Early life and education

John Reed was born on October 22, 1887, in his maternal grandmother's mansion in Portland, Oregon. His mother, Margaret Green Reed, was the daughter of a leading Portland citizen who had made a fortune through three enterprises: as owner of the first gas works in Oregon, owner of the first pig iron smelter on the west coast, and as second owner of the Portland water works. John's father, Charles Jerome Reed, was the representative of an agricultural machinery manufacturer who had come to town from the East. With his ready wit, he quickly won acceptance in Portland’s business community. His parents were married in 1886.

Young "Jack" grew up surrounded by nurses and servants, and his upper-class playmates were carefully selected. His brother, Harry, was two years his junior. A sickly child, Jack and his brother were sent to the recently-established Portland Academy, a private school. Jack was bright enough to pass his courses but could not be bothered to work for top marks, as he found school dry and tedious. In September 1904, Jack was sent to Morristown School in New Jersey to prepare for college as his father, who never attended a university, wanted his sons to go to Harvard. At this prep school, Jack continued his track record of poor classroom performance, although he did make the football team and showed literary promise.

Reed failed in his first attempt on the admission exam but passed on his second try and in the fall of 1906 he entered Harvard College. Tall, handsome, and light-hearted, Jack threw himself into all manner of student activities. He was a member of the cheerleading team, the swimming team, and the dramatic club. He served on the editorial boards of the Lampoon and the Harvard Monthly and as president of the Harvard Glee Club. He wrote a play produced by the Hasty Pudding Club, and was made ivy orator and poet. Reed failed to make the Harvard teams for football and crew, but excelled in other sports of lesser prestige, swimming and water polo.

Jack also attended meetings of the Socialist Club, over which his friend Walter Lippmann presided, but he never joined. Still, the club left its impact on his psyche. The group had social legislation introduced into the state legislature, attacked the university for failing to pay its servants living wages, and petitioned the administration for the establishment of a course in Socialism. Reed later recalled:

"All this made no ostensible difference in the look of Harvard society, and probably the club-men and the athletes, who represented us to the world, never even heard of it. But it made me, and many others, realize that there was something going on in the dull outside world more thrilling than college activities, and turned our attention to the writings of men like H.G. Wells and Graham Wallas, wrenching us away from the Oscar Wildian dilettantism which had possessed undergraduate litterateurs for generations."

Reed graduated from Harvard College in 1910, and that summer he set out to see more of the "dull outside world," visiting England, France, and Spain before returning home to America the following spring.

Bohemian journalist

John Reed had determined to become a journalist and he set out to make his mark in the big city in which that industry was based, New York. Jack made use of a valuable contact he had made at Harvard, the muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, who appreciated Reed's skills and intellect at an early date. Steffens landed his young admirer an entry-level position on the American Magazine, reading manuscripts, correcting proofs, and later helping with the composition. Reed supplemented his insufficient salary by taking an additional job as the business manager of a new short-lived quarterly magazine called Landscape Architecture.

Reed made his home in Greenwich Village, a burgeoning hub of poets and artists. He came to love New York, relentlessly exploring it and writing poems about it. His formal jobs on the magazines paid the rent, but it was as a freelance journalist that Jack sought to establish himself. He collected rejection slips circulating an essay and short stories about his six months in Europe, eventually breaking through in The Saturday Evening Post. Within a year, Reed had other work accepted by Collier's, The Forum, and The Century Magazine. One of his poems had been set to music by composer Arthur Foote, and the editors at The American had come to see him as a contributor and begun to publish his work. John Reed was a young man on the rise.

His serious interest in social problems was first aroused at about this time by Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, and once aroused it quickly led him to a far more radical position than theirs. In 1913 he joined the staff of The Masses, edited by Max Eastman and his sister Crystal. To this publication Jack contributed more than 50 articles, reviews, and shorter pieces.

The first of Reed's many arrests came in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1913, for attempting to speak on behalf of strikers in the New Jersey silk mills. The harsh treatment meted out by the authorities to the strikers and a short jail term which followed further radicalized him. Jack allied himself with the syndicalist trade union the Industrial Workers of the World at this time. Jack's account of his experiences appeared in June as an article "War in Paterson." During the same year, following a suggestion made by IWW leader Bill Haywood, Jack put on "The Pageant of the Paterson Strike" in Madison Square Garden as a benefit for the strikers.

In the autumn of 1913 John Reed was sent to Mexico by the Metropolitan Magazine to report the Mexican Revolution. He shared the perils of Pancho Villa's army for four months, present with Villa's Constitutional Army when it defeated Federal forces at Torreón, opening the way for its advance on Mexico City. Reed's time with the Villistas resulted in a series of outstanding magazine articles that brought Jack a national reputation as a war correspondent. Reed deeply sympathized with the plight of the peons and vehemently opposed American intervention, which came shortly after he left. Jack adored Villa, while Carranza left him cold. Jack's Mexican reports were later republished in book form as Insurgent Mexico, which appeared in 1914.

On April 30, 1914, John Reed arrived in Colorado, scene of the recent Ludlow massacre. There he spent a little more than a week and investigated the events, spoke on behalf of the miners, wrote an impassioned article on the subject ("The Colorado War", published in July), and came to believe much more deeply in class conflict. That summer he spent in Provincetown, Massachusetts with Mabel Dodge and her son, putting together Insurgent Mexico and interviewing President Wilson on the subject. The resulting report, much watered down at White House insistence, was not a success.

War correspondent

On August 14, 1914, shortly after Germany declared war on France, he set sail for neutral Italy, having been sent by the Metropolitan. He met his lover, Mabel Dodge, in Naples and the pair made their way to Paris. Reed saw the war as emerging from imperialist commercial rivalries and showed little sympathy for any of the participants. In an unsigned piece entitled "The Traders’ War," published in the September 1914 issue of The Masses, Jack passionately wrote:

"The real War, of which this sudden outburst of death and destruction is only an incident, began long ago. It has been raging for tens of years, but its battles have been so little advertised that they have been hardly noted. It is a clash of Traders...