Scrapbook collection offers glimpse of life in pre-World War II China

China in the 1930s was a place truly off the beaten path for Americans - and even for journalists.

But the country’s isolation and remoteness added to the adventure of being a foreign correspondent in prewar China.

Frank Smothers, a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, took his young family to Peiping (Peking, now Beijing) in 1935, where he chronicled the political and social scene and such everyday events as house hunting and going to market. He wrote more than 500 stories between February 1934 and March 1937, and he kept copies of most of the stories in scrapbooks.

Those scrapbooks, with their yellowing newspaper clips, now rest in ASU’s Department of Archives and Special Collections, thanks to Smothers’ grandson Michael Smothers.

Michael Smothers, an editor and reporter from Peoria, Ill., recently donated his father’s scrapbooks and other papers to ASU, where they will join the papers of other prewar Asian correspondents, such as Agnes Smedley, A.T. Steele, Mac Fisher and Jack Belden.

Scholars and those interested in prewar China now will have an unparalleled opportunity to learn firsthand about life in China - and about how journalism was practiced in that era.

Smothers wrote from the perspective of being a Christian, a Midwesterner and a family man, his grandson says.

“He graduated from Northwestern University and soon joined the Daily News, where he covered Chicago’s Prohibition-era gangs and the famous Leopold-Loeb ‘thrill murder’ trial before joining the newspaper’s prestigious foreign correspondence team,” Michael Smothers says.

When his grandfather went to China, Michael Smothers says, “Asia was just beginning to be of interest to the West in a major way.”

Not only do his stories, which are collected in 10 scrapbooks and a box of loose clips, illuminate Chinese politics and culture, but they are a window into the journalism of that time - what was covered, and what editors allowed to be published, Michael Smothers says.

Though journalism is “the first draft of history,” journalists of that era, in particular, did not think about preserving their work, he says.

That ASU has perhaps the best collection of China and Asia correspondents’ papers from that era can be credited to the work of Stephen MacKinnon, a professor of history.

“Frank Smothers was a colleague of A.T. Steele, around whom I have built a collection at ASU of major China reporters from the 1930s and 1940s,” MacKinnon says. “In 1982, I organized an oral history conference of many of these figures held in Scottsdale. The result was a book, ‘China Reporting,’ published by University of California Press in 1987. The Smothers family knew about this book and conference, and so we came in contact.”

The newspaper clippings in Smothers’ scrapbooks are fragile, and some are loose, so their first stop in Hayden Library will be the preservation department.

“Since the newsprint is deteriorating, we may wish to prepare some protective boxes for them, which will create their own microclimate and retard, somewhat, further deterioration,” says Marilyn Wurzburger, Special Collections librarian.

Judith Smith, jps@asu.edu

(480) 965-4821

http://www.asu.edu/news/stories/200602/20060215_chinascrapbook.htm