Maurice
Becker,
the son of a soldier in the Russian Army,
was born in Gorky in 1889. Three years later the Becker family emigrated
to America and settled in the Jewish quarter
of New York. After attending New York's
Commercial High School,
Becker worked in a local garment factory. He developed an interest
in art and in 1908 he began taking lessons from Robert
Henri and eventually became a member of what became known as the
Ash-Can Group.
In 1913 Becker joined with Robert Henri,
John Sloan, George
Bellows and Stuart Davis in taking
part in the famous 1913 Armory Show. Becker also began drawing cartoons.
He was a great admirer of radical artists such as Art
Young, Rockwell Kent and Robert
Minor who were using their art in an attempt to obtain social
reforms.
In 1914, John Sloan, the editor of The
Masses, began using Becker's work. Becker also had cartoons
published in the New
York Tribune
and Metropolitan.
Becker was a pacifist and a large number
of his cartoons concerned the First World War.
This included his powerful front-cover cartoon for The
Masses in September, 1914, entitled Whom
the Gods Would Destroy They First Make Mad.
Becker was
also active in the pacifist organisation,
American
Union Against Militarism.
Attitudes towards pacifists changed when the USA entered the war in
1917. Becker was conscripted into the USA Army
and when he refused to fight, he was sentenced to 25 years hard labour
in Fort
Leavenworth Disciplinary Barracks.
In 1919, with the war over, President Woodrow
Wilson decided to free all conscientious objectors from prison.
After his release, Becker began contributing cartoons to the new radical
journal in New York, the Liberator.
He later moved to Mexico where he concentrated on painting but his
cartoons continued to appear in left-wing journals such as the Daily
Worker,
New
Solidarity
and the
New Masses.
Becker remained a pacifist and although
a Jew, refused to produce pro-intervention
cartoons during the early stages of the Second World
War.
NURSE: "Don't be discouraged. The doctor
says you'll be back on the firing line in a week"
(1)
Maurice Becker, statement at
Military Tribunal (18th October, 1918)
Rockwell
Kent, a painter, saw some of my drawings and told me of a magazine
which he thought could use them. The magazine was The Masses
whose ideals were such that artists could express themselves in it
unhampered by considerations which control commercial magazines. Ever
since I could reason and think I have had a horror of war. I do not
believe it is right to kill a human being under any circumstances.
I do not belong to any religious sect of any church but my own conscience
leads me to this position. Much of my artistic work and many of my
sketches and cartoons done since the war began bear me out in this
statement.
(2)
In an interview with Richard Fitzgerald in 1968, Maurice Becker was
critical of those radicals who abandoned socialism
after the First World War.
Quite often we find that people who
espouse a cause while it's on paper became critical when they face
the reality or desert and became reactionary as do the Max Eastmans
those who continued with New Masses were not Eastmanites.
(3)
In
an interview with Richard Fitzgerald in 1968, Maurice Becker explained
why he did not advocate the USA becoming involved in the Second
World War.
I have no sympathy for those who
engineer wars and give them appealing names only to slaughter and
make fortunes, and will never call such atrocities by the label 'Patriotism'.
Maurice
Becker, Americanizing
the Alien,
New Solidarity (January, 1920)
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