Max Eastman

Max Forrester Eastman (January 4, 1883 – March 25, 1969) was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet and a prominent political activist. Moving to New York City for graduate school, Eastman became involved with radical circles in Greenwich Village. He 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, he co-founded in 1917 The Liberator, a radical magazine of politics and the arts. While residing in the Soviet Union from the fall of 1922 to the summer of 1924, Eastman was influenced by the power struggle between Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin and the events leading to Stalin's eventual takeover. As a witness to the Great Purge and the Soviet Union's totalitarianism, he became highly critical first of Stalinism and then of communism and socialism in general. While remaining atheist, he became an advocate of free market economics and anti-communism. In 1955, he published Reflections on the Failure of Socialism. He published more frequently in National Review and other conservative journals in later life, but he always remained independent in his thinking. For instance, he publicly opposed United States involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s, earlier than most. Early life and education Eastman was born in 1883 in Canandaigua, Ontario County, New York, the fourth of four children. His older brother died the following year at age seven. His father, Samuel Elijah Eastman, was a minister in the Congregational Church, and his mother, Annis Bertha Ford, joined him in 1889, one of the first women in the United States to be ordained in a Protestant church. They served together as pastors at the church of Thomas K. Beecher near Elmira, New York. This area was part of the "burned-over district", which earlier in the 19th century had generated much religious excitement, resulting in the founding of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and the Latter Day Saint movement. In addition, religion inspired such social causes as abolitionism and support for the Underground Railroad. Through his parents, Max became acquainted in his youth with their friend, the noted author Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Eastman graduated with a bachelor's degree from Williams College in 1905.