But Florence was distracted. Her Vitagraph appearances had caught the eye of Samuel Goldwyn, and though her interview with him and Goldwyn Pictures cofounder Edgar Selwyn did not lead to a contract (the salary was too small), Florence had her mind set on success in Hollywood. She went to see Jaffery again, one of her Vitagraph movies, and was appalled by her performance. Writing to Max, who was by now in Oakston, South Dakota, she sighed, “The picture is very old, and it looked terrible. I looked all right, but my work looked very amateurish. A year certainly makes a difference.”14 Max responded that she shouldn’t think about the film too much: “You know it made a hit.” Movies, literature, war, and workers’ rights seemed forgotten when he missed her, and more than once he thought of canceling the entire tour. From Kansas City he wrote, “I find myself continually playing with the idea of telegraphing Miss Secor that I’m dying, or that I’ve joined the army, or that I can’t find South Dakota, and just flying home to you.”15 This from the same man who had, a few days before, filled an entire opera house in St. Louis, with people standing up and cheering him. “I never saw such an audience.”16
Figure 24. Crowd at one of Max’s speeches, Cleveland, December 1918. Undated postcard, EM.
The strain of the tour, combined with his nervous longing for Florence, finally proved too much for Max, and he began to suffer from insomnia. “I have had a funny time with myself,” he wrote to Florence. Staying with friends a little outside of Kansas City, Max couldn’t settle down, slid into his clothes and out of their house, followed by his hosts’ barking dog. Running to the gate in stockinged feet and then on for another half mile through the prairie grass, he managed to catch the last trolley car to Kansas City, where his hotel room beckoned. When Max called his hosts the next morning they had not realized he was no longer at their house: “They were all still going around on tip-toe congratulating themselves that I had slept so long—they knew I hadn’t been sleeping—and he had climbed a tree in the night to catch a rooster so it wouldn’t wake me up crowing at dawn!” Max feared for his sanity, so much so that he picked a nerve doctor at random from the Kansas City phone book. The doc pronounced him sane and sound, noted his excellent blood pressure, and then went on to perform “a minor operation” on Max’s wallet, sending him away with the observation that “if I would go to bed intending to rest, instead of to sleep I would both rest and sleep, but if I went to bed intending to sleep I would neither.” That night Max slept like a lamb.17
The image of Florence’s body stayed with him as he traveled by car through the “dull, flat, characterless towns” of North Dakota, towns that dulled his consciousness.18 While the people adored him, the authorities cranked up their pressure on him. In Fargo, where Max had gone at the invitation of the antiwar Non-Partisan League of North Dakota, things got downright dangerous. Max was staying at the Gardner, a “Modern European Hotel” offering “Cleanliness, Courtesy, and Comfort,” according to its letterhead. But the hotel’s proprietor apparently felt not too bound by the promises made on his stationery. Max had been banned, by police orders, from every available hall in Fargo, and a military drill had been scheduled for exactly the time he was supposed to speak outdoors and on the very same block. Max was informed that the rifles used during that exercise would in fact be loaded. Casually, the hotel owner mentioned he would hang Max if he decided to speak in front of his hotel instead. Cleanliness, courtesy, and comfort. Max realized that this speech was going to be the most difficult thing he had ever done in his life.19
Max, the minister’s son from Elmira, was afraid. Afraid of what the police might do to him, afraid that Florence, in his absence, was in love with someone else, sick in “heart and body” that no one in the world might care about whether he lived or died.20 Mark Twain, his hero, might have been comfortable among these brash-talking, wisecracking men, but Max was not. He didn’t know that Florence had in fact sent him a supportive letter, in which she told him, among other things, that she thought he was the man the nation needed: “Everybody in other countries is crying for a leader. In America I think you are the leader.”21 However, her letter went to Minneapolis, Max’s next stop, in anticipation of his arrival there.
Stuck in Fargo, Max found himself very much alone when he came, in his own considered opinion, closer to death than he had ever been before. All the “money and power” in Fargo were against him, but, unwilling to simply cancel the Fargo meeting (“I am a man”), he asked two boys in an automobile to drive through the streets of town and to spread the word that he would hold his rally in a building near the outskirts of town. When Max got there, over two hundred people had gathered inside the building, with several hundred more assembled outside. Soon the soldiers had arrived, too. Everybody was waiting to see what would happen next. Max walked to the platform and began to speak when a group of six soldiers burst into the hall, knocking people down. “There was some commotion, and I told them to come down in front, there were seats on the platform. Cold-eyed, coarse, professional fighters—low in the brow, big in the torso—I knew them, I feared them, and I hated them. They were nonplussed a little at my politeness and quietness and their public position. I told them I wanted to go back a few sentences so they could get the thread of my argument.” After Max resumed his lecture, the astonished soldiers listened for a few minutes before they remembered why they had been sent and started yelling. Max asked the audience if they wanted him to continue, and all but a handful rose in a show of support. But it was too late—more soldiers were pouring in, and Max noticed about fifteen of them standing right behind him. They were getting more confident and drawing closer as the noise prevented Max from being heard by anyone. A soldier was turning off the lights when a woman in the audience intervened: “For God’s sake don’t do that, there are women and children here!” Meanwhile, another woman, who had, as Max learned, driven thirty miles to see him because she was such a fan of the Masses, stepped up and began arguing vociferously with the soldiers, hoping to distract them. When the woman who had invited Max motioned for him to follow her to a side exit, Max initially complied, but, seized with an absurd desire not to show his fear in public, he changed his mind and walked out through the crowd instead. Many of them shook his hand and told him how sorry they were and that “they had come a long way to hear me.”
Once safely outside, Max and supporters ran through the dark streets until they had reached the house of Max’s hostess, where she quickly pulled down the shades. Soon the phone rang. The soldiers were on their way! When his hostess asked him “if she hadn’t better take me in the automobile down to the station to take a train,” Max responded quickly, “Yes, you had.” What followed was like a scene from a movie: slipping out of the house and hiding behind a bush till a car had pulled up, clutching a revolver that someone had pressed into his reluctant hand, Max the self-declared antimilitarist, wearing a borrowed hat and raincoat, was whisked out of Fargo. As he was hunkering down in his getaway car, Max was shivering: “It was cold, and my fear was physical now—I was sick, chilly, I wanted to be alone, it was hard to talk naturally, I felt weak, but I loved that six-shooter as I never loved any inanimate thing before!”
Once Max was safely in Minneapolis, the attorney general of North Dakota, William Langer, phoned him to offer his protection. A member of the Non-Partisan League and, as it happened, a former student of Max’s at Columbia (Max had given him a grade of 100 in a logic class), “Wild Bill” would go on to become one of the most colorful figures in North Dakota and national politics. A fervent isolationist, he kept his antiwar stance during his two full terms as governor of the state and in the U.S. Senate. But his assurances were not enough to entice Max back, especially after the woman who had so courageously intervened by arguing with the soldiers that were about to seize him and had thus probably saved his life, told him she had seen the soldiers camped outside his hotel, promising themselves a “necktie party” when Max arrived.
Max ended his account of the incident with a textbook regres
sive fantasy. He had done all that to prove he was a man, but he really wasn’t. In truth, he was back to where he began. “I am baby and I yearn for your breast,” he informed Florence. “Oh my beautiful and my beloved I want to lie down in your arms.” If ever in his life Max was entitled to such a dream, it was after that nearly lethal summer night in Fargo.22
Upon his return to New York Max threw himself back into his relationship with Florence. It was then he composed one of the most vivid tributes to her, “Sweet Lovely Night”:
Sweet lovely night, O bring me to my love,
To drink the liquor of her shining eyes,
And catch her colored laughter with my lips,
To kiss her arms, and cling to her warm breasts
Erect and rosey-pointed up to meet
My cupping hand, to feel the intimate,
The self-touch in another’s passioned flesh,
And run my pure bold fingers lightly on,
And through the coarse sweet hairs & lips, until
Hot inward flesh cries out against their tips,
And in her thighs as in a nest
Of Eagerness, and all along her body
Live and leaping, I lie close and cling,
And plunge my throbbing to the hilt, and take
Her happy panting passion through my blood,
And in the pulse and color of her being,
Noble, tender, all trusted in,
Pour out my being to the utter last
That my flesh faints and falls upon her flesh,
With lovely and enamoured death,
And our sweet spirits mingle,
And we are one at last.23
As explicit a description of a shared sexual climax as one is likely to encounter in a text that can still pass for poetry, Max’s unpublished poem tells us much about him, though little about Florence. Perhaps unusually so for a love poem, she appears only in the third person, as “she” and “her,” the willing recipient of the pleasure the speaker is able to give her, which will then again translate into pleasure for him (“my flesh faints”). Living, leaping, throbbing, and dissolving, Max, above all, discovers himself (fig. 25).
But Max didn’t have much time to savor his reunion with Florence. For one thing, he had seriously underestimated the postmaster general of New York, who wanted the Masses to be not just censored but terminated. The successful suppression of the August issue allowed Burleson to argue that the Masses was no longer a true periodical, a strategy that finally had the desired effect. In November 1917 the Second Court of Appeals overturned Learned Hand’s earlier decision. The loss of second-class mailing privileges meant that Max’s magazine would have to cease publication. Max was without a job. The irony was that the very moment the court killed his magazine Max received news of the successful revolution in Russia. Closer to home, Morris Hillquit, a founder of the Socialist Party of America and a prominent labor lawyer in New York City’s Lower East Side, shocked the New York establishment by garnering an unprecedented 22 percent of the vote in the mayoral elections. “O you don’t know how happy I am about that,” wrote Max, “almost more than if Hillquit had won.”24 In the same election, with over 6,300 women serving as poll watchers, New York voters passed woman suffrage by a majority of 102,353 votes. Commented Florence, “It is very good for a beginning. I guess the pickets in Washington must be very happy. I think the victory is due to them. They put Suffrage back on the map after a long silence.”25
Figure 25. Max Eastman, ca. 1918. Photograph by Marjorie Jones. EMIIA1.
But none of this could save Max. Only a few days after the decision of the appeals court he and several of his contributors, including Josephine Bell, Dell, Glintenkamp, Reed, and Young as well as the magazine’s business editor, Merrill Rogers, were officially indicted for seeking to “unlawfully and willfully obstruct the recruiting and enlistment service of the United States.” The charges carried possible sentences of up to twenty years and a fine of $10,000. The trial opened on April 15, 1918, with Hillquit in charge of the defense. “You look so worried dearest,” wrote Florence. “My heart aches for you. Please forgive me but the trial is a strain to me also and I miss you so much.”26 Two months earlier, on February 12, Lincoln’s birthday, Crystal and Max had jointly launched their new magazine, the Liberator, named after William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery publication. With Lincoln and Garrison hovering behind him, Max announced a change in his views of the war, although the reason he gave seemed hardly suitable to sway a jury in his favor. The Liberator was endorsing America’s “war aims,” declared Max in his first editorial, insofar as they had been “outlined by the Russian people and expounded by President Wilson,” in that order. The goal was not war but peace, “a peace without forcible annexations, without punitive indemnities, with free development and self-determination for all peoples”—read: the Bolsheviks, as Max’s enemies would have immediately added.27
The trial, which took place on the third floor of the old Post Office building, was a farce. Presiding over United States v. Eastman et al. was August Hand, Learned’s older and “less genial” brother. A marching band performing outside the window forced the assembled group, including the defendants and therefore also a reluctant Max, to rise to their feet whenever the “Star-Spangled Banner” was intoned. Was he not patriotic?, Prosecutor Earl Barnes wanted to know once proceedings were under way, prompting Max to remind him that he had risen for the anthem and to mumble a declaration of respect for the boys “dying for liberty.”28 Art Young fell asleep during the proceedings, a clear violation of courtroom etiquette, and, when roused, drew a portrait of himself resting comfortably on his chair with his eyes closed. “Art Young on Trial for His Life,” as he called the little sketch, was perhaps the sanest commentary on what was happening around him.29 Dell, however, who had already been drafted and emphasized that by profession he was a soldier, embraced his chance to testify so that he could rail against militarism and “related subjects.” He seemed ecstatic to have a captive audience, twelve men who had “to sit there and listen to me.” And Hillquit, arguing for the defense, pointed out that constitutional rights were not a gift but a hard-won accomplishment of the American nation and therefore could not and should not be taken lightly away.30
But in the end it seems that none of that mattered all that much. Max noticed that one juror, a square-shouldered young man from the Bronx, seemed to have made his mind up from the beginning and apparently went on to convince two others to adopt his point of view. Max dashed off a complimentary sonnet to that twelfth juror, a factory manager from the Bronx. There was no “heat of conscience” in him and no “pious care / For points in virtue to be lost or won.” He was, in other words, like Max, skeptical of all that jingoistic rhetoric used to justify the American war effort: “I felt that to be with you would be fun.” With three jurors voting to acquit, the government’s case collapsed.31
A second trial in the fall of 1918 ended anticlimactically as well. Prosecutor Barnes had chosen to dedicate his final words to a friend who had died on the battlefields abroad, a powerful tribute: “Somewhere in France he lies dead, and he died for you and he died for me. He died for Max Eastman. He died for John Reed. He died for Floyd Dell. . . . His voice is but one of the thousand silent voices that demand that these men be punished.” Whereupon Art Young, who had been napping once again, awoke and whispered, “Didn’t he die for me, too?” The courtroom exploded with laughter. Reed, freshly returned from Moscow, assured him, “Cheer up, Art, Jesus died for you.”32
Jesus played an unexpected role at that second trial. He showed up, too, in Max’s speech to the jury, a memorable performance. It was published, all forty-four pages of it, by the Liberator as a separate pamphlet, and rightly so: Max’s defense of socialism as a position that demanded respect even from those who didn’t share its goals was a masterpiece of political rhetoric as well as of courtroom diplomacy. Socialism was, said Max, “either the most beautiful and courageous mistake that hundreds of million
s of mankind ever made, or else it is really the truth that will lead us out of misery, anxiety, and poverty, and war, and strife and hatred between classes, into a free and happy world. In either case it deserves your respect.” What a clever idea to give the members of the jury a choice between socialism as a “beautiful mistake” or as the embodiment of a life-saving truth! Max also invoked Samuel and Annis Eastman. His parents had taught him, he said, to admire the man from Nazareth, whose faith and influence were much closer to the message of Socialism than to the message of “any other political body of men.” And once again, this time with only four jurors voting for conviction and eight against, the jury was unable to reach a verdict.33
Perhaps because he had been so preoccupied during the year, Max felt that Florence had become more distant, too: “You used to love my gentleness and aspire to it a little, as I love and aspire to your impetuous strength. You used to be moved when I showed you my ideals, as I am moved by yours, and we grew together.” She seemed to resent him, and Max feared she was pushing him out “on the edge of her world.”34 But he himself had contributed to that process with a small volume of poetry, Colors of Life, published by Alfred Knopf in October 1918. His poems were dedicated to her, although, perhaps out of respect for her public status, he had refrained from mentioning her by name: “To One Who Loves Them / And Whose Beauty Crowned Their Dreams.”
Colors of Life paints a rather complex picture of Max’s relationship with Florence. In “To an Actress,” the poem that supplies the collection’s title, Max celebrates Florence as a life-giving force—though not without also imagining the eyes of desiring men that rest on her approvingly. Somewhere in the back of Max’s mind was the biblical Susannah from the book of Daniel, chapter 13. But his Susannah is a demonic force, fully conscious of her power over the wilting, panting elders who spy on her: “You walk as vivid as a sunny storm / Across the drinking meadows, through the eyes / Of stricken men.” In the sonnet titled “Those You Dined With” Max contrasts the view of Florence’s suitors, those who want to see her as a kind of pagan queen, a gemlike Cleopatra surrounded by glittering gold, “the mistress of a pale king,” with his own favorite image of her as a gypsy, “free / As windy morning in the sunny air,” a carefree spirit driven only by her natural impulses. The deeper levels of Florence’s being, the poem suggests, are known only to Max.
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