The suffragette “hen cock” that wouldn’t settle down was more than a casual metaphor for Max. Although he claimed this had happened more or less by accident, Max in 1909 became one of the founders of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage of New York State. The way he recalled it later, Max had, at a suffrage meeting, suggested that such an organization would be a good idea and that he would establish one, a statement that made it into the New York Herald.86 He now had to make good on his foolish promise. But the proposed league seemed like a good way for Max to do what Annis and Crystal were doing, too, and yet make use of his own unique talents as a speaker. As it turned out, others, notably the influential journalist, editor, and owner of the Nation and the New York Evening Post, Oswald Garrison Villard, had already been in conversation with Anna Howard Shaw, the leader of the American suffragettes, about the creation of such an institution. Max appointed himself treasurer and secretary of the new league and soon enlisted Annis’s and even Sam’s help in managing his correspondence and the checks that came in. When Annis came to New York in November 1909 to seek psychoanalytic treatment from Abraham Brill, the first analyst in the United States to have his own practice, she spent her spare time in Max’s apartment writing addresses on envelopes for the league.87
Max proved to be quite adept at harnessing the different advocates for the cause into supporting his new organization, assembling an impressive list of vice presidents, chairmen, board members, and so forth. But he, too, knew he couldn’t have gotten anywhere without his mother’s support. “Thank God you helped me with this,” he sighed in a letter to Annis, surveying the “secretarial debris” that surrounded him at his desk.88 According to its charter, published the following year in pamphlet form, the purpose of the new organization was “to express approval of the movement of women to attain the full suffrage in this country, and to aid them in their efforts toward that end by public appearances in behalf of the cause, by the circulation of literature, the holding of meetings, and such ways as may from time to time seem desirable.” The membership fee was one dollar per year. The progressive millionaire and philanthropist George Foster Peabody was president, John Dewey chaired the executive committee, of which Villard was a member, while Zebulon Brockway from Elmira, William Dean Howells, and the reformist Rabbi Wise served as vice presidents. Among the chartered members were many familiar names from Max’s and Crystal’s lives: apart from Samuel and Annis Eastman, there were “Baldy” Mann, Max’s classmate Ralph Erskine, Crystal’s erstwhile lover Paul Kellogg, Max’s former professor Dickinson Miller, and the ubiquitous Vladimir Simkhovitch.89 Max had some impressive stationery engraved and printed and aggressively pursued invitations to speak, while also soliciting new memberships. Send me those membership requests, Max never tired of saying at his events: “It is one thing to support a movement, and another thing to lick a stamp to advance it.”90
The rationale for the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, spelled out in many speeches Max would give over the next years, was crystal clear. The one way to get results in America is to threaten a politician that you won’t vote for them, Max would explain. But if you are a woman and you don’t have the vote, what do you do? Answer: “You are in an extreme predicament. You are unable to wake up our legislators at all. The end towards which you are striving is itself the means by which you may attain it.” Hence the league. “The League has for charter members about a hundred and fifty of the best men in the state,” and their most important objective was to “make equal franchise an issue at the polls.”91
Max’s first official appearance in his new capacity was at the Monroe County suffrage convention in Ontario, New York, on June 14, 1909. Max later called the speech his purgatory: too learned and too long, it nevertheless earned him $15, although, he quipped, any audience, had they been adequately warned, would have paid $500 to avoid having to sit through it.92 He went on to memorize his speeches and learned to compress his arguments, adapting them to the occasion and the audience. Many of his lecture notes have survived among his papers, and several of them Max had retyped later, perhaps as he was working on Enjoyment of Living. Max identified a voluminous package of notes as the text of that first speech, although he also noted that he reused his script when he spoke in Rochester more than a year later.93
The speech—newspaper accounts of the Rochester event confirm that Max stuck pretty closely to his draft—shows why he became such a sought-after speaker.94 He very cleverly began by questioning his right to speak about woman suffrage. He was young, a man, and an academic, the last person who should be holding forth about the issue before an audience of battle-hardened women “most ardently convinced of the righteousness of this cause.” Moreover, he was speaking in Rochester, the home of Susan B. Anthony. Maybe there were a few “inanimate males” in the audience (Max actually crossed out this very funny phrase, probably a wise decision). But even those were likely in full agreement with his argument. Max then very adroitly brought his personal history, as the son of two ministers, into play: “This was exactly the way I used to feel about going to church. It seemed to me that if we were fairly well agreed upon the Bible, and the minister, and a handful of familiar hymns, we could let it go at that. There was no use getting together every Sunday and shouting about it.” And yet meet his congregation did, Sunday after Sunday, and there was good reason for that. Why not adopt the same method for a worthier cause?
Max then changed gears and spoke as a philosopher. Hadn’t Aristotle argued that man was an animal equipped with reason? Both men and dogs were able to stand on their legs, but men, unlike dogs, talk and can hold and exchange opinions. Now what one would have to add to that philosophical definition was a psychological one. For man was also a suggestible animal, as Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault, the father of hypnotherapy, had shown as early as 1866. Max was speaking not only as a student of psychology but also as a former patient when he went on: “The fundamental, first, forcible, and eternal way to get an opinion into a man’s head and keep it there is to say it to him often and loud.” And wasn’t that precisely the purpose of a meeting such as this one? To say, often and loudly, what everyone knew to be true anyway, that women should have the right to vote? At that point in Max’s delivery, hardly any woman in the audience would have doubted his authority to speak on behalf of her rights.
To his credentials as a minister’s son, philosopher, psychologist, and hypnotist, Max added yet another element—that of the teacher. He explained that he regularly exposed his sophomores at Columbia to arguments in favor of woman suffrage, regardless of their indifference: “They think I am queer to introduce such a matter into the classroom to begin with, and they think I am queerer still to lecture them on the result.” Max went on to give his listeners a brilliant example of the kind of problem he would discuss in the classroom and in passing proved what a skilled logician he was. As everyone knew, the governor of Tennessee, Malcolm R. Patterson, had recently opposed a prohibition bill with the argument that it would bring women, who had been pushing for the law, “into the poisonous atmosphere of political strife.”95 Now this could be interpreted to mean two things: either that Governor Patterson enjoyed the poisonous atmosphere of political strife and did not want to see it diluted by the presence of women, or that he liked the women of Tennessee so much he wanted to protect them against such toxicity. Either way, there was only one conclusion to be drawn from this: “The present state of Tennessee politics is somehow incompatible with the present state of Tennessee women. You can’t bring them together without changing one or the other, or both.” The inevitable question: were the government of Tennessee, in all its venerable poisonousness, and the women of Tennessee, in all their holy innocence, really well served by the status quo? The answer was evident: change was needed. As Max put it, “I would like to see the air of politics cleared up by the introduction into it of all the moral idealism of which the community is capable, and I would like to see women’s ideals, and the ‘ideal of woman,’ unburdened of sen
timentality and hitched up into some sort of working contract with reality.” Women deserved better than “a life of futile and neurotic sainthood,” and politics, in Tennessee and elsewhere, was more important than to be left to the poison-mongers. One-fifth of women had entered the workforce anyway, and the political arena needed nothing more than their expertise now, as new areas of concern like sanitation, factory regulations, unemployment, and wage inequality had emerged. The socialists already understood that. And that was perhaps one of Max’s most effective points. Giving women the right to vote, and thus completing the government, as it were, was a way of preventing a full-scale revolution. Clearly, Max wasn’t yet a socialist.
Over the next two or three years Max would speak at the state suffrage convention in Troy, New York, and the national convention in the District of Columbia as well as in Albany, Boston, Buffalo, Ithaca, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. The Men’s League for Woman Suffrage gave Max the opportunity to do what he had long known he was especially good at, public speaking, and get paid for it, a prospect attractive to someone who at times couldn’t even afford his rent.96 In February 1910, for example, he claimed he made $225 in addition to his measly salary as a Columbia University teaching assistant. “I can get 100 a month out of my league,” he predicted, “and have half of my time free.”97 He also met some of the most courageous reformers of his time, such as the British suffragettes Ethel Snowden and Alice Paul.98
Most important, Max’s self-created responsibilities allowed him to spend more time with a girl, the “large-featured,” entrancingly liberated, courageous Inez Milholland, Crystal’s friend from Vassar. Inez would drive him to some of the events while also holding on to her own independent suffragist career that would get her arrested more than once. Turned into a tigress by Max’s virginal reticence, Inez extracted a declaration of love from him as well as an invitation to spend some of the Christmas holidays with him, which is when Inez apparently first figured out that she preferred, as Max feared she would, a more athletic lover. Over the next few months their love, by all appearances never consummated, fizzled out. Max blamed the breakup on the different things each of them wanted to get out of their relationship. But what indeed would Inez have thought about a lover who gave her six big roses while secretly wishing he had, in fact, put three of them upon his mother’s pillow while she slept? One just hopes he didn’t say any of that to her. Even Annis now felt her son had gone too far, though the reason she gave chillingly reveals just how closely knit the Eastmans really were: “I say that the 3 thus bestowed in your intent are always (the imperishable part of them) on my pillow when I wake so that Inez had only the bodies of the 3.” In other words, why did Max worry? If he didn’t understand what she meant, why, then love had really clouded his intellect.99
Some of Max’s suffrage events also went less than smoothly. In Poughkeepsie, for example, Max was getting ready to address a “wedge-shaped audience” at the Collingwood Opera House. After an incredibly tedious lecture by Ethel Arnold, whose main claim to fame was that she was a niece of the more famous Matthew, the editor of the Poughkeepsie Free Press, who had previously declared his allegiance to the local suffrage movement, stood up, and surprised everyone by speaking out against it: “O it was awful!” But Max saved the day by giving an impromptu speech that kept the audience on the edge of their seats and even motivated some to stand up—yet not for the right reasons. Talking about the ongoing strike of the shirtwaist factory workers in New York, Max discussed the fact that some had been tried in court “in company with harlots,” and though this reference had been intended in support of one of Max’s favorite themes in these speeches, the sanctity of womanhood, the mere mention of harlots induced some elderly participants to leave. If not exactly a “handsome” audience, that is, an audience not reluctant to use their hands for applause, the Poughkeepsians rewarded Max with frequent giggles, which he took to mean they liked his off-the-cuff manner.100
Reports in the newspapers show just how circumspect Max was during his public appearances. There was, for example, the event in Baltimore, at the Academy of Music on Howard Street on February 27, 1910. According to the Baltimore American, “several thousand men and women interested in the cause of equal suffrage” came and listened to Alice Paul, the American suffragist known for her role in the British fight for the women’s vote (so Max was, which he did not mention, not the main attraction). The event was held under the auspices of the Just Government League. Alice Paul set the tone for the event by comparing the fight for the women’s vote to the struggle for American independence and denounced those who regarded the methods of the British suffragettes as extreme: “We have broken windows for a cause, yet we’ve been classed as criminals while fighting for a principle.” When Max came on, introduced to the crowd as Professor Eastman, his message was conciliatory. No windows needed to be broken over here, he reassured his audience. Class was not really a problem in the United States, and there was nothing to be militant against over here. Of the four reasons usually given for women’s suffrage, reasons that he, too, had recited in every one of his speeches—justice, the purification of politics, the idea of democracy, and the full development of the personality of women—Max emphasized democracy. He said he pitied those, referring specifically to Presidents Roosevelt and Taft, who supported the women’s cause only out of a lukewarm sense of justice.
Democracy meant equal rights for all people. Max then used his favorite example, the shirtwaist strike, to demonstrate how widely accepted the different treatment of men and women was and how such inequality was directly related to suffrage: “Over 35,000 women appealed to the police commissioner for protection and were given no satisfaction. . . . If it had been 35,000 men with votes I know their demands would have received attention.” This was a clever and bold move. The shirtwaist strike had just ended, and while Max inflated the number of women involved (20,000, not 35,000), the facts were scary enough to employers and would have been fresh on people’s minds. Led by the immigrant garment worker Clara Lemlich and supported by the National Women’s Trade Union League, the strike, despite the thugs hired to attack the pickets, had led to vastly improved working conditions and higher wages for the mostly Jewish workers in the industry (though not at the New York Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, where a deadly fire a year later would kill 146).
But Max then somewhat reduced the force of his example by pointing out, as he was so fond of doing, that the right to vote would benefit the women themselves: “It is not a question of chivalry in giving the women their rights, but a heroic step in the evolution of a great race.” But hadn’t Lemlich’s example just shown that women were quite capable of evolving on their own? The truth is that Max had a keen sense of audience, and while talking about the strike had taken courage, he made sure he wasn’t going to bite the hand that fed him, or at least not too much. While he was answering questions a collection was taken. Obviously, by tailoring his message to the mainstream, Max kept his audiences with him: people were listening to him. Max was a full-fledged pragmatist now: expediency mattered to him more than being right on every single issue. And what an enormous validation for Professor Eastman, technically still an instructional assistant at Columbia University! A dinner in Max’s honor took place on Saturday night at the Hotel Belvedere. The attendees listed in the paper, including a federal judge, two renowned doctors from Johns Hopkins, politicians, and lawyers, were all men.101
Not all attendees at Max’s events were equally enthusiastic. The Gazette-Times of Pittsburgh caustically observed about one of his speeches: “No new arguments were advanced.”102 And a frequent guest at suffragist meetings sent Max a bluntly worded note in which she took him to task for speaking a lot without saying much. Paula Jakobi, a member of the Heterodoxy Club, a loose association of New York women with radical views, found Max unconvincing: “Always when you rose I had hopes—always I was disappointed. You looked strong, young, self-confident, thoughtful, and you would begin and ramble on in an amiable,
nonchalante way but you had no message—your words meant nothing.” Did he think the public was so easily fooled? “Give it your best and it would respond to the echo.”103
To his credit, Max never pretended he had original insights to share. He firmly believed that saying them at all was what mattered more than what he said. In a 1911 essay for the North American Review he gave a kind of summary of the ideas he had been discussing and would continue to discuss on the lecture trail: that it was high time to end a political system that turns women into stuck-up saints, even though they have long entered the workforce, and that the need for reform had been known to humankind since Plato, who had criticized the legislator bent on making the male sex happy when he had the capacity of “making the whole state happy.” Giving women the right to vote was nothing one could or even should have to argue for; the need for such a measure was as self-evident as the fact that women were mothers and men were not. We must not only give the ballot to those women who want it but also get those involved who do not yet know enough to want it.104
In his speeches Max made such self-evidence his main theme, turning the fact that he had nothing new to say into a kind of performance art, switching between a self-conscious display of boredom with the issues (do I really have to go on?) and a highly effective form of sarcasm. Sure, he didn’t have anything new to say, he conceded. But then the old problems persisted. Take the woman who had invented the detachable shirt collar, “that well known device for saving a man the trouble of changing his shirt.” While men had “gobbled up” this woman’s invention “and saved themselves no end of bother and effort to keep clean, for over fifty years,” they wouldn’t dream of allowing a woman to wear one. Women invent things for men, who, instead of being grateful to them, don’t do anything for them in return: “They won’t even give her political liberty in recognition of the invention, although she stands ready to make all sorts of other changes equally important to the progress of civilization.” Thundered Max, “That’s the only original idea on woman suffrage I’ve heard since I came into the business.” No need, really, to go over the other 2,780 reasons in favor of woman suffrage.105
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