Max Eastman
From Philosopedia
Eastman, Max (4 January 1883 - 25 March 1969)
Eastman, the editor of radical periodicals until 1923, was for many years a Communist and a leader of American liberal thought. He later rejected Communism and wrote several books attacking it. Eastman’s most popular work was Enjoyment of Laughter (1936), and among his autobiographical works was Love and Revolution (1965).
In 1949, he wrote when asked if he was a humanist,
- I never think of myself, and never have, as being any kind of an ‘ist” or subscribing to any “ism.” Even in regard to Socialism, I maintained this attitude to the extent possible in my editorials in the old Masses and The Liberator.
Eastman, whose parents were Congregationalist clergy, was born in Canandaigua, New York. His mother was a friend of Mark Twain and wrote Twain's funeral elegy. One of the first women to be ordained in the Congregational Church, she once told her congregation "that if they could find a spiritual uplift elsewhere, there was no reason for coming to church"). According to Time,
- Mrs. Eastman spent her last, vigorous year learning to swim, undergoing a Freudian analysis and deciding to leave her church. Her advice to her son, to "live out of yourself persistently," helped him decide at an early age "to live a life in which something should happen besides birth, death, disease and marriage."
Eastman attended Williams College but in 1905 worked toward his Ph. D. in philosophy at Columbia University. He became an assistant in the philosophy department where he taught logic - John Dewey took him on as a teaching assistant. He was a lecturer in the psychology department and completed the requirements for the degree, then refused to accept the degree and left in 1911. Whereupon he became a political left-winger in Greenwich Village and edited The Masses, a magazine that emphasized the arts as well as socialism.
He became a friend of Leon Trotsky while traveling to the Soviet Union, but by 1941 he wrote negatively about communism and socialism and actively supported right-wing McCarthyism. The major change in his thinking was admitted in his various works.
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Gossip
Gossip columnists in 1937 tried to document whether Hemingway slapped Eastman or whether Eastman threw Hemingway over a desk at editor Maxwell Perkiness' Scribner's publishing office. Whether or not Hemingway was as macho as publicists claimed, Eastman had his doubts. As for Eastman, in his Love and Revolution, he claimed to have shared a mistress with Charlie Chaplain. At Martha's Vineyard, artist Bernice Hall told Philosopedia's founder that, while walking on the beach at Martha's Vineyard, Eastman appeared, nude, "and abundantly proportioned."
According to Father Richard Butler, O.P., Santayana detested Eastman:
- He showed a particular disdain for the late Max Eastman, a frequent contributor to American magazines. He came twice and I was present on both occasions. The sessions were painful. Santayana's hearing was weak, but also selective. In every exchange between them I had to act as a relay interpreter. Whatever other information Eastman obtained, he had to rely on indirect sources or his own imagination.
- As a result of these meager pickings, Max Eastman wrote two full-length articles for American Mercury magazine. The first, entitled "Philosopher in a Convent" (November, 1951), repeated the stable and erroneous impression that Santayana was walled up in a cloistered convent of nuns. Referring to his "five or six visits" with the philosopher, Eastman embroidered an elaborately imaginative account of these sessions. In this article (p. 38) he reported: "Sometimes the high theologians of the Vatican come in and try to convert him to an existential belief in these dogmas that he loves." I first read this statement in Santayana's presence and asked him who these high theologians of the Vatican were. He smiled sourly and said: "That's you, I guess."
- Eastman wrote another article about these "visits." It was a cheap, sensational piece about Santayana's inferred effeminacy based on ridiculous evidence, such as his playing female roles in Hasty Pudding shows while he was a student at Harvard. Santayana was saddened by these articles (later included in a book called Great Companions). Santayana's visitors were immediately limited to [Daniel, his only regular companion] Cory and myself.
Butler, who was trying to convince readers of Spirituality Today (Winter 1986, Vol. 38, pp. 319-336), that Santayana the atheist was turning to Catholicism, was either naive or lying about Santayana's "inferred effeminacy," for Santayana the aesthete might well have come across as being effeminate but he was openly homosexual, as was known not only by Eastman but by all who were acquainted with Santayana. Father Butler held that Santayana was not a philosopher but, rather, a poet. He describes how Sister Angelique was assigned to look after the infirm poet, "the classical case of the confused skeptic who hesitatingly stands (in his own words) "at the church door." Eastman was no longer alive to support the man who allegedly detested him.
Quotes
"Socialism is no mean religion. But it is not a religion that binds or blesses the rich and powerful, and so it could hardly become established in a country like ours. For an established religion we needed something a little more like God. . . a little vaguer and more elegant and better adapted to bind in among other motives the economic self-interest of those who rule. We needed something that would give us the same emotional crystallization without greatly disturbing the profits on capital." - Max Eastman, 1917
"Nothing could be more calamitous than for patriotism to become the established religion of this country." - - Max Eastman, The Religion of Patriotism, 1917
"The words socialist and communist are changing their meaning just as the word Christian did. Just as heretics were burned by thousands in the name of the love of the neighbour, so peasants have been starved by millions in the name of the workers' and peasants' republic. The crude animal egoisms of men and classes of men thus grab ideas and use them, not as heroic lights to action, but as blinds to hide inaction or actions that are too base." - Max Eastman, 1938
"What is the 'secret ballot' when only one party can run candidates for office, and that the party in power? What is 'free press and assemblage' when no man can form, advocate, or support the platform of any but the gang in power, and when ten to twenty thousand of those who have done so are in jail or exile while you talk about it? What is the whole talk under these conditions about how 'we' are going to 'give the Russian people' the most democratic constitution on earth? Is there any term in the language to describe it except apple-sauce?" - Max Eastman, The End of Socialism in Russia, 1938
Books
- Understanding Germany (1916)
- Journalism Versus Art (1916, essays)
- Leon Trotsky: The Portrait of a Youth (1925, biography)
- Since Lenin Died (1925, essays)
- Artists in Uniform (1934)
- Enjoyment of Laughter (1936)
- Stalin's Russia and the Crisis in Socialism (1939, essays)
- Heroes I Have Known (1942)
- Enjoyment of Living (1948, autobiography)
- Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch (1965, autobiography)
- Seven Kinds of Goodness (1967)
Final Days
At the age of 86, Eastman died at his summer home in Bridgetown, Barbados.
At one point in his life, atheists as well as theists could claim him. At one point in his life, Communists as well as anti-Communists could claim him. In his 1949 letter, he clearly had no interest in being labeled.
