The wit and satire that leavened The Masses’ (1911–1917)
socialist critique of American society made it the most
compelling publication among the lively radical press that
preached cultural rebellion during the decade before World
War I. Piet Vlag, a Dutch-born anarchist and chef of the
Rand School for Social Sciences restaurant, founded the
monthly magazine in January 1911 in bohemian Greenwich Village as an organ of the cooperative store movement. Wealthy socialist insurance executive Rufus Weeks
financed the first year, although the staff and contributors
of the cooperatively owned nonprofit venture set policy at
monthly meetings. When Vlag quit publishing in August
1912 after Weeks withdrew his subsidy, the Masses’ artists
agreed to continue publication because it was a vital venue
for publishing their satirical political cartoons and drawings of working-class urban life, vanguard of the “Ashcan
School.” The cooperative elected as its unpaid editor the
absent Max Eastman, a charismatic socialist speaker and
writer who was finishing his dissertation in philosophy at
Columbia University.
“We are going to make The Masses a popular [italics
in original] Socialist magazine—a magazine of pictures
and lively writing,” the revived magazine announced in its
inaugural issue of December 1912. Masses’ abstention from
dogma and its buoyant, experimental tone gave it a broader
reach than other radical periodicals; the unifying theme of
the eclectic periodical was its iconoclastic commitment to
free expression. Causes it championed informed the prewar
radical agenda that marked Americans’ shift from Victorianism to modernism: modern art and literature, the new
field of psychology, the sexual revolution, and socialism in
the broadest sense. It criticized institutional religion, marriage, militarism, censorship, and big business. The magazine served as a vibrant forum for the burgeoning feminist
movement by advocating woman suffrage, birth control,
female sexual fulfillment, and the independent “New
Woman” in nonfiction articles and poetry and short stories
culled by fiction editor Inez Haynes Irwin.
The Masses’ greatest legacy may be its satirical line
drawings by contributors including Cornelia Baxter Barns, Robert Minor, Boardman Robinson, John Sloan, and Art
Young. Minor’s lampoon of puritanical censor Anthony
Comstock was a quintessentially Masses social critique: A
pompous lawyer who casts a mother before a judge intones,
“Your Honor, this woman gave birth to a naked child!” More
serious was Mary Heaton Vorse’s reportage on the Lawrence, Mass., textile workers’ strike and Eastman’s militant
suggestion in 1913 that “black citizens arise and demand
respect in the name of power.” More often the magazine
ignored race issues and occasionally was guilty of offensive
racial caricatures. The Masses’ biggest flaw may have been
that contributors cared more about personal emancipation
than political reform and lacked the intellectual discipline
to effect real social change. Despite its title, Masses readers
were disaffected middle-class intelligentsia who found their
alienation from American culture valorized in its pages,
in which its privileged contributors romanticized outsiders such as prostitutes and criminals. The magazine’s great
paradox was the tension between its sophisticated creators’
ardent individualism and its championing of the proletariat.
Authorities felt sufficiently threatened by The Masses
to attempt suppressing it. Magazine distributors refused to
carry it, and editors faced a criminal libel suit that stemmed
from a July 1913 story and cartoon that accused the Associated Press of suppressing news about an unprecedented
military tribunal convened to punish strike supporters in
the West Virginia coalmines. Radical luminaries rallied
at Cooper Union to support the magazine, and two years
later the government dropped the case. The U.S. Post Office
effectively killed The Masses by refusing it mailing privileges in August 1917 because of its criticism of the draft
and American entry into the war. Although the magazine
won a court injunction against the ban, the federal government charged several contributors with conspiracy to
incite mutiny in the military and obstruct the draft, crimes
punishable under the Espionage Act of 1917 by up to ten
thousand dollars in fines and twenty years in prison. Codefendants Eastman, Young, managing editor Floyd Dell,
business manager Merrill Rogers, and poet Josephine Bell
approached their April 1918 trial with the same insouciance
that colored the magazine. A single juror’s refusal to convict caused a mistrial, and a second conspiracy trial that
October won acquittals for co-defendants Eastman, Dell,
Young, and John Reed, who trekked back from covering the
Russia Revolution for the event. Meanwhile a federal Court
of Appeals had reversed the injunction against the post
office ban on mailing The Masses. Contributors regrouped
in February 1918 to launch a successor, The Liberator, but
it proved a pale, staid successor.
Further Reading
Eastman, Max. Enjoyment of Living. New York: Harper, 1948.
Fishbein, Leslie. Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of The Masses,
1911–1917. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1982.
May, Henry F. The End of American Innocence: A Study of the
First Years of Our Own Time, 1912–1917. New York: Knopf,
1959.
Jones, Margaret C. Heretics & Hellraisers: Women Contributors to The Masses, 1911–1917. Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1993.
O’Neill, William. Echoes of Revolt: ‘The Masses,” 1911–1917.
Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966.
Zurier, Rebecca. Art for “The Masses”: A Radical Magazine and
Its Graphics, 1911–1917. Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1988.
Linda J. Lumsden