Freepedia is a series of free encyclopaedias. We currently specialize in history but we intend to branch out into other areas. This section is about Max Eastman.

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.

 

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(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.