Tuesday, April 11, 2017

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.