Max Eastman

by Christoph Irmscher

  Max’s sense of his masculinity was far from robust, as these dreams confirm. They also hint that the Reverend Samuel Eastman, a diffident father at best, had something to do with that. His cousin Adra would later tell him how she constantly had to fend off the elder Eastman’s advances when he was staying with her, an indication of how painfully repressed Sam himself was. While Max might not have been aware of Adra’s predicament, his father’s demons were well familiar to him even when he was young, and lest the same fate befall him, he actively transformed himself into one of the most famously or, depending on one’s point of view, notoriously unrepressed lovers of the American Left.70 And that indeed was the self-image Max felt most comfortable with when he reached the end of his self-analysis. “Unsublimated heterosexual lust,” not worry about his masculinity, was responsible for all his troubles, he noted with relief. All his problems came from his unfulfilled wish to make love to someone not his wife.71

  In the summer of 1915 Max, Ida, and Dan made their way to Provincetown, where Max spent much time strolling around the wharfs while Ida threw herself into a new project, the Provincetown Players, which she cofounded. As a member of the Washington Square Players, she had theater experience; as an activist, she was a master improviser. The casual atmosphere in Provincetown was ideal for what she had in mind: “There were no actors and nobody in show business around. There were just painters and sculptors and writers and a few intelligent people who liked theater and thought it was in an awful mess, and there was nothing they wanted to go see. Well, we thought it would be nice to have a theater of our own and to put on our own plays.”72 The radical journalists Hutchins Hapgood and Jack Reed were there, as were the playwright George Cram Cook and his wife, Susan Glaspell, and Eugene O’Neill, Just the group of people to start a new chapter in the history of American theater. Max’s colleague from the Masses Mary Heaton Vorse owned a wharf in Provincetown, with a fish house at the end, not more than an old shack, but it seemed good enough to serve as a theater. In the absence of seats or benches, people brought cushions and sat on the floor. Two movable doors behind the ten-by-twelve-foot stage could be rolled back to reveal the ultimate stage set, the ocean itself. The Provincetown Players were born. After a second season in Provincetown, in the summer of 1916, a charter was written, and Ida’s group moved the whole enterprise to MacDougal Street in New York.

  Max wasn’t involved. Or so he said in his autobiography. The truth is he participated in both plays performed during the first season at Lewis Wharf, Cook’s Change Your Style and Wilbur Daniel Steele’s Contemporaries. The former was a play about the dilemma of a young student in art school, bankrolled by his wealthy father, who, instead of working with the respectable artist his family has picked for him, an adherent of the academic style of painting, decides to study with his revolutionary, post-Impressionist colleague. The rebellious art student was played by the painter Charles Demuth and the reactionary art professor, in a bit of delicious irony, by Max, whose traditional aesthetic preferences would not have escaped notice even in 1915. Ida played a wealthy art patroness who changes her mind about purchasing the young student’s first and rather abstract work. In Contemporaries, a more overtly political play about an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) organizer’s protest on behalf of the homeless, Max performed the part of the crotchety landlord.73

  Max did not like Provincetown. “A summer town where all the folks are old,” he called it in an unpublished poem, “The fishers old with labor, and the rest / With life, or art or some exotic thing.” He felt “lonely-hearted” there. Even the seagulls appeared to pick up on his misery: “The gulls cry sadly / As their shadows drift across the sand.”74 Max had his mind set on a more congenial place. In the autumn of 1915 he acquired a small, yellow clapboard house at 70 Mount Airy Road in Croton-on-Hudson, a picturesque village about forty miles north of Manhattan. A former cider mill, the house was the second oldest in the village. The purchase price came to $1,500, but Max could manage the minimal down payment of $20 that was required. He had maintained a special attachment to Croton ever since, during his first months in New York, he had taken a “slim, strong-bodied, brown-skinned” nurse named Nancy there and unsuccessfully tried to kiss her.75 Now he had come back as a resident.

  Max’s house is still there today, close to the top of a hill, accessible by a steep, narrow, leafy road that must have been pretty precarious to navigate in those days, especially in Max’s temperamental Ford. The house had four small rooms and a roofless porch, and it came with a barn (now gone), part of which Max converted into a study. While he planted some Japanese iris from his mother’s garden in Glenora, Max left the property largely to its own devices.76 Inevitably, the entire neighborhood has undergone a facelift since the days when Mount Airy Road was, according to fellow socialist Joseph Freeman, nothing more than a stretch of “brown, hilly earth.”77 But visitors still get the feeling that the outside world didn’t matter much, as if New York weren’t just a half-hour train ride away. And the two-mile walk from the Harmon train station is as daunting today as it was then.

  Croton and the surrounding areas had been popular for a while with artists seeking respite from the noisy environment of the city, and Max quickly understood why. The presence of other writers promised inspiration, while the remoteness of the place guaranteed privacy. For more than two decades Max’s little house on the hill would serve as his writing retreat, love nest, and general refuge (at least until government agents began to show up there as well). It also kept him connected with the kinds of places he had loved so much when he was a child. Mount Airy was Max’s Glenora, offering all the pleasures of a rural existence but without the demands that came with living on a farm. No one in Croton did any gardening. Tangled bushes, tall grass, and weeds long gone out of control gave the community a delightfully neglected look: a kind of communist pastoral, a workers’ paradise without any workers. At the top of Max’s hill there was a meadow with grass so high that the British painter Clare Sheridan, who had come for a visit in May 1921, felt like an insect when she lay down in it, “with the buttercups so much higher than ourselves, and the tall seed grasses like slender trees above our heads.”78 Reinvigorated by the experience of Croton, Max’s poetry brimmed with celebrations of thistles, clover, butterflies, and birds, tokens of his pagan delight in nature, an antidote to the post-Puritan sense of propriety and the institutionalized religion that had dominated his childhood and was still wreaking havoc on his marriage. He took great pride in the tennis court he installed in his backyard, which became the unofficial center of an expanding radical community.

  Max had by now become a celebrity, a socialist with a country home. It was in this capacity that he was featured in the December 1916 issue of Countryside magazine in a segment titled “The Country of Some Interesting People” (fig. 18). A portrait by Paul Thompson, who would acquire some fame as a World War I photographer, showed Max by the fireside in his country home, reading an issue of what might be his own magazine, the Masses, wearing impressive boots with rustically scuffed tips. Behind Max is a bookshelf, on the floor some carelessly strewn correspondence. His dark shirt goes nicely with his salt-and-pepper hair, giving him an air both of youthful, iconoclastic energy and genteel wisdom. The caption accurately summarized the conflicts in the personality of that country-loving drawing-room radical. “Max Eastman belonged to the most exclusive fraternity at Columbia, but is editor of ‘The Masses’ and one of the hottest radicals today.” The Countryside folks reprinted Max’s poem “The City,” a kind of post-Baudelairean fantasy in which the speaker moves through alien city streets, past blue faces and piercing whispers, realizing his solitude, for the country is where he really belongs. Max’s Greenwich Village buddies, had they bothered to read the magazine, would have been mightily surprised to see him relaxing in a wicker chair, looking like a self-satisfied country squire. There was no mention of Max’s family.

  Figure 18. Max Eastman in Croton, 1916. Photograph by Paul Thompson.
From “The Country of Some Interesting People,” Countryside (December 1916).

  As the United States was lumbering toward participation in a war no one wanted, Woodrow Wilson’s wavering attitude to the war in Europe confused and annoyed Max. As a member of a delegation of the American Union Against Militarism led by Crystal, Max got a chance to speak with Wilson at the White House, an experience on which he reflected in an essay for the July 1916 issue of the Masses. He had known Wilson since 1912, when he met him at a banquet organized by the New York Chamber of Commerce in Syracuse and came to appreciate his verbal dexterity. At the time, they discussed women’s suffrage, and Max prided himself on having persuaded the president that this was a worthy cause. Now, even more was at stake. But Max came back from his White House meeting with the disconcerting feeling that he had been “beautifully handled.” He was still convinced that Wilson personally did not want war. But, as if to prove he wasn’t in the president’s pocket, he took Wilson to task for neglecting the working class, the skeleton in America’s closet. It had to be said that Wilson was in cahoots with the capitalists: “Some day this skeleton will walk. It is not dead or decayed. More offensive than that—it is true.” This was the new Max, a master of the clipped, declarative sentence, the folksy but effective metaphor.79

  When Wilson ran in the November 1916 elections as the “Peace President,” Max supported him. Along with Randolph Bourne, Paul Kellogg, Amos Pinchot, and others, Max established a small Emergency Office (later renamed Committee for Democratic Control) at 70 Fifth Avenue, whose main purpose was to agitate, in New York and elsewhere, against the possibility of the United States being dragged into the European war. Max and his fellow activists took out newspaper advertisements, printed handbills, and gave lectures. Petition your president, they urged, wire him if necessary but make sure he keeps his promise of neutrality. An advertisement they published in the New York Times on February 2, 1917, struck a conciliatory tone: “We recognize the perplexity of the problem before you,” wrote the signers. “The men and women who elected you will back you in the most extreme measures for keeping this country clear of any ignominious eleventh-hour participation in a struggle for mastery which is not their own.”80 On April 1, 1917, Max addressed a crowd in Detroit: “You cannot,” he explained, “destroy German militarism by making war on Germany.”81 But it was all in vain. A few days after Max’s speech, responding to Wilson’s demand for a “war to end all wars,” a war that would make the world safe for democracy, Congress voted to declare war on Germany on April 6, 1917. Had Wilson just been stalling for time?

  Max’s magazine responded swiftly. Wilson’s war wasn’t our war, declared Reed, and Max wrote an editorial encouraging people to refuse to be drafted: “For my part I do not recognize the right of a government to draft me to a war whose purposes I do not believe in.” Wilson’s government had added another turn of the screw by not even communicating the purposes of the war they wanted—“an act of tyranny,” said Max, “discordant with the memory even of the decent kings.”82

  Appropriately, the artist Henry Glintenkamp’s cartoon on the topic, published in Max’s August 1917 issue, had a Goyaesque intensity that underscored this devastating assessment (fig. 19). It showed the allegorical figures of Youth, Labor, and Democracy chained to a war cannon, with a wailing mother, her dead child on the ground, sunk to her knees on the barren ground. Some readers might have remembered that the wheel was a notorious medieval torture device. But the figures in the cartoon are beyond the reach of torture: their suffering is over. Youth, Labor, and Democracy are dead. Conscription is not a beginning, but an end.

  Figure 19. H. J. Glintenkamp, “Conscription,” The Masses (August 1917). Courtesy of The Modernist Journal Project, Brown and Tulsa Universities.

  Max received his notice to appear for a physical examination in mid-October 1918. At thirty-five, he was well within the age bracket of the third registration held on September 12. He immediately dashed off a note to the War Department’s local board in which he apprised them of his state of mind: “I do not believe in international wars, and I do not recognize the right of the government to conscript the bodies of its citizens for service upon foreign soil.” Well aware that the conscription law did not allow any exceptions, Max said his motive in sending the card had been merely to keep his record clear and to reiterate his principles, which were “more sacred and of more value to the country than any religious scruple, or any membership in any antimilitary sect, could possibly be.” He was not expecting a deferment, and indeed he didn’t get one. But surely everyone involved realized that drafting Max Eastman would have been a very bad idea.83

  Meanwhile, at the Masses Max had his own internal war to deal with. Resenting his firm editorial hand, the artists among the editors, led by John Sloan, lamented that the magazine had now developed a “policy,” a development at odds with the spirit of its founders. They demanded that the position of editor and managing editor be abolished and that decisions on pictures and text be made by separate committees. Max recognized that this initiative was directed against him personally. He went on the offensive and reasserted his editorial privilege to make the final decisions. Max’s view was that the cooperative principle had outlived its usefulness. In a note read at an informal meeting of the editors and stockholders on March 23, 1916, he explained that the editing of a magazine such as the Masses was too complex to be done in meetings, especially if the contributors didn’t show up. Max emphasized that, since he was doing all the fund-raising, he was “the boss” of the magazine. If they wouldn’t let him edit, then he would leave.84

  Impressed by Max’s threat to resign, the artists in attendance offered a compromise, namely, that “their plan should apply only to the pictures and that the literary side of the magazine and the conduct of the business should continue as before.” But Max wasn’t having any of it: “I said that the reasons which induced me to despair of the cooperative plan applied equally to the pictures and text.” A vote taken on Sloan’s elimination proposal ended inconclusively; Art Young joined Max’s camp.85 At the annual meeting of all the stockholders on April 6, a motion proposed by Max’s camp, to drop the rebels from the list of editors, failed. But Sloan’s original elimination plan was also voted down, certainly with the help of a clever marshaling of proxy votes from absentee stockholders. A majority reelected Max as both editor and president of the Masses Publishing Company and, in a surprise move, added Sloan as vice president.86

  Clearly, there was trouble in the socialist paradise. The press loved it. When a reporter for the New York World showed up at Max’s Washington Square apartment, he was greeted not by Max the power wielder but by Max the languid, “seen-it-all” poet, clad, as the paper reported the next day in a classic example of bad journalistic prose, “in pajamas, a raincoat and an ample yawn.” Nothing had happened, really. “It was our semi-annual scrap. We live on scraps. Twenty fellows can’t get together to paste up a magazine without scrapping about it.” The same reporter subsequently went to Sloan’s apartment in Washington Place, where he had a very different experience. Sloan welcomed him “wearing a vivid green flannel shirt and an even vivider scarlet necktie.” And he was angry about what had happened: “It just proves that real democracy doesn’t work—yet.” He added ominously, “I don’t think you’ll see my name in the Masses for a long time.” Barely an hour later Sloan called in his resignation letter, reading it to the New York World before Max had even seen it: “Dear Max, ‘If thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.’ This afternoon I played the part of one of the five fingers”—Sloan was referring to the other artists who had rebelled against Max—“in the above-suggested tragedy, and foolishly resisted amputation. Now, alone at night, I have decided to submit to the operation.” Three of the other fingers, the artists Stuart Davis, Glenn Coleman, and Maurice Becker, followed Sloan’s example and left, as did the writer Bob Brown. Glintenkamp stayed on. Max had won.87

  The postrebellion Masses had become, as Floyd Dell o
bserved, a “practical dictatorship,” an ungenerous statement since Dell, as Max’s “faithful lieutenant,” was at the very least one of the facilitators of Max’s empire.88 But, as Max saw it, he had dealt a deathblow to the kind of self-indulgent bohemianism that he believed all serious socialists should oppose. “Personal revolt,” as manifested in Sloan’s self-pitying resignation letter, had to yield to the scientific discipline the revolution demanded. The artists were hoping to use the Masses for artistic self-expression, whereas Max, as editor, wanted to see its pages devoted to the hard work of political analysis.89

  However, as Max’s appearance before the New York World reporter suggested, behind the mask of Max the hard-nosed political analyst and merciless ruler of the paste-up room, the old, poetic, pajama-clad Max had lingered on. A mock-up parody of an issue of the Masses found among Max’s papers pokes fun at the purpose-driven political writing that seemed to have taken over his life (fig. 20). Max’s parodistic cover showed, under the title “Knowledge and Revolution,” one of his columns in the Masses, a languid, tousled-haired poet, tall like Max himself, lying on the bank of a river, writing in a notebook, one impossibly long leg draped casually over the fork of a tree, the other one dangling into the water below, where the fish from Max’s poem “At the Aquarium,” “stern-lipped, and pale, and wonder-eyed,” seem to be nipping at the poet’s naked foot. This cartoon was more about knowledge than revolution, more about rest than action. On his right foot the poet is wearing a slipper.

  Figure 20. Max Eastman, mock-up for The Masses. Undated. EMIIA1.