One Persisted, the Other Didn't: The Lives of Crystal and Max Eastman

148 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW fully enough to be acted upon. The theories of "structuralism and since" are powerful and suggestive, but ought not to captivate and mislead our judgment, allowing academic business, bouyed with new and flashy terms, to go on as usual. William E. Cain ONE PERSISTED, THE OTHER DIDN'T: THE LIVES OF CRYSTAL AND MAX EASTMAN Blanche Wiesen Cook, ed. Crystal Eastman on Women and Revolution. Oxford-LondonNew York: Oxford University Press, 1978. 388pp. $4.95 paper. William L. O'Neill, The Last Romantic: A Life of Max Eastman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. 339pp. $14.95. Crystal Eastman and her younger, more famous brother Max are two fascinating and important figures in the history of American radicalism. Born and raised in upstate New York near Elmira, the Eastmans were children of two Congregationalist ministers. Mother Annis Ford Eastman took up the cloth when her husband Samuel grew incapacitated due to a lung ailment initially sustained in the Civil War. It was a religion of joy in life which Max and Crystal imbibed at home. As they matured in the early twentieth century they would become central participants in the lyrical left which seemed to promise such hope for a rebirth of American culture and life in the years before World War I. Max became famous as a founder and propagandizer for the Masses magazine. Crystal, after graduating from Vassar and from New York University Law School, made a name for herself as a pioneer investigator into workplace accidents in Pittsburgh and New York. After the Masses was banned as allegedly seditious for its opposition to American entry into the war in 1917, Max and Crystal co-founded the magazine's successor, the Liberator. Like most of the lyrical left, the Eastmans championed the cause of Soviet Russia, seemingly the only positive outcome of the bloody world war. Crystal traveled to Hungary in 1919 and observed enthusiastically the short-lived revolution of Bela Kun. Tragically, Crystal would not survive the 1920s; she was only 46 years old when she died in 1928 of a lingering kidney ailment. She packed a lifetime of living and commitment into her short life. In Blanche Cook, Crystal Eastman has found a congenial soul and perceptive historian. In her introduction to this rich anthology of Crystal's writings, Cook notes the unique combination of Crystal's thought and life: "She was generally the only socialist at feminist meetings" (p. 1). The roots of her radicalism were solidly planted in her upbringing. When only 15, Crystal gave an oration at a summer Chautauqua-like symposium her mother had organized. Entitled "Woman," the speech contained the basic principles to which Crystal devoted her life. Women "must have work of their own . . . because the only way to be happy is to have an absorbing interest in life which is not bound up with any particular person," Crystal declared. "No woman who allows husband and children to absorb her whole time and interest is safe against disaster" (p. 4). Crystal went on to college at Vassar and then attended New York University law school, finishing second in her class. Her colleaguesincluded such gifted women as Inez Milholland, Madeline Doty and Ida Rauh, the latter of whom became Max's first wife. Fresh from law 149 REVIEWS school, Crystal plunged into her pioneering investigation of industrial accidents. The anthology includes a selection from some of Crystal's pre-World War I writings about workmen's compensation. They show her passion for change and her precision in research, unfortunately a rare combination in American radicals. "It seems a tame thing to drop so suddenly from talk of revolutions to talk of statistics," Crystal wrote in 191 1, "but I believe in statistics just as firmly as I believe in revolutions. And what is more, I believe statistics are good stuffto start a revolution with" (pp. 281-82). Cook's volume is excellent in delineating the differences between the moderate and radical wings of the social reform, peace and feminist movements. Although liberals like Jane Addams and Florence Kelley hailed the famous 1908 decision in Müller v. Oregon in which the Supreme Court approved limits on work...