Monday, November 19, 2012

Jack Reed and Louise Bryant, 3: A Fatal Journey

CHRONICLES OF CROTON'S BOHEMIA 
      Before Jack Reed could undertake a return trip to Russia in 1919, there were several matters that needed attention. Back home, the Socialist Party he had joined upon his return from Russia in 1918 was riven by dissension. 
      A foreign-language-speaking, mostly immigrant group led by Louis Fraina felt a kinship with the Russian Bolsheviks and called for the immediate organization of an American Communist Party. A rival centrist group, led by Benjamin Gitlow, proposed making the existing Socialist Party more revolutionary and to become the Communist Labor Party. 
      Jack Reed cast his lot with Gitlow, no longer in the majority. At the Socialist Party’s convention in Chicago in September of 1919 the two hostile groups remained poles apart.

False Papers
      When Jack heard that Louis Fraina was on his way to Moscow, he became convinced that he should hasten there himself. Although he was under surveillance by theU.S. government, he arranged to be hired as a stoker on a Swedish freighter by using forged seaman’s papers bearing the name "Jim Gormley.”
To reach Moscow it would be necessary to pass through regions torn by civil war. Nevertheless, Jack was convinced he could make the round trip quickly and be home in three short months.
The crossing was slow and the work of firing the boilers of a steamship was tiring. Jack jumped ship when the vessel reached Bergen, Norway. Local socialists took him to Christiania (now Oslo), where he learned troubling news from Russia.
Things were going badly for the Red Army. A White Army was approaching Petrograd from the Baltic. Another force pushing up from the south was within 250 miles of Moscow.
Reed was able to travel in Scandinavia and Russia only because a sort of Bolshevik underground railway existed, composed of friendly radical sympathizers. Making his way to Stockholm in Sweden, he was smuggled aboard a ship crossing the Baltic and brought to a safe house near Helsinki, in Finland, where he spent two restless weeks.
Traveling by sleigh and on foot through the subarctic landscape he reached Petrograd, which was no longer the capital. (In the spring of 1918 the Soviet government had moved to Moscow.) His mission was to plead for recognition of the Communist Labor Party, and he hurried to Moscow.
It soon became obvious that a quick decision would not be made. Eventually, the Bolshevik government recommended that a convention be held and that both competing American Communist parties be merged.
Although he was facing trial and probable imprisonment in the U.S., Jack decided to leave Russia in early February of 1920 and return home. The first attempt ended in failure in Latvia because of civil clashes. His second attempt was an absolute disaster. Carrying concealed diamonds and money provided by the Bolshevik government to aid the Communist cause in the U.S., he hid in the engine room of a freighter at the port of Abo. Reed was quickly discovered by Finnish customs agents and sent to jail.
Charged with smuggling, he was held in jail at the request of an American government unhappy with his radical activities. After almost three months in solitary confinement, Jack was permitted to return to Russia by way of Estonia. He caught a ferry in Helsinki for the short trip across the Gulf of Finland.
Because Louise was under surveillance in the U.S., in a carefully worded cable from Tallinn (formerly Revel), the capital, he wrote, “Temporarily returning headquarters. Come if possible,” and boarded a train for Petrograd. Louise understood the message.

Reunion with Jack
      First, she obtained press credentials from Hearst’s International News Service. Knowing she would be denied a passport, she quietly made preparations to smuggle herself illegally out of the U.S. Posing as the wife of a Swedish businessman, she embarked from New York aboard a Swedish steamer and arrived in Gothenburg, Sweden, on August 11.
Radical friends advised her to avoid traveling in Finland and to enter Russia by sea. She reached Narvik, an ice-free port in Norway inside the Arctic Circle, by train. There she found fishermen willing to bring her along the rugged coast in stages to the Russian port of Murmansk, a dangerous destination because it was in Allied hands.
In the meantime, Jack Reed had attended the Second Congress of the Communist International (the Comintern), known as the Third International, in Moscow, but was disappointed. Instead of continuing to foster the idea of world revolution, its focus was on solidifying the control of the Bolshevik party in Russia.
Unfortunately, Jack was not in Moscow when Louise arrived. He was attending a conference of the Peoples of the East at Baku, on the Western shore of the Caspian Sea in the Caucasus.
Jack and Louise did not reunite in Moscow until September 15. Louise later wrote, “We were terribly happy to find each other.” He seemed “older and sadder and grown strangely gentle.” His clothes were in rags and his flesh hung loosely on his big frame.
Ten days after returning from Baku Jack began to feel ill, complaining of dizziness and sharp headaches. A Russian doctor mistakenly diagnosed the illness as influenza. After five days the symptoms grew worse and he became delirious. Jack was moved to Moscow’s Mariinsky Hospital, where his condition was diagnosed as typhus.
Friends scoured the city for medicine. Because of the Allied blockade of Russian ports, medical supplies were scarce and nothing could be found. Louise sat at his bedside around the clock to comfort him. Soon it became difficult for him to swallow, and his body slowly began to waste away. Peasant nurses slipped off to a chapel to burn candles for his recovery.
In the early hours of the morning of October 17, 1920, five days before what would have been his 33rd birthday, Jack Reed’s heart stopped beating.

 Louise Bryant grieves at John Reed's coffin lying in state 
at the Labor Temple in Moscow, October 22, 1920.

Alone
      His body was carried from his hospital bed to the Labor Temple, also known as the Trade Union Hall, on the shoulders of Russian workers. It lay in state for a week on a dais, the long silver coffin banked with flowers and surrounded by colorful revolutionary posters. Also in evidence were the wreaths of gaily painted tin flowers used regularly in funerals of the poor.
On Saturday, October 23 a military band playing a doleful funeral march led the procession to Red Square. As a mixture of wet snow and rain began to fall, speeches were made in English, French, German and Russian. A backdrop above the grave--a large red banner decorated with gilt letters in Russian--proclaimed, “The leaders die, but the cause lives on.”
Jack Reed’s gravesite lies beside the massive red brick wall of the Kremlin in a small cemetery reserved for revolutionary heroes. Legend wrongly has it that Jack Reed is the only American to be buried in the Kremlin site. An urn containing the ashes of labor leader Big Bill Haywood, who was present at Reed’s funeral and who died in Moscow in 1928, is also interred there.
Louise wrote two poems that Max Eastman would later publish in The Liberator, successor
to The Masses. The first, "In Memory," evokes the house on Mt. Airy in Croton:

      Now you are gone--and past our garden hedge
      Walk strangers . . . little knowing
      How brave and fine a soul
      Has loved these clapboard walls,
      That scraggling lilac or yonder spreading elm.
The young fruit trees remember yet, perhaps,
How gently with your hands
You smoothed their roots in planting . . .
No less than a poet could feel
How shrubs and flowers shrink from rougher touch.
Oh, ever-dear and honored in love,
I go my lonely way
Far from our garden’s sweetly smelling roses.
Yet always does their fragrance
Reach me and enfold me--
Even as now my fancy brings you close
And you’re more real to me than all of the living.
For nightly do I walk with you
The moonlit roads of home
And there we mingle laughter with caresses
And stories of adventure without end.
      What matter if I wake in tears at cock-crow?
      I'll have the dreams again at night . . .
      And after many dreams, the long dream
      From which I'll wake not
      And no spell of stars be broken.

      The second poem, "Aftermath," captured her desperation:

      Dear, they are singing your praises, 
      Now you are gone. 
      But only I saw your going 
       I . . . alone . . . in the dawn. 
 
      Dear, they are weeping about you, 
      Now you are dead, 
      And they've placed a granite stone 
      Over your head. 
 
      I cannot cry any more, 
      Too burning deep is my grief. . , . 
      I dance through my spendthrift days 
      Like a fallen leaf. 
 
      Faster and faster I whirl 
      Toward the end of my days. 
      Dear, 1 am drunken with sadness 
      And lost down strange ways. 
 
      If only the dance would finish 
      Like a flash in the sky . . . oh, soon, 
      If only a storm would come shouting 
      Hurl me past stars and moon!
 
     Louise found herself stranded in Russia without a passport, unable to return home. Resolving to pick up 
the pieces of her journalistic career, she soon became William Randolph Hearst’s most adventurous and 
enterprising foreign correspondent.
Posted by Notorc @ 11/19/2012 11:55:00 AM 0 comments
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Jack Reed and Louise Bryant, 2: A Senatorial Inquisition

CHRONICLES OF CROTON’S BOHEMIA


The year 1919 opened with American troops bogged down in Siberia as part of an Allied intervention during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution.

The Senate announced that hearings would begin on February 11 to investigate Bolhevik propaganda. Sen. Lee S. Overman, a Democrat from North Carolina, headed the subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose five male members had an average age of 61.

The other committee members were Knute Nelson (R-Minn.), Thomas Sterling (R-N.D.), William H. King (D-Utah) and Josiah O. Wolcott (D-Del.).

In New York, Jack Reed was putting the finishing touches on his manuscript of Ten Days That Shook the World.

To promote her book Six Red Months in Russia and refute the lies being circulated by critics about the new Russia, Louise Bryant was about to begin a cross-country speaking tour on “The Truth About Russia.” 
Reed and Bryant had wired Senator Overman offering to testify as witnesses but received no reply.
On Sunday afternoon, February 2, Louise was in Washington for an appearance at Poli’s Theater at 15th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. After her talk, she remained in Washington and managed to get arrested in front of the White House. She was released following a brief hunger strike.
Louise attended the hearings and listened to a series of friendly witnesses. During a recess she confronted the chairman and demanded to be heard. He promised to tell her the next day when she would be called to testify, but failed to keep his promise.
Only after she stood up during a hearing, identified herself and publicly demanded that her testimony be scheduled was she called before the Overman Committee. She testified for two days as the first unfriendly witness, starting on February 20.         
Bryant’s treatment during her testimony initiated the practice of congressional witch-hunting that would culminate in the discredited House Un-American Activities Committee under J. Parnell Thomas and Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Armed Services Committee hearings in the 1950s.

Inquisition
      Throughout her testimony Overman Committee members were both bullying and belligerent. At the outset, they grilled her at length about her belief in God. Although she admitted that she believed in the sanctity of an oath, Senator King pressed on, stating. “A person who has no conception of God does not have any idea of the sanctity of an oath, and an oath would be meaningless,” he insisted.
Unsatisfied with her concession of belief that there was a God, she was asked by Senator Wolcott whether she believed “in a punishment hereafter and a reward for duty.” An exasperated Louise Bryant responded, “It seems to me as if I were being tried for witchcraft. Very well, I will concede--I concede there is a hell.”
Senator King asked Louise where she stayed in Washington. She told him that it was at the headquarters of the National Women’s Party, a militant suffragist group. He asked whether she belonged to the NWP “picket squad” that had actively picketed the White House.
She responded, “I do not know what that has to do with the truth about Russia, but I did.  I believe in equality for women as well as men, even in my own country.”
“We want to know something about the character of the person who testifies,” he told her, “so that we can determine what credit to give to their testimony.”
Under further questioning by Senator Nelson, she admitted that she took part in the burning of the president in effigy, an act for which she was jailed. After probing questions about her first and second marriages, Senator King asked if she participated in Bolshevik meetings. She replied that she took notes at such meetings, as other reporters did.

Three white men in suits sitting at a table, with a chandelier hanging and a mirror in the background
Three of the five members of the Overman Committee in 1919. From left: Senators Josiah O. Wolcott, Lee S. Overman (Chairman) and Knute Nelson.
She was asked about Jack Reed’s employment by the Bolsheviks. Holding copies of propaganda documents printed in German, Louise proudly admitted that her husband did a lot in Russia to bring about the abdication of the Kaiser.
Senator Nelson maintained that he wanted facts. Bryant insisted the papers she was holding were the facts. Nelson cautioned her: “Don’t be so impertinent.” When spectators applauded, the chairman warned that he would clear the room if the noise was repeated. It was and he did. Louise refused to testify in a closed session. After about an hour, spectators were allowed to return, with an admonition against “cheering.”

Senator Overman asked about her lecture at Poli’s Theater. “Its purpose was to protest against intervention in Russia.” she explained. “I, as an American, believing in self-determination, cannot believe in intervention. I do not see how we can fight for democracy in France and against it in Siberia. I believe we ought to take our troops out of Russia. It would be better for both nations to have friendly relations.”
Senator Nelson demanded to know whether she was “anxious” for the Bolsheviks to remain in power.
“I am anxious—" she began.
“Answer my question,” Senator Nelson interrupted. “Are you anxious to have the Bolshevik government there as a permanent thing?” he thundered.
Louise replied calmly, “I think the Russians ought to settle that.”
He posed the question again, and she replied, “I answered you. I said I believed in self-determination.”
“Self-determination at the point of a gun?” he asked.
“All governments have had to be self-determined at the point of a gun. There never has been the government established except after a war,” was her reply.
When the hearing opened the next day, Louise Bryant asked the chairman to be allowed “to speak a whole sentence before this committee without being interrupted.” He assented.
She criticized the hearings, pointing out that previous witnesses who did not support the revolution were allowed to talk at length, but she was not allowed to answer questions fully. She had been treated like “a traitor,” she charged.
Chairman Overman told her patronizingly: “You seem to want to make a martyr of yourself, when you have not been treated unfairly that I can see. You’re a woman and you do not know anything about the conduct of an examination such as we have in hand here. We’re going to treat you fairly and treat you as a lady.”
Louise’s answer has become a classic: “I don’t want to be treated as a lady, but I want to be treated as a human being.”
She wanted the record to show that she believed she had been “lectured at” and subjected to “a sort of third degree” by Senator Nelson. She was told by Senator Sterling, “You were not given lectures. You were cross-examined.”  Senator Nelson described her as “deluded,” adding, “You are young, too, and I feel sorry for you.”
The chairman declared that as a judge on the bench in Utah the senator frequently had before him witnesses who were charged with having no faith in the Christian religion. Bryant countered by asking, “How would you have treated me if I had been a Jew?”
Jack Reed followed Louise as a witness. His answers were crisp and clear. The committee obviously had no desire to tangle with him, and he was allowed to depart quickly.

Back in Croton
      In April of 1919, Jack and Louise acquired a German shepherd puppy and began gardening and laying flagstones at the house on Mount Airy. Reed fell ill in the influenza epidemic sweeping the country and became delirious. “For some days he seemed not to understand anything,” Louise noted. Getting a doctor to make house calls or finding a nurse was impossible. A phone call to Dr. Harry Lober in New York brought the advice “give him aspirin and eggnog with plenty of brandy."
She was wife, doctor and nurse to Jack. Because the little house was cold, she moved the bed to the living room near the fireplace. Each day she gave him an alcohol rub, "starting with his toes and working all over his body." She turned him regularly to prevent bedsores from developing.
Widespread fear of contagion made it futile to ask neighbors for help. Louise chopped wood and brought in armloads of logs for the fire. When he slept, she hurriedly descended into the village for groceries and supplies and struggled back up steep Mt. Airy Road.
Louise had ordered some trees. With a recovering Reed sitting by the window and giving instructions, Boardman Robinson and Louise planted a small red hawthorn where he suggested. She later wrote a touching poem about it:

     All the fruit-trees were in bloom.
     They were little girls
     Going to communion.
     But the hawthorn broke my heart.
     It was the little son
     I dreamed about and never had.

As strength slowly returned, Jack began to dream about making his way back to Russia where so much was happening. Louise was furious at the idea of another separation.


Posted by Notorc @ 11/19/2012 11:41:00 AM 0 comments
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