Max Eastman, Gangster of the Pen

W e live in a supposed Age of Tolerance, when we encounter more options for hair colors than a Crayola box contains and choices in genders unimagined just a few years ago. Our binary politics, however, tolerates little beyond prescribed, one-size-fits-all views for each side. Republicans illustrated our age’s paradoxical political intolerance in several primary campaigns this past week, including one in which the president endorsed a challenger in part because the sitting senator proved “very late in backing me” in his January 2024 endorsement. Progressives, who excommunicated Bari Weiss, Joe Rogan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Elon Musk, and others over small deviations — alas, no deviation is small in the Age of Tolerance — perhaps imparted lessons to the president on how to impart conformity.

One perhaps expects a measure of top-down discipline from a political party. But when ideologues encroach upon arts and letters, they inevitably lose either the artists and writers or the writers and artists lose their art.

Max Eastman experienced the smothering dogmatism of ideology a century ago. He led a fascinating life: an atheist son of ordained ministers, publisher of communist John Reed and libertarian Friedrich Hayek, Ernest Hemingway’s brawling partner in his fifties, and in his eighties, he struck a teenage Carly Simon as the most beautiful man she’d ever seen when she spotted him at a party. During the early 1920s, Eastman moved from Greenwich Village to Moscow only to discover that he much preferred the former to the latter. Upon his return, he encountered the Bohemians of the freewheeling, literary left of the 1910s reborn as Bolsheviks of a much grimmer left.

When the thought police cracked down in the 1930s on V. F. Calverton, a socialist who skipped the obligatory pledge of allegiance to Moscow, his kindred spirit naturally defended him.

“We were surprised to read your statement in the current issue of the Modern Monthly that Calverton’s essay on ‘Cultural Compulsives’ is not only a brilliant piece of work, but an original contribution of socialist thought in America,” three Communist Party heavies wrote Eastman in a 1933 letter preserved, along with other letters relied on here, at the Hoover Institution. “We disagree with you on many fundamental questions, but we have always assumed that you are intellectually honest.”

Eastman, the editor of the short-lived but revered Masses, responded to an article sent to him by the ideological goon squad in The New Masses that denounced him as counterrevolutionary. “You are fallen so low that you expect me to blink this little insult, knowing as we do ‘between friends’ that it is merely one of the expedient rubber-stamp formulae of the official lying machine,” Eastman informed the Moscow-controlled trio. He called the article “juvenile and pharisaical,” “all this chicken feed,” and “piffle,” and he described its authors as “contemptible liars.”

Tell us how you really feel? Eastman did the following year between two covers.

In Artists in Uniform, Eastman shifted from anger to ridicule. He pointed to such miss-the-point Soviet slogans as “poetic shock troops” and the “militant struggle for partyism in the arts.” Western imitators similarly embarrassed themselves. An American delegation to a 1932 conference in Russia returned with the idea of communist writers as “agitprop troops” who should identify themselves by dressing in blue blouses.

In Great Britain, the Artists’ International declared:

Art renounces individualism

Art is to be collectivized

Art is to be systemized

Art is to be organized

Art is to be disciplined

Art is to be created ‘under the careful yet firm guidance’ of a political party

Art is to be wielded as a weapon

Eastman’s exposé, which turned the words of communists upon them as a form of brutal mockery, provoked his former comrades into denunciations that recalled Stalin’s famous condemnation of the tall and handsome sybarite as a “gangster of the pen.” Joseph Freeman, who the previous decade had penned Eastman a plaintive note to express “how much your interest in my work has meant to me,” now called him a “liar” and a “forger.” The novelist Mike Gold offered, “I have never turned away from a friend who lost his path through drink, disease, or personal weakness. But Max Eastman, former friend, you have sunk beneath all tolerance. You are a filthy and deliberate liar!”

The vituperation owed partly to a longstanding figure of admiration now depicting their movement as an incubator of philistinism. It also put other potential deviationists on notice that dissent amounted to treason. The suffocation of individualism and creativity emphasized in the book and exemplified by the reaction to it pushed Eastman from a socialist critic of the Soviet Union to an opponent of both the general idea and the specific nation applying it.

By the time Eastman arrived at National Review in the 1950s, he believed in the free market and opposed communism. But he remained an admirer of Lenin, a disbeliever in God, and admittedly a mere “fellow traveler” of conservatism. His belief in Sacco’s guilt but Vanzetti’s innocence encapsulated his ideological journey, which, like his book on the pair of anarchist murderers, he never completed.

The opening line from another unwritten book, Escape from Socialism, summed up why on the left and right he clutched the heterodox and the heretical whenever intellectual overlords demanded fealty to this or that political commandment: “No prison is more confining than fervent belief in an idea that is not true.”