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This chapter considers how the conditions of production and dissemination of children's literature changed beginning in the mid-1930s, and looks at the particular ways that leftists, in response to these changes, began to reshape the field and its output in the years prior to the onset of the Cold War. Beginning in the mid-1930s, especially thanks to a Popular Front effort to broaden left-wing influence in American life, members of the Communist milieu began to write children's books that were geared toward a wide audience. This effort intersected with a growing sense among librarians, teachers, and other established members of the children's literature field (including the influential Child Study Association) that children should be exposed to real-world issues and cultural diversity (“interracial books”), a theme that became especially pronounced during World War II. Following discussions of left-wing efforts through the New Masses and organizations such as the League of American Writers to expand a leftist presence in children's literature, and institutional developments among educators, librarians, and publishers (including union efforts among teachers, the formation of a Progressive Librarians Council, and the development of the 25-cent Little Golden Book). The chapter concludes with an analysis of several books that promote an anti-fascist and anti-racist sensibility in children. Among the authors discussed in this chapter are Harry Granick, Marshall McClintock, Mary Elting, Lavinia Davis, John R. Tunis, Florence Crannell Means, Doris Gates, Henry Gregor Felsen, and Emma Gelders Sterne.

Mod D and the fragmentary Mod E show what the chapel’s repertoire of polyphonic Masses looked like prior to 1481. At least seven Masses by Martini were composed by then, and possibly several of the three or four others ascribed to him in contemporary sources. His Masses fall into several distinct categories. They were probably written to exemplify these categories, to provide the Duke with polyphonic settings for diverse occasions, and to display a variety of melodic and polyphonic antecedents on which Masses could be based. His ten attributed Masses make him a substantial contributor to the large and growing literature of the Mass Ordinary in the second half of the century. Meanwhile, his extensive use of secular cantus firmi for his Masses suggests a relaxed attitude toward the atmosphere of strong religious faith in the court under Ercole.

The theoretical background of the “Hercules” Mass has rarely been subjected to close scrutiny. This chapter distinguishes three levels of consideration: the systematic, the conventional, and the individual. By “systematic”, it means the basic tone-system of the period, as expounded by the best-informed and most authoritative theorists of Josquin’s time, especially Tinctoris. By “conventional”, it means particularly those features of design it shares with other polyphonic Mass settings, or with certain branches of the Mass literature with which it has most in common. There is also ample evidence that the “Hercules” Mass was recognized as being a distinctive type of glorification. What had originally been a fusion of the Mass as liturgy and as political celebration had become a tradition.

This chapter summarizes Blitzstein’s writings from the 1930s, which form the bulk of his criticism, and which increasingly tend toward Marxist perspectives. He wrote many of these articles for Modern Music, edited by Minna Lederman, but also The New Masses and other publications.

This chapter observes that some erstwhile pro-Communist writers subsequently devoted their fiction to working their way out of what they interpreted as misguided loyalty to Communism, yet most never relinquished pride in their antifascist idealism. It discusses the contemporary broadway play “Sincerity in the Theater,” written by Matt Wayne, identified only as the current drama editor of the New Masses. The chapter observes that the central themes of “Sincerity in the Theater” and additional writings in the New Masses by Matt Wayne between March 1945 and March 1946 dovetail with the prevailing opinions of playwright Arthur Miller (1915–2005). It notes that the play encapsulates the core argument of a “lost” Marxist essay that Miller would synopsize in 1956, and further, that circumstantial evidence is overwhelming that Matt Wayne was also Arthur Miller.

The problem of philosophical aesthetics may be formulated in a double sense: What justifies the privileged access of art to truth? What constitutes the historicity of art’s “configurational” status? The limitations of a principal component of the aesthetic tradition, namely, its basis in an immutable human nature, are all too evident. What historical approach to the social collective today can underwrite the consensual principle underlying Kant’s idea of taste? And, to take up another tenet of his aesthetic theory, what remains of the reflective judgment in an era when, as Benjamin put it, technology has subjected "the human sensorium to a more complex type of training’? The chapter situates Benjamin’s thought in relation to three strands, focusing in each case on one of Benjamin’s writings. Regarding the linkage of art and philosophy, what may be termed the ontological status of art, it draws on the essay on The Elective Affinities. Regarding the political-pedagogic function of art, it examines ’The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.’ And regarding the question of beauty and Schein, it focuses on the issue of commodity fetishism as treated in The Arcades Project.

Jokes about dull, identikit suburbs sound modern, but they are as old as the suburbs themselves. My introduction discusses the origins of the stereotype and sketches a counter narrative, of the suburbs as places of new beginnings for residents leaving the countryside in search of economic opportunities.

This chapter looks at the most substantial manifestation of ‘American Constructivism’, which took shape in the radical theatrical productions of the New Playwrights Theatre, a short-lived group that operated between 1926 and 1929. The NPT was closely affiliated with the communist cultural organ New Masses, and included the magazine’s most prominent editor, Mike Gold, amongst its number. The chapter charts the emergence of theatrical Constructivism in the USA, noting its origins in the radical and Expressionist theatrical culture associated with The Masses. The NPT differed from these earlier versions by emulating the machinolatry of Soviet Constructivism, drawing in particular from the experiments of Vsevolod Meyerhold. If Soviet Constructivism aimed to reach the masses, then the NPT mixed the machine aesthetic with specifically American phenomena such as Jazz, racial politics, and automobile production. However, unlike Russian theatrical productions the NPT betrayed a distinctly ambivalent attitude towards the machine, demonstrating residual Expressionist machinephobia. Arguably the most sophisticated writer of the NPT was John Dos Passos, whose concept of New Realism is considered in depth. Finally, the chapter includes a summation of the legacy of the NPT in the radical theatre of the 1930s.

Chapter 2 traces Louis Adamic’s emergence as a leader in the antifascist vanguard. By the mid-1930s, Adamic proclaimed that the United States was ripe for fascist exploitation and pointed to the efforts of white nationalists who claimed that the struggles for worker, immigrant, and black rights were communist-inspired. Adamic promoted cultural pluralism and the dynamic labor activism of the Congress of Industrial Organizations as countermeasures to fight the demagoguery of the anticommunists. Adamic also attacked the procommunist left in the United States because of their adherence to Moscow’s dictates, which highlighted his independent leftist politics. His proworker novel Grandsons, which became an example of the genera of proletarian literature, and his work with the propluralist Foreign Language Information Service are highlighted.

Using folio choirbooks of Masses as an example, this chapter traces the early emergence of bibliographic authority as it moved from the printer (as maker of the book) to the composer (as author of its contents). Andrea Antico, Ottaviano Petrucci, Valerio Dorico, and Cristopher Plantin are the principal printers investigated. The cultures in which their books had particular prestige centered initially on Rome and the Habsburg Empire. Primary composers considered include Carpentras and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Cristóbal de Morales, and Orlande de Lassus.

This chapter examines the crisis in American poetry during the period 1905–1912. Between 1900 and 1905, poetry in the United States was perceived to be in precipitous decline, and many questioned its very survival. No one assumed sustained responsibility for the publicizing and reviewing of new books of verse, the identification of emerging poets and trends, or the preservation of periodical verses past their immediate moment of publication. Aspiring poets felt isolated and useless, actively discouraged from writing for anyone except their own closeted muses. This chapter first provides an overview of the status of American poetry in the years before 1912 before discussing how its fortunes changed after October 1912, a period which saw the explosion of creative and institutional activity in a wide variety of venues such as the so-called “little magazines.” Examples of these little magazines are Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, The Masses, Others, and Seven Arts.

This chapter challenges the conceptual model dominating histories of modern American poetry from the 1940s, in which political and aesthetic radicalism are seen as mutually exclusive responses to twentieth-century modernity, by analyzing the avant-gardism of The Masses. It considers how The Masses, together with several other little magazines, enriched the New Verse movement by joining and competing with Poetry: A Magazine of Verse as vibrant venues of contemporary American poetry. It explains how The Masses, by putting ideology above artistry, placed itself beyond the pale of true modernism. It argues that the verse published in The Masses was more than just belated sentimentalizing or Marxist sermonizing with no significant role in the emergence of modern poetry. On the contrary, the magazine had a substantial institutional and aesthetic impact upon the New Poetry. The chapter also contends that The Masses's eclectic and iconoclastic poetics of modernity was strongly aligned with the experimental spirit later valorized by historians as modernist.

This chapter examines how the experimental verse of Others, the quintessential aestheticist-modernist little magazine of American poetry, emerges from and responds to the climate of metropolitan activism that links it to The Masses. Others, published between July 1915 and July 1919 by Alfred Kreymborg and various friends, published works by such distinguished poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Carl Sandburg. This chapter argues that Others's commitment to stylistic experimentalism possessed a strong social dimension by showing how its verses addressed the conditions of urban-industrial modernity. It also describes the magazine's poetics of modernity as it extends across three interdependent registers: formal, thematic, and metapoetic. Finally, it discusses Others's contribution to the expansion of modern poetic form by cultivating a distinctive innovation, the vers libre variation sequence.

In the 1920s, David Johnson Leisk sought employment in New York City, first as an assistant art director in Macy’s advertising department. At the age of twenty-one, he became the first art editor of Aviation, which later changed its name to Aviation Week. While he was receiving an on-the-job education in layout and design, Dave began taking typography and graphic design classes at New York University’s School of Fine Arts. After his stint at McGraw-Hill, Dave turned left, joining the Book and Magazine Writers Union and reading Communist publications such as the Daily Worker and New Masses. He befriended others in the movement, including Charlotte Rosswaag, with whom he fell in love, as well as Mary Elting and her future husband, Franklin “Dank” Folsom. Dave began to contribute to New Masses, on which his first cartoon appeared in April 1934. He signed his first cartoons simply “Johnson,” and later “C. Johnson,” although New Masses nearly always printed his byline as “Crockett Johnson.” Dave Leisk had become radical cartoonist Crockett Johnson.

As a Communist publication, New Masses gave Crockett Johnson the opportunity to attack fascism. In a December 1934 cartoon, for example, Johnson likened fascism to a racket run by a gang of thugs. He even compared fascism to organized crime. In March 1936, Johnson redesigned Fight against War and Fascism, a radical monthly publication with close ties to the Communist Party. That same year, he joined New Masses as art editor. During his tenure, the magazine featured the work of the best cartoonists in the business, including Ad Reinhardt and Mischa Richter. Johnson’s cartoons for New Masses depict children with powerful imaginations, evincing an interest in what Julia Mickenberg has termed the “Pedagogy of the Popular Front,” a movement in progressive parenting designed to produce open-minded children unfettered by their parents’ prejudices. Later in the 1930s, Johnson began to warm to Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal program just as the Popular Front version of communism did. He and Charlotte Rosswaag also decided to divorce. Meanwhile, Ruth Krauss returned to New York.

Max Eastman secretly marries the brilliant activist and artist Ida Rauh (1877–1970), who introduces him to socialism. A honeymoon trip takes the couple to Europe, where an annoying flea Max picks up in Tangier serves as a metaphor for his continuing sexual frustrations. He is asked to assume editorship of The Masses, which he reinvents as a cutting-edge forum for politically motivated art and writing. His son Daniel is born in 1912, to his father’s surprise and mystification. Max publishes Enjoyment of Poetry, his most enduringly successful book, as well as his first volume of poetry, Child of the Amazons. Max’s marital problems engender his interest in Freudian psychoanalysis. Dissatisfied with his analyst, Dr. Jelliffe, Max embarks on a course of self-analysis, diagnosing himself with “unsublimated heterosexual lust.” He acquires a small house in Croton-on Hudson, where he becomes the unofficial leader of a flourishing socialist commune. His increasing skepticism of Woodrow Wilson’s commitment to peace helps radicalize his writing. After meeting the beautiful actress Florence Deshon at a fund-raiser for The Masses, he leaves Ida Rauh, relinquishing his parental rights.

This chapter is devoted to Max Eastman’s tempestuous relationship with the radical actress Florence Deshon (Florence Danks, 1893–1922). On behalf of the People’s Council of America for Democracy and Terms of Peace, Max lectures at great personal risk to large audiences across the nation against American involvement in World War I. Along with fellow contributors to The Masses, he survives two trials for obstructing the military recruitment effort and founds The Liberator, with Crystal as co-editor. He pays tribute to Deshon in a second volume of poetry, Colors of Life (1918), lives with her in Croton, and, after her move to Hollywood, bombards her with love letters. During a visit he introduces her to Charlie Chaplin as well as to Margrethe Mather, who takes significant photographs of Deshon and Max. Florence has an affair with Chaplin, while Max takes up with the dancer Lisa Duncan. Frustrated with Hollywood and Max, Deshon returns to New York, where she dies, likely by her own hand, on February 4, 1922. Max’s book on The Sense of Humor is dedicated to Deshon and evokes her memorable smile.

After cultivating their moral selves in the Mutual Aid Society, Yun and his circle now founded an organization that aimed to embody their ideals and help propagate them in society. The Benefit the Masses Book Society (Liqun shushe) was a bookstore that dealt in radical literature and published its own periodical and whose member-workers lived together in an egalitarian commune that combined work and study. The chapter highlights the tensions Yun Daiying faced as he attempted to run an organization dedicated to advancing and embodying egalitarian ideals while keeping the organization economically viable. The chapter argues that Yun’s leadership made the Society more successful than other attempts that took place at this time across China. The chapter illuminates the dissemination, consumption, and production of radical literature in the heartland, and the web of interactions the society created both regionally and nationally, with the urban centers of Beijing and Shanghai.