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A. T. Steele Papers 1931-1982, 1995-1999

MSS-349

Biographical Note

Archibald "Arch" Trojan Steele was born to James Arthur and Clara (Trojan) Steele in Toronto, Ontario, Canada on June 25, 1903. He was one of seven children, including Gretchen Clara Harriet (1897-1904), Johannes (February 16, 1900-August 26, 1900), Martin Grieg (1904-1961), Clara Louise (Steele) Hallett (1904-1979), Arthur Alexander (1907-2003), Isobel Lillian (1910-1998), and Marian Dorothey (Steele) Benson Sykes (1918-1966). The family moved to the United States in 1915. They originally settled in Salt Lake City, Utah and lived briefly in Twin Falls, Idaho before establishing permanent residence in Boise, Idaho.

Arch Steele earned his B.A. at Stanford University in 1924. After graduation, he returned to Boise, where he worked as a cub reporter for the Capital News. He later moved to California, where he edited and wrote for the Willows Journal and The Downey Champion. Steele bought an interest in the Champion, but sold it in 1931 after losing most of his wealth in the Great Depression. He used the money to travel to China, where he began working as a foreign correspondent. He married Esther Frances Johnson (1910-1980), who he had courted during his time in California, at the Kojimachi Ward Office in Tokyo, Japan on January 16, 1933.

During his career, Steele wrote for the Associated Press (1932-1934), the New York Times (1935-1937), the Chicago Daily News (1937-1945), and finally for the New York Herald Tribune (1945-1960). During the 1930s he reported on the expanding Sino-Japanese War, including the Rape of Nanking. When the United States entered World War II in 1941, he expanded his reporting to include a wide variety of events in the CBI (China-Burma-India) Theater. After the war ended, he covered the War Crimes Trials and USSR's influence in the Far East. He also traveled to Tibet, where he met the Dalai Lama. Steele left the Far East in 1949 and made extended trips through Africa and the Middle East in 1947-1948, 1950, 1952-1953, and 1959-1960. He covered Central and South America from August of 1953 to May of 1954 and undertook a jeep trip from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego with his wife from August of 1954 to August of 1955. By the end of his career, Steele was a well-respected journalist and had been honored with Long Island University's George Polk Memorial Award (1950) and Columbia University's Maria Moors Cabot Prize (1955).

Steele retired in 1960 and settled in Sedona, Arizona. He wrote two books, The American People and China (McGraw-Hill, 1966) and Shanghai and Manchuria, 1932: Recollections of a War Correspondent (Occasional Paper No. 10, Center for Asian Studies, Arizona State University, 1977). Archibald T. Steele died at his home in Sedona of cancer on February 26, 1992.

Scope and Content Note

This collection houses original dispatches, newspaper clippings, interviews, printed matter, photographs, memorabilia, and other materials documenting A. T. Steele's work as a journalist in China, India, Southeast Asia, Africa, Central America, and South America between 1932 and 1960. It has been divided into eight series.

Series I: Newspaper Articles and Research has been divided into three sub-series. Sub-Series A: Original Dispatches and Mailers houses Steele's original articles. Published versions of these documents are housed in Sub-Series B. While Steele's originals are very similar to their published counterparts, the originals frequently contain details omitted in the final copy. Among the regions documented are the Far East (including China, Japan, Formosa, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Tibet), Africa (including South Africa, Egypt, and Kenya), and South America (including Arch and Esther Steele's trip from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego on the Pan American Highway). Of particular interest are the materials documenting the Sino-Japanese War (including the Rape of Nanking) and Steele's visit to Tibet.

Sub-Series C: Research Materials houses notes, pamphlets, maps, articles, interviews, and other documents that Steele used to write the dispatches housed in Sub-Series A and B. These materials have been organized alphabetically by topic, although it is unclear whether this organization reflects Steele's original filing system. Of particular interest are photographs, legal documents, and newspaper clippings documenting riots in Cairo and the destruction of the Steeles' possessions in the Shepheard Hotel fire; photographs and letters showing Steele's role in acquiring pandas for a zoo in Chicago during the 1930s; and Steele's interviews with such prominent persons as Mahatma Ghandi, Mao Tse-Tung, and Chiang Kai-Shek.

Series II: Other Written Materials houses monographs, book reviews, and articles by Steele. Among the book manuscripts are Shanghai and Manchuria, 1932: Recollections of a War Correspondent and the unpublished From Alaska to Tierra del Fuego by Jeep. The majority of the books Steele reviewed discuss China from 1930 to 1960, political relations between the United States and the Far East, and contemporary African events. Steele's articles cover a number of topics, including his trip to Tibet and his meeting with Lillian (Erickson) Riggs, the "Lady Boss of Faraway Ranch."

Series III: Correspondence and Personal Papers houses a variety of correspondence and memorabilia documenting Steele's career. Among these materials are letters that Steele wrote to his wife; an array of identification papers including entrance and exit permits, guarantees of safe passage, passports, and press cards; and such memorabilia as press collect cards allowing Steele to send collect telegrams to his employers in the United States.

Series IV: Photographs consists primarily of silver gelatin images ranging in size from 1¼" x 1¾" to 8" x 11" and has been divided into three sub-series. Sub-Series A: China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, and Malaya houses 714 images dating from 1932 to 1945. Among the subjects depicted are Japanese aggression in Manchuria and the establishment of Manchukuo (a Japanese puppet state); the falls of Shanghai, Hankow, Peking, and Nanking; the Sino-Japanese War; the China-Burma-India theater; General Joseph W. Stilwell and the Burma Road; and side trips to Tibet, Kashmir, Inner Mongolia, and Malaya during the Communist insurgency of 1949. Of particular interest are the images of journalists "on site" in the far east, scenes depicting China during wartime (including dramatic evidence of war damage), and pictures of Chinese Communists, military leaders, and political leaders in Yenan after the "Long March" (1938). The 200 photographs in Sub-Series B: Africa were supplied by government sources and depict the Belgian Congo, the Gold Coast, British West Africa, Kenya, and Nigeria. Subjects include customs, people, agriculture, buildings, and wildlife. The slides in Sub-Series C show Steele's four week trip to China in November and December of 1978 (just before President Carter announced his intent to accord full diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of China. Although Steele had assignments in Russia, South America, and Central America, no photographs showing these locations are included.

Series V: Writings by Others houses a wide variety of pamphlets, newspapers, articles, and other published materials by authors other than Steele. It appears that Steele used some of these materials while researching his dispatches and collected others as souvenirs during his international travels. It is, however, impossible to determine what precise purpose Steele put these materials to. This series is organized alphabetically by title.

Series VI: Chinese Communist Party Documents houses propaganda materials, wall posters, reprinted telegrams, and other materials produced by the Party. These items were numbered and described individually during the collection's original processing and these descriptions have been integrated into the container list. This series is organized by the document number assigned during processing.

Series VII: Microfilm and Indexes houses two indexes and ten rolls of microfilm showing documents from the collection. Researchers should note that the box numbers given in the index are no longer accurate and that the microfilm shows only a selection of documents regarding China, not the entire collection.

Arrangement

Restrictions

Access Restrictions

To view this collection, make an appointment at least five business days prior to your visit by contacting Ask an Archivist or calling (480) 965-4932. Appointments in the Wurzburger Reading Room at Hayden Library (rm. 138) on the Tempe campus are available Monday through Friday. Check the ASU Library Hours page for current availability.

Copyright

Arizona State University does not own the copyright to this collection. We recognize that it is incumbent upon the researcher to procure permission to publish information from this collection from the owner of the copyright.

Access Terms

Administrative Information

Custodial History

A. T. Steele donated the bulk of these papers to Arizona State University's Center for Asian Studies in 1976.

Alternative Form Available

The digital images on the compact disk titled "A. T. Steele in Tibet, 1939-1944" (Box 19, Folder 29) are available in Arizona State University's Digital Repository at http://hdl.handle.net/2286/R.C.207.

The Center for Asian Studies arranged to have portions of this collection microfilmed. Two sets of microfilm are available: one in Series VII of this collection and one in Hayden microforms (FILM 7849).

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], A. T. Steele Papers, MSS-349, Arizona State University Library.

Provenance

The A. T. Steele Papers were transferred from the Center for Asian Studies to Special Collections in 1981. Steele's niece, Carolyn Cozzetto, donated additional materials in 2003 and 2004 (Accession #2003-02763, #2003-02795, and 2004-03774).

Processing Note

After these materials were transferred to Special Collections, the Center for Asian Studies assisted in processing the collection and preparing an index. This work was completed in September of 1982. Ross S. Pearl and Douglas J. Easton combined the index with a table of contents and an addendum to form the collection's original finding aid. In 1990, the photographs in Series IV were arranged and described in greater detail.

When the collection was fully reprocessed in 2013, its previous arrangement was largely abandoned and the materials were re-arranged into their current configuration. Due to this reorganization, the order of the document images as they are presented on the microfilm no longer matches the order of the documents in the boxes. All newspaper clippings and other poor-quality papers were photocopied for preservation reasons. The item-level finding aids created for the photographs in Series IV and the original documents of the Chinese Communist Party in Series VI have been integrated into this finding aid.

Other Finding Aids

A partial subject index to Steele's dispatches dating from approximately 1940 to 1945 is available upon request in the Luhrs Reading Room.

Container List