New Masses

NEW MASSES. Following in the direct line of the Masses (1911–1917) and the Liberator (1918–1924), the New Masses began in May 1926 and ran as a monthly through September 1933, when it was revamped to reappear, on 2 January 1934, as a weekly. While the early editors of this “revolutionary magazine of art and literature” were holdovers from the period of “lyrical radicalism” of the 1910s and early 1920s, increasingly in the late 1920s, as contributing editors like Max Eastman and Floyd Dell drifted away, the New Masses was being run by writers like Mike Gold and Joseph Freeman, who argued for stronger revolutionary positions and closer ties to the Soviet Union. In 1930 the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, meeting in Kharkov, urged the magazine to become “in every respect the cultural organ of the class-conscious workers and revolutionary intellectuals of this country,” and the editors eagerly accepted this challenge. Gold’s campaign for proletarian literature in the late 1920s and early 1930s helped bridge the gap between art and politics that had existed in the earlier Masses-Liberator tradition, and when, after 1930, increasing numbers of bourgeois artists and writers moved left under the multiple pressures of the Great Depression, they discovered a loud and colorful journal with fairly advanced Marxist ideas about both literature and politics.

From 1934 through the end of the decade, during the period of the Popular Front, the weekly New Masses enjoyed its peak popularity. (Circulation for the last issue of the monthly in September 1933 was 6,000; the “4th Quarterly Issue” of 1 January 1935, one of a series of literary supplements that appeared after Granville Hicks was named literary editor of the weekly, had a printing of 25,000.) In this period, the New Masses was a visually exciting journal (drawing on the graphic skills of William Gropper, Reginald Marsh, and Hugo Gellert, among others) that was at the dynamic center of the literary-political Left in the 1930s. The magazine published many talented writers in this period—not only established authors like Ernest Hemingway (“Who Murdered the Vets?” 1935), Erskine Caldwell, Theodore Dreiser, and Langston Hughes, but newer writers such as Richard Wright, James Agee, Albert Maltz, and Jack Conroy. The New Masses sponsored some of the decade’s most important literary organizations (the John Reed Clubs in the early thirties, the first American Writers and Artists Congresses in 1935), provoked some of its most controversial literary discussions (on proletarian literature and Marxist literary criticism), and published some of the best radical literature to come out of the thirties (the reportage of Meridel Le Sueur, John L. Spivak, Josephine Herbst, and Agnes Smedley). Stressing sectarian and domestic issues in the first half of the decade, after the opening of the Popular Front the magazine tended to focus more and more on the Spanish Civil War and the growing international fascist threat and became much more conciliatory toward liberals and other journals.

While it continued after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, from 1941 through 1947, as a weekly, the journal’s political and literary positions were much narrower and its influence greatly diminished. In March 1948, the magazine reappeared as the merged Masses and Mainstream to run until 1956, under the editorship of Samuel Sillen and Milton Howard. While its influence clearly waned after 1941, in its overall twenty-two-year history, from 1926 to 1948, the New Masses must still be considered the dominant radical literary journal in the second quarter of the twentieth century.

Fitzgerald, Richard. “New Masses: New York, 1926–1948.” In The American Radical Press, 1880–1960, edited by Joseph R. Conlin, vol. 2. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974.

Hemingway, Andrew. Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926-1956. New Haven:Yale University Press, 2002.

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

North, Joseph, ed. New Masses: An Anthology of the Rebel Thirties. New York: International Publishers, 1969.

Peck, David. “‘The Tradition of American Revolutionary Literature’: The Monthly New Masses, 1926–1933.” Science and Society 42 (winter 1978–1979).

Wald, Alan M. Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of a Mid-Twentieth Century Literary Left. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

New Masses, 1926-1948. Marxists Internet Archives. https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/index.htm