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Masses--gay an jocular and daring.  He had a reckless equilibrium in walking life's tightropes that abashed me a little, and made me feel secondary, as though he were my more muscular big brother who knew all about living and was equal to it, whereas I was still trying to grow up."
     During a visit to Russia, Reed became a close friend of Lenin and witnessed the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) in 1917. His best-known work is Ten Days That Shook the World (1919), an eyewitness account of the Bolshevik Revolution. When Reed returned to the U.S., his political and personal friend, Max Eastman, observing Jack's mood noted that, " when he got back from Moscow (he) had, inwardly, a damping effect on my zeal for the revolution.  He wrote wonderful things about the seizure of power, the Red army, facts that

John Reed was born in Portland, Oregon, and educated at Harvard University.  After 1913 he was a member of the staff of the socialist periodical, The Masses. In 1914, as a war correspondent for Metropolitan Magazine, he won wide recognition for his articles on the Mexican revolution. He also reported on the strike of miners in Colorado in 1914. Following the outbreak of World War I, he became a war correspondent and later wrote The War in Eastern Europe (1916).
     Max Eastman, editor of The Masses, described John Reed in this way, "Jack was an incarnation, more than any of the rest of us, of the spirit of the old

able to invest in the new machinery required to work the fields.  Between 1860 and 1914, New York City grew from a population of 850,000 people to over one million.

     While some of the multimillionaires in the steel, oil, meat-packing, farm machinery and coal industries started in poverty, most did not.  In truth, 90% came from middle or upper class families.  In spite of the unflattering term "robber barons", used to describe these wealthy industrialists, most of the fortune building was done legally, with the collaboration of the government and the courts.  For example, when J.P. Morgan formed U.S. Steel by combining Andrew Carnegie's corporation with over 100 others,  he sold stocks and bonds for about 400 million more than the combined worth

"I give you, gentlemen, the Supreme Court of the United States - guardian of the dollar, defender of private property and enemy of spoliation."

-- New York Banker, 1895

     Between the Civil War and 1900, steam and electricity replaced human labor; iron was forged into steel; petroleum oil became the substance of choice to lubricate machines and to light homes, streets and factories; people and goods were increasingly transported en masse by railroad; the advent of manufactured ice enabled the transport of food over long distances; the invention of pneumatic drills dug deeper into the earth for coal.  In

1860, 14 million tons of coal were mined; by 1884, 100 million tons were mined.  More coal meant more steel.  By 1910, electricity was beginning to replace steam.  Electrical wire needed copper, of which 30,000 tons were produced in 1880; 500,000 tons by 1910.
     To accomplish all this industrial output required a combination of ingenious inventors of new processes and new machines, clever organizers and administrators of newly formed corporations, a country rich with natural resources, and a huge supply of human beings to do the work.  New York City's immigrants from Europe and China made the "new" labor force, also in the mixture of "new" labor, were the farmers un

See ROBBER, page 16