August 10, 2013
Edgar Snow, a journalist with the Saturday Evening Post who chronicled the rise of Communist China, was one of the victims of the McCarthyist "Who Lost China" debate. This biography, from an author who obviously admired Snow, sheds a lot of light on who he really was.
Snow is probably not much of figure today, one way or the other, and this book suffers from that reality. But I appreciated its insight into the Red Scare and the silliness it endangered, as in the following passage:
"Frightened Americans turned on themselves, on everyday people: librarians, teachers, scientists, maritime workers, electricians, New York City Transit Authority employees. A nineteen-year-old Seattle pot-washer lost her job in a hospital kitchen when her husband and father were named during a hearing of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1952, Henry Willcox, the president of Willcox Construction Company, visited China for two months. While he was gone the board of directors voted him out for fear of losing a contract with the New York Housing Authority. The New York Guild of the New York Times and the New York Daily News elected not to defend reporters who lost their jobs for taking the Fifth Amendment before congressional investigating committees.
"Americans and their representatives generated more public confusion and did more to wreck fellow Americans' lives and to subvert American values and institutions than Stalin, in his country's weakened state, could ever have hoped to achieve through Soviet actions. They did it all in the name of patriotism.
"The real tragedy of Edgar Snow was about to come into the open: not the tragedy many proclaimed, that Snow had mislead Americans about Communist intentions, but the tragedy that Americans, who had not paid close attention to what Snow wrote before, decided to ignore him altogether, precisely at a time when his insights, experience, and contacts were so desperately needed."