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From EASTMAN, page 2
I doubt if socialism was ever advocated in a more life-affirming spirit. We did shock the American mores with some gloomy-grim and cruel writing, and with saber-toothed cartoons that set a new style in both art and satire. We spoke our minds with unprecedented candor on both sex and religion." After war was declared and the Espionage Act of 1917 went into effect, the enforcement of the suppression of dissent doomed The Masses; in 1917, the last issue was published.
Eastman later founded and edited a similar publication, The Liberator (1918-22). The Liberator raised the issue of the American government's suppression of liberty at home during WW I and the Red Scare. Max Eastman spoke in aid of Soviet Russia, upheld women's rights, and called for a social revolution. Twice the government indicted Eastman and his associates under the dreaded Espionage Acts. Twice the result was a hung jury, due Eastman's performance at both trials and to his role as chief spokesman for the defense.
Max Eastman visited Soviet Russia in the twenties and became Trotsky's first American disciple, also his English translator and literary agent. Max defended Bolshevism for 18 years, yet was the only American writer Josef Stalin ever attacked by name. Eastman's 21 months in Russia (1922-24) determined his future. Russia was his greatest adventure, and explaining communism to the world became the great mission of his life. Soviet Russia brought out the best in him as a man and an intellectual, and the worst, too. It was his Russian involvement that ruined him politically, alienating radicals and liberals alike. Events in Russia finally led him to abandon political beliefs held for over 25 years. When Max returned to America early in 1927, he found himself isolated politically for the first time. To most Americans he was a Communist, an exponent of Bolshevism since the Russian
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Revolution. To most radicals, he was in disgrace for having sided with the left opposition against Stalin and released documents harmful to the regime--notably "Lenin's Testament", warning the party to beware of Stalin. None of Max's numerous former friends and political allies in the American Left supported Trotsky. While liberals acclaimed Russia as a model of social and economic justice throughout the 1930's, Max kept piling up evidence to the contrary. In 1939 when Moscow betrayed the anti-fascists by signing a pact with Berlin, opening the way for Germany's invasion of Poland and WW II, Max was prepared. Among his books on political science is Since Lenin Died (1925), which made public the previously suppressed testament of V. I. Lenin urging that Joseph Stalin, then general secretary of the Communist party, not be permitted to succeed Lenin as chairman of the party. Other works by Eastman include Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism (1939), Marxism: Is It Science? (1940), and Reflections on the Failure of Socialism (1955). He was the translator of History of the Russian Revolution (3 vol., 1932) and The Revolution Betrayed (1937), written by Leon Trotsky.
Eastman's Reader's Digest article called "Socialism Does Not Gibe with Human Nature, " his ongoing work as one of the Digest's contributing editors, and his alignment with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in the worst days of the post-war witchhunt, caused Eastman not to be treated seriously as a socialist, or as a convincing conservative. Eastman's McCarthyism is the one real blot on his record. Even so, he avoided the worst excesses of the radical Right. Eastman never dropped long lists of names or conducted personal vendettas against Communists and fellow travelers. He once gave a deposition to the effect that Charlie Chaplin, despite his foolish politics, was not subversive. His McCarthyism resembled his Leninism in being principled and abstract. He was blind to the worst
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in McCarthy, as before to the worst in Lenin.
In addition to his many political writings, Eastman's credits include the critical works Enjoyment of Poetry (1913), The Literary Mind (1932), and Enjoyment of Laughter (1936) and a novel called Venture. Max was disappointed at the response to his novel Venture, though some critics liked it. Fitzgerald told him that it was "beautifully written and it tells me so much about what are to me the dim days 1910-1917 that formed so many people of the liberal side in the generation just ahead of me and mine. You make it all very real and vivid--nothing so sane on that terribly difficult subject--for it was after all a creed, a faith, in the purest and most helpless sense, has ever been written." Mabel Dodge also expressed her appreciation for the book. The main character, Joe Hancock, had a love affair with someone very
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