nessed as a boy and young man with bark; on summer evenings canvas Childhood 1917 and the Sedition Act gave Attorney and mills. They died in the mines and General A. Mitchell Palmer the legal logging camps. Wages were low. Health Lean cowpunchers from Bums Stringy old prospectors. . Bums riding the rods, gp: Wobblies singing their defiant songs. . . " He states clearly, “I know you Americans.” “Fisherman putting out from Astoria in whose sides ran gas-pipes grown over the foggy dawn... ' |^^■■■■■■■ 26 Clinton St. Quarterly— Fall, 1987 the “father of modern journalism”—is perhaps notorious, charismatic literary figure of the early 20th century. Born in Portland, Oregon, he’s known worldwidefor Ten Days That Shook The World, the definitive eyewitness account of the November 1917 Bolshevik Revolution — which ushered in the modern Soviet state—the most important event ofour century. Reed became a Communist, afact that constantly overshadowed his briefcareer as a writer. His life was active, accomplished and yet so incomplete that he truly becomes a human conundrum. A puzzle., I see his overall life as an unfinished symphony, a tapestry with threads still unwoven and dangling. He shot across our literary skies like a meteor, a restless fireball of intellectual energy. And was gone! He can fairly be compared with Jack London and Thomas Wolfe. Had he survived his bout with typhus in 1920, his later biography would have been fascinating. Many have theorized what his critical position might have been regarding the hardening of Soviet bureaucracy and Stalin, who had not emerged by Reed’s death. Revered as a saint of the revolution, he’s also been labelled a Commie dupe. The “red herring” still exists. No, Reed College was not named after him. Such speculation goes beyond Reed and his writings. It has much to do with Cold War propaganda which we’ve been fed since that period of our own American history. Reed was a leading figure and a voice of conscience in the WWI era. Labor unrest, which peaked with violent revolutionary activity, brought about extreme government repression. For several years the United States was in fact a police state. The Espionage Act of means to arrest thousands. Persons advocating free speech, discussion of conscription and challenge of the no-strike clause during the War, as did the Wobblies, were fined and jailed. Twenty year prison sentences were handed out for political activity. Most Americans know little or have conveniently forgotten such history. I’m obviously biased about John Reed. I love him! He thought himself a poet. He was a big-hearted, joke-loving, boisterous man of the West. He loved the earthy people and the wide open landscape. While U.S. officials kept him from returning home, awaiting a visa in Christiana, Sweden, he wrote the epic poem “America 1918." This summary work is a patriotic hymn and a critique of his own country. It opens: “By my free boyhood tn the wide West, The powerful sweet river, fish-wheels, log rafts. . . ” He catalogs the characters he witOREGON BURIED W |KREMLIN IAXZA.LL By Walt Curtis The latter part gushes with descriptions of ethnic New York City. The Big Apple transformed the young man from Oregon into “an internationalist.” “The East side, worlds within a world, chaos of nations, Sink of the nomad races, last and wretchedest Port of the westward Odyssey of mankind.. . At dawn vomiting colossal flood of machine fodder. At evening sucking back terrible harsh sound To beast-like tenements .. .” The Statue of Liberty is raised on high within the poem, but Reed witnessed the reality. When immigrants arrived they were exploited in the garment districts, factories care and Social Security wore still a distant dream. Reed knew reform was needed in the American workplace and the only way to get it was to fight for it. Several books have been written about his life, interpreting him and his politics. The definitive text—with annotation, extensive reference and bibliography—is Robert Rosenstone’s Romantic Revolutionary (Alfred Knopf, 1975). Insurgent Mexico and Ten Days are available in paperback. Born on October 22, 1887, Reed died five days before his thirty-third birthday. The proper way to celebrate the 100th anniversary of his birth is to read one of his famous books. For the first 9 years, his parents lived at Cedar Hill above Northwest Portland, with his grandmother Charlotte Green. She was “the social queen of the city.” Mr. Green had been a successful pioneer capitalist, making a fortune in city utilities. Charlotte refused to play the bereaved widow! She threw lavish all- night parties at the mansion. Reed poetically remembered the scene: “The laWn terrace below the house was surrounded on three sides by great fir trees, up was laid on the turf, and people danced, illuminated by flaming jets of gas....” Troubled by a serious kidney ailment, Jack was a sickly, gangly, introspective kid. On the way to school, he’d let the shanty Irish boys bully him. He paid a nickel to pass through Goose Hollow! Lee Sing, the family cook, impressed a sense of Oriental exoticism on the little rich boy. His mother Margaret spoiled him, worrying about his health. He’d lie in bed reading stories of romantic chivalry and dragons. He invented a monster named “Hormuz" who devoured Portland children. His mother’s nickname was “Muz”! The family moved from Cedar Hill when Jack was 10, and he joined the Fourteenth Street gang. They made mud-balls, tore up lawns, and fought with the Montgomery St. gang. Young Jack was a superb swimmer. In the summer he practiced difficult back flips and twists from the highest diving board at Captain Bundy’s bathhouse on the Willamette. During his last year at Portland Academy, a rather staid private school, Reed excelled in poetry and writing. Although he was bored by the quality of teaching and curriculum, he served on the staff of the Troubador. Providing jokes, articles, and poems. Friendly for years with the children of “Ces” Wood, the free-thinking author of Heavenly Discourse, Jack often visited the older man. Discussing books and maybe getting advice about what Eastern school he should attend. Reed’s father, “C.J.,” realized how provincial Portland was, and he wanted the best education for his son. The Green family fortune had been steadily going downhill. Even though he belonged to the Arlington Club, Charles Jerome was known for making witticisms at the expense of the social establishment. In 1905 Teddy Roosevelt—the reformist president—appointed special prosecutor Francis J. Heney to investigate the Oregon Land Fraud Ring. Heney hired C.J. Reed as the U.S. Marshall. Conscientious, Mr. Reed was in the thick of it! The timber prosecutions went on for
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