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''The Masses'' was a graphically innovative magazine of socialist politics published monthly in the United States from 1911 until 1917, when federal prosecutors brought charges against its editors for conspiring to obstruct conscription. It was succeeded by ''The Liberator'' and then later ''The New Masses''. It published reportage, fiction, poetry and art by the leading radicals of the time such as Max Eastman, John Reed, Dorothy Day, and Floyd Dell. ==History== Piet Vlag, an eccentric socialist immigrant from the Netherlands, founded the magazine in 1911. Vlag’s dream of a co-operatively operated magazine never worked well, and after just a few issues, he left for Florida. His vision of an illustrated socialist monthly had, however, attracted a circle of young activists in Greenwich Village to ''The Masses'' that included visual artists from the Ashcan school like John French Sloan. These Greenwich Village artists and writers asked one of their own, Max Eastman (who was then studying for a doctorate under John Dewey at Columbia University), to edit their magazine. John Sloan, Art Young, Louis Untermeyer, and Inez Haynes Gillmore (among others) mailed a terse letter to Eastman in August 1912: “You are elected editor of The Masses. No pay.”〔Max Eastman, ''Enjoyment of Living'', New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948. 394.〕 In the first issue, Eastman wrote the following manifesto: ''The Masses'' was to some extent defined by its association with New York’s artistic culture. “The birth of ''The Masses'',” Eastman later wrote, “coincided with the birth of ‘Greenwich Village’ as a self-conscious entity, an American Bohemia or gipsy-minded Latin Quarter, but its relations with that entity were not simple.”〔''Enjoyment of Living'', 418.〕 ''The Masses'' was very much embedded in a specific metropolitan milieu, unlike some other competing socialist periodicals (such as the ''Appeal to Reason'', a populist-inflected 500,000-circulation weekly produced out of Girard, Kansas). The magazine carved out a unique position for itself within American Left print culture. It was more open to Progressive Era reforms, like women's suffrage, than Emma Goldman's anarchist ''Mother Earth''. At the same time it fiercely criticized more mainstream leftist publications like ''The New Republic'' for insufficient radicalism.〔The Masses, April 1916, 12.〕 After Eastman assumed leadership, and especially after August 1914, the magazine’s denouncements of the war were frequent and fierce. In the September 1914 edition of his column, “Knowledge and Revolution,” Eastman predicted: “Probably no one will actually be the victor in this gambler’s war—for we may as well call it a gambler’s war. Only so can we indicate its underlying commercial causes, its futility, and yet also the tall spirit in which it is carried off.”〔The Masses, September 1914, 4.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Masses」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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