Printed out of a cattle barn in Missouri, Anvil published some of the biggest leftist writers of the 1930s, including Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. Its popular vision for a multiracial socialism in the heart of the US could hardly be more urgent today.
In its three short years of existence, Anvil magazine published several writers who would go on to achieve immense fame, including Langston Hughes, Margaret Walker, Richard Wright, and Nelson Algren. The small, ragtag magazine, founded in 1933, was unique among leftist literary journals of the time in its racial diversity and its proud adoption of rural radicalism. It sought to offer an alternative to New York periodicals such as New Masses and Partisan Review and make Marxism accessible to workers in the cultural outskirts of the Midwest.
Despite publishing the early works of some of the most renowned US socialist writers of the twentieth century, Anvil remains unknown to all but a few specialists in leftist literary history. That’s a shame, because it offers a blueprint for communicating a popular socialist vision to a working class outside the United States’ major urban centers — a task that could hardly be more urgent today.
Jack “Cornrow” Conroy and the Barnyard Press
A historic meeting of radical authors convened at Manhattan’s New School on April 26–27, 1935. The League of American Writers, the meeting’s Communist Party–affiliated organizing body, was one recent manifestation of the red decade’s robust anti-fascist cultural front. The congress invited men and women of letters from across the country to collaboratively chart the course for a new revolutionary American literature. One of these writers was Jack Conroy, a working-class novelist who had authored two lauded works of proletarian fiction, The Disinherited and A World to Win.
The son of a coal miner, Conroy was raised near the small farming town of Moberly, Missouri. He spent most of his young adulthood hopping between jobs in the industrial Midwest, from working railroads in Missouri to automotive factories in Toledo, which provided the settings for his two novels. In prose and in person, Conroy flaunted his heartland roots with his folksy, idiomatic speech and his disdain for social status. He reportedly delivered his talk at the American Writers Congress with uncombed hair and disheveled clothes, looking “like an unmade bed,” in the words of journalist Heywood Broun. The talk, with its animosity to what Conroy considered elitist literary modernism, out-of-touch Marxist theoreticians, and urbane decadence, was denigrated by several members of the congress and the mainstream New York press. Conroy’s biographer, Douglas Wixson, relates that James T. Farrell, author of the popular Studs Lonigan trilogy and a fellow speaker at the congress, allegedly referred to Conroy as “Jack Cornrow” and even called him a “walking cornfield.”
Farrell’s identification of Conroy with the Midwestern landscape might have been just the reaction that Conroy hoped to elicit. He implored Marxist authors to write for the masses in accessible, demotic language: “The worker-writer must learn to express himself as clearly and as simply as he can. . . . In order to do this, he will not find it necessary to concoct weird hybrids of words or to coin new words. . . . One may combine simple, and what some ultra-aesthetic critics might call banal and commonplace, words into an exciting and colorful pattern.”
Conroy’s commitment to writing that realistically and organically reflected working-class experience made him a hayseed to some, a populist yokel who lacked the proper training to produce rigorous revolutionary literature. Yet at the time of the American Writers Congress, the provincial Conroy was the editor of one of the most cosmopolitan magazines of the period’s anti-capitalist literary movement: Anvil.
Founded by Conroy two years earlier, the magazine featured an impressively diverse masthead. It published the early works of some of the twentieth century’s most influential women and African American authors. Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Frank Yerby, Meridel Le Sueur, and Sanora Babb all placed writing in Anvil or its 1939 successor, New Anvil, when their names were virtually unknown. In addition to these upstarts, some already prominent figures in 1930s letters placed work in Conroy’s publication, including Langston Hughes and Erskine Caldwell. For a small rag produced on cheap newsprint with an ancient printing press in a cattle barn, this litany of names was no small feat. Nor was it coincidence.
Through its curation of working-class fiction and poetry, signature linoleum print illustrations, and Conroy’s rustic editorial commentary, Anvil fashioned an aesthetic that was at once provincial and international. Conroy’s sense of the importance of regional identity and his belief in authentic folk expression attracted several black and women writers who felt alienated from the Communist Party establishment. In the 1930s, Anvil contended with the elitist belief that cutting-edge literature could scarcely emerge from the allegedly conservative cultural backwaters of Missouri, Kansas, or Ohio.
Today US politics continues to turn on regional conflicts and inequalities, both real and perceived, and the Left cannot assemble a majoritarian, working-class coalition without winning over the nation’s rural and deindustrialized midlands. Especially for leftists campaigning in the field of culture, Jack Conroy and Anvil magazine provide lessons in representing and nourishing interracial radicalism in the heart of the United States.
The Roughneck Stylesheet
Conroy was a day laborer in his early thirties when he first entered the literary stage at the start of the Great Depression. Baptized in sudsy bar ballads, folk tales, and factory banter, the burly Conroy was driven by a desire to seize a place in the national literature for the workingmen and women surrounding him. Recognizing a lack of vehicles for what he called “non-urban” leftist fiction, he enlisted a journeyman printer named B. C. Hagglund and launched Anvil in 1933. The magazine’s subtitle, “Stories for Workers,” signaled its intended proletarian audience, while its slogan declared an aesthetic philosophy: “We prefer crude vigor to polished banality.”
From the start, Conroy made good on this slogan by publishing writing from workers who harbored literary ambitions but lacked the formal training and institutional access to make a career from their words. Some contributors, like Richard Wright and Nelson Algren, would not wait long for renown. For others, success came much later, if it arrived at all.
The lead piece in the July-August 1934 issue, “Postoffice Nights” by Harry Bernstein, gives an account of an ambitious, college-bound teenager confronting his own economic precarity. Bernstein would toil at writing for the next seven decades before his memoir, The Invisible Wall, finally won him acclaim in 2007. The impressionistic recollections that brought him celebrity at age ninety-six were already apparent in the 1934 Anvil story.
Anvil’s support of writing by workers, for workers, was a populist revolt from the village against the East Coast communist literary establishment. Although a committed revolutionary, Conroy clashed with influential New York radicals such as Philip Rahv and their leading magazines, among them the famous New Masses and Partisan Review. Conroy and his coterie of Midwestern proletarian writers critiqued these metropolitan journals for prioritizing Marxist theory over stories that realistically reflected working-class life and for their insensitivity to the disparity in both cultural and financial resources separating New York from environs like Conroy’s native Missouri.
As Conroy put it in a reflective essay written in the 1960s, “out in the Midwest of penny auctions and burning corn … we were far from the ideological tempests raging in New York City coffee pots. How many Marxian angels could dance on the point of a hammer and sickle?” Anvil therefore served as a pragmatist counterbalance to the headier discourses circulating in radical periodicals like Partisan Review, which would absorb and dissolve the first Anvil in 1935 in what Conroy interpreted as a hostile coup by the New York crowd against his vehicle of homegrown regional writing.
Anvil was premised on the existence of an already deep tradition of cultural radicalism in the heartland. However, this radicalism had rarely enjoyed a nationally prominent outlet to disseminate its principles and productions, at least not since the turn-of-the-century halcyon days of the major socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason. One of Anvil’s major tasks, then, was to represent this radical Midwest in print. As the poo-bah of New York communism, Daily Worker columnist and novelist Mike Gold advised Conroy: “Make it a regional paper, for the peasant poets and Midwest literary proletarians … proletarian in content, regional in form.”
In addition to reserving space for unknown writers, Conroy invoked regional radicalism through messages on the front and back covers requesting donations to Anvil and other revolutionary books produced by the magazine’s printer, B. C. Hagglund. Instead of promising glossy paper and high-end printing in exchange for contributions, Conroy’s solicitations emphasize the austere conditions in which the leftist texts were produced: “B. C. Hagglund, the proletarian publisher, proletarian printer, and proletarian writer, has returned to his cowbarn sanctum in the muskegs of Northern Minnesota. . . . Hagglund sadly needs a few extra dollars with which to buy paper and ink. . . . The actual printing is done on a press thrown away as unusable by a self-respecting printer . . . in the Boer War.” Conroy punctuates his request with a note that money can be sent to the farmer-poet H. H. Lewis at Rural Route 4 in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
The message’s tongue-in-cheek humor rests on quintessential Midwestern self-deprecation, yet he brandishes the magazine’s material deficiencies as a point of pride. Indeed, compared to the Partisan Review, which ran over one hundred pages an issue, and the New Masses, renowned for its avant-garde illustrations, Anvil was a ramshackle affair. Initially only eight pages (it eventually expanded to between twenty-four and thirty-two pages per issue), printed on inexpensive news stock, and featuring the occasional blatant printing error, Anvil embodied an unpolished, honest working-class ethos. Further, the places mentioned in Conroy’s request outline the topography of the radical Midwest. Revolutionary workers’ writing was being brought forth through a network running from northern Minnesota, to Conroy’s residence in St Louis, to southern Missouri and beyond. Certainly, anti-capitalism had long been active in these middle states, but Anvil’s explicit appeal to the Midwest and aestheticization of working-class grit helped to fashion a distinct identity for leftists living outside of major urban centers. It’s true that Cape Girardeau, Missouri, gave the world Rush Limbaugh, but it was also an important station of revolutionary workers’ writing. Why should the Left cede this territory, both physical and symbolic, to reactionaries who pretend that their ideology is representative of this mythical “true America”?
The magazine’s distinctive illustrations, when Conroy and Hagglund could afford to print them, were key to both its regional aesthetics and democratic socialist philosophy. Nearly all illustrations are linoleum block prints and depict workers in an asymmetrical, primitivist style. One image from the May-June 1940 issue of New Anvil, John C. Rogers’s Working Class Mother, portrays a simply clothed woman standing arms akimbo on a country hill, her back turned to the viewer as she looks proudly at a sun either rising or setting. As in Conroy’s vivid description of his printer’s “cowbarn sanctum,” Rogers depicts the rural environment of the magazine’s imagined reader with respect but little romanticism. Ideologically, it signals a departure from the conventions dominant in Marxist aesthetics during the early 1930s. Instead of replicating socialist realism and representing the world revolution with depictions of workers united in victory or heading into battle, Working Class Mother equivocates on the state of socialism in the rural United States. It is unclear whether the sun in the illustration is rising, suggesting the coming revolution, or setting on a passing opportunity, perhaps registering that the anti-capitalist potential of the Depression decade was on the wane.
This ambivalence is characteristic of Anvil’s heartland radicalism, as is suspicion of formal party politics. While Conroy was affiliated with the Communist Party, he was a consistent voice for internal critique. For his biographer, Wixson, Anvil was unique among other literary organs of the 1930s in its spirit of “independence, its promise to be of sectarian attitudes and ideologies.” Wixson echoes a long-held belief that communism failed to gain traction in the United States partly due to Americans’ reluctance to submit to centralized authority, especially an authority that they perceived as foreign, such as the Moscow-tied Communist Party. A popular, naturalized Marxism was supposedly yet to arise in the United States.
Anvil refutes this myth. However, the magazine suggests that American socialism would diverge greatly from the Soviet model. The preferred organizational strategy — and ultimate political goal — of the Anvil crowd was horizontal worker association that incorporated elements of Industrial Workers of the World–inspired syndicalism, prairie populism, and what would become known as autonomous Marxism or workerism. For Conroy, a properly American form of Marxism would honor the country’s mythos of freedom and independence while producing agitprop in forms that would be familiar to a Midwestern farmer. While an effective approach by several measures, Conroy’s writings can walk a thin beam between egalitarian regionalism and anti-intellectual nativism, and at moments they lose their balance. The discourses of “rootedness” and folk simplicity that abound in Conroy’s work can, as leftist literary historian Michael C. Steiner suggests, feed “a reactionary urge that encourages differences between regions and nations at the same time as it smothers differences within them.”
However, the Missouri of Conroy’s writings is never a homogenous landscape of so-called pure Americanism, and neither are the pages of Anvil. Flipping through a typical issue, readers could move from imagery depicting the rural Midwest to another Rogers linoleum block portrait, this time of Vladimir Lenin.
Depicted in the same folk style as the working-class mother, Lenin’s face fits naturally next to Rogers’s other prints and the magazine’s rural dialect stories. As editor, Conroy depicted a vision of the American heartland in which Lenin is an organic feature of the cultural landscape alongside Walt Whitman and Mother Jones. Radical regionalism is therefore not an isolationist ideology but a dialectic approach to revolutionary culture. Anvil’s aesthetic is as internationalist as it is regional; Rogers’s woodcuts, for instance, take influence from the murals and woodcuts of Mexican revolutionary artists who were also invested in ideas of the geographic periphery and the provincial. This regionalist internationalism, as I call it, provided fertile ground for anti-colonialist black writers such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Margaret Walker, who incisively described the conflicts of being black, Midwestern, and Marxist.
Race and Class in Anvil
Lenin’s likeness in the May 1934 issue was foreshadowed by a poem in the debut issue a year earlier: Langston Hughes’s “Ballads of Lenin.” Although an ode to the revolutionary titan, Hughes’s poem elevates the workers of the world to equal footing with the individual leader while forcefully expressing the proletarian internationalism that defines much of Hughes’s 1930s verse:
Comrade Lenin of Russia,
High in a marble tomb,
Move over, Comrade Lenin,
And give me room.
I am Ivan, the peasant …
I am Chico, the Negro…
I am Chang from the foundries /
On strike in the streets of Shanghai.
For the sake of the Revolution
I fight, I starve, I die.
Hughes’s poem is a fitting cry for the inaugural issue of a magazine whose contributors exemplified working-class writing from a breadth of demographics. Already established as a luminary of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes looms large over a masthead of otherwise “unknown writers of the revolutionary school,” as Conroy described the contributors in a prospectus for the magazine. From the NAACP’s Crisis to the Marxist New Masses, Hughes had access to publications with much larger reaches than Anvil, whose circulation peaked at four thousand. Why did he contribute what would become one of his most beloved poems to the first issue of a small literary journal in the hinterlands?
Hughes and Conroy had been professionally acquainted since the late 1920s, the pair likely bonding over their mutual upbringings in the robust socialist print culture of early twentieth-century Missouri and Kansas. According to his autobiography, The Big Sea, Hughes delivered copies of the Appeal to Reason to his black neighbors in Lawrence, Kansas, at age twelve. Two hundred miles away in Moberly, the just slightly older Conroy was reading copies of the same newspaper and the legendary Little Blue Books workingperson’s library, produced by the same Kansas publishing house responsible for the Appeal. Besides his affection for the vivacious Conroy, Hughes probably identified with Anvil’s attempt to forge a revolutionary literature with the Midwestern dialects, folklore, and landscapes that provided the material for his own work. Literary critic Anthony Dawahare points out that Hughes’s proletarian writing utilizes “working-class vernacular [that Hughes] believed could have multiracial mass appeal . . . to the worker unschooled in Marxist theory.” Hughes and Conroy were thus united in their desire to democratize socialist and communist literary arts. This democratization was a vital element in increasing black participation in the radical labor movement’s cultural front.
“The Sailor and the Steward,” Hughes’s short story that appears in the May-June 1935 issue, alludes to American labor’s troubled history of anti-blackness and supplies a parable of interracial organizing. Drawing from Hughes’s own experience as a ship hand in the early 1920s, the story takes place on a cargo ship called the Loganderry as it transports commodities from the United States to Africa. The protagonist and titular sailor is Manuel Rojas, an Afro-Cuban ship hand. When Manuel catches the ship’s captain and officers feasting on steak while the crew is fed a rotten seafood stew, he flies into a rage and attacks the ship’s West Indian steward, Manuel’s immediate superior in rank. The captain disciplines Manuel by locking him in the ship’s brig without food or water for at least a day. An unnamed Filipino waiter who also works on the ship finally brings Manuel a meal, but this is not all that he serves to the sailor.
The waiter, who already belongs to a union, provides Manuel with class consciousness and a map for organizing the crew, showing him that lashing out in angry isolation is futile. “The only way to stop the steward,” he advises, “and the company, too, from feeding you slop is for you boys back aft to get together and make one big kick in a bunch. If you don’t belong to a union like we officers do, then form one.” Manuel evolves from a disgruntled, isolated employee to a converted trade unionist who recognizes that his personal struggle is tied to that of his fellow crewmen. The expansion of Manuel’s consciousness is symbolized by a physical change in his perspective. The story begins with Manuel peeking through the brig’s lone porthole: “All that Manuel had seen since the sun came up was that miniature circle of sea water and sky.” His view is limited, his vision blank and dull. At the conclusion, after talking with the unionized Filipino waiter, Manuel has sprouted “beaming eyes” that are full of a horizon of hope and opportunity. He sees the world more vividly and accurately.
Alongside its commentary on the futility of unorganized, atomized strikes against oppression, the story narrates a resolution of ethnic conflict through trade unionism. Manuel begins the story by thinking of himself first as a “Cubano,” separate from other workers because of his nationality. By the end of the story, however, Manuel overcomes his sense of isolation from the other workers and identifies primarily as a “seaman” like the rest.
The initial distrust that Manuel feels toward his Filipino and West Indian crewmates evokes historical labor disputes that spiraled into ethnic violence. These instances would have been tragically familiar to Anvil readers; in 1917, white workers terrorized the Black neighborhoods of East St Louis, killing hundreds and destroying the property of scores more. The massacre began as a factory labor strike whose energy was brutally unleashed onto the Black workers whom the whites’ opportunistic bosses had employed as scabs.
In the preceding issue, Conroy published his own tale, “Down in Happy Hollow.” The story’s grotesque main character, coal miner Monty Cass, informs two young boys who stumble upon his shack that he once killed a man for crossing the picket line. The racialization of scabbing is evident in Monty’s account of his final appeal to the murdered traitor, Jess Gotts. “‘Jess, don’t go! Jess, be a white man!’. I coaxed ’im as nice as I knew how,” says Monty.
While Monty voices what was a painfully common belief — that solidarity was inherent to whiteness while scabbing was a mark of racial inferiority — Hughes’s story depicts unionization entirely driven by and consisting of non-white workers from US colonial territories. By joining a Cuban and Filipino worker in solidarity, Hughes stages an anti-colonial insurrection in miniature. Though Black radicals such as Cedric J. Robinson would later fairly criticize twentieth-century Marxism for its apathy and ignorance toward cultures outside of Europe, Anvil had managed to publish early decolonial Marxist writings like this, and from an unlikely locale.
Moreover, the labor union in Hughes’s story promises to be more successful than the one to which Conroy’s Monty Cass belonged, as the Loganderry crew is able to set aside ethnic differences for a common cause. Instead of persuading Jess Gotts to join the union like Hughes’s Filipino officer is able to do for Manuel, Monty buries an ice pick in Jess’s head. In Conroy’s story, Monty’s race-inflected appeal to Jess ultimately fails, the union is broken by the factory, and one white man has murdered another. Monty’s arc is the inverse of Manuel’s: he begins a union man on strike with his comrades, but his violence and prejudice doom him to a tragic end, alone and unloved on the outskirts of town.
These stories, published in sequential issues, facilitated a dialog on union racism. While other radical periodicals such as New Masses and the earlier Liberator also featured diverse editors and contributors, Anvil uniquely localized leftist politics without demarcating who did and didn’t belong in the Midwest. It’s no coincidence that Richard Wright, who maintained a lifelong correspondence with Conroy, published two of his earliest poems in Anvil when he was still working at a Chicago post office.
In his essay “I Tried to Be a Communist,” a dyspeptic but potent critique of the Communist Party’s attempts to connect with black Americans, Wright recounts reading an issue of Masses featuring a violent cover illustration and revolutionary catchwords: “I looked again at the cover . . . and I knew that the wild cartoon did not reflect the passions of the common people. . . . They had a program, an ideal, but they had not yet found a language.” This same conviction, that communist rhetoric was failing to speak to the people who stood to benefit most from a workers’ revolution, motivated the founding of Anvil.
Even as the magazine folded after three years, and its 1939 revival lasted only one, its success at fashioning an organic socialist language that could appeal to workers close to home can be measured by the litany of writers and artists, both acclaimed and anonymous, who placed their work in the cowbarn rag.
What Comes After Suppression: Lessons for Today
Nearly forty years after the New Anvil went under, Conroy began to reflect on his work in the 1930s. The anti-communist paranoia and suppression of the 1950s had decimated his circle of radicals. Richard Wright was surveilled by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI; Langston Hughes was hounded by G-men and called to testify before Joe McCarthy’s Subcommittee on Investigations to answer for the proletarianism of his 1930s writing. Others, like Conroy’s old friend H. H. Lewis who lived at Rural Route 4, suffered psychological collapse under federal harassment and spiraled into mental illness and delusion. Some trusted comrades turned traitor, such as Whittaker Chambers, an editor of the New Masses and former Soviet spy who accused several leftist literati of espionage. The rest, including Conroy, were forced underground, blacklisted from publishing in most commercially viable outlets.
The tide began to turn in the 1960s as the New Left recovered and rehabilitated the works of the Depression generation. Conroy embarked on campus speaking tours and benefitted from new anthologies of his writings, but in letters he and his confidants mourned the disappearance of the revolutionary energy and focus that distinguished the 1930s.
“We are living in vacuous times — themeless, visionless,” journalist and labor leader Edward J. Falkowski wrote to Conroy in 1976. “There are no longer any great visible leaders in this country in literature or politics or penetrative thinking.” Falkowski’s yearning for a theme and vision to galvanize the masses remains a familiar emotion for leftists today. Then as now, the Left was scattered across disparate and sometimes oppositional interest groups, while the apolitical settled into life oriented around consumerism.
Falkowski commented on the youth of the 1970s,
They’re being robbed of all their faith in social change. . . . And the Labor Movement (so-called) has joined with the fascists in return for a piece of the pie. So the young people say — to hell with it all — and go on to do their own thing . . . in the [Women’s] Lib movement, the Gay movements, Rock and Roll, etc. These movements are really gestures of despair.
While Falkowski failed to recognize the political necessity and triumphs of women’s liberation and gay rights, his larger point is that without a genuinely mass movement organized around a common language, without a radical, internationalist, and uncompromising labor movement, there was little hope to stop nascent neoliberalism in its tracks.
The November 2024 election results made obvious what had already been clear to many leftists. The hollowest form of identity politics, with no capacity to envision an alternative to decaying capitalism — what Falkowski might have called politics of “despair” — has no mass appeal. One of the most pressing tasks for the Left, then, is to communicate with workers in more compelling and less alienating language than both the Democrats and the Republicans. Despite the manifold crises of the present, US socialists now have the opportunity to progress from our overspecialized predecessors and appeal to the multiracial masses desperate for radical change.
Anvil reminds us that the most effective appeals result from a fluid dialogue between workers and intellectuals and the foregrounding of worker-intellectuals, not from closed communication by a distant governing body. Without access to focus groups or statistics, the data on which Anvil operated was the experience that its editor and contributors gained as laborers working in specific places among their inhabitants. In Anvil, the universal resides in the particular. The material for a rejuvenated, contemporary leftist culture surrounds us, in close proximity and crude vigor.
This article is made possible by archives at the Newberry Library and New York University’s Tamiment Library.