Seven Arts

SEVEN ARTS. Both a magazine (1916–1917) and a coterie, if not a small movement, of left-leaning intellectuals and artists, the Seven Arts crystallized in New York City in the period marked by the First World War. Edited by James Oppenheim, Van Wyck Brooks, and Waldo Frank, the review published in its brief life such legendary figures as journalist John Reed, poet Carl Sandburg, novelists John Dos Passos and Theodore Dreiser, and essayist Randolph Bourne, along with many other notable names including Sherwood Anderson, D. H. Lawrence, and Romain Rolland. It featured many of the same authors as the older, but more colorful Masses. Culture critic Lewis Mumford was one of a few members of the group who did not appear in the magazine because of its early demise. Though vaguely “highbrow” in its tone, the Seven Arts was consciously radical in overall intention, designed to function as an evolving manifesto for a new American society. The main editor, James Oppenheim (1882–1932), was a Whitmanesque poet whose strident verse expressed the spirit of the periodical, which intended to go beyond mere commentary and reflection by inaugurating a “communism of genius” to inspire and educate the nation to set aside the limitations of commercial civilization and culture.

Beneath the editorial posture was a collective desire to promote a national cultural renaissance as an alternative to the militaristic nationalism being drummed up by the advocates of U.S. entry into World War I. When Woodrow Wilson declared war on the Central Powers in April 1917, the Seven Arts was opening its pages to Randolph Bourne (1886–1918), an outspoken critic of the war who had been cut off by most journals because of his stand.

Bourne’s ensuing essays against the war, published from June through October 1917, covered the question from several perspectives, trying to capture the atmosphere of silent opposition by youth as well as the ins and outs of official pro-war strategies and rationalizations. His own deep oppositionism is the strongest motif in the unique series, which ended in the last issue of the Seven Arts with “Twilight of Idols.” Here he indicted the failure of instrumental pragmatism as a guide in the crisis and argued for intensified defiance on the part of like-minded “malcontents.” Bourne called for a bold new movement armed with an ultracritical spirit that would lead the younger generation along paths yet uncharted, but certainly envisioned in the dreams of revolutionaries and radical reformers. In a writing that was quite spare of political rhetoric or axioms, his challenge was strikingly direct.

Bourne’s controversial articles, a risky gambit on the part of the editors, brought pressure on the magazine’s patron, who abruptly withdrew vital financial backing. The demise of the Seven Arts thus repeated within weeks the patriotic suppression of The Masses. With the collective effort curtailed, the Seven Arts group turned to work on individual projects. Bourne continued his investigation of the war mentality on a more generic level in his unfinished work, “The State,” which was interrupted by his death in December 1918.

Waldo Frank and Van Wyck Brooks came together again in 1926 on the editorial board of the New Masses, dedicated to Left culture and politics. With them on the board was Lewis Mumford, who linked with remnants of the Seven Arts circle in 1921 and was close to its leading figures thereafter. Numerous veterans of the Seven Arts and The Masses joined these editors. In 1935 many enlisted in the new League of American Writers, which grew out of the U.S. Communist John Reed Clubs. Waldo Frank was the league’s chairman until he split with the Stalinists over the stormy issue of the Moscow purge trials. Mumford and Brooks also withdrew. Later, in 1940, Frank and Mumford resigned in succession from the New Republic because of that journal’s shyness about war against the Axis. They tried abortively to start, with the help of Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, a new magazine that was to focus on the world crisis from a Left perspective.

In his individual work Lewis Mumford turned out to be the most prophetic of the group after Bourne, and perhaps the most influential. His criticism of urban civilization, expressed in more than a score of books, anticipated and helped form the radical environmental movement that began in the 1970s. His new importance for social theory is best indicated in his discovery (or interpretation) of “the megamachine,” which was his term for massed and regimented human labor considered as an archetypal true machine. With such a vision latent in him in the thirties it is no surprise that he could not join in the defense of Stalin’s grim vision.

More activist, although not a Communist Party member, was Waldo Frank (1889–1967), who for a time gave open support to Communist initiatives and strove to remain in the forefront of intellectual radicalism through the twenties, thirties, and beyond. An unorthodox Judaic mystic, Frank was also prophetic in a way in his plunge into Latin America in the twenties and thirties, meeting Trotsky in Mexico, being assaulted by fascist thugs in Buenos Aires, seeing the sister continent as a lecturer and informal representative of the U.S. Left. Frank also traveled in Republican Spain and other parts of Europe and wrote books about his far-flung observations, his last about Cuba after a visit with Fidel Castro in 1960.

Though his America’s Coming of Age (1915) was one of the starting points for the socialistic philosophy of the Seven Arts, Van Wyck Brooks (1886–1963) was never as visible politically as a John Reed or a Waldo Frank. His deliberate concentration was on literary criticism, especially in the relatively remote field of “classical American literature,” where his involvement was so intense that it led to periods of instability and a mental breakdown. Brooks’s great contribution to literary criticism, an area of culture that seems peculiarly vulnerable to reactionary turns, was his insistence on a literature rooted in the common essence of human life and reflecting democratic and socialistic values. He stood against the petty formalism introduced by the so-called New Critics and, by extension, against the more convoluted formalism of their structuralist and deconstructionist successors.

As a writer on American music and modern art, Paul Rosenfeld (1890–1946) occupied an even more esoteric position than Brooks. He best represents the apolitical strain in the Seven Arts philosophy. A critic of capitalist society and its culture, he was Utopian enough to forgo encouragement for the Left’s ranks in the thirties because their program did not include radical aesthetic demands. The grain of truth in this position can be granted; it was shared by nearly all of the Seven Arts circle, who felt that a certain poetic temperature not attainable through politics was necessary to fuse the crude and fragmented American masses into a coherent society equal to the awesome potential of twentieth-century civilization.

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Blake, Casey Nelson. Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank & Lewis Mumford. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.

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Frank, Waldo. Memoirs of Waldo Frank. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973.

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Mumford, Lewis. Findings and Keepings: Analects for an Autobiography. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

Rosenfeld, Paul. Port of New York. Reprint. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966.

The Seven Arts. Edited by James Oppenheim et al. New York (November 1916–October 1917). New York: AMS reprint, 1954.

The Seven Arts, Vol. I. 1916-1917/ https://modjourn.org/journal/seven-arts/