Walt Carmon

Walt Carmon (1894-1968) was a magazine editor and writer best known for his years as managing editor of the Communist magazine the New Masses from 1929 to 1932. He also worked for a number of other magazines in smaller roles, which contributed to his becoming something of a frontman for the Midwestern radicals.

Walt Carmon was born in New Jersey, played professional baseball in the midwest, and “spent time in Mexico with [New Masses founder and editor] Mike Gold during World War I” prior to entering the magazine world. He “worked for the Labor Defender (the publication of the Party-led International Labor Defense) and also assisted as circulation manager of the Daily Worker,” on which limited credentials (and a reputation as a midwestern radical) he was hired as managing editor at the New Masses and made the move from Chicago to New York.

Walt Carmon became managing editor for the Communist Party USA-affiliated New Masses in 1929. He was brought on, in part, due to the financial issues the magazine had been dealing with since its inception in 1926. To help confront this problem, he introduced New Masses masquerade balls, held in the fall and the spring. Founder and (since 1928) sole editor Mike Gold’s name remained on the masthead as “editor,” but Carmon was effectively running the magazine, albeit “haphazard[ly].” Gold would show up to the office with less frequency as the Carmon years progressed, but Carmon’s desk contained a drawer filled with “the scented love letters that poured in for Mike Gold.”

Carmon seems to have held a similar view to Mike Gold in regards to the ideal writer for the New Masses; both wanted the proletarian concern to be the primary and sole issue addressed by writers, and both encouraged worker-writer contributors. Carmon commented in an article about Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter that “under its black skin, real proletarian blood” ran through it. A similar sentiment was voiced towards Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth; while he praised her in 1929 for being “a proletarian to the marrow,” he wrote in 1930 that her work was “‘marred…’ because it derived ‘its bias from the bitterness of a woman.’” Carmon’s suggestion that “class is essence” while race and gender (among other factors) are “mere epiphenomenon” has been critiqued by Barbara Foley as problematic for readers and contributors whose concern for the proletarian movement was held together with concerns for other aspects of societal oppression.

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