American History

John Reed was an American journalist, war correspondent, and Communist agitator who died in 1920, at the age of thirty-two, and is buried in the Kremlin Wall.  He is most famous for his writing, especially his classic account of the 1917 Russian Revolution Ten Days That Shook the World, and for his vibrant character.  In the biographies John Reed The Making of a Revolutionary and Romantic Revolutionary, Granville Hicks and Robert Rosenstone both portray Reed as a poet of the revolution, a man whose mission was to interpret and live Life, wherever it may be found.  Both biographies show how Reed balanced his interest in realism with his romantic nature, fulfilling his childhood dreams of heroism and adventure by turning journalism into a literary art form and revolutions into romantic myths.

Rosenstone acknowledges that he is writing about a legend, whereas Hicks is actively involved in molding that legend.  Hicks, a member of the Communist Party until 1939, published his biography of John Reed in 1936, and his sympathies with Communist revolution are clearly visible.  Though Rosenstone is somewhat less approving of Bolshevik terror than Hicks, he also takes a sympathetic view of Reeds political activism.  I will argue that the principal difference between the biographers treatments is their understanding of history and how to interpret it, which is a product of their respective times.  Hicks approaches Reed in terms of his greatness as a historical figure and a revolutionary, and conceives of Reeds development in terms of a clear narrative arc, with the high point being the Russian Revolution.  This suggests a kind of modernist, great man view of history.  Rosenstone, on the other hand, is more concerned with Reeds existential search and locates his development at various historical moments, pointing to a more postmodern understanding of history as a dialectical process.  Other important differences include the authors descriptions of Soviet Russia, their narrative distance from Reed, and the presence of critique in their texts.  I will begin by describing the authors two views of history, before showing how these views inform their interpretations of Reeds personal, literary and political maturity.  Finally, I will show how Hicks identifies with or mirrors Reed in his book, while Rosenstone takes a more distant perspective that includes the critique of Reeds personal and political decisions.

The great man theory of history sees history in terms of the famous people or moments that shape it a historical event is like the plot of a Greek play, with a clear crisis and catharsis, a clear beginning and end.  This view is reflected in Hickss interpretation of Reeds life, which achieves its height or crisis in the Russian Revolution and resolves, before he dies, in the writing of Ten Days That Shook the World and the adoption of Marxist theory.  All events in Reeds life led up to the revolution, Hicks indicates, at which time Communism became the dominant force in his life.

John Reed in Petrograd on the eve of the revolution, was a good reporter, going everywhere, seeing every one. Moreover, he felt the significance of events, in their relation both to Petrograds present and his own past. The rightness of what he had become was being tested if the revolution succeeded, he would know his intuition had been sound and his doubts superfluous the present would lead by a plain path into the future.

Here, we see how every aspect of Reeds lifehis future, his belief in himselfis centered on the success of the revolution.  This is the closest Hicks comes to identifying the meaning of Reeds life.  The revolution was a trial, the great event through which John Reed became a great man.

Rosenstone also acknowledges the centrality of the Russian Revolution in Reeds life.  Like Hicks, he shows how the journalists intellectual and literary development peaked with Ten Days That Shook the World.  But if Rosenstone locates meaning in Reeds life, it is in the small details and the accumulation of moments.   In his preface, Rosenstone states  Readers who expect to learn, in some larger sense, what John Reeds life means, or what his life says about America as a society, will have to invest their own intellect and imagination in what follows.the act of writing history is a dialogue between the individual and the past.  This proves that Rosenstone is operating with a more contemporary, dialectical historical outlook.  He describes multiple occasions on which John Reed achieved maturity or became himself, and shows how each occasion both built upon and departed from the rest.

Rosenstone identifies to four major points, besides the Russian Revolution, of Reeds maturing or self-becoming.  First, in 1913, when he experienced the revolution in Mexico under General Villa, Reed came into himself as a reporter and learned to how to realize his life-long romantic fantasies through participation in revolution.  Composed to help both the revolution and himself, Insurgent Mexico was a tribute of thanks to the people and country that had helped John Reed to find himself again.  Second, Rosenstone shows how the 1914 Ludlow massacre of striking coal workers stimulated Reed to look beyond himself and include the rest of humanity in his personal identity.

The drive for personal freedom, excitement and recognition that had once made him so self-centered had slowly given way to the knowledge that his life was involved with other men, and a vision that his own liberation was connected to the freedom of people who were economically, politically or emotionally constricted by modern institutions. Shocked by the horrors stemming from the Ludlow strike, Reed learned to take the workers struggle seriously and commit to radical politics for reasons other than self-gratification.  It was a major moment in his moral development as well as in his development as a revolutionary.  Third, Rosenstone has Reed reaching a peak of self-consciousness in 1916 and coming to terms with the his existential duality.  Finally, Rosenstone describes Reeds establishment of equilibrium between fantasy and reality Having matured much in recent years, Jack had come to possess a strong stabilizing mechanism.  Here, the biographer sees Reeds maturity as a process, one which had been progressing in fits and starts since long before the Russian Revolution.  This reflects Rosenstones contemporary view of history as a dialectical process with multiple centers.

Hicks, on the other hand, though he does speak about Reeds progress, locates the journalists maturity at a particular centerthe Russian Revolutionto which all other events in his life led up.  The East Side, Paterson, Mexico, Ludlow, and the war had taught him much, preparing him for the crowning good fortune of being in Russia during the revolution.  This language reveals not only Hickss theory of history as comprised of grand, singular narrative arcs, but also his commitment to the desirability, the good fortune, of Communist revolution.  Hicks shows Reed maturing, becoming himself as a person and writer, two months after the revolution.

It was America that inspired the poem, his America, the America he loved as distinguished from the America he hated. At last he knew himself, knew where he stood and what he wanted, and the old tenderness came back. He had suppressed it when it seemed likely to betray him into the hands of the eagle-screaming patriots. Now that his position was clear, he could give voice to his emotions and, from his exile, sing the song of America.

In the Communist revolutionary experience, Reed had learned to make sense of his history as an American.  He had finally discovered who he was and adopted an ethical system, something he had never been able to do before.  As a poet, he had learned to express emotion clearly and maturely.

For Hicks, Reeds identity became complete, fusing emotion and rationality, when he became a Russian revolutionary.

He had not been adopted by the Russian revolutionists he belonged with them, for they were fighting his battles. The distrust of the working class that had so long plagued him disappeared. The gloom that the war had fostered vanished before the great hope that steadily grew in his mind. The old questions as to what he could and should do simply never occurred to him. He found himself, not only emotionally, as had happened in Mexico, but also intellectually, for now the revolutionary ideas he had absorbed came to life.  He was gayer than he had been for many months, but he was also more serious than he had ever been before.

In this passage, Hicks downplays Reeds time in Mexico as chiefly the emotional experience of a young man, while the Russian Revolution was the emotional and intellectual experience of a serious, adult man.  In some ways this is true he did become increasingly serious after 1917.  But, as Rosenstone says, he also found himself as a journalist and literary artist in Mexico, and he learned to take the class struggle seriously long before the Bolsheviks took over Russia.  Hickss commitment to the Russian Revolution as a great moment in history, which saw the making of a peoples hero, points to his great man theory of history as well as his appreciation for Communist revolution.

Hicks further reveals this appreciation by mirroring Reeds romantic portrayal of Soviet Russia.  Rosenstone emphasizes the negative aspects of post-revolution Russia (the cold winter, the suppression of counterrevolutionaries), or at least he does not use the exalted descriptions that Hicks, in imitation of Reeds romantic and novelistic journalistic style, employs.  In Soviet Russia green crops were growing, and the factories were all at work. The people of Petrograd were not only better dressed and better fed than they had been when Reed left, three months before they were stronger, happier, more confident.  Here, Hicks paints a beautiful and optimistic picture of Soviet Russia.  In contrast, Rosenstone draws attention to its hunger, terrorism and confusion.

It is clear that Rosenstone sympathizes with the revolutionary and anti-war activities in which John Reed and his friends engaged.  But he does not mirror Reed in apologizing for Bolshevik terror, as Hicks does.  Although the terror, which had been necessary to suppress counter-revolution, was relaxing, stories still came of the horrors of civil warfare.  Hickss characterization of Bolshevik terror as necessary points to his Communist commitments, and it mirrors Reeds apology for the brutality of the secret police and the Soviet dictatorship.  Rosenstone is far more critical of Reeds attitude on this matter, pointing out his hypocrisy in advocating the Bolshevik use of terror against counterrevolutionaries while despising the American government for their use of terror against radicals and workers in the United States.

Critique is one of the ways in which Rosenstone establishes narrative distance between himself and the subject of his biography.  He also does this in the preface by acknowledging his own limitations and context, and being self-conscious about Reeds legendary status.  By writing a first-person preface, Rosenstone sets himself apart from the character of John Reed.  Hicks romanticizes Reed and his experiences more, participating in the creation of a legend.  He is less critical than Rosenstone of Reeds political and personal failings, often describing these failings as goods in disguise.  Rosenstone, on the other hand, makes a lot of how uncaring Reed was toward the people in his life, showing how he hurt his wife and his mother, and even explaining in the preface that he wishes Reed could have been more kind.  But this was the price Reed paid as a human being, Rosenstone seems to suggest, for being a poet of the revolution.

Rosenstone also questions the veracity of Reeds reporting in a way that Hicks does not.  Suspended in John Reeds writings are incidents that float delicately between the realms of fact and fiction, with the narrator a character living in a world of romance, enacting a truth more emotional than literal.  He does not necessarily suggest that this mixing of fact and fiction is a bad thing.  To Rosenstone, the greatness of Reeds writingparticularly Ten Days That Shook the Worldis in the way it captures some essential emotional truth about life.  While Reeds masterpiece is inaccurate in details about the Russian Revolution and biased in point of view, since Reed supported and mythologized its topic, it is expressive of deep truth.  In fact, it is precisely through its bias and inaccuracy that the book expresses truth, the kind of truth that is beyond fact, that creates fact.  More than history, it is poetry, the poetry of revolution.  Both biographers see Reed as a poet of the revolutionand more than that, a poet of life who began with experience and constructed his own moral, political and literary structures out of that experience.  The entire structure and style of his life was based on the conversion of sensory experience into a coherent literary and political worldview, and it is because of this that he was and remains a culture hero, or a representative of the aspirations of the artistically and politically radical community in America.

I have shown that Rosenstone and Hicks both reveal their historical time periods and consequent theoretical commitments through their treatments of Reeds life.  While Rosenstone sees Reeds life as a process with many centers, revealing his more postmodern viewpoint, Hicks centers Reeds personhood on one moment that completes a singular narrative arc, suggesting a great man theory of history.  For Rosenstone, Reed is not so much a great man as a searching man who became himself again and again in the small details of life as well as in its explosive moments.  He was born into a position of privilege, and spent his entire life searching for a way to reconcile that position with the struggle of the working classes across the world.  In this struggle, he also sought to fulfill his childhood dreams of heroism, adventure and freedom, managing to transform those dreams into a real desire to improve peoples lives.