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Taking Liberties:
Crystal Eastman, Media Ethics and the Exercise of a Free Press
Amy Beth Aronson, Ph.D.
191 Claremont Avenue, #34
New York, New York 10027
(212) 316-1757
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Crystal Eastman (1881-1928) was a labor attorney, peace activist, radical
organizer, and journalist whose work engaged virtually every major social
movement of the twentieth centuryDfeminism, antimilitarism, socialism, and civil
rights. Although less famous than her editor brother, the radical Max Eastman,
Crystal Eastman drafted New York State's first workers' compensation law in
1910, was a founder of the American Union Against Militarism in 1914, was
president of the Women's Peace Party of New York in 1917, was co-owner and
Managing Editor of the radical magazine, The Liberator (1918-24), and was
instrumental in founding the Civil Liberties Bureau, which in 1920 became the
ACLU. And the engine of her work in all these areas was a commitment free
speech and media accountability. Throughout her career, she acted on an
ever-evolving faith in the power of open, honest, accurate information and
exchange to bring about peace and social progress in America and abroad.
This paper discusses Crystal Eastman's work in the early twentieth century
media, tracing the evolution and impact of her free speech politics. Organized
chronologically across a life lived in mainly in New York City and, in her later
years, in London, the paper chronicles Eastman's first published writings as an
undergraduate at Vassar College, discusses in greater detail her endeavors
beginning in 1914 as a political organizer and counter-propagandist, and
concludes with discussion of her investigative and interpretive journalism in
The Liberator, as well as magazines ranging from the left-wing Nation and New
Republic, to British feminist magazines such as Equal Rights and Time and Tide,
to newspapers including The Christian Science Monitor and London Daily Herald,
to mainstream American magazines such as Children and Cosmopolitan.
Taking Liberties:
Crystal Eastman, Media Ethics and the Exercise of a Free Press
The October, 1918, issue of the radical magazine, The Liberator (1918-24)
illustrates a critique of the press that the magazine's co-owner and co-editor,
Crystal Eastman, developed through her career as a feminist, attorney, peace
activist, and founder of what became the ACLU. In the drawing, two men stand
conversing in front of an open newsstand. One man is large, bespeckled and
wearing a suit; the caption lets us know that he is the spokesman for "The
System." The other man, small, mustached and unassuming, represents the ordinary
American "citizen." In the background, newspapers are displayed whose blaring,
black-and-white headlines reveal their true colors: "LIES," FAKE NEWS," "FIBS
N.Y.C." A small, average reader can also be seen perusing an open newspaper
called, "Hot Air." In the foreground, The System holdsDwhile seeming to
conceal behind his backDan advertisement that says, "Read the Daily Bluff."
So the citizen says to The System, "I want a newspaper that contains the whole
truth." And The System replies, "Mister, your ration has been reduced to 5% in
each paper."[1]
It is fitting that The Liberator, the radical journal produced by Crystal
Eastman and Max Eastman, would advertise opposition to the misleading or
downright dishonest copy carried by the mainstream press of the day. The two
radical siblings had, alone and together, struggled against the complicity of
the press in the World War I-era dissemination of government-controlled
information and the accompanying suppression of dissent. Indeed, the Four
Lights, the official organ of Crystal Eastman's Woman's Peace Party of NY, and
Max Eastman's radical monthly, The Masses, had been two of the most high-profile
radical journals seized under the Espionage Act by the U.S. Postal Service in
1917. The case against The Masses, in fact, had become the most important
court test of the government's right to suppress free speech of the era.[2]
For her part, Crystal Eastman had been an early and instrumental proponent
of an aggressive program of confrontation politics designed to highlight the
denial of civil liberties and to test the rights of free speech in America, both
before and long after the U.S. entered the war.[3] Although less known than
her editor brother, Crystal Eastman's life and work engaged virtually all of the
great social changes that characterize the twentieth centuryDsuffragism,
socialism, anti-militarism, and opposition to the organization of the media
"apparatus of the national security state."[4] And the great engine of her life
and work was her faith in free speech and exchange, in the power of open, honest
expression for bringing about social progress. Not only did she believe that
free expression and association were fundamental democratic liberties; she also
maintained that the exercise of such liberties was a most reliable mechanism of
rightful reform and change. This dedication to an ethics of free expression
informed her politicsDfrom feminism to socialism to pacificismDand her
journalism, which appeared in publications ranging from the Left magazines The
New Republic and The Nation, to feminist periodicals such as Equal Rights and
Time and Tide, to newspapers including The Christian Science Monitor and the
London Daily Herald, to mainstream magazines such as Children and
Cosmopolitan.[5]
From the start, the Eastmans' Liberator articulated the conviction that
progress depended on the exercise of a free press. "A great magazine of
liberty,"[6] it emphasized an ethic of free speech and guaranteed undiluted,
undaunted, truthful expression in and to the public. "The Liberator will be
owned and published by its editors, who will be free in its pages to say what
they truly think," the Introduction reads. Furthermore, "The Liberator will be
distinguished by complete freedom in art and poetry and fiction and criticism.
It will be candid. It will be experimental. It will be hospitable to new
thoughts and feelings. It will direct its attacks against dogma and rigidity of
mind upon whichever side they are found."[7]
As this article will discuss, all of Crystal Eastman's public work
championed the full, free, and honest exchange of ideas and information. As an
organizer, reformer, operative, spokesperson, and journalist, she transformed
basic beliefs in the promises of democracy and the First Amendment into a
modernized, media-savvy politics of the free press and the changing of the
American mind.
The Liberator's commitment to "candid" talk and "compete freedom" of
expressionDnot "lies," "not air," and "bluff,"Dreflected values Crystal Eastman
had carried from her earliest exposure to the politics of self-expression.
Crystal Eastman (like her baby brother Max) was raised a feminist and
free-thinker. She was the daughter of two Unitarian ministers, both feminists,
whose words and works advanced a social ideal in which freedom, faith, equality
and social conscience comprised both the promise and the rewards of American
democracy.[8] Although from a family of limited means, Crystal Eastman
graduated from Vassar College in 1903, and earned a Master's degree in Sociology
from Columbia University in 1904; she then studied law at New York University
between 1904-07.
It was while in law school and living amongst the radical communities of
students and others in Greenwich Village that she began to articulate her
feelings about speaking truth to power. She wrote to her brother Max in 1905
that the most I strive for_ is to make words say what I mean,"[9] even though,
she had admitted the week before, she felt "in constant danger of saying too
much."[10] Just after graduation from law school, when one of her professors
interviewed her about a position with the New York Immigration Commission, he
asked her why she thought she could do the job. Crystal "meditated a while, and
then I said I was pretty sure I could find out the truth, and understand it when
I found it out."[11] Later, in 1913, she commented to Max that his "straight
talk" in The Masses, even about socialists, "does us all good."[12]
This often courageous candor led Crystal's intimate friend and longtime ally,
the civil libertarian Roger Baldwin, to describe her as "a natural leader:
outspoken (often tactless), determined, charming, beautiful, courageous."[13]
This ethic of outspokenness certainly sparked her rise to prominence as a lawyer
and radical spokesperson in New York. In 1909, Crystal Eastman founded and was
Secretary-Treasurer of the American Association for Labor Legislation, for which
she produced the influential report, Work Accidents and the Law. (The report
was published as a small book by the Russell Sage Foundation in 1910.) Its
intellectual inventiveness and attention-getting presentation attracted the
notice of New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes, who appointed her to the
state's Employers' Liability CommissionDthe only woman included on the panel.
From that position, Crystal Eastman drafted New York State's first Workers'
Compensation Law.
Work Accidents and the Law shows signs of Crystal's developing talent for
using popular media strategies to promote avant-garde social ideas. The
published report contains not a word of legal or bureaucratic policy-speak.
Instead, it is direct, colloquial, readable. It is illustrated throughout,
including a satiric and eye-catching cover illustration. It is organized under
headlines and tag lines, and its themes are enhanced by probing photographs with
well-edited captions. It effectively integrates research data, reportage, and
human-interest stories to make an all-around case for the rightfulness and good
sense of law insuring the shared responsibility by employers and workers in
cases of personal injury or industrial accident.[14]
Crystal Eastman became Crystal Eastman Benedict in 1911, when, soon after
the death of her mother, she married Wallace "Bennie" Benedict, and moved with
him to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Immediately upon arrival in the Midwest, she
established herself as a resident radical, lecturing and writing particularly
about suffrage and its links to socialism. Although speaking and writing to
more conservative audiences, she never compromised her truth for the sake of
safety, propriety, or comfort; her honesty in public and trust in her audiences
proved successful from the start. "Ten days ago, I made a ten minute speech at
the luncheon of the Collegiate Alumnae," she wrote to Max in the fall of 1911,
titled "'The Peculiar Opportunity of Milwaukee Women.'" "It was a radical
talkDtelling 'em to get the vote and then back up La Follette's party in the
State and the Socialist administrationDespecially the latter. Most of 'em were
placid conservativesDIt was fun and a great success I hear."[15]
Her reputation and opportunities grew along with her conviction that to
promote progress, one must reach and reveal the truth. In June, 1912, she
wrote to Max about "some exciting things going on." She had "a picture and an
article in the Chicago Record Herald Sunday,"[16] which followed on an
investigative reporting success she had had. "The saloon keepers are publishing
anti-suffrage literature anonymously," she reported, [so] "I hired a detective
(!) and tracked it down, and put it in the hands of the District Attorney."[17]
But her very success in the Midwest troubled Crystal Eastman. Her own
visibility and increasing clout charged her appetite and ambition for a larger
role in the politics of change. Plus, her husband's financial success
distressed and debilitated her. By January of 1912, Eastman longed to leave
behind the American Dream they had achieved in the MidwestDthe home, car, and
leisured comfortsDand return to radical politics and social democracy in New
York. At her urging, the couple put their home on the market because, she
explained, "if we stay here, Bennie will get rich so fast it will be hard for
him to pull out_[the] first thing you know we'll be stuck here, with expensive
tastes formed and no freedom for either of us,--just fat Dutchmen."[18]
Back in New York in 1913, Crystal Eastman soon united with feminist leaders
Alice Paul, Lucy Burns, and others to found the Congressional Union for Woman
Suffrage, the forerunner of the National Woman's Party.[19] With the onset of
the war in Europe in 1914, Crystal's commitments to truth and democratic justice
took on an internationalist and yet more radical turn. In November, she
spearheaded the founding of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), a
lobbying group organized in late 1914 to protest America's military build-up,
the draft, and American imperialism in the Caribbean and Latin America "around
which various splinter groups ultimately coalesced."[20] Crystal was Executive
Secretary of the AUAM, its mastermind in New York, and the director of its New
York office, a full-time position for which she earned a small salary of $75.00
per year.[21] In addition to Crystal and Max Eastman, the organization's
membership included some of the most prominent progressives of the era: Lillian
Wald (who was its first Chair); Hull House reformer Jane Addams; Oswald Garrison
Villard, publisher of The New York Post and later The Nation; Paul Kellogg,
editor-in-chief of the Left-wing social work journal The Survey (1897-1932); and
Rabbi Stephen Wise, leader of the American Jewish Congress from 1916-1949 and a
participant in the founding of the NAACP (in 1909) and the ACLU (in 1920).[22]
The AUAMDfirst called the "Anti-Militarism Committee," then changed to the
"Anti-Preparedness Committee" before settling on its nameDannounced several
ambitious, immediate goals: the prevention of further expenditure for armaments
during the present Congressional session; an investigation of the war budget
with an eye toward 100% efficiency and the removal of private profit from
armament manufacture; the pursuit of a Pan-American Conference to pursue the
federation of the twenty-one American Republics in the interests of peace and
Republicanism; and a rational approach to differences at issue between the U.S.
and Asia through the appointment of an expert commission.[23] Importantly, its
proposed methods of work reflected both the formal and media politics of World
War I eraDand the courage of Crystal Eastman and a few others to try to fight
fire with fire. In addition to "personal work with Congressmen" and "conducting
effective public hearings before Congressional Committees," the AUAM planned the
maintenance of "a well equipped, effective publicity bureau," the organization
and maintenance of "an up-to-date Speaker's bureau," the "circularizing by
pamphlets and letters large and important groups" throughout the nation.[24]
After the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, Crystal led the AUAM in the
mounting of a massive "Truth About Preparedness" campaign, which used the
democratic soap box as well as these media publicity techniques to get the
message out. Crystal organized public debates between businessmen in wartime
industries and prominent anti-militarists.[25] And the group cleverly
advertised a series of eleven mass meetings in the largest halls in New York,
Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Minneapolis, Des Moines, Kansas City, St.
Louis, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. Their meeting announcements mimicked the
formal qualities and layout of the U.S. Constitution; this structure and type
style, as much any explicit copy, suggested the constitutional claims and
objects of the media-based campaign. These tactics, at least as much as their
message, attracted considerable notice. At the rallies, "our speakers addressed
40,000 people and won hundreds of columns of publicity from an unwilling press,"
Crystal later reported.[26]
The keynote of the Truth About Preparedness Campaign depended on the
deployment of popular muckraking-style investigative techniques to bring to
light. Crystal and the AUAM exposed the corporate economic interestsDthe
industrial profiteeringDthat they believed lay behind calls for "military
preparedness." To counter former President Theodore Roosevelt's public
statements that the U.S. had only "a puny little eggshell of a navy," the AUAM
uncovered figures revealing that the U.S. navy was actually the third largest
fleet in the world.[27] The group published broadsides screaming "Do You Want
to Buy a War?" and eye-catching cartoons revealing the real "Facts and Figures
About Preparedness."[28] They circulated political cartoons, a war-propaganda
mainstay, but against military-mindedness and the armaments build-up itself.
One 1916 drawing, circulated on postcards, portrayed a battalion of men marching
past U.S. Secretary of War Garrison, under the flags of "Bethlehem Infantry" and
"Midvale Steel Battalion."[29] By these methods, the AUAM was able to rally
attention to their call for an investigation of the arms industry and for public
financing of the war effort.[30] Their counter-propaganda propaganda campaign
revealed a thesis about the nation's participation in World War I that would be
"discovered" by political operatives and circulated by the mainstream press only
decades later: that British propagandists, American munitions makers, and
cynical politicians coopted an acquiescent media to call a misled American
public to arms.[31]
The success of the campaign fanned the flames of fear about the un-American
activities of an un-checked American press, the very free expression that
Crystal and the AUAM believed were essential to realizing "a democratic
peace."[32] In February, 1917, the AUAM was feeling the heat when it released
an urgent Bulletin denouncing the proposed "Press Censorship Bill."[33] "The
bill is extremely dangerous and should be defeated," the statement began. "It
is aimed, not at the enemy, but at the complete control of public opinion in
this country in time of war. If passed it would set up a complete censorship
machinery throughout the country and forbid the publication in newspapers,
periodicals or pamphlets of any discussion of the war except by special
permission of the censor."[34] Furthermore, the AUAM predicted, such
legislation would be used selectively, politically; it "was drafted with an eye
to those newspapers which, in the event of war, might attempt to criticise the
conduct of the war, those newspapers (to borrow the language of the War
College's statement) which 'by their editorials and presentation of news***may
sway the people***against the war and thus***by adverse criticism tend to
destroy the efficiency of these [the military] agencies."[35]
The American press would play its part in facilitating pro-war sentiment
and the repression of dissent that was coming along with it. By the summer of
1916, the major mainstream pressDincluding the New York Times, New York Herald,
New York World and Life magazine, among othersDwere filled with pro-war
talk.[36] The AUAM answered by circulating eye-catching statements of opinion
and counter-argument, such as one presenting Winston Churchill's exclamation,
"God preserve us from our 'patriotic' press!"[37] Crystal and the AUAM grew more
militant and more controversial, intensifying print and public efforts to combat
American military involvement and press control even while she and her allies
were often attacked in the press and booed at rallies and meetings. She spent
16-hour days writing, organizing demonstrations, rallying involvement around the
country, and speaking at lecture halls and college campusesDwith quite some
success. By August, the group had grown from a small committee of 15 members to
an organization with local committees in 22 cities from Boston to San Francisco.
They had conducted public hearings before Congressional Committees concerned
with the big armaments bills, all of which, Crystal noted proudly, "received
wide publicity." They had "produced a graphic War Against War Exhibit, which
was drawing "as many as 10,000 people a day" during its six weeks in New York,
one month in Chicago, and August stay in Detroit.
That summer, Crystal fully developed a series of media strategies she and
the organization would deploy in the coming months and years. They "distributed
600,000 pieces of propaganda literature, 579,000 of these being of [their] own
design and publication." What's more, they induced the prominent industrialist
Henry Ford "to publish two full page advertisements in hundreds of newspapers
exposing the falseness and folly of the so-called 'preparedness' agitation."
And they successfully began a "press bureau," which sent out "frequent bulletins
and news stories (many of them illustrated) to 1601 papers all over the
country,Dlabor and farm weeklies as well as regular dailies." The few pacifist
journals after 1914Dprimarily, The Nation (1865-present) William Jennings
Bryan's Commoner (1901-23), and La Follette's Magazine (1909-29)Dwere struggling
to combat the biggest propaganda build-up ever seen in American history. The
press bureau, Crystal emphasized, "has been and still is the only active
nation-wide press service available for the forces fighting militarism."[38]
These achievements, however, would make little impact on the problems of
wartime misinformation and suppression of free speech the AUAM had openly
predicted the previous February. The Committee on Public Information (CPI) was
formed by President Wilson in April, 1917, just one week after U.S. entry into
the war, and it quickly became the dissemination source for endless pieces of
war "information." At the outset, the CPI issued a voluntary censorship code
under which editors agreed not to print material that might aid the enemy.
Before the war's end, the CPI's Official Bulletin would reach a daily
circulation of 118,000, issue more than 6,000 individual news stories, and
conceal considerable military information from the public.[39] In his How We
Advertised America (1920), George Creel, the seasoned newspaperman in charge,
characterized the Great War as "a plain publicity proposition, a vast enterprise
in salesmanship, the world's greatest adventure in advertising."[40]
Before long, freedom of speech and the press would be more systematically
censored. In the summer of 1917, the broadly inclusive Espionage Act passed by
an overwhelming Congressional majority. Within less than two weeks of passage,
Crystal Eastman put out an "urgent" press release announcing that "seventeen
radical publications [had] been suppressed" by the government and that an
emergency public meeting would therefore be held in New York.[41] Max Eastman
and John Reed of The Masses were among those who would speak. Although "nearly
one hundred editors, journalists, magazine writers and other public spirited
citizens were present," Crystal later reported, their voices went largely
unheard. A 1918 amendment to the Act, popularly known as the "Sedition Act,"
followed, and pointedly outlawed "any disloyal_scurrilous, or abusive language
about the form of government of the United States,_or any language intended to
bring the form of government of the United States_into contempt, scorn,
contumely, or disrepute."[42]
The U.S. Postal Service assumed the front-line position in the wartime
attack on freedom of speech and the press both signaled and pursued by the
Espionage Act. Under existing law in 1917, the U.S. Postal Service could deny
second-class mailing privileges to any magazine or newspaper it chose.[43] Max
Eastman's The Masses was seized as "unmailable" that summer, not for publishing
direct calls for conscientious objection or antiwar activism, but for several
suggestive cartoons, including one that depicted a naked woman labeled
"Democracy" lashed to a wheel, and one that portrayed two naked men, "Labor" and
"Youth," chained to an enormous cannon.[44] Virtually every radical publication
in America was silenced at this timeDmany of them forever. These included
International Socialist Review (1900-1918), American Socialist (1914-17), The
Masses (1911-17) and The Four Lights (1917), the radical newsletter with which
Crystal Eastman was associated.
Four Lights was the newsletter of the Women's Peace Party of New York, a
coordinate organization of the AUAM whose New York branch Crystal herself had
founded to speak out more forcefully than the national Party leadership would
allow.[45] Although she was not specifically responsible for its editorial
content, Crystal Eastman "was directly responsible for its tone, and it was the
official paper of the organization over which she presided."[46] The comrade
and kin of The Masses in many respects, the Lights pledged itself to the cause
of international democracy as well as antimilitarism, lambasting wartime
violence and the tyranny she believed was growing out of it. The journal
debuted in January, 1917, promising to be "the voice of the young,
uncompromising peace movement in America, whose aims are daring and
immediate."[47] In its brief time in print, Four Lights openly accused the
United States of "busily forging weapons to menace the spirit of freedom
struggling to life in an exhausted Europe."[48] It further asserted the
controversial link between a military mentality and race violence at home.
"American negroes have died under more horrible conditions than any
noncombatants who were sunk by German submarines," one editorial ran. "Those
who guard our land at home have learned that black men and women and little
children may safely be mutilated and shot and burned while they stand idly
by."[49]
In all, 44 U.S. newspapers and magazines lost publishing privileges during
1917 alone, and another 30 retained the right to publish only by agreeing to
print nothing about the war.[50] Even prominent liberal publications, such as
New Republic (1914-present), Atlantic Monthly (1857-present) and the Outlook
(1898-1928) would draw back in fear, refusing to accept some radical notices and
advertising by the AUAM;[51] publisher Ben Heubsch, founder of the Viking Press
and later a longtime Board Member of the ACLU, withdrew promotional circulars
from the mails after the local U.S. attorney warned him that three of his books
were "objectionable."[52] (Even Max and Crystal Eastman briefly refrained from
criticism of the government in The Liberator of early 1918.)[53]
The concealment of information and suppression of free expression, abided
by some and even endorsed by others in the mainstream press, helped prompt
Crystal and a few others in the AUAM to shift the focus to a new front. Crystal
persisted in the conviction that a democratic, free press could, should, and
would play a pivotal role in national politics and policies, beginning with the
re-establishment of peace. Her 1916 Survey article, "War and Peace," for
example, explicitly allied militarization with the undoing of the liberties of
mind and body that she saw as the soul and center of the nation. "_This great
American democracy [must] know, as we know, _that free minds, and souls
un-drilled to obedience are vital to the life of democracy, " she
maintained.[54]
Undaunted by the fact that the Espionage Act had had made the very legal
status of the AUAM uncertain,[55] Crystal Eastman pressed the position that the
anti-militarists now faced some new threats to national and international
progress. The mounting wartime mania threatened fundamental rights to "free
minds," free speech, a free press, free assemblyDthe very essence of the
democracy, she believed, that "the war to end all wars" sought to safeguard for
the world. In this dedication to the then-unnamed but decidedly unpopular cause
of civil liberties in wartime, Crystal maintained, "we believe ourselves to be
patriots, no less sincere and earnest, than those who lead our armies to
France."[56] But, she explained in a press release, "it takes an exceedingly
large-minded liberal to fight for the right of another man to say exactly what
he himself does not want said. He may stand for free speech, but he won't
really fight for free speech so long as what he says goes. That is why it is
essential for leadership in the fight for civil liberty in war time to come from
the heart of the minority itself. With rare exception the minority must depend
upon itself and its own unaided efforts to maintain its right to exist."[57]
For Crystal Eastman, this position was a natural outgrowth of the
continuing struggle dor a democratic peace. For others in the AUAM leadership,
however, the civil liberties fight represented a division in interest and
radical departure in policy. Lillian Wald, the Chair of the organization, for
one, wrote to Crystal in the summer of 1917 that she was "persuaded of the
wisdom of resigning" over it. To her view, the achievement of peace required
that the organization remain in good standing with official Washington; to that
end, she argued, they must avoid even the appearanceDlet alone policiesDof
opposition to "Mr. Wilson's war."[58]
Crystal summarized the problem in a letter to the Executive Committee in
June of 1917. Miss Wald's perspective, she explained, was that "we cannot plan
continuance of our program which entails friendly governmental relations (at
least opportunities to get before the powers that be and possibly obtain
governmental cooperation for our program) and at the same time drift into being
a party of opposition to the government." Paul Kellogg, another dissenter,
feared that "we might become so hopelessly identified in the public mind with
'anti-war' agitation as to make it impossible for us to lead the liberal
sentiment for peace."[59]
Crystal Eastman had always believed that free speech was the wellspring of
democracy and progressDand therefore, at this time, peace. So fundamental was
this belief that she argued that the AUAM's defense of free speech would
increase the stature of the organization in Washington.[60] She could not agree
that censorship was reasonable or tolerable. She concluded that "war is
intolerable; we must get rid of war. Moreover militarism, which is a fruit of
war, endangers democracy. We must therefore fight militarism in all its phases,
keep it from spreading and growing, even while we are working to abolish the war
itself, the source of militarism." Neither the effort to combat the
manifestations of militarism nor the effort to abolish war itself "can be real
or intelligent or altogether sincere without the other," she believed. "The
American Union Against Militarism has been a synthesis of the two. By all
means, let it continue to be so."[61]
Crystal herself devised the solution that would rescue the fracturing AUAM
without abandoning the emergent cause of American civil liberties. "I would
suggest an immediate statement to the press," she wrote in her June, 1917, memo,
"making one legal bureau for the maintenance of fundamental rights in war
timeDfree press, free speech, freedom of assembly, and liberty of
conscience."[62] In the July 2 press release, Crystal announced the formation
of the Civil Liberties Bureau (CLB) of the AUAM. "It is high time all honest
liberals in this country, whether for or against the war, realize that all that
is real in American democracy is in danger today," she said.[63] The Civil
Liberties Bureau of the AUAM was founded "to combat_the tendency to sacrifice
everything to complete military efficiency_where it threatens free speech, free
press, freedom of assembly and freedom on conscienceDthe essentials of liberty
and the heritage of all past wars worth fighting_"[64] Resting upon America's
democratic promises, now a familiar rhetorical strategy for Crystal, she argued
that the CLB would aimed to safeguard the future of the nation and the free
world: "_To maintain something over here that will be worth coming back to when
the weary war is overDthat is what our Civil Liberties Bureau is for."[65]
The New York Times dismissed the new Civil Liberties Bureau as a "little
group of malcontents, "an unimportant and minute minorityDnoisy out of all
proportion to their numbers" in an editorial on Independence Day, 1917.[66]
The American "newspaper of record" further noted that freedom of speech is
lovely idea, but that "good citizens willingly submit" when "the national
welfare and existence is at stake."[67] Nevertheless, the CLB opened offices
at 70 Fifth Avenue, the same office building that housed the AUAM, and shared
many of the same media tactics that the AUAM had used to make itself heard in
the past. The Bureau limited its scope to the media ethics and issues raised by
the Espionage Act, becoming nothing more or less than a "propaganda
agency_rather than an advisory or quiet negotiator," as the AUAM had partly
tried to be.[68] It issued postcards, posters, cartoons, and often crackling,
satirical poems, as well as dozens of broadsides and leaflets, some illustrated,
quoting opponents to the Espionage Act, revealing details of civil liberties
violations around the country, and explaining in brief blurbs the first and
fourth amendments of the U.S. Constitution. One such political leaflet simply
quoted these content of these amendments under the leading headline, "Is the
Constitution a Scrap of Paper?"
The CLB used some muckraking-style tactics against the misstatements or
falsifying omissions of the increasingly corporatized mainstream press itself.
The Bureau circulated a flyer with the headline "General Sherburne Blurts Out
the Truth," for example, which offers as its text, "some testimony which the
newspapers have omitted."[69]
The Bureau also rebutted false information carried by the mainstream papers
by excerpting such copy surrounded by pointed, factual rebuttal. A November 18,
1918, letter circulated to "Friends and Subscribers of the Bureau," for example,
contains an excerpt from a story that had run in more than one New York
newspaper. The piece had uncritically repeated the government's loaded charge
that "various anti-war organizations promoting disloyalty are federated." "This
is a striking example," the CLB literature reads, "of the methods adopted by the
forces of reaction and illiberality in the attempt to cripple and destroy all
organizations who still presume to strive for the maintenance of those civil
liberties which are requisite to free government." Noting that the article's
reference to Roger Baldwin clearly identified the CLB, the expose continues to
counter fiction, conveyed unquestioningly by numerous newspapers, with plain
facts directly from the source. "It is not a fact that the funds contributed to
the work of the Bureau are used for any purposes whatever other than those for
which they were given. No funds contributed to our work have ever been
disbursed for the work of any other organization, except that in the months of
December, 1917 and February, 1918, we contributed $250 toward the expenses of
the New York Bureau of Legal Advice which was engaged in work for conscientious
objectors complementary to our own."[70] Broadening the attack, the notice
asserts that "perhaps the most remarkable fact about this despatch [sic] is its
attempt to attach the stigma of disloyalty to those movements which look to the
promotion of civil liberties. Such an attempt needs no characterization."[71]
The CLB became Crystal Eastman's top priority in the struggle to make the
world safe for democracy. She resolved to resign from the AUAM in September,
1917, and worked transitionally with the small committee of AUAM insiders who
dealt with the "adjunct financial problems involved with the separation of the
CLB." [72] The Bureau successfully separated from the AUAM, and it officially
became the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB), under the direction of Roger
Baldwin, in October, 1918.[73] It expanded into a nation-wide organization at
a meeting in New York on January, 1920. In Baldwin's words, "The Bureau was
dissolved and the new organization named the American Civil Liberties
Union."[74]
Meanwhile, Crystal had been thinking about joining forces with Max since
1911,[75] so the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1918 found the Eastman
siblings living together in Greenwich Village and starting to publish The
Liberator. Crystal Eastman maintained many ties to Baldwin and the NCLB, not
least of which was the show of support in the cartoon critique of "fake news,"
which appeared in The Liberator in October, the same month that the NCLB began
operation as an independent organization. The Eastmans' "Journal of
Revolutionary Progress" quickly became the paper of record on radical movements
worldwide, and published some of the most notable American free thinkers of the
post-war era. Floyd Dell was Associate Editor and frequently wrote for the
magazine; John Reed, Louise Bryant, and John Dos Passos reported from Russia;
Michael Gold covered coal strikes in Pennsylvania and Illinois; Jean Toomer and
the poet Claude McKayDwhose work had been rejected by virtually every magazine
in New York until Crystal "discovered" him in London's Pearson's (1899-1925 in
U.S.) and personally brought him to The Liberator[76]Ddramatized race conditions
in America. (McKay became an Executive Editor, along with Gold, in 1921.)
Other contributors to The Liberator included Sherwood Anderson, Amy Lowell,
William Carlos Williams, Bertrand Russell, Djuana Barnes, Vachel Lindsay, Helen
Keller, George Bellows, Edmund Wilson, Dorothy Day, and Carl Sandburg.
Crystal Eastman's media ethics about candor continued to inform her work in
journalism. She traveled for The Liberator as an investigative reporter,
becoming the first American journalist to visit communist Hungary, in 1919. Her
July and August articles reflected this ongoing commitment to truth in
reporting, "whichever side" the information may offend or seem to favor. Her
series on Hungary celebrated the abolition of private property while also
revealing with pointed candor and poignant honesty the widespread repression
under its revolutionary government.
Unlike many radical women of the era, Crystal Eastman was never persuaded
to sideline her feminism in favor of her socialism.[77] In searching for a
largely unprecedented balance, she was sustained by her commitment to free and
honest expressionDthe very ethic of open exchange she had always advocated as
the best mechanism for conflict resolution and social progress. She recognized
ideological contradictions between the two liberationist movements, and
organizational conflicts within them as well; she believed herself actively
involved in promoting resolutions when she revealed and commented on them. In
"Practical Feminism, " published in The Liberator in January, 1920, just months
before passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, she was already pushing women not to
rest on their laurels once the vote was won. Women must take it upon themselves
to become full participants in American democracyDfrom voting, to organized
dissent, to outspoken protest. "After all these centuries of retirement," she
asserted in "women need more than equal opportunity. They need a generous shove
into positions of responsibility," she wrote.[78] In "Now We Can Begin,"
published in The Liberator just months after passage, she simultaneously
addressed her feminist and socialist politics, suggesting finally the radical
revolution would not automatically bring about the equality it supposed and
promised:
_the true feminist, no matter how far to the left she may
be in the revolutionary movement, sees the woman's battle as
distinct in its objects and different in its methods from the
workers' battle for industrial freedom. She knows, of course,
that the vast majority of women as well as men are without
property, and are of necessity bread and butter slaves under a
system of society which allows the very sources of life to be
privately owned by a few_but as a feminist she also knows that the
whole of woman's slavery is not summed up in the profit system,
nor her complete emancipation assured by the downfall of
capitalism_ Woman's freedom, in the feminist sense, can be fought
for and conceivably won before the gates open into industrial
democracy_[but] woman's freedom, in the feminist sense, is not
inherent in the communist ideal. If we should graduate into
communism tomorrow_[a husband's] attitude to his wife would not be
changed.[79]
In her feminism, Crystal Eastman was more radical than most prominent women
of her era, who emerged mainly from the ranks of progressive liberalism. She
was among the first to champion the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and was also
an early and outspoken advocate of "voluntary motherhood." Crystal Eastman
backed birth control out of her dual commitments to women's desire to become
mothers and their right to sexual agency, both essential, she believed, in the
feminist struggle "to create conditions of outward freedom in which a free
woman's soul can be born and grow."[80] Almost as heretical, she proposed a
national "motherhood endowment" to remunerate women for their service to
society. "The only way we can keep mothers free, at least in a capitalist
society," Crystal reasoned in "Now We Can Begin," is "by the establishment of a
principle that the mother upon whom the necessity and privilege [of motherhood]
falls, is entitled to an adequate economic reward from the political
government." "It is idle to talk of real economic independence for women
unless this principle is accepted," she added.[81] Furthermore, she often put
forward the still-rare policy that "we must bring up feminist sons."[82]
Max and Crystal Eastman both resigned from The Liberator, and turned it
over to the Workers' Party, in 1922 (it became the Worker's Monthly in November,
1924). Both departed for Europe: Max set sail for the Soviet Union; Crystal
and her two children, Jeffrey (who later became active in the ACLU) and Annis,
settled in London until 1927. There, Crystal continued to work mainly as a
radical journalist, especially for the independent monthly, Time and Tide
(1919-1931). She analyzed, and attempted in her work to help resolve, the
growing fissures in the feminist movement between equal rights advocates and
protectionists. Both an historian of the women's movement and a activist
chronicler of social conditions and national progress, Crystal pioneered a kind
of feminist journalism, fifty years before this approach would be named and
fully developed in the U.S. by Gloria Steinem and others at Ms
(1972-present).[83] And this feminist journalism, not surprisingly, was
primarily characterized by its dedication to revealing hidden assumptions or the
mechanisms that promoted and perpetuated them in unseen ways. She wrote think
pieces, like "1848-1923" (Time and Tide, July 27, 1923), articles on gender and
education, such as "Boys and Girls" (Time and Tide, January 4, 1924), and a host
of articles revealing the hidden challenges to women pressing forDand pressing
themselves forDtrue equality and ever more political progress. Articles such as
"Equality of Protection?" (Equal Rights, March 15, 1924), "Feminists Must Fight
(The Nation, November 12, 1924), and "Women, Rights, and Privileges" (The
[London] Outlook, February 5, 1927) all look beneath the surface of things to
pose pointed questions about women's liberties and both ethical and political
responsibilities to themselves and the world.
As the post-war media grew even more corporatized and potentially
massifying, Crystal Eastman persisted in questioning it, and in trying to
exploit its powers of persuasion for her ownDand for what she saw as
publicDpurposes. In "What Should We Do with the Women's Page?" (Time and Tide,
May 20, 1927), she asserted that the mainstream papers should function as a mass
meeting ground and nexus for women's organizing, a "forum, a clearing-house for
the exchange of ideas, a meeting-place where they can learn of each other's
experiments and benefit by each others conclusions."[84] She called for the
wide publication of women's lettersDa recognized strategy of reader revelation
and consensus-building the feminist presses from The Lily (1849-58) to
Ms.[85]Dwhich she called "the best 'copy' in the world." This "great question
of to-day" about which Eastman called for open discussion and debate was so
forward-looking in 1927 that it remains a critical issue on the women's movement
agenda more than fifty years later: "_how to reconcile a woman's natural desire
for love and home and children with her equally natural desire for work of her
own for which she is paid, for some normal work-contact with the world at
large."[86] To this advanced agenda about work-family balance, she added that
"a series of letters on marriage and finance would be invaluable." Such
articles would rightly "challenge the interest of men as well as women. And I
wish to emphasize this," she pressed. "No one is so bewildered by this modern
woman's revolution as the average husband."[87] Revealing this still
underconsidered issue and espousing her belief in the value of open debate in
addressing it, she asserted that "nothing would help more toward its solution
than a full and free exchange of experience."[88]
Crystal Eastman's more mainstream journalism challenged the boundaries of
the popular press from both the production and the reception sides. Not only
did she disclose and discuss progressive ideas in mainstream venues, but also
she trusted ordinary readers to have the intelligence and individual agency to
make up their own minds, to accept or revise or resist media messages. She
worked against the massification and mystification seen increasingly as a threat
at this time. Her 1927 piece for Cosmopolitan (begun 1886) "Marriage Under Two
Roofs," openly discusses the unconventional marriage arrangementDthe couple
lived apart but were not separatedDchosen by Crystal and her second husband,
Walter Fuller.[89] She makes no excuses and trusts her readers to determine for
themselves the merits arguments that derive both from pro-family and radical
feminist politics. And she leaves the subject open for debate, assuming her
readers will weigh inDin their own minds and within their own lives. Her
interview with Bertrand Russell for Children (1926-59) directly advocates
co-educationDbeginning with then-controversial nursery schoolDtoward the
explicit end of promoting equal opportunity and employment.[90] Again, she
neither sticks to the liberal party line in her arguments, no minces words with
her readers. Her "Schoolgirl Fiction for To-Day," a roundup of young adult
fiction in Time and Tide, articulates again the ethic of candor. She praises
stories for "honesty," "emphasis on realities," and "putting of sex in its
place_".[91] And, she writes, that while the books are "concerned, like most
novels, with [the heroines'] love affairs," the good ones make it "clear that
business and professional life is their normal background."[92] The
"school-girl of to-day," she summarizes approvingly, "has her eyes open."[93]
Eastman's life and career engaged many of the largest social movements of
the twentieth centuryDpeace, feminism, socialism, civil libertiesDand in all
endeavors, her belief in free speech and a free press animated her ideas,
activism, and attitude toward mass audiences. For her use of popular media to
promote democratic possibilities and pursue change in American life, she
deserves a recognized place in media history.
[1] Illustration by Gropper. The Liberator, Max Eastman, Editor. October,
1918, p. 41.
[2] See Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). See also, Max Eastman's "Address to
the Jury in the Second Masses Trial: In Defense of the Socialist Position and
the Right of Free Speech." In Banche Weisen Cook, ed., Toward the Great
Change: Max and Crystal Eastman on Feminism, Antimilitarism and Revolution (New
York: Garland Publishing, 1976), pp. 305-39.
[3] See Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the
United States (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), pp. 155-6.
[4] The term belongs to Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A
History of the ACLU (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 16.
[5] A partial listing of Eastman's periodical publications can be found in Amy
Aronson, "Crystal Eastman." Dictionary Of Literary Biography: American Women
Prose Writers 1870-1920 (Gale Research Publications, 1998). A number of these
articles are included in Blanche Weisen Cook's two edited volumes: Toward the
Great Change: Crystal and Max Eastman on Feminism, Antimilitarism and Revolution
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1976); and Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution
(New York; Oxford University Press, 1978).
[6] The Liberator, Vol. 1, no. 1, March 1918. Collected in Blanche Weisen
Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978), 290-3.
[7] The Liberator, Vol. 1, no. 1, March, 1918. In Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman
on Women & Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 290; p. 291.
[8] See, Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978). See also, Amy Aronson, "Crystal Eastman." American
Women Prose Writers, 1870-1920 (New York: Gale Research Publications, 1998).
[9] Crystal Eastman to Max Eastman, February 10, 1905. Schlesinger Library,
File 82-M4, carton 6.
[10] Crystal Eastman to Max Eastman, February 18, 1905. Schlesinger Library,
File 82-M4, carton 6.
[11] Crystal Eastman to Annis Ford Eastman, June 8, 1907. Schlesinger Library,
File 82-M4, carton 6.
[12] Crystal Eastman to Max Eastman, January 15, 1913. Schlesinger Library,
File 82-M4, carton 6.
[13] In a 1907 letter to her mother, Crystal added a p.s. saying "I did kiss
Baldwin!" Crystal Eastman to Annis Ford Eastman, June 19, 1907. Schlesinger
Library, File 82-M4, carton 6. The Baldwin quote is cited by Blanche Weisen
Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution (New York; Oxford University
Press, 1978), p. 3.
[14] See Crystal Eastman, Work Accidents and the Law (Russell Sage Foundation,
1910/16). The report was reprinted by Arno Press in 1970.
[15] Crystal Eastman to Max Eastman October 17, 1911. Schlesinger Library,
File 82-M4, carton 6.
[16] Crystal Eastman to Max Eastman, June 20, 1912. Schlesinger Library, File
82-M4, carton 6.
[17] Crystal Eastman to Max Eastman, June 20, 1912. Schlesinger Library, File
82-M4, carton 6.
[18] Crystal Eastman to Max Eastman, January 15 [1913]. Schlesinger Library,
File 82-M4, carton 6.
[19] Crystal Eastman later gave an influential speech at the luncheon of the
National Woman's Party convention in June, 1916, although she would soon have a
falling out with Paul, among others, over her initial support of Wilson's
presidential candidacy. See Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution,
pp. 16-18. A very helpful introduction to a variety of little-known women
activists can be found in Kristen Golden and Barbara Findlen, Remarkable Women
of the Twentieth Century (New York: Michael Friedman Publishing, 1998).
[20] Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origins of Civil Liberties in the
United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979).
[21] "Memorandum on the Organization," Minutes of the AUAM, May 8, 1916, p. 3.
Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, PA. Roger Baldwin
describes that The AUAM first had offices in Washington and New York, and that
"the Washington office was directed by Charles T. Hallinan, a journalist, and
the New York office by Crystal Eastman, a well-known champion of women's rights
and the sister of Max Eastman, editor of the Socialist monthly, The Masses."
See "Memorandum on the Origins of the ACLU." Pamphlets in American History (New
York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1973), p. 1.
[22] Roger Baldwin provides a more inclusive list of the early board members in
the "Memorandum on the Origins of the ACLU." Pamphlets in American History (New
York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1973), p. 1. See also, Samuel Walker, who
provides a useful overview of the three groups which provided the most ready
support for the later Civil Liberties Bureau of the AUAM social workers and
radicals like the Eastmans and Roger Baldwin; the Protestant clergy; and
conservative lawyers outraged by violations of free speech and due process. In
Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), pp. 21-22.
[23] "Statement Concerning the Anti-Militarism Committee," November 15, 1915.
Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, PA.
[24] "Statement Concerning the Anti-Militarism Committee," November 15, 1915.
Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, PA.
[25] Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution, p. 12.
[26] Crystal Eastman memo to AUAM Membership, August 3, 1916, pp. 1-2.
Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, PA.
[27] Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution, p. 13.
[28] Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, PA.
[29] Swarthmore College Peace Collection. Swarthmore College, PA.
[30] See Banche Weisen Cook, "Democracy in Wartime: Antimilitarism in England
and the United States, 1914-1918." In Charles Chatfield, ed., Peace Movements
in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1972). See also, Roland Marchand, The
American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898-1918 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1972).
[31] See Emery and Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the
Mass Media (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1996), p. 255.
[32] The AUAM used this phrase often in their literature, and briefly called
themselves "The American Union For a Democratic Peace" in 1919.
[33] AUAM Bulletin No. 66 (February 9, 1917). Swarthmore College Peace
Collection, Swarthmore College, PA.
[34] AUAM Bulletin No. 66, February 9, 1917. Swarthmore College Peace
Collection, Swarthmore College, PA.
[35] AUAM Bulletin No. 66, February 9, 1917. The Army War College's report to
which the Bulletin refers is War Department Document No. 528, "The Proper
Relationship Between The Army and The Press in War," prepared by the war college
division, general staff corps as a supplement to the statement of proper
military policy of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, 1916).
[36] Michael Emery and Edwin Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive
History of the Mass Media (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1996).
[37] AUAM folders, Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, PA.
[38] Crystal Eastman memo to AUAM Membership, August 3, 1916, pp. 1-2.
Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, PA.
[39] Emery and Emery, The Press and America: An Interpretive History of the Mass
Media (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1996), p. 257.
[40] Cited in Emery and Emery, The Press and America, p. 257.
[41] Roger Baldwin notes that it was "Miss Eastman, the executive director who
managed all these activities_" See "Memorandum on the Origins of the ACLU."
Pamphlets in American History (New York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1973),
p. 2.
[42] Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, p. 14.
[43] Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, p. 14.
[44] A helpful summary of the postal seizures and "machinery of suppression"
appears in Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, 13-16.
[45] See Marie L. Degen, The History of the Woman's Peace Party (New York:
Garland Publishing, 1975 [1939]). See also, Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the
Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979),
60.
[46] Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution, p. 19.
[47] Cited by Blanche Weisen Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution,
p. 20.
[48] Cited by Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution, p. 20.
[49] Cited by Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution, p. 20.
[50] Emery and Emery, The Press and America, p. 259.
[51] Walker, In Defense of American Liberties (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1990), p. 25.
[52] Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, p. 14.
[53] Max Eastman explained that they "would have to temper speech to the taste
of the Postmaster General." Cited in Samuel Walker, In Defense of American
Liberties , p. 25.
[54] Crystal Eastman, "War and Peace." The Survey, December 30, 1916.
Collected in Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution, pp. 252-4.
[55] Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 19.
[56] AUAM "Proposed Statement to the Press," September 13, 1917, p. 2.
Swarthmore College Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA.
[57] Ibid.
[58] Crystal Eastman memo to AUAM, June 14, 1917, pp.5-6. Swarthmore College
Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, PA. Wald later wrote that the AUAM fell
apart in some measure because Eastman's "fire and imagination" was "impatient of
more sober councils." See Lillian Wald, Windows on Henry Street (Boston: Little
Brown, 1934). See also, Blanche Weisen Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women &
Revolution, p. 22.
[59] Crystal Eastman memo to AUAM, June 14, 1917, pp.5-6. Swarthmore College
Peace Collection, Swarthmore College, PA.
[60] Walker, In Defense of American Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press,
1990), p. 19.
[61] Crystal Eastman memo to AUAM, June 14, 1917, p. 9.
[62] Ibid, p. 6.
[63] AUAM press release, July 2, 1917. Swarthmore College Peace Collection,
Swarmore College, Swarthmore, PA.
[64] AUAM press release, July 2, 1917. Swarthmore College Peace Collection,
Swarmore College, Swarthmore, PA.
[65] AUAM press release, July 2, 1917. Swarthmore College Peace Collection,
Swarmore College, Swarthmore, PA.
[66] The New York Times, July 5, 1917. Cited in Samuel Walker, In Defense of
American Liberties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 11.
[67] The New York Times, July 5, 1917. Cited in Walker, In Defense of American
Liberties , p. 11.
[68] Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the Origin of Civil Liberties in the
United States (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), p. 156.
[69] The document is undated. Swarthmore Peace Collection. Swarthmore
College, Swarthmore, PA.
[70] Letter from L. Hollingsworth Wood, Chairman, National Civil Liberties
Bureau, November 18, 1918, p. 1. Swarthmore College Peace Collection,
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA.
[71] Letter from L. Hollingsworth Wood, Chairman, National Civil Liberties
Bureau, November 18, 1918, p. 1. Swarthmore College Peace Collection,
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA.
[72] AUAM minutes of September 28, 1917. Swarthmore College Peace Collection,
Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA.
[73] The work of the NCLB "abruptly stopped when its offices were raided and
its files seized by the Department of Justice," Baldwin later wrote. Although
"a brief examination showed the charges groundless and the files were returned
immediately after the war," he spent a year in jail, while the Bureau continued
under Albert de Silver. The "mounting violations accompanying the great strikes
of 1919, as well as the shock and effects of the Russian revolution, made only
too plain the need for continuation," Baldwin explained. Roger Baldwin,
"Memorandum on the Origins of the ACLU." Documents in American History (New
York: American Civil Liberties Union, 1973), p. 3.
[74] Roger Baldwin, "Memorandum on the Origins of the ACLU." Documents in
American History, p. 3.
[75] Crystal Eastman to Max Eastman, February 6, 1911. Schlesinger Library, Box
82-M4, carton 6.
[76] McKay describes his this first meeting with Crystal Eastman at the
Liberator's offices in his memoir, A Long Way From Home (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and World, 1970 [1935]). See also, Blanche Weisen Cook, ed., Crystal
Eastman on Women & Revolution, pp. 25-26.
[77] Many progressive and socialist women, like many abolition women in the
mid-nineteenth century, felt forced to choose between their feminism and other
political commitments. Of the many sources that touch on these dilemmas for
socialist women, see Philip S. Foner, Women and the American Labor Movement (New
York: The Free Press, 1970); June Sochen, The New Woman: Feminism in Greenwich
Village, 1910-1920 (New York: Quadrangle Books, 1972); J. Stanley Lemons, The
Woman Citizen: Social Feminism in the 1920s (Chicago: University of Illinois
Press, 1973); Blance Weisen Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978).
[78] "Practical Feminism," The Liberator, January, 1920, p. 40.
[79] Crystal Eastman, "Now We Can Begin." The Liberator, December, 1920.
Included in Blance Weisen Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 52-7.
[80] In Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution, p. 56.
[81] In Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution, p. 57.
[82] Crystal Eastman, "Now We Can Begin." The Liberator, December, 1920. In
Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution, p. 56.
[83] See Mary Thom, Inside Ms.: 25 Years of the Magazine and the Feminist
Movement (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997.
[84] Crystal Eastman, "What Shall We Do with the Woman's Page?" Time and Tide,
May 20, 1927. Collected in Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 96-8.
[85] See Amy Aronson, "The Lily: From the Popular to the Political in America's
First Feminist Magazine." In Laurel Brake, ed., Defining Centres:
Nineteenth-Century Media and Defining Identities (London: Macmillan, 1998). See
also, Anne Mather, "A History of Feminist Periodicals, Part I. Journalism
History, Vol. 1 (Autumn 1973), pp. 82-85; Anne Mather, "A History of Feminist
Periodicals , Part II." Journalism History, Vol. 1 (Winter 1974), pp. 108-111;
Anne Mather, "A History of Feminist Periodicals, Part III." Journalism History,
Vol. 2 (Spring 1975), pp. 19-23. Linda Steiner discusses the role of letters
and letters pages in Stanton and Anthony's feminist journal, Revolution
(1868-70), in "Oppositional Decoding as an Act of Resistance." In Robert Avery
and David Eason, eds. Critical Perspectives on Media and Society (London:
Guilford, 1992).
[86] Crystal Eastman, "What Shall We Do with the Woman's Page?" Time and Tide,
May 20, 1927. In Cook, ed. Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 97.
[87] Crystal Eastman, "What Shall We Do With the Woman's Page?" In Cook, ed.,
p. 98. Eastman was among a very few who saw that feminism posed new challenges
and opportunities to men. But, as the sociologist Michael Kimmel has discussed,
among those who recognized these implications were Crystal's brother Max Eastman
and her friend and colleague Floyd Dell. See Michael Kimmel and Thomas
Mosmiller, eds., Against the Tide: Pro-Feminist Men in the United States,
1776-1990 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. See also, Michael Kimmel, Manhood in
America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996). A useful overview and
update is Michael Kimmel, "Real Men Join the Movement." Ms., November/December,
1997.
[88] 90Crystal Eastman, "What Shall We Do With the Woman's Page?" In Cook, ed.,
Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution, p. 97.
[89] Crystal Eastman, "Marriage Under Two Roofs," Cosmopolitan, December, 1923.
In Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution, pp. 76-83. Crystal and
"Bennie" were separated sometime around 1913, and were divorced when Crystal met
Fuller in 1916.
[90] Crystal Eastman, "Bertrand Russell on Bringing Up Children." Children:
The Magazine for Parents, March, 1927. In Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women &
Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 88-93.
[91] Crystal Eastman, "Schoolgirl Fiction for To-day." Time and Tide, June 3,
1927. In Cook, ed. Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution, pp. 93-5.
[92] In Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution, p. 95.
[93] In Cook, ed., Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution, p. 95.
Relevant and useful background on the question of "schoolgirl fiction" can be
found in Sally Mitchell, The New Girl: Girls' Culture in England, 1800-1915
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).