George
Bellows was born
in Columbus, Ohio on 19th August, 1882. At Ohio
State University (1901-1904) Bellows was a talented baseball player
but his first love was art and he moved to New York without graduating.
Bellows studied at the New York School of Art under Robert
Henri, leader of what became known as the Ashcan School. In 1906
he rented a studio and began painting scenes of everyday urban life.
He also taught art at the Arts Students
League.
Bellows developed a strong social conscious and in 1911 began contributing
pictures to the radical journal, The
Masses. Although rarely paid for his work, Bellows
got the opportunity to work with other left-wing artists such as John
Sloan, Stuart
Davis and Boardman Robinson.
Bellows were deeply influenced by the events of the First
World War and he completed a series of paintings and lithographs
on the subject. He also produced several anti-war drawings for The
Masses including the powerful attack on Woodrow
Wilson and his Espionage Act, Blessed
are the Peacemakers.
In 1919 Bellows moved to the Chicago Art Institute.
He also illustrated novels including several by H.
G. Wells. George Bellows died on
8th January, 1925 in New York after a
neglected attack of appendicitis.
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This
man subjected himself to imprisonment and probably to
being shot or hanged.
The prisoner used language tending to discourage men from
enlisting in the United States Army.
It is proven and indeed admitted that among his incendiary
statements were -
Thou shalt not kill
and
Blessed are the peacemakers. |
|
George
Bellows, Blessed are the
Peacemakers, The Masses (July, 1917)
(1)
Max Eastman, Love and Revolution
(1964)
In spite of a ruling by the Attorney General that "the constitutional
right of free speech, free assembly, and petition exist in wartime
as in peacetime," nearly two thousand men and women were jailed
for their opinions during the First World War, their sentences running
as high as thirty years.
The Espionage Act, signed by Wilson one month after our entrance into
the war, although it contained no press censorship clause, and was
ostensibly designed to protect the nation against foreign agents,
established three new crimes which made it dangerous to criticize
the war policy and impossible to voice the faintest objection to conscription.
A subsequent amendment known as the Sedition Act, defined as seditious,
and made punishable, all disloyal language and attacks on the government,
the army, the navy, or the cause of the United States in the war.
Under this act it became a crime to write a "disloyal" letter,
or an anti-war article which might reach a training camp, or express
anti-war sentiments to an audience which included men of draft age,
or where the expression might be heard by ship-builders or munition-makers.
In our June and July numbers (of The Masses) we had two anti-war
cartoons by Boardman Robinson: a picture of Uncle Sam in chains and
handcuffs, "All ready to fight for liberty," and one of
Jesus Christ being dragged in on a rope by an idiotic recruiting officer.
George Bellows contributed another Jesus, in stripes now, with ball
and chain and a crown of thorns: "The prisoner used language
tending to discourage men from enlisting in the United States army:
"Thou shalt not kill - Blessed are the peacemakers."
(2)
Max Eastman, Love and Revolution
(1964)
There was one big difference between the Masses and the Liberator;
in the latter we abandoned the pretense of being a co-operative. Crystal
Eastman and I owned the Liberator, fifty-one shares of it,
and we raised enough money so that we could pay solid sums for contributions.
The list of contributing editors, largely brought over from the Masses,
reads as follows: Cornelia Barns, Howard Brubaker, Hugo Gellert, Arturo
Giovannitti, Charles T. Hallinan, Helen Keller, Ellen La Motte, Robert
Minor, John Reed, Boardman Robinson, Louis Untermeyer, Charles Wood,
Art Young.
Later Claude McKay, the Negro poet, became an associate editor. At
a New Year's party in 1921, we elected Michael Gold and William Gropper
to the staff - two opposite poles of a magnet: Gropper as instinctively
comic an artist as ever touched pen to paper, and Gold almost equally
gifted with pathos and tears.
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