and she couldn’t confess the real reason she didn’t want him to return home—her lover Andrew Dasburg, the painter. She warned that he wasn't strong enough to face jail. “My dear little Honey,” he responded, “ I would do anything I could for you, but don’t ask me to be a coward.” In Moscow Jack took Louise to visit the Bolsheviks Trotsky, Kamanev and Angelica Balabnova, Turkey’s Enver Pasha and Hungary’s Bela Kun. He arranged an interview for her with Lenin: They attended the ballet and opera, museums and art galleries. Shared quiet moments speaking of the future. He wanted to do more writing, less political work. She agreed to have a baby. Reed developed flu symptoms, and taken to Marinsky Hospital, he was diagnosed as having the dreaded spotted fever—typhus! Linder Allied blockade, medical supplies were unavailable. Louise was at his side as the fever raged. Pain was constant, he couldn’t swallow. He gripped her hand. At times hallucinations, poems and stories swarmed in his feverish mind. Other times he was clear. Near the end he reputedly said something about being “caught in a trap.” The vortex of history and personal mortality swallowed him up! There is a striking photo of a grief- stricken Louise, standing beside Reed's flower-laden and slogan-draped bier. His body lay in state for a week, in a silver coffin at the Labor Temple. Thousands joined in the funeral procession, speeches were given and there was much public sorrow and pageantry. Louise cabled Jack’s brother Harry. The October 18 morning Oregonian read: JOHN REED, PORTLAND RADICAL WRITER, DIES. The story’s last line crisply dismissed him saying “that he had been sent to Moscow to represent American communists.” Louise married William Bullitt in Paris in 1923—the same man who had gone on a secret mission with Steffens in 1919 for President Wilson and Britain’s Lloyd George. Lenin agreed to a seven-point recognition plan for the Bolshevik government. France got wind of it and protested. Wilson and George denied it had ever happened. Bullitt later became the first American ambassador to the U.S.S.R. Louise left Bullit after seven years, returning to the Village apartment she had once shared with the writer. At 1 Patchin Place. Unable to recapture the past, she fled to Paris. Leftist cartoonist Art Young writes of her dying there in 1936 in his autobiography: “Poor Louise committed slow suicide— went the sad road of narcotic escape. Only a few weeks before she died she sent me a postcard from Paris. ‘I suppose in the end life gets all of us. It has nearly got me now—getting my friends and myself out of jail—living under curious conditions—but never minding much. . . Know always I send my love to you across the stars. If you get there before I do, or later, tell Jack Reed I love him.’ ” Footnotes to History 4 merican capitalist Armand Ham- 7 A mer’s account of meeting Lenin in August 1921 in his new book Hammer is sensational. He claims Lenin treated him “like atrusted friend.” Hammer had gone there to help as a doctor in medical relief. Lenin purportedly told him: “What we really need is American capital and technical aid to get our wheels turning once again. . .. The New Economic Policy demands a fresh development of our economic possibilities. . . . Itwill give great opportunities to the United States. Have you thought of it at all?” Dealing with the U.S.S.R. over the years, Hammer certainly took heed of Lenin’s advice to become a millionaire several times over. When Norman Solomon lays a wreath of red roses on Reed’s grave—at high noon, Moscow time, October 22nd—perhaps a long overdue gesture of respect will be paid by the citizens of Portland to a most notable native son. Lenin himself would suffer a stroke in 1922, at 52 years of age, just as his father had before him. It incapacitated him for five months. A third one killed him—he was dead by January of 1924. Only six years in power. One can only imagine what would have happened if Lenin had lived another 10 or 15 years and Stalin hadn’t taken over. My friend Norman Solomon recently sent me an excerpt from the radical journalist George Seldes’ Witness to a Century. We have a way of forgetting these old characters who laid lives and integrity on the line. Warren Beatty filmed seven reels of Seldes for Reds, and utilized only a few seconds. Seldes was asked to sing a ribald song over and over again that Reed used to sing at Harvard: Down in the sewer, digging up manure. Sure we do get buggered now and then; But our chieftest delight Is to hurl up the shite For we're Tom and Jerry, the night soil men. They never used it. No one is really a mirror image of anyone else, but I feel that Norman Solomon is “a second John Reed.” Co-author of Killing Our Own, a history of U.S. commercial and military uses of nuclear energy, he was the disarmament director for the national Fellowship of Reconciliation until he staged a sit-in at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow protesting Reagan’s arms policies. Author of some 60 op-ed pieces in U.S. newspapers, Solomon is working to set up PrintBridge, a U.S.- Soviet exchange of citizen journalism. Returning to the U.S.S.R. for the sixth time, he will spend a year, among other things, retracing some of Reed’s steps. “I’ve got my typhus shots!” he quips. When Norman lays a wreath of red roses on Reed’s grave—.at high noon, Moscow time, October 22nd—perhaps a long overdue gesture of respect will be paid by the citizens of Portland to a most notable native son. John Reed deserves reading. He ought not be relegated to a footnote in the history books. Whatever his actual achievements during his short lifetime— he takes on great symbolical significance today. He was the first cultural emissary between the suspicious superpowers, an American that tried to convince other Americans that the Soviets were okay. We are still living with Soviet phobia that traces back to the earliest Western capitalist reaction to the Bolsheviks. Gorbachev has made some overtures as Lenin did in his day. Shouldn’t our two societies soon begin to accept each other in an open, reasonable and civilized manner? “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. ” George Santayana Walt Curtis, the Portland poet, has been working the last several years on studies of major Oregon literary figures. He’s currently showing a slide presentation on Oregon literature and John Reed. Author of Mala Noche, Curtis has written several articles for CSQ. 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