The New Masses. Vol. 18 No. 9. September 15, 1936.

Contents: Editorial Comment, Paris Defends Leon Blum by Raoul Damiens, Gov. Landon Gets a Haircut by DeWitt Gilpin, The Battle for Art by Joseph Freeman, A Pinch of Salt by John L Spivak, “It’s Smart To Be Thrifty” by Irving Enray, The Trumpeter by David Wolff, Two Million Black Voices by Richard Wright, Toward a Doctors’ Union by Daniel Summer, The Protector by Marcelo Salinas, Jersey Judges the Home by Blaine Owen, Our Readers’ Forum, A “Case” for the Classics by Rolfe Humphries, Old Time Tales by Sterling A. Brown, Moody’s Letter by Granville Hicks, Books in Brief Review, The Theater First “Theater Union Night” by Stanley Burnshaw, Music The Phonograph and Labor by Gareth Ross, The Screen by Peter Ellis, Between Ourselves, Drawings by Serrano, Russell T. Limbach, William Gropper.

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/1936/v18n09-feb-25-1936-NM.pdf