An amazing early ‘New Masses’ beginning with Albert Rhys Williams’ ‘October Reaches the Village,’ Arturo Giovannitti’s memorial poem for John Reed, and Robert Dunn reminding us that, in the midst of a boom time, the ‘class was was still on.’ But what makes this issue exceptional are its many pages of brilliant art. Julian Gumperz profiles ‘George Grosz: Up Out of Dada,’ with drawings by Grosz, and a treasure trove of stunning pieces from the likes of Otto Soglow, Amero, Art Young, Rufino Tamayo, Wanda Gag, Jan Matulka, Art Gunn, Louis Lozowick, Beulah Stevenson, Reginald Mars, William Gropper, I. Klein, William Siegel, and Hugo Gellert. We have nothing to compare with this today.

The New Masses. Vol. 2 No. 6. April, 1927.

Contents: October Reaches the Village by Albert Rhys Williams, John Reed by Arturo Giovannitti, The Red and Yellow Peril by Howard Brubaker, Shooting Gospel by Leonard Gregory, It Was All A Mistake by Kenneth Fearing, The Desert and the City by Dwight Morgan, Where Are We Going: A Manifesto by Henri Barbusse, Let Fat Men by Eli Siegel, Monday Afternoon, A Story by K. Eastham, The Red Necklace by Hyperion Le Bresco, George Grosz: Up Out of Dada by Julian Gumperz, Bohemia, A Poem by H.S.W., The Class War is Still On by Robert Dunn and Mary Reed, Morning Song of the Proletarian Poet by Max Eastman, Episode of Decay by Witter Bynner, A Letter From Bahia, Relief Map of Mexico by John Dos Passos, Angel Arms by Kenneth Fearing, We Must Be One by David Gordon, BOOK REVIEWS BY James Rorty, Whit Burnett, Scott Nearing, Vincenzo Vacirca, A.B. Magil, Avis Feme, Winifred Raushenbush, ART BY Otto Soglow, Amero, Art Young, Rufino Tamayo, Wanda Gag, Jan Matulka, Art Gunn, George Grosz, John Reehill, Louis Lozowick, Beulah Stevenson, Reginald Mars, William Gropper, I. Klein, William Siegel, Hugo Gellert, Aladjalov.

The New Masses was the continuation of Workers Monthly which began publishing in 1924 as a merger of the ‘Liberator’, the Trade Union Educational League magazine ‘Labor Herald’, and Friends of Soviet Russia’s monthly ‘Soviet Russia Pictorial’ as an explicitly Communist Party publication, but drawing in a wide range of contributors and sympathizers. In 1927 Workers Monthly ceased and The New Masses began. A major left cultural magazine of the late 1920s to early 1940s, the early editors of The New Masses included Hugo Gellert, John F. Sloan, Max Eastman, Mike Gold, and Joseph Freeman. Writers included 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, Artists included Hugo Gellert, Stuart Davis, Boardman Robinson, Wanda Gag, William Gropper and Otto Soglow. Over time, the New Masses became narrower politically and more journalistic in its tone.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1927/v02n06-apr-1927-New-Masses.pdf