"New Masses"

Upon the teeming sea of U.S. magazine publishing there was launched last week a smoky vessel, ungainly but powerful, with daubs of red on her lunging bows and red marks here and there on her some-what disorderly running gear. She was the New Masses, a workers' monthly floated (TIME, Dec. 21) to replace the Masses and Liberator by the friends of those defunct organs, with money from the American Fund for Public Service (Charles Garland fund).

The editors and contributors-- there was no chief among Editors Egmont Arens, Joseph Freeman, Hugo Gellert, Michael Gold, James Rorty and John Sloan--included some of the mainstays of the older magazines, especially artists: the powerful Gellert, convulsive William Gropper, sly Art Young with his tongue in his foxy-grandpa cheek. But for the most part they were new hands--economic malcontents and idealists recruited from the younger generation. There were names like Klein, Lozowick, Soglow and Dehn signed to some of the pictures. A young lady called Wanda Gag contributed a startling portrait of "The Tired Bed."

No wind that blew dismayed this crew or troubled their artist minds; they fired salutes beneath Capital's boots, with every expectation of booming gales of applause from "workers." The cover design was a brawny miner with an idea bursting from his skull. Scott Nearing, famed sociologist, just back from a trip to Moscow, Kharkov, Rostov, Tiflis and other centres of culture, limned a deplorable contrast between the mammon-ridden U.S. and progressive Soviet Russia. Robert W. Dunn, young Yale Communist, described with devastating irony the activities of a Massachusetts labor-spy. "Bad Bishop" William Montgomery Brown contributed his revolutionary blessing (and a check for $1,100 to help the sheet get started). The current Passaic garmentworkers' strike was recorded in all its gory glory by Mary Heaton Vorse. An editor of the New Student compiled reports of undergraduate demonstrations of all kinds and dimensions to show how many "learners" were "in active revolt." More coherent was a dialog in limbo between Lenin and Anatole France, by Poet Babette Deutsch. More profound, and quite un-Communistic save in its departure from conventional form, was an "Apology for Bad Dreams" by the country's new national poet, Robinson Jeffers of the Pacific headlands.

Like many another nonspecific magazine, the New Masses solicited contributions, offered prize-money for "the best letter." Like most radical efforts to become and stay articulate, it said it needed more money (but only $5,000) to keep going for three years.

Copies of the New Masses may be had for 25-c- by addressing: New Masses, 39 West Eighth St., New York City.