John Silas Reed

Birth and education

Resulting from the middle-class woman from Portland cement, Oregon, John Reed accepted the education of the easy American families of her time. Without being a pupil shining, he managed to integrate it University of Harvard in 1906, where it rubbed with the descendants of the patricians families of the East coast. Charmed to escape the atmosphere from Portland cement, it published its first texts in the Harvard Lampoon , a humorous and sarcastic periodical rested by the students, and took an active part in the social life of the university, without still engaging politically. Stimulated by the teaching of his professor of literature, Charles Copeland, to which it dedicated its book later, insurgent Mexico , it was graduate in 1910. He accomplished a first voyage in Europe, before being established in New York the following year.

Journalism

Attending the New Yorkean mediums intellectual and artistic, which led it to maintain short and tumultuous connection with Mabel Dodge, rich bienfaitrice of arts, John Reed published some articles and of the poems before writing, starting from 1913, for the socialist review The Masses , published by max Eastman. This year, he discovered the hardness of the social reports/ratios in the United States by covering the strike of the workmen of Paterson, in the New Jersey. To have taken party in favor of the strikers and the trade-union activists of the Industrial workers off the world (IWW), of which Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, it was imprisoned during four days, experiment which contributed notably to its political evolution.

A few months later, it went to Mexico to cover the revolutionary events. During several months, it followed the army of Pancho Villa, sympathizing deeply with let us péons insurgent and acquiring a certain notoriety as war correspondent in the United States. He was vigorously opposed to the American military intervention 1914 in the Mexican businesses. Into the way of the return, he inquired into the Massacre of Ludlow which had just occurred in Colorado.

After the release of the First World War, John Reed went several times to Europe. Until 1917, it could benefit from the non-belligerency of the United States to travel of one face to the other, in the two camps. In 1915, it spent several months in Balkans, accumulating the elements of its work, the War in Balkans . It is at this time that it entered to Russia for the first time, not without vexations, since it was stopped and suspected of espionage. This first experiment aroused at his place hatred of tsarism and interest for the Russian people. Between two voyages in Europe, in 1916, it married Louise Bryant and sympathized with the playwright Eugene O' Neill.

Horrified by the war, its horrors and its nonsense, John Reed was opposed of all its forces to the chauvinistic current which was going to push the United States in the conflict in spring 1917. For him, this war did not serve the interests of no people and the great sentences on the democracy could justify an alliance with the tsar Nicolas II. But, as in Europe, the pacifist current was swept in America.

Policy

John Reed and Louise Bryant arrived at Pétrograd in September 1917, six months after the beginning of the Russian Revolution and a few days after the attempt at putsch of the general Kornilov. They were the enthusiastic witnesses of the revolution of October. Reed gathered its observations on the revolution Bolshevik in her most famous work, Ten days which shook the world . Lénine itself recommended the reading of it, writing in 1920: “Here a work that I would like to see printed to million specimens and translated into all languages, because it describes in a veracious and extraordinarily alive way events of considerable importance for the intelligence of what is the proletarian revolution, of what is dictatorship of the proletariat.” Returned in the United States in spring 1918, John Reed there defended with strength the new Soviet mode and was opposed to any intervention of its country against Russia Bolshevik. That was worth to him several arrests and of the judgments for seditious matter, in particular for an article entitled “ Tricotez a strait jacket for your small soldier ”. At the time of the lawsuit of the Woblies (nickname of the trade unionists of the IWW), he wrote: “ I doubt that one never saw nothing of such in all the history. The meeting of one hundred loggers, farm laborers, minor, journalists, who think that the richnesses of the ground belong to that which creates them, in other words with the carriers, with the cutters of trees, the dockers, all these guy who make the hard job. ” After having contributed to the birth of the Communist Labor Party , it turned over to Russia end 1919, in the hope to convince the Internationale Communist lately created to recognize its organization like its American section, with the detriment of the other communist grouping of the United States, the Communist party of America . The International one sliced while requiring of the two movements to amalgamate.

In March 1920, whereas it tried to turn over clandestinely to America, it was arrested and imprisoned in Finland whose mode was then violently anticommunist. Finally released in June, it turned over to Pétrograd and could take part in IIème congress of the International Communist. Comintern required of him to go to Bakou where in September 1920 a Congrès was held of the People of the East which was to contribute to rejoin the colonized people of Asia to the world revolution. It spoke there. Shortly after its return to Moscow, John Reed caught the Typhus, which carried it at the 32 years age. The Soviet authorities organized official funeral and it was buried on the Red Place, in front of the wall of the the Kremlin, like the revolutionists of 1917 of which it had described the combat.

Anecdotes

the film of 1981 Reds with Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton, and Jack Nicholson, based on her life and that of his wife Louise Bryant, was nominated for new Academy Awards and gained three of them.
the Soviet film Red Bels , with Free Nero, left in 1982, is another adaptation of its life.
a urban Légende persistent in the birthplace of John Reed says that the Reed College was thus named in its memory. Although the not-official currency of the establishment ( tongue-in-cheek motto ) is: “Atheism, Communism, and Free Coil”, (Athéisme, Communisme and free love), the rumor is not proven.

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