John Reed

John Reed 1887-1920, American journalist and radical leader, b. Portland, Oreg. After graduating from Harvard in 1910, he wrote articles for various publications and from 1913 was attached to the radical magazine The Masses. His coverage of the Paterson, N.J., silk workers strike of 1913 profoundly affected him, and thereafter he became a proponent of revolutionary politics. The articles that he wrote from Mexico about Pancho Villa established his reputation as a journalist and a radical. He served as a reporter in Europe in World War I and was in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) when the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917; his book, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), is considered the best eyewitness account of the revolution. Expelled from the U.S. Socialist convention in 1919, he helped to organize the Communist Labor party, a left-wing splinter group of the Socialist party. He was indicted for sedition in New York City in 1918 and in Philadelphia in 1919, but both cases were dropped. Reed returned to the USSR, worked in the Soviet bureau of propaganda, and was appointed Soviet consul to New York. Upon protest from the U.S. government, Reed was withdrawn from the consulship. He died in Moscow of typhus and was buried at the Kremlin. A selection of his writings was edited by John Stuart (1955).

Bibliography: See biographies by G. Hicks (1936), R. O'Connor and D. L. Walker (1967), and B. Gelb (1973).

Reed, John (1887–1920), born of wealthy parents in Portland, Ore., graduated from Harvard (1910), then traveled in Europe. Aided by Lincoln Steffens, he obtained employment with The American Magazine, but he submitted his most sincere work to The Masses. His report of the Paterson silk mills strike won him recognition, and in 1913 he was sent by the New York World to cover the Mexican revolt of Villa. During the same year he reported the miners' strike at Ludlow, Colo., for the Metropolitan Magazine and wrote his impressions of Villa and others in Insurgent Mexico (1914). As a war correspondent for the Metropolitan, as well as for The Masses and The Seven Arts, he wrote the articles republished in The War in Eastern Europe (1916). Already sympathetic with the cause of the Russian Revolution. Reed became friendly with the Bolshevik leaders and, after reporting their coup (1917), returned to America to be active in the organization of the first Communist party of the U.S. Difficulties encountered in this enterprise sent him back to Russia, where he died and was accorded the honor of burial in the Kremlin. His eyewitness story of the Russian Revolution is contained in Red Russia (1919) and his most important work, Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). The latter graphic account was officially approved by the Soviets, and Lenin wrote an introduction to a later edition. In 1985 Corliss Lamont gathered from early sources a volume of Reed's Collected Poems.

Reed, John and Reed, Sunday. See ANGRY PENGUINS.