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LRB, March 22, 2018
I was the Left Opposition
by Stuart Middleton
Max Eastman: A Life by Christoph Irmscher
Yale, 434 pp, £35.00, August 2017, ISBN 978 0 300 22256 2
American radicalism, the art critic Hilton Kramer claimed in a review of
Max Eastman’s autobiography in 1965, produced ‘not an intellectual
tradition that illuminates current problems but a collection of case
histories’, of which Eastman’s is ‘in some respects the most dismaying’.
It isn’t difficult to see what he meant. Eastman’s career as editor,
essayist, philosopher, translator, activist and poet made him a major
figure in American intellectual life, and at times a glamorous one. But
his journey across the political spectrum, from the bohemian radicalism
of pre-war Greenwich Village, to Trotskyist left-oppositionism, to the
conservatism of William F. Buckley’s National Review, seemed to
exemplify the failures of socialism in the 20th century. In his final
years Eastman himself was sometimes overcome by a sense of personal
futility; he complained on his death bed that his life had been wasted.
Christoph Irmscher’s new biography uncovers some new details of that
life, but also gives us an opportunity to reconsider the hopes and
failures of radical politics in the 20th century, and their
possibilities in the 21st.
Eastman’s assumption that life should be turned to account shows the
profound hold over him of the traditions of New England puritanism. He
was born in 1883, the child of Congregationalist ministers in
Canandaigua, New York. The family was dominated by his mother, who
instilled in her children a nonconformism that made a virtue of being at
odds with the world. He developed an intense bond with his mother and
sister, Crystal, but was emotionally distant from almost everyone else,
despite himself, until he was in his thirties. As a student at Williams
College, he discovered a facility for writing and public speaking; he
also developed mysterious back pains that he later attributed to his
relationship with his mother, and an interest in psychology prompted by
the ‘suggestive therapeutics’ he used to treat them. His first serious
publication was an essay on ‘The New Art of Healing’ which appeared in
the Atlantic Monthly in 1908.
By then Eastman was living in New York with Crystal, and through a
friend of hers became an assistant to John Dewey at Columbia. Dewey was
one of the leading philosophers in America, and his prestige beyond
university philosophy departments was such that, as Eastman recalled,
‘rays of his influence may have helped to mould me long before I heard
of him.’ The guiding principle of the philosophical approach William
James defined as ‘pragmatism’ was that ideas and beliefs are not
inherently true, or right, but are made so by their practical
consequences. For James, this meant that religious belief could retain
its validity in an age of science on the grounds of its efficacy for the
believer. For Dewey it underpinned an ideal of democracy understood as a
capacity for harmonious ‘associated living’, sustained by the constant
appraisal of ideas and practices in terms of the ends they served. For
Eastman pragmatism was an instrument of radical iconoclasm: he once gave
a course in aesthetics in which he elaborated 23 different definitions
of beauty and concluded by demonstrating that beauty was undefinable. He
became, and remained, an accomplished anti-philosopher. He later argued
that ‘if “the meaning of an idea is its results in action,” then the
meaning of pragmatism is to resign your chair in philosophy.’
Eastman was as good as his word, and refused to take his PhD after his
dissertation was approved at Columbia. He had already achieved some
celebrity by inadvertently founding the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage,
after his call for the establishment of such a group was taken seriously
by the progressive publisher Oswald Garrison Villard. The world of
activism and public speaking suited Eastman, and he rode the upsurge of
progressivism and socialism that resulted in the candidacies of Theodore
Roosevelt and the socialist Eugene Debs in the presidential election of
1912. Alongside Crystal, who was a prominent workers’ rights campaigner,
he cut a figure in pre-war Greenwich Village, where artistic, political
and moral conventions were enthusiastically rejected. It was here
Eastman met his first wife, the lawyer and women’s trade unionist Ida
Rauh, who relieved him of his sexual inhibitions and instructed him in
the rudiments of Marxism. Eastman appears to have become a socialist
because of its anticipated practical effects, and because it seemed to
fit with his rather self-conscious defiance of convention and religion.
He was also responding to the industrial conflicts of early 20th-century
America. A speech given by the labour organiser Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
at a silk-workers’ strike in Paterson, New Jersey in 1913 inspired in
him a sense of ‘the likeness of all human beings and their problems’, a
feeling he could still recall in his eighties. The conception of
socialism as the natural extension of individualism was widely shared in
the early 20th century, in America and Britain.
Around a year before he heard Flynn speak, Eastman had received a
telegram informing him: ‘You are elected editor of The Masses. No pay.’
The Masses was a drab, vaguely socialist monthly facing financial ruin
after less than a year’s existence. Yet under Eastman’s editorship it
became the most celebrated mouthpiece for pre-war Village radicalism,
and Eastman one of the heroes of that milieu. Assisted by the novelist
Floyd Dell and by contributors including the artists Art Young and John
Sloan, and the writers Louis Untermeyer and John Reed, Eastman
encouraged the breaking of taboos around prostitution, birth control and
organised religion, championed workers’ rights, and exposed industrial
and racial violence. He wrote an impassioned account of the Ludlow
massacre of April 1914, when striking mineworkers and their families
were shot at and their tent settlement set on fire by the Colorado
National Guard. He published caricatures showing the anti-vice
campaigner Anthony Comstock in the nude, and as an enraged midget
wielding a sword over a prone, unclothed woman. The Masses never had a
large readership: it was kept alive by the donations Eastman extracted
from the bourgeoisie its contributors mocked. But its influence exceeded
its circulation. Under Eastman, Irving Howe wrote, The Masses was ‘the
rallying centre … for almost everything that was then alive and
irreverent in American culture’.
The irreverence initially survived the outbreak of war in Europe in
1914. Eastman suggested that the conflict would be a fillip for the
international labour movement, and the magazine mocked the
‘preparedness’ campaign to which the president, Woodrow Wilson, lent his
support after the sinking of the Lusitania, with the loss of 128
American lives, by a German submarine in May 1915. As the US inched
towards war, the magazine’s artists and polemicists were emboldened. The
cartoonist Boardman Robinson depicted Eastman explaining pacifism to the
warmongering Nobel peace laureate Theodore Roosevelt, and in September
1917 John Reed catalogued the repressions that had followed the
declaration of war the previous April, a decision justified by Wilson on
the questionable grounds that ‘the world must be made safe for
democracy.’ As Eastman told a rally of the anti-war People’s Council of
America for Democracy and Peace, which he and Crystal had helped found,
‘There is no use making the world safe for democracy if there is to be
no democracy left in the world. There is no use waging a war for liberty
if every liberty we have must be abolished in order to wage war.’ When
he repeated the message at a meeting in Fargo, North Dakota, soldiers
from a nearby training camp threatened to lynch him.
By 1917 The Masses was not only opposing the war but enthusiastically
supporting the revolutions in Russia. The paper was suppressed at the
end of that year, and Eastman, Dell and five other contributors were
charged with conspiring to obstruct the draft. Calmly deflecting the
prosecutor’s questions, Eastman reframed the indictment as a matter of
free speech and secured two hung juries. Eugene Debs wasn’t so lucky:
his trial ended in a ten-year prison sentence (which was commuted in
1921, after nearly three years).
Eastman’s support for the Bolshevik regime was undiminished. The
revolution, he wrote, was ‘the one thing that has ever happened in the
political sciences comparable to the confirmations of the hypotheses of
Copernicus and Kepler and Newton in the physical sciences’. That was a
bold view to express at the height of the postwar ‘red scare’, and
Eastman had close shaves with would-be vigilantes and again courted
prosecution by exposing US support for counter-revolution. When Bertrand
Russell, who had welcomed the revolution in a piece for Eastman’s new
magazine, the Liberator, denounced the cruelty and fanaticism he had
witnessed in Russia, Eastman derided him as a Menshevik whose ‘tender
emotions about human progress’ were out of step with the
world-historical march of Bolshevism. In April 1922 he set off for
Russia announcing, disarmingly, that he intended to ‘find out whether
what I have been saying is true’.
He had other reasons for making the journey. His marriage had broken
down and he had embarked on an affair with the actress Florence Deshon.
But this foundered too, along with Deshon’s acting career and her
contemporaneous affair with Charlie Chaplin, to whom Eastman had
introduced her. In February 1922 she was found dying in her apartment,
where a gas jet had been left on. Eastman rushed to the hospital and
gave her a direct blood transfusion, but it was too late. Her friends
suspected suicide, and later Eastman decided he agreed. As he crossed
the Atlantic he wrote a threnody in which he envisaged lying down with
her in the grave.
His first stop in Europe was Genoa, where he attended the economic and
financial conference proposed by Lloyd George to aid European
reconstruction and establish formal relations with the USSR. Here he met
his first Bolsheviks, finding in the Soviet delegation the embodiment of
his ideal of the ‘scientific revolutionary’. He went on to Moscow and
travelled around the USSR, learning Russian from a lover in Yalta and
starting an affair with Eliena Krylenko, whose brother Nikolai would
become Stalin’s commissar of justice (before being purged himself).
Eastman arrived in Moscow as war communism was giving way to the New
Economy Policy, a partial restoration of market economics that imparted
a veneer of affluence to Soviet life. Moscow reminded Eastman of
Greenwich Village before the war, a place where a ‘democracy of manners
and aspects and attitudes’ was flourishing. Unperturbed by reports of
Bolshevik violence, Eastman told readers of the Liberator of the
‘hard-handed, iron-minded men’ he encountered at the Fourth Congress of
the Comintern in December 1922, where he finally saw Lenin and met
Trotsky, who seemed to him ‘the most universally gifted man in the world’.
Eastman was unaware of the power struggle within the Communist Party
that Trotsky was losing to the triumvirate of Stalin, Zinoviev and
Kamenev. At the Party Congress in May 1924, Eastman, in the front row
next to Nikolai Krylenko, saw Trotsky publicly humiliated by Stalin and
Zinoviev, and decided to leave the country with Eliena, who had been
compromised in the eyes of the Soviet security police years before for
carrying a letter for her anarchist sister, Sophia. Since neither of
them had a valid passport, Eastman was appointed to a diplomatic post by
Eliena’s boss, Maxim Litvinov, and they were hastily married (or rather
Eastman was; the bride was too busy packing to attend the ceremony).
They settled temporarily in the South of France and Eliena worked in
Paris to support Eastman while he wrote. He made it clear to her that
the marriage was merely one of convenience, though it would become much
more to him in time.
Irmscher displays an almost prurient interest in Eastman’s love life,
but more significant is his description of how, over the following three
years, Eastman became a significant member of the ‘Left Opposition’ to
Stalin. In 1925 he published Since Lenin Died, which held up the
‘saintly’ Trotsky as Lenin’s rightful heir and exposed the machinations
of Stalin and his supporters, who, he wrote, were overseeing ‘the
transformation of Bolshevism from a science into a religion’. He also
discussed ‘The Testament of Lenin’, a series of notes dictated towards
the end of his life in which Lenin criticised Stalin and urged his
removal from the position of general secretary. Trotsky, desperately
struggling for political survival, was forced to denounce Eastman’s
account. He also denied the existence of the Testament, but a copy was
smuggled to Paris, and Eastman helped to arrange its publication in the
New York Times in October 1926. By then he had also completed his
theoretical opus Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution, beginning a
bitter dispute with Sidney Hook, who had also been Dewey’s student, over
the relationship between Hegel and Marx and between Marx and Dewey. The
argument continued into the 1930s, until Eastman brought out a
self-published pamphlet – which he thought settled the matter in his favour.
Eastman cut a lonely figure on the American left when he and Eliena
returned to the US in 1927. He was one of the most prominent communists
in the country, but his opposition to Stalin made him an apostate. ‘I
was for six years alone in America in supporting the Left Opposition,’
he wrote to Trotsky in 1933: ‘I was the Left Opposition.’ After Trotsky
was sent into exile in 1929 Eastman acted as an informal literary broker
for him in the US, and with Eliena’s help translated his major works,
including the epic History of the Russian Revolution.
Until the mid-1930s Eastman shared the Trotskyist view of the Soviet
Union as a workers’ state that had degenerated into bureaucracy. After
the first of the Moscow Trials in 1936, at which Trotsky was vilified in
absentia and Stalin began to eliminate potential rivals among the ‘old
Bolsheviks’, he abandoned this vestigial article of faith and, in an
article in Harper’s, proclaimed ‘The End of Socialism in Russia’. It was
now, he claimed, ‘a totalitarian state not in essence different from
that of Hitler and Mussolini’. The implication was that Eastman still
believed in the idea of a socialism untainted by Stalinism. But this
position was increasingly difficult to sustain within the philosophical
framework that had shaped his political commitments, according to which
the validity of socialism as an idea must be inextricable from its
practical consequences. When Dewey returned from chairing an inquiry in
Mexico into the charges made against Trotsky in the Moscow Trials, he
remarked to Sidney Hook that whatever Marxism meant in theory, in
practice it could not be separated from the official dogma of the Soviet
Union. Eastman took this logic a step further. His equation of Stalinism
and Nazism seemed to be vindicated by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August
1939, but the following year, in Stalin’s Russia and the Crisis in
Socialism, he declared that Stalinism was not an aberration from
socialism but its ultimate realisation. He also claimed that economic
collectivism was incompatible with human nature and must always end in
totalitarianism, asking for the first time whether the Marxian
insistence on the primacy of economics did not mean that the free market
was the precondition of all other forms of liberty.
*
Eastman’s dilemma here was one that threatened the fundamental
assumptions of progressive politics in the early 1940s. The
‘totalitarian’ regimes of Germany and Russia were widely viewed as
epitomes of different forms of the modern state, and as antithetical to
democracy. ‘We have become conservatives,’ the British journalist H.N.
Brailsford declared in 1939, ‘fighting with our backs to the wall, to
preserve for Europe the liberties our fathers won.’ Characteristically,
Eastman pursued this reasoning further than most by founding his
critique of socialism on the idea of an immutable and inherently flawed
‘human nature’, which was incompatible with the dynamic and adaptive
principles of pragmatism. In 1941 he published an essay in Reader’s
Digest with the title ‘Socialism Doesn’t Jibe with Human Nature’. From
this point Eastman’s relationship with the left was increasingly
distant, and his association with Reader’s Digest – for which he became
a well-paid ‘roving editor’ – came to symbolise his abandonment of
radicalism.
There were complicating factors. Eastman’s espousal of Trotskyism, and
his defence of artistic and intellectual freedom, broke ground that was
later occupied by the editors of Partisan Review from the late 1930s;
but his move from anti-Stalinism to anti-socialism, and his support for
America’s entry into the Second World War, set him at odds with them.
When Hitler attacked the USSR in June 1941, and the US entered the war
the following December, the growth of popular sympathy with Russia
heightened Eastman’s concern that what he called ‘the mental habits of
totalitarianism’ might develop in American society. He was also
suspicious of the admiration for the Soviet Union once again in vogue in
the liberal press. Irmscher reports that he began keeping lists of
people and organisations he suspected of communist sympathies, on
sometimes insubstantial evidence, and believed that thirty million
people in America were somehow under Stalin’s influence.
As a harbinger of the anti-communist left that formed after the war, he
received some credit for his prescience, even from Partisan Review after
it turned against what it called ‘The “Liberal” Fifth Column’ in
America. In 1950 the novelist James T. Farrell, who had denounced
Eastman in its pages in the early 1940s, printed a public apology
saluting the moral courage Eastman had shown in criticising the Soviet
regime at the cost of his own popularity and livelihood. But Eastman
wasn’t interested in becoming the grand old man of radical American
letters. Instead he went beyond the anti-communism of the American
Committee for Cultural Freedom, of which Farrell and Hook were leading
members, and publicly endorsed McCarthyism on the basis that there was
no middle ground in the fight against communism. Old friends like Floyd
Dell tried to talk him into moderation, but to no avail. His
increasingly polarised view of politics led him to endorse free market
economics, and to lend his name to the masthead of the conservative
National Review when it was launched in 1955.
Eastman’s career followed a broader shift in American intellectual
culture, as the sceptical, tolerant and relativistic impulses of
pragmatism gave way to the antagonistic dogmas of the cultural Cold War.
Eastman himself wasn’t a very convincing dogmatist. He defended Chaplin
and other victims of McCarthyism, and his political views were less
extreme than he sometimes made them sound: Dell told him that his view
of capitalism was ‘utopian’ and his conservatism ‘jerry-built’. Eastman
broke with the National Review three years after it was founded over its
‘primitive and superstitious’ emphasis on religion, as he described it
to Buckley. Irmscher quotes an unpublished essay in which he
acknowledged his proximity to anarchism – an affinity common among
former socialists who feared that collectivism contained the seeds of
totalitarianism.
Eastman’s radicalism had always drawn on the mainstream of American
political culture, in particular the need, which he learned from Dewey,
constantly to re-evaluate ideas and practices in terms of their
practical effects. Dewey calmly persisted in this until his death in
1952, but Eastman jettisoned it along with his socialism rather than
subject that body of ideas to the same process of reappraisal. His
editorship of The Masses had demonstrated the potency of American
radicalism’s synthesis of individualism and solidarity, the sense that,
as Debs declared at his trial in 1918, ‘While there is a lower class, I
am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is
a soul in prison, I am not free.’ Perhaps the appalling sense of
futility that beset Eastman in old age indicates the personal costs of
his abandonment of that outlook, in favour of free-market dogmas which
he refused to submit to critique.
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