While classmate Walter Lippmann joined the College's Socialist Club, Reed did not. Nor did he learn radicalism in class. Another classmate, the late journalist Heywood Broun was able to quip later that he himself became a Communist because he went to see the Boston Red Sox play instead of listening to his economic's professor's lecture refuting Marx. But John Reed was not interested enough in his studies to learn Marxism in the classroom.

Harvard was no mechanism in developing the individuality of this mythical hero of two later generations of would-be revolutionaries. His career as a writer, his reaction against the World War, his associations, and inborn rebelliousness more surely led Reed to communism. For, to Reed, revolution was, as John Dos Passos '16 writes, "a voice as mellow as Copey's, Diogenes Steffens with Marx for a lantern going through the west looking for a good man, Socrates Steffens kept asking why not resolution? Jack Reed wanted to live in a tub and write verses; but he kept meeting bums workingmen husky guys he liked out of luck out of work why not revolution?"

So Reed slowly turned to Communism--finally attaining leadership in Russia itself. Four years after graduation, in 1914, Lippmann had already written an article, "The Legendary John Reed." By 1920, when Reed died in Moscow, he was a real myth, probably one of the most singular of the University's graduates. The singular class of 1910's 25th reunion report commented, "The soul of this man whom we knews and loved goes marching on in the garments of a Soviet saint, and in his name in our own land little struggling clubs of painters and writers attack the foundation of the existing social order."

In many ways the ten years following Reed's death proved a decade of insanity. Prosperity was the backdrop both for obsessions with baubles and scientific progress. It was a decade of protest and agitation: against God and for lipstick; against long skirts and for bobbed hair. Later years have called this the "Lost Generation." In spite of its aims, its main distinction seemed to be aimlessness. Its members tossed off old values and traditions, but they went no place. This was a class of revolutionaries without an excuse for a revolution.

At first there were reactions against the new liberalism, such as it was. At Harvard the most notable revolt occurred in 1920. A European liberal was causing a stir in Cambridge. Harold J. Laski, later famed as an economist at London University's School of Economics, and then a tutor in the division of History, Government, and Economics here, caused the Lampoon to depart from its humorous ways. In its own words, the Lampoon "dipped its pen in vitriol," and castigated Mr. Laski, dedicating a whole issue to the radical who had advocated anarchy in a Boston Milk Strike. From cover to cover, in cartoon, verse, and prose, he was represented as the worst of Bolsheviks--morally and politically.

More a Farmer than a Summa

Immediately the Yard was in an uproar; the controversy flamed for weeks, extending to alumni, other universities, and to editorial columns all over the nation. Hundreds rallied to Laski's defense, accusing the Lampoon of misrepresenting the views of students and of doing Laski "great injustice." Although President Lowell and the Corporation refused to respond to demands for Laski's removal, he resigned four months later to go to London, a full professor.

The forces which were prompted such a Lampoon in 1920 grew weaker in many ways as the decade were on. The developments of the twenties and their results in the thirties can be seen by looking at the history of Granville Hicks '23.

Today Hicks lives a secluded life in a little old red frame farm house on a dirt road a mile off the main highway which leads down from the mountains to Troy, New York. Thirty-two years after graduation he looks more like a small-town farmer than a Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude graduate of the University, a prolific writer, a one-time communist leader, a present anti-communist, the man responsible for Wendell Furry's being called to the congressional witness stand, and the friend who convinced Robert Gorham Davis '29 to testify to Congressman Velde.

From Gandhi to Birth-Control

Why did such a man become a communist? And what did his University life in the 1920's have to do with it? Hicks is in a way typical of the intellectual to whom the lure of communism during the thirties made sense. His later conversion to the party was by no means a direct result of his undergraduate activity at Harvard, but the spirit of dissent which he developed here, combined with the conditions of the time in which he lived were formative influences on his later decisions--both to enter and to leave the Communist party.

Hicks entered the College in 1919 as a scholarship student. A commuter for the first two years, he didn't even know that social clubs existed until many years after graduation. He found most of his social life in a Church's student group and in the Harvard Liberal Club.

John Reed's revolt against the status quo now was part of the intellectual atmosphere. Writings of the period indicate that men of the 1920's were constantly reminding themselves that many others only a little older had been killed in a war which they believed was wrong. Despite living in a "chicken in every pot" society, they could see sufficient examples of economic inequality to feel that something less than justice prevailed, and to want to do something about it.

So, as Hicks writes in his latest book, Where We Came Out, "Whenever the president of the (Liberal Club) discovered that some prominent dissenter was going to visit Cambridge or Boston he offered him the hospitality of the clubhouse. In exchange, the distinguished guest spoke at lunch."

But this interest in dissent was not confined to politics alone. The Liberal Club's guests included birth-controllers and disciples of Gandhi, as well as anarchists, communists, Socialists, pacifists, friends of Sacco and Vanzetti, and foes of the Versailles Treaty, Hicks writes, "We would listen to anybody who condemned the status quo and proposed to change it."