During
the the First World War, most of the people
who worked for the believed that the USA should remain neutral. After
the USA declared war on the Central
Powers in 1917, the The Masses
magazine came under government pressure to change its policy. When
it refused to do this, the journal lost its mailing privileges.
In July, 1917, it was claimed by the authorities that articles by
Floyd Dell and Max
Eastman and cartoons by Art Young,
Boardman Robinson and H.
J. Glintenkamp had violated the Espionage
Act. Under this act it was an offence to publish material that
undermined the war effort. The legal action that followed forced The
Masses to cease publication.
In 1918 the same people who produced The
Masses, including the editor, Max
Eastman, went on the publish a very similar journal, The Liberator.
The journal published information about socialist
movements throughout the world and was the first to break the news
that the Allies had invaded Russia.
People
who contributed to the journal included Crystal
Eastman, Art Young, Claude
McKay, Boardman Robinson, Roger
Baldwin, Norman Thomas, John
Reed, Louise Bryant, Bertrand
Russell, Dorothy Day, Robert
Minor, Stuart Davis, Maurice
Becker, Helen Keller, Cornelia
Barns, Louis Untermeyer, K.
R. Chamberlain and William Gropper.
In 1922 the journal was taken over by Robert
Minor and the Communist Party.
and in 1924 was renamed as The Workers' Monthly. Many of the
people who contributed to the The Masses
and the original Liberator, were unhappy with this development
and in 1926, they started their own journal, the New
Masses.
(1)
Floyd Dell, Homecoming (1933)
The Masses harassed by the post-office authorities, was
suppressed in October, 1917, by the Government, and its editors were
indicted, myself among them, under the so-called Espionage Act, which
was being used not against German spies but against American Socialists,
Pacifists, and anti-war radicals. Sentences of twenty years were being
served out to all who dared say this was not a war to end war, or
that the Allied loans would never be paid. But the courts would probably
not get around to us until next year; and we immediately made plans
to start another magazine, The Liberator, and tell more truth;
we would stand on the pre-war Wilsonian program, and call for a negotiated
peace.
(2)
The Liberator, editorial, introductory issue (March 1918)
Never was the moment more auspicious to issue a great magazine
of liberty. With the Russian people in the lead, the world is entering
upon the experiment of industrial and real democracy. Inspired by
Russia, the German people are muttering a revolt that will go farther
than its dearest advocates among the Allies dream. The working people
of France, of Italy, of England, too, are determined that the end
of autocracy in Germany shall be the end of wage-slavery at home.
America has extended her hand to the Russians. She will follow in
their path. The world is in the rapids. The possibilities of change
in this day are beyond all imagination. We must unite our hands and
voices to make the end of this war the beginning of an age of freedom
and happiness for mankind undreamed by those whose 'minds comprehend
only political and military events. With this ideal The Liberator
comes into being on Lincoln's Birthday February 12, 1918.
The Liberator
will be owned and published by its editors, who will be free in its
pages to say what they truly think. It will fight in the struggle
of labor. It will fight for the ownership and control of industry
by the workers, and will present vivid and accurate news of the labor
and socialist movements in all parts of the world.
It will
advocate the opening of the land to the people, and urge the immediate
taking over by the people of railroads, mines, telegraph and telephone
systems, and all public utilities.
It will
stand for the complete independence of women - politi- cal, social
and economic - and an enrichment of the existence of mankind.
It will
stand for a revolution in the whole spirit and method of dealing with
crime.
It will
join all wise men in trying to substitute for our rigid scholastic
kind of educational system one which has a vivid relation to life.
It will
assert the social and political equality of the black and white races,
oppose every kind of racial discrimination, and conduct a remorseless
publicity campaign against lynch law.
It will
oppose laws preventing the spread of scientific knowledge about birth
control.
The Liberator
will endorse the war aims outlined by the Russian people and expounded
by President Wilson - a peace without forcible annexations, without
punitive indemnities, with free development and self-determination
for all peoples. Especially it will support the President in his demand
for an international union, based upon free seas, free commerce and
general disarmament, as the central principle upon which hang all
hopes for permanent peace and friendship among nations.
The Liberator
will be distinguished by complete freedom in art and poetry and fiction
and criticism. It will be candid. It will be experimental. It will
be hospitable to new thoughts and feelings. It will direct its attacks
against dogma and rigidity of mind upon whichever side they are found.
(3)
Crystal
Eastman, The Liberator (February
1919)
Some good
friends of the Liberator are disturbed at our want of enthusiasm for
the League of Nations. We believe in a League of Nations as the one
thing that will ever remove the menace of nationalistic war from the
earth. We believe that it must be a definite, concrete, continuous
and working federation of the peoples. We believe that such a thing
may come to pass in the near future, and we will work for it. But
we do not discover in the victorious governments that are meeting
in Paris, nor in any of the delegates of these governments, the least
disposition to establish such a federation of the peoples. We are
not free to say all that we might of these governments, but we can
say that the hands they clasp over the council table will be red with
the fresh blood of the freest people on earth.
(4)
Crystal
Eastman, The Liberator (February
1919)
Bela Kun is a young man
(they are all young) - probably 29 or 30. He is stocky and powerful
in physical build, not very tall, with a big bulging bullet-head shaved
close. His wide face with small eyes, heavy jaws and thick lips is
startling when you first see it close - I am told it is a well-known
Magyar type—but his smile is sunny and winning, and he looks
resolute and powerful. He has a superhuman capacity for hard work.
His title is Commissar of Foreign Affairs, but there is not the slightest
doubt in anyone's mind that he is in every sense the head of the government.
He is described by his comrades as a "great agitator," a
man of real revolutionary talent, a "genuine Socialist statesman,"
the "first statesman Hungary has had in seventy years."
Their eyes glow with pride in him. "The rest of us are nothing,"
said Lukacs, Commissar of Education. "We do our part, but there
are hundreds like us in every country." It is nothing to the
European movement whether we are hanged tomorrow or not. If Kun were
killed it would be a serious loss to the revolution."
Bela Kun gave me a written
message to the workers of America, which I cabled for publication
in the July number of The Liberator.
He also gave me written
answers to some of the questions that were in our minds in America.
He said that they had learned much from the experience of Russia -
both what to do and what to avoid. Perhaps
it was a reflection of his own personal growth in Russia that made
him say, "We certainly learned, from the Russian example, self-sacrifice."
He also said, "We
learned the proper form of dictatorship there."
I asked him whether the
Hungarian dictatorship was more or less
strict than the Russian, and he said it was more strict. "The
Russians made many
experiments," he said, "before they found the proper
form of dictatorship. We have been saved those experiments."
I asked him whether he
found necessary a complete suppression of free speech and press, and
this is his reply:
"We do not practice
general suppression of free speech and free press at all. Workmen's
papers are published without the intervention of any censorship. Among
workingmen there is perfect freedom of speech and of holding meetings;
this freedom is enjoyed not only by the workmen who share our views
but also by those whose views are different. The anarchists, for instance,
publish a paper and other printed matter. There are also citizens'
papers, for instance, the Twentieth Century, a periodical published
by the society for sociology,
without any control or restriction being exercised upon it. We
only suppress bourgeois papers having decided counter-revolutionary
intentions.
"We are doing this
not because we are afraid of them, but because
we want in this way to obviate the necessity of suppressing counter-revolution
by force of arms."
(5)
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.
(6)
In his autobiography, A Long Way From Home, Claude
McKay described what it was like to have his poem, If We Must
Die, in The Liberator.
The Liberator was a group magazine. The list of contributing
editors was almost as exciting to read as the contributions themselves.
There was a freeness and a bright new beauty in those contributions,
pictorial and literary, that thrilled. And altogether, in their entirety,
they were implicit of a penetrating social criticism which did not
in the least overshadow their novel and sheer artistry. I rejoiced
in the thought of the honour of appearing among the group.
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