John Silas Reed

• John Reed
• Born: October 20, 1887
• Died: Oc-tober 17, 1920

Writer and labor activist, was born in Portland, Oregon, son of Charles Jerome Reed—known as “C. J.”—and Margaret (Green) Reed. His father was a businessman and his mother the daughter of a well-to-do family. Educated in Portland private schools, he was given luxuries by a father who, he remembered, “… poured out his life that we might live like rich men’s sons.” He suffered poor health as a boy but recovered as an adolescent. At seventeen, his parents sent him East to the exclusive Morristown School, at which he was prepared for admission to Harvard. In 1905 his father was appointed U. S. marshal and participated in the federal investigation of land frauds in Oregon. The subsequent prosecution involved the Oregon power structure and C. J. Reed was viewed as a pariah by his former friends. His son never forgot his father’s tenacious prosecutions. Although a mediocre student at Morristown, Reed revealed a forte for writing. A bare pass in the Harvard entrance exams earned him admission to the class of 1906.

At Harvard he ran up against the class elite that dominated life at Cambridge. Walter Lippmann, a classmate, recalled, “He came from Oregon, showed his feelings in public, and said what he thought to the club men who didn’t like to hear it.” He turned his turbulent energy to writing, dramatics, and team activities. Although he dabbled in the Socialist Club, he seemed, as the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, a family friend, recalled, always ready to plunge into “the next most wonderful thing.” Upon his graduation, Reed wandered off to Europe for half a year. Upon his return, he learned that his family’s now straitened circumstances had left him on his own.

As an aspiring writer, Reed knew New York City was the place to tap success. It was there, he remembered, that “… I first wrote of the things I saw, with a fierce joy of creation—and I knew at last that I could write.” Steffens obtained for him a position on the eclectic magazine American. Surrounded by the ferment of Greenwich Village and encouraged by Steffens, Reed experimented with poetry and fiction. Increasingly, he expressed an identification with the working class. His commitment took sharper focus when Max Eastman invited him to become an editor of The Masses. Although Reed asserted that “the broad purpose of The Masses is a social one; to everlastingly attack old systems, old morals, old prejudices …,” his approach to social questions were visceral rather than cerebral. “It didn’t come to me from books,” he noted, “that the workers produced all the wealth of the world, which went to those who did not earn it.”

The appearance of The Day in Bohemia in 1912 established him as the poet of the freewheeling lifestyle of Greenwich Village. An encounter with William (Big Bill) Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World in the spring of 1913 sent him to Paterson, New Jersey, to investigate the strike of 25,000 silk workers. Arrested for refusing to obey a policeman’s order, he was sentenced to twenty days in jail. After four days, he was released, and he promptly recorded his experiences for The Masses. Reed and his Village friends hit upon the idea of a Paterson Pageant to help the strikers. He converted the idea into reality. The result, as the critics reported, was a “spectacular production” at Madison Square Garden on the evening of June 7, 1913, that promised “a new art form.” Unfortunately, the affair lost money, and he was already turning his interest elsewhere. He reassured his mother, “I am not a Socialist any more than I am an Episcopalian. I know now that my business is to interpret and live life, wherever it may be found—whether in the labor movement or out of it.”

Reed’s interest had turned to Pancho Villa and the Mexican Revolution. In December 1913, he went to Mexico as a reporter for the New York World and the Metropolitan Magazine. His reports made Villa a household word in America. He shaped a romantic legend depicting Villa “… as the Friend of the Poor … the Mexican Robin Hood.” Lippmann described his Mexican reporting as “undoubtedly the finest reporting that’s ever been done. … Incidentally … the stories are literature.” His best reports were brought together in Insurgent Mexico (1914), which portrayed Mexican life as a compound of “impetuosity, hot blood, heroism, pose, bombast, cruelty, love, abandon, asceticism, grace, rudeness, warmth.” No one reading the account doubted Reed’s total identification with a life untrammeled by middle-class values and morality. On the battlefield of Mexico, he had also learned “… that bullets are not very terrifying, that the fear of death is not such a great thing.”

Back in the United States, reports of the Ludlow, Colorado, massacre of striking workers on April 20, 1914, sent Reed west. His report, “The Colorado War,” scathingly indicted the Rockefeller interests against whose Colorado Fuel and Iron Company the strike had been directed. The outbreak of World War I sent him to Europe. The war proved to him that “militarism [is] the crowning fact of our time.” He repeatedly insisted: “This is not Our War.” The battlefields of Europe convinced him that it was a “trader’s war” devoid of “idealism,” its objective material gain. “It was a war of the workshops, and the trenches were factories turning out ruin—ruin of the spirit as well as of the body, the real and only death.” His friend Lippmann observed, Reed “did not judge, he identified himself with the struggle, and gradually what he saw mingled with what he hoped. Whenever his sympathies marched with the facts, Reed was superb. … But where his feelings conflicted with the facts, his vision flickered.” What the observation missed was the fact that Reed now believed the only hope for the future was in revolution.

Reed went to the Balkan battlefields in the spring of 1915. In Serbia, he reported walking “on the dead.” He reached Russia in the summer of 1915, there observing omnipresent corruption. Upon his return to New York, he published The War in Eastern Europe (1916). Russia had captured his imagination. He wondered: “Is there a powerful and destructive fire working in the bowels of Russia?” Approaching thirty, he glumly wrote, “I’ve watched civilization change and broaden and sweeten in my lifetime, and tried to help; and I’ve watched it wither and crumble in the red blast of war. . . . I’m not quite sick of seeing yet, but I will be—I know that.” On America’s entrance into the war, he told the Congressional Committee on Military Affairs, “I do not believe in this war. . . . I would not serve in it.” His opposition increased as war-inspired antiradical sentiment in the United States grew.

With the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, he went to see it firsthand in September 1917. He witnessed the Bolshevik triumph in November and predicted that it would launch a “proletarian government [that] will last.” Upon his return to the United States early in 1918, his papers were seized for examination by the State Department. It was the beginning of a pervasive surveillance. In mid-September 1918, he was arrested for seditious actions. Later that month, he stood trial with the editors of the suppressed Masses, charged with sedition. He was freed by a hung jury, and the return of his papers by the government allowed him to write Ten Days That Shook the World (1919). Well reviewed, it sold well, and even the Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin was impressed.

Active in the formation of the American Communist Party, Reed was convinced that he had to return to Russia to get Bolshevik endorsement for his wing of the new organization, which was riven by disputes. While in Russia, he was indicted by a Chicago federal grand jury for plotting the overthrow of the United States government. His effort to return to the United States to stand trial failed when he was jailed in Finland. After twelve weeks, he was released and returned to Russia in weakened health. At the Second Congress of the Communist International, he urged the Communists in America to work “… to unite the Negro and the white laborer in common labor unions; this is the best and quickest way to destroy race prejudice and develop class solidarity.” Reed longed to go home, even though his wife, who had joined him in Moscow, warned him that he would be sent to prison. (Reed had married Louise Bryant on November 9, 1916.) His health shattered, he contracted typhus and died. The Bolsheviks buried him in the Kremlin Wall.

Two excellent biographies are G. Hicks, John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary (1936) and R. A. Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (1975). See also R. O’Connor and D. L. Walker, The Lost Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (1967), and J. Tuck, Pancho Villa and John Reed (1984). W. Beatty’s film Reds (1981) is a romanticized depiction of Reed’s life, particularly focusing on his relationship with Louise Bryant.