Largely now forgotten was the bloody strikes in Rhode Island the accompanied the Uprising of 1934 among the country’s garment workers. Along with other unions, the T.U.U.L.’s The National Textile Workers Union was involved in the Rhode Island strike. Occupation by National Guard troops, weeks of rioting, street blockades and several dead were features of the strike in the smallest state in the Union.

The New Masses. Vol. 12 No. 13. September 25, 1934.

Contents: Editorials, The Week’s Papers, The Soviet Union in the League, Terror in Rhode Island as the Textile Strike Grows by Walter Snow, On the Picket Line by Merle Colby, A Letter from the Soviet Silk Workers, The Newspaper on the Ice Floe: Underground Journalism by John Roman, March of the Native Bezprizorni by W.D. Trowbridge, Romanticism and Communism by Genevieve Taggard, Solidarity by John Mullen, Witness at Leipzig by Edwin Rolfe, Correspondence, Books, Still on the Sidelines by Joseph North, Not So Slow by Edwin Seaver, No Salvation by Art by Isidor Schneider, Return to Faith by David Ramsey, Salamandar and Politics by Granville Hicks, Brief Reviews, The Theatre: Judgment Day by George Willson, In a Burst of Fury by Robert Forsythe, A Revolutionary Film by Peter Ellis, Between Ourselves, Drawings by B. Limbach, Jacob Burck, Philip Nesbitt, Page.

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/v12n13-sep-25-1934-NM.pdf