For our April quote of the month, we decided to switch things up a bit and give our audience a quote from a former socialist who changed his political beliefs and became a hard line capitalist. Quite a change of pace from our Leprechaun buddy from last month. Max Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. After completing a PhD at Columbia University, he became editor of America’s leading socialist periodical called ‘The Masses’. The periodical was very critical of the first world war and landed Eastman in trouble with the United States government several times. Eastman twice stood trial under the provisions of the Sedition Act, but was acquitted each time. Unfortunately, the periodical was forced to shut down because of charges under the Espionage Act of 1917. Eastman traveled to Russia and stayed there for over a year and witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution. He was a strong supporter of Leon Trotsky with whom he became friends with and would help to translate several of his works from Russian to English for American readers.
Eastman would later condemn Socialism in Russia after witnessing the Party being overtaken by radical influences such as the ideals of Joseph Stalin who would have someone assassinate his good friend Trotsky while in exile in Mexico. Following the Great Depression, Eastman changed his political beliefs and started to promote free market capitalism and wrote articles condemning socialism in the Libertarian publication ‘The Freeman’. Eastman published more than twenty books on subjects as diverse as the scientific method, humor, Freudian psychology and Soviet culture as well as volumes on poetry, his memoirs and reflections on his personal encounters with many famous people during his career such as Charlie Chaplin, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein and many other influential people. In this month’s quote, Eastman talks about jokes from one of his published volumes on humor. He gives his opinion on how one understands a joke and explains the ability to prove you have a sense of humor…
| “It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humor. – Max Eastman” |
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