Loading...
Creator
Russell, Maud
Call number
MssCol 2649
Physical description
30 linear feet (82 boxes)
Language
Materials in English
Preferred Citation

Maud Russell papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library

Repository
Manuscripts and Archives Division
Access to materials
Request an in-person research appointment.

Collection consists of correspondence, writings, subject files, photographs, printed matter, and other items documenting Russell's life and work. Correspondence, speeches and writings, 1914-1989, include copies of outgoing letters, 1918-1943, describing her life and work in China and incoming letters, ca. 1951-1980, from friends in China with information which she used for her talks and for the Far East Reporter. Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy (CDFEP) records, 1945-1955, 1982, are a combination of Russell's files and those of the Committee and include minutes of meetings, press releases, pamphlets, newsletters, and subject files. Far East Reporter files, 1953-1989, contain a complete run of the publication plus correspondence, itineraries for speaking tours, clippings and periodicals that she used as source material, financial records, and manuscripts. Also, income tax records, 1956-1986, providing information about Russell's business expenses; her notebooks, daybooks, calendars, etc., 1919-1988; notes, catalogs and correspondence concerning her collection of Chinese pottery; biographical materials; printed matter, 1917-1989, including clippings and China-related newsletters.

Biographical/historical information

Maud Muriel Russell was born on August 9, 1893, in Hayward, Alameda County, California, near San Francisco. The oldest of four children, she was the daughter of Thomas Bartlett Russell, a fruit grower and civil engineer, and Lelia Smalley Russell. Russell attended Hayward public schools and the University of California at Berkeley, where she was active in the campus chapter of the Young Women's Christian Association. It was through the Berkeley YWCA that she met Mary Ingle Bentley (1878-1940), who later became her closest friend and life companion.

Shortly after graduation in 1915, Russell went to work for the YWCA's Pacific Coast field office in San Francisco. In the spring of 1917, the office received a visit from a recruiter for the YWCA of China. Intrigued, Russell arranged to meet with her. Although a graduate degree in social work was usually a prerequisite for overseas work with the YWCA, Russell was chosen for work in China on the condition that she spend part of her furloughs (roughly every seven years) in graduate study in the U. S. She sailed for Shanghai in August 1917.

As an interdenominational agency, the YWCA differed from other missionary groups in that its primary role was to educate rather than proselytize. (Russell later came to avoid entirely the term "missionary" in describing her work, preferring "social worker".) By 1916, YWCAs in China were offering literacy classes and programs stressing disease prevention and child welfare along with courses in sewing, cooking, and Bible study. The western women who worked for the China YWCA were expected to help their Chinese colleagues establish YWCAs in their communities, then to turn over the leadership of those Ys to an all-Chinese staff. Russell's first posting, after language study in Nanking, was with the newly-formed YWCA in Changsha, Hunan Province. She was there from 1919 until her first furlough in 1924, and again from 1928 to 1930 and 1932-1933.

In late 1926 and 1927, Russell was stationed in Wuhan (the term for the three Yangtze River cities of Wuchang, Hankow, and Hanyang), which was then the seat of the Nationalist government, having been recently liberated from warlord control by the coalition of the Chinese Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang, or KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In the wake of the warlords' defeat, numerous Communist-inspired labor unions sprang up, directing many of their efforts against foreign-owned businesses. As anti-foreign sentiment began to escalate in early 1927, missionary groups ordered the evacuation of their non-Chinese staffs from the interior of China to the coastal cities. Russell, who for some months had been translating political and labor-related handbills in Wuhan for her American constituency, was among the last to leave, arriving in Shanghai on April 10. Two days later, by order of the KMT, paramilitary groups in Shanghai attacked striking union members and their supporters, killing nearly a hundred of them and bringing a violent end to the CCP-KMT alliance.

The spring of 1927 was a turning point for Russell. She began to question more closely the various roles played by foreigners in China; at the same time, she began to read Marxist theory and to learn more about the 1917 Russian Revolution and the founding of the Soviet Union, with its implications for China. While on furlough in 1932, she spent some months in Leningrad and Moscow observing Soviet society before returning to China via Siberia and Manchuria.

For most of the 1930s, Russell's time in China was spent at the China YWCA's national headquarters in Shanghai and in various cities in the interior, where she helped to establish regional Ys. While in Shanghai in the early 1930s, she participated in a Marxist study group comprised of westerners and Chinese. Among them were the New Zealander Rewi Alley, later a founder of Indusco (Chinese Industrial Cooperatives), and YWCA colleagues Lily K. Haass, Talitha Gerlach, and Cora Deng (Deng Yu-shih). All four remained lifelong friends of Russell.

When Russell returned to China in 1938 after her second furlough, Japan had been occupying much of China, chiefly the coastal cities, for a year. The China YWCA began to direct most of its efforts in the central areas, eventually relocating its national headquarters from Shanghai to Chengtu in western China. From 1938 to 1943, Russell was stationed at various Ys in the interior, chiefly in Chengtu, Sian, and Kweiyang.

Russell was in Kweiyang in November 1940 when she received unexpected bad news: a telegram arrived from California, informing her of Mary Bentley's sudden death following a short illness. Theirs had been an unusual relationship, flourishing mainly through their correspondence, as their work had for the most part kept them on opposite sides of the world. The stress generated by shock and a continuing sense of loss may have contributed to Russell's developing a mild case of tuberculosis early in 1942.

By the early 1940s, there were fewer than twenty foreign women still working for the YWCA of China. Russell had gradually arrived at the awareness that she herself would be of more use in her native country than in China. In 1943, she was well enough to travel, and took advantage of an opportunity, not easy to come by in wartime, to return to the U. S. She left China a few months after her fiftieth birthday, arriving in California in November.

In the spring of 1944, Russell came east to New York, where she worked for the YWCA of Passaic, New Jersey while completing her master's degree in social work at Columbia University Teachers College, and often spoke about China before such civic groups as the League of Women Voters. By early 1946, she had become an active member of the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy (CDFEP), a progressive organization whose goals included opposition to American intervention in China, in particular the Truman administration's backing of the Nationalist government headed by Chiang Kai-shek.

Russell assumed the executive directorship of the CDFEP in June 1946, a position she held until the Committee's dissolution six years later. She moved from Passaic to New York in 1947, where she found an apartment on West 93rd Street with a China acquaintance, Ida Pruitt, the field director for the American Committee in Aid of Chinese Industrial Cooperatives. (Russell and Pruitt continued to share quarters until June 1961, when their building was slated for demolition. Pruitt moved to Philadelphia and Russell took an apartment on Riverside Drive, where she lived until her death in 1989.)

Russell's responsibilities as CDFEP director included frequently writing and speaking on current events in China. Continuing as a member of the CDFEP's Information Committee, she also helped with the reading and clipping of daily newspapers and the compiling of other materials for the Committee's resource files. These activities reflected the role she would later play as an independent editor and lecturer on contemporary Chinese affairs.

After 1949, the CDFEP's support for diplomatic recognition and trade with the People's Republic of China and its objections to America's role in the Korean War brought its members under increasing scrutiny by the House Un-American Activities Committee and the Attorney General's Subversive Activities Control Board. Membership and contributions fell off rapidly, forcing the CDFEP to disband in August 1952. Undaunted, Russell resolved to continue to lecture and write about China, feeling that Americans wanted to hear points of view other than the almost uniformly negative ones being provided by the mainstream press. With the help of her CDFEP colleague Ira Gollobin and others, she began publication of a newsletter, the Far East Reporter, a sort of successor to the CDFEP's Far East Spotlight. At the same time, she spent much of each year on the road, driving across the country to speak on China before school, church, and civic groups. To save expenses, she stayed whenever possible with former China colleagues and CDFEP supporters, who also often arranged and publicized her appearances.

For source material on China, Russell relied on a wide variety of newspapers and magazines ranging from the New York Times to the Far East Economic Review and China Reconstructs. She also received literature, slides, and films from friends in China, most notably Rewi Alley and Talitha Gerlach, and traveled to China herself in 1959, an action that resulted in the cancellation of her passport.

With the easing of Sino-American hostilities in the early 1970s, Russell found herself in growing demand as a speaker. She was particularly delighted by the intense interest in China shown by younger people, who comprised an increasingly large part of her audience. In 1971, she was among the first members of the United States-China People's Friendship Association (USCPFA), and went to China again in 1972.

Russell's last visit to China was in 1978, the same year in which failing eyesight caused her to abandon her annual cross-country car trips. A hearing loss and increasing mobility problems created by arthritis also limited her active participation in the USCPFA and other organizations. Nevertheless, she was able to tour Nicaragua in 1980, and went to Ireland with her sister in 1981, when she was eighty-eight. She also maintained a prolific correspondence with friends in the U. S. as well as China, and continued to publish the Far East Reporter several times a year.

In the early summer of 1989, Russell was diagnosed as having lung cancer. She died at home on November 8, at ninety-six.

Scope and arrangement

The eighty-one boxes comprising the Maud Russell Papers contain correspondence, writings, speeches, notebooks, clippings and other printed matter, photographs, and sound recordings; they also include minutes, newsletters, and subject files of the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy (CDFEP), and Far East Reporter files. These materials document Maud Russell's life and work for the Young Women's Christian Association in China from 1917 to 1943, her tenure as the executive director of the CDFEP in the 1940s and early 1950s, the speaking tours that took her on annual cross-country trips from 1953 to 1978, and her newsletter, the Far East Reporter, which she edited and published from 1953 until shortly before her death in 1989.

The great majority of this material reflects Russell's life-long interest in China and the role she saw for herself in bringing information to Americans on China's politics and people, at first in her employment with the YWCA and the CDFEP and later through her lectures and publications. Much of the correspondence from her years in China consists of Russell's copies of her outgoing letters to the American YWCA's New York headquarters and various regional Ys, describing her work and living conditions; most of the surviving incoming letters from ca. 1951 to 1980 are from friends who remained or returned to live in China after 1949 and regularly sent descriptions of and material about life in "new China", which Russell used for her talks and for the Far East Reporter. Her files of clippings and other printed matter also nearly all pertain to political events in China and aspects of Chinese society and culture.

Russell apparently weeded her files from time to time, possibly for lack of storage space; the volume of correspondence and printed matter increases noticeably after 1980.

Large runs of periodicals that arrived at the New York Public Library with Russell's papers, including the Peking Review and China Reconstructs, have been transferred to the Library's Periodicals Division.

The Maud Russell papers are arranged in ten series:

  • Series 1: Correspondence, Speeches, and Writings

    Roughly nine-tenths of Series 1 consists of correspondence, mostly Russell's copies of her outgoing letters. (As mentioned in the Scope and Content Note, Russell seems to have weeded her letter files periodically.) From 1918 to the early 1930s, most of these letters were to her family and to the "Asilomar group", the aggregate of college YWCAs in California, Arizona, and Nevada that raised funds to support her work in China. These letters include lively descriptions of the communities in which she lived and worked, the activities she shared with her friends, and her travels in different parts of China and Asia. Of particular note as well are Russell's letters to Mary Bentley and the Asilomar group that were written during her visit to the U. S. S. R. in 1932. (Very little else of the correspondence between Russell and Bentley is among these papers; the whereabouts of those letters, if they have survived, is unknown).

    Correspondence from the late 1930s and early 1940s documents the challenges of living and working in central China during wartime. Most of the letters from this period are to YWCA colleagues in the U. S. and in other parts of China.

    There is almost no incoming correspondence from 1918-1943, except for a number of letters of condolence Russell received after Bentley's death in November 1940. There are also scattered letters from relatives, and a few from such friends and acquaintances as Rewi Alley, Cora Deng, and Soong Ching-ling (Mme. Sun Yat-sen).

    Letters from the middle and late 1940s mainly concern Russell's work for the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy. Along with the chronological files in Box 5 are separate files of correspondence between Russell and Evans Carlson, Agnes Smedley, Edgar Snow, and Anna Louise Strong, all concerning a mixture of personal and CDFEP-related matters.

    The volume of incoming correspondence increases markedly in the 1950s. From 1951 to about 1980, virtually all of these letters are from Russell's friends in China, chiefly Talitha Gerlach in Shanghai and Rewi Alley, Anna Louise Strong, Israel Epstein, Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley, and David and Isabel Crook in Peking. Most of these letters contain accounts of life and work in the People's Republic of China, frequently including information that Russell used in compiling the Far East Reporter. Letters written during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) are often as notable for what they omit as for what they relate.

    Correspondence files from the last eight years of Russell's life show no sign of having been weeded. There are letters to and from her sister and nieces, old friends from her crosscountry lecture tours, and U. S. - China People's Friendship Association members, as well as the "China hands. ".

    Researchers should note that there are also two boxes of Russell's correspondence, 1949-1982, in Series 10, consisting mostly of letters from Russell to Ira Gollobin that she wrote during her travels across the country and her trips to China.

    Interfiled among the correspondence are the texts of trans-Pacific radio broadcasts made by Russell from China in the 1930s and early 1940s, and talks she gave in the New York area about China in the mid-1940s. The writings in Series 1 consist mostly of Russell's translations of political handbills in Wuhan and her term papers for her courses in social work at Columbia; of note also is an article from 1939, "Notes From a Summer Vacation in Yenan", describing her visit to the Chinese Communist Party headquarters there.

    Speeches and writings by Russell that pertain specifically to the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy and the Far East Reporter are found in Series 2 and Series 3.

  • Series 2: Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy

    Initially called the Committee for a Democratic Policy Toward China, the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy (CDFEP) was founded in 1945. Its stated goals were to inform Americans about Far Eastern issues, to oppose American intervention in East Asian countries, and to seek peaceful solutions to political conflicts through such international organizations as the United Nations. The CDFEP's diverse membership included journalists, former missionaries, and East Asian scholars. (Ronald Reagan's name also appears on early CDFEP stationery as a sponsor.).

    Through frequent conferences and a wide variety of publications, the CDFEP sought to provide politicians and the general public with an alternative perspective to that of the pro-Chiang Kai-shek China Lobby. After 1949, the Committee vigorously promoted American diplomatic recognition of the newly created People's Republic of China. In the Cold War climate of the early 1950s, however, organizations such as the CDFEP were increasingly regarded as subversive, Communist Party-controlled agencies that had conspired to bring about the "loss" of China to Communism. In 1952, as support and membership dwindled in the face of continuing FBI harassment, the CDFEP disbanded.

    A more detailed overview of the history of the CDFEP is available in a series of articles from the U. S. - China Review (1982) by Karen Kerpen, based on her doctoral dissertation, in Box 28.

    Evidently, many CDFEP records have been lost over time. Karen Kerpen notes in her dissertation and in Part III of her article that the McCarthy era was for the CDFEP "a time to protect supporters and sponsors from allegations or subpoena; files were hidden or destroyed and financial records were burned". (There is no citation for the source of this information.) In a June 30, 1961 letter to former CDFEP colleagues Israel Epstein and Elsie Fairfax-Cholmeley, Russell wrote about the housecleaning she was doing in preparation for moving to her Riverside Drive apartment, adding: "How I hated to throw away much valuable historical material collected during your days, but I just do not have place or use for them at present and there was no where to put them. ".

    An early member of the CDFEP, Russell succeeded Harold Fletcher as its executive director in June 1946, serving in that capacity until the organization's demise. The materials in this series are evidently a combination of her own files and those of the CDFEP's. Roughly one-third is mimeographed and printed matter: press releases, pamphlets, and newsletters; there are also four boxes of subject files. Box 18 includes an apparently complete set of minutes of meetings, the CDFEP's constitution and by-laws, and a small amount of correspondence.

  • Series 3: Far East Reporter

    Boxes 29-32 of Series 3 contain a mostly complete set of Russell's publication, the Far East Reporter. (Because Russell did not use volume and issue numbers or dates, feeling that they would imply a time limit on the informational value of each issue, it is difficult to ascertain whether the New York Public Library's Manuscripts Section received a full run of the FER.) Interfiled among the publications, which are arranged by year, are copies of Russell's form letters to subscribers, itineraries for her speaking tours, clippings and other periodicals that she used as source material, and occasional letters from subscribers and potential contributors.

    Boxes 33-43 contain financial records for the FER: Russell's ledgers, account books, receipt books, and lists of expenditures, interspersed with a few letters from subscribers. Box 44 contains various files (itemized in the box and folder lists for Series 3), including manuscripts, announcements of Russell's speaking tours and film showings, and her annual holiday letter to her subscribers.

  • Series 4: Income Tax Records

    Series 4 contains Russell's New York State and federal income tax records from the 1950s until a few years before her death. These files, along with the financial records for the Far East Reporter, may be of more than passing interest to researchers because of the occasional charges made by Russell's detractors that her newsletters and lecture tours were funded by suspicious sources, presumably the American Communist Party or the "red" Chinese government. Russell's painstaking itemization of business expenses seems to provide scant evidence for such accusations.

  • Series 5: Notebooks, Daybooks, Calendars, etc

    This series consists mostly of items in notebook form, among them a guestbook Russell kept during her first years in China, her daybooks - three- or four-line descriptions of daily activities from the 1930s through the 1980s - Christmas card and gift lists, and notes for speeches and from her three return visits to China.

  • Series 6: Various Materials

    Series 6 contains a diverse assortment of materials: notes, catalogs, and correspondence concerning Russell's collection of Chinese pottery; newspaper and magazine articles from the 1920s through the 1980s about her life and work; documents from and about the YWCAs of the U. S. and China, mostly from the 1930s and 1940s; an obituary for Mary Bentley and a few items concerning her nephew, the Berkeley artist and printer Wilder Bentley. Among the more unusual items in this series is a 1936 typescript (apparently never published) by an unidentified author, The Spirit of Yamato, evidently the memoirs of a western diplomat in Japan.

  • Series 7: Printed Matter

    Most of Series 7 consists of clippings from magazines and articles about China, compiled by Russell from the mid-1920s through 1989. Earlier clippings are from the English-language Shanghai paper, the China Weekly Review; later ones are from the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Manchester Guardian, and other newspapers. Box 65 contains clippings about Russell's friends and colleagues, arranged alphabetically.

    Series 7 also includes an assortment of China-related newsletters, including many from the 1940s from such organizations as Indusco and the China Aid Council. There is as well a nearly complete run of Anna Louise Strong's Letter From China (1962-1970).

    Box 66 includes several books belonging to Russell and heavily underlined and annotated by her, including a 1924 New Testament in modern speech, and a long poem by the British poet laureate Robert Bridges, The Testament of Beauty (1930).

  • Series 8: Photographs

    About a third of the pictures in Series 8 (Boxes 67-70) are snapshots taken in China by and of Russell between 1917 and 1936. The pictures, in albums and filed loosely in envelopes, mostly depict Russell and her friends and co-workers at the YWCAs where they worked and on holidays in various parts of China, and formal group portraits of YWCA staffs posing in front of their buildings. There are also pictures of Russell and her friends in other countries, including Japan, the Philippines, and India, taken during vacations and furloughs. Box 71 mostly contains pictures of Russell's friends from college days, pictures of Mary Bentley, and a number of pictures of Russell's China YWCA colleague Anne G. Seescholtz.

    Later pictures include Russell's snapshots from her visits to China in 1959, 1972, and 1978 (Boxes 72-73); CDFEP photos, and friends in the U. S. and China (Box 74). Box 75 includes formal portraits of Russell's parents, her childhood home in Hayward, and pictures of her nieces and nephew as children, as well as more recent snapshots of them and their families.

    The photographs in Boxes 76 and 77 are of China in the late 1940s and early 1950s, possibly originally acquired by the CDFEP. They depict such subjects as the People's Liberation Army, the celebratory parades of 1950 in Peking commemorating the first anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China, and developing industries in a number of cities.

  • Series 9: Sound Recordings

    Series 9 consists of cassette tapes made from three phonograph records* and four reel-to-reel tapes. [The Russell Papers contain a total of eight phonograph records, five of which are duplicates]. The phonograph records pertain to the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy, featuring addresses by Evans Carlson and Soong Ching-ling (Madame Sun Yat-sen) from 1946, and a question-and-answer session with Maud Russell about the CDFEP for radio station KPOJ in Portland, Oregon, 1950.

    The tapes contain two separate interviews with Russell for radio station KRAB in Seattle, Washington, conducted in December 1962 and September 1963.

  • Series 10: Files of Ira Gollobin and Ida Pruitt

    In 1991, the attorney Ira Gollobin, a close friend of Russell and the executor of her estate, gave to the New York Public Library a number of his files of material pertaining to Maud Russell and to the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy. Box 78 contains his CDFEP files, including legal material concerning its supposed "subversive" status (see also Box 28).

    In Boxes 79 and 80 are Gollobin's letters from Russell, 1949-1982, mostly written during her many cross-country speaking tours. They provide an upbeat, lively picture of the busy schedule to which she held herself, her encounters with hecklers, and her optimism and faith in the majority of people who attended her talks and bought her pamphlets. Box 80 also includes Gollobin's remarks at Russell's 90th birthday celebration in 1983 and her memorial service in 1989, and legal correspondence concerning the donations of her pottery collection to museums.

    Box 81 contains four folders of correspondence, 1938-1952 and undated, belonging to Ida Pruitt, which she apparently left behind when she moved to Philadelphia in 1961. These include letters of introduction that Pruitt brought with her to the U. S. when she left Peking in 1938, Indusco-related correspondence, and letters from her mother, Anna Seward Pruitt.

Administrative information

Source of acquisition

Gift of Ira Gollobin, 1990, 1991, 1992

Maud Russell's papers came to the New York Public Library in 1990 from her friend Ira Gollobin, her attorney and the executor of her estate. Subsequent additions, consisting mainly of sound recordings and Gollobin's own files of material from and about Russell, arrived in 1991, 1992, and 1993.

Processing information

Compiled by Laura K. O'Keefe, October 1992; Revised and updated November 1993

Using the collection

Location

Manuscripts and Archives Division
Stephen A. Schwarzman Building
Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, New York, NY 10018-2788
Brooke Russell Astor Reading Room, Third Floor, Room 328

Alternative form available

Sound recordings available on audio cassettes