Wealth & Money Quote by Agnes Smedley

A “rich harvest” is a nasty phrase to hang next to adolescent deaths, and Smedley knows it. The line is built to sting: she borrows the language of abundance and turns it into an indictment of scarcity. Tuberculosis isn’t personified as a tragedy or a medical problem; it’s cast as a profiteer reaping bodies. That rhetorical choice signals her intent: to make hunger read as violence, not misfortune.

The target is explicit - “the working masses” - but the subtext is broader. Smedley is refusing the comforting idea that a nation’s “terrible condition” is evenly shared. She drills down to class, then tighter still to children at the threshold of adulthood, where a society’s future should be most protected. By specifying “particularly of adolescent children,” she punctures any temptation to treat postwar suffering as an abstract statistic or a temporary rough patch. Malnutrition is framed as a pipeline into contagion, a social policy failure expressed through a disease that thrives on crowding and weakened bodies.

Context matters: Smedley reported on Germany in the turbulent interwar years, when economic collapse, political extremism, and punitive post-World War I conditions converged. Her journalism often leaned toward the lived experience of labor and the costs of state and capitalist systems on ordinary people. The sentence doesn’t plead; it prosecutes. Germany’s crisis is not just national humiliation or macroeconomic instability - it’s a measurable, intimate catastrophe, visible in a thin child’s lungs.