The Harvard Man In The Kremlin Wall (February 1960 | Volume: 11, Issue: 2)

The Harvard Man In The Kremlin Wall

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Authors: Bertram D. Wolfe

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February 1960 | Volume 11, Issue 2

John Reed was as American as apple pie and store cheese. Yet he was one of the founders of the Communist International, and his ashes lie under the Kremlin wall. From a mansion on Cedar Hill in Portland, Oregon, through respectable Harvard College, to the Kremlin wall in the heart of Moscow—such is the trajectory of his life. Except that his further evolution was cut short by untimely death, it was the trajectory, too, of the pre-igi^ Greenwich Village radicalism of which he was an integral part. Indeed, to follow his adventures of Mesh and spirit is to learn more about native American radicalism than about Russian Communism.

 

John Silas Reed, as he was christened in Portland’s fashionable Trinity Episcopal Church, was born on October 20, 1887, in the sumptuous mansion of his maternal grandparents. His childhood memories center around their lordly hilltop home, “a French chateau, with immense park, formal gardens, lawns, stables, greenhouses, glass grape-arbor, tame deer … Chinese servants … idols, strange customs and ceremonies … pig-tails and gongs and fluttering red paper.”

But Jack’s father and mother, the C. J. Reeds, were neither so rich nor so colorful. They owned a little home in Portland, then moved to an apartment hotel. His father did well as agent for an eastern agricultural implement company, until the international Harvester trust swallowed it up. Then he struggled along as an insurance salesman. He strove to give his tsvo sons the education proper to Portland “society” (private school, eastern prep school, Harvard), never letting his boys know the effort it cost him. In later years he became a crusader against the deeds of the great Portland families of which his father-in-law was a leading representative. Some of Oregon’s leaders were pre-empting the forests (to say Oregon was to say lumber). When Theodore Roosevelt began his battle for conservation of the forest lands, C. J. Reed became a United States marshal to fight the despoilers of the Oregon forests. The divisions in Portland society, the excitements of the crusade, the friendship between Jack’s father and Lincoln Steffens, the firing of Portland’s United States marshal by Taft—such was the political heritage which John Reed took with him to Harvard and Greenwich Village.

Jack’s boyhood was troubled by illness, particularly a kidney ailment, a sense of physical weakness, the fear of older and tougher boys. He was never really well and strong until his sixteenth year. His way to the Portland Academy lay through Goose Hollow, inhabited by “brutal Irish boys.” He fought when he had to, ran when he could, paid tribute to his tormentors, finally got himself accepted precariously as one of the less valued members of the Fourteenth Street Gang.

The boy’s happiness was not in the world of fights and sports but, his mother having early taught him to read, in the world of books and dreams. Soon he was writing verses, telling fanciful talcs to younger