Max Eastman meets Charlie Chaplin in Hollywood in 1919
Both were lovers of actress Florence Deshon
Max Eastman, influential radical activist, was born 140 years ago today.
A poet, a prose writer on literature, philosophy and society and a prominent political activist, Eastman moved to New York City for graduate school. There, he became involved with liberal and radical circles in Greenwich Village.
Eastman supported socialism and became a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance, and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes. For several years, he edited The Masses. With his sister, Crystal Eastman, in 1917, he co-founded The Liberator, a radical magazine of politics and the arts.
In later life, however, Eastman changed his views, becoming highly critical of socialism and communism after his experiences during a nearly two-year stay in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, as well as later studies.
He was influenced by the deadly rivalry between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, by which Trotsky was assassinated, as well as the wholesale abuses of the 1930s show trials under Stalin, who conducted widespread terror against his citizens, repression and purges that resulted in the imprisonment and deaths of millions of people in the Soviet Union.
Eastman became an advocate of free-market economics and anti-communism, while remaining an atheist and independent thinker. In 1955, he published Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. He published more frequently in The National Review and other conservative journals in later life, but always remained independent in his thinking.
For instance, he publicly opposed United States involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, earlier than most. He also wrote two volumes of memoirs, as well as two volumes of recollections of his friendships and personal encounters with many of the leading figures of his time.
These included Pablo Casals, Charlie Chaplin, Eugene Debs, John Dewey, Isadora Duncan, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, H. L. Mencken, John Reed, Paul Robeson, Bertrand Russell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, George Santayana, E. W. Scripps, George Bernard Shaw, Carlo Tresca, Leon Trotsky, Mark Twain and H. G. Wells.
Eastman's last memoir was Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epic (1964). In 1969, he died at his summer home in Bridgetown, Barbados, at the age of 86.
Edward Herrmann portrayed Eastman in the film, Reds (1981), directed by and starring Warren Beatty, which was based on the life of John Reed.