Background During the decade of the 1910s, Boston was at the time one of the centers of the
foreign language federations of the
Socialist Party of America — organized groups of
immigrants conducting their activities in languages other than English. Many of these foreign language groups, particularly those hailing from the
Russian Empire, were deeply inspired by the
Marxist revolutionary movement which overthrew the
Tsarist regime in 1917. This emerging revolutionary left in the Socialist party sought to advance its ideas through the establishments. The immediate forerunner of
The Revolutionary Age was a newspaper called
The New International, issued n New York under the auspices of the
Socialist Propaganda League. This paper was launched early in 1917, but ran out of funds by summer, forcing its outright suspension from the middle of July until the start of October 1917. The Boston City Committee made the decision to bring
New International editor Louis Fraina from New York City to Boston to take charge of party educational work from that center. Joining Fraina as associate editor was Irish-American radical
Eadmonn MacAlpine. Additional material was dedicated to the ongoing
revolution in Germany, thereby assuring that the issue's whole content lived up to the slogan printed on the publication's masthead — "A Chronicle and Interpretation of Events in Europe." The publication was merged with the organ of the Left Wing Section of Greater New York,
The New York Communist and operations were henceforth conducted from an office located at 43 West 29th Street in Manhattan. The paper was succeeded by the organs of the two new Communist Parties established at Chicago conventions during the first week of September — the
Communist Party of America and the
Communist Labor Party of America. The name
The Revolutionary Age was used again in 1929 as the title of an American communist newspaper by the so-called
Communist Party (Majority Group) headed by
Jay Lovestone. The Lovestone group, which including such veterans of the Left Wing Section
Benjamin Gitlow and
Bertram D. Wolfe, chose to pay homage to the seminal earlier publication by choosing the same name for their own official organ. ==Footnotes==