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John Silas Reed, more commonly known by the nickname Jack Reed, is an American politician and socialist activist who has been serving as the Senior U.S. Senator for New York since his election to the post in 1928 and inauguration in 1929. Reed also serves alongside Quentin Roosevelt, elected in 1934. Before his entry into mainstream socialist politics Reed was an investigative journalist best known for his coverage of the Mexican. Russian, and French Revolutions.

Born to a wealthy upper-class family in Portland, Oregon, in his early years Reed received a private education at various schools. Eventually Reed went on to attend Harvard College, where he would be introduced to socialism. Reed eventually went on to graduate in 1910. Afterward, He established himself as a freelance journalist in New York City, writing featured articles for various mainstream as well as radical outlets. In 1913 he was sent by Metropolitan Magazine to cover the Mexican Revolution and spent four months with the Constitutional Army of Pancho Villa. He traveled to Russia with his wife Louise Bryant in 1917 and witnessed the October Revolution, writing about his experience in his book Ten Days That Shook The World.

Reed returned to America in 1920 and was instrumental in uniting the disparate factions of the American Left behind the Combined Syndicates of America, an association of trade unions and socialist political parties. After his return from reporting on the newly-created Communard government in France, he became an active participant in the 1923 Seattle Commune. In 1928 he was elected to serve as a United States Senator from New York in a stunning upset victory. He is expected to run as a candidate in the 1936 Presidential Elections.

Biography[]

Early Life and Education[]

John Silas Reed was born at his maternal grandparents’ residence on 22 October 1887 in Portland, Oregon. His mother, Margaret (née Green) Reed, was the daughter of wealthy Portland industrialist Henry Dodge Green, while his father, Charles Jerome Reed, came to Portland in 1886 as a representative of an agricultural machinery manufacturer. He also had a younger brother, Harry, who was two years his junior.

A sickly child, Reed spent his formative years surrounded by nurses, servants, and upper-class playmates carefully selected by his mother. He enjoyed a private education at Portland Academy and Morriston prep school, where he demonstrated a gifted literary talent in spite of a lackluster classroom performance. He enrolled in Harvard University in September 1904 and joined an array of student organizations and activities, ranging from athletics to fine arts. Among the many student meetings Reed attended were those of the Socialist Club, founded by his friend Walter Lippmann in May 1908, although he never became an official member.

After Reed graduated from Harvard in 1910, he embarked on a tour of Europe on the advice of his favorite professor, Charles T. Copeland, who counseled him that he had to “see life” in order to accurately write about it. He made stops in England, France, and Spain, paying his fare through Europe by working as a laborer on a cattle boat. He returned to America the following spring, taking up a residence in New York City to begin his career in journalism.

Journalism and Radicalisation[]

Reed moved to New York City in March 1911 and earned an entry-level position at The American Magazine with the help of Lincoln Steffens, an investigative journalist and muckraker he befriended while at Harvard. He found a home In Greenwich Village and fell in love with New York, relentlessly exploring and writing poems about it. Establishing himself as a freelance journalist, Reed first broke out at The Saturday Evening Post before writing several featured articles for Collier’s, The Forum, and The Century Magazine.

While living in New York City, Reed first became interested in social problems by the writings of Steffens and Ida Tarbell, eventually joining the staff of the socialist publication The Masses in 1913. The first of his many arrests came that year after he attempted to speak on behalf of striking silk mill workers in Paterson in New Jersey. The violence used to break the strike and the short prison term he served further radicalised Reed, and he allied himself with the socialist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He published an article entitled “War in Paterson'' recounting his experience and organized “The Pageant of the Paterson Strike” in Madison Square Garden to benefit the strikers.

In the autumn of 1913, Reed traveled to Mexico to report on the ongoing civil war for the Metropolitan Magazine. He spent four months embedded in Pancho Villa's Constitutional Army and published numerous magazine articles that painted a vivid portrait of Villa, his men, and the women soldaderas in his forces. He deeply sympathized with the Mexican peasants and vehemently opposed the American occupation of Veracruz and expedition against Villa. His reports were collected and published in the book Insurgent Mexico in 1914, earning him a national reputation as a war correspondent.

On 30 April 1914 he arrived in Colorado just ten days after the Ludlow massacre during the height of the Colorado Coalfield War. He spent a little over a week in the state investigating the events and speaking on behalf of striking workers. His impassioned article on the subject published that July, entitled “The Colorado War”, further advanced his belief in class conflict as a vehicle for social change.

War Correspondence[]

Reed and Robinson

Jack Reed with Boardman Robinson in Eastern Europe, 1916.

Shortly after the outbreak of the Weltkrieg, Reed set sail for neutral Italy on assignment for the Metropolitan. He viewed the war as a result of competing imperialist commercial rivalries and showed little sympathy for any of the involved parties. In an anonymous piece in The Masses entitled "The Traders' War" he famously declared, "This is not Our War". While in France, he found his journalistic efforts frustrated by wartime censorship and encountered difficulties gaining access to the front lines. In December 1914 he traveled to Berlin and interviewed Karl Liebknecht, one of the few socialists in Germany to vote against war credits. Reed was deeply disappointed by the collapse in working-class solidarity in the Second International and its replacement with militarism and nationalism.

In 1915 Reed spent three months traveling in Central and Eastern Europe with Boardman Robinson, a Canadian and fellow Masses contributor. Travelling up from Thessaloniki, they witnessed scenes of profound devastation in the Serbian capital of Belgrade, also passing through Bulgaria and Romania. While in Chełm they were arrested and incarcerated for several weeks, and might have been executed for espionage if not for the intervention of the American ambassador. They moved on to Russia but were rearrested when trying to cross the border back into Romania, ironically due to the American ambassador in Petrograd’s suspicion that they might be spies. This time it was the British ambassador (Robinson being a British subject) who secured permission for them to leave, but not before their papers were seized in Kiev. They proceeded to Bucharest, where they spent time piecing together their recounting of the journey, which would be published as The War in Eastern Europe in April 1916.

After he returned to America, Reed traveled to Portland to visit his mother, where he met and fell in love with Louise Bryant. Bryant returned with him to the East Coast and the couple married in Peekskill, New York in November 1916. That same year, Reed underwent an operation to remove a kidney for which he was hospitalized until mid-December.

Time in Bolshevik Russia[]

On 17 August 1917 Reed and Bryant embarked for Europe from New York to report on the sensational developments taking place in the fledgling republic of Russia. Traveling by way of Finland, they arrived in Petrograd shortly after the failed military putsch of Tsarist General Lavr Kornilov. Reed and Bryant were in Petrograd during the events leading up to the October Revolution and were present at the symbolic fall of the Winter Palace.

Reed in Petrograd

Jack Reed (center right, in black) with a contingent of Red Guards in Petrograd, 1917.

Reed quickly became an enthusiastic supporter of the new socialist government and began working for the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, translating decrees from the new government into English. He became close to the inner circle of the Bolsheviks, meeting with and interviewing both Leon Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin. He attended the opening of the Third Congress of Soviets and gave a short speech promising to bring news of the revolution to America, declaring that he hoped it would "call forth an answer from America's oppressed and exploited masses”.

In January 1918, Trotsky offered Reed the post of Soviet Consul in New York in response to Reed’s concerns about the safety of his substantial archive. However, Ukrainian Businessman Alexander Gumberg met with Lenin and showed him a prospectus in which Reed called for American capital support for Russia and for setting up a newspaper to express the American viewpoint on negotiations at Brest-Litovsk. Lenin found the proposals unsavory and subsequently withdrew Reed's nomination.

While Bryant managed to return to America in January 1918, Reed was not able to reach New York City until 28 April, as he was arrested by Finnish police at the port of Turku and held at Kakola prison for several weeks. Back in America, they passionately defended the Bolsheviks to the American public and were aggressively interrogated before a Senate committee about Bolshevik propaganda activities in the United States on 21-22 February 1919. The pair both wrote and published books about their experiences while in Russia; although Bryant's Six Red Months in Russia appeared first, Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World garnered far greater public attention.

Political Activism and Senate Career[]

Reed was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of America following the 1919 elections, which handed control of the party to its more radical left-wing for the first time. The near simultaneous fall of Bolshevik Russia and rise of Syndicalist France had created a rift between the communist and syndicalist factions of the party which came to a head during the Emergency National Congress of the Socialist Party in April 1920. Reed played an instrumental part in bridging the divide when he gave a speech to the Congress highlighting the collaboration between the CGT and the Socialist Party in France and calling for a similar partnership between the IWW and the Socialist Party of America. Supported by Eugene V. Debs, the Congress voted to rescind the 1911 expulsions as well as amendments condemning direct action and sabotage.

In 1920, Reed once again traveled to Europe to report on political affairs, this time traveling to the newly-created Commune of France. Meeting with and interviewing several prominent government officials and revolutionaries, he became an ardent syndicalist after he found the Communard government to be more efficient and responsive to the needs of the people compared to that of the Bolsheviks. Upon his return to America in 1923, Reed became an active participant in the General Strike Commission, the government of the Seattle Commune from early April to mid-May, elevating him to a leading voice in socialist politics.

On 12 July 1925 at a special “pan-union” congress in Philadelphia, Reed and several leaders of the IWW presented a bold plan to form an umbrella organization to coordinate union activity and policy in order to bring about the revolution in America, tentatively named the “Combined Syndicates of America”. Although the plan was met with general approval, several constituent unions within the American Federation of Labor (AFL) objected to the stated goal of revolution. Reed formulated a compromise whereby the anti-revolution unions would be organized into a specially autonomous branch of the CSA headed by Norman Thomas, finally realizing the IWW’s primary objective of “One Big Union”.

The onset of the Great Depression in 1925 following the British Revolution and collapse of the New York Stock Exchange led to a surge in the popularity of socialism in the United States. To support Thomas’s 1928 campaign for President, Reed ran for senator in New York state and defeated the incumbent Democrat Royal S. Copeland in a surprise upset, becoming the second Socialist senator after Seymour Stedman of Illinois. As labor disputes gradually began to return better results for workers in the early 1930s due to a combination of public sympathy, CSA organizing and direction, and Socialist Party support, Reed slowly opened to the idea of “reform from the top” advocated by the social democratic wing of the SPA.

As a senator, Reed advocates for greater protection for workers and the expansion of collective bargaining rights. He is expected to run as a candidate in the 1936 Presidential Elections on the Socialist Party ticket and has received endorsements from a number of prominent socialist politicians and leaders, including SPA chairman Alexander Berkman and prominent IWW activist William "Big Bill" Haywood.

Personal Life[]

Reed is married to fellow journalist and socialist activist Louise Bryant. They have one daughter.

Bibliography[]

Books
  • Insurgent Mexico (1914)
  • The War in Eastern Europe (1916)
  • Ten Days that Shook the World (1919)
Articles
  • "War in Paterson" (June 1913)
  • "The Colorado War" (July 1914)
  • "The Traders' War" (September 1914)
Poetry
  • "Sangar" (1912)
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