Max
Eastman was born in Canadaigua in 1883. Both his parents, Samuel Eastman
and Annis Ford, were church ministers. He graduated from Williams
College in 1905 and afterwards studied philosophy with John
Dewey at Columbia University.
In 1907 Eastman moved to New York, settling
in Greenwich Village with his sister Crystal
Eastman. A socialist, Eastman became
involved in several radical causes and in 1910 helped form the Men's
League for Women's Suffrage.
Eastman
soon developed a reputation as an outstanding journalist and in 1912
was invited to become editor of the left-wing magazine, The
Masses. Organized like a co-operative, artists and writers
who contributed to the journal shared in its management. Others radical
writers and artists who joined the team included Floyd
Dell, John Reed, William
Walling, Crystal Eastman, Sherwood
Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Upton
Sinclair, Amy Lowell, Louise
Bryant, John Sloan, Art
Young, Boardman Robinson, Robert
Minor, K. R. Chamberlain, Stuart
Davis, George Bellows and Maurice
Becker.
The Masses was often in trouble
with the authorities. One of Art Young's cartoons, Poisoned at
the Source, that appeared in the July 1913 edition of The
Masses, upset the Associated Press company and he was indicted
for criminal libel. However, after a year, the company decided to
drop the law suit.
Eastman, like most of the people working for The
Masses, believed that the First World War
had been caused by the imperialist competitive system and that the
USA should remain neutral. This was reflected in the fact that the
articles and cartoons that appeared in journal attacked the behaviour
of both sides in the conflict.
After the USA declared war on the Central
Powers in 1917, The Masses
came under government pressure to change its policy. When it refused
to do this, the journal lost its mailing privileges. In July, 1917,
it was claimed by the authorities that cartoons by Art
Young, Boardman Robinson and H.
J. Glintenkamp and articles by Eastman and Floyd
Dell had violated the Espionage Act.
Under this act it was an offence to publish material that undermined
the war effort.
The legal action that followed forced The
Masses to cease publication. In April, 1918 the jury failed
to agree on the guilt of Eastman and his fellow defendants. The second
trial in January 1919 also ended with a hung jury. As the war was
now over, it was decided not to take them to court for a third time.
"Jimmie, take the head of the class. You certainly
do better than this doddering imbecile."
Art
Young, The Liberator (October,
1920)
In
1918 Eastman joined with Art Young, Floyd
Dell and his sister, Crystal Eastman,
to establish another radical journal, The
Liberator. Other writers and artists involved in the magazine
included Claude McKay, Boardman
Robinson, Robert Minor, Stuart
Davis, Maurice Becker, Helen
Keller, Cornelia Barns, and William
Gropper.
In 1922 the journal was taken over by Robert
Minor and the Communist Party and
in 1924 was renamed as The Workers' Monthly. After this Eastman
left the United States and travelled to the
Soviet Union. Eastman had welcomed the Russian
Revolution but became disillusioned when Joseph
Stalin ousted Leon Trotsky.
Eastman went to live in France in 1924 where
he wrote Since Lenin Died
(1925), and Marx and Lenin: The Science
of Revolution (1926). In these books Eastman warned of
the dangers posed by Joseph Stalin in
the Soviet Union. The book was unpopular with most American Marxists
and Eastman was denounced as a rebellious individualist.
In
1927 Eastman returned to the United States and
now a supporter of Leon Trotsky, becomes
his translator and unofficial literary agent. During the Great
Purge most of Eastman's left-wing friends in the Soviet
Union were executed by Stalin. Books published during this period
include The Enjoyment of Laughter
(1935), The End of Socialism in Russia
(1937), Marxism: Is It Science?
(1940), Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in
Socialism (1940), Marxism, Is
It Science? (1940) and Heroes
I Have Known (1942).
During the Second World War Eastman began to
question his socialist beliefs. In 1941 the Reader's
Digest appointed him their roving editor and began publishing
his attacks on socialists and communists.
In
the 1950s Eastman was a strong supporter of Joe
McCarthy and the House of Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC). His anti-Communist articles in the Reader's
Digest, The Freeman
and the National Review in the
1950s played an important role in what became known as McCarthyism.
In 1955 he published Reflections on the Failure
of Socialism.
For over twenty-five years Eastman worked as a roving reporter for
the Reader's Digest where he advocated
free enterprise and warned of the dangers of communism.
He also wrote two volumes of autobiography: The
Enjoyment of Living (1948)
and Love and Revolution (1965).
Max Eastman died in 1969.
(1)
Max Eastman, policy of The Masses
(1912)
This magazine is owned and published cooperatively by its editors.
It has no no dividends to pay, and nobody is trying to make money
out of it. A revolutionary and not a reform magazine: a magazine with
a sense of humour and no respect for the respectable: frank, arrogant,
impertinent, searching for true causes: a magazine directed against
rigidity and dogma wherever it is found: printing what is too naked
or true for a money-making press: a magazine whose final policy is
to do as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers.
(2) At the beginning of the First
World War, the editor of The Masses,
Max Eastman, wrote an article entitled The War of Lies (October,
1914)
Food is as important to armies as ammunition - but more important
than either is an unfailing supply of lies. You simply cannot murder
your enemy in the most efficient manner if you know he is in every
essential the same kind of a man as yourself.
Governments have tried to lay up a sufficient stock of lies before
the war start, but always in vain. The progress of popular intelligence
scraps such lies almost as fast as they are manufactured. The only
safe way is to produce an entirely new stock in the panic days immediately
before the war, when the people have no time or inclination to think,
and are cut off from all communication with the other side. After
the war starts, of course, the industry may be indefinitely continued.
This should be bourne in mind in reading tales of the barbarous atrocity
of soldiers, now on one side and now on the other.
(3) The Masses (September, 1917)
The Post Office was represented by Assistant District Attorney Barnes.
He explained that the Department construed the Espionage Act as giving
it power to exclude from the mails anything which might interfere
with the successful conduct of the war.
Four cartoons and four pieces of text in the August issue were specified
as violations of the law. The cartoons were Boardman Robinson's Making
the World Safe for Democracy, H. J. Glintenkamp's Liberty Bell
and the conscription cartoons, and one by Art Young on Congress and
Big Business. The conscription cartoon was considered by the Department
"the worst thing in the magazine". The text objected to
was A Question, an editorial by Max Eastman; A Tribute,
a poem by Josephine Bell; a paragraph in an article on Conscientious
Objectors; and an editorial, Friends of American Freedom.
(4) Max Eastman, Love and Revolution
(1964)
There was one big difference between the Masses and the
Liberator; in the latter we abandoned the pretense of being
a co-operative. Crystal Eastman and I owned the Liberator,
fifty-one shares of it, and we raised enough money so that we could
pay solid sums for contributions.
The list of contributing editors, largely brought over from the Masses,
reads as follows: Cornelia Barns, Howard Brubaker, Hugo Gellert, Arturo
Giovannitti, Charles T. Hallinan, Helen Keller, Ellen La Motte, Robert
Minor, John Reed, Boardman Robinson, Louis Untermeyer, Charles Wood,
Art Young.
Later Claude McKay, the Negro poet, became an associate editor. At
a New Year's party in 1921, we elected Michael Gold and William Gropper
to the staff - two opposite poles of a magnet: Gropper as instinctively
comic an artist as ever touched pen to paper, and Gold almost equally
gifted with pathos and tears.
(5) Claude McKay
met Max Eastman for the first time in 1918
The rendezvous with Max Eastman was to be at his study-room, somewhere
in or near St. Luke's Place. I got there first and was about to ring
when my attention was arrested by a tall figure approaching with long
strides and distinguished by a flaming orange necktie, a mop of white
hair and a grayish-brown suit. The figure looked just as I had imagined
the composite personality of The Masses and The Liberator
might be: colourful, easy of motion, clothes hanging a little loosely
or carelessly, but good stuff with an unstylish elegance. As I thought,
it was Max Eastman.
We went up into a high room and he lounged lazily on a couch and discussed
my poems. I had brought a batch of new ones. There was nothing of
the "I" first person in Max Eastman's manner. Nor did he
question me to any extent about myself, my antecedents, and the conditions
under which I lived and wrote at the time. He was the pure intellectual
in his conversation and critical opinion.
With distinguished exceptions, it is only those of us who have been,
if not inside the Communist movement, at least close enough to feel
and know by experience its passions and purposes and schemes for achieving
them, who fully realize what the free world, and its captain the United
States, are up against. We are, in a way that others are not, fortified
against the vice of self-deception. And for the last fifteen years
self-deception has been the essential foreign policy of the United
States. Our Western statesmen simply can not get it through their
heads that they are fighting an armed international religion with
a fixed creed and a fixed purpose to destroy free institutions throughout
the world.
R. Kempf, Come on in, America, the
Blood's Fine!, The Masses
(July, 1917)
(5) Max Eastman,
The Necessity of Red Baiting, The Freeman (1st June, 1953)
Red Baiting - in the sense of reasoned,
documented exposure of Communist and pro-Communist infiltration of
government departments and private agencies of information and communication
- is absolutely necessary. We are not dealing with honest fanatics
of a new idea, willing to give testimony for their faith straightforwardly,
regardless of the cost. We are dealing with conspirators who try to
sneak in the Moscow-inspired propaganda by stealth and double talk,
who run for shelter to the Fifth Amendment when they are not only
permitted but invited and urged by Congressional committee to state
what they believe. I myself, after struggling for years to get this
fact recognized, give McCarthy the major credit for implanting it
in the mind of the whole nation.
(6) Max Eastman, National Review (22nd
February, 1956)
With distinguished exceptions, it is only those of us who have been,
if not inside the Communist movement, at least close enough to feel
and know by experience its passions and purposes and schemes for achieving
them, who fully realize what the free world, and its captain the United
States, are up against. We are, in a way that others are not, fortified
against the vice of self-deception. And for the last fifteen years
self-deception has been the essential foreign policy of the United
States. Our Western statesmen simply can not get it through their
heads that they are fighting an armed international religion with
a fixed creed and a fixed purpose to destroy free institutions throughout
the world.
Nobody wants a hot war in the present state of technology. The Communists
want it least of all, both because they would surely be destroyed,
and because their fanatical aim is to take over the American industrial
plant as a going concern, not as a heap of unapproachable ruins. But
the Communists take advantage of this universal abhorrence of a hot
war to wage the cold war with every means and instrument they can
lay hold of or devise. We, on the contrary, cannot make up our mind
to face continually and with resolution the fact that we are in a
cold war. We can’t seem to get it through our heads that the
golden rule, although a noble and wise aphorism in its place, has
no application to the task of calling the bluff and stopping the depredations
of a bully. “Speak softy and carry a big stick,” was the
maxim applied by Theodore Roosevelt to such exigencies. “Carry
a perfectly enormous stick, and announce in a loud voice every morning
that no matter what happens you are not going to use it,” has
been the maxim of our government for the last ten years.
We are fighting this cold war for our life, and we must fight on all
fronts and in every field of action. We must employ in a campaign
to liberate the enslaved countries and deliver the world from the
menace of Communist tyranny all the means employed by the Communists
to destroy and enslave us-expecting only that we fight with the truth,
adhering to moral principle, while they fight with lies and a deliberate
code of treachery. And we must make our aim as clear to the world
as the Communists have made theirs. We must never affirm our loyalty
to Peace without linking to it the word Freedom.
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