Marguerite Harrison
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Marguerite Elton Baker Harrison (1879-1967) was a reporter, spy, film maker, and translator who was one of the four founding members of the Society of Woman Geographers.
From 1917-1923 Harrison spied for the United States in Russia and Japan, coming to Russia in 1920 as an Associated Press correspondent . She assessed Bolshevik economic strengths and weakness and assisted American political prisoners in Russia. She was held captive in Lubyanka, the infamous Russian prison from from 1919-1922 but was eventually set free in exchange for food and other aid. She was arrested again in 1923 but was released before her trial after recognition by an American aid worker.
These experiences, and those of her fellow prisoners, are related in two of her books, Marooned in Moscow: the Story of an American Woman Imprisoned in Russia (1921) and Unfinished Tales from a Russian Prison (1923). She expressed her views of Russia and China as world forces in her book Red Bear or Yellow Dragon (1924). These, with her volume Asia Reborn (1928) comprise her major publications on Asia.
Marguerite Harrison was an important member of the production team of Merian C. Cooper's classic ethnographic film Grass (1925). This silent movie depicts the annual migration of the Bakhtiari, a poor Iranian tribe who herded their livestock through snow-bound mountain passes, under conditions of great hardship, to reach high altitude summer grasslands, and then returned to lower elevations for the winter. In this movie, Harrison appears as herself, a reporter. [1]
Her adventures are related in her autobiography There’s Always Tomorrow: the Story of a Checkered Life (1935) and in Women of the Four Winds (1999) by Elizabeth Olds.
