The Masses, April 1916

The Masses has been one of my favorites among the periodicals that I've been reading for some time now--I appreciated its blend of serious politics and humor. Students like it for the same reasons, and it is a good text for discussions on American politics in the nineteen teens.

So, it's terrible when it is racist.

The author of the poem is one Jane Burr, a pseudonym of Rosalind Guggenheim Winslow. The poem is an utterly demeaning account of her African American nurse. Often when I see racism in The Masses it's possible to figure out why it's there--a political cartoon that tries to use racial stereotypes to undermine the rhetoric of racism, but that instead ends up repeating the stereotypes. That sort of thing. That's bad enough. This poem is worse. I'm not going to quote it here because I don't have the stomach for it.

Max Eastman knows better--how could this poem appear in the same issue as this image, for instance:

The poem is a different kind of slumming, rural slumming, perhaps. It's the sort of thing The Masses should deplore. After all, this is the same journal that campaigned against lynching, enough to get accolades from The Crisis and to infuriate the southern white press. The Masses promotes books by Du Bois, editor of The Crisis, and appeared with Du Bois in The New Review, which was advertised in The Masses, in an ad that set them side by side in a list of contributors (January 1913, page 19, for instance):

The New Review included an essay by Du Bois criticizing the socialist tendency to exclude people of color from the socialist program in February 1913 (here's a link that should open a pdf of that issue of The New Review).

So what gives? The New York Times ran a story on Burr on August 3, 1913. It's the best source about her I've found so far. Here's the lede:

The New York Times holds up this feminist from a privileged background as a curiosity. The article makes much of the fact that she works in an office, because otherwise she'd bake cakes instead of writing poems (Burr/Winslow says this herself). NYT is also somewhat bewildered by the fact that she's married but believes in divorce. They also mention that her husband, Horatio Gates Winslow, was the original editor of The Masses (Eastman took over in December 1912), and that she gives them poems for free (while the NYT has to pay).

So maybe the picture comes into focus a bit. Burr/Winslow is a friend of the magazine. I don't know if the fact that she supports herself via poetry means she has no independent means, but I'm curious if she's also a benefactor of The Masses. So they print her poem. Still doesn't make much sense to me, and I'll see if I can learn more about it. This post isn't really enough of an analysis--as many of these, it's more of an annotation than an argument. I hope I can come back to this some day. And in the meantime, I'll think about what I'm reading and writing, and why I talk about certain texts and not others. I may be belatedly grouchy with The Masses, which at first struck me as misplaced in history--but I think this particular failure feels very recent. 

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...

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, January 1915

I realized that I forgot to write my post on The Masses of January. Bear with me while I take a step back before taking one forward.

I'll just jot down a few quick notes, and post a couple images of interest.

There are several pieces arguing against American involvement in the war, and there's further coverage of the Socialist Party's activities in Europe, including the story of Karl Leibknecht's lone opposition to WWI in the Reichstag (18).

On page 11, there's an entertaining selection of letters arguing for and against prohibition. I also noticed that there seems to be an image that has been removed: I wonder if it was pulled from the pdf or was cut from the original?

Max Eastman pens a lengthy article on "What is the Matter with Magazine Art." The issue also contains images like this one:

The interests of the journal come to a head here: in a country beset by the horrors of peace, how could we think about joining a war? The image is haunting, the caption contextualizes it.

Lastly, and more frivolously, an advertisement that speaks for itself:

Poetry, October 1913

The headlining Yeats poem is the most interesting part of a more-tepid Poetry. Yeats' The Two Kings is the sort of magical Irish mythology that he's so famous for in 1913. The story hinges on the husband-king forgiving the queen-wife for magically-induced infidelity, and has some really great lines in it.

Harriet Monroe's essay about the Panama Canal is very excited, but not particularly exciting to me.

Alice Corbin Henderson reviews Child of the Amazons by Max Eastman of The Masses, her verdict: meh.

Ezra Pound has the guts to summarize his essays on Paris and mention the originals in The New Age, which of course has been panning each one as it appears. His apparent lack of concern over the combined efforts of the editors of TNA is striking.

Boring post, sorry.