The Masses. Vol. 9 No. 4. January, 1917.

Contents: Cover by Hugo Gellert, Irresponsibilities by Howard Brubaker, The Boarder by Maurice Lazar, Black ‘Ell by Miles Malleson, An Old American Radical by Frank Bohn, Two Ideals, Everett’s Bloody Sunday by Charles Ashleigh, Crimes of Charity by Konrad Bercovici, Four Poems by Max Endicoff, A Prophetic Utterance In Praise of John Brown by Isaac Sherwood, Culture and Crochet by Isabel R Mayers, Poems, To Socialist Party Critics by Max Eastman, After the War by Austin Lewis, Beating Germany by HM, Dominant Capitalist Class by AL, Governor Hunt by HM, The Challenge by HM, A Possible Decision on the Railroad Question by Maurice Becker, Delay by HM, Porcine Christianity, Books That Are Interesting by Floyd Dell and Max Eastman, The Spiritual Significance of Legs and Loyalty by Charles Wood, Letters and Verse. Art by John Sloan, Alice Beach Winter, Mary Ellen Sigsbee, Cornelia Barns, Reginald Marsh, Art Young, Boardman Robinson, Robert Minor, Lydia Gibson, K. R. Chamberlain, Hugo Gellert, and Maurice Becker.

The Masses is among the most important, and best, radical journals of 20th century America. It was started in 1911 as an illustrated socialist monthly by Dutch immigrant Piet Vlag, who shortly left the magazine. It was then edited by Max Eastman who wrote in his first editorial: “A Free Magazine — This magazine is owned and published cooperatively by its editors. It has no dividends to pay, and nobody is trying to make money out of it. A revolutionary and not a reform magazine; a magazine with a sense of humour and no respect for the respectable; frank; arrogant; impertinent; searching for true causes; a magazine directed against rigidity and dogma wherever it is found; printing what is too naked or true for a money-making press; a magazine whose final policy is to do as it pleases and conciliate nobody, not even its readers — There is a field for this publication in America. Help us to find it.” The Masses successfully combined arts and politics and was the voice of urban, cosmopolitan, liberatory socialism. It became the leading anti-war voice in the run-up to World War One and helped to popularize industrial unions and support of workers strikes. It was sexually and culturally emancipatory, which placed it both politically and socially and odds the leadership of the Socialist Party, which also found support in its pages. The art, art criticism, and literature it featured was all imbued with its, increasing, radicalism. Floyd Dell was it literature editor and saw to the publication of important works and writers. Its radicalism and anti-war stance brought Federal charges against its editors for attempting to disrupt conscription during World War One which closed the paper in 1917. The editors returned in early 1918 with the adopted the name of William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, which continued the interest in culture and the arts as well as the aesthetic of The Masses. Contributors to this essential publication of the US left included: Sherwood Anderson, Cornelia Barns, George Bellows, Louise Bryant, Arthur B. Davies, Dorothy Day, Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, Wanda Gag, Jack London, Amy Lowell, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Inez Milholland, Robert Minor, John Reed, Boardman Robinson, Carl Sandburg, John French Sloan, Upton Sinclair, Louis Untermeyer, Mary Heaton Vorse, and Art Young.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/masses/issues/tamiment/t70-v09n04-m68-feb-1917.pdf