American History

A man from Oregon, who moved east with certainty and curiosity and sometimes fearing for his life, who made his way through levels of multiple societies with the ease that only natural grace and flexible intellect can provide, serendipitous traveler to Moscow at the very moment the world of the 19th century crumbled and the potential wrapped in the works of Karl Marx became a new menace with far-reaching consequences, an insightful eyewitness to history and even playing a small part in it until his untimely death, so that he was buried at the Kremlin Wall, barely having turned thirty.

The man was John Reed, poet, journalist, intellectual, dissenter and activist for socialism. The Moscow he visited was then the home of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky when the Czarist power collapsed in the Russian Revolution of 1917. He wrote about it in Ten Days that Shook the World, passing long before he could witness just how much the world eventually shook from the days he stood in the center of the revolution that along with World Wars would so broadly define the past century.

The brief adventurous life of John Reed was first taken up in a biography by Granville Hicks, with the help of John Stuart, titled John Reed The Making of a Revolutionary. Like Reed, Hicks was a supporter of Marxism, an ardent critic of the democracy that surrounded him, locking horns with the establishment, fish seeking to leave the water for the promise of land. Hicks worked closely with Marxist groups and helped their efforts to spread the word of a new vision of society, if not with the nearly-poetic force of Reed, at least with steadfast conviction.

But unlike Reed, who died before the rise of Joseph Stalin, Hicks saw the brutality of Stalins purges and the dissolution of Russian society and these observations led him to eventually renounce Marxism, going so far as to actually become a witness against former colleagues before the notorious House Unamerican Activities Committee. As time passed, Hicks views shifted from a pointed  thrust towards Marxism to a broader, more centrist acceptance that no single group or class has an automatic monopoly on the concepts that most benefit a society.

However, at the time he wrote his biography of Reed, Hicks was very much a member of the intellectually sidelined, a group viewed with increasing suspicion fed by a small measure of ignorance, as many critics of Marxism had never read the works of Marx, and by the growing realization that a workers paradise was potentially in the making, thus shaking the foundations of the powers that be. The world of Reed and Hicks had seen ground-shaking changes that made the potential of once-unthinkable ideas seem not insubstantial, adding muscle and sound to the silent pages of socialism, communism and a rising of the masses to create a new world order that amounted to an upending of the pyramid of classes.

Despite the often virulent passion of the times, where the rhetoric of disasters prophesied from intellectual vantage points paled before the grim reality of world wars, pandemics and global economic disaster, and the many opinions surrounding his subject, Hicks wrote about Reed with a sense of distance, an objectivity noteworthy enough to merit the attention of even harsh critics of Reed and Marxism in general. That Hicks could set aside his obvious sympathy of Reeds intellectual positions in favor of a more neutral approach may be laid at the feet of his growing disenchantment with Stalins brutal wrenching of Russia, but it is more likely that Hicks deliberately chose his tone and approach based on the tenor of his times.

Hicks saw in Reed a man who came from privilege and had his eyes opened to the larger world while dabbling in college activities. Reed, a Harvard man, went to meetings of the Socialist Club and even helped back some of their petitions aimed at correcting social injustices, such as paying better wages to Harvard servants. What started out as perhaps an idle moment of curiosity became a life-changing shift in thinking for Reed. For Hicks, this transition is vital in his eyes, for it represents the core of John Reed. Hicks explores this viewpoint shift carefully, a writer doing the work deemed of the highest standard.

The influential media of the day were newspapers and magazines, with clear delineations between serious journalism, a methodical approach based on facts, and yellow journalism, the rabble-rousing emotional punch delivered in printers ink. Daily papers and weekly magazines sold in the millions, and even with the rise of the new-fangled moving pictures show, it was on the printed page where knowledge was disseminated,. opinions formed and positions forged. Until the rise of television in the 1950s and 1960s, no media could so strongly mold public opinion and because of this, it was the gold standard of communication.

Hicks was well aware of Reeds reputation for keen eye and impassioned voice in his own journalistic forays, and Hicks, and experienced writer himself, adopted the serious approach as the highest road. Hicks was not a historian, yet his standard was that of the professional historian, seeking the evidence then laying out those facts in a manner worthy of their importance. He wrote a biography that could stand the test of time because it was accurate and fair-minded.

Some 40 years later, Robert Rosenstone, a child of television and movies and a self-confessed fiction writer, wrote his biography, called Romantic Revolutionary A Biography of John Reed. Rosenstones book didnt delve into the reason Reed became a Socialist and supporter of communism, eschewing an exploration of his past while opting to present speculation of the events in Reeds life that were gaps in the mans life. One particular narrative in the book concerns the meeting between Reed and Louise Bryant, the remarkable woman who was to become his widow.  Instead of presenting the various versions that had filtered down through the years about how these two passionate intellectual Marxists from Oregon had met and eventually merged as one halfway around the world, Rosenstone created his own version, his personal take on the personalities involved, rendering them not as blank canvases upon which nothing was writ, but as vibrant actors in a theater of the mind.

In Rosenstones eye, the key to the biography of Reed was not the intellectual and political struggle that characterized a certain day and age, but the story of a man who swam against the currents of conformity and history. Like any competent fiction writer, Rosenstone starts in the middle of the story, and moves on from there, favoring action over exposition. Whereas Hicks saw political thought embodied, Rosenstone saw human drama personified.      

By doing this, Rosenstone was not adhering to a modern historians method he was a post-modernist rediscovering an old one, simply reaching back into the past to represent the old historians method we have long called storytelling. From Homer (if indeed Homer existed) to this months best-selling historical novel, history has been, above all, a story, told to educate, edify and entertain, for history made indifferent becomes unknown and condemned to not being repeated. Hicks was part of the history he was writing about he walked many of the same paths his subject matter did, treading the intellectual skirmish fields Reed did and ultimately moving beyond them to a point of more neutral observation.

Yet even before his transition away from Marxism, Hicks was implementing his capacity for neutrality and objectivity by treating Reed and the events surrounding him with widely-acknowledged evenhandedness.  For someone who could have, at least a couple of times, inserted himself directly into the story of John Reed, as either fellow traveler or trenchant commentator, Hicks remained within the modern historians role of letting the facts speak mostly for themselves. In fact, Hicks plays the role of careful historian in his extensive use of quotes, making use of the many writings by and of Reed to, in essence, let Reed speak for himself.

By contrast, Rosenstone, born long after Reeds times, inserts himself into almost every page of  the biography by adding his own take on events and issues.  The fictionalization of Reeds life thus becomes a story draped over a framework of facts, arguably a more traditional presentation than the method Hicks used. Fashion, it is said, runs in cycles, and the fashion in history moved from story to history, eschewing the imaginative in favor of the factual, and with Rosenstone and many others since, the fashion cycle has seemingly swung back to story over history.

Note that Rosenstones work on Reed has almost certainly reached more people on film than on paper, as his take on John Reed was the basis for the movie Reds. If the biggest transitive factor at the world level has been nuclear weapons, then quite possibly the second-largest factor has been the global acceptance of television and movies. Once culture was based on the books and newspapers one had read, a combination of written words from the past and present. But with the rise of television as a global phenomena, culture is less about reading and more about seeing and hearing. The gold standard is not what source has produced the words, but how many people have come in contact with it. Ratings trump reading.

Along those lines, and well-represented in his biography of Reed, Rosenstone has argued that film is the strongest form of historical presentation, because the images reach more deeply and thus have more impact than the written or simply spoken word.  His argument is bolstered by the observation that so-called docudramas and recreations on film are increasingly seen as truth rather than fiction. . One need only note that is seems very possible that Oliver Stones take on the John F. Kennedy assassination, woefully lacking in factual evidence of any kind, is taken by a significant minority of people to be closer to the truth of that fateful November day than the Warren Report.

For Hicks, a man squarely set in the America of the early 20th century, an age that went  from World War to Jazz to Depression in barely 20 years, facts were what they always were vital, but elusive. And yet the dominant thrust of his and Reeds activities was the almost-belligerent focus on re-examining what was deemed by the majority as factual, of looking hard at the world and seeing the reality of it, not in vegging out before a flickering screen to forget about the reality outside the box.

Reed did not flinch in his appraisal of the world he moved in, and yet like any human being, his perceptions were clouded by his personal biases. His journalism pieces, many of which Hicks quoted and examined in the biography, were snapshots of current history, featuring the facts he uncovered and the prism through which he saw them. He didnt look away, but made a point of looking at. Much of what is left of Reed is still alive in these words, in his examination of society, war, art and politics. Reed was the kind of writer who almost naturally inserted himself in his stories, thus he wrote what others would call propaganda. Hicks, in his biography of Reed, made sure not to.

And yet, neither did Rosenstone, for whom inserting himself in the story was obviously a goal. He chose the path of entertaining his reader in order to draw him or her in and interest them in the story of a remarkable man, his equally remarkable wife Louise, and the heady days of danger and revolution they both sought out. Hicks was writing for an audience that either knew and remembered who John Reed was, what he stood for and what others thought of him, an educated audience of contemporaries who, by dint of living in the same times or close enough to understand them intrinsically, an audience that didnt need an extra incentive to explore the man and his actions. They would either read Hicks book because they approved of Reed in some way or because they disapproved of him for some reason. In either case, the work of attracting readers lay lightly in Hicks hands, but heavily on Rosenstones.

By the early 1970s, Rosenstone was writing about a man barely remembered, about a time barely understood and concerning events from so long ago that few barely cared about them. For Rosenstone to write about Reed, a context needed to be created, a feeling of time aand place that would allow the facts of Reeds life to have meaning for those who shared no direct connection to his time and place. It is within this reality that Rosenstone cloaked his story, using the moments and technique of fiction to bring into sharp relief the fuzzy image of Reed and the days he lived in. Hicks was the journalist, the reporter on the spot, to Rosenstones raconteur, the storyteller who makes the story come alive. Switching roles in their respective times would have not suited either man, nor the man they wrote about.

Choosing one style of historical treatment over another is, like any other subjective endeavor, a matter of taste. Rosenstone could take advantage of 40 years of additional works on and about John Reed and the world he lived in to build his biography, but Hicks had the advantage and force of immediacy and personal experience to bolster his. One chose the facts as voice the other chose his voice above the facts. If success is measured by fame, then Rosenstone won hands down, but if the appreciation of experts and cognoscenti is the measuring stick, then Hicks would rise above, if not tower over, Rosenstone. What cannot be obscured by this dichotomy is the understanding that the combination of approaches greatly enhances the visibility, understanding and appreciation of John Reed. Like a camera angle, each biography reveals a little more of the subject so that more biographies and more angles trumps the single work from one angle. And yet, not all angles are created equally some are better than others. The debate over what angle or approach historians should take in their work has been with us since the days a wandering poet told scintillating and dramatic stories of the virtues and vices of gods and men, stories both familiar and not-so-familiar, with each telling adding or dropping something to the portrait left in the mind.

John Reed was not a major player on the world stage, neither conqueror nor explorer, nor unique creator or massive destroyer. He was a man possibly above and beyond his times, yet very much a part of them. In the hands of Hicks and Rosenstone, Reed was flesh and legend, hero and anti-hero, a man of drama and a victim of tragedy. If nothing else, these two biographies would leave most readers wanting to learn more about John Reed and his world, now long gone. And therein lies the ultimate success of Hicks and Rosenstone, because for every historian since days immemorial, there is truly no greater goal than eliciting a heartfelt reaction of I want to know more.