History of Oregon Literature/Chapter 34
CHAPTER 34
Thomas Howell and John Reed
A botanist whom fate would cheat
By putting him in the grocery trade
In village stores and south Hood Street
Where all day long he measured and weighed—
And dreams be naught that housewives cook.
He murmured not, but simply took
Twenty-one long years, to make a book,
And didn't stop till it was made.
Rhymes of Research.
Place over him a stone
And write with a soft sigh,
"For people not my own
I laid me down to die."
marya zaturensky.
They were two widely different men of Portland: one magnetic and light-hearted, with money and social position, who accomplished things dashingly and easily by instinctive genius; the other of ungregarious personality and touched by the contagion of Oregon somberness, with scant earnings and without social status, who put into his thick book the most work that has ever gone into an Oregon volume; one with clubs named after him in many cities and looked upon by the foreign nation he died for in somewhat the same way as Byron in Greece and Lafayette in America; the other simply recorded year after year in the annual catalogue of a university for the great gift that he gave—one buried in the Kremlin in Moscow; the other occupying an obscure grave in Vancouver, Washington; one John Reed, the revolutionist; the other Thomas Howell, the botanist. There is a meaning for a cultural soil when it can be recorded that two such significant and divergent personalities were nurtured in Portland, one for twenty years, the other much
Thomas Howell spent 21 years on his book, A Flora of Northwest America, published in Portland in 1903. This rich result of a patient man's toil originally sold for $5 and at the time of its publication he was eager for customers and badly in need of them. Fortunate now, however, is the collector who can find a copy for $5. The whole tremendous task of making it he performed himself—he gathered the flowers and plants from all over the Pacific Northwest, he classified them and described them, and then he learned to set type and printed the book. Even its poor typography endears it all the more to the owner of a copy who knows the labor and sacrifice that attended its production. It is a volume of 816 pages, and "is the only work in existence in which descriptions can be found of all plants, shrubs and trees growing naturally in the states of Oregon, Washington and Idaho."
He was born in Missouri in 1842 and came to Oregon with his parents in 1850, living the first winter on Tualatin Plains and then removing to Sauvie's Island. There, in 1853, he went to school for three months, the only schooling he ever received. From early boyhood he was interested in plant life and began his serious collecting in 1877. He was married to Effie Hudson in 1892, when he was 50, and about that time opened a small grocery store in the town of Clackamas. About 1900 he moved to Oak Grove, and in the later part of his life kept a store on Hood Street in South Portland. From the time he conceived the plan of a complete flora for the three states of the Pacific Northwest, he devoted to it all the money he could save and all the time he could take from making 
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Opal Whiteley
The book describes 3,150 species—2,370 flowering plants and 780 trees, shrubs, sedges and rushes, all of which he saw for himself before they were recorded on his pages. Of these, 89 had not before been identified or classified by other scientists. This field work was described in an article in the Oregonian in 1904:
The collection of this vast amount of material has occupied the greater part of the time of the author during the summer seasons for over 20 years. During this long period many severe and tedious trips had to be made to mountain slopes and out-of-the-way sections where it not infrequently happened that the night had to be spent in a spot where the only shelter to be obtained was beside a convenient log, or under the friendly boughs of a Douglas spruce. Mr. Howell had all the patience and perseverance necessary to sustain him through these long-continued and unremitting labors and hardships without once faltering in his design, and it must be remembered that it was purely a labor of love, without hope of any remuneration at the end worth considering, and practically without any aid except the sympathy and encouragement at all times of his friend, Martin Gorman, also a botanist and ardent student and lover of the science.
He returned from these solitary wanderings with his loaded knapsacks to the lonely labor of classifying and describing what he had found, and still after the manuscript was ready his single-handed work was not at an end. Because of his poverty he could not hire skilled printers who could set the technical matter with its numerous abbreviations and symbols, and unskilled printers could not do it.
This, however, did not discourage the author, who immediately took up the difficult task of learning to set type, and, despite all impediments, succeeded so well that in due time he was enabled to set his own manuscript, form after form, until each fascicle was completed, the press work being done in Portland. . . . The first fascicle was issued March 15, 1897, and now, after a period of seven years of unceasing labor and the expenditure of every dollar he could gather during that time, the seventh and last fascicle is finished, the whole forming a handsome octavo volume of 792 pages of text and 24 pages of index.
His collection of plants was given to the herbarium of the University of Oregon, and recognition of the gift is made in each annual catalogue of that institution. Beyond that there is little record of him in the history and memorials of Oregon in a way to keep before the public the inspiration of his spirit, the example of his selfless motivation. Professor A. R. Sweetser is writing a history of the early botanists of the Pacific Northwest, and it is hoped a full account of Thomas Howell in that book will make some amends for a long neglect.
He died in Portland on December 3, 1912, at the age of 62, and was buried in the family lot in Vancouver, Washington. "Simple in manner, unaffected in speech, of few wants, but of great capacity for fortitude, he asked little of the world."
John Reed's outlook was upon far broader horizons than Thomas Howell's. The latter by intensive observation of plant life in three western states became known to scientists all over the world. The former by a vision that, barrage-like, leaped across the foreground to far distant points, became a hero to millions who spoke a strange tongue. Thomas Howell saw through a microscope and John Reed through a telescope; and what their gaze encompassed was alike obscure to their neighbors of ordinary sight. Neither is now much remembered at home but both left international reputations, and John Reed, outside the state itself, earned a fame equaled by that of few who ever lived in Oregon.
He was author of The Pageant of the Patterson Strike, 1914, and of the following books: Sangar, a poem, privately printed, 1912; The Day in Bohemia, 1913; Insurgent Mexico, 1914; Tamburlaine and Other Poems, privately printed, 1916; The War in Eastern Europe, 1916; Red Russia, 1919; Ten Days That Shook the World, 1919.
Curious are the origins of genius, and sometimes in striking contrast to its fostering environment are its manifestations. From a wealthy and prominent Portland family and out of a city eschewing radical opinion, came this young man who was arrested many times, who was indicted for sedition and who was being sought by Government secret service agents all over the United States at the very time he was making speeches in Moscow. What kind of evidence does such a brilliant but variant case afford for regional literature?
He was born in Portland on October 22, 1887. He attended the Portland Academy and then went to Harvard, where, "tall, handsome and light-hearted", he was a yell leader, a member of clubs and an associate of wealthy and socially prominent young men. The story is told that when he had been on the campus only a few days as a freshman he proposed to a student artist the publication of a book about Harvard, "Reed to write it and the artist to illustrate it."
The artist doubted the feasibility of the plan. "What do we know about Harvard?" he exclaimed.
With a world-embracing gesture, Reed swept his partner's misgivings aside, saying, "Hell, we'll find out in doing the thing!"
After his graduation in 1910 he took a trip abroad and in 1911 joined the staff of the American Magazine. Whatever he contributed to that periodical's glorification of capitalistic careers, he must have done increasingly with his tongue in his cheek, for in 1913 he switched over to a magazine with an exactly opposite policy—the Masses, and the following year, while trying to speak for the strikers at Patterson, he experienced his first arrest, which was to become a frequent incident. In that year also he secured his first assignment as a foreign correspondent, going to Mexico for the Metropolitan Magazine and spending some months with the army of Pancho Villa. When the War broke out, the same magazine sent him to Europe. Russia was not on his formal itinerary but he slipped across the border, and he who was afterward to be deified in that country had many hazardous adventures in it and was under suspicion as a spy. He returned to America in 1916. A surgical removal of a kidney, saved him from the inconvenience of his stand as a conscientious objector when America entered the War and established conscription for men of his age.
Meanwhile, an attractive young woman of Portland, Louise Bryant, who had been graduated from the University of Oregon in 1908 and who had been married to a Portland dentist, had read about him with romantic longings, and spoke often to her friends of “the brilliant John Reed”. She met him during one of his visits home. In January of 1917 they were joined in a marriage by which she kept her own name, and in August of that year they went to Russia.
He “won the close friendship of Lenin and wrote much of the Bolshevist propaganda dropped over the German lines.” When he returned to America in 1918, he had an appointment from Trotsky as Bolshevik consul-general at New York, a revolutionary joke which the United States Government ignored. He got into frequent trouble over “incendiary speeches”, headed the Communist Labor Party in 1919 when it split with the Communist Party, and was indicted for sedition. With a forged passport, and working his way as a stoker, he escaped to Russia. Some accounts say that during this visit he was still in high favor with the Soviet leaders and some accounts say that he wasn’t, but the sequel to his last adventure and the high honor of his burial indicate that he was. In March, 1920, while attempting to leave the country as a stowaway on a vessel bound for Sweden, he was arrested in Finland, with “a large quantity of soviet propaganda with him when he was taken from the steamer”. For 12 weeks he was held in a Finnish prison, until he was released to Russia on an exchange of prisoners. Four months later, on October 19, 1920, he died in Moscow of typhus and was buried in the Kremlin.
His wife, Louise Bryant, is the author of two books: Six Red Months in Russia, 1918; and Mirrors of Moscow, 1923. She is reported to be working on a biography of John Reed. She was married in 1923 to William Christian Bullitt, United States ambassador to Russia since 1934. They have one daughter and are now separated.
There are John Reed clubs in several of the cities of the United States; Julian Street, who used to know him well, wrote a long article about him in the Saturday Evening Post of September 13, 1930, under the title "A Soviet Saint"; and the Oregon Journal for February 5, 1931, carried the following news correspondence from the Russian capital:
Moscow, Feb. 5.—(U.P.)—The American Journalist, John Reed, who won a place among the Bolshevik immortals, will be the principal character portrayed in a grand opera being rehearsed here for its premiere. The opera, called John Reed, will show the American journalist's participation in the Russian revolution, as he described his experiences in his book Ten Days That Shook the World. The music was written by the youthful Klementi Korchmarev, with a libretto by Peter Barnardsky. Other Americans who will be portrayed in this historical opera include Reed's widow, Louise Bryant. . . .
A poem of 67 lines entitled "Elegies Over John Reed", by Marya Zaturensky, originally published in Poetry in 1924, is given in the chapter "Oregon Authors About Each Other".