by DANIEL McCARTHY
Yale University Press
The times and trajectory of Max Eastman, progressive turned “libertarian conservative”
Max Eastman: A Life by Christoph Irmscher. (Yale University Press, 434 pages, $40
“It doesn’t cheapen the aims of this biography or the ambitions of its subject,” writes Christoph Irmscher, “to describe what follows as a story largely about sex and communism.” What follows is the life of Max Eastman—poet, nudist, women’s suffragist, war resister, socialist editor, and finally a self-described “libertarian conservative.” William F. Buckley Jr. found his atheism unpalatable. But to a teenage Carly Simon, Eastman—by then in his 80s—was “the most beautiful man she had ever met.” She was far from the only woman to feel that way.
Eastman’s star burned bright for more than half of the 20th century, as he wrote his way to fame, traveled the world, translated Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution, and ended up as one of the red faith’s foremost apostates.
What kind of background produces a character like Max Eastman? One that begins with parents who were both Christian ministers. Max was born in Canandaigua, New York, in 1883. His mother, Annis, was ordained in 1889, but had for years already been assisting her husband, Rev. Samuel Eastman, with his sermons. Annis was emotionally close to her children, and they were close to one another. In the case of Max and his sister Crystal, two years older than him, they might have been too close. Crystal would be the adolescent Max’s ideal woman; her letters home to him from college are full of flirtatious teasing.
“Max’s previous biographer has suggested that Max and Crystal had an incestuous relationship,” Irmscher notes. He doesn’t leap to that conclusion himself, saying the mix of religious passion, motherly doting, and sibling affection that swirled around Eastman defies easy interpretation. In any event, Eastman seems not to have had much specifically sexual confidence or experience until after he graduated from Williams College.
Appropriately enough, his first step toward becoming a public intellectual was made possible by one of his sister’s boyfriends, who happened to teach at Columbia University. He got Max a job as a teaching assistant in the philosophy and psychology department, where Max fell into John Dewey’s orbit. Crystal also drew her brother into progressive politics; soon he was a leading speaker in the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage.
The Columbia connection—Eastman was sometimes erroneously identified in the press as a professor—and his success as a speaker eased his path to becoming a noted writer too, and not just on suffrage. He published as a poet as well. And in 1913, he was offered the editorship of a small socialist magazine, The Masses, which under Max would become, as Irmscher puts it, “the only artsy socialist magazine the United States had ever had.” Max’s plan was “to make The Masses a popular Socialist magazine—a magazine of pictures and lively writing” rather than a vehicle for dogma.
The magazine made Max an outspoken champion of left-wing causes, including labor and, most fatefully, opposition to World War I. Max’s editorial criticisms of the war earned the magazine harassment from Woodrow Wilson’s government, which ultimately forced The Masses to close. In its place, Max and Crystal launched a new magazine, the Liberator. As the conflict drew to a close, it endorsed the war aims “outlined by the Russian people and expounded by President Wilson.” Max and several former colleagues from The Masses were put on trial for having attempted to “unlawfully and willfully obstruct the recruiting and enlistment service of the United States.” Two hung juries saved Max from a prison sentence.
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