The Liberator (magazine)

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The Liberator

Debut issue, March 1918, with cover art by Hugo Gellert.
Editor	Max Eastman (1918-22) Floyd Dell (1922) Robert Minor (1922-24)
Staff writers	Cornelia Barns Howard Brubaker Dorothy Day Hugo Gellert Arturo Giovannitti Charles T. Hallinan Ellen La Motte Robert Minor John Reed Boardman Robinson Louis Untermeyer Charles W. Wood Art Young
Categories	Politics
Frequency	Monthly
First issue	March 1918
Final issue	October 1924
Company	Liberator Publishing Co. (1918-1922), Workers Party of America (1922-1924)

The Liberator was a monthly

in 1924.

History

The Liberator focused on international news, featuring war correspondent and Communist Labor Party founder

.

As with The Masses, The Liberator relied heavily upon political art, including contributions from

, and others.

Maintaining a low price for the elaborate publication came at a huge cost, however. To economize, ultra-thin newsprint was used for the magazine's pages — cheap and high in acid content. The result was a fragile and ephemeral publication. Despite a circulation that peaked at 60,000 copies per month,[1] comparatively few specimens of The Liberator have survived.

The Liberator ran into trouble in 1922—both financial and motivational, as editor Max Eastman's interests shifted from the mundane work of editing to book writing. Eastman ceded his editorial blue pencil around January 1, 1922, with literary critic

. When finances became tight that year, the underground Communist Party of America moved to fill the void, working with Eastman, Dell, and the core of writers behind the magazine towards a friendly takeover of the publication effective in October of that same year.

After the fall of 1922, The Liberator emerged as the de facto official organ of the CPA and its "Legal Political Party" sibling, the Workers Party of America — maintaining a similar graphic style and orientation toward fiction, albeit with a noticeable ideological narrowing of political content. Long articles began to be published by prominent Communist leaders, including C. E. Ruthenberg, John Pepper, William Z. Foster, Jay Lovestone, and Max Bedacht. Former anarchist turned Communist true-believer Robert Minor served as editor during this period, assisted by Joseph Freeman as an associate editor in charge of literary material.

In 1924 The Liberator was merged with the Workers Party's Trade Union Educational League magazine, The Labor Herald, and its "Friends of Soviet Russia" monthly, Soviet Russia Pictorial, to form a new publication. This new magazine, The Workers Monthly, was fundamentally similar to the 1923–24 vintage Liberator and continued as the Workers Party's de facto theoretical journal until 1927, at which time it was given a new form and title as The Communist. In January 1945 the name of the publication was changed to Political Affairs. In January 2008, Political Affairs ceased publication as printed paper, switching to an entirely web-based existence. It was later discontinued and aired its final issue in 2016.

See also

• Proletarian literature
• American proletarian poetry movement

References

External links

• The Liberator online archive, Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/ —Downloadable pdfs of full issues at the highest resolution scans available online.
• The Liberator in the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University.
• Max Eastman Internet Archive, Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/
• John Reed Internet Archive, Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/