The Liberator, an American cultural and political magazine published from March 1918 to October 1924, was among the most important venues for artists and writers of the 1920s. During the seven years of its publication, the New York-based monthly attempted to balance politics and culture by providing graphic art, which varied from scathing attacks on capitalists to lighthearted scenes of leisure. In 1923 the Liberator was turned over to the Workers’ Party, the official name of the Communist party of America. The magazine shifted from idealistic theory toward a communist line, until ultimately in 1924 it became the Worker's Monthly. While maintaining its character as an independent voice for radical intellectuals of the 1920s, the Liberator was committed to social change, addressing issues such as the Russian and German revolution, communism, the rights of African Americans and social injustice. The Liberator was the only influential American radical publication of the early 1920s equally committed to politics and art that had both an international and a widespread national audience. In addition to anticipating Social Realism of the 1930s, the magazine introduced the concept of proletarian art, featuring the work of international prominent communist artists such as Diego Rivera and George Grosz, and American social artists such as William Gropper and Hugo Gellert. Through an examination of the Liberator’s historical context, its cultural policy, and its place among magazine publication, this article seeks to broaden the scope and role of the politically active artist and intellectual during the 1910s and 1920s. ¹

In the early twentieth century the medium of popular journalism was the most effective means to inform the public before the advent of radio and television. Social consciousness was limited in the “fine arts” because there was no patronage and the artist instead turned to the graphic arts. American scholarship is only now beginning to examine the prominence of illustrators and the graphic artists of the postwar years of the 1920s as the voice of a nation struggling with a national identity and its social place in international events. The term “little renaissance” has been coined to describe the proliferation of small magazines in New York between 1908 to 1917. The “little magazine” provided the appropriate medium of dissent and was devoted to experimentation. These magazines were established to afford authors an outlet for works of artistic merit or experimentation that could find no place in commercial magazines. Among the most notable was the Masses (1911-1917), the popular forerunner of the Liberator. The Masses set the basic foundation for the Liberator ; however, historical circumstances surrounding the Liberator, namely the end of World War I and the Bolshevik revolution created a markedly different situation. As the acknowledged successor to the Masses, the Liberator preserved most of the same editorial staff of writers and artists. Among them was Max Eastman as the executive editor, and John Reed, Floyd Dell, Robert Minor, Boardman Robinson and Art Young as contributing editors. ²

The Liberator emerged on the cusp of the “little renaissance,” and serves more as an example of the relatively new, but expanding radical press, undergoing a major resurgence at this time. Among the more radical press, which espoused the causes and concerns of the working class, there were at least six hundred leftist periodicals published in the early twentieth century, excluding daily newspapers and local publications. Most were short-lived from various facets of the labor movement or of the socialist and communist press. The leftist press was often far ahead of their times in their advocacy of social reforms and became the chief source for understanding the radical experience in America. While these publications were influential to the leftist experience, they did not feature art, poetry or literature. Radical publications preferred the use of documentary photography and were not concerned with artistic or technical merit. Socialist and politically oriented magazines tended to be didactic, ponderous and somber. And, although the Liberator was not the only political magazine that included art, none had its reputation, circulation, and quantity of illustrations, scope or artistic diversity.³

The editors of the Liberator had complete control of its contents and illustrations. The policy of each editor was essential to the evolving cultural pedagogy of the magazine. The two most important editors in the early years were Max Eastman (1883-1969), a well-known socialist and writer and Floyd Dell (1887-1969), a former magazine editor and writer from Chicago. Both Eastman and Dell sought an American equivalent to the Soviet example and expected a transformation in culture and society; the two being explicitly tied together in the process. Identification with a foreign revolutionary movement made radicals vulnerable to charges of anti-Americanism. As a consequence, one of Eastman’s techniques was to situate the Liberator within a respectable tradition of American radicalism and social critique. He claimed that “the right of revolutionary agitation” was “interwoven in the traditions of this country,” quoting Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln. The “Americanization” of Bolshevism became a defining aspect of the Liberator circle’s definition of the newly emerging communist principles. It seemed important to radicals to find American equivalents to Russian developments as a way of completing their own identification with the revolution. Boardman Robinson’s often-reproduced portrait of Lincoln for the February 1919 cover serves to reveal the artist’s skill as a portraitist and conveys his admiration for President Lincoln as liberator of the oppressed and voice for the masses. The portrait is also a direct example of situating a revolutionary example in the context of American tradition, thereby legitimizing American radicals by claiming Lincoln’s humanitarian legacy as their own. Stuart Davis similarly captures the early response of Greenwich Village artists to Bolshevism in the February 1919 issue titled “Bolshevism in Bohemia.” The scene consists of a lively group of Bolsheviks and bohemians socializing in a Greenwich Village café setting. The image transforms the “alien” nature of the Russian proletarian into the familiar, thereby Americanizing the foreign element and legitimizing the embrace of Bolshevism. ⁴

Notwithstanding the internationalism of the Liberator, Eastman’s editorial remarks with regard to culture suggest an ethnocentricity, which envisioned a distinctly American art. He felt American artists and writers should cultivate their own experiences and often evoked the American poet, Walt Whitman. In his review of the work of Stuart Davis, Eastman observed that even though great art and poetry had not yet appeared, there was a mood of reckless experimentation that held promise for the advent of a great “native” American art and poetry in the tradition of Whitman. For Eastman, art offered the potential for transformation in the American tradition of transcendentalism. Similarly, even if seemingly contradictory, Dell used the Soviet example to call for an American democratic spirit in art: “A new beginning has been made, and the people . . . are meantime to be the judges of whether art is doing what art must do to be alive—expressing their will, their love, their pity, their hopes and fears, their enthusiasm and their dreams.” Citing Tolstoy and Lincoln, Dell insisted that “art must be of and for and by the people!” ⁵

After Eastman’s departure from the magazine in 1922 the magazine progressively shifted toward a more communist line. One of the editors who succeeded Eastman at this time was Mike Gold (Irwin Granich). Gold (1893-1967) of Russian-Jewish descent, would later become a major bridge between the prewar bohemian and the communist literary movement of the 1930s. Gold’s “Towards Proletarian Art,” which appeared in the February 1921 issue of the Liberator was a major document in radical literary theory in the United States and was virtually the first call for the creation of an art distinctly by and for the American working class. Gold too sought an indigenous American art and called for artists to return to their common experience: “Its roots must be in the fields, factories, and workshops of American life.” In addition, Gold, unlike most writers of the Liberator who focused on the international class struggle, grounded his writing in his immediate circumstances and those circumstances were New York city. The dominant image portrayed by Gold was the poverty and misery of the tenements and sweatshops of New York’s working classes. Gold not only turned to the newly founded Proletkult in Russia, but also to Walt Whitman as a model for the new proletarian art. For Gold, Whitman was “the heroic spiritual grandfather of our generation in America” who envisioned a proletarian culture through his elevation of the grassroots of America; a man who dwelt among the masses, and from there drew his strength to intuitively arrive at proletarian art.⁶

Many literary historians have viewed Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a “hymn to the United States.” For Whitman, America offered unlimited possibilities, its future, undetermined by the past was rich with infinite promise. In the 1856 preface to Leaves of Grass, Whitman called for a defining American poetry that corresponded to the democracy and liberty he envisioned for the New World. In Whitman’s Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, he declared that the poet must not be ashamed of his “native-born perceptions” but must on the contrary “recognize with joy the sturdy living forms of the men and women of These States.” Whitman’s ideology represented more than simply blind patriotism to the United States, it was a desire for democratic equality; a broad internationalism that sought universal kinship; a celebration of races and of people. Also, largely overlooked in cultural history is the profound influence of Whitman on American radicals and socialists of the early twentieth century. Whitman’s Leaves of Grass was often circulated and evoked among leftists writers and intellectuals for its regard for the common people, democracy, love of Lincoln and poems about European revolutionists. In the 1930s, even though Whitman was dismissed by modernists as being sentimental and naively nationalistic, poets who were socially active and engaged on the political left embraced his writings. Whitman’s poetry came to be seen by leftists poets as socially significant; often interpreted as a call to socialist revolution that was predicated on a return to the land and the land’s values. In the 1930s Gold continued his praise of Whitman, calling himself “a son of Whitman,” and ultimately considering the Whitman a poet of labor revolt. For Gold, Whitman expressed his concern for the working people, the poor, the marginalized, and those whose work can be put in the service of social revolution. ⁷

Many of Gold’s cultural theories were residuals of the formative writings on the subject by Eastman and Dell—the quest for a distinctly American art, the importance of art in communicating to the masses, the call for an art relating to the life of reality, the ability of art to transform society, and the disdain for abstraction. Gold’s essay set the precedent for defining proletarian art in America and defined its most significant traits. These characteristics included: autobiographical identification with the working class, the prediction of an American renaissance, the necessity of the artist’s reliance on personal experience, an art that was comprehensible to the masses, an American equivalent to the Russian model, and devotion to the Soviet example. In the Liberator editorials, Gold reasserted his position of the inevitability of an art rising from grassroots America, from workingmen and women, not from bourgeois-trained artists and writers.

Like the editors, Liberator artists also sought to convey a distinctly American expression to their social content themes. In a lecture delivered in 1936, Robinson stressed the importance of the art of the past and was pleased that Regionalism was replacing “the weak, imitations of European Cubism, Post-Impressionism, and Expressionism.” As an exponent of American art, he maintained “art is best when it is native.” Likewise, Lydia Gibson illustrator, writer, editor, and political activist also upheld a similar point of view. While Gibson’s art indicates knowledge of modernism, she never deviated from a naturalistic representation and appears to have had little patience with contemporary European movements. In a review of the American artist Adolf Dehn’s work for the May 1923 Liberator, she intimated her preferences and dislikes. Of Dehn, she wrote: “He is without the moral despair of Grosz, whose bitterness presupposes a disappointed ideal; he is free of the sentimentality of the French, of the fantastic unreality of the Russians.” Gibson dismissed Grosz’s brand of German expressionism, nineteenth century French academic tradition, and Russian Futurism. In the review she emphasized Dehn’s nationality as American; he was in a unique position to observe and translate “modern life” because he was “young enough to accept great changes without regret.” Gibson’s commentary suggests a promotion of American artists because they would be able to express the modern experience, which for her, was new, social change for a nation on the cusp of what she believed was revolutionary transformation.⁸

Artists and editors of the Liberator did not find the use of realism inconsistent with modernism. When Eastman and Gold called for artists to return to their native American roots via the tradition of Walt Whitman, they were indirectly manifesting the avant-garde interest in exploring a nationalistic heritage. A defining aspect of avant-garde modernism in the early twentieth century was to explore alternative art forms that included a re-discovery of nationalistic folk traditions. After World War I, American nationalism in art had increased, reflecting in part an effort by artists to find a national identity in competition with more prestigious European counterparts. The renewal of interest in American art was evidenced by the opening of the American wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1924, the opening of the Intimate Gallery, dedicated exclusively to American artists in 1925, the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in 1929, and the opening of the Whitney Museum in 1931. While it could be argued that a greater interest in American art may suggest xenophobia, and by extension anti-Bolshevik and anti-radical sentiments, the Liberator and its artists represented the new surge of politicized artists who provided the historical link between the past and present. Their interest in American tradition, while seemingly ethnocentric, was an effort to explore a culture uncorrupted by bourgeois and capitalist standards. Even though several of the Liberator artists drew direct inspiration from European leftist art, particularly that of Daumier’s crayon technique and Grosz’s expressive linear style, few foreign publications offered entirely appropriate models for commentary on American society. For the Liberator circle, looking back to the American grassroots tradition held the promise of a transformation in culture and society.⁹

Until recently, assumptions of modernism were limited to a definition based solely on formalism and aestheticism or avant-garde abstraction. More current scholarship, particularly literary and sociological studies of the 1920s, has broadened the scope and definition of modernism. Little magazines offered a way of reading modernism that had more historical specificity and insight into the complexities of the era than a single work produced by a single artist. According to Adam McKible, who attempted to redefine the origins of American literary modernism in his recent dissertation, “The Space and Place of Modernism: The Little Magazine in New York,” little magazines, as an often-underutilized source of analysis, were the cornerstone of literary modernism in America. Mckible argued that the time and place of historical change defines modernism and that for the artists and writers of the Liberator modernism was “found in the lived experience of historical change.” After the war and the Russian revolution, America was undergoing enormous changes, particularly New York, which became a place of uncertainty and revolutionary instability. Despite the upheaval, there were countless possibilities. McKible wrote: “Little magazines were the ground zero of modernism; if modernism exploded upon American culture, then its initial points of detonation were little magazines.” Melissa Nickle’s 1996 dissertation, “Max Eastman and the Greenwich Village Left, 1900-1929,” pointed out that many studies of the modernist period end with America’s entry into World War I, thus neglecting the response of intellectuals to the Bolshevik revolution and as result, “how modernist impulses shaped the politics of revolutionary socialism in America.” Nickle concurred that radical intellectuals were modernists, since art was integral to the project of personal and social liberation and regeneration. Likewise, according to Martin Green in his study of the IWW Paterson Strike Pageant and Armory Show, radical politics was a metaphor for the modern experience as it transcended the individual self and nineteenth-century bourgeois notions. If radical politics, the time and place of historical change, as well as personal and social regeneration constitute aspects of modernism, then the Liberator and its artists were at the very core of the modern American experience of the 1920s.¹⁰

In its ongoing debate between the role of art and politics, the Liberator was successful in defining a nation in the 1920s and its place in the aftermath of war and revolution, all of which are critical to our understanding of American cultural identity and its role in modernism. Americans were well aware that their nation and national identity were undergoing enormous changes, and nowhere was that more evident than in the pages of the Liberator. Artists and writers of the Liberator, along with their more oft cited counterparts in the realm of fine arts, contributed to a national identity based on a socially relevant premise. The Liberator sustained the American realist tradition, which unfolded as Social Realism of the 1930s. Ideas about the nature of radical art, conclusions drawn from an analysis of American culture and definitions of the relation between the artist and society became central to the 1930s. Social art in America was primarily tied to newspaper and magazine illustration and to graphic media. The Liberator and its contributors pioneered the ongoing debate on the relationship between art and politics, the conflicting objectives of artistic merit versus political message, as well as what constituted an indigenous American art.