Camping by history

Date: 31-Aug-02  

Growing up, going to Seneca Lake from Vermont was an annual ritual. My parents would pack their ever-growing brood of children into the jeep-station wagon-vw-microbus and off we would go.

My mother grew up on a farm in Dundee, New York, and the family had a cottage on the lake just a few miles away. There we would join up with our uncles, aunts and cousins for a blissful week or two, swimming, boating and making occasional forays to the working dairy farm, then being run by my mothers brother.

I have tried to stay in touch with the family near Seneca by visiting once a year for a weekend. On my trip this time, I was fortunate enough to have my cousin Betsey take my son Darrel and I for a tour around the neighborhood.

We stopped by Fred Shoemaker's place in Glenora, a beautiful old farmhouse that he has been working on for some years now. It sits facing the lake, perhaps a quarter mile from the shore. He was doing some painting, and in the course of the discussion, he mentioned that the red house just down the road had been owned by Max Eastman, the noted writer and radical socialist of the first decades of the twentieth century. Fred said that Eastman had turned the place, which his parents had owned, into a commune of sorts, with a common dining room and dock area on the lake, with cottages adjoining the property brought into the mix.

According to my Aunt Martha Morse, a biography of Eastman touches on this aspect of his life. Apparently many of his friends, which included many of the famous figures of radical politics and literature of the time, spent time on the commune, particularly in the summer.

The family farm is literally just up the hill from the Eastman house. Aunt Martha said that my grandparents were known to join the Eastman crew in some literary soiree's and organizations, a fact which rather blew me away.

I knew my grandmother as a rather austere gray eminence who used to sit at our house doing her knitting, occasionally making severe comments about how things were done "in her day." I would scarcely have believed that "her day" would have included frolicking with Max Eastman and his merry band of Greenwich Village bohemians and socialists.

When I got home from this trip, I did some quick research on the web on Eastman and Glenora. I was somewhat familiar with Max Eastman's trajectory from editor of "The Masses", translator of Trotsky's "History of the Russian Revolution" and subsequent transformation into a die hard conservative supporter of Joe McCarthy and contributor to "The Reader's Digest."

I knew nothing of his remarkable sister Crystal Eastman. Or of his mother Annis, the first woman Congregational minister, who pastored Park Church in Elmira, New York, which included in it's congregants Mark Twain.

Certainly Crystal Eastman, who was recently voted into the Women's Hall of Fame, deserves greater attention, particularly for those in New York State Labor.

She was the author of "Work Accidents and the Law," a pioneering study of workplace accidents and deaths, as part of a team examining working class life in the "Pittsburgh Survey." After graduating from law school at NYU, an accomplishment in and of itself for the time, she found an application for her skills in this project. I won't belabor this essay with details that can easily be found in a web search, but suffice it to say that she argued very effectively for employer liability, not accepted at the time, and as a result, was brought into the drafting of Workman's Compensation legislation in New York.

Her efforts along this line would be enough laurels for most to rest on, but she was also an active suffragist, peace activist and civil libertarian. I append a brief biography by Blance Wiesen Cook below.

I return to Seneca Lake to revisit my own past, with its brightly colored memories of childhood on the water. This time I was fortunate enough to learn a bit of the past of others who also spent time there, others like Crystal Eastman, who made a mark in the world despite her gender,and who by happenstance touched my family's world as well.

Jon Flanders

a few pictures at http://snow.prohosting.com/~jeflan/seneca/seneca.htm

Crystal Eastman by Blanche Wiesen Cook

Crystal Eastman, a brilliant orator whom Roger Baldwin remembered as "a natural leader: outspoken (often tactless), determined, charming, beautiful, courageous," was at the center of a community of activists and rebels whose determination to breathe life into the Bill of Rights wrote the first chapter in the story of the American Civil Liberties Union. In addition, she was a labor lawyer, suffragist, socialist and journalist who authored model legislation and helped create political organizations that survived this century's turmoil. Yet she was lost to memory for almost 50 years.

Crystal Eastman was born on June 25, 1881 in Glenora, New York, to ordained ministers of the Congregational Church. In adulthood, she attributed the most profound parental influence to Annis Ford Eastman, who encouraged her daughter and two sons, Max and Anstice, to be independent in thought and vigorous in action. Max, editor and publisher of the pre-World War I journal, The Masses, was Crystal's political partner and best friend in many ventures.

After graduating from Vassar in 1903, Eastman received a Master's in sociology from Columbia University and was second in the class of 1907 at New York University School of Law. While in graduate school, the six-foot tall, athletic Eastman lived in Greenwich Village and worked evenings as a recreation leader at a settlement house.

Eastman owed her first job as an attorney to Paul Kellogg, editor of the social work journal, Charities And The Commons, who hired her to investigate labor conditions for the Russell Sage Foundation's Pittsburgh Survey. Her pioneering report, Work Accidents And The Law (1910), led Governor Charles Evans Hughes to appoint her the first woman on NewYork State's Commission on Employers' Liability and Causes of Industrial Accidents, Unemployment and Lack of Farm Labor. While on the Commission from 1909-1911, Eastman drafted the nation's first workers' compensation law. Between 1913 and 1914, during Woodrow Wilson's presidency, she served as investigating attorney for the U.S.Commission on Industrial Relations.

While married to insurance salesman Wallace Benedict, Eastman lived with him in Milwaukee and managed the unsuccessful fight for woman's suffrage in Wisconsin in 1912. That fierce struggle further radicalized Eastman, and upon returning East in 1913 she joined Alice Paul, Lucy Burns and others in founding the militant Congressional Union -- forerunner of the National Woman's Party. As war loomed, Eastman expanded her activities to include the peace movement. She founded the U.S. Woman's Peace Party (WPP), heading the radical New York branch while Jane Addams served as national president. (In 1921, the WPP was renamed the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which is today the nation's oldest women's peace organization.) Simultaneously, she served as executive director of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM), founded by Lillian Wald, Oswald Garrison Villard and others to lobby against U.S. entry into World War I.

In 1916, Eastman married British poet and anti-war activist Walter Fuller. In the same year, she invited her friend Roger Baldwin, then a social worker based in St. Louis, to run the AUAM office while she took a brief leave to give birth to her first child, Jeffrey. The AUAM averted a war with Mexico in 1916, and campaigned against the draft, arms profiteering and U. S. military adventures in Latin America and the Caribbean. Above all, Eastman advocated the defense of civil liberties in wartime and championed the rights of dissenters and conscientious objectors. In April 1917, assisted by Baldwin and Norman Thomas, she established the National Civil Liberties Bureau (NCLB).

The mission of the NCLB, said Eastman, its chief counsel and guiding spirit, was to protect the Bill of Rights: "To maintain something over here that will be worth coming back to when the weary war is over."

When the war ended, Eastman resumed her suffrage work, organizing the First Feminist Congress in 1919. With brother Max, she co-published The Liberator, a journal of politics and culture. Blacklisted during the Red Scare of 1919-1921, she commuted between New York and London, where her husband had gone in search of work. During this period, she gave birth to a daughter, Annis.

In 1920, the NCLB was reconstituted as the ACLU, the suffrage movement triumphed and Eastman continued her activities in support of women's rights. One of the few socialists to endorse the Equal Rights Amendment, she was one of its four authors when it was introduced in 1923 -- legislation enacted to "protect" women, she warned, would in practice foster discrimination against them. About the ERA's importance, revealed by the intensity of the battle against it, Eastman said: "This is a fight worth fighting even if it takes ten years."

During the 1920s, Eastman wrote columns for Alice Paul's journal, Equal Rights, and in London for Lady Rhonda's feminist weekly, Time And Tide. Unhappy in exile, she returned home after her husband died suddenly from a stroke in 1927. The following year, Eastman succumbed to nephritis at age 48, a democrat and idealist to the end.

"Life is a big battle for the complete feminist," Crystal Eastman wrote, nevertheless convinced that feminists and civil libertarians would one day be victorious.

Blanche Wiesen Cook edited Crystal Eastman on Women And Revolution (Oxford University Press/1978). A professor of history at John Jay College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, she is the author of The Declassified Eisenhower (Penguin/1984) and the two-volume biography, Eleanor Roosevelt (Viking-Penguin).