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In 1912, a young man named Max Eastman got a letter: You are elected editor of The Masses. No pay. Eastman had no idea when, how, or why hed been granted this post as head of a small New York socialist newspaper.

But as Jeremy McCarter tells it in his new book, Young Radicals, Eastman followed up, visiting the offices of The Masses. An aspiring poet and socialist with no journalistic ambitions, he immediately took to the business when he saw how to lay out a page, or paste up a dummy. Soon, he was running the paper, then reinventing it. He filled it with funny drawings and new, vibrant voices. He moved the offices to Greenwich Village.

This made Eastman neighbors with John Reed, a young bohemian journalist and another one of the principles of Young Radicals. Reed got help in his early writing from his former Harvard classmate Walter Lippmann, a third key player in the book. Lippmann went on to help found New Republic, where he helped invent a new kind of progressive liberalism. One of his writers was Randolph Bourne, whose sharp, singular essays forged an uncompromising vision of what America could be.

Meanwhile, suffragist Alice Paul was leading the charge to gain women the right to vote, and doing so on a national level, upping the ante from the state-by-state strategy the movement had been employing. Pauls influence was big enough that she faced off with President Wilson himself in the White House.

Soon, all the radicals of McCarters book would have to define themselves in relation to Wilson and the coming war. Their prewar commitment to idealism and a vision for democratic socialism would become somewhat rearranged and reprioritized as they grappled with the reality of the war and their ideological responsibility to take a position on it and the 1916 election.

Bournes adamant opposition to American entry into the war got him fired. The other young radicals made arguments on behalf of Woodrow Wilson as a rational, pragmatic, and reachable president, even though there was a socialist candidate, Allan Benson, in the race. Lippmann, formerly critical of Wilson, was won over by his first term and backed him publicly. Reed voted for Wilson the first time he ever voted for a president, he said because he felt him to be sensible and reachable.

Eastman used his post at The Masses to endorse Wilsons reelection, and caught fire from fellow socialists, including his own staff. How could the editor of a socialist paper endorse a Democrat when their party had a man in the race in Benson? But Eastman held firm, writing that in the face of the war in Europe and the possibility of U.S. involvement, Wilson was the responsible choice.

But just for the record, when Eastman went into the voting booth, he voted socialist.

Read more from the original source:
Young Radicals: A Story of Socialism, Suffragists, and Journalism - Signature Reads