The Masses


The Masses was a graphically innovative American magazine of socialist politics published monthly from 1911 until 1917, when federal prosecutors brought charges against its editors for conspiring to obstruct conscription in the United States during World War I. It was succeeded by The Liberator and then later New Masses. It published reportage, fiction, poetry and art by the leading radicals of the time such as Max Eastman, John Reed, Dorothy Day, and Floyd Dell.

History

Beginnings

, an eccentric Dutch socialist immigrant from the Netherlands, founded the magazine in 1911. For the first year of its publication, the printing and engraving costs of the magazine were paid for by a sympathetic patron, Rufus Weeks, a vice president at the New York Life Insurance Company. Vlag's dream of a co-operatively operated magazine never worked well, and after just a few issues, he left for Florida. His vision of an illustrated socialist monthly had, however, attracted a circle of young activists in Greenwich Village to The Masses; these included visual artists such as John French Sloan from the Ashcan School. These Greenwich Village artists and writers asked one of their own, Max Eastman, to edit their magazine. John Sloan, Art Young, Louis Untermeyer, and Inez Haynes Gillmore mailed a terse letter to Eastman in August 1912: "You are elected editor of The Masses. No pay." In the February 1913 issue of The Masses, Eastman wrote the following manifesto:
The Masses was to some extent defined by its association with New York's artistic culture. "The birth of The Masses," Eastman later wrote, "coincided with the birth of 'Greenwich Village' as a self-conscious entity, an American Bohemia or gipsy-minded Latin Quarter, but its relations with that entity were not simple." The Masses was very much embedded in a specific metropolitan milieu, unlike some other competing socialist periodicals.
The magazine carved out a unique position for itself within American Left print culture. It was more open to Progressive Era reforms, like women's suffrage, than Emma Goldman's anarchist Mother Earth. At the same time it fiercely criticized more mainstream leftist publications like The New Republic for insufficient radicalism.
After Eastman assumed leadership, and especially after August 1914, the magazine's denouncements of the war were frequent and fierce. In the September 1914 edition of his column, "Knowledge and Revolution," Eastman predicted: "Probably no one will actually be the victor in this gambler's war—for we may as well call it a gambler's war. Only so can we indicate its underlying commercial causes, its futility, and yet also the tall spirit in which it is carried off."
By May 1916, the radical content published in The Masses had caused it to be boycotted by two major American magazine distribution companies, United News Co. of Philadelphia, and Magazine Distributing Co. of Boston. It was also excluded from the Canadian mails, university libraries, bookshops, and the newsstands of the New York City subway system.

Associated Press lawsuits

In July 1913, in the aftermath of the Paint Creek–Cabin Creek strike of 1912 in West Virginia, Max Eastman wrote an editorial in The Masses accusing the Associated Press of "having suppressed and colored the news of that strike in favor of the employers". Eastman detailed the AP's alleged suppression of information regarding the abuses carried out by a military tribunal set up to punish striking coal workers, and also accused the AP of having a conflict of interest, after it was discovered that the AP's local correspondent was also a member of the tribunal. The editorial was accompanied by a cartoon by Art Young, entitled "Poisoned at the Source", which featured a figure of the AP poisoning the reservoir of news with "Lies", "Suppressed Facts", "Prejudice", "Slander", and "Hatred of Labor Organization".
The AP filed suit for criminal libel against Eastman and Young through its attorney William Rand, but the suit was dismissed by a judge. Rand followed up by persuading the District Attorney in New York City to convene a Grand Jury, which indicted Eastman and Young for criminal libel in December 1913. The two editors were arrested on December 13 and released on $1,000 bail each, facing the prospect of a year in prison if found guilty. A month later, the two were also charged with personally libeling the President of the Associated Press, Frank Brett Noyes, when it was determined that the figure of the AP in Young's cartoon was in Noyes's likeness.
Young and Eastman were represented pro bono by Gilbert Roe, and their plight attracted the support of an array of activists including Lincoln Steffens, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Inez Milholland, and Amos Pinchot. At a meeting held in support of Eastman and Young at Cooper Union, Pinchot expressed his support of their cause and agreed with the two editors' charge that the AP was operating as a monopoly "in constraint of truth". The AP demanded he retract his statement on the threat of a $150,000 libel lawsuit, but Pinchot persuaded the organization that the publicity would reflect poorly on them and the suit went nowhere. The defense consulted the lawyer Samuel Untermyer, who claimed to have personally witnessed the distortion of the West Virginia news by the AP. After two years of litigation, the District Attorney's office quietly dropped the lawsuits against Young and Eastman.

First trial

Following the passing of the Espionage Act, The Masses attempted to comply with the new regulations as to remain eligible for shipment by the U.S. Post Office. The business manager, Merrill Rogers, "made efforts to be in compliance by seeking counsel from George Creel, Chairman of the Committee on Public Post office still denied use of the mails." Challenging the injunction from the mail, The Masses found brief success in having the ban overturned; however, after bringing public attention to the issue, the government officially identified the "treasonable material" in the 1917 August issue and, shortly after, issued charges against Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, John Reed, Josephine Bell, H.J. Glintenkamp, Art Young, and Merrill Rogers. Charged with seeking to "unlawfully and willfully…obstruct the recruiting and enlistment of the United States" military, Eastman and his "conspirators" faced fines up to 10,000 dollars and twenty years imprisonment.
The trial opened April 15, 1918, and despite the onslaught of prejudicial emotions, the defendants were not very worried. The Masses cohort, aware of the prosecutory artifice, played up a lackadaisical performance of absurdist humor. "Contributing to a carnival atmosphere that first day of the trial was a band just outside the courtroom window patriotic tunes in a campaign to sell Liberty Bonds and disturbing the solemnity within the courtroom itself. Each time the band played the "Star Spangled Banner" Merrill Rogers jumped to the floor to salute the flag. Only after the fourth time that the band played the tune and only after the Judge asked him did Rogers finally dispense with the salute." Finally, only five of seven defendants even appeared for the trial – Reed was still in Russia and H.J. Glintenkamp was of unknown whereabouts, though rumored to be anywhere from South America to Idaho. Louis Untermeyer commented, "As the trial went on it was evident that the indictment was a legal subterfuge and that what was really on trial was the issue of a free press."
Before releasing the jury for deliberation, Judge Learned Hand altered the charges against the defendants and attempted to preface the jury of their constitutional duties. Hand dismissed all the charges against Josephine Bell, and dismissed the first count – "conspiracy to cause mutiny and refusal of duty"—against the remaining defendants. Prior to releasing the jurors, Judge Hand stated, "I do not have to remind you that every man has the right to have such economic, philosophic or religious opinions as seem to him best, whether they be socialist, anarchistic or atheistic." After deliberating from Thursday afternoon to Saturday, the jury returned with two decisions. First, the jury was unable to come to a unanimous decision. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the jurors seeking to convict the defendants blamed one juror for being unable to conform to the majority opinion, as he was also a socialist and, consequently, un-American. Not only did the other eleven jurors demand the prosecutor to levy charges against the lone juror, but moved to drag the socialist supporter out into the street and lynch him. Judge Hand, given the uproar, declared a mistrial.

Second trial

In September 1918, The Masses were back on trial, this time joined by John Reed. Aside from new defense attorneys, the proceedings remained very similar to the first trial.
Ending his closing arguments, Prosecutor Barnes invoked the image of a dead soldier in France, stating, "He lies dead, and he died for you and he died for me. He died for Max Eastman. He died for John Reed. He died for Merrill Rogers. His voice is but one of a thousand silent voices that demand that these men be punished." Art Young, who had taken to sleeping through most of the court proceedings, awoke at the end of Barnes's argument, whispering loudly, "What? Didn't he die for me?" John Reed, sitting next to Young responded, "Cheer up Art, Jesus died for you." As before, the jury returned unable to come to a unanimous decision.
After The Masses died, Eastman and other writers were unwilling to let its spirit go with it. In March 1918, their new monthly adopted the name of William Lloyd Garrison's famed The Liberator.
The Masses continued to serve as an example for radicals long after it was suppressed. "The only magazine I know which bears a certain resemblance to Politics and fulfilled a similar function thirty years earlier," Hannah Arendt claimed in 1968, was "the old Masses."