INTELLIGENTSIA AND REVOLUTION
Nowhere was the continuity between The Masses and The Liberator as evident as in literary style and philosophy. War, revolution, and repression drove Eastman and his cohorts left and embroiled them far more seriously in practical revolutionary politics; but except for John Reed, who almost abandoned literature for propaganda and agitation, they continued their "spirit of serious play" in literature and life. Eastman continued to address the role of the radical intelligentsia in a time of revolutionary ferment, elaborating upon his previous views in light of the Soviet experience. He reiterated his previous stance: creative literature enhanced life regardless of any contribution it might make towards the political struggle, while independent intellectuals such as himself could directly aid the workers in their class struggle.
Eastman had long insisted that everyone--and especially intellectuals and others of ambivilent class position--must choose sides in times of overt class struggle, and that some "disinterested idealists" could side with the proletariat even if they were not themselves workers. Class position, in other words, did not always determine personal ideology and commitment, especially among the intellectual elite. "It is possible for persons of drastic and pure intellect, or militantly sympathetic emotion, to abstract from their own economic or social situation, conceive the process of revolutionary struggle scientifically, and put their personal force in upon the side where lie the ultimate hopes of human life," Eastman reiterated in 1920. "It is possible and it has occasionally occurred." Bertrand Russell's stunning repudiation of the Bolsheviks stemmed not from his class position but from his antiquated traditional culture, "the contagious Christian disease of idealizing the soft, and worshipping the ineffectual."[369]
Eastman conceded that most intellectuals gravitated towards liberalism rather than revolutionism, towards an open-minded accommodation of differing points of view rather than a decisive taking of sides. At its best, liberalism meant entering "with one's imagination into any point of view that is proposed." This was "a dangerous gift" but did not preclude revolutionary commitment if a person could "stand by one's own point of view to the end." The urbane, educated liberal accepted or rejected any idea with a full consciousness of its meaning, which "he knows by a sympathetic intellectual experience" because he was "gifted with imagination and curiosity."
And this poised and temperately generous person presents for ultimate times perhaps an ideal of mankind, but in a revolutionary age he will have difficulty finding any place or any function whatever, for the depth and force of the conflict compel all men to abandon themselves to one side or the other completely. They can no longer exercise judgment between two parties, because the underlying standards of judgment are in question.... [We are experiencing] the dawn of a revolutionary age, the forcing itself foward of a conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as absolute, the temporary twilight of liberalism.[370]
Liberal qualities such as impartiality, disinterested judgment, independence from all parties, and humanitarian concern for all people were counterproductive because "it is not against injustice, but against justice, as conceived in a capitalist society and founded upon the habits of that society, that the struggle of labor will be definitely directed.... There can be no judge when justice is on trial." Anyone aspiring to arbitrate the class struggle from a position of impartiality would find himself inexorably driven into the camp of one of the warring adversaries.[371]
Lenin repudiated bourgeois freedoms and civil liberties in favor the the dictatorship of the proletariat, a pronouncement "shocking to most liberals, and even to many of the tender-hearted Socialists." However, economic, working-class revolution entailed such a dictatorship.
And all social idealists are going to have to choose between this act, involving such idealistic partisanship and temporary illiberality as it does, and the opposite act--throwing over the bill of rights, as we are doing in this country, in order to suppress, imprison and slow-murder the agitators of economic revolution, and protect the profits of capital. The one thing is done with the great vision and purpose of a more real and universal liberty--the other with no vision and no hope of better things to come. It is natural that a majority of the liberals should fly at first to the latter, the well-tried policy. But it is not impossible that many of them--those who are not wholly bound up in a capitalistic profession--will upon reflection discover a wiser course.[372]
If enough workers (and their intellectual allies) understood the nature and necessity of a complete revolution, "it may be peaceful." According to Eastman, "violence is the inevitable result of the ascendency of Scheidemanns and Kerenskys. Eliminate them and the change may be peaceful."[373]
Lenin--as Marx before him--epitomized the non-proletarian intellectual whose ideas and activities were necessary for working-class victory. "Lenin not only recognized the supreme importance of revolutionary ideas," Eastman said, "but he realized that the people in whom such ideas constitute a predominant motive, are comparatively few. He set these scientifically idealistic people--the Marxian intelligentsia--off against the 'unconscious mass' in a way that shocks our democratic modesty." Eastman averred that "there is a struggle between two classes, and then there is a third and independent factor, the 'revolutionists' who understand that struggle and who desire the victory of the working class, not because they belong to it (whether they do or not) but because they have a socialist ideal." The "trained scientific revolutionists" discovered scientific truths that the working class qua working class could not discover on its own, and legitimately dominated the Soviet Communist party. "The dictatorship of the proletariat can be realized only through the political party of the revolutionary vanguard successfully leading the proletariat," Eastman insisted. He paraphrased Lenin as demanding that his scientifically trained cadre "take the position of ideological and political leadership, without any false modesty or sentimental democratism, of any thought about what class you belong to." Russian revolutionists had agonized over whether they should remain loyal to the opinions or interests of the masses; again summarizing Lenin, Eastman declared that "if you are flexible and dextrous" revolutionists could "unite with the masses and at the same time be loyal to your ideal."[374]
Eastman declared that Lenin had rebutted a related error, the idea that economic determinism denied "the importance of scientific ideas" and of individual personality in history.
Economic determinism no more denies the power of ideas to change the course of history, than the determinism recognized by Mandel in writing the laws of heredity denies the power of a breeder to produce new variations, or than the 'psychic determinism' insisted upon by Sigmund Freud denies his power to cure nervous disease. It assures him of that power.
Marx founded a science, and the foundation of every science is a recognition of some new system of causal determination. The fact that in the sciences whose subject is mankind, the scientist himself seems to fit into the general chain of causes, and deny his power to make use of his own discovery, is an old and undeniable intellectual difficulty. It guarantees a permanent job to the professors of philosophy, but it does not delay the scientists in their work.[375]
Eastman complained that a mechanistic interpretation of economic determinism had distorted Marxism into "a philosophy of inaction." Reformist Socialists claimed that because only maturation of the forces of production would generate revolution, intellectuals could achieve little until working-class consciousness ripened. Eastman, however, denied that Communists must exaggerate "the degree of revolutionary spirit or understanding in the workers and soldiers of the United States." Rather, "we have only to be sure that we possess a little revolutionary spirit and understanding ourselves, and that we intend to propagate it." Reformist Socialists spread defeatism, lied about the Soviet Union, opposed revolution, and contradicted "the emotional and intellectual principles of Socialism." Attacking editorials in the conservative SP daily, The New York Call, Eastman proclaimed that
We of the Communist International are not deceived about the stage of development which the movement has reached in America. We understand quite well that its velocity will depend upon the development of the economic situation and not upon the degree of anybody's conviction or state of excitement. We understand this a good deal better than that featured editorial wreiter in the New York Call, who postpones the hope of Socialism beyond the term of his own life upon the ground that it will take that long to elevate the masses to the necessary height of moral and intellectual enfranchisement.
It is the desires, not the convictions; the will, not the intelligence, of the masses that will precipitate the social revolution when the system of capitalistic production breaks down. There are more people in the United States at this moment who have Socialist education than there were in Russia and Hungary at the time of the successful revolutions. The question is whether these people have the resoluteness, and clarity of mind, and solidarity of organization, to seize the helm and guide the masses in such a crisis toward the nationwide accomplishment of the thing that they desire. They certainly will not have, if they are filled up with the intellectual milk-water and wet wool which went into the composition of those editorials.[376]
As noted above, Eastman opposed immediate revolution, which he equated with romantic adventurism; he differed from the reformists "not about what we should do, but about what we should teach."[377] The revolutionary intelligentsia must delegitimize bourgeois institutions and moral ideals, particularly those associated with political democracy; it must educate the workers in the class struggle, the economic nature of freedom, and the role of the state as a class instrument.
Eastman also found a role for himself in educating the public in the truth about the Soviet Union. We have quoted above his numerous pronouncements about Soviet policies in almost every area of life. Eastman also published Soviet documents on cultural policy in The Liberator and, while introducting a booklet of documents on Soviet education and art, praised the new republic's educational reforms as "the most important of all the good things" that Russia had attempted.[378] Eastman extolled the Soviet Union's policy of universal education, its Deweyite emphasis on creative learning rather than rote memorization, and its stress on literature and art. Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik cultural commissar, appropriated rather than repudiating feudal and bourgeois cultural forms; he instructed the masses in the glories of past civilization even as the Soviet state fostered a universal and proletarian culture. Under the Bolsheviks, ordinary men and women would not only appreciate the cultural treasures of the past; they would actively create a new culture based on their own sensibilities and values. Eastman (and Floyd Dell) found this exhilerating.
Eastman believed that artistic freedom could not exist in a class society, which could foster only a culture which justified exploitation and war. Educational reformers could never succeed under capitalism because "a society in which one class of the people lives and finds leisure for 'ideals,' only because it exploits another class and deprives them of life, cannot possibly realize those of its ideals which are humane and just." Previous reformers had always shipwrecked on "the blind instinct of self-preservation in that upper class which holds the power of wealth." Now, however, "someone who desires a common ownership of capital, and an aristocracy not of wealth but of real merit and ability, has come into the possession of absolute power" and "has proceeded at once, and with all the power, energy, brains and wealth at his disposal, to make permanent the growth of the seeds of the republic, by revolutionizing the system of education.... To me, at least, much as I have believed in the possibility of ideal developments once the capitalistic obstacle was removed, the degree in which such a development appears already in these fragments of the most vital news from Moscow, is astonishing."[379]
Eastman still differentiated "scientific intelligence" from "poetic realization." He praised those who could distinguish the two and "combine them without blemishing either." He agreed with Mike Gold that "we want to be the Gorkis and Lunacharskis, rather than the Lenins and Trotskys, of the revolution in America."[380] In other words, The Liberator would foster revolutionary culture and advise revolutionary activists on matters of strategy, tactics, and ideology, without assuming any formal leadership role; by constantly differentiating poetry (which was emotional and inexact) from science (which was hard-headed, pragmatic, and precise) it would avoid tarnishing both literature and revolution. "Every moderating of the revolutionary ideology is a weakening of the movement," Eastman declared.[381]
The Liberator did indeed publish creative literature and innovative art as well as revolutionary polemics. Eastman himself helped polish Liberator translations of 8th century Chinese poetry, praised the abstract creativity of Chinese painting while reproducing some examples, and published his decidely non-political The Sense of Humor in 1921.[382] Many of Floyd Dell's articles, as we shall see below, were whimsical and apolitical. Yet by 1921 Eastman admitted that under the exigencies of war, revolution, and repression, his magazine had become too much a movement organ and too little a literary magazine; by that year, however, expressedly Party publications were again legal and the revolutionary tide had subsided, making a more literary focus appropriate. Even then, however, Eastman vowed to make The Liberator both "in spirit more like its honorably annihilated predecessor, THE MASSES" and in content more focused on "the American labor movement." Eastman hailed "those rare and obstreperous geniuses who contributed to THE MASSES" and had adroitly combined literature, humor, art, and politics.[383]
Eastman's good friend John Reed, unlike Eastman himself, largely abandoned literature in favor of professional revolutionary activism, lamenting that "this class struggle sure plays hell with your poetry." In his last years before dying in Moscow, Reed wrote little poetry and few short stories, focusing instead on his journalistic descriptions of the Bolshevik revolution, published as Ten Days Which Shook the World and as articles in The Liberator. When Reed "died at his revolutionary post" in Moscow, Eastman eulogized him as embodying almost every intellectual virtue. The newspapers, Eastman said, honored Reed "despite the fact that he died as an outlaw and a man wanted by the police as a criminal. They admire him because he is dead. But we speak to a different purpose. We pay our respect to John Reed because he was an outlaw." Reed was, Eastman said, a very atypical intellectual who, like Lenin, combined poetic realization, scientific thinking, and revolutionary activism. Although Reed
was gifted with the power to use ideas emotionally, and paint them for the imagination with colors of flame--he was a poet, he was an idealist--nevertheless he was never deluded by the emotional coloring of ideas into ignoring their real meaning when translated into the terms of action upon matters of fact. He knew the cold tone of voice in which a scientist says what things are. He knew the hard mood in which a captain of industry says how things can be achieved. He was a poet who could understand science. He was an idealist who could face facts....[384]
Reed, Eastman continued, was a poet, journalist, and dramatist who was published in both popular and literary magazines. His energy and creativity "convinced us that we had to have a magazine like The Masses whether it was possible or not." Reed's life impulse developed "in two directions which were fundamentally opposed to each other, and between which at some culminating moment he would inevitably be compelled to choose." Despite his enormous successes in both popular journalism and fine literature, he revolted "against the conditions of exploitation from which our journalism, and what we call our art of literature, springs, and which it justifies, and over which it spreads a garment of superficial and false beauty. There was growing in his breast a sense of the identity of his struggle towards a great poetry and literature for America, with the struggle of the working-people to gain possession of America and make it human and make it free." By donating his best work to The Masses and its small band of dedicated readers, "he kept those two contrary streams of achievement running together as long as he could."
Then, almost at the same moment, war came to America, and the active struggle for a proletarian revolution began in Russia. And John Reed was confronted, as every man of free and penetrating intelligence was confronted, with the choice between popular and profitable hypocrisy in the capitalist journals, and lonely and disreputable truth in the revolutionary press. And he chose the truth. Way over the heads of the American proletariat, and beyond any vision that they had in their eyes, he chose to identify his interest with their interest, and his destiny with their ultimate destiny.
John Reed sacrificed a life to the revolution, not only in Moscow in 1920, but in America in that winter of 1917. And if there is any special tribute I can add to that of these other friends who were active with him at a later time, it is a testimony to the splendour and gayety and wealth and magnifiscence of the life he sacrificed. All that this contemporary world has with which to tempt a young man of genius, he renounced, when he fell in with the humble ranks, and accepted the bitter wages of a soldier of the revolution.[385]
In these passages, Eastman perceived a continuing symbiosis between revolutionary class struggle and poetic realization. His confusion is evident when he speaks both of "the identity" of Reed's struggle for working-class emancipation and the creation of great literature, and in the next breath of "those two contrary streams of achievement" that could be combined only in The Masses. Eastman refused to sacrifice his poetic sensibilities, his skeptical intelligence, or his effervescent sense of life's possibilities, upon the altar of revolution, and later doubted that Reed could have so fundamentally transformed himself for any length of time. Such a sacrifice, while antithetical to Eastman's revolution, was demanded by the self-appointed proprietors of a new kind of revolution that Eastman abominated.
Eastman elaborated his views on the revolutionary role of writers when responding to Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse, French writers who separately organized intellectuals for collective effort. The Liberator printed Rolland's manifesto, "A Declaration of Intellectual Independence," in December 1919. One of those rare European intellectuals who had intransigently opposed World War I, Roland addressed "workers of the mind." He complained that "the majority of intellectuals have placed their science, their art, their reasoning powers, at the disposal of governments" and "have laboured to destroy understanding and love among men. And, in so doing, they have disfigured, degraded, lowered, and debased Thought, which they represented," by making it an instrument of hatreds based on nation, party, and class. This constituted an "almost total abdictation of the intelligence of the world." Roland proclaimed that genuine intellectuals "honor truth alone.... It is for Humanity that we work, but for the whole of Humanity... We know the people, one, universal...."[386]
Invited to sign this declaration, Eastman predictably critiqued it. He denied that there is an autonomous class of intellectuals, "any more than there is an independent class of dry-goods merchants." The pretentious concepts "intellectual" and "higher thought" suggested "a superior cult." Eastman disdainfully said that "I cannot take that expression 'higher thought' into my lips. It is not higher to think about abstract ideas than about concrete things, although it may be more interesting to some people. And the moment it is tinged with a flavor of self-conscious superiority, it is lower, from the standpoint of social morality." Eastman considered "Mind" and "Intelligence" as concrete human abilities that could equally serve any human purpose; therefore, employing them for conservative ends in no sense debased or corrupted them. Each individual made a moral choice about the goals of his life; intelligence then helped achieve those purposes. "The great question before us is a question of values to be chosen"; neither science nor "Mind" helped in that choice. Moreover, "the most eminent wholesalers and retailers of intellectual goods are on the whole capitalist-nationalistic in their position, and they not only did react accordingly in the crisis of 1914, but they always will react in the same way in every crisis until capitalism is destroyed by the workers." Not only their dependence on the capitalists for their wealth and social position, but also their position as conservators of past culture, ensured this. "Their very culture and wealth of knowledge is of itself a conservative influence.... Knowledge is turned into ignorance by a real revolution, just as wealth is turned into poverty."[387]
Eastman did see a place for literary men and women, however.
There exists a science, consisting of a series of hypotheses as to the method by which this choice of ours may be carried out in the actual world. This science teaches that if we wish to achieve liberty and democracy for the world we must place ourselves and all our powers unreservedly upon the side of the working class in its conflict with the owners of capital. We must adopt--at least so far as we are engaged upon this social quest--a fighting mentality and we must engage in a conscious class struggle. That is, I believe, the supreme edict which mind at its best--that is, its most scientific--now delivers to those who choose freedom and democracy as their goal for the world.[388]
Eastman disdained intellectuals who still perceived themselves "as a class apart and aloof from the wage-laborers of the earth, or think there is any function of any place for a man of social ideals above the present battle."[389]
Eastman, therefore, reaffirmed his pragmatic belief in science as experimental intelligence and his consequence disdain for abstractions such as "The People" and "Mind." His qualifying clause, "at least so far as we are engaged upon this social quest," allowed poets, writers, and those who enjoyed life to avoid placing "all of our powers unreservedly" in the service of the class struggle. When engaged in political activity, the engaged writer must side totally with the workers; but Eastman still believed that other interests and activities were fully legitimate. Although he asserted that revolution was a "surgical shock which a perfectly intelligent love must inflict upon mankind," he implied that politics, even in the most desperate of times, did not constitute all of life.[390]
In April 1920, Eastman responded to another organization of progressive intellectuals, Henri Barbusse's "League of Intellectual Solidarity for the Triumph of the International Cause," often called Clarté, after its journal. Although Clarté soon lurched sharply left and affiliated with the Third International, its original manifesto asserted that "to the conflict of material forces have succeeded the conflict of ideas," a conflict "more important" because it underlies "the causes of all existing institutions." Clarté proclaimed that "since human affairs are not validly regulated except by human intelligence, it belongs to the intellectuals above all to intervene in preparing the rule of the mind.... We will work to prepare the Universal Republic, outside of which there is no safety for the people.... We call amicably to our side all those who believe in the power of thought." Clarté would not form a political party, but would work for peace, feminism, and the full development of human personality.[391]
Eastman criticized Clarté's assumption that ideas, not material interests, ruled history, and its consequent belief that intellectuals were the natural leaders of revolution.
It is not intellectuality, reason, "the power of thought," that will fight and win the battle for liberty and international peace. It is the self-protective will of the exploited classes that will do it. And if there really is such a thing as an intellectual--a person whose will attaches with single devotion to abstract and impersonal truth--he will be distinguished by his knowledge of this very fact.... The task at hand is the overthrow of a master class by the workers of the world. It is as simple as that. In this operation the humanitarian intellectuals will function up to the critical moment as obscurers of the issue, and when the critical moment comes they will function as apostles of compromise and apologists of the masters.[392]
That artists and writers would support the capitalists, Eastman asserted, was evident in theory (from their economic position) and empirically (from their past conduct). "In light of this established truth", he exclaimed, "how pathetic is the vain glory of their raising a banner of leadership!" Instead, "they should form a penitential order, retiring into a convent in sack-cloth and ashes, resolved that if they cannot help the working class in its struggle, they will at least cease to corrupt and water its vigor with misleading and obscure idealistic emotions." Eastman sardonically asserted that literati who wanted to help the workers should "lay down the pretense of revolutionary and intellectual leadership," humbly organize themselves as a craft union, and affiliate with organized labor. Even if their union's articles eschewed revolutionary rhetoric, such practical affiliation "would be a step of some potential significance." Eastman claimed that Barbusse's organization deliberately ignored the class struggle in an attempt to include the widest possible spectrum of intellectuals. But the class struggle could not be evaded; Clarté "will either split in two at the first active effort it makes, or making no active effort will expire with a long sigh like any pious and impractical intention."[393]
A year later Eastman announced that Clarté "has revised its principles and purged its ranks of reformers and amateur socialists. It has accepted the principle of the class struggle in its full meaning," thereby recognizing "somewhat tardily, as literary intellectuals always do--the practical science which alone can really give light to our steps." Eastman quoted the revised Clarté manifesto in full: endorsing class war, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the "purge" of all waverers, Clarté pronounced that it would offer the International Communist party "a contribution of a kind more especially intellectual. Powerless in itself to precipitate the historic evolution, this intellectual action, to which the Russian Revolutionaries devoted the utmost care, has proven itself day by day to be one of the essential factors of success." Clarté would help create a "prolet-culture" which the Communist party "has not the leisure to attempt."[394]
Eastman approved of this new orientation and indicated that The Liberator would pursue a somewhat similar path.
During the war, when all the other Left Wing papers were suppressed, and we managed to replace the MASSES with the LIBERATOR, we felt that our duty was propaganda, and for a time we slipped almost into the position of an "organ" of the movement. But with the reappearence of weekly papers issued by those actually on the job, our function has become more and more differentiated, and we have gradually decided upon a course similar to that now chosen by the "Clarté" group in France. To me the term "prolet-cult"' is so dull, busy, self-conscious, ugly and uninspiring a name for any creative occupation, that I can not bring myself to employ it. I hope it is not a sample of the poetry it proposed to evoke. But it is perhaps a fair practical designation for the task we are engaged upon.[395]
Yet Eastman criticized some phrases in the new manifesto. He denied that Clarté members were more intellectual than Communist party leaders and activists; in fact, the latter had displayed a far more acute understanding of theoretical issues and "the first principles of the revolution." Clarté members had lacked "intellectuality" above all; their emotion and purpose had been revolutionary, but as their revised manifesto clearly indicated, "their minds were weak.... Would not any judicious person looking for authentic and important information on any of the problems of the revolution--theoretic or practical--go rather to the party publications" than Clarté or The Liberator? The literary left contributed neither theoretical precision nor practical information, but rather the poetry of life.[396]
We are distinguished, we literary and artistic people, by our ability to realize--to feel and discuss the qualities of things. We experience vividly the existing facts, and the revolutionary ideal, and the bitterly wonderful long days of the struggle that lies between these two. All the way along we are dealing as experts in experience. Experience is our trade. We receive it vividly and convey it vividly to others. And this faculty of vivid living--besides the ultimate and absolute value that it has in itself--contributes something indispensable to the practical movement. It contributes something that we may call inspiration. It keeps up a certain warm faith and laughing resolution in those who might weary of learning and laboring in the mere practical terms of the task. It is inspiration that one finds in the works of Barbuse, of Gorki, of Robert Minor--a sense of the companionable zest of the adventure, of the drama, the romance, and the utter reality of the life that is throbbing through time in this mighty current of change. It is warmth rather than light that these men bring to the revolution.[397]
Barbuse, Gorki, and Minor had all attained great authority by spreading revolutionary feeling, and then had inadvertently betrayed the workers by commiting "an intelligent blunder" that would disgrace "the merest novice" member of a Communist local. All had denied the decisive nature of the class struggle, and had instead promulgated misty ideals. By admitting bourgeois reformists and basing its appeal on universal humanitarian values rather than the class struggle, Clarté had done "all that a group of artists and writers possibly could do, to obscure the line of battle and weaken the revolutionary perceptions of the workers."[398] Treading delicately on the line between diametrically opposing viewpoints, Eastman opposed an autonomous organization of the revolutionary intelligentsia, whose total independence he viewed as dangerous, even as he repudiated overt party control over writers and artists.
These celebrated errors... bear heavily upon the question now at issue. Is it wise for these people whose service to the revolution is inspiration--the poets, artists, humorists, musicians, reporters, story-tellers, and discursive philosophers--to form a distinct and autonomous organization of their own? To me it seems unwise. These particular people, I should say, are more in need of guidance and careful watching by the practical and theoretical workers of the movement than the members of any other trade. There is so strong an admixture of play in their work--that is the reason. Their work has to be playful in order to be creative. It has to be very free and irresponsible. It cannot, I think, submit to the official control of a party. And for that very reason the task of making it circumspect enough never to injure practically, while it is aiding poetically, the work of the party, is a very delicate one. It is one which can best be accomplished, in my opinion, if the party is the only organization, the only corporate source of intellectual guidance.
We have not only to cultivate the poetry, but keep the poetry true to the science of the revolution--to give life and laughter and passion and adventures in speculation, without ever clouding or ignoring any point that is vital in the theory and practice of communism. That is a task wich the organizers of "Clarté" seem not yet to have clearly defined. And it is a task which to me at least, so far as my judgment is formed, seems to make their organization as unhelpful, as their individual works are helpful beyond price to the revolution.[399]
Eastman, therefore, distinquished between serving the revolution through poetry, broadly conceived, and through practical advice and scientific understanding. However, he added that "the distinction is not often absolute even in a given piece of work, to say nothing of the whole work of an individual. Poets and artists, like the members of any other trade, can be at the same time practical workers," running for office, mounting the soapbox, or writing pamphlets. "It is only insofar as they distinguish themselves from the regular propagandists that I maintain these people must use poetic, or some similar word, instead of intellectual, to describe what they are."[400] The poetic imagination, however, vividly realized unique sensations and experiences at the expense of general, scientific truth. Writers "have rather a pale interest in general truth. Their interest is in particular experiences. The apprehension of a general truth is a particular experience, and as such they usually judge it. If it does not make something of a poetic 'go' among their emotions, they reject it offhand--the idea of general verification being foreign to the whole aim and tenor of their lives."[401]
Van Wyck Brooks contested Eastman's views on the role of the revolutionary intelligentsia--both on the contributions they offered and the dangers that they posed. Creative writers, he said, denied that their creative intelligence threatened the revolutionary movement, and felt no need of guidance from anybody. Indeed, artists and poets undergirded any political movement; "in the very act of distinguishing themselves from Lenin," writers such as Gorky validly claimed revolutionary "intellectual leadership." Gorki's "little error about the two varieties of socialism" distracted little from his genuine contribution to the Russian ethos, and hence the revolution.[402]
Brooks complained that Eastman reduced art to a mere handmaiden who "delights in trimming the beard and warming the slippers of a grim strenuous giant whose name is Science and whose business is Revolution." Brooks countered that literature not only helped achieve purposes, but also shaped our personalities, and thus indicated the purposes we should pursue. The Russian Revolution had partly succeeded because of the qualities inherent in "the Russian people, in their feelings and desires," shared, evoked, intensified, and cultivated by a long line of illustrious poets and novelists. Ideals and values preceded practical efforts towards their attainment, and trumped "the statesmen, the economists, and the scientists. If Pushkin had never existed... Lenin would never have existed either."[403]
Eastman replied that whether or not creative writers felt the need for supervision and careful guidance by the party cadre, "I am sure that every practical and theoretical worker in the movement feels it for them." When Gorki opposed the Bolsheviks during the revolutionary crisis he "threw the whole weight of the revolutionary literary tradition in Russia against the revolution." This was not only "a tragedy in Gorki's life and the life of Russia" but an error of "a typical kind," which artists and intellectuals could avoid only by recognizing "the sovereignity of that 'grim, strenuous giant whose name is Science and whose business is Revolution.'" Eastman conceded Brooks's point that creative artists helped precipitate as well as inspire the revolution; "to that degree I must ascribe leadership to the poets and prophets of art." However, "this is leadership of the will and not of intellect," and unlike "both propaganda and scientific theory," was inspirational rather than educational.[404]
Agreeing with Brooks that the entire ethos and mentality of the Russian people underlay their Revolution, Eastman insisted that creative artists expressed rather than created that ethos. "From the standpoint of practical importance in arousing a revolutionary will among the Russian people, literature has been only a tiny thing compared with conversation," he said. "Literature is indeed only a lingering crest or high-point in that mightier process. Even the works of Pushkin are but the topmost sun-perfected fruit upon the tree of Russian conversation. Their perfection is what is unusual--not their nature and effect. It is true that if the stream of feelings and ideas which Pushkin precipitated in crystals of immortal perfection had not existed, Lenin would not have existed either. But it is not true that any such immortal perfections were essential to Lenin's existence."[405] Brooks therefore exaggerated the strictly revolutionary importance of the Russian literary tradition.
Yet Eastman insisted that Brooks had unintentionally undervalued literature and art by stressing (and exaggerating) their practical value. Poetry was an essential of life which required no practical justification. In the banal high school debates over the relative impact of politicians and writers
we lacked the courage to say that poets are greater than statesmen whether they had any effect on history or not. Poetry is life itself lived most utterly, and its intrinsic and absolute value is what we really feel. But because we are incurably and stupidly moral, we think we have to bolster up and support this feeling by lying to ourselves in a mystical way about its practical importance.... Oh, how foolish it is to try to justify poetry and art on the ground of their service to the revolution! They are but life realizing itself utterly, and only by appeal to the value of life's realization can the revolution be justified. Be a little more pagan, Comrade Brooks, and a little more recklessly proud of your trade. It has a value that no "movement" can justify, no theory dim, no regime and no practical mandate ever create or destroy. It belongs with and replenishes the source of all values--the living of life.
And if in addition it can sometimes in great hands inspire the workers in a practical movement towards a richer and more universal life for all--keep warm their faith, and laughing this resolution--and awaken, if you will, their desire for the goal--is that not enough glory to your trade?[406]
Eastman here adroitly reconciled revolutionary commitment with artistic freedom. As in his days as editor of The Masses, he insisted that creative writers must fully express themselves and life as long as they did not obstruct the Revolution. Literature and art should address universal themes of love and death, nature and civilization, growing up and growing old. In so doing, they served Life and therefore the Revolution and the Communist party. Party leaders and activists must oversee and guide their writers. Yet Eastman did not advocate formal Party censorship of creative art; in the last analysis, poets must censor themselves, or heed the criticism of other writers and of the genuine revolutionary leaders, the Party activists and theoreticians. Eastman opposed a separate organization of the revolutionary intelligentsia because he feared its wayward and autonomous power; such an organization, however, could also facilitate direct Party control. As the 1920s and 1930s progressed, Eastman found himself less and less welcome or at home in a movement that regimented writers and demanded that they express every petty twist of the Party line. Eastman's trajectory in the next decades largely encapsulates the impossibility of combining a free and creative play of the mind with revolutionary purity and party orthodoxy--divergent goals which, in 1921, he hoped were compatible.[407]
The Actors' strike of 1919, like the death of John Reed and the Rolland and Barbusse manifestos, evoked important reflections from Eastman on the relations between art and revolution. Eastman's discussion of the strike unified many of his perennial themes: the economic nature of working-class freedom; the symbiosis of proletarian revolution and free artistic creativity; the hardening of class lines and the consequent necessity for individual choice in times of bitter class conflict; and the possibility that some idealistic intellectuals--including some whose material interests lay with the capitalists--may side with the workers. Eastman regarded the Actors' strike as both illuminating the processes at work in the Soviet Union and as foreshadowing the transformation of American life during the Revolution. "The Actors' Strike was not the social revolution, but it was a very complete picture of it," Eastman proclaimed; it was Bolshevism on a small scale.
Eastman rejoiced that the actors stopped paying tribute to the parasites (the capitalists who owned the theatres). After walking out, the actors produced drama for their own and humanity's benefit, hired their own managers, kept all profits, and rediscovered "that friendly and joyful, free creative exuberance that has not been seen on the stage since the age of Pericles." Eastman proclaimed that all the workers of world would "some coming day" seize the means of production, appropriate their entire product, and transform life, "for they have the same power to be joyful." However, he acknowledged that the actors, like most American workers, were reformists rather than revolutionaries, and did not recognize the full significance of their actions. "They thought they were fighting against the immorality and injustice of the men who own them, instead of against the immorality and injustice of being owned," he said. "They thought they were against the managers because they are bad" rather than "because they are managers." Although the actors believed that their action was only for higher wages, they would find that appropriating the means of production was "perfectly inevitable" and "the only possible outcome of the struggle."[408]
For Eastman, the actors' strike illuminated the general facts underlying class war. In any community, some individuals had an ambiguous class position: some people who appropriated unearned increment also worked for wages or a salary, while some workers owned a bit of stock. In other words, some capitalists worked, and some workers extracted surplus value from other workers. In the theatre business, some actors were also producers, or owned part of a theatrical company, while some producers and owners had risen from the ranks of the actors and still performed creative labor. However, once the strike began, everyone was confronted with a stark choice: whether to support the workers or the capitalists. "When conditions are unbearable and the fight begins, then the world automatically divides itself into these two classes," Eastman said. "And every man and every woman has to take his stand on one side or the other, whether he wants to or not."[409] The courts, of course, sided with the owners, as they always did during times of acute class conflict. The actors, initially as ignorant as any other workers, were at first amazed by the sweeping injunction against them, but soon joyfully ignored it.
Although the government predictably backed the capitalists against the workers, not all individuals lined up on the side that their class interests dictated. The capitalists, imitating their breathren who confronted industrial strikes, formed an organization of "loyal" employees--i.e. actors who supported their own exploiters. Capitalists often formed such organizations during strikes because "the bosses themselves are so few in number that if the public could once clearly see them all alone, the monstrous injustice of their owning the earth would overwhelm everybody." Through "loyal employees" organizations, the bosses fostered the illusion that majority of workers were on their side. This was partly a public relations gimmick, but it also assuaged their own guilty consciences and bolstered their self-image as benefactors who provided jobs for their workers. And indeed, many workers fell for these blandishments. "There are always a certain number of workmen who are ready to be so organized--even at their own expense," Eastman lamented. "They act from a kind of disinterested ideal.... It is a trait in human nature that makes people willing to sacrifice the real things of life, including their own personal independence, in order to feel that they 'belong' to the wealthy classes. They would rather belong to them in the way that Fido belongs to his master than not belong at all."[410]
If many workers acted in the interests of their masters, the Actors' Strike also corrorborated Eastman's thesis that some capitalists could side with the workers. "It is a hard philosophy which tells us that people line up inevitably in classes on the basis of their economic interest," he said. "It is just as hard as the truth. But fortunately for our feelings, and for our sense of the picturesque, there are occasional individual exceptions to this truth, and they warm us up and keep us excited, and make us feel that if we could once get rid of economic classes altogether (as we did at the Lexington Theatre) human nature would be very lovable and interesting." Francis Wilson, one such exception, was endowed with "a vein of abstract and impersonal idealism.... Having arrived and succeeded for himself, he wanted to do something for the good of art and humanity." Ethel Barrymore was another for whom "an impersonal ideal... furnished the motive to action." Eastman quoted others who had worked their way up, but whose hearts remained with those on the bottom.[411] He perceived the Actors' Strike--which occurred in a year of massive social upheavals and major strikes in the mass production industries--as a thrilling premonition of a new world:
The "labor unrest" is the one great, beautiful and hopeful thing in these sad and terrible times. It shows that the spirit of life still inhabits this bloody globe, and that out of all the devastation and death which our insane commercial civilization has brought upon itself, a new, and free and democratic society may yet be born. The strike of the actors has added enthusiasm and courage and a new flavor of the picturesque to the revolutionary struggle of labor, the "movement of the world toward industrial control." It could do nothing better than that.[412]
One actor told a mass meeting that European actors had long organized into unions; Eastman said that "he needed to add, in order to complete the pageant and enforce the moral of the whole drama," that actors (and other workers) were now free in Russia.[413] This omission signalled the large gap between Eastman's understanding of the strike and that of its participants.
Although the Actors' Strike was conservative in motive and ideology, Eastman nevertheless believed that proletarian revolution was possible in the United States. But by early 1922 the revolutionary tide had long since subsided, repressed mostly by ruling-class terrorism and violence, but deflated also by working-class conservatism (itself largely stemming from capitalist terrorism). As he prepared to leave The Liberator and visit the Soviet Union, Eastman, in a mood of contemplative melancholy, compared the attitude of two creative artists: reformist Socialist H.G. Wells, and the Russian actor Chaliapin. The two men epitomized two disparate worlds which Eastman had simultaneously inhabited at one point in his life, and which he hoped he could again eventually reconcile. Although Wells was a conservative Socialist of the type Eastman had excoriated since 1919, Eastman received him cordially at the offices of The Liberator. "There is in quiet times a certain fraternity among all those who have abandoned the mere rationalizing of primitive instinct and traditional belief and custom, and are learning the art of critical and creative thought," Eastman said. "There is a fraternity of those who know how to doubt, and like to disturb the established inanities. And to this fraternity of disturbance at least we all belonged." Eastman's renewed tolerance of Wells reflected his conviction that 1922 was a "quiet time" in the United States. However, the Revolution was alive and well in the Soviet Union, Eastman believed; and Chaliapin, a famous Russian actor who had returned home even though he could earn riches abroad, epitomized the promise of the new regime. Chaliapin identified with the masses and said that the government could appropriate his money for the common good if it took everyone else's: "I am no exception. I am one of the people." Eastman said that "he remained true, at enormous personal cost, to the Russian people and to the revolutionary ideal." Asked about Soviet policy towards the arts, Chaliapin replied that "You know it is hard for art to flourish where people are hungry for bread.... But the Bolshevik government gives infinitely more money to art than any other Russian government ever did. It gives us money, and it leaves us free. We are free to do anything we want to--anything we want to do!"[414]
By the time this article appeared, Eastman had resigned from The Liberator to visit the Soviet Union and "see," he said only half jestingly, "if what I had been saying was true." The Liberator was afflicted with editorial, financial, and ideological problems. It was beset by factionalism; Mike Gold in particular was extolling "proletarian literature," and raising yet another rebellion against Eastman's@ purportedly lax editorial policy. Extreme financial difficulties also afflicted the publication. Eastman had long detested his role as chief fundraiser among the rich (although it was the main source of his power); and The Liberator found that it could no longer raise money from the rich or depend on advertising revenue. Furthermore, the bookkeeper abscounded with the magazine's financial reserve. Finally, the revolutionary tide had obviously ebbed in the United States; Eastman was so dubious about The Liberator's prospects for survival that he demanded that, in the event of its demise, the defunct journal should be given to the Workers party rather than sold commercially. (The Liberator passed under Party control in 1922, and, after folding in 1924, was combined with two other publications to form a new Party publication, Workers Monthly. Neither Eastman nor Dell contributed to the new magazine).
When Eastman sailed for the Soviet Union, however, he could not have known that his departure symbolized the end of an era, both in American society and in his own political and personal lives. In the remaining two and a half years of The Liberator's life, he contributed few articles. By the time of his departure, however, he had some inkling of the big change, and the corresponding necessity for a new Liberator. The magazine, he said, should remain
a little natural group or parish of people who happen to have a like interest in truth and the expression of feeling.... I feel sometimes as though the whole modern world, capitalism and communism and all, were rushing toward some enormous nervous efficient machine-made doom of the true values of life.
A very counter-revolutionary feeling![415]
He warned Claude McKay, one of the two co-editors, that he would write not major articles, but "an occasional letter of impressions as I go along."
Eastman had long insisted that everyone--and especially intellectuals and others of ambivilent class position--must choose sides in times of overt class struggle, and that some "disinterested idealists" could side with the proletariat even if they were not themselves workers. Class position, in other words, did not always determine personal ideology and commitment, especially among the intellectual elite. "It is possible for persons of drastic and pure intellect, or militantly sympathetic emotion, to abstract from their own economic or social situation, conceive the process of revolutionary struggle scientifically, and put their personal force in upon the side where lie the ultimate hopes of human life," Eastman reiterated in 1920. "It is possible and it has occasionally occurred." Bertrand Russell's stunning repudiation of the Bolsheviks stemmed not from his class position but from his antiquated traditional culture, "the contagious Christian disease of idealizing the soft, and worshipping the ineffectual."[369]
Eastman conceded that most intellectuals gravitated towards liberalism rather than revolutionism, towards an open-minded accommodation of differing points of view rather than a decisive taking of sides. At its best, liberalism meant entering "with one's imagination into any point of view that is proposed." This was "a dangerous gift" but did not preclude revolutionary commitment if a person could "stand by one's own point of view to the end." The urbane, educated liberal accepted or rejected any idea with a full consciousness of its meaning, which "he knows by a sympathetic intellectual experience" because he was "gifted with imagination and curiosity."
And this poised and temperately generous person presents for ultimate times perhaps an ideal of mankind, but in a revolutionary age he will have difficulty finding any place or any function whatever, for the depth and force of the conflict compel all men to abandon themselves to one side or the other completely. They can no longer exercise judgment between two parties, because the underlying standards of judgment are in question.... [We are experiencing] the dawn of a revolutionary age, the forcing itself foward of a conflict between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as absolute, the temporary twilight of liberalism.[370]
Liberal qualities such as impartiality, disinterested judgment, independence from all parties, and humanitarian concern for all people were counterproductive because "it is not against injustice, but against justice, as conceived in a capitalist society and founded upon the habits of that society, that the struggle of labor will be definitely directed.... There can be no judge when justice is on trial." Anyone aspiring to arbitrate the class struggle from a position of impartiality would find himself inexorably driven into the camp of one of the warring adversaries.[371]
Lenin repudiated bourgeois freedoms and civil liberties in favor the the dictatorship of the proletariat, a pronouncement "shocking to most liberals, and even to many of the tender-hearted Socialists." However, economic, working-class revolution entailed such a dictatorship.
And all social idealists are going to have to choose between this act, involving such idealistic partisanship and temporary illiberality as it does, and the opposite act--throwing over the bill of rights, as we are doing in this country, in order to suppress, imprison and slow-murder the agitators of economic revolution, and protect the profits of capital. The one thing is done with the great vision and purpose of a more real and universal liberty--the other with no vision and no hope of better things to come. It is natural that a majority of the liberals should fly at first to the latter, the well-tried policy. But it is not impossible that many of them--those who are not wholly bound up in a capitalistic profession--will upon reflection discover a wiser course.[372]
If enough workers (and their intellectual allies) understood the nature and necessity of a complete revolution, "it may be peaceful." According to Eastman, "violence is the inevitable result of the ascendency of Scheidemanns and Kerenskys. Eliminate them and the change may be peaceful."[373]
Lenin--as Marx before him--epitomized the non-proletarian intellectual whose ideas and activities were necessary for working-class victory. "Lenin not only recognized the supreme importance of revolutionary ideas," Eastman said, "but he realized that the people in whom such ideas constitute a predominant motive, are comparatively few. He set these scientifically idealistic people--the Marxian intelligentsia--off against the 'unconscious mass' in a way that shocks our democratic modesty." Eastman averred that "there is a struggle between two classes, and then there is a third and independent factor, the 'revolutionists' who understand that struggle and who desire the victory of the working class, not because they belong to it (whether they do or not) but because they have a socialist ideal." The "trained scientific revolutionists" discovered scientific truths that the working class qua working class could not discover on its own, and legitimately dominated the Soviet Communist party. "The dictatorship of the proletariat can be realized only through the political party of the revolutionary vanguard successfully leading the proletariat," Eastman insisted. He paraphrased Lenin as demanding that his scientifically trained cadre "take the position of ideological and political leadership, without any false modesty or sentimental democratism, of any thought about what class you belong to." Russian revolutionists had agonized over whether they should remain loyal to the opinions or interests of the masses; again summarizing Lenin, Eastman declared that "if you are flexible and dextrous" revolutionists could "unite with the masses and at the same time be loyal to your ideal."[374]
Eastman declared that Lenin had rebutted a related error, the idea that economic determinism denied "the importance of scientific ideas" and of individual personality in history.
Economic determinism no more denies the power of ideas to change the course of history, than the determinism recognized by Mandel in writing the laws of heredity denies the power of a breeder to produce new variations, or than the 'psychic determinism' insisted upon by Sigmund Freud denies his power to cure nervous disease. It assures him of that power.
Marx founded a science, and the foundation of every science is a recognition of some new system of causal determination. The fact that in the sciences whose subject is mankind, the scientist himself seems to fit into the general chain of causes, and deny his power to make use of his own discovery, is an old and undeniable intellectual difficulty. It guarantees a permanent job to the professors of philosophy, but it does not delay the scientists in their work.[375]
Eastman complained that a mechanistic interpretation of economic determinism had distorted Marxism into "a philosophy of inaction." Reformist Socialists claimed that because only maturation of the forces of production would generate revolution, intellectuals could achieve little until working-class consciousness ripened. Eastman, however, denied that Communists must exaggerate "the degree of revolutionary spirit or understanding in the workers and soldiers of the United States." Rather, "we have only to be sure that we possess a little revolutionary spirit and understanding ourselves, and that we intend to propagate it." Reformist Socialists spread defeatism, lied about the Soviet Union, opposed revolution, and contradicted "the emotional and intellectual principles of Socialism." Attacking editorials in the conservative SP daily, The New York Call, Eastman proclaimed that
We of the Communist International are not deceived about the stage of development which the movement has reached in America. We understand quite well that its velocity will depend upon the development of the economic situation and not upon the degree of anybody's conviction or state of excitement. We understand this a good deal better than that featured editorial wreiter in the New York Call, who postpones the hope of Socialism beyond the term of his own life upon the ground that it will take that long to elevate the masses to the necessary height of moral and intellectual enfranchisement.
It is the desires, not the convictions; the will, not the intelligence, of the masses that will precipitate the social revolution when the system of capitalistic production breaks down. There are more people in the United States at this moment who have Socialist education than there were in Russia and Hungary at the time of the successful revolutions. The question is whether these people have the resoluteness, and clarity of mind, and solidarity of organization, to seize the helm and guide the masses in such a crisis toward the nationwide accomplishment of the thing that they desire. They certainly will not have, if they are filled up with the intellectual milk-water and wet wool which went into the composition of those editorials.[376]
As noted above, Eastman opposed immediate revolution, which he equated with romantic adventurism; he differed from the reformists "not about what we should do, but about what we should teach."[377] The revolutionary intelligentsia must delegitimize bourgeois institutions and moral ideals, particularly those associated with political democracy; it must educate the workers in the class struggle, the economic nature of freedom, and the role of the state as a class instrument.
Eastman also found a role for himself in educating the public in the truth about the Soviet Union. We have quoted above his numerous pronouncements about Soviet policies in almost every area of life. Eastman also published Soviet documents on cultural policy in The Liberator and, while introducting a booklet of documents on Soviet education and art, praised the new republic's educational reforms as "the most important of all the good things" that Russia had attempted.[378] Eastman extolled the Soviet Union's policy of universal education, its Deweyite emphasis on creative learning rather than rote memorization, and its stress on literature and art. Lunacharsky, the Bolshevik cultural commissar, appropriated rather than repudiating feudal and bourgeois cultural forms; he instructed the masses in the glories of past civilization even as the Soviet state fostered a universal and proletarian culture. Under the Bolsheviks, ordinary men and women would not only appreciate the cultural treasures of the past; they would actively create a new culture based on their own sensibilities and values. Eastman (and Floyd Dell) found this exhilerating.
Eastman believed that artistic freedom could not exist in a class society, which could foster only a culture which justified exploitation and war. Educational reformers could never succeed under capitalism because "a society in which one class of the people lives and finds leisure for 'ideals,' only because it exploits another class and deprives them of life, cannot possibly realize those of its ideals which are humane and just." Previous reformers had always shipwrecked on "the blind instinct of self-preservation in that upper class which holds the power of wealth." Now, however, "someone who desires a common ownership of capital, and an aristocracy not of wealth but of real merit and ability, has come into the possession of absolute power" and "has proceeded at once, and with all the power, energy, brains and wealth at his disposal, to make permanent the growth of the seeds of the republic, by revolutionizing the system of education.... To me, at least, much as I have believed in the possibility of ideal developments once the capitalistic obstacle was removed, the degree in which such a development appears already in these fragments of the most vital news from Moscow, is astonishing."[379]
Eastman still differentiated "scientific intelligence" from "poetic realization." He praised those who could distinguish the two and "combine them without blemishing either." He agreed with Mike Gold that "we want to be the Gorkis and Lunacharskis, rather than the Lenins and Trotskys, of the revolution in America."[380] In other words, The Liberator would foster revolutionary culture and advise revolutionary activists on matters of strategy, tactics, and ideology, without assuming any formal leadership role; by constantly differentiating poetry (which was emotional and inexact) from science (which was hard-headed, pragmatic, and precise) it would avoid tarnishing both literature and revolution. "Every moderating of the revolutionary ideology is a weakening of the movement," Eastman declared.[381]
The Liberator did indeed publish creative literature and innovative art as well as revolutionary polemics. Eastman himself helped polish Liberator translations of 8th century Chinese poetry, praised the abstract creativity of Chinese painting while reproducing some examples, and published his decidely non-political The Sense of Humor in 1921.[382] Many of Floyd Dell's articles, as we shall see below, were whimsical and apolitical. Yet by 1921 Eastman admitted that under the exigencies of war, revolution, and repression, his magazine had become too much a movement organ and too little a literary magazine; by that year, however, expressedly Party publications were again legal and the revolutionary tide had subsided, making a more literary focus appropriate. Even then, however, Eastman vowed to make The Liberator both "in spirit more like its honorably annihilated predecessor, THE MASSES" and in content more focused on "the American labor movement." Eastman hailed "those rare and obstreperous geniuses who contributed to THE MASSES" and had adroitly combined literature, humor, art, and politics.[383]
Eastman's good friend John Reed, unlike Eastman himself, largely abandoned literature in favor of professional revolutionary activism, lamenting that "this class struggle sure plays hell with your poetry." In his last years before dying in Moscow, Reed wrote little poetry and few short stories, focusing instead on his journalistic descriptions of the Bolshevik revolution, published as Ten Days Which Shook the World and as articles in The Liberator. When Reed "died at his revolutionary post" in Moscow, Eastman eulogized him as embodying almost every intellectual virtue. The newspapers, Eastman said, honored Reed "despite the fact that he died as an outlaw and a man wanted by the police as a criminal. They admire him because he is dead. But we speak to a different purpose. We pay our respect to John Reed because he was an outlaw." Reed was, Eastman said, a very atypical intellectual who, like Lenin, combined poetic realization, scientific thinking, and revolutionary activism. Although Reed
was gifted with the power to use ideas emotionally, and paint them for the imagination with colors of flame--he was a poet, he was an idealist--nevertheless he was never deluded by the emotional coloring of ideas into ignoring their real meaning when translated into the terms of action upon matters of fact. He knew the cold tone of voice in which a scientist says what things are. He knew the hard mood in which a captain of industry says how things can be achieved. He was a poet who could understand science. He was an idealist who could face facts....[384]
Reed, Eastman continued, was a poet, journalist, and dramatist who was published in both popular and literary magazines. His energy and creativity "convinced us that we had to have a magazine like The Masses whether it was possible or not." Reed's life impulse developed "in two directions which were fundamentally opposed to each other, and between which at some culminating moment he would inevitably be compelled to choose." Despite his enormous successes in both popular journalism and fine literature, he revolted "against the conditions of exploitation from which our journalism, and what we call our art of literature, springs, and which it justifies, and over which it spreads a garment of superficial and false beauty. There was growing in his breast a sense of the identity of his struggle towards a great poetry and literature for America, with the struggle of the working-people to gain possession of America and make it human and make it free." By donating his best work to The Masses and its small band of dedicated readers, "he kept those two contrary streams of achievement running together as long as he could."
Then, almost at the same moment, war came to America, and the active struggle for a proletarian revolution began in Russia. And John Reed was confronted, as every man of free and penetrating intelligence was confronted, with the choice between popular and profitable hypocrisy in the capitalist journals, and lonely and disreputable truth in the revolutionary press. And he chose the truth. Way over the heads of the American proletariat, and beyond any vision that they had in their eyes, he chose to identify his interest with their interest, and his destiny with their ultimate destiny.
John Reed sacrificed a life to the revolution, not only in Moscow in 1920, but in America in that winter of 1917. And if there is any special tribute I can add to that of these other friends who were active with him at a later time, it is a testimony to the splendour and gayety and wealth and magnifiscence of the life he sacrificed. All that this contemporary world has with which to tempt a young man of genius, he renounced, when he fell in with the humble ranks, and accepted the bitter wages of a soldier of the revolution.[385]
In these passages, Eastman perceived a continuing symbiosis between revolutionary class struggle and poetic realization. His confusion is evident when he speaks both of "the identity" of Reed's struggle for working-class emancipation and the creation of great literature, and in the next breath of "those two contrary streams of achievement" that could be combined only in The Masses. Eastman refused to sacrifice his poetic sensibilities, his skeptical intelligence, or his effervescent sense of life's possibilities, upon the altar of revolution, and later doubted that Reed could have so fundamentally transformed himself for any length of time. Such a sacrifice, while antithetical to Eastman's revolution, was demanded by the self-appointed proprietors of a new kind of revolution that Eastman abominated.
Eastman elaborated his views on the revolutionary role of writers when responding to Romain Rolland and Henri Barbusse, French writers who separately organized intellectuals for collective effort. The Liberator printed Rolland's manifesto, "A Declaration of Intellectual Independence," in December 1919. One of those rare European intellectuals who had intransigently opposed World War I, Roland addressed "workers of the mind." He complained that "the majority of intellectuals have placed their science, their art, their reasoning powers, at the disposal of governments" and "have laboured to destroy understanding and love among men. And, in so doing, they have disfigured, degraded, lowered, and debased Thought, which they represented," by making it an instrument of hatreds based on nation, party, and class. This constituted an "almost total abdictation of the intelligence of the world." Roland proclaimed that genuine intellectuals "honor truth alone.... It is for Humanity that we work, but for the whole of Humanity... We know the people, one, universal...."[386]
Invited to sign this declaration, Eastman predictably critiqued it. He denied that there is an autonomous class of intellectuals, "any more than there is an independent class of dry-goods merchants." The pretentious concepts "intellectual" and "higher thought" suggested "a superior cult." Eastman disdainfully said that "I cannot take that expression 'higher thought' into my lips. It is not higher to think about abstract ideas than about concrete things, although it may be more interesting to some people. And the moment it is tinged with a flavor of self-conscious superiority, it is lower, from the standpoint of social morality." Eastman considered "Mind" and "Intelligence" as concrete human abilities that could equally serve any human purpose; therefore, employing them for conservative ends in no sense debased or corrupted them. Each individual made a moral choice about the goals of his life; intelligence then helped achieve those purposes. "The great question before us is a question of values to be chosen"; neither science nor "Mind" helped in that choice. Moreover, "the most eminent wholesalers and retailers of intellectual goods are on the whole capitalist-nationalistic in their position, and they not only did react accordingly in the crisis of 1914, but they always will react in the same way in every crisis until capitalism is destroyed by the workers." Not only their dependence on the capitalists for their wealth and social position, but also their position as conservators of past culture, ensured this. "Their very culture and wealth of knowledge is of itself a conservative influence.... Knowledge is turned into ignorance by a real revolution, just as wealth is turned into poverty."[387]
Eastman did see a place for literary men and women, however.
There exists a science, consisting of a series of hypotheses as to the method by which this choice of ours may be carried out in the actual world. This science teaches that if we wish to achieve liberty and democracy for the world we must place ourselves and all our powers unreservedly upon the side of the working class in its conflict with the owners of capital. We must adopt--at least so far as we are engaged upon this social quest--a fighting mentality and we must engage in a conscious class struggle. That is, I believe, the supreme edict which mind at its best--that is, its most scientific--now delivers to those who choose freedom and democracy as their goal for the world.[388]
Eastman disdained intellectuals who still perceived themselves "as a class apart and aloof from the wage-laborers of the earth, or think there is any function of any place for a man of social ideals above the present battle."[389]
Eastman, therefore, reaffirmed his pragmatic belief in science as experimental intelligence and his consequence disdain for abstractions such as "The People" and "Mind." His qualifying clause, "at least so far as we are engaged upon this social quest," allowed poets, writers, and those who enjoyed life to avoid placing "all of our powers unreservedly" in the service of the class struggle. When engaged in political activity, the engaged writer must side totally with the workers; but Eastman still believed that other interests and activities were fully legitimate. Although he asserted that revolution was a "surgical shock which a perfectly intelligent love must inflict upon mankind," he implied that politics, even in the most desperate of times, did not constitute all of life.[390]
In April 1920, Eastman responded to another organization of progressive intellectuals, Henri Barbusse's "League of Intellectual Solidarity for the Triumph of the International Cause," often called Clarté, after its journal. Although Clarté soon lurched sharply left and affiliated with the Third International, its original manifesto asserted that "to the conflict of material forces have succeeded the conflict of ideas," a conflict "more important" because it underlies "the causes of all existing institutions." Clarté proclaimed that "since human affairs are not validly regulated except by human intelligence, it belongs to the intellectuals above all to intervene in preparing the rule of the mind.... We will work to prepare the Universal Republic, outside of which there is no safety for the people.... We call amicably to our side all those who believe in the power of thought." Clarté would not form a political party, but would work for peace, feminism, and the full development of human personality.[391]
Eastman criticized Clarté's assumption that ideas, not material interests, ruled history, and its consequent belief that intellectuals were the natural leaders of revolution.
It is not intellectuality, reason, "the power of thought," that will fight and win the battle for liberty and international peace. It is the self-protective will of the exploited classes that will do it. And if there really is such a thing as an intellectual--a person whose will attaches with single devotion to abstract and impersonal truth--he will be distinguished by his knowledge of this very fact.... The task at hand is the overthrow of a master class by the workers of the world. It is as simple as that. In this operation the humanitarian intellectuals will function up to the critical moment as obscurers of the issue, and when the critical moment comes they will function as apostles of compromise and apologists of the masters.[392]
That artists and writers would support the capitalists, Eastman asserted, was evident in theory (from their economic position) and empirically (from their past conduct). "In light of this established truth", he exclaimed, "how pathetic is the vain glory of their raising a banner of leadership!" Instead, "they should form a penitential order, retiring into a convent in sack-cloth and ashes, resolved that if they cannot help the working class in its struggle, they will at least cease to corrupt and water its vigor with misleading and obscure idealistic emotions." Eastman sardonically asserted that literati who wanted to help the workers should "lay down the pretense of revolutionary and intellectual leadership," humbly organize themselves as a craft union, and affiliate with organized labor. Even if their union's articles eschewed revolutionary rhetoric, such practical affiliation "would be a step of some potential significance." Eastman claimed that Barbusse's organization deliberately ignored the class struggle in an attempt to include the widest possible spectrum of intellectuals. But the class struggle could not be evaded; Clarté "will either split in two at the first active effort it makes, or making no active effort will expire with a long sigh like any pious and impractical intention."[393]
A year later Eastman announced that Clarté "has revised its principles and purged its ranks of reformers and amateur socialists. It has accepted the principle of the class struggle in its full meaning," thereby recognizing "somewhat tardily, as literary intellectuals always do--the practical science which alone can really give light to our steps." Eastman quoted the revised Clarté manifesto in full: endorsing class war, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the "purge" of all waverers, Clarté pronounced that it would offer the International Communist party "a contribution of a kind more especially intellectual. Powerless in itself to precipitate the historic evolution, this intellectual action, to which the Russian Revolutionaries devoted the utmost care, has proven itself day by day to be one of the essential factors of success." Clarté would help create a "prolet-culture" which the Communist party "has not the leisure to attempt."[394]
Eastman approved of this new orientation and indicated that The Liberator would pursue a somewhat similar path.
During the war, when all the other Left Wing papers were suppressed, and we managed to replace the MASSES with the LIBERATOR, we felt that our duty was propaganda, and for a time we slipped almost into the position of an "organ" of the movement. But with the reappearence of weekly papers issued by those actually on the job, our function has become more and more differentiated, and we have gradually decided upon a course similar to that now chosen by the "Clarté" group in France. To me the term "prolet-cult"' is so dull, busy, self-conscious, ugly and uninspiring a name for any creative occupation, that I can not bring myself to employ it. I hope it is not a sample of the poetry it proposed to evoke. But it is perhaps a fair practical designation for the task we are engaged upon.[395]
Yet Eastman criticized some phrases in the new manifesto. He denied that Clarté members were more intellectual than Communist party leaders and activists; in fact, the latter had displayed a far more acute understanding of theoretical issues and "the first principles of the revolution." Clarté members had lacked "intellectuality" above all; their emotion and purpose had been revolutionary, but as their revised manifesto clearly indicated, "their minds were weak.... Would not any judicious person looking for authentic and important information on any of the problems of the revolution--theoretic or practical--go rather to the party publications" than Clarté or The Liberator? The literary left contributed neither theoretical precision nor practical information, but rather the poetry of life.[396]
We are distinguished, we literary and artistic people, by our ability to realize--to feel and discuss the qualities of things. We experience vividly the existing facts, and the revolutionary ideal, and the bitterly wonderful long days of the struggle that lies between these two. All the way along we are dealing as experts in experience. Experience is our trade. We receive it vividly and convey it vividly to others. And this faculty of vivid living--besides the ultimate and absolute value that it has in itself--contributes something indispensable to the practical movement. It contributes something that we may call inspiration. It keeps up a certain warm faith and laughing resolution in those who might weary of learning and laboring in the mere practical terms of the task. It is inspiration that one finds in the works of Barbuse, of Gorki, of Robert Minor--a sense of the companionable zest of the adventure, of the drama, the romance, and the utter reality of the life that is throbbing through time in this mighty current of change. It is warmth rather than light that these men bring to the revolution.[397]
Barbuse, Gorki, and Minor had all attained great authority by spreading revolutionary feeling, and then had inadvertently betrayed the workers by commiting "an intelligent blunder" that would disgrace "the merest novice" member of a Communist local. All had denied the decisive nature of the class struggle, and had instead promulgated misty ideals. By admitting bourgeois reformists and basing its appeal on universal humanitarian values rather than the class struggle, Clarté had done "all that a group of artists and writers possibly could do, to obscure the line of battle and weaken the revolutionary perceptions of the workers."[398] Treading delicately on the line between diametrically opposing viewpoints, Eastman opposed an autonomous organization of the revolutionary intelligentsia, whose total independence he viewed as dangerous, even as he repudiated overt party control over writers and artists.
These celebrated errors... bear heavily upon the question now at issue. Is it wise for these people whose service to the revolution is inspiration--the poets, artists, humorists, musicians, reporters, story-tellers, and discursive philosophers--to form a distinct and autonomous organization of their own? To me it seems unwise. These particular people, I should say, are more in need of guidance and careful watching by the practical and theoretical workers of the movement than the members of any other trade. There is so strong an admixture of play in their work--that is the reason. Their work has to be playful in order to be creative. It has to be very free and irresponsible. It cannot, I think, submit to the official control of a party. And for that very reason the task of making it circumspect enough never to injure practically, while it is aiding poetically, the work of the party, is a very delicate one. It is one which can best be accomplished, in my opinion, if the party is the only organization, the only corporate source of intellectual guidance.
We have not only to cultivate the poetry, but keep the poetry true to the science of the revolution--to give life and laughter and passion and adventures in speculation, without ever clouding or ignoring any point that is vital in the theory and practice of communism. That is a task wich the organizers of "Clarté" seem not yet to have clearly defined. And it is a task which to me at least, so far as my judgment is formed, seems to make their organization as unhelpful, as their individual works are helpful beyond price to the revolution.[399]
Eastman, therefore, distinquished between serving the revolution through poetry, broadly conceived, and through practical advice and scientific understanding. However, he added that "the distinction is not often absolute even in a given piece of work, to say nothing of the whole work of an individual. Poets and artists, like the members of any other trade, can be at the same time practical workers," running for office, mounting the soapbox, or writing pamphlets. "It is only insofar as they distinguish themselves from the regular propagandists that I maintain these people must use poetic, or some similar word, instead of intellectual, to describe what they are."[400] The poetic imagination, however, vividly realized unique sensations and experiences at the expense of general, scientific truth. Writers "have rather a pale interest in general truth. Their interest is in particular experiences. The apprehension of a general truth is a particular experience, and as such they usually judge it. If it does not make something of a poetic 'go' among their emotions, they reject it offhand--the idea of general verification being foreign to the whole aim and tenor of their lives."[401]
Van Wyck Brooks contested Eastman's views on the role of the revolutionary intelligentsia--both on the contributions they offered and the dangers that they posed. Creative writers, he said, denied that their creative intelligence threatened the revolutionary movement, and felt no need of guidance from anybody. Indeed, artists and poets undergirded any political movement; "in the very act of distinguishing themselves from Lenin," writers such as Gorky validly claimed revolutionary "intellectual leadership." Gorki's "little error about the two varieties of socialism" distracted little from his genuine contribution to the Russian ethos, and hence the revolution.[402]
Brooks complained that Eastman reduced art to a mere handmaiden who "delights in trimming the beard and warming the slippers of a grim strenuous giant whose name is Science and whose business is Revolution." Brooks countered that literature not only helped achieve purposes, but also shaped our personalities, and thus indicated the purposes we should pursue. The Russian Revolution had partly succeeded because of the qualities inherent in "the Russian people, in their feelings and desires," shared, evoked, intensified, and cultivated by a long line of illustrious poets and novelists. Ideals and values preceded practical efforts towards their attainment, and trumped "the statesmen, the economists, and the scientists. If Pushkin had never existed... Lenin would never have existed either."[403]
Eastman replied that whether or not creative writers felt the need for supervision and careful guidance by the party cadre, "I am sure that every practical and theoretical worker in the movement feels it for them." When Gorki opposed the Bolsheviks during the revolutionary crisis he "threw the whole weight of the revolutionary literary tradition in Russia against the revolution." This was not only "a tragedy in Gorki's life and the life of Russia" but an error of "a typical kind," which artists and intellectuals could avoid only by recognizing "the sovereignity of that 'grim, strenuous giant whose name is Science and whose business is Revolution.'" Eastman conceded Brooks's point that creative artists helped precipitate as well as inspire the revolution; "to that degree I must ascribe leadership to the poets and prophets of art." However, "this is leadership of the will and not of intellect," and unlike "both propaganda and scientific theory," was inspirational rather than educational.[404]
Agreeing with Brooks that the entire ethos and mentality of the Russian people underlay their Revolution, Eastman insisted that creative artists expressed rather than created that ethos. "From the standpoint of practical importance in arousing a revolutionary will among the Russian people, literature has been only a tiny thing compared with conversation," he said. "Literature is indeed only a lingering crest or high-point in that mightier process. Even the works of Pushkin are but the topmost sun-perfected fruit upon the tree of Russian conversation. Their perfection is what is unusual--not their nature and effect. It is true that if the stream of feelings and ideas which Pushkin precipitated in crystals of immortal perfection had not existed, Lenin would not have existed either. But it is not true that any such immortal perfections were essential to Lenin's existence."[405] Brooks therefore exaggerated the strictly revolutionary importance of the Russian literary tradition.
Yet Eastman insisted that Brooks had unintentionally undervalued literature and art by stressing (and exaggerating) their practical value. Poetry was an essential of life which required no practical justification. In the banal high school debates over the relative impact of politicians and writers
we lacked the courage to say that poets are greater than statesmen whether they had any effect on history or not. Poetry is life itself lived most utterly, and its intrinsic and absolute value is what we really feel. But because we are incurably and stupidly moral, we think we have to bolster up and support this feeling by lying to ourselves in a mystical way about its practical importance.... Oh, how foolish it is to try to justify poetry and art on the ground of their service to the revolution! They are but life realizing itself utterly, and only by appeal to the value of life's realization can the revolution be justified. Be a little more pagan, Comrade Brooks, and a little more recklessly proud of your trade. It has a value that no "movement" can justify, no theory dim, no regime and no practical mandate ever create or destroy. It belongs with and replenishes the source of all values--the living of life.
And if in addition it can sometimes in great hands inspire the workers in a practical movement towards a richer and more universal life for all--keep warm their faith, and laughing this resolution--and awaken, if you will, their desire for the goal--is that not enough glory to your trade?[406]
Eastman here adroitly reconciled revolutionary commitment with artistic freedom. As in his days as editor of The Masses, he insisted that creative writers must fully express themselves and life as long as they did not obstruct the Revolution. Literature and art should address universal themes of love and death, nature and civilization, growing up and growing old. In so doing, they served Life and therefore the Revolution and the Communist party. Party leaders and activists must oversee and guide their writers. Yet Eastman did not advocate formal Party censorship of creative art; in the last analysis, poets must censor themselves, or heed the criticism of other writers and of the genuine revolutionary leaders, the Party activists and theoreticians. Eastman opposed a separate organization of the revolutionary intelligentsia because he feared its wayward and autonomous power; such an organization, however, could also facilitate direct Party control. As the 1920s and 1930s progressed, Eastman found himself less and less welcome or at home in a movement that regimented writers and demanded that they express every petty twist of the Party line. Eastman's trajectory in the next decades largely encapsulates the impossibility of combining a free and creative play of the mind with revolutionary purity and party orthodoxy--divergent goals which, in 1921, he hoped were compatible.[407]
The Actors' strike of 1919, like the death of John Reed and the Rolland and Barbusse manifestos, evoked important reflections from Eastman on the relations between art and revolution. Eastman's discussion of the strike unified many of his perennial themes: the economic nature of working-class freedom; the symbiosis of proletarian revolution and free artistic creativity; the hardening of class lines and the consequent necessity for individual choice in times of bitter class conflict; and the possibility that some idealistic intellectuals--including some whose material interests lay with the capitalists--may side with the workers. Eastman regarded the Actors' strike as both illuminating the processes at work in the Soviet Union and as foreshadowing the transformation of American life during the Revolution. "The Actors' Strike was not the social revolution, but it was a very complete picture of it," Eastman proclaimed; it was Bolshevism on a small scale.
Eastman rejoiced that the actors stopped paying tribute to the parasites (the capitalists who owned the theatres). After walking out, the actors produced drama for their own and humanity's benefit, hired their own managers, kept all profits, and rediscovered "that friendly and joyful, free creative exuberance that has not been seen on the stage since the age of Pericles." Eastman proclaimed that all the workers of world would "some coming day" seize the means of production, appropriate their entire product, and transform life, "for they have the same power to be joyful." However, he acknowledged that the actors, like most American workers, were reformists rather than revolutionaries, and did not recognize the full significance of their actions. "They thought they were fighting against the immorality and injustice of the men who own them, instead of against the immorality and injustice of being owned," he said. "They thought they were against the managers because they are bad" rather than "because they are managers." Although the actors believed that their action was only for higher wages, they would find that appropriating the means of production was "perfectly inevitable" and "the only possible outcome of the struggle."[408]
For Eastman, the actors' strike illuminated the general facts underlying class war. In any community, some individuals had an ambiguous class position: some people who appropriated unearned increment also worked for wages or a salary, while some workers owned a bit of stock. In other words, some capitalists worked, and some workers extracted surplus value from other workers. In the theatre business, some actors were also producers, or owned part of a theatrical company, while some producers and owners had risen from the ranks of the actors and still performed creative labor. However, once the strike began, everyone was confronted with a stark choice: whether to support the workers or the capitalists. "When conditions are unbearable and the fight begins, then the world automatically divides itself into these two classes," Eastman said. "And every man and every woman has to take his stand on one side or the other, whether he wants to or not."[409] The courts, of course, sided with the owners, as they always did during times of acute class conflict. The actors, initially as ignorant as any other workers, were at first amazed by the sweeping injunction against them, but soon joyfully ignored it.
Although the government predictably backed the capitalists against the workers, not all individuals lined up on the side that their class interests dictated. The capitalists, imitating their breathren who confronted industrial strikes, formed an organization of "loyal" employees--i.e. actors who supported their own exploiters. Capitalists often formed such organizations during strikes because "the bosses themselves are so few in number that if the public could once clearly see them all alone, the monstrous injustice of their owning the earth would overwhelm everybody." Through "loyal employees" organizations, the bosses fostered the illusion that majority of workers were on their side. This was partly a public relations gimmick, but it also assuaged their own guilty consciences and bolstered their self-image as benefactors who provided jobs for their workers. And indeed, many workers fell for these blandishments. "There are always a certain number of workmen who are ready to be so organized--even at their own expense," Eastman lamented. "They act from a kind of disinterested ideal.... It is a trait in human nature that makes people willing to sacrifice the real things of life, including their own personal independence, in order to feel that they 'belong' to the wealthy classes. They would rather belong to them in the way that Fido belongs to his master than not belong at all."[410]
If many workers acted in the interests of their masters, the Actors' Strike also corrorborated Eastman's thesis that some capitalists could side with the workers. "It is a hard philosophy which tells us that people line up inevitably in classes on the basis of their economic interest," he said. "It is just as hard as the truth. But fortunately for our feelings, and for our sense of the picturesque, there are occasional individual exceptions to this truth, and they warm us up and keep us excited, and make us feel that if we could once get rid of economic classes altogether (as we did at the Lexington Theatre) human nature would be very lovable and interesting." Francis Wilson, one such exception, was endowed with "a vein of abstract and impersonal idealism.... Having arrived and succeeded for himself, he wanted to do something for the good of art and humanity." Ethel Barrymore was another for whom "an impersonal ideal... furnished the motive to action." Eastman quoted others who had worked their way up, but whose hearts remained with those on the bottom.[411] He perceived the Actors' Strike--which occurred in a year of massive social upheavals and major strikes in the mass production industries--as a thrilling premonition of a new world:
The "labor unrest" is the one great, beautiful and hopeful thing in these sad and terrible times. It shows that the spirit of life still inhabits this bloody globe, and that out of all the devastation and death which our insane commercial civilization has brought upon itself, a new, and free and democratic society may yet be born. The strike of the actors has added enthusiasm and courage and a new flavor of the picturesque to the revolutionary struggle of labor, the "movement of the world toward industrial control." It could do nothing better than that.[412]
One actor told a mass meeting that European actors had long organized into unions; Eastman said that "he needed to add, in order to complete the pageant and enforce the moral of the whole drama," that actors (and other workers) were now free in Russia.[413] This omission signalled the large gap between Eastman's understanding of the strike and that of its participants.
Although the Actors' Strike was conservative in motive and ideology, Eastman nevertheless believed that proletarian revolution was possible in the United States. But by early 1922 the revolutionary tide had long since subsided, repressed mostly by ruling-class terrorism and violence, but deflated also by working-class conservatism (itself largely stemming from capitalist terrorism). As he prepared to leave The Liberator and visit the Soviet Union, Eastman, in a mood of contemplative melancholy, compared the attitude of two creative artists: reformist Socialist H.G. Wells, and the Russian actor Chaliapin. The two men epitomized two disparate worlds which Eastman had simultaneously inhabited at one point in his life, and which he hoped he could again eventually reconcile. Although Wells was a conservative Socialist of the type Eastman had excoriated since 1919, Eastman received him cordially at the offices of The Liberator. "There is in quiet times a certain fraternity among all those who have abandoned the mere rationalizing of primitive instinct and traditional belief and custom, and are learning the art of critical and creative thought," Eastman said. "There is a fraternity of those who know how to doubt, and like to disturb the established inanities. And to this fraternity of disturbance at least we all belonged." Eastman's renewed tolerance of Wells reflected his conviction that 1922 was a "quiet time" in the United States. However, the Revolution was alive and well in the Soviet Union, Eastman believed; and Chaliapin, a famous Russian actor who had returned home even though he could earn riches abroad, epitomized the promise of the new regime. Chaliapin identified with the masses and said that the government could appropriate his money for the common good if it took everyone else's: "I am no exception. I am one of the people." Eastman said that "he remained true, at enormous personal cost, to the Russian people and to the revolutionary ideal." Asked about Soviet policy towards the arts, Chaliapin replied that "You know it is hard for art to flourish where people are hungry for bread.... But the Bolshevik government gives infinitely more money to art than any other Russian government ever did. It gives us money, and it leaves us free. We are free to do anything we want to--anything we want to do!"[414]
By the time this article appeared, Eastman had resigned from The Liberator to visit the Soviet Union and "see," he said only half jestingly, "if what I had been saying was true." The Liberator was afflicted with editorial, financial, and ideological problems. It was beset by factionalism; Mike Gold in particular was extolling "proletarian literature," and raising yet another rebellion against Eastman's@ purportedly lax editorial policy. Extreme financial difficulties also afflicted the publication. Eastman had long detested his role as chief fundraiser among the rich (although it was the main source of his power); and The Liberator found that it could no longer raise money from the rich or depend on advertising revenue. Furthermore, the bookkeeper abscounded with the magazine's financial reserve. Finally, the revolutionary tide had obviously ebbed in the United States; Eastman was so dubious about The Liberator's prospects for survival that he demanded that, in the event of its demise, the defunct journal should be given to the Workers party rather than sold commercially. (The Liberator passed under Party control in 1922, and, after folding in 1924, was combined with two other publications to form a new Party publication, Workers Monthly. Neither Eastman nor Dell contributed to the new magazine).
When Eastman sailed for the Soviet Union, however, he could not have known that his departure symbolized the end of an era, both in American society and in his own political and personal lives. In the remaining two and a half years of The Liberator's life, he contributed few articles. By the time of his departure, however, he had some inkling of the big change, and the corresponding necessity for a new Liberator. The magazine, he said, should remain
a little natural group or parish of people who happen to have a like interest in truth and the expression of feeling.... I feel sometimes as though the whole modern world, capitalism and communism and all, were rushing toward some enormous nervous efficient machine-made doom of the true values of life.
A very counter-revolutionary feeling![415]
He warned Claude McKay, one of the two co-editors, that he would write not major articles, but "an occasional letter of impressions as I go along."