1. This article was based in part on the author’s dissertation and subsequent article, “From Bohemianism to Radicalism: The Art of the Liberator: 1918-1924” (Ph.D. diss., CUNY Graduate Center, 2000) and “From Bohemianism to Radicalism: The Art of the Liberator” American Studies International (February 2002), v. XL, n. 1: 4-33.

2. For further information on American nineteenth and twentieth century magazine illustration, see Milton Brown, American Painting From the Armory Show to the Depression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955); Paul Hogarth, The Artist as Reporter (London: Gordon Fraser, 1986); Ralph Shikes and Steven Heller, The Art of Satire: Painters as Caricaturists and Cartoonists from Delacroix to Picasso (New York: Pratt Graphics Center and Horizon Press, 1984); Virginia Hagelstein Marquardt, Art and Journals on the Political Front, 1910-1940 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997); Steven Smith, Catherine A. Hastedt and Donald Dyal, ed., American Book and Magazine Illustrators to 1920 in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 188 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research, 1998); Francine Tyler, “The Impact of Daumier’s Graphics on American Artists: c. 1863-c. 1928,” Print Review 11 (1980): 109-126; and Arthur Frank Wertheim, The New York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism, and Nationalism in American Culture, 1908-1917 (New York: New York University Press, 1976). Several books have been published on the Masses, among the ones dealing with its graphic artists are John Fitzgerald, Art and Politics: Cartoonists of the Masses and Liberator (Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press, 1973) and Rebecca Zurier, Art for the Masses: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, 1911-1917 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).

3. Any thorough list of radical publications would be nearly impossible to compile. Documentation is scant as some organizations have denied even their existence because the radical left did not preserve or deliberately did not keep records. See Walter Goldwater, Radical Periodicals in America 1890-1950 (New Haven: Yale University Library, 1964) and Joseph R. Conlin, The American Radical Press, 1880-1960 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1974), 1-7. The New York Call and Freiheit (1922-1929) were both daily newspapers and included illustrations by some of the Liberator artists. The Young Worker (Chicago, February 1922-28; April 1936), The Labor Herald (Chicago, March 1922-October 1924) and Good Morning (New York, 1919-1921) also included drawings by political cartoonists and artists.

4. “A little rebellion now and then is a good thing’ said Jefferson,” in Eastman, “Science on Trial,” Liberator 3, no. 12 (December 1920): 20. On another occasion, he wrote: “In the name and memory of Benjamin Franklin, I demand that the American government and the government of New York State, pending the time when they will be compelled by the power of the international proletariat to recognize the sovereignty of the Russian Republic.” See “The Soviet Envoy,” Liberator 2, no. 8 (August 1919): 30-31. See also Melissa Nickle, “Max Eastman and the Greenwich Village Left, 1900-1929” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Irvine, 1996), 99-100.
5. Dell, “Art Under the Bolsheviks,” Liberator 2, no. 6 (June 1919): 11-18.

6. Granich changed his name to Mike Gold during the Palmer Raids of 1919-20 as a protective pseudonym. Granich’s “Towards Proletarian Art” was the last work he published under that name. For an analysis of Gold’s essay as it relates to American literary modernism, see Adam McKible, “The Space and Place of Modernism: The Little Magazine in New York” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina at chapel Hill, 1998), 1-24. For biographical information and analysis of Gold’s work, see Michael Folsom, introduction to Mike Gold: A Literary Anthology (New York: International Publishers, 1972), and Samuel Sillen, introduction to The Mike Gold Reader (New York: International Publishers, 1954).

7. See Roger Asselineau, The Evolution of Walt Whitman (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1962), 129-138 and Ed Folsom, introduction to Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Duluth, MN: Holy Cow Press, 1998). Folsom also claims that Whitman’s poetry was often brought to the front lines of workers’ strikes.

8. See Robinson, “Regionalism in Art,” Colorado College Bulletin: Four Lectures on the Fine Arts (Colorado Springs College Publications: March 1936), 23-31 and Gibson, “Adolf Dehn,” Liberator 6, no. 5 (May 1923): 36.

9. See Brown, Social Art in America: 1930-1945 (New York: ACA Galleries, 1981), 7-8. Unlike Brown, Matthew Baigell argues that the renewed interest in a national identity in American art of the 1930s was nativist and restrictive. See Baigell, “American Art and National Identity: The 1920s,” Arts Magazine 61, no. 1 (February 1987): 48-55.

10. Zurier, the scholar who has written the most comprehensive artistic study of the Masses stated: “The Masses presented an art that was contemporary but hardly modern—radical, perhaps, but not avant-garde.” See Zurier, Art for the Masses, 161. See also Martin B. Green, New York 1913: The Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant (New York: Scribner, 1988), 6; McKible, 1-28, 18-22, 233; and Nickle, 70.

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