Max Forrester Eastman (January 4, 1883 – March 25, 1969) was an American writer on literature, philosophy, and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. Moving to New York City for graduate school, Eastman became involved with radical circles in Greenwich Village. He supported socialism and became a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes. For several years, he edited The Masses. With his sister Crystal Eastman, he co-founded in 1917 The Liberator, a radical magazine of politics and the arts. While residing in the Soviet Union from the fall of 1922 to the summer of 1924, Eastman was influenced by the power struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and the events leading to Stalin's eventual seizure of power. As a result of the Great Purge and the Soviet Union's totalitarianism, he became highly critical first of Stalinism and then of communism and socialism in general. While remaining an atheist, he became an advocate of free market economics and anti-communism. In 1955, he published Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. He published more frequently in National Review and other conservative journals in later life. He publicly opposed United States involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
Early life and education Eastman was born in 1883 in Canandaigua, Ontario County, New York, the fourth of four children. His older brother died the following year at age seven. His father, Samuel Elijah Eastman, was a minister in the Congregational Church, and his mother, Annis Bertha Ford (1852–1910), joined him in 1889, one of the first women in the United States to be ordained in a Protestant church. They served together as pastors at the church of Thomas K. Beecher near Elmira, New York. This area was part of the "burned-over district", which earlier in the 19th century had generated much religious excitement, resulting in the founding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Latter Day Saint movement. In addition, religion inspired such social causes as abolitionism and support for the Underground Railroad. Through his parents, Max became acquainted in his youth with their friend, the noted author Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Eastman graduated with a bachelor's degree from Williams College in 1905. His good friend and roommate while at Williams was Charles Whittlesey, later known as the Lost Battalion commanding officer and a World War I hero. From 1907 to 1911, Eastman completed the work toward a PhD in philosophy at Columbia University under the noted philosopher John Dewey. He also was a member of both the Delta Psi and Phi Beta Kappa societies. Settling in Greenwich Village with his older sister Crystal Eastman, he became involved in political causes, including helping to found the Men's League for Women's Suffrage in 1910. While at Columbia, he was an assistant in the philosophy department as well as a lecturer in the psychology department. After completing the requirements for his doctoral degree, he refused to accept it and simply withdrew in 1911. He spent summers and weekends with Crystal in Croton-on-Hudson, where he bought a house in 1916.
Leading radical
Eastman became a key figure in the left-leaning Greenwich Village community and lived in its influence for many years. He combined this with his academic experience to explore varying interests, including literature, psychology, and social reform. In 1913, he became editor of the US' leading socialist periodical, The Masses, a magazine that combined social philosophy and the arts. Its contributors during his tenure included Sherwood Anderson, Louise Bryant, Floyd Dell, Amy Lowell, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Robert Minor, John Reed, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, and Art Young. That same year, Eastman published Enjoyment of Poetry, an examination of literary metaphor from a psychological point of view. During this period, he also became a noted advocate of free love and birth control. In his first editorial for The Masses, Eastman wrote:
This magazine is owned and published cooperatively by its editors. It has no dividends to pay, and nobody is trying to make money out of it. A revolutionary and not a reform magazine: a magazine with a sense of humour and no respect for the respectable: frank, arrogant, impertinent, searching for true causes: a magazine directed against rigidity and dogma wherever it is found: printing what is too naked or true for a money-making press: a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers. The numerous denunciations of US participation in World War I published in The Masses, many written by Eastman, provoked controversy and reaction from authorities. Eastman was twice indicted and stood trial under provisions of the Sedition Act, but he was acquitted each time. In a July 1917 speech, he complained that the government's aggressive prosecutions of dissent meant that "[y]ou can't even collect your thoughts without getting arrested for unlawful assemblage". In 1918, The Masses was forced to close due to criminal charges based on the Espionage Act of 1917. Eastman raised the money to send the radical John Reed to Russia in 1917. His magazine published Reed's articles from Russia, later collected as Ten Days That Shook the World, his notable account of the Bolshevik Revolution. Eastman had even delivered anti-war speeches on behalf of the People's Council of America for Democracy and the Terms of Peace.
In 1919, Eastman and his sister Crystal (who the next year was one of the founders of American Civil Liberties Union) created a similar publication titled The Liberator. They published such writers as E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, Claude McKay and Edmund Wilson. In 1922, the magazine was acquired by the Workers Party of America after continuing financial troubles. In 1924, The Liberator was merged with two other publications to create The Workers Monthly. Eastman ended his association with the magazine.
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