Radical Wheat, Romantic Chaff

RIDING ACROSS the dusty plains of Mexico with Pancho Villa and his band; rallying the members of the International Workers of the World to close the Paterson silk mills; storming the Winter Palace in Leningrad, shoulder to shoulder with the Bolsheviks in 1917--this is the stuff of which a radical's fantasies are made. Indeed, the entire adult life of John Reed '10 reads like a travelogue of the great events of the first two decades of this century. It is a long way from Portland, Oregon, where Reed was born in 1887 to a prosperous family, to the Kremlin in Moscow where he was buried in 1920--the only American ever to receive that honor.

Reed was an outsider at Harvard. Not coming from the clique of Eastern establishment families that sent its sons to Groton, Exeter, and Andover, he found it impossible to crack the club system in his sophomore year. In one of his more ignominious moments, Reed told his Jewish roommate, Carl Binger, that they could not live together, because it would hamper Reed's chances of gaining membership in the Hasty Pudding Institute. Reed preferred football games and social functions to participation in Walter Lippmann's newly formed Socialist Club.

Following graduation and a six-month sojourn in Europe, Reed settled down in Greenwich Village where he got a job on Max Eastman's New Masses. Here Reed came into contact with artists and intellectuals--Van Wyck Brooks, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Max Weber, and Eugene O'Neill among them--who pushed the tenor of political consciousness in the Village toward the Left.

But it was Reed's own experience, his observation of the Paterson silk strike in 1913, that radicalized him. He saw the lengths to which state and capital would go to crush any expression of solidarity among the workers. The lesson was reiterated a year later for Reed by the state militia's massacre of striking coal miners in Ludlow, Colorado.

REED COVERED THE ACTION on the Eastern Front during the First World War for New Masses, then sneaked across German lines to Leningrad in 1917. The even-headed leadership of Lenin impressed him and Reed was convinced that the Bolshevik party was the only group which could safely navigate the Russian people around the dangers of counter-revolution. There are some indications that in the last months of his life Reed became somewhat disenchanted with certain elements of the Communist leadership. Zineview, the head of the Comintern for which Reed was working, struck him as particularly arrogant and tyrannical.

The life of a journalist presents certain problems for the biographer, problems which Rosenstone does not adequately resolve. Why read about John Reed in Leningrad when we have his own superb account of the period, Ten Days That Shook the World, or about his adventures with Villa's troops when they are carefully chronicled in Reed's In-surgent Mexico?

To avoid being superfluous, Rosenstone would have to provide some sort of framework within which Reed's drive to participate in these events could be understood. Rosenstone, however, fails to do this. In his preface, he declares himself against imposing "any full blown psychological theory" on Reed's life and says he will instead use "my own understanding of how and why men act." What this "understanding" consists of, however, is never elaborated. Rosenstone is content to make vague generalizations about "men of Reed's generation" and "the nature of modern society."

There are striking similarities between this biography and E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime. Many of the same great personages appear--Emma Goldmann, Henry Ford, Pancho Villa--and one gets the same impression of noncontingent events held together by a single thread. In the case of Ragtime, the thread is Doctorow's narrative structure, and here it is the presence of John Reed as observer of and participant in history. But unlike Ragtime, Rosenstone's book need not be played slowly. Romantic Revolutionary is best read quickly, selectively, so as to glean the golden Russian wheat of Reed's life from the chaff of Rosenstone's analysis.