Product Code Database
New Masses (1926–1948) was an American Marxist magazine closely associated with the Communist Party USA (CPUSA). It was the successor to both The Masses (1911–1917) and The Liberator (1918–1924). New Masses was later merged into Masses & Mainstream (1948–1963).
With the widespread economic hardships brought on by the Great Depression of 1929, many Americans were more receptive to socialism and leftist ideas. As a result, New Masses grew in circulation and became highly influential in literary, artistic, and intellectual circles. The magazine has been called "the principal organ of the American cultural left from 1926 onwards."
In its first phase as a monthly, which ended in 1933, the New Masses editorial staff included The Masses alumni Max Eastman, Hugo Gellert, Mike Gold, John F. Sloan, as well as Walt Carmon and Joseph Freeman. It also briefly included figures such as Whittaker Chambers, William Gropper, and James Rorty. When the magazine was revamped as a weekly in January 1934, the reshuffled editorial staff featured Nathan Adler, Jacob Burck, Stanley Burnshaw, Joseph Freeman, Granville Hicks, and Joseph North, among several others.
Many New Masses contributors are now considered distinguished, even canonical authors/writers, artists, and activists: William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, James Agee, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O'Neill, Rex Stout, and Ernest Hemingway. More importantly, it also circulated works by avowedly leftist, "proletarian" (working-class) artists: Kenneth Fearing, H.H. Lewis, Jack Conroy, Grace Lumpkin, Jan Matulka, Ruth McKenney, Maxwell Bodenheim, Meridel LeSueur, Josephine Herbst, Jacob Burck, Tillie Olsen, Stanley Burnshaw, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Crockett Johnson, Wanda Gág, Albert Halper, Hyman Warsager, and Aaron Copland.
The vast production of left-wing popular art from the late 1920s to 1940s was an attempt to create a radical culture in opposition to popular culture. Infused with a defiant, outsider mentality, this leftist cultural front represented a rich period in American history. Michael Denning has called it a "Second American Renaissance" because it permanently transformed American modernism and popular culture as a whole. One of the foremost periodicals of this renaissance was New Masses.
At the outset, New Masses adopted a loosely leftist position: "Among the fifty-six writers and artists connected in some way with the early issues of the New Masses, Joseph Freeman reports, only two were members of the Communist Party, and less than a dozen were fellow travelers."Hoffman, Frederick J., Charles Allen, and Carolyn F. Church. "Political Directions in the Literature of the Thirties." The Little Magazine: a History and a Bibliography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1946. 151. There was, however, an eventual transformation in which this magazine of the "generic left", with its numerous competing points of view, gradually became a bastion of Marxist conformity. By the end of 1928, when Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman gained full editorial control, the "Stalinism/Trotskyism" division began in earnest. Gold’s January 1929 column, "Go Left, Young Writers!", initiated the "proletarian literature" movement, one spurred by the emergence of writers with true working-class credentials. Barbara Foley points out, though, that Gold and his peers did not eschew various literary forms in favor of strict literary realism; they advocated stylistic experimentation, but championed and preferred genuine proletarian authorship.
A substantial number of poems, short stories, journalistic pieces, and quasi-autobiographical sketches by young working-class writers (Richard Wright and Jack Conroy being prime examples) dominated New Masses in its earliest days because the magazine sought "to make the 'worker-writer' a reality in the American radical press." As Nathan Robinson notes: Rather than cater only to the college-educated intelligentsia, the magazine's editorial policy lauded rough-hewn literature considered more appealing to a working-class audience. The convergence of this literary philosophy and CPUSA policy in Depression-era America was facilitated by the John Reed Club of New York City, one of the Party's affiliated organizations. The goal was to expand the class conflict to the literary realm and support political revolution.
In furtherance of the magazine’s editorial shift, “the proletariat Stalinists of the founding group,” according to Samuel Richard West, "began applying a Marxist litmus test to every contribution; as a result, the less ideological contributors and editors began to drop away".West, Samuel Richard. Foreword. The New Masses Index, 1926–1933. By Theodore F. Watts. Easthampton, MA: Periodyssey, 2002. 5. But the magazine still managed to include literary, artistic, and sociological content, just not in the same abundance as in previous years. While this content was slowly phased out in favor of politically oriented journalism, New Masses continued to influence the leftist cultural scene. For example, in 1937 New Masses printed Abel Meeropol's anti-lynching poem "Strange Fruit", later popularized in song by Billie Holiday. The magazine also sponsored the first From Spirituals to Swing concert on 23 December 1938 at Carnegie Hall, an event organized by John Hammond. In one of the magazine's last issues on 30 December 1947, editor Betty Millard published her groundbreaking feminist text, "Woman Against Myth", which examined the history of the women's struggle for equality in the U.S., the USSR, and within the international socialist movement.
Though the Great Depression caused a surge in American communism and expanded New Masses readership – so much so that Mike Gold, Joseph Freeman and their colleagues responded by turning the magazine into a weekly publication in 1934 – New Masses would eventually encounter competition from Partisan Review. Providing a place for creative writing of a leftist character was one of the original missions of New Masses, but this mission was crowded out by urgent demands for political and economic discussion and by the need for adherence to Party doctrine. According to Arthur Ferrari, the fate of New Masses illustrates how the circumstances under which political and cultural forces converge can be temporary in nature. In his assessment of the magazine's history, David Peck pinpoints 1934 as the time when a change in focus occurred, converting New Masses "from a monthly 'revolutionary magazine of art and literature' into a 'weekly political magazine.'"
Despite being an official organ of the Communist Party, New Masses lost some of its Party support when the CPUSA's Popular Front stage began in 1936. That was when fighting the Spanish Civil War and the threat of world fascism trumped class conflict and political revolution in the U.S., at least for the foreseeable future.Ferrari, Arthur C. “Proletarian Literature: A Case of Convergence of Political and Literary Radicalism.” Cultural Politics: Radical Movements in Modern History. Ed. Jerold M. Starr. New York: Praeger, 1985. 185–186. Although the magazine supported the Popular Front's aims, it found itself in a difficult and complicated position as it tried to strike the proper editorial balance.
The 1940s brought significant philosophical and practical troubles to the publication. It struggled with the ideological upheavals caused by blowback from the Moscow Trials and Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, while at the same time facing virulent anti-communism and censorship at home during the war. With its readership declining, New Masses published its final issue on 13 January 1948. The magazine soon merged with another Communist quarterly to form Masses & Mainstream (1948–1963). In 2016, the Party of Communists USA revived the name New Masses with its own publication.
Managing editors
|
|
