The story of Max Eastman’s wayward life—the story of a shy academic becoming the death-defying champion of a cause, of a son of two ministers turning into a shameless pagan, of an apolitical country-boy poet growing up to be hailed as “the founding father of the twentieth-century American left”—this story begins on a summer day in 1912, when the mail arrives.1
Eastman opens an envelope and inside finds a torn sheet of drawing paper. It reads, in its entirety: “You are elected editor of The Masses. No pay.”
What could it mean?
Max is familiar with the magazine. A socialist is bound to be, even if you want to avoid it, which he would have been happy to do. The Masses is a year-old monthly magazine edited by Piet Vlag, a long-nosed, dark-eyed Dutchman who worked in the cafeteria of the Rand School. One brief look into its pages is enough to see leaden editorials, pages crammed with text, and stagy illustrations of manly hands gripping blazing torches. Walter Lippmann’s paean to Schenectady’s budget, published a few months earlier, had been on the racy end of its spectrum.
Max can’t understand why the dozen signatories to the note would offer him a subscription, let alone make him editor.
Is it a mistake? A joke?
Max’s eye drifts to one signatory in particular: Art Young. The roly-poly artist is one of the foremost political cartoonists in America and a fervent socialist, though neither trait is evident to people who meet him. (Young favors slouchy suspenders and a laconic drawl. “Nothing is funnier than a man who is boiling mad. Especially a fat man,” he would explain in his memoir. “Perhaps that is one reason why I usually hold my anger in leash.”)2
The previous winter, Eastman met Young at a banquet honoring the visiting socialist dignitary Jack London. Max told Young he wanted to serve the socialist cause. That’s why he’d quit his job teaching alongside John Dewey in the Columbia philosophy department. He was paying his bills by making speeches, but he found the work demeaning—especially since the success of his cool, understated presentations on behalf of woman suffrage was leading to offers to speak about subjects farther afield. The closer he got to being a mere entertainer, the queasier he felt.
The simplest explanation for the letter is that Young misunderstood what Eastman said that night. Max wants to help socialism, but he needs to make a living. He can’t take a job that doesn’t pay. And anyway, an editing job doesn’t suit his introvert’s temperament. The job would wreak havoc on his life.
Although, now that he thinks about it (standing there, peculiar letter in hand), what is his life? Something needs to change—and badly. Maybe havoc is the answer.
That summer, Max and his wife, Ida Rauh, have traded their apartment in Greenwich Village for a summer sublet in Waterford, Connecticut. She is pregnant with their first baby, which was reason enough to flee the city heat. The quiet means less to Ida, who likes noise and bustle and people, than to Max, who doesn’t. He had hoped the solace would help him finish a book that would modernize—and, who knows, revolutionize?—the enjoyment of poetry. He calls it The Enjoyment of Poetry.
But he is trying to write about enjoyment without feeling any joy. His marriage had been a mistake, he has come to feel. Ida is brilliant and idealistic: Like Max’s sister, Crystal, she is one of the first female lawyers in New York. In fact, he has Ida to thank for converting him from somebody who mocked socialism to a fervent believer. Still there is a deep part of his soul that she can’t reach. It is rooted in western New York, where he grew up, not the city, where they live. It doesn’t kindle to the social causes that Ida and many of their friends work for. It wants to write poems. It wants to play.
Could The Masses be the change that he needs?
No. Clearly, no.
Eastman decides that he will look up Art Young and decline the magazine’s offer when he gets back to the city. That is due to happen in early September, when Ida will give birth, and Max will become a father. He doesn’t feel too joyous about that, either.
“Come up and meet the bunch anyway,” says Art Young a few weeks later, when Max returns to New York.
Now a man who was settled in his convictions, or even had a grown-up willingness to hurt somebody’s feelings, would have held firm. He would have insisted that his “no” was final, and that there was no need to attend a Masses meeting, for there was nothing left to discuss.
Max Eastman is not that man. His motto is Anything to avoid a harsh scene.3
And so one night in mid-September—shortly after the birth of his son, Daniel, toward whom he feels pretty warmly, actually, warmer than he expected to—Eastman finds himself climbing flights of stairs to the studio of Charles A. Winter, the art editor of The Masses, and Alice Beach Winter, his wife.
Eastman looks around at the bunch; the bunch blinks back. Then they start to talk. And what they say surprises him.
How have such fascinating people produced such a dull magazine? Here are men and women of formidable achievements—in painting, in poetry, in criticism—who range freely over social, political, and artistic questions, not just dreary cooperative socialism. In their talk around the Winters’ big table, in the easy connections they draw between this and that protest against the old ways of doing things, he detects a new spirit: “a sense of universal revolt and regeneration, of the just-before-dawn of a new day in American art and literature and living-of-life as well as in politics.”4
He likes them. And after a season of feeling starved for affection, he likes that they like him.
Something is spread across the table that Eastman has never seen before: the guts of a magazine. Here are long columns of text, bits of headlines, and graphics of different shapes and sizes. Charles Winter thought that Eastman might like to see the process by which drawings and stories and poems are arranged on a page of the magazine.
Max is fascinated. He has never heard of this. “Pasting up the dummy,” Winter calls it.
He suggests Max give it a try.
Within moments, Eastman is enthralled; within minutes, he is obsessed. The process, he discovers, combines two joys: “the infantine delight of cutting out paper dolls or keeping a scrapbook with the adult satisfaction of fooling yourself into thinking you are molding public opinion.”5 He discovers that he is a genius at pasting up dummies.
The savvy radicals must exchange delighted glances as their gangly, fair-haired, twenty-nine-year-old visitor plays with the scissors and paste pot: He had walked into a trap. What he didn’t know when he opened that letter, and might have not realized until that night, is that The Masses was effectively dead.
After a year of publication, The Messes (as Vlag had called it in his thick Dutch accent) had worn out the patience of the life insurance executive footing the bill. Vlag patched up a merger between the magazine and a women’s socialist publication in Chicago without asking his contributors’ opinions, then moved to Florida. Art Young and the other artists had wanted to continue without Vlag. To do so, they would need an organizer: someone to handle the dirty work, the drudgery, the grown-up stuff. That, it turns out, is why Young had proposed Eastman for editor—not because Max showed any particular socialist promise. Young had read to the group an article Max wrote about organizing the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage. In a funny, self-deprecating way, Eastman explained how he rounded up socially prominent men by assuring them they wouldn’t have to do anything. The organization’s sole function was to exist.6
A thriving radical organization in which most of the work is done by one man: That sounded right to the artists of The Masses.
It will all be cooperative, the bunch assure him that night in the Winters’ studio. Everybody will pitch in.
Eastman must know that it isn’t true. All his frustrations about finding the right balance between political agitation and poetic expression will multiply. His life needs to change, but editing a failing socialist magazine isn’t the way to do it. He would be a fool or a masochist to agree.
His first issue of The Masses appears two months later. It is an “experimental” number, he explains to readers: a demonstration to potential supporters of what the magazine could become. In an editor’s note, he explains the company’s financial plight and frankly asks for loans.
To make sure those readers feel maximum inspiration to give, Eastman tries to dazzle them with a magazine unlike any that have been produced in the radical press in America. He makes it bolder, funnier, more vivid. He puts color on the cover and makes the text less dense. He takes big swings, none bigger than the magazine’s political orientation, which he changes completely.
Earlier in the year, after a decade of continuous growth, the Socialist Party had split. On one side are the yellows: people like Lippmann and the party’s leaders, who concentrate on winning elections and steady reforms. On the other side are the reds, who countenance using violence to combat the violence they suffer at the hands of capitalists. In a letter to The New York Call, his first public utterance as a socialist, Eastman criticizes the moderate leaders of the party who expelled the labor leader Bill Haywood (who is very, very red). But he doesn’t pick a side—he says that both approaches should be allowed to coexist.
That broad-minded approach, a resistance to doctrinal purity, is Eastman’s most distinctive contribution to the magazine. Ida had converted him to socialism by convincing him that Marx’s theory of class struggle wasn’t dreamy utopian thinking, or a creed that demanded unthinking fealty, but a close kin to the hardheaded experimental approach to life he’d learned from John Dewey. (“Ida,” he had exclaimed, “that’s a perfectly wonderful idea!”)7 Eastman’s love of variety extended beyond socialist disputes. “The Masses shall be hospitable to free and spirited expressions of every kind—in fiction, satire, poetry, and essay,” he promises.
In essence, he wants the magazine to reflect the kind of freewheeling radicalism he heard in the Winters’ studio: frank, wide-ranging, unafraid. He declares his eagerness to publish things that a moneymaking magazine beholden to advertisers and middle-class mores wouldn’t touch. To make sure nobody misses the point, he devotes the middle two pages of his experimental issue to an enormous Art Young illustration that depicts the New York press as a whorehouse. A rich man labeled “Big Advertisers” pays an editor to have access to the ladies within: ladies who are really the men working at a newspaper in incongruously slinky dresses.
Eastman’s rejuvenated magazine attracts notice in radical circles, some of it outraged (one friend tells him that Young’s drawing is “vulgar beyond anything I have ever seen in an American magazine”)8 but all of it useful. They need to make a splash to have a chance.
A few weeks after the issue appears, the bunch reconvenes to see how the experiment has gone.
It has not gone well.
Eastman’s plea for support has yielded a puny twenty dollars. Despite agreeing that everybody would hit up their rich friends for money, nobody has raised a dime.
For Eastman, the verdict brings relief: He doesn’t have to agonize over whether to accept the burden, because there is no burden to accept. The Masses looks to be finished.
Except that in 1912, radical circles are compact, and strange collisions occur. Shortly after the dispiriting meeting with the staff, Eastman runs into Inez Milholland: fierce suffragist, radical activist, ex-girlfriend.
She says nice things about his foray into magazine journalism. She hopes he’ll keep it up.
Max confesses that it’s impossible: The money isn’t there.
“Have you tried Mrs. Belmont?” she says.
Max points out that the august lady, an ex-wife of a grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt, is not likely to back a magazine making an explicit case for revolution—not blood-in-the-streets revolution, but workers’ control all the same.
“What of it?” says Inez. “You’re a militant—that’s all that matters.”9
And she’s right. At dinner in Alva Belmont’s palatial home on Madison Avenue, Eastman persuades her that the fight for economic justice is not so different from the militant suffragettes’ fight for the vote in England—the cause that Belmont supports and wants to bring to America. He leaves with a big enough pledge to keep the magazine alive.
Eastman can feel momentum building now. He’s not sure that he likes it. The last time he felt momentum, it carried him into an unhappy marriage.
He wants to be a poet. He doesn’t want to keep raising money. He definitely doesn’t want to spend all his time corralling contributions from writers and artists who receive no money for their work, or turning down work that they volunteer, which feels even worse.
In this gloomy mopey mood one morning, Eastman gets a phone call. A writer wants to submit some stories for his consideration. He insists on doing so in person. Eastman has barely prepared himself when the visitor arrives: a nervous young man who paces and fidgets and does everything he can to avoid making eye contact.
Eastman takes the manuscripts and sends their author away. It’s the last straw: He is going to get out of this nerve-jangling editing racket for good.10
Then he reads the stories.
They are bold and stylish. They confront heavy subjects with a light touch. The best story of the bunch is about a prostitute who is taken on a world tour by a john, only to return home to New York and go back to her old life—an old-fashioned story somehow updated and made radical, without losing human interest. No commercial magazine would touch such a story.11 And so Max grabs paper and a pencil, and scribbles a note to its author.
“Your things are great,” he writes to John Reed.
Eastman tells Reed he’s going to run one of the stories in the next issue, and asks him to write more: “Some of us have got to do a turn every month until the magazine gets going.”12
Eastman has made a lot of claims on behalf of The Masses, especially about its willingness to publish great work that a commercial magazine wouldn’t tolerate, without entirely believing that such work exists. John Reed leads him to consider, with a jolt, that the things he has been saying might actually be true.
As soon as Eastman can manage it, he moves the magazine’s office from Nassau Street, in dreary Lower Manhattan, to Greenwich Village. The magazine’s arrival in 1913 is another milestone for the neighborhood’s burgeoning rebellion. Like the Liberal Club, Polly’s Restaurant, and a dozen little teahouses and bookstores, it creates a meeting point, a beacon.
But The Masses isn’t just in Greenwich Village—it is of, by, and for the Village. Every few weeks, Eastman, Reed, the artists, and the writers get together to decide what should appear in the next issue. Somebody reads a story or poem out loud; everybody shouts what they think of it. It’s not just the people on the masthead. Friends are welcome to show up and shout along.
Walter Lippmann joins one of the early meetings, even though shouting isn’t his style. He has been seeking a form of socialism that’s more effective than the approach that proved so dismaying in Schenectady. The meeting yields no revelations, but it does leave him admiring Eastman’s “beautifully tempered mind.”13
Other guests are less impressed. Hippolyte Havel, irascible anarchist cook at Polly’s Restaurant, joins them one night and can’t believe what he sees.
“Bourgeois!” he screams at them in his thick Czech accent. “Voting! Voting on poetry! Poetry is something from the soul! You can’t vote on poetry!”14
Havel is on the staff of an anarchist magazine, somebody points out. Surely they take votes.
“Yes!” Havel replies. “But we don’t abide by them!”15
In truth, the process is not quite as democratic as it seems: Eastman makes a lot of the decisions on his own after the meetings break up. He exerts himself to make sure that a certain provincialism he detects around the Village—an enthusiasm for revolt that’s too easy, too fashionable—doesn’t distort what he’s trying to do. But the magazine still remains an index of radical causes. It defends the militant suffragettes in England and Margaret Sanger’s crusade to publish information on what she has just labeled “birth control.” It sticks up for striking workers in the face of violent repression. Eastman publishes his wish that the racist night riders who are trying to drive black families out of Georgia will inspire a Toussaint-Louverture figure to rise and lead an armed resistance.16
Given the choice between two positions, the magazine habitually picks the more incendiary one. But it also runs beautiful images simply because they’re beautiful, and jokes because they make the contributors laugh. The cover of one issue is a John Sloan illustration of a sumptuously wealthy couple in an opera house box, above the caption “The Unemployed.” There’s a notably modern tone in the way the magazine talks about itself. An ad for the mundane job of circulation manager says: “A small salary, a large commission, and a BIG CHANCE FOR THE FUTURE are waiting for the right man.”
Some of Eastman’s comrades aren’t happy with this laughing tone. Isn’t there a class war on? Aren’t there ramparts to climb, converts to win?
Max never denies it.
“We could strengthen our propaganda value by toning down our expression of life,” he concedes to one prominent comrade. “But it just isn’t politic propaganda, it is life to which the venture is primarily dedicated. I can’t help it. That is deeper in me than the desire to be useful.”17
Horace Traubel, one of the last of Walt Whitman’s comrades, grasps what many of Eastman and Reed’s contemporaries miss. He understands that The Masses does more than agitate for change: It embodies change. It is a message sent back from the freer world it is trying to create: “a vehement red-paint signal post.”18 To Eastman, Traubel’s note of praise feels like a send-off from Whitman himself.
In spite of their awkward first encounter, Eastman and Reed become friends. They’re a study in fruitful contrasts: Max, running cool, a little shy, devoted (as Art Young puts it) to “truth, polemics, tennis, and swimming”; Jack, running hot, talking loud, playing endless pranks (one day he carries the office safe out to the sidewalk “just to give you boys something to do”—they have to call the fire department to get it back).19 Working together, they create something new.
One day in early 1913, Reed shows Eastman a little something he has written, an attempt to articulate the principles that animate their work. Eastman likes the general idea, but not Reed’s execution. Jack still has no grasp of socialist theory, so he makes a mess of the terminology. Max rewrites it:
This magazine is owned and published cooperatively by its editors. It has no dividends to pay, and nobody is trying to make money out of it. A revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with a sense of humor and no respect for the respectable; frank, arrogant, impertinent, searching for the true causes; a magazine directed against rigidity and dogma wherever it is found; printing what is too naked or true for a moneymaking press; a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers—there is a field for this publication in America.20
Max and Jack’s statement runs at the front of every issue after that. It is a manifesto for their magazine—but also for their neighborhood and their young era.