Portland produced the only American buried in the Kremlin wall, and a romantic young socialist goes to find what is left
A Pilgrimage to a Park Bench: Looking for John Reed in the City That Forgot Him
I went on a pilgrimage today. I took a bus and then walked uphill in a fine rain for twenty-five minutes, through a rose garden with nothing in bloom, to sit on a bench. I had a flask of tea, a damp paperback and a sense of occasion. A squirrel watched me the whole time with what I can only call political scepticism.
The bench is a memorial to John Reed. If you do not know the name, that is rather my point.
Who He Was
He was born in Portland in 1887, in a mansion on a hill, the grandson of one of the city’s richest pioneers. A delicate, bookish child who was bullied on his way to school. He went east to Harvard, became a journalist and turned out to have a gift for being wherever history was happening and writing it up as if it were a novel.
He rode with the rebel armies in the Mexican revolution. He covered the great silk strike in New Jersey and was jailed with the strikers. He reported from the Eastern Front. And in the autumn of 1917 he was in Petrograd when the Bolsheviks took power. He was in the room. He saw the Winter Palace fall. He knew the leaders personally.
He came home and wrote, in a few furious weeks, Ten Days That Shook the World. It is still the most vivid eyewitness account of a revolution in the language. It is breathless, partisan and impossible to put down. The archive at marxists.org has the whole text.
He went back to Russia, fell out with some of the people he had made heroes of, caught typhus and died in Moscow in 1920, three days short of his thirty-third birthday. He was given a state funeral and buried in the Kremlin wall. He remains one of a tiny handful of Americans ever laid there.
A rich boy from Portland, Oregon. In the Kremlin wall.
What Portland Did About It
Nothing, for about eighty years. The mansion was pulled down. There was no plaque and no street. The city’s respectable families were not anxious to claim him. During the long decades when the wrong opinion could cost you your job, a local boy in a Soviet grave was not something one mentioned at the Rotary.
The bench went in around the turn of this century, paid for by admirers, in the big park in the west hills not far from where the house stood. It is an ordinary park bench with an inscription. You would walk past it. Most people do. While I sat there, eleven went by. Two had dogs, one was running and one was arguing on the phone about a boat. Nobody stopped.
The Rest of the Hidden History
I have been reading up, since it is more fun than my thesis. This polite, rainy, coffee-drinking city has a radical past it keeps in the attic.
In the early 1900s it was a stronghold of the Industrial Workers of the World, the Wobblies, who organised the loggers, the harvest hands and the dockers the craft unions would not touch. They had a hall here and fought the city for the right to speak on street corners. In 1934 the port was shut for nearly three months by the great waterfront strike that ran the length of the West Coast, and police fired on pickets. Before any of that, a small utopian colony or two had come and gone in the Oregon woods.
And there is the other history, which a socialist ought to face squarely. Oregon entered the Union with a clause in its constitution barring Black people from settling in the state at all. It stayed on the books, unenforced, into the 1920s. The city’s Black neighbourhood was bulldozed in stages for a stadium, a motorway and a hospital extension. The progressive reputation is recent, and it sits on that.
My Own Romanticism, Examined
Here I must turn the lamp on myself, because my editor would, and because the squirrel already had.
I adore Reed. I read him at fifteen in my bedroom in Tottenham and decided that was the life: to be there, to be on the right side, to write it at white heat. I have a postcard of him on my fridge. I was sitting on that bench, in the rain, having something very close to a religious experience.
And I know perfectly well what the book leaves out. He was writing in the first glow. He did not live to see what that revolution became, the camps and the famines and the show trials, some of which swallowed people he had praised by name. A careful reader of his last months can see the doubts beginning. I believe what I believe about how wealth and work should be arranged. I also have to be able to look at that record without squinting. A politics that cannot be honest about its own dead is not worth much.
There is also the small matter that Reed was a millionaire’s grandson and I am pursuing the liberation of the working class by way of a fully funded doctorate and a part-time job making jokes. My mum, who has stacked shelves for thirty years, calls it her daughter’s revolutionary career with the heating on.
The Piece
So this week’s item for The London Prat wrote itself on the bench. A city in the Pacific Northwest, it reports, has unveiled a memorial to its most famous revolutionary son: a seat. Officials said the design reflects the municipality’s long tradition of sitting down. A spokesman confirmed that a second bench, facing the other way, has been provided for balance.
And a line at the end about a young woman observed weeping on it in the rain, who, when approached, said she was fine and asked whether the cafe took cards.
My editor’s guide for all of us, what satirical commentary is, and what it is not, says the writer should be the first casualty of any piece. I have put myself in the last paragraph. I think that squares it with Reed. It will be on the English satirical news page, and the history of how that tradition runs is on the British Onion page for anyone who wants it.
Down the Hill
I finished the tea and read the first chapter again, aloud, quietly, which seemed the proper thing to do. Then I left him a rose hip, there being no roses, and walked down.
On the bus a man asked what I was reading. I showed him. He said, oh, like the movie. There was a film, in 1981, three hours long, with an intermission. It won awards. That is how the city remembers him, when it does: as a part someone played.
I do not mind as much as I thought. He would have liked being a film. He was always a bit of a show-off. This diary is kept on this site, and my writing for the paper is here. The city’s own website has a map of the park, for other pilgrims. Bring a flask.
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