New Masses

The New Masses (1926-1948) was prominent American Marxist publication edited by Michael Gold.

Begun as an independent organ in response to the Workers Party of America take over of The Liberator, by the late 1930's 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 1940's 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, 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. New Masses was the venue in which Abel Meeropol's anti-lynching poem "Strange Fruit," later popularized in song by Billie Holiday, first appeared in 1937.