New Masses. Vol. 19 No. 1. March 31, 1936.

Contents: Editorial Comment McSwain, Disciple of Hearst, Shall Britain Remain Hitler’s Broker? By John Strachey, Pittsburgh’s Flood: No Act of God by Bruce Minton, A Generation is Stirring by James Wechsler, In the Name of the Great Jehovah by Rockwell Kent, Ridder Urges Violence by Martin Field, Spain: 1931-1936 Drawings by Helios Gomez, Taxi Dance by Nathan Asch, God Pity the Others! by Robert Forsythe, Program for Professionals by Carl Haessler, Our Readers’ Forum, Sex, Opium of the People by Isidor Schneider, Science Faces the Dawn by Victor Brinton, Divided Philosophy by H.N. Fairchild, Bedroom Revolutionaries by James Neugass, A Civil War Diary by Walter Wilson, New Recordings by Henry Johnson, The Theater “Case of Clyde Griffiths” by Stanley Burnshaw, The Screen by Peter Ellis, Between Ourselves, Drawings by William Gropper, Serrano, Gardner Rea.

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/v19n01-mar-31-1936-NM.pdf