Michael Gold announces the very modest formation of the John Reed Club of revolutionary writers and artists in late 1929. The Club’s influence would grow considerably with many writers of note connected with it in the following years until its 1936 dissolution into the American Artists Congress during the Popular Front-era.

‘The John Reed Club is Formed’ by Michael Gold from New Masses Vol. 5 No. 10. January, 1930.

The John Reed Club was organized about two months ago here in New York. It is a small group of writers, artists, sculptors, musicians and dancers of revolutionary tendencies.

It takes time for any group to develop unity and purpose. Our problems so far have been mainly how to raise the rent for the clubrooms and how to get furniture. ‘Some of the painters and writers got together one night and built a lot of tables and chairs. Bill Gropper, Klein, Refregier and others whitewashed the walls. Other work has been done. Soon the place will look like a clubroom instead of an Ellis Island flophouse.

Several activities have begun. The artists arranged an exhibit at the Workers’ Co-operative House in the Bronx. About 35 pictures were hung. The exhibit will be shown for about 4 weeks. Over 300 workers came to the opening. There was a furious discussion, led by Lozowick, Basshe, Gropper, Klein and others. The workers razzed the still-lifes, nudes and several other pieces of stale academicism hung by several of the painters. The workers liked the strong modern stuff. The talking ended at one in the morning.

There have also been previews of new films at the club and movie discussion. Other activities of club members: Harold Hickerson has organized a music school with 100 pupils at the Co-operative Apartments; Gropper and Lozowick have a class in the graphic arts with about 30 members; Edith Siegel is training a worker’s ballet for the Lenin Memorial pageant. Em Jo Basshe is directing the Jewish Workers’ Theatre plays; other members are lecturing at the Workers’ School.

There will be a big Red Art Night in the Labor Temple on December 28th, run by the club, with a fine varied program. Red poets, novelists, playwrights, will read from their work; several critics will talk, there will be a new movie from Soviet Russia, a ballet of Negro and white workers, a play by a group of Japanese proletarian artists, and satirical songs by Horace Gregory, illustrated in the sentimental manner with lantern slides by Gropper. It looks like a good night. The Workers’ International Relief is working with us on this affair.

The literary members are getting busy. There have been several meetings to discuss practical plans for work. At the next meeting I shall propose the following:

That every writer in the group attach himself to one of the industries. That he spend the next few years in and out of this industry, studying it from every angle, making himself an expert in it, so that when he writes of it he will write like an insider, not like a bourgeois intellectual observer.

He will help on the publicity in strikes, etc. He will have his roots in something real. He will specialize because it is a source of strength. The old Fabians used to get together and write essays based on the books they had read. We will get closer to the realities.

It is possible to create a national corps of writers, each of whom knows one industry thoroughly. There is already a basis for this. Ed Falkowski has been a miner since childhood, born of miner parents. He can write well. Martin Russak has the same background in the textile industry, and is a writer of real quality. H.H. Lewis is a farmer, close to the problems of the dirt farmers of the middle west. Joe Kalar has been a lumber worker for years. There are others.

It may be possible in the near future, if all these writers become fully conscious of their unique mission in the modern world, that we may put the New Masses on an industrial basis.

Instead of having a board of contributing editors made up of those vague, rootless people known as writers, we will have a staff of industrial correspondents, whose function will be to report each month, in prose, poetry, plays and satire, what is happening in each part of industrial America.

This would make the magazine functional, and give its readers something real to chew aver. It would help the writers, too, by damming their energies into one sharp swift channel of experience. Any industry can furnish enough themes to any writer for a lifetime.

If this can be done, it will be something new—something that has never before happened in the history of writing. It is not an imitation of Zola. He was a great pioneer, but he was always the tourist. We must become more than that, part of the industrial life itself, the tongue of the working class.

I hope this can be done. It is quite practical and quite exciting. We would like to hear from Kalar, Lewis and other writers on this program.

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/1930/NM-1930-01-jan.pdf