"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."

https://jacobin.com/2025/02/anvil-magazine-midwest-communism-conroy

#USA #Midwest #Missouri #Marxism #DemocraticSocialism #Socialism