Word: reed
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Byrns was not a great Speaker in the tradition of "Tsar" Reed, "Uncle Joe" Cannon and "Nick" Longworth. But the same big, warm heart which kept him from giving the unwieldy House the iron-fisted discipline it often needs made the onetime Tennessee farm boy one of the best-liked Speakers the House has ever had. Last week the nation's statesmen forgot his amiable, easy-going leadership, paid heartfelt tribute to his honest simplicity, blamed his death on the conscientious industry with which he strived to fulfill his duties. "He served his State and the nation," mourned President...
Euclid Avenue was filled with old familiar faces, some of whom Cleveland had not seen since 1924 when her new Public Hall needed no WPA renovation and Calvin Coolidge was nominated. C. Bascom Slemp from Virginia, David A. Reed from Pennsylvania, Ralph E. Williams from Oregon, Walter F. Brown from nearby Toledo, Jim Watson over the border from Indiana, Charles G. Dawes from Chicago, came trooping in. So did the Elephant's ladies, Alice Longworth from Cincinnati, Ruth Hanna [McCormick] Simms, now from New Mexico, Ruth Baker Pratt from New York. Crowds seethed in hotel lobbies. Fat men sweated...
This was John Reed of Portland, Oregon, of the Harvard class of 1910. The John Reed who wrote youthful poetry for the Harvard Monthly and the Advocate, who led the cheering in the Stadium, member of Hasty Pudding and Ibis of the Lampoon. The same John Reed wrote the words to the football song "Score," and created the Paterson strike pageant. The same Reed chummed with the romantic Villa in Mexico and, not much later, was under indictment in a half-score of sedition cases for defending the Russion Revolution in this country. He changed tremendously in the decade...
Well, for Mr. Hicks, John Reed's fight was in the right direction. Was "a first-rate poet spoiled to make a third-rate revolutionary?" Was John Reed simply a little more highly-flavored liberal than the run of his friends, who had just a little more adventurousness and a little more guts, so that he went the whole hog instead of signing up for Creel's Committee for Public Information? Was he sinsere or was he just too romantic to be sensible...
...John Reed was an amazing, a talented, and a brave man. He deserves the full and well-documented history that Granville Hicks has made of him both from a sociological and a personal standpoint. Things significant need not be things effective, or even things agreeable. The life of John Reed by Granville Hicks is a beautifully-written and extremely absorbing book...