New Masses

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New Masses
Michael Gold, Walt Carmon, Whittaker Chambers, Joseph Freeman, Granville Hicks
First issue 1926 (1926-month)
Final issue1948
CountryUnited States

New Masses (1926–1948) was an American

Marxist magazine closely associated with the Communist Party USA. It succeeded both The Masses (1912–1917) and The Liberator (1918–1924). New Masses was later merged into Masses & Mainstream (1948–1963). With the coming of the Great Depression in 1929 America became more receptive to ideas from the political Left and New Masses became highly influential in intellectual circles. The magazine has been called “the principal organ of the American cultural left from 1926 onwards."[1]

History

Early years

New Masses was launched in

The Workers Monthly (successor to The Liberator) into a more theoretically-oriented publication. The name of the new magazine was a tip of the hat to The Masses
(1911–1917), forerunner of both publications.

The editorial staff of New Masses included The Masses alumni

Meridel LeSueur, Josephine Herbst, Jacob Burck, Tillie Olsen, Stanley Burnshaw, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Crockett Johnson, Wanda Gág, Albert Halper, Hyman Warsager,[3] and Aaron Copland.[4]

The vast production of left-wing popular art of the 1930s and 1940s 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 New Masses.[5]

The magazine adopted a loosely

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.[7]

A substantial number of poems, short stories, journalistic pieces and quasi-autobiographical “sketches” dominated the magazine at its onset (

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.

Later years and demise

The New Masses featured the political art of a number of prominent radical cartoonists, including William Gropper.

In the 1930s 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-

John Hammond
.

Though the

Popular Front stage – fighting the threat of fascism and global war trumped class conflict and political revolution for the foreseeable future .[10]

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

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.

In 1948, the magazine merged with another Communist quarterly to form Masses & Mainstream (1948–1963). In 2016, the Party of Communists USA revived this publication.[11]

Managing editors

Mike Gold was among the most widely recognized radical literary figures associated with The New Masses.
  1. Joseph Freeman : His reputation rests on his influential introduction to Granville 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.[12]
  2. Jews Without Money, a fictionalized autobiography about growing up in impoverished Manhattan
    , was published in 1930.
  3. Walt Carmon (1930/1–1932)
  4. Ware Group and Alger Hiss). His name persisted in the masthead for months thereafter, perhaps as cover.[13]
  5. Joseph Freeman (1932–1933)[12]
  6. 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. Hicks is remembered for his well-publicized resignation from the CPUSA in 1939.[14]
  7. Joseph Freeman (1936–1937)[12]
  8. No top editor from 1938 onward[15]

Footnotes

  1. ^ Foley, Barbara. Radical Presentations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993; p. 65.
  2. ^ Paul Buhle, Marxism in the USA: From 1870 to the Present Day (London: Verson, 1987), p. 172.
  3. ^ "brooklynmuseum.org". Brooklyn Museum – Color Prints by Four W.P.A. Artists. Retrieved 4 October 2022.
  4. ^ Copland, Aaron (5 June 1934). "Workers Sing!". New Masses. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. ^ Denning, Michael (1996). The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso. pp. xi–xx.
  6. ^ 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.
  7. ^ Foley, Barbara. Radical Presentations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. 54–55.
  8. ^ Foley, Barbara. Radical Presentations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929–1941. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. p. 88.
  9. ^ West, Samuel Richard. Foreword. The New Masses Index, 1926–1933. By Theodore F. Watts. Easthampton, MA: Periodyssey, 2002. 5.
  10. ^ 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.
  11. ^ "Publications". partyofcommunistsusa.net. Retrieved 21 September 2023.
  12. ^ a b c "Joseph Freeman papers". Stanford University.
  13. ^
    LCCN 52005149
    . Retrieved 8 September 2017.
  14. ^ "Granville Hicks Papers". Syracuse University Library = Special Collections Research Center. Retrieved 8 September 2017.
  15. ^ "masthead" (PDF). New Masses: 13. 4 January 1938. Retrieved 10 March 2024. Editors: Theodore Draper, Granville Hicks, Crockett Johnson, Joshua Kunitz, Herman Michelson, Bruce Minton, Samuel Sillen, Alexander Taylor

Further reading

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External links

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