The Masses, February 1916

I haven't done a post on the Masses in a while, but I've been reading along. Here's one on the February, 1916 issue. I had my class read this issue last week, so it's particularly vivid in my mind, as the students here at UW really liked it, and we learned a ton together by digging through articles,  ads, and art.

Three featured articles caught our collective eye.

The first is John Reed's report from the Serbian front of the war, titled, "The World Well Lost." Reed opens with a beautiful and horrible parody of travel writing:

"THE Serbian town of Obrenovatz is a cluster of red tile roofs and white bulbous towers, hidden in green trees on a belt of land, around which sweeps the river Sava in a wide curve. Behind rise the green hills of Serbia, toppling up to blue ranges of mountains upon whose summit heaps of dead bodies lie still unburied, among the stumps of trees riddled down by machine-gun fire; and half-starved dogs battle there ghoulishly with vultures" (5).

Reed's embedded in the Serbian army, a staunchly nationalist force. When the soldiers hear that he is a socialist, they send him to the artillery to meet a former Serbian socialist officer there. Reed's interview with this man, Takits, shows the damage that the war can do to both a country and to a left-wing individual. Takits often refers to the fact that he can barely remember his activism, despite it being hugely important to him. He explains that socialism was a natural fit in Serbia, as a nation of freeholding peasants, "we were naturally communists." His original goal was to develop a sense of class loyalty among the lower classes to match that of the upper classes, because the lower classes already owned the means of production. The war has pushed all that into the background: "Well, I have forgotten my arguments, and I have lost my faith!" Takit's tragedy is that an intellectual, committed leftist lawyer could be so completely subsumed by the war as to lose his individuality. It's a cautionary tale for American socialists who are reading The Masses. 

The second text that we discussed was "The A.F. of L. Convention: An Impression" by Inez Haynes Gillmore. As my class has spent a lot of time discussing impressionism and post-impressionism, we were impressed by Gillmore's invocation of "impression" in the title, and discussed how framing it as an impression changes the reader's expectations of the piece. The account itself is joyous about the power of the labor delegates, who are sketched as super strong huge hunky brilliant men arguing intelligently over issues that will change the world. Students hypothesized that the female feminist readership of The Masses would have appreciated the woman's vision of male beauty here, so unusual after our many encounters with male representations of women in the course. Gillmore's writing is poetic and powerful: "The voice of labor is a roar, deep as though it came from a throat of iron, penetrating as though it came through lips of silver. One day that voice will silence all the great guns of the world."


Third piece: "About Schools" by Max Eastman. Eastman comments on the plan to adopt the Gary educational system in New York. He's writing to convince his left-wing audience that the plan is a good one, despite its concessions to religion. The Gary plan involves adding workshops to schools, intense shop class, essentially. Eastman writes that his own education was largely useless, and that he learned versatility and self-reliance at his first factory jobs, not in high school. We got the sense that Eastman sees the potential for worker's solidarity here--if everyone works in a factory as part of their schooling, they will have more sympathy with people who work in factories for life. That's implicit, though, a theory. Students appreciated this cartoon that accompanies the piece:

The caption reads: "Let's go out to Central Park and look at the animals." "I can't, I've got to study my zoology." We discussed how this is funny, a critique of current educational systems, and simultaneously a validation of women's ability to be serious students of sciences. Pretty good, for a single image.

There's more, but that's all for now...