American, Revolutionary John Reed, the “Hero” of Lenin’s Communists buried at Kremlin’s Wall
John “Jack” Silas Reed was an American journalist, poet and Revolutionary who’s actions and writings led to the founding of the Communist Party of the USA.
Reed’s big break came when he was assigned to cover the Mexican Revolution in 1913. His vivid dispatches from months of hell-raising in the desert with Pancho Villa’s gunslinging horsemen made Reed’s name as a journalist. Harvard via RFE
John Reed Oregon SOS . John Reed was born in Portland, Oregon on October 22, 1887 to Charles Jerome Reed and Margaret Green Reed. As a youth he was educated at the Portland Academy. Reed graduated from Harvard in 1910, where he served on the editorial board of the Harvard Monthly and Lampoon, and was class orator and poet. After graduation he traveled in England and Spain. Upon returning to the United States, Reed started his career as a journalist in the magazines of the political left. He was one of the leading socialists of the New Review and The Masses.
In 1914 Reed covered the Mexican revolution for the Metropolitan Magazine. He spent four months with Pancho Villa and his troops and described the revolutionary fighting in his book Insurgent Mexico published the same year.
During World War I Reed worked as a war correspondent for the Metropolitan Magazine. The magazine rejected some of his stories as being too leftist in tone. Reed’s reports on the fighting in Germany, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria and Russia were published in 1916 in The War in Eastern Europe.
That same year he returned to the United States for an operation to remove one of his kidneys. In the early 1917 he married the journalist Louise Bryant and traveled with her to Russia to witness and report on the October Revolution in St. Petersburg for The Masses. Reed’s pro-Communist and antiwar articles were partly responsible for that journal’s indictment and trials on the grounds of sedition.
Reed’s next international story would begin the unravelling of his reputation in the United States. While covering World War I from the German trenches in 1915, Reed and a colleague drunkenly fired a rifle in the direction of the opposing French lines. With the backdrop of uncountable thousands of dead young men rotting in the mud of France, the incident sparked disgust back at home.
Lenin saw Reed’s enthusiasm for the Bolsheviks as a propaganda coup. Reed was granted access to Lenin during the chaotic days around the October revolution. He described the Bolshevik leader as “a short, stocky figure, with a big head set down in his shoulders, bald and bulging…. Dressed in shabby clothes, his trousers much too long for him. Unimpressive, to be the idol of a mob, loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been.”
His 1919 book Ten Days That Shook the World focused on the crucial moment of history when Lenin, a friend of Reed’s, pressed the Bolsheviks to seize power. The book recounted conversations, arguments, political machinations, and personal motives. Although Reed’s enthusiasm for the revolution limited his objectivity, he provided a unique, firsthand account of a turning point in Russian history. In 1919 he organized the Communist Labor Party and was founder and first editor of the Voice of Labor. For a short time he was the Soviet consul in New York.
Soon Reed’s journalistic coverage of industrial disputes and social issues in America morphed into all-out political activism. He became a target of law enforcement at a time when left-wing radicals were viewed as a potential revolutionary threat to the country. By the beginning of 1917, after several arrests, a friend said the formerly fun-loving Reed was “beginning to assume some of the humorless and dogmatic qualities of the doctrinaire Marxist.” via RFE Public Domain
In October 1919, facing charges of sedition after hearings in which Reed hinted at his support for a violent socialist revolution in America, Reed fled the United States with a forged passport and headed to Russia for the last time.
Arriving in Russia amid the political terror and obvious breakdown of the country, Reed’s once unshakable faith in revolutionary socialism faltered. His friend and fellow left-wing activist Emma Goldman, who had been deported by the United States to Russia, told Reed: “I must be crazy, Jack, or else I never understood the meaning of revolution. I certainly never believed that it would signify callous indifference to human life and suffering, or that it would have no other method of solving its problems than by wholesale slaughter.” ViA RFE
When the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party split in 1919, Reed became the leader of the latter. After charges of treason he fled to Finland where the authorities kept him in prison before exchanging him for Russian-held Finnish prisoners of war. In prison Reed wrote more poetry and outlined a pair of novels, which he never completed. In Russia he gave speeches and was joined by Bryant, whom he had secretly contacted. At the peak of his career, Reed was stricken with typhus and died on October 19, 1920. He was subsequently buried with other Bolshevik heroes beside the Kremlin wall. Reed’s popularity as a radical leader led to the creation of John Reed clubs across the United States. His life was subject of the 1981 film Reds.
Reed’s disillusionment with Lenin’s Bolsheviks accelerated in 1920 when he was sent to Baku, in Soviet Azerbaijan, to attend a multinational meeting of the Communist International. On the long train ride back to Moscow, Reed watched Comintern officials treating themselves “to an order of exotic foods, endless supplies of alcohol, and young prostitutes, some of whom may have been 14.”
The 1981 Hollywood film Reds, which won three Academy awards, was based on Reed’s life. In 1999, Reed’s book was named one of the most important works of journalism by New York University. The judges wrote: “Perhaps the most controversial work on our list is the seventh, John Reed’s book, Ten Days That Shook the World, reporting on the October revolution in Russia in 1917. Yes, as conservative critics have noted, Reed was a partisan. Yes, historians would do better. But this was probably the most consequential news story of the century, and Reed was there, and Reed could write.”
Amos Chapple Feature on Reed used in part for photos in this feature
Amos Chapple is a New Zealand-born photographer and picture researcher with a particular interest in the former U.S.S.R.