged" the countryside, and killed thousands of men and women of the "upper classes." Snow also pointed to "the directing hand of Moscow" and financing through "Russian agents" in the treaty ports. On the other hand, he pictured the movement as an effectively led, powerful revolutionary force with great potential and promise for China's oppressed and impoverished millions. It was the deplorable conditions of Chinese life, and the Kuomintang's failure to better them, that had won the Communists their successes and the support of poor peasants and "half-starved" workers. Snow was thus already moving away from the simplistic "Red bandit" portrait propagated by the Chinese government and most press reports. His article was in fact paired and contrasted with one rifled, "Banditry in a New Guise." But Snow's assessment also revealed the built-in contradictions for him as a liberal-humanitarian, sensitive to the conditions that led to inevitably violent and ruthless social revolution.^[23]

Snow's further education on the revolutionary movement in China came from a very special source. Some time after the Shanghai war ended in 1932, he sought out Madame Sun Yat-sen (Soong Qingling), to do a profile of her for the Herald-Tribune . Madame Sun's credentials

were truly formidable. As the widow of the officially revered Dr. Sun, with her younger sister married to the Generalissimo, her older sister to China's top banker and major government figure, and her brother T. V. the financial wizard of the Nanking regime, Qingling was clearly a most inconvenient but personally untouchable odd woman out. She openly and uncompromisingly condemned Chiang and his regime as betrayers of Sun's legacy and retained links to, and support for, the liberal and revolutionary opposition. She was a guiding force in the China League for Civil Rights, which sought human rights in general, and legal protections and fair trials for the thousands of political prisoners, usually accused as Communists.

Soong Qingling was a radian fly lovely and well educated modern woman, with a subtle intelligence, indomitable will, and independent character. She dearly had the qualities Snow found most appealing in women. (He had already written a paean of praise to China's "modern" emancipated new career women.) Ed later characterized Qingling as "the conscience and constant heart of a 'still unfinished revolution.'" Harold Isaacs, equally smitten, remembered her as "advancing her causes not just by the power of her name but by the quality of her person and her presence."^[24]

Snow's first meeting with Madame Sun (known to her close foreign friends by her Wesleyan College sobriquet, Suzie) took place at the American hangout in Shanghai, the Chocolate Shop—also the site of Ed's first encounter with Peg. Madame Sun and Snow became good friends. Through her, Snow recalled, "I met the thought and sentiment of China at its best." She introduced him to "young writers, artists, and fighters who were to make history." She told him about the Chinese revolution and its politics in a way he "could never have learned from books." Perhaps most important, she made him "comprehend that the Chinese people were capable of radically changing their country," and raising it once again to its rightful place in the world.

Snow was a frequent guest at Madame Sun's home on the Rue Molière in the French Concession, where she presided over something of a left-wing cultural-political salon and befriended also the American radical journalists Agnes Smedley (who became an important figure for Snow) and Harold Isaacs. Unlike them, Snow was never part of Madame Sun's inner political circle of clandestine revolutionary contacts and undertakings, though he did tap into it for his trek to the northwestern Red base in 1936. As Israel Epstein notes in his recent biography of Madame Sun, though she had visitors from "all sections of society," she

generally Kept them "strictly separate, even if they knew each other, were trusted by her, and were dose in outlook." Tiffs was actually the pattern in Shanghai's leftist circles during those years of the White Terror.^[25]

Lu Xun (Hsün) was then another major force in Snow's development. He was China's foremost modern literary figure, and the revered exemplar of its revolutionary young writers. Born in 1881 and raised in the scholarly classical tradition, he became a champion of the new vernacular literary style, and a biting critic of all the "man-eating" malig-nancies of Chinese life. His short stories, essays, and parables dealt with the sham, hypocrisy, self-deceit, inhumanity, and injustices in Chinese society. Snow felt that Lu Xun, whose essays left readers "between bitter laughter and indignation," might best be described as "China's Voltaire." Lu Xun became strongly hostile to the Kuomintang after 1927 and moved toward the Communist opposition. He was an active figure in the Red-inspired League of Left-Wing Writers founded in 1930. But he affirmed always the creative independence of the writer from all political dictation. From "the standpoint of the [Communist] Party apparatus, Lu Hsün was a prickly kind of supporter to have," Isaacs recalled. On Lu Xun's death of tuberculosis in 1936, ten thousand people joined his funeral procession on a route closely guarded by armed police, to his burial place in Chinese Shanghai.^[26]

Snow met Lu Xun through Madame Sun; Lu in turn introduced Ed to the new writers and literature of the left. These writers lived, as did the famed Lu, in the shadow of the Kuomintang terror, even in the supposed sanctuary of the foreign enclaves. "During these years," Frederic Wake-man, Jr., writes in his study of the Shanghai police during the 1927-1937 Nanking decade, "the Nationalist government was expending a large proportion of its resources on the extirpation of Communists and other progressives, who were either jailed or killed, or offered the choice of defection or betrayal with its material rewards." Western radicals had extraterritorial protection, but Chinese leftists were at risk. It is true that Chinese dissident organizations, publications, and individuals might find some haven in the foreign settlements, either covertly or on a semi-legal footing. (The Communist party's central leadership functioned underground in Shanghai until probably 1932.) But the International Settlement counts quite routinely turned over accused Communists to the Nationalist authorities, many of them to their deaths. These courts, according to Isaacs, "handed over 326 real or alleged 'Communists' to the Kuomintang" from 1930 to 1932. Patrick Givens, the "charming Irishman" in charge of the Special (political) Branch of the International Settlement police, "per-

sonified" this collaborative policy, Wakeman states. (Givens had also been the one who compiled the infamous Shanghai "red" dossier on Snow.) When Givens retired in 1936 as assistant commissioner, he was awarded the Chinese medal of honor, along with a letter from the mayor of (Chinese) Shanghai, noting that "in the course of [Givens's] duties in securing evidence against Communists, he frequently worked in close cooperation with the [Nationalists'] Bureau of Public Safety."

The fascist-like Blue Shirts of the KMT also intimidated the regime's critics in the foreign concessions through kidnappings and assassinations. Ex-Communist informers added to the fear-ridden, conspiratorial atmosphere. Isaacs, who maintained very carefully circumscribed contact with the Communist sponsors of his journal between 1932 and 1934, later recounted, "It did not do for any vulnerable Chinese to be seen in my company." He never knew the real names of the ones who worked for the Forum , and "if I ever did meet any important Communist figures in Shanghai in those days, I never knew who they were. What one did

not know, one could not tell."^[27]

The execution in February 1931 of five young writers was a particularly infamous case. They had been among twenty-four persons arrested in a British police raid on a secret Shanghai meeting of a Communist opposition faction, all of whom were turned over to the Nationalist authorities and executed at the notorious Lunghua killing grounds outside Shanghai. (A story by one of the executed writers was included in Snow's Living China . )^[28]

Snow, while deeply influenced by his radical contacts, had no inside picture of the revolutionary network. Isaacs, however, was close to the Communist movement and knew at first-hand its rigidly imposed "line," its control mechanisms, its harsh treatment of deviationists, and lethal reprisals against defector informers. Through Madame Sun, and less closely Lu Xun, Snow dealt with compellingly attractive and out-spokenly independent leftist figures, who saw his sympathetic but autonomous position as an asset and in his writings found more prominent expression for their radical views. Lu Xun encouraged and assisted Ed in collecting representative short stories of the new literature of protest, which Snow translated (with Chinese assistants) and edited. Stories by Lu were the centerpiece of this Living China book, which included also an essay on him by Snow. And with the volume's dedication to Soong Qingling, "whose incorruptible integrity, courage, loyalty, and beauty of spirit are burning symbols of the best in living China," Snow affirmed his admiration for these two influential figures.^[29]

Snow always responded more readily to the humanistic approach to the larger China equation, rather than to abstract ideological analyses or detached Western treatises on the subject. He once observed to Howard that the "few translations we have of Chinese fiction and philosophy are more valuable than all the thousands of pages poured through the lens of twisted foreign perspectives." The Chinese were "real people like ourselves," he wrote a publisher, and he saw his Living China project as an antidote to "the impossible fiction on China" turned out by Western writers. It was to the human condition ("all kinds of people, and what they thought and said and how they lived"), and to the misery of it all in China, that he reacted most intensely.^[30]

The line between liberal democrat and radical revolutionary was a thin one in Nationalist-ruled China. Liberal political options were then (and since) in very short supply. The Nanking authorities applied the "Communist" label broadly and freely to its opponents, though such elements among China's intellectual and cultural circles covered a broad political spectrum. "In the revolutionary literature movement," Snow observed in 1935, "there were, for example, disgruntled bourgeoisie, salon socialists, liberals, Communists, Menshevists, Trotskyites, and whatnots." In this context, Snow (perhaps a bit disingenuously) could later lump together as critics of the regime the independent revolutionary writer Lu Xun and the urbane literary satirist Lin Yu-tang. They were both "merely Western-oriented liberal individualists"—a rubric Snow presumably applied to himself as well.^[31]

In Snow's continuing China education, the role of Soong Qingling was somewhat akin to J. B. Powell's in 1928. The personal qualities of both individuals immediately captivated Snow, particularly their courageous independence—Powell's pro-China stand in the face of "die-hard" Shanghailander hostility, and Madame Sun's outspoken condemnation of the Chiang regime in the harshly repressive atmosphere of the early 1930s. She gave Ed a view of China's recent political history that reflected her support for the leftist forces crushed in 1927. Madame Sun had been an active figure in the Kuomintang-Communist alliance. She saw its destruction as a counterrevolutionary betrayal of Sun's cause. For her, the banner of the "unfinished revolution" had been taken up by the Communists, and other remaining leftist and liberal dissident forces.

Snow, of course, was no longer the China novitiate of 1928. Soong Qingling reinforced many of the conclusions he had already reached while she explained the leftist view of the revolutionary events of the 1920s. She liked and trusted Ed and utilized 'him to publicize her opin-

ions in the "bourgeois" American media. At the same time, by copious quotations and attributions to Madame Sun, Snow could project his own "liberal-leftist" views on China in a less politically compromising manner. (His writings would nevertheless raise some hackles back home, as well as in China.)

Thus in a September 1932 dispatch, Snow quoted Madame Sun to the effect that the Kuomintang had become a "moribund institution doomed to extinction." She thinks, Snow went on, "that the Chinese Communist Party is the only real revolutionary force in China today," and that it would soon conquer the entire country. Snow cited her judgments on the rulers in Nanking: "mediocre men," lacking any "progressive social or political concept," with "darkly feudal minds," who have brutally destroyed the spirit and principles of the Kuomintang. In his profile article on Madame Sun the following year, Snow elaborated on these themes, again by numerous citations from her. It was also a thoroughly admiring portrait. "I have never met anyone who inspires such instant trust and affection," Ed declared. In reporting Madame Sun's condemnation of the Chiang regime and all its works, Snow somewhat cautiously added, "These are opinions which not many would dare voice so strongly, but which, although there are mitigating circumstances, it would be impossible to confute completely." Clearly, they were views Ed himself endorsed.^[32]

It was in Snow's closer attention to the Chinese Communists that Madame Sun's impact was most evident. In June 1932 Snow expressed to Epes a strong interest in "the Communist situation in central China," noting that a trip to those regions would "offer particular lure since practically no reliable information has yet been secured from actual investigation." Apparently through his new Shanghai contacts, Ed attempted for some months to gain entry to the Red areas, but to no avail. Madame Sun "strongly sympathizes" with the Red armies fighting in central China, Ed wrote in his profile on her. "A woman of unusual grit herself, perhaps she admires their spirit." Snow linked the Communist label often attached to Madame Sun with her opposition to Nanking's anti-Communist suppression campaigns, to her key role in many "liberalizing movements," and to her "ceaseless effort to relieve the oppressed." Again, Snow associated his own views with these positions. "I do not know much about these 'Chinese Red Armies'; accurate information is hard to secure," he wrote. "It is impossible for anyone familiar with the present tragedy of rural life in China to deny a certain admiration for this little band of fighters." Noting that the Reds now "had the

audacity to declare war on Japan," Snow expressed "a modicum of contempt" for those Nationalists waging war on the Communists while the Japanese pushed down from the north. And again in line with Madame Sun's convictions, Snow expressed the view that Sun Yat-sen and the Communists he had united with before his death had shared "the same avowed purposes"—"achieving social, economic and political unity and justice," uplifting "the masses of men who toil," and "making them into human beings."^[33]

In Far Eastern Front Snow reiterated these themes with his usual ample references to Soong Qingling. The Kuomintang's "revolutionary character" had become "a grim joke and earned the tragic laughter of China," while the Communists had carried on the agrarian revolution and implemented basic social, economic, and political reforms that appealed to "the vast landless, propertyless classes." Yet Snow questioned whether this would become anything more than a "destructive" peasant movement that could bring down the corrupt and decaying old order. It "remained to be seen whether the movement would produce something better to replace it ." On the indications thus far, he rather curiously (and obscurely) declared, Communist victory "would mean the triumph of ochlocracy" (mob rule). He faulted the movement for its lack of "ideological background and instructed leadership," dubiously citing as key evidence the absence of any translation into Chinese of Marx's Capital .^[34]

Perhaps Snow was then influenced by his Shanghai radical intellectual contacts who reflected the conventional urban Marxist suspicion of a peasant-centered revolution. In any case, Snow already saw the rural revolution in typically human terms—"peasants who call themselves Communists, but who are in reality men who have been crushed, oppressed, robbed, bullied," and "are at last in a revolt for freedom," he explained to his father in early 1933. Still, Ed's unease with such impoverished, desperate peasants who needed to be uplifted into "human beings," may have been a residue of his American middle-class origins. It may also underlie Snow's intellectual attraction to the "uplifting" social reformism of the British Fabian socialists. And on the American scene, he was still apt to think in terms of his "own kind." Commenting to Mildred in November 1932 on the birth of a son to Howard and Dorothy, he could remark on the responsibility of "the well-bred, the intelligent, the worthwhile element of the population" to "perpetuate itself."^[35]

Snow's strongly asserted China views were bound to raise problems for him both in China and back home. He remarked to Howard in Sep-

tember 1933 that his newly published Far Eastern Front "will probably result in making enemies for me in certain quarters in China," and he also expected his Madame Sun article to arouse "considerable antagonism among certain officials." And Peg wrote to Ed's father that "we await with some slight anxiety the repercussions from the book next month, especially among the Chinese and Japanese." In July of that year in Peking Snow consulted the American minister to China, Nelson T. Johnson (subsequently ambassador), about his Shanghai British police dossier that had followed him around Asia since his early days in China. This had become of greater concern to him since he had heard, according to Johnson's memorandum of the meeting, that "the story was going about town that he was under suspicion as being a friend of radicals, a subversive character, etc." Johnson noted that "Mr. Snow informed me of his friendship for Mrs. Sun Yat-sen and for one or two others of the younger China group in Shanghai who have been prominently engaged in the propagation of liberal ideas." The minister's basic counsel was for Snow to ignore the matter, "leaving his actions and his writings to prove the falsity or truth" of the allegations.^[36]

Snow's subsequent "actions and writings" did not ward off his detractors. He would have numerous run-ins with the Nanking authorities through the years. He discussed some of these in a February 1937 letter to Ambassador Johnson in Nanking. Referring to his Living China volume, Snow responded typically. "I learned very much while doing this book—probably too much, along certain lines, for the powers that be to look upon me benignly again," he told Johnson. "You cannot enter a thing like this very deeply without coming to share some of the feeling that produces it—and to begin to have feelings about a country and its people may prove a good road to ruin for a 'foreign correspondent.'" The Japanese, equally unhappy with Snow's reporting, had him on their blacklist from the early 1930s.^[37]

There were some repercussions on the home front too. Howard, now working for the ultra-conservative National Association of Manufacturers, wrote Ed in June 1935 that he had "heard indirectly" that Ed was becoming "leftist" or "Communistic." Snow reacted sharply, as he would always do on such charges. (Nor could he resist needling Howard on his new job: "Is it your task to get more manufacturers to associate or to promote company unions among the workers?") As to the "Communistic" rumors, "You must know very well that it would do me no good in my work to have such stuff circulating. There is hardly an editor in America who would print a thing by me if it were thought I was a Communist.

And for your satisfaction, I am not." He belonged to no political organization and adhered to no "ready-made economic or political doctrine whatever, whether Marxist or Leninist or Mussolinian or Rooseveltian."

Ed's reply to Howard gave him an opportunity to sum up his social and political thinking as it had evolved by 1935, just a year before his journey to the Red northwest. There was a clear distinction between his approach to America and China. Toward the former, he affirmed his belief ha its democratic principles, while favoring the reform of its "hopelessly archaic economic system" along more planned, socialistic lines. He saw this in essentially Fabian terms: it did not require revolution, only the "intelligent" exercise of the vote by the citizenry. The ideals of the found-hag fathers could be made consistent with "a decent civilized system of life and economics which will fairly soon put the control of the means of production in the hands of the people, and for the widest social benefit:." China, however, was a very different matter. There, the "man with the biggest pile and the biggest army casts all the votes." Now, finally, millions of starving peasants and workers were attempting to organize their own armies and seize the power. "They are in revolution," which was "sometimes the only thing that will save a people," and "is tried only when every other means of resolving intolerable situations has been exhausted." The Chinese Red Army was thus the "technique" used by the long-suffering masses "to cast their vote in the national will." Now "volcanic and catastrophic in its manifestations," it is "the people's thumbs-down on the rulers of the realm." (All in all, we might wonder just how reassuring Ed's letter was to Howard! Actually, up to the 1950s nearly all of Snow's reporting was for generally conservative American newspapers and journals, and the anti-Communist British Labor Daily Herald , and he avoided writing for avowedly radical publications.)^[38]

This letter in its essentials expressed Snow's standpoint on the Chinese revolution and on social revolution generally. Any remaining am-bivalences he had on the Red Chinese cause (such as his image of its unbridled peasant fury) would be largely dispelled in his 1936 journey of investigation. But it is time to backtrack to another much more personal and pleasing challenge to Snow's independence—courtship, marriage, and life in ancient and beautiful Peking. This former capital, a focal point of Japan's expansionist aims in northern China, would soon be the site of a student-led surging anti-Japanese tide. Helen and Ed Snow would be important participants.