John Reed as a Plunket Medal Subject.

Dear "Smad,"—

Tardiloquent's sneering reference to John Reed as "just a second-rate Yankee reporter," and his rebuke to the Debating Society for allowing so cheap a character to be spoken on in the Plunket Medal Contest is further proof—if any were needed—of the vicious parochialism that so stultifies our cultural life.

Disregarding the moot point of what a person must be to be "noted in history" and the extremely relative nature of such distinction (how famous is Te Rauparaha in Japan or even in the United States?) it did not require a Plunket Medal address to establish John Reed's name, nor can it be detracted from in the columns of "Smad."

The most concrete testimony to his fame are the memorial John Reed Clubs—numbering more than 500 throughout America—composed of revolutionary students, writers, and artists. My copy of his book, "Ten Days That Shook the World," dated 1932, was in the twelfth (English) edition of 100,000 copies; the book, of course, has been translated into more than a dozen languages, and is famous everywhere as the finest brief account of the Russian Revolution of October, 1917. John Reed and his work are known and cherished by all fighters in the great revolutionary cause in which he died.

—Alfred Katz.