The Press: Radical Magazine

Of radical magazines there is no end. The barometers of influence, modes, cults and cliques, they succeed each other in gay, interminable succession—backed by a group of bright young people who want to see their names in print, or by a garretful of earnest intellectuals whose desire it is to break a lance for any forlorn cause and die if they can—or at least starve—on the barricade of some well fought for hope. The magazines are published in amazing covers of topaz and mauve and cinnamon. Braver than autumn leaves, they flourish for a while, bailiffs occupy the editorial rooms and grubby gentlemen attach the furniture, and the gay little magazines dry up and perish.

But last week came the announcement of a new radical magazine. It will be on the newsstands, said its editors, in about six weeks. When people saw the names of those editors, when they read the statement issued by its underwriters, they wondered if here, at last, was not the ultimate evergreen of radical magazines, the hardy perennial that would come to stay.

The backers are the trustees of the American Fund for Public Service—that lump of money which was made into a trust fund by earnest young Charles Garland of Boston, who inherited $1,000,000 and refused to accept it because he was that rarest of idealists, a socialist who applied his precepts to himself. The fund has been nearly doubled by careful investments. Its custodians stated that they were ready to devote $17,000 a year “or more” to this publication, with the condition that the founders raise an additional $10,000 a year. And what will this magazine be called? The New Masses, said the editors. And who are the editors? Michael Gold, Joseph Freeman, James Rorty, Hugo Gellert and John Sloan, said the backers. And what will they write about? This question the editors and backers answered in chorus in a flamboyant bulletin entitled: OUR THEMES.

It read: This is a new age, and a great age. This loud vast machine civilization contains greater materials for art than any of the previous ages of history. And the New Masses writers and artists are not going to run away from it.

The creative imagination of today has cast off the shackles of our timid middle-class culture. It sees and feels a new America—an America of steel and stone, of dynamos and blast furnaces. It sets itself to discover the new America that contains great corporations and great trade unions, New York skyscrapers, Chicago stockyards, Pittsburgh steel mills, Florida land-rushes. West Virginia strikes, Herrin massacres, Ku Klux Klans, Legions and Leagues, labor spies, tabloid newspapers, jazz, lynching, sports, mortgaged farms, farm trusts, romantic fiction magazines, movies, bunk morality, bunk religion, bunk politics, imperialistic adventures—the new America that all the rest of the world watches with mingled horror and admiration.

We are through forever with the picked chicken-bones and squeezed lemons of art; with the moonlight and roses and the tiresome nudes that make up the world of the unoriginal esthetes. We turn to the dynamo of the engineers and workers of America.