ART FROM THE MASSES
Knoll, Erwin
views The Masses reviews BY ERVVIN KNOLL There never was another magazine, before or since, like The Masses. It could call itself revolutionary without seeming self-conscious. It could crusade...
...Such popular magazines as Harper's, Collier's, The Saturday Evening Post, Judge, Life, and Puck were in their heyday, and political publications enjoyed a readership they never matched again...
...Without access to the mails, The Masses could not keep publishing...
...The Masses was the first well-known publication to fall victim to the Government's new censorship powers...
...Writers (who were not paid for their work) competed furiously with artists (who weren't paid either) for space in the magazine...
...But the writing is dated, by and large, and of more historic than current interest...
...The Masses made its first appearance in January 1911, identifying itself as "a monthly magazine devoted to the interests of working people...
...I have been with the armies of all the belligerents except one, and I have seen men die, and go mad, and lie in hospitals suffering hell...
...Some readers may remember a pale "successor," The New Masses, that dutifully followed every twist and turn of the Communist Party line in the 1930s and 1940s...
...While thanking the editors for the magazine's provocative political stands, they often criticized the magazine's overall 'tone of perpetual protest and rebellion.' Many readers were genuinely puzzled by the urban genre drawings and realist literature, with its 'insistent harping on the shadows of life.' Some praised the drawings for their 'truth and vividness,' but many considered them 'foul.' 'Life isn't all sweat and struggle,' one letter noted, 'isn't anything all right?'" But for The Masses itself, life was often sweat and struggle...
...Not everyone admired The Masses...
...In April 1917, John Reed wrote, "The press is howling for war...
...It was all of that and more...
...Printing what is too Naked or True for a Money-Making Press...
...the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, and the Boston University Art Gallery...
...In the pages of The Masses, these gifted and dedicated individuals found freedom not only from the conservative constraints imposed by the profit-oriented mass-circulation magazines, but also from the ideological rigidity of many political publications...
...to attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, or refusal of duty in the military or naval forces...
...Judge Learned Hand issued a vigorous First Amendment decision in support of The Masses, but the Government appealed and, in the meantime, succeeded in barring three issues from the mails...
...It could crusade against the worst abuses of the established order without seeming grim...
...or willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment services of the United States...
...In Art for The Masses (1911-1917): A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, Rebecca Zurier writes: "Loyal subscribers kept up an earnest running critique...
...Years later, Floyd Dell, who had been managing editor of The Masses, called it "a garden of delights, a garden of wit, beauty, and courage that does honor to America...
...But the old Masses was something else...
...The show was compiled by the Yale University Art Gallery, and will be on display there until March 9. The exhibition's catalog, Art for The MassesJ1911-1917): A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, compiled by Rebecca Zurier, also contains informative essays on the magazine and its graphics...
...It could bring together, between its brightly colored covers, the most radical writers and the most creative illustrators of its time...
...The church is howling for war----I know what war means...
...The !aw also empowered postal authorities to bar from the mails any material fostering "treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to any law of the United States...
...In the litigation that followed...
...It went out of business in December 1917...
...I'm talking about the original Masses that streaked across the political firmament for six years, from 1911 to 1917, and then was seen no more...
...Like The Progressive, founded in 1909 as LaFollette's Weekly Magazine, The Masses was born during the Golden Age of magazine publishing in the United States...
...Despite the brave proletarian rhetoric, however, it was primarily a showcase for radical intellectuals-such writers as Walter Lippmann, Max Eastman, John Reed, Louis Untermeyer, Sherwood Anderson, Amy Lowell, and Carl Sandburg...
...The graphics, on the other hand, will strike many as powerfully contemporary...
...Then, in a Catch-22 decision, it withdrew the magazine's second-class mailing privileges on grounds that it no longer qualified as a monthly publication...
...On July 5, the editors were notified that the magazine was "unmailable...
...such artists as Robert Minor, Boardman Robinson, Art Young, and John Sloan...
...On June 15, 1917, the Espionage Act went into effect, making it a crime to "make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States...
...but there is a worse thing than that...
...Readers who come across an issue of The Masses today in a used-book shop or library, or in one of several anthologies and collections devoted to the magazine, will be impressed by the vigor of its commitment, and especially by the optimism—even exuberance—that often infused its pages...
...As World War I raged in Europe and the United States edged toward joining the slaughter, The Masses focused more and more of its writers' and artists' energies on opposition to the war...
...After a major dispute about the magazine's graphics, several leading artists, including Sloan, resigned in 1916...
...Its editors declared it to be "a Magazine Directed Against Rigidity and Dogma wherever it is found...
...it was free-wheeling to the point of near-chaos, caught up in constant conflict between political activists and literati, between socialists and anarchists, between rhymesters and free-verse poets...
...Some referred to its editors as "them asses," and one wag offered this comment on the artists: They draw fat women for The Masses, Denuded, fat, ungainly lasses-How does that help the working classes...
...The socialist press included some 300 publications, ranging from union newsletters to daily newspapers and scholarly quarterlies, in English and the other languages of major European immigrant groups...
...The magazine was sued by the Associated Press (for accusing the news service of bias against striking workers), barred from the newsstands in New York City, Boston, and Philadelphia, refused by the bookstore and library at Columbia University, and excluded from the mails in Canada...
...The artists waged war among themselves over abstract versus "communicative" forms...
...An exhibition of art from The Masses, from which the graphics on these pages were selected, has been seen in recent months at the University of California, Los Angeles...
...The populist Appeal to Reason, published in Gir-ard, Kansas, had a circulation in the hundreds of thousands...
...In those years before World War I, there were no movie theaters, stereo phonographs, radios, or television sets to compete for a reader's attention...
...War means an ugly mob-madness crucifying the truth-tellers, choking the artists, side-tracking reforms, revolutions, and the working of social forces...
...a Magazine whose final Policy is to do as it Pleases and Conciliate Nobody, not even its Readers—a Free Magazine...
...The Masses was anything but rigid...
Vol. 50 • February 1986 • No. 2
