and women. .. . Their paid mercenaries, the armed detectives, shoot and kill innocent people.” At Margaret Sanger’s uptown flat, anarchists, suffragettes, playwrights and poets hotly debated plans to publicize the situation. Jack and Mabel came up with the concept of a theatrical pageant. However, the script didn’t come together until the workers themselves improvised their own history: the picket line, police billyclubs, the funeral of Valentino, May Day. Rah-rah boy Reed drove himself to the point of collapse! He orchestrated the different nationalities with hand cues and reset the words of a favorite Wobbly song to the melody of “Harvard, Old Harvard!” On June 7, 1913, twelve hundred strikers took the Hoboken ferry to Manhattan. The stadium was packed. Red electric lights blazed “IWW” 1O-feet-tall above Madison Square Garden. Sheriff Julius Harburger complained that he couldn’t stop them from singing the Internationale, but they’d better not desecrate the American flag—he’d shut them down! Newspapers spoke of a “poignant realism no man will ever forget,” and bohemians saw the birth of a revolutionary popular theater. Characteristically, despite the publicity, the silk workers’ demands were not met. Wealthy New Yorkers did not attend, and the one-day event netted little profit. After the media-arousing event, Mabel Dodge whisked Reed off to Italy. The lovers were like two sparrows twittering in a villa, with servants and ornate hangings. For a month or so. Then he began to feel like a bird in a gilded cage. He flew the coop! Insurgent Mexico Jn November of 1913 a rebel leader named Pancho Villa, a hero among the Mexican peasants, had set the world abuzz with his military victories. Carl Hovey asked Reed to cover the scene for Metropolitan. Barred from entering the country, other journalists sat around the hotel bar in El Paso making up stories. Not so Jack! He had “a terrible curiosity ... . I felt I had to know how / would act under fire.” Federalist General Orozco warned Reed that if he crossed the Rio Grande he would shoot furrows up and down his back. Reed waded the river anyway. He had the great reportorial knack of jumping in feet first. Surviving the leap, he wrote fresh firsthand analysis. By Christmas, Reed got the big interview in Chihuahua City. Villa wore a rumpled brown suit as he conferred with aides and listened to the grievances of the peons. Reed described him as having “terrible eyes” that wouldn’t hesitate to kill you. He also was “the most natural human being I ever saw.” Fond of Reed, Villa nicknamed him Chatito, or pug nose. The vivid dispatches of riding with La Tropa, as Villa marched decisively on Torreon, were published in major newspapers. At noon we roped a steer, and cut his throat. And because there was no time to build a fire, we ripped the meat from the carcass and ate it raw. “Oiga, meester,” shouted Jose. “Do the United States soldiers eat raw meat?! I said I didn’t think they did. “It is good for the hombres. In the campaign we have no time for anything but carne crudo. It makes us brave.” Insurgent Mexico This was a “romantic” revolution, one that Reed believed in. The Mexican peasants accepted him as a comrade. He was right there in battle with them, sharing their danger, witnessing their death throes. When Reed returned to New York his name was plastered everywhere as a celebrity. There were lecture invitations. He was wined and dined. At the salon, an evening was devoted to his views on Mexico. Mabel adoringly looked on, recalling his “eyes shining and curls bobbing back, temples agleam.” The sharpshooter running in front stopped suddenly, swaying, as if he had run against a solid wall. . . . He shook his head impatiently, like a dog with a hurt ear. Blood drops flew from it. Bellowing with rage, he shot the rest of his clip, and then slumped to the ground and thrashed to and fro for a minute. . . . Now the trench was boiling with men scrambling to their feet, like worms when you turn over a log. Insurgent Mexico Overnight John Reed became the most famous correspondent of his day. He was compared with Kipling, Stephen Crane and Richard Harding Davis, who’d written about the Spanish American War. Almost enviously his college buddy Lippmann wrote: “Your articles are undoubtedly the finest reporting that’s ever been done. It’s kind of embarrassing-to tell a fellow you know that he’s a genius.” It’s hard for us to imagine. More astonishingly, how quickly he fell out of favor! Insurgent Mexico came out as a book in July of 1914. At the age of 26, he had found his skills and his confidence. Restless, ever in pursuit of a story, he read of the massacre of striking coal miners by the state militia in Ludlow, Colorado. Outraged, he and Max Eastman of the Masses headed west. President Woodrow Wilson sent in federal troops to disarm both sides. Nosing around in the burned out workers’ colony where 26 bodies were uncovered, talking with those involved, he penned “The Colorado War.” The union wasn’t recognized and John D. Rockefeller’s interests were victorious, but Reed got out his message: Class warfare was imminent in the U.S. World War I More and more, John Reed was seeing world events from a Marxist point of view. Entire empires were crumbling in Europe. Hovey and mentor Steffens had high hopes when they asked Reed to go to France and Germany after Mexico. They expected exciting copy. When he visited French and German soldiers on the Western front, he saw apathy about the fighting. From the guy who gave us the blood and guts, here’s a bayonet in your eye-type of reporting, what do we get? Reed called the First World War “a war of traders.” He couldn’t write colorful copy encouraging “the good fight.” The Huns seemed no worse to him than the English! After 5 months, he came home depressed with one good article, “A Night in the German Trenches.” He saw a man go insane. In the morning he and the other correspondent were handed a rifle to take a potshot. They did! This was reported, and the French denied him a future passport. Teddy Roosevelt, asked to intervene, stated flatly: “If I were Marshall Joffre and Reed fell into my hands, I should have him court-martialed and shot.” Hovey then sent Reed and Boardman Robinson, a cartoonist, to tour the Eastern front. They went to Serbia, Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia. Stories of Austrian atrocities were everywhere. The dreaded typhus was killing thousands. Bored and not seeing any action, they sneaked into Czarist Russia. In Petrograd with improper credentials, both were put under “house arrest” at the Hotel Astoria. There was a possibility of a firing squad. Duke Nicholas, the Czarist commander, did not want correspondents writing the truth about the vaunted Russian “steam-roller.” That it was a patsy- inept, corrupt and losing the war. Negley Farson in Way of a Transgressor comically describes how the secret police, dressed like Charlie Chaplin, shadowed the two. Reed and Robinson had great fun “tormenting” them. Laughing, John lobbed pop bottles at them from the veranda of the hotel. Because the American ambassador wouldn’t help, it took the British embassy to get them safely out. Reed’s time in Eastern Europe was not a lark. He tramped over the blown-up flesh and bones, maggoty pockets of corpses in the ground. His kidney inflamed. Reed’s The War in Easter Europe did not sell well. It boiled down to this: Nothing was more important to Jack Reed than to stop American participation in World War I. He couldn’t do it; he wrecked his career trying. He saw the same economic forces at work in the U.S. that had started the war in Europe. In the Masses of July 16, 1917, he published the article “At the Throat of the Republic.” It documented who stood to gain the most from the war. Munition makers. Those on preparedness committees. Shortly thereafter, U.S. government officials suppressed the Masses and charged the editors with sedition. On April 2, 1917 when Reed was attending a pacifist rally in Washington, D.C., President Wilson declared war on Germany. Reed had halfway believed in Wilson. He felt bitterly betrayed. At . House conscription hearings he testified: “You can shoot me if you want. I have no personal objection to fighting..! just think that the war is unjust on both sides, that Europe is mad, and that we should keep out of it.” Jack and Louise J ohn Reed met Louise Bryant at an artist’s home in Portland in December ui 1915. He was visiting his mom, taking care of family affairs. An aspiring journalist, Louise was doing fashion sketches for the local newspapers. They hit if off immediately! Always a free spirit, she left her dentist husband, Dr. Trullinger, and by January was living with Jack in the Village. Theirs was a great but turbulent love story. Worthy of the Hollywood movie Reds. True bohemians, experimenters with life, both Jack and Louise flirted with different lovers. Whatever might be said about her notorious affair with the playwright Eugene O’Neill, it didn’t last long! Believing in “free love” intellectually, Jack found it hard to live by. When apart, they corresponded effusively. Addressing each other as “Big" and “Small.” At his request, before he had a kidney removed at Johns Hopkins, a dangerous operation, they got married. In the summer of 1916, they moved to Provincetown with a theater friend, George Cram Cook. O’Neill showed up. Calling themselves the Provincetown Players, the three are credited with starting modern American drama. They built a theater at the end of the wharf, in a weather-beaten fishhouse. They produced O'Neill’s Bound East for Cardiff and Reed’s Freedom. Jack swam off • Cape Cod, tiring himself out doing theater. It was a wonderful lull in his life. Before entering the hospital, he put down a payment on a cottage in Croton on the Hudson. He would garden and recuperate there. The end of 1916 and the first half of 1917 was the most uncertain, hellish time in his life. America entered the War, and moreover he had severe doubts about his relationship with Louise. Had he found out about O’Neill? Some claim that her “ovarian infection” at the time This was a “romantic” revolution, one that Reed believed in. The Mexican peasants accepted him as a comrade. He was right there in battle with them, sharing their danger, witnessing their death throes. Overnight John Reed became the most fam ous correspondent of his day. was really an abortion! In May Louise decided to go to France as a foreign correspondent. Jack gave her all the contacts he could. When she got there, she realized it was a mistake to leave him. Because of the threat of German U- boats, the passage over and back was risky. She wrote: “I feel so alien. Not one person since I left my Honey thinks a thing I do. Not one! Sometimes the conversation drives me almost mad.... I’m homesick for the first time in my life. It’s a queer sensation; beside it, seasickness is quite pleasant. Home is where you are my dearest. ... I love you and need you terribly.” He had a confession to make too. He'd tried to make love to another.woman, and he couldn’t do it. “You see, my dearest lover, I was once a free person. I was as humanly independent as it was possible to be. Then along came women. . . . Well, they did it, and so now without a mate I am half a man, and sterile.” Petrograd 1917 T X T hen Lincoln Steffens came back V V from Russia, he talked about “big things” happening. Bolsheviks! Revolution! Bursting with enthusiasm, Reed swept Louise up in his arms. . .they were going. This was the biggest story of his life! And he had “the nose” for it. The unerring knack of being at the wrong place at the right time! Ever since 1915, he’d been intrigued by the Russian people: “Russian ideals are the most exhilarating, Russian thought the freest. ... ” After Czar Nicolas II abdicated in February, a provisional government was headed by Kerensky. Russia was in chaos. Peasants, workers and soldiers were fed up with high prices, short rations and unequal distribution of land. The Soviets—’’town qobncils” organized from the disaffected groups—were Socialist in sympathy. They had the confidence of the industrial workers and the army, who were maintaining law and order. The Russian people were getting their ass kicked and they were totally demoralized by the ongoing war with Germany. Who should be there to pick up the pieces? The party headed by Trotsky and Lenin, theorists and orators. With their own newspapers. Single-minded and highly disciplined, the Bolsheviks had been organizing ever since the 1905 debacle. Reed arrived with notebook in hand, interviewing Kerensky, Trotsky, and the capitalist Lianozov who told him “sooner or later the foreign powers must intervene—as one would intervene to cure a sick child.” He and Louise scurried around to the Smolny Institute, cafes, factories, the ballet. They talked to radicals and people in the street. On November 7th, 1917 Lenin gave the signal. All power to the Soviets! It was time to dispose of the provisional government. Because a defecting army regiment, Kronstadt sailors and the Cossacks went along, it was almost a bloodless takeover. The guns of the battleship Aurora fired on the Winter Palace, the last symbolical holdout of the provisional government. Hand in hand, Reed and Bryant followed the Red Guards into the palace, stepping over the thrown- down weapons of the Junkers who had surrendered. In the morning we woke to window- ledges heaped white, and snowflakes falling so whirling thick that it was impossible to see ten feet ahead. The mud was gone; in a twinkling the gloomy city became white, dazzling. The droshki with their padded coachmen turned into sleighs, bounding along the uneven street at headlong speed, their drivers’ beards stiff and frozen.... In spite of Revolution, all Russia plunging dizzily into the unknown and terrible future, joy swept the city with the coming of the snow. Everybody was smiling; people ran into the streets, holding out their arms to the soft, falling flakes, laughing. Hidden was all the greyness; only the gold and coloured spires and cupolas, with heightened barbaric splendour, gleamed through the white snow. Ten Days The first lengthy article he wrote reeked of hope that “this proletarian government will last in history, a pillar of fire for mankind forever.” Reed was willing to for28 Clinton St. Quarterly— Fall, 1987
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