The Liberator

The Liberator was a monthly socialist magazine established by Max Eastman and his sister Crystal Eastman in 1918 to continue the work of The Masses, which was shut down by the wartime mailing regulations of the U.S. government. Intensely political, the magazine included copious quantities of art, poetry, and fiction along with political reporting and commentary. The publication was an organ of the Communist Party of America (CPA) from late 1922 and was merged with two other publications to form The Workers Monthly in 1924. History The Liberator focused on international news, featuring war correspondent and Communist Labor Party founder John Reed reporting on the ongoing situation in Soviet Russia; reports were filed from across post-war Europe by Robert Minor, Frederick Kuh, and Crystal Eastman. As with The Masses, The Liberator relied heavily upon political art, including contributions from Maurice Becker, E.E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, Fred Ellis, Lydia Gibson, William Gropper, Ernest Hemingway, Helen Keller, J.J. Lankes, Boardman Robinson, Edmund Wilson, Wanda Gág, and Art Young. Each color cardstock cover of The Liberator was unique. Poetry and fiction fleshed out its pages, including work by Carl Sandburg, Claude McKay, Arturo Giovannitti, and others. Maintaining a low price for the elaborate publication came at a huge cost, however. To economize, ultra-thin newsprint was used for the magazine's pages — cheap and high in acid content. The result was a fragile and ephemeral publication. Despite a circulation that peaked at 60,000 copies per month, comparatively few specimens of The Liberator have survived.