02/07/2025
The heroic life of American Communist revolutionary John Reed.
One of Us, The Story of John Reed #30
From 1935 with lithographs by Lynd Ward and narrative by Granville Hicks.
This is final installment in our series. Long Live the Memory of Comrade John Reed!
"John Reed died on October 17, 1920, five days before his thirty-third birthday. Four doctors and two consulting physicians had fought the disease; an assistant-surgeon and a nurse were in constant attendance. What could be done in a famine-stricken, war-torn country, deprived of medical supplies by the embargoes of foreign powers, the United States included, was done. It was not enough. For seven days the body lay in state in the Trades Union Hall, guarded by fourteen soldiers of the Red Army. On the walls were flaming posters of the revolution. Over the coffin lay wreaths, mostly of painted tin, the best heroic workers and soldiers could provide. On October 24, thousands of Moscow's proletariat marched behind John Reed’s body as it was carried to the Kremlin. Snow and sleet fell. A military band played the funeral march of the revolution. At the grave, beside the Kremlin wall, comrades spoke: Nicholai Bukharin, Alexandra Kollontai, Karl Radek, Boris Reinstein, Murphy of England, and Rosmer of France. In Portland people shook their heads over the bad end to which, not unpredictably, poor John Reed had come; at Harvard, “Copey” spoke of his Jack Reed, dead among the damned Bolsheviki; in New York and Washington clubs classmates tried to remember the boy they had played with and to forget the revolutionary they had shunned; behind heavy mahogany desks editors shrugged professionally cynical shoulders. But the revolutionary workers of America, in crowded mass meetings, pledged themselves with upraised fists to a harder fight in John Reed’s name. And in America’s prisons, in Leavenworth and Atlanta and San Quentin, and in the penitentiaries of forty-eight states, comrades, awaiting trial, serving their ten or twenty year sentences, perhaps awaiting death, thought of John Reed and steeled themselves once more for the final conflict."
