THE MASSES AND THE GREAT WAR
Eastman's life project did not shipwreck because of the alleged deficiencies of his ideas cited by critics and historians. Rather, it was destroyed by a succession of upheavals that originated far outside the radical movements and annihilated not only the lyrical radicals but the entire American left. Eastman directly involved himself in the traumas of 1916-1922. The election of 1916, largely fought over Wilson's slogan "He Kept Us Out of War," was quickly followed by American entry into the carnage. The Wilson administration suppressed The Masses and charged Eastman and his co-editors with obstructing the draft and encouraging mutiny in the armed forces--offenses meriting a twenty year prison term. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks overthrew the conservative Socialists in Russia and withdrew from the war, the United States invaded the Soviet Union, and the capitalists (acting privately and through federal, state, and local governments) launched a systematic campaign of murder, torture, jailings, and deportations against the left. Finally, the remnants of both the Socialist party and the IWW splintered, largely over issues concerning American entry into the war, Soviet Bolshevism, and domestic repression.
Yet throughout these traumas Eastman's general philosophy and tone remained surprisingly constant. Rejecting abstract principles, Eastman prided himself on continually revising his concrete proposals in accordance with new information and changing realities. In a tumultuous world he predictably reversed himself on specific issues. Yet he quickly replaced The Masses with The Liberator and, except for self-restraint and Aesopian language in war-related discussions, continued his general editorial stance. The Liberator stressed socialist revolution, the model for which was now the Soviet Union; but it also championed paganism, laughter, black militancy, feminism, and the transformation of education, culture, and literature. It folded only in 1924, when the entire left--the IWW, the SP, the black radicals, and organized feminism--was defunct, and even the AFL and other reformist organizations were in shambles. With every insurgency defeated, the magazine that had expressed them had no constituency.
The mass slaughter that erupted in Europe in August 1914 destroyed the international Socialist movement and soon devastated the American left, including The Masses. Eastman and his cohorts, however, remained revolutionary proletarian internationalists and pursued their four-fold program: workers' revolution; literary radicalism; countercultural support of feminism, racial equality, and sexual freedom; and joyous, pagan, liberated, and experimental lifestyles. Each Masses editor risked his freedom, and Eastman nearly lost his life, for opposing the war and advocating resistance. War, repression, and the Bolshevik revolution radicalized Eastman, Dell, and Reed, whose conduct belies their reputation as frivolous, dilettante, and bourgeois bohemians. Eastman applied his pragmatic, open-ended, non-dogmatic, science-as-experiment concept of Marxism to a world in upheaval. He revised the dogma of strictly economic determinism, flirted with Woodrow Wilson in 1916, and modified his views when epochal events at home and abroad transformed the political landscape. In applying Marxist theory to changing circumstances, Eastman necessarily revised some of its details; in revising those details, he faithfully applied the method of Marxism. Revision was application of general Marxist principles; application of those principles was revision of specific predictions and strategies. Eastman's open-mindedness and tactical and ideological flexibility proved his steadfast revolutionary commitment rather than indicating the jejune reformism of which political opponents and historians have accused him.
Like almost everyone else, Eastman was appalled by the mass slaughter in Europe. The eruption of war only confirmed his glorification of class (civil) war and detestation of patriotic (national) wars. Initially he regarded the conflagration as "a commercial war" that revealed "the bloody fundamentals" of capitalist civilization. "There is no Christianity, no culture, no civilization," he said. "Our whole upper-class polity and pretense of spirituality is built of a leisure that is the loot of predatory competition and the perpetual exploitation and death of the poor." The war discredited capitalism and Christianity rather than Socialism, a new movement "founded upon a truth as to the real nature of humanity and human history." Socialists could not prevent war until they overthrew capitalism. Nationalism was but its pretext; all European peoples were fundamentally of one race, and class rather than racial traits explained the alleged differences between Germany and its opponents. "Racial animosity" was in reality directed "against an economic rival"; humanity's "survived impulse against a man of alien traits" dissipated when not exacerbated by "a real or imagined clash of interests."[211]
At first, Eastman hoped that the war would hasten social change in Europe. The devastations of war "will shake people together like dice in a box, and how they will fall out nobody knows. But they will fall out shaken; that everybody knows. Nothing will be solid as it was before, no title, no privilege, no property. Discontent among the poor will be enormous. And the ideal of industrial democracy is now strong enough and clear enough to control that discontent, and fashion it to a great end." Indeed, mass death, destruction, and the subsequent rebuilding would improve conditions for surviving workers; when the capitalists "have made labor scarce, they will find labor proud" as it was after the Black Death. Eastman also fervently desired an Allied victory. "The Kaisar and his military machine must be whipped back into Prussia and smashed," he exclaimed. "Let the war go on until that is accomplished.... It is for Germany, more than for the Allies, that we want the Kaisar's defeat.... [Germany's] feudal and military oppression, linked fast with cultural and scientific and social-reform progress of the highest type, is the most abominable monster of Europe.... For the sake of the people of Germany and of all nations, let the war go on." A German defeat would hasten revolution there and embolden labor radicalism in France.[212]
Although Eastman held all belligerents responsible for the war, he believed that Germany was perhaps marginally more guilty. He also declared that "France has more of what is dear to us than any other country of Europe.... France has not only freedom but the arts of life more nearly won than another other country of Europe. Her culture is one of superior happiness, the habits of her people are more poetic, they realize more, live more, and with all that are more spontaneously intelligent than the Germans. They are at home among ideas.... They have the rare gift of thinking with their minds. They feel with their hearts.... Obviously, then, I value the culture of France above that of Germany." Eastman also regarded England and Russia more highly than Germany. However, he decried the "monomania" and "absolute fixation.... a choice between two absolutes" engendered by the war. He perceived differences between the belligerents as only a matter of degree and predicted that French civilization would conquer Germany regardless of who won the war. At other times he almost denied the existence of cultural differences between nations. He favored the Allies for pragmatic reasons--the probable results of their victory--while regarding their unctuous slogans of democracy and self-determination as cant. The war was one of "nationalism, the most banal and stupid of human idol-worships."[213]
Eastman soon recognized that the war had shattered Socialist hopes and would destroy the vestiges of American civil liberties if the United States entered. He opposed American entry "not alone because of the waste of life, but because of the inevitable loss under a consequent military dictatorship of most of our liberties. Every force of reaction will be strengthened by war, as it has been strengthened in Europe."[214] A neutral United States, he hoped, could mediate a peace based upon a federation of nations modelled on the United States. The mass slaughter was an appalling "waste of heroism" and "an absolutely uninterrupted monotony of noise and carnage." Europe was now one vast abattoir:
When we used to kill a bull on the farm, it was a great thing.... When you go into the beef factories in Chicago, and see them drive steers up into a narrow chute by the five thousand, and a man on a platform above them drops his hammer every so many seconds, and the steers roll out to be switched away, and shoved along, like mere material--why, the business of killing a bull loses every bit of drastic quality it had.... This war has no more sport in it than it has dramatic action. It is merely a regular businesslike killing and salting down of the younger men of each country involved--twenty thousand a day, perhaps, all told.... When you kill some fifteen thousand youths a day, and rip the limbs or faces off how many thousands more nobody counts, the individual mangled hero is no longer characteristic. The color runs. There are no longer heroes--there is just the common fighting stuff of human nature, one continuous scrambled homogeneous jelly....[215]
Eastman was criticized at the time, and has been skewered by historians ever since, for modifying his Marxist theories after the Second International collapsed amidst an orgy of patriotic frenzy. As early as December 1914 Eastman proposed that labor ally with capital in advocating a world federation which would protect the interests of both classes. Such a strategy was both logical and consistent with "the Economic Interpretation of History...." he asserted; "but logical or not, let us not block the progress of our hopes out of respect to a major premise." A year later, however, Eastman despaired that economic self-interest alone would not prevent war. Both "moral exhortation" and "mental enlightenment" were "utopian and a waste of time"; patriotism was rooted in unalterable "universal hereditary tendencies." The conduct of European antimilitarists, both proletarian and bourgeois, proved that people did not act solely from economic motives.[216]
In Europeans at least, warlike patriotism was "fixed in the nervous tissue like self-preservation itself. Men who would not contribute a peaceable eight cents to the public weal, drop their cash, credit, and commercial prospects and go toss in their lives like a song, at the bidding of an alien abstraction called the state.... It is an organic aptitude more old and deeply set by evolution than any of the impulses that would enlighten it.... It is there no matter what you teach." Identification with the clan, tribe, and finally the nation "has been grafted deep into the souls of European people by centuries of bloody and drastic group selection.... The patriotic and pugnacious tribes survived--we are those tribes." Culture, education, and self-interest could modify this fundamental instinct but not uproot it. In times of crisis "we are all touched with this mania." Socialists had hoped that workers would transfer their patriotism--their instinctive gregarious and pugnacious self-identity with a larger group--from their nation to their international class; rather than suppressing "the patriotic disposition altogether," Socialists "offered it a new object." Yet "the abstract thought of kindred groups in other countries" could not compete against "our fighting union with the group we feel," those "surrounding us with whom we rush together for defense." Socialist (and bourgeois) internationalists had "nursed a dream." Instead of seeking peace through proletarian internationalism, radicals should advocate a genuine United States of America embracing all countries of the western hemisphere. (This would require that the U.S. stop invading its neighbors.) "The name of our country is the name of our task," Eastman said. This federation could someday encompass the world; "ultimately our patriotism may embrace the Earth, the Earth may be our nation."[217]
Patriotism, Eastman recognized, combined altruistic identification with a larger group, disguised and virulent egoism, compensatory self-glory offsetting the pitiful reality of our individual lives, and a nostalgia for the memories and sensations of youth. It mixed humanity's gregarious "fighting solidarity with a group" with self-love, self-praise, and an "imaginary self-importance." In praising our nation we praise ourselves "enlarged and clothed in public splendour." Eastman sardonically remarked that "if a man cannot afford to have a steeple on his own hat, he is so much the more proud and anxious about the size and proportions of the town hall and the village church." Each of us also longed for the protection, safety, and familiarity of our childhood. "There is a little child inside of every one of us," and when threatened that child will "run home to mother." He yearns for "the things he loved and leaned on in the days when there was no doubt and no trouble. For these, as for no others, he will pour out his song and sacrifice.... Men cling to the place they were born in, as they cling to the breast that bore them." This explained the "blind, puppy-like almost chemical way in which otherwise intelligent minds will cling to the proposition that their country is right, no matter what their country does."[218]
Eastman insisted that moral exhortation and rational argument were powerless before the toxic combination of emotions powerfully combined in patriotism. "Preaching at human nature, preaching that never takes the scientific trouble" to ascertain "the origin and composition and actual potentiality of the traits preached at," had proven "a complete failure." Patriotism was "a combination of remarkable emotional satisfactions that is irresistible... a trait of character that no pledge or resolution, no theory, no gospel, no poetry or philosophy of life, no culture or education, and not even your own financial interest can ever completely conquer." Only "international union" could abolish war, much as "wars of family and clan and city were eliminated by national union." Such international federation was realistic because it would benefit everyone and satisfy "all the organic interests of men, except their sheer love of patriotic fighting itself."[219]
By mid-1916 Eastman had partly (if temporarily) rejected the Economic Interpretation of History itself. Marxists had sensibly but wrongly predicted that propertyless workers would join with their class rather than with the countries that belonged to their masters. Socialists must learn from their error. After surveying Socialist movements throughout Europe, Eastman declared that "it is not very scientific to denounce a fact for refusing to come under your hypothesis. It is wiser to scrutinize a fact with a view to remodelling, if necessary, the hypothesis.... People do not go to war for their property, they go to war for their country." Rare individuals of unusually intellectual disposition or who especially disliked fighting could resist patriotic frenzy. However, in time of war the masses would never "control their patriotic reflexes" on behalf of a weak and abstract "solidarity of labor."[220] Mass wartime psychology
is comparable to a stampede, or a sexual or religious orgy. This tribal fighting instinct is an organized instinct latent in us.... Ideas do not reach down to these instinctive levels.... The masses of mankind will support war, whenever any menace or danger to the national prestige, real or apparent, is declared. Such is the conclusion I draw from the trying out of our theories in all the countries of Europe.[221]
Eastman did not explain why workers would identify more readily with an international federation of nations than with the international of their own class; both were rather remote abstractions. Neither consisted of the near neighbors "surrounding us." His concrete policy recommendations were similarly confused and contradictory. Aside from supporting a bourgeois federation of states, Eastman urged that Socialists "with somewhat chastened understanding" reconstitute the International and emphasize antiwar agitation during times of peace, when workers were more readily swayed by reason. Capitalists were uniting across national lines for the peaceful exploitation of labor; workers must simultaneously organize against militarism and capitalism. However, Eastman did not convincingly explain how these measures could prevent wars generated by an unreasoned, frenzied patriotism.[222]
Eastman did foresee a possible "higher destiny" for the International in some nations: fomenting civil (class) war. "The day may come when a civil war of labor against the tyranny of capital is itself so ready to break that the declaration of a foreign war will start it," he said. "In that happy accident our hopes of labor's pacifism could be realized. For though understanding and deliberate purpose can hardly check the patriotic stampede, a stampede in the opposite direction might check it." This, however, would constitute "revolution rather than international solidarity," and Eastman thought its prospects remote. In January 1917, however, he reiterated his preference for civil (class) over international (patriotic) war. "All seriously moral people," he declared, preferred "civil over soldierly violence" because the former aimed at a real benefit, while the latter stemmed from "blind tribal instincts."[223] Later that year the war precipitated the overthrow of the Czar and the increasing ascendency of the revolutionary Soviets in Russia--developments which Eastman enthusiastically welcomed.
Although Eastman rejected Socialist arguments that capitalist economic motives alone caused the war, he did admit that many capitalists benefitted by the carnage. Although modern war impoverished its participants, some classes could profit "at the expense of other classes in their own nation." War was "extraordinarily good business" that "piles up wealth for the wealthy as usual." Even if victory could not compensate a nation for the costs entailed by war, if the capitalists profited
then so far as our hopes of peace go, the question whether victory harms or benefits "the nation" is not of final importance.... For in most cases the business class is "the nation," so far as sovereign decision upon the most critical issues is concerned; and if war, merely as war, transfers an increased proportion of the wealth from other classes to the business class, without greatly decreasing the total amount, then war remains a good "national" business, no matter whether victory is worth anything or not.[224]
Capitalists profited from increased war production, the introduction of new technologies, Taylorization, the streamlining of production, and war's making a patriotic virtue out of high production. If foreign invasion risked destroying capital goods, these wore out in the course of ordinary use; if war killed the workers who made profits for the rich, people not previously in the paid labor force (such as previously homebound women and children) replaced them. "War is an industry which gives a vast profit"; sudden peace "would depreciate a great many heavy investments." Yet wise capitalists recognized that their increasingly globalized system was undermined by war's uncertainties. War, indeed, might even generate revolution. "The exploitation of labor rests securely upon the psychology and politics of peace," Eastman declared. So the relationship between capitalism and war was much less clear-cut than orthodox Marxists claimed; many capitalists qua capitalists opposed it, while patriotism was endemic among persons of all classes.[225]
By 1915 Eastman, worried that Wilson's foreign policy and preparedness campaign presaged war with Germany, energetically debunked pro-interventionist arguments. Germany, he insisted, differed from its enemies not by nature but because of its history and situation. Feudalism was far more powerful in Germany than in England because industry (and hence a strong Parliament) developed later and because the Prussian king, controlling his own lands and revenues, granted his nobles no Magna Charta in return for taxes. Germany's location in central Europe amidst potential enemies encouraged its militarization, which stemmed from insecurity rather than wanton aggressiveness. Germany's idolization of the state and worship of an ethereal freedom of the spirit that was in fact a form of slavery was an ideological compensation for her lack of genuine political freedom. The British Empire was as brutal, and British patriotism as ludicrous and vile, as Germany's. German atrocities during the war were no worse than those of its enemies, who also massacred defenseless civilians and invaded neutral nations. The sinking of the Lusitania, which killed prominent Americans, was "a tactless blunder" but no worse morally than routine British atrocities, including the starvation blockade imposed upon German civilians. After the United States entered the war Eastman exclaimed that it had "a more extended record of atrocities to her credit than any other nation of the civilized world," including outrageous mass murders and deportations of the very kind charged against Germany.[226]
Eastman earnestly desired the destruction of the Kaisar's "monarchic military state, and all the emotions and ideologies of the heart and mind which inevitably attach to it." However, by 1916 he recanted his earlier belief that decisive defeat would hasten democratic revolution in Germany. Indeed, he specifically repudiated his October 1914 Masses editorial. "Either a victory or a defeat" would "inflame the patriotic bigotry of whatever country suffers it," he now recognized. A peace of mutual exhaustion "with no consolation, no glory, and no prize" would impress European peoples with the futility and horrors of war and might also generate revolution. "Let [the belligerents] be defeated by war, and let them fear the victor," he said. In a gruesomely prescient passage Eastman predicted that "German defeat would mean another crisis of nationalism. Injured self-esteem is as absorbing to the heart as exultant vanity." The "mortification of defeat" would only exacerbate German nationalism. Industrial and commercial developments, not defeat in war, would democratize and liberalize Germany; "the forces that gave us democracy" would bring it also to Germany, whose "imperial despotism will rot within its own heart and fall. We can only lend our aid to those slow forces."[227]
Eastman's pragmatic application (and therefore creative revision) of Marxism generated controversy on the left; but his flirtation with Woodrow Wilson's re-election campaign more seriously compromised his radical stance. Indeed, Eastman's support for the Wilson administration revealed the pitfalls of an unmitigated pragmatism and embroiled The Masses in controversy. Wilson's crushing betrayal of the antimilitarists' fond hopes further disillusioned peace advocates with capitalism and the United States, and, along with the Bolshevik revolution and the U.S. invasion of the Soviet Union, drove Eastman and his cohorts towards a more strident and uncompromising revolutionism.
Eastman had previously exonerated Wilson for America's invasion of Mexico, at one point even declaring his "unreserved admiration" of the President "for his unswerving purpose to let the Mexican people govern, or not govern, themselves." Eastman offered his "gratitude to Woodrow Wilson, all alone, for giving the peasants of Mexico their chance." However misguided this adulation, it had some scant basis in fact: Wilson had backed away from all-out war apparently in response to the American peace movement, in which Eastman's sister Crystal was very active.[228] After carnage erupted in Europe, Wilson pledged American neutrality; and even when he moved towards war, Eastman vastly favored him over hyper-bellicose Theodore Roosevelt and other Republicans. Eastman also agreed with Wilson's advocacy of a League of Nations. The Masses vehemently opposed Wilson's militaristic "preparedness" program but regarded it as the policy of a united ruling class rather than as a distinctively Wilsonian measure. Indeed, at the outset of the 1916 campaign Wilson received Eastman and other Masses editors at the White House, politely heard their protestations that American workers opposed U.S. involvement in the war, and duped Eastman with private assurances of his good intentions. The Masses fatuously proclaimed that Wilson's fear of Roosevelt's popularity kept him publicly silent about his real views.[229]
Wilson's ignoble actions soon undermined Eastman's confidence, however. In the August 1916 Masses Eastman proclaimed that the election opposed "militarism against democratic good sense." However, even as he penned that sentence Wilson threatened Mexico; he was, Eastman charged, either "playing a contemptible game for re-election" or was "utterly sutpfied with the pride of patriotism." Wilson also endorsed the xenophobic anti-immigrant plank in the Democratic platform; "a more stupid piece of cleverness could hardly be imagined," Eastman said.[230] Meanwhile, The Masses ignored the SP presidential candidate Allan Benson, and indeed the SP's entire election effort.
Despite his doubts about Wilson, Eastman increasingly worried that a Republican victory would involve the U.S. in war and therefore crush American civil liberties. Shortly before the election, therefore, he endorsed Wilson because the Democratic nominee "aggressively believes not only in keeping out of war, but in organizing the nations of the world to prevent war." Eastman also praised Wilson's oblique praise for (but not advocacy of) the eight-hour day. Eastman's endorsement, given to one of Wilson's campaign committees, remained unmentioned in Eastman's magazine until after the election, when Eastman responded to bitter criticism (which itself was not printed in The Masses).[231]
Eastman's self-justification was not his finest moment. Although he claimed to have voted for Benson, he criticized the SP as more of "a religious sect" than "the political instrument of the working class." (Indeed, Benson's main campaign plank--the demand for a plebiscite before the U.S. entered a foreign war--was exactly the kind of reformist nostrum that Eastman had specifically repudiated.) In a lamentably "more revolutionary than thou" stratagem, Eastman condemned the SP for nominating the middle-class Benson instead of the working-class James Maurer; this falsely implied that Eastman might otherwise have not endorsed Wilson. Claiming that his "statement" (Eastman implied that it was not an endorsement, only a preference between the two candidates who could actually win election) had elicited "letters of excommunication from keepers of the sacred dogmas in all parts of the country," Eastman thundered that if the SP was "so weak that it can only live by suppressing the free use of opinions, or throttling the natural interest of a living beings in the important events of the day," it would "die soon and deservedly." He urged that Socialists "try to use our brains freely, love progress more than a party, allow ourselves the natural emotions of our species, and see if can can get ready to play a human part in the acual complex flow of events." The SP, he said, must repudiate "sectarian dogmatism, this doctrinaire, index expurgatorius mode of thinking, and this infatuation with an organization as an end in itself."[232]
The January 1917 Masses contained three articles by prominent radicals extolling Wilson's re-election. However, Eugene Wood, a regular Masses contributor, blasted Eastman's stance as providing "aid and comfort to the enemy" and strongly implied that Eastman's SP local should expel him. (SP rules allowed expulsion of members who endorsed a capitalist party or candidate.) Eastman himself remained silent on this controversy but, perhaps hoping to bolster his sagging reputation for revolutionism, did reiterate his preference for civil war upon the basis of class over national war waged under the guise of patriotism. February's issue contained another harsh criticism of The Masses for "performing a scalp dance in honor of Wilson's election." Pro-Wilson Socialists were "flamboyant egotists who desert at the first opportunity," pseudo-revolutionists "who play with great words and then swallow line, bob and sinker at the first cast, with the mighty thin bait of a few meretricious and contemptible bouregois reforms!" Eastman claimed that the SP was not the party of the working class but he himself, by endorsing Wilson, had undermined its support among workers.[233]
In his defense, Eastman reminded his readers that the European war had decimated every revolutionary organization in Europe and predicted similar destruction if America entered the conflagration.
Nothing remained of the International, the socialist opposition, the labor movement, the class struggle. The whole thing and all the complaisant expectations resting on it, sank out of existence instantly in a welter of patriotic emotions and military enterprise. Some of us simply could not help noticing this, no matter how badly it fitted into our academic theories. War, we said, to ourselves, is death to liberty and death to the struggle for liberty. At whatever cost we must avoid war.[234]
The United States had verged on war several times and in fact if not in theory "the issue rested absolutely in the hands of one man.... Therefore it matters to the working class who is elected President," especially "when war is in the wind." Eastman reiterated his firm conviction that "men's hereditary instinctive reactions" predisposed them to war once the fighting began; therefore, "our only hope is in preventing declarations of war." Only a League of Nations could prevent the outbreak of war, and socialists should "encourage the capitalistic governments in their new motion towards internationalism, because they will get there before we will." War devastated workers and radicals even more than it hurt the capitalists; therefore, because "business is stronger than we are.... we ought to help business stop war." Eastman acknowledged that support of a capitalist government could vitiate Socialist and working-class movements but asserted that war simply destroyed radical organizations. Therefore, he claimed, it was precisely the most class-conscious Socialists who endorsed or voted for Wilson. Eastman said that the Democrats' "attack on the plutocracy was genuine and important" even while acknowledging that Wilson would help the workers only insofar as the capitalists remained the main beneficiaries of his reforms. He ended on another radical if irrelevant note, asserting that revolutionaries should focus not on politics at all, but on "the struggle of organized labor for industrial soveriegnity."[235]
As Wilson prepared to drag the United States into the war, Eastman reiterated his contention that "patriotic war has always meant death to liberty and the struggle for human rights." Wilson's endorsement of a League of Nations was "the most momentous event conceivable in the evolution of a capitalistic civilization." Such a League would inevitably attract some of the patriotic emotions previously lavished exclusively on the nation-state, while the resulting peace would preserve the civil liberties necessary for revolutionary agitation. Decline in the SP's vote and membership had injected doubt into minds previously "paralyzed with certitude." Dogmatism was the SP's most debilitating fault. "Scientific thinking requires the power to suspend judgment, and that power has been habitually renounced as an automatic part of the act of becoming a party member..... Clap the creed over any new fact that arises, and if the fact will not fit under the creed, shut your eyes and jam it under. This manner of employing the mind cannot be called thinking." Such "theological automatism" and "revolutionary theology" undermined the SP's appeal.[236] A mass party that could win working-class votes required major restructuring:
Having released himself from a dogmatic fixation upon his doctrine, [the Socialist must] subordinate doctrine altogether in his recruiting activities. Even a live and pliant scientific hypothesis is not the nucleus around which a political party can be formed. A political party ought to represent, not a certain kind of knowledge, but a certain economic interest. It ought to take in all the people who agree in wanting something concrete and immediate. The American Socialist party includes only people who agree in understanding something remote and ultimate. It is not a party of the working class; it is a party of the theory of the working class. This fatal weakness is accentuated by the fact that the theory is of European origin, and all its terminology and catch-words are alien to our people. But no matter where the theory originated--and no matter how true it may be--you cannot build an effectual fighting group around it. Theoretic thinking is too unusual--thinking is too univerally subordinated to immediate interests--for such a group to grow great and have a direct impact upon history. It will remain merely an organ of special education.[237]
Eastman claimed that the famous Gompers/Hillquit exchange before the Commission on Industrial Relations symbolized the woeful chasm between the Socialist and labor movements in America:
Gompers wants to get something for labor--time, wages, freedom--he wants to get more and more of it, and he sets no limit. He cannot be induced to discuss the limit. He simply starts out to go in a certain direction, taking a short look to determine the first step.... Hillquit, on the other hand, cares little enough about the active business.... He wants [Gompers] to stop doing it, you might almost say, in order to talk about those implications. He overemphasizes the ultimate theory, as much as Gompers overemphasizes the immediate interest.... The Socialists think that by propagating an understanding of that struggle they can bring it to victory; the labor people resent this attempt to force an external understanding on them.... Moreover they see plainly that those theorists never do anything.[238]
The SP won so few workers "because it approaches human nature with an abstract theory when the core of human nature is always a concrete wish." The disagreement between the practical labor organizer and the Socialist theoretician was "simply a conflict between the will and the idea."[239]
Eastman specifically repudiated a left-Socialist idea which he had at times championed. According to this left-wing theory, the the SP should stress ultimate aims above immediate concerns because reformist demands would dilute its Socialist appeal; it could focus on "straight Socialism" without losing votes because "real Socialists" would not desert the SP to vote for bourgeois reform candidates. Eastman himself had denounced reforms that benefitted capitalists as well as workers; as late as June 1917 he was still insisting that if the SP jettisoned dogma, theory, and complacency, and championed "the working-class principle that all changes which... benefit labor at the expense of capital are socialistic, it might crystalize around itself a major part of the exploited classes."
Eastman's behavior in this episode, and even more his rationalization of it, come closest to justifying those critics who condemn him for frivolous phrase-mongering and revolutionary posturing. Eastman faced a perennial radical dilemma: he was correct in his belief that war would ruin American radicalism, and of course realized that the SP candidate stood no chance of winning. Hughes and the Republicans were more warlike than the Democrats and Wilson had campaigned on the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War"; although Eastman deplored Wilson's militaristic policies on preparedness, Mexico, and German submarine warfare, he could not have predicted the events of spring 1917. His pragmatic admission of a preference for Wilson was humanly understandable, however regrettable for a prominent Socialist editor; his denunciation of his SP critics--especially on the spurious grounds that they were dogmatic and intolerant--was hardly defensable. Years later, he admitted that his stance must have exasperated "anybody who was trying to run a party.... Under the cloak of an intellectual virtue, I was concealing the fact that I could not make up my mind."[240]
However, Eastman's vacillations were only temporary; and when, immediately after Wilson's second inauguration, the President dragged the United States into the war and unleashed a reign of terror that destroyed the American left, Eastman and The Masses vociferously denounced these policies. Indeed, while some "Socialists for Wilson" endorsed the war, lurched rightward, and slandered their former comrades, Eastman and his cohorts deepened and intensified their radicalism as a result of revolution abroad and repression at home. Wilson's despicable betrayal of every noble ideal and cause brought home with irrevocable force the real nature of the United States, its government, its civilization, and its ruling class; Eastman, Reed, Dell, and many others finally learned the literal meaning of the words they had so long spoken. April 1917 and its aftermath was a watershed in the lives of Eastman and his cohorts.
The Masses had openly praised resistance to militarism since August 1914 and even before. In January 1914 Eastman had extolled class war while deprecating patriotic or international war; later that year he praised English soldiers who refused orders to fire on civilians and Buffalo street-car operators who would not transport soldiers to a strike. Shortly after Europeans started World War I, Eastman praised "the noble mutinies and patriotic treasons that are the glories of this war." These events occurred in Europe, but in the May 1915 Masses the usually moderate Meyer London, SP Congressman from Manhattan, advocated a general strike of American workers "engaged in the manufacturing of ammunition" and "the exporting of food." Exporting of "any article" to the belligerent powers, London declared, prolonged the slaughter. The Masses also offered its readers an anti-enlistment pledge; when criticized for its alleged pacifism, it editorialized that it did not oppose all wars, but rather judged actions by their consequences. Its editors might conceivably enlist in a national army "to fight either against our own country or with it.... We suspect that those who signed that pledge would be the first to bleed, were the cause of industrial liberty at stake." In the July 1916 "Preparedness Number" Eastman, referring to the possible registration or conscription of men into the New York national guard, declared that "if Governor Whitman or any of his war lords undertook to draft me into the National Guard, I would barricade my house and start the war there."[241]
In January 1917 Eastman powerfully reiterated his preference for civil war over international slaughter. The April 1917 Masses was composed when U.S. entry into the war seemed inevitable; in it Eastman lavishly praised Wilson's proposal for a League of Nations and obliquely defended his endorsement of Wilson in late 1916. However, he also proclaimed that radicals would vehemently oppose American involvement in the bloodbath. The Masses' antiwar stance resulted from "our loyalty to a struggle that is vaster and more freighted with the world's future than a war between nations can be." He urged active resistance. Radicals
will remember that there is not liberty nor democracy anywhere in this capitalistic society. They will remember that this government does not protect human life, the lives of its citizens, either on sea or land.... It is capitalistic business that our government fundamentally protects, and it is for the honor of a government devoted to such a function that we are asked to wage war.... War is the destroyer of liberty.... [Those who cherish freedom] will be neutral, whether the government goes to war or not. They will not enlist in the army of the government, and they will not renounce their independence of judgment, and their deliberate devotion to a better thing than any government, at the demand of those emotionalists who think it is virtuous and worthy of human dignity to abandon all judgment and all deliberate devotion whatver, in the long orgy of tribal patriotism.[242]
John Reed attacked American entry with similar bitterness. "I know what war means," he exclaimed. "I have been with the armies of all the belligerents except one, and I have seen men die, and go mad, and lie in hospitals suffering hell; but there is a worse thing than that. War means an ugly mob-madness, crucifying the truth-tellers, choking the artists, side-tracking reforms, revolutions, and the working of social forces.... For many years this country is going to be a worse place for free men to live in; less tolerant, less hospitable."[243] Reed continued:
Whose war is this? Not mine. I know that hundreds of thousands of American workingmen employed by our great financial 'patriots' are not paid a living wage. I have seen poor men sent to jail for long terms without trial, and even without any charge. Peaceful strikers, and their wives and children, have been shot to death, burned to death, by private detectives and militiamen. The rich have steadily become richer, and the cost of living higher, and the workers proportionately poorer. These toilers don't want war--not even civil war. But the speculators, the employers, the plutocracy--they want it, just as they did in Germany and England; and with lies and sophistries they will whip up our blood until we are savages--and then we'll fight and die for them.... The fault is not ours. It is not our war.[244]
When former Masses mainstay and ex-radical William English Walling vilified Eastman as pro-Kaisar, Eastman reiterated that the democratization of Germany would emerge from within rather than from foreign imposition. The slayers of Kaisar autocracy were already arising "and what those heroes need to help them is a failure of Germany, but not a humiliating defeat. A humiliating defeat would inflame German nationalism as much as a signal victory would." The reprehensible British Empire encircled the globe and also richly deserved failure; without U.S. involvement in the war, neither government could achieve their designs of conquest. "The world is becoming Prussianized on a basis of industrial autocracy," Eastman said, "and those who cannot see this because of the size of the Kaisar's helmet" ignored the Economic Interpretation of History. "The place to fight the economic autocracy, the oligarchy of the future, the militarism, the Iron Heel, is the place where you are. And the way to begin the fight is to refuse to give them their war."[245]
In the June 1917 Masses Eastman again counselled active resistance to the American war effort. Denying that the U.S. was fighting in any sense for democracy, Eastman mercilessly dissected Wilson's contradictory war aims. He continued:
We wish to persuade those who love liberty and democracy enough to give their energy or their money or their lives for it, to withhold the gift from this war, and save it to use in the sad renewal of the real struggle for liberty that will come after it. We want them to resist the war-fever and the patriotic delirium, the sentimental vanity, the sentimental hatred, the solemn hypocrisies of idealists, resist the ceremonious installations of petty tyranny in every department of our lives, resist consciption if they have the courage, and at whatever cost to their social complissance save themselves for a struggle of human liberty against oppression that will be what is says it is.[246]
Eastman also denounced Wilson's fatuous claim that the draft was "in no sense a conscription of the unwilling" because American had "volunteered in mass." Eastman declared that "the President has not even deigned to announce to his victims the end for which they are to march into the pens.... For my part I do not recognize the right of a government to draft me to war whose purposes I do not believe in. But to draft me for a war whose purposes it will not so much as communicate to my ear, seems an act of tyranny, discordant with the memory even of decent kings."[247]
Eastman also confronted opposition from pro-war Socialists, and published extensive excerpts from Upton Sinclair's resignation statement in The Masses. Sinclair declared that Prussian militarism must be crushed, predicted that the government would destroy the SP if it obstructed the war, and, echoing Eastman's own philosophy, insisted that Socialists align themselves with actual forces that could further Socialist goals. Instead of opposing the war, which was an existing reality, Socialists should fight for a just peace and for improved labor conditions at home. Eastman recongized that Sinclair's pragmatic reasoning greatly resembled his own emphasis on creative intelligence:
If this magazine has contributed anything to social revolutionary philosophy in America, its contribution has been a resolute opposition to bigotry and dogmatic thinking of all kinds. It has insisted upon the recognition of variety and change in the facts, and the need for pliancy in the theories of revolution. It has insisted that the world can no more be saved be a single ism--syndicalism, socialism, single-Taxism, anarchism, or whatever--that it was saved by a single God. Along with theology, we have urged the dumping of theological methods of thought. We have asked our readers to use all general ideas as working hypotheses, and not as havens of rest. We have foresworn the absolute and the abstract and the predetermined, and tried to meet each fresh and developing situation with a fresh and developing mind.[248]
There was, Eastman said, no prima facie certainty that Sinclair's pragmatic arguments were wrong in the present situation. He reiterated his previous belief that a national war could further "the liberation of the world" under some circumstances. "We have foresworn the absolute and the abstract and the predetermined, and tried to meet each fresh and developing situation with a fresh and developing mind.... Time holds more various wonders in her womb than our intellects can ever prepare for in advance.... A liberal mind is a mind that is able and willing to imagine itself believing anything." But, Eastman complained, "Sinclair and Walling have gone over to this war with a kind of enthusiasm, as if they were going to direct it.... Sinclair writes his own peace terms, and goes to war along with the Allies; but I read the terms of peace that were written by the governments of the Allies, and I stay at home." Eastman said that the internal development of industry would democratize Germany, doubted that the Allies could win a decisive victory, and reminded Sinclair that the British Empire fought for imperialism rather than freedom. Eastman declared that he sided with the Socialists and Wobblies who fought "the militarization of this country at the hands of our industrial feudalism."[249] He also noted although Sinclair predicted a decline in SP membership and influence, SP membership was actually soaring. Members had endorsed the antiwar platform by an overwhelming margin. Sinclair replied that the Allies could indeed win, that the hardships of war were weakening the Kaisar's rule, and that a victorious Germany would soon threaten American security. He also asserted that the SP's new members were overwhelmingly German-Americans and pacifists rather than genuine Socialists; they would not compensate for "the party's enormous loss of influence with the mass of every day Americans."[250]
Even as Eastman, Reed, and Art Young vociferously opposed the war, however, events unfolding in Russia presaged an eventual shift in their position. By mid-1917 the Soviets were assuming power in Russia, a process which The Masses greeted ecstatically. In the June 1917 issue Reed mentioned the chagrin among the English and American ruling classes that "the [Russian] revolution is being conducted by revolutionists"; he predicted that the allies would "crush [democracy] wherever it is found." The following month Reed indicated that "Russia must have peace from without" if Soviet democracy was to triumph; "indeed, every other consideration, whether of honor or profit, sinks into insignificance besides" this need for peace.[251]
Eastman greeted the rise of the Soviets with almost delirious enthusiasm. In Russia, he exclaimed, "all our own theories are proving true.... One by one the facts fall out exactly as they were predicted by Marx and Engels and the philosophers of Syndicalism.... All the esoteric terminology of the Marxian theory that used to be locked up in the Rand School Library, or employed to enliven in Jewish accent the academic deliberations of East side debating societies, is now flashed in the despatches of the Associated Press from one end of the world to another.... The names of our theories have become the names of current facts.... This Russian revolution seems to be conducted in the terms of the most erudite modern interpretations of the straight Marxian science."[252] Eastman's analysis is worth quoting at length because it was the first statement of views that would dominate his thinking throughout the life of The Liberator:
One feature of the drama surpasses in its truth to Marxian theory, anything that might have been conceived by a poet.... That is the arising, side by side with the bourgeois political government, of an unauthorized government representing the economic and military power of the working class. A Parliament of proletarian deputies, entirely unofficial politically--a body like the American Federation of Labor convention with a majority of IWWs--is in essential control of Russian affairs. And this although the representatives of "The People" are sitting officially at the same capital..... It is this that our newspaper wise men, who never heard of the economic interpretation of history, or the class theory of government, can absolutely not understand. They fail altogether to comprehend the sovereign power of a non-political government.
To us it is merely an amazing visualization, or embodiment, of the truth we learned long ago and have been telling ever since--that either through, or aside from, political forms, the economic forces always rule.... That Russia should issue with a single convulsion from Czarism to the industrial democracy is far more than I can learn, in so few days, even to hope. But never mind--the events have already verified our hypothesis, and confirmed us in the whole direction of our thoughts and deeds. And whether this revolution wins to the extreme goal, or falls short, may be accounted incidental to its success in clearing and verifying the way forward. It has established us and made us sure. A working class will yet own the tools with which it works, and an industrial parliament will yet govern the co-operative affairs of men.[253]
Eastman, indeed, was so exultant that he feared he was dreaming; he hesitated to publish the above paragraphs until Lincoln Steffens, freshly arrived from Petrograd, assured him that "the whole dream is true."[254]
In that same issue (published after passage of the Espionage Act, which effectively criminalized criticism of the United States government, its military, or its war effort) Eastman declared that he sided with
the Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies, the first Industrial Parliament of the world, in its diplomatic conflict with the political governments of all Europe and America.... In the issue of that conflict lies the hope of a democracy more democratic than this war's apologists dream of. We have faith in the coming of democracy--a faith that is realistic enough to make it seem relatively unimportant to us whether the present Germany has a corridor to Bagdad, and whether the present Brittania rules the waves.... The Council in Russia speaks for the working classes of every country, and for us the hope of democracy lies in those classes, and in none of the governmental institutions now in charge of the war.[255]
On June 15, 1917 Congress passed the Espionage Act, which criminalized expression of antiwar views. The act set penalties of twenty years in jail and a $10,000 fine for conveying "false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies" or statements that attempted "to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States.... or willfully obstruct recruiting or enlistment...."[256] Under this statute he United States prosecuted Masses editors and contributors for cartoons and other material that no one even claimed was false; insisted that any criticism of the war interfered with military operations and obstructed recruiting; and claimed that editors and contributors who had not coordinated or even discussed their separate articles and cartoons were guilty of conspiracy.
Eastman had on several occasions signalled that he disdained martrydom and would not deliberately test the law. He had previously indicated that The Masses would temper its birth control advocacy so that it could retain its mailing rights. In October 1914 he had defended individuals who, eschewing martrydom, became soldiers when the labor and Socialist movements were unsuccessful in preventing war; the failure of collective opposition in some measure justified individual acquiescence. A short time later he had extolled the antiwar Socialists in Germany but indicated that they might reasonably remain quiet during a time of mass hysteria. "Perhaps their function for a while is to store and preserve the truth--'unto the day'--rather than fight for it." When Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were arrested in 1917 for opposing conscription, The Masses warmly supported them but hinted that its editors would not emulate their conduct. "They can both endure what befalls them," it said. "They have more resources in their souls, perhaps, as they have the support of a more absolute faith, than we have who admire them." In the same issue, however, it extolled "the self-reliance and sacrifice of those who are resisting the conscription law" and condemned the United States government for "adopting towards its citizens the attitude of a rider toward cattle."[257]
Nevertheless, as we have seen, The Masses stridently opposed both U.S. entry into the war and the Selective Service Act despite the rising crescendo of vigilante and governmental terrorism, violence, and censorship. Wilson's Postmaster-General, Albert Burleson, a sadistic racist who owned a slave labor camp in Texas, continued his policy of denying mailing rights to publications of which he disapproved. When the August 1917 Masses was excluded from the mails, its business manager asked why it had been excluded--what portions of the magazine violated which sections of the law--but the authorities refused to divulge this information. The Masses then took the government to court. After an initial victory, The Masses eventually lost its case. Subsequent issues were also excluded from the mails partly because of their content but ultimately because the government, having suppressed it from the mails, now claimed that it was not a regular publication. Finally, the government indicted many editors and contributors under the Espionage Act.[258] The Masses editors had plenty of company; the final issues of the magazine were filled with accounts of atrocities against dissenters, striking workers, and blacks.
In accordance with his pragmatic principles and detestation of flamboyant rebellion, however, Eastman tried to obey the law and keep The Masses afloat. He asked George Creel, an occasional contributor who now headed the Wilson administration's propaganda apparatus, whether the most recent Masses was legal; Creel disapproved of its contents but agreed that it remained within the law. When Eastman suspected that a paragraph in the June issue, written before the passage of the Espionage Act but published after its enactment, might violate that statute, he excised the offending paragraph from the pamphlet version. When Postmaster-General Burleson denied The Masses mailing rights, Eastman plaintively wrote President Wilson that "I have not violated any law, nor desired to violate the law.... I am willing to make my magazine conform to the laws, if it does not." The postal authorities, Eastman complained, "stubbornly and contemptuously" refused to say "what specific things or kinds of things in my magazine they consider unmailable, so that I might make up the magazine in such a way as to be mailable in the future." Wilson replied courteously but vaguely. When neither Wilson nor Burleson would inform him why The Masses was barred from the mails, Eastman sued, initially winning a favorable ruling. When a different judge affirmed that Burleson could ban the magazine, Eastman again wrote Wilson for advice, and visited Burleson with yet another request that he clarify the law. "Fourteen times I appealed to the authorities, either in the courts or in Washington, to find out what my rights were under this law as a Socialist who did not believe in the war as it was being conducted by the Government," Eastman later claimed. He also advised that conscientious objectors register for the draft if such action harmonized with their moral principles.[259]
Presaging his Liberator policy, Eastman tried soothing Wilson's vanity with conciliatory editorials. Towards the end of 1917 Wilson did enunciate his war aims in terms that echoed those of the Russian soviets and American radicals. When Wilson published a letter to the Pope, Eastman took the extraordinary step of appending a supplement to the October 1917 Masses. Wilson's letter, Eastman exclaimed, "has so far altered the international situation, that we cannot see the magazine go out without some comment upon it." Eastman said that Wilson had acceded to important demands propounded by both Russian soviets and American pacifists: he would negotiate with democratic government in Germany and oppose punitive damages, the dismemberment of empires, and territorial aggrandizements. "He does separate our purposes absolutely from the imperialistic ambitions of the ruling classes in the Allied countries.... He does state in concrete terms what it is our citizens are being drafted for, and this removes a little of the insult, at least, from the injury of conscription..... There is high hope, in this letter to the Pope, of permanent just peace and international federation for the world.... And while denouncing his autocracy and its employment to silence criticism and quell the struggle for liberty within our borders, we are thankful for this evidence that he still intends to use it beyond our borders, if he can, to the great end of eliminating international war from the world."[260]
Eastman also wrote Wilson a letter published in the last issue of The Masses. "I want to express my appreciation of your letter to the Pope..." he said. "You have declared essentially the Russian terms.... The manner in which you have accomplished this--and apparently bound the allies to it into the bargain--has my profound admiration." Averring his trust in Wilson's democratic protestations, Eastman also asked that Wilson protect freedom of speech and assembly. The charge that The Masses aimed to obstruct the draft was vile slander. Wilson, as usual, replied with vapid platitudes: "My Dear Mr. Eastman; I thank you warmly for your generous appreciation of my reply to the Pope, and I wish that I could agree with those parts of your letter which concern the other matters we were discussing when you were down here."[261] Despite Eastman's legal manuevering and editorial conciliations, the Wilson administration suppressed The Masses and indicted Eastman and six of his associates for obstructing the draft.
Yet throughout these traumas Eastman's general philosophy and tone remained surprisingly constant. Rejecting abstract principles, Eastman prided himself on continually revising his concrete proposals in accordance with new information and changing realities. In a tumultuous world he predictably reversed himself on specific issues. Yet he quickly replaced The Masses with The Liberator and, except for self-restraint and Aesopian language in war-related discussions, continued his general editorial stance. The Liberator stressed socialist revolution, the model for which was now the Soviet Union; but it also championed paganism, laughter, black militancy, feminism, and the transformation of education, culture, and literature. It folded only in 1924, when the entire left--the IWW, the SP, the black radicals, and organized feminism--was defunct, and even the AFL and other reformist organizations were in shambles. With every insurgency defeated, the magazine that had expressed them had no constituency.
The mass slaughter that erupted in Europe in August 1914 destroyed the international Socialist movement and soon devastated the American left, including The Masses. Eastman and his cohorts, however, remained revolutionary proletarian internationalists and pursued their four-fold program: workers' revolution; literary radicalism; countercultural support of feminism, racial equality, and sexual freedom; and joyous, pagan, liberated, and experimental lifestyles. Each Masses editor risked his freedom, and Eastman nearly lost his life, for opposing the war and advocating resistance. War, repression, and the Bolshevik revolution radicalized Eastman, Dell, and Reed, whose conduct belies their reputation as frivolous, dilettante, and bourgeois bohemians. Eastman applied his pragmatic, open-ended, non-dogmatic, science-as-experiment concept of Marxism to a world in upheaval. He revised the dogma of strictly economic determinism, flirted with Woodrow Wilson in 1916, and modified his views when epochal events at home and abroad transformed the political landscape. In applying Marxist theory to changing circumstances, Eastman necessarily revised some of its details; in revising those details, he faithfully applied the method of Marxism. Revision was application of general Marxist principles; application of those principles was revision of specific predictions and strategies. Eastman's open-mindedness and tactical and ideological flexibility proved his steadfast revolutionary commitment rather than indicating the jejune reformism of which political opponents and historians have accused him.
Like almost everyone else, Eastman was appalled by the mass slaughter in Europe. The eruption of war only confirmed his glorification of class (civil) war and detestation of patriotic (national) wars. Initially he regarded the conflagration as "a commercial war" that revealed "the bloody fundamentals" of capitalist civilization. "There is no Christianity, no culture, no civilization," he said. "Our whole upper-class polity and pretense of spirituality is built of a leisure that is the loot of predatory competition and the perpetual exploitation and death of the poor." The war discredited capitalism and Christianity rather than Socialism, a new movement "founded upon a truth as to the real nature of humanity and human history." Socialists could not prevent war until they overthrew capitalism. Nationalism was but its pretext; all European peoples were fundamentally of one race, and class rather than racial traits explained the alleged differences between Germany and its opponents. "Racial animosity" was in reality directed "against an economic rival"; humanity's "survived impulse against a man of alien traits" dissipated when not exacerbated by "a real or imagined clash of interests."[211]
At first, Eastman hoped that the war would hasten social change in Europe. The devastations of war "will shake people together like dice in a box, and how they will fall out nobody knows. But they will fall out shaken; that everybody knows. Nothing will be solid as it was before, no title, no privilege, no property. Discontent among the poor will be enormous. And the ideal of industrial democracy is now strong enough and clear enough to control that discontent, and fashion it to a great end." Indeed, mass death, destruction, and the subsequent rebuilding would improve conditions for surviving workers; when the capitalists "have made labor scarce, they will find labor proud" as it was after the Black Death. Eastman also fervently desired an Allied victory. "The Kaisar and his military machine must be whipped back into Prussia and smashed," he exclaimed. "Let the war go on until that is accomplished.... It is for Germany, more than for the Allies, that we want the Kaisar's defeat.... [Germany's] feudal and military oppression, linked fast with cultural and scientific and social-reform progress of the highest type, is the most abominable monster of Europe.... For the sake of the people of Germany and of all nations, let the war go on." A German defeat would hasten revolution there and embolden labor radicalism in France.[212]
Although Eastman held all belligerents responsible for the war, he believed that Germany was perhaps marginally more guilty. He also declared that "France has more of what is dear to us than any other country of Europe.... France has not only freedom but the arts of life more nearly won than another other country of Europe. Her culture is one of superior happiness, the habits of her people are more poetic, they realize more, live more, and with all that are more spontaneously intelligent than the Germans. They are at home among ideas.... They have the rare gift of thinking with their minds. They feel with their hearts.... Obviously, then, I value the culture of France above that of Germany." Eastman also regarded England and Russia more highly than Germany. However, he decried the "monomania" and "absolute fixation.... a choice between two absolutes" engendered by the war. He perceived differences between the belligerents as only a matter of degree and predicted that French civilization would conquer Germany regardless of who won the war. At other times he almost denied the existence of cultural differences between nations. He favored the Allies for pragmatic reasons--the probable results of their victory--while regarding their unctuous slogans of democracy and self-determination as cant. The war was one of "nationalism, the most banal and stupid of human idol-worships."[213]
Eastman soon recognized that the war had shattered Socialist hopes and would destroy the vestiges of American civil liberties if the United States entered. He opposed American entry "not alone because of the waste of life, but because of the inevitable loss under a consequent military dictatorship of most of our liberties. Every force of reaction will be strengthened by war, as it has been strengthened in Europe."[214] A neutral United States, he hoped, could mediate a peace based upon a federation of nations modelled on the United States. The mass slaughter was an appalling "waste of heroism" and "an absolutely uninterrupted monotony of noise and carnage." Europe was now one vast abattoir:
When we used to kill a bull on the farm, it was a great thing.... When you go into the beef factories in Chicago, and see them drive steers up into a narrow chute by the five thousand, and a man on a platform above them drops his hammer every so many seconds, and the steers roll out to be switched away, and shoved along, like mere material--why, the business of killing a bull loses every bit of drastic quality it had.... This war has no more sport in it than it has dramatic action. It is merely a regular businesslike killing and salting down of the younger men of each country involved--twenty thousand a day, perhaps, all told.... When you kill some fifteen thousand youths a day, and rip the limbs or faces off how many thousands more nobody counts, the individual mangled hero is no longer characteristic. The color runs. There are no longer heroes--there is just the common fighting stuff of human nature, one continuous scrambled homogeneous jelly....[215]
Eastman was criticized at the time, and has been skewered by historians ever since, for modifying his Marxist theories after the Second International collapsed amidst an orgy of patriotic frenzy. As early as December 1914 Eastman proposed that labor ally with capital in advocating a world federation which would protect the interests of both classes. Such a strategy was both logical and consistent with "the Economic Interpretation of History...." he asserted; "but logical or not, let us not block the progress of our hopes out of respect to a major premise." A year later, however, Eastman despaired that economic self-interest alone would not prevent war. Both "moral exhortation" and "mental enlightenment" were "utopian and a waste of time"; patriotism was rooted in unalterable "universal hereditary tendencies." The conduct of European antimilitarists, both proletarian and bourgeois, proved that people did not act solely from economic motives.[216]
In Europeans at least, warlike patriotism was "fixed in the nervous tissue like self-preservation itself. Men who would not contribute a peaceable eight cents to the public weal, drop their cash, credit, and commercial prospects and go toss in their lives like a song, at the bidding of an alien abstraction called the state.... It is an organic aptitude more old and deeply set by evolution than any of the impulses that would enlighten it.... It is there no matter what you teach." Identification with the clan, tribe, and finally the nation "has been grafted deep into the souls of European people by centuries of bloody and drastic group selection.... The patriotic and pugnacious tribes survived--we are those tribes." Culture, education, and self-interest could modify this fundamental instinct but not uproot it. In times of crisis "we are all touched with this mania." Socialists had hoped that workers would transfer their patriotism--their instinctive gregarious and pugnacious self-identity with a larger group--from their nation to their international class; rather than suppressing "the patriotic disposition altogether," Socialists "offered it a new object." Yet "the abstract thought of kindred groups in other countries" could not compete against "our fighting union with the group we feel," those "surrounding us with whom we rush together for defense." Socialist (and bourgeois) internationalists had "nursed a dream." Instead of seeking peace through proletarian internationalism, radicals should advocate a genuine United States of America embracing all countries of the western hemisphere. (This would require that the U.S. stop invading its neighbors.) "The name of our country is the name of our task," Eastman said. This federation could someday encompass the world; "ultimately our patriotism may embrace the Earth, the Earth may be our nation."[217]
Patriotism, Eastman recognized, combined altruistic identification with a larger group, disguised and virulent egoism, compensatory self-glory offsetting the pitiful reality of our individual lives, and a nostalgia for the memories and sensations of youth. It mixed humanity's gregarious "fighting solidarity with a group" with self-love, self-praise, and an "imaginary self-importance." In praising our nation we praise ourselves "enlarged and clothed in public splendour." Eastman sardonically remarked that "if a man cannot afford to have a steeple on his own hat, he is so much the more proud and anxious about the size and proportions of the town hall and the village church." Each of us also longed for the protection, safety, and familiarity of our childhood. "There is a little child inside of every one of us," and when threatened that child will "run home to mother." He yearns for "the things he loved and leaned on in the days when there was no doubt and no trouble. For these, as for no others, he will pour out his song and sacrifice.... Men cling to the place they were born in, as they cling to the breast that bore them." This explained the "blind, puppy-like almost chemical way in which otherwise intelligent minds will cling to the proposition that their country is right, no matter what their country does."[218]
Eastman insisted that moral exhortation and rational argument were powerless before the toxic combination of emotions powerfully combined in patriotism. "Preaching at human nature, preaching that never takes the scientific trouble" to ascertain "the origin and composition and actual potentiality of the traits preached at," had proven "a complete failure." Patriotism was "a combination of remarkable emotional satisfactions that is irresistible... a trait of character that no pledge or resolution, no theory, no gospel, no poetry or philosophy of life, no culture or education, and not even your own financial interest can ever completely conquer." Only "international union" could abolish war, much as "wars of family and clan and city were eliminated by national union." Such international federation was realistic because it would benefit everyone and satisfy "all the organic interests of men, except their sheer love of patriotic fighting itself."[219]
By mid-1916 Eastman had partly (if temporarily) rejected the Economic Interpretation of History itself. Marxists had sensibly but wrongly predicted that propertyless workers would join with their class rather than with the countries that belonged to their masters. Socialists must learn from their error. After surveying Socialist movements throughout Europe, Eastman declared that "it is not very scientific to denounce a fact for refusing to come under your hypothesis. It is wiser to scrutinize a fact with a view to remodelling, if necessary, the hypothesis.... People do not go to war for their property, they go to war for their country." Rare individuals of unusually intellectual disposition or who especially disliked fighting could resist patriotic frenzy. However, in time of war the masses would never "control their patriotic reflexes" on behalf of a weak and abstract "solidarity of labor."[220] Mass wartime psychology
is comparable to a stampede, or a sexual or religious orgy. This tribal fighting instinct is an organized instinct latent in us.... Ideas do not reach down to these instinctive levels.... The masses of mankind will support war, whenever any menace or danger to the national prestige, real or apparent, is declared. Such is the conclusion I draw from the trying out of our theories in all the countries of Europe.[221]
Eastman did not explain why workers would identify more readily with an international federation of nations than with the international of their own class; both were rather remote abstractions. Neither consisted of the near neighbors "surrounding us." His concrete policy recommendations were similarly confused and contradictory. Aside from supporting a bourgeois federation of states, Eastman urged that Socialists "with somewhat chastened understanding" reconstitute the International and emphasize antiwar agitation during times of peace, when workers were more readily swayed by reason. Capitalists were uniting across national lines for the peaceful exploitation of labor; workers must simultaneously organize against militarism and capitalism. However, Eastman did not convincingly explain how these measures could prevent wars generated by an unreasoned, frenzied patriotism.[222]
Eastman did foresee a possible "higher destiny" for the International in some nations: fomenting civil (class) war. "The day may come when a civil war of labor against the tyranny of capital is itself so ready to break that the declaration of a foreign war will start it," he said. "In that happy accident our hopes of labor's pacifism could be realized. For though understanding and deliberate purpose can hardly check the patriotic stampede, a stampede in the opposite direction might check it." This, however, would constitute "revolution rather than international solidarity," and Eastman thought its prospects remote. In January 1917, however, he reiterated his preference for civil (class) over international (patriotic) war. "All seriously moral people," he declared, preferred "civil over soldierly violence" because the former aimed at a real benefit, while the latter stemmed from "blind tribal instincts."[223] Later that year the war precipitated the overthrow of the Czar and the increasing ascendency of the revolutionary Soviets in Russia--developments which Eastman enthusiastically welcomed.
Although Eastman rejected Socialist arguments that capitalist economic motives alone caused the war, he did admit that many capitalists benefitted by the carnage. Although modern war impoverished its participants, some classes could profit "at the expense of other classes in their own nation." War was "extraordinarily good business" that "piles up wealth for the wealthy as usual." Even if victory could not compensate a nation for the costs entailed by war, if the capitalists profited
then so far as our hopes of peace go, the question whether victory harms or benefits "the nation" is not of final importance.... For in most cases the business class is "the nation," so far as sovereign decision upon the most critical issues is concerned; and if war, merely as war, transfers an increased proportion of the wealth from other classes to the business class, without greatly decreasing the total amount, then war remains a good "national" business, no matter whether victory is worth anything or not.[224]
Capitalists profited from increased war production, the introduction of new technologies, Taylorization, the streamlining of production, and war's making a patriotic virtue out of high production. If foreign invasion risked destroying capital goods, these wore out in the course of ordinary use; if war killed the workers who made profits for the rich, people not previously in the paid labor force (such as previously homebound women and children) replaced them. "War is an industry which gives a vast profit"; sudden peace "would depreciate a great many heavy investments." Yet wise capitalists recognized that their increasingly globalized system was undermined by war's uncertainties. War, indeed, might even generate revolution. "The exploitation of labor rests securely upon the psychology and politics of peace," Eastman declared. So the relationship between capitalism and war was much less clear-cut than orthodox Marxists claimed; many capitalists qua capitalists opposed it, while patriotism was endemic among persons of all classes.[225]
By 1915 Eastman, worried that Wilson's foreign policy and preparedness campaign presaged war with Germany, energetically debunked pro-interventionist arguments. Germany, he insisted, differed from its enemies not by nature but because of its history and situation. Feudalism was far more powerful in Germany than in England because industry (and hence a strong Parliament) developed later and because the Prussian king, controlling his own lands and revenues, granted his nobles no Magna Charta in return for taxes. Germany's location in central Europe amidst potential enemies encouraged its militarization, which stemmed from insecurity rather than wanton aggressiveness. Germany's idolization of the state and worship of an ethereal freedom of the spirit that was in fact a form of slavery was an ideological compensation for her lack of genuine political freedom. The British Empire was as brutal, and British patriotism as ludicrous and vile, as Germany's. German atrocities during the war were no worse than those of its enemies, who also massacred defenseless civilians and invaded neutral nations. The sinking of the Lusitania, which killed prominent Americans, was "a tactless blunder" but no worse morally than routine British atrocities, including the starvation blockade imposed upon German civilians. After the United States entered the war Eastman exclaimed that it had "a more extended record of atrocities to her credit than any other nation of the civilized world," including outrageous mass murders and deportations of the very kind charged against Germany.[226]
Eastman earnestly desired the destruction of the Kaisar's "monarchic military state, and all the emotions and ideologies of the heart and mind which inevitably attach to it." However, by 1916 he recanted his earlier belief that decisive defeat would hasten democratic revolution in Germany. Indeed, he specifically repudiated his October 1914 Masses editorial. "Either a victory or a defeat" would "inflame the patriotic bigotry of whatever country suffers it," he now recognized. A peace of mutual exhaustion "with no consolation, no glory, and no prize" would impress European peoples with the futility and horrors of war and might also generate revolution. "Let [the belligerents] be defeated by war, and let them fear the victor," he said. In a gruesomely prescient passage Eastman predicted that "German defeat would mean another crisis of nationalism. Injured self-esteem is as absorbing to the heart as exultant vanity." The "mortification of defeat" would only exacerbate German nationalism. Industrial and commercial developments, not defeat in war, would democratize and liberalize Germany; "the forces that gave us democracy" would bring it also to Germany, whose "imperial despotism will rot within its own heart and fall. We can only lend our aid to those slow forces."[227]
Eastman's pragmatic application (and therefore creative revision) of Marxism generated controversy on the left; but his flirtation with Woodrow Wilson's re-election campaign more seriously compromised his radical stance. Indeed, Eastman's support for the Wilson administration revealed the pitfalls of an unmitigated pragmatism and embroiled The Masses in controversy. Wilson's crushing betrayal of the antimilitarists' fond hopes further disillusioned peace advocates with capitalism and the United States, and, along with the Bolshevik revolution and the U.S. invasion of the Soviet Union, drove Eastman and his cohorts towards a more strident and uncompromising revolutionism.
Eastman had previously exonerated Wilson for America's invasion of Mexico, at one point even declaring his "unreserved admiration" of the President "for his unswerving purpose to let the Mexican people govern, or not govern, themselves." Eastman offered his "gratitude to Woodrow Wilson, all alone, for giving the peasants of Mexico their chance." However misguided this adulation, it had some scant basis in fact: Wilson had backed away from all-out war apparently in response to the American peace movement, in which Eastman's sister Crystal was very active.[228] After carnage erupted in Europe, Wilson pledged American neutrality; and even when he moved towards war, Eastman vastly favored him over hyper-bellicose Theodore Roosevelt and other Republicans. Eastman also agreed with Wilson's advocacy of a League of Nations. The Masses vehemently opposed Wilson's militaristic "preparedness" program but regarded it as the policy of a united ruling class rather than as a distinctively Wilsonian measure. Indeed, at the outset of the 1916 campaign Wilson received Eastman and other Masses editors at the White House, politely heard their protestations that American workers opposed U.S. involvement in the war, and duped Eastman with private assurances of his good intentions. The Masses fatuously proclaimed that Wilson's fear of Roosevelt's popularity kept him publicly silent about his real views.[229]
Wilson's ignoble actions soon undermined Eastman's confidence, however. In the August 1916 Masses Eastman proclaimed that the election opposed "militarism against democratic good sense." However, even as he penned that sentence Wilson threatened Mexico; he was, Eastman charged, either "playing a contemptible game for re-election" or was "utterly sutpfied with the pride of patriotism." Wilson also endorsed the xenophobic anti-immigrant plank in the Democratic platform; "a more stupid piece of cleverness could hardly be imagined," Eastman said.[230] Meanwhile, The Masses ignored the SP presidential candidate Allan Benson, and indeed the SP's entire election effort.
Despite his doubts about Wilson, Eastman increasingly worried that a Republican victory would involve the U.S. in war and therefore crush American civil liberties. Shortly before the election, therefore, he endorsed Wilson because the Democratic nominee "aggressively believes not only in keeping out of war, but in organizing the nations of the world to prevent war." Eastman also praised Wilson's oblique praise for (but not advocacy of) the eight-hour day. Eastman's endorsement, given to one of Wilson's campaign committees, remained unmentioned in Eastman's magazine until after the election, when Eastman responded to bitter criticism (which itself was not printed in The Masses).[231]
Eastman's self-justification was not his finest moment. Although he claimed to have voted for Benson, he criticized the SP as more of "a religious sect" than "the political instrument of the working class." (Indeed, Benson's main campaign plank--the demand for a plebiscite before the U.S. entered a foreign war--was exactly the kind of reformist nostrum that Eastman had specifically repudiated.) In a lamentably "more revolutionary than thou" stratagem, Eastman condemned the SP for nominating the middle-class Benson instead of the working-class James Maurer; this falsely implied that Eastman might otherwise have not endorsed Wilson. Claiming that his "statement" (Eastman implied that it was not an endorsement, only a preference between the two candidates who could actually win election) had elicited "letters of excommunication from keepers of the sacred dogmas in all parts of the country," Eastman thundered that if the SP was "so weak that it can only live by suppressing the free use of opinions, or throttling the natural interest of a living beings in the important events of the day," it would "die soon and deservedly." He urged that Socialists "try to use our brains freely, love progress more than a party, allow ourselves the natural emotions of our species, and see if can can get ready to play a human part in the acual complex flow of events." The SP, he said, must repudiate "sectarian dogmatism, this doctrinaire, index expurgatorius mode of thinking, and this infatuation with an organization as an end in itself."[232]
The January 1917 Masses contained three articles by prominent radicals extolling Wilson's re-election. However, Eugene Wood, a regular Masses contributor, blasted Eastman's stance as providing "aid and comfort to the enemy" and strongly implied that Eastman's SP local should expel him. (SP rules allowed expulsion of members who endorsed a capitalist party or candidate.) Eastman himself remained silent on this controversy but, perhaps hoping to bolster his sagging reputation for revolutionism, did reiterate his preference for civil war upon the basis of class over national war waged under the guise of patriotism. February's issue contained another harsh criticism of The Masses for "performing a scalp dance in honor of Wilson's election." Pro-Wilson Socialists were "flamboyant egotists who desert at the first opportunity," pseudo-revolutionists "who play with great words and then swallow line, bob and sinker at the first cast, with the mighty thin bait of a few meretricious and contemptible bouregois reforms!" Eastman claimed that the SP was not the party of the working class but he himself, by endorsing Wilson, had undermined its support among workers.[233]
In his defense, Eastman reminded his readers that the European war had decimated every revolutionary organization in Europe and predicted similar destruction if America entered the conflagration.
Nothing remained of the International, the socialist opposition, the labor movement, the class struggle. The whole thing and all the complaisant expectations resting on it, sank out of existence instantly in a welter of patriotic emotions and military enterprise. Some of us simply could not help noticing this, no matter how badly it fitted into our academic theories. War, we said, to ourselves, is death to liberty and death to the struggle for liberty. At whatever cost we must avoid war.[234]
The United States had verged on war several times and in fact if not in theory "the issue rested absolutely in the hands of one man.... Therefore it matters to the working class who is elected President," especially "when war is in the wind." Eastman reiterated his firm conviction that "men's hereditary instinctive reactions" predisposed them to war once the fighting began; therefore, "our only hope is in preventing declarations of war." Only a League of Nations could prevent the outbreak of war, and socialists should "encourage the capitalistic governments in their new motion towards internationalism, because they will get there before we will." War devastated workers and radicals even more than it hurt the capitalists; therefore, because "business is stronger than we are.... we ought to help business stop war." Eastman acknowledged that support of a capitalist government could vitiate Socialist and working-class movements but asserted that war simply destroyed radical organizations. Therefore, he claimed, it was precisely the most class-conscious Socialists who endorsed or voted for Wilson. Eastman said that the Democrats' "attack on the plutocracy was genuine and important" even while acknowledging that Wilson would help the workers only insofar as the capitalists remained the main beneficiaries of his reforms. He ended on another radical if irrelevant note, asserting that revolutionaries should focus not on politics at all, but on "the struggle of organized labor for industrial soveriegnity."[235]
As Wilson prepared to drag the United States into the war, Eastman reiterated his contention that "patriotic war has always meant death to liberty and the struggle for human rights." Wilson's endorsement of a League of Nations was "the most momentous event conceivable in the evolution of a capitalistic civilization." Such a League would inevitably attract some of the patriotic emotions previously lavished exclusively on the nation-state, while the resulting peace would preserve the civil liberties necessary for revolutionary agitation. Decline in the SP's vote and membership had injected doubt into minds previously "paralyzed with certitude." Dogmatism was the SP's most debilitating fault. "Scientific thinking requires the power to suspend judgment, and that power has been habitually renounced as an automatic part of the act of becoming a party member..... Clap the creed over any new fact that arises, and if the fact will not fit under the creed, shut your eyes and jam it under. This manner of employing the mind cannot be called thinking." Such "theological automatism" and "revolutionary theology" undermined the SP's appeal.[236] A mass party that could win working-class votes required major restructuring:
Having released himself from a dogmatic fixation upon his doctrine, [the Socialist must] subordinate doctrine altogether in his recruiting activities. Even a live and pliant scientific hypothesis is not the nucleus around which a political party can be formed. A political party ought to represent, not a certain kind of knowledge, but a certain economic interest. It ought to take in all the people who agree in wanting something concrete and immediate. The American Socialist party includes only people who agree in understanding something remote and ultimate. It is not a party of the working class; it is a party of the theory of the working class. This fatal weakness is accentuated by the fact that the theory is of European origin, and all its terminology and catch-words are alien to our people. But no matter where the theory originated--and no matter how true it may be--you cannot build an effectual fighting group around it. Theoretic thinking is too unusual--thinking is too univerally subordinated to immediate interests--for such a group to grow great and have a direct impact upon history. It will remain merely an organ of special education.[237]
Eastman claimed that the famous Gompers/Hillquit exchange before the Commission on Industrial Relations symbolized the woeful chasm between the Socialist and labor movements in America:
Gompers wants to get something for labor--time, wages, freedom--he wants to get more and more of it, and he sets no limit. He cannot be induced to discuss the limit. He simply starts out to go in a certain direction, taking a short look to determine the first step.... Hillquit, on the other hand, cares little enough about the active business.... He wants [Gompers] to stop doing it, you might almost say, in order to talk about those implications. He overemphasizes the ultimate theory, as much as Gompers overemphasizes the immediate interest.... The Socialists think that by propagating an understanding of that struggle they can bring it to victory; the labor people resent this attempt to force an external understanding on them.... Moreover they see plainly that those theorists never do anything.[238]
The SP won so few workers "because it approaches human nature with an abstract theory when the core of human nature is always a concrete wish." The disagreement between the practical labor organizer and the Socialist theoretician was "simply a conflict between the will and the idea."[239]
Eastman specifically repudiated a left-Socialist idea which he had at times championed. According to this left-wing theory, the the SP should stress ultimate aims above immediate concerns because reformist demands would dilute its Socialist appeal; it could focus on "straight Socialism" without losing votes because "real Socialists" would not desert the SP to vote for bourgeois reform candidates. Eastman himself had denounced reforms that benefitted capitalists as well as workers; as late as June 1917 he was still insisting that if the SP jettisoned dogma, theory, and complacency, and championed "the working-class principle that all changes which... benefit labor at the expense of capital are socialistic, it might crystalize around itself a major part of the exploited classes."
Eastman's behavior in this episode, and even more his rationalization of it, come closest to justifying those critics who condemn him for frivolous phrase-mongering and revolutionary posturing. Eastman faced a perennial radical dilemma: he was correct in his belief that war would ruin American radicalism, and of course realized that the SP candidate stood no chance of winning. Hughes and the Republicans were more warlike than the Democrats and Wilson had campaigned on the slogan "He Kept Us Out of War"; although Eastman deplored Wilson's militaristic policies on preparedness, Mexico, and German submarine warfare, he could not have predicted the events of spring 1917. His pragmatic admission of a preference for Wilson was humanly understandable, however regrettable for a prominent Socialist editor; his denunciation of his SP critics--especially on the spurious grounds that they were dogmatic and intolerant--was hardly defensable. Years later, he admitted that his stance must have exasperated "anybody who was trying to run a party.... Under the cloak of an intellectual virtue, I was concealing the fact that I could not make up my mind."[240]
However, Eastman's vacillations were only temporary; and when, immediately after Wilson's second inauguration, the President dragged the United States into the war and unleashed a reign of terror that destroyed the American left, Eastman and The Masses vociferously denounced these policies. Indeed, while some "Socialists for Wilson" endorsed the war, lurched rightward, and slandered their former comrades, Eastman and his cohorts deepened and intensified their radicalism as a result of revolution abroad and repression at home. Wilson's despicable betrayal of every noble ideal and cause brought home with irrevocable force the real nature of the United States, its government, its civilization, and its ruling class; Eastman, Reed, Dell, and many others finally learned the literal meaning of the words they had so long spoken. April 1917 and its aftermath was a watershed in the lives of Eastman and his cohorts.
The Masses had openly praised resistance to militarism since August 1914 and even before. In January 1914 Eastman had extolled class war while deprecating patriotic or international war; later that year he praised English soldiers who refused orders to fire on civilians and Buffalo street-car operators who would not transport soldiers to a strike. Shortly after Europeans started World War I, Eastman praised "the noble mutinies and patriotic treasons that are the glories of this war." These events occurred in Europe, but in the May 1915 Masses the usually moderate Meyer London, SP Congressman from Manhattan, advocated a general strike of American workers "engaged in the manufacturing of ammunition" and "the exporting of food." Exporting of "any article" to the belligerent powers, London declared, prolonged the slaughter. The Masses also offered its readers an anti-enlistment pledge; when criticized for its alleged pacifism, it editorialized that it did not oppose all wars, but rather judged actions by their consequences. Its editors might conceivably enlist in a national army "to fight either against our own country or with it.... We suspect that those who signed that pledge would be the first to bleed, were the cause of industrial liberty at stake." In the July 1916 "Preparedness Number" Eastman, referring to the possible registration or conscription of men into the New York national guard, declared that "if Governor Whitman or any of his war lords undertook to draft me into the National Guard, I would barricade my house and start the war there."[241]
In January 1917 Eastman powerfully reiterated his preference for civil war over international slaughter. The April 1917 Masses was composed when U.S. entry into the war seemed inevitable; in it Eastman lavishly praised Wilson's proposal for a League of Nations and obliquely defended his endorsement of Wilson in late 1916. However, he also proclaimed that radicals would vehemently oppose American involvement in the bloodbath. The Masses' antiwar stance resulted from "our loyalty to a struggle that is vaster and more freighted with the world's future than a war between nations can be." He urged active resistance. Radicals
will remember that there is not liberty nor democracy anywhere in this capitalistic society. They will remember that this government does not protect human life, the lives of its citizens, either on sea or land.... It is capitalistic business that our government fundamentally protects, and it is for the honor of a government devoted to such a function that we are asked to wage war.... War is the destroyer of liberty.... [Those who cherish freedom] will be neutral, whether the government goes to war or not. They will not enlist in the army of the government, and they will not renounce their independence of judgment, and their deliberate devotion to a better thing than any government, at the demand of those emotionalists who think it is virtuous and worthy of human dignity to abandon all judgment and all deliberate devotion whatver, in the long orgy of tribal patriotism.[242]
John Reed attacked American entry with similar bitterness. "I know what war means," he exclaimed. "I have been with the armies of all the belligerents except one, and I have seen men die, and go mad, and lie in hospitals suffering hell; but there is a worse thing than that. War means an ugly mob-madness, crucifying the truth-tellers, choking the artists, side-tracking reforms, revolutions, and the working of social forces.... For many years this country is going to be a worse place for free men to live in; less tolerant, less hospitable."[243] Reed continued:
Whose war is this? Not mine. I know that hundreds of thousands of American workingmen employed by our great financial 'patriots' are not paid a living wage. I have seen poor men sent to jail for long terms without trial, and even without any charge. Peaceful strikers, and their wives and children, have been shot to death, burned to death, by private detectives and militiamen. The rich have steadily become richer, and the cost of living higher, and the workers proportionately poorer. These toilers don't want war--not even civil war. But the speculators, the employers, the plutocracy--they want it, just as they did in Germany and England; and with lies and sophistries they will whip up our blood until we are savages--and then we'll fight and die for them.... The fault is not ours. It is not our war.[244]
When former Masses mainstay and ex-radical William English Walling vilified Eastman as pro-Kaisar, Eastman reiterated that the democratization of Germany would emerge from within rather than from foreign imposition. The slayers of Kaisar autocracy were already arising "and what those heroes need to help them is a failure of Germany, but not a humiliating defeat. A humiliating defeat would inflame German nationalism as much as a signal victory would." The reprehensible British Empire encircled the globe and also richly deserved failure; without U.S. involvement in the war, neither government could achieve their designs of conquest. "The world is becoming Prussianized on a basis of industrial autocracy," Eastman said, "and those who cannot see this because of the size of the Kaisar's helmet" ignored the Economic Interpretation of History. "The place to fight the economic autocracy, the oligarchy of the future, the militarism, the Iron Heel, is the place where you are. And the way to begin the fight is to refuse to give them their war."[245]
In the June 1917 Masses Eastman again counselled active resistance to the American war effort. Denying that the U.S. was fighting in any sense for democracy, Eastman mercilessly dissected Wilson's contradictory war aims. He continued:
We wish to persuade those who love liberty and democracy enough to give their energy or their money or their lives for it, to withhold the gift from this war, and save it to use in the sad renewal of the real struggle for liberty that will come after it. We want them to resist the war-fever and the patriotic delirium, the sentimental vanity, the sentimental hatred, the solemn hypocrisies of idealists, resist the ceremonious installations of petty tyranny in every department of our lives, resist consciption if they have the courage, and at whatever cost to their social complissance save themselves for a struggle of human liberty against oppression that will be what is says it is.[246]
Eastman also denounced Wilson's fatuous claim that the draft was "in no sense a conscription of the unwilling" because American had "volunteered in mass." Eastman declared that "the President has not even deigned to announce to his victims the end for which they are to march into the pens.... For my part I do not recognize the right of a government to draft me to war whose purposes I do not believe in. But to draft me for a war whose purposes it will not so much as communicate to my ear, seems an act of tyranny, discordant with the memory even of decent kings."[247]
Eastman also confronted opposition from pro-war Socialists, and published extensive excerpts from Upton Sinclair's resignation statement in The Masses. Sinclair declared that Prussian militarism must be crushed, predicted that the government would destroy the SP if it obstructed the war, and, echoing Eastman's own philosophy, insisted that Socialists align themselves with actual forces that could further Socialist goals. Instead of opposing the war, which was an existing reality, Socialists should fight for a just peace and for improved labor conditions at home. Eastman recongized that Sinclair's pragmatic reasoning greatly resembled his own emphasis on creative intelligence:
If this magazine has contributed anything to social revolutionary philosophy in America, its contribution has been a resolute opposition to bigotry and dogmatic thinking of all kinds. It has insisted upon the recognition of variety and change in the facts, and the need for pliancy in the theories of revolution. It has insisted that the world can no more be saved be a single ism--syndicalism, socialism, single-Taxism, anarchism, or whatever--that it was saved by a single God. Along with theology, we have urged the dumping of theological methods of thought. We have asked our readers to use all general ideas as working hypotheses, and not as havens of rest. We have foresworn the absolute and the abstract and the predetermined, and tried to meet each fresh and developing situation with a fresh and developing mind.[248]
There was, Eastman said, no prima facie certainty that Sinclair's pragmatic arguments were wrong in the present situation. He reiterated his previous belief that a national war could further "the liberation of the world" under some circumstances. "We have foresworn the absolute and the abstract and the predetermined, and tried to meet each fresh and developing situation with a fresh and developing mind.... Time holds more various wonders in her womb than our intellects can ever prepare for in advance.... A liberal mind is a mind that is able and willing to imagine itself believing anything." But, Eastman complained, "Sinclair and Walling have gone over to this war with a kind of enthusiasm, as if they were going to direct it.... Sinclair writes his own peace terms, and goes to war along with the Allies; but I read the terms of peace that were written by the governments of the Allies, and I stay at home." Eastman said that the internal development of industry would democratize Germany, doubted that the Allies could win a decisive victory, and reminded Sinclair that the British Empire fought for imperialism rather than freedom. Eastman declared that he sided with the Socialists and Wobblies who fought "the militarization of this country at the hands of our industrial feudalism."[249] He also noted although Sinclair predicted a decline in SP membership and influence, SP membership was actually soaring. Members had endorsed the antiwar platform by an overwhelming margin. Sinclair replied that the Allies could indeed win, that the hardships of war were weakening the Kaisar's rule, and that a victorious Germany would soon threaten American security. He also asserted that the SP's new members were overwhelmingly German-Americans and pacifists rather than genuine Socialists; they would not compensate for "the party's enormous loss of influence with the mass of every day Americans."[250]
Even as Eastman, Reed, and Art Young vociferously opposed the war, however, events unfolding in Russia presaged an eventual shift in their position. By mid-1917 the Soviets were assuming power in Russia, a process which The Masses greeted ecstatically. In the June 1917 issue Reed mentioned the chagrin among the English and American ruling classes that "the [Russian] revolution is being conducted by revolutionists"; he predicted that the allies would "crush [democracy] wherever it is found." The following month Reed indicated that "Russia must have peace from without" if Soviet democracy was to triumph; "indeed, every other consideration, whether of honor or profit, sinks into insignificance besides" this need for peace.[251]
Eastman greeted the rise of the Soviets with almost delirious enthusiasm. In Russia, he exclaimed, "all our own theories are proving true.... One by one the facts fall out exactly as they were predicted by Marx and Engels and the philosophers of Syndicalism.... All the esoteric terminology of the Marxian theory that used to be locked up in the Rand School Library, or employed to enliven in Jewish accent the academic deliberations of East side debating societies, is now flashed in the despatches of the Associated Press from one end of the world to another.... The names of our theories have become the names of current facts.... This Russian revolution seems to be conducted in the terms of the most erudite modern interpretations of the straight Marxian science."[252] Eastman's analysis is worth quoting at length because it was the first statement of views that would dominate his thinking throughout the life of The Liberator:
One feature of the drama surpasses in its truth to Marxian theory, anything that might have been conceived by a poet.... That is the arising, side by side with the bourgeois political government, of an unauthorized government representing the economic and military power of the working class. A Parliament of proletarian deputies, entirely unofficial politically--a body like the American Federation of Labor convention with a majority of IWWs--is in essential control of Russian affairs. And this although the representatives of "The People" are sitting officially at the same capital..... It is this that our newspaper wise men, who never heard of the economic interpretation of history, or the class theory of government, can absolutely not understand. They fail altogether to comprehend the sovereign power of a non-political government.
To us it is merely an amazing visualization, or embodiment, of the truth we learned long ago and have been telling ever since--that either through, or aside from, political forms, the economic forces always rule.... That Russia should issue with a single convulsion from Czarism to the industrial democracy is far more than I can learn, in so few days, even to hope. But never mind--the events have already verified our hypothesis, and confirmed us in the whole direction of our thoughts and deeds. And whether this revolution wins to the extreme goal, or falls short, may be accounted incidental to its success in clearing and verifying the way forward. It has established us and made us sure. A working class will yet own the tools with which it works, and an industrial parliament will yet govern the co-operative affairs of men.[253]
Eastman, indeed, was so exultant that he feared he was dreaming; he hesitated to publish the above paragraphs until Lincoln Steffens, freshly arrived from Petrograd, assured him that "the whole dream is true."[254]
In that same issue (published after passage of the Espionage Act, which effectively criminalized criticism of the United States government, its military, or its war effort) Eastman declared that he sided with
the Council of Workmen's and Soldiers' Deputies, the first Industrial Parliament of the world, in its diplomatic conflict with the political governments of all Europe and America.... In the issue of that conflict lies the hope of a democracy more democratic than this war's apologists dream of. We have faith in the coming of democracy--a faith that is realistic enough to make it seem relatively unimportant to us whether the present Germany has a corridor to Bagdad, and whether the present Brittania rules the waves.... The Council in Russia speaks for the working classes of every country, and for us the hope of democracy lies in those classes, and in none of the governmental institutions now in charge of the war.[255]
On June 15, 1917 Congress passed the Espionage Act, which criminalized expression of antiwar views. The act set penalties of twenty years in jail and a $10,000 fine for conveying "false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies" or statements that attempted "to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States.... or willfully obstruct recruiting or enlistment...."[256] Under this statute he United States prosecuted Masses editors and contributors for cartoons and other material that no one even claimed was false; insisted that any criticism of the war interfered with military operations and obstructed recruiting; and claimed that editors and contributors who had not coordinated or even discussed their separate articles and cartoons were guilty of conspiracy.
Eastman had on several occasions signalled that he disdained martrydom and would not deliberately test the law. He had previously indicated that The Masses would temper its birth control advocacy so that it could retain its mailing rights. In October 1914 he had defended individuals who, eschewing martrydom, became soldiers when the labor and Socialist movements were unsuccessful in preventing war; the failure of collective opposition in some measure justified individual acquiescence. A short time later he had extolled the antiwar Socialists in Germany but indicated that they might reasonably remain quiet during a time of mass hysteria. "Perhaps their function for a while is to store and preserve the truth--'unto the day'--rather than fight for it." When Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman were arrested in 1917 for opposing conscription, The Masses warmly supported them but hinted that its editors would not emulate their conduct. "They can both endure what befalls them," it said. "They have more resources in their souls, perhaps, as they have the support of a more absolute faith, than we have who admire them." In the same issue, however, it extolled "the self-reliance and sacrifice of those who are resisting the conscription law" and condemned the United States government for "adopting towards its citizens the attitude of a rider toward cattle."[257]
Nevertheless, as we have seen, The Masses stridently opposed both U.S. entry into the war and the Selective Service Act despite the rising crescendo of vigilante and governmental terrorism, violence, and censorship. Wilson's Postmaster-General, Albert Burleson, a sadistic racist who owned a slave labor camp in Texas, continued his policy of denying mailing rights to publications of which he disapproved. When the August 1917 Masses was excluded from the mails, its business manager asked why it had been excluded--what portions of the magazine violated which sections of the law--but the authorities refused to divulge this information. The Masses then took the government to court. After an initial victory, The Masses eventually lost its case. Subsequent issues were also excluded from the mails partly because of their content but ultimately because the government, having suppressed it from the mails, now claimed that it was not a regular publication. Finally, the government indicted many editors and contributors under the Espionage Act.[258] The Masses editors had plenty of company; the final issues of the magazine were filled with accounts of atrocities against dissenters, striking workers, and blacks.
In accordance with his pragmatic principles and detestation of flamboyant rebellion, however, Eastman tried to obey the law and keep The Masses afloat. He asked George Creel, an occasional contributor who now headed the Wilson administration's propaganda apparatus, whether the most recent Masses was legal; Creel disapproved of its contents but agreed that it remained within the law. When Eastman suspected that a paragraph in the June issue, written before the passage of the Espionage Act but published after its enactment, might violate that statute, he excised the offending paragraph from the pamphlet version. When Postmaster-General Burleson denied The Masses mailing rights, Eastman plaintively wrote President Wilson that "I have not violated any law, nor desired to violate the law.... I am willing to make my magazine conform to the laws, if it does not." The postal authorities, Eastman complained, "stubbornly and contemptuously" refused to say "what specific things or kinds of things in my magazine they consider unmailable, so that I might make up the magazine in such a way as to be mailable in the future." Wilson replied courteously but vaguely. When neither Wilson nor Burleson would inform him why The Masses was barred from the mails, Eastman sued, initially winning a favorable ruling. When a different judge affirmed that Burleson could ban the magazine, Eastman again wrote Wilson for advice, and visited Burleson with yet another request that he clarify the law. "Fourteen times I appealed to the authorities, either in the courts or in Washington, to find out what my rights were under this law as a Socialist who did not believe in the war as it was being conducted by the Government," Eastman later claimed. He also advised that conscientious objectors register for the draft if such action harmonized with their moral principles.[259]
Presaging his Liberator policy, Eastman tried soothing Wilson's vanity with conciliatory editorials. Towards the end of 1917 Wilson did enunciate his war aims in terms that echoed those of the Russian soviets and American radicals. When Wilson published a letter to the Pope, Eastman took the extraordinary step of appending a supplement to the October 1917 Masses. Wilson's letter, Eastman exclaimed, "has so far altered the international situation, that we cannot see the magazine go out without some comment upon it." Eastman said that Wilson had acceded to important demands propounded by both Russian soviets and American pacifists: he would negotiate with democratic government in Germany and oppose punitive damages, the dismemberment of empires, and territorial aggrandizements. "He does separate our purposes absolutely from the imperialistic ambitions of the ruling classes in the Allied countries.... He does state in concrete terms what it is our citizens are being drafted for, and this removes a little of the insult, at least, from the injury of conscription..... There is high hope, in this letter to the Pope, of permanent just peace and international federation for the world.... And while denouncing his autocracy and its employment to silence criticism and quell the struggle for liberty within our borders, we are thankful for this evidence that he still intends to use it beyond our borders, if he can, to the great end of eliminating international war from the world."[260]
Eastman also wrote Wilson a letter published in the last issue of The Masses. "I want to express my appreciation of your letter to the Pope..." he said. "You have declared essentially the Russian terms.... The manner in which you have accomplished this--and apparently bound the allies to it into the bargain--has my profound admiration." Averring his trust in Wilson's democratic protestations, Eastman also asked that Wilson protect freedom of speech and assembly. The charge that The Masses aimed to obstruct the draft was vile slander. Wilson, as usual, replied with vapid platitudes: "My Dear Mr. Eastman; I thank you warmly for your generous appreciation of my reply to the Pope, and I wish that I could agree with those parts of your letter which concern the other matters we were discussing when you were down here."[261] Despite Eastman's legal manuevering and editorial conciliations, the Wilson administration suppressed The Masses and indicted Eastman and six of his associates for obstructing the draft.