Days of May I enjoyed putting these poems together because their choice led me to look back at the old bound volumes, and in doing so I discovered a continuity - and a separation. That is, I suddenly returned through the looking glass to a literary and political world that seemed at once familiar and strange: an absurd world, but never for a moment foreign. What I saw had the same fascination that your father's face has at sixteen, when you meet him peering through an album, for the first time after years of worrying about your own generation. Of course, there's only part of Dad's face here. To put the whole portrait together I would have to get the folders of Others, Seven Arts and Little Review; find images of early suffrage parades and speeches by social reformers reported in the New York Times; follow the rises and editorial advances of the Nation and the New Republic; and see, by some act of imagination, the expression on the faces of the crowd who went to the Armory Show in 1912 to watch the Nude descend the stairs. A war, a revolution and five or six famines have something to do with the separation I felt. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Behind the human end of those slow war years we discover the earlier period parading down Fifth Avenue: white horses, purple banners, and a phalanx of well-shod bourgeois women, demanding and getting the vote! Elsewhere, a little outside the centre, we find Frank Tanenbaum and Arturo Giovannitti galvanizing liberal opinion with the news that, at least for some in the Commonwealth, this is not exactly the best possible world. Behind them, the shadow of Upton Sinclair, who perhaps single-handedly, hatched this germ of middle-class discontent during the manure-raking period just preceding when he tore up the respectable meat consumer of the Chicago slaughterhouse. . . a severe stomach ache struck a hypochondriac nation and a disturbing idea was born: perhaps even for the middle class this was not the best possible world: "Factory windows are always broken. Something or something is going wrong. Something is rotten, I think, in Denmark." That was the mood. Something was wrong. Probably in Denmark. Where else? It's not that wrong. Wrong enough to warrant a holiday. And the holiday had numerous events and several interesting features. There was zealous social work, supported by an optimistic social theory; humanitarian crusades abounded, gentle amateur movements grew like mushrooms. This activity was never ruthless or bitter, but serious, idealistic, always Christian. Our awakening was like us. There wasn't much thought or arduous work. Austerity and desperate struggle were absent. It was a happy, cultured and lively society, although it longed to be much more. The air was clear and exciting and it was seven o'clock on a spring morning. May days, indeed. . . . Dignity was not fashion. Boredom and boredom were not in fashion. There was so much to say, do, think, see, feel. The youth of the village were leaving home and all the winter taboos were being broken: in that dawn it was a delight to be alive, but to be young was truly a paradise. Later, after the first burst of activity had worn off, the whole mood of the time blossomed in Woodrow Wilson. He and his words ended one period and began another: they began it with the vow of the stripped youth to be anything in the world, but never again Woodrovian. In him, as in his generation, the beautiful faith in the beautiful effectiveness of beautiful words ended. Not even the free verse movement had shaken that faith.Our legitimate President, before going to France, was vaguely idealistic, serious as they say, Christian (so they say). It could be. The era had not come to terms with anything more serious than the problem of rancid meat. The IWW and the far left wing of the revolutionary movement also shared the verbosity and romanticism of the era. Everyone was playing. And the Masses editors were playing harder than anyone. It was easy to read the masses in those days. I say easy after following all the indignant letters protesting Carl Sandburg's "Billy Sunday", or Billy Williams' "Ballad" (GBS was one of the Protestants at the time) or Floyd Dell's articles on birth control. It was easy despite all the shock it gave to the audience of professors and university students, because its shock was pleasant for those who could bear it and was mainly focused on breaking down traditional prudery and dogma. It hit few class or economic pain points, not because it didn't aim for them, but because class fear in the reader had not been genuinely aroused. If he had managed to miss the fine print of Max Eastman's monthly "Knowledge and Revolution," he could have swallowed the rest, usually. In any case, this first reader rarely began to agitate, fearing bloody upheavals, seeing himself, wife and child thrown away out of safety in a great flood. This magazine was obviously the voice of a harmless minority. Although its editor insisted on the distinction between reform and the seizure of economic power by the working class, he failed to keep them separate in the mind of the middle-class intellectual because events themselves had not yet separated them. Because this magazine of rebellion was published, despite its title, for the bourgeois liberal, to give him the freedom he increasingly needed, and because, although he spoke about the proletariat in a very concrete and realistic tone of voice, it did not speak with the proletariat, the scoffers rightly said: they draw naked women for the MASSES Fat, fat, ungainly girls: how does this help the working classes? When it came down to it - actually helping the working classes a little later - the scoffers, along with most other readers, found the magazine extremely difficult to read. But now they were no longer limited to masses. That initial note of joyful contempt for the bourgeois and his lady, his ideas on sex, literature, art, politics, furniture, etc., have been the inspiration for almost every best seller ever since. The 500,000 Americans who stayed up at night with "Main Street" in 1920, "So Big" in 1924 and Ring Lardner in 1925, would read the first masses with giggles of delight, if they could get them. Lewis, Lardner and Ferber are not as harsh nor as clear as their spasmodic original. The Saturday Evening Post's method helped dilute the murix for billboards, while the overly intense blue was left to serious artists. Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, John Howard Lawson, and Eugene O'Neil would have written, Masses or no masses, but they would have had to spend more time underwater grubbing up the ocean floor if dredging had not begun sooner . The little magazine taken up by John Sloan's group for the publication of his drawings, and gradually transformed into a newsletter for the hungry idealist, had a range of contributors as well as curious readers. Gelett Burgess, Inez Haynes Gillmore, William English Walling, Lincoln Steffens, Amy Lowell, Jimmie Hopper, Will Levington Comfort, Mary Heaton Vorse, Harry Kemp, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Poole, Charles Edward Russell, Witter Bynner, Irwin Granich, William Rose Benét , JE Spingarn, Margaret Widdemer; - if this rabbletrained its contributors, you ask, what was the magazine as a whole trying to say? However, the family was affable. Because his enemy was so rugged and so vast, he found more similarities than differences among its ranks. Even the broader implications of a revolutionary doctrine can cast a grateful shadow across a great desert. Reginald Wright Kauffman and Pablo Picasso lie down together between the same editorial sheets. All this you can observe - the grotesque bright green landscape - through the peephole of the old numbers. Having glimpsed this, I momentarily changed my position relative to the landscape itself to see the masses in its environment. It was born from a general upheaval that is still too close to us to be described with precision. In 1912 there were other living places, but they were overvalued, I believe, by the schismatic disciples. The Masses seems to have disappeared from the literary historian's gaze: it went underground, to cut channels in the rock, and left the Little Review, The Glebe, Seven Arts, Others, Soil, Camera Work, and Miss Monroe's Poetry in full view above the ground. But with the exception of Soil, these magazines did not even know the qualities that made the Masses dynamic; they lacked native humor and realistic philosophy, they had too much defensive aestheticism and too little natural or racial intoxication. They were all frighteningly immaculate and upper class. They were of a high standard. They distrusted the country and the country distrusted them – rightly, I think, like the mushrooms that any nation or era can produce for a season thanks to the determination of a few editors. We have had several growths of this type in the past; such a group produced Stephen Crane and Harold Frederic in the nineties. And the Soil, the exception, is the example that demonstrates the uselessness of a sociological pioneer who carries crooked maps and poor-quality tools in his backpack. Its publisher, under a layer of radical-sounding talk, finally believed in the family salvation of more education, Henry George and community singing. The Masses, despite its readership, and the economic status of its publishers, despite its publishing background, despite almost everything, was revolutionary. It takes very few individuals to create a new era or explode the old one. That is, if the individuals themselves retained a vital substance. For me, and I think for many others, there were few people writing in America in 1913 with a desire for a realistic understanding of our lives as a whole. Creative artists don't dare bite off more than they can chew; consequently the novelists of the time, in love with America, deliberately saw the country as a confusion of parts and chose for themselves one part among many. As far as I know, there were only three people who saw then what we all see now: the identity of the earth. In any case, only three have recorded themselves indelibly: Max Eastman, Jack Reed and Floyd Dell. Perhaps I am doing them some personal injustice by classifying them as they appear to me now. There will then be plenty of time to discuss them as rich and fascinating individual figures. In this preface I consider them as interacting forces, not as they are now, but as they were then. They were more than three people when you put them in close contact: they attracted to them a swarm of excellent artists and social satirists, --Max Eastman, realist philosopher and poet; Floyd Dell, teacher and intimate psychologist; Jack Reed, man of action and human symbol for the time. This was a living combination and the ideas that came from it had kinetic energy. They were more of these embodied abstractions, but being figures in a historical drama they must, having chosen to play the roles, take in all the foreshortening and distortion that attends the simple outlines of great events. Seen like this, workingtogether, they are the most significant for America. group that has ever managed to dominate, for a certain period, an entire generation. They, and the Masses as their instrument, were of enormous importance to every middle- or working-class youth who was coming alive within their reach at the time. Their sense of contemporary life has been a storehouse to which the diverse and fractious world of advertising has turned for its energy: the liberal editors of the New York World, the humorists of Vanity Fair, the organizers and pamphleteers of Amalgamated, the decorous contributor to the New Republic, the serious contributor to the Nation, and the current proletarian intellectuals who run the Daily Worker, all have to some extent, consciously or unconsciously, mirrored the tutelage of Masses-Liberator. Only one other man, I believe, belongs to Max, Floyd and Jack, in their curious role as father-teacher-hero of that generation of young Americans. , and he, George Bernard Shaw, is an English-Irishman, avoiding sex with windy excuses and married in politics to the Fabians. What did they do? Well, for starters, all three, even if they denied it, have given up on being resolute artists. They had begun, all as poets (which they might even have considered unimportant), when something else overtook them. They became obsessed with the unity of our life, with its dance, and when they found themselves, after following the dance with abandon for a while, they were no longer poets: they simply were. There was a fatal sociability in them that made being artists a temptation that they reluctantly set aside for urgent matters. Floyd Dell expresses the struggle best in his own words. His writing abounds with the phrase escape from reality - "escape" is the preoccupation with a fantasy - or, as we say, the writing of a great poem, a great novel, a great play. That was the temptation he and his companions resisted. During the days of the masses they turned their backs on the "escape". And for what purpose? There was this America: its politics, its love life, its industry, its humor, its architecture, its education, its poetry, its dance, its clothing, its theater, its sports, its language. . .When the Masses group, cartoonists, artists and publishers touched on these topics, it was their combination of sophistication and naivety that made what they said so difficult to resist. These were in just the right proportions; proportions that allowed one part of the soul to remain childish while another part acquired worldly wisdom and discovered its delightful inheritance of wholesome family sense. The native slyness, the drawling humor that is called American because Mark Twain, Mr. Dooley, and Abraham Lincoln possessed it, was emerging through the outlet afforded by this magazine, under layers of superficial solemnity. The masses pitched their little tent between the two most social tendencies then active in the American community: between the group that was liberal but Christian and the group that was rational but narrow-minded. He entertained them both with cheerful impudence, being in some measure the son of both. The parents watched as modern parents do, in awe of the little creature. Soon the child found his mission, that of debunking the society into which he was born. A point of view, known as Marxian, hitherto expressed in this land chiefly in undomesticated foreign gutturals, became, when simplified and translated into the idiom of Lincoln, Jefferson, and Tom Paine, the new Yankee wisdom: shrewd, bold, materialist. And the awakening didn't come too soon. The world moved menacingly beneath everyone's feet. Great strikes, outrages; the Mooney case; the McNamara case, – a nest of strikes in the textile sector pushed him forward. Plenty of grist for the mill and a good ehonest grinding. The European war extended beyond the Atlantic. Holiday time is almost over. It wouldn't have been all a battle of ideas, no really. A long road to Tipperary, the slaughterhouses of Chicago, Isadora Duncan dancing and the bright, enthusiastic faces of the suffrage parades glittering along the grand avenues, Fifth, Michigan, Commonwealth. The Masses had a movement in their hands: people who followed him, going where he led. He had created that following and now he had to take it somewhere. And a battle is coming: America entered the war. The world, abandoning even liberal Christianity and rationalism, went mad. The people at the Masses saw the show. They knew something could be done, but what, exactly? They kept their balance if nothing else, in a world that was starting to spin faster than a carousel. Until Wilson's second election their ideas were clear, and until the trial most of young alert America went to school in Masses' office. When the test came, the three men pulled in separate directions and the triangle broke. Mr. Glintenkamp had drawn two images and an assistant editor had printed them while Max and Floyd were away, dealing with the larger turmoil. The collapsed Liberty Bell served as the frontispiece; another titled Conscription, a few pages later. The August magazine was refused mail. Another picture by the same artist followed in October: a naked young man with a too-beautiful youthful face, a skeleton measuring him. Hot stuff. But they were all doing interesting things for years: Art Young, Boardman Robinson, Clive Weed, Robert Minor, Maurice Becker, Cornelia Barns, John Sloan, George Bellows. Except suddenly it wasn't just Hot Stuff anymore. It was treason. Or so it became apparent: slowly, despite a cordial letter from President Wilson, visits with George Creel, and a judge's ruling in their favor. At first the post office wouldn't hear of it, was silent for a while, and then when the masses went to court over lost mailing privileges, it quickly turned around and filed the indictment. The following spring, in April 1918, Max Eastman, Floyd Dell, Art Young, Merrill Rogers, and Josephine Bell were tried on charges of "conspiracy to hinder recruiting and enlistment," with Morris Hillquit and Dudley Field Malone at defend them. In the interval between November 1917 and March 1918 no magazine existed. The Masses were fading into the Liberator's protective coloration. The first jury disagreed. A new trial was ordered. A second jury disagreed. The publishers had won and lost. Jack Reed left the magazine, reorganized in a compromise with the war spirit; died in Russia, lies buried in the Kremlin with Lenin. Not an easy or complex thinker, but he escaped the dead end of opportunism and took the road to death and lasting glory. "Fog," his strange epitaph, printed in this anthology, secures for him no less permanent a title as a poet. Floyd, who had never supported anything other than parliamentary socialism and who believed, as many Bolsheviks do today, in conscription, was willing to go to prison but reluctant to adhere to an abstract principle that he considered worthless. He remained with the Liberator, to finally emerge as a popular novelist for the generation he had so long educated. Max is determined to be a realist and keep the domestic revolutionary fires burning. This is his response to Jack's letter of resignation from the editorial board: I have not a word of protest, only a deep feeling of regret. In your absence we all considered the matter and decided that it was our duty to the social revolution to keep it alivethis tool that we have created towards a moment of great usefulness. You will help us with your writings and reporting, and that's all we ask. Personally, I envy you the strength to free yourself when this undertaking lacks not only a good part of the dramatic beauty, but also the charm of the abstract moral principle, and for us it simply remains the most effective and therefore right thing to do. do it. Yours as always Max Eastman. This is what perhaps we should call a rationalization these days. His followers who agreed with him that a sincere radical does not go around the world courting martyrdom, still felt that a revolutionary leader does not gain immunity from prison by repudiating his revolutionary views. Prosecutor: "Will you tell us whether the feelings expressed there (regarding the Star Spangled Banner), which I just read to you, are your feelings today?" Defendant: "No, I'm not, Mr. Barnes. My feelings have changed a lot. I think when kids start going to Europe and fighting to the tune of that anthem, you feel a lot different about it. Have you noticed that when it was played out there the other day, I stood up... I felt very solemn, very saddened, because I thought of those boys who were dying by the thousands with courage and even with laughter on their lips , because they die for freedom." Whether or not this retreat was a tactical error, Max did what he set out to do. He continued with the Liberator, forcibly modified as it was, and preserved what he could of the badly destroyed body of the new philosophy. Significantly, due to his old quality of intellectual courage, Max was a Bolshevik when many of today's most prominent leaders were still anarchists, Mensheviks or industrialists. In his final days, when the Liberator couldn't decide whether he wanted to be either a propagandist or an arts magazine, or both, he rapidly declined: everything that had been brilliant became violent and wasteful; what had been masterful was either annoying or sentimental. The magazine, like a seismograph, once again vividly recorded the tremors of the day before any other group could understand exactly what was happening. In November 1924 the Liberator was incorporated together with the Soviet Russia Pictorial and the Labor Herald as the official organ of the Workers' Party, renamed Workers Monthly. The useless magazine of recent years is reborn as a first-rate revolutionary publication. But the liberating spirit of the masses had disappeared: not so much dead as dispersed and divided. The magazine, until the war, was like a self-fertilizing tree. Social passion and creative beauty grew from the same branches. Now there has been pruning and grafting, as a result we have two trees, the air is muggy, there is no cross-pollination. The artists attracted to the Masses for its art went in one direction; the revolutionaries another. The two factions view each other with hostility and suspicion. They consider each other exclusive and do their best to remain so. Artists on the whole have become reactionaries or, at best, liberals camouflaging themselves for the reaction. Revolutionaries are impatient with any expression that fails to endorse the specific doctrines of the latest party creed. From a certain point of view, artists are slackers. On the other hand, revolutionaries are not artists! * In such a discouraging world the robust exchange between the two types of temperament of the masses seems surprising and impossible. Bellows, Sterne, Sloane, Minor, Lankes, Young, Barber, Becker, Davis, Barnes, Robinson and many others in those prolific years did not stay awake at night struggling against the essential meaning of the contemporary scene as unsuitable material for art. Barnes,