Max Eastman

The Digest at the time had close to 9 million subscribers, and more than half a million copies of the condensed version were eventually sold separately as well as a reprint.

It was pushed through by the Digest roving editor Max Eastman, who had himself been something of a radical.

Now, the condensation deserves more attention than it gets now because Hayek wrote a careful, heavily qualified argument addressed directly to British socialists at the time, whose good faith he looked for, he took for granted.

And, excuse me, the Digest version stripped the qualifications out, and the stripped-down version is what most Americans have read and what most Americans still think the book says.

The man who solved this problem was Frank Meyer, and his biography comes into focus.

Meyer had been a Communist Party organizer recruited at the London School of Economics, and he spent 14 years inside the party apparatus before he left it.

He came to the National Review as a senior editor, having already lived through one total system of thought.

Total system of thought means, [clears throat] uh, this ideology explains everything, right? And his solution was called fusionism.

It, it, they are.

Uh, uh, there's a great book by Max Eastman, who used to be a, uh, socialist, a, actually a committed communist, and he was, uh, he'd, he had traveled to Russia, uh, right after the Bolsheviks took power, so he was there in the '20s, and he really believed strongly in socialism.

And it's called, I believe the book is called The Failure, uh, Failures of Socialism.

But he talks about people that, that get stuck in this trap and, and believe in this philosophy, and he c- refers to them as being soft-minded.

[instrumental music] The scene is the office of the late Max Perkins of Scribner's, the same Max Perkins who edited Wolfe and didn't have to edit Hemingway.

Seated with Perkins is Max Eastman, author and critic.

Enter, stage left, Hemingway.

There follows an encounter which will be told and retold as long as Scribner's stands on Fifth Avenue.

Max Eastman looks back over the years.

When he published his glorification of bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon, I took a crack at it in a critical essay.

To me, bullfighting is the unsportsmanlike tormenting of a dumb animal, and I thought Ernest's book contained a good deal of rather highfalutin gush about it.

He also reincorporated and renamed it for the third and final time as the American Civil Liberties Union, or the ACLU.

Some of the original members of the ACLU were Norman Thomas, who was six times the Socialist Party's candidate for president; William Foster, chairman of the Communist Party USA; Max Eastman, editor of the Communist Party's paper, The Masses; Harry Ward, who according to the Congressional Record, maintained membership and affiliation with over two hundred communist or communist front organizations; and Clarence Darrow, who dazzled the nation as a flamboyant and articulate defense attorney and anti-Christian crusader.

During the first sixty years, a full ninety percent of the cases that the ACLU defended involved communists.

As a result, the ACLU was stigmatized as a communist front organization itself.

After M. France come the other two figures in the comedy, his accuser and his apologist.

The apologist is Mr. Max Eastman, of whom I know nothing except that he writes well in his rather faddist fashion.

Perhaps the name of Eastman also is a nom de plume and indicates merely that he is a man of the East, let us hope a wise man of the East.

The name of the accuser is Boris Popovski, which implies at least a man of the East of Europe.

Apparently Popovski denounces him, not only for being proud of the French nation, but even for being proud of the French Revolution.

The atrocious Anatole actually begins by recalling that a hundred years before the people of Paris, armed with pikes and guns, attacked the Bastille and took possession of the hated fortress.

Can anyone pretend he is militant after that? Dare Max Eastman defend as militant a man who approves of pikes and guns and the storming of the Bastille? But there is worse behind.

M. France says he wishes justice to conquer iniquity.

But the Fabian Society had called themselves Marxist Darwinists initially, right? Like Bertrand Russell was talking about pro-Marxist ideas and everything.

He later on became an avid anti-Marxists, as you see also with people like James Burnham, Max Eastman, like a lot of these really famous American Trotskyists, they all were like mentored by John Dewey, who was in connection with Bertrand Russell and all of this.

And then they all later become avid anti-communists to the point where they are the most extreme in their McCarthyist ideas of like what should happen to communists.

And this is obviously not just a coincidence that it was a game.