Young Radicals by Jeremy McCarter

Author:Jeremy McCarter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-06-13T04:00:00+00:00

Eastman shares the letter with the newspapers. It appears on front pages around the country, where it is billed as the “first utterance from the President on the subject of free speech during war time.”32

That fall, other voices rise in Eastman’s defense. Walter Lippmann pauses in his weighty wartime labors to write to Wilson. He tells the president that he has less concern for The Masses, which he uncharitably describes as “an obscure and discredited little sheet,” than for Wilson’s standing with liberals. Censorship, he argues, “is breaking down the liberal support of the war and is tending to divide the country’s articulate opinion into fanatical jingoism and fanatical pacifism.”33

Even this appeal doesn’t change Wilson’s mind.

The end comes a few weeks later. The appeals court throws out Learned Hand’s ruling that had favored The Masses. The magazine is now barred from the mail. And thanks to the newly passed Trading with the Enemy Act, a publication barred from the mail can’t be distributed any other way.34 The Wilson administration has killed The Masses.

“We live in a world of the kind we believe in,” Eastman writes in one of his final editor’s notes.35 The death of The Masses shows that the world he is talking about is gone. A society forming up ranks for war has no room for a magazine that exists to taunt authority and defy conventions, or a bunch of rebellious artists and writers who are happy to live, as Falstaff does, “out of all order, out of all compass.” As Floyd Dell would write: “It stood for fun, truth, beauty, realism, freedom, peace, feminism, revolution.”36 No wonder the government hated it.

Once in a very long while, a research librarian makes a mistake, and instead of giving you the reproductions that library policy insists you use (low quality, black and white, printed long after the fact), you are handed the actual original magazines: spare, bright, vivid, beautiful. A century after its demise, The Masses is as vibrant as anything being published today: an artifact of a young republic scrambling to get itself expressed, and to enjoy it.

If Eastman had merely been silenced, it would be insult enough. But in another echo of Falstaff, who is forsaken by a ruler whose affection he had overestimated, he faces the prospect of jail.

On November 19, 1917, Eastman, Reed, and a handful of their Masses colleagues are indicted for violating the Espionage Act.37 By that time, Reed is in Petrograd, where he has gone to report on Russia’s lurch toward another revolution. The other editors send him a telegram, breaking the awkward news that when he comes home, he might be facing twenty years in prison and a fine of $10,000.

Max can’t bear the thought of being separated from Florence for even one year, let alone spending twenty of them behind bars. That’s not even his biggest problem: “Some of us have 20 years, but none of us has $10,000.”38

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