BRIDGEPORT, Pa. — The history of water polo – and the athletes who played it on the collegiate level – is a unique patchwork of outstanding players who made their marks behind the scenes and role-players who became influential powers on humanity outside the pool.
For fans of history, the name John “Jack” Silas Reed (October 22, 1887-to-Ocober 17, 1920) carries a degree of notoriety – or infamy depending on political leaning. For most, however, the name is among a slew that are passed along without much connection to the sport of water polo.
A Harvard University water polo alum, American journalist, poet, and communist activist, Reed first gained prominence as a correspondent during World War I, and later became best known for his coverage of Russia’s October Revolution, which he wrote about in his book Ten Days That Shook the World. His life notably inspired a 1981 movie, Reds, starring Warren Beatty, Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson, which claimed three Academy Awards and was nominated for nine more.
Born in 1887 at his maternal grandparents’ mansion in what is now the Goose Hollow neighborhood of Portland, Oregon, Reed’s mother, Margaret (Green) Reed, was the daughter of Portland industrialist Henry Dodge Green, who had made a fortune founding and operating three businesses: the first gas & light company, the first pig iron smelter on the West Coast, and the Portland water works (he was its second owner).
A sickly child, young Jack grew up surrounded by nurses and servants. His mother carefully selected his upper-class playmates for him and his brother, Harry, who was two years younger Schooled at Portland Academy, a private school, he was sent to Morristown, a New Jersey prep school, in September 1904 to prepare for college. His father, who did not attend college, wanted his sons to go to Harvard. At Morristown, Jack continued a trend of poor classroom performance, but made the football team and showed some literary promise.
However, Reed failed his first attempt at Harvard College’s admission exam but passed on his second try, and enrolled in the fall of 1906. He threw himself into all manner of student activities as a . He was a member of the cheerleading team, the swimming team, and the dramatic club, served on the editorial boards of the Lampoon and The Harvard Monthly, and was president of the Harvard Glee Club. In 1910 he held a position in the Hasty Pudding Theatricals, and also wrote music and lyrics for their show Diana’s Debut. Reed, who failed to make the football and crew teams, excelled in swimming and water polo. Further, he was also made “Ivy orator and poet” in his senior year.
While at Harvard, Reed attended meetings of the Socialist Club, over which his friend Walter Lippmann presided, but never joined. The group introduced legislation into the state legislature, attacked the university for failing to pay its servants living wages, and petitioned the administration to establish a course on socialism.
Reed graduated from Harvard in 1910 and set out to visit England, France and Spain before returning home to America the following spring. To pay his fare to Europe, Reed worked as a common laborer on a cattle boat to pay his fare to Europe.
Upon his return from Europe, he elected to become a journalist and set out to make his mark in New York, a center of the industry. Reed made use of a valuable contact from Harvard, Lincoln Steffens, who was establishing a reputation as a muckraker and is remembered for investigating corruption in municipal government in American cities. Steffens landed Reed an entry-level position on The American Magazine, where he read manuscripts, corrected proofs, and later helped with the composition. Reed supplemented his salary by taking an additional job as the business manager of a new short-lived quarterly magazine called Landscape Architecture.
Reed made his home in Greenwich Village, a burgeoning hub of poets, writers, activists, and artists. His formal jobs on the magazines paid the rent, but it was as a freelance journalist that Reed sought to establish himself. He collected rejection slips, circulating an essay and short stories about his six months in Europe, eventually breaking through in The Saturday Evening Post. Within a year, Reed had other work accepted by Collier’s, The Forum, and The Century Magazine. The editors at The American came to see him as a contributor and began to publish his work.
Reed’s serious interest in social problems was first aroused about this time by Steffens and Ida Tarbell. He moved beyond them to a more radical political position than theirs. In 1913 he joined the staff of The Masses, edited by Max Eastman. Reed contributed more than 50 articles, reviews, and shorter pieces to this socialist publication.
The first of Reed’s many arrests came in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913, for attempting to speak on behalf of strikers in the New Jersey silk mills. The harsh treatment meted out by the authorities to the strikers and the short jail term he served further radicalized Reed. He allied with the general socialist union, the Industrial Workers of the World. His account of his experiences was published in June as an article, “War in Paterson.” During the same year, following a suggestion made by IWW leader Bill Haywood, Reed put on “The Pageant of the Paterson Strike” in Madison Square Garden as a benefit for the strikers.
In the autumn of 1913, Reed was sent to Mexico by the Metropolitan Magazine to report the Mexican Revolution. He shared the perils of Pancho Villa’s army for four months and was with Villa’s Constitutional (Constitutionalist) Army when it defeated Federal forces at Torreón, opening the way for its advance on Mexico City.
Reed’s reporting on the Villistas in a series of outstanding magazine articles gained him a national reputation as a war correspondent. He opposed American intervention against Villa and Reed’s reports were collected and published as the book Insurgent Mexico (1914).
On April 30, 1914, Reed arrived in Colorado, scene of the recent Ludlow massacre, a result of owners’ suppression of labor organizing. There he spent a little more than a week, during which he investigated the events, spoke on behalf of the miners, and wrote an impassioned article on the subject (“The Colorado War”, published in July). He came to believe much more deeply in class conflict.
On August 14, 1914, shortly after Germany declared war on France, Reed set sail for neutral Italy, on assignment for the Metropolitan. He met his lover Mabel Dodge in Naples, and the pair made their way to Paris.
In France, Reed was frustrated by wartime censorship and the difficulty of reaching the front.
He returned to New York in December and wrote more about the war. In 1915 he traveled to Central Europe, accompanied by Boardman Robinson, a Canadian artist and frequent Masses contributor. Traveling from Thessaloniki, they saw scenes of profound devastation in Serbia (including a bombed-out Belgrade), also going through Bulgaria and Romania. They passed through the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Bessarabia. In Chełm they were arrested and incarcerated for several weeks. At risk of being shot for espionage, they were saved by the American ambassador.
Traveling to Russia, Reed was outraged to learn that the American ambassador in Petrograd was inclined to believe they were spies. Reed and Robinson were rearrested when they tried to slip into Romania. This time the British ambassador (Robinson being a British subject) finally secured permission for them to leave, but not until after all their papers were seized in Kiev. In Bucharest, the duo spent time piecing together more of their journey. At one point Reed traveled to Constantinople in hopes of seeing action at Gallipoli. From these experiences he wrote the book, The War in Eastern Europe, published in April 1916.
After returning to New York, Reed visited his mother in Portland. There he met and fell in love with Louise Bryant, who joined him on the East coast in January 1916. Early in 1916 Reed met the young playwright Eugene O’Neill. Beginning that May, the three rented a cottage in Provincetown, Mass., a summer destination on Cape Cod for many artists and writers from Greenwich Village. Not long after, Bryant and O’Neill began a romance.
That summer Reed covered the Presidential nominating conventions. He endorsed Woodrow Wilson, believing that he would make good on his promise to keep America out of the war. In November 1916 he married Bryant in Peekskill, New York. The same year, he underwent an operation at Johns Hopkins Hospital to remove a kidney which rendered him ineligible for conscription via a draft and saved him from registering as a conscientious objector.
When Wilson asked for a declaration of war on April 2, 1917, Reed shouted at a hastily convened meeting of the People’s Council in Washington: “This is not my war, and I will not support it. This is not my war, and I will have nothing to do with it.” However, due to the United States’ pro-war fervor, Reed’s domestic journalism career came to an end.
On August 17, 1917, Reed and Bryant set sail from New York to Europe, having first provided the State Department with legally sworn assurances that neither would represent the Socialist Party at a forthcoming conference in Stockholm. The pair were going as working journalists to report on the sensational developments taking place in Russia. Traveling by way of Finland, the pair arrived in the capital city of Petrograd immediately after the failed military coup of monarchist General Lavr Kornilov. This was an attempt to topple the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky by force of arms. Reed and Bryant found the Russian economy in shambles. Several of the subject nations of the old empire, such as Finland and Ukraine, had gained autonomy and were seeking separate military accommodations with Germany.
Reed and Bryant were in Petrograd for the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks, headed by Vladimir Lenin, toppled the Kerensky government; the Bolsheviks believed this was the first blow of a worldwide socialist revolution.
The Bolsheviks, seeking an all-socialist government and immediate end to Russian participation in the war, sought the transfer of power from Kerensky to a Congress of Soviets, a gathering of elected workers’ and soldiers’ deputies to be convened in October. The Kerensky government considered this a kind of coup, and moved to shut down the Bolshevik press. It issued warrants of arrest for the Soviet leaders and prepared to transfer the troops of the Petrograd garrison, believed to be unreliable, back to the front. A Military Revolutionary Committee of the Soviets, dominated by the Bolshevik Party, determined to seize power on behalf of the future Congress of Soviets. At 11 pm on the evening of November 7, 1917, it captured the Winter Palace, the seat of Kerensky’s government. Reed and Bryant were present during the fall of the Winter Palace, the symbolic event that started the Bolshevik Revolution.
Reed was an enthusiastic supporter of the new revolutionary socialist government. He went to work for the new People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, translating decrees and news of the new government into English.
Reed was close to the inner circle of the new government. He met Leon Trotsky and was introduced to Lenin during a break of the Constituent Assembly on January 18, 1918. By December, his funds were nearly exhausted, and he took a job with American Raymond Robins of the International Red Cross. Robins wanted to set up a newspaper promoting American interests; Reed complied. But in the dummy issue he prepared, he included a warning beneath the masthead: “This paper is devoted to promoting the interests of American capital.”
Reed attended the opening of the Third Congress of Soviets, where he gave a short speech promising to bring the news of the revolution to America, saying he hoped it would “call forth an answer from America’s oppressed and exploited masses.” American journalist Edgar Sisson told Reed that he was being used by the Bolsheviks for their propaganda, a rebuke he accepted.
In January, Trotsky, responding to Reed’s concern about the safety of his substantial archive, offered Reed the post of Soviet Consul in New York. As the United States did not recognize the Bolshevik government, Reed’s credentials would almost certainly have been rejected and he would have faced prison (which would have given the Bolsheviks some propaganda material). Most Americans in Petrograd considered Reed’s appointment a massive blunder. Lenin then withdrew Reed’s nomination.
Reed and Bryant wrote and published books about their Russian experiences. Bryant’s Six Red Months in Russia appeared first, but Reed’s 10 Days That Shook the World (1919) garnered more notice.
Bryant returned to the United States in January 1918, but Reed did not reach New York City until April 28. On his way back, Reed traveled from Russia to Finland; he did not have a visa or passport while crossing to Finland. In Turku harbor, when Reed was boarding a ship on his way to Stockholm, Finnish police arrested him; he was held at Kakola prison in Turku until he was released. From Finland, Reed traveled to Kristiania, Norway via Stockholm.
United States federal authorities immediately met Reed when his ship reached New York, holding him on board for more than eight hours while they searched his belongings. Reed’s papers, the material from which he intended to write his book, were seized. His papers were not returned to him until November.
Back in America, Reed and Bryant defended the Bolsheviks and opposed American intervention in Europe during World Ward I. Incensed at Russia’s departure from the war against Germany, the public turned away from Reed’s writings.
Reed became more aggressively political, intolerant, and self-destructive and was arrested for the third time since returning from Russia, charged with violating the Sedition Act and freed on $5,000 bail.
On February 21–22, 1919, Bryant was fiercely grilled before a Senate committee exploring Bolshevik propaganda activities in the US, but emerged resilient. Returning to New York, Reed continued speaking widely and participating in the various twists of socialist politics that year. He served as editor of The New York Communist, the weekly newspaper issued by the Left Wing Section of Greater New York.
Affiliated with the Left Wing of the Socialist Party, Reed with the other radicals was expelled from the National Socialist Convention in Chicago on August 30, 1919. The radicals split into two bitterly hostile groups, forming the Communist Labor Party of America (Reed’s group, which he helped create) and, the next day, the Communist Party of America. Reed was the international delegate of the former, wrote its manifesto and platform, edited its paper, The Voice of Labor, and was denounced as “Jack the Liar” in the Communist Party organ, The Communist.
Indicted for sedition, Reed fled America with a forged passport in early October 1919 on a Scandinavian frigate and made his way to Moscow from Finland by train. In the cold winter of 1919–20, he traveled in the region around Moscow, observing factories, communes, and villages.
Reed’s feelings about the revolution became ambivalent and he attempted to return to the United States in February 1920 although he was facing the threat of arrest in Illinois. At that time, the Soviets organized a convention to establish a United Communist Party of America. Reed attempted to leave Russia through Latvia, but his train never arrived, forcing him to hitch a ride in the boxcar of an eastbound military train to Petrograd. In March, he crossed into Helsinki, where he had radical friends. With their help, he was hidden in the hold of a freighter.
On March 13, customs officials in Finland found Reed in a coal bunker on the ship. He was taken to the police station, where he maintained that he was seaman “Jim Gormley”. Eventually, the jewels, photographs, letters, and fake documents he had in his possession forced him to reveal his true identity. Although beaten several times and threatened with torture, he refused to surrender the names of his local contacts. Because of his silence, he could not be tried for treason. He was charged and convicted of smuggling and having jewels in his possession (102 small diamonds worth $14,000, which were confiscated).
The US Secretary of State was satisfied with Reed’s arrest and pressured the Finns for his papers. American authorities, however, remained indifferent to Reed’s fate.[54] Although Reed paid the fine for smuggling, he was still detained. His physical condition and state of mind deteriorated rapidly. He suffered from depression and insomnia. He was finally released in early June, and sailed for Tallinn, Estonia, on the fifth of the month. Two days later, he traveled to Petrograd, recuperating from malnutrition and scurvy caused by having been fed dried fish almost exclusively. His spirits were high.[56]
At the end of June, Reed traveled to Moscow and was ordered by the party Reed to attend the Congress of the Peoples of the East to be held at Baku on August 15.
The journey to Baku was a long one, five days by train through a countryside that was devastated by civil war and infected by typhus. Reed was reluctant to go. He asked for permission to travel later, but was ordered to travel leading him to become disillusioned with the Communist movement.
During his time in Baku, Reed received a telegram announcing Bryant’s arrival in Moscow. He followed her there, arriving on September 15.
Reed was determined to return to the United States but fell ill on September 25. At first thought to have influenza, he was hospitalized five days later and diagnosed with spotted typhus. Bryant spent all her time with him, but there were no medicines to be obtained because of the Allied blockade of Europe. His mind started to wander, and then he lost the use of the right side of his body and could no longer speak. He died in Moscow on October 17, 1920 and received a hero’s funeral from the Communist regime. His body was buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis making him one of three Americans honored buried there.
