ABSTRACT

In the fall of 1921, after a decade-long tenure as editor of The Masses and then The Liberator, Max Eastman decided to join the steady stream of American artists and intellectuals crossing the Atlantic for Europe. After considerable internal squabbling among The Liberator staff, editorial control of the magazine passed into new hands (Love and Revolution 264-72). The January 1922 edition announced that Claude McKay and Mike Gold were now the magazine’s “Executive Editors” (9). In Love and Revolution, Eastman suggests that he nominated Gold and McKay as counter-balances to each other: “Although I trusted Claude’s political intelligence as well as his literary taste, I had no more faith in his ability to manage people than I had in Mike Gold’s. They were both richly endowed with complexes, and moreover Claude looked upon Mike’s tobacco-stained teeth, and his idea of ‘printing doggerels from lumberjacks and stevedores and true revelations from chambermaids’ as the opposite of a poised loyalty to art and the proletariat. It was indeed as a foil to Mike’s emotional extremism that I had suggested Claude as co-editor. Their colleagueship did not last long” (269).