But for all his high-minded talk about "hersey," in 1917 Jack Reed was definitely a minor league rebel while he was at Harvard.

Coming from a small, respectable prep school in New Jersey, Reed hoped to throw himself into Harvard life with the same success that had made him Big Man at Morristown Prep.

When he had been at Harvard only a few days, for instance, he walked up to classmate Bob Hallowell. "I hear you draw," he said. "Why don't we do a book about Harvard? I'll do the text and you do the pictures." When Hallowell protested that they knew nothing about the college, Reed replied, "Hell, we'll find out doing the thing."

But Harvard was not so easily conquered. Desiring to be accepted by what he called "the aristocracy"--those who lived along the Gold Coast of Mt. Auburn St. and belonged to the Final Clubs--Reed felt pangs of loneliness and bitterness when no club opened its doors to him.

On paper, Reed had the right qualifications--an ancestry dating back to Patrick Henry, and a "good" prep school diploma--but apparently his personality clashed too often with the ruling lords.

"Large, athletic, exuberant and humorous, he seemed to be on earth for the motion he got out of it," a classmate remarked later. "Big, brisk, and breezy," his impetuous cordiality which would later win him many admirers alienated those whose friendship he sought.

Rejected by the "gentlemen," Reed turned next to Harvard's vast number of extracurricular activities--this time with success.

Activity men, Reed wrote, were "the realest expression of what Harvard means today.... They are dreamers and often poets." And so, in his undergraduate years, Jack Reed joined the Christian Association, St. Paul's Society, the Memorial Society, Debating Club, Oracle, Round Table, Dramatic Club, Symposium, Hasty Pudding--and became captain of the water polo team, Ibis of the Lampoon, Editor of the Monthly, manager of the Banjo, Glee, Guitar and Mandolin Clubs, and President of the Western and Cosmopolitan Clubs.

Conspicuously absent from the above list is the Socialist Club, formed by Reed's friend Walter Lippman. Several of Reed's biographers, in tracing his political development, have given him undeserved credit for helping organize the club. The Socialist Club itself was more interested in promoting discussion than political activity.

Reed, later one of the first leaders of the Communist Party in the United States, showed little political intrest in college. He was interested mainly in creative writing, and his "rebellion" took the form of practical jokes rather than that of radical thought.

For this training in writing, Reed was to study under two of the great names in Harvard history--Charles T. Copeland, known as "Copey," and George P. Baker, known for his "47 Workshop." In addition, Reed studied literature with such giants as George L. Kittridge, and Bliss Perry.

Although he later would be quoting Marxist dogma to lecture halls throughout the country, at college Reed took only one course in the social sciences--that in medieval history.

Copeland, after Reed had become famous, said that he was "a brilliant character. His prose was lively, and his poetry adventurous."

However much the swaggering Reed may have impressed Copeland, his poetry is only an expression of a somewhat sentimental and romantic college youth, with no lasting literary merit. His college prose was somewhat better, and several of his Lampoon articles showed a keen sense of satire. His short stories in the Harvard Monthly