ABSTRACT

Shortly after the stock market crash of 1929, the editors of the New Masses, led by Mike Gold, formed the first John Reed Club of New York. As part of a program to develop leftist literature, the groups manifesto suggested that each young writer attach himself to an industry for several years so that he could write about it as “an insider, not like a bourgeois intellectual observer.” First by working in a factory, then by acquiring further education writing publicity for strikes, budding writers would acquire “roots in something real,” in effect becoming what Gold termed “industrial correspondents” who would give the New Masses its necessary “industrial basis” and make the mag­ azine the genuine voice of the working class.1