Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1982. január-június (36. évfolyam, 1-25. szám)
1982-01-28 / 4. szám
2 AMERIKAI magyar szó Thursday, Jan. 28. 1982. Rediscovering John Reed COMMENTARY By Howard Zinn Special to The Globe > R adicals are doubly exasperating. They not only refuse to conform to ideas of what true American patriots are like: they may not even fit common notions of what radicals are like. This is true of John Reed and Louise Bryant, who confounded and infuriated the guardians of cultural and political orthodoxy around the time of World War I. They are now being portrayed in Warren Beatty’s grand movie, "Reds," causing some critics to grumble about “communist chic" and "mod Marxism,” in an unwitting replay of the barbs thrust at Reed and Bryant in their time. It was bad enough that they and their remarkable friends - Max Eastman, Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, Margaret Sanger - spoke out for sexual freedom in a country dominated by Christian righteousness, or opposed militarization in a time of jingoism and war, or advocated socialism when business and government were clubbing and shooting strikers, or welcomed what seemed to them the first proletarian revolution in history with the forces of law and order apoplectic about communism. What was worse was that they refused to remain mere writers and intellectuals, assailing the system with words; they walked picket lines, loved freely, defied government committees, went to jail. They declared for revolution in their actions as well as their art, ignoring those cautions against commitment offered, in any generation, by the voyeurs of social movement. John Reed could not be forgiven by the Establishment (or even by some of its critics, like Walter Lippmann and Eugene O'Neill) for refusing to separate art and insurgency, for being not only rebellious in his prose but imaginative in his activism. He saw revolt as not mere fulmination, but fun, not just analysis but adventure. This caused some of his liberal friends to take him less seriously (Lippmann spoke of Reed's “inordinate desire to be arrested”), not understanding that, to the power elite of the country, protest joined to imagination was dangerous, courage combined with wit was no joke. Grim rebels can be jailed, but the highest treason, for which there is no adequate punishment, is to make rebellion attractive. □ "Reds," as encompassing as it is, cannot take the time to trace John Reed’s development as a radical before World War I. The limitations of film make it hard to convey the style of his newspaper dispatches or the power of "Ten Days that Shook the World,” his matchless book on the Russian Revolution. One can get tastes of his prose and immerse oneself in the details of his life outside the scope of the film by finding Granville Hicks’ admiring old biography, "John Reed" or Robert Rosen- stone's more recent book, “Romantic Revolutionary." Jack Reed, his friends called him. He was a poet all his life, from his comfortable childhood in Portland, Ore., through Harvard College, peasant uprisings in Mexico, the strikes of silk workers in New Reed and Bryant in real life. PHOTO COURTESY OF "ROMANTIC REVOLUTIONARY'' Howard Zinn is author of ’’-A People's History of the United States" and professor oj Political Science at Boston University. Jersey and coal miners in Colorado, the war fronts of Europe, the shouting, singing crowds of the Bolshevik Revolution in Petrograd. But, as his fellow editor of the Masses, Max Eastman wrote: "Poetry to Reed was not only a matter of writing words but of living life.” His many poems, in fact, were not memorable, but he rushed into the center of wars and revolutions, strikes and demonstrations, with the eye of a movie camera, before there was one. and the memory of a tape recorder, before that existed. He made history come alive for the readers of popular magazines and impoverished radical monthlies. At Harvard between 1906 and 1910, Reed was an athlete (swimming and water polo), prankster, cheerleader, writer for the Lampoon, student of the famous writing teacher they called Copey (Charles Townsend Copeland). At the same time he was a protege of the muckraker- Lincoln Steffens and a mischievous critic of Harvard snobbery, though not a member of Walter Lippmann’s Socialist Club. On graduation, he worked his way aboard a freighter to Europe - London, Paris, Madrid - then returned to join a cluster of Bohemian-radical writers living in Greenwich Village, where Steffens helped him get his first job as a reporter, doing rather routine editorial work for a literary political magazine called the American. In New York in 1912, for anyone who looked around as sharply as John Reed, the contrasts of wealth and poverty stunned the senses. He began writing for the Masses, a new magazine edited by Max Eastman (brother of the socialist-feminist Crystal Eastman) and penned a manifesto: "Poems, stories, and drawings, rejected by the capitalist press on account of their excellence, will find a welcome in this magazine." The Masses was alive, not a party organ, but a party, with anarchists and socialists. artists and writers, and undefinable rebels of all sorts in its pages: Carl Sandburg and Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Upton Sinclair. And from abroad, Bertrand Russell, Gorky, Picasso. The times.trembled with class struggle. Reed went to Lawrence, Mass., where women and children had walked out of the textile mills and were carrying on a heartrending and heroic strike with the help of the IWW (the revolutionary Industrial Workers of the World) and the Socialist Party. Reed met Bill Haywood, the IWW leader. From Haywood ; he learned of the strike of 25,000 silk workers across the Hudson River in Paterson, N.J., who were asking for an eight-hour day and being clubbed by the police. The press was not reporting any of this, so Reed went to Paterson. Six years later he was in Petrograd reporting history’s greatest revolution. “Mom was a work/ngclass ” Emma Kinces died at Frenchtown, N.J. on Jan. 30, 1981. She was 84 years old. Came to the United States around 1910, or 1912 to Bridgeport, Conn. Survivors are 3 daughters, 4 sons, 12 grandchildren, 14 great-grandchildren. Mom Kinces was a very kind woman, many people ate in her home, there was always room to pay a friendly visit. I first got to know my stepmom in Windber, Pa. in 1922 at the time of the coalminers’ strike. Mom Kinces’ was one of those families that were evicted during the strike. The familiy’s furniture was ruined from living in a tent that the union supplied. The 1922 strike was a long one. Mom was a working- class woman until her last days. Always on the side of the union where workers were struggling. Speaking for myself glad to tell people of how many of these things rubbed off on me. One is what I learned from all the Hungarian coalminers, union miners that is. They would get together at our home, talk about struggle of the miners. One of the prize sayings was always to hear them say: you know how we never scabbed! Painter Endre Szász’s newest creation, Travel ’80, is a 6 square meter porcelain wallpainting made by special process with the cooperation of the fine Ceramic Works at Hollóháza. The work of the popular artist can be seen in the lobby of the Budapest Hilton, where it was unveiled last year. Much more could be written about Mom Kinces but this was the life of all workingclass miners’ women’. A lot rubbed off from the “Uj Előre” and now the Hungarian Word. Your paper is doing a fine job. Thank you good people, Frank Kinces, Philadelphia, Pa. Let us learn Hungarian I like, lo get mg sail druncil. : must get IIUJ cual ■ banal. I er got grease stains •a nuj skirl. r.'byre’s there a good eigener’s? ’ •. you think you can re more this stain? : iránt tő have it dry- rhaned. . I like to wash nig blouse. Szeretném kitisztittntni az öltönyömet. Ki kell tisztíUatnom a kabátomat. Zsirpccsétcs a szoknyáin. Hol van egy jó tisztító? Ki tudja (luggya) venni ezt a foltot? Szárazon szeretném kitisztíttatni. Szeretném kimosni a blúzomat. FŰTÉS Működik a központi fűtés? A központi fűtés nem működik. Jobban szeretem a kandallót. HEATING Is the central healing on ? The central heating is oat of order. I prefer a fireplace. AMERIKAI , MAGYAR SZO USPS 023-980 ISSN 0194-7990 Published weekly, exc. last week in July and 1st 2 weeks in August by Hungarian Word,Inc. 130 E 16 St. New York, N.Y. 10003, Ent. as 2nd Class Matter, Dec. 31. 1952 under the Act of*March 21.1879, at the P.O. of New York, N.Y. ti . r Szerkeszti a Szerkesztő Bizottság Előfizetési árak az Egyesült Államokban egy évre $ 1 8.— félévre $ 10.— Kanadaban és minden más külföldi országban egy évre $ 20.— félévre $ 12.— PostmasterjSend address changes to; Hungarian Word,Inc. 130 E 16 St. New York, N.Y. 10003.
