Floyd Dell remembers Crystal Eastman, his comrade from the Masses and Liberator, on her death in 1928 at 47.

‘Crystal Eastman’ by Floyd Dell from New Masses. Vol. 4 No. 4. September, 1928.

Crystal Eastman lived so strongly and beautifully that it is hard to think of her as having died. She embodied in her rich and warm personality the modern revolutionary movements which are transforming the world.

She was a feminist in the least narrow sense of the word, a feminist who knew that the struggle of women for freedom is a part of the struggle of the working class to take possession of the world. She had studied law and been admitted to the bar; but the kind of individual feminist triumph which was possible in the legal career before her was not just what she wanted; she dropped law, became an investigator of social and working conditions, and helped to make the Pittsburgh survey for the Russell Sage Foundation. She became the only woman member of the New York State Employers’ Liability Commission, and as its secretary published in 1911 a report on “Work Accidents and the Law.” Then came the suffrage campaign, into which she put her great energies, as state leader in Wisconsin, as a militant propagandist and organizer, and as a member of the Women’s Party.

When the war came she threw her strength into the pacifist movement, as a leader of the Women’s Peace Party and of the American Union Against Militarism. In 1918 she and her brother started and edited the Liberator, successor to the old Masses, and devoted herself to the journalism of revolution during the two years which saw the rise of the Soviet Republic in Russia and the crushing of the workers’ hopes and efforts throughout Europe. Recently, after a number of years spent in England with her second husband, Walter Fuller, and her two children, she returned to America and worked on the Nation. A condition of high blood pressure of long standing, similar to that which resulted in her husband’s death in England just after she came back to America last year, became more acute a few months ago, and her death by nephritis occurred at her brother Dr. Ford Eastman’s home in Detroit last month.

Those who knew Crystal Eastman will never forget her courage and generosity, and the magnificent spirit with which she devoted herself to the cause of freedom.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s and early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1928/v04n04-sep-1928-New-Masses.pdf