Word: reed
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Imagination let loose--that's what any reconstruction of Reed's life involves. Why be surprised that the man who was both a romantic revolutionary and a soulful dreamer, could inspire the the legends, even if fraudulent, that grew up around his life? The eyewitnesses in the movie Reds, men and women who knew either John Reed or his wife, give a sensuous picture of what life must have meant to a man who graduated from Harvard and died a Russian patriot. But it's almost a shame Walter Lippmann himself couldn't be there to tell all interested about...
...less and less impressive the closer one looks. Turn to Holworthy or Hollis, and you're likely to detect the sounds (and perhaps a whiff) of the 1980s, spoiling the sense of placidity. And it's doubtful that much besides taste has changed since the days when Lippmann and Reed attended classes in the Yard. Harvard loses its glory when it goes from general to specific. Not the individual students--but the path set out for them--is the measure of Harvard's glory...
...course system that was entirely elective. "The purpose of a University," Harvard president Charles W. Eliot told the entering Class of 1910, is "to allow each man to think and do as he pleases, and the tendency is to allow this more and more," The 18-year-old Reed could not have known how prophetic Eliot's statement would turn out to be--and also what...
Harvard, for the young student, was another in a series of social challenges. Reed's father, an affluent merchant in Portland, Oregon, desired the highest in social prestige for his children and Harvard was the logical means to that end. Earlier, however, came Morristown, a fashionable prep school in New Jersey, where Jack devoted himself to athletics, charming the local girls and leading troops in a number of surreptitious raids into the nearby town. He also wrote, contributing short stories regularly to the school's literary magazine, and editing a humor magazine he published with his father's funds. Academics...
...went up to Harvard almost alone, knowing hardly a soul in the University," Reed would write later. "My college class entered almost seven hundred strong, and for the first three months it seemed to me, going around to lectures and meetings, as if everyone of the seven hundred had friends but me. I was thrilled with the immensity of Harvard, its infinite opportunities, its august history and tradition, but desperately lonely." The boyish friendliness that had made Reed a celebrity at Morristown did just that at Harvard, except, this time, it might not have been the effect he desired...