From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Reasserting the Importance of Committed, Truthful, On-the-Ground Reporting on the Centenary of John Reed’s Passing
Date November 15, 2020 1:05 AM
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[John Reed was confronted with the choice between popular and
profitable hypocrisy in the capitalist journals, and disreputable
truth in the revolutionary press. He chose the truth.]
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REASSERTING THE IMPORTANCE OF COMMITTED, TRUTHFUL, ON-THE-GROUND
REPORTING ON THE CENTENARY OF JOHN REED’S PASSING  
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Juan Antonio Sanz
October 28, 2020
Equal Times
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_ John Reed was confronted with the choice between popular and
profitable hypocrisy in the capitalist journals, and disreputable
truth in the revolutionary press. He chose the truth. _

John Reed is the author of the landmark chronicle of the October
Revolution of 1917. In this archive image, taken in October 1917,
armed soldiers march towards the Kremlin with a banner reading
‘Communism’, AP/Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive

 

On 17 October 1920, just days before his 33rd birthday, American
journalist John Reed, author of _Insurgent Mexico_, a book covering
the Mexican Revolution, and _Ten Days that Shook the World_, the most
famous chronicle of the October Revolution of 1917, died of typhus in
a Russian hospital in Moscow. Both of these works and Reed’s career
now constitute an invaluable example of engaged journalism committed
to social justice while ensuring truthful reporting, respect for
sources and the indispensable need for the journalist to be where the
news is happening.

Reed was a forerunner of narrative or literary journalism, capable of
taking his readers to the scene of the events and giving them a sense
of the atmosphere surrounding them, many decades before Tom Wolfe made
it fashionable under the generic term ‘new journalism’ or authors
such as Rodolfo Walsh, Truman Capote, Gay Talese or Nobel Prize winner
Gabriel García Márquez elevated it to the category of a literary
genre.

One of Reed’s ‘brothers in arms’ and author of one of the most
insightful introductions to _Ten Days that Shook the World_ (1919),
journalist Albert Rhys Williams, wrote a highly detailed portrayal of
the US journalist in action in the full throes of the Revolution:
“He collected material wherever he could find it, moving from place
to place. He collected complete files of
the _Pravda_ and _Izvestia_, all the proclamations, booklets,
posters, and announcements. Posters were a special passion. Every time
a new poster appeared, he did not hesitate to tear it from the wall if
there was no other way of getting it.” According to Williams:
“Those who wanted to be abreast of contemporary affairs needed only
to follow John Reed, for he always hastened, a kind of storm bird, to
wherever big things happened.”

John Reed, journalist, poet, adventurer, political activist and
workers’ rights defender, is the only US citizen whose remains are
buried in the most sacrosanct place in the Russia that inherited the
Soviet Union, the foot of the Kremlin Wall.

This empire of empires was to emerge a few years after the triumph of
the Revolution, in October and November 1917, an event Reed recounted
in a way few others could aspire to.

John Reed was born into a wealthy family in Portland, Oregon, on 22
October 1887. The future chronicler of conflicts and revolutions
graduated from Harvard in 1910 and his interests soon turned from
adolescent heroic fantasies towards the social struggle and
journalism. In 1913, Reed’s life reached a turning point that shaped
his political engagement. Having joined the staff of _The Masses_, a
socialist publication headed by Max Eastman, Reed covered a series of
serious labour disputes in the United States that reinforced his
vision of journalism as a tool for denouncing social injustice. _War
in Paterson
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article on the silk workers’ strikes in New Jersey dates back to
that time. As an uncomfortable witness to such labour struggles, Reed
had his first experience as a guest of the federal prison system, one
that would be repeated throughout his life, including in Finland,
where he was imprisoned many years later on suspicion of spying for
Bolshevik Russia.

Being on the scene

Reed travelled to Mexico in 1913 as a correspondent for _Metropolitan
Magazine_, to cover the Mexican Revolution for almost four months.
During his time there, he was able to interview and develop a good
rapport with the guerrilla and revolutionary leader Pancho Villa, who
fondly nicknamed the US correspondent ‘Chatito’. The 1914
book _Insurgent Mexico_ was the result of those months spent
chronicling the war and the insurrection, a book that would earn him
great prestige as a war correspondent and paved the way for his
journey to Europe, where he was sent to cover the First World War.

In _The Traders’ War
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in September 1914 for The Masses, Reed explained that the war in
Europe was, in fact, a “clash of traders”. In _The Worst Thing in
Europe [[link removed]]_, an
article also written for _The Masses_, in March 1915, he gave a brief
insight into Russia’s “military might”, a presage of what was to
come two years later, when its army fell apart, abandoned the front
and joined the Revolution: “The Russian army, inexhaustible hordes
of simple peasants torn from their farms, blessed by a priest, and
knouted into battle for a cause they had never heard of…,” wrote
Reed.

One of the keys to Reed’s ability to describe events with such
precision, and irrespective of his own political assessment of them,
is that he was always on the scene of the events as they were
happening.

Unlike now, in the midst of the 21st century, when the internet has
become the main source of information and an excuse for not sending
reporters to the scene of events, a century ago, if you wanted to
write with sufficient accuracy and objectivity about any event, the
Russian Revolution, for example, you had to be in Petrograd, in Moscow
or on board the convoy that carried the forces of Alexander
Kerensky’s provisional government to crush the Bolsheviks in the
imperial city.

And that is what John Reed did. That is why he headed to Petrograd,
now St. Petersburg, to give a first-hand account of the by then
unstoppable Revolution. John Reed and his then partner, Louise Bryant,
a feminist, left-wing activist and also a journalist, set off for
Europe at the end of August 1917, with Petrograd as their final
destination. It was the start of their Russian adventure.

The US journalist described in great detail the events rapidly
unfolding in Russia and that formed part of the history of those
“ten days that shook the world”. In a report sent to _The New
York Call_ on 22 November 1917, but which corresponds to the events
of 7 November according to the Gregorian calendar (25 October 1917
according to the Julian calendar followed in Russia at the time), Reed
offered this brief insight into one world that was collapsing and
another that was emerging: “This morning I was at the scene of the
dispersal of the Junkers [military school cadets] defending the Winter
Palace by the Soviet troops. In the afternoon I was present at the
opening of the All-Russian Assembly of Soviets. In the evening I
witnessed the assault on the Winter Palace, entering with the first
Bolsheviki troops.”

In his 1975 biography of the journalist, _Romantic Revolutionary_,
Robert A. Rosenstone writes that the Revolution was a “dream
incarnate” for Reed, who “soared into a realm of visionary
transcendence”. Many in the United States had an exotic and mystical
notion of Russia at the turn of the century. It was the land of the
“Slavic soul”, a mystical force expressed by figures such as
Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Stravinsky or Diaghilev, the “polar
opposite” to America’s materialism and pragmatism, according to
Rosenstone.

The human tragedy of the First World War and the February 1917
revolution that toppled Tsar Nicholas II put an end to that, and what
was happening in Russia started to be viewed as an almost
millennium-long struggle between autocracy and democracy. Reed himself
went on to apologise for not having understood what was happening from
the outset. In an article for _The Masses_, in July 1917, prior to
the tsunami of the October Revolution, Reed noted that although the
focus in the analysis of Russia during those world war years was
placed on its role in the struggle, the real key was the long
frustrated uprising of the Russian masses, the purpose of which was to
establish “a new human society on earth”. And even then he
forecast that the drivers of this change would be the Soviets, “the
real revolutionary heart of the New Russia”.

Pascual Serrano, journalist and expert in international politics,
underlines John Reed’s ability to understand and interpret the
events of the Russian Revolution, something which left Russian
historians and scholars astonished from the outset. Serrano, author of
the 2011 book _Contra la Neutralidad_ (_Against Neutrality_), in
which he analyses John Reed’s commitment to the truth and social
rights, explains that this insight may have been due to the fact that
he was a “foreign” correspondent, capable of perceiving details
that a local analyst would perhaps overlook.

For Serrano, who also refers in his book to the committed journalism
of authors such as Rodolfo Walsh, Robert Capa, Edgar Snow and Ryszard
Kapuscinski, another of Reed’s skills was to give a voice to the
leading characters of the stories, whether it be the striking textile
workers in Paterson, United States, in the uprising in the dusty lands
of northern Mexico, in the trenches of the Great War or in the Smolny
Institute in Petrograd, where the Bolsheviks set up their
headquarters. The aim was to break down false stereotypes through
information and truthful reporting. Reed makes this clear in the
preface to his book on the Russian Revolution:

“In the struggle my sympathies were not neutral. But in telling the
story of those great days I have tried to see events with the eye of a
conscientious reporter, interested in setting down the truth.”

In 1919, a year before he fell fatally ill with typhus, Reed was able
to publish his most popular work, despite the obstacles put in his way
by the conservative, anti-communist forces in the United States. Reed
was not only confronted with condemnation on this front, but also with
criticism from the inert socialist movement in his country at the
time. Reed was a member of the Third International, but he was not
forgiven, in socialist circles, for his independence, and not least
his imagination. Max Eastman, editor of _The Masses_, summarised the
situation in a speech paying tribute to Reed. He said, “John Reed
was confronted with the choice between popular and profitable
hypocrisy in the capitalist journals, and lonely disreputable truth in
the revolutionary press. And he chose the truth”.

_Juan Antonio Sanz is a Spanish journalist based in Cuba. He worked
for Agencia EFE for over 20 years – as a correspondent in Russia and
South Korea and as head of the agency in Japan and Uruguay. He has
worked as a university teacher in Bolivia, for the Bolivian Armed
Forces General Staff and Spain’s international development
cooperation agency. His specialist areas include international
security and cooperation._

_This article has been translated from Spanish._

_Equal Times is a trilingual (English, French and Spanish) global
news and opinion website focusing on labour, human rights, culture,
development, the environment, politics and the economy from a social
justice perspective._

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