Reed, John (1887–1920)

JOHN SILAS REED was born in Portland, Oregon, to a middle-class family. His bourgeois origins gave no indication of the role he would play in two of the 20th century's most landmark revolutions. He matriculated at Harvard University, where he joined literary magazines in 1908. Here, the talents he would use in progressive thought were honed before an appreciative, yet discriminating audience. He joined the Harvard Lampoon and Monthly, becoming acquainted with the young poet Alan Seeger. Seeger's social consciousness and desire to fight oppression would lead him and other Harvard students to join the French Foreign Legion in 1914 to help defend against the German invasion in World War I.

After graduating from Harvard in June 1910, Reed took a tour through Europe, which was then de rigeur—an expected part of growing up—for those in the American upperand upper-middle classes before World War I. While he enjoyed himself—a lucrative letter of credit assisted him, as Robert A. Rosenstone noted in Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed—he began to develop the social consciousness that would characterize the mature part of his tragically short career. In the middle of enjoying Paris, France, Reed wrote that he would like to travel around the world, but only “when I have done something worth while myself.” He went to New York City, where he became part of the intellectual ferment that made Greenwich Village a central location for progressive thought in the first third of the 20th century. Reed began working with Max Eastman on The Masses, a journal established in January 1911 that found itself becoming the voice of the socialists and other liberal thinkers who had been making New York City an intellectual hotbed since the 1880s.

Reed's first real social commitment came when he went to cover the silk workers' strike in Paterson, New Jersey. There, he met one of the most charismatic labor leaders of the period, William D. “Big Bill” Haywood of the International Workers of the World (IWW), or the “Wobblies.” Arrested at the strike, after release Reed wrote of the strike in what could be seen as the inauguration of his career as a radical journalist. Writing of the oppression of the strikers by the police, Reed declared in The Masses, “the police club unresisting men and women and ride down law-abiding crowds.”

Reed's pursuit of radical journalism led him to witness two of the most important upheavals of his time: the Mexican and Russian revolutions. On October 4, 1910, the Mexican dictator Porfirio Diaz, through manipulated elections, had been elected president for the eighth time. Resistance to Diaz coalesced around Francisco Madero, who became president after the people, dissatisfied with the Diaz oligarchs who had despoiled Mexico, overthrew Diaz. In a period of leaderless times, in the north of Mexico, the most charismatic leader was Francisco “Pancho” Villa, an outlaw turned revolutionary.

The Mexican Revolution had a profound effect on American journalism; the famous writer and Civil War veteran Ambrose Bierce would travel to Mexico, only to disappear. Reed was sent to the northern Mexico battle lines by the Metropolitan magazine in November 1913. Meeting with Villa, he reported a vivid picture of el centauro del norte, “the centaur of the north.” Wrote Reed, “everywhere he was known as the Friend of The Poor. He was the Mexican Robin Hood.”

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