John Reed: The Eternal Cheerleader

On a cold morning in Moscow, 38 years ago today, a mixture of snow and rain soaking the mourners, John Reed's coffin was laid to rest next to the Kremlin Wall--alongside those who had given their lives for the Bolshevik Revolution.

As a Red Guard band played the funeral dirge, a large Red banner was nailed upon the wall with the letters in gold, "The leaders die, but the cause lives on."

But these words would have had little meaning for John Reed. As poet, war correspondent, Communist, and Harvardman, John Reed saw life as one Big Game. You could lose the game, but it wasn't worth dying for. Life was too exciting.

Graduate of the Class of 1910, world famous by the age of 26, and dead at 32, Reed lived hard, and it was only when he was fatally stricken with typhus that he gave up fighting for the Bolsheviks as he had fought for Harvard, Pancho Villa, and the Socialists.

Reed was impetuous--a romantic who saw a beauty in fighting for something even if everyone else was against him. But at the same time, he craved popularity.

His friends had expected his impulsiveness to vanish, but he always cherished the memory of those moments, when, in front of the Harvard stands, Cheerleader Jack Reed could summon help to "dash old Eli's hopes."

"As song leader of the cheering section," Reed wrote at the age of 29, "I had the supreme blissful sensation of swaying 2000 voices in great crashing choruses during the big football games."

It was this spirit which impelled Reed, at the end of the Second Communist international in Moscow in August, 1920, to lift his team captain--in this case Lenin--on top of his shoulders.

With two friends, Paul Freeman and Owen Penney, Reed boosetd the Bolshevik leader up. Granville Hicks reported:

Before he knew what was happening, Lenin found himself high on Reed's and Freeman's shoulders, gazing down on a bewildered crowd. Ignorant of American customs, or perhaps disapproving, he protested, and, when protests did no good, kicked. They let him down, Reed, unabashed, joking at the bump on Penney's forehead.

When John Reed, son of an Oregon liberal, reached Cambridge in the fall of 1906, Charles W. Eliot was to serve only two more years as president of Harvard and would turn over to A. Lawrence Lowell a tradition of freedom and excellence that has characterized Harvard this whole century.

"Freedom is the condition necessary to the progress of society," Eliot told Reed's assembled class. "A striking phenomenon of our day is the distrust of freedom that is manifesting itself in all walks of life."

The class of 1910 produced a number of individuals whose use of this freedom was to develop into diverse, but highly articulated philosophies. In addition to Reed, there was Walter Lippman, T.S. Eliot, Heywood C. Broun, Alan Seeger, and Hamilton Fish, Jr.

Looking back on his college days, Reed wrote

There was talk of the world and daring thought and intellectual insurgency; heresy has always been a Harvard and New England tradition. Students themselves criticized the faculty for not educating them, attacked the sacred institution of intercollege athletics, sneered at undergradaute clubs so holy that no one dared mention their name.

But for all his high-minded talk about "hersey," in 1917 Jack Reed was definitely a minor league rebel while he was at Harvard.

Coming from a small, respectable prep school in New Jersey, Reed hoped to throw himself into Harvard life with the same success that had made him Big Man at Morristown Prep.

When he had been at Harvard only a few days, for instance, he walked up to classmate Bob Hallowell. "I hear you draw," he said. "Why don't we do a book about Harvard? I'll do the text and you do the pictures." When Hallowell protested that they knew nothing about the college, Reed replied, "Hell, we'll find out doing the thing."

But Harvard was not so easily conquered. Desiring to be accepted by what he called "the aristocracy"--those who lived along the Gold Coast of Mt. Auburn St. and belonged to the Final Clubs--Reed felt pangs of loneliness and bitterness when no club opened its doors to him.

On paper, Reed had the right qualifications--an ancestry dating back to Patrick Henry, and a "good" prep school diploma--but apparently his personality clashed too often with the ruling lords.

"Large, athletic, exuberant and humorous, he seemed to be on earth for the motion he got out of it," a classmate remarked later. "Big, brisk, and breezy," his impetuous cordiality which would later win him many admirers alienated those whose friendship he sought.

Rejected by the "gentlemen," Reed turned next to Harvard's vast number of extracurricular activities--this time with success.

Activity men, Reed wrote, were "the realest expression of what Harvard means today.... They are dreamers and often poets." And so, in his undergraduate years, Jack Reed joined the Christian Association, St. Paul's Society, the Memorial Society, Debating Club, Oracle, Round Table, Dramatic Club, Symposium, Hasty Pudding--and became captain of the water polo team, Ibis of the Lampoon, Editor of the Monthly, manager of the Banjo, Glee, Guitar and Mandolin Clubs, and President of the Western and Cosmopolitan Clubs.

Conspicuously absent from the above list is the Socialist Club, formed by Reed's friend Walter Lippman. Several of Reed's biographers, in tracing his political development, have given him undeserved credit for helping organize the club. The Socialist Club itself was more interested in promoting discussion than political activity.

Reed, later one of the first leaders of the Communist Party in the United States, showed little political intrest in college. He was interested mainly in creative writing, and his "rebellion" took the form of practical jokes rather than that of radical thought.

For this training in writing, Reed was to study under two of the great names in Harvard history--Charles T. Copeland, known as "Copey," and George P. Baker, known for his "47 Workshop." In addition, Reed studied literature with such giants as George L. Kittridge, and Bliss Perry.

Although he later would be quoting Marxist dogma to lecture halls throughout the country, at college Reed took only one course in the social sciences--that in medieval history.

Copeland, after Reed had become famous, said that he was "a brilliant character. His prose was lively, and his poetry adventurous."

However much the swaggering Reed may have impressed Copeland, his poetry is only an expression of a somewhat sentimental and romantic college youth, with no lasting literary merit. His college prose was somewhat better, and several of his Lampoon articles showed a keen sense of satire. His short stories in the Harvard Monthly