ABSTRACT
The John Reed Club announces a series of sixteen public lectures on Sunday afternoons at 63 West Fifteenth Street, "to work out a complete proletarian theory of Art, Literature and Criticism." Oakley Johnson, the executive secretary of the club, adds a postscript. Mr. Edmund Wilson declared flatly that he no longer believed in those antiquated documents, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He used to, but has lately decided that they were the work of impractical idealists, who at the same time were impelled by bourgeois group considerations. He believes in economic determinism; people think and act according to their "group interests." As for liberty and equality, Mr. Wilson said nobody believed in those any more. What Mr. Wilson seemed to find all wrong was that one cannot invariably get paid for writing what one pleases.
