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but we intend to branch out into other areas. This section is about
The Masses.
The
Masses
was founded in New York in 1911
by Piet
Vlag. Another important financial backer was Amos
Pinchot,
a wealthy lawyer who supported a wide variety of progressive causes.
Organised
like a co-operative, artists and writers who contributed to the journal
shared in its management. Vlag edited the socialist
journal for a year but in 1912 appointed Max
Eastman, a Marxist, to carry out this task.
Articles and poems were written by people such as John
Reed, Sherwood Anderson, Crystal
Eastman, Hubert Harrison, Inez
Milholland, Mary Heaton Vorse, Louis
Untermeyer, Randolf Bourne, Dorothy
Day, Helen Keller, William
Walling, Carl Sandburg, Upton
Sinclair, Amy Lowell, Mabel
Dodge, Floyd Dell and Louise
Bryant.
The Masses
also published the work of important artists including
John Sloan, Robert
Henri, Alice Beach Winter, Mary
Ellen Sigsbee, Cornelia Barns, Reginald
Marsh, Rockwell Kent, Art
Young, Boardman Robinson, Robert
Minor, K. R. Chamberlain, Stuart
Davis, Cornelia Barns,
George Bellows and Maurice
Becker.
Max
Eastman believed that the First World War
had been caused by the imperialist competitive system. Eastman and journalists
such as John Reed who reported the conflict
for The
Masses,
argued that the USA should remain neutral. Most of those involved with
the journal agreed with this view but there was a small minority, including
William Walling and Upton
Sinclair, who wanted the USA to join the Allies
against the Central Powers. When
Sinclair failed to convince his fellow members he resigned from the
Socialist Party and ceased to contribute to The
Masses.
After the USA declared war on the Central
Powers in 1917, The Masses
came under government pressure to change its policy. When it refused
to do this, the journal lost its mailing privileges.
In July, 1917, it was claimed by the authorities that articles by Floyd
Dell and Max Eastman and cartoons by
Art Young, Boardman
Robinson and H. J. Glintenkamp
had violated the Espionage Act. Under
this act it was an offence to publish material that undermined the war
effort. The legal action that followed forced The
Masses to cease publication. In April, 1918, after three days
of deliberation, the jury failed to agree on the guilt of the men.
The second trial was held in September, 1918. John
Reed, who had recently returned from Russia, was also arrested and
charged with the original defendants. This time eight of the twelve
jurors voted for acquittal and the defendants walked free on October
5, 1918.
In 1918 the same people who produced The
Masses,
including the editor, Max Eastman, went on
the publish a very similar journal,
The Liberator.
Art Young, The
Cartoonists (1917)
The
Masses
The
Masses: Wikipedia
The
Masses:
Spartacus Biography
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Debates
War
Propaganda Bureau
The
Masses
(1)
John
Sloan, Gist of Art (1939)
The night the first copy of The Masses
(under Max Eastman's editorship) came out, I sold seventy-eight copies.
It was at a Suffrage parade. I went up to people, sometimes got on the
running board of a car, saying, "Buy it. It will be worth ten dollars
some day."
(2)
In his autobiography, Homecoming, Floyd
Dell wrote about joining The Masses
in 1914.
I was paid twenty-five dollars a week for helping
Max Eastman get out the magazine. My job on The Masses was to
read manuscripts, bring the best of them to editorial meetings to be
voted on, send back what we couldn't use, read proof, and 'make up'
the magazine - all duties with which I was familiar; and also to help
plan political cartoons and persuade the artists to draw them. I could
submit my stories and poems anonymously to the editorial meetings, hear
them discussed, and print them if they were accepted.
At the monthly editorial meetings, where the literary editors were usually
ranged on one side of all questions and the artists on the other. The
squabbles between literary and art editors were usually over the question
of intelligibility and propaganda versus artistic freedom; some of the
artists held a smouldering grudge against the literary editors, and
believed that Max Eastman and I were infringing the true freedom of
art by putting jokes or titles under their pictures. John Sloan and
Art Young were the only ones of the artists who were verbally quite
articulate; but fat, genial Art Young sided with the literary editors
usually; and John Sloan, a very vigorous and combative personality,
spoke up strongly for the artists.
Nobody gained a penny out of the things published in the magazine; it
was an honour to get into its pages, an honour conferred by vote at
the meetings. Max Eastman and I did get salaries for editorial work;
but that was regarded as dirty work, which ought to be paid for. We
were actually a little republic in which, as artists, we worked for
the approval of our fellows, not for money.
(3)
At the beginning of the First World War, the editor
of The Masses, Max Eastman, wrote
an article entitled The War of Lies (October, 1914)
Food is as important to armies as ammunition
- but more important than either is an unfailing supply of lies. You
simply cannot murder your enemy in the most efficient manner if you
know he is in every essential the same kind of a man as yourself.
Governments have tried to lay up a sufficient stock of lies before the
war start, but always in vain. The progress of popular intelligence
scraps such lies almost as fast as they are manufactured. The only safe
way is to produce an entirely new stock in the panic days immediately
before the war, when the people have no time or inclination to think,
and are cut off from all communication with the other side. After the
war starts, of course, the industry may be indefinitely continued.
This should be bourne in mind in reading tales of the barbarous atrocity
of soldiers, now on one side and now on the other.
(4)
John
Reed, The Masses
(September, 1914)
No
recent words have seemed to me so ludicrously condescending as the Kaiser's
speech to his people when he said that in this supreme crisis he freely
forgave all those who had ever opposed him. I am ashamed that in this
day in a civilized country any one can speak such archaic nonsense as
that speech contained.
More nauseating than the crack-brained bombast of the Kaiser is the
editorial chorus in America which pretends to believe - would have us
believe - that the White and Spotless Knight of Modern Democracy is
marching against the Unspeakably Vile Monster of Medieval Militarism.
What has democracy to do in alliance with Nicholas, the Tsar? It is
Liberalism which is marching from the Petersburg of Father Gapon, from
the Odessa of Progroms? Are our editors naive enough to believe this?
We, who are Socialists, must hope - we may even expect - that out of
this horror of bloodshed and dire destruction will come far-reaching
social changes - and a long step forward towards our goal of peace among
men. But we must not be duped by this editorial buncombe about Liberalism
going forth to Holy War against Tyranny. This is not our war.
(5)
John Reed, The Masses (March 1915)
The French Army has not been fighting well. But
it has been fighting, and the slaughter is appalling. There remains
no effective reserve in France; and the available youth of the nation
down to seventeen years of age is under arms. For my part, all other
considerations aside, I should not care to live half-frozen in a trench,
up to my middle in water, for three or four months, because someone
in authority said I ought to shoot Germans. But if I were a Frenchman
I should do it, because I would have been accustomed to the idea by
my compulsory military service.
I could fill pages of horrors that civilized Europe is inflicted upon
itself. I could describe to you the quiet, dark, saddened streets of
Paris, where every ten feet you are confronted with some miserable wreck
of a human being, or a madman who lost his reason in the trenches being
led around by his wife.
I could tell you of the big hospital in Berlin full of German soldiers
who went crazy from merely hearing the cries of the thirty thousand
Russians drowning in the swamps of East Prussia after the battle of
Tannenburg. Or of the numbness and incalculable demoralization among
men in the trenches. Or of holes torn in bodies with jagged pieces of
melanite shells, of sounds that make people deaf, of gases that destroy
eyesight, of wounded men dying day by day and hour by hour within forty
yards of twenty thousand human beings, who won't stop killing each other
long enough to gather them up.
(6)
Upton Sinclair, letter of resignation from
the Socialist Party (September, 1917)
I have lived in Germany and know its language
and literature, and the spirit and ideals of its rulers. Having given
many years to a study of American capitalism. I am not blind to the
defects of my own country; but, in spite of these defects, I assert
that the difference between the ruling class of Germany and that of
America is the difference between the seventeenth century and the twentieth.
No question can be settled by force, my pacifist friends all say. And
this in a country in which a civil war was fought and the question of
slavery and secession settled! I can speak with especial certainty of
this question, because all my ancestors were Southerners and fought
on the rebel side; I myself am living testimony to the fact that force
can and does settle questions - when it is used with intelligence.
In the same way I say if Germany be allowed to win this war - then we
in America shall have to drop every other activity and devote the next
twenty or thirty years to preparing for a last-ditch defence of the
democratic principle.
(7)
The Masses (September, 1917)
The Post Office was represented by Assistant
District Attorney Barnes. He explained that the Department construed
the Espionage Act as giving it power to exclude from the mails anything
which might interfere with the successful conduct of the war.
Four cartoons and four pieces of text in the August issue were specified
as violations of the law. The cartoons were Boardman Robinson's Making
the World Safe for Democracy, H. J. Glintenkamp's Liberty Bell
and the conscription cartoons, and one by Art Young on Congress and
Big Business. The conscription cartoon was considered by the Department
"the worst thing in the magazine". The text objected to was
A Question, an editorial by Max Eastman; A Tribute, a
poem by Josephine Bell; a paragraph in an article on Conscientious
Objectors; and an editorial, Friends of American Freedom.
(8)
Floyd Dell, Homecoming
(1933)
The Masses
harassed by the post-office authorities, was suppressed in October,
1917, by the Government, and its editors were indicted, myself among
them, under the so-called Espionage Act, which was being used not against
German spies but against American Socialists, Pacifists, and anti-war
radicals. Sentences of twenty years were being served out to all who
dared say this was not a war to end war, or that the Allied loans would
never be paid. But the courts would probably not get around to us until
next year; and we immediately made plans to start another magazine,
The Liberator, and tell more truth; we would stand on the pre-war
Wilsonian program, and call for a negotiated peace.
(9)
In
his autobiography, Homecoming,
Floyd Dell explained his thoughts on being
charged with breaking the Espionage
Act.
While we waited, I began to ponder
for myself the question which the jury had retired to decide. Were we
innocent or guilty? We certainly hadn't 'conspired' to do anything.
But what had we tried to do? Defiantly tell the truth. For what purpose?
To keep some truth alive in a world full of lies. And what was the good
of that? I don't know. But I was glad I had taken part in that act of
defiant truth-telling.
Rumours began to perculate. "Six to six." Next morning the
debate in the jury-room grew fiercer, noisier. At noon the jury came
in, hot, weary, angry, limp, and exhausted. They had fought the case
amongst themselves for eleven vehement hours. And they could not agree
upon a verdict.
But the judge refused to discharge them; and they went back, after further
instructions, with grim determination on their faces.
At eleven o'clock the jurors reported continued disagreement, but were
sent back. The next noon, hopelessly deadlocked, the jury was discharged,
with all our thanks. And so we were free.
(10)
Max Eastman, Love and Revolution (1964)
There was one big difference between the Masses
and the Liberator; in the latter we abandoned the pretense of
being a co-operative. Crystal Eastman and I owned the Liberator,
fifty-one shares of it, and we raised enough money so that we could
pay solid sums for contributions.
The list of contributing editors, largely brought over from the Masses,
reads as follows: Cornelia Barns, Howard Brubaker, Hugo Gellert, Arturo
Giovannitti, Charles T. Hallinan, Helen Keller, Ellen La Motte, Robert
Minor, John Reed, Boardman Robinson, Louis Untermeyer, Charles Wood,
Art Young.
Later Claude McKay, the Negro poet, became an associate editor. At a
New Year's party in 1921, we elected Michael Gold and William Gropper
to the staff - two opposite poles of a magnet: Gropper as instinctively
comic an artist as ever touched pen to paper, and Gold almost equally
gifted with pathos and tears.
Boardman
Robinson, The Deserter, The Masses (July, 1916)
