IMPORTANT ADDITION & NOTES
The Liberator continued Eastman's previous policy of publishing non-political literature and art while rejecting material that did not "transgress the principles of socialism."[463] This stance attracted widespread criticism on two separate occasions when The Liberator refused paid advertising for books which Eastman regarded as counter-revolutionary. The first incident concerned Bolshevism, by John Spargo, who, resigning from the SP after American entry into the war, had vituperatively denounced his former comrades as pro-Kaisar traitors. In 1919 The Liberator carried a short apology for running an ad for Spargo's book, stating that the money for the ad had been returned and promising that the ad would not run again. Fremont Older, a famous liberal editor, criticized such rejection of ads as illiberal. Eastman replied that "the whole occidental world is swilled full and flooded over with malicious and criminal lies about the Bolshevik government. These lies are the principle weapons with which the great capitalists will destroy that government if they can. Opposing this daily and hourly flood of corrupt profitable propaganda" were a few idealistic publications "standing up alone like quivering reeds at the outlet of a sewer." The Liberator was one such magazine, struggling along without the benefits of capitalist advertising revenue and sustained only by its uncompromising stand for truth.
Along comes a publishing house with an offer of good money if we will accept a certain kind of advertising... of exactly those capitalistic lies about the Bolshevik government which we are so bitterly struggling to stand up against. We refuse to be bought. We refuse to be persuaded into doing something whose practical effect will be the direct opposite of that to which our efforts are dedicated. We refuse to be persuaded by money. Fremont Older will understand that. But with exactly the same energy we refuse to be persuaded by religion, by an absolute ideal, whether it be the ideal of free speech or any other. Our loyalty is not to abstract ideals, but to concrete purposes.[464]
Eastman addressed this issue again when Upton Sinclair protested The Liberator's censoring of a publisher's praise for Karl Kautsky's book on the dictatorship of the proletariat. Eastman said that if Sinclair "thinks that we have built up this magazine through eight long years of labor for the publication and sincere discussion of the truth, only in order to sell space in it for the publication of what we consider to be lies, he is far from understanding our character. And if his idea of 'freedom' involves the indiscriminate public sale of the opportunity to propigate false statements, I would suggest that he can find a close parallel to it in a house of prostitution--or for that matter in the daily press." While Eastman was surely justified in refusing advertising for books which subverted the very purposes of his non-profit periodical, he also said that he would suppress capitalist papers if he could. Any ruling class, he declared, would suppress opposition papers which seriously threatened the regime, as the United States had during and after World War I.[465]
[1] Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence (Chicago, 1964, first published in 1959), p. 317; Allen Churchill, The Improper Bohemians (New York, 1959), p. 89. May claims that "its political message was confusing and not very important; its tone was unforgettable." Churchill likewise says that The Masses advocated "a mental rather than a shooting revolution." The idea that Max Eastman was a frivolous bohemian who was not serious about revolutionary politics was first broached by his conservative Socialist opponents in 1914 and later taken up by the Communists after 1924. Albert Parry (Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America, 1933) echoed this criticism. The Communists used this charge to discredit Eastman, who was then a firm supporter of Leon Trotsky. Eastman indignantly rebutted the accusation in two articles in The Modern Monthly: "Bunk about Bohemia" (May 1934) and "New Masses for Old" (June 1934).
[2] Churchill, Improper Bohemians, p. 84, attributes this to Bobby Edwards.
[3] Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia (Chapel Hill, 1982), epitomizes this attitude. "Lacking the kind of ideological tradition that shaped the thought of European radicals," she says, "these Villagers selected the elements of their creed with reference neither to intellectual coherent nor to political purity." Most of The Masses group was characterized by a "bizarre amalgam of belief" that led to "a dearth of ideological coherence.... The prewar rebellion was more a matter of temperament than of theory, and it fostered more conviviality than commitment among its exponents." (p. 4).
Fishbein's methodology, however, is seriously flawed. Her book consists of separate chapters on discrete ideas championed by The Masses: religion, sex, feminism, class, race, etc.). Each chapter also discusses the views of many disparate individuals (some of whom had no connection with The Masses.) Any philosophy can be made to seem an eclectic hodge-podge if it is broken down into opinions on discrete issues, with no effort to discover unifying themes. By lumping the views of all these individuals together by topic, rather than by analyzing the complete world-view of any one person, Fishbein inevitably fails to uncover any unified, coherent philosophy. She neglects to ask how Eastman himself perceived the relationships between his ideas, and between his ideas and those of other contributors.
For a more recent exemplar of this approach see Brian Lloyd, Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890-1922 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore), 1997.
[4] Fishbein, Humphrey, May, Churchill, Parry, Zurier, and Lasch focus on The Masses and almost ignore The Liberator. For other examples see Thomas A. Maik, The Masses Magazine (1911-1917): Odyssey of an Era (Garland, New York), 1994 and William O'Neill's anthology, Echoes of Revolt: The Masses, 1911-1917 (Quadrangle, Chicago), 1966. See also book on women writers of TM; but book on cartoonists of TM and TL, also Writers on the Left.
[5] Robert Humphrey, Children of Fantasy (New York, 1978), pp. 10-11, 253. Humphrey analyzes the lives of five leading bohemian radicals, including three major figures from The Masses, to document his contention that "social narcissism" and immature "rebellion for its own sake" motivated them. "They kept their adolescent fantasies in good health beyond the usual life expectancy.... Having learned in childhood that fantasies could protect them against loneliness and rejection, they were unwilling to relinquish or discipline their dreams." According to Humphrey, any attempt to forge a counter-community outside traditional institutions and cultural patterns is a form of self-destructiveness rooted in the pathologies of adolescent development.
The methodology Humphrey uses to support these assertions is flawed on all counts. It is virtually impossible even to gauge the effects of any particular family upbringing on any individual. People respond differently to similar experiences from the time they are infants, while parents seldom treat their different children exactly alike. While acknowledging that even the well-considered beliefs of moral and rational people stem not only from moral commitment and calm reflection but from psychological needs, we must admit that both the disparities in individual personality and nuances of individual upbringings make any correlation between childhood experience and adult political stance extremely problematic.
Humphrey neither shows that the childhoods of his subjects differed from those of people who were not radicals, nor that their childhoods were actually similar to those of other radicals. Many people experienced severe childhood traumas without journeying to Greenwich Village or becoming political radicals, while many radicals were raised by enlightened and loving parents. To the very limited extent that any correlation between adolescent experience and political opinion can be documented, it is very likely the exact opposite of that posited by Humphrey. Children who are raised with love and respect often find the cruelties and irrationalities of the world intolerable, and seek changes that will universalize and apply the values they were taught and experienced in childhood. Political and cultural rebellion, far from being a reaction against parental authority or the nurturing of adolescent fantasies, may be a sane and rational way to preserve one's personality and values in a hostile world, as well as to improve that world.
[6] Humphrey, Children, p.34; Fishbein, Rebels, p.18. According to Humphrey, Eastman and his comrades were "mainly interested in improving the quality of peoples' private lives." Fishbein complains that their belief that every individual should be free to live and grow in his or her own chosen way is "an essentially bourgeois ideal."
[7] Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America (New York, 1967, first published 1965), pp. 192, xiv, ix--xviii. Lasch's choice of subjects, however, is curious; he includes key figures who were neither intellectuals nor radicals, and barely mentions anyone from The Masses--or, for that matter, from Seven Arts, The Dial, or The Little Review.
[8] Lasch, New Radicalism, pp. 207, 162-3, 310, 298, 316-319, xvi. Many of the characteristics he ascribes to the new radicals seem to apply to Eastman and his group. They were pragmatists; their self-consciousness as a group separated them from mainstream society; they criticized patriarchy and capitalism; and they identified with other outcasts. Other qualities which Lasch ascribes to the new radicals approximate those ascribed to The Masses group by their critics: indulgence in "expressive politics" rather than "interest politics" and a "confusion of politics and culture." None of these criticisms even remotely apply to Max Eastman or the considerable group of radicals who gathered around The Masses and The Liberator.
[9] T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880--1920 (New York, 1981), pp. xi-xx, 1-58.
[10] Eastman discusses this in Enjoyment of Living (New York, 1948), pp. 534-547. This account differs somewhat from that in "In Explanation", The Masses, December 1915, p. 15, when he simply claimed that The Masses Review, a recently-added theoretical section, had been discontinued.
[11] Eastman describes this incident in Enjoyment of Living, 394-396; Art Young and Floyd Dell also recount it in their memoirs.
[12] Masthead statement, circumstances of its composition in EL, 420-21; see also TM; cf Mother Earth.
[13] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, December 1912, p. 5; Eastman, "Niggers and Night Riders," (The Masses, February 1913). Incidentally, Max anticipated the Supreme Court's reasoning when it declared segregated schools unconstitutional in 1954 when he stated that "not one child in ten million can achieve his full stature against the inhibitions of a humiliated or contemptuous environment. The possibilities of the black man have never been tested."
[14] Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York, 1977), pp. 13-14, 23-29. Aaron sometimes implies that there was a natural affinity between political radicals, bohemians, and literary insurgents in the years before World War I, only to later categorize the literary insurgents into four groups of which two were either apolitical or conservative. Aaron has a fifth category of "unclassifiables."
[15] Nick Salvatore, Eugene Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana, 1982), excellently treats this theme in Debs's life. Gary Gerstle, Working-Class America: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (New York, 1991)) has an excellent analysis of the strengths and pitfalls of this approach.
[16] The assertion of John Patrick Diggins (The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York, 1992), p. 104) that "Eastman knew socialism had no chance in America unless it could be rendered compatible with some cherished native conceits" is directly contrary to the facts. Diggins conflates the two Masses trials, puts them in the wrong year, and omits both the context of and a significant part of the quotation he uses as evidence. Eastman was on trial for serious charges that could have led to a 20 year prison sentence; he had ample motive to persuade his upper-class jury that socialism was fully compatible with traditional American notions. In general, Eastman was more moderate in his public pronouncements than in the pages of The Masses. Diggins's account is not only unanalytical, but grossly deficient in factual accuracy.
[17] "Correspondence," The Masses, October 1917, p. 16.
[18] The term and concept of "movement culture" was coined by Lawrence Goodwyn and appears in his The Populist Moment: A Short History of Agrarian Radicalism in America (New York, 1978). I am using it in a more countercultural sense than Goodwyn, who confined it mainly to an alternative press, cooperatives, and similarly explicitly political institutions. The concept is brilliantly applied in Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875-1900 (Urbana, 1989).
[19] Humphrey, Children, p.10, claims that there is "an inherent conflict between artistic freedom and ideological politics." Fishbein, Rebels, passim and Brian Lloyd, Left Out.
[20] Eastman, "Towards Liberty," The Masses, September 1916, p. 30; Eastman, "Niggers and Nightriders," TM, February 1913.
[21] Eastman, "Towards Liberty," TM, October 1916.
[22] "Towards Liberty," The Masses, October 1916, pp. 23-25.
[23] "Towards Liberty," The Masses, October 1916, p. 25; Eastman, "Is Woman Suffrage Important," a pamphlet of the Men's League for Woman Suffrage, 1910, reprinted in Blanche Wiesen Cook, Toward the Great Change: Crystal and Max Eastman on Feminism, Antimilitarism, and Revolution (New York, 1976), pp. 58-72. The quote is on page 69.
[24] Eastman, "Towards Liberty," TM, October 1916.
[25] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution: Contagion," TM, February 1913.
[26] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution,", The Masses, April 1913, p. 5; Eastman, "What Is Patriotism and What Shall We Do With It? A Speech Given November 1915," in Eastman, Understanding Germany, -----; Eastman, "Ex Cathedra," TM, May 1913.
[27] Editorial Reply to a letter, "From a Doubter," The Masses, June 1915, p. 22. I have corrected an obvious typographical error. This reply is unsigned, but clearly expresses Eastman's view.
[28] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, pp. 198-199; Eastman, Colors of Life, p. 97.
[29] Eastman, "Who's Afraid? Confession of a Suffrage Orator," (The Masses, November 1915): 7-9. This seems logical. Unfortunately, insecure people often must believe that their own chosen path is not only the correct one, but the only possible one. Other people who construct their lives upon different values and preferences threaten those insecure people, who demand conformity. For reasons discussed later, workers, more often that the relatively privileged, demand cultural conformity even at the point of a bayonet. This presents revolutionaries who demand both cultural and economic change with an almost insoluble dilemma.
[30] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, pp. 64, 20, 168.
[31] "Towards Liberty," The Masses, September 1916, p. 28.
[32] Eastman, Colors of Life, pp. 13-14.
[33] Eastman, "Confessions of a Suffrage Orator," TM, October-November 1915,
[34] Eastman, referring to Omaha, Nebraska, "Examples of 'Americanism,'", (The Liberator, February 1920); Charles W. Wood, "Should Art Young Be Shot at Sunrise," (The Masses, November/December 1917); JR, "With Eugene Debs on the Fourth," The Liberator, September 1918.
[35] Eastman, "The Great American Scapegoat," (The New Review, August 1914): 465-70; Eastman, "Two Book Reviews," (The New Review, November 1914): 649-653; EG quote on those with nothing to lose but chains cling all the more tenaciously to them.
[36] The policy statement was first printed in January 1913. Eastman describes its composition in Enjoyment of Living, pp. 420-421.
[37] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, December 1912, p. 5; "War Psychology and International Socialism, The Masses, August 1916, p. 27; Eastman, Colors of Life (New York, 1918), pp. 97-98. Eastman's views on the relationship of poetry to science are best expressed in Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry (New York, 1913).
[38] Eastman, Love and Revolution (New York, 1964), p. 15; "Weak Spots," The Masses, September 1914, p. 18. This latter is unsigned but presumably by Eastman because it closely correlates with the above passage from his autobiography.
[39] For Eastman's praise of skeptics and of science, see Eastman, Colors of Life (New York, 1918) pp. 97-101; for Nietzsche, see Eastman, Understanding Germany (New York, 1916), pp. 60-68; for the quotation, "The First Few Books," The Masses, April, 1915, p. 22.
[40] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, January 1913, p. 5; Eastman, "Riot and Reform at Sing Sing," TM, June 1915.
[41] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, September 1914, p. 5; "Revolutionary Birth Control," The Masses, July 1915, p. 22.
[42] In addition to the Eastman critics noted above, see Nathan G. Hale, Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917 (Oxford, 1971), 400-404, 432. In his second volume, Hale notes that Eastman soon became disillusioned with psychoanalysis because of its conservative effects on its subjects. Hale, The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917-1985 (Oxford, 1995), 68-69. Floyd Dell was particularly influenced by Freud, and repudiated free love in favor or monagomous marriage and babies.
[43] Eastman, "The Churchly Rockefeller," TM, June 1916; Eastman, "Margins," TM, January 1916.
[44] Eastman, Understanding Germany, p. 121; Eastman, "Towards Liberty: The Method of Progress," The Masses, September 1916, p. 28.
[45] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution: Not Heretical," TM, December 1914. Other Marxists, of course, demanded that the working class help achieve "bourgeois tasks" when the capitalists proved unwilling or unable to achieve them.
[46] The vast literature on the SPD's policy includes Peter Nettl, "The German Social Democratic Party 1890-1914 as a Political Model," Past and Present, April 1965, pp. 64-95; Geoff Eley, "Combining Two Histories: The SPD and the German Working Class Before 1914," Radical History Review, 1984, pp. 13-44; Gunther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany.
[47] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, March 1914, p. 5; "Knowledge and Revolution, The Masses, April 1917, p. 6.
[48] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, April 1917, p. 6.
[49] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, April 1913. Socialism, Eastman declared, was "founded upon a truth as to the real nature of humanity and human history." Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, December 1914.
[50] Eastman, "Utopian Reality," TM, December 1916.
[51] ibid.
[52] Eastman, "Exposure of a Negative" and "Class Struggle and Class Hate," in "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, February 1913; Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, November 1913. Eastman did admit that passions flared in the heat of actual battle; this was also natural. He quoted Mother Jones, cursing a prison warden, as epitomizing his own attitude: "Poor boy, God damn your soul, ye can't help it!"
[53] Eastman, "Rubert Hughes and the Constabulary," TM, February 1915.
[54] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, December 1912.
[55] Eastman, "Revolutionary Progress," TM, January 1913.
[56] Eastman, "Ditto," TM, February 1913; Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, June 1913.
[57] Eastman, "A Key Word," TM, August 1913.
[58] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, December 1912; Eastman, "Rsume," TM, February 1914.
[59] Eastman, "Reform Strikes," TM, April 1913.
[60] Eastman, "Object Lesson," TM, September 1913; Eastman, "Philanthro-Efficiency Again" and "Plain Efficiency," TM, February 1914.
[61] Eastman, "Revolutionary Progress," TM, January 1913.
[62] ibid.
[63] ibid.
[64] ibid.
[65] Eastman, "Investigating Vice," TM, May 1913; Eastman, "The First Victories," TM, September 1914; Eastman, untitled article beneath cartoon about the garment workers' uprising, TM, March 1913; Eastman, "The Mad Hatters," TM, February 1914. Unfortunately, repressive court decisions made labor more conservative rather than radicalizing it; see Forbath, American Labor and the Law-----.
[66] Eastman, "Understanding Germany," in Understanding Germany full title, pub data and pages.
[67] The best account of factional struggles within the Socialist party is Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement: 1897-1912 (New York, 1952).
[68] The best statement of this oft-repeated sentiment is Eugene Debs, "Danger Ahead," International Socialist Review, January 1911, p. 413.
[69] Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger epitomized this approach; see hillquit book and bios of both men.
[70] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, December 1912, p. 6.
[71] Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," reprinted in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1958), pp. 77-128. Two books which use this model for explaining the failure of American socialism are Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton, 1967) and Sally M. Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of American Socialism (Westport, Connecticut, 1973).
[72] Michael Harrington did much to popularize this notion in his many works, especially Socialism (New York, 1977) pp. 305-331.
[73] This controversy eerily foreshadows those between Randolph Bourne and John Dewey, and between Eastman and Upton Sinclair, over American entry into World War I. It also highlights a central radical dilemma: to what extent should radicals participate in mainstream politics, in pursuit of important short-term goals? Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 547. Lasch's analysis of the attractions of power from intellectuals may also be of relevance here, although ultimately, of course, Eastman did not succumb.
[74] "Revolutionary Progress," The Masses, June 1917, p. 22.
[75] "Concerning War," The Masses, January 1914, pp. 18-19.
[76] "Concerning War," The Masses, January 1914, pp. 18-19.
[77] "Revolutionary Progress: Kinds of War," The Masses, January 1917, p. 21.
[78] Eastman, "In Defense of Criminals," Speech reprinted in TM, August 1914.
[79] The New York Call, May 29, 1912.
[80] "Knowledge and Revolution: Abrakadabra," The Masses, August 1913, p. 6.
[81] Dee Garrison, Mary Heaton Vorse: The Life of an American Feminist (Philadelphia, 1989), p. 53. An excellent account of the Lawrence strike is found in Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All (New York, 1969), pp. 227-263. See also the Final Report, Commission on Industrial Relations, especially its summary and conclusions, pp. -----.
[82] "A New Crime," The Masses, January 1914, p. 22.
[83] One account of many is in Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (New York, 1934), pp. 179-257. The McNamaras were conservative craft unionists and members of the Catholic and anti-Socialist militia of Christ.
[84] "Dynamite Against Steel," The Masses, February 1913, p. 3.
[85] "Dynamite Against Steel," The Masses, February 1913, p. 3.
[86] "Class War in Colorado," The Masses, June 1914, p. 8.
[87] Eastman, "Kinds of War," TM, January 1917. Remarkably, this article was published as the United States was preparing for possible war (largely on grounds of national honor) against both Mexico and Germany.
[88] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, August 1914, pp. 5-6; Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, June 1915; Eastman, "Kinds of War," TM, January 1917; "Anarchy While You Wait," TM, May 1915; Eastman, "From a Terrorist" and "Fatuous Feebleness," TM, February 1915. In these two articles Eastman specifically mentioned Marie Sukloff, a Russian terrorist, Bakunin, Berkman, and the McNamaras.
[89] "Knowledge and Revolution: Niggers and Nightriders," The Masses, February 1913, p. 6.
[90] Eastman, "Riot and Reform at Sing Sing," TM, June 1915.
[91] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, passim; quote from p. 152.
[92] Eastman, "The First Few Books," TM, April 1915.
[93] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, p. 4; Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, p. 420.
[94] Eastman, TM, January 1913.
[95] Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, pp. 449-452. Eastman was probably reminded of his poem by his view of the ruins of the tent colony with "the larks singing over them so incongruously in the sun." mention max's ludlow articles, nice people of trinidad, class war in colorado
[96] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, pp. 193-194, 116-120.
[97] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution: West to East," The Masses, October 1914, p. 6; Eastman, "Rebecca West," TM, February 1917. The relationship of art and social change was, of course, one of Floyd Dell's perennial themes. An unsigned notice, "An Incendiary Play" (TM, March 1916) praised Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers as accurately portraying contemporary America as well as Germany. "That the American working class is permitted to see it can only means that the powers which put Quinlan and Lawson out of the way believe that 'art' is harmless. It isn't, though." Art would help inspire a revolution that would win.
[98] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, p. 169.
[99] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, pp. 169-170.
[100] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, pp. 170-171.
[101] Eastman, Journalism versus Art (New York, 1916), pp. 7-87.
[102] "Rebecca West," The Masses, February 1917, p. 30.
[103] Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, pp. 414-416.
[104] Eastman, "Liberality Is Not Loose Thinking," TM, July 1913.
[105] Eastman, "The Woman Rebel," TM, May 1914; Eastman, "The Anarchist Almanac," TM, March 1914.
[106] Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, pp. 421, 548
[107] "The Masses versus Ward and Gow: Statement Of Max Eastman Before The Senator Thompson Legislative Committee," The Masses, September 1916, p. 5; various stories about the first Masses trial, particularly "The Story of The Trial," by Floyd Dell, and "The Speech of Max Eastman at the Masses dinner, The Liberator, June 1918; "Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial," pamphlet, reprinted in Cook, Toward the Great Change, pp. 305-339.
[108] "The Masses Versus Ward & Gow: Statement of Max Eastman Before the Senator Thompson Legislative Committee," TM, September 1916.
[109] ibid.
[110] Eastman, Journalism versus Art, pp. 11-12; Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, pp. 549-559.
[111] "Various Matters," The Masses, October 1916, p. 34; Advertisement for Eastman lecture tour, TM, August 1915; Eastman, "Editorial Policy," TM, August 1915; Eastman, "Liberality Is Not Loose Thinking," TM, July 1913.
[112] Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, p. 411; Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution: Concerning Optimism," TM, April 1915; Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution: Merry Christmas," TM, December 1914.
[113] Eastman, "Editorial Policy," TM, December 1915.
[114] "Editorial Notice," The Masses, December 1912, p.3.
[115] Eastman, Journalism versus Art, pp. 87-106; Eastman, Colors of Life, pp. 20-26.
[116] Waldo Frank, "Ed. Note," and Eastman, "Science and Free Verse," The Seven Arts (February 1917): 429-31. This exchange was elicited by James Oppenheim's attack on Eastman, "'Lazy' Verse," The Seven Arts, November 1916: 66-72.
[117] Aaron, Writers on the Left, pp. 25, 50n.
[118] Aaron, Writers on the Left, p. 50n.
[119] This is paraphrased from Granville Hicks, literary commissar of the Communist party during the thirties, whose autobiographies (When We Came Out and Part of the Truth) describe his involvement in and eventual disillusionment with Communism, proletarian literature, and any effort to politicize art.
[120] cite popular magazine of revolutionary socialism quote. Louis Untermeyer, From Another World: The Autobiography of Louis Untermeyer (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1939), 46; bio of john sloan by John Loughery, page uncertain check for Vorse who commented on acerbity of criticisms of artists. Mention accounts from Max, Floyd, etc.
When two writers threatened resignation if a controversial Stuart Davis drawing appeared in The Masses, Eastman met their objections with technical finesse by splashing it on the front cover. The "Gee, Mag" cover was an instant sensation. put date here.
[121] The best accounts of this episode are Eastman's own, in Enjoyment of Living (New York: Harper and Row, 1948), 548-559 and Rebecca Zurier's excellent Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). Zurier recounts the artists' strike on pages 52-58, but she has many illuminating and relevant comments throughout her book.
Sloan also demanded that the board vote on all submissions. Dell later said that the rebels suspected that Eastman and Dell deliberately withheld works until after the editorial meeting so that they could print them "without having to run the gauntlet of a meeting where they might have been voted down." Dell, "Memories of the Old Masses," (The American Mercury. LXVIII, April 1949): 481-487. The quote is on p. 483.
[122] Dell, "Memories of the Old Masses,"(The American Mercury, April 1949); 484; Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 554-555. Young's statement originated the epithet "ashcan school," an appelation Sloan and his cohorts hated, to describe a school of social realism in art.
[123] Charles L. Edson, "Radical Editors Fight Over Magazine Policy," The [New York] Morning Telegraph, April 8, 1916; Van Wyck Brooks, John Sloan: A Painter's Life, (New York, Dutton), 1955, 92-99.
[124] Dell, "What Does it Mean," (The Masses, April 1916).
[125] Dell, "What Does it Mean? (The Masses, April 1916). Dell may have hoped that this article would conciliate the artists and lure them back to The Masses.
[126] For a more detailed analysis, see Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses.
[127] Zurier, Art for the Masses, 153-54.
[128] Zurier, Art for the Masses, 56-7, 139, 145, 154-158.
[129] Zurier, Art for the Masses, 154-158; "An Experiment," (The Masses, May 1917). The new artistic policy was a three month experiment; however, The Masses soon had more pressing concerns, and was shortly afterwards suppressed.
[130] Dell, Homecoming, 281.
[131] The Masses: Odyssey of an Era author says this, see also The Politics of Surrealism.
[132] Zurier, Art for the Masses, 154.
[133] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, December 1912, pp. 5-6.
[134] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, December 1912, pp. 5-6.
[135] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, December 1913. Eastman discussed religion in four separate portions of his column that month: "The Church is Judas," "Jesus Christ," "Further Thought," and "Corroboration." In addition, that same issue of The Masses carried nine cartoons attacking religion for fostering exploitation and mindless respectability.
[136] Eastman, "Ex Cathedra," TM, May 1913; Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, December 1913; Eastman, "Editorial Policy," check this, was it his column, December 1915.
[137] Vida Schudder letters in TM December 1915 and February 1916. "A Ballad" appeared in TM January 1916, p. 13, signed "Williams."
[138] Eastman, TM December 1915; Eatman, reply to Vida Scudder letter, December 1915.
[139] Eastman, TM, December 1915, two articles I think. See also Eastman, "The Churchly Rockefeller," TM, June 1916.
[140] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, pp. 169-170; "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, October 1914, p. 5.
[141] "Sumner vs. Forel," TM, November 1916; "Correspondence," TM, October 1917. The censor never returned the seized issues even though a court dismissed his charges. This illustrates the kind of relatively minor (compared to total suppression, torture, and murder) repression that The Masses and other radical publications and organizations routinely suffered.
[142] Eastman, TM, January 1913 get title; Eastman, "Natural Eugenics," TM, September 1913. Although many radical women favored mothers' pensions, some socialist-feminists opposed them on the grounds that they implied that raising children was a woman's job. These radicals argued that although giving birth was obviously a biological role, the raising of children was socially defined as a female task; rather than mothers' pensions, such feminists demanded government sponsored childcare centers so that women could work outside the home. See Belle Oury, ---- SW article on this, reply to -----.
[143] Eastman, "Inez Milholland," TM, March 1917.
[144] Eastman, TM, January 1913 cite article
[145] Eastman, "Confessions of a Suffrage Orator," TM, October-November 1915. Eastman's condemnation of female fashion consciousness was motivated in party by antisuffragist arguments (advanced by women as well as men) that such a fixation on appearence proved women's unworthiness for the vote. Eastman, "Starting Right," TM, September 1913. In April 1914 Eastman declared that he had never claimed that women votes would inaugurate utopia, and the fact that they had not "seemed to prove that they are human, and that was what we were most anxious to prove." However, he strongly condemned the women votes of Colorado for failing to protest the imprisonment of Mother Jones. "An Occasion for Militancy," TM, April 1914.
[146] Eastman, "Confessions of a Suffrage Orator," TM, October-November 1915. The Masses vigorously supported suffrage right up to its final issue; even in late 1917, when Eastman was downplaying his antiwar stance in an effort to appease the Wilson administration, The Masses severely castigated Wilson for his treatment of the suffrage pickets. In its penulitimate issue it carried a drawing of the suffragist pickets' "Kaisar Wilson" banner, which evoked mob violence and savage repression by Wilson.
[147] Eastman, "The Woman Rebel," TM, May 1914; "Birth Control and Emma Goldman," unsigned, TM, May 1916; unsigned articles entitled "Birth Control" in TM April, July, and October 1916; Jessie Ashley, "Successful Law-Breaking," TM, January 1917.
[148] Eastman, "Is the Truth Obscene?" TM, March 1915; "Announcement," TM, March 1915. I say that Eastman "implicitly" urged that women publicly announce their use of birth control because in his article Eastman only urged that they publicly state their knowledge of its necessity; however, the tone of the article strongly implies that he wanted them to speak out about their actual experiences. The following month a letter by Miriam Oatman said that she would like to be one of a thousand woman publicly stating they used birth control and extolling its many benefits, in connection with the very trial which Eastman had discussed in his article. Oatman's letter appeared with others in "Progress or Comstock?" TM, April 1915.
Eastman's determination to preserve his mailing rights presaged his conduct during the war, when he tried to self-censor himself in order to keep his magazine in business. This policy, fully in accord with his pragmatic principles, did not work.
[149] Eastman, "Revolutionary Birth Control," TM, July 1915.
[150] Eastman, "Revolutionary Birth Control," TM, July 1915. This article replied to readers who objected to Eastman's extolling of birth control in his March 1915 Masses article "Is the Truth Obscene?"
[151] Eastman, "Is the Truth Obscene?" TM March 1915.
[152] Eastman, "Is the Truth Obscene?" TM, March 1915.
[153] ibid.
[154] Eastman, "Inez Milholland," TM, March 1917.
[155] ibid.
[156] Eastman, "Utopian Reality," TM, December 1916; Eastman, "Margins," TM, January 1916.
[157] "The Uninteresting War," The Masses, September 1915, p. 7.
[158] "The Religion of Patriotism,", The Masses, July 1917, pp. 8-11.
[159] "The Religion of Patriotism," The Masses, July 1917, pp. 8-11.
[160] The phrase is from Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, p. 446.
[161] "The Only Way to End War," The Masses, December 1915, p. 9. This essay, like others Eastman wrote about war, was reprinted in Understanding Germany.
[162] FD, "Louis Untermeyer," TM, June 1917; Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, p. 171; the quote is from Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, p. 418. See also Dell, Homecoming, 279-81.
[163] FD, "Homecoming," 279-281.
[164] ibid.
[165] FD, "Books that Are Interesting," Review of Grete Meisel-Hess's The Sexual Crisis, TM, April 1917.
[166] Dell, Homecoming (New York; Harper and Rinehart, 1933), 251.
[167] Dell, "Memories of the Old Masses," (The American Mercury, April 1949), 484; Dell, Homecoming, 251.
[168] Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, p. 556
[169] As Eastman would have predicted, these brilliant but impractical creative artists failed; Spawn ceased publication after three issues.
[170] Charles Edson, "Radical Editors Fight Over Magazine Policy," The [New York] Morning Telegraph, April 8, 1916; Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 548-559. Eastman entitled his chapter on this strike "Greenwich Village Revolts," showing that he never really understood the artists' point of view.
[171] Dell, Homecoming, 251.
[172] Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, passim; Floyd Dell, Homecoming, passim; Art Young, -----; bios of JR, Louise Bryant.
[173] For sensitive discussions of these issues in relation to Eastman and his cohorts, see Ellen Kay Trimberger, "Feminism, Men, and Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1900-1925, in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, edited by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (Monthly Review Press, New York), 131-152, and June Sochen, The New Woman: Feminism in Greenwich Village, 1910-1920 (Quadrangle Books, New York, 1972).
[174] Dell, Homecoming, 288. Although the theory designedly expurged guilt, Eastman and Dell were in fact tormented and ambivilent about their relationships and doubted their own capacity for love, as their autobiographies make clear.
[175] Dell, "Feminism for Men," (The Masses, July 1914).
[176] Eastman and Dell frequently asserted that the liberation of women would help men and their families. Dell claimed that feminism would liberate men from the necessity of supporting a woman; this was particularly important to Dell, Eastman, and other free spirited poets who worked for money as little as possible and reserved their real energies for unpaid creative work. Eastman claimed that liberated women would make better mothers. "Only a developed and fully constituted individual is fit to be the mother of a child," he said. "Only one who has herself made the most of the present, is fit to hold in her arms the hope of the future.... The babies of the world suffer a good deal more from silly mothers than from spoiled milk."
They used these arguments, however, to convince skeptical men of the value of feminism. This was consistent with Eastman's strategy of giving opponents "an hour's exercise in liking something else"--a strategy outlined in his "Confessions of a Suffrage Orator." Dell's "Feminism for Men" obviously stressed feminism's benefits for men. Eastman and Dell themselves, their writings make clear, supported feminism for the same reasons they favored the liberation of blacks and women--because of their underlying demand for full human liberation.
[177] Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 573; Dell, "Feminism for Men," (The Masses, July 1914; "playfellow" quote, Dell, Intellectual Vagabondage: An Apology for the Intelligensia (New York, George H. Doran Company, 1926), 139.
[178] Dell, Homecoming, 283.
[179] Dell, "La Bell Dame Sans Merci," (The Liberator, Janurary 1920), 41-2.
[180] Dell, Intellectual Vagabondage, 139-141; Dell, Women as World Builders, (Hyperion Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1976, reprint of 1913 edition), 19-20. Barbara Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men.
[181] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, March 1914, p. 7. For excellent discussions of the differential effects of sexual liberation and birth control on women and men, see Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right (New York, 1976) and John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters (New York, 1988).
[182] All the quotations from Ida Rauh in this and succeeding paragraphs are from a newspaper clipping in the Max Eastman papers, Lily Library, University of Indiana. The clipping is not identified.
[183] William O'Neil, The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman (New York, 1978), pp. 25-26.
[184] All the quotations from Ida Rauh in this and succeeding paragraphs are from a newspaper clipping in the Max Eastman papers, Lily Library, University of Indiana. The clipping is not identified.
[185] All the quotations from Ida Rauh in this and succeeding paragraphs are from a newspaper clipping in the Max Eastman papers, Lily Library, University of Indiana. The clipping is not identified.
[186] Dell, Homecoming, 271-272.
[187] Margaret C. Jones, Heretics and Hellraisers: Women Contributors to The Masses, 1911-1917 (University Press of Texas, Austin, 1993) exhaustively and perceptively chronicles the women contributors, their impact on The Masses, and the magazine's impact on them.
[188] "To The Woman Readers of The Masses," by five woman, TM, February 1916.
[189] Herbert J. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York, 1977); Robert J. Wiebe, The Search for Order (New York, 1967). The quotation from James is from Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 179. For accounts of rural, middle-class radicalism see Elliott Shore, Talkin' Socialism: J.A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890-1912 (University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 1988) and James R. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895-1943 (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1978).
[190] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, May 1913, pp. 5-6.
[191] Eastman, "Class Lines in Colorado," (The New Review, July 1914), 381-387. Because the workers were fighting against absentee, feudal-like owners, lacked revolutionary consciousness, and had patiently endured oppression until the national guard massacred their families, Eastman thought that more middling elements backed them than might have in different circumstances.
[192] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution: Blood?" TM, February 1914; Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution: The Question of Violence," The Masses, May 1913, p. 6; untitled article by Eastman beneath cartoon about the uprising the of the garment workers, TM, March 1913; unsigned editorial, "Industrial Relations," TM, October-November 1915. I assume Eastman wrote this editorial because its views and style are his.
[193] Eastman, "Stubborn and Stupid," TM, September 1914.
[194] Lears, No Place of Grace, pp. 2-59.
[195] Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley, 1985). Although Marchand discusses later decades, many of the trends he highlights were well underway before World War I.
[196] Warren I. Susman, Culture as History, (New York, 1973), pp. 271-287.
[197] "The Religion of Patriotism," July 1917, p. 12.
[198] Eastman describes his fund-raising efforts among the wealthy in Enjoyment of Living, 455-463.
[199] "What a Peach of a Day," The Masses, April 1914, p. 4; "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, February 1914, p. 5.
[200] "Knowledge and Revolution: The Question of Violence," The Masses, May 1913, p. 6.
[201] College professors had always been chosen with a view to their orthodoxy in religion, politics, and economics; they were subject to summary dismissal if they deviated from established truths. This was only just beginning to change in the years before World War I; or, more accurately, the reality remained the same, but the idea of academic freedom was beginning to be discussed.
[202] Irwin Granich, review of W.H. Davies, The Autobiography of a Super-tramp, TM, October 1917. Granich soon became famous under the pen-name Mike Gold.
[203] ibid.
[204] As one example of this, see William English Walling, "Class Struggle Within the Working Class," (The Masses, January 1913). Walling correctly noted that this analysis "will mean a complete revolution both in socialism and labor unionism... The theories of half a century may have to be abandoned." He claimed that this new empahsis preserved "every practical and revolutionary Marxian principle." PERHAPS QUOTE WALLING IN THE TEXT
[205] Eastman, "Revolutionary Progress," TM, April 1917.
[206] Eastman, "War and Politics," TM, August 1916.
[207] Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, passim.
[208] For example, in Victorian America, the working class was more sexually expressive than the repressed middle class; sexual decorum had a cachet, and often tangible financial benefits as well. Since the 1920s, however, the middle class has been more sexually adventurous than a relatively staid and conservative working class. Sexual permissiveness is now socially validated, at least for elites; what they do is by definition au current. Whenever working-class behavior differs, it is de facto retrogressive and primitive.
[209] May, End of American Innocence, p. 86.
[210] Decades later Eastman became conservative after the Communists, who destroyed everything Eastman had ever valued, hijacked the world revolutionary movement, vituperatively slandered Eastman and, not so incidentally, massacred many of his friends, associates, and in-laws.
[211] Eastman, "Concerning War," TM, January 1914; Eastman, KR, "War for War's Sake," September 1914; Eastman, KR, October 1914; Eastman, KR, "Is Socialism Lost?" TM, October 1914.
[212] Eastman, KR, "War for War's Sake," TM, September 1914; Eastman, KR, TM, October 1914; Eastman, KR, "Is Socialism Lost?" TM, October 1914.
[213] Eastman, "The Uninteresting War," TM, September 1915; Eastman, "On Characterizing Nations," TM, August 1916, reprinted in Understanding Germany, 57-59.
[214] "Honor Versus Democracy," unsigned editorial, TM, July 1915; unsigned editorial, TM, August 1915.
[215] Eatman, KR, "War for War's Sake," TM, September 1914; Eastman, "The Uninteresting War," TM, September 1915.
[216] Eastman, "Not Utopian" and "Not Heretical," KR, December 1914; Eastman, "The Only War to End War," TM, December 1915.
[217] Eastman, "The Only Way to End War," TM, Demember 1915.
[218] Eastman, "What Is Patriotism and What Shall We Do With It?" Speech, November 1915, printed in Eastman, Understanding Germany," (New York: Mitchell Kennerley: 1916) 98-111.
[219] ibid.
[220] Eastman, "War Psychology and International Socialism," TM, August 1916.
[221] ibid. See John Reed's stupendously wonderful "The World Well Lost," TM February 1916, for a vivid first-person account of the swamping of proletarian internationalism by fervid and homicidal patriotism.
[222] ibid; Eastman, "Kinds of War," TM, January 1917.
[223] ibid; Eastman, "Kinds of War," TM, January 1917.
[224] Eastman, "The Business Cost of War," in Eastman, Understanding Germany, 113-121.
[225]ibid.
[226] Eastman, Understanding Germany, passim. This collection of essays, published in 1916, included material from the previous year as well.
[227] Eastman, Understanding Germany, passim.
[228] Eastman, "A Tribute," TM, December 1914. For the impact of American pacifists on Wilson's Mexican policy see CE, ---- and Cook's dissertation.
[229] Eastman, "The Masses at the White House," TM, July 1916.
[230] Eastman, "War and Politics," TM, August 1916.
[231] Eastman, "Sect or Class?" TM, December 1916.
[232] Eastman, "Sect or Class?" TM, December 1916.
[233] Frank Bohn, "The Re-Election of Wilson," TM, January 1917; Amos Pinchot, "What the Election Means," TM, January 1917; William English Walling, "Socialists for Wilson," TM, January 1917; Eugene Wood, "Aid and Comfort," TM, January 1917; Frank Stuhlman, TM, February 1917.
[234] Eastman, "To Socialist Party Critics," TM, February 1917.
[235] Eastman, "To Socialist Party Critics," TM, February 1917.
[236] Eastman, "Revolutionary Progress," TM, April 1917.
[237] ibid.
[238] ibid.
[239] ibid.
[240] autobiog, get page and volume.
[241] Eastman, "Concerning War," TM, January 1914; Eastman Knowledge and Revolution, TM, May 1914; Eastman, "War for War's Sake," KR, September 1914; Meyer London, "There Must Be an End," TM, February 1915; Eastman, "Conscription Here," TM, July 1916.
[242] Eastman, "In Case of War," TM, April 1917.
[243] John Reed, "Whose War?" TM, April 1917.
[244] ibid.
[245] "A Separation," TM, May 1917.
[246] Eastman, "Advertising Democracy," TM, June 1917.
[247] Eastman, "Conscription, For What?" TM, July 1917.
[248] Eastman, "The Pro-War Socialists," TM, September 1917.
[249] Eastman, "The Pro-War Socialists," RP, September 1917.
[250] "Correspondence: From Upton Sinclair," TM, November-December 1917.
[251] John Reed, "Too Much Democracy," KR, June 1917; Reed, "The Russian Peace," TM, July 1917; Eastman, "Syndicalist-Socialist Russia," TM, August 1917.
[252] Eastman, "Syndicalist-Socialist Russia," RP, August 1917.
[253] ibid.
[254] Eastman, "It is True," TM, August 1917.
[255] Eastman, "A Working-Class Peace," RP, August 1917.
[256] Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (New York, 1964), 13-14.
[257] Eastman, "A Reminder," KR, October 1914; Eastman, "The Great Socialist," KR, February 1915; "Friends of American Freedom," TM, August 1917; Eastman, "A Question," RP, August 1917.
[258] "What Happened to the August Masses," TM, September 1917. When forced to reveal its objections to the August issue, the government cited four cartoons, three editorial or opinion pieces, and a poem.
[259] Correspondence between Eastman and Woodrow Wilson, (The Masses, November/December, 1917); Dell, "The Story of the Trial," Speech of Dudley Field Malone, and "The Masses Case," all in (The Liberator, June 1918); Eastman, "Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial," The Liberator Publishing Company, New York, 1918.
[260] Eastman, "President Wilson's Letter to the Pope," TM, October 1917.
[261] "Correspondence," TM, November-December 1917.
[262] Untitled Editorial Statement, TL, March 1918.
[263] Untitled Editorial Statement, TL, March 1918.
[264] Eastman, Editorials, July 1918; intro to Lenin's Letter to American Workingmen; article on Debs trial; Bross Lloyd letter; article where he says he cannot say all he wants about allied govts, also July 1918?
[265] Untitled Editorial Etatement, TL March 1918.
[266] Eastman, "Their Utmost Hope," March 1918; Eastman, "A World's Peace," March 1918; Eastman, "What Kind of Peace?", April 1918; Eastman, "A Working-Class Peace," April 1918.
[267] Eastman, "Wilson and the World's Future," May 1918. Typically, Eastman's endorsement of Wilson was hedged with subtle reservations. While approving Wilson's greetings to the Soviet Union, he quoted the British Labor party's stronger declaration of support, which he claimed Wilson had endorsed; he also quoted Trotsky on the value of fellow travellers.
[268] Eastman, Wilson and the World's Future," May 1918.
[269] Eastman, "As to Discrimination," TL, December 1921; Eastman, "Leadership or Inspiration," TL, August 1921.
[270] Dell, "The Story of the Trial," and speeches of Dudley Field Malone, Morris Hillquit, and Eastman (Eastman at the dinner on May 9), (The Masses, June 1918.) See O'Neill Last Romantic, 111-112. In 1925 a critic reminded the world of this remark; Eastman had apparently so far suppressed it in his memory, that he actually denied having made it.
[271] Speeches of Max Eastman and Morris Hillquit at the Masses Dinner, May 9," TL June 1918.
[272] Speeches of Max Eastman.... TL, June 1918.
[273] Editorial, "Socialist Leadership," TL, July 1918.
[274] Editorial, "Socialist Leadership," July 1918.
[275] William Bross Lloyd, "Silence--and the Resurrection," TL, August 1918.
[276]Eastman, reply to William Bross Lloyd, "Silence--and the Resurrection," TL, August 1918.
[277] "Two Letters," TL, September 1918.
[278] "Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial: In Defense of the Socialist Position and the Right of Free Speech," The Liberator Publishing Company, New York, 1918.
[279] ibid.
[280] ibid
[281] ibid
[282] ibid
[283] ibid
[284] Eastman, Editorials, December 1918. Eastman reiterated these views in "The Capitalist International," TL, September 1921, in which he criticized the Soviet Union for belittling the significance of the League of Nations.
[285] Eastman, Editorials, December 1918.
[286] Eastman, "Wilson's Failure," May 1919; Eastman, Editorials, June 1919; Eastman, Editorials, July 1918; Eastman, Editorials, September 1919; Eastman, Editorials, October 1919.
[287] Eastman, "The International Class Struggle," June 1919.
[288] Eastman so regarded the two magazines as one that in 1921 he casually said that "we have built up this magazine through eight long years of labor"--a statement which makes sense only if The Masses and The Liberator were in fact a single entity. Eastman, "Free Speech Again," March 1921.
[289] Almost all the books discussed at the beginning of this manuscript focus entirely on The Masses. In addition, see Zurier, Art for the Masses, Margaret C. Jones, Heretics and Hellraisers: Women Contributors to The Masses, 1911-1917, and ---, The Masses: Odyssey of an Era. One except is Artists and Cartoonists of the Masses and the Liberator.
[290] Eastman, "Revolutionary Progress," (The Masses, August 1917). I discussed this article at some length in a previous chapter.
[291] Eastman, "The New International," (The Liberator, July 1919): 28.
[292] Editorials, The Liberator, April 1918; Eastman, "A Stateman of the New Order," (The Liberator, September and October, 1918).
[293] Editorials, TL August 1920.
[294] Editorials, TL August 1920.
[295] Eastman, "About Dogmatism," TL, November 1920.
[296] Eastman, "A Statesman of the New Order," TL, September 1918. Eastman's reference to the telephone meant that Lenin was a master strategist who, within sight of the Winter Palace, marshalled his forces and organized the revolution.
[297] Eastman, "Thesis of Lenin at the Time of Brest Litovsk," August [?] 1920.
[298] Eastman, "About Dogmatism," (The Liberator, November 1920); Eastman, "Lenin--A Statesman of the New Order," (The Liberator, September and October, 1918); Eastman, Editorials, (The Liberator, April 1920); Eastman, Editorials, (The Liberator, August 1920).
[299] Eastman, "Nietzsche, Plato, and Bertrand Russell, (The Liberator, September 1920.) The quote "may be saved" is Eastman quoting Plato; the other quotations are directly from Eastman.
[300] Eastman, "A Statesman of the New Order," TL, September 1918.
[301] Eastman, "A Statesman of the New Order," TL, September and October, 1918.
[302] Eastman, "Lenin the Communist," TL, June 1919.
[303] Eastman, "The Wisdom of Lenin," TL, June 1924.
[304] Eastman, "The Wisdom of Lenin," TL, June 1924.
[305] ibid.
[306]ibid.
[307] Eastman, "The Russian Dictators," TL, March 1918.
[308] Eastman, "Bolshevik Problems," TL, April 1918.
[309] Eastman, "Bolshevik Problems," TL, April 1918.
[310] Eastman, "Bolshevik Problems," TL, April 1918. Before
The Liberator went to press, Louise Bryant informed Eastman that Breshkovskaya had not in fact been arrested; but Eastman felt so highly of his analysis that he published it anyway.
[311] Eastman, "Lenin--A Statesman of the New Order, II," TL, October 1918.
[312] Eastman, Editorials, TL, January 1919. This downplayed the issue of red terrorism, which Eastman addressed elsewhere.
[313] Eastman, "Niggers and Nightriders," (The Masses, February 1913); Eastman, "Nietzsche, Plato, and Bertrand Russell," (The Liberator, September, 1920); EASTMAN ON LUDLOW.
[314] Eastman, "Bob Minor and the Bolsheviki," (TL, March 1919); Eastman, Editorials, (TL, May 1919); Eastman, Editorials, (TL, February 1919); Eastman, "Free Speech Again," (TL, September 1919). Eastman had inadvertently accepted an ad for Spargo's book slandering the Bolsheviks; he returned the money to the publisher and vowed that he would accept no such ads in the future. Older had responded to Eastman's announcement of this in The Liberator, July 1919.
[315] Eastman, "Robert Lansing Explains Bolshevism," TL, March 1920. Strangely, Eastman appealed here to the supposed "sporting sense" of the American ruling class, a sense which he claimed should have recognized the justice of the Soviet actions. This was not the first or last time he would appeal to such a sporting sense; he mentioned it in his Masses article asking fair treatment for conscientious objectors and when he complained about Burleson's ungentlemanly conduct. See also Eastman, "November Seventh, 1918," TL, December 1918.
[316] Eastman, "Lenin--A Statesman of the New Order," TL, October 1918; Eastman, "Bolshevik Problems," TL, April 1918. Eastman's biographer William O'Neill reports that when Eastman visited the Soviet Union he was disconcerted to find that union officials were appointed by the Communist party rather than elected by the workers. However, fearing that full disclosure would undermine the Revolution, Eastman initially suppressed this information.
[317] Eastman, "Bob Minor and the Bolsheviki," TL, March 1919.
[318] Robert Dell quoted in Eastman, "Dogmatism Again," TL, May 1921.
[319] ibid.
[320] ibid.
[321] Eastman, "About Dogmatism," TL, November 1920.
[322] Eastman, Editorials, TL, July 1919.
[323] Eastman, Editorials, TL, May 1921.
[324] Eastman, Editorials, TL, August 1921.
[325] Eastman, "A Permanent Revolution," TL, December 1923.
[326] editorial TL September 1921.
[327] Eastman, "A Permanent Revolution," TL December 1923.
[328] Eastman, editorials, TL, April 1920.
[329] Eastman, "A Permanent Revolution," TL, December 1923.
[330] Eastman, editorials, TL December 1918 GET TITLE; Eastman, "The New International," TL, July 1919.
[331] Eastman, "The New International," TL, July 1919; Eastman, editorials, TL, December 1918 GET EXACT TITLE.
[332] Eastman, "Members or Not," TL April 1918; Eastman, Editorials, TL July 1918 GET EXACT TITLE; Eastman, editorials, TL, January 1919 GET EXACT TITLE; Eastman, "Bolshevism and Socialism," TL, January 1919.
[333] Eastman, "The New International," TL, July 1919. Eastman was responding to Morris Hillquit's "The Socialist Task and Outlook."
[334] Eastman, "The Left is Right," TL, May 1919.
[335] Eastman, "The International Class Struggle," TL, June 1919.
[336] Eastman, "The New International," TL, July 1919.
[337] Eastman, "The New International," TL, July 1919.
[338] Eastman, "Hillquit Repeats His Error," TL, January 1921. Eastman also debunked Hillquit's claim that the Bolsheviks coined the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" only after they had a majority in the Soviets.
[339] Eastman, editorials, TL, April 1921.
[340] Eastman, "Dogmatism Again," TL, May 1921. This editorial was on the whole a ringing defense of the Comintern against a British leftist's accusations of dogmatism, sectarianism, and Russian domination.
[341] Eastman, "Two Critics of Russia," TL, August 1922; Eastman, "The Capitalist International," TL, December 1921. GET CITES FOR MOSCOW REV ENG AND FOR THEORET COMPASS
[342] Eastman, "The Chicago Conventions," TL, October 1919.
[343] ibid. Eastman also correctly noted that the Slavic leaders planned to purge the Michigan delegates after using them for their own purposes.
[344] ibib.
[345] ibid.
[346] ibid.
[347] ibid.
[348] ibid.
[349] ibid.
[350] ibid.
[351] "Our Candidate," TL April 1920; Eastman, Editorials, TL May 1920.
[352] Eastman, "For President," TL May 1920; Eastman, "Inadvertent," TL, May 1920.
[353] Eastman, "The Railroads," TL September 1919.
[354] Eastman, "Foster," TL, April 1921.
[355] Eastman, "Dreadful Bombs," TL, June 1919; Eastman, "More Bombs," TL, July 1919.
[356] Eastman, "More Bombs," TL, July 1919.
[357] Eastman, "Bolshevism and Socialism," TL, January 1919; Eastman, Editorials, TL, August 1921. While Eastman was condemning violence and barricades, his good friend John Reed implicitly endorsed violent revolution and predicted that it was imminent in America. In a March 1919 review of Sen Katayama's The Labor Movement in Japan, Reed exclaimed that "We Americans have been through nothing yet. We are not acquainted with barricades--familiar, at least by tradition, to all the world's workers. A few of us have gone--more of us are probably going--to jail; a few of us have had our heads broken by the clubs of the police; but to date most of our revolutionary history consists of words. In spite of the War, in spite of arrests, prosecutions and suppressions, what do we know today about the appalling work of commencing a Revolutionary movement in a totally hostile society?
"It is not our fault that we do not know; we shall know soon enough." JR, "Darkness Before Dawn," TL, March 1919.
Even Upton Sinclair implicitly endorsed violence, saying "we want Social Justice, by peaceful means if possible; but we want Social Justice first of all things in this world." Sinclair wrote this in Upton Sinclair's Magazine and quoted it in a letter to The Liberator which Eastman published in February 1919 under the title "Good News."
[358] Eastman, "Examples of 'Americanism,'" TL, February 1920.
[359] ibid.
[360] Eastman, "Science on Trial," TL, December 1920. Eastman hailed the defendants as "the teachers of a science" who instructed the jury in the science of "proletarian revolution."
[361] Eastman, "An Opinion on Tactics," TL, October 1921.
[362] ibid.
[363] ibid.
[364] ibid.
[365] Eastman, "A Response," TL, December 1921.
[366] ibid.
[367] ibid.
[368] Eastman, "A Christmas Party," TL, February 1922.
[369] Eastman, "Nietzsche, Plato, and Bertrand Russell," TL, September 1920.
[370] ibid.
[371] ibid.
[372] Eastman, "The Nature of the Choice," TL, February 1919.
[373] Eastman, "Remember Vallient Russia," TL July 1919.
[374] Eastman, "The Widsom of Lenin," TL, June 1924 and July 1924.
[375] Eastman, "The Wisdom of Lenin," TL, June 1924.
[376] Eastman, "The New International," TL, July 1919.
[377] Eastman, "Hillquit Repeats His Error," TL, January 1921.
[378]soviet docs on cultural policy in TL, including Lunaschar article; Eastman, Forward to Education and Art in Soviet Russia, In the Light of Official Degrees and Documents, The Socialist Publication Society, New York. Internal evidence indicates that this was published in 1919.
[379] Eastman, Forward, Education and Art in Soviet Russia.
[380] Eastman, "Nietzsche, Plato, and Bertrand Russell," TL, September 1920; Eastman, "Clarifying the Light," TL, June 1921.
[381] Eastman, "The Wisdom of Lenin," TL, June 1924.
[382] Spirit of serious play, "Hillquit Repeats His Error," TL January 1921; Chinese verse and painting......
[383] Eastman, Editorials, TL, March 1921.
[384] Eastman, "John Reed," (The Liberator, December 1920.) Comparing this eulogy with Eastman's account of Reed in Max's Heroes I Have Known: Twelve Who Lived Great Lives (Simon and Shuster, New York): 201-237 affords an interesting lesson in the politics of biography.
[385] Eastman, "John Reed," (The Liberator, December 1920). When Reed told Floyd Dell that he was organizing a Communist party or professional revolutionaries, Dell, according to his account, replied "Then I shan't join it. I am a professional writer." Floyd Dell, Homecoming, (Farrar and Rinehart, New York), 328.
[386] Romain Rolland, "A Declaration of Intellectual Independence," (The Liberator, December 1919): 23-25.
[387] Eastman, "A Letter to Romain Rolland," (The Liberator, December 1919): 23-25.
[388] Eastman, "A Letter to Romain Rolland," (The Liberator, December 1919): 23-25. Eastman printed Rolland's reply in The Liberator, March 1920.
[389] ibid.
[390] ibid.
[391] Eastman, "The Clarte Movement," TL, April 1920.
[392] Eastman, "The Clarte Movement," (The Liberator, April 1920). David James Fisher discusses Rolland's group and Rolland's controversy with Barbusse and Clarté in Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1988), 68-111.
[393] Eastman, "The Clarte Movement," (The Liberator, April 1920).
[394] Eastman, "Clarifying the Light," TL, June 1921.
[395] ibid.
[396] ibid.
[397] ibid.
[398] ibid.
[399] ibid.
[400] Eastman, "Addendum," TL, July 1921.
[401] Eastman, "Laughing at Veblen," TL, July 1921. Eastman admitted that this characterization was extreme.
[402] Eastman, "Inspiration or Leadership," TL, August 1921. Contravening standard practice, Eastman did not print Brooks's letter, but merely quoted portions of it in the course of his rebuttal.
[403] ibid.
[404] ibid.
[405] ibid.
[406] ibid. Eastman published Barbusse's reply in TL, October 1921. Barbusse claimed that Eastman had misrepreseted him and his group in several ways. First, Clarté had long since "abandoned that distinction of a past age between the intellectuals and the manual proletarians." It conceived of intellectuals as those who tested and rectified contemporary ideas; such people could work at any occupation. Because "all the ignorant and intoxicated multitudes oppose social change with a terrible inertia," this counter-hegemonic enterprise was necessary. Second, Clarté was not affiliated with the Communist party; if after free and open inquiry it arrived at a similar position, "it is because there is but one truth and one morality, and honest people, if they are at the same time intelligent people, cannot finally differ in opinion." Clarté had not become an "annex to the Communist party, which in fact has no need of such support"; fusion with the Party would weaken both organizations. Finally, Barbusse denied that the organization's new manifesto was an admission of previous error; Clarté was originally formed "with the greatest possible eclecticism," and recently had more precisely formulated its ideal.
Eastman did not reply to this letter. Barbusse had conceded some of his main points, and the issues on which they still disagreed required no further comment.
[407] Eastman estrangement from party and its control, see bio; Writers on the Left; Eastman's own Writers in Uniform.
[408] Eastman, "The Lesson of the Actors' Strike," TL, October 1919.
[409] ibid.
[410] ibid.
[411] ibid.
[412] ibid.
[413] ibid.
[414] Eastman, "Two Conversations," TL, February 1922. Ironically, Chaliapin was abroad once again when Eastman met him. However, he said that he had remained in Russia for seven years and was restless for travel; he implicitly denied that he was abroad because of artistic restrictions or censorship in the Soviet Union.
[415] "Theosophy on the High Seas, A Letter En Route from Max Eastman," TL, April 1922.
[416] Eastman, A Militant Suffrage Victory," March 1918; Eastman, "Feminism," June 1910, part of Rev Progres or whatever.
[417] Eastman, "Feminism," TL, June 1919 part of editorial section.
[418] note Blanche Wisen Cook collections, intro; articles by CE in TL.
[419] Crystal Eastman, "In Communist Hungary," TL, August 1919, in Cook, 315-328.
[420] ibid.
[421] ibid.
[422] Crystal Eastman, "The Socialist Party Convention," TL, July 1920, in Cook, 349-356.
[423] ibid.
[424] Crystal Eastman, "Feminism: A Statement Read at the First Feminist Congress in the United States, New York, March 1, 1919," TL, May 1919, in Cook, 49-51; Crystal Eastman, "Practical Feminism," TL, January 1920, in Cook, 51-52.
[425] Crystal Eastman, "Now We Can Begin," TL, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[426] ibid.
[427] ibid.
[428] ibid.
[429] ibid.
[430] ibid.
[431] cite my unpublished work The New Women of the Socialist party, and JCK publications.
[432] ibid.
[433] Eastman, "The Supreme Atrocity," TL, April 1918.
[434] Eastman, "Race and Class," TL September 1919, part of editorial section.
[435] Dell, review of James Weldom Johnson"s Fifty Years and Other Poems (The Liberator, March 1918).
[436] Langston Hughes, "The Negro and the Racial Mountain" orginally appeared in The Nation, June 23, 1926. Endlessly reprinted, it can be found in Black Expression, edited Addison Gayle, Jr., (Weybright and Talley, New York, 1969), 258-263.
[437] CM, "How Black Sees Red and Green," TL, June 1921; CM, "Garvey as a Negro Moses," TL, April 1922.
[438] CM, "A Negro Extravaganza," TL, December 1921.
[439] CM, "He Who Gets Slapped," TL, May 1922, in PCM, 69-73. McKay repeated some of the greatest lines from this article verbatim in LWFH, 144-145.
[440] CM, "He Who Gets Slapped," TL, May 1922, in PCM, 69-73; LWFH, 145.
[441] LWFH, 137 (cf. 132-133); PCM, 83; Cooper, 134-192; Mike Gold, "Drunk With Sunlight," New Masses, July 1929. In an incident revealing the sharp contrast between Eastman's and McKay's situation and perceptions, the pair was once denied entry into an all-black cabaret. McKay had believed they could secure admission because he was a regular customer and Eastman a totally atypical white; but the proprietor denied them entry. Far from being appalled or humiliated, Eastman expressed relief that "there was one place in Harlem that had the guts to keep white people out." CM, LWFH, 135.
[442] LWFH, 134-135; Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch (Random House, New York, 1964), 222.
[443] LWFH, 135.
[444] LWFH, 117-118.
[445] LWFH, 149. Marcus Garvey falsely blamed the repression of The Liberator ball on white radicals, and asserted that it proved that white leftists could not be trusted.
[446] Eastman, introduction to Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows (New York, 1922), ix-x. McKay, in his autobiography, called this introduction "splendid." (LWFH, 148). To our eyes it seems condescending because Eastman considered, even while rejecting, the idea of innate Negro inferiority.
[447] Eastman, introduction to Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows (New York, 1922), ix-xi.
[448] LWFH, 138-139.
[449] Gold, "Towards Proletarian Art," TL, February 1921; CM, LWFH, 138-140.
[450] Gold, ibid.; McKay, material in Pearson's and The Crisis extolling politicized art.
[451] McKay, "Birthright," The Liberator (August 1922), in PCM, 73-76.
[452] McKay, "Birthright," in The Liberator (August 1922), 15-16, in PCM, 73-76.
[453] CM, "Birthright," Liberator, August 1922, in PCM, 76.
[454] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-90, especially 83.
[455] PCM, 84.
[456] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-84.
[457] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-90. McKay's Negroes in America was soon published, in Russian, in the Soviet Union. Whether because of Eastman's entreaties or because the Soviets would not print an attack on one of their chief American supporters, this chapter was excised from the published version. For an example of McKay stressing class over race, see his exchange with DuBois in The Crisis, July 1921, reprinted in Philip S. Foner and James S. Allen, American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1987), pp. 12-14. Foner and Allen printed the entire exchange as DuBois published it; the elipses in McKay's letter are in the exchange as it appears in The Crisis.
[458] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-90, especially 89.
[459] "The Negro and Radical Thought," TC, July 1921. Du Bois excised part of McKay's letter, which may have somewhat modified McKay's thesis.
[460] "The Negro and Radical Thought," TC, July 1921.
[461] CM, "The Racial Issue in the United States of America: A Summary," International Press Correspondence, November 21, 1922, in PCM, 90-91.
[462] CM, "Report on the Negro Question," International Press Correspondence, January 5, 1923, in PCM, 91-95; CM, NIA, 37-38, 41, 90.
[463] Eastman summarized this policy of The Masses in Enjoyment of Living, 414-416.
[464] "Free Speech Again," TL, September 1919.
[465] "Free Speech Again," TL, March 1921; "The Free Press," TL, May 1921.
[i] Eastman, "The Masses and the Negro," (The Masses, May 1915). Claude McKay, a black poet and an editor of The Liberator, agreed with Sloan's assessment of Davis. See McKay, A Long Way from Home, 28-29.
[ii] "Race Superiority," (The Masses, June 1913); "Another Negro Outrage," (The Masses, July 1914): 20. The latter title parodies articles about alleged Negro depradations featured in the atrocity-mongering white mainstream press.
[iii] Eastman, introduction, Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude Mckay (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company), 1922, ix-x. Eastman specifically noted that, while McKay used Jamaician dialect with great effect, he needed other language to express the full range of his emotions.
[iv] W.E.B. DuBois, "The Conservation of Races," reprinted in W.E.B. DuBois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890-1919, Philip Foner, editor (Pathfinder Press, New York, 1970), 73-85, quotation is on p. 81; W.E.B. DuBois, Dusk at Dawn, (Shocken, 1970, reprint of 1940 edition), 147-149.
Along comes a publishing house with an offer of good money if we will accept a certain kind of advertising... of exactly those capitalistic lies about the Bolshevik government which we are so bitterly struggling to stand up against. We refuse to be bought. We refuse to be persuaded into doing something whose practical effect will be the direct opposite of that to which our efforts are dedicated. We refuse to be persuaded by money. Fremont Older will understand that. But with exactly the same energy we refuse to be persuaded by religion, by an absolute ideal, whether it be the ideal of free speech or any other. Our loyalty is not to abstract ideals, but to concrete purposes.[464]
Eastman addressed this issue again when Upton Sinclair protested The Liberator's censoring of a publisher's praise for Karl Kautsky's book on the dictatorship of the proletariat. Eastman said that if Sinclair "thinks that we have built up this magazine through eight long years of labor for the publication and sincere discussion of the truth, only in order to sell space in it for the publication of what we consider to be lies, he is far from understanding our character. And if his idea of 'freedom' involves the indiscriminate public sale of the opportunity to propigate false statements, I would suggest that he can find a close parallel to it in a house of prostitution--or for that matter in the daily press." While Eastman was surely justified in refusing advertising for books which subverted the very purposes of his non-profit periodical, he also said that he would suppress capitalist papers if he could. Any ruling class, he declared, would suppress opposition papers which seriously threatened the regime, as the United States had during and after World War I.[465]
[1] Henry F. May, The End of American Innocence (Chicago, 1964, first published in 1959), p. 317; Allen Churchill, The Improper Bohemians (New York, 1959), p. 89. May claims that "its political message was confusing and not very important; its tone was unforgettable." Churchill likewise says that The Masses advocated "a mental rather than a shooting revolution." The idea that Max Eastman was a frivolous bohemian who was not serious about revolutionary politics was first broached by his conservative Socialist opponents in 1914 and later taken up by the Communists after 1924. Albert Parry (Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America, 1933) echoed this criticism. The Communists used this charge to discredit Eastman, who was then a firm supporter of Leon Trotsky. Eastman indignantly rebutted the accusation in two articles in The Modern Monthly: "Bunk about Bohemia" (May 1934) and "New Masses for Old" (June 1934).
[2] Churchill, Improper Bohemians, p. 84, attributes this to Bobby Edwards.
[3] Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia (Chapel Hill, 1982), epitomizes this attitude. "Lacking the kind of ideological tradition that shaped the thought of European radicals," she says, "these Villagers selected the elements of their creed with reference neither to intellectual coherent nor to political purity." Most of The Masses group was characterized by a "bizarre amalgam of belief" that led to "a dearth of ideological coherence.... The prewar rebellion was more a matter of temperament than of theory, and it fostered more conviviality than commitment among its exponents." (p. 4).
Fishbein's methodology, however, is seriously flawed. Her book consists of separate chapters on discrete ideas championed by The Masses: religion, sex, feminism, class, race, etc.). Each chapter also discusses the views of many disparate individuals (some of whom had no connection with The Masses.) Any philosophy can be made to seem an eclectic hodge-podge if it is broken down into opinions on discrete issues, with no effort to discover unifying themes. By lumping the views of all these individuals together by topic, rather than by analyzing the complete world-view of any one person, Fishbein inevitably fails to uncover any unified, coherent philosophy. She neglects to ask how Eastman himself perceived the relationships between his ideas, and between his ideas and those of other contributors.
For a more recent exemplar of this approach see Brian Lloyd, Left Out: Pragmatism, Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890-1922 (The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore), 1997.
[4] Fishbein, Humphrey, May, Churchill, Parry, Zurier, and Lasch focus on The Masses and almost ignore The Liberator. For other examples see Thomas A. Maik, The Masses Magazine (1911-1917): Odyssey of an Era (Garland, New York), 1994 and William O'Neill's anthology, Echoes of Revolt: The Masses, 1911-1917 (Quadrangle, Chicago), 1966. See also book on women writers of TM; but book on cartoonists of TM and TL, also Writers on the Left.
[5] Robert Humphrey, Children of Fantasy (New York, 1978), pp. 10-11, 253. Humphrey analyzes the lives of five leading bohemian radicals, including three major figures from The Masses, to document his contention that "social narcissism" and immature "rebellion for its own sake" motivated them. "They kept their adolescent fantasies in good health beyond the usual life expectancy.... Having learned in childhood that fantasies could protect them against loneliness and rejection, they were unwilling to relinquish or discipline their dreams." According to Humphrey, any attempt to forge a counter-community outside traditional institutions and cultural patterns is a form of self-destructiveness rooted in the pathologies of adolescent development.
The methodology Humphrey uses to support these assertions is flawed on all counts. It is virtually impossible even to gauge the effects of any particular family upbringing on any individual. People respond differently to similar experiences from the time they are infants, while parents seldom treat their different children exactly alike. While acknowledging that even the well-considered beliefs of moral and rational people stem not only from moral commitment and calm reflection but from psychological needs, we must admit that both the disparities in individual personality and nuances of individual upbringings make any correlation between childhood experience and adult political stance extremely problematic.
Humphrey neither shows that the childhoods of his subjects differed from those of people who were not radicals, nor that their childhoods were actually similar to those of other radicals. Many people experienced severe childhood traumas without journeying to Greenwich Village or becoming political radicals, while many radicals were raised by enlightened and loving parents. To the very limited extent that any correlation between adolescent experience and political opinion can be documented, it is very likely the exact opposite of that posited by Humphrey. Children who are raised with love and respect often find the cruelties and irrationalities of the world intolerable, and seek changes that will universalize and apply the values they were taught and experienced in childhood. Political and cultural rebellion, far from being a reaction against parental authority or the nurturing of adolescent fantasies, may be a sane and rational way to preserve one's personality and values in a hostile world, as well as to improve that world.
[6] Humphrey, Children, p.34; Fishbein, Rebels, p.18. According to Humphrey, Eastman and his comrades were "mainly interested in improving the quality of peoples' private lives." Fishbein complains that their belief that every individual should be free to live and grow in his or her own chosen way is "an essentially bourgeois ideal."
[7] Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America (New York, 1967, first published 1965), pp. 192, xiv, ix--xviii. Lasch's choice of subjects, however, is curious; he includes key figures who were neither intellectuals nor radicals, and barely mentions anyone from The Masses--or, for that matter, from Seven Arts, The Dial, or The Little Review.
[8] Lasch, New Radicalism, pp. 207, 162-3, 310, 298, 316-319, xvi. Many of the characteristics he ascribes to the new radicals seem to apply to Eastman and his group. They were pragmatists; their self-consciousness as a group separated them from mainstream society; they criticized patriarchy and capitalism; and they identified with other outcasts. Other qualities which Lasch ascribes to the new radicals approximate those ascribed to The Masses group by their critics: indulgence in "expressive politics" rather than "interest politics" and a "confusion of politics and culture." None of these criticisms even remotely apply to Max Eastman or the considerable group of radicals who gathered around The Masses and The Liberator.
[9] T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880--1920 (New York, 1981), pp. xi-xx, 1-58.
[10] Eastman discusses this in Enjoyment of Living (New York, 1948), pp. 534-547. This account differs somewhat from that in "In Explanation", The Masses, December 1915, p. 15, when he simply claimed that The Masses Review, a recently-added theoretical section, had been discontinued.
[11] Eastman describes this incident in Enjoyment of Living, 394-396; Art Young and Floyd Dell also recount it in their memoirs.
[12] Masthead statement, circumstances of its composition in EL, 420-21; see also TM; cf Mother Earth.
[13] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, December 1912, p. 5; Eastman, "Niggers and Night Riders," (The Masses, February 1913). Incidentally, Max anticipated the Supreme Court's reasoning when it declared segregated schools unconstitutional in 1954 when he stated that "not one child in ten million can achieve his full stature against the inhibitions of a humiliated or contemptuous environment. The possibilities of the black man have never been tested."
[14] Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York, 1977), pp. 13-14, 23-29. Aaron sometimes implies that there was a natural affinity between political radicals, bohemians, and literary insurgents in the years before World War I, only to later categorize the literary insurgents into four groups of which two were either apolitical or conservative. Aaron has a fifth category of "unclassifiables."
[15] Nick Salvatore, Eugene Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Urbana, 1982), excellently treats this theme in Debs's life. Gary Gerstle, Working-Class America: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 (New York, 1991)) has an excellent analysis of the strengths and pitfalls of this approach.
[16] The assertion of John Patrick Diggins (The Rise and Fall of the American Left (New York, 1992), p. 104) that "Eastman knew socialism had no chance in America unless it could be rendered compatible with some cherished native conceits" is directly contrary to the facts. Diggins conflates the two Masses trials, puts them in the wrong year, and omits both the context of and a significant part of the quotation he uses as evidence. Eastman was on trial for serious charges that could have led to a 20 year prison sentence; he had ample motive to persuade his upper-class jury that socialism was fully compatible with traditional American notions. In general, Eastman was more moderate in his public pronouncements than in the pages of The Masses. Diggins's account is not only unanalytical, but grossly deficient in factual accuracy.
[17] "Correspondence," The Masses, October 1917, p. 16.
[18] The term and concept of "movement culture" was coined by Lawrence Goodwyn and appears in his The Populist Moment: A Short History of Agrarian Radicalism in America (New York, 1978). I am using it in a more countercultural sense than Goodwyn, who confined it mainly to an alternative press, cooperatives, and similarly explicitly political institutions. The concept is brilliantly applied in Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness in Detroit, 1875-1900 (Urbana, 1989).
[19] Humphrey, Children, p.10, claims that there is "an inherent conflict between artistic freedom and ideological politics." Fishbein, Rebels, passim and Brian Lloyd, Left Out.
[20] Eastman, "Towards Liberty," The Masses, September 1916, p. 30; Eastman, "Niggers and Nightriders," TM, February 1913.
[21] Eastman, "Towards Liberty," TM, October 1916.
[22] "Towards Liberty," The Masses, October 1916, pp. 23-25.
[23] "Towards Liberty," The Masses, October 1916, p. 25; Eastman, "Is Woman Suffrage Important," a pamphlet of the Men's League for Woman Suffrage, 1910, reprinted in Blanche Wiesen Cook, Toward the Great Change: Crystal and Max Eastman on Feminism, Antimilitarism, and Revolution (New York, 1976), pp. 58-72. The quote is on page 69.
[24] Eastman, "Towards Liberty," TM, October 1916.
[25] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution: Contagion," TM, February 1913.
[26] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution,", The Masses, April 1913, p. 5; Eastman, "What Is Patriotism and What Shall We Do With It? A Speech Given November 1915," in Eastman, Understanding Germany, -----; Eastman, "Ex Cathedra," TM, May 1913.
[27] Editorial Reply to a letter, "From a Doubter," The Masses, June 1915, p. 22. I have corrected an obvious typographical error. This reply is unsigned, but clearly expresses Eastman's view.
[28] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, pp. 198-199; Eastman, Colors of Life, p. 97.
[29] Eastman, "Who's Afraid? Confession of a Suffrage Orator," (The Masses, November 1915): 7-9. This seems logical. Unfortunately, insecure people often must believe that their own chosen path is not only the correct one, but the only possible one. Other people who construct their lives upon different values and preferences threaten those insecure people, who demand conformity. For reasons discussed later, workers, more often that the relatively privileged, demand cultural conformity even at the point of a bayonet. This presents revolutionaries who demand both cultural and economic change with an almost insoluble dilemma.
[30] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, pp. 64, 20, 168.
[31] "Towards Liberty," The Masses, September 1916, p. 28.
[32] Eastman, Colors of Life, pp. 13-14.
[33] Eastman, "Confessions of a Suffrage Orator," TM, October-November 1915,
[34] Eastman, referring to Omaha, Nebraska, "Examples of 'Americanism,'", (The Liberator, February 1920); Charles W. Wood, "Should Art Young Be Shot at Sunrise," (The Masses, November/December 1917); JR, "With Eugene Debs on the Fourth," The Liberator, September 1918.
[35] Eastman, "The Great American Scapegoat," (The New Review, August 1914): 465-70; Eastman, "Two Book Reviews," (The New Review, November 1914): 649-653; EG quote on those with nothing to lose but chains cling all the more tenaciously to them.
[36] The policy statement was first printed in January 1913. Eastman describes its composition in Enjoyment of Living, pp. 420-421.
[37] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, December 1912, p. 5; "War Psychology and International Socialism, The Masses, August 1916, p. 27; Eastman, Colors of Life (New York, 1918), pp. 97-98. Eastman's views on the relationship of poetry to science are best expressed in Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry (New York, 1913).
[38] Eastman, Love and Revolution (New York, 1964), p. 15; "Weak Spots," The Masses, September 1914, p. 18. This latter is unsigned but presumably by Eastman because it closely correlates with the above passage from his autobiography.
[39] For Eastman's praise of skeptics and of science, see Eastman, Colors of Life (New York, 1918) pp. 97-101; for Nietzsche, see Eastman, Understanding Germany (New York, 1916), pp. 60-68; for the quotation, "The First Few Books," The Masses, April, 1915, p. 22.
[40] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, January 1913, p. 5; Eastman, "Riot and Reform at Sing Sing," TM, June 1915.
[41] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, September 1914, p. 5; "Revolutionary Birth Control," The Masses, July 1915, p. 22.
[42] In addition to the Eastman critics noted above, see Nathan G. Hale, Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876-1917 (Oxford, 1971), 400-404, 432. In his second volume, Hale notes that Eastman soon became disillusioned with psychoanalysis because of its conservative effects on its subjects. Hale, The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917-1985 (Oxford, 1995), 68-69. Floyd Dell was particularly influenced by Freud, and repudiated free love in favor or monagomous marriage and babies.
[43] Eastman, "The Churchly Rockefeller," TM, June 1916; Eastman, "Margins," TM, January 1916.
[44] Eastman, Understanding Germany, p. 121; Eastman, "Towards Liberty: The Method of Progress," The Masses, September 1916, p. 28.
[45] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution: Not Heretical," TM, December 1914. Other Marxists, of course, demanded that the working class help achieve "bourgeois tasks" when the capitalists proved unwilling or unable to achieve them.
[46] The vast literature on the SPD's policy includes Peter Nettl, "The German Social Democratic Party 1890-1914 as a Political Model," Past and Present, April 1965, pp. 64-95; Geoff Eley, "Combining Two Histories: The SPD and the German Working Class Before 1914," Radical History Review, 1984, pp. 13-44; Gunther Roth, The Social Democrats in Imperial Germany.
[47] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, March 1914, p. 5; "Knowledge and Revolution, The Masses, April 1917, p. 6.
[48] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, April 1917, p. 6.
[49] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, April 1913. Socialism, Eastman declared, was "founded upon a truth as to the real nature of humanity and human history." Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, December 1914.
[50] Eastman, "Utopian Reality," TM, December 1916.
[51] ibid.
[52] Eastman, "Exposure of a Negative" and "Class Struggle and Class Hate," in "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, February 1913; Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, November 1913. Eastman did admit that passions flared in the heat of actual battle; this was also natural. He quoted Mother Jones, cursing a prison warden, as epitomizing his own attitude: "Poor boy, God damn your soul, ye can't help it!"
[53] Eastman, "Rubert Hughes and the Constabulary," TM, February 1915.
[54] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, December 1912.
[55] Eastman, "Revolutionary Progress," TM, January 1913.
[56] Eastman, "Ditto," TM, February 1913; Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, June 1913.
[57] Eastman, "A Key Word," TM, August 1913.
[58] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, December 1912; Eastman, "Rsume," TM, February 1914.
[59] Eastman, "Reform Strikes," TM, April 1913.
[60] Eastman, "Object Lesson," TM, September 1913; Eastman, "Philanthro-Efficiency Again" and "Plain Efficiency," TM, February 1914.
[61] Eastman, "Revolutionary Progress," TM, January 1913.
[62] ibid.
[63] ibid.
[64] ibid.
[65] Eastman, "Investigating Vice," TM, May 1913; Eastman, "The First Victories," TM, September 1914; Eastman, untitled article beneath cartoon about the garment workers' uprising, TM, March 1913; Eastman, "The Mad Hatters," TM, February 1914. Unfortunately, repressive court decisions made labor more conservative rather than radicalizing it; see Forbath, American Labor and the Law-----.
[66] Eastman, "Understanding Germany," in Understanding Germany full title, pub data and pages.
[67] The best account of factional struggles within the Socialist party is Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement: 1897-1912 (New York, 1952).
[68] The best statement of this oft-repeated sentiment is Eugene Debs, "Danger Ahead," International Socialist Review, January 1911, p. 413.
[69] Morris Hillquit and Victor Berger epitomized this approach; see hillquit book and bios of both men.
[70] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, December 1912, p. 6.
[71] Max Weber, "Politics as a Vocation," reprinted in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York, 1958), pp. 77-128. Two books which use this model for explaining the failure of American socialism are Daniel Bell, Marxian Socialism in the United States (Princeton, 1967) and Sally M. Miller, Victor Berger and the Promise of American Socialism (Westport, Connecticut, 1973).
[72] Michael Harrington did much to popularize this notion in his many works, especially Socialism (New York, 1977) pp. 305-331.
[73] This controversy eerily foreshadows those between Randolph Bourne and John Dewey, and between Eastman and Upton Sinclair, over American entry into World War I. It also highlights a central radical dilemma: to what extent should radicals participate in mainstream politics, in pursuit of important short-term goals? Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 547. Lasch's analysis of the attractions of power from intellectuals may also be of relevance here, although ultimately, of course, Eastman did not succumb.
[74] "Revolutionary Progress," The Masses, June 1917, p. 22.
[75] "Concerning War," The Masses, January 1914, pp. 18-19.
[76] "Concerning War," The Masses, January 1914, pp. 18-19.
[77] "Revolutionary Progress: Kinds of War," The Masses, January 1917, p. 21.
[78] Eastman, "In Defense of Criminals," Speech reprinted in TM, August 1914.
[79] The New York Call, May 29, 1912.
[80] "Knowledge and Revolution: Abrakadabra," The Masses, August 1913, p. 6.
[81] Dee Garrison, Mary Heaton Vorse: The Life of an American Feminist (Philadelphia, 1989), p. 53. An excellent account of the Lawrence strike is found in Melvyn Dubofsky, We Shall Be All (New York, 1969), pp. 227-263. See also the Final Report, Commission on Industrial Relations, especially its summary and conclusions, pp. -----.
[82] "A New Crime," The Masses, January 1914, p. 22.
[83] One account of many is in Louis Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (New York, 1934), pp. 179-257. The McNamaras were conservative craft unionists and members of the Catholic and anti-Socialist militia of Christ.
[84] "Dynamite Against Steel," The Masses, February 1913, p. 3.
[85] "Dynamite Against Steel," The Masses, February 1913, p. 3.
[86] "Class War in Colorado," The Masses, June 1914, p. 8.
[87] Eastman, "Kinds of War," TM, January 1917. Remarkably, this article was published as the United States was preparing for possible war (largely on grounds of national honor) against both Mexico and Germany.
[88] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, August 1914, pp. 5-6; Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, June 1915; Eastman, "Kinds of War," TM, January 1917; "Anarchy While You Wait," TM, May 1915; Eastman, "From a Terrorist" and "Fatuous Feebleness," TM, February 1915. In these two articles Eastman specifically mentioned Marie Sukloff, a Russian terrorist, Bakunin, Berkman, and the McNamaras.
[89] "Knowledge and Revolution: Niggers and Nightriders," The Masses, February 1913, p. 6.
[90] Eastman, "Riot and Reform at Sing Sing," TM, June 1915.
[91] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, passim; quote from p. 152.
[92] Eastman, "The First Few Books," TM, April 1915.
[93] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, p. 4; Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, p. 420.
[94] Eastman, TM, January 1913.
[95] Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, pp. 449-452. Eastman was probably reminded of his poem by his view of the ruins of the tent colony with "the larks singing over them so incongruously in the sun." mention max's ludlow articles, nice people of trinidad, class war in colorado
[96] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, pp. 193-194, 116-120.
[97] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution: West to East," The Masses, October 1914, p. 6; Eastman, "Rebecca West," TM, February 1917. The relationship of art and social change was, of course, one of Floyd Dell's perennial themes. An unsigned notice, "An Incendiary Play" (TM, March 1916) praised Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers as accurately portraying contemporary America as well as Germany. "That the American working class is permitted to see it can only means that the powers which put Quinlan and Lawson out of the way believe that 'art' is harmless. It isn't, though." Art would help inspire a revolution that would win.
[98] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, p. 169.
[99] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, pp. 169-170.
[100] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, pp. 170-171.
[101] Eastman, Journalism versus Art (New York, 1916), pp. 7-87.
[102] "Rebecca West," The Masses, February 1917, p. 30.
[103] Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, pp. 414-416.
[104] Eastman, "Liberality Is Not Loose Thinking," TM, July 1913.
[105] Eastman, "The Woman Rebel," TM, May 1914; Eastman, "The Anarchist Almanac," TM, March 1914.
[106] Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, pp. 421, 548
[107] "The Masses versus Ward and Gow: Statement Of Max Eastman Before The Senator Thompson Legislative Committee," The Masses, September 1916, p. 5; various stories about the first Masses trial, particularly "The Story of The Trial," by Floyd Dell, and "The Speech of Max Eastman at the Masses dinner, The Liberator, June 1918; "Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial," pamphlet, reprinted in Cook, Toward the Great Change, pp. 305-339.
[108] "The Masses Versus Ward & Gow: Statement of Max Eastman Before the Senator Thompson Legislative Committee," TM, September 1916.
[109] ibid.
[110] Eastman, Journalism versus Art, pp. 11-12; Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, pp. 549-559.
[111] "Various Matters," The Masses, October 1916, p. 34; Advertisement for Eastman lecture tour, TM, August 1915; Eastman, "Editorial Policy," TM, August 1915; Eastman, "Liberality Is Not Loose Thinking," TM, July 1913.
[112] Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, p. 411; Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution: Concerning Optimism," TM, April 1915; Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution: Merry Christmas," TM, December 1914.
[113] Eastman, "Editorial Policy," TM, December 1915.
[114] "Editorial Notice," The Masses, December 1912, p.3.
[115] Eastman, Journalism versus Art, pp. 87-106; Eastman, Colors of Life, pp. 20-26.
[116] Waldo Frank, "Ed. Note," and Eastman, "Science and Free Verse," The Seven Arts (February 1917): 429-31. This exchange was elicited by James Oppenheim's attack on Eastman, "'Lazy' Verse," The Seven Arts, November 1916: 66-72.
[117] Aaron, Writers on the Left, pp. 25, 50n.
[118] Aaron, Writers on the Left, p. 50n.
[119] This is paraphrased from Granville Hicks, literary commissar of the Communist party during the thirties, whose autobiographies (When We Came Out and Part of the Truth) describe his involvement in and eventual disillusionment with Communism, proletarian literature, and any effort to politicize art.
[120] cite popular magazine of revolutionary socialism quote. Louis Untermeyer, From Another World: The Autobiography of Louis Untermeyer (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1939), 46; bio of john sloan by John Loughery, page uncertain check for Vorse who commented on acerbity of criticisms of artists. Mention accounts from Max, Floyd, etc.
When two writers threatened resignation if a controversial Stuart Davis drawing appeared in The Masses, Eastman met their objections with technical finesse by splashing it on the front cover. The "Gee, Mag" cover was an instant sensation. put date here.
[121] The best accounts of this episode are Eastman's own, in Enjoyment of Living (New York: Harper and Row, 1948), 548-559 and Rebecca Zurier's excellent Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988). Zurier recounts the artists' strike on pages 52-58, but she has many illuminating and relevant comments throughout her book.
Sloan also demanded that the board vote on all submissions. Dell later said that the rebels suspected that Eastman and Dell deliberately withheld works until after the editorial meeting so that they could print them "without having to run the gauntlet of a meeting where they might have been voted down." Dell, "Memories of the Old Masses," (The American Mercury. LXVIII, April 1949): 481-487. The quote is on p. 483.
[122] Dell, "Memories of the Old Masses,"(The American Mercury, April 1949); 484; Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 554-555. Young's statement originated the epithet "ashcan school," an appelation Sloan and his cohorts hated, to describe a school of social realism in art.
[123] Charles L. Edson, "Radical Editors Fight Over Magazine Policy," The [New York] Morning Telegraph, April 8, 1916; Van Wyck Brooks, John Sloan: A Painter's Life, (New York, Dutton), 1955, 92-99.
[124] Dell, "What Does it Mean," (The Masses, April 1916).
[125] Dell, "What Does it Mean? (The Masses, April 1916). Dell may have hoped that this article would conciliate the artists and lure them back to The Masses.
[126] For a more detailed analysis, see Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses.
[127] Zurier, Art for the Masses, 153-54.
[128] Zurier, Art for the Masses, 56-7, 139, 145, 154-158.
[129] Zurier, Art for the Masses, 154-158; "An Experiment," (The Masses, May 1917). The new artistic policy was a three month experiment; however, The Masses soon had more pressing concerns, and was shortly afterwards suppressed.
[130] Dell, Homecoming, 281.
[131] The Masses: Odyssey of an Era author says this, see also The Politics of Surrealism.
[132] Zurier, Art for the Masses, 154.
[133] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, December 1912, pp. 5-6.
[134] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, December 1912, pp. 5-6.
[135] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, December 1913. Eastman discussed religion in four separate portions of his column that month: "The Church is Judas," "Jesus Christ," "Further Thought," and "Corroboration." In addition, that same issue of The Masses carried nine cartoons attacking religion for fostering exploitation and mindless respectability.
[136] Eastman, "Ex Cathedra," TM, May 1913; Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution," TM, December 1913; Eastman, "Editorial Policy," check this, was it his column, December 1915.
[137] Vida Schudder letters in TM December 1915 and February 1916. "A Ballad" appeared in TM January 1916, p. 13, signed "Williams."
[138] Eastman, TM December 1915; Eatman, reply to Vida Scudder letter, December 1915.
[139] Eastman, TM, December 1915, two articles I think. See also Eastman, "The Churchly Rockefeller," TM, June 1916.
[140] Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, pp. 169-170; "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, October 1914, p. 5.
[141] "Sumner vs. Forel," TM, November 1916; "Correspondence," TM, October 1917. The censor never returned the seized issues even though a court dismissed his charges. This illustrates the kind of relatively minor (compared to total suppression, torture, and murder) repression that The Masses and other radical publications and organizations routinely suffered.
[142] Eastman, TM, January 1913 get title; Eastman, "Natural Eugenics," TM, September 1913. Although many radical women favored mothers' pensions, some socialist-feminists opposed them on the grounds that they implied that raising children was a woman's job. These radicals argued that although giving birth was obviously a biological role, the raising of children was socially defined as a female task; rather than mothers' pensions, such feminists demanded government sponsored childcare centers so that women could work outside the home. See Belle Oury, ---- SW article on this, reply to -----.
[143] Eastman, "Inez Milholland," TM, March 1917.
[144] Eastman, TM, January 1913 cite article
[145] Eastman, "Confessions of a Suffrage Orator," TM, October-November 1915. Eastman's condemnation of female fashion consciousness was motivated in party by antisuffragist arguments (advanced by women as well as men) that such a fixation on appearence proved women's unworthiness for the vote. Eastman, "Starting Right," TM, September 1913. In April 1914 Eastman declared that he had never claimed that women votes would inaugurate utopia, and the fact that they had not "seemed to prove that they are human, and that was what we were most anxious to prove." However, he strongly condemned the women votes of Colorado for failing to protest the imprisonment of Mother Jones. "An Occasion for Militancy," TM, April 1914.
[146] Eastman, "Confessions of a Suffrage Orator," TM, October-November 1915. The Masses vigorously supported suffrage right up to its final issue; even in late 1917, when Eastman was downplaying his antiwar stance in an effort to appease the Wilson administration, The Masses severely castigated Wilson for his treatment of the suffrage pickets. In its penulitimate issue it carried a drawing of the suffragist pickets' "Kaisar Wilson" banner, which evoked mob violence and savage repression by Wilson.
[147] Eastman, "The Woman Rebel," TM, May 1914; "Birth Control and Emma Goldman," unsigned, TM, May 1916; unsigned articles entitled "Birth Control" in TM April, July, and October 1916; Jessie Ashley, "Successful Law-Breaking," TM, January 1917.
[148] Eastman, "Is the Truth Obscene?" TM, March 1915; "Announcement," TM, March 1915. I say that Eastman "implicitly" urged that women publicly announce their use of birth control because in his article Eastman only urged that they publicly state their knowledge of its necessity; however, the tone of the article strongly implies that he wanted them to speak out about their actual experiences. The following month a letter by Miriam Oatman said that she would like to be one of a thousand woman publicly stating they used birth control and extolling its many benefits, in connection with the very trial which Eastman had discussed in his article. Oatman's letter appeared with others in "Progress or Comstock?" TM, April 1915.
Eastman's determination to preserve his mailing rights presaged his conduct during the war, when he tried to self-censor himself in order to keep his magazine in business. This policy, fully in accord with his pragmatic principles, did not work.
[149] Eastman, "Revolutionary Birth Control," TM, July 1915.
[150] Eastman, "Revolutionary Birth Control," TM, July 1915. This article replied to readers who objected to Eastman's extolling of birth control in his March 1915 Masses article "Is the Truth Obscene?"
[151] Eastman, "Is the Truth Obscene?" TM March 1915.
[152] Eastman, "Is the Truth Obscene?" TM, March 1915.
[153] ibid.
[154] Eastman, "Inez Milholland," TM, March 1917.
[155] ibid.
[156] Eastman, "Utopian Reality," TM, December 1916; Eastman, "Margins," TM, January 1916.
[157] "The Uninteresting War," The Masses, September 1915, p. 7.
[158] "The Religion of Patriotism,", The Masses, July 1917, pp. 8-11.
[159] "The Religion of Patriotism," The Masses, July 1917, pp. 8-11.
[160] The phrase is from Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, p. 446.
[161] "The Only Way to End War," The Masses, December 1915, p. 9. This essay, like others Eastman wrote about war, was reprinted in Understanding Germany.
[162] FD, "Louis Untermeyer," TM, June 1917; Eastman, Enjoyment of Poetry, p. 171; the quote is from Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, p. 418. See also Dell, Homecoming, 279-81.
[163] FD, "Homecoming," 279-281.
[164] ibid.
[165] FD, "Books that Are Interesting," Review of Grete Meisel-Hess's The Sexual Crisis, TM, April 1917.
[166] Dell, Homecoming (New York; Harper and Rinehart, 1933), 251.
[167] Dell, "Memories of the Old Masses," (The American Mercury, April 1949), 484; Dell, Homecoming, 251.
[168] Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, p. 556
[169] As Eastman would have predicted, these brilliant but impractical creative artists failed; Spawn ceased publication after three issues.
[170] Charles Edson, "Radical Editors Fight Over Magazine Policy," The [New York] Morning Telegraph, April 8, 1916; Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 548-559. Eastman entitled his chapter on this strike "Greenwich Village Revolts," showing that he never really understood the artists' point of view.
[171] Dell, Homecoming, 251.
[172] Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, passim; Floyd Dell, Homecoming, passim; Art Young, -----; bios of JR, Louise Bryant.
[173] For sensitive discussions of these issues in relation to Eastman and his cohorts, see Ellen Kay Trimberger, "Feminism, Men, and Modern Love: Greenwich Village, 1900-1925, in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, edited by Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (Monthly Review Press, New York), 131-152, and June Sochen, The New Woman: Feminism in Greenwich Village, 1910-1920 (Quadrangle Books, New York, 1972).
[174] Dell, Homecoming, 288. Although the theory designedly expurged guilt, Eastman and Dell were in fact tormented and ambivilent about their relationships and doubted their own capacity for love, as their autobiographies make clear.
[175] Dell, "Feminism for Men," (The Masses, July 1914).
[176] Eastman and Dell frequently asserted that the liberation of women would help men and their families. Dell claimed that feminism would liberate men from the necessity of supporting a woman; this was particularly important to Dell, Eastman, and other free spirited poets who worked for money as little as possible and reserved their real energies for unpaid creative work. Eastman claimed that liberated women would make better mothers. "Only a developed and fully constituted individual is fit to be the mother of a child," he said. "Only one who has herself made the most of the present, is fit to hold in her arms the hope of the future.... The babies of the world suffer a good deal more from silly mothers than from spoiled milk."
They used these arguments, however, to convince skeptical men of the value of feminism. This was consistent with Eastman's strategy of giving opponents "an hour's exercise in liking something else"--a strategy outlined in his "Confessions of a Suffrage Orator." Dell's "Feminism for Men" obviously stressed feminism's benefits for men. Eastman and Dell themselves, their writings make clear, supported feminism for the same reasons they favored the liberation of blacks and women--because of their underlying demand for full human liberation.
[177] Eastman, Enjoyment of Living, 573; Dell, "Feminism for Men," (The Masses, July 1914; "playfellow" quote, Dell, Intellectual Vagabondage: An Apology for the Intelligensia (New York, George H. Doran Company, 1926), 139.
[178] Dell, Homecoming, 283.
[179] Dell, "La Bell Dame Sans Merci," (The Liberator, Janurary 1920), 41-2.
[180] Dell, Intellectual Vagabondage, 139-141; Dell, Women as World Builders, (Hyperion Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1976, reprint of 1913 edition), 19-20. Barbara Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men.
[181] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, March 1914, p. 7. For excellent discussions of the differential effects of sexual liberation and birth control on women and men, see Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right (New York, 1976) and John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters (New York, 1988).
[182] All the quotations from Ida Rauh in this and succeeding paragraphs are from a newspaper clipping in the Max Eastman papers, Lily Library, University of Indiana. The clipping is not identified.
[183] William O'Neil, The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman (New York, 1978), pp. 25-26.
[184] All the quotations from Ida Rauh in this and succeeding paragraphs are from a newspaper clipping in the Max Eastman papers, Lily Library, University of Indiana. The clipping is not identified.
[185] All the quotations from Ida Rauh in this and succeeding paragraphs are from a newspaper clipping in the Max Eastman papers, Lily Library, University of Indiana. The clipping is not identified.
[186] Dell, Homecoming, 271-272.
[187] Margaret C. Jones, Heretics and Hellraisers: Women Contributors to The Masses, 1911-1917 (University Press of Texas, Austin, 1993) exhaustively and perceptively chronicles the women contributors, their impact on The Masses, and the magazine's impact on them.
[188] "To The Woman Readers of The Masses," by five woman, TM, February 1916.
[189] Herbert J. Gutman, Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America (New York, 1977); Robert J. Wiebe, The Search for Order (New York, 1967). The quotation from James is from Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 179. For accounts of rural, middle-class radicalism see Elliott Shore, Talkin' Socialism: J.A. Wayland and the Role of the Press in American Radicalism, 1890-1912 (University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, Kansas, 1988) and James R. Green, Grass-Roots Socialism: Radical Movements in the Southwest, 1895-1943 (Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge, 1978).
[190] "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, May 1913, pp. 5-6.
[191] Eastman, "Class Lines in Colorado," (The New Review, July 1914), 381-387. Because the workers were fighting against absentee, feudal-like owners, lacked revolutionary consciousness, and had patiently endured oppression until the national guard massacred their families, Eastman thought that more middling elements backed them than might have in different circumstances.
[192] Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution: Blood?" TM, February 1914; Eastman, "Knowledge and Revolution: The Question of Violence," The Masses, May 1913, p. 6; untitled article by Eastman beneath cartoon about the uprising the of the garment workers, TM, March 1913; unsigned editorial, "Industrial Relations," TM, October-November 1915. I assume Eastman wrote this editorial because its views and style are his.
[193] Eastman, "Stubborn and Stupid," TM, September 1914.
[194] Lears, No Place of Grace, pp. 2-59.
[195] Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920-1940 (Berkeley, 1985). Although Marchand discusses later decades, many of the trends he highlights were well underway before World War I.
[196] Warren I. Susman, Culture as History, (New York, 1973), pp. 271-287.
[197] "The Religion of Patriotism," July 1917, p. 12.
[198] Eastman describes his fund-raising efforts among the wealthy in Enjoyment of Living, 455-463.
[199] "What a Peach of a Day," The Masses, April 1914, p. 4; "Knowledge and Revolution," The Masses, February 1914, p. 5.
[200] "Knowledge and Revolution: The Question of Violence," The Masses, May 1913, p. 6.
[201] College professors had always been chosen with a view to their orthodoxy in religion, politics, and economics; they were subject to summary dismissal if they deviated from established truths. This was only just beginning to change in the years before World War I; or, more accurately, the reality remained the same, but the idea of academic freedom was beginning to be discussed.
[202] Irwin Granich, review of W.H. Davies, The Autobiography of a Super-tramp, TM, October 1917. Granich soon became famous under the pen-name Mike Gold.
[203] ibid.
[204] As one example of this, see William English Walling, "Class Struggle Within the Working Class," (The Masses, January 1913). Walling correctly noted that this analysis "will mean a complete revolution both in socialism and labor unionism... The theories of half a century may have to be abandoned." He claimed that this new empahsis preserved "every practical and revolutionary Marxian principle." PERHAPS QUOTE WALLING IN THE TEXT
[205] Eastman, "Revolutionary Progress," TM, April 1917.
[206] Eastman, "War and Politics," TM, August 1916.
[207] Marchand, Advertising the American Dream, passim.
[208] For example, in Victorian America, the working class was more sexually expressive than the repressed middle class; sexual decorum had a cachet, and often tangible financial benefits as well. Since the 1920s, however, the middle class has been more sexually adventurous than a relatively staid and conservative working class. Sexual permissiveness is now socially validated, at least for elites; what they do is by definition au current. Whenever working-class behavior differs, it is de facto retrogressive and primitive.
[209] May, End of American Innocence, p. 86.
[210] Decades later Eastman became conservative after the Communists, who destroyed everything Eastman had ever valued, hijacked the world revolutionary movement, vituperatively slandered Eastman and, not so incidentally, massacred many of his friends, associates, and in-laws.
[211] Eastman, "Concerning War," TM, January 1914; Eastman, KR, "War for War's Sake," September 1914; Eastman, KR, October 1914; Eastman, KR, "Is Socialism Lost?" TM, October 1914.
[212] Eastman, KR, "War for War's Sake," TM, September 1914; Eastman, KR, TM, October 1914; Eastman, KR, "Is Socialism Lost?" TM, October 1914.
[213] Eastman, "The Uninteresting War," TM, September 1915; Eastman, "On Characterizing Nations," TM, August 1916, reprinted in Understanding Germany, 57-59.
[214] "Honor Versus Democracy," unsigned editorial, TM, July 1915; unsigned editorial, TM, August 1915.
[215] Eatman, KR, "War for War's Sake," TM, September 1914; Eastman, "The Uninteresting War," TM, September 1915.
[216] Eastman, "Not Utopian" and "Not Heretical," KR, December 1914; Eastman, "The Only War to End War," TM, December 1915.
[217] Eastman, "The Only Way to End War," TM, Demember 1915.
[218] Eastman, "What Is Patriotism and What Shall We Do With It?" Speech, November 1915, printed in Eastman, Understanding Germany," (New York: Mitchell Kennerley: 1916) 98-111.
[219] ibid.
[220] Eastman, "War Psychology and International Socialism," TM, August 1916.
[221] ibid. See John Reed's stupendously wonderful "The World Well Lost," TM February 1916, for a vivid first-person account of the swamping of proletarian internationalism by fervid and homicidal patriotism.
[222] ibid; Eastman, "Kinds of War," TM, January 1917.
[223] ibid; Eastman, "Kinds of War," TM, January 1917.
[224] Eastman, "The Business Cost of War," in Eastman, Understanding Germany, 113-121.
[225]ibid.
[226] Eastman, Understanding Germany, passim. This collection of essays, published in 1916, included material from the previous year as well.
[227] Eastman, Understanding Germany, passim.
[228] Eastman, "A Tribute," TM, December 1914. For the impact of American pacifists on Wilson's Mexican policy see CE, ---- and Cook's dissertation.
[229] Eastman, "The Masses at the White House," TM, July 1916.
[230] Eastman, "War and Politics," TM, August 1916.
[231] Eastman, "Sect or Class?" TM, December 1916.
[232] Eastman, "Sect or Class?" TM, December 1916.
[233] Frank Bohn, "The Re-Election of Wilson," TM, January 1917; Amos Pinchot, "What the Election Means," TM, January 1917; William English Walling, "Socialists for Wilson," TM, January 1917; Eugene Wood, "Aid and Comfort," TM, January 1917; Frank Stuhlman, TM, February 1917.
[234] Eastman, "To Socialist Party Critics," TM, February 1917.
[235] Eastman, "To Socialist Party Critics," TM, February 1917.
[236] Eastman, "Revolutionary Progress," TM, April 1917.
[237] ibid.
[238] ibid.
[239] ibid.
[240] autobiog, get page and volume.
[241] Eastman, "Concerning War," TM, January 1914; Eastman Knowledge and Revolution, TM, May 1914; Eastman, "War for War's Sake," KR, September 1914; Meyer London, "There Must Be an End," TM, February 1915; Eastman, "Conscription Here," TM, July 1916.
[242] Eastman, "In Case of War," TM, April 1917.
[243] John Reed, "Whose War?" TM, April 1917.
[244] ibid.
[245] "A Separation," TM, May 1917.
[246] Eastman, "Advertising Democracy," TM, June 1917.
[247] Eastman, "Conscription, For What?" TM, July 1917.
[248] Eastman, "The Pro-War Socialists," TM, September 1917.
[249] Eastman, "The Pro-War Socialists," RP, September 1917.
[250] "Correspondence: From Upton Sinclair," TM, November-December 1917.
[251] John Reed, "Too Much Democracy," KR, June 1917; Reed, "The Russian Peace," TM, July 1917; Eastman, "Syndicalist-Socialist Russia," TM, August 1917.
[252] Eastman, "Syndicalist-Socialist Russia," RP, August 1917.
[253] ibid.
[254] Eastman, "It is True," TM, August 1917.
[255] Eastman, "A Working-Class Peace," RP, August 1917.
[256] Robert K. Murray, Red Scare: A Study in National Hysteria, 1919-1920 (New York, 1964), 13-14.
[257] Eastman, "A Reminder," KR, October 1914; Eastman, "The Great Socialist," KR, February 1915; "Friends of American Freedom," TM, August 1917; Eastman, "A Question," RP, August 1917.
[258] "What Happened to the August Masses," TM, September 1917. When forced to reveal its objections to the August issue, the government cited four cartoons, three editorial or opinion pieces, and a poem.
[259] Correspondence between Eastman and Woodrow Wilson, (The Masses, November/December, 1917); Dell, "The Story of the Trial," Speech of Dudley Field Malone, and "The Masses Case," all in (The Liberator, June 1918); Eastman, "Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial," The Liberator Publishing Company, New York, 1918.
[260] Eastman, "President Wilson's Letter to the Pope," TM, October 1917.
[261] "Correspondence," TM, November-December 1917.
[262] Untitled Editorial Statement, TL, March 1918.
[263] Untitled Editorial Statement, TL, March 1918.
[264] Eastman, Editorials, July 1918; intro to Lenin's Letter to American Workingmen; article on Debs trial; Bross Lloyd letter; article where he says he cannot say all he wants about allied govts, also July 1918?
[265] Untitled Editorial Etatement, TL March 1918.
[266] Eastman, "Their Utmost Hope," March 1918; Eastman, "A World's Peace," March 1918; Eastman, "What Kind of Peace?", April 1918; Eastman, "A Working-Class Peace," April 1918.
[267] Eastman, "Wilson and the World's Future," May 1918. Typically, Eastman's endorsement of Wilson was hedged with subtle reservations. While approving Wilson's greetings to the Soviet Union, he quoted the British Labor party's stronger declaration of support, which he claimed Wilson had endorsed; he also quoted Trotsky on the value of fellow travellers.
[268] Eastman, Wilson and the World's Future," May 1918.
[269] Eastman, "As to Discrimination," TL, December 1921; Eastman, "Leadership or Inspiration," TL, August 1921.
[270] Dell, "The Story of the Trial," and speeches of Dudley Field Malone, Morris Hillquit, and Eastman (Eastman at the dinner on May 9), (The Masses, June 1918.) See O'Neill Last Romantic, 111-112. In 1925 a critic reminded the world of this remark; Eastman had apparently so far suppressed it in his memory, that he actually denied having made it.
[271] Speeches of Max Eastman and Morris Hillquit at the Masses Dinner, May 9," TL June 1918.
[272] Speeches of Max Eastman.... TL, June 1918.
[273] Editorial, "Socialist Leadership," TL, July 1918.
[274] Editorial, "Socialist Leadership," July 1918.
[275] William Bross Lloyd, "Silence--and the Resurrection," TL, August 1918.
[276]Eastman, reply to William Bross Lloyd, "Silence--and the Resurrection," TL, August 1918.
[277] "Two Letters," TL, September 1918.
[278] "Max Eastman's Address to the Jury in the Second Masses Trial: In Defense of the Socialist Position and the Right of Free Speech," The Liberator Publishing Company, New York, 1918.
[279] ibid.
[280] ibid
[281] ibid
[282] ibid
[283] ibid
[284] Eastman, Editorials, December 1918. Eastman reiterated these views in "The Capitalist International," TL, September 1921, in which he criticized the Soviet Union for belittling the significance of the League of Nations.
[285] Eastman, Editorials, December 1918.
[286] Eastman, "Wilson's Failure," May 1919; Eastman, Editorials, June 1919; Eastman, Editorials, July 1918; Eastman, Editorials, September 1919; Eastman, Editorials, October 1919.
[287] Eastman, "The International Class Struggle," June 1919.
[288] Eastman so regarded the two magazines as one that in 1921 he casually said that "we have built up this magazine through eight long years of labor"--a statement which makes sense only if The Masses and The Liberator were in fact a single entity. Eastman, "Free Speech Again," March 1921.
[289] Almost all the books discussed at the beginning of this manuscript focus entirely on The Masses. In addition, see Zurier, Art for the Masses, Margaret C. Jones, Heretics and Hellraisers: Women Contributors to The Masses, 1911-1917, and ---, The Masses: Odyssey of an Era. One except is Artists and Cartoonists of the Masses and the Liberator.
[290] Eastman, "Revolutionary Progress," (The Masses, August 1917). I discussed this article at some length in a previous chapter.
[291] Eastman, "The New International," (The Liberator, July 1919): 28.
[292] Editorials, The Liberator, April 1918; Eastman, "A Stateman of the New Order," (The Liberator, September and October, 1918).
[293] Editorials, TL August 1920.
[294] Editorials, TL August 1920.
[295] Eastman, "About Dogmatism," TL, November 1920.
[296] Eastman, "A Statesman of the New Order," TL, September 1918. Eastman's reference to the telephone meant that Lenin was a master strategist who, within sight of the Winter Palace, marshalled his forces and organized the revolution.
[297] Eastman, "Thesis of Lenin at the Time of Brest Litovsk," August [?] 1920.
[298] Eastman, "About Dogmatism," (The Liberator, November 1920); Eastman, "Lenin--A Statesman of the New Order," (The Liberator, September and October, 1918); Eastman, Editorials, (The Liberator, April 1920); Eastman, Editorials, (The Liberator, August 1920).
[299] Eastman, "Nietzsche, Plato, and Bertrand Russell, (The Liberator, September 1920.) The quote "may be saved" is Eastman quoting Plato; the other quotations are directly from Eastman.
[300] Eastman, "A Statesman of the New Order," TL, September 1918.
[301] Eastman, "A Statesman of the New Order," TL, September and October, 1918.
[302] Eastman, "Lenin the Communist," TL, June 1919.
[303] Eastman, "The Wisdom of Lenin," TL, June 1924.
[304] Eastman, "The Wisdom of Lenin," TL, June 1924.
[305] ibid.
[306]ibid.
[307] Eastman, "The Russian Dictators," TL, March 1918.
[308] Eastman, "Bolshevik Problems," TL, April 1918.
[309] Eastman, "Bolshevik Problems," TL, April 1918.
[310] Eastman, "Bolshevik Problems," TL, April 1918. Before
The Liberator went to press, Louise Bryant informed Eastman that Breshkovskaya had not in fact been arrested; but Eastman felt so highly of his analysis that he published it anyway.
[311] Eastman, "Lenin--A Statesman of the New Order, II," TL, October 1918.
[312] Eastman, Editorials, TL, January 1919. This downplayed the issue of red terrorism, which Eastman addressed elsewhere.
[313] Eastman, "Niggers and Nightriders," (The Masses, February 1913); Eastman, "Nietzsche, Plato, and Bertrand Russell," (The Liberator, September, 1920); EASTMAN ON LUDLOW.
[314] Eastman, "Bob Minor and the Bolsheviki," (TL, March 1919); Eastman, Editorials, (TL, May 1919); Eastman, Editorials, (TL, February 1919); Eastman, "Free Speech Again," (TL, September 1919). Eastman had inadvertently accepted an ad for Spargo's book slandering the Bolsheviks; he returned the money to the publisher and vowed that he would accept no such ads in the future. Older had responded to Eastman's announcement of this in The Liberator, July 1919.
[315] Eastman, "Robert Lansing Explains Bolshevism," TL, March 1920. Strangely, Eastman appealed here to the supposed "sporting sense" of the American ruling class, a sense which he claimed should have recognized the justice of the Soviet actions. This was not the first or last time he would appeal to such a sporting sense; he mentioned it in his Masses article asking fair treatment for conscientious objectors and when he complained about Burleson's ungentlemanly conduct. See also Eastman, "November Seventh, 1918," TL, December 1918.
[316] Eastman, "Lenin--A Statesman of the New Order," TL, October 1918; Eastman, "Bolshevik Problems," TL, April 1918. Eastman's biographer William O'Neill reports that when Eastman visited the Soviet Union he was disconcerted to find that union officials were appointed by the Communist party rather than elected by the workers. However, fearing that full disclosure would undermine the Revolution, Eastman initially suppressed this information.
[317] Eastman, "Bob Minor and the Bolsheviki," TL, March 1919.
[318] Robert Dell quoted in Eastman, "Dogmatism Again," TL, May 1921.
[319] ibid.
[320] ibid.
[321] Eastman, "About Dogmatism," TL, November 1920.
[322] Eastman, Editorials, TL, July 1919.
[323] Eastman, Editorials, TL, May 1921.
[324] Eastman, Editorials, TL, August 1921.
[325] Eastman, "A Permanent Revolution," TL, December 1923.
[326] editorial TL September 1921.
[327] Eastman, "A Permanent Revolution," TL December 1923.
[328] Eastman, editorials, TL, April 1920.
[329] Eastman, "A Permanent Revolution," TL, December 1923.
[330] Eastman, editorials, TL December 1918 GET TITLE; Eastman, "The New International," TL, July 1919.
[331] Eastman, "The New International," TL, July 1919; Eastman, editorials, TL, December 1918 GET EXACT TITLE.
[332] Eastman, "Members or Not," TL April 1918; Eastman, Editorials, TL July 1918 GET EXACT TITLE; Eastman, editorials, TL, January 1919 GET EXACT TITLE; Eastman, "Bolshevism and Socialism," TL, January 1919.
[333] Eastman, "The New International," TL, July 1919. Eastman was responding to Morris Hillquit's "The Socialist Task and Outlook."
[334] Eastman, "The Left is Right," TL, May 1919.
[335] Eastman, "The International Class Struggle," TL, June 1919.
[336] Eastman, "The New International," TL, July 1919.
[337] Eastman, "The New International," TL, July 1919.
[338] Eastman, "Hillquit Repeats His Error," TL, January 1921. Eastman also debunked Hillquit's claim that the Bolsheviks coined the slogan "All Power to the Soviets" only after they had a majority in the Soviets.
[339] Eastman, editorials, TL, April 1921.
[340] Eastman, "Dogmatism Again," TL, May 1921. This editorial was on the whole a ringing defense of the Comintern against a British leftist's accusations of dogmatism, sectarianism, and Russian domination.
[341] Eastman, "Two Critics of Russia," TL, August 1922; Eastman, "The Capitalist International," TL, December 1921. GET CITES FOR MOSCOW REV ENG AND FOR THEORET COMPASS
[342] Eastman, "The Chicago Conventions," TL, October 1919.
[343] ibid. Eastman also correctly noted that the Slavic leaders planned to purge the Michigan delegates after using them for their own purposes.
[344] ibib.
[345] ibid.
[346] ibid.
[347] ibid.
[348] ibid.
[349] ibid.
[350] ibid.
[351] "Our Candidate," TL April 1920; Eastman, Editorials, TL May 1920.
[352] Eastman, "For President," TL May 1920; Eastman, "Inadvertent," TL, May 1920.
[353] Eastman, "The Railroads," TL September 1919.
[354] Eastman, "Foster," TL, April 1921.
[355] Eastman, "Dreadful Bombs," TL, June 1919; Eastman, "More Bombs," TL, July 1919.
[356] Eastman, "More Bombs," TL, July 1919.
[357] Eastman, "Bolshevism and Socialism," TL, January 1919; Eastman, Editorials, TL, August 1921. While Eastman was condemning violence and barricades, his good friend John Reed implicitly endorsed violent revolution and predicted that it was imminent in America. In a March 1919 review of Sen Katayama's The Labor Movement in Japan, Reed exclaimed that "We Americans have been through nothing yet. We are not acquainted with barricades--familiar, at least by tradition, to all the world's workers. A few of us have gone--more of us are probably going--to jail; a few of us have had our heads broken by the clubs of the police; but to date most of our revolutionary history consists of words. In spite of the War, in spite of arrests, prosecutions and suppressions, what do we know today about the appalling work of commencing a Revolutionary movement in a totally hostile society?
"It is not our fault that we do not know; we shall know soon enough." JR, "Darkness Before Dawn," TL, March 1919.
Even Upton Sinclair implicitly endorsed violence, saying "we want Social Justice, by peaceful means if possible; but we want Social Justice first of all things in this world." Sinclair wrote this in Upton Sinclair's Magazine and quoted it in a letter to The Liberator which Eastman published in February 1919 under the title "Good News."
[358] Eastman, "Examples of 'Americanism,'" TL, February 1920.
[359] ibid.
[360] Eastman, "Science on Trial," TL, December 1920. Eastman hailed the defendants as "the teachers of a science" who instructed the jury in the science of "proletarian revolution."
[361] Eastman, "An Opinion on Tactics," TL, October 1921.
[362] ibid.
[363] ibid.
[364] ibid.
[365] Eastman, "A Response," TL, December 1921.
[366] ibid.
[367] ibid.
[368] Eastman, "A Christmas Party," TL, February 1922.
[369] Eastman, "Nietzsche, Plato, and Bertrand Russell," TL, September 1920.
[370] ibid.
[371] ibid.
[372] Eastman, "The Nature of the Choice," TL, February 1919.
[373] Eastman, "Remember Vallient Russia," TL July 1919.
[374] Eastman, "The Widsom of Lenin," TL, June 1924 and July 1924.
[375] Eastman, "The Wisdom of Lenin," TL, June 1924.
[376] Eastman, "The New International," TL, July 1919.
[377] Eastman, "Hillquit Repeats His Error," TL, January 1921.
[378]soviet docs on cultural policy in TL, including Lunaschar article; Eastman, Forward to Education and Art in Soviet Russia, In the Light of Official Degrees and Documents, The Socialist Publication Society, New York. Internal evidence indicates that this was published in 1919.
[379] Eastman, Forward, Education and Art in Soviet Russia.
[380] Eastman, "Nietzsche, Plato, and Bertrand Russell," TL, September 1920; Eastman, "Clarifying the Light," TL, June 1921.
[381] Eastman, "The Wisdom of Lenin," TL, June 1924.
[382] Spirit of serious play, "Hillquit Repeats His Error," TL January 1921; Chinese verse and painting......
[383] Eastman, Editorials, TL, March 1921.
[384] Eastman, "John Reed," (The Liberator, December 1920.) Comparing this eulogy with Eastman's account of Reed in Max's Heroes I Have Known: Twelve Who Lived Great Lives (Simon and Shuster, New York): 201-237 affords an interesting lesson in the politics of biography.
[385] Eastman, "John Reed," (The Liberator, December 1920). When Reed told Floyd Dell that he was organizing a Communist party or professional revolutionaries, Dell, according to his account, replied "Then I shan't join it. I am a professional writer." Floyd Dell, Homecoming, (Farrar and Rinehart, New York), 328.
[386] Romain Rolland, "A Declaration of Intellectual Independence," (The Liberator, December 1919): 23-25.
[387] Eastman, "A Letter to Romain Rolland," (The Liberator, December 1919): 23-25.
[388] Eastman, "A Letter to Romain Rolland," (The Liberator, December 1919): 23-25. Eastman printed Rolland's reply in The Liberator, March 1920.
[389] ibid.
[390] ibid.
[391] Eastman, "The Clarte Movement," TL, April 1920.
[392] Eastman, "The Clarte Movement," (The Liberator, April 1920). David James Fisher discusses Rolland's group and Rolland's controversy with Barbusse and Clarté in Romain Rolland and the Politics of Intellectual Engagement (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1988), 68-111.
[393] Eastman, "The Clarte Movement," (The Liberator, April 1920).
[394] Eastman, "Clarifying the Light," TL, June 1921.
[395] ibid.
[396] ibid.
[397] ibid.
[398] ibid.
[399] ibid.
[400] Eastman, "Addendum," TL, July 1921.
[401] Eastman, "Laughing at Veblen," TL, July 1921. Eastman admitted that this characterization was extreme.
[402] Eastman, "Inspiration or Leadership," TL, August 1921. Contravening standard practice, Eastman did not print Brooks's letter, but merely quoted portions of it in the course of his rebuttal.
[403] ibid.
[404] ibid.
[405] ibid.
[406] ibid. Eastman published Barbusse's reply in TL, October 1921. Barbusse claimed that Eastman had misrepreseted him and his group in several ways. First, Clarté had long since "abandoned that distinction of a past age between the intellectuals and the manual proletarians." It conceived of intellectuals as those who tested and rectified contemporary ideas; such people could work at any occupation. Because "all the ignorant and intoxicated multitudes oppose social change with a terrible inertia," this counter-hegemonic enterprise was necessary. Second, Clarté was not affiliated with the Communist party; if after free and open inquiry it arrived at a similar position, "it is because there is but one truth and one morality, and honest people, if they are at the same time intelligent people, cannot finally differ in opinion." Clarté had not become an "annex to the Communist party, which in fact has no need of such support"; fusion with the Party would weaken both organizations. Finally, Barbusse denied that the organization's new manifesto was an admission of previous error; Clarté was originally formed "with the greatest possible eclecticism," and recently had more precisely formulated its ideal.
Eastman did not reply to this letter. Barbusse had conceded some of his main points, and the issues on which they still disagreed required no further comment.
[407] Eastman estrangement from party and its control, see bio; Writers on the Left; Eastman's own Writers in Uniform.
[408] Eastman, "The Lesson of the Actors' Strike," TL, October 1919.
[409] ibid.
[410] ibid.
[411] ibid.
[412] ibid.
[413] ibid.
[414] Eastman, "Two Conversations," TL, February 1922. Ironically, Chaliapin was abroad once again when Eastman met him. However, he said that he had remained in Russia for seven years and was restless for travel; he implicitly denied that he was abroad because of artistic restrictions or censorship in the Soviet Union.
[415] "Theosophy on the High Seas, A Letter En Route from Max Eastman," TL, April 1922.
[416] Eastman, A Militant Suffrage Victory," March 1918; Eastman, "Feminism," June 1910, part of Rev Progres or whatever.
[417] Eastman, "Feminism," TL, June 1919 part of editorial section.
[418] note Blanche Wisen Cook collections, intro; articles by CE in TL.
[419] Crystal Eastman, "In Communist Hungary," TL, August 1919, in Cook, 315-328.
[420] ibid.
[421] ibid.
[422] Crystal Eastman, "The Socialist Party Convention," TL, July 1920, in Cook, 349-356.
[423] ibid.
[424] Crystal Eastman, "Feminism: A Statement Read at the First Feminist Congress in the United States, New York, March 1, 1919," TL, May 1919, in Cook, 49-51; Crystal Eastman, "Practical Feminism," TL, January 1920, in Cook, 51-52.
[425] Crystal Eastman, "Now We Can Begin," TL, December 1920, in Cook, 52-57.
[426] ibid.
[427] ibid.
[428] ibid.
[429] ibid.
[430] ibid.
[431] cite my unpublished work The New Women of the Socialist party, and JCK publications.
[432] ibid.
[433] Eastman, "The Supreme Atrocity," TL, April 1918.
[434] Eastman, "Race and Class," TL September 1919, part of editorial section.
[435] Dell, review of James Weldom Johnson"s Fifty Years and Other Poems (The Liberator, March 1918).
[436] Langston Hughes, "The Negro and the Racial Mountain" orginally appeared in The Nation, June 23, 1926. Endlessly reprinted, it can be found in Black Expression, edited Addison Gayle, Jr., (Weybright and Talley, New York, 1969), 258-263.
[437] CM, "How Black Sees Red and Green," TL, June 1921; CM, "Garvey as a Negro Moses," TL, April 1922.
[438] CM, "A Negro Extravaganza," TL, December 1921.
[439] CM, "He Who Gets Slapped," TL, May 1922, in PCM, 69-73. McKay repeated some of the greatest lines from this article verbatim in LWFH, 144-145.
[440] CM, "He Who Gets Slapped," TL, May 1922, in PCM, 69-73; LWFH, 145.
[441] LWFH, 137 (cf. 132-133); PCM, 83; Cooper, 134-192; Mike Gold, "Drunk With Sunlight," New Masses, July 1929. In an incident revealing the sharp contrast between Eastman's and McKay's situation and perceptions, the pair was once denied entry into an all-black cabaret. McKay had believed they could secure admission because he was a regular customer and Eastman a totally atypical white; but the proprietor denied them entry. Far from being appalled or humiliated, Eastman expressed relief that "there was one place in Harlem that had the guts to keep white people out." CM, LWFH, 135.
[442] LWFH, 134-135; Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch (Random House, New York, 1964), 222.
[443] LWFH, 135.
[444] LWFH, 117-118.
[445] LWFH, 149. Marcus Garvey falsely blamed the repression of The Liberator ball on white radicals, and asserted that it proved that white leftists could not be trusted.
[446] Eastman, introduction to Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows (New York, 1922), ix-x. McKay, in his autobiography, called this introduction "splendid." (LWFH, 148). To our eyes it seems condescending because Eastman considered, even while rejecting, the idea of innate Negro inferiority.
[447] Eastman, introduction to Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows (New York, 1922), ix-xi.
[448] LWFH, 138-139.
[449] Gold, "Towards Proletarian Art," TL, February 1921; CM, LWFH, 138-140.
[450] Gold, ibid.; McKay, material in Pearson's and The Crisis extolling politicized art.
[451] McKay, "Birthright," The Liberator (August 1922), in PCM, 73-76.
[452] McKay, "Birthright," in The Liberator (August 1922), 15-16, in PCM, 73-76.
[453] CM, "Birthright," Liberator, August 1922, in PCM, 76.
[454] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-90, especially 83.
[455] PCM, 84.
[456] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-84.
[457] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-90. McKay's Negroes in America was soon published, in Russian, in the Soviet Union. Whether because of Eastman's entreaties or because the Soviets would not print an attack on one of their chief American supporters, this chapter was excised from the published version. For an example of McKay stressing class over race, see his exchange with DuBois in The Crisis, July 1921, reprinted in Philip S. Foner and James S. Allen, American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History (Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1987), pp. 12-14. Foner and Allen printed the entire exchange as DuBois published it; the elipses in McKay's letter are in the exchange as it appears in The Crisis.
[458] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-90, especially 89.
[459] "The Negro and Radical Thought," TC, July 1921. Du Bois excised part of McKay's letter, which may have somewhat modified McKay's thesis.
[460] "The Negro and Radical Thought," TC, July 1921.
[461] CM, "The Racial Issue in the United States of America: A Summary," International Press Correspondence, November 21, 1922, in PCM, 90-91.
[462] CM, "Report on the Negro Question," International Press Correspondence, January 5, 1923, in PCM, 91-95; CM, NIA, 37-38, 41, 90.
[463] Eastman summarized this policy of The Masses in Enjoyment of Living, 414-416.
[464] "Free Speech Again," TL, September 1919.
[465] "Free Speech Again," TL, March 1921; "The Free Press," TL, May 1921.
[i] Eastman, "The Masses and the Negro," (The Masses, May 1915). Claude McKay, a black poet and an editor of The Liberator, agreed with Sloan's assessment of Davis. See McKay, A Long Way from Home, 28-29.
[ii] "Race Superiority," (The Masses, June 1913); "Another Negro Outrage," (The Masses, July 1914): 20. The latter title parodies articles about alleged Negro depradations featured in the atrocity-mongering white mainstream press.
[iii] Eastman, introduction, Harlem Shadows: The Poems of Claude Mckay (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company), 1922, ix-x. Eastman specifically noted that, while McKay used Jamaician dialect with great effect, he needed other language to express the full range of his emotions.
[iv] W.E.B. DuBois, "The Conservation of Races," reprinted in W.E.B. DuBois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890-1919, Philip Foner, editor (Pathfinder Press, New York, 1970), 73-85, quotation is on p. 81; W.E.B. DuBois, Dusk at Dawn, (Shocken, 1970, reprint of 1940 edition), 147-149.