The Masses, October-November 1915

I love this issue: the Women's Citizenship Number.

There's a lot to cover, but I'll start with a general observation: The Masses devoting a special issue to women's citizenship would seem to imply a shift of focus to a single topic, but despite the cover, the issue discusses the vote, labor relations, and race relations--all common topics in its pages. Probably less than half of the text is explicitly in reference to suffrage. It doesn't feel strange, though: the cover is an act of solidarity. Here's the kind of solidarity attempted by The Masses: a short piece apologizing to the suffrage movement for the conflation of its activities with those of The Masses, they print this:

The Masses positions itself as a supporter and acknowledges that this support requires nothing from the suffragists. It's about human rights, not about The Masses. The article continues, and things begin to run together: the piece is about Leo Frank's  lynching and the cover of The Masses that foreshadowed this lynching by depicting Frank on a cross. Apparently the suffragists were blamed for The Masses "blasphemy" when an anti-suffragist used it to implicate that suffrage and The Masses were one and the same. It all holds together--the fact that Frank tried for the murder of a child laborer in the South comes back to have implications for women's suffrage. The whole issue feels like this.

Floyd Dell and Max Eastman contribute pieces directly on women's suffrage. One interesting component of Eastman's argument is that women are already in the workforce--the bourgeois preoccupation with women remaining in the domestic sphere is a hypocrisy in that these pinnacles of traditional gender roles hire women to run their homes, as maids, cooks, etc.

Amos Pinchot explains that labor is reaching a crossroads: the oversupply of labor means that strikes can never really be effective again, and the state-industry monopoly of violence means that strikes will be fatal as well as futile. The only avenue left to reach an equitable society is political, as the wealth of the elites must be countered by creating self-sustaining labor-led alternatives to the mainstream society.

While this issue has bigger issues on its mind, B. Boysen writes a piece titled "What the Universities Need," protesting the dismissal of a professor from U. Penn for his political views, like our current situation with Steven Salaita. Boysen points to the capitalist takeover of the university system as the root problem, and proposes a national instructor's union with heavy student input as a counterweight to the power of the wealthy trustees. Awesome stuff.

Mary White Ovington, cofounder of the NAACP, contributes a short story about a black couple undergoing horrific crimes in the American South, illustrating the cycles of violence that can extend for decades. It links closely, though not overtly, with the coverage of the Frank case elsewhere in the issue.

Jeanette Eaton castigates the women's magazine for its pernicious influence on women, driving them deeper into the domestic sphere instead of focusing their energies on real living, moving into a general critique of men for encouraging this kind of thought:

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

The Masses, February 1915

After giving The Masses short shrift in January, I'm going to do my post on it early this month.

This image stands for one of the main meditations of The Masses this month: how impoverished women relate to sex, especially as prostitutes, or otherwise exploited. January's issue had the story "Nobody's Sister" on the same subject--but this month's Masses is anchored by a story by John Reed, Daughter of the Revolution. He tells about meeting a prostitute from a third-generation Socialist family--she is impoverished because her father rejected her desire for freedom. That's the irony of it. As a story, the writing is good, if a little prone to over-exposition. Marcelle, the prostitute, tells the story of her grandfather dying at the fall of the commune, her father's activities as a strike leader, and all the rest of the family history. She herself hates socialism for the way her family has been crushed by the system--and yet, she herself feels free. The story comes off as part inspiring, part sordid--another glimpse into wartime Paris, and one more polished than the others I've covered. It's worth reading. Contrast this vision to that of "The Bachelor Girl" drawing above, and with the poem "You Turned" by Robert Carlton Brown below (page 9):

Robert Carlton Brown is one of my favorites--and a forgotten modernist I want to spend more time studying, someday. He doesn't even have a wikipedia page yet, as I think I've noted before--I keep meaning to write one, but finding sources on him is difficult. See also his drunken Whitmanic prose poem rollick, "A Nickel at Night" on page 20. 

Quick gossipy note: when Reed is establishing the scene at the beginning of the story, and for no readily apparent reason, he writes that "Beatrice and Alice were farther down along under the glare of the yellow lights" (5). Could this be not two women, but Beatrice Hastings/Alice Morning of The New Age?! Conspiratorial of me to think it, but the coincidence--BH/AM would have been in Paris at the time the story was set.

Quick notes:

This issue of The Masses contains some interesting poems beyond Brown's above. Carl Sandburg publishes "Buttons," about the horror of abstracting the war. 

I may have made a minor discovery in another one of the poems... but I'll keep some secrets for myself, until they are ready. 

Karl Liebknecht, covered in my last post, has his tragic insurrection prophesied by The Masses on page 14. 

Floyd Dell contributes an essay on Gilbert Murray's comparing the era to the Greece of Pericles. It's interesting for the connections with the Hellenism of so much of the art of the day. 

The Masses has set up shop as a mail-order bookstore, a prototype of Amazon: you let them be your middleman, and the profits support the journal. We'll see how the scheme plays out. 

I'm going to take off now, but there's plenty more to say about this issue--the best way to experience The Masses, its worldview, its black humor, its art, is not this blog post. Here's to the thing itself.