Max Eastman
(1883-1969)
American socialist, writer, and journalist. Eastman was born in Canandaigua, New York in 1883 to clergy parents and radicalized in his youth on the issue of women's rights.
A prolific writer, Eastman gained a reputation as fine journalist and in 1912 was asked to take over editorship of the left literary journal The Masses. Other writers to the cooperative magazine included John Reed, Upton Sinclair, his sister (Crystal Eastman), Amy Lowell and Louise Bryant. The journal moved further to the left under Eastman and took a strong stand against US involvement in World War I. As a result, in 1917, they lost mailing privileges and several of its editors were tried twice for violating the Espionage Act. The Masses was suppressed during the trials, but failing to get a conviction by the time the war ended, the government dropped its case.
In 1918 Eastman joined with other radical writers to publish The Liberator, a magazine similar with similar intentions to The Masses, and remained with the publication until 1924, when it ran out of money and was taken over by the Communist Party USA. In 1922 he left the US for a two year stay in the Soviet Union.
A friend of both Bill Haywood and James P. Cannon, Eastman was part of the American far-left. Having learned Russian while in the USSR, he helped Leon Trotsky translate numerous works into English for publication in the United States. Though on the forefront of getting Trotskyist issues to America and a supporter of Trotskyist publications, he was a critic of dialectical and historical materialism and the idea of Marxist philosophy as a science.
During the 1940's he became disillusioned with Stalinist Russia and eventually turned against socialism altogether in his article "Reflections on the Failure of Socialism" (1955). Because of his hatred of the pro-Stalin Communist Party, he was a supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) and his witch-hunt for Communists. He spent the last decades of his life writing for publications such as the Readers' Digest and also wrote two volumes of autobiographical material, The Enjoyment of Living (1948) and Love and Revolution (1965). He died in 1969, just prior to the release of his translation of Young Lenin.
Eastman was the author of several books: Understanding Germany (1916); Journalism Versus Art (1916); The Sense of Humor (1921); Leon Trotsky: Portrait of a Youth (1925); Marx, Lenin and the Science of Revolution (1926); and Artists in Uniform (1934).