Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
Return to Contents»
John Dos Passos, Mike Gold, and the Birth of the New Masses / Rich Hancuff
Abstract: This article uses the work of two New Masses editors, John Dos Passos, and Mike Gold, to examine the competing visions for the future of the then-new magazine, including the concepts of audience, contributors, and subject matter, within a framework of widespread anti-immigration sentiment in the United States and a large immigrant working class. This seemingly insular literary debate between early leaders of the magazine echoes in the culture-at-large, as Dos Passos' involvement in the Sacco-Vanzetti case reveals. Dos Passos' rhetoric works to assimilate recent immigrants to the prevailing discourse of American exceptionalism, while Gold's vision seeks to "internationalize" recent immigrants and the United States working class in general as part of a movement that breaks down national borders and national narratives. As editors and contributors to a magazine dedicated, rather loosely, to some representation of the working masses and analysis of labor issues, both Gold and Dos Passos also debate the role of the creative artist in the emerging cultures of labor unrest and proletarian revolution. I argue that Dos Passos' stance leads to an understanding of the artist as distanced observer, a position that leads to disconnection between the artist and the laboring masses, while Mike Gold's position involves artists as active participants, drawn – where possible – from the laboring masses themselves.
1.
<1> While we are familiar with the deployment of claims to "racial purity" or homogenous national identity being deployed by the political Right as exclusionary acts – current debates on the use of "illegal aliens" (a term often shortened to "illegals") versus "undocumented workers" underscores the importance of this rhetoric as more than wordplay – the Left has also struggled with advancing inclusionary and progressive political goals within the prevailing discourse of national identity, an identity that in the United States has been historically tied to race and culture (e.g. the U.S. as a "Christian nation"). Whether it's Jack London's "The Yellow Peril" or Earl Browder's Popular Front-era slogan, "Communism is twentieth-century Americanism," the Left has often found itself either compromised by reactionary blindspots or drawn into defining itself within the constraints of long-standing nationalist discourses. For the Left in the United States, the 1920's was a decade that saw the Nativist triumph of the Immigration Act of 1924, which attempted to "preserve" the United States as a nation of primarily "Nordic stock," as Lothrop Stoddard put it, through the physical exclusion of non-northwestern European immigrants, and the pervasive reactionary rhetoric of socialism and communism as "foreign" ideologies, as unwelcome in the U.S. as the southern and eastern Europeans who had come to this country in great numbers in the early twentieth-century. The 1920's also saw the birth of the New Masses, a magazine of Leftist culture that aspired to cover current events and provide an outlet for radical literature and art.
<2> When the New Masses was launched in May 1926, Sacco and Vanzetti had been sitting in separate prisons in Massachusetts for six years. Their case had evolved from a local violent robbery to worldwide notoriety that involved much more than the guilt or innocence of these two Italian immigrants; indeed, complex cultural issues such as immigration policy, anti-radical sentiments, and Left politics coalesced around these two individuals. John Dos Passos made these links clear in the full title of his 1927 pamphlet Facing the Chair, Sacco and Vanzetti: The Story of the Americanization of Two Foreign Born Workmen. Within that title is contained an answer to the nativists who attacked "new immigrants" coming mainly from southern and eastern Europe as unassimilable, as well as a nod to the class origins of Sacco and Vanzetti; Dos Passos chooses to emphasize, in the title at least, the process of becoming American. It is an ironic title not only because the "Americanization" that the two condemned men experienced was one of suspicion and exclusion, but also because of the subtle internationalist signifier of "workmen." Theirs is a tale, Dos Passos indicates, that should resonate worldwide among the working class: "Will that be the verdict of workingmen the world over who see their own image in Sacco and Vanzetti?" (22). There was nothing special, Dos Passos implied, about Sacco and Vanzetti: their story transcended national borders, and instead became a parable of class struggle. Yet as the ironic use of "Americanization" indicates, the discourse surrounding the idea of the nation was saturated enough to permit oppositional definitions to come into play with little context. "Americanization," or the assimilation of immigrants into American society, had close ties to nationalism, which challenged Leftists who were interested not in nationalism but in internationalism and had to negotiate a culture in which immigration increasingly was becoming the scapegoat for economic, political, and social ills. The self-destruction of the Socialist Party during the Great War demonstrated the division on the Left between those who gave precedence to internationalist sentiment and those who subordinated it to nationalist unity. For the Left in the 1920's it might have seemed that the internationalist cause was counterproductive to building a broad-based political force, as the Palmer Raids reinforced the notion of "Reds" as largely immigrant (i.e., "foreign") threats. Warren G. Harding's slogan, "Return to Normalcy," indicated not only the return to peacetime life, but also more menacingly a national(ist) impulse to reinforce a pre-war status quo that continued to serve business interests.
<3> Through his work on the New Masses, Dos Passos was entering into the debate over what America was and what it would become as a nation and as a people. Proponents of a "Nordic" America saw newer immigrants as a threat to established power relations. As Lothrop Stoddard, a leading enthusiast and publicist for the eugenics movement would proclaim in Re-Forging America (1928) while defending anti-Chinese violence in California, "We are unalterably resolved that our America shall survive" (119; emphasis in original), and it was perfectly clear that "our America" did not include the new immigration of which Sacco and Vanzetti were a part, let alone the more obviously racially other Chinese. As Dos Passos wryly put it in Facing the Chair, "a roomful of people talking a foreign language was most certainly a conspiracy to overturn the government" (53). Facing the Chair was the culmination of Dos Passos's investigation, which began in the pages of the New Masses, into the Sacco and Vanzetti case, and it signaled an extensive engagement with problems of immigration, assimilation, and anti-radicalism by a leading American writer. In arguing that "any man who gives up his life to the hope of humanizing the treadmill of industry is a bad actor in the minds of the governing class and governing class police" (20), Dos Passos declared that this struggle over "America" directly applied to the working class. His attention befits a member of the executive board of New Masses, which strove to be, as its opening issue declared, "a monthly mosaic of American life" ("Is This It?" 3), assembled largely from stories of labor, describing "the hopes and dreams of the most obscure American mill town or cross-roads village" (3). The stories that Dos Passos tells of Sacco and Vanzetti's daily lives both before and after their arrests humanize these figures and reflect this call to bring the aspirations of the common man into artistic circulation.
<4> Although emphasizing its interest in everyday experiences of the masses, the lead editorial of the inaugural issue of the magazine had described New Masses as an open-ended and loosely controlled voyage of discovery: "As to the magazine, we regard it with almost complete detachment and a good deal of critical interest, because we didn't make it ourselves. We merely 'discovered' it" ("Is This It?" 3). The remainder of the editorial pleaded with the reader to contribute ideas about the content and direction of the magazine. While this pronouncement may have been disingenuous and more intended as clever rhetoric than anything else, the magazine continued to display some public indecisiveness about its editorial and investigative directions. The second issue included two manifestoes for the future of the magazine, which were presented in the form of Dos Passos's proposal and Gold's rebuttal and counter proposal. In many ways, these two pieces engage not only with each other but also with larger questions of the working class "constituency" with which the magazine wanted to align. Championing the laboring masses was of course a good thing from the editors' perspectives, but exactly how that was to be done remained an open question, especially as there were difficulties in defining the writer's place among the working class. For his part, Dos Passos indicated early on that he distrusted the "word-slinging classes" ("The New Masses I'd Like" 20) as advocates of the working class, a position he would later refine in "The Writer as Technician." Gold took the opposite tack, placing himself within a group of "the younger writers in every land" ("Let It Be Really New" 20) who were attuned to the revolutionary culture of Soviet Russia, implying they were already a part of the international proletariat and seeing it through the lens of class consciousness. [1]
<5> Underlying both positions, however, is a shared desire to connect with a coming proletarian culture that would dominate the new world they were setting out to discover. Yet this working class was not a homogenous group but was divided bitterly within as well as pushing against reductive definitions from without. As the struggles within union culture show, there was disagreement over the types (along both race and trade lines) of workers eligible for entry into organizations such as the American Federation of Labor (a rift that would eventually lead to the founding of the Congress of Industrial Organizations). Among forces hostile to the labor movement, eugenicists would attempt to paint labor unrest and political radicalism in general as endemic to "lower stock" immigrants, thereby at one stroke railing against the "self-destructive" policy of allowing mass immigration and vilifying labor leaders as the products of bad breeding. As an avowedly radical magazine with a stated interest in labor issues, the New Masses entered directly into one of the prominent cultural arguments of the 1920's. This argument cannot simply be examined as one of labor policy, or immigration concerns, or antiradicalism, because all of these issues inflect each other's articulation. Immigrants, whose cheap labor the captains of industry welcomed, were subject to both exploitation in the factories and vilification as racial others who brought with them not only disease and sub-par human stock, but also the "alien" discourse of political radicalism. In their appeals to form common cause with the labor movement, Dos Passos and Gold joined a conversation already in process, strident in tone, and vitally important in outcome.
"A Highly Flexible Receiving Station"
<6> Earnestly presenting this new magazine as an opportunity to impact the real world, Dos Passos urged writers to take an active role in representing the labor unrest and workers' concerns in America: "there's much more to be gained by rigorous exploration than by sitting on the sidelines of the labor movement with a red rosette in your buttonhole and cheering for the home team" ("The New Masses I'd Like" 20). Dos Passos was asking writers to make something happen by rejecting the role of observer and jumping into the thick of activity, as he soon would with the Sacco and Vanzetti case. The New Masses was to explore a "fairly limited range [ . . . ] vaguely laid down to be the masses, the people who work themselves rather than the people who work others" (20). Dos Passos's hedging with the adverbs "fairly" and "vaguely" speaks to the difficulty he and other writers would have in determining who these masses were. "People who work themselves" was a malleable phrase capable of covering not only ditch diggers, but also writers, artists, teachers and a whole array of professional or semi-professional workers. Opening up the definition of the "masses" also allowed Dos Passos space to imply a divergence from "workers' revolutions" elsewhere in the world. Although Dos Passos was asking writers, the "word-slinging organisms" (20), to chronicle the labor movement from a distinctly anti-imperialist position, he qualified his argument by insisting that he didn't "think there should be any more phrases, badges, opinions, banners, imported from Russia or anywhere else" (20). In short, he wanted discovery and analysis of the laboring world, but distrusted existing organized movements, from unions to Bolsheviks, that had arisen from critical economic analysis, in large part because he felt they had missed some crucial aspect that would reveal a better way: "If we ever could find out what was really going on, we might be able to formulate a theory of what to do about it" (20). Dos Passos places the writer outside the laborers' world, where things are "really going on," yet posits the writer as the agent who will be able to enter that world, recover the truth of it, and mold a plan to change it.
<7> Dos Passos's metaphor of exploration reveals how alienated he felt from the masses that this new magazine, whose soul he was arguing for, sought to represent. Raised in European and American urban centers, educated at private schools such as Choate and Harvard, Dos Passos in his early years lived among the upper crust of American society, even if he did characterize himself later as a "middle class liberal" (Ludington 291). Despite the fact that his father had written several defenses of laissez-faire capitalism and preached the Gospel of Wealth repeatedly [2], or perhaps because of it, Dos Passos had developed a highly sensitive critique of modern American consumer culture during his college years. He used the Harvard Monthly as a forum for such essays as "A Humble Protest," in which he indicts "our worship of this two-fold divinity: Science and Industrialism" (32). However, as Robert Rosen has pointed out, "the aesthete and social critic remain at odds in Dos Passos, as do the elitist and the democrat: a tendency to judge a society primarily by its highest art, and some almost sneering references to 'the mob' and 'the crowd' clash with genuine concern for the oppressed" (6). That is, while Dos Passos had come to an understanding that "millions of men perform labor narrowing and stultifying even under the best conditions [ . . . ] without ever a chance of self-expression" ("Humble Protest" 34), he had little direct contact with these men or their lives. In his memoir The Best Times (1966), Dos Passos recalls that he joined the New Masses "as a means of getting firsthand knowledge of the labor movement" (165). Certainly the magazine gave him an opportunity to do that, as it devoted extensive column space to covering strikes and other manifestations of labor unrest. Yet in this early New Masses essay, Dos Passos creates a dividing line between the world of the writer and that of the worker.
<8> In part, this division is complicated by Dos Passos's insistence on developing mythically pure American ideals, such as his assertion that "ever since Columbus, imported systems have been the curse of this continent" (20). Dos Passos, a descendant himself of one-time European immigrants, should have been more skeptical of such a formulation that seemed to smooth over the same ground as the rhetoric of the racist anti-immigration "100 Percent Americans." [3] Dos Passos was well aware of the "imported" makeup of the American workforce and also relies upon earlier imported systems of thought when he refers to the traditions of the Pilgrim Fathers, but his urgency here betrays uneasiness with the popular discourse surrounding radicalism as an "imported" or alien movement. Dos Passos sees in this population an almost animalistic herd mentality, among whom there are "tentative flickers of thought" (20) that go unnoticed by the "agitators and organizers," whom Dos Passos also positions outside, or at least out of touch with, the working masses. And while he views the writers as the ones who should get inside this movement and make sense of it, he also distrusts his fellow writers, arguing that "at this moment it seems to me that the word-slinging classes, radical and fundamentalist, are further away from any reality than they've ever been" (20); this distance had everything to do with his belief that most writers tended "to restrict themselves more and more to Karl Marx, the first chapter of Genesis and the hazy scientific mysticism of the Sunday supplements" (20). Dos Passos certainly knows what direction he doesn't want the magazine to take, but his suggestion that the magazine be a "highly flexible receiving station that will find out what's in the air in the country" (20) offers no guidance as to what should be in the magazine; rather it makes the magazine a passive recipient of the left zeitgeist. It's tempting to pair Dos Passos's inability to articulate a new set of guidelines with the general cultural malaise associated with the post-war Modernist writers: Eliot's The Wasteland, Pound's "botched civilization," and even Dos Passos's own Three Soldiers could be cited as archetypes of this disillusionment with Western civilization (even if many Modernists would eventually rally around some sort of reactionary version of the Western tradition). However, I find it far more compelling to see Dos Passos's aimlessness in this essay linked to his ambivalence toward the immense cultural transformations taking place in the United States. Immigration had changed the country, but immigration itself was a reaction to economic changes. As Dos Passos put it, "the pressure is rising and rising in the boiler of the great imperial steamroller of American finance" (20); this flexing of economic muscle, built upon the rise of American industry and fueling the need for increased immigration, had not only altered the demographics of the nation, but also, at least for Dos Passos, corrupted its mission.
<9> Far from ambivalent, Gold's enthusiasm for this same cultural transformation drives his response to Dos Passos's vision for the New Masses, although Gold persistently refuses to recognize the importance of a distinctly American tradition. Dismissing Dos Passos's skepticism as "introspection and doubt" ("Let It Be" 20), accusing him of flying into this experiment "blindly," Gold instead opens by declaring that he is "an internationalist" and that "the World Revolution provides a Weltanschauung that exfoliates a thousand bold new futurist thoughts in psychology, art, literature, economics, sex." While he avoids direct discussion of immigration, foreignness, or assimilation, Gold moves immediately against ideas of national identity by proposing connections based upon world-historical events rather than national boundaries. The new America is not so much a distinct nation as it is another setting for exploration of the workers' insurgency. Gold's emphasis is on the internationalism of revolutionary thoughts and feelings, although he does claim that "Soviet Russian and its revolutionary culture form the spiritual core around which thousands of the younger writers in every land are building their creative lives, including myself." In other words, while the Soviet Union may serve as an example of actualized or in process communist revolutionary culture, the conditions for this development exist across cultures throughout the world. Because these conditions are generalized across the industrialized nations by the effects of capitalism, Gold dismisses charges of "importing" slogans from Russia:
What I deny is that I, or anyone else, demands of young American writers that they take their "spiritual" commands from Moscow. No one demands that; for it is not necessary. It is no more necessary than were orders from Moscow in the British general strike. Moscow could not have created such a strike; British life created it. Moscow could not have created John Reed, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Max Eastman, or Horace Traubel, American life created them. (20)
Gold backs his assertions not only through allusion to the recent British general strike, which Egmont Arens had declared in the same issue of New Masses to be "successful, beyond all expectations" (4), but also through appeal to the tradition descending from the old Masses, which Dos Passos and others (including Gold himself) deeply respected as American radicals. In his reasoning, Gold essentially echoed Jay Lovestone's response in the Daily Worker to criticisms that the Passaic strike was a communist-generated plot to destroy America: "We Communists have not created the strike. But we have likewise not been asleep and have pointed out the lessons to the thousands of workers" (1). Lovestone, like Gold, insists that conditions give rise to crises, and that communism simply provides a theory to understand and overcome the root causes of those crises.
<10> In insisting that "Moscow could not have created such a strike" and affirming that living conditions remain the grounds for unrest, Gold relies on Marxism's insistence that the workers' revolution was an inevitable consequence of capitalist exploitation. As Marx famously formulated it in The Communist Manifesto, "The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable" (483). Lenin echoed these sentiments in his 1918 "Letter to American Workers," which John Reed helped to publish in American Socialist Party publications, by arguing that the Great War had revealed "the general law of capitalism as applied to war between robbers for the division of spoils" (64), and that exposure of that deception would "ease the task of the socialist revolution, will hasten it, will weaken the international bourgeoisie, will strengthen the position of the working class which is defeating the bourgeoisie" (68-9). The Great War had awakened many on the left to the global reach of inter-imperialist competition, and Gold, who had cut his teeth writing for the Masses, took the lessons of that war to mean among other things that Modern Industry everywhere was producing the grave-diggers. Economic exploitation, Gold implies, isn't very concerned with the formalities of national boundaries. In fact, Gold elides Dos Passos's distinction between foreign and native "slogans" by denying that foreign and native have any real meaning in class analysis. For him, the new world the magazine is exploring is "the world of revolutionary labor. It exists in America as in Russia. It has its schools, its unions, its tragedies, its defeats, its philosophy, ethics and science" (26). The conditions of the workers' lives under capitalism, in other words, were giving rise to institutions and ideologies that were just as "American" as anything in the Bill of Rights, but were also not to be seen as peculiarly national in character.
<11> Furthermore, Gold's name-dropping did more than simply provide a list of "American radicals"; many of those named were deeply involved in the emerging Soviet Union. John Reed's journalism for the Masses and masterful depiction of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, had solidified his reputation as a first-person witness to the tumultuous events that shaped the new industrial realities, while his part in founding the American Communist Party tied him firmly to direct radical politics in the United States. In fact, Gold alludes to Reed's active engagement in the development of the new Soviet state when he asserts that "John Reed poured out his rich manhood for it [revolutionary labor]" (26). That Reed, a giant among American leftists and by 1926 an almost mythical figure, exhausted himself and eventually died laboring to bring forth a workers' paradise, did much rhetorically to establish a continuity between Russian and American radicals in Gold's piece. [4] Max Eastman, Reed and Gold's comrade from the Masses and the Liberator, was in 1926 still in favor, although his familiarity with and advocacy for Trotsky would later be his undoing. His two years in Russia provided him with Russian language expertise that enabled him for a brief time to serve as a bridge between the groundwork being laid in the Soviet Union and the American Left; his book Since Lenin Died (1925) had opened up questions of Stalin's legitimacy as successor to Lenin and signaled his affiliation with the Trotskyist position, but was still a momentous occasion for those on the radical Left who were looking to the Soviet Union, if not for answers, then at least for examples. [5] However much the coming years would separate Eastman and Gold, in 1926 Gold still looked to Eastman as a comrade.
<12> Ultimately, the exchange between Dos Passos and Gold in the second issue of the New Masses had to do with two competing visions of the labor movement and the writer's place within that movement. Dos Passos, with his desire to "find out what was really going on" ("The New Masses I'd Like" 20), positioned the writer (and by extension the collection of artists and intellectuals that made up the New Masses) as external to the working movement, while Gold insisted that, by virtue of the lineage he supplied, the American writer was already immersed in the "organ-bass [of World Revolution] that softly or harshly throbs through the young literature of America today" (20). Like most exploratory essays of their type, these competing visions were short on programmatic details. Despite Gold's fervor for "conscious exploration – with a compass" (26), he never reveals the compass, but rather insists that "perhaps some of us younger writers have stumbled into the real path," which he names as "the world of revolutionary labor." In all of these descriptions, Gold subtly changes the metaphoric terms first from a "compass," then to a "path," and finally to a "discovery." Yet aside from a general insistence that the writer should chronicle the emerging world of revolutionary labor, Gold provides little sense of what that chronicle would look like. For his part, Dos Passos proclaims up front that although "generalizations are worthless, here they are" (20), and while his cautious and distanced stance also asks that the magazine get inside the labor movement, his bourgeois sense of intellectual exteriority presents a difficult barrier, which he only partially solves with the programmatic suggestion that "a blank sheet for men and women who have never written before to write on as no one has ever written before [would] be better than an instruction book, whether the instructions come from Moscow or Bethlehem, Pa." (20). In other words, he envisions a magazine and contributors with almost no cultural memory, whose lives somehow stand outside the rush of history, surely an odd position for a writer whose major work would be so overwhelmed by its sense of history. However, despite their competing conceptions of the writer and the labor movement, neither Gold nor Dos Passos speaks to the varied demographics and stratifications within the laboring class.
<13> Negotiating, analyzing, and overcoming these divisions would become a major focus for the magazine, which would eventually take a vital role in publicizing appeals for both Sacco and Vanzetti's and the Scottsboro Boys' innocence, not to mention Mary Heaton Vorse's repeated communiqués concerning immigrant and native labor strife in mill towns across the United States. Race riots and the Palmer Raids had already proven that class unity remained a distant goal in the face of both racism and nationalism. Rather than simply covering over these differences with romanticized appeals to "the working class," writers for the New Masses had to confront them, because the hegemonic discourse of nativist, capitalist America exploited these divisions to maintain existing power relations. Regarding the strength of these attacks upon the broad spectrum of people who made up the working class and those who fought for and alongside them, Barbara Foley reminds us that "the discursive field of racist antiradicalism was so ideologically saturated that, when either race or nation was invoked through one or more elements of the organic trope [root, tree, soil, seed, fruit, etc.], an entire combinatoire of associated ideas and assumptions – often gendered – could also be invoked, without a shred of argument having been made" (Spectres 146). That is, the preponderance of this line of thought in the popular imagination tasked the New Masses with developing methods by which to circumvent or overcome these ideological shortcuts, although the magazine was not always up to the task. Whether they ignored these differences by not portraying them, as Gold was prone to do in some of his general criticism, or presented them matter-of-factly in defiance of the Nativists, as Gold was prone to do in his autobiographical writings, Left writers entered into a discourse already occupied by racists. As Foley has wryly noted, while liberal and radical critiques were confined to "the Dial and the Nation, as well as scientific journals with even less of a popular audience, the Saturday Evening Post, the largest circulation magazine in the country, brought to its two million readers – for weeks on end – the wisdom of Kenneth Roberts and Lothrop Stoddard" (152). [6] The New Masses was certainly not a mass market magazine, but it did seek to impact the course of history, and, like it or not, it simply could not afford to ignore entirely the prevalent racist discourse influencing conceptions of the working class; as Marx put it, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves" (18th Brumaire 15). Gold, Dos Passos, and their comrades would have to contest not only the definition of Americanism, but also the usefulness of the term within the context of proletarian revolution.
Works Cited
Arens, Egmont. "British Labor Walks Out." New Masses 1 (June 1926): 4.
Dos Passos, John. The Best Times: An Informal Memoir. New York: The New American Library, 1966.
---. Facing the Chair: The Americanization of Two Foreignborn Workmen. New York: Oriole, 1927.
---. "A Humble Protest." Harvard Monthly 62 (June 1916): 115-120. Rpt. in John Dos Passos: The Major Nonfictional Prose. Ed. Donald Pizer. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988. 30-34.
---. "The New Masses I'd Like." New Masses 1 (June 1926): 20.
Eastman, Max. Since Lenin Died. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925.
Foley, Barbara. Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.
Folsom, Michael. Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology. New York: International Publishers, 1972.
Gold, Mike. "John Reed and the Real Thing." New Masses 3 (Nov 1927):
---. "Let It Be Really New." New Masses 1 (June 1926): 20, 26.
"Is This It??" New Masses 1 (May 1926): 3.
Lenin, V.I. "Letter to American Workers." Collected Works. Vol. 28. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1966. 62-75.
Lovestone, Jay. "Who Is Behind the Passaic Strike?" Daily Worker (March 26, 1926): 1.
Ludington, Townsend. John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980.
Marx, Karl. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York: International Publishers, 1998.
---. The German Ideology. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978. 147-200.
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Frederick. Manifesto of the Communist Party. The Marx Engels Reader. Ed. Robert C. Tucker. New York: Norton, 1978. 469-500.
Rosenstone, Robert. Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed. New York: Knopf, 1975.
Stoddard, Lothrop. Re-Forging America: The Story of Our Nationhood. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927.
Wald, Alan M. Exiles from a Future Time: The Forging of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Literary Left. University of North Carolina: Chapel Hill, 2002.
Notes
[1] This positioning showed some inventiveness on Gold's part, since he had been born in 1893, and was something of an "elder statesman" among radicals, having been a contributor to The Masses and other Left journals since 1914. According to Michael Folsom, Gold often listed his birthdate as 1896, not exactly a stretch along the lines of Zora Neale Hurston's shaving of ten years off her age, but still indicative of a desire to seem more of a generation that had come of age following World War I. For a brief biographical sketch of Gold, see the introduction to Folsom's Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology (New York: International Publishers, 1972). For a more complete evocation of Gold's development, see "Inventing Mike Gold," the second chapter of Alan Wald's Exiles from a Future Time (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2002), pages 39-70. [^]
[2] John Randolph Dos Passos was a successful corporate lawyer who had "defended trusts before the Industrial Commission in Washington in December 1899, then revised his argument and published it as a book, Commercial Trusts: The Growth and Rights of Aggregated Capital, in 1901" (Ludington 10). For more information on his public statements and actions on economic and political matters, see Townsend Ludington's John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980), esp. pages 9-12. [^]
[3] Again, Dos Passos's father had been active on the Anglo-Saxon supremacy front as well, publishing in 1903 The Anglo-Saxon Century and the Unification of the English Speaking People, which rode the rising tide of white supremacist publishing with its "mission to spread Christianity and civilization everywhere, and to open up the undeveloped part of the world to the expanding demands of commerce" (qtd. in Ludington's John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey 12). Dos Passos, Sr.'s overt linkage of Christianity, civilization, and commerce can be heard echoing in much of the rhetoric of late-20th and early 21st century neo-conservatives, who consider the West (and particularly the United States) to have won the so-called "clash of civilizations" and (along with neo-liberals) portray open markets as civilizing influences. [^]
[4] Reed's importance to the Left would persist most famously in the short-lived John Reed Clubs, whose alumni would include Richard Wright and the Partisan Review circle. Mike Gold would later emphasize more directly Reed's connection to the new Soviet Union in a 1927 article in which he describes his visit to "Jack Reed's grave under the Kremlin wall" ("John Reed and the Real Thing." New Masses 3 (Nov 1927), affirming that the visitors to the grave know that "Jack Reed died for them." For more on Reed as mythical in his own time, see chapter one of Robert Rosenstone's Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (New York: Knopf, 1975). [^]
[5] Eastman, who helped translate Trotsky into English and acted as his literary agent, published the still-controversial "suppressed testament" of Lenin in Since Lenin Died (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925). He would soon be expelled, like Trotsky himself, from favor among the strictly Communist Party adherents. Like many of Trotsky's champions among the Left in the 1920's and 1930's, Eastman drifted gradually to the Right, eventually becoming an outspoken critic of the Left and a proponent of McCarthyism. [^]
[6] As Marx notes in The German Ideology (in Tucker, Robert, ed. The Marx-Engels Reader. New York: Norton, 1978: 146-200), "the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production" (172). Limited access to mainstream publications and a dearth of consistent funding to launch their own outlets plagued radical writers; while the New Masses was started on a grant from the Garland Foundation, that funding had dried up by 1928, forcing the magazine into desperate straits from which it never really escaped. [^]
Return to Top»