Masses

MASSES. The radical magazine the Masses reflected the changing relationship between art and politics in the early twentieth century, as did its successor, the Liberator (1918–1924).

The Masses was founded in 1911 by the Dutch-born socialist Piet Vlag (with silent backing from Rufus Weeks, vice president of the New York Life Insurance Company) to promote consumer cooperatives in the United States. Modeled after the earlier cultural publication the Comrade, it included literature by Tolstoy and Sudermann (translated by the editor, Thomas Seltzer), didactic artwork, and articles in support of cooperatives, right-wing Socialism, woman suffrage, and child labor laws. Its contributors included Mary Heaton Vorse, Walter Lippmann, Art Young, and Josephine Conger-Kaneko. This earnest but dull publication failed in 1912 after attempting to merge with the Chicago-based Progressive Woman.

Later in 1912, a group of artists revived the Masses as an American equivalent to the lavishly illustrated European satiric journals Simplicissimus and L’Assiette au Beurre; they invited Max Eastman to serve as editor and to raise funds (largely through contributions from wealthy progressives). The artists sought “a magazine we could run around in and be free”—contributors received no pay but exercised artistic control. In protest against the journalistic marketplace, they structured the Masses as a worker-owned cooperative with all editorial decisions to be made by group vote. As editor, Eastman moved the magazine away from Socialist Party “dogma” and toward a more wide-ranging program condemning racism, supporting direct action and the Industrial Workers of the World, and advocating a political theory of “hard-headed idealism”—socialism tempered with the pragmatic philosophy of John Dewey. William English Walling contributed a column on European socialism. The strongest writing was labor reportage from Vorse and John Reed, who joined the staff in 1913. After the Chicago critic Floyd Dell became managing editor that year, the literary content expanded to encompass poems by Carl Sandburg, Amy Lowell, and Louis Untermeyer, and stories by Sherwood Anderson, in addition to early attempts at proletarian fiction. Dell, a noted “Greenwich Villager,” also brought an interest in psychology, feminism, and free love. The Masses soon encountered legal difficulties stemming from its attacks on the capitalist press and organized religion, and its advocacy of birth control. All of these positions were presented with irreverent humor, echoing the editors’ promise to “conciliate nobody, not even our readers.” The journal soon attracted a reputation and a following far beyond its circulation of between fifteen thousand and twenty-five thousand.

The Masses was noted for its art. As official art editor, the painter and illustrator John Sloan redesigned the large-format layout and worked with printers to reproduce vivid two-color covers and the heavy black crayon drawings favored by followers of the socially conscious cartoonist Honoré Daumier. The magazine attracted a group of urban realists who later became known as the Ashcan School (George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Glenn Coleman, and others); their drawings of New York’s immigrant neighborhoods in the Masses rival their better-known “fine art” paintings and prints. The Masses also printed political cartoons “too naked and true for the money-making press” by Robert Minor, Boardman Robinson, Maurice Becker, Kenneth Russell Chamberlain, and Art Young, social satire, and figure studies and landscapes with no overt political message.

The twin goals of “free expression” and “appealing to the masses with the livelier forms of propaganda” led to conflicts that erupted during World War I, when most of the art staff “struck” over the issue of adding propagandistic captions to drawings conceived as self-sufficient works of art. Eastman’s efforts to commit the Masses to an anti-war position eventually ran afoul of the postmaster general, who revoked the magazine’s mailing license under the Espionage Act of 1917. In an early test of free-speech laws, the Masses editors were vindicated during a series of well-publicized court cases in 1917 and 1918 but lost access to the mails through a legal technicality; the loss of distribution outlets forced the magazine out of business in December 1917.

A Decision for the Ages: A Symposium Marking the Centenary of Masses Publishing Co. v
Patten. Special issue of Arizona State Law Journal vol 50 no. 3 (Fall 2018).

Eastman, Max. Love and Revolution: My Journey through an Epoch. New York: Random House, 1964.

Fishbein, Leslie. Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of The Masses, 1911–1917. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Heller, Adele, and Lois Rudnick, eds. Beginnings: The Cultural Moment, 1915. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991.

Jones, Margaret C. Heretics and Hellraisers: Women Contributors to the Masses, 1911–1917. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993.

Maik, Thomas A. The Masses Magazine, 1911–1917. New York: Garland Publishing, 1994.

The Masses. Complete file available online at the Modernist Journals Project. https://modjourn.org/journal/masses/

Schreiber, Rachel. Gender and Activism in a Little Magazine: The Modern Figures of the Masses. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2011.

Zurier, Rebecca. Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and its Graphics, 1911–1917. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988.