married to a Portland dentist, had read about him with romantic longings, and spoke often to her friends of “the brilliant John Reed”. She met him during one of his visits home. In January of 1917 they were joined in a marriage by which she kept her own name, and in August of that year they went to Russia.
He “won the close friendship of Lenin and wrote much of the Bolshevist propaganda dropped over the German lines.” When he returned to America in 1918, he had an appointment from Trotsky as Bolshevik consul-general at New York, a revolutionary joke which the United States Government ignored. He got into frequent trouble over “incendiary speeches”, headed the Communist Labor Party in 1919 when it split with the Communist Party, and was indicted for sedition. With a forged passport, and working his way as a stoker, he escaped to Russia. Some accounts say that during this visit he was still in high favor with the Soviet leaders and some accounts say that he wasn’t, but the sequel to his last adventure and the high honor of his burial indicate that he was. In March, 1920, while attempting to leave the country as a stowaway on a vessel bound for Sweden, he was arrested in Finland, with “a large quantity of soviet propaganda with him when he was taken from the steamer”. For 12 weeks he was held in a Finnish prison, until he was released to Russia on an exchange of prisoners. Four months later, on October 19, 1920, he died in Moscow of typhus and was buried in the Kremlin.
His wife, Louise Bryant, is the author of two books: Six Red Months in Russia, 1918; and Mirrors of
