BIRTH | Oct. 22 – John Reed

Russian Versions of Reed's Works,
in English and Russian.

October 22, 2017 – This day in 1887 was born in Portland, Oregon, American journalist John Silas “Jack” Reed.

He's best known as the author of Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), his eye-witness account of Russia’s 1917 "October" Revolution.

He is included in this Inez Milholland blog because:

• He was an older contemporary of Inez's brother John ("Jack") Milholland at Harvard. Both of them tried out for the Harvard football team.
• He was a part of Inez Milholland's circle of radical feminists and pacifists.
• His famed trip to Russia in 1917 was financed, according to their friend Max Eastman, through an appeal to Alma Vanderbilt Belmont and others by Inez's widower Eugen Boissevain.

***

Reed was from a wealthy Portland family. His mother, Margaret Green Reed, was the daughter of a man who owned Oregon's first gas works, first pig-iron smelter, and the City of Portland water works.

At Harvard, Reed tried out for football but did not make the team (unlike Inez's brother Jack, who became the team's well-publicized designated drop-kicker). While a student, Reed attended meetings of the Socialist Club headed by Walter Lippman and became an admirer and friend of Lincoln Steffens, the famed muckraker. His favorite professor was English Professor Charles Townsend "Copey" Copeland (1860-1952), who recommended that his students interested in a writing career get involved in real-life gritty working experiences as a way of generating something to write about.

Reed graduated from Harvard in 1910 and after several gritty jobs began in 1913 writing for Max Eastman's anti-war and socialist magazine, The Masses. In 1914 he covered the revolution in Mexico and recorded his impressions in Insurgent Mexico. In 1915 he met the leftist journalist Louise Bryant. He said:

She is coming to New York to get a job with me, I hope. I think she's the first person I ever loved without reservation.

They were married that year. They spent that summer in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, with a group of other writers from Greenwich Village that included Floyd Dell and Theodore Dreiser. Several of them established the Provincetown Theatre Group at the end of a wharf, which inspired another theater on McDougall Street in New York City with the same name. Bryant wrote:

Never were so many people in America who wrote or painted or acted ever thrown together in one place. 

Other writers like Eugene O'Neill and Eugen Boissevain's second wife Edna St. Vincent Millay joined the group in later years.

Arrested often for his coverage of strikes, Reed rapidly became established as a radical leader and helped form the U.S. Communist Party. He covered World War I for Metropolitan magazine and wrote The War in Eastern Europe (1916).

Reed sought money to go to Russia in 1917 to cover what became the Russian Revolution. Eugen Boissevain, now Inez Milholland's widower, spoke with some of their New York City friends, including Alma Vanderbilt Belmont, and, according to Max Eastman, was the key person who put together Reed's funding.

In Russia, Reed befriended Lenin and was an eye-witness to the early days of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Reed wrote back with enthusiastic correspondent reports that generated U.S. headlines.

He returned to to New York and when the U.S. Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party split in 1919, Reed became the leader of the latter. Indicted for sedition (treason), he escaped via Scandinavia to Russia. But in his final years he was disillusioned by the loss of democracy after the Russian Revolution and especially by restrictions on his own travel.

He died in 1920 in a Moscow hospital of scrub typhus, which is associated with poor hygiene and cold weather. He is buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis for Bolshevik heroes, along with Bill Haywood, Chairman of the American Communist Party and a leader of the IWW ("Wobblies") and the Paterson strike, who died in 1928 in Moscow. 

Reed and Haywood are two of only three Americans buried with Soviet heroes (the other is Charles E. Ruthenberg, Cleveland-born co-founder of the Communist Party USA). Russian leaders have seldom expressed admiration for Americans. Usually it is in response to praise in the other direction – other examples that come to mind are Jack London (1876-1916) and Donald J. Trump (1946-present).

INEZ | Fund-Raiser for Socialists, 1910-1922

Art Young (1866-1943)

I have just been reading Art Young's long and interesting first (1928) autobiography, My Life and Times, available online (http://bit.ly/2jSuoeO – the download is slow because the file is large).

It reveals the important and inadequately remembered role that Inez Milholland, daughter and then wife of business entrepreneurs, played as a go-between for the funding of socialist publications in the 1910-1916 period.

Her fundraising continued until her death in 1916 and her influence continued thereafter through her widower Eugen Boissevain, who after her death became highly successful, with two of his five brothers, importing coffee from Java in what was then the Dutch East Indies.

The socialist publications in the 1911-1922 period coincided with the creation of the traditions and energy that emanated for the rest of the century from Greenwich Village.

These traditions were also wrapped up with the energy of New York University. Inez Milholland attended NYU Law School – and thereby became part of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company strike in 1909 and a witness to the fire in 1911 – because her application to Harvard Law School was rejected. The Harvard Law School faculty decided she could do the work, but the administration did not admit women for another four decades–not until 1950.

1. The Masses, 1911-17

Art Young shows how The Masses got started with a $2,000 contribution (equal to about $50,000 today) from Alva Belmont, whose support was enlisted by Inez. Max Eastman hadn't thought of approaching her, because he knew that Alva wasn't  a socialist. But Inez knew that she was a supporter of suffragist causes and correctly perceived that she would be open to supporting other issues if properly presented. (See Young, previously cited 1928 Autobiography, p. 297.)

Inez explained to him that Alva was a "militant" – which would be enough for her to want to enable militancy of other kinds.

Alva's gift was quickly matched by $1,000 from popular novelist John Fox and then another $2,000 from civil rights lawyer Amos Pinchot. That was sufficient to get the magazine under way. Belmont made subsequent contributions.

The magazine was ended when Woodrow Wilson's Postmaster General invoked wartime laws against sedition and refused to mail it. The magazine was succeeded by another one led by Max Eastman, The Liberator, and later by The New Masses.

2. Good Morning, 1919-22

Cartoonist Art Young, a mainstay of The Masses, created his own magazine in 1919. He needed $4,500 to get it going, and received $1,000 of it (equal to about $25,000 today according to the BLS inflation calculator) from Inez's widower Eugen Boissevain. Eugen asked Art: "Are you sure this is enough?" (See his previously cited 1928 autobiography, p. 356.)

Art's magazine competed with Max Eastman's new magazine The Liberator. It only lasted three years. The value of these magazines is that they show an alternative point of view to the prevailing mood of capitalist acquisitiveness that lasted until FDR's election in 1932.

3. John Reed's Trip to Russia

Eugen Boissevain is credited by Max Eastman in his book Great Companions with contributing and raising the money that John Reed needed to go to Russia and write the book that became Seven Days that Shook the World.

EUGEN | Feb. 7–Chaplin Debuts as The Little Tramp (Personal Note)

This day in 1914, Charles Spencer (Charlie) Chaplin premiered in vaudeville theaters as "The Little Tramp" in the silent film Kid Auto Races at Venice.

Born in England April 16, 1889, Chaplin was a performer by the age of 10, in 1908 joining a pantomime troupe and playing a drunk. Spotted by a talent scout on a 1913 U.S. tour, Chaplin signed up with Keystone Studios. His first movie, Making a Living, in which he played a swindler, was not a success.

Keystone gave him a second chance and this time Chaplin worked hard on his look. He scoured the  Keystone costume wardrobe to put together the Little Tramp ensemble–“pants baggy, coat tight," "hat small, shoes large”. He added the mustache to look older, he said in his autobiography.

In his first appearance as the Little Tramp (he was also called Charlot, and there is a fine restaurant in NYC named after him), Chaplin interrupts a kids' cart race in Venice, Calif., and gets in the way of the filming in ways both comic and tragic, wherein may lie the secret of why we laugh at him. After this debut, Chaplin became the most famous actor in Hollywood, appearing in 35 Keystone comedies. He then signed with a series of bigger-money contracts before founding the United Artists in 1919 with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and director D.W. Griffith.

Chaplin's characters all had a bit of the Tramp in them, whether he played a waiter (The Rink, 1916), a janitor (Triple Trouble,1918) or a gold prospector (The Gold Rush, 1925). Chaplin gave his Tramp speaking lines in Modern Times (1936); to hide his British accent , he sang in Italian with made-up lyrics–that was the last Little Tramp movie. Chaplin subsequently made The Great Dictator (1940), Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and Limelight (1952).

Personal Note

During the period from 1916 to 1923 (I am still hunting in the historical NYC records for the exact dates), my Dutch great-uncle Eugen Boissevain was working with his brothers Robert and Jan on the successful business of importing coffee from Java when it was still a Dutch colony. He owned a townhouse on St. Luke's Place in the East Village in New York City. Eugen was between two marriages–his first wife Inez Milholland died in 1916, and he married his second wife Edna St. Vincent Millay in 1923. Charlie Chaplin was his tenant on St. Luke's Place when not in Hollywood. Another tenant was Max Eastman, who edited The Masses until the U.S. Post Office refused to distribute the famous magazine in 1917 because it was viewed as disloyal to America when it was at war.

xBOISSEVAIN Gen 7 | Eugen, Between Marriages

Eugen Boissevain and his four brothers and their
mother, Emily Heloise MacDonnell Boissevain.
Eugen went into business with two of his brothers,
Robert and Jan. 

This post has been consolidated with another one on Eugen Boissevain.

he is best known for his two marriages, 1913-16 and 1923-49. In the seven-year period 1916-23 he was on his own, and it is interesting to know more about how he fared on his own.

Five men loom large in this period:

• His brothers Robert and Jan Boissevain worked with him to build up Boissevain & Co. into a major business, buying coffee in Java and shipping it to New York City. A steamship was named after them. They had a fleet at their disposal and a top-floor office in the Whitehall Building in lower Manhattan. 
• Max Eastman, editor of The Masses, was engaged in anti-war activities until the U.S. Post Office essentially shut down his magazine. Eastman stayed in Eugen's house on St. Luke's Place in Manhattan, presumably a tenant. Eastman later writes glowingly about his friendship with Eugen in his book Great Companions. The circle around Eastman that included Inez Milholland and Eugen also included Sherwood Anderson, Eugene O'Neill (whose daughter Oona married Charlie Chaplin), Upton Sinclair (who had a crush on Inez), Amy Lowell, Mabel Dodge, Floyd Dell, Carl Sandburg, Crystal Eastman and Boardman Robinson.  
• John (Jack) Reed (Harvard '10) was part of the group clustered around The Masses. In 1915 he met the leftist journalist Louise Bryant. He said: "She is coming to New York to get a job with me, I hope. I think she's the first person I ever loved without reservation." They were married that year. They spent that summer in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, with a group of other writers from Greenwich Village that included Floyd Dell and Theodore Dreiser.  Several of them established the Provincetown Theatre Group at the end of a wharf.  Bryant wrote: "Never were so many people in America who wrote or painted or acted ever thrown together in one place." Other writers like Eugene O'Neill and Edna St. Vincent Millay joined the group in later years. Reed sought money to go to Russia in 1917 to cover the Russian Revolution. Eugen spoke with some of his New York City friends and, according to Eastman, was the person who arranged Reed's funding. Reed wrote back with enthusiastic reports: "I have seen the future." He died in Moscow of an illness in 1920 and is one of only two Americans buried in the Kremlin wall, the other being Bill Haywood, who was Chairman of the American Communist Party and died in 1928 in Moscow.
• Charlie Chaplin was also a resident of Eugen's house. Born in 1889 four days before Adolf Hitler (his first film with dialog would be The Great Dictator, in which he made fun of Hitler). Chaplin would have been 27 years old when Eugen became a widower in 1916. He was already becoming very well known. In 1917, Chaplin signed with Mutual for $10,000 a week, plus a $150,000 bonus under a contract that required him to make 12 films annually with creative control. In 1918, he signed with First National for $1 million for eight films.  Chaplin founded United Artists Corporation in 1919 with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and director D.W. Griffith. Chaplin after World War II was accused of Communist sympathies and left the United States. He returned in 1972 for a special Academy Award for “the incalculable effect he has had on making motion pictures the art for and of this century.” The Queen in 1975 knighted him Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin. He lived two more years.

I am still poking around among source materials for this period of Eugen's life – including some unique letters that have been entrusted to me to put into context – and would welcome contact with anyone else who is doing research in this area. I will be in New York City and Washington, DC working on this during the April-June 2016 period.

MILHOLLAND | 5B. Men's Leagues for Woman Suffrage, 1911-1913 [1]

The Men's League for Woman Suffrage Marches,
Probably in 1912 in New York City (police
were scarce in the D.C. parade in 1913.)

In 1913 there was a "Men's League for Woman Suffrage" with its own organization and officers. Max Eastman was one of the founders.

Chapters were formed in states around the country. The active membership included Inez's father John E. Milholland, a newspaperman turned businessman who had editorialized on Votes for Women in the New York Tribune. 

The "men's groups for woman suffrage" had their own place in the lineup of the 1913 Washington parade.

Most of the half-million people on the sidewalks of Pennsylvania Avenue in 2013 were men, who were described as coming to look over the young women in the parade.

Young suffragettes from the women's colleges were featured in the newspapers and gave the Votes for Women movement some glamor that it lacked during the two last decades of the 19th century, when aging Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were maneuvering to keep alive and effective the movement they had started.

There were some men's groups for woman suffrage in the colleges, but they do not seem to have been very active, at least not as of 1911, as may be judged by the following letter in the Harvard Crimson that year, by third-year Harvard Law student A. S. Olmstead: 

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:
Mr. E. Kerper, in yesterday's CRIMSON, asks the officers of the Harvard Men's League for Woman Suffrage, who the League is, that it uses the name of Harvard? The answer to his questions follow.
The League, when organized, consisted of seven men, and now contains 53 undergraduates and five graduate vice-presidents, of whom three are members of the Faculty. Just what bearing the size of the League has on its status is not clear; for whenever even a few students are gathered together for any cause, academic, social, political, athletic or literary, their petitions for the use of College buildings have hitherto been granted. But if numbers is the test of the status of a society as a Harvard organization, then this League has as good if not better claim to the use of the name "Harvard" than most undergraduate organizations.
Neither is it obvious what bearing the attendance at Mrs. Kelley's lecture has on whether the League should be granted a hall for Mrs. Pankhurst. As a matter of fact, relevant or irrelevant, from 80 to 100 members of the University attended that lecture. The 30 which Mr. Kerper refers to, apparently, is the number as quoted in the Boston papers, which joined the League at that time. The number, more accurately, is 28.
Finally Mr. Kerper wants to know "whether the League was not formed by a few men for the sole purpose of having some suffrage speakers appear here this fall." The answer is, omitting the words "not", "sole", and "this fall", yes. A complete statement of the objects of the League is on file with the Student Council. A. S. OLMSTEAD 3L. President Harvard Men's League for Woman Suffrage.