ABSTRACT
In the fall of 1921, after nine years as editor of The Masses and then The Liberator, Max Eastman decided to join the steady stream of American writers, artists, and intellectuals crossing the Atlantic for Europe. After considerable internal squabbling among The Liberator staff, control of the magazine was passed to Mike Gold and Claude McKay, who became Executive Editors beginning with the January 1922 number. Eastman suggests that he nominated Gold and McKay as counter-balances to each other:
Seven months, as it turned out, and during that time, tensions at The Liberator had become impossible to ignore. Fractious arguments, sometimes bordering on physical violence, were common in the magazine’s offices, and the overly aggressive Gold became a recurrent target in the pages of The Liberator for the taunts and barbs of his colleagues, who charged him with being boorish and doctrinaire. Gold responded to his detractors by characterizing them-particularly McKay-as effete aesthetes who valued art over the needs of the proletariat. Such tensions at The Liberator were clearly difficult for McKay and Gold to live through, but their contentiousness ultimately benefited the magazine, because together they published some of its most exciting issues.
