Reed, John 1887-1920

REED, JOHN 1887-1920

Reporter

Busy at Harvard, and After

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1887, John Reed entered Harvard University with the illustrious class of 1910 that included Walter Lippmann and T. S. Eliot. He studied writing and found time to write for the Lampoon, help edit the literary Monthly, captain the water polo team, sing in the glee club, and write lyrics for Hasty Pudding theatricals. After graduation he traveled to Europe, settled among a bohemian circle in New York's Greenwich Village, and wrote for the muckraking American Magazine and for the radical Masses after its founding in 1911.

The Stories of Workers and Peasants

Reed wrote with great passion about domestic social problems. His moving account of a strike by twenty thousand textile workers in Paterson, New Jersey, attracted widespread attention. In 1913 Metropolitan magazine sent him to Mexico to cover Pancho Villa's peasant revolution against the dictator Victoriano Huerta. When he found Villa's forces in the mountains of Chihuahua, Reed began to fight alongside them. His vivid dispatches inspired Walter Lippmann, who had also already achieved renown, to say that "with Jack Reed reporting begins." After returning from Mexico, he wrote an account of a miners' strike in Colorado that culminated in the "Ludlow Massacre," in which mine owners burned a tent city constructed by the strikers and twenty-five people died. Reed habitually stepped over the line between reporting and advocacy, a tendency that lent great power to his writing, even if it called his impartiality into question.

Russia, Portland, Provincetown

In 1914 Reed went to Europe with illustrator Boardman Robinson to report on the war for Metropolitan. They received a cool reception in czarist Saint Petersburg because of Reed's socialist views, which would become his ticket to great access to the leaders of the Russian Revolution three years later. In 1916, on a visit to his parents in Portland, he met the wife of a local dentist. Louise Bryant followed him back to New York, where they eventually married. They spent their time in Greenwich Village and Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Reed had helped to found the Provincetown Players.

Revolution

In 1917, as revolutionaries came closer to ousting Czar Nicholas from his throne, Reed decided to return to Russia. It took him six months to raise enough money and to secure the impractical sponsorship of the left-wing Call, The Masses, and Seven Arts magazine. Bryant earned accreditation from the Bell Syndicate. She and Reed arrived in Saint Petersburg in September, where they witnessed the October Revolution firsthand. Their best contact was Alexander Gumberg, a well-connected Russian. Reed kept a daily diary and spent every possible hour conversing with well-educated leaders and peasant radicals alike. He witnessed Vladimir Lenin's return and proclamation of the victorious "Workers and Peasants Government" at the Great Hall of the Smolny Institute. While some foreign correspondents were ignored or attacked, Reed was treated as a comrade and worked more effectively than his peers.

Troubles

Reed was not allowed to return to the United States in January 1918 because of a sedition charge. He stayed in Norway and wrote Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), an account of the revolution in Russia that stands as one of the great books of journalism. His close proximity to the events of the October Revolution makes it an indispensable guide, full of vivid sights and sounds, as well as insights into the principal players. For a decade it was the standard work on Bolshevism, and Lenin's wife translated it into Russian, On his eventual return to the United States, Reed abandoned journalism and began to organize the Communist Labor Party, a competitor to the Soviet-sponsored Communist International. He returned to Russia in the fall of 1919 on a fake passport but was disappointed when the Comintern failed to recognize his Communist Labor Party.

A Hero's Burial

In 1920 Reed gave a speech to the Congress of the Toilers of the East in Baku on the Caspian Sea. He contracted typhus, and with Bryant at his side he died in Moscow on 17 October 1920, just before his thirty-third birthday. He was buried at the foot of the Kremlin wall, facing Red Square, the only American and one of the few foreigners ever accorded such an honor. In the 1960s his remains were moved to a new site within the Kremlin designated for the "fallen heroes" of the Russian Revolution.

Sources:

Whitman Bassow, The Moscow Correspondents: Reporting on Russia from the Revolution to Glasnost (New York: Morrow, 1988);

Robert A. Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (New York: Vintage, 1975).