Liberator

LIBERATOR. Max Eastman and his sister Crystal founded the Liberator in March 1918 to print John Reed’s reports of the Bolshevik Revolution (which would eventually become Ten Days That Shook the World). Reed had originally gone to Russia as a correspondent for the Masses, but on August 1917 the postmaster of New York suppressed that magazine under the Espionage Act. The Liberator became the Masses under a new masthead and was on the streets before the first trial of the Masses editors had even begun.

The Liberator was smaller, more focused, and more political than its flamboyant predecessor, but it attracted work from most of the Masses’ artists and writers, as well as contributions from William Gropper, Reginald Marsh, and Boardman Robinson in graphics, and Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, Jean Toomer, and Mary Heaton Vorse in prose and poetry, among many others. The Liberator’s primary impact came from its labor reporting, its cultural criticism, and the dissemination of information from the Soviet Union. As staff member Joseph Freeman was to write in his 1936 autobiography of this postwar period, the Liberator might have mistakenly ignored Eliot’s The Waste Land when it appeared in 1922, but “we alone consistently devoted the pages of our publication to the Sacco-Vanzetti case, the partition of China by the imperialist powers, the oppression of Haiti by American bankers, the Garvey movement among the Negroes, the Mexican Revolution, [and] the wage-cut campaign in this country.” Mike Gold covered the coal-miners’ strike in Pennsylvania and contributed (under his real name, Irwin Granich) the prophetic essay “Towards Proletarian Art” (February 1921), while Floyd Dell produced articles like “Art under the Bolsheviks” (June 1919) and a series on “Literature and the Machine Age,” which ran in 1923–1924. Circulation once reached eighty thousand (compared with twenty-five thousand for the Masses) under the editorship of Eastman and Dell, but the magazine was never finally able to solve the problem that had haunted its predecessor, namely, the split between its art and its politics; the magazine “had one foot in bohemia,” Freeman complained “the other in the revolutionary movement.” While the Bolshevik Revolution provided a model for a society in which the two had been fused, as Freeman said, in this country by 1922 “the era of the Tired Radical had begun.”

After Eastman himself left to witness the revolution in Russia in 1922, he turned the magazine over to Hugo Gellert, Claude McKay, Gold, and Freeman, who formed two boards, one political and one artistic, under the control of the Communist Party. Such an unnatural arrangement could not long survive, and in the fall of 1924, the Liberator was fused with other Communist periodicals, moved its offices to Chicago, and became the Worker’s Monthly, which continued under the editorship of Robert Minor, Earl Browder, and Max Bedacht. The spirit of the Masses and the Liberator would be picked up again in 1926 when the New Masses began publication with many of the editors, writers, and artists of the Masses-Liberator tradition as contributors.

Freeman, Joseph. An American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics. London: Gollancz, 1938.

Klein, Marcus. Foreigners: The Making of American Literature, 1900–1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Liberator. Marxists Internet Library. https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/culture/pubs/liberator/index.htm