[1] Reed wrote of paying a nickel to a "Goose Hollowite" (young toughs in a gang in the working-class neighborhood below King's Hill) to keep from being beaten up.

The group introduced legislation into the state legislature, attacked the university for failing to pay its servants living wages, and petitioned the administration to establish a course on socialism.

[14] Reed later recalled: All this made no ostensible difference in the look of Harvard society, and probably the club-men and the athletes, who represented us to the world, never even heard of it.

But it made me, and many others, realize that there was something going on in the dull outside world more thrilling than college activities, and turned our attention to the writings of men like H. G. Wells and Graham Wallas, wrenching us away from the Oscar Wildian dilettantism which had possessed undergraduate litterateurs for generations.

His travels were encouraged by his favorite professor, Charles Townsend Copeland ("Copey"), who told him he must "see life" if he wanted to successfully write about it.

Reed supplemented his salary by taking an additional job as the business manager of a new short-lived quarterly magazine, Landscape Architecture.

He collected rejection slips, circulating an essay and short stories about his six months in Europe, eventually breaking through in the Saturday Evening Post.

During the same year, following a suggestion made by IWW leader Bill Haywood, Reed put on "The Pageant of the Paterson Strike" in Madison Square Garden as a benefit for the strikers.

There he spent a little more than a week, during which he investigated the events, spoke on behalf of the miners, and wrote an impassioned article on the subject ("The Colorado War", published in July).

[24] Reed spent summer 1914 in Provincetown, Massachusetts with Mabel Dodge and her son, putting together Insurgent Mexico and interviewing President Wilson on the subject.

[25] On August 14, 1914, shortly after Germany declared war on France, Reed set sail for neutral Italy, on assignment for the Metropolitan.

There is a falling out among commercial rivals.... We, who are Socialists, must hope—we may even expect—that out of this horror of bloodshed and dire destruction will come far-reaching social changes—and a long step forward towards our goal of Peace among Men.

He pawned his late father's watch and sold his Cape Cod cottage to the birth control activist and sex educator Margaret Sanger.

"[33] In July and August Reed continued to write vehement articles against the war for The Masses, which the United States Post Office Department refused to mail, and for Seven Arts.

Due to antiwar articles by Reed and Randolph Bourne, the arts magazine lost its financial backing and ceased publication.

On August 17, 1917, Reed and Bryant set sail from New York to Europe, having first provided the State Department with legally sworn assurances that neither would represent the Socialist Party at a forthcoming conference in Stockholm.

Traveling by way of Finland, the pair arrived in the capital city of Petrograd immediately after the failed military coup of monarchist General Lavr Kornilov.

The Bolsheviks, seeking an all-socialist government and immediate end to Russian participation in the war, sought the transfer of power from Kerensky to a Congress of Soviets, a gathering of elected workers' and soldiers' deputies to be convened in October.

It issued warrants of arrest for the Soviet leaders and prepared to transfer the troops of the Petrograd garrison, believed to be unreliable, back to the front.

But in the dummy issue he prepared, he included a warning beneath the masthead: "This paper is devoted to promoting the interests of American capital.

Two days later, armed with a rifle, he joined a patrol of Red Guards prepared to defend the Foreign Office from counter-revolutionary attack.

Because he remained under indictment in the Masses case, federal authorities immediately met Reed when his ship reached New York, holding him on board for more than eight hours while they searched his belongings.

[46] He tried to prevent Allied intervention in Russia, arguing that the Russians were contributing to the war effort by checking German ambitions in Ukraine and Japanese designs on Siberia, but this argument came to naught.

"[49] Indicted for sedition and hoping to secure Communist International (Comintern) backing for the CLP, Reed fled the US with a forged passport in early October 1919 on a Scandinavian frigate; he worked his way to Bergen, Norway as a stoker.

Given shore leave, he disappeared to Kristiania, crossed into Sweden on October 22, passed through Finland with Ivar Lassy's help, and made his way to Moscow by train.

Activist Emma Goldman had recently arrived aboard the Buford, among hundreds of aliens deported by the United States under the Sedition Act.

The latter believed the tide of revolutionary fervor was ebbing, and that the Communist Party needed to work within the existing institutions—a policy Reed felt would be disastrous.

[60] Years after having abandoned communism himself, his friend Benjamin Gitlow asserted that Reed became bitterly disillusioned with the communist movement because of his treatment by Zinoviev.

Only three Americans have received this honor; the others are C. E. Ruthenberg, the founder of the Communist Party USA; and Bill Haywood, a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World.

[63] For the communist movement to which he belonged, Reed became a symbol of the international nature of the October Revolution, a martyr buried at the Kremlin wall amid solemn fanfare, his name to be uttered reverently as a member of the radical pantheon.