History of the New Masses Magazine (The Masses and The Liberator Magazine)

During the the First World War, most of the people who worked for the believed that the USA should remain neutral. After the USA declared war on the Central Powers in 1917, the The Masses magazine came under government pressure to change its policy. When it refused to do this, the journal lost its mailing privileges.

In July, 1917, it was claimed by the authorities that articles by Floyd Dell and Max Eastman and cartoons by Art Young , Boardman Robinson and H. J. Glintenkamp had violated the Espionage Act. Under this act it was an offence to publish material that undermined the war effort. The legal action that followed forced The Masses to cease publication.

In 1918 the same people who produced The Masses, including the editor, Max Eastman, went on the publish a very similar journal, The Liberator. The journal published information about socialist movements throughout the world and was the first to break the news that the Allies had invaded Russia.

People who contributed to the journal included Crystal Eastman, Art Young , Claude McKay,Boardman Robinson , Roger Baldwin, Norman Thomas, John Reed, Louise Bryant, Bertrand Russell, Dorothy Day, Robert Minor , Stuart Davis, Maurice Becker , Helen Keller, Cornelia Barns , Louis Untermeyer, K. R. Chamberlain and William Gropper .

In 1922 the journal was taken over by Robert Minor and the Communist Party. and in 1924 was renamed as The Workers' Monthly . Many of the people who contributed to the The Masses and the original Liberator, were unhappy with this development and in 1926, they started their own journal, the New Masses.

The New Masses

Over the years most of the well-known left-wing writers and artists produced material for The New Masses. This included Max Eastman, Upton Sinclair, Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Alvah Bessie , James Agee, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, John Dos Passos, Josephine Herbst , Theodore Dreiser, Floyd Dell , Art Young , William Gropper , Albert Hirschfeld , Carl Sandburg, Waldo Frank and Eugene O'Neill. The New Masses ceased publication in 1948.

External links

• The Masses

• The New Masses

• The Liberator

• Art for the Masses A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics 1911-1917