John Reed

Early life and education

Reed was born on October 22, 1887, in his maternal grandparents' mansion in what is now the Goose Hollow neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. His grandmother's household had Chinese servants. Reed wrote of paying a nickel to a "Goose Hollowite" (young toughs in a gang in the working-class neighborhood below King's Hill) to keep from being beaten up. In 2001 a memorial bench dedicated to Reed was installed in Washington Park, which overlooks the site of Reed's birthplace (the mansion no longer exists).

His mother, Margaret Reed (née Green), was the daughter of Portland industrialist Henry Dodge Green, who had made a fortune founding and operating three businesses: the first gas & light company, the first pig iron smelter on the West Coast, and the Portland water works (he was its second owner). SW Green Avenue was named in his honor.

John's father, Charles Jerome Reed, was born in the East and came to Portland as the representative of an agricultural machinery manufacturer. With his ready wit, he quickly won acceptance in Portland's business community. The couple had married in 1886, and the family's wealth came from the Green side, not the Reed side.

A sickly child, young Jack grew up surrounded by nurses and servants. His mother carefully selected his upper-class playmates. He had a brother, Harry, who was two years younger. Jack and his brother were sent to the recently established Portland Academy, a private school. Jack was bright enough to pass his courses but could not be bothered to work for top marks, as he found school dry and tedious. In September 1904, he was sent to Morristown, a New Jersey prep school, to prepare for college. His father, who did not attend college, wanted his sons to go to Harvard. At Morristown Jack continued his poor classroom performance, but made the football team and showed some literary promise.

Reed failed his first attempt at Harvard College's admission exam but passed on his second try, and enrolled in the fall of 1906. Tall, handsome, and lighthearted, he threw himself into all manner of student activities. He was a member of the cheerleading team and the swimming team, served on the editorial boards of the Harvard Lampoon and The Harvard Monthly, was president of the Harvard Glee Club, and founded the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club (then simply the Dramatic Club). In 1910 he held a position in the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and also wrote music and lyrics for their show Diana's Debut. Reed failed to make the football and crew teams, but excelled in swimming and water polo. He was also made "Ivy orator and poet" in his senior year.

Career

Journalist

Reed had determined to become a journalist and set out to make his mark in New York. Reed made use of a valuable contact from Harvard, Lincoln Steffens, who was establishing a reputation as a muckraker. Steffens quickly appreciated Reed's skills and intellect and landed his young admirer an entry-level position on The American Magazine, where Reed read manuscripts, corrected proofs, and helped with the composition. Reed supplemented his salary by taking an additional job as the business manager of a new short-lived quarterly magazine, Landscape Architecture.

Reed made his home in Greenwich Village, a burgeoning hub of poets, writers, activists, and artists. He came to love New York, relentlessly exploring it and writing poems about it. His formal jobs on the magazines paid the rent, but it was as a freelance journalist that Reed sought to establish himself. He collected rejection slips, circulating an essay and short stories about his six months in Europe, eventually breaking through in the Saturday Evening Post. Within a year, Reed had other work accepted by Collier's, The Forum, and The Century Magazine. One of his poems was set to music by composer Arthur Foote, another by Marion Bauer. The editors at The American came to see him as a contributor and began to publish his work.

Reed's serious interest in social problems was first aroused about this time by Steffens and Ida Tarbell. He moved beyond them to a more radical political position than theirs. In 1913, he joined the staff of The Masses, edited by Max Eastman. Reed contributed more than 50 articles, reviews, and shorter pieces to this socialist publication.

The first of Reed's many arrests came in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913, for attempting to speak on behalf of strikers in the New Jersey silk mills. The harsh treatment meted out by the authorities to the strikers and the short jail term he served further radicalized Reed. He allied with the general socialist union, the Industrial Workers of the World. His account of his experiences was published in June as an article, "War in Paterson". During the same year, following a suggestion made by IWW leader Bill Haywood, Reed put on "The Pageant of the Paterson Strike" in Madison Square Garden as a benefit for the strikers.

In the autumn of 1913, Reed was sent to Mexico by the Metropolitan Magazine to report on the Mexican Revolution. He shared the perils of Pancho Villa's army for four months and was with Villa's Constitutional (Constitutionalist) Army (whose "Primer Jefe" political chief was Venustiano Carranza) when it defeated Federal forces at Torreón, opening the way for its advance on Mexico City. Reed adored Villa, but Carranza left him cold.

War correspondent

On August 14, 1914, shortly after Germany declared war on France, Reed set sail for neutral Italy, on assignment for the Metropolitan. He met his lover Mabel Dodge in Naples, and the pair made their way to Paris. Reed believed the war was the result of imperialist commercial rivalries and felt little sympathy for any of the parties.

In an unsigned piece titled "The Traders' War", published in the September 1914 issue of The Masses, Reed wrote:

The real War, of which this sudden outburst of death and destruction is only an incident, began long ago. It has been raging for tens of years, but its battles have been so little advertised that they have been hardly noted. It is a clash of Traders...

What has democracy to do in alliance with Nicholas, the Tsar? Is it Liberalism which is marching from the Petersburg of Father Gapon, from the Odessa of the pogroms?...

No. There is a falling out among commercial rivals....

We, who are Socialists, must hope—we may even expect—that out of this horror of bloodshed and dire destruction will come far-reaching social changes—and a long step forward towards our goal of Peace among Men.

But we must not be duped by this editorial buncombe about Liberalism going forth to Holy War against Tyranny.

This is not Our War.

In France, Reed was frustrated by wartime censorship and the difficulty of reaching the front. Reed and Dodge went to London, and Dodge soon left for New York, to Reed's relief. The rest of 1914 he spent drinking with French prostitutes and pursuing an affair with a German woman. The pair went to Berlin in early December. While there, Reed interviewed Karl Liebknecht, one of the few socialists in Germany to vote against war credits. Reed was deeply disappointed by the general collapse in working-class solidarity promised by the Second International, and by its replacement with militarism and nationalism.

Witness to the Russian Revolution

On August 17, 1917, Reed and Bryant set sail from New York to Europe, having first provided the State Department with legally sworn assurances that neither would represent the Socialist Party at a forthcoming conference in Stockholm. The pair were going as working journalists to report on the sensational developments taking place in the fledgling republic of Russia. Traveling by way of Finland, the pair arrived in the capital city of Petrograd immediately after the failed military coup of monarchist General Lavr Kornilov. This was an attempt to topple the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky by force of arms. Reed and Bryant found the Russian economy in shambles. Several of the subject nations of the old empire, such as Finland and Ukraine, had gained autonomy and were seeking separate military accommodations with Germany.

Reed and Bryant were in Petrograd for the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Lenin, toppled the Kerensky government; the Bolsheviks believed this was the first blow of a worldwide socialist revolution.

Food shortages made the situation dire in the capital, and social disorder reigned. Reed later recalled:

The last month of the Kerensky regime was marked first by the falling off of the bread supply from 2 pounds a day to 1 pound, to half a pound, to a quarter of a pound, and, the final week, no bread at all. Holdups and crime increased to such an extent that you could hardly walk down the streets. The papers were full of it. Not only had the government broken down, but the municipal government had absolutely broken down. The city militia was quite disorganized and up in the air, and the street-cleaning apparatus and all that sort of thing had broken down—milk and everything of that sort.

A mood for radical change was in the air. The Bolsheviks, seeking an all-socialist government and immediate end to Russian participation in the war, sought the transfer of power from Kerensky to a Congress of Soviets, a gathering of elected workers' and soldiers' deputies to be convened in October. The Kerensky government considered this a kind of coup, and moved to shut down the Bolshevik press. It issued warrants of arrest for the Soviet leaders and prepared to transfer the troops of the Petrograd garrison, believed to be unreliable, back to the front. A Military Revolutionary Committee of the Soviets, dominated by the Bolshevik Party, determined to seize power on behalf of the future Congress of Soviets. At 11 pm on the evening of November 7, 1917, it captured the Winter Palace, the seat of Kerensky's government. Reed and Bryant were present during the fall of the Winter Palace, the symbolic event that started the Bolshevik Revolution.

Radical political activist

Back in America, Reed and Bryant defended the Bolsheviks and opposed the American intervention. Incensed at Russia's departure from the war against Germany, the public gave Reed a generally cold reception. While he was in Russia, his articles in The Masses, particularly one headlined "Knit a straight-jacket for your soldier boy", had been instrumental in the government gaining an indictment for sedition against the magazine (antiwar agitation was considered sedition and treason).

The first Masses trial ended in a hung jury the day before Reed reached New York. The defendants, including him, were to be retried. He immediately posted $2,000 bail on April 29. The second Masses trial also ended in a hung jury.

In Philadelphia, Reed stood outside a closed hall on May 31, and harangued a crowd of 1,000 about the case and the war until police dragged him away. He was arrested for inciting a riot, and posted $5,000 bail. Reed became more aggressively political, intolerant, and self-destructive. On September 14, he was arrested for the third time since returning from Russia, charged with violating the Sedition Act and freed on $5,000 bail. This was a day after possibly the largest demonstration for Bolshevik Russia was held in the United States (in the Bronx). Reed had passionately defended the revolution, which he seemed to think was coming to America as well. He tried to prevent Allied intervention in Russia, arguing that the Russians were contributing to the war effort by checking German ambitions in Ukraine and Japanese designs on Siberia, but this argument came to naught.

On February 21–22, 1919, Bryant was fiercely grilled before a Senate committee exploring Bolshevik propaganda activities in the US, but emerged resilient. Reed followed her. According to Homberger, his testimony was "savagely distorted" by the press. Later that day Reed went to Philadelphia to stand trial for his May speech; despite a hostile judge, press, and patriotic speech by the prosecutor, Reed's lawyer, David Wallerstein, convinced the jury the case was about free speech, and he was acquitted. Returning to New York, Reed continued speaking widely and participating in the various twists of socialist politics that year. He served as editor of The New York Communist, the weekly newspaper issued by the Left Wing Section of Greater New York.

Affiliated with the Left Wing of the Socialist Party, Reed with the other radicals was expelled from the National Socialist Convention in Chicago on August 30, 1919. The radicals split into two bitterly hostile groups, forming the Communist Labor Party of America (Reed's group, which he helped create) and, the next day, the Communist Party of America. Reed was the international delegate of the former, wrote its manifesto and platform, edited its paper, The Voice of Labor, and was denounced as "Jack the Liar" in the Communist Party organ, The Communist. Reed's writings of 1919 displayed doubts about Western-style democracy and defended the dictatorship of the proletariat. He believed this was a necessary step that would prefigure the true democracy "based upon equality and the liberty of the individual."

Comintern functionary

Indicted for sedition and hoping to secure Communist International (Comintern) backing for the CLP, Reed fled the US with a forged passport in early October 1919 on a Scandinavian frigate; he worked his way to Bergen, Norway as a stoker. Given shore leave, he disappeared to Kristiania, crossed into Sweden on October 22, passed through Finland with Ivar Lassy's help, and made his way to Moscow by train. In the cold winter of 1919–1920, he traveled in the region around Moscow, observing factories, communes, and villages. He filled notebooks with his writing and had an affair with a Russian woman.

Reed's feelings about the revolution became ambivalent. Activist Emma Goldman had recently arrived aboard the Buford, among hundreds of aliens deported by the United States under the Sedition Act. She was especially concerned about the Cheka. Reed told her that the enemies of the revolution deserved their fate, but suggested that she see Angelica Balabanoff, a critic of the current situation. He wanted Goldman to hear the other side.

Though facing the threat of arrest in Illinois, Reed tried to return to the United States in February 1920. At that time, the Soviets organized a convention to establish a United Communist Party of America. Reed attempted to leave Russia through Latvia, but his train never arrived, forcing him to hitch a ride in the boxcar of an eastbound military train to Petrograd. In March, he crossed into Helsinki, where he had radical friends, including Hella Wuolijoki, the future politician and member of parliament. With their help, he was hidden in the hold of a freighter.

On 13 March, Finnish Customs officials found Reed in a coal bunker on the ship. He was taken to the police station, where he maintained that he was seaman "Jim Gormley". Eventually, the jewels, photographs, letters, and fake documents he had in his possession forced him to reveal his true identity. Although beaten several times and threatened with torture, he refused to surrender the names of his local contacts. Because of his silence, he could not be tried for treason. He was charged and convicted of smuggling and having jewels in his possession (102 small diamonds worth $14,000, which were confiscated).

The US Secretary of State was satisfied with Reed's arrest and pressured the Finnish authorities for his papers. American authorities, however, remained indifferent to Reed's fate. Although Reed paid the fine for smuggling, he was still detained. His physical condition and state of mind deteriorated rapidly. He suffered from depression and insomnia, wrote alarming letters to Bryant, and on May 18 threatened a hunger strike. He was finally released in early June, and sailed for Tallinn, Estonia, on the 5th. Two days later, he traveled to Petrograd, recuperating from malnutrition and scurvy caused by having been fed dried fish almost exclusively. His spirits were high.

Death

Reed was determined to return to the United States but fell ill on September 25. At first thought to have influenza, he was hospitalized five days later and diagnosed with spotted typhus. Bryant spent all her time with him, but there were no medicines to be obtained because of the Allied blockade. Reed's mind started to wander; eventually he lost the use of the right side of his body and could no longer speak. His wife was holding his hand when he died in Moscow on October 17, 1920. After a hero's funeral, Reed's body was buried in Mass Grave No. 5 at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis next to Inessa Armand. Only three Americans have received this honor; the others are C. E. Ruthenberg, the founder of the Communist Party USA; and Bill Haywood, a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World.

Legacy

Reed's interpretation in popular culture has varied. Some, such as biographer Robert A. Rosenstone, have called him a romantic, while Upton Sinclair derided him as a "playboy of the revolution". For the communist movement to which he belonged, Reed became a symbol of the international nature of the October Revolution, a martyr buried at the Kremlin wall amid solemn fanfare, his name to be uttered reverently as a member of the radical pantheon. The Harvard Lampoon later memorialized Reed in a stained glass window in their building with a hammer and sickle.

Representation in other media

Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein's influential 1927 silent film October: Ten Days That Shook the World was based on Reed's book.

John Dos Passos included a highly stylized, brief biography of Reed in his 1932 novel/history work 1919, the second part of his U.S.A. trilogy.

The 1958 Soviet film In October Days (Russian: В дни Октября), directed by Sergei Vasilyev, depicted Reed and Bryant.

Actor and director Warren Beatty made the film Reds (1981), based on Reed's life. Beatty starred as Reed, Diane Keaton as Louise Bryant and Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill. The movie won three Academy Awards and was nominated for nine others.

Two films are based on Reed's accounts of the Mexican Revolution, one with two parts released a year apart. Mexican director Paul Leduc made Reed: Insurgent Mexico (1973). A Mexican–Soviet-Italian co-production released Red Bells (1982) and Red Bells II (1983), both directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, with Franco Nero as Reed.