MAX EASTMAN'S LIFE PROJECT
Max Eastman's place in history is secure. He is best remembered as the editor of The Masses and, after its suppression by the U.S. government in late 1917, of The Liberator. Both of these magazines advocated revolutionary socialism and a variety of other causes, including feminism, birth control, free love, artistic and literary realism, and racial egalitarianism. They did so, under Eastman's editorial guidance, in a distinctive, effervescent style that combined humor, eccentricity, skepticism, and militancy. Eastman himself was a poet, humorist, philosopher, and bohemian as well as a feminist and a proletarian internationalist. He wrote many books, lectured widely, and loved freely; he is widely credited with helping inspire a dynamic new spirit in American journalism and popular art, and with expanding the range of personal lifestyle choices available to sophisticated, urban Americans.
Yet for all his fame and notoriety, Eastman has been largely misunderstood by historians and critics. Although most scholars agree on the importance of The Masses and the movement that crystallized around it, many view it in one-dimensional and ahistorical terms, and thus miss its genuine significance. Certain criticisms of Eastman and his cohorts appear with surprising frequency in the historical literature without the backing of either facts or sustained analysis.
Many authors claim that Eastman's revolutionary politics were insincere or merely rhetorical. This criticism comes in two contradictory versions. Some mainstream historians seem eager to praise The Masses' rebel tone and cultural insurgency without endorsing (or even confronting) its revolutionary politics, which are simply incomprehensible to them.[1] Adducing little evidence for their opinions, such historians simply refuse to take Eastman at his word, and excise his very real proletarian socialism from the historical record. The revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the working class was the centerpiece of The Masses' and The Liberator's editorial policies; although Eastman encouraged a vigorous pluralism of views, he consistently excluded material inconsistent with revolutionary socialism. Eastman's revolutionary politics may seem unimportant to subsequent generations because the socialist movement was eventually destroyed while many of Eastman's other causes won some measure of acceptance. But political revolution was the heart and soul of Eastman's own endeavor as he conceived it.
A second line of argument, this time from the left, also belittles Eastman's revolutionary credentials. Some scholars claim that The Masses group comprised frivolous dilettantes lacking both understanding of, and commitment to, revolutionary economic change. This criticism has a long pedigree, beginning with a contemporary piece of doggerel which is quoted in virtually every account of Eastman:
They draw nude women for The Masses
Thick, fat, ungainly lasses--
How does that help the working classes?[2]
This question merits an answer. But too many historians, apparently thinking that merely asking it in a tone of ridicule disposes of the issue, accuse Eastman and his cohorts of ideological fuzziness and of valuing personal self-expression over social change.[3] These authors may exaggerate the virtues of a completely air-tight and wholly comprehensive weltanschauung. Indeed, they (even the non-Marxists) often implicitly assume that a Marxist teleology is the only possible form of relationship between various social causes. According to this view--which perhaps reflects Marxist criticisms of the New Left--if Eastman did not view racism, sexism, patriotism, sexual repression, and artistic sterility as derived from and ultimately reducible to class relations, he could not have had a coherent worldview that explained them and related them to each other. But other forms of explanation are at least theoretically possible. Did Eastman believe that all human ills stemmed from one fundamental cause, or did he rather believe that they had diverse and separate origins? Did these evils interact in a way such that elimination or amelioration of one would guarantee, facilitate--or perhaps even impede--improvement in another? Or--a separate question--did he adhere to fundamental values that led him to espouse various causes and cherish values which might have unified seemingly disparate causes?
Moreover, such criticisms stem exclusively from Eastman's editorship of The Masses, ignoring its successor, The Liberator.[4] However, The Liberator continued The Masses under a new name; Eastman started it with many of the same contributors and editors only because his first publication was violently suppressed by the government. The continuity in Eastman's views amidst the uphevals of war, repression, and international revolution, therefore, is vital for analyzing his philosophy. After the Bolshevik revolution, Eastman remained a somewhat pluralistic, ecumenical, and pragmatic revolutionary, but adapted his core values to the newly-urgent concepts of class struggle, economic determinism, and proletarian dictatorship.
Other authors belittle Eastman and his comrades by psychoanalyzing them or claiming that they were more interested in having fun than in fomenting revolution.[5] According to this theory, they were bohemians whose revolutionary posturing was a form of slumming, excitement, and personal enrichment.[6] These critics are oblivious to a more common critique levelled at conventional radicals, who reduce everything to economics, care more about abstract theories than concrete individuals, and prove willing to immolate themselves and others upon the altar of "progress". Moreover, they overlook precisely the combination of cultural and social revolution that distinguished The Masses group from other insurgents. Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Art Young, and John Reed risked ostracism, imprisonment, and even death for their beliefs; they remained true to revolutionary politics long after all vibrant American radical organizations were destroyed by repression and internal dissension. Indeed, after the Bolshevik Revolution Eastman, Dell, Reed, and Masses stalwarts Mike Gold and Robert Minor became if anything even more stridently revolutionary.
Eastman, in fact, criticized many intellectuals of his time in terms surprisingly similar to Christopher Lasch, whose The New Radicalism in America situates an emergent intelligentsia in the social context of their times and discussed how they emerged from and responded to the basic changes of their era.[7] Lasch criticizes the belief that conflict is the greatest evil, which social engineering can avoid, and the related idea that cultural change can be achieved non-coercively by political means without any change in the economic structure. The new radicals, Lasch says, were "fatally indifferent to questions of power" and indulged in an "expressive politics" that resulted in "a confusion of politics with culture." On the other hand, Lasch says, this self-conscious new class was driven by a will to power. Their effort to refashion culture rather than redistributing wealth and equalizing opportunity suggested "that men of learning occupy or ought to occupy the strategic loci of social control." Lasch's new radicals believed that administration could improve culture and that exhortation would reform morals. Finally, Lasch claims that the new radicals, by allying themselves with the forces of history and the popular will, and by participating in national crusades, abdicated their role as critical intellectuals. Ignoring the actual consequences of their actions, they ended by blindly worshipping power. This, Lasch charges, constituted an "anti-intellectualism of the intellectuals." Intellectuals, Lasch implies, would have gained more power over events if they had engaged in their true vocation of criticism rather than trying to become political activists in their own right.[8]
Eastman himself, however, heartily endorsed most of Lasch's criticisms as applying to many professed reformers, including those in the Wilson administration and writers associated with The New Republic. The truly interesting question, therefore, concerns the characteristics of the Progressive Era that evoked such divergent responses, and the reasons why the one represented by The Masses proved abortive. This question assumes even more salience if we consider the intellectuals analyzed by T. Jackson Lears in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. Lears discusses avowed conservatives, and makes no effort to generalize his conclusions; yet his book is relevant to The Masses group not only because the antimodernists' quest for authentic experience bears many similarities to Eastman's, but also because the denouement of the antimodernists' quest strikingly resembles that of Lasch's intellectuals. The antimodernists, according to Lears, began in rebellion against the formality, emptiness, and meaninglessness of contemporary life; yet their rebellion largely resulted in a "therapeutic culture" of narcissism that reinforced, rather than challenged, the "evasive banality" of their time, and proved congruent with the consumer culture of the twenties.[9]
Max Eastman's rebellion had no such outcome; it was intransigent and intractible. The Masses group was defeated mainly by the massive repression directed at the radical labor activists upon whom they placed their hopes. The working-class insurgencies with which they allied were crushed by government and corporate terrorism and violence. Eastman never viewed his own social group (the so-called intellectuals) as an independent formation which could inaugurate social change; rather, he hoped that a saving remnant of "abstract idealists" of relatively ambiguous class position would reject capitalism, side with the revolutionary proletariat and aid the revolution. He grew more insistent upon this after the suppression of The Masses, abandoning it only decades after the authentic working-class movements of his youth were irreparably destroyed. In the interim, Eastman himself pioneered the criticism of "lyrical Socialists" as dilettantes who feared and detested actual revolution. In the twenties, Eastman and his group neither accommodated to official power nor succumbed to consumerism. Rather, they met defeat in their own way. Many of their proposed cultural revolutions were partly achieved in later decades, but only in forms detached from any larger social change, and thus in vitiated forms that deprived them of much of their intended meaning. Yet the distinctiveness of Eastman' version of revolution suggests that Americans had more than one option in the early twentieth century; the social upheavals of the era generated not one but a multiplicity of responses. Eastman's ultimate defeat suggests that the massive power of corporate capitalism can defeat or absorb rebellious impulses of very diverse origins and content.
Eastman's philosophy and his life enterprise are nonetheless full of paradoxes and dilemmas. They pose fascinating questions of interpretation, even if not those upon which historians have previously focused. Eastman was, despite his protestations and his degree in philosophy, more of a journalist than a systematic thinker. He quickly abandoned Towards Liberty, his one attempt during this period at a comprehensive statement of his political philosophy, because he had not done the necessary background reading and had difficulty reconciling some of his most deeply held beliefs.[10] Those wishing to understand Eastman's own concept of his project must therefore piece together an overall view by reading his articles on particular topics. Like other thinkers who frequently responded to immediate events in print--including systematic philosophers such as Karl Marx--Eastman was sometimes inconsistent, and changed over time. Despite contradictions and alterations, however, his overall philosophy was remarkably stable during his years on The Masses and The Liberator.
Eastman became editor of The Masses by both chance and destiny. He received an unexpected "letter scrawled with a brush on a torn-off scrap of drawing paper," signed by prominent artists and writers; the letter read, in its entirety, "You are elected editor of The Masses. No pay." Appalled by this proposition, Eastman nevertheless attended the next editorial meeting, and was inveiged into assuming an unwanted responsibility. Eastman later bemoaned his indecisiveness. When confronted with tempting alternatives, he said, "I was incapable of any decision whatever. I wanted to go both ways; I wanted to go all ways. I never could find the reason for a choice, and I rarely made one." This explains "how a poet and philosophic moralist, with a special distaste for economics, politics, and journalism, became know to the public as a journalist campaigning for a political idea based primarily upon economics."[11] Despite the seeming randomness of his appointment, Eastman was in fact chosen because of his personal qualities and beliefs. A radical Socialist, he had founded the Men's League for Women's Suffrage, was known as a poet and philosopher, and embodied the qualities for which The Masses soon famous. With help from John Reed, Eastman composed the famous credo which adorned the masthead of his famous magazine:
This magazine is owned and published cooperatively by its editors. It has no dividends to pay, and nobody is trying to make money out of it. A revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with a sense of humor and no respect for the respectable; frank, arrogant, impertinent, searching for the true causes; a magazine directed against rigidity and dogma whatever it is found; printing what is too naked or true for a money-making press; a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers....[12]
As editor, Eastman engaged in four distinct and yet related major enterprises--socialist revolution, literary insurgency, cultural revolution, and the form of countercultural lifestyle characterized as bohemianism. His distinctive characteristic was precisely his combination of these four activities, which are often pursued separately and indeed sometimes contradict one another. Each of these projects contains its own internal problems and dilemmas; combining each one with the other three generates additional difficulties. To understand Eastman's life and endeavor we must clearly understand each strand of his activity, both separately and in relation to the others.
The first of Eastman's projects was economic, political, and social revolution (henceforth referred to as socialist or proletarian revolution), which Eastman viewed in Marxist terms. He vigorously if critically supported most efforts at proletarian revolution, whether by the Socialist party, the IWW, anarchists, or even, when its efforts seemed to point in that direction, by the AFL. He supported electoral and union, peaceful and violent, legal and illegal, struggles.
The most obvious question about this aspect of Eastman's enterprise concerns the nature of his own contribution to the movements he supported. Eastman firmly believed that oppressed groups must liberate themselves. He distrusted elite leadership (which he viewed as a form of control), and insisted that reforms granted by an exploiting group were diametrically opposed to a revolutionary transformation achieved by the oppressed themselves. He sounded this theme in his first editorial in The Masses. "Between revolutionist and reformer... there is a flat contradiction of wish, belief, and action. The reformer wishes to procure for the workers their share of the blessings of civilization; he believes in himself and his altruistic oratory; he tries to multiply his kind. The revolutionist wishes the workers to take the blessings of civilization; he believes in them, and their organized power; he tries to increase in them the knowledge of their situation and the spirit of class-conscious aggression." Eastman similarly advocated armed self-defense on the part of blacks, and told his readers that blacks "need not your pity. They need not your ethnological interest, your uplift endowments. They wait for their heroes." The South needed "a Toussaint L'Ouverture.... a fighting liberator, a negro with power, pride of ancestry, and eternal rebellion in his soul. Unless you look to the awakening of such a man, or a thousand such men and women among the negroes, your institutions of charitable education will not amount to the land they are built on. For you cannot educate a suppressed spirit. Not one child in ten million can achieve his full stature against the inhibitions of a humiliated or contemptuous environment. The possibilties of the black man have never been tested, and they never will be tested until after the wine of liberty and independence in instilled into his veins."[13] Eastman also frequently asserted that people usually act in their own economic self-interest. Finally, viewing himself as a poet and a philosopher, he disdained (at least until 1918) full-time commitment to any cause or enterprise, however worthy. For both philosophical and personal reasons, therefore, he volubly rejected any formal leadership role for himself.
Eastman therefore had to explain what contribution a middle-class, white, American male could make to the self-liberation struggles of workers, blacks, and women. Eastman did not belong to any of the groups whose liberation he sought (except for writers); nor did he stand to benefit economically, in any obvious sense, from their struggles. His emphasis on the necessity of self-liberation, his disdain for elite reformers, and his emphasis on economic motivation would all seem to deprive him of a meaningful role in the liberation movements he championed. Indeed, his own beliefs would seem to cast him in the role of a mere reformer, a meddler and intruder into the freedom struggles of others. Eastman believed, however, that some disinterested idealists could transcend their class origins and subordinate their own interests to those of social revolution.
Eastman's second major enterprise was literary radicalism, the revolutionary transformation of all forms of high culture, including literature, education, journalism, and the arts. Disdaining saccharine optimism and Victorian evasions in literature and art, he favored authentic self-expression and social realism; attacking capitalist censorship and lies in journalism, he edited a free-spirited magazine owned by its contributors; opposing regimentation and rote-learning in schools, he perceived education as the creative unfolding of individual personality. Literary and educational revolution was one major enterprise in which Eastman and his comrades could act autonomously on their own behalf, without depending upon or allying themselves with oppressed groups. There is, however, no necessary connection, either logical or historical, between literary insurgency and Eastman's other projects of political radicalism, cultural revolution, and countercultural living. Many prominent literary and artistic innovators in virtually every age have been conservative in politics and conventional in belief and behavior.[14] Eastman's attempt to unite revolution in the arts and in politics stemmed from will and of thought rather than necessity.
The third major strand in Eastman's project was cultural revolution, alterations in the fundamental ways people defined and imagined themselves and their worlds. While cultural revolution can congrue with social revolution and has obvious affinities with literary radicalism, it is not necessarily allied with either. Some revolutionaries enlist traditional cultural symbols, values, and concepts in their cause, infusing old ideals and symbols with new meanings which advance the changes they want. Socialist party leader Eugene Debs, for example, infused the traditional concepts of citizenship, manhood, and work with new meanings (and preserved and accentuated vital aspects of old meanings) antithetical to those imparted by an emergent industrial capitalism.[15] Other revolutionaries, however, repudiate traditional institutions and old cultural symbols and construct new loyalties, symbols, and associations, believing that the old ones are inherently unsuitable for revolutionary purposes or that they have been irrevocably appropriated by established authorities. Debs himself repudiated hoary ideals of patriotism, racism, and sexism. The IWW advocated cultural revolution more consistently than the Socialist party, however, and Eastman, despite his membership in the SP and his occasional pragmatic use of traditional values, generally sided with the IWW. In addition, his advocacy of feminism, racial egalitarianism, sexual freedom, internationalism, and bohemianism decisively repudiated traditional culture and demanded that the individual redefine himself along lines radically different from conventional sources of self-identity.[16]
Forging a counterculture (an activity related to and yet distinct from cultural revolution) was Eastman's forth major goal. Some people advocate a major restructuring of values and culture during or after the revolution and yet conform to traditional codes in the present. Many radicals, including Debs and major portions of the Socialist party (and later the Communist party) embodied this approach for a variety of reasons such as inertia or the conviction that conventional, respectable behavior avoided alienating potential converts. Many believed that personal implementation of revolutionary cultural ideals diverted revolutionaries from the all-important class struggle, was impossible within the framework of capitalist society, and was perhaps ultimately harmful or unnecessary. Eastman, however, was passionately committed to countercultural lifestyles. Whereas revolutionary politics entailed a commitment to collective and organized struggle, countercultural revolution necessitated immediate change in the way in which the individual lived his or her own life. As Eastman said, "We live in a world of the kind we believe in."[17]
This enterprise, however, generated theoretical and intensely practical problems of its own. Attempts to live by values contravening those of the larger society, as if the revolution has already occurred, often encounter not only the active and conscious resistance of large numbers of people, but automatic and pervasive obstruction by institutions and practices predicated upon society's conventional and hostile values. The larger society often makes countercultural lifestyles impossible, or imposes so many obstacles and penalties that the new values can be achieved only by a self-consciousness and exertion that make them seem unnatural and contrived. Efforts to forge genuinely egalitarian relationships in a hierarchical society are especially susceptible to such sabotage by the larger society because the institutional support for such equality does not exist. This is the familiar problem of socialism (or racial or sexual egalitarianism) in one country or one coterie. Eastman faced this problem often, most particularly in his relations with The Masses collective, women, and, on The Liberator, with black poet Claude McKay. Eastman's advocacy of cultural revolution and his practice of a countercultural lifestyle also undermined his proletarian revolutionism because many workers and radicals were largely conservative on cultural issues.
Countercultural radicals usually attempt to surmount these difficulties by forging a movement culture, a matrix of institutions, people, and shared values supportive of dissident lifestyles.[18] But this effort also presents difficulties. Two in particular stand out: relating to a hostile or indifferent mainstream culture, and avoiding mimicking the coerciveness, sterility, and hierarchies of that mainstream. An individualistic and bohemian movement such as Eastman's also finds that the relationship of individual fulfillment to collective identity, discipline, and struggle is problematic.
This brings us to a final subject of concern to historians: the reasons for the disintegration of The Masses group and the failure of its entire enterprise of uniting cultural and social radicalism. Two explanations, which are seemingly contradictory and yet share underlying similarities, predominate. Some historians take an essentialist, ahistorical view, saying that Eastman's ideas were inherently contradictory and unworkable. Some posit an inherent conflict between artistic freedom and political activism; others claim that laughter, skepticism, and "the enjoyment of living" are incompatible with the serious business of revolution. Brian Lloyd argues that Eastman's pragmatism undermined his Marxian revolutionism and fostered his eventual conservatism.[19] This ignores the fact that movements with ambiguous or inconsistent ideologies and programs often achieve remarkable success; it also deflects attention from the historical context of the movement, and the actual reasons (both structural and historically contingent) for its failure.
Other historians declare that America's entry into World War I and the harsh realities of the Bolshevik Revolution immediately and irretrievably destroyed the unique blend of laughter and high purpose, of economic and cultural insurgency, that had characterized The Masses. While this has the merit of paying attention to historical context, it ignores the complexity of events that impinged upon the movement (which included the breakdown of the Second International, the European war, American entry into World War I, Woodrow Wilson's reign of terror, the Bolshevik Revolution, American invasion of the Soviet Union, and the splintering of the Socialist party.) It resembles the essentialist argument in that it denies that Eastman's philosophy was resilient enough to withstand the harsh realities of war and revolution. It ignores both the simultaneous demise of the entire revolutionary left, regardless of the different ideologies of its component parts, and the large degree of continuity between Eastman and his associates before and after 1917. Indeed, most of Eastman's critics ignore The Liberator altogether, thus missing both the striking continuities in Eastman's thought and the new departures caused by the upheavls of 1917-1924. Eastman championed the same wide variety of causes, and in much the same effervescent spirit, all through the tumultuous years 1912-1924 and beyond. His ultimate failure was not caused by intrinsic flaws or any single historical event, but rather by a combination of structural obstacles, historical events, and long-term trends largely beyond the control or foresight of Eastman or anyone else.
The truly interesting question about the fate of The Masses group, in fact, consists of possible relationships between the cultural changes that continued in the twenties and beyond, albeit detached from and even antithetical to any broadly-based economic and political insurgency, and the catastrophic defeat of those revolutionaries who sought fundamental social and cultural change. Many of the causes that Eastman championed--feminism, racial egalitarianism, sexual liberation, birth control, a more open, expressive literature--have won spectacular formal victories, some of a scope that would have been unimaginable in 1917, even if (perhaps because) those victories have been achieved within the context of a capitalist society that vitiates their significance. This is particularly striking because most people, including workers, often resist cultural change even more tenaciously than they resist fundamental economic and political change. In fact, many people oppose economic change more because it undermines their traditional culture than because it causes them material deprivations. The partial triumph and continued viability of cultural and literary change may be related to the defeat of political and economic change in ways that are partly systemic and partly historically contingent.
Yet for all his fame and notoriety, Eastman has been largely misunderstood by historians and critics. Although most scholars agree on the importance of The Masses and the movement that crystallized around it, many view it in one-dimensional and ahistorical terms, and thus miss its genuine significance. Certain criticisms of Eastman and his cohorts appear with surprising frequency in the historical literature without the backing of either facts or sustained analysis.
Many authors claim that Eastman's revolutionary politics were insincere or merely rhetorical. This criticism comes in two contradictory versions. Some mainstream historians seem eager to praise The Masses' rebel tone and cultural insurgency without endorsing (or even confronting) its revolutionary politics, which are simply incomprehensible to them.[1] Adducing little evidence for their opinions, such historians simply refuse to take Eastman at his word, and excise his very real proletarian socialism from the historical record. The revolutionary overthrow of capitalism by the working class was the centerpiece of The Masses' and The Liberator's editorial policies; although Eastman encouraged a vigorous pluralism of views, he consistently excluded material inconsistent with revolutionary socialism. Eastman's revolutionary politics may seem unimportant to subsequent generations because the socialist movement was eventually destroyed while many of Eastman's other causes won some measure of acceptance. But political revolution was the heart and soul of Eastman's own endeavor as he conceived it.
A second line of argument, this time from the left, also belittles Eastman's revolutionary credentials. Some scholars claim that The Masses group comprised frivolous dilettantes lacking both understanding of, and commitment to, revolutionary economic change. This criticism has a long pedigree, beginning with a contemporary piece of doggerel which is quoted in virtually every account of Eastman:
They draw nude women for The Masses
Thick, fat, ungainly lasses--
How does that help the working classes?[2]
This question merits an answer. But too many historians, apparently thinking that merely asking it in a tone of ridicule disposes of the issue, accuse Eastman and his cohorts of ideological fuzziness and of valuing personal self-expression over social change.[3] These authors may exaggerate the virtues of a completely air-tight and wholly comprehensive weltanschauung. Indeed, they (even the non-Marxists) often implicitly assume that a Marxist teleology is the only possible form of relationship between various social causes. According to this view--which perhaps reflects Marxist criticisms of the New Left--if Eastman did not view racism, sexism, patriotism, sexual repression, and artistic sterility as derived from and ultimately reducible to class relations, he could not have had a coherent worldview that explained them and related them to each other. But other forms of explanation are at least theoretically possible. Did Eastman believe that all human ills stemmed from one fundamental cause, or did he rather believe that they had diverse and separate origins? Did these evils interact in a way such that elimination or amelioration of one would guarantee, facilitate--or perhaps even impede--improvement in another? Or--a separate question--did he adhere to fundamental values that led him to espouse various causes and cherish values which might have unified seemingly disparate causes?
Moreover, such criticisms stem exclusively from Eastman's editorship of The Masses, ignoring its successor, The Liberator.[4] However, The Liberator continued The Masses under a new name; Eastman started it with many of the same contributors and editors only because his first publication was violently suppressed by the government. The continuity in Eastman's views amidst the uphevals of war, repression, and international revolution, therefore, is vital for analyzing his philosophy. After the Bolshevik revolution, Eastman remained a somewhat pluralistic, ecumenical, and pragmatic revolutionary, but adapted his core values to the newly-urgent concepts of class struggle, economic determinism, and proletarian dictatorship.
Other authors belittle Eastman and his comrades by psychoanalyzing them or claiming that they were more interested in having fun than in fomenting revolution.[5] According to this theory, they were bohemians whose revolutionary posturing was a form of slumming, excitement, and personal enrichment.[6] These critics are oblivious to a more common critique levelled at conventional radicals, who reduce everything to economics, care more about abstract theories than concrete individuals, and prove willing to immolate themselves and others upon the altar of "progress". Moreover, they overlook precisely the combination of cultural and social revolution that distinguished The Masses group from other insurgents. Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Art Young, and John Reed risked ostracism, imprisonment, and even death for their beliefs; they remained true to revolutionary politics long after all vibrant American radical organizations were destroyed by repression and internal dissension. Indeed, after the Bolshevik Revolution Eastman, Dell, Reed, and Masses stalwarts Mike Gold and Robert Minor became if anything even more stridently revolutionary.
Eastman, in fact, criticized many intellectuals of his time in terms surprisingly similar to Christopher Lasch, whose The New Radicalism in America situates an emergent intelligentsia in the social context of their times and discussed how they emerged from and responded to the basic changes of their era.[7] Lasch criticizes the belief that conflict is the greatest evil, which social engineering can avoid, and the related idea that cultural change can be achieved non-coercively by political means without any change in the economic structure. The new radicals, Lasch says, were "fatally indifferent to questions of power" and indulged in an "expressive politics" that resulted in "a confusion of politics with culture." On the other hand, Lasch says, this self-conscious new class was driven by a will to power. Their effort to refashion culture rather than redistributing wealth and equalizing opportunity suggested "that men of learning occupy or ought to occupy the strategic loci of social control." Lasch's new radicals believed that administration could improve culture and that exhortation would reform morals. Finally, Lasch claims that the new radicals, by allying themselves with the forces of history and the popular will, and by participating in national crusades, abdicated their role as critical intellectuals. Ignoring the actual consequences of their actions, they ended by blindly worshipping power. This, Lasch charges, constituted an "anti-intellectualism of the intellectuals." Intellectuals, Lasch implies, would have gained more power over events if they had engaged in their true vocation of criticism rather than trying to become political activists in their own right.[8]
Eastman himself, however, heartily endorsed most of Lasch's criticisms as applying to many professed reformers, including those in the Wilson administration and writers associated with The New Republic. The truly interesting question, therefore, concerns the characteristics of the Progressive Era that evoked such divergent responses, and the reasons why the one represented by The Masses proved abortive. This question assumes even more salience if we consider the intellectuals analyzed by T. Jackson Lears in No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920. Lears discusses avowed conservatives, and makes no effort to generalize his conclusions; yet his book is relevant to The Masses group not only because the antimodernists' quest for authentic experience bears many similarities to Eastman's, but also because the denouement of the antimodernists' quest strikingly resembles that of Lasch's intellectuals. The antimodernists, according to Lears, began in rebellion against the formality, emptiness, and meaninglessness of contemporary life; yet their rebellion largely resulted in a "therapeutic culture" of narcissism that reinforced, rather than challenged, the "evasive banality" of their time, and proved congruent with the consumer culture of the twenties.[9]
Max Eastman's rebellion had no such outcome; it was intransigent and intractible. The Masses group was defeated mainly by the massive repression directed at the radical labor activists upon whom they placed their hopes. The working-class insurgencies with which they allied were crushed by government and corporate terrorism and violence. Eastman never viewed his own social group (the so-called intellectuals) as an independent formation which could inaugurate social change; rather, he hoped that a saving remnant of "abstract idealists" of relatively ambiguous class position would reject capitalism, side with the revolutionary proletariat and aid the revolution. He grew more insistent upon this after the suppression of The Masses, abandoning it only decades after the authentic working-class movements of his youth were irreparably destroyed. In the interim, Eastman himself pioneered the criticism of "lyrical Socialists" as dilettantes who feared and detested actual revolution. In the twenties, Eastman and his group neither accommodated to official power nor succumbed to consumerism. Rather, they met defeat in their own way. Many of their proposed cultural revolutions were partly achieved in later decades, but only in forms detached from any larger social change, and thus in vitiated forms that deprived them of much of their intended meaning. Yet the distinctiveness of Eastman' version of revolution suggests that Americans had more than one option in the early twentieth century; the social upheavals of the era generated not one but a multiplicity of responses. Eastman's ultimate defeat suggests that the massive power of corporate capitalism can defeat or absorb rebellious impulses of very diverse origins and content.
Eastman's philosophy and his life enterprise are nonetheless full of paradoxes and dilemmas. They pose fascinating questions of interpretation, even if not those upon which historians have previously focused. Eastman was, despite his protestations and his degree in philosophy, more of a journalist than a systematic thinker. He quickly abandoned Towards Liberty, his one attempt during this period at a comprehensive statement of his political philosophy, because he had not done the necessary background reading and had difficulty reconciling some of his most deeply held beliefs.[10] Those wishing to understand Eastman's own concept of his project must therefore piece together an overall view by reading his articles on particular topics. Like other thinkers who frequently responded to immediate events in print--including systematic philosophers such as Karl Marx--Eastman was sometimes inconsistent, and changed over time. Despite contradictions and alterations, however, his overall philosophy was remarkably stable during his years on The Masses and The Liberator.
Eastman became editor of The Masses by both chance and destiny. He received an unexpected "letter scrawled with a brush on a torn-off scrap of drawing paper," signed by prominent artists and writers; the letter read, in its entirety, "You are elected editor of The Masses. No pay." Appalled by this proposition, Eastman nevertheless attended the next editorial meeting, and was inveiged into assuming an unwanted responsibility. Eastman later bemoaned his indecisiveness. When confronted with tempting alternatives, he said, "I was incapable of any decision whatever. I wanted to go both ways; I wanted to go all ways. I never could find the reason for a choice, and I rarely made one." This explains "how a poet and philosophic moralist, with a special distaste for economics, politics, and journalism, became know to the public as a journalist campaigning for a political idea based primarily upon economics."[11] Despite the seeming randomness of his appointment, Eastman was in fact chosen because of his personal qualities and beliefs. A radical Socialist, he had founded the Men's League for Women's Suffrage, was known as a poet and philosopher, and embodied the qualities for which The Masses soon famous. With help from John Reed, Eastman composed the famous credo which adorned the masthead of his famous magazine:
This magazine is owned and published cooperatively by its editors. It has no dividends to pay, and nobody is trying to make money out of it. A revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with a sense of humor and no respect for the respectable; frank, arrogant, impertinent, searching for the true causes; a magazine directed against rigidity and dogma whatever it is found; printing what is too naked or true for a money-making press; a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers....[12]
As editor, Eastman engaged in four distinct and yet related major enterprises--socialist revolution, literary insurgency, cultural revolution, and the form of countercultural lifestyle characterized as bohemianism. His distinctive characteristic was precisely his combination of these four activities, which are often pursued separately and indeed sometimes contradict one another. Each of these projects contains its own internal problems and dilemmas; combining each one with the other three generates additional difficulties. To understand Eastman's life and endeavor we must clearly understand each strand of his activity, both separately and in relation to the others.
The first of Eastman's projects was economic, political, and social revolution (henceforth referred to as socialist or proletarian revolution), which Eastman viewed in Marxist terms. He vigorously if critically supported most efforts at proletarian revolution, whether by the Socialist party, the IWW, anarchists, or even, when its efforts seemed to point in that direction, by the AFL. He supported electoral and union, peaceful and violent, legal and illegal, struggles.
The most obvious question about this aspect of Eastman's enterprise concerns the nature of his own contribution to the movements he supported. Eastman firmly believed that oppressed groups must liberate themselves. He distrusted elite leadership (which he viewed as a form of control), and insisted that reforms granted by an exploiting group were diametrically opposed to a revolutionary transformation achieved by the oppressed themselves. He sounded this theme in his first editorial in The Masses. "Between revolutionist and reformer... there is a flat contradiction of wish, belief, and action. The reformer wishes to procure for the workers their share of the blessings of civilization; he believes in himself and his altruistic oratory; he tries to multiply his kind. The revolutionist wishes the workers to take the blessings of civilization; he believes in them, and their organized power; he tries to increase in them the knowledge of their situation and the spirit of class-conscious aggression." Eastman similarly advocated armed self-defense on the part of blacks, and told his readers that blacks "need not your pity. They need not your ethnological interest, your uplift endowments. They wait for their heroes." The South needed "a Toussaint L'Ouverture.... a fighting liberator, a negro with power, pride of ancestry, and eternal rebellion in his soul. Unless you look to the awakening of such a man, or a thousand such men and women among the negroes, your institutions of charitable education will not amount to the land they are built on. For you cannot educate a suppressed spirit. Not one child in ten million can achieve his full stature against the inhibitions of a humiliated or contemptuous environment. The possibilties of the black man have never been tested, and they never will be tested until after the wine of liberty and independence in instilled into his veins."[13] Eastman also frequently asserted that people usually act in their own economic self-interest. Finally, viewing himself as a poet and a philosopher, he disdained (at least until 1918) full-time commitment to any cause or enterprise, however worthy. For both philosophical and personal reasons, therefore, he volubly rejected any formal leadership role for himself.
Eastman therefore had to explain what contribution a middle-class, white, American male could make to the self-liberation struggles of workers, blacks, and women. Eastman did not belong to any of the groups whose liberation he sought (except for writers); nor did he stand to benefit economically, in any obvious sense, from their struggles. His emphasis on the necessity of self-liberation, his disdain for elite reformers, and his emphasis on economic motivation would all seem to deprive him of a meaningful role in the liberation movements he championed. Indeed, his own beliefs would seem to cast him in the role of a mere reformer, a meddler and intruder into the freedom struggles of others. Eastman believed, however, that some disinterested idealists could transcend their class origins and subordinate their own interests to those of social revolution.
Eastman's second major enterprise was literary radicalism, the revolutionary transformation of all forms of high culture, including literature, education, journalism, and the arts. Disdaining saccharine optimism and Victorian evasions in literature and art, he favored authentic self-expression and social realism; attacking capitalist censorship and lies in journalism, he edited a free-spirited magazine owned by its contributors; opposing regimentation and rote-learning in schools, he perceived education as the creative unfolding of individual personality. Literary and educational revolution was one major enterprise in which Eastman and his comrades could act autonomously on their own behalf, without depending upon or allying themselves with oppressed groups. There is, however, no necessary connection, either logical or historical, between literary insurgency and Eastman's other projects of political radicalism, cultural revolution, and countercultural living. Many prominent literary and artistic innovators in virtually every age have been conservative in politics and conventional in belief and behavior.[14] Eastman's attempt to unite revolution in the arts and in politics stemmed from will and of thought rather than necessity.
The third major strand in Eastman's project was cultural revolution, alterations in the fundamental ways people defined and imagined themselves and their worlds. While cultural revolution can congrue with social revolution and has obvious affinities with literary radicalism, it is not necessarily allied with either. Some revolutionaries enlist traditional cultural symbols, values, and concepts in their cause, infusing old ideals and symbols with new meanings which advance the changes they want. Socialist party leader Eugene Debs, for example, infused the traditional concepts of citizenship, manhood, and work with new meanings (and preserved and accentuated vital aspects of old meanings) antithetical to those imparted by an emergent industrial capitalism.[15] Other revolutionaries, however, repudiate traditional institutions and old cultural symbols and construct new loyalties, symbols, and associations, believing that the old ones are inherently unsuitable for revolutionary purposes or that they have been irrevocably appropriated by established authorities. Debs himself repudiated hoary ideals of patriotism, racism, and sexism. The IWW advocated cultural revolution more consistently than the Socialist party, however, and Eastman, despite his membership in the SP and his occasional pragmatic use of traditional values, generally sided with the IWW. In addition, his advocacy of feminism, racial egalitarianism, sexual freedom, internationalism, and bohemianism decisively repudiated traditional culture and demanded that the individual redefine himself along lines radically different from conventional sources of self-identity.[16]
Forging a counterculture (an activity related to and yet distinct from cultural revolution) was Eastman's forth major goal. Some people advocate a major restructuring of values and culture during or after the revolution and yet conform to traditional codes in the present. Many radicals, including Debs and major portions of the Socialist party (and later the Communist party) embodied this approach for a variety of reasons such as inertia or the conviction that conventional, respectable behavior avoided alienating potential converts. Many believed that personal implementation of revolutionary cultural ideals diverted revolutionaries from the all-important class struggle, was impossible within the framework of capitalist society, and was perhaps ultimately harmful or unnecessary. Eastman, however, was passionately committed to countercultural lifestyles. Whereas revolutionary politics entailed a commitment to collective and organized struggle, countercultural revolution necessitated immediate change in the way in which the individual lived his or her own life. As Eastman said, "We live in a world of the kind we believe in."[17]
This enterprise, however, generated theoretical and intensely practical problems of its own. Attempts to live by values contravening those of the larger society, as if the revolution has already occurred, often encounter not only the active and conscious resistance of large numbers of people, but automatic and pervasive obstruction by institutions and practices predicated upon society's conventional and hostile values. The larger society often makes countercultural lifestyles impossible, or imposes so many obstacles and penalties that the new values can be achieved only by a self-consciousness and exertion that make them seem unnatural and contrived. Efforts to forge genuinely egalitarian relationships in a hierarchical society are especially susceptible to such sabotage by the larger society because the institutional support for such equality does not exist. This is the familiar problem of socialism (or racial or sexual egalitarianism) in one country or one coterie. Eastman faced this problem often, most particularly in his relations with The Masses collective, women, and, on The Liberator, with black poet Claude McKay. Eastman's advocacy of cultural revolution and his practice of a countercultural lifestyle also undermined his proletarian revolutionism because many workers and radicals were largely conservative on cultural issues.
Countercultural radicals usually attempt to surmount these difficulties by forging a movement culture, a matrix of institutions, people, and shared values supportive of dissident lifestyles.[18] But this effort also presents difficulties. Two in particular stand out: relating to a hostile or indifferent mainstream culture, and avoiding mimicking the coerciveness, sterility, and hierarchies of that mainstream. An individualistic and bohemian movement such as Eastman's also finds that the relationship of individual fulfillment to collective identity, discipline, and struggle is problematic.
This brings us to a final subject of concern to historians: the reasons for the disintegration of The Masses group and the failure of its entire enterprise of uniting cultural and social radicalism. Two explanations, which are seemingly contradictory and yet share underlying similarities, predominate. Some historians take an essentialist, ahistorical view, saying that Eastman's ideas were inherently contradictory and unworkable. Some posit an inherent conflict between artistic freedom and political activism; others claim that laughter, skepticism, and "the enjoyment of living" are incompatible with the serious business of revolution. Brian Lloyd argues that Eastman's pragmatism undermined his Marxian revolutionism and fostered his eventual conservatism.[19] This ignores the fact that movements with ambiguous or inconsistent ideologies and programs often achieve remarkable success; it also deflects attention from the historical context of the movement, and the actual reasons (both structural and historically contingent) for its failure.
Other historians declare that America's entry into World War I and the harsh realities of the Bolshevik Revolution immediately and irretrievably destroyed the unique blend of laughter and high purpose, of economic and cultural insurgency, that had characterized The Masses. While this has the merit of paying attention to historical context, it ignores the complexity of events that impinged upon the movement (which included the breakdown of the Second International, the European war, American entry into World War I, Woodrow Wilson's reign of terror, the Bolshevik Revolution, American invasion of the Soviet Union, and the splintering of the Socialist party.) It resembles the essentialist argument in that it denies that Eastman's philosophy was resilient enough to withstand the harsh realities of war and revolution. It ignores both the simultaneous demise of the entire revolutionary left, regardless of the different ideologies of its component parts, and the large degree of continuity between Eastman and his associates before and after 1917. Indeed, most of Eastman's critics ignore The Liberator altogether, thus missing both the striking continuities in Eastman's thought and the new departures caused by the upheavls of 1917-1924. Eastman championed the same wide variety of causes, and in much the same effervescent spirit, all through the tumultuous years 1912-1924 and beyond. His ultimate failure was not caused by intrinsic flaws or any single historical event, but rather by a combination of structural obstacles, historical events, and long-term trends largely beyond the control or foresight of Eastman or anyone else.
The truly interesting question about the fate of The Masses group, in fact, consists of possible relationships between the cultural changes that continued in the twenties and beyond, albeit detached from and even antithetical to any broadly-based economic and political insurgency, and the catastrophic defeat of those revolutionaries who sought fundamental social and cultural change. Many of the causes that Eastman championed--feminism, racial egalitarianism, sexual liberation, birth control, a more open, expressive literature--have won spectacular formal victories, some of a scope that would have been unimaginable in 1917, even if (perhaps because) those victories have been achieved within the context of a capitalist society that vitiates their significance. This is particularly striking because most people, including workers, often resist cultural change even more tenaciously than they resist fundamental economic and political change. In fact, many people oppose economic change more because it undermines their traditional culture than because it causes them material deprivations. The partial triumph and continued viability of cultural and literary change may be related to the defeat of political and economic change in ways that are partly systemic and partly historically contingent.