We are the itinerant unemployed but to the police of big cities
               we are social lice. 

                                              —H. H. Lewis, "Sidewalks of Los Angeles,"                                                                   New Masses, June 1929 

                All the unemployed know is that their bellies are empty,
                that February winds are raw...that life is hell. 

                                               —Harvey O'Connor, "'Work or Wages': New York                                                         [The Bowery]," New Masses, March 1930

In the prelude to the Depression, the sole left-wing magazine melding aesthetics and protest was New Masses: A Journal of Art and Labor (NM).¹ At the helm was Mike Gold, who was seen in many quarters as the "most famous Communist writer in America" (Chura 1). He was certainly the first to connect a proletarian literary formation with working-class consciousness (Magill 5).² The monthly soon rose to prominence as it spoke to a growing cadre of angry, normatively white, unemployed men.³ NM stalwart Ralph Cheyney explained, "The worker is no less a worker because he [sic] gets laid off" (21). These were the respectable jobless. Gold cultivated young writers who moved in and out – but mostly out – of the casual labor force ("Write for Us!" 2; "Go Left, Young Writers," 3).⁴

Gold's slogan was that literature was "a weapon in the class struggle" (qtd. in Chura 123). This verbal art was proletarian, dedicated to the worker conscious of the need for revolutionary change.⁵ Yet internal wrangling revealed that neither Gold nor his large editorial board agreed on the genres or substance of this cultural production, the degree of revolutionary fervor, the nature of the subject, or even the worker-writer who generated class-based material (Childers 175). 

What the NM editors did agree on was the subculture of the subclass enemies of the working class who made up the lumpenproletariat.⁶ Such outcasts were not worth mentioning, but they hovered over or "ghosted" the categories, to employ Nina Auerbach's term. Yet to Marx, a prime influence on the NM radical imagination, the lumpen were a danger to a workers' state, and he called, through a welter of contradictions, for their extinction (Barrow 3). The American version, if not as bloody-minded, was practical: punishment for the lumpen after the revolution. 

This outcast horde had multiple members, including, among others, thieves, panhandlers, vagrants, and loose women. There was no more likely home for these miscreants than Skid Row. As ground zero for those who did not work, this population conned and profited on the Main Stem, the commercial avenue synonymous with the Row. This notorious urban district was the historical venue of seedy hotels, missions, Prohibition speakeasies, and brothels. In dictating that the taboo subject be avoided, the editors actually mystified it, to use the insight of Benedict Giamo, a noted social historian of New York City's interwar castoffs (32-33). 

This combination of stereotype and omission negated the fact that on the cusp of the Depression transient job seekers may well have comprised one-third to one-fourth of the Stem's population (Storch 108). A few years later, the Depression propelled the newly jobless into the district, "increasing the size of the skid row population" (224). These statements are difficult to verify, but the indifference exhibited by NM is incontestable. Dismissed as well by its editors were the conclusions of the roving dean of migrant studies, Nels Anderson, who pictured an unwilling stay on Skid Row as a way station (32-33).⁷

Only a handful of NM mavericks, while known for their "good soldier" output, transformed this fraught topic by re-visioning the Row's stigmatized figures. H.H. Lewis (1901-1985), Joseph Kalar (1906-1972), and Harvey O'Connor (1897-1987) have been forgotten since the onset of the Second World War. My attempts to resurrect their individual and composite achievements revealed an innovative school of thought animating Lewis's "Sidewalks of Los Angeles" (June 1929), Kalar's "Skidway: Seattle" (December 1928), and O'Connor's "'Work or Wages': New York [The Bowery]" (March 1930).⁸

That these writers slipped from notice is not surprising. It difficult to find any relevant sources in the digitized bibliographies and full issues of NM in its formative period, 1928 to 1930 (www.marxists.org).⁹ My hunt for sources encountered obstacles to depicting the skidscape both inside NM and in the dominant society. 

Bibliographically and historiographically, there is a scholarly gap regarding the flophouse population. Scholars either pass over the three authors in question or submerge their Main Stem pieces. Further evidence of this minimization is found in some cursory readings of the texts themselves. When Douglas Wixson, an important scholar of 1930s culture, alludes to Lewis's "Sidewalks of Los Angeles," he misstates the facts in favor of a polemic about bodies on the streets (162).¹⁰ In his usually thoughtful piece on NM, Daniel Peck sees Kalar only as a poet of revolt (391). The cultural historian Eric Homberger identifies Kalar as a lumberman and a poet, but without linking the two occupations or noting Kalar's preoccupation with the urban lower depths (128, 169). 

Most obituaries of members of the Old Left blocked their Communist affiliations. This enduring Cold War approach has particular resonance in O'Connor's case. His 1987 obituary never mentions his lifetime of syndicalism. Invisible too are his rousing editorials in Oregon, Ohio, and Washington state as well as his involvement with the Daily Worker. Instead, leading the way, the New York Times columnist James Barron begins his 1987 obit by mentioning O'Connor's biographies of the Mellons, Guggenheims, and Astors, published in the 1940s (30). 

So many missteps make it all the more important to give voice to the silence surrounding the vexed subject. In the name of recovery, we need to read Lewis, Kalar, and O'Connor through their working-class Main Stem. In contending that this trio made a literal and figurative space for the proletariat in their Skid Row representations, I take a threefold approach. First, rather than contrast the normative texts of the three with their Skid Row antitheses, I argue for a continuum that reveals their reform vision. Second, I study the way their unorthodox sketches played off the surface descriptions with coded subtexts. By arguing for the working-class ethos of the laid-off men who inhabited the Row, the sketches interrogate the NM literary agenda. Using a variety of framing devices, reappropriations, and reversals, they inscribe a political critique of leftist indifference to the Stem. 

Who Are You Calling a (Social) Parasite?:
H.H. Lewis and the Proletarian Body

During NM's formative period from 1928 to 1930, Gold laid out his hopes for revolutionary spirit, or the balance between the militant and the eloquent. In one of his most important editorials, "A New Program for Writers" (January 1930, 21), he foregrounded H.H. Lewis. Given his ambitions and labor credentials, Lewis was a good fit for NM, and he soon became a tireless contributor. His "Prosperity, A Hymn" appeared in January 1929 in the NM "New Year Literary Number." The piece raged at President Hoover's starvation-level policies and hit on one of his hard-knocks themes when he urged readers to march and "join those outside the mill of strife" (Peck 391). Shifting to the peon's task in "Memoirs of a Dishwasher" (February 1929), he deplored the lot of the deskilled while taking the customary NM view that even the poorly paid avoided the many dangers of the Stem. 

Apparently, Lewis saw no contradiction between his prodigious output, which was well received by Gold and his editors, and the journal's abhorrence of the sidewalk transient. Gold admired the "hobo," but his admiration stopped at the entrance to the Stem. Similarly, the journal was unreasonably opposed to Lewis's bruising journeys on freight trains that landed him in the worst section of Los Angeles. In dangers and derelicts, this part of LA was second only to the Bowery. 

Heedless of possible censorship, Lewis chose to turn away from the hoboing world he knew so intimately and to write about the untried topic of the Row. He found social-historical importance in the claustral world of the Skidway. In the autobiographical "Sidewalks of Los Angeles" (June 1929), Lewis wrote himself into the disappearance of jobs. Balancing the creative and the analytical, he compares the reception of the jobless to the attitude toward societal bloodsuckers while also providing a rhetoric of surveillance: "We are the itinerant unemployed...but to the police of big cities we are social lice" (13). 

Sociologists from the groundbreaking University of Chicago School knew that "itinerant" was a slippery term. They categorized the transients of the road as hobos, tramps, or bums (Anderson 63), a typology accepted to this day. As the sociologist Roger Salerno explains, only the hobo, who had been "forced into transience" followed seasonal or other temporary manual work (89). The tramp toiled barely enough for survival. Further confusing the issue, tramping and bumming were vernacular for seasonal laborers who were taking to the road (Goodwin 2). When hoboing did not support them, they panhandled at back doors in small towns or other likely non-urban places. Despite sometimes descending into beggary, both hobos and tramps stood apart from the professional mendicant, or bum, who never worked at all. Confusing the typology, "vagrant" was used as an umbrella term for all of these types. 

For Lewis, who rejected this elision, the Row was not a study in contrasts between the panhandlers and the job seekers. Rather, the lumpen quickly disappeared, their identities extinguished by political actors. These survivalists understood that the economic hierarchy had abolished opportunity. Proof of this class-consciousness can be found in this subtle first-person passage, which seems to contradict Lewis's erasure but in actuality foregrounds the thwarted proletarian: 

I had been sleeping on the floor of a rescue mission, near a toilet, carelessly used by the others...[which] had become clogged; its contents had run out on the floor...With two side-sleepers packed against me, I viewed the horrible scene. The dimly-lit hall...was crammed to full capacity with...bums...It was a suffocating, putrid hell but glory hallelujah for the lice. ("Sidewalks of Los Angeles," 13, author's emphasis)

The absence of beds and sanitation underscores the obedience to mission authorities of these Main Stem Calibans. So does the past tense used in his anecdote. Thus, what looks like an observation about the lower depths actually privileges a deeper truth. In an artful reversal, the writer is not one of those in hell but a working man who denies kinship with those "bodies in extremis" (Goff 292). Regardless of his locational constraint, Lewis makes it clear that he is not a social parasite. The businessmen with mission contracts who are in league with paid-off evangelists are the true charity grifters. They sell rotten food to missions, charge as much as they would for more nutritious fare, and together share the difference.¹¹ In a literary sleight of hand, Lewis uses his own slumscape to deplore these entrepreneurs, who are "loud-voiced hyenas," and names their quasi-religious organizations as emblems of corporate greed (10). He vents his ire at the "honest" work provided by alleged self-improvement organizations like Goodwill and unveils another act of Hoover-like chicanery: pushing men to do the work of sorting used clothes so the charities can sell them. In a spirit of revolutionary anger, he derides these organizations for preaching "a hand up, not a handout" (https://www.goodwill.org/about-us/goodwills-history). 

Aware of the forces controlling them, Lewis disjunctively shifts to the same rebels against so-called philanthropy as he reads the jobs placed on the walls outside a city-run site. With a sense of solidarity, he shifts from "I" to "we" and "us": 

A scene I can never forget is when the police raided the city's free employment bureau and nabbed many who were standing outside. The head raider lectured us: if we really wanted a job why didn't we stand inside? But the inside of that large hall was already crowded to capacity with 250... Those...outside were vagrants, a menace to public safety. ("Sidewalks of Los Angeles," 13, author's emphasis)

In ironically identifying the "raider" as a figure of legal absurdity, Lewis dismantles the common view that sidewalk men lacked ambition simply because they did not have access to municipal opportunities. 

In this narrative of jailing or deportation for those labeled dangerous idlers, Lewis does not empower the "insiders" either. Bridling at the politics of policing, these "fortunate" men run outside to help lead a protest (13). In this fleeting move toward solidarity, they join their sometime comrades, but their action is short-lived. At the behest of the mayor and his cronies, police rush the crowd to label everyone there a vagrant, and all resisters are punished. In his wry manner, Lewis dramatizes the costs of such alliances by drawing a lesson that is both communitarian and bitter: "Assert your proletarian rights and you go to jail" (13). 

It is not just that a Stem resistance fizzles. Inherent in this story, as in Lewis's reportage, is a double indictment: The arrests were obviously classed actions, but where were the Communist Party organizers? 

Lewis's colleague Joseph Kalar was also disappointed by the absence of left-wing support. Structurally and stylistically, his writing provided, in Alan Trachtenberg's judgment, "an exchange of subjectivities" (265). That is, Kalar told, not Lewis's tale of social realism, but a fable of dystopia.

Babel on the Skidway and Joseph Kalar's Shadow Men 

Like Lewis, Kalar received the Gold imprimatur. A prolific contributor, he wrote poetry that was praised by the editorial board, and by some accounts he was a fervent Communist and had even been nicknamed "Comrade Kalar" (Wald 128). He saw himself as an adviser and once wrote to Gold suggesting that the journal pay more attention to the "roughness of life" (qtd. Genoways 13). Though occasionally serving as a contributing editor, he was disappointed in the NM failure to provide a "mirror" of all forms of "proletarian experience" (qtd. in Genoways 13). 

Kalar was a Communist Party advocate, but he was also a contrarian who produced a counternarrative of the rough life. He chose for his case in point Seattle, which, like Lewis's Los Angeles, had been the largest employment center for roving labor in the Pacific Northwest during the previous decade. "Skidway: Seattle" appeared in 1929, after the decline of the fiery IWW (Industrial Workers of the World, known in non-left publications as I Won't Work). Rather than the debasing filth of Lewis's flophouse, anomie pervades Kalar's sanitized avenue: "The Skidway is the main proletarian street of Seattle, lined with cheap rooming houses, speakeasies, mission halls, unemployment agencies. Every night radicals make soapbox speeches at the corners" (10). 

This passage undercuts the left's widespread regulatory definition of proletarianism. For one thing, Kalar's affectless diction and flat tone invoke a landscape without a worker class. He had experimented with these missing men in "Midnight Mission," a piece in which the breadlines render only outlines of men, who quickly disappear into missions and are not seen again (15). The Seattle piece extends that idea: here the men are on the street, but also not on the street. The putative inhabitants have disappeared into shelters and shark agencies. Even the orators drawing the mission crowd are not enlivened: they speak, but the listeners hardly matter. 

Kalar's method is allegorical. Like Lewis, he strategizes a removal of the begging confraternity, yet he exaggerates this removal to the point of absurdity. He constructs ghostly inhabitants who need a creed to bring them out of the "shadows." Supposedly at the rally itself they "become men" (10). In real terms, they "become men" in being drawn to the lamps that illuminate the soapboxers. On a poetic level, they are faceless cadres in a crowd moving as one. 

Kalar intensifies the sounds of the ideological war that was being fought across the nation by dueling news outlets, right-wing radio broadcasts, and small armies of speakers. In imaginative terms, Kalar creates a babel as he turns that debate into a circus of speakers trying to lure the unwary. Some of the Mormons, Catholics, evangelicals, atheists, and anarchists peddling their creeds are trying to turn the still shadowy audience into true believers. The Salvation Army, often on the march for contributions, is the noisiest; with their message amplified by their famously loud music, they obliterate the voices of nearby speakers. In the melee, the Communists among them, representing the only organization that describes these men as working-class, struggle to be heard but cannot prevail: "Look, fellow workers," declares a Communist trying to be heard, "there goes God marching by!" (10). 

With no access to CP truths, the befuddled crowd is bombarded by senseless creeds. In this cacophony of ideas, each soapboxer tries to outshout the others. The myriad voices, however, are unheard. In the chaos created by the myriad of dueling narratives, Kalar's left-wing fable demonstrates the men cannot be reached. Ideas are "nervous" as they slot into ideologies any responses coming from the men; "ideas like bat" fly through the crowd, which blindly frightens those in the labor-class darkness (10). The narrator warns about the dangerous fate of those without insight as a "black wave" submerges them (10). Mixing metaphors of dematerialization, he also foresees them being crushed like "grapes under doorways" (10). 

Conquering the anarchic scene, Kalar hints that a way out of this Platonic cave is to heed the Communist orators who emerge early in the story. By narrative's end, the one true idea radiates the light of truth. Those who have been all but ground down by spurious philosophies are now transformed into crusading bodies, and in this way they transcend what Kalar calls the "self-conscious proletarians" (13) who work but seek the distractions frowned upon by the Party. 

In this strange fable, those who are ignored, indeed diaphanous, on the street are now the real proletarians at the rally. In taking aim at the capitalists, the men have become fully formed; they are "sharpshooters of ideas" (13). What does that gunning down of the false philosophies betoken now that the irrefutable logic of the Communist Party has turned them into newly "alert individuals" with "eyes alight"? (13). 

Given Kalar’s interest in the Skidway, however fleeting, he wanted to keep such rhetoric to a minimum. He questioned the Soviet fiat of a "spontaneous eruption of feeling" (Chura 116), which he criticized, in his defiant skepticism toward polemics, as an "as yet embryonic pattern of the revolutionary movement"" (10) (author’s emphasis). According to CP historian Daniel Leab, it was an uncertain time for the local unemployed councils, which were supposed to support and motivate (300).¹² The clichéd "light that saved" did not shine brightly enough to help these men gain access to security. 

In their respective discourses of the insubstantial and the animalistic, Kalar and Lewis are in a dialectical relationship, yet a synthesis is available: both writers show men without work being dehumanized. These counternarratives presciently fractured stereotypes as they range across the spectrum between nationwide resistance and the local ethos of the Stem. It remained for another NM contributor, Harvey O'Connor, to introduce a new paradigm of skidscape representation.

Declassed on the Bowery:
Harvey O'Connor's Slum Proletarians

Harvey O'Connor arrived in New York in 1927 having spent time at a savage lumber camp, done a jailhouse stint, and been engaged in unceasing activism on the Pacific Coast. From the heyday of the prewar IWW to the founding of the CPUSA, his pamphlets and columns evidenced an unceasing opposition to devious corporate practices. For a time, his political home was the worker-owned, widely circulated Seattle Union Record. In all ways, he brought his belief in the fight to join "the front lines of industrial warfare" to his mapping of the Bowery (Chura 7). 

O'Connor served briefly as an editor of the city's Daily Worker (DW), the political arm of the CP (Chambers 218). Whether he left his mark on the paper is difficult to discover as editorials were unsigned. But his verbal force and selective attitude are evident in his March 1930 piece in NM, "'Work or Wages': New York [The Bowery]." Ambiguous to us now, wages referred at that time to unemployment insurance (Burnham 27). As the 1930s dawned with accelerating strikes, this demand also integrated the Main Stem into the rights of all workers. Thus, O'Connor prefaces his anti-authoritarian topography with references to the "wage slaves" hired by Buffalo employers from the state job bureau (3). He also dismantles Hoover's absurd statements about patriotic workers' contributions to a thriving economy.

However, O'Connor's primary focus in NM remained on the jobless New York precincts, chief among them the Bowery, New York's original Skid Row. It had the dubious distinction of being the largest in the United States, with an astounding ten thousand lodgings, from five-cent flophouses to overnight missions (Jackson 76).¹³ More forcefully than his colleagues, O'Connor reinvented a poverty world without beggars or the near-destitute. Street criminals and gangs were likewise omitted. In a riposte to the NM naysayers, the fraught location tested those with a labor ethos. In his daring text, work seekers there by day walked out of the area even if they had to return at night. 

For O'Connor there was no usable literary past in which period authors contested these comings and goings. Instead, guidebooks such as James Dabney McCabe's bestselling 1882 New York by Sunlight and Gaslight were marked by a sensationalist prehistory. McCabe pretended to moralize but also provided exact addresses, inspiring readers to go slumming or to patronize the area. Readers were more avid about the Bowery's underworld of brothels and gambling "hells" than shocked by it (474-489). Meanwhile, the era's serious writers saw the Row through the prism of surrealism or determinism. To Stephen Crane, assuming the role of an undercover journalist, the flophouse was hallucinatory, a nightmare of devils ("Experiment in Misery," 1893). "Men in the Storm" (1894) provided a more expansive occasion for a dazzling metaphoric style. He poeticized the dehumanization of the soupline-to-night's-sleep population.¹⁴ Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), while novelistically detailed, took a deterministic view of the local breadline. Those who descended to charity in this universe might even kill themselves, as does a central figure in the novel. 

Building on prewar anarcho-syndicalism production was not an option either. Prior to the rise of the CPUSA, many NM contributors, such as Lewis, Kalar, and O'Connor, had links to the Paterson and Lawrence mill town strikers. In the prime IWW years, worker-run hotels and food coops had sprung up, only to be quickly closed by the police. Almost unknown were marches to Union Square where  hobo hotels and cooperatives were quickly shut down (Foner 444). IWW activism in New York City was typically absent from folklorist George Milburn's Hobo's Hornbook (1930) and the fiction, poems, tall tales, news pieces, and parodies of popular tunes published in Rebel Voices. 

Rather than provide description missing in the works above, O'Connor's Bowery was narrowly thematized. In that spirit, he leveled the landscape of pool halls, missions, and saloons in favor of the "workless haunts of Manhattan" ("'Work or Wages'" 3). In this CP gothic tale, O'Connor displaces the death of work onto the places themselves. In his economy of scarcity, he also omits the false charity of subpar food and one-night stays provided by the area's missions: "All the unemployed know is that their bellies are empty, that February winds are raw, [and] that life is hell" (3). 

There is continuity between the workless and those O'Connor had witnessed as victims of management cruelty in his depiction of the victims of absence of political support. "'Work or Wages'" appeared in NM the same day as the Party's mass gathering for Unemployment Day. One of the important speakers, William Foster, could have been describing many who responded to the CP call. Like O'Connor, he saw in the dreary surroundings a class issue: "The declassed worker," Foster explained, "becomes the slum proletarian" (242). 

To stop that spiral, Foster helped plan the largest outpouring of dissent the city had seen. The event occurred a few subway stops from the Bowery, in Union Square. The American version of Hyde Park, Union Square was often called "Red Square" for the many Communist speeches delivered there (Edward Ellis 537). Estimates of the crowd size at the largest rally in the history of the city ranged from the Party's (and police commissioner's) 100,000 to the 35,000 of conservative newspapers. Equally unreliable was the estimated number of Party advocates, who were said to number anywhere from two to ten thousand. 

Planned for February, the Union Square protest may have been moved forward to March because of the winter chill. But worker anger, both national and local, was in the air. Finally, a date of March 6 was chosen, which was followed by demonstrations on March 19 and 30. Major newspapers such as the New York World and the New York Times routinely charged that "rioters" charged the police. Such anarchic behavior was taken as further evidence that the protesters were mostly the "professional unemployed...panhandlers" (Jackson 76). Deliberately omitted from this reporting was the consensus that wageless blacks "belonged" in Harlem. It is crucial that the DW, in deploring the breadlines, acknowledged blacks standing there alongside whites. In general, the CP saw "proletarian power" in a black constituency when, in Naison's formulation, they marched "shoulder to shoulder" (Garon 203; qtd. in Naison 36).¹⁵

Whether from nativism or alarm or both, it was the poor white male, employable and apolitical, who was considered reliable, or at least safe enough, for a secular redemption. Elmer Galloway, the head of the YMCA, defined the issue in a winter of 1930 article, "Homeless Men Make Up Unique Bowery Problem" (139). The comfort of the word "unique" was that hordes of wageless men, ready to follow the strict institutional guidelines, were confined to the New York Main Stem. 

In "[Local Reformers] See...Much Distress Along the Bowery," William Hodson, a welfare administrator, embroidered on Galloway's definition. As if men were not daily pouring into cities elsewhere, he too utilized euphemisms such as "distress" to defuse the threat. That his piece appeared on March 30, the day of another protest, was no accident. Sensing the urgency, Hodson exhorted caseworkers to develop a plan to solve the "Growing Problem of the [Bowery] Homeless Man" (Hodson 169). 

The "solution" – to contain the potential danger of an able-bodied but wageless population – could not have been farther from the truth of the situation. These professional reformers, in whose lexicon "class" was reserved for manual laborers and the better educated on the avenue, did not see a class issue defining blue- and white-collar occupations. Furthermore, they explained the role of layoffs in creating the Bowery as the temporary result of "industrial emergencies" in far distant places and unspecified factory towns (Hodson 169), a phrase that, not surprisingly, denoted an unfair loss to employers, not to those let go. 

O'Connor despised this management model. He saw manipulation in the men's naive belief that employment was to be had in shoveling snow: "Clogged [streets]...meant work! Work!" (3). Ringing changes on that phony promise, as if talking at the nearby March 6 rally, he labeled them "suppliants," not job applicants (3). As the men crossed avenues to a municipal station, the hopeful became a landscape of determined men, yet only the half subservient to City Hall were chosen for the job. Speaking for the many unnoticed, one man was bold enough to challenge that corruption. O'Connor used the interchange between this Bowery Everyman and the Tammany hiring manager as a capsule dialogue: 

     "Say, why don't you ever see me?" demands one.
     "You? What's your name?" 
     [The jobless one answers.]
     "Don't remember your name. Where were you election day?" (3) 

O'Connor closes by mimicking the Tammany minion, they "gotta vote the ticket to get a chance at a swell job like that" (3) From this dialogue to the last line, O'Connor could be speaking at the March 6 rally where the audience raged at politicians selling jobs. In this article, as a member of the rebel trio, he subverted the NM's silence on onetime workers imprisoned in the city's corruption. 

Using literary devices and political savvy, O'Connor framed a paradigm adopted by the CP press. His call for a rapid education in upheaval provided a coda to the other texts studied here and served as a prelude to a DW breadline-to-rally discourse. The new model transformed the thematics of defeat into one of rising up. 

Proletarians on the Breadline 

Labor Day in 1930, which fell on September 4, accreted meaning in DW coverage. The editors and unknown reporters called for "unity with all the jobless" (O'Connor 1). In a new model, they used the Communist Party's bully pulpit to call for a breadline rebellion. 

Locating the line in a geographical spinoff of the Bowery, the DW chose the St. Vincent's Hospital food station, a few blocks from its office as a background for recruitment. CP organizers routinely fanned out to the soup kitchens of O'Connor's topography (Rozensweig 793). Whether that outreach included vagrants was left unsaid. The DW food relief lineup reflects the worker trope illustrated by Lewis, O'Connor, and Kalar. There were no vagrants in this soup line, only the jobless or "those evicted for lack of rent" (O'Connor 1). 

But the signature CP newspaper also provided closure to the cultural work studied here. In symbolic terms, Skid Row was everywhere. Under the slogan "Workers of the World Unite!" the journal's Labor Day front page privileged this new paradigm. Figure 1 shows a selection from the DW Labor Day front page. Above the first photograph is the head, "Not Breadlines but Unemployment Insurance," and the first photo is captioned: "Workers on the Breadline in Front of St. Vincent's Hospital, New York. Lines in New York [run] into tens of thousands. During the summer the bosses cut them out, to hide the extent of unemployment. But breadlines are coming back, larger than ever."

                                                          Figure 1 

Below the second paragraph, we read: "Two aged workers eat...their bitter bread and slop coffee on the breadline. This is the blessing of capitalism for the workers. On the job, starvation and speed-up, and at 40, disease and starvation – this is the protest that faces every worker. (1). In compositional shorthand, the combined visual and prose texts spotlight former workers eating wretched meals of bread doled out to them. Thus, on the front page, the juxtaposition of food insecurity, beaten-down elderly, and rallying labor implicitly invokes the standard slogan: "Fight or Starve!" 

To varying degrees, Lewis, Kalar, and O'Connor dramatized the DW battle for working-class identity. Until the rise of Bottom Dog fiction in the mid-1930s, they remained the only period imaginers to produce a Skidway aesthetic. Their pioneering writings on lowest-depths inequality were more than preludes to a new inclusiveness by the literary left. In style and substance, they disrupted the influence of NM's moralizing attacks. Transgressive and innovative, the three turned ugliness into urgency. Against the NM grain, they created their own ways of writing red.

Notes 

1. Other journals foregrounded labor concerns from American cities to Europe and Asia. But in the early phase, 1928 to 1930, a good half of NM's contents were also literary or illustrative. Because the artists on the editorial board saw the urban "forgotten man" as an essential subject while the literary members did not, many cartoons and drawings dwelled on, often with dark humor, the park bencher as capitalist victim. See, for instance, Dehn's "Unemployed," NM, May 1929, p. 15. No such subject matter reigned in cartoons and drawings concerned, for example, with monopolies and government greed. For a contrary argument, see Langa, 24-49. 

2. Declaring upon being appointed as editor that proletarian literature – the cultural production of working-class direct action – was new, Gold developed the agenda of worker "correspondents" who fanned out to industries, farms, and other labor-class locations ("A New Program" 21). His conviction was that worker-writers would have no difficulty making firsthand contact with a discontented rank and file. Using NM as the platform for his American version of The Communist Manifesto, he was lauded by some for a Marxist aesthetic that energized American literary leftism (Chura 217). 

But Gold's multiple and contradictory statements inspired other conclusions as well. Suggs explains that Gold was not satisfied with extant definitions of literary proletarianism (87), and in his study of the NM, Peck concurs, noting that Gold was never clear about what it was (378). 

One should not omit feminist denigration of the monolithic definition of proletarianism as masculine. Women were, according to Rabinowitz in Writing Red, a substantial percentage of the red correspondents in the 1930s decade. Yet NM, which in the early years was the central venue for these women, published only two selections from women writers, both of them minor. For an extended discussion of the most significant women writers of the NM and their difficulty with male proletarianism, see Hapke, Daughters of the Great Depression, pp. 73-75. 

For our purposes, a capsule description of proletarian literature is that it encompasses multi-genre expressions of rebellious working-class-ness, preferably by writers with labor résumés. 

3. Adding the usually backgrounded 1928-1931 period to their analyses, recent scholars have pointed to the racial and gendered minorities who published in periodicals like NM. These contributors easily outnumbered the contributors scrutinized here. But NM writers on racism were consistently white. In "Negro Poetry," counter to the usual acceptance of African-American folk songs in Southern vernacular, a reviewer characterized black poets as crude, amateurish, and ignorant about revolutionary verse (Patterson 21). 

4. Unless otherwise noted, all article citations are to New Masses. Rather than provide volume and issue number, as do some scholars, others opt, as I do, for the accessibility of month and year. 

5. Foley, Radical Representations, pp. 63-85, provides an account of the permutations of Soviet influence. Homberger, American Writers, pp. 126-138, offers a convincing counterargument. 

6. Some authors provided additions to this enemies list, including everyone from the classless to the bourgeois to black Marxists (Mills 20-49). Norwood's monograph on strikebreakers and other company ploys adds scabs (121). 

7. The most scholarly version of Anderson's monographs combines two books, The Hobo (1923) and Men on the Move (1940). The editor of this edition, Raphael Rauty, sees no boundary between them and provides scant chronological clarification (1-14). Further muddying the waters is the inclusion of other chroniclers like the Roosevelt administration Farm Security Administration photographer Dorothy Lange. Anderson does not address the Depression era. 

8. Lewis's poem "Midnight Mission" and Kalar's vignette "Midnight Mission" are withering portraits. Kalar lays the groundwork for the end of the Row in "Unemployed Anthology" and "Proletarian Geography." O'Connor's "Carolina Mill Slaves" employs his outrage to reassert the millworkers' proletarianism in a Communist-led strike. 

Titles by other NM authors are partial exceptions. See Spector, "Unemployed," p. 17; Newhouse, "I Look for a Job," p. 7; Peters, "Hallelujah I'm a Bum! (A Scene from a Proletarian Play)," p. 14; and a brief October 1928 letter by Dave Goodwin, "Still on the Bum," p. 2. Lewis broke with NM and wrote a compelling 1933 memoir-account of his younger days, "Down the Skidway," for a new journal, Anvil. 

9. Some words on methodology. Digitization has made possible the compilation of a complete indexed bibliography of writers and titles from 1926 to 1933 and all complete issues (www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/new-masses/index.htm). After a two-year search through hundreds of likely articles between 1928 and 1930 and scrutiny of 100 "typical" articles, I concluded that Skid Row was a repressed category. A keyword search was not available. 

I sorted through hundreds of pertinent essays and eventually contrasted the form and content of the Skid Row School with the articles on other social outliers outside Bottom Dog districts. Attention to title, subject, or author listing revealed terms such as "lumpen," "scab," "picketer," "unemployed," "underemployed," "jobless," "organizer," "hobo," "tramp," "working stiff," "migrant labor," "the Lower East Side," "worker," "proletarian," "proletariat," "Soviet literature," and reviews of essays in foreign language journals with titles like Il Proletario (and of course "proletarian literature"). 

Except for occasional titles, none of the prior terms referenced the jobless world of the down and out. More research is clearly needed on all of the journal’s content. But it is safe to conclude that prior to the 1930s, the park benchers of the cities were taboo subjects. 

10. Wixson also states that "Sidewalks of Los Angeles" was influenced by Rorty's "Everything Happens in Los Angeles," p. 6. There was no connection between the two pieces except the city itself. 

11. Focusing on areas outside the Stem, the venerated Elizabeth Gurley Flynn concluded that these grifters were economic parasites (Camp 262). Gold poetically named them "a great pack of ravening wolves" (10). As he did so often, Lewis here alludes to NM assertions about charity grifters in general. 

12. Kalar cannot find room in the allegory for the notorious Seattle Hooverville, an emblem, however seedy, of shacktown self-help. 

13. Historically Skid Row was considered a part of the Lower East Side, which itself is a huge area. In 1930s terms, references to the Bowery privilege the avenue itself and the few blocks surrounding it. Kenneth Jackson uses a different map on which it "stretched from Chatham Square to Cooper Square, from Chinatown to the eastern reaches of Greenwich Village" (69). Whatever the parameters, Jackson reminds us that the Bowery stretched for only a mile, as was typical of a contained Skid Row district. 

14. There is no consensus on whether Crane's "Experiment" is reportage, short fiction, or both. What can be said is that Crane's readers expected to be fascinated, if horrified as well. 

15. Black boxcar riders were sometimes treated equally by white occupants. Blacks did appear in Bowery hotels, but were always kept segregated. Deportation to Harlem was the order of the day. Communist protests against Harlem as "an oppressed nation" were not as effective as the party wished (Naison 261). Unemployed councils in African-American neighborhoods were also few and far between. 

Black women were spiritual cousins of white “Sisters of the road,” a term fusing hobos and prostitutes (Martin 37; De Pastino 54–56)). Ben Reitman was the ghostwriter of Sister of the Road, an autobiography of a white anarchist hobo, Bertha Thompson, who was a composite of three adventurers in the farthest reaches of female rebellion. Despite the protagonist’s milieu of murderers, drug addicts, and the like, or perhaps because of it, Reitman’s semidocumentary account presents no evidence that Thompson or anyone she associated with appeared on breadlines.

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