End of the Line

Manhattan's Communist New Masses, butcher-paper bible of the far left, last week had a birthday--its 37th and its last. Mounting costs had starved it to death; the 1947 deficit was an unmanageable $65,000. In two doleful, defiant pages, the editors wrote the obituary of a Marxist magazine that had first attracted, then repelled, some of the most brilliant writers of its day.

The day dawned in 1911. Max Eastman, John Reed, Floyd Dell, Artist Art Young and other idealistic radicals joined the Masses to help their bright socialist dream come true. Suspended for opposing America's entry into World War I, the Masses reappeared in 1918 as the Liberator. In 1926 it became New Masses, pledged to avoid "political affiliations or propaganda obligations." As late as 1936 it could get, for little or no money, such writers as Dreiser and Dos Passes, such poets as Millay and William Rose Benet, such artists as Gropper and Groth.

Even then, its party line was beginning to show. Within another year there was no concealing it. In 1939 the New Masses appealed for funds to "help the fight to keep America out of the imperialist war"; in 1943 it posed as "one of America's staunchest win-the-war publications."

Last week when it went under, the New Masses took a little comrade along with it. Mainstream, a literary quarterly that had shared Author Howard Fast* (who is under a three-month sentence for contempt of Congress), Screenwriters John Howard Lawson and Dalton Trumbo (who were charged with contempt in the House Un-American Activities Committee hearing) and others, was suspending after a year of life. New Masses Editor Joseph North had already jumped aboard the Daily Worker (as staff writer). Most of his associates (e. g., Richard O. Boyer, New Yorker writer) had other ways of making a living. Executive Editor A. B. Magill and others from both staffs said they would launch a monthly magazine in March. So far, they had figured out a formula (the mixture as before) and a price (35-c-), but not a title.

Wisconsin's zealous little monthly Progressive, which died three months ago, came back to life last week, with best wishes from brothers Bob & Phil La Follette, but, for the first time since it was formed 39 years ago, without La Follette money and wearing no party's collar. Loyal readers had refused to let it stay dead. They had dug up more than $40,000 from their jeans, to go with pledges of $100,000 already obtained.

* Last week the Daily Worker, weary of double-talk about whether Fast was or wasn't, came right out and called him a Communist.

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