An American in Search of Revolution : EDGAR SNOW : A Biography <i> by John Maxwell Hamilton (Indiana University Press: $25; 352 pp.) </i>

Even today, I can visualize with perfect vividness the faded-blue binding of the copy of Edgar Snow’s “Red Star Over China,” which I finally found one winter afternoon in 1960 after a weeklong search in one of Harvard’s most out-of-the-way libraries. This classic 1938 account of the genesis of Mao’s Chinese Communist Revolution had been assigned in a survey course on Far Eastern history taught by the doyen of American China studies, John K. Fairbank. Although 20 years after its first publication it was still the work on Mao’s life and the early years of his agrarian revolution. Because of the wave of McCarthy-ite hysteria that had swept the United States in the 1950s and maligned so many of the country’s most experienced and insightful China observers, Snow was in bad odor among the Establishment and his classic book was out of print. Even at liberal Harvard University where Fairbank, Snow’s old friend, taught, there were no more than a handful of dog-eared copies available. It was a great shame, because as I soon learned when I opened the tattered binding of my newly found prize and began reading, there were few more spellbinding and astute books ever written about contemporary Chinese communism. In fact, so engrossed did I become in Snow’s account, that I was unable to put the book down until I had completely finished it. By then, it was dawn, and in spite of my fatigue, every fiber in my 19-year-old body yearned not only to to become a journalist like Snow, but to follow his footsteps to the Far East. And, indeed, still under his sway a year later, I did precisely that. Taking a leave of absence from college, I shipped out on a Norwegian freighter, and went to study Chinese in Taiwan.

In reading John Maxwell Hamilton’s superb new biography about Snow, which traces his life from his childhood in Kansas City, Mo., through his early years in China in the ‘20s and ‘30s, his stint in the Soviet Union, Europe and then India, covering the war and its aftermath during the ‘40s, his year languishing at home in America in the ‘50s, his path-breaking trips back to Mao’s China in the ‘60s, and finally his exile in Switzerland where he remained until his death in 1972, I was reminded over and over again not only of what a good and prescient writer Snow was, but how profoundly he had in fact influenced the lives and thinking of a whole generation of China watchers. And so, in ways that I had hardly expected, Hamilton’s well-researched and exciting work proved to be a homecoming of sorts.

What was so immensely appealing about Snow’s writing was the way in which he as a person combined adventure with a sense of commitment. Exciting without ever being flashing and self-promotional, he was a living embodiment of American values at their very best. He was, for instance, a deeply loyal and principled person, but one who had an abiding faith in the value of the individual.

As Hamilton notes, “While others yearned to get along in the corporate world which emerged in the 20th Century, Snow clung stubbornly to American storybook ideals, nurtured on the prairie--ideals that elevated the dignity of the individual, the ‘little man,’ and that honored self-determination and glorified its ultimate expression, revolution.”

Although rarely doctrinaire or polemical, Snow’s writing was almost always marked by an undisguised identification with the underdog and sense of moral purpose. This inborn sympathy for the downtrodden and sense of indignation at injustice made him naturally abhor all inequality, even if he were its beneficiary. In China, he spoke out tirelessly against the poverty that he saw ravaging so much of the population and decried the humiliating extraterritorial privileges that China had forced on treaty ports by superior military strength. As an ardent proponent of self-determination, he chided the imperial European powers for their reluctance to give up their colonial empires, just as in later years he criticized his own country for opposing what he saw as “popular uprisings against intolerable regimes.”

And, rarely in the history of journalism has there been a writer of such stature who was so tenaciously independent. Snow wrote what he wanted, fought against editorial censorship, and quit the only longstanding and lucrative job he ever had--with the Saturday Evening Post--in 1951 when he found himself more and more at odds with its growing editorial conservatism.

Snow was a man who was slow to anger, but deeply imbued with a Jeffersonian notion that rebellion against established authority is not only sometimes justified but necessary, he often found himself critical of established authority. “Nurtured on American rhetoric, educated about the world in countries that yearned for dramatic political, economic and social change,” Hamilton tells us, “Snow had no vested interest to protect. He became an American truly in search of revolution.”

What made the normally temperate Snow able even to imagine the notion of revolution was the abject poverty and the inequality, particularly between Chinese and foreigners, which he encountered as soon as he reached Shanghai. As he wrote to his brother in 1931, “What I hate, of course, is the filth of the country, the hopelessness of the people, the apparent poverty, distress, diseases and inequality everywhere.” And, out of this confrontation with people so much less fortunate than himself, developed a notion of writing as not simply a means for conveying truthful information, but as a form of social action.

As Snow told an inquiring Chinese, “My view is that writing justifies itself if its results add even a very small contribution to man’s knowledge, and I believe that can not be done without advancing the interests of the poor and the oppressed of this world, who are the vast majority of men.”

Snow was at heart both a humanist and an idealist. But what saved him from the kind of woolly-headed thinking of many other leftists of his generation was his down-to-earth Midwestern realism and abiding respect for “the facts.”

Indeed, rereading Snow’s articles and books once again, I find myself filled with renewed respect for not only their perceptiveness, but the way they have stood the test of time. As Hamilton reminds us, “He was a relentless questioner, meticulous in taking notes, working far into the night to sort out and ponder his material.” And whatever one may have thought of Snow’s affinity for being engage, he was first and foremost a reporter, a person rarely swayed from the truth by wishful political thinking. As Snow himself noted to the American ambassador to China, Nelson Johnson, after his epic journey to Mao’s hideout in Shanxi hills, “Wherever my person, I continue to be from Missouri,” which was, after all, the “Show Me State.” As diplomat Edmund Clubb said of his friend, he was “one of the most honest men I ever knew.”

But in spite of his rigorous respect for the facts, again and again Snow found himself being drawn into his own stories. In Beijing in the late 1930s, he helped students organize demonstrations against Chiang Kai-shek’s refusal to stand up to invading Japanese and then aided several to escape a police dragnet. In the ‘40s, he helped raise funds for a network of independent cooperatives that had been set up to provide desperately needed employment and production. And, throughout his career he used occasions to talk with Presidents, prime ministers and other high officials to lobby for what he believed to be right.

As he wrote from Moscow during World War II to his editor Bennett Cerf at Random House about his activist sensibility: “In this international cataclysm brought on by fascists it is no more possible for any people to remain neutral than it is for a man surrounded by bubonic plague to remain ‘neutral’ toward the rat population. Whether you like it or not, your life, your life as a force is bound either to help the rats or hinder them. Nobody can be immunized against the germs of history.”

Instead of resisting involvement, Snow embraced it as a natural and logical human response to the kind of suffering and tragedy he saw everywhere around him. It was this willingness to empathize, and even to act that became his hallmark as a journalist and made his writing so compelling, especially to a young man such as myself, who, primed with adolescent dreams of adventure and political activism, was all too ready to abandon everything and follow in his footsteps.

Sadly for Snow, however, his idealism, his quickness to sympathy and his political activism also lead to political problems. Because he had done more than any other writer to bring the nascent Maoist movement to Western attention, after the “loss” of China in 1949, he was smeared as a “leftist,” “fellow traveler,” “concealed communist,” and even as a “Soviet agent.” He became engaged in endless effort to set the factual record straight by trying to remind people that it was he who had long cautioned against viewing the Chinese Communists as “nineteenth-century agrarian democrats” who had lost interest in class revolution. As Snow wrote to a friend, “My record on China is clear for all to see; though my writing is full of faults in detail . . . it is not the work of a sycophant. It is honest independent journalism seeking the truth. . . . I am not a writer who changes his political views to suit a weather vane.”

But, alas, his efforts were futile. In the climate that prevailed in the United States during the ‘50s, such self-defense often seemed only to confirm one’s guilt. And so, Snow, one of America’s pre-eminent authorities on Chinese communism, languished for a decade virtually unpublished in his own country.

Snow wrote to his brother lamenting the fact that “The sense of freedom and liberty we know or thought we knew, or were taught that we actually had as boys, the feeling that one could express an opinion or could openly discuss any idea with immunity, seems to be gone from this country. We are forced more and more to become all of a piece, as like as peas in our politics, nobody daring to contradict the conventional views expressed in the great conservative or reactionary press, and in this respect becoming more and more like automatons in Russia.”

Although in 1960, Snow was the first American journalist to return to Beijing, and wrote another path-breaking book about the Mao revolution, “The Other Side of the River,” he had been largely pushed out of the mainstream of American journalism. And sadly, just as the United States began to come back to its senses about China, Snow’s life ended. He died on Feb. 15, 1972, fewer than three days before Richard Nixon left on his historic trip to meet Mao in the Peoples Republic.