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The Masses
The Masses was a graphically innovative American magazine of socialist politics published monthly from 1911 until 1917, when federal prosecutors brought charges against its editors for conspiring to obstruct conscription in the United States during World War I. It was succeeded by The Liberator and then later New Masses. It published reportage, fiction, poetry and art by the leading radicals of the time such as Max Eastman, John Reed, Dorothy Day, and Floyd Dell.
Piet Vlag, an eccentric Dutch socialist immigrant from the Netherlands, founded the magazine in 1911. For the first year of its publication, the printing and engraving costs of the magazine were paid for by a sympathetic patron, Rufus Weeks, a vice president at the New York Life Insurance Company. Vlag's dream of a co-operatively operated magazine never worked well, and after just a few issues, he left for Florida. His vision of an illustrated socialist monthly had, however, attracted a circle of young activists in Greenwich Village to The Masses; these included visual artists such as John French Sloan from the Ashcan School. These Greenwich Village artists and writers asked one of their own, Max Eastman (who was then studying for a doctorate under John Dewey at Columbia University), to edit their magazine. John Sloan, Art Young, Louis Untermeyer, and Inez Haynes Gillmore (among others) mailed a terse letter to Eastman in August 1912: "You are elected editor of The Masses. No pay." In the February 1913 issue of The Masses, Eastman wrote the following manifesto:
A Free Magazine—This magazine is owned and published cooperatively by its editors. It has no dividends to pay, and nobody is trying to make money out of it. A revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with a sense of humour and no respect for the respectable; frank; arrogant; impertinent; searching for true causes; a magazine directed against rigidity and dogma wherever it is found; printing what is too naked or true for a money-making press; a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers—There is a field for this publication in America. Help us to find it.
The Masses was to some extent defined by its association with New York's artistic culture. "The birth of The Masses," Eastman later wrote, "coincided with the birth of 'Greenwich Village' as a self-conscious entity, an American Bohemia or gipsy-minded Latin Quarter, but its relations with that entity were not simple." The Masses was very much embedded in a specific metropolitan milieu, unlike some other competing socialist periodicals (such as the Appeal to Reason, a populist-inflected 500,000-circulation weekly produced out of Girard, Kansas).
The magazine carved out a unique position for itself within American Left print culture. It was more open to Progressive Era reforms, like women's suffrage, than Emma Goldman's anarchist Mother Earth. At the same time it fiercely criticized more mainstream leftist publications like The New Republic for insufficient radicalism.
After Eastman assumed leadership, and especially after August 1914, the magazine's denouncements of the war were frequent and fierce. In the September 1914 edition of his column, "Knowledge and Revolution," Eastman predicted: "Probably no one will actually be the victor in this gambler's war—for we may as well call it a gambler's war. Only so can we indicate its underlying commercial causes, its futility, and yet also the tall spirit in which it is carried off."
By May 1916, the radical content published in The Masses had caused it to be boycotted by two major American magazine distribution companies, United News Co. of Philadelphia, and Magazine Distributing Co. of Boston. It was also excluded from the Canadian mails, university libraries, bookshops, and the newsstands of the New York City subway system.
In July 1913, in the aftermath of the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912 in West Virginia, Max Eastman wrote an editorial in The Masses accusing the Associated Press of "having suppressed and colored the news of that strike in favor of the employers". Eastman detailed the AP's alleged suppression of information regarding the abuses carried out by a military tribunal set up to punish striking coal workers, and also accused the AP of having a conflict of interest, after it was discovered that the AP's local correspondent was also a member of the tribunal. The editorial was accompanied by a cartoon by Art Young, entitled "Poisoned at the Source", which featured a figure of the AP poisoning the reservoir of news with "Lies", "Suppressed Facts", "Prejudice", "Slander", and "Hatred of Labor Organization".
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The Masses
The Masses was a graphically innovative American magazine of socialist politics published monthly from 1911 until 1917, when federal prosecutors brought charges against its editors for conspiring to obstruct conscription in the United States during World War I. It was succeeded by The Liberator and then later New Masses. It published reportage, fiction, poetry and art by the leading radicals of the time such as Max Eastman, John Reed, Dorothy Day, and Floyd Dell.
Piet Vlag, an eccentric Dutch socialist immigrant from the Netherlands, founded the magazine in 1911. For the first year of its publication, the printing and engraving costs of the magazine were paid for by a sympathetic patron, Rufus Weeks, a vice president at the New York Life Insurance Company. Vlag's dream of a co-operatively operated magazine never worked well, and after just a few issues, he left for Florida. His vision of an illustrated socialist monthly had, however, attracted a circle of young activists in Greenwich Village to The Masses; these included visual artists such as John French Sloan from the Ashcan School. These Greenwich Village artists and writers asked one of their own, Max Eastman (who was then studying for a doctorate under John Dewey at Columbia University), to edit their magazine. John Sloan, Art Young, Louis Untermeyer, and Inez Haynes Gillmore (among others) mailed a terse letter to Eastman in August 1912: "You are elected editor of The Masses. No pay." In the February 1913 issue of The Masses, Eastman wrote the following manifesto:
A Free Magazine—This magazine is owned and published cooperatively by its editors. It has no dividends to pay, and nobody is trying to make money out of it. A revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with a sense of humour and no respect for the respectable; frank; arrogant; impertinent; searching for true causes; a magazine directed against rigidity and dogma wherever it is found; printing what is too naked or true for a money-making press; a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers—There is a field for this publication in America. Help us to find it.
The Masses was to some extent defined by its association with New York's artistic culture. "The birth of The Masses," Eastman later wrote, "coincided with the birth of 'Greenwich Village' as a self-conscious entity, an American Bohemia or gipsy-minded Latin Quarter, but its relations with that entity were not simple." The Masses was very much embedded in a specific metropolitan milieu, unlike some other competing socialist periodicals (such as the Appeal to Reason, a populist-inflected 500,000-circulation weekly produced out of Girard, Kansas).
The magazine carved out a unique position for itself within American Left print culture. It was more open to Progressive Era reforms, like women's suffrage, than Emma Goldman's anarchist Mother Earth. At the same time it fiercely criticized more mainstream leftist publications like The New Republic for insufficient radicalism.
After Eastman assumed leadership, and especially after August 1914, the magazine's denouncements of the war were frequent and fierce. In the September 1914 edition of his column, "Knowledge and Revolution," Eastman predicted: "Probably no one will actually be the victor in this gambler's war—for we may as well call it a gambler's war. Only so can we indicate its underlying commercial causes, its futility, and yet also the tall spirit in which it is carried off."
By May 1916, the radical content published in The Masses had caused it to be boycotted by two major American magazine distribution companies, United News Co. of Philadelphia, and Magazine Distributing Co. of Boston. It was also excluded from the Canadian mails, university libraries, bookshops, and the newsstands of the New York City subway system.
In July 1913, in the aftermath of the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912 in West Virginia, Max Eastman wrote an editorial in The Masses accusing the Associated Press of "having suppressed and colored the news of that strike in favor of the employers". Eastman detailed the AP's alleged suppression of information regarding the abuses carried out by a military tribunal set up to punish striking coal workers, and also accused the AP of having a conflict of interest, after it was discovered that the AP's local correspondent was also a member of the tribunal. The editorial was accompanied by a cartoon by Art Young, entitled "Poisoned at the Source", which featured a figure of the AP poisoning the reservoir of news with "Lies", "Suppressed Facts", "Prejudice", "Slander", and "Hatred of Labor Organization".