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…
