Max Eastman
Max Eastman | |
---|---|
Canandaigua, New York, US | |
Died | March 25, 1969 Bridgetown, Barbados | (aged 86)
Education | Williams College Columbia University |
Occupation(s) | Writer, political activist |
Spouses |
Max Forrester Eastman (January 4, 1883 – March 25, 1969) was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet and a prominent political activist. Moving to New York City for graduate school, Eastman became involved with radical circles in
While residing in the
Early life and education
Eastman was born in 1883 in
Eastman graduated with a bachelor's degree from
Settling in Greenwich Village with his older sister Crystal Eastman, he became involved in political causes, including helping to found the Men's League for Women's Suffrage in 1910. While at Columbia, he was an assistant in the philosophy department as well as a lecturer in the psychology department. After completing the requirements for his doctoral degree, he refused to accept it and simply withdrew in 1911. He spent summers and weekends with Crystal in Croton-on-Hudson, where he bought a house in 1916.[1]
Leading radical
Eastman became a key figure in the left-leaning Greenwich Village community and lived in its influence for many years. He combined this with his academic experience to explore varying interests, including literature, psychology, and social reform. In 1913, he became editor of the U.S.' leading socialist periodical, The Masses, a magazine that combined social philosophy and the arts. Its contributors during his tenure included Sherwood Anderson, Louise Bryant, Floyd Dell, Amy Lowell, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Robert Minor, John Reed, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair and Art Young. That same year, Eastman published Enjoyment of Poetry, an examination of literary metaphor from a psychological point of view. During this period, he also became a noted advocate of free love and birth control.[2]
In his first editorial for The Masses, Eastman wrote:
This magazine is owned and published cooperatively by its editors. It has 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.[3]
The numerous denunciations of U.S. participation in World War I published in The Masses, many written by Eastman, provoked controversy and reaction from authorities. Eastman was twice indicted and stood trial under provisions of the Sedition Act, but he was acquitted each time. In a July 1917 speech, he complained that the government's aggressive prosecutions of dissent meant that "[y]ou can't even collect your thoughts without getting arrested for unlawful assemblage".[4] In 1918, The Masses was forced to close due to criminal charges based on the Espionage Act of 1917.
Eastman raised the money to send the radical
Eastman had even delivered anti-war speeches on behalf of the People's Council of America for Democracy and the Terms of Peace.[6]
In 1919, Eastman and his sister
In 1922, Eastman embarked on a fact-finding tour of the Soviet Union to learn about the Soviet implementation of Marxism. He stayed for a year and nine months, observing the power struggles between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin. After attending the Party Congress of May 1924, he left Russia in June of that year. He remained in Europe for the next three years.
Upon returning to the United States in 1927, Eastman published several works that were highly critical of the Stalinist system, beginning with "Since Lenin Died", which was written in 1925.[7] In that essay, he described Lenin's Testament, a copy of which Eastman had smuggled out of Russia. In it, Vladimir Lenin proposed changes to the structure of the Soviet government, criticized the leading members of the Soviet leadership and suggested Stalin be removed from his position as General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. The Soviet leadership denounced Eastman's account and used party discipline to force Trotsky, then still a member of the Politburo, to write an article denying Eastman's version of the events.[2] In other essays, Eastman described conditions for artists and political activists in Russia. Such essays made Eastman unpopular with American leftists of the time. In later years, his writings on the subject were cited by many on both the left and the right as sober and realistic portrayals of the Soviet system under Stalin.[2]
Eastman's experiences in the Soviet Union and his studies afterward led him to change his view of Marxism as practiced in Soviet Russia under Stalin. However, his commitment to left-wing political ideas continued unabated. While in the Soviet Union, Eastman began a friendship with Trotsky, which endured through the latter's exile to Mexico. In 1940, Trotsky was assassinated there by an agent of Stalin. Having mastered the Russian language in little more than a year, Eastman translated several of Trotsky's works into English, including his monumental three-volume History of the Russian Revolution. He also translated and published works by the poet Alexander Pushkin, including The Gabrieliad.[8]
During the 1930s, Eastman continued writing critiques of contemporary literature. He published several works in which he criticized James Joyce and other modernist writers who, he claimed, fostered "the Cult of Unintelligibility". These were controversial at a time when the modernists were highly admired. When Eastman had asked Joyce why his book was written in a very difficult style, Joyce famously replied: "To keep the critics busy for three hundred years".[9]
Eastman published The Literary Mind (1931) and Enjoyment of Laughter (1936) in which he also criticized some elements of
Contributions to the women's rights movement
Eastman was a notable member of the women's rights movement in the early 20th century. He served as President of the Men's Equal Suffrage League in New York and was a founding member of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage in New York in 1910.[11] In 1913, he spoke at Bryn Mawr College on the subject of women's suffrage in a speech titled "Woman Suffrage and Why I Believe in It".[12]
Changing political beliefs
Hegelism is like a mental disease—you cannot know what it is until you get it, and then you can't know because you've got it.
— Max Eastman, Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution (1926), p. 22
Following the Great Depression, Eastman started to abandon his socialist beliefs, becoming increasingly critical of the ideas of Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whom he had once admired.
In 1941, he was hired as a roving editor for
Initially, Eastman had supported the
In the 1950s, Eastman joined the classical liberal Mont Pelerin Society, founded by Hayek and Mises. He was a participating member of the American Committee for Cultural Freedom at the invitation of Sidney Hook.[18] Although he became aligned with conservative political thinkers, Eastman remained a lifelong atheist.
In the 1960s, he broke with his friend William F. Buckley Jr. and resigned from the National Review's Board of Associates on the grounds that the magazine was too explicitly pro-Christian.[19]
Shortly after this, he began to publicly oppose American involvement in the Vietnam War.[16] Despite his advocacy of free market economics, Eastman had a range of views that were unconventional for a political conservative. Favoring the self-description of "radical conservative", he rejected the label "libertarian" then being used by political writer Rose Wilder Lane. They engaged in an acrimonious correspondence. Eastman associated the term with the ideas of the writer Albert Jay Nock.[20]
Daniel Oppenheimer writes in the Left-Leaning The New Republic that Eastman's last years were a period of decline in influence:
His writing was more predictable and less generous in spirit. He led no magazines, and wasn't particularly central to those to which he contributed. He wielded some influence in conservative and anti-communist circles, through organizations like the American Committee for Cultural Freedom and magazines like National Review, but he was essential to none of them. His memoirs, Enjoyment of Living in 1948 and Love and Revolution in 1964, were interesting as documents of his age, and for their unusual frankness about sex, but they weren't great books.[21]
Assessment of literary works
A prolific writer, Eastman published more than twenty books on subjects as diverse as the
Eastman composed five volumes of poetry and a novel. In addition, he translated into English some of the work of Alexander Pushkin. For the Modern Library, he edited and abridged Marx's Das Kapital.
Eastman also wrote two volumes of memoirs as well as two volumes of recollections of his friendships and personal encounters with many of the leading figures of his time, including
Selected works
- Enjoyment of Poetry, 1913. [2]
- Child of the Amazons, and other Poems, 1913. [3]
- Journalism Versus Art, 1916.[4]
- Conscription for what? (The Masses, July 1917[23])
- Colors of life; poems and songs and sonnets, 1918. [5]
- The Sense of Humor, 1921. [6]
- Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth, 1925
- Since Lenin Died, 1925. [7]
- Venture 1927
- Marx and Lenin: The Science of Revolution, 1927.
- The End of Socialism in Russia, 1928.
- The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science, 1931.
- Artists in Uniform: a Study of Literature and Bureaucratism, 1934.
- Art and the Life of Action, 1934.
- The Last Stand of Dialectic Materialism : A Study of Sidney Hook's Marxism. New York: Polemic Publishers, 1934.
- Enjoyment of Laughter, 1936.
- Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism, 1939.
- Marxism: Is It a Science?, 1940.
- Heroes I Have Known, 1942.
- Enjoyment of Living, 1948.
- Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, 1955. [8]
- Great Companions: Critical Memoirs of Some Famous Friends. New York: Farrar, Straus and Gudahy. 1959. Retrieved October 22, 2019 – via Internet Archive.
- Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch, 1964.
- Seven Kinds of Goodness, 1967
Representation in other media
- Eastman narrated the documentary film Tsar to Lenin (1937).
- At the arrangement of Eastman, the American magazine Reader's Digest published an abridged version of Friedrich Hayek's "The Road to Serfdom", enabling the book and Hayek's ideas to reach a wide non-academic audience (1945).
- Edward Herrmann portrayed Eastman in the film Reds (1981), directed by and starring Warren Beatty, which was based on the life of John Reed. John Patrick Diggins, Eastman's biographer, said that it was ironic that Herrmann was cast as Eastman, who was an extremely handsome man while the good-looking Beatty portrayed Reed, who had a bookish appearance.[24]
- He was portrayed by actor Mark Pellegrino in the 2012 TV movie Hemingway & Gellhorn, directed by Philip Kaufman.
- He is mentioned in James Thurber's memoir, The Years With Ross (1959). Thurber quotes Wolcott Gibbs as saying of Eastman's The Enjoyment of Laughter: "It seems to me Eastman has got American humour down and broken its arm".
- He appears in Thomas Hart Benton's 1930 mural "America Today", sitting on a subway ogling the burlesque actress Peggy Reynolds.
Personal life
After moving to New York City, Eastman married Ida Rauh in 1911, a lawyer, actress, writer, fellow radical and early feminist. Rauh kept her last name. They divorced in 1922, some years after being separated. Together they had one child, Dan, with whom Eastman had no connection for 23 years after their separation.[25] Eastman credited Rauh with introducing him to socialism.[26]
In 1924, he married the painter
In 1958, Eastman married Yvette Szkely, who was born in Budapest in 1912. She emigrated to New York with her divorced stepmother. She had a long-term relationship with Theodore Dreiser before her marriage to Eastman. In 1995, she published a memoir, Dearest Wilding.[28] She died in New York in 2014 at the age of 101.[29]
Throughout his life, Eastman had many affairs, which "as he aged, came to seem sad and compulsive".[21]
References
- ^ Eastman, Max (1964). Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch. New York: Random House. p. 79-81,5.
- ^ a b c d John Patrick Diggins, Up From Communism, Columbia University Press, later, Harper & Row, 1975, pp. 17–73.
- ^ The Masses, February 1913, 2.
- ^ Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Boston: Little, Brown, 1980, p. 124
- ^ John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World, Boni and Liveright, 1919; Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, Devin-Adair, 1955, p. 10.
- ^ Arnesen, Eric (Winter, 2018). "The Passions of Max Eastman." Archived January 16, 2020, at the Wayback Machine Dissent. Retrieved April 1, 2019.
- ^ Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, "Biographical Introduction," pp. 9–17.
- ^ Diggins, "Exorcising Hegel: Max Eastman," in Up From Communism, pp. 17–20.
- ^ Eastman, Max, "The Cult of Unintelligibility," Harper's Magazine, clviii, April 1929, pp. 632–639.
- ^ Diggins, Up From Communism, pp. 51–58.
- ISSN 1537-7814.
- ^ "The Suffrage Cause and Bryn Mawr – More Speakers". Dedicated to the Cause: Bryn Mawr Women and the Right to Vote. Bryn Mawr College Library Special Collections. Archived from the original on October 19, 2018. Retrieved April 16, 2015.
- ^ Diggins, Up From Communism, p. 485, fn. 43, 44, 46.
- ^ Charles H. Hamilton, "The Freeman: the Early Years," The Freeman, Dec. 1984, vol. 34, issue 1.
- ^ Max Eastman Archived February 2, 2016, at the Wayback Machine. Spartacus Educational.
- ^ a b Paul Le Blanc, Marx, Lenin and the Revolutionary Experience: Studies of Communism and Radicalism in an Age of Globalization, 2006, Routledge, p. 91.
- ^ Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, Devin-Adair, 1955, p. 113
- ^ Diggins, Up From Communism, pp. 201–233; Sidney Hook, Out of Step, Carroll & Graf, 1987, chapter 27.
- William F. Buckley," interview, Acton Institute [1] Archived December 1, 2008, at the Wayback Machine(retrieved 4-13-09).
- ^ Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, Devin-Adair, 1955, p. 79; his correspondence with Lane is in Eastman manuscripts. Archived May 29, 2010, at the Wayback Machine at Indiana University's Lilly Library; philosopher Ayn Rand also rejected the label, similarly calling herself a "radical for capitalism," but, in contrast, she stressed that she was "not a conservative."
- ^ a b "The Love Affairs of an American Radical". New Republic. Archived from the original on October 2, 2017. Retrieved October 3, 2017.
- ^ Diggins, Up From Communism, p. 19.
- ^ Max Eastman challenges conscription, In Instead of violence. Boston; Beacon Press (Arthur and Lila Weinberg Eds.), 1963, pp. 244–246.
- John Diggins, "Exorcising Hegel: Max Eastman," and "Capitalism and Freedom: Eastman," in Up From Communism, pp. 17–73, 201–233.
- ISBN 0805048472.
- ^ "Max Eastman Dies: Author and Radical" (obituary). The New York Times. March 26, 1969. p. 1. Archived from the original on July 27, 2019. Retrieved July 27, 2019.
- ISBN 087140155X(2nd, 1994 edition), p. 382.
- ^ Murray, Janet H. (July 2, 1995). "Review of Dearest Wilding: A Memoir. With Love Letters from Theodore Dreiser by Yvette Eastman; edited by Thomas P. Riggio". New York Times. Archived from the original on April 15, 2022. Retrieved April 15, 2022.
- ^ Meras, "Yvette Eastman, 101, Photographer, Longtime Aquinnah Summer Resident," Vinyard Gazette (Jan. 24, 2014) Archived May 14, 2014, at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved May 14, 2014
Further reading
- Richard Fitzgerald, Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the "Masses" and "Liberator." Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1973.
- Christoph Irmscher, Max Eastman: A Life. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.
- William L. O'Neill, Echoes of Revolt: The Masses, 1911–1917. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966.
- Anne Cipriano Venzon, United States in the First World War: An Encyclopedia. Taylor & Francis, 1995.