The Masses October 1917

It’s been a long while since my last post—I finished my PhD in August, and have been working on other projects since. I doubt anyone still checks on this blog, but I hope to get it ramped up again.

It seems most important to check in on the penultimate issue of The Masses. While it will be reborn as The Liberator, it is soon to be shut down by the wartime censors. The Post Office refused to distribute the August issue—then has the gall to argue that because they weren’t circulating issues, they are no longer a magazine, and thus have none of the legal protections of a magazine. It’s all a delaying action designed to sink The Masses by running out the clock on their resources. The whole censorship fight is an interesting story—the young brilliant socialists mocking the courthouse—I forget where I read it just now, but I’ll dig around and see if I can provide a link.

This issue revolves around the war. The Masses and the American socialist movement in general are being hounded by the wartime government. Meanwhile, they continue their coverage of the war in Europe and around the world.

It opens, somewhat surprisingly, with a page hastily inserted by Max Eastman which praises Woodrow Wilson’s letter to the Pope. In Eastman’s response to the letter, he absolves Wilson of most of the criticism heaped upon him in The Masses. Wilson promises that Germany will not be punished, and that his conditions of peace will be negotiated with the Reichstag, not the Kaiser. Eastman sees this as a move toward establishing the war as a fight for authentic democracy, though he is still nervous (rightly so, considering what actually happens in the Treaty).

Louise Bryant and John Reed write “News from France,” a blend of Francophilia and anti-militarism that praises the rationality of the French in their cold-blooded assessment of the war. It includes a review of Le Feu by Henri Barbusse, causing it to quickly ascend to the top of my to-read pile. 

Check out this quip:

 

Quick Notes:

George Bernard Shaw writes a stuffy letter highly critical of The Masses, Eastman has fun responding to it by pointing out the stuffiness.

Mabel Dodge’s story “The Eye of the Beholder” stands out as somewhat of a sore thumb, as its aesthetic parable about the power of the gaze to transform women into art sits uneasily in a magazine fighting for its life. It’s so-so, but I liked seeing Dodge in print, having encountered her due to the Taos colony—which she moved to in 1917.

In other art news, there’s a short note on John Storrs and a collection of his drawings. Very cool, modernist, Rodin-influenced, sculptural drawings by an artist-architect.

There’s an interesting review of W.H. Davies’ autobiography, The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp. It’s on LibriVox, so I’ll put it in line there—read by Expatriate of Bangor Maine, one of my favorite readers.

Louis Untermeyer writes a scathing review of… his own book? Funny.

There’s a cool poem by Miriam Vedder just inside the front cover, “Pins,” a prose poem of private ecstasies physical and religious.

That’s all for now…

The New Age, April 12, 1917

I’m going to do a series of posts on each magazine’s reaction to the American entry into World War One, starting here with The New Age, because it’s a weekly: the USA entered so early in April that the monthlies had almost an entire month before they could respond.

I have been reading the journals without posting as often because I’m finishing up my dissertation, but I regret not getting around here more often: the Russian Revolution is also in its early phases, and has been discussed in The New Age and elsewhere. I was interested to see how that commentary would link with the journal’s coverage of the US entry. TNA sees its Guild Socialist ideals becoming reality in Russia.

So, with that smidgen of context, what happens: Orage writes an extremely positive review of Woodrow Wilson’s speech requesting the declaration of war. Orage is impressed by Wilson’s philosophical grounding of the American intervention, especially Wilson’s compassion to the German working people. 

Remarkable--the US seen as the guardian of the Germans. This sent me to look at Wilson's address, here. 

“Three of the mightiest political events ever known in the history of the world have occurred within three years of the lives of the most common of us. The war is unique for its dimensions and its issues in the history of mankind; the Russian Revolution is a phenomenon of epic size; and the intervention of America in, a European ,war carries with it such implications that our remotest descendants will date an epoch of history from it.”

Yeah, that’s why I wanted to do a post on this. Intriguingly, TNA reports that the mainstream press was cynical about the intervention. TNA hates the Daily Mail.

Quick Notes:

S. Verdad points out that the US will now seize all German ships in US harbors. He performs a cold-blooded computation showing that the Germans sank less tonnage with their submarines than the US is about to confiscate from them. Celebrating the intervention, he praises the US for its plans for mild censorship—something the fate of The Masses might refute (it will perish at the end of the year). 

G.D.H. Cole prints an article arguing that capitalism can’t be overthrown by a frontal assault on the monopoly of production: first the workers must attack the function of exchange. This mirrors some 2016-17 calls for alternative modes of distribution. Without those networks, the general strike knockout blow won’t land.

Bechofer interviews Lord Haldane about education (he wants a hybrid Montessori/apprenticeship model).

There’s a letter from someone named G. E. Fussel about a show of Epstein sculptures, linking modernist art with social progress.

Pair that with a review of a review of Bernard van Dieran’s  music, and a further hostile letter against Epstein, and it seems that modernist art manages to be discussed despite the war: but in the correspondence pages.