Jesus and "The Masses"

Dorothy Day worked for The Masses for six months in 1917.  The Masses, the most polished magazine of this genre, George Bellows, Boardman Robinson, and Art Young used Jesus in their cartoons to protest against injustices to workers, the call for peace, the injustice of prejudice and the determination of the industrialists to go to war.  Stripped of supernatural trappings, Jesus’ teachings were a convenient source of authority for their social ideas and the Beatitudes offered a useful cudgel to bludgeon the hypocrisy of the so-called practicing Christians.

Jesus and his teachings had a recurring presence in the radical political conversation in and around Greenwich Village before World War I.  In

Many Villagers knew these teachings well.  Some were children of Protestant clergyman, for instance Max Eastman, the editor of The Masses and an avowed pagan.  The traditional religion they threw off was a strain of Protestantism that equated human success with divine predilection. It was commonly held among them that all strains of American Protestantism ended up emphasizing human success.

The use of the image of Jesus and his teaching seems to be more of a taunt to establishment Christians who in their search for comfort and respectability follow only what they wanted from Jesus's teachings. There is little to refute a thesis that these radicals never had any intention to put this teaching into practice.  They felt no obligation to follow the evangelical counsels or live under any authority. Rather, they selected those passages that suited their political and polemical purposes just as their opponents did.

Poor Jesus, mocked on all sides, but then he went around leaving himself vulnerable.