The Masses -

New York, 1916. Vol. 8, No. 3 (January 1916) to Vol. 9, No. 2 (December 1916), comprising 12 issues, bound in red cloth. Small folio. Binding VG-, nibbling and wear to edges, rebacked in black cloth with paper spine label. Contents VG, with some toning, wrinkling to the July issue, and offsetting to the July back cover. All covers and advertisements bound in. This volume is from the library of The New Masses and bears its stamp on the front fly. Highlights of this volume include covers by Frank Walts, Maurice Becker, and Hugo Gellert, cartoon art by Art Young, Boardman Robinson, Stuart Davis, Cornelia Barns, and essays by Max Eastman, John Reed, and many others. By all measures except the most mundane (profitability, advertising pages, circulation figures), The Masses was a great magazine: beautiful, intelligent, surprising, dynamic, deadly serious, laugh-out-loud funny, high-minded and frivolous. Nothing like it had ever been seen in America before it began publishing in its new form in December 1913. While Puck, Judge, and Life, America's leading political satire magazines, had been entertaining readers for nearly two generations, only occasionally did the first and the last of these (Judge almost never did) challenge its audience with a cartoon or an editorial that departed from the status quo. The Masses was beholden to these venerable mainstream magazines for the visual and comedic vocabulary they popularized. But the artists and writers of The Masses were more interested in subverting tradition than in extending it. For that task, they drew their inspiration from the artistic satire magazines of Europe, Simplicissimus and L'Assiette Au Buerre, and succeeded in bringing the bravura of those unconventional publications to America. The teens was socialism's glorious moment in America. The movement was the product of more than 100 years of agitation- perhaps beginning with Jefferson's warnings about the deleterious effects of urbanized culture - to curb the excesses of American capitalism. The American culture had wrestled with the coarser aspects of capitalism. Most Americans embraced the system enthusiastically, but they were not stone deaf to the stories of men who got rich on speculation during the civil war, to the ruthlessness of the robber barons, to the exploitation of immigrant and child labor and the brutal suppression of the labor union movement, to the abuse of privilege in the halls of government, to the exposes of the muckrakers and social workers. Slowly, converts were won in the fight for greater economic equity, in the fight for fairness. A great portion of the country was willing to embrace some sort of change, however cautious, exemplified by the elections of two reformers, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, to the presidency. A smaller, though growing, minority on the left wanted sweeping change. These radicals tended to gather under the socialist banner. It would be a mistake to suggest that the pre-world war I left was a monolith. But the unity of purpose in those pre-war days far surpassed any period since. That was because the evil - capitalism - was known in all of its destructive dimensions. Workers could feel its oppressive weight every day of their lives. Intellectuals and reformers could see the injustice all around them. The socialist vision, on the other hand, was just that - a vision, largely untested, but temptingly appealing. The vigor and élan of The Masses is due in great part to this dynamic: the writers and artists confronted a pervasive foe, a hulking target, a system that in its excesses was its own worst enemy. They had, in short, an endless source of inspiration. Were they required to propose alternatives to Rockefeller's henchmen gunning down mine workers and their families? The argument was academic. So, though the majority of Americans were skeptical, at minimum, of the sweet song of socialism, only the most mossback could defend the worst abuses of capitalism. History showed how the American left shattered as it responded to the Russian revolution, that is, when it was finally confronted with the reality of a Socialist state, but that story comes later, after The Masses was run from the stage. So this magazine spotlights that magical moment in the history of the American left, when it was resolute in its fight against evil and pregnant with glorious possibility. The Masses was perhaps the socialist movement's greatest gift to American culture.. Red Cloth Rebacked in Black. See Description. Small Folio.