Concept

John Reed (journalist)

Summary
John "Jack" Silas Reed (October 22, 1887 – October 17, 1920) was an American journalist, poet, and communist activist. Reed first gained prominence as a war correspondent during the Mexican Revolution for Metropolitan and World War I for The Masses. He is best known for his coverage of the October Revolution in Petrograd, Russia, which he wrote about in his 1919 book Ten Days That Shook the World. Reed supported the Soviet takeover of Russia, even briefly taking up arms to join the Red Guards in 1918. He hoped for a similar Communist revolution in the United States, and co-founded the short-lived Communist Labor Party of America in 1919. He died in Moscow of spotted typhus in 1920. At the time of his death he may have soured on the Soviet leadership, but he was given a hero's burial by the Soviet Union, and is one of only three Americans buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. John Silas Reed was born on October 22, 1887, in his maternal grandparents' mansion in what is now the Goose Hollow neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. His grandmother's household had Chinese servants. Reed wrote of paying a nickel to a "Goose Hollowite" (young toughs in a gang in the working-class neighborhood below King's Hill) to keep from being beaten up. In 2001 a memorial bench dedicated to Reed was installed in Washington Park, which overlooks the site of Reed's birthplace (the mansion no longer exists). His 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). SW Green Avenue was named in his honor. John's father, Charles Jerome Reed, was born in the East and came to Portland as the representative of an agricultural machinery manufacturer. With his ready wit, he quickly won acceptance in Portland's business community. The couple had married in 1886, and the family's wealth came from the Green side, not the Reed side.
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