The Masses Magazine The Croton Connection

A century later we still enjoy this innovative ILLUSTRATED magazine of art, literature, politics and science. The socialist monthly covered women’s suffrage, birth control, workers rights, economic injustice, and free speech, and committed to printing “cartoons and illustrations of the text by the best artists of the country, on a quality of paper that will really reproduce them. …a necessary luxury.”

The extraordinary visuals—on the 75 covers presented here, and on the inner pages—leave a lasting legacy. That legacy originated, in part, in a small town on the Hudson River about 30 miles north of Manhattan, where many of the key creators intermittently lived and worked. Max Eastman, second editor and guiding light of the endeavor, together with Floyd Dell, Crystal Eastman, Boardman Robinson, John Reed, Louise Bryant, Mabel Dodge and others resided in the Mount Airy section of Croton-on-Hudson—a neighborhood known for most of the twentieth century as “Red Hill.”