The Masses Magazine Study

In the excerpt "How to Study a Modern Magazine," authors Scholes and Wulfman offer a variety of things to consider when attempting to study a Modernist Period piece such as the implied reader, circulation, regular contributors, contents, the editor, format, and the magazine's history, as well as a description of the magazine. I chose to do the magazine Masses for an example of each of these things.


Implied Reader: On the front cover of the January 1911 issue, Masses declares itself a  "Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Interests of the Working People," meaning that the implied audience must be working-class, ordinary people.

Source: The Modernist Journals Project (searchable database). Brown and Tulsa Universities, ongoing. w


Circulation: Masses circulated around a quarter million magazines per issue, due to its popularity.

Source: Maik, TA. A History of The Masses Magazine. Bowling Green State University, 1969.


Regular Contributors: "Radical Journalists John Reed and Louise Bryant;...Art Young...John Sloan and Boardman Robinson...Carl Sandburg, Louis Untermeyer, and Amy Lowell; fiction by Jack London, Upton Sinclair, and Sherwood Anderson."

Source: The Modernist Journals Project (searchable database). Brown and Tulsa Universities, ongoing.


Contents: Art, Poerty, Politics, Reporting/Journalism, Fiction. If another magazine had something in it, chances are that Masses had it too.

Source: The Modernist Journals Project (searchable database). Brown and Tulsa Universities, ongoing.


Editor: Over the years many different people edited Masses such as Thomas Seltzer, Horatio Winslow, and Piet Vlag in the first years, and Max Eastman with Floyd Dell for the later years.

Source: The Modernist Journals Project (searchable database). Brown and Tulsa Universities, ongoing.


 Format: Masses is set up in a three-colun format with visuals and title inbetween and around each piece of writing. Some pages are taken up by full drawings. There are limited advertisements and they only take up a few pages. There are consistently 15 to 30 pages in each issue including the adverts.


History: Masses was founded in 1911 and ran until 1917 when it was blacklisted by the government for espionage due to it's radical views and critiquing of the government. Over that time, there were many editors as well as lawsuits against the magazine.

Source: The Modernist Journals Project (searchable database). Brown and Tulsa Universities, ongoing.


Putting it together:  Masses is the most influential, radical, and shocking modern magazine. It is known as the "Socialist" Magazine of the Modermism era, displaying radical ideas for the time such as suffrage, birth control, and free love, as well as civil rights and unionization.