John Reed (journalist)

John Silas Reed was an American journalist, poet, and communist activist who lived from October 22, 1887, to October 17, 1920. He first became well-known as a war correspondent, reporting on the Mexican Revolution for Metropolitan and on World War I for The Masses. His most famous work is Ten Days That Shook the World, a 1919 book based on his firsthand coverage of the October Revolution in Petrograd, Russia.

Reed backed the Soviet seizure of power and even briefly fought alongside the Red Guards in 1918. He wanted a similar communist revolution to happen in the United States, and in 1919 he helped start the short-lived Communist Labor Party of America.

Death

He died in Moscow from spotted typhus in 1920. By the end of his life, he may have grown disillusioned with Soviet leaders, but the Soviet Union gave him a hero’s funeral. He is one of only five Americans buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

Early life and education

Reed was born in his maternal grandparents’ mansion in what is now the Goose Hollow neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. His grandmother’s household employed Chinese servants. As a child, he wrote about paying a nickel to a “Goose Hollowite”—a young gang member from the working-class area below King’s Hill—to avoid a beating. A memorial bench dedicated to Reed was installed in Washington Park in 2001, overlooking the site of his birthplace; the mansion no longer stands.

His mother, Margaret Reed (née Green), was the daughter of Henry Dodge Green, a Portland industrialist who made a fortune founding and running three businesses: the first gas and 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 after him.

John’s father, Charles Jerome Reed, was born in the East and moved to Portland as a representative for an agricultural machinery manufacturer. His quick wit helped him gain acceptance in Portland’s business circles. The couple 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 chose his upper-class playmates. He had a brother, Harry, two years younger. Both boys attended the recently established Portland Academy, a private school.

Jack was smart enough to pass his courses but didn’t bother working for top marks, finding school dry and tedious. In September 1904, he was sent to Morristown, a New Jersey prep school, to prepare for college. His father, who never attended 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’s admission exam but passed on his second try, enrolling in the fall of 1906. Tall, handsome, and lighthearted, he threw himself into student activities. He was on the cheerleading and swimming teams, 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 named “Ivy orator and poet” in his senior year.

Reed attended meetings of the Socialist Club, which his friend Walter Lippmann presided over, but never joined. The group introduced legislation to the state legislature, attacked the university for not paying its servants living wages, and petitioned the administration to create a course on socialism. Reed later recalled that none of this visibly changed Harvard society, and that most club-men and athletes never even heard of it. But it made him and many others realize that something more thrilling than college activities was happening in the dull outside world, and it turned their attention to writers like H. G. Wells and Graham Wallas, pulling them away from the Oscar Wildian dilettantism that had gripped undergraduate writers for generations.

Reed graduated from Harvard in 1910. That summer he set out to see more of that “dull outside world,” visiting England, France, and Spain before returning home to America the following spring. To pay his fare to Europe, he worked as a common laborer on a cattle boat. His travels were encouraged by his favorite professor, Charles Townsend Copeland (“Copey”), who told him he must “see life” if he wanted to write about it successfully.

Journalist

Reed had decided to become a journalist and set out to make his mark in New York. He used a valuable Harvard contact, Lincoln Steffens, who was building a reputation as a muckraker. Steffens quickly saw Reed’s skills and intellect and got his young admirer an entry-level job at The American Magazine, where Reed read manuscripts, corrected proofs, and helped with composition. He supplemented his salary with an additional job as business manager for a short-lived quarterly magazine, Landscape Architecture.

Reed made his home in Greenwich Village, a growing hub for poets, writers, activists, and artists. He came to love New York, exploring it relentlessly and writing poems about it. His formal magazine jobs paid the rent, but he sought to establish himself as a freelance journalist. He collected rejection slips while circulating an essay and short stories about his six months in Europe, eventually breaking through in the Saturday Evening Post.