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ANVIL, THE FORGOTTEN MAGAZINE OF HEARTLAND MARXISM  
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Marc Blanc
February 23, 2025
Jacobin
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_ 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 multiracial socialism in the
heart of the US could hardly be more urgent. _

John C. Rogers, front cover of Anvil, September-October 1934. ,
Courtesy of Newberry Library

 

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

Ahistoric 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.

The Left cannot assemble a majoritarian, working-class coalition
without winning over the nation’s rural and deindustrialized
midlands.

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
[[link removed]] 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”?

_Anvil_’s support of writing by workers, for workers, was a populist
revolt from the village against the East Coast literary
establishment. 

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.

John C. Rogers, Working Class Mother, New Anvil (May-June 1940).
(Courtesy of Newberry Library)

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.

John C. Rogers, Nicolai Lenin, Great Leader of the World Proletariat,
Anvil (May-June 1934). (Courtesy of Newberry Library)

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
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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.

Communist rhetoric was failing to speak to the people who stood to
benefit most from a workers’ revolution.

“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.

John C. Rogers, Mill Town, New Anvil (May-June 1940). (Courtesy of
Newberry Library)

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
[[link removed]] 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
[[link removed]] 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
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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.

Without a radical, internationalist, and uncompromising labor
movement, there was little hope to stop nascent neoliberalism in its
tracks.

“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
[[link removed]] 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.

_MARC BLANC is postdoctoral fellow in English at Washington University
in St Louis. His writing on radical literary history has appeared
in Chicago Review, Belt, History News Network, the New Territory,
and elsewhere._

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