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Crystal Eastman

 Crystal Eastman (1881-1928), was vibrant figure in US workers’ safety and compensation, the women’s movement, US internationalism, and civil liberties.  Born in Glenora, New York, she was the daughter of two free-thinking Congregationalist ministers who jointly succeeded the abolitionist Thomas Beecher as pastor of the Park Church in Elmira. After graduating from Vassar she began graduate studies in political economy at Columbia, then decided to go to law school. The law school at New York University had by then become the leading school for training women lawyers in the United States.  During her two-year law school degree (1905-07), she emerged as one of the school’s leading students, the second vice-president of the class, a champion of law school causes, and friend of everyone from faculty members to the school janitor.  After taking the bar exam in the summer of 1907, she went to Pittsburgh in the fall of 1907 to investigate the immense problems of industrial accidents for the Pittsburgh Survey of social conditions, and helped draft the Wainwright Commission report that led to New York’s 1910 workmen’s compensation legislation.  A dynamic figure in the Greenwich Village community, she was radicalized by the avoidable deaths of many women workers in the 1911 Triangle Shirt-Waist factory fire near Washington Square.   From August 1914 and March 1917, Crystal Eastman was, in historian John Witt’s assessment, among the most important organizers of the radical internationalist movement. She helped Jane Addams and Carrie Chapman Catt form the Woman’s Peace Party in January 1915.  She was a founder and Executive Secretary of the American Union Against Militarism, whose internationalist program included: self-determination; equal treatment for all nations; a “Society of Nations” developed through the Hague Conference, along with a “permanent Court of International Justice” to strengthen the existing Hague Court of Arbitration; reductions in armaments; the voiding of secret treaties; and the removal of restraints on international trade.  As anti-militarism came  increasingly to be viewed as treasonable after US entry into World War I, and as conscientious objectors and other critics faced persecution, she came to advocate a connection between internationalism and civil liberties.  The American Union, she argued, was the “logical group to defend the other American liberties, free speech, free press and free assembly.”  This was one of the roots of what, after various divisions, became the American Civil Liberties Union.  She took the Kantian view that all nations needed to “be democratized before a federated world can be achieved,” and despite ill health continued to pursue her radical mix of  women’s rights, social reform, civil liberties and internationalism until her premature death.  She lost her US nationality and became British automatically by marrying a British subject in the US in 1916, and lobbied for the reform of national and international law on nationality of married women, a reform still far from complete. 

From: Witt, John Fabian. (draft of Nov. 24, 2003)  “The Lawyer as Revolutionary, II: Crystal Eastman and the Internationalist Beginnings of American Civil Liberties”: Histories of American Law (forthcoming). 

Further Reading:

Max Eastman, Enjoyment of Living (1948)

Blanche Wiesen Cook, “Introduction” to Crystal Eastman on Women & Revolution 4 (1978)

Sylvia A. Law, “Crystal Eastman: Organizer for Women’s Rights, Peace, and Civil Liberties in the 1910s,” 28 Val. U. L. Rev. 1305 (1994).