Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Although published only from January 1911 through December 1917, The Masses was perhaps the American left's best-loved magazine, publishing some of the age's leading artists and writers. In an era when the American socialist press included hundreds of daily and weekly papers, published in the dozens of languages spoken by a largely immigrant working class, The Masses and the more agitational International Socialist Review were the party's most prominent magazines until they were suppressed during World War I. After a modest beginning as an earnest exponent of an evolutionary road to socialism, The Masses was re-launched in 1912 with Max Eastman as editor and a core of artists and writers who ran the magazine as a cooperative. They proudly proclaimed it “A Revolutionary and not a Reform Magazine; a Magazine with a Sense of Humor and no Respect for the Respectable.” The reborn Masses embodied a fusion of avant-garde artistic and literary sensibilities with a more radical but eclectic socialist approach. The magazine was lively and irreverent, illustrated by some of the leading artists of the day and publishing contributions by radical labor leaders and other activists, side by side with prominent writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Floyd Dell, John Reed , Carl Sandburg, and Mary Heaton Vorse. Many made their living in the commercial press, while contributing their more ... log in or subscribe to read full text