Max Eastman - Leading Radical

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 America's leading socialist periodical, The Masses, a magazine that combined social philosophy with 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. The 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.

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."

The numerous denunciations of U.S. participation in World War I later published in The Masses, many written by Eastman, became intensely controversial and stimulated official reaction. Eastman twice stood trial under provisions of the Sedition Act, but was acquitted each time. In a July 1917 speech, he complained that the government's aggressive prosecutions of dissent meant that "ou can't even collect your thoughts without getting arrested for unlawful assemblage." In 1918, The Masses was forced to close due to charges under the Espionage Act of 1917.

Eastman raised the money to send the radical John Reed to Russia in 1917, and Eastman's journal published Reed's articles later collected as Ten Days That Shook the World, his notable account of the Bolshevik Revolution.

In 1919, Eastman and his sister Crystal (who was one of the founders of American Civil Liberties Union) created a similar publication titled The Liberator. They published such writers as E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Claude McKay and Edmund Wilson. In 1922 after continuing financial troubles, the magazine was taken over by the Workers Party of America. (In 1924, The Liberator was merged with two other publications to create The Workers Monthly, and Max Eastman's association with the magazine ended.

In 1922, Eastman embarked on a fact-finding tour of the Soviet Union to learn about the Soviet enactment of Marxism. He stayed for a year and nine months, observing the power struggles between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, and he attended the Party Congress of May 1924. Leaving Russia in June 1924, 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. In that essay, he described Lenin's Testament, a copy of which Eastman had smuggled out of Russia and in which Lenin proposed changes to the structure of the Soviet government, criticized the leading members of the Soviet leadership, and suggested Joseph 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. 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, however, 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.

Although Eastman's view of the Soviet Union was sharply altered by his experiences there and by subsequent study, his commitment to left-wing political ideas continued unabated. While in the Soviet Union, Eastman began a friendship with Leon Trotsky, which endured through the latter's exile to Mexico. There Trotsky was murdered by an agent of Stalin in 1940. 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, as well as works by the poet Alexander Pushkin, including The Gabrieliad.

During the 1930s, Eastman continued writing critiques of contemporary literature. He published several controversial works in which he criticized James Joyce and other modernist writers, who, he claimed, fostered "the Cult of Unintelligibility." 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." Eastman published The Literary Mind (1931) and Enjoyment of Laughter (1936), in which he also criticized some elements of Freudian theory. In the 1930s, he debated the meaning of Marxism with the philosopher Sidney Hook (who, like Eastman, had studied under John Dewey at Columbia University) in a series of public exchanges. Eastman was a traveling lecturer throughout the 1930s and 1940s, when he spoke on various literary and social topics in cities across the country.