The League of American Writers was founded in April, 1935. One of the more influential of the Communist Party’s ‘mass’ Popular Front-era projects, the League replaced the John Reed Club of the ‘Third Period’ as the major cultural appendage of the Communist Party. Began explicitly as a defense of culture against rising fascism, the League lost much of its cache after 1939’s Non-Aggression Pact and was dissolved in 1943. Many talented and well-known writers joined the League, and their membership lists would later serve as the Rolodex of McCarthyist literary targets, whether or not they were Communists.

‘The League of American Writers Meets’ from New Masses. Vol. 15 No. 6. May 7, 1935.

AT Mecca Temple, April 27, four thousand people crowded to hear the opening session of the first Congress of American Writers. Facing them on the platform were more than 200 delegates, among them the ablest writers of the middle and younger generation. Sixty-four had come from twenty-four states other than New York. Thirty-six were women guests and delegates and twenty-one were Negro writers. Mexico sent four delegates, among them José Mancisidor. Cuba was represented by one woman writer and editor, Lola de la Torriente; Jewish literature by Moishe Nadir, poet; and the German revolutionary writers, writers, many of them in the Nazi prisons and concentration camps, sent greetings to the Congress by Friedrich Wolff, author of Sailors of Cattaro. Japan sent one woman delegate.

The next day the delegates began their two days of discussion at the New School for Social Research, which concluded in the organization of the League of American Writers. The myth that writers cannot meet together to talk over the questions that come to them in the study, cannot act together, because of “temperament,” professional jealousy and so on was exploded. With an extremely wide range of views, of methods of approach, differences of opinion on almost everything concerning literature, there was nevertheless unity and strength. The inwardness of an event that gives it life, excitement, reality, was present at the sessions as a whole, and in the too brief conversations that went on between the sessions. In this gathering of intellectual craftsmen there was not one moment of musty academicism.

As Waldo Frank the newly elected secretary of the League, said in his last address, “It is only possible to describe our feeling about this Congress in terms which we, who are trained in understatement, shrink from.” It is impossible in a brief report to do more than suggest the scope of the subjects discussed. To name the writers who spoke and their topics would merely become a long list. More than thirty prepared papers were read, and these were discussed by a still larger number of speakers from the floor. One evening was devoted to literary crafts in separate commissions, dramatists, novelists, poets, critics, for more technical study of their work.

Geographically, the membership of the congress was significant. From the far West came the young novelist, Tillie Lerner, and Louis Colman, author of the working class novel, Lumber. Jack Conroy represented the Middle West, James Farrell and Nelson Algren, Chicago, and Meridel Le Sueur, whose articles have been outstanding among the contributions to THE NEW MASSES, came on from Minneapolis. Eugene Clay, young Negro poet, came from Washington; Eugene Gordon from Boston. Josephine Herbst spoke of her people in Pennsylvania, German settlers who arrived long before the American revolution. Grace Lumpkin was a delegate from the far South, Rebecca Pitts from Indiana. There were writers from Arkansas and New Mexico. In background too, these writers differed widely. The overwhelming majority of course, were middle class but Jack Conroy, Michael Gold and many of the younger writers spring directly from the working class. Langston Hughes, the poet of the Negro worker, was unable to be present but a paper by him was read at the opening session.

The Congress was addressed by a number of working-class leaders, among them Earl Browder, General Secretary of the Communist Party, Hays Jones, marine worker, Angelo Herndon, and Clarence Hathaway, editor of The Daily Worker.

Harry Carlisle, from Los Angeles, brought up the problem which faces many writers today. Until a few years ago he was a novelist with a decided leaning toward the material of workers’ lives. During the economic col- lapse he had been drawn into the struggles of the agricultural and marine workers of California and had been too active in organization to write. But this is a problem that even in California, where every available active organizer is needed, has been gradually solved. With the growth of the base of the movement in the West, Carlisle explained, greater division of labor has been possible, and poets and novelists can begin now to function in their their professional work. Earl Browder, in his address to the first session of the Congress, referred to this dilemma:

First, is the question: Does the Party claim a leading role in the field of fine literature? If so, upon what basis?

Our Party claims to give political guidance directly to its members, in all fields of work, including the arts. How strong such leadership can be exerted upon non-Party people depends entirely upon the quality of the work of our members. If this quality is high, the Party influence will grow–if the quality falls down, nothing in the world besides this can give the Party any leading role. We demand nothing more than to be judged by the quality of our work.

That means that the first demand of the Party upon its writer-members is that they shall be good writers, constantly better writers, for only so can they really serve the Party. We do not want to take good writers and make bad strike leaders of them.

The Congress concluded its sessions with the task for which it was called, the organization of the League of American Writers, to be affiliated with the International Union of Revolutionary Writers. The League, under the leadership of Waldo Frank, begins its career with nearly two hundred members. The work of the League will be carried on by a national council of fifty. From this national council, the Congress elected seventeen members to the executive committee, who will guide the central work of the body in New York. The members of the executive committee are: Kenneth Burke, Malcolm Cowley, Waldo Frank, Joseph Freeman, Michael Gold, Henry Hart, Josephine Herbst, Granville Hicks, Matthew Josephson, Alfred Kreymborg, John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Harold Clurman, Edwin Seaver, Isidor Schneider, Genevieve Taggard, Alexander Trachtenberg.

We rise and cheer the Congress, the departing delegates, the newly organized League of American Writers, and Waldo Frank in his responsible task. The League will make for a greater unity and singleness of purpose, and will create an organic social significance for literature, which has never been known before in our history.

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/1935/v15n06-may-07-1935-NM.pdf