The New Masses - History

History

'The New Masses was launched in New York City in 1926 as part of the Workers (Communist) Party of America's publishing stable, produced by a communist leadership but making use of the work of an array of independent writers and artists. The magazine was established to fill a void caused by the gradual transition of The Workers Monthly (successor to The Liberator) into a more theoretically-oriented publication. The name of the new magazine was a tip of the hat to The Masses (1911–1917), the forerunner of both of these publications.

The editorial staff of the New Masses included Masses alumni Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Michael Gold, as well as Joseph Freeman, Granville Hicks (starting in 1934), Walt Carmon, and James Rorty. Many contributors are now considered distinguished, even canonical authors/writers: William Carlos Williams, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Day, John Breecher, Langston Hughes, Eugene O'Neill, Rex Stout and Ernest Hemingway. More importantly, it also circulated works by avowedly leftist, even “proletarian” (working-class) artists: Kenneth Fearing, H.H. Lewis, Jack Conroy, Grace Lumpkin, Jan Matulka, Ruth McKenney, Maxwell Bodenheim, Meridel LeSueur, Josephine Herbst, Jacob Burck, Tillie Olsen, Stanley Burnshaw, Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, and Albert Halper.

The vast production of left-wing popular art of the 1930s and 1940s was an attempt to create a radical culture in conflict with mass culture. Infused with an oppositional mentality, this cultural front was a rich period in American history and is what Michael Denning calls a “Second American Renaissance” because it permanently transformed American modernism and mass culture. One of the foremost periodicals of this renaissance was the New Masses.

The magazine adopted a loosely leftist position at its onset, and Frederick J. Hoffman describes “among the fifty-six writers and artists connected in some way with the early issues of the New Masses, Freeman reports, only two were members of the Communist Party, and less than a dozen were fellow travelers”. There was, however, eventual transformation: the editorial shift from a magazine of the radical left, with its numerous competing points of view, gave way to a bastion of Marxist conformity. When Gold and Freeman gained full control by 1928 the “Stalinist/Trotskyist” division began in earnest. Gold’s January 1929 column “Go Left, Young Writers” began the “proletarian literature” movement, one spurred by the emergence of writers with true working-class credentials. Barbara Foley points out, though, that Gold and his peers did not eschew various literary forms in favor of strict realism; they advocated stylistic experimentation but championed and preferred genuine proletarian authorship.

A substantial number of poems, short stories, journalistic pieces and quasi-autobiographical “sketches” dominated the magazine at its onset (Richard Wright and Jack Conroy being prime examples) because the magazine stressed the presence of worker-correspondents in its pages “to make the ‘worker-writer’ a reality in the American radical press”. This movement lauded literature considered more appealing to a working-class audience. This convergence of literary philosophy and Communist Party policy in Depression-era America was facilitated by the John Reed Club of New York City, one of the Communist Party’s affiliated literary organizations. Thus, class conflict was to expand to the literary realm and support political revolution.