Iris Hamilton provides a thorough background to the waterfront strikes leading to the July 16, 1934 San Francisco General Strike.

The New Masses. Vol. 12 No. 4.July 24, 1934.

Contents: Editorial Comment, To Free Angelo Herndon, The Week’s Papers, General Strike by Iris Hamilton, The Veterans Won’t Scab by Dawn Lovelace, Maneuvering for Position by John Strachey, Cattle in the Gravel Pits by Albert Maltz, Mopping Up in China by Harold Ward, Literary Wars in the U.S.S.R. Problems of the Fellow Traveler by Joshua Kunitz, A Job Alone by Warren C. Huddlestone, Dixie Jew by Tom Johnson, Dewey, Russell and Cohen: Why They Are Anti-Communist by Paul Salter and Jack Librome, Repentant Judas by Joseph Kalar, Correspondence, Books Reviews, Speaking of the Dance by Robert Forsythe, Historical Hash by Irving Lerner, Between Ourselves, Drawings by B. Limbach, Gardner Rea, Crockett Johnson, Fr. Leschani.

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 and 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 the articles more commentary than comment. However, particularly in it first years, New Masses was the epitome of the era’s finest revolutionary cultural and artistic traditions.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/1934/v12n04-jul-24-1934-NM.pdf