MAX, WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO YOU?'

...Do you, Max, remember that night at the Lotus Club when you dismayed the Scripps-Howard executives by your forthright and upstanding exposition and defense of Stalin and his policies...

...They could hardly have done so if it were only a choice of dictators...

...I actually promised him a case of Scotch, not of wine...

...After the debate, friends surged up and shook my hand, asserting that it was the best feat I had ever turned in, even in the field of forensic effort which is always duck soup for me...

...My views, whether wise or foolish, informed or ignorant, are my own...

...All we can know about what free enterprise might have achieved in Russia after 1917 is what it accomplished between 1891 and 1917, and the notorious paucity of results in this period affords little ground for believing that it could have done anything like what Stalin has brought about under the Five Year Plans...

...I still think Carleton Beals "had the dope" on the Dewey Committee...

...With all his enviable mastery of fact, logic, irony, humor, subtlety, and rhetoric, he made even such worthy and seasoned opponents as Messrs...

...Clarence Darrow could hardly have become a Holy Roller without fairly exposing himself to the charge of being a renegade, and such a suppositious change in Mr...

...Max even understated my personal affection for him...

...If the Russians do not feel that Uncle Joe has delivered for them, why have they fought with such fanatical devotion...

...I liked him even after he had won Wendell Willkie's praise for his apostasy in Reader's Digest...

...Paul on the road to Damascus, long after the fact...

...Surely no sane person could well believe that conditions in Russia and Europe since 1928 have been favorable to a recession of governmental control in Russia...

...What counter-revolutionaries and Adolf Hitler would have done to a weak-kneed and indecisive regime in Russia would be something for Ripley...

...What has happened" to you...

...Indeed, Judge Riddell asserted that they had been accorded greater fairness than they could have expected in this country...

...Before it was warned off by the war-mongers a couple of years back, even the New York Times always gave my books a generous "break," but no communist publication has ever failed to take a lusty crack at my writings and doctrines...

...Max repeatedly seeks to jog my memory, so I will conclude by caressing his a bit...

...Lipsticks vs...

...You appeared as a frank sympathizer with Soviet policies, and I as an impartial observer...

...I do not doubt his complete honesty of intent in the Trotsky adventure...

...Max may not know that such distinguished anti-Communist jurists as Newton D. Baker and Judge William Renwick Riddell of Canada read the court record and concluded that the accused had been given a fair trial...

...Joe had shown all his colors by that time...

...If Uncle Joe had given his attention primarily to perfumes and lipsticks, he would now be hiding somewhere in the Siberian tundra...

...This, let me remind you, Max, was no less than five years after Uncle Joe had taken over in Russia and two years after the First Five Year Plan had been launched...

...But there must be some reasonable limit to such mental back flops...

...And Stalin did not begin his great armament program until after he and Litvinov had exhausted every resource of logic and in opportunity to bring about complete disarmament among the nations...

...And neither self-interest nor world hysteria has led me to change them...

...Moreover, let Max dig up his own views as of 1930, on the efficacy of private enterprise...

...I have never even been a Socialist, to say nothing of a Communist...

...But I did wince at the sight of Dewey being exploited by persons who had persistently reviled him until he could serve their purposes...

...Since Max is probably our foremost authority on the philosophy and art of laughter, we can forgive him for springing the majestic horselaugh that I am playing the "Commie" game, even inferring that I am either a Communist myself or a very warm fellow-traveller...

...Even if that has slipped your mind, you surely must recall that memorable Sunday afternoon in the spring of 1930, when you and I upheld the Russian religious policy in a debate against Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Dr...

...There was nothing personal in my sceptical observations...

...even if he embraced cannibalism...

...HARRY ELMER BARNES Cooperstown, N. Y...

...The mechanization of Russia began even 20 years earlier than Max alleges—by 1891—but the slight progress made in over a quarter of a century is, by implication, the greater tribute to Uncle Joe's accomplishments, in the face of far greater difficulties, since 1928...

...I can even go further than this...

...John Haynes Holmes before -a great crowd in Carnegie Hall...

...Obviously, any man can change his mind without being justly branded a renegade...

...He may be a bit cockeyed and jaundiced about Soviet " Russia, which is unbecoming to a man of his intelligence and realism...

...And I cannot afford to drink Scotch myself, even if I liked it...

...To quote Judge Rid-dell's concise conclusion {Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, September-October, 1937, p. 339) : "The story of most of the accused, the organizers and direct executors of the treasonable espionage, undermining, wrecking and terrorist activities, members of the Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Center, all fully admitting their offenses, fully justified the death penalty for treason pronounced against them...

...He was one man whose intellectual courage and personal integrity I had intensely admired for a quarter of a century...

...But I have been greatly saddened by Max's intellectual antic's over the last few years...

...To witness him slump into the role of a savage red-baiter and war-monger has disillusioned me more than any other personal somersault during these trying years, save only for that of Paul Howard Douglas...

...My views on the purge trials were, assuredly, not based on Joe Davies' mystical revelations, in the manner of St...

...Darrow would certainly have been no greater than the alteration of Max's views on socialism, Soviet Russia, and war in less than a decade...

...Do you remember this one, Max...

...And, if I ever hated to have to make such a charge against any man, it was against Max Eastman...

...But there is little reason to doubt that Soviet Russia is running true to the Marxian pattern of socialist revolution—i.e., that the state must assume complete control until after the revolution is accomplished ; afterwards, the powers and activity of the state will gradualy be surrendered, until a democratic, cooperative commonwealth has come into being...

...To be sure, it may be no disgrace to be a renegade, but Max can hardly deny that he has laid himself wide open to such a characterization...

...But I actually felt humiliated and dismayed when confronted with the spectacle of Max's magnificent performance...

...But this is not moral recantation or a renunciation of his principles...

...There is surely a vast difference between building up a great army, as Hitler did, primarily for offense, and Stalin's creation of a powerful army for defense...

...And look at what private enterprise was doing in countries like the United States from 1928 to 1940, under the most favorable conditions conceivable...

...War hysteria has not driven Norman a whit from his devotion to socialism and peace...

...Wise and Holmes look like guilty and disconcerted children, apprehended in flagrante delicto in their mother's pot of jam...

...Guns I hardly put physical changes and mechanization before cultural issues in my scale of values, but obviously, material betterment must take temporal precedence...

...It is hard to assure "spiritual" values in a backward and starving and defeated country...

...Max, What Has Happened To You?' A Reply to Max Eastman By HARRY ELMER BARNES Dear Sirs: THE EDITOR of The Progressive has kindly offered me space to reply to Max Eastman's gentle admonitions relative to my recent article on Russia...

...A Limit To Back Flops Norman Thomas is a horse of a different color...

...I could not help liking Max...

...Of course, I do not know all that the future holds in store...

...And Max's letter published above is fulsome praise of me, compared to what Uncle Joe's American boys have to say about me...

...I derived no personal satisfaction from jumping on Max, but, since he has quite voluntarily and enthusiastically put himself forward as perhaps the most bitter American assailant of Uncle Joe Stalin's ways, I could hardly fail to pay my tribute to his efforts...

...You, Max, know as well as anybody else that the failure to provide more consumption "goods and higher living standards in Soviet Russia after 1933 was due chiefly to the war threat and the war itself...

...Yet you did not have a harsh word for the little man with the walrus moustache—only honeyed phrases, delivered with the most ingratiating1 inflections...

...I yield to no man in my admiration of John Dewey, but I do not think that his talents as a detective match his prodigious powers as a logician and philosopher...