The New Masses

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The Intricate Structure of Wall Street's Fascist Conspiracy, from the February 5, 1935 issue of The New Masses magazine, John Spivak.

The New Masses (1926 – 1948) was prominent American Marxist publication edited by Michael Gold, and briefly by Whittaker Chambers.

Begun as the independent organ in response to the Workers Party of America take over of The Liberator, by the late 1930s it strongly backed the Communist Party USA's Popular Front movement as a response to the rise of fascism and the Spanish Civil War. The 1940s brought significant philosophical and practical troubles to the publication, as it faced the ideological upheaval created by the Soviet-Nazi non-aggression pact of 1939 (as well as blowback from its support for the Moscow Trials) while at the same time facing virulent anti-Communism and censorship during the war.

Contributors included Upton Sinclair, Richard Wright, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Albert Maltz, Granville Hicks (who was also the editor for a number of years), Max Eastman, Dorothy Day, Eugene O'Neill, Theodore Dreiser, Josephine Herbst, Tillie Olsen, and Meridel Le Sueur. In 1937, New Masses also printed Abel Meeropol's anti-lynching poem "Strange Fruit," later popularized in song by Billie Holiday. The journal also sponsored the first Spirituals to Swing concert on 23 December 1938 at Carnegie Hall which was organised by John Hammond.