EASTMAN, THE LIBERATOR, AND THE WAR
The suppression of The Masses and indictment of its editors did not dampen Eastman's enthusiasm for his philosophy or his causes. While awaiting trial, Eastman started The Liberator as The Masses' successor, and made the compromises necessary to keep it alive. Its editorial credo echoed the effervescence of its predecessor:
THE LIBERATOR will be owned and published by its editors, who will be free in its pages to say what they truly think.
It will fight in the struggle of labor. It will fight for the ownership and control of industry by the workers, and will present vivid and accurate news of the labor and socialist movements in all parts of the world..... It will stand for the complete independence of women--political, social, and economic--as an enrichment of the existence of mankind.... It will assert the social and political equality of the black and white races, oppose every kind of racial discrimination, and conduct a remorseless publicity campaign against lynch law....
THE LIBERATOR will be distinguished by a complete freedom in art and poetry and fiction and criticism. It will be candid. It will be experimental. It will be hospitable to new thoughts and feelings. It will direct its attack against dogma and rigidity of mind upon whatever side they are found.[262]
The Liberator advocated birth control, prison reform, the nationalization of the railroads, and child-centered education. It published a wide variety of literature and art, and its editors wrote decidely non-political poetry and fiction even as they participated in the class war. In March 1918 Wilson had implicitly endorsed the Soviet peace terms, and had not yet invaded the Soviet Union. In this premier issue Eastman exulted that
Never was the moment more auspicious to issue a great magazine of liberty. With the Russian people in the lead, the world is entering upon the experiment of industrial and real democracy.... America has extended her hand to the Russians. She will follow in their path. The world is in the rapids. The possibilities of change in this day are beyond all imagination. We must unite our hands and voices to make the end of this war the beginning of an age of freedom and happiness undreamed by those whose minds comprehend only political and military events. With this ideal THE LIBERATOR comes into being on Lincoln's birthday, February 12, 1918.[263]
On one issue The Liberator did temporize, however. Facing twenty years in prison for his antiwar stance, Eastman moderated expression of such views and bluntly stated that certain articles were self-censored. Accused by both supporters and opponents of "a certain amount of camouflage in what we say editorially in THE LIBERATOR," he said that "we are not saying things in this magazine that we do not think are true." He did not, however, claim that he fully spoke his mind on every subject. Indeed, on at least three separate occasions he forthrightly informed his readers that he had excised some contributors' remarks on the war because of the censorship, and on another occasion he admitted that "we are not free to say all that we might" about the allied governments he nonetheless harshly criticized.[264] In one key respect, however, Eastman's position had genuinely changed. After the Bolshevik Revolution--and especially after the harsh Brest-Litovsk Treaty--Eastman supported the war against the Kaisar. Because Wilson and Lenin were temporarily on the same side, and because Wilson's Fourteen Points echoed Bolshevik peace proposals, Eastman could use Wilsonian language for purposes that went far beyond Wilson's, and ultimately contradicted them. Eastman used the President's own words as Aesopean language that hinted at Eastman's own meaning. "THE LIBERATOR," he said, "will endorse the war aims outlined by the Russian people and expounded by President Wilson," including "self-determination for all peoples" and a world federation against war.[265]
Eastman's creative adaptation of Wilsonian rhetoric began in The Liberator's first issues. Quoting Wilson's offer of help for the Russian people in their quest for liberty, Eastman said that "he was speaking for us. And we would only wish to add two things to his words before the world." Eastman insisted (minor points, surely) that the Russians included ownership of the means of production among the prerequisites of liberty and that Americans deserved similar freedom. Applying the Fourteen Points to the U.S. sphere of influence, Eastman urged respect for the rights of small nations in central America and the internationalization of the Panama Canal. Warning that "peace has its evils no less than war," Eastman said that as "the anti-democratic forces have had their kind of war, they will certainly try to have their kind of peace. It will be an imperial, nationalistic and capitalist peace, a peace with wars already in its womb." He demanded not only a peace among nations, but one where "labor in every country shall play so strong a part that that peace will mean freedom."[266]
In May 1918, in editorials written around the time of the first Masses trial, Eastman proclaimed that Wilson had astonished the world with his bold and liberal peace proposals. Wilson was an ideal pragmatist who recognized the value of doubt and calmly awaited evidence before making a decision; he recognized that a League of Nations would result not from abstract ideals but from actual power relations. Wilson, therefore, would "cooperate with evolution"; he acted "in the single interest of human freedom." He had opposed the Japanese invasion of Russia, rhetorically supported "the republic of labor unions" in Russia, sent a strongly progressive message to the Democratic party of New Jersey, and liberated hundreds of conscientious objectors. Enthusing that Wilson should join the Socialist party, Eastman declared that he personally would "take the risk of accepting him as a member."[267]
Having approved four of Wilson's actions or pronouncements, Eastman then advocated "four things he might do." He should unequivocably reassure anti-imperialists in Germany that the allies would conclude a just peace with them; recognize the Soviet Union; endorse the proposed interbelligerent conference; and free all American political prisoners, the arraignment of whom "may be technically plausible perhaps under the espionage act because of the extreme language of the St. Louis program." The United States, Eastman pointed out, could not rely on the cooperation of European socialists while their counterparts in America languished in jail. Lovers of liberty approved action against spies and those who would sabotage the military but opposed "the spirit of barbarism and feudal reaction and internal autocratic militarism." Wilson should stop the reign of terror against dissidents immediately. "And in proportion as this war is a war of right and democracy, the stoppage of these things, and the restoration of elementary liberties and justice to men without capitalistic influence, would strengthen the government in its waging of the war, and strengthen it immeasurably in that democratic world-reconstruction which it has declared to be the irreducible term of peace." Eastman concluded that Wilson had in effect dictated terms of peace to his allies because he spoke for the peoples of the world. Having "ventured into a position of almost militant leadership of those peoples for the purposes of war and peace," he could reshape the world with "his new knowledge of the difference between the interests of men and the interests of money and prestige."[268]
Eastman was apparently sincere in these statements. By late 1921 he had admitted that "The Liberator took two different positions, under pressure of two situations not practically different, upon the subject of Wilson's war policy, and one of them was revolutionary and right, and the other was conciliatory and wrong." In 1922 Eastman again conceded his error. The New York Call, a relatively conservative Socialist newspaper angered by Eastman's communist views, harshly criticized his alleged gyrations and inconsistencies. In defense, Eastman did not claim that fear of prison had motivated his pro-Wilson pronouncements. Instead he admitted that his praise for Wilson constituted "an error both in judgment of Wilson's ability, and in understanding the relation between the revolutionary movement and the movement for a capitalist international. But it was not an abandonment of the revolutionary movement. It was not an abatement of my loyalty to the principle of the class-struggle."[269]
Eastman did, however, try to avoid a long prison term. In May 1918, during the first Masses trial, he downplayed his revolutionary and antiwar stance. In a statement that must have amused John Sloan and George Bellows, Eastman claimed that "the only policy of the magazine [was] complete freedom of expression for its editors." He stated that he opposed not patriotism but only its misuse by militarists, while Morris Hillquit (Eastman's attorney, a conservative, if antiwar, Socialist) declared that Eastman's attacks on capitalism merely criticized war profiteering. When a band played the national anthem outside the courthouse window, Eastman rose and, in a statement that would haunt him later, claimed that he had changed his views on the war. "When the boys begin to go over to Europe, and to fight to the stains of the anthem, you feel very differently about it," he said. "You noticed when it was played out there in the street the other day, I did stand up." Eastman demanded that the government prosecute the numerous (he estimated 150,000) German spies at large in the United States instead of "upright American citizens."[270]
Eastman also told the jury that after the United States entered the war he had not advocated withdrawal. "I do not use my brains in that way. When there is a settled fact, I try to look ahead and see what can lead us out to a satisfactory result, and I regarded the war as a fact from the time it began." He had proposed only that Wilson endorse the Russian peace terms and more specifically encourage German anti-imperialists; since Wilson did these things on February 11, "I have not had an idea of anything that ought to be done that has not been done."[271]
Unlike most prosecutions under the Espionage and Sedition acts, the first Masses trial ended in a hung jury. A public dinner celebrated this event and raised funds for the next trial. Eastman humorously complained that his friends had deserted him. "Just lately the world seems pretty evenly divided between those who are down on me because I am going to jail and those who are down on me because I am not going to jail," he said. That he and the other defendants remained at large was not their fault; they had committed no crime. "I want to disclaim absolutely any aspirations towards martrydom. I know that the truth is usually unpopular and often persecuted, but I do not belong with those who try to be unpopular and invite persecution." Eastman claimed that he and other Masses editors had neither recanted nor exaggerated their opinions, but rather expressed them
with a careful avoidance of bravado, because we did not want to go to jail, and with a careful avoidance of apology, because we did not want to dishonor the truth.... I have no desire to become a martyr for my opinions, but I do not intend to change them at the dictation of any power but my own intelligence. I have not relinquished and I do not relinquish my lawful right to speak the important truth as I see it. And I ask you to help me defend that right.[272]
Between the first and second Masses trials, Eastman urged that the Socialist party formulate a new program accepting the fact of war and demanding a just and labor-friendly peace. Union organizing and criticizing the war had been virtually criminalized; however, Socialist candidates could campaign on a platform of pure Socialism. The St. Louis antiwar manifesto
was not adopted for these elections.... [or] circumstances. It bears no relation to a world in which there exists a soviet republic in danger of annihilation from four quarters and calling to us for four kinds of help. It bears no relation to a war in which the international peace terms proposed by that republic have been embodied in the organized war program of our country. Let it stand--with its faults and virtues--as a monument to our sincere truth to the principle of internationalism as we conceived it to apply at that hour.[273]
The Socialist Congressional platform must demand "the revolutionizing of all industry." It must forthrightly endorse the "war aims that President Wilson has dictated to the allied countries" and develop their implications. Socialists must also defend free speech, which "must be won every morning" if socialists would replace political democracy with "industrial self-government."[274]
Eastman's endorsement of Wilson and war elicited a critical response from William Bross Lloyd, SP candidate for the United States Senate from Illinois. Eastman published Lloyd's letter "with some necessary omissions." Saying that "THE LIBERATOR has disappointed me," Lloyd characterized Eastman as a frivolous, literary bohemian--a charge later popularized by critics left and right. Lloyd praised The Liberator as "the courageous voice of new things--noble, intense, daring new things.... new forms of art, new styles in versification, new fancies in drawing, new animation in book reviews." Although it won readers "by charm of entertainment," however, it could not claim "leadership in political thought" or "distinction as a socialist journal." The St. Louis resolution which it criticized was "the one great achievement of American socialism." Lloyd denied elevating abstract principles above Eastman's pragmatic realism, "though it is often true that these principles contain a more fundamental realism than the things of current experience." Echoing Eastman's earlier critique of Upton Sinclair, Lloyd found "inscrutable" Eastman's jump from Wilsonian rhetoric to "democratic peace terms."
You know the American government, You know the English, French, Italian and Japanese governments. You know about certain secret treaties which the British Parliament has refused to revise as a contradiction to [its] protestations of sympathy with the Wilson administration.... You know that the "implications" of Wilson's rhetoric are not the thoughts of the diplomats of any of the contending nations. Go ahead and spin them out. You will teach your readers and hearers what a democratic peace ought to mean. But you know that, short of revolution, none of the governments will disrupt its modus operandi on account of your "implications" from Wilson's writings.
The Socialist party aimed "to get hold of the government" and "enforce its own terms of peace, its own modes of politics and industry." Socialists must consider events, including American intervention and the growth of labor's influence in Europe, when formulating their program; but above all "we must not surrender the achievement of placing human values above every other code." Propounding democratic peace terms was "educational leadership," but "must not fool us into the idea that we are making peace when we talk peace. We are helping. But this we cannot do at the cost of giving up our political leadership against war, because that would mean to give up the greater teaching for the lesser. Rather silence--and the resurrection."[275]
Eastman regretted that he could not fully discuss Lloyd's points because of the war censorship, but agreed that Socialists must constantly apply their principles in each particular situation. However, he insisted that "some of the steps suggested by the St. Louis pronouncement are not only impractical, in view of current facts, but utterly out of relation to the facts." A reformulated SP platform would not abandon socialist principles, as Lloyd feared, but rather "apply those principles to a new situation."[276] Eastman also acknowledged that The Liberator perforce censored some of Lloyd's and his own opinions. Disgusted by such self-censorship, John Reed resigned from the Liberator's editorial board, proclaiming that "I cannot in these times bring myself to share editorial responsibility for a magazine which exists upon the suffrance of Mr. Burleson." Eastman expressed "a deep feeling of regret" and characteristically replied that in Reed's absence (in the Soviet Union) the editors
decided it was our duty to the social revolution to keep this instrument we have created alive toward a time of great usefulness.... Personally, I envy you the power to cast loose when not only a good deal of the dramatic beauty, but also the glamour of abstract moral principle, is gone out of the venture, and it remains for us merely the most effective and therefore the right thing to do.[277]
At this time Eastman and the other Masses editors (including Reed) still had the government's indictment hanging over them. Their second trial occured in October 1918, after Wilson had incensed Eastman by invading the Soviet Union. Eastman again conciliated the jury. He denied the government's charge of conspiracy, asserting that the editors never even agreed upon an antiwar policy, much less obstructed conscription or the war. "We never had any meeting to discuss our attitude towards this war," he said. "We never adopted any policy toward this war. We never adopted any policy" except that of self-expression and conciliating nobody. The Masses had expressed the individual opinions of its editors and contributors; its antiwar articles, however extreme and indelicate, had appeared "before our country had got into the fight... before one single man of our fellow citizens, so far as was publicly known, had set foot in the trenches of Europe." Specifically criticizing some antiwar items as exhibiting bad taste, Eastman claimed that he had "sobered a good deal more quickly than some of the editors of the Masses to a realization of the fact that the United States had really got into a world war, and could not get out except by carrying it forward in a diplomatic and military way to some sort of conclusion." The Masses only belatedly realized "the full sense and tragic significance of the fact that we are in this war, and that thousands of our friends are going to die."[278]
Eastman accurately expressed the manifold purposes of The Masses as a literary and political magazine publishing the editors' "satirical and argumentative and poetic and pictorial comments upon the general policy of the Government from a socialist point of view." The editors were "artists and literary men in a state of revolt from the commercial magazines" who believed "that the proletariat ought to replace the bourgeoisie in the position of social and industrial and political control of our civilization."[279]
In his conciliatory fashion, Eastman then lectured the jury on the fundamentals of socialism. Socialists believed in liberty and democracy exactly as did American's revolutionary forefathers.
Only it is their opinion that real democracy does not consist merely in letting the people elect the officials who shall govern them, and they believe that true liberty is not guaranteed to a citizen merely by the possession of the right to vote. They think that democracy will begin when the people rule in industry as well as in politics. And they believe that true liberty involves the right to work and to possess all that you produce by doing your work. I think it is pretty obvious, if you just look along the street, that only those people are really free who possess an adequate source of income--only they are free from anxiety and worry, and the danger of ruin and poverty, and from the domination of some man or some corporation which holds their luck and their happiness in its power.[280]
Universal political suffrage was indeed essential. "But after all, how much of our time, and how much of our life does politics influence? Is not the main occupation of our time, and the main engagement of our interest, determined by business rather than political considerations? And is it not true that those who rule business, whoever they may be, rule the better part of our lives? I think there will be no dispute about it." Equating socialism with government ownership rather than proletarian rule, Eastman identified wartime government operation of the railroads with practical Socialism. Government consolidation and operation of the railroads was "the simple, quick, sensible thing to do in an emergency. But Socialists believe that the fact that 10 percent of the people own 90 percent of the wealth, and that 2 percent of the people own 60 percent of the wealth, is an emergency, and that we ought to do the simple, quick, sensible thing on that account, and do it everywhere, and do it a little more thoroughly."[281]
With extreme delicacy, Eastman next explained the class struggle. The capitalists, he told the jury, would not change the system which benefitted them. Change would emanate from "the poorer people--the working people--the small farmers--the small business men, who are not very sure of their jobs, and who are immediately under the domination of somebody, and do not feel very free. It is the people who will benefit from the change, who can be depended on to change the world." The proletariat--all those whose income came from work--would create "an industrial as well as a political democracy." The working classes were also "personally interested in preventing war." Most wars (Eastman delicately allowed some unspecified exceptions) concerned "thinly disguised conflicts of business or commercial interests." Lacking property, workers naturally opposed war; but when the Great War started, most Socialist parties betrayed their pledges and endorsed their governments. American Socialists, however, honored their vows of peace and adopted the St. Louis resolution, "absolutely condemning the entrance of the United States into this war." Courageously (and, in light of his publicly expressed views, surprisingly), Eastman forthrighly endorsed that resolution:
As a member of the party that adopted it, and as an American citizen who still dares to believe in his rights, I have no hesitation in telling you that I endorsed that resolution. And although subsequently, during last winter and spring when Germany was invading Russia, I passed through a period of extreme doubt, and was almost ready to lay the resolution aside as an expression of abstract principle no longer applicable to the current of affairs, that period of doubt has passed. I think that the Socialists were right in judging this war to be a war to which their general principle of opposition to all international war properly applies. I had no part in writing the St. Louis resolution, and it contained modes of expression that would not be mine, but as for the principles that it proclaimed with courage in a time of stress, they are my principles.[282]
Denying that he was a "bigoted or fanatical advocate of the mere abstract principle of free speech," Eastman admitted that the government could "pass extraordinary laws in an emergency and defend its armies with a military and wartime censorship." However, free speech undergirded even a merely political democracy. Some writings that the government cited as obstructing the draft were written before the Conscription Act was passed; others, such as demands for the fair treatment of political prisoners, were perfectly innocuous. Eastman reiterated that
my feeling of rebellious opposition to the war was sobered by the law, and... gradually transferred itself from a negative opposition to the war, to a more positive demand that we should endorse the Russian peace terms, which I believed would lead us quickly out of the war to a democratic and just settlement.... I was not for the defeat of our armies. I was not even for a separate peace. My whole argument at that time was for the possibility of getting a general democratic peace soon, by endorsing the Russian peace terms.[283]
Eastman defended the Soviet Union; he also discussed the many times he had contacted the government in an effort to ascertain and obey the law.
The second Masses trial concluded, like the first, with a hung jury. With the war almost over and the United States victorious, further prosecution seemed unlikely. Eastman confidently added "a journal of revolutionary progress" to The Liberator's masthead. By December 1918, however, his enthusiasm for Wilson and the League of Nations had evaporated because Wilson had invaded the Soviet Union and his allies were obviously intent on plundering Germany. Eastman denounced Wilson's "business internationalism" and condemned the proposed League of Nations as "a business organization" for "the exploitation of the world." Eastman conceded that the League was "one of the great events of history" and "the crowning achievement of the age of business efficiency" that would inaugurate nearly permanent peace. However, it would also throttle democracy and freedom and "increase the wealth of those who possess wealth." The political expression of the globalization of capital, the League constituted "an international state" which would "express and defend" the interests of the idle rich. It was "the next natural step in the development of capitalism." Like the trusts, it would end destructive competition, although now on an international scale; as evidenced by the invasion of Russia by England, France, Japan, and the US, it would comprise a strike-breaking army against Socialism. Labor, Eastman cried, must organize an International of Labor stronger than that of Capital:
We believe in a League of Nations as the one thing that will ever remove the menace of a nationalistic war from the earth. We believe that it must be a definite, concrete, continuous and working federation of the peoples. We believe that such a thing may come to pass in the near future, and we will work for it. But we do not discover in the victorious governments that are meeting in Paris, nor in any of the delegates of these governments, the least disposition to establish such a federation of the peoples. We are not free to say all that we might of these governments, but we can say that the hands they clasp over the council table will be red with the fresh blood of the freest people on earth.[284]
Having learned from John Dewey "that every question that arises in the complex of events is a specific question," Eastman asked not whether the proletariat should support a league, but whether it should support the particular League under discussion. Eastman advised that unless the Soviet Union was admitted on terms of equality, the workers should support their own League of Nations, the Third International.[285]
Eastman now denounced Wilson as an idle phrase-monger who believed that mere rhetoric and diplomacy could transform an imperialist war into a crusade for democracy and who "did not even ask the Allies to revise their war aims as a condition of American participation." Denouncing the starvation terms imposed by the allies upon Germany, Eastman declared that Wilson's main role had been "to surround himself and the general public with a blinding vapor of self-righteous emotion all the time that the job was being done." He castigated the infamous "milch cow" provision of the Versailles Treaty as an unparalleled atrocity; "there is no name that has come down out of history, not from Atilla nor from Genghis Khan, that can adequately characterize a little group of cultivated old men torturing and mutilating the dying bodies of women and children." These same predators were now starving Russian men, women, and children to "prevent the truth that has been demonstrated in Russia from becoming known to the whole world."[286] Eastman's abhorrence of these policies caused him to repudiate not only Wilson, but a temporizing Socialist party as well. Denouncing the invaders of Russia, Eastman thundered that
We cannot treat with these, the murderers of our comrades. We cannot send delegates to them to plead and persuade, to beg for amnesties for our prisoners, to pray for the incorporation of social reform measures in the constitution of their League of Nations, as the Berne conference did. It is time for all pleading and appealing and associating ourselves with these governments to cease. It is time for us, in every act of our organization and in every word from our press and our platforms, to wage class war against them.... And that is why at last, even in the United States, we have a Left Wing, with its own organization, and its own spokesmen, and its own press. We know that the international class struggle is being fought to a finish in Europe, with all the weapns and forces of propaganda that are available on either side. There is no middle ground left. Every thinking man and woman there is either for the revolution or against it. And every one here too. And we are for it, and we cannot tolerate the silence of the official party in this the most critical hour in all the history of the revolutionary hopes of mankind.[287]
By the end of the war, therefore, defense of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union had become a touchstone of Eastman's foreign (and domestic) policy.
The Liberator greatly resembled The Masses in its contributors, opinions, and range of topics; in a real sense it was the same magazine.[288] Although subsequent historians have sharply differentiated the two magazines--most treatments of the "lyrical left" stop abruptly in late 1917, and William O'Neill's Echoes of Revolt contains nothing from the new magazine--Eastman started The Liberator only because the authorities had suppressed The Masses and indicted its editors.[289] Neither he nor any of his co-editors regarded it as a new departure, nor had they materially changed their views. The Liberator, unlike its predecessor, was owned by Max and his sister Crystal, rather than being a cooperative; but Max, who raised most of the money and did most of the hard work, had long demanded greater control. He believed that his new magazine surpassed the old precisely because it had a greater editorial focus and a more assured policy. Most of the old contributors remained, and were now paid for their work. World upheavals caused such differences as existed between the two magazines and, contrary to the impression created by most historians, drove Eastman and his cohorts to the Left rather than revealing a dilettante sensibility.
THE LIBERATOR will be owned and published by its editors, who will be free in its pages to say what they truly think.
It will fight in the struggle of labor. It will fight for the ownership and control of industry by the workers, and will present vivid and accurate news of the labor and socialist movements in all parts of the world..... It will stand for the complete independence of women--political, social, and economic--as an enrichment of the existence of mankind.... It will assert the social and political equality of the black and white races, oppose every kind of racial discrimination, and conduct a remorseless publicity campaign against lynch law....
THE LIBERATOR will be distinguished by a complete freedom in art and poetry and fiction and criticism. It will be candid. It will be experimental. It will be hospitable to new thoughts and feelings. It will direct its attack against dogma and rigidity of mind upon whatever side they are found.[262]
The Liberator advocated birth control, prison reform, the nationalization of the railroads, and child-centered education. It published a wide variety of literature and art, and its editors wrote decidely non-political poetry and fiction even as they participated in the class war. In March 1918 Wilson had implicitly endorsed the Soviet peace terms, and had not yet invaded the Soviet Union. In this premier issue Eastman exulted that
Never was the moment more auspicious to issue a great magazine of liberty. With the Russian people in the lead, the world is entering upon the experiment of industrial and real democracy.... America has extended her hand to the Russians. She will follow in their path. The world is in the rapids. The possibilities of change in this day are beyond all imagination. We must unite our hands and voices to make the end of this war the beginning of an age of freedom and happiness undreamed by those whose minds comprehend only political and military events. With this ideal THE LIBERATOR comes into being on Lincoln's birthday, February 12, 1918.[263]
On one issue The Liberator did temporize, however. Facing twenty years in prison for his antiwar stance, Eastman moderated expression of such views and bluntly stated that certain articles were self-censored. Accused by both supporters and opponents of "a certain amount of camouflage in what we say editorially in THE LIBERATOR," he said that "we are not saying things in this magazine that we do not think are true." He did not, however, claim that he fully spoke his mind on every subject. Indeed, on at least three separate occasions he forthrightly informed his readers that he had excised some contributors' remarks on the war because of the censorship, and on another occasion he admitted that "we are not free to say all that we might" about the allied governments he nonetheless harshly criticized.[264] In one key respect, however, Eastman's position had genuinely changed. After the Bolshevik Revolution--and especially after the harsh Brest-Litovsk Treaty--Eastman supported the war against the Kaisar. Because Wilson and Lenin were temporarily on the same side, and because Wilson's Fourteen Points echoed Bolshevik peace proposals, Eastman could use Wilsonian language for purposes that went far beyond Wilson's, and ultimately contradicted them. Eastman used the President's own words as Aesopean language that hinted at Eastman's own meaning. "THE LIBERATOR," he said, "will endorse the war aims outlined by the Russian people and expounded by President Wilson," including "self-determination for all peoples" and a world federation against war.[265]
Eastman's creative adaptation of Wilsonian rhetoric began in The Liberator's first issues. Quoting Wilson's offer of help for the Russian people in their quest for liberty, Eastman said that "he was speaking for us. And we would only wish to add two things to his words before the world." Eastman insisted (minor points, surely) that the Russians included ownership of the means of production among the prerequisites of liberty and that Americans deserved similar freedom. Applying the Fourteen Points to the U.S. sphere of influence, Eastman urged respect for the rights of small nations in central America and the internationalization of the Panama Canal. Warning that "peace has its evils no less than war," Eastman said that as "the anti-democratic forces have had their kind of war, they will certainly try to have their kind of peace. It will be an imperial, nationalistic and capitalist peace, a peace with wars already in its womb." He demanded not only a peace among nations, but one where "labor in every country shall play so strong a part that that peace will mean freedom."[266]
In May 1918, in editorials written around the time of the first Masses trial, Eastman proclaimed that Wilson had astonished the world with his bold and liberal peace proposals. Wilson was an ideal pragmatist who recognized the value of doubt and calmly awaited evidence before making a decision; he recognized that a League of Nations would result not from abstract ideals but from actual power relations. Wilson, therefore, would "cooperate with evolution"; he acted "in the single interest of human freedom." He had opposed the Japanese invasion of Russia, rhetorically supported "the republic of labor unions" in Russia, sent a strongly progressive message to the Democratic party of New Jersey, and liberated hundreds of conscientious objectors. Enthusing that Wilson should join the Socialist party, Eastman declared that he personally would "take the risk of accepting him as a member."[267]
Having approved four of Wilson's actions or pronouncements, Eastman then advocated "four things he might do." He should unequivocably reassure anti-imperialists in Germany that the allies would conclude a just peace with them; recognize the Soviet Union; endorse the proposed interbelligerent conference; and free all American political prisoners, the arraignment of whom "may be technically plausible perhaps under the espionage act because of the extreme language of the St. Louis program." The United States, Eastman pointed out, could not rely on the cooperation of European socialists while their counterparts in America languished in jail. Lovers of liberty approved action against spies and those who would sabotage the military but opposed "the spirit of barbarism and feudal reaction and internal autocratic militarism." Wilson should stop the reign of terror against dissidents immediately. "And in proportion as this war is a war of right and democracy, the stoppage of these things, and the restoration of elementary liberties and justice to men without capitalistic influence, would strengthen the government in its waging of the war, and strengthen it immeasurably in that democratic world-reconstruction which it has declared to be the irreducible term of peace." Eastman concluded that Wilson had in effect dictated terms of peace to his allies because he spoke for the peoples of the world. Having "ventured into a position of almost militant leadership of those peoples for the purposes of war and peace," he could reshape the world with "his new knowledge of the difference between the interests of men and the interests of money and prestige."[268]
Eastman was apparently sincere in these statements. By late 1921 he had admitted that "The Liberator took two different positions, under pressure of two situations not practically different, upon the subject of Wilson's war policy, and one of them was revolutionary and right, and the other was conciliatory and wrong." In 1922 Eastman again conceded his error. The New York Call, a relatively conservative Socialist newspaper angered by Eastman's communist views, harshly criticized his alleged gyrations and inconsistencies. In defense, Eastman did not claim that fear of prison had motivated his pro-Wilson pronouncements. Instead he admitted that his praise for Wilson constituted "an error both in judgment of Wilson's ability, and in understanding the relation between the revolutionary movement and the movement for a capitalist international. But it was not an abandonment of the revolutionary movement. It was not an abatement of my loyalty to the principle of the class-struggle."[269]
Eastman did, however, try to avoid a long prison term. In May 1918, during the first Masses trial, he downplayed his revolutionary and antiwar stance. In a statement that must have amused John Sloan and George Bellows, Eastman claimed that "the only policy of the magazine [was] complete freedom of expression for its editors." He stated that he opposed not patriotism but only its misuse by militarists, while Morris Hillquit (Eastman's attorney, a conservative, if antiwar, Socialist) declared that Eastman's attacks on capitalism merely criticized war profiteering. When a band played the national anthem outside the courthouse window, Eastman rose and, in a statement that would haunt him later, claimed that he had changed his views on the war. "When the boys begin to go over to Europe, and to fight to the stains of the anthem, you feel very differently about it," he said. "You noticed when it was played out there in the street the other day, I did stand up." Eastman demanded that the government prosecute the numerous (he estimated 150,000) German spies at large in the United States instead of "upright American citizens."[270]
Eastman also told the jury that after the United States entered the war he had not advocated withdrawal. "I do not use my brains in that way. When there is a settled fact, I try to look ahead and see what can lead us out to a satisfactory result, and I regarded the war as a fact from the time it began." He had proposed only that Wilson endorse the Russian peace terms and more specifically encourage German anti-imperialists; since Wilson did these things on February 11, "I have not had an idea of anything that ought to be done that has not been done."[271]
Unlike most prosecutions under the Espionage and Sedition acts, the first Masses trial ended in a hung jury. A public dinner celebrated this event and raised funds for the next trial. Eastman humorously complained that his friends had deserted him. "Just lately the world seems pretty evenly divided between those who are down on me because I am going to jail and those who are down on me because I am not going to jail," he said. That he and the other defendants remained at large was not their fault; they had committed no crime. "I want to disclaim absolutely any aspirations towards martrydom. I know that the truth is usually unpopular and often persecuted, but I do not belong with those who try to be unpopular and invite persecution." Eastman claimed that he and other Masses editors had neither recanted nor exaggerated their opinions, but rather expressed them
with a careful avoidance of bravado, because we did not want to go to jail, and with a careful avoidance of apology, because we did not want to dishonor the truth.... I have no desire to become a martyr for my opinions, but I do not intend to change them at the dictation of any power but my own intelligence. I have not relinquished and I do not relinquish my lawful right to speak the important truth as I see it. And I ask you to help me defend that right.[272]
Between the first and second Masses trials, Eastman urged that the Socialist party formulate a new program accepting the fact of war and demanding a just and labor-friendly peace. Union organizing and criticizing the war had been virtually criminalized; however, Socialist candidates could campaign on a platform of pure Socialism. The St. Louis antiwar manifesto
was not adopted for these elections.... [or] circumstances. It bears no relation to a world in which there exists a soviet republic in danger of annihilation from four quarters and calling to us for four kinds of help. It bears no relation to a war in which the international peace terms proposed by that republic have been embodied in the organized war program of our country. Let it stand--with its faults and virtues--as a monument to our sincere truth to the principle of internationalism as we conceived it to apply at that hour.[273]
The Socialist Congressional platform must demand "the revolutionizing of all industry." It must forthrightly endorse the "war aims that President Wilson has dictated to the allied countries" and develop their implications. Socialists must also defend free speech, which "must be won every morning" if socialists would replace political democracy with "industrial self-government."[274]
Eastman's endorsement of Wilson and war elicited a critical response from William Bross Lloyd, SP candidate for the United States Senate from Illinois. Eastman published Lloyd's letter "with some necessary omissions." Saying that "THE LIBERATOR has disappointed me," Lloyd characterized Eastman as a frivolous, literary bohemian--a charge later popularized by critics left and right. Lloyd praised The Liberator as "the courageous voice of new things--noble, intense, daring new things.... new forms of art, new styles in versification, new fancies in drawing, new animation in book reviews." Although it won readers "by charm of entertainment," however, it could not claim "leadership in political thought" or "distinction as a socialist journal." The St. Louis resolution which it criticized was "the one great achievement of American socialism." Lloyd denied elevating abstract principles above Eastman's pragmatic realism, "though it is often true that these principles contain a more fundamental realism than the things of current experience." Echoing Eastman's earlier critique of Upton Sinclair, Lloyd found "inscrutable" Eastman's jump from Wilsonian rhetoric to "democratic peace terms."
You know the American government, You know the English, French, Italian and Japanese governments. You know about certain secret treaties which the British Parliament has refused to revise as a contradiction to [its] protestations of sympathy with the Wilson administration.... You know that the "implications" of Wilson's rhetoric are not the thoughts of the diplomats of any of the contending nations. Go ahead and spin them out. You will teach your readers and hearers what a democratic peace ought to mean. But you know that, short of revolution, none of the governments will disrupt its modus operandi on account of your "implications" from Wilson's writings.
The Socialist party aimed "to get hold of the government" and "enforce its own terms of peace, its own modes of politics and industry." Socialists must consider events, including American intervention and the growth of labor's influence in Europe, when formulating their program; but above all "we must not surrender the achievement of placing human values above every other code." Propounding democratic peace terms was "educational leadership," but "must not fool us into the idea that we are making peace when we talk peace. We are helping. But this we cannot do at the cost of giving up our political leadership against war, because that would mean to give up the greater teaching for the lesser. Rather silence--and the resurrection."[275]
Eastman regretted that he could not fully discuss Lloyd's points because of the war censorship, but agreed that Socialists must constantly apply their principles in each particular situation. However, he insisted that "some of the steps suggested by the St. Louis pronouncement are not only impractical, in view of current facts, but utterly out of relation to the facts." A reformulated SP platform would not abandon socialist principles, as Lloyd feared, but rather "apply those principles to a new situation."[276] Eastman also acknowledged that The Liberator perforce censored some of Lloyd's and his own opinions. Disgusted by such self-censorship, John Reed resigned from the Liberator's editorial board, proclaiming that "I cannot in these times bring myself to share editorial responsibility for a magazine which exists upon the suffrance of Mr. Burleson." Eastman expressed "a deep feeling of regret" and characteristically replied that in Reed's absence (in the Soviet Union) the editors
decided it was our duty to the social revolution to keep this instrument we have created alive toward a time of great usefulness.... Personally, I envy you the power to cast loose when not only a good deal of the dramatic beauty, but also the glamour of abstract moral principle, is gone out of the venture, and it remains for us merely the most effective and therefore the right thing to do.[277]
At this time Eastman and the other Masses editors (including Reed) still had the government's indictment hanging over them. Their second trial occured in October 1918, after Wilson had incensed Eastman by invading the Soviet Union. Eastman again conciliated the jury. He denied the government's charge of conspiracy, asserting that the editors never even agreed upon an antiwar policy, much less obstructed conscription or the war. "We never had any meeting to discuss our attitude towards this war," he said. "We never adopted any policy toward this war. We never adopted any policy" except that of self-expression and conciliating nobody. The Masses had expressed the individual opinions of its editors and contributors; its antiwar articles, however extreme and indelicate, had appeared "before our country had got into the fight... before one single man of our fellow citizens, so far as was publicly known, had set foot in the trenches of Europe." Specifically criticizing some antiwar items as exhibiting bad taste, Eastman claimed that he had "sobered a good deal more quickly than some of the editors of the Masses to a realization of the fact that the United States had really got into a world war, and could not get out except by carrying it forward in a diplomatic and military way to some sort of conclusion." The Masses only belatedly realized "the full sense and tragic significance of the fact that we are in this war, and that thousands of our friends are going to die."[278]
Eastman accurately expressed the manifold purposes of The Masses as a literary and political magazine publishing the editors' "satirical and argumentative and poetic and pictorial comments upon the general policy of the Government from a socialist point of view." The editors were "artists and literary men in a state of revolt from the commercial magazines" who believed "that the proletariat ought to replace the bourgeoisie in the position of social and industrial and political control of our civilization."[279]
In his conciliatory fashion, Eastman then lectured the jury on the fundamentals of socialism. Socialists believed in liberty and democracy exactly as did American's revolutionary forefathers.
Only it is their opinion that real democracy does not consist merely in letting the people elect the officials who shall govern them, and they believe that true liberty is not guaranteed to a citizen merely by the possession of the right to vote. They think that democracy will begin when the people rule in industry as well as in politics. And they believe that true liberty involves the right to work and to possess all that you produce by doing your work. I think it is pretty obvious, if you just look along the street, that only those people are really free who possess an adequate source of income--only they are free from anxiety and worry, and the danger of ruin and poverty, and from the domination of some man or some corporation which holds their luck and their happiness in its power.[280]
Universal political suffrage was indeed essential. "But after all, how much of our time, and how much of our life does politics influence? Is not the main occupation of our time, and the main engagement of our interest, determined by business rather than political considerations? And is it not true that those who rule business, whoever they may be, rule the better part of our lives? I think there will be no dispute about it." Equating socialism with government ownership rather than proletarian rule, Eastman identified wartime government operation of the railroads with practical Socialism. Government consolidation and operation of the railroads was "the simple, quick, sensible thing to do in an emergency. But Socialists believe that the fact that 10 percent of the people own 90 percent of the wealth, and that 2 percent of the people own 60 percent of the wealth, is an emergency, and that we ought to do the simple, quick, sensible thing on that account, and do it everywhere, and do it a little more thoroughly."[281]
With extreme delicacy, Eastman next explained the class struggle. The capitalists, he told the jury, would not change the system which benefitted them. Change would emanate from "the poorer people--the working people--the small farmers--the small business men, who are not very sure of their jobs, and who are immediately under the domination of somebody, and do not feel very free. It is the people who will benefit from the change, who can be depended on to change the world." The proletariat--all those whose income came from work--would create "an industrial as well as a political democracy." The working classes were also "personally interested in preventing war." Most wars (Eastman delicately allowed some unspecified exceptions) concerned "thinly disguised conflicts of business or commercial interests." Lacking property, workers naturally opposed war; but when the Great War started, most Socialist parties betrayed their pledges and endorsed their governments. American Socialists, however, honored their vows of peace and adopted the St. Louis resolution, "absolutely condemning the entrance of the United States into this war." Courageously (and, in light of his publicly expressed views, surprisingly), Eastman forthrighly endorsed that resolution:
As a member of the party that adopted it, and as an American citizen who still dares to believe in his rights, I have no hesitation in telling you that I endorsed that resolution. And although subsequently, during last winter and spring when Germany was invading Russia, I passed through a period of extreme doubt, and was almost ready to lay the resolution aside as an expression of abstract principle no longer applicable to the current of affairs, that period of doubt has passed. I think that the Socialists were right in judging this war to be a war to which their general principle of opposition to all international war properly applies. I had no part in writing the St. Louis resolution, and it contained modes of expression that would not be mine, but as for the principles that it proclaimed with courage in a time of stress, they are my principles.[282]
Denying that he was a "bigoted or fanatical advocate of the mere abstract principle of free speech," Eastman admitted that the government could "pass extraordinary laws in an emergency and defend its armies with a military and wartime censorship." However, free speech undergirded even a merely political democracy. Some writings that the government cited as obstructing the draft were written before the Conscription Act was passed; others, such as demands for the fair treatment of political prisoners, were perfectly innocuous. Eastman reiterated that
my feeling of rebellious opposition to the war was sobered by the law, and... gradually transferred itself from a negative opposition to the war, to a more positive demand that we should endorse the Russian peace terms, which I believed would lead us quickly out of the war to a democratic and just settlement.... I was not for the defeat of our armies. I was not even for a separate peace. My whole argument at that time was for the possibility of getting a general democratic peace soon, by endorsing the Russian peace terms.[283]
Eastman defended the Soviet Union; he also discussed the many times he had contacted the government in an effort to ascertain and obey the law.
The second Masses trial concluded, like the first, with a hung jury. With the war almost over and the United States victorious, further prosecution seemed unlikely. Eastman confidently added "a journal of revolutionary progress" to The Liberator's masthead. By December 1918, however, his enthusiasm for Wilson and the League of Nations had evaporated because Wilson had invaded the Soviet Union and his allies were obviously intent on plundering Germany. Eastman denounced Wilson's "business internationalism" and condemned the proposed League of Nations as "a business organization" for "the exploitation of the world." Eastman conceded that the League was "one of the great events of history" and "the crowning achievement of the age of business efficiency" that would inaugurate nearly permanent peace. However, it would also throttle democracy and freedom and "increase the wealth of those who possess wealth." The political expression of the globalization of capital, the League constituted "an international state" which would "express and defend" the interests of the idle rich. It was "the next natural step in the development of capitalism." Like the trusts, it would end destructive competition, although now on an international scale; as evidenced by the invasion of Russia by England, France, Japan, and the US, it would comprise a strike-breaking army against Socialism. Labor, Eastman cried, must organize an International of Labor stronger than that of Capital:
We believe in a League of Nations as the one thing that will ever remove the menace of a nationalistic war from the earth. We believe that it must be a definite, concrete, continuous and working federation of the peoples. We believe that such a thing may come to pass in the near future, and we will work for it. But we do not discover in the victorious governments that are meeting in Paris, nor in any of the delegates of these governments, the least disposition to establish such a federation of the peoples. We are not free to say all that we might of these governments, but we can say that the hands they clasp over the council table will be red with the fresh blood of the freest people on earth.[284]
Having learned from John Dewey "that every question that arises in the complex of events is a specific question," Eastman asked not whether the proletariat should support a league, but whether it should support the particular League under discussion. Eastman advised that unless the Soviet Union was admitted on terms of equality, the workers should support their own League of Nations, the Third International.[285]
Eastman now denounced Wilson as an idle phrase-monger who believed that mere rhetoric and diplomacy could transform an imperialist war into a crusade for democracy and who "did not even ask the Allies to revise their war aims as a condition of American participation." Denouncing the starvation terms imposed by the allies upon Germany, Eastman declared that Wilson's main role had been "to surround himself and the general public with a blinding vapor of self-righteous emotion all the time that the job was being done." He castigated the infamous "milch cow" provision of the Versailles Treaty as an unparalleled atrocity; "there is no name that has come down out of history, not from Atilla nor from Genghis Khan, that can adequately characterize a little group of cultivated old men torturing and mutilating the dying bodies of women and children." These same predators were now starving Russian men, women, and children to "prevent the truth that has been demonstrated in Russia from becoming known to the whole world."[286] Eastman's abhorrence of these policies caused him to repudiate not only Wilson, but a temporizing Socialist party as well. Denouncing the invaders of Russia, Eastman thundered that
We cannot treat with these, the murderers of our comrades. We cannot send delegates to them to plead and persuade, to beg for amnesties for our prisoners, to pray for the incorporation of social reform measures in the constitution of their League of Nations, as the Berne conference did. It is time for all pleading and appealing and associating ourselves with these governments to cease. It is time for us, in every act of our organization and in every word from our press and our platforms, to wage class war against them.... And that is why at last, even in the United States, we have a Left Wing, with its own organization, and its own spokesmen, and its own press. We know that the international class struggle is being fought to a finish in Europe, with all the weapns and forces of propaganda that are available on either side. There is no middle ground left. Every thinking man and woman there is either for the revolution or against it. And every one here too. And we are for it, and we cannot tolerate the silence of the official party in this the most critical hour in all the history of the revolutionary hopes of mankind.[287]
By the end of the war, therefore, defense of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union had become a touchstone of Eastman's foreign (and domestic) policy.
The Liberator greatly resembled The Masses in its contributors, opinions, and range of topics; in a real sense it was the same magazine.[288] Although subsequent historians have sharply differentiated the two magazines--most treatments of the "lyrical left" stop abruptly in late 1917, and William O'Neill's Echoes of Revolt contains nothing from the new magazine--Eastman started The Liberator only because the authorities had suppressed The Masses and indicted its editors.[289] Neither he nor any of his co-editors regarded it as a new departure, nor had they materially changed their views. The Liberator, unlike its predecessor, was owned by Max and his sister Crystal, rather than being a cooperative; but Max, who raised most of the money and did most of the hard work, had long demanded greater control. He believed that his new magazine surpassed the old precisely because it had a greater editorial focus and a more assured policy. Most of the old contributors remained, and were now paid for their work. World upheavals caused such differences as existed between the two magazines and, contrary to the impression created by most historians, drove Eastman and his cohorts to the Left rather than revealing a dilettante sensibility.