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Eastman, Max (1883-1969)

Born in New York in 1883 to clergy parents and radicalized in his youth, Max Eastman first became an activist for women's issues and was an early supporter of the Left Opposition.

A prolific writer, Eastman gained a reputation as a 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 his sister, Crystal Eastman, Floyd Dell, John Reed, Sherwood Anderson, Upton Sinclair, Amy Lowell and Louise Bryant. The journal moved further to the left under Eastman and took a strong stand against US involvement in WWI. 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 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. In 1922 he left the U.S. for a two year stay in the Soviet Union.

Eastman also authored several books including, 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), Artists in Uniform (1934) and also translated several of Trotsky's books. 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.

In the 40's he became anti-communist and was a supporter of Joe McCarthy. 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. For some of his works, see the Max Eastman Internet Archive.