John Reed (journalist) - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

Reed was determined to return home, but fell ill on September 25. At first thought to have influenza, he was hospitalized five days later and was found to have spotted typhus. Bryant spent all her time with him, but there were no medicines to be obtained because of the Allied blockade. His mind started to wander, and then he lost the use of the right side of his body and could no longer speak. His wife was holding his hand when he died in Moscow on October 17, 1920. After a hero's funeral, his body was buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.

The uses of John Reed as a symbol in popular culture have been varied. Some have dismissed him as a "romantic revolutionary" and a "playboy"—a vapid dilettante pretending to profess revolutionary sensibilities. For the Communist movement to which he belonged, Reed became a symbol of the international nature of the Bolshevik revolution, a martyr buried at the Kremlin wall amidst solemn fanfare, his name to be uttered reverently as a member of the radical pantheon. Others, such as his old friend and comrade Benjamin Gitlow, made the claim that Reed had begun to shun the bureaucracy and violence of Soviet Communism late in his life and have thus sought to posthumously enlist Reed in their own anti-communist cause.

John Reed has also been an influence upon the cinema. Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein's influential 1927 silent film October: Ten Days That Shook the World was based on Reed's book.

Half a century later, Warren Beatty made the 1981 film Reds, based on the life of John Reed. Beatty starred as Reed, while Diane Keaton played the part of Louise Bryant and Jack Nicholson that of Eugene O'Neill. The movie won three Academy Awards, and was nominated for nine others.

The 1958 Soviet film In October Days (Russian: В дни Октября), directed by the highly-regarded Sergei Vasilyev, also featured roles for Reed and Bryant.

Two films are based on Reed's accounts of the Mexican Revolution: the two-part Mexican–Soviet-Italian co-production consisting of Red Bells (1982) and Red Bells II (1983), both directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, with Franco Nero as Reed, and the 1973 film Reed: Insurgent Mexico, by Mexican director Paul Leduc.

A persistent urban legend exists that John Reed came from the family for which Reed College, an elite liberal arts school located in Portland, Oregon, was named. Despite Portland being Reed's place of birth, and the college's reputation for leftist politics, there is no truth to this rumor. The College was named for Simeon Reed by his widow Amanda Reed who donated a significant part of her inherited fortune to establish the college in 1911.