Common Sense (Vol. II, #3, Sep. 1933) — Alfred M. Bingham & Selden Rodman (Eds.)

September 1933
Edited by Alfred M. Bingham and Selden Rodman
Common Sense Publishing Corporation · New York · 1933
Volume II · Number 3
First Edition · First Printing

The Magazine:
The original September 1933 issue of Common Sense, published during the first year of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency and devoted substantially to arguments for fundamental political and economic reconstruction during the Great Depression. The issue features John Dewey’s “The Imperative Need—A New Radical Party,” Mary Van Kleeck’s “Prosperity Through Scarcity,” Stuart Chase’s “An Engineer’s Report on the Recovery,” and C. Hartley Grattan’s “Grattan on the Liberals,” alongside contributions and editorial material addressing labor, economic planning, public ownership, and independent political organization. Original staple-bound printed self-wrappers retaining the 15¢ cover price.

Condition:
Very Good. Original printed self-wrappers remain complete and firmly attached at the staples, with moderate age toning, scattered edge wear, several small chips, minor corner losses, and a vertical reading crease to the front wrapper. Interior remains clean with no ownership markings observed. Original 15¢ cover price remains present.

Story Of The Magazine

In September 1933, the question was no longer simply how America would recover from the Great Depression. For the writers of Common Sense, the question was whether the political and economic system that produced the crisis deserved to survive it unchanged.

The magazine's name was deliberate. Editors Alfred M. Bingham and Selden Rodman believed they were following in the footsteps of Thomas Paine, borrowing the title of his revolutionary pamphlet for a publication that called for a return to the ideals of 1776 while arguing that a system based on competition for private profit could no longer serve the general welfare.

Franklin Roosevelt had been president for only six months, and the first New Deal programs were already transforming the federal response to economic catastrophe. But Common Sense argued that recovery alone was insufficient. John Dewey made the case explicit in “The Imperative Need—A New Radical Party,” calling for political organization outside the established party system, while Mary Van Kleeck challenged an economy capable of producing abundance while enforcing scarcity and Stuart Chase examined the machinery of recovery itself.

The issue went beyond commentary. Its editorial material promoted the United Conference for Progressive Political Action and printed a proposed “Declaration of Rights” emerging from its Chicago conference.

These writers did not know which parts of the New Deal would succeed or what American politics would look like when the crisis ended. By invoking Paine, they were consciously placing their argument within an older American tradition: when institutions fail badly enough, reform may no longer be the only question on the table.

This is dissent before hindsight: a surviving record of Americans asking whether economic collapse required recovery—or reconstruction.

Why It’s In The Collection

Common Sense, Vol. II, No. 3 belongs in Consigned to Darkness because political dissent matters differently when its alternatives are still genuinely possible.

Today, the New Deal is history. In September 1933, it was an experiment only months old, competing with proposals from across the political spectrum for how the United States should respond to mass unemployment, economic collapse, concentrated private power, and political disillusionment.

This issue preserves one of those competing possibilities in its original form. Dewey and his fellow contributors were not writing retrospective histories of the Depression. They were attempting to influence what came next—advocating independent political organization, labor protections, public ownership, economic planning, and structural reform while those ideas were still actively competing for public acceptance.

Even the magazine's name made that ambition explicit. Bingham and Rodman deliberately invoked Thomas Paine's Common Sense, reaching back to one of America's foundational works of political dissent as a model for confronting another moment when established institutions appeared incapable of answering a national crisis.

That makes the physical magazine more important to the collection than a later anthology containing Dewey's essay. It preserves the argument where it originally lived: surrounded by other writers, editorials, political appeals, and proposals aimed at readers living through the same crisis.

The Depression had broken the economy. Common Sense asked whether Americans should use the opening to rebuild the political order as well.

Collection Categories: Political Dissent · Political Movements · Labor & Economic Justice · Political History · Anti-Authoritarianism · Free Expression · Publication-Event Object · Magazine & Periodical History

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Authentication Evidence

• Front wrapper explicitly identifies the publication as Common Sense.

• Front wrapper states Volume II, Number 3 and September 1933.

• Original printed 15¢ cover price appears at the upper-right corner of the front wrapper.

• Editorial page independently repeats Vol. II, No. 3 · September 1933, confirming correspondence between wrapper and interior issue designation.

• Editorial page identifies Alfred M. Bingham and Selden Rodman as editors.

• Named contributors include Robert S. Allen, Stuart Chase, Henry Hazlitt, Carleton Beals, John Dos Passos, A. J. Muste, John Chamberlain, J. B. S. Hardman, James Rorty, V. F. Calverton, and George Soule.

• Publication statement reads “Copyright, 1933, by Common Sense Publishing Corporation” and gives the publisher’s address as 155 East 44th Street, New York, N.Y.

• Publication statement identifies Common Sense as a monthly publication and records second-class postal entry at New York, consistent with an original periodical issue.

• Contents correspond to the articles advertised on the wrapper, including Dewey’s “The Imperative Need—A New Radical Party,” Van Kleeck’s “Prosperity Through Scarcity,” Chase’s “An Engineer’s Report on the Recovery,” and Grattan’s “Grattan on the Liberals.”

• Continuous internal pagination is present, consistent with the issue’s position within the periodical volume.

• Original staple-bound self-wrapper construction, typography, paper stock, cover pricing, dated masthead, and postal information are mutually consistent.

• No evidence of facsimile reproduction, later reissue, replacement wrappers, or modern reproduction is observed.

• The periodical is bibliographically recorded as Walter Goldwater, Radical Periodicals in America, 1890–1950, No. 45, providing specialist bibliographic corroboration for the publication.

• Taken together, the observed bibliographic and physical evidence supports identification as the original Common Sense · Volume II, Number 3 · September 1933 · First Edition · First Printing.