Anna Louise Strong

Anna Louise Strong (November 24, 1885 – March 29, 1970) was an American journalist and activist, best known for her reporting on and support for communist movements in the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. She wrote over 30 books and varied articles.

Strong was born on November 24, 1885, in a "two-room parsonage" in Friend, Nebraska, the "Middle West," to parents who were middle class liberals active in missionary work and in the Congregational Church. She lived with her family from 1887 to 1891 in Mount Vernon, Ohio, and in Cincinnati beginning in 1891. Her father, Sydney Dix Strong, was a Social Gospel minister in the Congregational Church, active in missionary work, and a dedicated pacifist. Strong worked quickly through grammar and high school, and then studied languages in Europe.

She first attended Pennsylvania's Bryn Mawr College from 1903 to 1904, then graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio in 1905 where she later returned to speak many times. In 1908, at the age of 23, she finished her education and received a PhD in philosophy from the University of Chicago with a thesis later published as The Social Psychology of Prayer. Being an advocate for child welfare while she worked for the United States Office of Education, joining the National Child Labor Committee around the same time, she organized an exhibit and toured it extensively throughout the United States and abroad. When she brought it to Seattle, in May 1914, 6,000 people came to visit it every day, culminating with an audience, on May 31, of 40,000 people.

At this point, Strong was already convinced that capitalism was responsible for poverty and the suffering of the working class. She was 30 years old when she returned to Seattle to live with her father, then pastor of Queen Anne Congregational Church. Living with her father from 1916 to 1921, she favored the political climate there, which was pro-labor and progressive, with "radicalizing events" like the Seattle General Strike and Everett massacre.

Strong also enjoyed mountain climbing. She organized cooperative summer camps in the Cascades and led climbing parties up Mount Rainier, leading to the Washington Alpine Club, formed in 1916.

In 1916, Strong ran for the Seattle School Board and won easily due to the support she garnered from women's groups and organized labor and to her work on child welfare. She was the only female board member. She argued that the public schools should offer social service programs for underprivileged children, with these schools serving as community centers, but other members wanted to "devote meetings to mundane matters like plumbing fixtures."

The year she was elected to the Seattle School Board, the Everett massacre happened. The New York Evening Post hired her as a stringer to report on the conflict between armed guards, hired by Everett mill owners, and the Industrial Workers of the World (or "Wobblies"). Quickly dropping her neutrality, she soon became a dedicated spokesperson for workers' rights.

Strong's endorsement of left-wing causes set her apart from her colleagues on the school board. She opposed war as a pacifist. When the United States entered World War I in April 1917, she spoke out against the draft. On one hand, the Parent-Teacher Association and women's clubs joined her in opposing military training in the schools, but the former military veterans of the Spanish–American War, the Seattle Minute Men, took a jingoistic tone, branding her as "unpatriotic." The same year, she wrote a letter to the Department of Justice, saying