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 Greenwich Village. He supported socialism and became a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes. For several years, he edited The Masses. With his sister Crystal Eastman, he co-founded in 1917 The Liberator, a radical magazine of politics and the arts.
While residing in the Soviet Union from the fall of 1922 to the summer of 1924, Eastman was influenced by the power struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and the events leading to Stalin's eventual seizure of power. As a result of the Great Purge and the Soviet Union's totalitarianism, he became highly critical first of Stalinism and then of communism and socialism in general. While remaining an atheist, he became an advocate of free market economics and anti-communism. In 1955, he published Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. He published more frequently in National Review and other conservative journals in later life. He publicly opposed United States involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
Early life and education Eastman was born in 1883 in Canandaigua, Ontario County, New York, the fourth of four children. His older brother died the following year at age seven. His father, Samuel Elijah Eastman, was a minister in the Congregational Church, and his mother, Annis Bertha Ford (1852–1910), joined him in 1889, one of the first women in the United States to be ordained in a Protestant church. They served together as pastors at the church of Thomas K. Beecher near Elmira, New York. This area was part of the "burned-over district", which earlier in the 19th century had generated much religious excitement, resulting in the founding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Latter Day Saint movement. In addition, religion inspired such social causes as abolitionism and support for the Underground Railroad. Through his parents, Max became acquainted in his youth with their friend, the noted author Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.
Eastman graduated with a bachelor's degree from Williams College in 1905. His good friend and roommate while at Williams was Charles Whittlesey, later known as the Lost Battalion commanding officer and a World War I hero. From 1907 to 1911, Eastman completed the work toward a PhD in philosophy at Columbia University under the noted philosopher John Dewey. He also was a member of both the Delta Psi and Phi Beta Kappa societies.
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.
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 US' 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.John Patrick Diggins, Up From Communism, Columbia University Press, later, Harper & Row, 1975, pp. 17–73.
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 Masses, February 1913, 2.
The numerous denunciations of US 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".Ronald Steel, Walter Lippmann and the American Century, Boston: Little, Brown, 1980, p. 124 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 John Reed to Russia in 1917. His magazine published Reed's articles from Russia, later collected as Ten Days That Shook the World, his notable account of the Bolshevik Revolution.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.
Eastman had even delivered anti-war speeches on behalf of the People's Council of America for Democracy and the Terms of Peace.Arnesen, Eric (Winter, 2018). "The Passions of Max Eastman." Dissent. Retrieved April 1, 2019.
In 1919, Eastman and his sister Crystal (who the next year 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, the magazine was acquired by the Workers Party of America after continuing financial troubles. In 1924, The Liberator was merged with two other publications to create The Workers Monthly. Eastman ended his association with the magazine.
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.Max Eastman, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, "Biographical Introduction," pp. 9–17. 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. 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.
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.Diggins, "Exorcising Hegel: Max Eastman," in Up From Communism, pp. 17–20.
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".Eastman, Max, "The Cult of Unintelligibility," Harper's Magazine, clviii, April 1929, pp. 632–639.
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 (like Eastman, he had studied under John Dewey at Columbia University) in a series of public exchanges.Diggins, Up From Communism, pp. 51–58. Eastman was a traveling lecturer throughout the 1930s and 1940s, when he spoke on various literary and social topics in cities across the country.
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. 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".
Changing political beliefs
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 Reader's Digest magazine, a position he held for the remainder of his life. About this time, he also became a friend and admirer of the noted free market economists Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Wilhelm Röpke. He allied with the American writers James Burnham, John Chamberlain, and John Dos Passos.Diggins, Up From Communism, p. 485, fn. 43, 44, 46. Nobel laureate economist Hayek referred to Eastman's life and to his repudiation of socialism in his widely read The Road to Serfdom. Eastman arranged for the serialization of Hayek's work in Reader's Digest. Later, Eastman wrote articles critical of socialism for The Freeman, an early libertarian publication edited by his friends John Chamberlain and Henry Hazlitt.Charles H. Hamilton, "The Freeman: the Early Years," The Freeman, Dec. 1984, vol. 34, issue 1.