Reed, John

REED, JOHN (1887–1920). Reed is best known for a single work, Ten Days That Shook the World, the eyewitness / participant account of the Bolshevik Revolution that he dubbed “a slice of intensified history.” Not only did that book for decades shape how much of the world came to understand the Russian Revolution of 1917, it also – though it is impossible to find precise figures – must have been one of the most widely circulated books of the twentieth century. Translated into dozens of languages and promoted by Communist Parties throughout the world, it was required reading not just for party members, but for all leftists who wanted to learn what a revolution was supposed to look like in the twentieth century.

A century after the events it describes, Ten Days can seem to those unfamiliar with the complex politics and multiple parties of Russian the revolution a difficult read. Yet across the decades the most diverse set of people have endorsed it. Lenin wrote in an introduction to the first edition of 1919: “Unreservedly do I recommend it to the workers of the world.” George Kennan, father of the theory of Containment that governed American actions towards the Soviet Union for decades, wrote: “Reed’s account of events . . . rises above every other contemporary record for its literary power, its penetration, it’s command of detail.” In 1999 a group of judges centered at New York University created a list of the one hundred best works of American journalism of the twentieth century: Ten Days was number seven.

Those days helped to turn Reed – born into a wealthy family in Portland, Oregon, educated at a private school in New Jersey, and graduate of Harvard in 1910 – already known as a poet, short-story writer, and highly regarded foreign correspondent, into a full-time activist. He briefly affiliated the Socialist Party, then became a major organizer of the Communist Labor Party of America (CLP), and finally a CLP delegate to meetings of the Communist International in Moscow. Those days also ultimately led to his death at the age of thirty-three from typhus, a disease that killed over a million people in a revolutionary Russia suffering a blockade by the navies of Western powers that kept food and medical supplies from reaching the new regime.

Masterpiece it may be, but Ten Days captures only a small part of the breadth and meaning of Reed’s life. Long before he arrived in Petrograd in the fall of 1917, Jack, as he was always called, was a leading figure in the vibrant American counterculture of the second decade of the twentieth century, a period of social, political, and cultural upheaval that centered in Greenwich Village. He served as an editor of The Masses, the weekly that was the house organ of the Village, with its diverse essays on anarchism, socialism, immigration, the rise of labor unions, women’s suffrage, and birth control jostling against articles on free love, modern dance, experimental theater, and Freudian psychology.

Brightening its pages were cartoons and images by Pablo Picasso, and John Sloan and George Bellows of the Ashcan School of painters. Some of the most famous American writers and activists published in The Masses: Emma Goldman, Margaret Sanger, Jack London, Sherwood Anderson, Upton Sinclair, Amy Lowell, and Carl Sandburg.

Two years out of Harvard in 1912, Reed was making a living as a free-lance writer and a journalist, publishing in both the leftist press and large circulation, slick magazines -- sketches, short stories, poems, and reportage. He covered public events and interviewed people both unknown and important (e.g. President Woodrow Wilson, evangelist Billy Sunday), but what made him notorious were his reports from the sites of major industrial upheavals. The first time he was arrested for talking back to cops was during the strike of IWW silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey in 1913; a year later he was in Ludlow, Colorado, exposing the National Guard for shooting down more than twenty-five striking coal miners in cold blood.

In mid-1914 the mass circulation Metropolitan Magazine sent him off to cover the revolution unfolding in Mexico. Unlike other American reporters who sat in El Paso and interviewed refugees from the conflict, Reed waded across the Rio Grande, hitched a ride in a donkey cart and made his way to Chihuahua where he hung out at the headquarters of the legendary Pancho Villa before going on to spend six weeks riding with a troop of cavalry. His electric reporting from the front lines turned him into the highest paid journalist in the country ($500 a week plus $500 for every article, $500 equaling almost $13 thousand in 2020 currency).

With some regularity, Jack was jailed for “interfering” with cops on picket lines, and as the United States entered the World War in 1917, he was arrested more than once for speaking out in public both against American involvement and the drafting young men for military service. His opposition to the war resulted in his loss of all commercial outlets; by late 1917, Reed could only publish in small leftist outlets like the socialist Call. Despite financial difficulties, he retained his attachment to the values of the Village and continued to work on The Masses. His leftism was more instinctual than theoretical, for only towards the end of his life did he get around to reading some of Marx. Yet his first essay after the outbreak of the conflict dismissed it as “A Trader’s War.” This leftist attitude was only strengthened after his tours of the carnage on the Western and the Eastern Fronts in the two years before censorship clamped down on his reports.

To peers, Reed often seemed larger than life. Known for affairs with famous women like wealthy salon hostess, Mabel Dodge, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, and writer Louise Bryant (who became his wife), he seemed a reckless character who blinked away danger as he rode with the troops of Villa, or sought out the front lines in the war zones of France, Germany, and the Balkans, or mingled with soldiers of the Red Army in trenches only a couple of hundred yards away from German lines.

Reed’s journey can be seen as a metaphor for change in early twentieth-century America, where a radical subculture struggled with issues of capital and labor, freedom of the press, censorship, women’s and immigrant’s rights, and the remnants of Victorian repression and prudery. Two decades into the twenty-first Century, he remained a symbolic radical, one who took the beliefs of that counterculture all the way to support for revolution. Few Greenwich Village radicals followed him. Yet how enduring and contemporaneous are the issues with which he grappled: the explicit critique of capitalism that runs through his writings like a thread; his support for immigrant rights (he knew mostly Italian, Polish, and Russian), and birth control; his exposes of exploitation in factories, opposition to involvement in foreign wars and government censorship, and his fervid support of the rights of everyone, no matter what their class, race, or gender to have their voices heard.

Hicks, Granville. John Reed: The Making of a Revolutionary. New York: Macmillan. 1936.

Homberger, Eric. American Writers and Radical Politics, 1900–1939: Equivocal Commitments. London: Macmillan, 1986.

Rosenstone, Robert A. Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.