By Michael Munk, The Portland Alliance, May 2001

    Most lefties know the revolutionary poet, journalist and a founder of the US Communist party was born in Portland and buried in Moscow—but do we know that until today his plain grave at the wall of the Kremlin was his only known memorial?  Although Reed is best known for his eye-witness account of the Soviet Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World, his career as journalist and revolutionary began when he covered the IWW-led strike of textile workers in Paterson, New Jersey for radical The Masses. Anyway, his native land is about to dedicate the first memorial on its own soil. Years of effort by the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission have finally bought a bench and plaque in his honor that the Parks Department has just installed in Washington Park. The whole town is invited to celebrate its dedication at High noon Sunday, May 6 [2001].

    The bench overlooks Reed’s birthplace at the northeast corner of Washington Park, where his grandfather’s mansion Cedar Hill, stood on 5 acres. Today, only the elaborate concrete steps that connect SW Cedar Lane with Cactus Drive survive but nearby SW Green Street is named for his capitalist grandfather. One of Reed’s biographers found that Henry Dodge Green’s fortune was made by “swindling Indian tribes out of precious furs and using then using the profits to build water, gas and iron empires—and the chateau on Cedar Hill.” Green and his brother John were partners in an Indian trading post in Astoria by early 1850.

    Jack (as he was usually called) also grew up in four other Portland locations, none of which exist today. Between 1890-96 the family lived in a comfortable Queen Anne at today’s 119 NW 21st Avenue—now part of a strip mall-- and then until 1899 in an apartment hotel originally called “The Hill” at SW 14th Avenue and Jefferson. That site is now a parking lot near Lincoln High School. They then moved partway up Kings Hill again to what is today the Hadley House apartments at 20220 SW Salmon, from which Jack attended the private Portland Academy. Finally, the Reeds moved to a more modest house at 2169 NW Everett (now the site is the Rose Plaza apartment house), where they lived until Jack’s father died in 1912.   In that house, Jack wrote two of his most famous poems, “Sangar” (about his friend Lincoln Streffens’ efforts to defend the accused bombers of the anti-labor Los Angeles Times) and “A Day in Bohemia” about his crew in Greenwich Village. The Green and Reed families buried their members (except Jack, of course) in the Riverview cemetery where they surround the tall family memorial.

    Jack thought the IWW Hall then at 521 NW Davis (now a new loft style apartment house) was the “liveliest intellectual center in town” and that Portland’s best artist was Carl Walters. The plaque on the Washington Park bench contains Jack’s appreciation of Walters that he wrote for the Oregon Journal in 1914:
 

Portlanders understand and appreciate how differently beautiful is this part of the world—the white city against the deep evergreen of the hillls, the snow mountains to the east, the everchanging river and its boat life—and the grays, blues and greens, the smoke dimmed sunsets and pearly hazes of August, so characteristric of the Pacific Northwest. You don’t have to point out these things to our people. Walters, I think, paints them with more affection and understanding than they have yet been painted.

    As many have noted, Jack grew to hate and denounce the reactionary political culture of Portland’s ruling class into which he was recruited by birth, but as his words reveal, he loved its natural environment. In his political attitude toward his “Home place” as he called it, he was joined by his “friend and lover” Louise Bryant. Americans probably know the couple best for their portrayals by Warren Beatty and Diane Keaton in the 1981 film, “Reds.”  Louise had moved into what still stands as the Professional Building at 1033 SW Yamhill when she graduated from the University of Oregon in 1909, and soon married Paul Trullinger, a dentist who lived on a houseboat at the Oregon Yacht Club—similar to some that still float at the Club next to Oaks Park on the Willamette. Two other sites associated with Louise remain: her homes with Paul at  2226 NE 53rd Avenue and a fancier one in Dunthrope at 11801 SW Riverwood Road. But she didn’t enjoy the last house for even a year before leaving Portland shortly after meeting Jack at the end of  1915 to live with him New York. He never returned to Portland and died in Moscow in 1920, Louise's last visit was to denounce US intervention in the Soviet revolution to a packed Civic Auditorium in 1919. She died in Paris in 1936.