New Masses. Vol. 5 No. 4. September, 1929.

Contents: Cover by Tina Modotti, A Day in the Life of an Agitator by Carlo Tresca, Barrage by Charles Yale Harrison, In the German Bambus by Ed Falkowski, Notes on Art Life Crap-Shooting Etc by Michael Gold, The Mexican Reaction by Juan De Torres, Culture-Film by Winifred Ray, A Letter to Workers’ Art Groups, Letters from Readers, ART BY Hugo Gellert, A.Z. Kruse, William Gropper, Jacob Burk, Maz Feldman, Tina Modotti, Louis Lozowick, POETRY AND PROSE BY Frederick Cover, Michael Gold, William Allen Ward, Frank Thibault, Norman MacLeod, BOOKS BY Elsie Gluck, Thames Williamson, Jack Woodford, Major R.W.G. Kingston, Vasilievich Gladkov, E.K. Fradkin, REVIEWED BY Vern Smith, Joseph Kalar, Walt Carmon, Will Herberg, Nicholas Moskowitz, Helen Black, Edward Newhouse.

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/1929/v05n04-sep-1929-New-Masses.pdf