Max Forrester Eastman

• Max Eastman
• Born: January 12, 1883
• Died: March 25, 1969

Radical editor, poet, and critic of Marxism, was born in Canandaigua, New York, the youngest of four children—three sons and one daughter—of Samuel Elijah Eastman and Annis (Ford) Eastman. He was descended on his father’s side from a long line of New England churchmen going back to the Puritan Roger Eastman, who arrived in Massachusetts from England in 1638. On his mother’s side, his ancestors were pious Scotch-Irish and Germans who settled in colonial Pennsylvania. His parents met at Oberlin College, where they were studying theology.

At Max Eastman’s birth, his father was pastor of the First Congregational Church of Canandaigua, a calling he had to abandon in 1891 because of ill health. The elder Eastman was a distant, shadowy figure during his son’s childhood. Eastman was much closer to his remarkable mother, who, in 1891, became the first women to be ordained as a Congregational minister in New York State. A prominent suffragist, antidogmatic theologian, and eloquent preacher, she succeeded the unconventional Thomas K. Beecher as principal pastor of the Park Church in Elmira, New York, a center of progressive, nondenominational Christianity.

Max Eastman grew up in a stimulating and liberal home environment. His parents’ circle included the prominent Beecher and Langdon families, as well as Mark Twain, who was married to Olivia Langdon and whose leonine presence made a lasting impression on the young boy. Apart from his mother, the chief influence of his childhood years was his much-loved sister, Crystal, who, as a fiercely independent young woman, led him into the world of radical art and politics.

Eastman later remembered himself as an overprotected “mother’s boy,” irrationally fearful and prone to psychosomatic illness. He failed to realize his own abilities until he left home to complete his secondary education at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, from which he was graduated in 1900 with the highest grades in the school’s history. As a scholarship student at Williams College in Massachusetts, he studied the classics and abandoned his family’s religious heritage, replacing it with a lifelong atheism and an abstract reverence for science. He received his B.A. degree in 1905.

In 1907 Eastman followed his sister to New York City. He spent the next four years at Columbia University, where, as a protégé of John Dewey, he taught philosophy and esthetics while completing the requirements for a Ph.D. degree that, in the end, he refrained from taking. He left Columbia in 1911 as a confirmed pragmatist, with two lasting prejudices—a contempt for metaphysics and an exaggerated respect for science as the great panacea. By this time, he had taken a plunge into the heady radical politics of Greenwich Village. Inspired by the example of Crystal, he organized, in 1909, the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage, and got his first political experience as a public speaker advocating equal rights for women.

For the next decade, Eastman was at the heart of the vigorous bohemian subculture in Greenwich Village that embraced such diverse luminaries as Theodore Dreiser, Isadora Duncan, Emma Goldman, William (Big Bill) Haywood, and Margaret Sanger. Tall, strikingly handsome, and articulate, he became the visible symbol of the “lyrical left,” the generation of young American radicals that believed it was possible to unite artistic, social, and political revolution under one banner. Receptive to new ideas in every field, Eastman was an early admirer of Sigmund Freud, a champion of birth control, and an advocate of free love and open marriage. His political radicalism, initially a na]ve mixture of the ideas of his heroes, Walt Whitman and Thorstein Veblen, was hardened by his first exposure to Marxism. He later claimed that he was converted to scientific socialism by Ida Rauh, a rebel from a wealthy Jewish family, who became his wife in 1911. Their marriage, which ended in divorce in 1921, produced Eastman’s only child, Daniel, born in 1912.

Eastman’s career began in earnest when, in August 1911, he received a telegram that read: “You have been elected editor of The Masses. No pay.” For the next six years he held together, by sheer wit and determination, the most remarkable and unruly collection of young artistic and political radicals ever captured within the pages of one magazine. The Masses was notable for the handsome graphics of such artists as Stuart Davis, George Bellows, John Sloan, and Art Young, and for the exciting political writing of Eastman, John Reed, and William English Walling. It published the work of such gifted young poets and writers of fiction as Sherwood Anderson, William Carlos Williams, Amy Lowell, and Floyd Dell.

Under Eastman’s direction, The Masses became, in Irving Howe’s words, “the rallying center ... for almost everything that was then alive and irreverent in American culture.” As editor, he was the dominant voice of the magazine, treating the readers of his weekly editorials to a peculiarly American version of socialism that combined New England conscience with joyful spontaneity. In his Masses years, he also published the highly successful Enjoyment of Poetry (1913), an attempt to employ psychology in literary criticism, and two volumes of his own verse, Child of the Amazons (1913) and Colors of My Life (1918).

In 1917, after it had vigorously opposed the entry of the United States into World War I, The Masses was suppressed by the federal government, and Eastman and six other members of the editorial board were indicted under the Espionage Act for conspiring to promote mutiny and obstruct the draft. Eastman had been active since 1916 in the American Union Against Militarism. As the key figure in two trials, both ending in hung juries, he received national attention as the most famous young radical of his day. In 1918 he cofounded with Crystal Eastman a new radical journal, The Liberator, which published Lenin’s “Letter to American Working-men” and championed the cause of the struggling young Soviet Union.

During the split within American socialism that followed the Bolshevik revolution, Eastman threw the support of The Liberator to those left-wing Socialists who were later to found the American Communist party. He was, by 1918, an enthusiastic admirer of the Bolshevik leader, finding in Lenin “a practical-minded and free-minded engineer of revolution.”

In 1922 he went on a pilgrimage to Russia to watch the Bolsheviks construct the new Socialist order. He learned Russian quickly and stayed for two years, long enough for his infatuation to sour. Witnessing the beginning of Stalin’s ascendancy that followed the death of Lenin, Eastman sided with Leon Trotsky and the left opposition. As Stalin’s grip tightened, Eastman left Russia, in May 1924, with documents supporting the opposition’s cause. He also brought with him a new wife, Eliena Krylenko, the sister of Nicolai Krylenko, the Soviet minister of justice. They were to have a mutually agreed-upon open marriage that lasted until Eliena’s death in 1956.

Eastman’s direct experience of the revolution “devouring its children” transformed him into one of the earliest American radical critics of Stalin’s Russia. In Paris, in 1925, he completed Since Lenin Died, the first account of the Soviet power struggle to reveal Lenin’s secret testament —the document in which he warned against Stalin. Eastman returned home in 1927 to find himself persona non grata on the American left, reviled by his former comrades. Yet he still considered himself a Marxist and he devoted much of his energy to a defense of “scientific socialism,” which he associated with the example of Lenin. In Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution, first published in England in 1926, he attempted to expunge from the Marxist tradition all nonscientific, quasi-religious aspects; shortcomings he attributed to the baleful influence of Hegelian metaphysics.

Considering Trotsky to be the true heir of Lenin, Eastman served as his literary agent in the United States; it was a collaboration that produced translations of The Real Situation in Russia (1928), The Revolution Betrayed (1937), and, most notably, The History of the Russian Revolution (1932), the best example of Eastman’s compelling literary style. It was, however, a stormy relationship. Eastman was never an uncritical admirer of Trotsky, and he often questioned the latter’s tactics and ideas. For this he suffered frequent repudiations by Trotsky and rebukes from American Trotskyites.

As the Soviet dictatorship hardened in the 1930s, Eastman extended his hatred of Stalinism to doubts about Marxism itself. At a time when the Great Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe led most American intellectuals to support the Soviet Union, Eastman was a lonely and increasingly bitter voice in the wilderness. He publicized the great purges and attacked the moral blindness of Socialists and Popular Front liberals who supported the Communist policy. In Artists in Uniform (1934) he discussed the regimentation and censorship of the arts in the Soviet Union.

Eastman’s ultimate disillusionment with Marxism, in theory as in practice, was expressed in Stalin’s Russia and the Crisis of Socialism (1939), in which he concluded that the methods of Lenin and Trotsky had led directly to the totalitarian state. This was followed by Marxism: Is It Science? (1940), a summary of his previous writings on the unscientific metaphysical foundations of Marxism. His complete break with the American Socialist tradition was symbolized by his acceptance, in 1940, of DeWitt Wallace’s offer of the position of roving editor for Reader’s Digest. One of his early contributions, an article entitled “Socialism Does Not Gibe With Human Nature,” appeared in June 1941 with an endorsement from Wendell L. Willkie, the 1940 Republican candidate for president.

During the years when his political opinions were at odds with those of most American intellectuals, Eastman was also a literary critic whose views ran counter to the prevailing currents of his day. In an article in Harper’s, “The Cult of Unintelligibility” (1929) and in The Literary-Mind (1931), he deplored the trend toward “obscurantism” in the works of such modernists as T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, charging that they were abandoning the claim of art to interpret experience. Eastman was a pioneer in the use of psychological interpretation in his criticism, employing the insights of Freud as well as of the behaviorists. In a hostile review of Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon that appeared in The New Republic in 1933, he suggested that Hemingway’s obsession with virility was the literary equivalent of “wearing false hair on the chest.” This led, in 1937, to a celebrated scuffle with the author in the editorial office of Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s.

For the rest of his career, Eastman stubbornly lived up to his reputation as a gadfly in liberal intellectual circles. When the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 alienated many former supporters of the Soviet Union, he had little time to relish his position as a “premature anti-Stalinist.” He regarded the World War II Western alliance with the Soviets as a necessary evil, but wrote articles for the New Leader and Reader’s Digest that warned Americans about Stalin’s guile and treachery. Having already rejected socialism, Eastman was, by this time, an intrepid defender of American free enterprise. Influenced by the work of the economist Friedrich Hayek, he was convinced that capitalism was the only system compatible with human freedom.

At the war’s end, the advances of communism in Eastern Europe and China made Eastman obsessively fearful of internal subversion in the United States. Believing that liberals and progressives were incapable of resisting the tide of totalitarianism, he moved to the right of the American political spectrum. In the 1950s he defended the activities of Senator Joseph McCarthy and became a contributing editor for the National Review, joining such former radicals as John Dos Passos and James Burnham. He never ceased demonstrating his intellectual independence. Still a convinced atheist, he engaged in a running dispute with the editor, William F. Buckley Jr., over the magazine’s identification of anticommunism with Christianity.

In the last two decades of his long life, Eastman removed himself physically and spiritually from the field of battle. In his treasured retreat at Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard, off Massachusetts, he completed two volumes of autobiography that may stand as his most lasting literary achievement. In Enjoyment of Living (1948) and Love and Revolution (1965), he presented a lively and characteristically combative chronicle of his career, featuring details of his numerous affairs of the heart. He summed up his neglected vocation as a poet in Poems of Five Decades (1966), a collection of his best verse. In 1956 the death of Eliena Eastman, his wife of thirty years, had caused him great sorrow. Two years later he married Yvette Szekely, a literary consultant whom he had met years before in the home of Theodore Dreiser. They subsequently divided their time between Martha’s Vineyard and an apartment in Greenwich Village, spending winter vacations in Hawaii and the West Indies. Max Eastman died at eighty-six of a cerebral hemorrhage in Bridgetown, Barbados.

The history of American radicalism has no personality more dogged, lonely, and controversial than Max Eastman. His life was a long intellectual voyage that began with the progressive Christian environment of his childhood; passed through the joyous radicalism of his Masses years to his conversion to and rejection of communism in the 1920s and 1930s; and ended, finally, in the cranky conservatism of his later years. His guideposts along that bumpy road were figures as diverse as Darwin, Freud, Dewey, Lenin, Trotsky, and Hayek. Never a fanatical true believer, he was a radical in whom the influence of ideology could not compete with the natural moralism of the son of ministers.

Eastman was not a profound thinker, and his claims to scientific objectivity were never realized in the emotional heat that he brought to his many controversies. His strong points were his intellectual independence and, as Edmund Wilson noted, a genius for stimulating the thinking of others—even when they violently disagreed with him. But Eastman ultimately paid a high price for this independence in his ostracism from the radical and liberal intellectual community. Bitterness clouded his vision and turned him away from the humane concern with the victims of American society that had been the inspiration of his youthful radicalism. He was keenly aware, of course, of the personal costs of a lifetime of controversy. In looking back on his life in Love and Revolution, he observed: “I shall die wishing I had devoted myself to poetry.”

The papers of Max Eastman are in the Lilly Library of Indiana University. There are also family and personal papers in the possession of his widow, Yvette Eastman. Both of these collections are now closed to scholars. In addition to his two volumes of autobiography, Eastman wrote two volumes of biographical essays: Heroes I Have Known (1942), with portraits of Annis and Crystal Eastman, John Reed, and Isadora Duncan; and Great Companions (1959), with his reflections of Freud, Einstein, Trotsky, and Ber-trand Russell. Eastman’s works of literary criticism include Journalism Versus Art (1916); Art and the Life of Action; and The Enjoyment of Laughter (1948). For portraits of Eastman as a radical in combat, see D. Aaron, Writers on the Left (1961); J. P. Diggins, Up from Communism (1975); S. Hook, “Remembering Max Eastman,” The American Scholar, Summer 1979; W. O’Neill, ed., Echoes of Revolt: The Masses 1911-1917(1966); E. Wilson, “Max Eastman in 1941,” in Classics and Commercials (1950). See also Contemporary Authors, vols. 11-12 (1965) and Current Biography, April 1969. An obituary appeared in The New York Times, March 26, 1969.