Seven Arts (literary journal)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The Seven Arts was a literary journal which flourished briefly in 1916-1917. It was edited by James Oppenheim, Waldo Frank, and Van Wyck Brooks. The magazine featured new American writing by figures such as Sherwood Anderson, Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, Eugene O'Neill, and John Dos Passos. The magazine's pacifist editorial stance led to a loss of funding and the magazine ceased publication in 1917, after which it merged with The Dial.
One of the editors, James Oppenheim, later wrote a reminiscence of his one tumultuous year as editor of the journal in which he observed that Randolph Bourne “was the real leader. . . of what brains and creativeness we had at the time and had he lived the ‘twenties might have sparkled much more than they did. Mind you, this young man not only was a cripple, but wheezed in breathing, and was mortally physically afraid most of the time. More than that, he had one fear greater than any other. That was the fear of prison. He could hardly bear the thought of it.” However, Bourne wrote six anti-war articles for the magazine in the teeth of these frailties and fears. Then “the air began to get hot, pro and con, mainly pro” but Oppenheim also found himself the object of surveillance. “The illusion of a ‘free country’ in which I had grown up simply exploded. It was something in those days to know one was shadowed, spied upon, trailed by snoopers, that one must whisper what one thought in a restaurant and even then be sure one’s friend wasn’t going to hand one over to the police. . . . The lying propaganda had something foul and degrading in it. The exultation of the timorous stay-at-homes was rotten and debased. “Enemies Within,” shrieked the old New York Tribune and spat snake’s venom at Bourne and the rest of us.” The circulation was actually climbing when “the inevitable happened. The contract stipulated that there should be no interference from the business side. However, our backer, clerking still [i.e., the rich backer worked as a clerk to dispel her boredom], was mortally terrified not only by the danger we found ourselves in, but by the word treason. She was of good old American stock, and besides, relatives of her’s owned a great food industry. They pressed her hard. She came to me and said we would have to lay off the war, or there would be no more subsidy. There was no more subsidy. . . . But I wouldn’t have missed that year for kingdom come.”
