The New Masses
Encyclopedia
The "New Masses" was a prominent American Marxist publication edited by Walt Carmon, briefly by Whittaker Chambers
, and primarily (or famously) by Michael Gold, Granville Hicks
, and Joseph Freeman
.
When the Great Depression
struck in 1929 America became more receptive to ideas from the political Left
. The magazine became a highly influential publication and, from the 1930s onwards was “the principal organ of the American cultural left from 1926 onwards."
Named in homage to its predecessor, Masses (1911–17), and formed as a response to the emergence of The Workers Monthly in 1924, New Masses was founded and initially edited by Hugo Gellert
, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman
, (Masses alumni), Michael Gold, Joseph Freeman
, Granville Hicks
(starting in 1934), Walt Carmon, and James Rorty in 1926 in New York City
. Many contributors are now considered distinguished, even canonical authors/writers: William Carlos Williams
, Theodore Dreiser
, John Dos Passos
, Upton Sinclair
, Richard Wright
, Ralph Ellison
, Dorothy Parker
, Dorothy Day
, John Breecher, Langston Hughes
, Eugene O'Neill
, and Ernest Hemingway
. More importantly, it also circulated works by avowedly leftist, even “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
, and Albert Halper
. The vast production of left-wing popular art of the 1930s and 40s was an attempt to create a radical culture in conflict with mass culture. Infused with an oppositional mentality, this cultural front was a rich period in American history and is what Michael Denning calls a “Second American Renaissance” because it permanently transformed American modernism
and mass culture
. One of the foremost periodicals of this renaissance was the New Masses.
The magazine adopted a loosely leftist
position at its onset, and Frederick J. Hoffman describes “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”. There was, however, eventual transformation: the editorial shift from a magazine of the radical left, with its numerous competing points of view, gave way to a bastion of Marxist conformity. When Gold and Freeman gained full control by 1928 the “Stalinist
/Trotskyist
” division began in earnest. Gold’s January 1929 column “Go Left, Young Writers” began 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 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” dominated the magazine at its onset (Richard Wright
and Jack Conroy
being prime examples) because the magazine stressed the presence of worker-correspondents in its pages “to make the ‘worker-writer’ a reality in the American radical press”. This movement lauded literature considered more appealing to a working-class audience. This convergence of literary philosophy and Communist Party
policy in Depression-era America was facilitated by the John Reed Club
of New York City
, one of the Communist Party’s
affiliated literary organizations. Thus, class conflict
was to expand to the literary realm and support political revolution.
published two articles, “Wall Street’s Fascist Conspiracy: Testimony that the Dickstein MacCormack Committee Suppressed” and “Wall Street's Fascist Conspiracy: Morgan Pulls the Strings” with a deleted portion of a congressional committee. He said there was a plot which was part of a fascist conspiracy
of financiers to take over the United States, and cited the names of business leaders. Furthermore, “[t]he 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”. The magazine still included literary and artistic content until its eventual demise, just not in the same abundance as in its previous years. While this content was slowly crowded out in favor of more journalistic pieces, New Masses still impacted 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 journal also sponsored the first From Spirituals to Swing
concert on 23 December 1938 at Carnegie Hall
and was organized by John Hammond
.
Though the Great Depression
caused resurgence in the American Communist movement and New Masses readership surged - so much so that Gold and his colleagues responded by turning the magazine into a weekly publication in 1933 - New Masses would eventually encounter competition from Partisan Review
. One of its chief aims was to provide a place for creative writing of leftist character gradually crowded out of New Masses by its urgent demands for political and economic discussion and strict adherence to Party doctrine. Furthermore, according to Arthur C. Ferrari, New Masses illustrates how the circumstances under which political and cultural forces converge can be temporary. By the late 1930s, New Masses strongly backed the Communist Party, USA’s Popular Front
movement as a response to the rise of fascism
and the Spanish Civil War
. More specifically, though New Masses was an official organ of the Communist Party, it lost Party support when the Party entered the Popular Front
stage – fighting the threat of fascism
and global war trumped class conflict and political revolution for the foreseeable future .
Though the magazine supported these aims, the 1940s brought significant philosophical and practical troubles to the publication, as it faced the ideological upheaval created by the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact of 1939 (as well as blowback from its support for the Moscow Trials
), while at the same time facing virulent anti-communism
and censorship during the war. In 1948, editor Betty Millard
published the influential article "Woman against Myth", which examined and explained the history of the women's movement in the United States, in the socialist movement, and in the USSR. The New Masses ceased publication later that year.
Real name Itzok Isaac Granich, the Jewish-American writer was a devout communist and abrasive left-wing literary critic. During the 1930s and 1940s, he was considered the proverbial dean of American proletarian literature
. In 1925, after a trip to Moscow
, he helped found New Masses, which published leftist works and set up radical theater groups. In 1928, he became the editor-in-chief. As editor, he adopted the hard-line stance to publish works by proletarian authors rather than literary leftists. Endorsing what he called “proletarian literature
,” Gold was influential in making this style of fiction popular during the depression years of 1930s
. His most influential work, Jews Without Money, a fictionalized autobiography
about growing up in impoverished Manhattan
, was published in 1930.
Granville Hicks
Hicks was an influential Marxist literary critic during the 1930s. He established his intellectual reputation as an influential literary critic with the 1933 publication of The Great Tradition, an analysis of American literature from a Marxist perspective. He joined the Communist Party
and became literary editor of New Masses in January 1934, the same issue New Masses became a weekly. He is known for his well-publicized resignation from the Communist Party
in 1939.
Joseph Freeman
Joseph Freeman was an early proponent of cultural Marxism
. His reputation rests on his influential introduction to Hicks’s 1935 anthology, Proletarian Literature in the United States and his 1936 account of his immigrant coming-of-age and becoming a Communist, An American Testament. During the Depression years Freeman did his most influential work as a literary theorist and cultural journalist. His 1929 essay “Literary Theories,” a review essay for New Masses, and his 1938 Partisan Review
article, “Mask Image Truth,” would eventually frame his mid-decade introduction to Hicks’s anthology. Freeman strains in these essays to honor the Communist Party
line and, concurrently, to resist the ideological crudity, or “vulgar Marxism,” that often resulted from such striving.
Whittaker Chambers
Whittaker Chambers was born Jay Vivian Chambers and also known as David Whittaker Chambers , was an American writer and editor. After being a Communist Party USA member and Soviet spy, he later renounced communism and became an outspoken opponent later testifying in the perjury and espionage trial...
, and primarily (or famously) by Michael Gold, Granville Hicks
Granville Hicks
Granville Hicks was an American Marxist as well as an anti-Marxist novelist, literary critic, educator, and editor.-Life:...
, and Joseph Freeman
Joseph Freeman
Joseph Freeman, Jr. was the first man of black African descent to receive the Melchizedek priesthood and be ordained an elder in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints after the announcement of the 1978 Revelation on Priesthood, which allowed “all worthy male members of the Church” to...
.
When the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
struck in 1929 America became more receptive to ideas from the political Left
Left-wing politics
In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...
. The magazine became a highly influential publication and, from the 1930s onwards was “the principal organ of the American cultural left from 1926 onwards."
History
Hugo Gellert
Hugo Gellert was a Hungarian-American illustrator and muralist. A committed radical, much of Gellert's work is agitational in nature and distinctive in style, considered by some art critics as among the best political work of the first half of the 20th Century.-Early years:Hugo Gellert was born...
, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman
Max Eastman
Max Forrester Eastman was an American writer on literature, philosophy and society, a poet, and a prominent political activist. For many years, Eastman was a supporter of socialism, a leading patron of the Harlem Renaissance and an activist for a number of liberal and radical causes...
, (Masses alumni), Michael Gold, Joseph Freeman
Joseph Freeman (writer)
Joseph "Joe" Freeman was an American writer and magazine editor. He is best remembered as a contributor and editor to The New Masses, a literary and artistic magazine closely associated with the Communist Party USA, and as a founding editor of the magazine Partisan Review.-Early years:Joseph...
, Granville Hicks
Granville Hicks
Granville Hicks was an American Marxist as well as an anti-Marxist novelist, literary critic, educator, and editor.-Life:...
(starting in 1934), Walt Carmon, and James Rorty in 1926 in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. Many contributors are now considered distinguished, even canonical authors/writers: William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams
William Carlos Williams was an American poet closely associated with modernism and Imagism. He was also a pediatrician and general practitioner of medicine, having graduated from the University of Pennsylvania...
, Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Herman Albert Dreiser was an American novelist and journalist of the naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite a lack of a firm moral code, and literary situations that more closely resemble studies of nature than tales of...
, John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos
John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist.-Early life:Born in Chicago, Illinois, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of John Randolph Dos Passos , a distinguished lawyer of Madeiran Portuguese descent, and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison of Petersburg, Virginia. The elder Dos Passos...
, Upton Sinclair
Upton Sinclair
Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. , was an American author who wrote close to one hundred books in many genres. He achieved popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, acquiring particular fame for his classic muckraking novel, The Jungle . It exposed conditions in the U.S...
, Richard Wright
Richard Wright (author)
Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African-Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries...
, Ralph Ellison
Ralph Ellison
Ralph Waldo Ellison was an American novelist, literary critic, scholar and writer. He was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Ellison is best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953...
, Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker
Dorothy Parker was an American poet, short story writer, critic and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th century urban foibles....
, Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day
Dorothy Day was an American journalist, social activist and devout Catholic convert; she advocated the Catholic economic theory of Distributism. She was also considered to be an anarchist, and did not hesitate to use the term...
, John Breecher, Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist. He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry. Hughes is best known for his work during the Harlem Renaissance...
, Eugene O'Neill
Eugene O'Neill
Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was an American playwright and Nobel laureate in Literature. His poetically titled plays were among the first to introduce into American drama techniques of realism earlier associated with Russian playwright Anton Chekhov, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Swedish...
, and Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American author and journalist. His economic and understated style had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his life of adventure and his public image influenced later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the...
. More importantly, it also circulated works by avowedly leftist, even “proletarian” (working-class) artists: Kenneth Fearing
Kenneth Fearing
Kenneth Fearing was an American poet, novelist, and founding editor of the Partisan Review. Literary critic Macha Rosenthal called him "the chief poet of the American Depression."-Early life:...
, H.H. Lewis
H.H. Lewis
H.H. Lewis was a Communist American poet during the 1930s thru the 1970s.Harold Harwell Lewis , or H.H. Lewis as he become known, was born January 13, 1901, near Cape Girardeau, Missouri...
, Jack Conroy
Jack Conroy
Jack Conroy a leftist American writer, also known as a Worker-Writer, and was best known for his contributions to “proletarian literature,” fiction and nonfiction about the life of American workers during the early decades of the 20th century.-Background:He was born John Wesley Conroy to Irish...
, Grace Lumpkin
Grace Lumpkin
Grace Lumpkin was an American writer of proletarian literature, focusing most of her works on the Depression era and the rise and fall of favor surrounding communism in the United States...
, Jan Matulka
Jan Matulka
Jan Matulka was a Czech-American modern artist originally from Bohemia. Matulka's style would range from Abstract expressionism to landscapes, sometimes in the same day.-Early life:...
, Ruth McKenney
Ruth McKenney
Ruth McKenney was an American author and journalist, best remembered for My Sister Eileen, a memoir of her experiences growing up in Ohio and moving to Greenwich Village with her sister Eileen McKenney. This was later adapted as the musical Wonderful Town by Leonard Bernstein.-Early life:McKenney...
, Maxwell Bodenheim
Maxwell Bodenheim
Maxwell Bodenheim was an American poet and novelist who was known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians. His writing brought him international fame during the Jazz Age of the 1920s.-Biography:...
, Meridel LeSueur, Josephine Herbst
Josephine Herbst
Josephine Herbst was an American writer and journalist, active from 1923 to near the time of her death. She was a radical with communist leanings, who "incorporate[d] the philosophy of socialism into her fiction" and "aligned herself with the political Left", She wrote "proletarian novels"...
, Jacob Burck
Jacob Burck
Jacob "Jake" Burck was an American painter, sculptor, and Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.-Early years:Jacob Burck was born January 10, 1907, near Białystok, Poland, the son of ethnic Jewish parents, Abraham Burck and Rebecca Lev Burck...
, Tillie Olsen
Tillie Olsen
Tillie Lerner Olsen was an American writer associated with the political turmoil of the 1930s and the first generation of American feminists.-Biography:...
, Stanley Burnshaw
Stanley Burnshaw
Stanley Burnshaw was an influential American poet, primarily known for his ontology, The Seamless Web . His style was particularly writing political poems, prose, editorials, etc...
, Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky
Louis Zukofsky was an American poet. He was one of the founders and the primary theorist of the Objectivist group of poets and thus an important influence on subsequent generations of poets in America and abroad.-Life:...
, George Oppen
George Oppen
George Oppen was an American poet, best known as one of the members of the Objectivist group of poets. He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism, and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attentions of the House Un-American Activities Committee...
, and Albert Halper
Albert Halper
-Life:Born in 1904 and raised in Chicago, Halper went to live and work in New York City in 1929. His work came to the attention of Elliot E. Cohen, who published him in his magazine, the Menorah Journal...
. The vast production of left-wing popular art of the 1930s and 40s was an attempt to create a radical culture in conflict with mass culture. Infused with an oppositional mentality, this cultural front was a rich period in American history and is what Michael Denning calls a “Second American Renaissance” because it permanently transformed American modernism
American modernism
American modernism like modernism in general is a trend of thought that affirms the power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the aid of scientific knowledge, technology and practical experimentation, and is thus in its essence both progressive and optimistic...
and mass culture
Popular culture
Popular culture is the totality of ideas, perspectives, attitudes, memes, images and other phenomena that are deemed preferred per an informal consensus within the mainstream of a given culture, especially Western culture of the early to mid 20th century and the emerging global mainstream of the...
. One of the foremost periodicals of this renaissance was the New Masses.
The magazine adopted a loosely leftist
Left-wing politics
In politics, Left, left-wing and leftist generally refer to support for social change to create a more egalitarian society...
position at its onset, and Frederick J. Hoffman describes “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
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
, and less than a dozen were fellow travelers”. There was, however, eventual transformation: the editorial shift from a magazine of the radical left, with its numerous competing points of view, gave way to a bastion of Marxist conformity. When Gold and Freeman gained full control by 1928 the “Stalinist
Stalinism
Stalinism refers to the ideology that Joseph Stalin conceived and implemented in the Soviet Union, and is generally considered a branch of Marxist–Leninist ideology but considered by some historians to be a significant deviation from this philosophy...
/Trotskyist
Trotskyism
Trotskyism is the theory of Marxism as advocated by Leon Trotsky. Trotsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist and Bolshevik-Leninist, arguing for the establishment of a vanguard party of the working-class...
” division began in earnest. Gold’s January 1929 column “Go Left, Young Writers” began the “proletarian literature
Proletarian literature
Proletarian literature refers to the literature created by working-class writers for the class-conscious proletariat, published by the communist parties. It was a literature without literary pretensions....
” 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 realism
Literary realism
Literary realism most often refers to the trend, beginning with certain works of nineteenth-century French literature and extending to late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century authors in various countries, towards depictions of contemporary life and society "as they were." In the spirit of...
; they advocated stylistic experimentation but championed and preferred genuine proletarian authorship. A substantial number of poems, short stories, journalistic pieces and quasi-autobiographical “sketches” dominated the magazine at its onset (Richard Wright
Richard Wright (author)
Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of sometimes controversial novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially those involving the plight of African-Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries...
and Jack Conroy
Jack Conroy
Jack Conroy a leftist American writer, also known as a Worker-Writer, and was best known for his contributions to “proletarian literature,” fiction and nonfiction about the life of American workers during the early decades of the 20th century.-Background:He was born John Wesley Conroy to Irish...
being prime examples) because the magazine stressed the presence of worker-correspondents in its pages “to make the ‘worker-writer’ a reality in the American radical press”. This movement lauded literature considered more appealing to a working-class audience. This convergence of literary philosophy and Communist Party
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
policy in Depression-era America was facilitated by the John Reed Club
John Reed Club
The John Reed Club was an American, semi-national, Marxist club for writers, artists, and intellectuals, named after the American journalist, activist, and poet, John Reed.-Founding:...
of New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, one of the Communist Party’s
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
affiliated literary organizations. Thus, class conflict
Class conflict
Class conflict is the tension or antagonism which exists in society due to competing socioeconomic interests between people of different classes....
was to expand to the literary realm and support political revolution.
Later Years and Demise
In the thirties New Masses entered a new phase: a magazine of leftwing political comment, its attention to literature confined to book reviews and explosive editorials aimed at non-Marxist contemporaries. For example, in 1935, John L. SpivakJohn L. Spivak
John Louis Spivak , an American socialist and later communist reporter and author, wrote about the problems of the working class, racism, and the spread of fascism and anti-Semitism in Europe and the United States. Most of his writings date from the 1920s and 1930s...
published two articles, “Wall Street’s Fascist Conspiracy: Testimony that the Dickstein MacCormack Committee Suppressed” and “Wall Street's Fascist Conspiracy: Morgan Pulls the Strings” with a deleted portion of a congressional committee. He said there was a plot which was part of a fascist conspiracy
Business Plot
The Business Plot was an alleged political conspiracy in 1933. Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler claimed that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans' organization and use it in a coup d’état to overthrow United States President Franklin D...
of financiers to take over the United States, and cited the names of business leaders. Furthermore, “[t]he proletariat
Proletariat
The proletariat is a term used to identify a lower social class, usually the working class; a member of such a class is proletarian...
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”. The magazine still included literary and artistic content until its eventual demise, just not in the same abundance as in its previous years. While this content was slowly crowded out in favor of more journalistic pieces, New Masses still impacted the leftist cultural scene. For example, In 1937 New Masses printed Abel Meeropol
Abel Meeropol
Abel Meeropol was an American writer and song-writer, best known under his pseudonym Lewis Allan and as the adoptive father of the young sons of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.-Biography:...
’s anti-lynching poem “Strange Fruit
Strange Fruit
"Strange Fruit" is a song performed most famously by Billie Holiday, who released her first recording of it in 1939, the year she first sang it. Written by the teacher Abel Meeropol as a poem, it exposed American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans. Such lynchings had occurred...
,” later popularized in song by Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday was an American jazz singer and songwriter. Nicknamed "Lady Day" by her friend and musical partner Lester Young, Holiday had a seminal influence on jazz and pop singing...
. The journal also sponsored the first From Spirituals to Swing
From Spirituals to Swing
From Spirituals to Swing was the title of two concerts presented by John Hammond in Carnegie Hall on 23 December 1938 and 24 December 1939. The concerts included performances by Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Big Joe Turner and Pete Johnson, Helen Humes, Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, Mitchell's...
concert on 23 December 1938 at Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall
Carnegie Hall is a concert venue in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, United States, located at 881 Seventh Avenue, occupying the east stretch of Seventh Avenue between West 56th Street and West 57th Street, two blocks south of Central Park....
and was organized by John Hammond
John H. Hammond
John Henry Hammond II was an American record producer, musician and music critic from the 1930s to the early 1980s...
.
Though the Great Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
caused resurgence in the American Communist movement and New Masses readership surged - so much so that Gold and his colleagues responded by turning the magazine into a weekly publication in 1933 - New Masses would eventually encounter competition from Partisan Review
Partisan Review
Partisan Review was an American political and literary quarterly published from 1934 to 2003, though it suspended publication between October 1936 and December 1937.-Overview:...
. One of its chief aims was to provide a place for creative writing of leftist character gradually crowded out of New Masses by its urgent demands for political and economic discussion and strict adherence to Party doctrine. Furthermore, according to Arthur C. Ferrari, New Masses illustrates how the circumstances under which political and cultural forces converge can be temporary. By the late 1930s, New Masses strongly backed the Communist Party, USA’s Popular Front
Popular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...
movement as a response to the rise of fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
and the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...
. More specifically, though New Masses was an official organ of the Communist Party, it lost Party support when the Party entered the Popular Front
Popular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...
stage – fighting the threat of fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
and global war trumped class conflict and political revolution for the foreseeable future .
Though the magazine supported these aims, the 1940s brought significant philosophical and practical troubles to the publication, as it faced the ideological upheaval created by the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact of 1939 (as well as blowback from its support for the Moscow Trials
Moscow Trials
The Moscow Trials were a series of show trials conducted in the Soviet Union and orchestrated by Joseph Stalin during the Great Purge of the 1930s. The victims included most of the surviving Old Bolsheviks, as well as the leadership of the Soviet secret police...
), while at the same time facing virulent anti-communism
Anti-communism
Anti-communism is opposition to communism. Organized anti-communism developed in reaction to the rise of communism, especially after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the beginning of the Cold War in 1947.-Objections to communist theory:...
and censorship during the war. In 1948, editor Betty Millard
Betty Millard
Elizabeth “Betty” Boynton Millard was a writer, artist, political activist, philanthropist, and a feminist. She is known for her feminist publication "Woman against Myth", as well as her involvement with the United States Communist Party in the 1940s and 1950s.-Early life:Born in Highland Park,...
published the influential article "Woman against Myth", which examined and explained the history of the women's movement in the United States, in the socialist movement, and in the USSR. The New Masses ceased publication later that year.
Editors
Michael GoldReal name Itzok Isaac Granich, the Jewish-American writer was a devout communist and abrasive left-wing literary critic. During the 1930s and 1940s, he was considered the proverbial dean of American proletarian literature
Proletarian literature
Proletarian literature refers to the literature created by working-class writers for the class-conscious proletariat, published by the communist parties. It was a literature without literary pretensions....
. In 1925, after a trip to Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, he helped found New Masses, which published leftist works and set up radical theater groups. In 1928, he became the editor-in-chief. As editor, he adopted the hard-line stance to publish works by proletarian authors rather than literary leftists. Endorsing what he called “proletarian literature
Proletarian literature
Proletarian literature refers to the literature created by working-class writers for the class-conscious proletariat, published by the communist parties. It was a literature without literary pretensions....
,” Gold was influential in making this style of fiction popular during the depression years of 1930s
1930s
File:1930s decade montage.png|From left, clockwise: Dorothea Lange's photo of the homeless Florence Thompson show the effects of the Great Depression; Due to the economic collapse, the farms become dry and the Dust Bowl spreads through America; The Battle of Wuhan during the Second Sino-Japanese...
. His most influential work, Jews Without Money, a fictionalized autobiography
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...
about growing up in impoverished Manhattan
Manhattan
Manhattan is the oldest and the most densely populated of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the state of New York...
, was published in 1930.
Granville Hicks
Hicks was an influential Marxist literary critic during the 1930s. He established his intellectual reputation as an influential literary critic with the 1933 publication of The Great Tradition, an analysis of American literature from a Marxist perspective. He joined the Communist Party
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
and became literary editor of New Masses in January 1934, the same issue New Masses became a weekly. He is known for his well-publicized resignation from the Communist Party
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
in 1939.
Joseph Freeman
Joseph Freeman was an early proponent of cultural Marxism
Cultural Marxism
Cultural Marxism is a term referring to a group of Marxists who have sought to apply critical theory to matters of family composition, gender, race, and cultural identity within Western society.-Explanation of the "Cultural Marxism" theory:...
. His reputation rests on his influential introduction to Hicks’s 1935 anthology, Proletarian Literature in the United States and his 1936 account of his immigrant coming-of-age and becoming a Communist, An American Testament. During the Depression years Freeman did his most influential work as a literary theorist and cultural journalist. His 1929 essay “Literary Theories,” a review essay for New Masses, and his 1938 Partisan Review
Partisan Review
Partisan Review was an American political and literary quarterly published from 1934 to 2003, though it suspended publication between October 1936 and December 1937.-Overview:...
article, “Mask Image Truth,” would eventually frame his mid-decade introduction to Hicks’s anthology. Freeman strains in these essays to honor the Communist Party
Communist party
A political party described as a Communist party includes those that advocate the application of the social principles of communism through a communist form of government...
line and, concurrently, to resist the ideological crudity, or “vulgar Marxism,” that often resulted from such striving.
Other Sources
- Freeman, Joseph. “Literary Theories.” New Masses 4.5 (1929): 13. Print.
- Folsom, Michael. “The Education of Michael Gold.” Proletarian Writers of the Thirties. Ed. David Madden. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1968. 222-51. Print.
- Gold, Mike. “Go Left, Young Writers!” New Masses 4.1 (1929): 3-4. Print.
- Hicks, Granville. “The Crisis in American Criticism.” New Masses 9.2 (1933): 4-5. Print.
Further reading
- Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism. New York: Hartcourt, 1961. Print
- Freeman, Joseph. Introduction. Hicks 9-28
- Gold, Michael. Jews Without Money. New York: Liveright, 1930. Print
- Hemingway, Andrew. Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926-1956. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2002. Print
- Hicks, Granville, et. al., eds. Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology. New York: International, 1935. Print
- Murphy, James F. “The American Communist Party Press and the New Masses.” The Proletarian Moment: The Controversy over Leftism in Literature. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1991. 55-82. Print
- North, Joseph, ed. New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties. New York: International, 1969. Print
- Wald, Alan M. Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of a Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left. Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 2002. Print