John Reed

Bio

(1887-1920) Journalist and radical leader. After graduating from Harvard in 1910, he wrote articles in the United States for various publications and from 1913 was attached to the radical magazine The Masses. His coverage of the Paterson, N.J., silk workers strike of 1913 profoundly affected him, and thereafter he became a proponent of revolutionary politics. The articles that he wrote from Mexico about the revolt of Pancho Villa established his reputation as a journalist and a radical. He served as a reporter in Europe in World War I and was in Petrograd (Leningrad) when the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917; his book on the event, “Ten Days That Shook The World” (1919), is considered the best eyewitness account of the revolution. Expelled from the US Socialist convention in 1919, he helped to organize the Communist Labor party, which was a left-wing splinter group of the Socialist party. He was indicted for sedition in New York City in 1918 and in Philadelphia in 1919, but both cases were dropped. Reed returned to the USSR, worked in the Soviet bureau of propaganda, and was appointed Soviet consul to New York. Upon protest from the U.S. government, Reed was withdrawn from the consulship. He lived at 42 Washington Square with ALAN SEEGER and LINCOLN STEFFINS and at 1 Patchin Place, in 1916. He died in Moscow of typhus and was buried at the Kremlin.