How the Mexican Revolution Made John Reed a Red
John Reed’s thrilling dispatches from the front lines of the Mexican Revolution could have made him a pop culture celebrity. Instead, the experience made him a committed socialist.
Journalist John Reed, author of Insurgent Mexico and Ten Days That Shook the World, in 1914. (Getty Images)
In 1913, American journalist John Reed was embedded with a ragged band of revolutionary soldiers in Mexico. Few of them possessed a complete uniform. Some were shod only in cowhide sandals. They were camped out in northern Durango, sleeping on the tiled floors of an hacienda whose wealthy owner had been expelled by revolutionary forces.
But now the counterrevolutionary colorados were coming to kill them all.
Reed, known to his friends back home as Jack and his friends here in Mexico as Juan, was twenty-six years old, boyish and spirited, quick-witted and usually self-possessed, though at this moment he was scared out of his mind. Bullets were already flying, sending mules and men scattering into the Chihuahuan Desert. The peasants of the hacienda took cover in their modest adobes and prayed. One soldier, face blackened with gunpowder, galloped past crying that all hope was lost.
This article is for subscribers only. Please login or subscribe to access our full archives and beautiful print and digital magazine starting at just $3 a month.