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 14, 1885, in a "two-room parsonage" in Friend, Nebraska, the "Middle West," to parents who were middle class liberals active in the Congregational Church and missionary work. 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 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 Education Office, 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 still convinced that capitalism was responsible for poverty, and sufferings 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 Mt. Rainier, leading to the Washington Alpine Club, formed in 1916. Strong died in a hospital in Beijing (then Peking) on March 29, 1970, pulling out her "intravenous tubes and had refused to eat and take medication."