Chapter 15: THE FAILURE OF A DREAM: CLAUDE MCKAY AND THE WHITE RADICALS
Claude Mckay's experiences sharply revealed the limitations of interracial comity on the Left, even under conditions of abundant good will on both sides. McKay worked more closely with white leftists than did any other black, including Harrison; because of this, and despite very real interracial friendships, he routinely suffered from racist abuse and political misunderstandings. McKay's career exemplifies important reasons why radicals of both races won so few converts among the black masses. It also symbolizes the sad trajectory of the black intelligentsia during the 1920s. During that decade, social radicalism was increasingly deflected into tepid literary insurgencies that threatened no existing power structures, but bitterly divided Afro-American intellectuals. By the late 1920s the term "New Negro," which had initially connoted a newly militant and radicalized Afro-American community, had been appropriated by literary insurgents and domesticated into a term signifying black writers, many of whom imitated or titillated white voyeurs.
Like so many Harlem radicals, McKay was a West Indian immigrant. Born in Jamaica in 1889, he educated himself in the public schools and his brother's library, and attracted the attention of the well-to-do Englishman Walter Jekyll, who furthered McKay's immersion in classical English literature. Jekyll convinced McKay that the local dialect, which McKay had considered "a vulgar tongue" and "the language of the peasants," was a splendid vehicle for great poetry, and also helped puncture McKay's British patriotism and Christian beliefs. "The villagers now looked at me strangely as one who was among but not really of them," McKay later reminisced, "chiefly because I did not believe in their gods." Jekyll helped McKay publish Songs of Jamaica (1912), a book of strikingly original dialect poems reviewed throughout the English-speaking world, except the United States. This volume brought McKay celebrity and its accompanying "old embarrassment.... People knew that I was a poet, and that made me different, although I wanted so much to be like them. Even my closest friends at home were never the same." McKay also suffered from the misinterpretation of one of his poems, and was distressed when Jekyll, fearing political repercussions, advised against publishing another poem. Moreover, some genteel literati shared McKay's initial opinion that dialect poetry was somehow not genuine art; McKay vowed that he would someday "write poetry in straight English and amaze and confound them."[1] Before he left for the United States, McKay was already suffering from the torments, ambiguities, and conflicted identities that would plague him for the rest of his life.
Despite Jekyll's warnings about the vicious U.S. racial climate, McKay emigrated to the United States in 1912. He took up the study of scientific agriculture, apparently intending, like Garvey, to establish a Tuskegee-like institution in Jamaica. He also sought more vibrant themes and a wider public for his poetry. Repelled by the military discipline at Tuskegee, he quickly transferred to Kansas State College, where studied agriculture. (While McKay studied in Kansas, another short book of his dialect verse, Constab Ballads, was published in Jamaica.) With money provided by Jekyll, he moved to New York, where he married and started a small restaurant. Both of these ventures disintegrated almost immediately, his wife returning to Jamaica and his restaurant going broke.[2] McKay quickly became very secretive about both his marriage and his brief venture into petty-bourgeois capitalism.
Like other West Indian immigrants, McKay entered the United States with both a class consciousness inculcated by the class-saturated atmosphere of Jamaica and a relatively weak awareness of race. His arrival in the United States, he said, was the "first time I had ever come face to face with such manifest, implacable hate of my race, and my feelings were indescribable.... At home there is also prejudice of the English sort, subtle and dignified, rooted in class distinction--color and race being hardly taken into account." The United States was characterized by "primitive animal hatred" toward blacks manifested by "daily murders of a nature most hideous and revolting." McKay wrote that "I soon found myself hating in return but this feeling couldn't last long for to hate is to be miserable."[3]
McKay had undoubtedly read prominent Fabian Socialists, such as George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, as a youth in Jamaica; he may also have associated with white Socialist students in Kansas. By 1918 he was clearly aware of the class dimensions and international implications of race prejudice, manifest "in different ways... all over the world. Whites were exploiting and oppressing whites even as they exploited and oppressed the yellows and blacks. And the oppressed, groaning under the lash, evinced the same despicable hate and harshness toward their weaker fellows." The world war revealed the "hollowness of nationhood, patriotism, racial pride and most of the things which one was taught to respect and reverence." McKay perceived literature as both a protest against and an escape from such harsh realities. "I ceased to think of people and things in the mass," he said. "Why should I fight with mad dogs only to be bitten and probably transformed into a mad dog myself? I turned to the individual soul, the spiritual leaders, for comfort and consolation. I felt and still feel that one must seek for the noblest and best in the individual life only: each soul must save itself."[4] Nevertheless, his early poetry was saturated with racial themes, and constituted an implicit--and often explicit--protest against white racism and imperialism.
McKay worked at the odd jobs for which blacks were hired--"porter, houseman, janitor, butler, waiter,--anything that came handy. The life was different and fascinating," and McKay avidly imbibed it all. "My writing makes it possible for me to stand being a slave on a lousy job," he told a friend; indeed, menial jobs which kept his hands busy left his mind free for contemplation.[5] McKay published two poems in the final (October 1917) issue of Seven Arts, just before its patron, angered by its antiwar stance, withdrew its subsidy. "Invocation" recalled the lost glories of African civilization before white despoliation, and hoped for its revival, "so I may be, thine exiled counterpart/ The worthy singer of my world and race." McKay expressed the alienation that often underlay ostensible black happiness in "The Harlem Dancer." He marveled at the dancer's "perfect, half-clothed body sway" but concluded that "looking at her falsely-smiling face,/ I knew her self was not in that strange place." Both poems appeared under a pseudonym since McKay worked at a club frequented by literary women and "as I was a good enough waiter I did not care to be discovered as a poet there." Shortly afterward he took a job as a waiter on the Pennsylvania railroad--a job which he kept through the "Red Summer" anti-black pogroms of 1919--and composed verses in his spare time.[6] Afraid of ridicule and ostracism, he carefully concealed his poetic vocation from his fellow waiters. A cautious concealment of his genuine self--often even of his name--had become second nature.
Between railroad forays, McKay met his literary idol Frank Harris, editor of Pearson's Magazine, who published five of McKay's poems and a short autobiographical essay in the September 1918 issue. However, Harris criticized a conventional and tepid McKay poem protesting lynching as an "anti-climax" after the horrific East St. Louis pogrom. Harris read McKay a Milton sonnet of vengeance and hate and predicted that "someday you will rip [a poem expressing your real feelings] out of your guts." He also advised that McKay write prose, which he considered a more mature art form than poetry. "You are an African," he admonished McKay. "You must accomplish things, for yourself, for your race, for mankind, for literature. But it must be literature." This advice directly contradicted that of Stanley Braithwaite, the nationally known literary critic for the Boston Transcript. Braithwaite, the only Afro-American prominent in the white literary world, advised McKay to submit for publication "only such poems as did not betray [his] racial identity." Braithwaite himself had succeeded precisely by carefully concealing his own background in both his verse and his criticism. McKay, however, felt that poetry was subjective and self-expressive; the best poets inexorably revealed themselves in their verse, and "likewise I could not realize myself writing without conviction."[7]
The Masses, which McKay read regularly, rejected some of his poems, but in April 1919 its successor, the Liberator, published "The Dominant White," an incendiary poem denouncing white mass murder, rape, and oppression of the darker races.[8] Crystal Eastman, then managing editor, asked McKay to stop by the office. The two hit it off instantly, and became lifelong friends; her brother Max--who also became a close friend and literary advisor--published a large selection of McKay's poetry in the July 1919 issue. Eastman's introduction (which, incidentally, did not capitalize the word "Negro"), indicated that McKay, contrary to his own hopes, would be presented and evaluated in racial terms. Eastman enthused that McKay had "a greater and more simple and strong gift of poetry than any other of his race has had." As a waiter in a dining car McKay had seen and understood "a great many things... with a bold and unhesitating mind" and had arrived as a poet "practically without encouragement or critical help."[9]
The spread began with "The Negro Dancers," which, offering a strikingly different view of the subject from McKay's earlier "The Harlem Dancer," virtually encapsulated the theme of his later novel, Home to Harlem. The laughter and dance reveals "the deathless spirit of a race":
Not one false step, no note that rings not true!
Unconscious even of the higher worth
Of their great art, they serpent-wise glide through
The syncopated waltz. Dead to the earth
And her unkindly ways of toil and strife
For them the dance is the true joy of life.
And yet they are the outcasts of the earth,
A race oppressed and scorned by ruling men;
How can they thus consent to joy and mirth
Who live beneath a world-eternal ban?
......
But, oh! they dance with poetry in their eyes
Whose dreary loveliness no sorrow dims....[10]
"After the Winters" was a poem of nature and love; "The Barrier" condemned the prohibition of a black man so much as gazing upon a white woman; "The Little Peoples" protested that the small nations, if white, were freed by the world war, but Africans, "less than the trampled dust.... The white world's burden must forever bear." McKay concluded "A Capitalist at Dinner" with the wish that if such bloated oppressors ruled, "Let human beings perish from the earth."[11]
The selection ended with two powerful poems protesting lynching. "A Roman Holiday" depicted white men torturing black men and ripping babies from the wombs of pregnant black women. The pièce de résistance, toward which the poems had been building, was "If We Must Die," the poem that made McKay famous throughout the black world. Based on his experience as a railroad waiter during the "Red Summer" of 1919, during which he and his railroad coworkers faced danger in every city they visited, "If We Must Die" appeared during the very month of the District of Columbia and Chicago race riots, in which blacks fought back against their white attackers. The only one of his poems which he had read to his railroad co-workers (to tearful acclaim), "If We Must Die" advocated armed self-defense against white terrorists.
If we must die--let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die--oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but--fighting back![12]
This was the poem Harris had demanded McKay write, and Harris was incensed when McKay published it in the Liberator. But Eastman insisted that it appear with McKay's other poems. Meanwhile, Domingo, writing in the Messenger, heralded this poem as expressing the new mood of the younger generation of blacks. "New Negroes are determined to make their dying a costly investment for all concerned," Domingo said. "If they must die, they are determined... that some of their oppressors shall be their companions.... [Their] creed is admirably summed up in the poem of Claude McKay."[13] By this time McKay had quit his railroad job and taken work at a factory, where he joined the IWW. He had also become close friends with Harrison. McKay, therefore, was rapidly becoming involved in the American revolutionary movement and simultaneously tasting his first success as a poet. At this time, however, a wealthy white admirer offered him funds for a journey to England, which McKay accepted with alacrity. He remained in England for one and a half years, affiliating himself with Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Dreadnought, on the extreme left wing of English radicalism, even as he continued publishing verse in mainstream venues.
In England, McKay frequented the International Socialist Club (ISC), composed mostly of foreign denizens of the far-flung British Empire. He learned much from his fellow members and from speakers. "For the first time I found myself in an atmosphere of doctrinaire and dogmatic ideas in which people devoted themselves entirely to the discussion and analysis of social events from a radical and Marxian point of view," he later said. "The contact stimulated me and broadened my social outlook and plunged me into the reading of Karl Marx.... I felt intellectually inadequate and decided to educate myself." McKay found Marx difficult and more of an abstruse theoretician than the "torch-burning prophet of social revolution" at home on "the street corners from which I had so often heard his gospel preached." McKay was not sure that he fully understood the intricacies of Marxian theory; however, he was confident that he mastered "the essential stuff." (A comrade on the Workers' Dreadnought edited his articles, making them "more effectively radical.") McKay also frequented a government-sponsored club for colored soldiers and attempted (without much success) to interest its members in radical social thought.[14]
Pankhurst had republished (apparently without his consent) some of McKay's poems in her Workers' Dreadnought even before his arrival in England. In early 1920, she published a seminal McKay essay, "Socialism and the Negro." Beginning with an orthodox, class-based analysis of American racism and its black opponents, McKay charged that the capitalists deliberately inculcated race hatred in both races to divide the working class. The NAACP had done some good work, but it relied upon moral suasion in the South and demanded mostly the admission of cultured, educated Afro-Americans "into white society on equal terms" (rather than freedom for the black masses). Black professionals, however, would never prosper until the black masses had adequate purchasing power and overcame their race-deprecating doubts about the abilities of their professional brethren. Racial discrimination, he added, "would be impossible... under a soviet system of Government."[15]
McKay entered relatively uncharted territory when he discussed Garvey's African Communities League and UNIA, hailed by the black masses of the world "as the star of hope, the ultimate solution of their history-old troubles." The launching of the Black Star Line had inspired blacks everywhere, and governments left the UNIA unmolested because it was not Socialist. In an analysis doubtless influenced both by Harrison and by McKay's contacts with Irish revolutionaries (many of whom were both fervent nationalists and staunch Socialists), McKay said that "although an international Socialist, I am supporting the [Garvey] movement, for I believe that, for subject peoples, at least, Nationalism is the open door to Communism. Furthermore, I will try to bring this great army of awakened workers over to the finer system of Socialism." McKay's stance was also fully consistent with that of the Dreadnought, which supported Irish revolutionaries.[16]
Opposing English Communists who dismissed the Irish and Indian national movements on the grounds that they represented mere bourgeois nationalism, McKay insisted that "the British Empire is the greatest obstacle to International Socialism" and that the revolt of any of its subjugated peoples would promote international Communism. "No people who are strong enough to throw off an imperial yoke will tamely submit to a system of local capitalism," McKay said. "The breaking up of the British Empire must either begin at home or abroad; the sooner the strong blow is struck the better it will be for all Communists. Hence the English revolutionary workers should not be unduly concerned over the manner in which the attack should begin." McKay, however, suspected that some so-called Communist internationalists favored a "Socialist" British Empire which would provide "cheap raw materials" extorted from "the slaves of Asia and Africa."[17]
The Workers' Dreadnought published many poems, articles, and book reviews by McKay (some under pseudonyms); but a clash with George Lansbury, editor of the Socialist newspaper, the London Daily Herald brought an offer of a staff position on the Dreadnought. Lansbury had published sensational articles alleging the rape of white German women by black French troops stationed in Germany. Lansbury ignored McKay's scathing reply, whereupon McKay turned to the Workers' Dreadnought, which published it. White troops routinely committed acts of rape, he wrote, as was proved by the great numbers of mixed-race children born in white-controlled Africa. "If the black troops are syphilitic, they have been contaminated by the white world," he said. French Socialists must oppose their government's depredations against the workers of Germany, but not by inciting race hatred. Race-baiting articles would only "further strife and blood-spilling between whites and the many members of my race, boycotted economically and socially, who have been dumped down on English docks since the ending of the European War."[18]
As a staff journalist on the Dreadnought, McKay learned "a little practical journalism... A little more schooling, a few more lessons--learning something from everything--keeping the best in my mind for future creative work." He was now securely ensconced in the "nest of extreme radicalism in London," affiliated also with Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation, on whose behalf he stood on London street corners selling Communist literature. (At the behest of Harrison, he also wrote some articles for Garvey's Negro World until he learned that it would not pay for his contributions.) In addition to publishing his own articles and poems, McKay solicited the work of others, discovering a dissident sailor in the Royal Navy who wrote a series of articles exposing squalid conditions aboard ship. These articles evoked a police raid, during which McKay smuggled the original texts out of the Dreadnought office and destroyed them. Pankhurst, however, received a six-month prison term.[19]
However involved in radical politics, McKay did not abandon literature. "I had not neglected the feeling of poetry, even while I was listening to Marxian expositions at the International Club and had become involved in radical activities," he later reminisced. "A little action was a nice stimulant for another lyric." He published twenty-three poems (none of them radical poems from the Dreadnought) in the prestigious Cambridge Magazine and prepared for the release of his collection, Spring in New Hampshire, from which, upon the advice of his English publisher, he omitted "If We Must Die." Despite this omission, Harrison, writing in the Negro World, said that "without any aid from Negro editors or publications, [McKay] made his way because white people who noted his gifts were eager to give him a chance while Negro editors, as usual, were either too blind to see or too mean-spirited to proclaim [those gifts] to the world."[20]
While McKay's experience in the British radical movement was highly positive, the shadow of racism hovered forever over him. Even at the International Socialist Club he encountered racist barbs; McKay brought charges against one member for inciting race hatred. He could never relax his guard. In 1920 McKay wrote to a friend "I approach the whole crowd [at the ISC] from the critical artistic standpoint--only to measure and weigh and discount them." McKay's art would depict and comment on reality, rather than idealizing the revolutionary movement. His personal interview with George Bernard Shaw was also in one respect a disappointment, although not one without precedent. Even Frank Harris had told McKay--and this amid the latest European bloodbath--that Africans had little respect for human life (a remark that McKay had diplomatically ignored). Shaw displayed an equal racial obtuseness when he solicitously asked McKay why he had chosen poetry over pugilism (a stereotypical black avocation). McKay gamely responded that "poetry had picked me as a medium instead of my picking poetry as a profession."[21] Later, however, he ironically entitled a chapter in his autobiography "Pugilist vs. Poet," and remarked that, given British prejudice against black boxers, the black poet might have the advantage.[22] Shaw refused McKay's request that he write an introduction for Spring in New Hampshire, saying that McKay's poems must stand or fall on their own merits.
McKay endured no racial slights on the Dreadnought, but he did suffer occasional rebuffs. Pankhurst rejected McKay's important exposé of George Lansbury's use of scab labor against striking workers, citing her reliance on Lansbury's past and present assistance. As McKay later mused, "there are items which the capitalist press does not consider fit to print for capitalist reasons and items which the radical press does not consider fit to print for radical reasons." Pankhurst also criticized McKay's praise for labor leader Robert Smillie as contravening her policy favoring rank-and-file workers over their official leaders.[23]
McKay must also have felt distress at Pankhurts's encounters with the dictatorial Third International. Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation (WSF) stressed industrial over political action much like the IWW. Pankhurst herself, while favoring affiliation with the Third International, balked at its demand that all leftist groups unite with the reformist Labour party. McKay attended the founding convention of the British Communist Party, in which the WSF was in opposition. (After some resistance, Pankhurst finally capitulated. But after her release from prison, she repudiated the Third International in favor of retaining autonomy for her magazine.) Finally, a police raid which arrested a secret Comintern agent working for the Dreadnought (the very comrade who had stiffened McKay's articles) evoked suspicion (justified, as it turned out) that the publication harbored a police spy. No one, including Pankhurst and McKay, was immune from corrosive distrust. The consequent reign of paranoia upset McKay, who decided upon a return to the United States. An IWW friend helped raise the necessary funds.[24]
Upon returning to New York in 1921, McKay exulted that he was once again "just one black among many... lost in the shadows of Harlem."[25] However, he was soon immersed in the nearly all-white milieu of the Liberator. While in England, McKay had remained in contact with his American comrades and had published four poems in the Liberator. When he returned, Max Eastman offered him a job as associate editor. McKay used this platform as a vehicle to enlighten white radicals about Afro-American racial concerns. He also resumed his friendship with Harrison and joined Briggs's African Blood Brotherhood, furthering its efforts to inject a class-conscious radicalism into the UNIA.
McKay informed the Liberator about the combination of social radicalism and nationalism that characterized the Irish revolutionary movement and about the disdain shown for the Irish by many English revolutionaries. McKay said that he sympathized even with the Irish bourgeoisie. "I suffer with the Irish.... My belonging to a subject race entitles me to some understanding of them.... They think, as do all subject peoples with foreign soldiers and their officers lording it over them, that even the exploited English proletariat are their oppressors." And English workers did indeed "merrily ship munitions and men across the Channel for the shooting of their Irish brothers." Although British racism made the Irish of all classes intensely nationalistic, McKay believed that "the Irish revolution--nationalistic though it is--is an entering wedge directed straight to the heart of British capitalism."[26]
McKay said that "it is with the proletarian revolutionists of the world that my whole spirit revolts." However, his own situation was worse than that of his white fellow workers:" Besides being an economic slave as they, I am what they are not--a social leper, of a race outcast from an outcast class." Despite the chasm between the races, McKay continued, "I see no other way of upward struggle for colored peoples, but the way of the working-class movement, ugly and harsh though some of its phases may be. None can be uglier and harsher than the routine existence of the average modern worker. The yearning of the American Negro especially, can only find expression and realization in the class struggle." Despite the occasional black professional, capitalism and white supremacy place "the entire Negro race alongside the lowest section of the white working class." These two groups were "fighting for identical things. They fight along different lines simply because they are not as class-conscious and intelligent as the ruling classes they are fighting." McKay warned white radicals that racial oppression solidified race consciousness among blacks (and whites) to the exclusion of class consciousness. "When an American Negro is proscribed on account of his color," McKay said, "when the lynching fever seizes the South and begins to break out even in the North, the black race feels and thinks as a unity" and loses all "sense of its unity as a class--or as a part, rather, of the American working class.... The Negro must acquire class consciousness. And the white workers must accept him and work with him, whether they object to his color and morals or not. For his presence is to them a menacing reality."[27]
McKay revealed his incendiary views on Afro-American life and art--later embodied in Home to Harlem and other novels that would generate unending controversy among Afro-American intellectuals--in his review of Shuffle Along, an all-Negro revue. Shuffle Along, McKay said, "somewhat conflicts with my international intelligence and entices me to become a patriotic barker for my race." McKay assailed the effete, respectable Afro-American intelligentsia that disdained such shows as demeaning to the race. In terms resembling Chandler Owen's praise of the interracial cabarets, McKay denounced the
convention-ridden and head-ossified Negro intelligentsia, who censure colored actors for portraying the inimitable comic characteristics of Negro life, because they make white people laugh! Negro artists will be doing a fine service to the world, maybe greater than the combined action of all the white and black radicals yelling revolution together, if by their efforts they can spirit the whites away from lynching and inbred prejudice, to the realm of laughter and syncopated motion.[28]
George Lansbury had brought the American Southern Orchestra into the very heart of English race riots, which dissipated under impulse of "syncopated songs." Song and laughter, McKay asserted, bound the races together in terms of shared enjoyment.[29]
McKay lamented that the absence of authentic Afro-American performances meant that whites turned to inferior "bastard exhibitions," white imitators of Negro life and song. Afro-American servility and fear of white criticism had corrupted black critical judgment. Negro critics declared that Negro art
must be dignified and respectable like the Anglo-Saxon's before it can be good. The Negro must get the warmth, color and laughter out of his blood, else the white man will sneer at him and treat him with contumely. Happily, the Negro retains his joy of living in the teeth of such criticism; and in Harlem, along Fifth and Lenox avenues, in Marcus Garvey's Hall with its extravagant paraphernalia, in his churches and cabarets, he expresses himself with a zest that is yet to be depicted by a true artist.[30]
While Shuffle Along did adopt many of the conventions of white Broadway theatre, McKay denied that this lessened its value as an authentic expression of Afro-American life. In an implicit slap at Garvey, McKay said that Afro-Americans, "who by an acquired language and suffering, are closer knit together than all the many tribes of Africa, alien to each other by custom and language, cannot satisfy the desire of the hypercritical whites for the Congo wriggle, the tribal war jig, and the jungle whoop. The chastisement of civilization has sobered and robbed them of these unique manifestations. American Negroes have not the means and leisure to tour Africa for ancestral wonders.... The conventions of Shuffle Along are those of Broadway, but the voice is nevertheless indubitably Africa expatriate." McKay did criticize the show for its very light-skinned chorus, which should have represented the "diversity of shades" among Afro-Americans and thus given "more distinction and realism" to the performance.[31]
McKay and other Afro-American radicals hoped that they could capture the UNIA for their class-conscious radical movement. When these efforts failed (the ABB having been unceremoniously expelled from the UNIA) and Garvey was indicted for mail fraud, McKay publicly criticized "the Negro Moses," even while acknowledging his tremendous success in galvanizing Afro-American militance. In Harlem Garvey "struck the black belt like a cyclone;" the Black Star Line "had an electrical effect upon all the Negro peoples of the world--even the black intelligentsia." While other black leaders hardly made a dent in white opinion, McKay said, "Garvey succeeded in bringing the Associated Press to its knees every time he bellowed. And his words were trumpeted round the degenerate pale-face world trembling with fear of the new Negro."[32]
Although Garvey's spirit was revolutionary, McKay wrote, he did not understand "modern revolutionary developments," ignoring industrial unions and criticizing integrated organizations such as the SP and the NAACP. Garvey also talked of Africa "as if it were a little island in the Caribbean Sea. Ignoring all geographical and political divisions, he gives his followers the idea that vast continent of diverse tribes consists of a large homogeneous nation of natives struggling for freedom and waiting for the Western Negroes to come and help them drive out the European exploiters."[33]
McKay charged that Garvey inflicted "five years of stupendous vaudeville" upon the Afro-American community. He criticized Garvey's racist preference for dark skin (a predilection which McKay partly shared), his dictatorial tendencies, his floating of unseaworthy boats, and his comical claim that he could harness "African mysteries"; but in the end he recognized Garvey as "the biggest popularizer of the Negro problem, especially among Negroes, since Uncle Tom's Cabin."[34] Sadly, McKay did not analyze the main reasons for Garvey's popularity--the white terrorism and violence that rendered class consciousness self-defeating among black workers and other plans for black liberation as illusory as Garvey's schemes. Indeed, McKay and his black Communist cohorts hardly recognized the reasons for their own failure among the black masses who flocked under Garvey's banner.
McKay not only rejected American racism; he denounced American civilization in toto in his review of John Dos Passos's novel, Three Soldiers. McKay characterized the American government as "a state whose energy is organized to make money on a vast scale to the exclusion of every individual and social ideal of man." Chesterfield, one of the novel's main characters, epitomized
the highest composite type of the United States civilization. A strong, sentimental ape-man who refuses to use his intellect under any circumstances and touches everything that is fine in civilized life... with the hand of the brute. In him is embodied the new war-strengthened America that means to trample on all the cultural values of life, in the West Indies, the Philippines, Europe and the East, armed with Yankee bluff and money-power. He is the terrible vital soul of lynching, mob chivalry, the posse, rough-house movies, Billy Sundayism, strike-breaking firms, state constabularies, election-campaign thugs, the American Legion, pulpit pimps, the Hearst headlines, the Trusts and Wall Street.[35]
Death, McKay implied, was vastly preferable to such a life.
Yet in a prophetic article, McKay rejected exile in Europe as a suitable option for a black artist. Europe lacked America's virulent racism. "But for all its twilight charm, old Europe is no haven for a young, striving American Negro," McKay said, virtually predicting his own future. "After a while he will tire even of kindly, but unrelieved pale-pink faces, and his heart will turn with sad longing to the dark limited areas of his own country. He will see through a mist, soft and indefinable, their colorful loveliness, and yield to the irresistible call to return to his own, to laugh and struggle and hope with them."[36] McKay, however, could not merge into the black masses in America any more than he could in Jamaica; he would remain truly "a long way from home" wherever he was.
As an editor of the Liberator, McKay became close friends with many whites, notably Crystal and Max Eastman.[37] Yet McKay's presence in the very center of an otherwise all-white radical milieu exposed him to contumely and abuse, despite the best intentions of the other Liberator editors. "When I went to work on the Liberator I knew that I would have to face social problems even greater than before," McKay later said, "but I was determined to face them out. But what happened to me hurt more because it came from an unexpected source." The magazine's theatre critic having left for the season, McKay "elected myself dramatic critic by acclamation" and attended a performance of Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped at the avant-garde Theatre Guild. McKay anticipated a good seat at the front of the theatre in the Press section, but when he and his white friend and Liberator artist William Gropper presented their tickets, the usher (confused and incredulous that a black and white man would attend together) confiscated them, hurriedly consulted the manager, and shunted both men into the balcony. "Suddenly the realization came to me," McKay wrote in the Liberator. "I had come here as a dramatic critic, a lover of the theatre, and a free soul. But--I was abruptly reminded--those things did not matter. The important fact, with which I was suddenly slapped in the face, was my color. I am a Negro.... I had come to see a tragic farce--and I found myself unwittingly the hero of one. He who got slapped was I."[38]
McKay took consolation in his recognition that the forces which fostered racism were not eternal, and would be destroyed. Despite his humiliation he rationalized the Theatre Guild's conduct:
Big business thrives on color lines and race differences. Its respectable institutions and criminal governments draw strength and power from race hatreds, class distinctions and social insults and discriminations against Negroes. I know the mighty world forces that reach out to control even such organizations as the tiny Theatre Guild that are doubtless, so far as they can be, radical.... I know the cruel competition of the theatre business. I know that most of the productions are financial failures.
McKay, therefore, would not "ask any business, however exquisitely artistic, however moral and aloof from the market, to shoulder the burden of the Negro race."[39]
Consumed with rage, McKay could not enjoy the performance. Unconsoled when the Theatre Guild telephoned the Liberator and explained the necessity for its policy, he exclaimed:
Poor, painful black face, intruding into the holy places of the whites. How like a specter you haunt the pale devils! Always at their elbow, always darkly peering through the window, giving them no rest, no peace. How they burn up their energies trying to keep you out! How apologetic and uneasy they are, yes, even the best of them, poor devils, when you force an entrance, blackface, facetiously, incorrigibly smiling or disturbingly composed. Shock them out of their complacency, blackface, make them uncomfortable, make them unhappy! Give them no peace, no rest. How can they bear your presence, blackface, great, unappeasable ghost of Western civilization![40]
McKay's hurt and estrangement was magnified by the conduct of the Liberator staff, which, however sympathetic, took no concrete action against the offending theatre. Joseph Freeman, who soon replaced McKay at the Liberator, later commented that "no boycott or demonstration was organized against the theatre which humiliated a gifted poet and through him his entire people." Incredibly, McKay (who similarly vastly romanticized his vagabond existence in Marseilles) later asserted "many a white wretch, baffled and lost in his civilized jungles, is envious of the toiling, easy-living Negro."[41] This statement was certainly belied by the horror he had just endured; but it represented a contradiction that forever informed his art. Home to Harlem, Banana Bottom, and Banjo would exemplify the theme that blacks, however oppressed, retained the gift of enjoying life.
The American caste system intruded even into the intimate relations of McKay and his white friends. Eastman, for example, could not fully understand the humiliations blacks faced in routine public situations. In his autobiography McKay described his feelings about a particularly lacerating incident in which he and some white friends were driving about and wanted to stop for a meal, but found no restaurant that would serve them together. Finally a restaurant allowed them to dine at a servants' table amidst the heat, noise, and garbage of the kitchen. "It was one of the most miserable meals I ever ate," McKay remembered. "I felt not only my own humiliation, but more keenly the humiliation that my presence had forced upon my friends... I did not want friends to make such sacrifices for me. If I had to suffer in hell, I did not want to make others suffer for me." On a similar occasion Eastman remarked, "If I were a Negro I couldn't be anything but a revolutionist!"--which McKay thought frivolous.[42] Eastman probably regarded the entire situation as something of an adventure, an initiation into an aspect of life virtually unknown to him. He, of course, could dine in any restaurant whenever he wished, as long as he was not accompanied by McKay. Nothing McKay could do, however, would make him welcome. This incident symbolized the chasm that separated Eastman from McKay--a chasm that neither of them wanted, and yet neither could fully surmount. Only earnest communication could begin to assuage the devastations inflicted by the pervasive racism of American life. But Eastman and McKay did not discuss their feelings about the incident with each other.
McKay certainly did not communicate the depth of his alienation and resentment. Sometimes, giving no reason, he would refuse invitations from his white friends. "I did not always like to intrude the fact of my being a black problem among whites," he later said. "For, being born and reared in the atmosphere of white privilege, my friends were for the most part unconscious of black barriers. In their happy ignorance they would lead one into the traps of insult.... No white person, however sympathetic, can feel fully the corroding bitterness of color discrimination." Eastman, for his part, was surprised by what he considered McKay's occasional outbursts of "unaccountably spiteful behavior."[43] But Eastman (as he himself acknowledged) simply could not sufficiently identify with McKay. McKay, unsurprisingly, recognized the problem. He viewed segregation as "the most powerful instrument in the world" for preventing "rapprochement and understanding between different groups of people.... Ultimately it can destroy even the most devoted friendship. Only super-souls among the whites can maintain intimate association with colored people against the insults and insinuations of the general white public and even the colored public. Yet no white person, however sympathetic, can fully feel the corroding bitterness of color discrimination."[44] McKay's lacerating experience with Eastman was not exceptional; Mike Gold later said that when he and McKay associated in New York, "we were always being thrown out of restaurants. Once, for race reasons, we were thrown out of a chop suey house by an indignant Chinese!"[45]
A revealing difference in the racial situations of Eastman and McKay was highlighted when McKay invited Eastman to an all-black cabaret. McKay later recounted that "I had become so familiar with Max Eastman, and his ideas and ways were so radically opposed to the general social set-up of white-without-black, that it was impossible to feel about him as a black does about a white alien. And I was such a good and regular customer of Ned's that I thought he would waive his rule for me. But I thought wrong that time.... [Max] said he was happy that there was one place in Harlem that had the guts to keep white people out."[46] Eastman could respond with equanimity to his exclusion, for, as he fully recognized, it was very rare. McKay, however, could at any time find himself, and his white companions, ignominiously evicted from any public establishment without warning.
Although Eastman struggled tenaciously to transcend the racist structures of American society, an incident in his own home revealed the obstacles he confronted. The Liberator held an informal reception for H.G. Wells, despite Wells's racist and imperialist views. This itself was an unintentional, but common, slap at McKay; in an era of pervasive racism even on the Left, white radicals could hardly repudiate Socialist luminaries, whatever their racial views. Yet McKay suffered an additional indignity when Charlie Chaplin's southern companion, Neysa McMein, ruined the party when she discovered that McKay "was a guest and not a servant in Max Eastman's house." Undaunted, Eastman later read her some of McKay's poems without disclosing the poet's identity. "She expressed great appreciation and a desire to buy a book of some of them," McKay later reported. But when Eastman triumphantly revealed that the author was none other than the black man whose presence at the party McMein had resented, she remained obstinate in her bigotry. "She did not like the verses any less or the idea of my equal association with whites any more," McKay said.[47] This incident shows that Eastman would push the limits in undermining the racism even of associates; but it also reveals his lack of success. Indeed, the New York police violently broke up an interracial Liberator ball because, in McKay's words, they "were aghast at the spectacle of colored persons mixed with white in a free fraternal revel."[48] (Garvey, as related above, misrepresented this imbroglio for his own purposes.) When the entire social, legal, and economic structure denigrated blacks as inferior and besmirched the reputations of any whites who risked association with them, how could the relatively puny efforts of isolated individuals bridge the chasm?
McKay also found himself embroiled in literary and political controversies on the Liberator. Such uproars were not at all unusual--in a sense they constituted the lifeblood of the magazine--yet in McKay's case they often acquired racial overtones. For instance, McKay clashed with Robert Minor over the merits of some early verses by e.e. cummings that McKay advocated publishing in a special two-page spread. In McKay's later account, Minor said "that if I liked such poems I was more of a decadent than a social revolutionist. I protested that the verses were poetry, and that in any work of art my natural reaction was more for its intrinsic beauty than for its social significance. I said that my social sentiments were strong, definite and radical, but that I kept them separate from my aesthetic emotions, for the two were different and should not be mixed up." This was a purely literary disagreement; even Eastman was not enthusiastic about the verses. The Liberator printed a few, but did not highlight them. But Minor (a Texas native) raised the stakes when he charged that McKay was not "a real Negro."[49]
On another occasion, Eastman chanced by the Liberator offices when McKay, Minor, and the Harlem black radicals (including Harrison, Domingo, Briggs, Moore, Huiswood, and Grace Campbell) were discussing strategies for radicalizing the UNIA. Eastman jocularly said, "Ah, you conspirators!" However, fearing Justice Department repression (he had already endured two trials under the Espionage Act), Eastman asked that McKay hold such meetings elsewhere--a request which angered and offended McKay.[50]
Eastman and McKay, however, were not only close friends, but also artistic collaborators who shared political and literary tastes. Eastman was a political revolutionary who esteemed "art for art's sake," championed traditional rhymed and metered poetry against avant-garde verse, and denounced the priggish, artificial refinement of much contemporary literature. Although he strongly favored literature with social themes, he condemned propaganda that masqueraded as literature. He deeply regretted the lack of high-quality revolutionary verse. "There just wasn't any blending of poetry with revolution," he lamented. "Nobody wrote revolutionary poetry that was any good." Eastman himself tried but failed. "It just happens that political emotions did not move me to write poetry.... It was a limitation of my nature that I would occasionally try to overpass. But there's no use trying to write poetry." Eastman suspected that he failed because his political emotions were "less profound, less organic, less clear perhaps, less wholly myself."[51]
Because Eastman and McKay shared such artistic and political predilections, they developed a warm literary and personal friendship. McKay, in fact, almost perfectly embodied Eastman's own ideal of a literary artist. McKay was a member of the working class and a revolutionary; he crafted magnificent poems of revolt as well as lyrics of love and nature; he used classical forms such as the sonnet; and he gave white readers vivid intimations of a universe previously unknown to them. Unlike Eastman, he could write highly charged, authentic protest poetry from the heart, rather than out of a sense of political duty. Introducing McKay's Harlem Shadows (1922), Eastman extolled his friend as embodying the ideal of a poet simultaneously expressing individual, racial, and universal themes. Eastman also expressed the very stereotypes about blacks which McKay himself shared:
Here for the first time we find our literature vividly enriched by a voice from this most alien race among us. And it should be illuminating to observe that while these poems are characteristic of that race as we most admire it--they are gentle-simple, candid, brave, and friendly, quick of laughter and of tears--yet they are still more characteristic of what is deep and universal in mankind.... The subject of all poetry is the experience of the poet, and no man of any other race in the world can touch or imagine the experience of the children of African slaves in America.[52]
McKay, Eastman continued, "found himself by an instinctive gravitation singing in the forefront of the battle for human liberty.... He knew that his voice belonged not only to his own moods and the general experience of humanity, but to the hopes and sorrows of his race." McKay had dropped out of college and "cast in his lot with the working-class Negroes of the north"; he "has earned his living in every one of the ways that northern Negroes do." Eastman compared McKay to Catullus and Villon "and all the poets that we call lyric because we love them so much.... It is the poetry of life, and not of the poet's chamber."[53]
When Michael Gold raised a rebellion against Eastman's editorship, alleging that Eastman was insufficiently revolutionary, Eastman--who had longed chafed under his administrative duties--gladly resigned and departed for a long sojourn in the Soviet Union. Before leaving, he engineered an agreement by which Gold and McKay became joint editors. McKay, an emigrant black, was now coeditor of one of the most influential American revolutionary publications--a magazine that, whatever its intentions, reached an almost exclusively white audience. However, as McKay ruefully observed, "there could have been no worse combination, because personally and intellectually and from the first time we met, Michael Gold and I were opposed to each other."[54]
McKay performed his editorial duties with confidence and competence. But he soon ran afoul the growing dogmatism of his coeditor, who espoused with increasing stridency the virtues of proletarian literature. Gold proclaimed that "I was born in a tenement.... It was in a tenement that I first heard the sad music of humanity rise to the stars.... All I know of life I learned in the tenement..... What is art? Art is the tenement pouring out its soul through us, its most sensitive sons and daughters. What is Life? Life for us has been the tenement that bore and molded us through years of meaningful pain." He apotheosized the masses as the wellsprings of the primitive, uncorrupted life in which the artist must immerse himself. He denounced solitary artists, aloof and isolated from the people, who considered themselves spiritual aristocrats and were "therefore sick to death." Artists must lose themselves in the people and "learn through solidarity with the people what Life is."[55]
Gold declared that the masses would now "put forth those huge-hewn poets, those striding, out-of-door philosophers and horny-handed creators of whom [Whitman] prophesied"; such earth-spawned artists would create "the spiritual cement of a literature and art [that] is needed to bind together a new society." In what must have seemed a personal affront to McKay, many of whose poetic forms and sentiments were shaped by Victorian conventions, Gold denounced bourgeois artists as sterile, isolated, and diseased, and thundered that "the boy in the tenement must not learn of their art. He must stay in the tenement and create a new and truer one there."[56] McKay later claimed that Gold wanted the Liberator to become "a popular proletarian magazine, printing doggerels from lumberjacks and stevedores and true revelations from chambermaids. I contended that while it was most excellent to get material out of the forgotten members of the working class, it should be good stuff that could compare with any other writing."[57]
McKay, however, caricatured Gold's position. Gold's call for a popular literature as exemplified by Walt Whitman hardly constituted a lowering of standards. Gold also expressedly stated that his ideal was "not an artificial theory evolved in the brains of a few phrase-intoxicated intellectuals, and foisted by them on the masses. Art cannot be called into existence that way. It must grow from the soil of life, freely and without forethought." The social revolution, rather than dictating to artists or demanding formulaic literature, would liberate the innate creativity of the masses, repressed by "the economic barriers and social degradation" imposed by capitalism. Artistic liberation, like social, economic, and political revolution, required the conscious creation of new forms and institutions.[58]
McKay's own views at the time were not as far removed from Gold's as he later claimed. Indeed, less than two years after he left the Liberator, McKay told the Crisis that although his childhood mentor had emphasized the chasm between literature and propaganda, experience had altered his own views. "I lighted upon one of Milton's greatest sonnets that was pure propaganda, and a widening horizon revealed that some of the finest spirits of modern literature--Voltaire, Hugo, Heine, Swift, Shelley, Byron, Tolstoy, Ibsen--had carried the taint of propaganda." McKay claimed that he had then embraced "another extreme where I have always sought for the motivating force or propaganda intent that underlies all literature of interest." McKay himself, of course, wrote poetry of passionate protest that hostile critics could attack as propagandistic. Moreover, McKay exemplified in many respects Gold's own ideal of the proletarian artist: he was of working-class origin, and wrote vivid protest poetry about the life of common blacks in language fully intelligible to the black masses, who adopted him as their poet laureate.[59] McKay later wrote realistic novels of working-class Negro life and claimed that he was a proletarian novelist in the truest sense.[60]
Ironically, in view of their controversy over "propaganda vs. aesthetics," McKay and Gold also squared off over the amount of racial material published in the Liberator. McKay asked that the magazine include more material on black concerns and issues, eventually demanding that the space given to such stories equal the proportion of blacks in the American working class, roughly 10 percent. Appraised of this dispute, Eastman predictably considered McKay's attitude formulaic and counterproductive; it would, Eastman feared, cause whites to dismiss the Liberator. "You began to introduce so much material about the race question into your magazine," he later wrote McKay, "that it was destined to have the exact opposite effect from the one we desired.... You have a magazine circulating practically entirely among whites. You have these whites full of peculiar ignorance and intolerance of the Negro and the Negro problem, which you describe in your book as the chief problem of the revolution in America.... What you will do is destroy your instrument, that is all." McKay called Eastman (who had endured the suppression of The Masses, two trials under the Espionage Act, and a near lynching) "a nice opportunist always in search of the safe path and never striking out for the new if there are any signs of danger ahead."[61] Eastman, however, recognized the deeply ingrained racism of even the relatively enlightened whites who read the Liberator--a recognition difficult to reconcile with his belief that proletarian revolution would automatically eliminate such tenaciously held sentiments.
Sadly, Mckay expressed the depths of his feelings only after he had left the Liberator and was about to publish, in Moscow and in Russian, his Negroes in America. This book contained a chapter (excised from the published version) criticizing the racism of the American revolutionary movement and depicting the Liberator in an unflattering manner. McKay apparently sent Eastman a draft copy of this chapter. Hurt and bewildered, Eastman wrote McKay that he had never known of any disputes over editorial policy concerning racial issues. McKay tellingly replied that "You never discussed the Negro problem as a policy of the Liberator with me. Nor did any of the other editors.... My position on the Liberator I discussed seriously only with the radical Negro group in New York."[62] Why was there no discussion? McKay perhaps despaired of ever communicating his perceptions to a solid phalanx of whites who could not understand; he attempted to break through on particular issues without success, and thus avoided broaching his larger concerns.[63] He knew that the downtrodden cannot criticize their "benefactors" in the dominant group without being accused of ingratitude; this must have acted as a major constraint on a free and equal exchange of views.
McKay was bitterly but realistically aware of his plight as a black. He was seldom viewed simply as a person, but always as an exotic and as a representative of his race, whose every act was rigorously scrutinized. In an exchange of letters with Eastman in Russia in 1923--a time when McKay was very angry and somewhat unfair in his accusations--he claimed that he had worked at the Liberator in the same spirit as he worked at menial jobs, "with the full knowledge that I was not merely an ordinary worker, but that I was also a Negro, that I would not be judged on my merits as a worker alone, but on my behavior as a Negro.... [I] was on trial not as a worker but as a strange species."[64] McKay undoubtedly would have had such feelings regardless of the attitudes and actions of the Liberator's editors; they were based on solid experience in the larger, racist society. He did not discuss these feelings with Eastman at the time--the feelings virtually precluded their being discussed--and even later, by letter, described them somewhat obliquely. The hurt and estrangement from even his best friends were far too deep to be bridged by words. Only his anger at the circumstances of his departure from the Liberator caused him to express his feelings--and even then in a book scheduled for publication in Russia and in Russian, rather than directly to his friend.
McKay was embittered because of the denouement of his controversy with Gold. In June 1922 Gold assailed McKay, as editor, for publishing in that month's Liberator a devastating, understated account of the legal lynching of a shy, young African-American man.[65] Finally, Gold--who had adopted the persona of a rough-and-tumble working-class tough--challenged McKay to a boxing match (presumably, in his eyes, the proletarian equivalent of a duel) over an alleged personal slight. Gold's belligerent challenge of a boxing match to McKay revealed a deep-seated, if unconscious, racism. Gold was an amateur boxer, which McKay was not; but whites (as George Bernard Shaw had earlier reminded him) often associated blacks with boxing. Gold's macho bluster, therefore, was as demeaning as Robert Minor's assertion that only he could define a real Negro, and all the more devastating in its impact on McKay for Gold's obliviousness to his insult.[66]
McKay temporarily mollified Gold, but "saw clearly that our association could not continue." He demanded that the editorial staff of the Liberator choose between him and Gold. Despite Gold's racism, bluster, and dogmatism, the staff (partly on Eastman's advice, proffered from abroad) sided with him against McKay. This virtually forced McKay's resignation, although the July Liberator somewhat mendaciously announced that McKay had resigned as an executive officer so that he could devote more time to writing and travel. McKay remained a contributing editor, and the Liberator promised that his work "would have the same high place in the pages of the Liberator as heretofore."[67] However, except for a farewell article criticizing his comrades for their racial blindness, and a single poem, McKay never again published in the Liberator.[68]
Because McKay's stance on the literary controversies that divided him from Gold was exactly the position Eastman had long championed, Eastman's preference for Gold as editor must have been especially painful for McKay. McKay later charged that racial issues underlay what was in effect his dismissal.[69] Although Eastman pled ignorance of the specific incidents mentioned by McKay, his own explanation for his decision--that the issues produced by Gold had "more pep"--is hardly convincing, given Eastman's strident opposition to Gold's literary philosophy. In fact, it was Gold's raising of a rebellion against Eastman's editorship that had precipitated Eastman's own withdrawal.[70] Eastman had wanted to leave in any case, and Gold's outburst provided a convenient excuse. Nonetheless Eastman could not have been pleased with Gold, and must have known the significance of siding with him in his dispute with McKay. McKay, a black poet, would have symbolized continuity in the values Eastman had embodied in the Masses and the Liberator.
As it was, McKay's dismissal reverberated throughout the black world. Noting that McKay "has since severed his connection" with the Liberator, Du Bois printed a long excerpt from McKay's valedictory article, "Birthright," which excoriated radical whites for their racism. The Negro World gloated that Michael Gold objected to "Negroizing" the Liberator and "objected to working side by side with a Negro." Garvey's weekly concluded that "in the McKay incident the lesson to our group is obvious. If we must pal around with a white man, let us do so with a bourgeois white man! No hypocritical radical trash for us!"[71]
Why did Eastman let McKay down? Perhaps he worried that McKay would, as sole editor, implement the 10 percent formula for materials relating to African Americans, and thus vitiate the Liberator. But there were alternatives to a sole editorship by McKay. Joseph Freeman, elected to replace McKay, could just as easily have replaced Gold. At any rate, the decision against McKay proved disastrous, as was predictable. The Liberator soon encountered financial difficulties, and in 1924 merged with two more doctrinaire Communist magazines and disappeared. This fate may well have befallen the Liberator in any case--Eastman's departure exacerbated a severe shortage of funds and rendered more difficult the solicitation of great creative writing. (McKay, in fact, had implored reactionary H.L. Mencken to contribute an article, hoping that Mencken's name would boost circulation.[72]) McKay, therefore, may have lost nothing more than blame for an inevitable catastrophe. Nevertheless, the fact that Eastman and a majority of the staff sided against him hurt McKay deeply.
After his departure from the Liberator, McKay published an article in the August issue that hinted at the subterranean disagreements over racial issues among the staff:
Some friendly critics think that my attitude towards the social status of the Negro should be more broadly socialistic and less chauvinistically racial as it seems to them. These persons seem to believe that the pretty parlor talk of international brotherhood or the radical shibboleth of "class struggle" is sufficient to cure the Negro cancer along with all the other social ills of modern civilization. Apparently they are content with an intellectual recognition of the Negro's place in the class struggle, meanwhile ignoring the ugly fact that his disabilities as a worker are relatively heavier than those of the white worker.[73]
McKay, however, claimed explicating for whites the peculiar condition of the black proletarian as his "proud birthright" and asserted that "the problem of the darker races is a rigid test of Radicalism," more fearsome for some radicals than "the barricades." Racial divisions constituted "the monkey wrench thrown into the machinery of American revolutionary struggle..... [Blacks] might remain a tool of the ruling class, to be used effectively, as in the past, against radical labor. And in that event the black workers will suffer--the white workers will lose--the ruling class will win."[74]
McKay saw himself as a mediator between radical whites and the black masses; his duty was "to educate the black worker" and "interpret him to the uninformed white radical who is prone to accept the colorful fiction rather than the stark reality of the Negro's struggle for full social and economic freedom." The white radical who ignored the special experiences, sensibilities, and needs of blacks "not only aids the bourgeoisie, but also the ultra-nationalist Negro leaders" who preached racial hate while ignoring the class struggle.[75]
McKay felt it necessary to repudiate white stereotypes about blacks--particularly that they were licentious and dirty:
Whitetown does not exert itself to work. It lives a leisurely life on the back of Niggertown. Whitetown has a double standard of sex morals by which its best young blood flows regularly into the rising stream of Niggertown and gives America the finest results of mixed mating in the world. Niggertown itself is very dirty, filthy, and immoral. It transgresses all the superficial standards of the moral code by which Whitetown lives. Niggertown, according to the standards of Whitetown, is lazy and unthrifty, yet, by its labors, Niggertown keeps Whitetown clean, respectable and comfortable. Niggertown, like most servants' quarters, is ugly because it gives its best time to making Whitetown beautiful.[76]
One might hope that the revolutionaries and cultural rebels who read the Liberator were aware of such realities. But McKay later charged that even the Liberator's white editors lacked "a comprehensive grasp of the Negro's place in the class-struggle." Eastman denied this, at least as far as he himself was concerned, replying that "so far as you interpret the Negro from the standpoint of the class struggle, there is not a hair's difference between you and me--except of course your more sustained thoughtfulness about it." In truth, both McKay and Eastman believed that blacks suffered horrendous disabilities above and beyond those inflicted upon white workers, but that they were nevertheless an integral part of the working class. They agreed that white racism was the primary obstacle to the organization of black workers. Both acknowledged that racial and class oppression were inextricably related, but were also semi-autonomous, requiring separate analysis and attack. Both vacillated and hedged on whether class or race was the more important factor, and neither precisely delineated the relationship between the two. After the Bolshevik Revolution, however, Eastman stressed class almost to the exclusion of race, and veered toward the orthodox Marxist belief that a working-class revolution would automatically abolish racial oppressions.[77]
This was precisely the kind of sterile dogma that Eastman had previously disdained, and it upset McKay. When Eastman claimed that the proletarian revolution in Russia had immediately and automatically abolished anti-Semitism and pogroms (and that working-class revolution in the United States would probably abolish white racism in similar fashion), McKay indignantly replied that the Red Army, rather than any instantaneous and miraculous change in consciousness, had ended the pogroms. Could any fool "think that with the revolutionary overturn in Russia all class, national and racial differences would disappear as if by magic?" he asked Eastman. "Do you think the Communist leaders and the rank and file could by a single stroke change the minds of all the fossil-minded, stereotyped and mannikin wrecks of humanity that have been warped by hundreds of years of bourgeois traditions and education?"[78] McKay's own experiences among white workers and radicals continually reminded him of a truth that had momentarily escaped Eastman: cultural patterns are deeply embedded and not easily overturned, even by conscious effort. Whether a transformed consciousness or the Red Army had abolished the pogroms, however, the fact remained that they had ceased.
Ironically, however, McKay had previously made exactly the arguments he now found so wrongheaded in Eastman. In the Crisis for July 1921, McKay had heralded the Bolshevik Revolution as "the greatest event in the history of humanity." Afro-Americans must understand that "a mere handful of Jews," greatly fewer proportionately than blacks in American, had won "through the Revolution, all the political and social rights that were denied to them under the regime of the Czar." Class, not race, was paramount; the Afro-American was "ostracized only technically by the distinction of color; in reality the Negro is discriminated against because he is of the lowest type of worker."[79] McKay allowed that "this economic difference between the white and black workers manifests itself in various forms, in color prejudice, race hatred, political and social boycotting and lynching of Negroes." All American institutions collaborated in this. "Still, whenever it suits the business interests controlling these institutions to mitigate the persecutions against Negroes, they do so with impunity." As evidence McKay cited scabbing blacks, who worked "under the protection of the military and the police," which would not under ordinary circumstances protect blacks from the mob. Yet McKay concluded not that Communist revolution would inevitably liberate blacks; on the contrary, he asserted that if the plutocrats granted equal rights to Negroes, it would cause immediate "revolution in the economic life of the country."[80]
While tension was building on the Liberator, McKay achieved one of the literary triumphs of his life--an expanded, American edition of his poems, now titled Harlem Shadows. McKay had visited Frank Harris shortly after McKay's return to the United States, and had shown Harris his Spring in New Hampshire. Harris, however, had immediately noticed the absence of "If We Must Die"; told by an apologetic McKay that "I was advised to keep it out," Harris exploded:
You are a bloody traitor to your race, sir! A damned traitor to your own integrity. That's what the English and civilization have done to your people. Emasculated them. Deprived them of their guts. Better you were a head-hunting, blood-drinking cannibal of the jungle than a civilized coward. You were bolder in America. The English make obscene sycophants of their subject peoples. I am Irish and I know. But we Irish have guts the English cannot rip out of us. I am ashamed of you, sir.[81]
McKay said that "Harris's words cut like a whip into my hide" precisely because he felt them fully deserved. Rather than simply a traitor to his race, McKay said, "I felt worse for being a traitor to myself. For if a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything." He vowed that he would "plug hard for the publication of an American edition, which would include the omitted poem."[82]
With the help of Joel Spingarn, a white NAACP official who had also placed McKay's poems in Seven Arts, and aided by Max Eastman's enthusiastic preface, McKay's new volume was published by Harcourt in the spring of 1922. Hubert Harrison, writing in the New York World, praised McKay as "the greatest living poet of Negro blood in America today." Harrison also touted McKay's verse in the Negro World as "high in aim, in thought, in technique." In a review which McKay thought evinced genuine understanding, Hodge Kirnon also greeted the volume enthusiastically in the Negro World. James Weldon Johnson praised the beauty of McKay's language and the bitterness of some of his sentiments, enthusing that "what [McKay] has achieved in this little volume sheds honor upon the whole race." McKay said that despite the flattering reviews, "I was too broke and hungry and anxious about the future to cultivate conceit." Nevertheless, he pronounced the publication of his first American book "the greatest joy of my life."[83]
Whatever his poetic success, McKay still encountered difficulties in making a living. In the fall of 1922, after the Liberator debacle, McKay, aided by James Weldon Johnson and Crystal Eastman, embarked for the Soviet Union. (Despite Johnson's help in raising money for the trip, McKay paid his passage to Liverpool by working as a stoker.) By the time McKay departed all hopes of Communist revolution or meaningful Afro-American insurgency in the United States had vanished. The black radicals were in disarray: Garvey had repudiated the radicals, who now lacked any possible social base, and was himself entangled in the legal complications that would land him in jail. Even the NAACP was in steep decline. Further, McKay had quarreled with Harrison over the latter's publication, in the Negro World, of McKay's private, disparaging remarks about top NAACP officials.[84] Yet one aspect of his departure was a harbinger of things to come. James Weldon Johnson arranged a farewell party for McKay, attended by literary figures of both races. Much later, Johnson wrote McKay that the party "was the first getting together of the black and white literati on a purely social plane.... I think that party started something." That "something" was the black/white collaboration inaugurating the Harlem Renaissance.[85]
Mckay, "as a social-minded being and a poet," was moved by the Russian experiment. "I desired to experience all the sensations of the new order struggling to extricate itself from the old," he wrote, "[so] I never turned aside from anything or anybody that might possibly add something to the fullness of my exciting adventure." Although the official Workers party delegation opposed and obstructed him (partly because McKay advocated a legal party, except in the South, and insisted that revolution in the United States was a distant prospect[86]), he found himself lionized by the common people, who hoisted him into the air and carried him on their shoulders. "Even the Russian comrades, who have a perfect pat social-economic explanation for all phenomena, were amazed," McKay marveled. "For the first time in my life I knew what it was to be a highly privileged personage. And in the Fatherland of Communism! Didn't I enjoy it! The American comrades were just too funny with envy and chagrin." McKay poked fun at Otto Huiswood, an official Workers party delegate: "The mulatto delegate was a washout. He was too yellow." At one point in the massive Fourth Convention of the Comintern McKay was grabbed by an usher. "At first I thought I was going to be conducted to the balcony, but instead I was ushered onto the platform to a seat beside Max Eastman and just behind Zinoviev [the head of the Comintern]."[87]
The intervention of McKay's friend Sen Katayama (and also, most probably, Max Eastman), won him entry into the circles of top Soviet officials.[88] He interviewed Leon Trotsky; and Trotsky's written answers to McKay's questions were publicized in the United States by Briggs's Crusader News Service. Zinoviev also publicly addressed McKay's concerns about Soviet, and Communist International, policy on racial questions. Because both McKay and Trotsky advocated recruitment of Afro-Americans and Africans into the Red Army and Red Navy officer corps, McKay was sent on an inspection tour of Soviet military installations. Nevertheless, McKay downplayed his own radical sentiments, telling the Fourth Congress that because of the acclaim "If We Must Die" had won among Afro-Americans, "I have been pushed forward as one of the spokesmen of Negro radicalism in America to the detriment of my poetic temperament."[89] McKay's protestations, his open association with bohemian, anti-Bolshevik writers, and his lack of accreditation as a Workers party delegate apparently convinced Zinoviev that McKay was not a Workers party member--an impression that McKay energetically dispelled.[90] Eventually McKay was accepted as comrade and a representative of the African Blood Brotherhood.
McKay affirmed that the Communist movement could liberate blacks everywhere. He told the Fourth Congress that his race was among "the most oppressed, exploited, and suppressed section of the working class of the world. The Third International stands for the emancipation of all the workers of the world, regardless of race or color," a stance that--unlike American constitutional guarantees--was "real." In his Russian-language book Negroes in America, McKay said that he disagreed with his comrades who denied that international communism could solve the race problem. "All local and national remedies applied to the Negro problem" had failed; but "I believe in the Communist International." Blacks "should turn for the solution of their problem to the Third International, since local and national measures are obsolete methods applied by the exploiting bourgeoisie.... In our day the solution of the Negro question by social reform methods is much further from its goal than it ever was." (This sentiment accorded with that of many Afro-American Communists, who joined the CP precisely because the Comintern dictated CPUSA racial policy.) Writing in the Crisis, McKay said that "the actual government [of the Soviet Union] is now in the hands of the national minorities, the peasantry, and the proletariat."[91]
Yet McKay warned the Fourth Congress, and the Soviet public in general, that the revolutionary task in the United States was difficult, partly because of the false consciousness (inculcated, however, by very real experiences) prevalent among Afro-Americans. "Some comrades may think that I am too harsh and too imbued with race consciousness," he said; but although class consciousness was better, "the Negro in America is not permitted for one minute to forget his color, his skin, or his race."[92] Therefore, the Negro was merely "race-conscious and rebellious, not revolutionary and class-conscious." Most Negroes, except for some intellectuals resentful at their enforced segregation with the mass of blacks, were "anti-socialistic."[93] McKay warned the Fourth Congress that the nature of radical propaganda and strategy concerning blacks would determine whether Afro-Americans sided with the capitalists or the white workers. At present, blacks were "very hostile to the radical propaganda of the whites."
The blacks are hostile to Communism because they regard it as a "white" working-class movement and they consider the white workers their greatest enemy, who draw the color line against them in factory and office and lynch and burn them at the stake for being colored. Only the best and broadest minded Negro leaders who can combine Communist ideas with a deep sympathy for and understanding of the black man's grievances will reach the masses with revolutionary propaganda. There are few such leaders in America today.[94]
McKay's address received widespread publicity in the United States; the Messenger and the Amsterdam News praised it, as did Abram Harris. However, Charles S. Johnson denounced McKay's charges against the National Urban League in that organization's magazine, Opportunity, in September 1923.[95]
While in the Soviet Union McKay also complained that because Afro-American intellectuals lacked the leisure and means required for serious reflection and analysis, not a single book explained the "close affinity" of the workers of both races, or informed blacks of "their true place in the class struggle and their role in the international workers' movement." Further, many black intellectuals wanted inclusion in the white supremacist, capitalist system rather than mass working-class revolution. (McKay cited Du Bois as one such individual, but said that "for the Negro masses and for America, it is better that Dr. Du Bois cannot be swallowed by the bourgeoisie.") The black elite was also seduced by the assiduous philanthropic work of the white "reformist bourgeoisie, who divert [the race question] from its true path and obscure its proletarian character with Christian philanthropy." Different racial attitudes among white imperialist powers had convinced many black intellectuals "that one imperialist exploiter can be better than another." The warm reception accorded Afro-Americans in France "is valued so highly by Negroes that they are beginning to forget about the vile exploitation of Africans by the French." Especially during the war, the French military and civilians treated Negro soldiers equally with white. "Thus the sympathy of the Negro intelligentsia is completely on the side of France. It is well informed about the barbarous acts of the Belgians in the Congo, but it knows nothing at all about the barbarous acts of the French in Senegal"--acts that included exploitation, impoverishment, and the "annihilation of whole tribes."[96]
McKay warned that prejudice was deeply ingrained in the American working class and would not dissipate quickly or easily. In the meantime, blacks must organize separately, as Russian Jews had under the Czar. Until recently, all attempts at black self-organization had "ended in nothing since ministers, politicians, and reformers have seized the leadership." However, the African Blood Brotherhood and the Friends of Negro Freedom exemplified recent class-and-race based efforts. While organizing separately, McKay said, Afro-Americans should also join the militantly interracial IWW, "a revolutionary union in which not the slightest distinction is made on the basis of race, nationality, or skin color, and which is imbued with class consciousness."[97]
McKay also warned the Fourth Congress of endemic racism within the Communist movement, of which he was personally familiar. "The reformist bourgeoisie have been carrying on the battle against discrimination and racial prejudice in America," McKay said. "The Socialists and Communists have fought very shy of it because there is a great element of prejudice among the Socialists and Communists of America. They are not willing to face the Negro question... The Communists of America... must first emancipate themselves from the ideas they entertain towards the Negroes" before they could "reach the Negroes with any kind of radical propaganda." The Workers party had overwhelmingly rejected a resolution demanding social equality between the races; its recent 48-page program never mentioned race. President Harding, McKay said bitterly, was further left than the Workers party on the racial question. Many Communists would risk death on the barricades before demanding equality for blacks in unions or defending intermarriage and social equality "in theory and practice." Confronting racism, McKay warned, would incur "the violent anger of American public opinion in the North as well as the South," and could even provoke "a race war."[98]
McKay said that American capitalists incited black workers against white, and warned that they would "mobilize the entire black race of America for the purpose of fighting organized labor" unless class-conscious workers of both races intervened. Capitalist hegemony over both races had existed for centuries, and was reenforced by social practice. Under slavery, the masters had completely controlled "the psychology of both races" by artful divisive techniques; after the Civil War, "the northern bourgeoisie," which had crushed their Southern competitors, abandoned Afro-Americans "even if they were being burned alive in bonfires." The distinctly American practice of lynching, encouraged by the capitalists, created insurmountable divisions between the races. "Women and children armed with red-hot pokers compete with the men, and add to the torments of the victim by pouring on kerosene. The men are always castrated, and the sexual organs, fingers, toes, hair, and other parts of the victim's body are removed triumphantly by men, women and children as souvenirs." The Northern states participated in this; "the whole white American nation" was "possessed by a Negro neurosis."[99] All large capitalist newspapers publicized alleged Negro crimes in screaming two-inch headlines, and "the literate proletariat of the North avidly swallows this news while rushing to work on streetcars and subways."
Thus, the well-staged propaganda of the American bourgeoisie directed against Negro workers has had great success. In the South Negroes are indiscriminately exploited and oppressed by the oligarchy and lynched by the white proletariat; in the North they are exploited and ostracized by the plutocracy and boycotted by the white proletariat.[100]
McKay advocated the devious Leninist "united front" tactics aimed at working within mainstream Afro-American organizations, discrediting their liberal leaders, and recruiting the rank-and-file for the revolutionary cause--the very strategy that the ABB had disastrously attempted within the UNIA. McKay concluded that "the Negro Communist must not only be an interpreter of the moods of his own people for white comrades who do not know this people," but must also establish contact with "white reformers and the petty-bourgeois leaders of his own race. He must prod them to make greater and greater demands for the Negro masses and undermine their authority by making counter-demands." McKay also warned blacks that they must "realize that the supremacy of American capital today proportionately increases American influence in the politics and social life of the world. Every American official abroad, every smug tourist, is a protagonist of dollar culture and a propagandist against the Negro." Afro-Americans must counter insidious American propaganda, publicize their grievances in every international forum, and ally themselves with all who resisted the stranglehold of American capitalism. The United States held the world, except for the Soviet Union, in its power or debt; and Soviet racial egalitarianism would evoke the undying enmity of the United States.[101]
The complications of American racism were well illustrated by McKay's analysis of the racial issue in American sports. Complaining that Afro-Americans could not compete in most American sports, McKay described the persecution of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. "The Negro must not show himself capable of fighting and winning; it is not entirely safe for capitalistic America, which makes twenty million Negroes bow down.... Thus, in the United States there is no room for a Negro, even in the area of sports. Only in the national American sport called lynching is he assigned first place." In an ironic commentary on the social construction of race, McKay explained that Afro-Americans were barred from baseball, but that black Cubans could play; similarly, in a football match a dark-skinned player was saved from lynching by a quick-thinking sympathetic white who shouted that the player was a Cuban, not a "nigger. Emphasizing capitalist control over the minds of white workers, McKay said that a few extraordinary blacks could compete in American sports; where profits beckoned, the capitalist did an abrupt about-face and "stuffs the black champion down the throats of a submissive white public."[102]
McKay despaired at the enormous symbolic significance of black athletic achievement in the Afro-American community. He viewed such achievement (and, implicitly, popular culture generally), as a surrogate for meaningful lives and victorious social struggle. "When Jack Johnson was beaten by Jess Willard, in all the Negro billiard halls, barbershops, and nightclubs of American cities the crying and moaning could be heard," he said. (McKay was apparently not aware that this match was fixed, and that white authorities had threatened Johnson with a long jail term on trumped-up charges unless he threw the match.) In capitalist America, profits trumped even racism. The white boxer Jack Dempsey would soon confront the black Harry Wills in the ring. "Everything will be arranged in the most splendid manner," McKay said. "The entrance fee will be high, the proceeds will be huge, both sides will place large bets, and at the same time that part of the black and white proletariat which has not been imbued with class consciousness will think that those radical [racial?] differences which exist between them can be settled by fist fights arranged for a commercial purpose."[103]
McKay also decried the white American's hysterical phobia about interracial sex. The American bourgeoisie, he said, "artfully maintains a war between the races over sex. Every crime--be it class inequality, lynch law, or the exploitation of labor--is concealed by the fetish of sex as behind a smoke screen." The taboo on sex between black men and white women, cultivated by the slaveowners before the Civil War (even as these owners indulged themselves with their slave property), remained "a form of black magic" which "splendidly served the aims and intentions of the master class." Southern whites, indeed, were gripped by a "neurotic fascination with the naked body and sexual organs of Negroes." The master class encouraged lynchings, "that exclusively American sport," as a mechanism for hiding "the disgusting economic situation of the South." However, the North also revelled in this barbaric sport; "the whole white American nation is, in a strange way, possessed by a Negro neurosis." In a starling yet undeveloped insight, McKay perceived that "the Negro question is inseparably connected with the question of woman's liberation" because white men used the specter of the bestial black rapist to control white women, whose morals were also cast into doubt.[104]
McKay's writings from the Soviet Union also commented on the tragic dilemma of the Afro-American artist. McKay complained that the Afro-American intelligentsia, angered at stereotypical and racist depictions of blacks, stigmatized authentic Afro-American artistic achievement as demeaning. It "would replace genuine Negro folksongs and jazz songs with mediocre Negro singers performing Italian arias, German songs and Chopin waltzes in decorous drawing rooms." It had abandoned "the profound aspiration" of remaining true to itself and "realiz[ing] its ideals as a group inside a certain society" in favor of imitating whites. This generated only "spiritual impotence" and the neglect of race traditions at the very time that the white world was discovering Negro art.[105]
In a capitalist society there is no slave equal to the artist. He is the greatest slave because his instinctively revolutionary spirit is harnessed like a mechanical machine. And still the artist prides himself on the fact that he is free and stands above propaganda..... Our age is the age of the Negro in art. The slogan of the aesthetic art world is "Return to the Primitive.".... The Congo, it turns out, has an interest independent of rubber and savages.... The artists have discovered art. It is often strange to see how an ultra-civilized pupil sits at the feet of a simple savage teacher and gleans so little from him because he is too civilized to learn.[106]
McKay disparaged much Afro-American literature as cheap imitations of bad white writing or of Negro dialect writers who, however expressive of their own times, could not represent the urbanized Afro-American of industrial America. Dunbar's dialect poems, for example, authentically expressed "the very soul of the Negro during the period of emancipation"; his other writings, however, were execrable. Many Negro short stories were "unreal, wrapped in an idealistic religious fog," and depicted angelic blacks much like "the black angels, cherubims, and cupids sold in Negro shops and stands." McKay insisted that truly great Afro-American literature retained "the character of national propaganda." Almost any black writer, however seemingly detached from social issues, was in reality a propagandist; the racial situation was so urgent that "not a single person can stand aloof." McKay, however, discerned a new spirit in Afro-American literature, "a vivid poetry and prose of a more intimate and subjective character in its expression, but more widely objective in its content." He urged that Afro-American writers abandon the old dialect mode and emulate "the new school of critics, chiefly Jews, who have a great heritage of racial community expression in literature" and who "strike definite racial notes in art rather than express general and universal ideas."[107]
In an impish slap at orthodox "proletarian literature" theorists like his old bête noir, Michael Gold, McKay noted that Soviet workers appreciated the traditional ballet and classical plays, while the intelligentsia frequented the experimental and revolutionary theatre. "The workers and soldiers really preferred the ballet of the Bolshoi theatre, the Moscow art theatres, the expressionist theatre and the ordinary vulgar theaters.... While the workers and soldiers showed a distinct preference for the straight familiar entertainment, it was the intelligentsia that was avid [for] revolutionary drama."[108]
During his sojourn in the citadel of world revolution, McKay frequented both the Arbot, a rendezvous of serious proletarian writers, and the Domino Cafe, "a notorious den of the dilettante poets and writers." At the latter, "there was an undercurrent of hostility to the Bolshevists. But I was invited to speak and read my poetry whenever I appeared at any [reading] and [was] treated with every courtesy and consideration as a writer. Among those sophisticated and cultured Russians, many of them speaking from two to four languages, there was no overdoing of the correct thing, no vulgar wonderment and bounderish superiority over a Negro's being a poet. I was a poet, that was all, and their keen questions showed that they were much more interested in the technique of my poetry, my views on and my position regarding the modern literary movements than in the difference in my color." Revealing the stark difference between Leninist and Stalinist Russia, McKay said that many writers freely expressed their criticisms of the Bolshevik regime, although they knew that he was "very sympathetic to it."[109]
McKay remained in Soviet Russia for six months following the Fourth Congress. His writings, for which he was well paid, appeared prominently in major Soviet publications, and (along with his two articles in the Crisis) indicate that he was very favorably impressed with Soviet ideology and achievements. Indeed, writing H.L. Mencken, he expressed surprise at the freedom of speech prevailing in Soviet Russia, praised the Soviet Department of National Minorities, and predicted that the United States would disintegrate under the force of diverse and incompatible interests much as Czarist Russia had.[110]
Why then did McKay leave the Communist heartland? First, he had alienated American Communists by his ridicule of their conspiratorial mentality, his denunciations of their racism, his loud insistence on artistic independence, and his refusal to accept disciplined Party assignments. McKay wrote Walter White that American Party members feared him because "although I am a Communist, I am a fearless champion of race rights even when that championship should reflect on American comrades." More importantly, he desperately required medical treatment for syphilis, and believed that he could obtain superior care in Europe. Partly because of fears of secret police harassment, he did not seriously consider returning to the United States. Many secret police agencies had monitored McKay ever since the publication of "If We Must Die"; his meetings with other black radicals had not escaped their notice. His Soviet connections would predictably render him even more persona non grata. William Burns, head of the Bureau of Investigation, warned agents that the Jamaican "may carry instructions and documents from the Communist International to the Communists in this country, together with a considerable sum of money." The U.S. planned to detain and question McKay should be attempt re-entry. McKay could not have known specifically of these plans; but he was not a citizen, and was well aware of U.S. persecution of radicals.[111]
McKay had no fixed plans when he entered Russia, and had no specific plans when he left. Without ever making a definite decision, he remained in Europe for twelve years, becoming a semi-voluntary exile from the United States (of which he was not, of course, a citizen.) During these years he gradually drifted away from radical politics of all kinds, focusing instead on scrounging a living and writing novels of Afro-American life. McKay had found only a marginal place for himself in the United States even during its brief years of radical ferment; he deemed the reactionary United States of the 1920s even less hospitable. He could not participate in the (similarly suppressed and failed) revolutionary movement in Europe, where he was truly a foreigner (he spoke only English). His experiences with left-wing censorship, suspicion, and political maneuvering in England, the United States, and the Soviet Union, and his acute awareness of the white racism that pervaded even the International Communist movement, also discouraged him. His admiration for, and brief association with, Leon Trotsky, doubtless led to further alienation when Trotsky was vilified by Stalin and his henchmen worldwide.[112] Much later he called himself "a truant by nature and undomesticated in the blood"; he also said that "I could never be a disciplined member of any Communist party, for I was born to be a poet."[113]
Whatever the precise reasons for McKay's subsequent political quiescence, the Jamaican poet and former revolutionary would dramatically re-enter the American scene only in 1928, with the publication of his sensational novel, Home to Harlem. This novel, which created an uproar in both white radical and Afro-American literary circles, epitomized the declension of Afro-American social radicalism into a tepid literary rebellion--a rebellion which, however tame and inconsequential from the standpoint of revolutionary social change, fostered divisions within and between the Afro-American literati and white radicals as ferocious as the political and social controversies of the previous decade.
[1] Claude McKay, My Green Hills of Jamaica (Kingston, 1979), 44-87.
[2] Wayne Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1987), 1-103. This excellent biography is the source of all uncited information about McKay's life.
[3] CM, "A Negro Poet," Pearson's Magazine, September 1918, in PCM, 48-50.
[4] ibid.
[5] ibid.; LWFH, 53. In LWFH, 4, McKay said that he became "a vagabond with a purpose.... I looked for the work that was easy to my hand while my head was thinking hard."
[6] RSHR, 81-84.
[7] LWFH, 20-21, 26-28.
[8] TLB, April 1919. The poem appeared directly after Mary Burrill's "Aftermath: A One-act Play of Negro Life."
[9] Max Eastman, "Claude McKay," TLB, July 1919. Eastman was apparently unaware of Jekyll's important role in cultivating McKay's talent.
[10] CM, "The Negro Dancers," TLB, July 1919.
[11] CM, "Sonnets and Songs," TLB, July 1919.
[12] CM, "If We Must Die," TLB, July 1919. McKay later said (LWFH, 31) that "this grand outburst is [the blacks'] sole standard of appraising my poetry."
[13] WAD, "If We Must Die," TM, September 1919; LWFH, 32-34.
[14] LWFH, 68-69, 77. RSHR, 103-133, treats McKay's English years.
[15] CM, "Socialism and the Negro," Workers Dreadnought, January 31, 1920, in PCM, 50-54.
[16] ibid.
[17] ibid.
[18] LWFH, 74-77; CM, "A Black Man Replies," Workers Dreadnought, April 24, 1920, in PCM, 54-57. Ironically, the original "black scourge" articles were authored by E.D. Morel, who had exposed Belgian King Leopold II's mass murders of blacks in the Congo. McKay said that George Lansbury, who had criticized white British riots against blacks in English seaports, was not personally racist. Both men merely and obliviously used racial hatred as part of their Socialist propaganda. RSHR, 113.
[19] LWFH, 73-85; RSHR, 133. RSHR, 130, says that McKay wrote twenty articles and letters for the Workers Dreadnought; but in PCM, he lists many fewer in his bibliography. McKay published most of his articles under various pseudonyms, so we cannot ascertain with certainty which articles are his. RSHR, 123, says that it is "very likely" that McKay wrote "The Yellow Peril and the Dockers," which appeared under the name of Leon Lopex. This appeared in the same issue (October 16, 1920) as the final article about the royal navy, "Discontent on the Lower Deck," signed "S. 000 (Gunner). H.M.S. Hunter." "The Yellow Peril and the Dockers" advocated looting of West End shops as a palliative for unemployment. It was written by a West Indian, and is fully consistent with McKay's style and point of view. Pankhurst was indicted for four articles in the October 16 issue: in addition to "Discontent" and "Yellow Peril," Rubinstein's "How to Get a Labour Government," and an unsigned editorial, "The Datum Line." McKay, therefore, may have written one of the four articles for which Pankhurst was imprisoned, as well as discovering the sailor who wrote another.
[20] RSHR, 118-119, 125-126, 132, 165; LWFH, 86.
[21] RSHR, 130-131; LWFH, 61, 71-2. Shaw had told McKay, "It must be tragic for a sensitive Negro to be a poet. Why didn't you choose pugilism instead of poetry for a profession?" Shaw said that "poets remain poor, unless they have an empire to glorify and popularize like Kipling." These remarks hardly represent conscious racism; but their underlying assumptions are certainly racist. Shaw's question evokes Countee Cullen's poem, "Yet Do I Marvel," which, praising the inscrutable goodness of God, ends with the stanzas
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
[22] McKay recounted the tale of a black boxer, lionized until the crowd learned that he had a white wife, whereupon it nearly lynched him. He also said that Africans were denied the chance for title fights in England, and concluded that "Perhaps the black poet has more potential scope than the pugilist. The literary censors of London have not yet decreed that no book by a Negro should be published in Britain--not yet!" LWFH, 72.
[23] LWFH, 79-82; RSHR, 123-127.
[24] ibid.
[25] LWFH, 95-96.
[26] CM, "How Black Sees Green and Red," TLB, June 1921, in PCM, 57-62.
[27] ibid.
[28] CM, "A Negro Extravaganza," TLB, December 1921, in PCM, 62-65.
[29] ibid.
[30] ibid.
[31] ibid. With a bitter facetiousness, McKay added that "If black men in general favor the lighter women of their race, it is a natural phenomenon beyond criticism."
[32] CM, "Garvey as a Negro Moses," TLB, April 1922, in PCM, 65-69.
[33] ibid.
[34] ibid.
[35] CM, "The American Type," TLB, January 1922.
[36] CM, "A Black Star," TLB, August 1921.
[37] RSHR, 148-149; LWFH, passim.
[38] CM, "He Who Gets Slapped," TLB, May 1922, in PCM, 69-73. McKay repeated some of the best lines from this article verbatim in LWFH, 144-145.
[39] ibid.
[40] ibid.; LWFH, 145.
[41] Jospeh Freeman, American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics (New York, 1936), 258. Freeman commented that although "on a small scale the Liberator group represented that ideal society which we all wanted, that society in which no racial barriers could possibly exist," no one, including the Communists, "seriously considered organizing writers and artists for political action." Freeman, 246, 258.
[42] LWFH, 137 (cf. 132-133); "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 83; RSHR, 134-192.
[43] LWFH, 134-135; Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch (New York, 1964), 222.
[44] LWFH, 135.
[45] Mike Gold, "Drunk With Sunlight," New Masses, July 1929. This was a review of Banjo, McKay's second novel.
[46] McKay added that "There are no such places [which exclude whites] left today. Harlem is an all-white picnic ground and with no apparent gain to the blacks. The competition of white-owned cabarets has driven the colored out of business, and blacks are barred from the best of them in Harlem now." LWFH, 132-133.
[47] LWFH, 117-118.
[48] LWFH, 149.
[49] LWFH, 102-103.
[50] "An Eastman--McKay Exchange," PCM, 89. For McKay's later, and more forgiving, account, see LWFH, 109.
[51] Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York, 1977), 25, 50n.
[52] Eastman, introduction to Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows (New York, 1922), ix-x. In his autobiography, McKay called this introduction "splendid." LWFH, 148. To our eyes it seems condescending because Eastman considered, even while rejecting, the idea of innate Negro inferiority. For two vastly different views of the Eastman-McKay relationship and its context see Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of The Masses, 1911-1917 (Chapel Hill, 1982), 160-167, and George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, 1995), 250-268.
[53] ibid.
[54] LWFH, 138-139.
[55] Michael Gold, "Towards Proletarian Art," TLB, February 1921.
[56] ibid.
[57] LWFH, 138-140.
[58] Gold, "Towards Proletarian Art," TLB, February 1921, 20-24. It was the New Masses, a distant successor to the Liberator, which advertised (July 1928) for "revelations by rebel chambermaids and night club waiters" as well as "letters from hoboes, peddlers, small town atheists, unfrocked clergymen and schoolteachers" and "the poetry of steelworkers." Gold was editor of the New Masses.
[59] Revealing his continuing ambivalence about "pure" art and propaganda, McKay lamented (to no less an audience than the Fourth Congress of the Communist International) that "If We Must Die" had made him, against his will, "one of the spokesmen of Negro radicalism in America to the detriment of my poetic temperament." McKay, "Report on the Negro Question," International Press Correspondence (January 5, 1923), in PCM, 91-95.
[60] McKay's later career is covered in RSHR and LWFH; Cooper gives a generous selection of McKay's articles and letters in PCM.
[61] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-90.
[62] ibid., 78-90, especially 83.
[63] ibid. McKay said that "little instances indexed for me your attitude on the race problem. It was never hostile, always friendly, but never by a long stretch revolutionary."
[64] ibid., 84.
[65] RSHR, 159. The controversial article was "Out of Texas," by Lucy Maverick. It contained no explicitly anti-capitalist message, and in fact quoted many of the victim's former employers as certifying his innocence. McKay indicated that other members of the staff of the Liberator disagreed with his decision to publish this piece. "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 82.
[66] Robert Minor had earlier published in Current Literature (October 1912) a cartoon entitled "PUGILISM IN EXCELSIS: The Grinning Negro as He Appears to Robert Minor." In Leslie Fishbein's account (Rebels, 165), "This cartoon depicts the black boxing champion as a grinning cannibal surrounded by what are presumably human bones. The most lurid southern fantasies of blacks could do no worse."
[67] RSHR, 160-162, 167; LWFH, 138-141. Although the Liberator concealed the political infighting on the magazine, McKay had indeed planned to resign in the near future so he could write and travel. PCM, 82. Eastman's departure, was, like McKay's, immediately prompted by an ugly faction fight within the staff; but the public announcement also emphasized that Eastman wanted to travel and write. Eastman, apparently like McKay, was in fact waiting for an opportunity to depart. Floyd Dell had also taken a long leave of absence to write a second novel; leaving the editorial staff for such purposes was a tradition by June 1922.
[68] RSHR, 167.
[69] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-90; CM to Max Eastman, December 19, 1934, PCM, 212-213. Eastman told McKay that "as far as I am informed the race question had nothing whatever to do" with his dismissal. In words that must have devastated McKay, Eastman said that his choice and that of the editors of Gold over McKay was "made entirely upon the basis of intrinsic fitness for that particular job. For my part when I left New York I should have chosen you, but on the basis on the magazines you each put out, in spite of the superior reliability and delicacy of yours, I was in favor of Mike because his magazine had more 'pep'."
McKay did concede, in the course of his exchange with Eastman, that "the race matter was incidental to my quitting the executive work," but he was obviously upset at how he had been treated.
In 1934, McKay wrote Eastman that "We had one important difference--that was in Moscow and it was over an abstract intellectual point--regarding the Negro problem and the Liberator.... It was purely intellectual--never degenerating into [a] personal wrangle.... As far as I remember we have never had any real personal differences."
Because we have only Eastman's and McKay's accounts of what happened, and are obviously missing important letters and other documents which would illuminate even their own views, we cannot be sure exactly why McKay was unceremoniously pushed aside. We do know that he and Gold detested each other and that most of the editors of the Liberator, including Eastman, sided with Gold.
[70] Eastman, Love and Revolution, 265-272.
[71] "Duty of the Black Radical," TC, October 1922; "Black and White Labor," NW, August 12, 1922.
[72] RSHR, 159. Mencken, while politically very conservative, was also a racial egalitarian who encouraged black writers.
[73] McKay, "Birthright," TLB (August 1922), in PCM, 73-76.
[74] ibid.
[75] ibid.
[76] ibid.
[77] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-90. These letters concerned McKay's proposed chapter on the Liberator in his Negroes in America, which was soon published, in Russian, in the Soviet Union. Whether because of Eastman's entreaties, or because the Soviets would not print an attack on one of their chief American supporters, this chapter was excised from the published version. For an example of McKay stressing class over race, see his exchange with Du Bois, "The Negro and Radical Thought," TC, July 1921, discussed above. This exchange is reprinted in Philip S. Foner and James S. Allen, American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History (Philadelphia, 1987), 12-14. Foner and Allen printed the entire exchange as Du Bois published it; the ellipses in McKay's letter are in the text as it appears in the Crisis.
[78] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-90, especially 89.
[79] "The Negro and Radical Thought," TC, July 1921. Du Bois excised part of McKay's letter, which may have somewhat modified McKay's thesis.
[80] ibid.
[81] LWFH, 98-99.
[82] LWFH, 98-99.
[83] RSHR, 165-166; LWFH, 148; Tyrone Tillery, Claude McKay: A Black Poet's Struggle for Identity (Amherst, 1992), 54. Harrison's NW review (which Perry dates as May 21, 1921), is reprinted in HHHR, 392-394. Perry says that the New York World review of McKay's Harlem Shadows also appeared on May 21, 1921; however, McKay's American collection did not appear for another year. RSHR dates the NW review of Spring in New Hampshire in 1920 and the World review of Harlem Shadows as 1922.
[84] RSHR, 145-6.
[85] RSHR, 169. McKay never saw either Hubert Harrison or Crystal Eastman again. In his autobiography, McKay says that Crystal had left him a short farewell note, which he carried forever with him, "transferring it, when one pocket book was worn out, to another." When he heard of Crystal's death, "I took her farewell note out of my pocket and cried." LWFH, 154-155.
[86] LWFH, 174. McKay said that "I had listened to the American delegates deliberately telling lies about conditions in America, and I was disgusted. Not only the Communist delegates, but radical American intellectuals really thought it was right to buoy up the Russians with false pictures of the American situation." McKay was ignored when he told the Russians that revolution was not imminent in the United States.
[87] LWFH, 153, 217, 159-162, 174-6, 179-80, 167, 170-172.
[88] LWFH, 166. McKay said, LWFH, 180, that "Sen Katayama had no regard for the feelings of the white American comrades, when the Negro question came up, and boldly told them so. He said that though they called themselves Communists, many of them were unconsciously prejudiced against Negroes" and "that really to understand Negroes they needed to be educated about and among them as he had been." (Katayama had attended Tuskegee).
[89] CM, "Report on the Negro Question," International Press Correspondence, January 5, 1923, in PCM, 91-95. Tillery, 62, argues that neither Trotsky nor Zinoviev realistically addressed McKay's concerns.
[90] NIA, 88-90. In LWFH McKay denied that he had ever joined the Workers party.
[91] CM, "Report on the Negro Question," International Press Correspondence, January 5, 1923, in PCM, 91-95; NIA, 5-6, 18; CM, "Soviet Russia and the Negro," TC, January 1924.
[92] NIA, 4.
[93] CM, "The Racial Issue in the United States of America: A Summary," International Press Correspondence, November 21, 1922, in PCM, 90-91.
[94] ibid.
[95] Tillery, 73; "Claude McKay Before the Internationale," OPP, September 1923.
[96] NIA, 3, 52, 71, 44, 52.
[97] NIA, 5, 35-6.
[98] CM, "Report on the Negro Question," International Press Correspondence, January 5, 1923, in PCM, 91-95; NIA, 37-38, 41, 90.
[99] CM, "Report on the Negro Question," International Press Correspondence, January 5, 1923, in PCM, 91-95; NIA, 79-80, 82.
[100] NIA, 82.
[101] NIA, 90; CM, "Soviet Russia and the Negro," TC, December 1923.
[102] NIA, 53-55.
[103] NIA, 53-55.
[104] NIA, 76-82.
[105] NIA, 61-64.
[106] NIA, 63-64.
[107] NIA, 69-75. McKay's reference to black angels "sold in Negro shops" provides an interesting commentary on Garvey's complaint that blacks pictured angels as "white peaches from Georgia."
[108] LWFH, 189-90.
[109] CM, "Soviet Russia and the Negro," TC, January 1924.
[110] CM to H.L. Mencken, September 5, 1923, in Tillery, McKay, 64-65.
[111] Maxwell, New Negro, 89-91; Tillery, McKay, 69-70, 76-78.
[112] For McKay on Trotsky, see LWFH, 182, 208-209. McKay recounted his interview and correspondence with Trotsky in NIA, 6-10. The American secret police were very interested in this interview (widely publicized in the Soviet Union at the time); accounts of it are found in secret police files from many different agencies.
[113] LWFH, 150, 173.
Like so many Harlem radicals, McKay was a West Indian immigrant. Born in Jamaica in 1889, he educated himself in the public schools and his brother's library, and attracted the attention of the well-to-do Englishman Walter Jekyll, who furthered McKay's immersion in classical English literature. Jekyll convinced McKay that the local dialect, which McKay had considered "a vulgar tongue" and "the language of the peasants," was a splendid vehicle for great poetry, and also helped puncture McKay's British patriotism and Christian beliefs. "The villagers now looked at me strangely as one who was among but not really of them," McKay later reminisced, "chiefly because I did not believe in their gods." Jekyll helped McKay publish Songs of Jamaica (1912), a book of strikingly original dialect poems reviewed throughout the English-speaking world, except the United States. This volume brought McKay celebrity and its accompanying "old embarrassment.... People knew that I was a poet, and that made me different, although I wanted so much to be like them. Even my closest friends at home were never the same." McKay also suffered from the misinterpretation of one of his poems, and was distressed when Jekyll, fearing political repercussions, advised against publishing another poem. Moreover, some genteel literati shared McKay's initial opinion that dialect poetry was somehow not genuine art; McKay vowed that he would someday "write poetry in straight English and amaze and confound them."[1] Before he left for the United States, McKay was already suffering from the torments, ambiguities, and conflicted identities that would plague him for the rest of his life.
Despite Jekyll's warnings about the vicious U.S. racial climate, McKay emigrated to the United States in 1912. He took up the study of scientific agriculture, apparently intending, like Garvey, to establish a Tuskegee-like institution in Jamaica. He also sought more vibrant themes and a wider public for his poetry. Repelled by the military discipline at Tuskegee, he quickly transferred to Kansas State College, where studied agriculture. (While McKay studied in Kansas, another short book of his dialect verse, Constab Ballads, was published in Jamaica.) With money provided by Jekyll, he moved to New York, where he married and started a small restaurant. Both of these ventures disintegrated almost immediately, his wife returning to Jamaica and his restaurant going broke.[2] McKay quickly became very secretive about both his marriage and his brief venture into petty-bourgeois capitalism.
Like other West Indian immigrants, McKay entered the United States with both a class consciousness inculcated by the class-saturated atmosphere of Jamaica and a relatively weak awareness of race. His arrival in the United States, he said, was the "first time I had ever come face to face with such manifest, implacable hate of my race, and my feelings were indescribable.... At home there is also prejudice of the English sort, subtle and dignified, rooted in class distinction--color and race being hardly taken into account." The United States was characterized by "primitive animal hatred" toward blacks manifested by "daily murders of a nature most hideous and revolting." McKay wrote that "I soon found myself hating in return but this feeling couldn't last long for to hate is to be miserable."[3]
McKay had undoubtedly read prominent Fabian Socialists, such as George Bernard Shaw and H.G. Wells, as a youth in Jamaica; he may also have associated with white Socialist students in Kansas. By 1918 he was clearly aware of the class dimensions and international implications of race prejudice, manifest "in different ways... all over the world. Whites were exploiting and oppressing whites even as they exploited and oppressed the yellows and blacks. And the oppressed, groaning under the lash, evinced the same despicable hate and harshness toward their weaker fellows." The world war revealed the "hollowness of nationhood, patriotism, racial pride and most of the things which one was taught to respect and reverence." McKay perceived literature as both a protest against and an escape from such harsh realities. "I ceased to think of people and things in the mass," he said. "Why should I fight with mad dogs only to be bitten and probably transformed into a mad dog myself? I turned to the individual soul, the spiritual leaders, for comfort and consolation. I felt and still feel that one must seek for the noblest and best in the individual life only: each soul must save itself."[4] Nevertheless, his early poetry was saturated with racial themes, and constituted an implicit--and often explicit--protest against white racism and imperialism.
McKay worked at the odd jobs for which blacks were hired--"porter, houseman, janitor, butler, waiter,--anything that came handy. The life was different and fascinating," and McKay avidly imbibed it all. "My writing makes it possible for me to stand being a slave on a lousy job," he told a friend; indeed, menial jobs which kept his hands busy left his mind free for contemplation.[5] McKay published two poems in the final (October 1917) issue of Seven Arts, just before its patron, angered by its antiwar stance, withdrew its subsidy. "Invocation" recalled the lost glories of African civilization before white despoliation, and hoped for its revival, "so I may be, thine exiled counterpart/ The worthy singer of my world and race." McKay expressed the alienation that often underlay ostensible black happiness in "The Harlem Dancer." He marveled at the dancer's "perfect, half-clothed body sway" but concluded that "looking at her falsely-smiling face,/ I knew her self was not in that strange place." Both poems appeared under a pseudonym since McKay worked at a club frequented by literary women and "as I was a good enough waiter I did not care to be discovered as a poet there." Shortly afterward he took a job as a waiter on the Pennsylvania railroad--a job which he kept through the "Red Summer" anti-black pogroms of 1919--and composed verses in his spare time.[6] Afraid of ridicule and ostracism, he carefully concealed his poetic vocation from his fellow waiters. A cautious concealment of his genuine self--often even of his name--had become second nature.
Between railroad forays, McKay met his literary idol Frank Harris, editor of Pearson's Magazine, who published five of McKay's poems and a short autobiographical essay in the September 1918 issue. However, Harris criticized a conventional and tepid McKay poem protesting lynching as an "anti-climax" after the horrific East St. Louis pogrom. Harris read McKay a Milton sonnet of vengeance and hate and predicted that "someday you will rip [a poem expressing your real feelings] out of your guts." He also advised that McKay write prose, which he considered a more mature art form than poetry. "You are an African," he admonished McKay. "You must accomplish things, for yourself, for your race, for mankind, for literature. But it must be literature." This advice directly contradicted that of Stanley Braithwaite, the nationally known literary critic for the Boston Transcript. Braithwaite, the only Afro-American prominent in the white literary world, advised McKay to submit for publication "only such poems as did not betray [his] racial identity." Braithwaite himself had succeeded precisely by carefully concealing his own background in both his verse and his criticism. McKay, however, felt that poetry was subjective and self-expressive; the best poets inexorably revealed themselves in their verse, and "likewise I could not realize myself writing without conviction."[7]
The Masses, which McKay read regularly, rejected some of his poems, but in April 1919 its successor, the Liberator, published "The Dominant White," an incendiary poem denouncing white mass murder, rape, and oppression of the darker races.[8] Crystal Eastman, then managing editor, asked McKay to stop by the office. The two hit it off instantly, and became lifelong friends; her brother Max--who also became a close friend and literary advisor--published a large selection of McKay's poetry in the July 1919 issue. Eastman's introduction (which, incidentally, did not capitalize the word "Negro"), indicated that McKay, contrary to his own hopes, would be presented and evaluated in racial terms. Eastman enthused that McKay had "a greater and more simple and strong gift of poetry than any other of his race has had." As a waiter in a dining car McKay had seen and understood "a great many things... with a bold and unhesitating mind" and had arrived as a poet "practically without encouragement or critical help."[9]
The spread began with "The Negro Dancers," which, offering a strikingly different view of the subject from McKay's earlier "The Harlem Dancer," virtually encapsulated the theme of his later novel, Home to Harlem. The laughter and dance reveals "the deathless spirit of a race":
Not one false step, no note that rings not true!
Unconscious even of the higher worth
Of their great art, they serpent-wise glide through
The syncopated waltz. Dead to the earth
And her unkindly ways of toil and strife
For them the dance is the true joy of life.
And yet they are the outcasts of the earth,
A race oppressed and scorned by ruling men;
How can they thus consent to joy and mirth
Who live beneath a world-eternal ban?
......
But, oh! they dance with poetry in their eyes
Whose dreary loveliness no sorrow dims....[10]
"After the Winters" was a poem of nature and love; "The Barrier" condemned the prohibition of a black man so much as gazing upon a white woman; "The Little Peoples" protested that the small nations, if white, were freed by the world war, but Africans, "less than the trampled dust.... The white world's burden must forever bear." McKay concluded "A Capitalist at Dinner" with the wish that if such bloated oppressors ruled, "Let human beings perish from the earth."[11]
The selection ended with two powerful poems protesting lynching. "A Roman Holiday" depicted white men torturing black men and ripping babies from the wombs of pregnant black women. The pièce de résistance, toward which the poems had been building, was "If We Must Die," the poem that made McKay famous throughout the black world. Based on his experience as a railroad waiter during the "Red Summer" of 1919, during which he and his railroad coworkers faced danger in every city they visited, "If We Must Die" appeared during the very month of the District of Columbia and Chicago race riots, in which blacks fought back against their white attackers. The only one of his poems which he had read to his railroad co-workers (to tearful acclaim), "If We Must Die" advocated armed self-defense against white terrorists.
If we must die--let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die--oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us still be brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but--fighting back![12]
This was the poem Harris had demanded McKay write, and Harris was incensed when McKay published it in the Liberator. But Eastman insisted that it appear with McKay's other poems. Meanwhile, Domingo, writing in the Messenger, heralded this poem as expressing the new mood of the younger generation of blacks. "New Negroes are determined to make their dying a costly investment for all concerned," Domingo said. "If they must die, they are determined... that some of their oppressors shall be their companions.... [Their] creed is admirably summed up in the poem of Claude McKay."[13] By this time McKay had quit his railroad job and taken work at a factory, where he joined the IWW. He had also become close friends with Harrison. McKay, therefore, was rapidly becoming involved in the American revolutionary movement and simultaneously tasting his first success as a poet. At this time, however, a wealthy white admirer offered him funds for a journey to England, which McKay accepted with alacrity. He remained in England for one and a half years, affiliating himself with Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Dreadnought, on the extreme left wing of English radicalism, even as he continued publishing verse in mainstream venues.
In England, McKay frequented the International Socialist Club (ISC), composed mostly of foreign denizens of the far-flung British Empire. He learned much from his fellow members and from speakers. "For the first time I found myself in an atmosphere of doctrinaire and dogmatic ideas in which people devoted themselves entirely to the discussion and analysis of social events from a radical and Marxian point of view," he later said. "The contact stimulated me and broadened my social outlook and plunged me into the reading of Karl Marx.... I felt intellectually inadequate and decided to educate myself." McKay found Marx difficult and more of an abstruse theoretician than the "torch-burning prophet of social revolution" at home on "the street corners from which I had so often heard his gospel preached." McKay was not sure that he fully understood the intricacies of Marxian theory; however, he was confident that he mastered "the essential stuff." (A comrade on the Workers' Dreadnought edited his articles, making them "more effectively radical.") McKay also frequented a government-sponsored club for colored soldiers and attempted (without much success) to interest its members in radical social thought.[14]
Pankhurst had republished (apparently without his consent) some of McKay's poems in her Workers' Dreadnought even before his arrival in England. In early 1920, she published a seminal McKay essay, "Socialism and the Negro." Beginning with an orthodox, class-based analysis of American racism and its black opponents, McKay charged that the capitalists deliberately inculcated race hatred in both races to divide the working class. The NAACP had done some good work, but it relied upon moral suasion in the South and demanded mostly the admission of cultured, educated Afro-Americans "into white society on equal terms" (rather than freedom for the black masses). Black professionals, however, would never prosper until the black masses had adequate purchasing power and overcame their race-deprecating doubts about the abilities of their professional brethren. Racial discrimination, he added, "would be impossible... under a soviet system of Government."[15]
McKay entered relatively uncharted territory when he discussed Garvey's African Communities League and UNIA, hailed by the black masses of the world "as the star of hope, the ultimate solution of their history-old troubles." The launching of the Black Star Line had inspired blacks everywhere, and governments left the UNIA unmolested because it was not Socialist. In an analysis doubtless influenced both by Harrison and by McKay's contacts with Irish revolutionaries (many of whom were both fervent nationalists and staunch Socialists), McKay said that "although an international Socialist, I am supporting the [Garvey] movement, for I believe that, for subject peoples, at least, Nationalism is the open door to Communism. Furthermore, I will try to bring this great army of awakened workers over to the finer system of Socialism." McKay's stance was also fully consistent with that of the Dreadnought, which supported Irish revolutionaries.[16]
Opposing English Communists who dismissed the Irish and Indian national movements on the grounds that they represented mere bourgeois nationalism, McKay insisted that "the British Empire is the greatest obstacle to International Socialism" and that the revolt of any of its subjugated peoples would promote international Communism. "No people who are strong enough to throw off an imperial yoke will tamely submit to a system of local capitalism," McKay said. "The breaking up of the British Empire must either begin at home or abroad; the sooner the strong blow is struck the better it will be for all Communists. Hence the English revolutionary workers should not be unduly concerned over the manner in which the attack should begin." McKay, however, suspected that some so-called Communist internationalists favored a "Socialist" British Empire which would provide "cheap raw materials" extorted from "the slaves of Asia and Africa."[17]
The Workers' Dreadnought published many poems, articles, and book reviews by McKay (some under pseudonyms); but a clash with George Lansbury, editor of the Socialist newspaper, the London Daily Herald brought an offer of a staff position on the Dreadnought. Lansbury had published sensational articles alleging the rape of white German women by black French troops stationed in Germany. Lansbury ignored McKay's scathing reply, whereupon McKay turned to the Workers' Dreadnought, which published it. White troops routinely committed acts of rape, he wrote, as was proved by the great numbers of mixed-race children born in white-controlled Africa. "If the black troops are syphilitic, they have been contaminated by the white world," he said. French Socialists must oppose their government's depredations against the workers of Germany, but not by inciting race hatred. Race-baiting articles would only "further strife and blood-spilling between whites and the many members of my race, boycotted economically and socially, who have been dumped down on English docks since the ending of the European War."[18]
As a staff journalist on the Dreadnought, McKay learned "a little practical journalism... A little more schooling, a few more lessons--learning something from everything--keeping the best in my mind for future creative work." He was now securely ensconced in the "nest of extreme radicalism in London," affiliated also with Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation, on whose behalf he stood on London street corners selling Communist literature. (At the behest of Harrison, he also wrote some articles for Garvey's Negro World until he learned that it would not pay for his contributions.) In addition to publishing his own articles and poems, McKay solicited the work of others, discovering a dissident sailor in the Royal Navy who wrote a series of articles exposing squalid conditions aboard ship. These articles evoked a police raid, during which McKay smuggled the original texts out of the Dreadnought office and destroyed them. Pankhurst, however, received a six-month prison term.[19]
However involved in radical politics, McKay did not abandon literature. "I had not neglected the feeling of poetry, even while I was listening to Marxian expositions at the International Club and had become involved in radical activities," he later reminisced. "A little action was a nice stimulant for another lyric." He published twenty-three poems (none of them radical poems from the Dreadnought) in the prestigious Cambridge Magazine and prepared for the release of his collection, Spring in New Hampshire, from which, upon the advice of his English publisher, he omitted "If We Must Die." Despite this omission, Harrison, writing in the Negro World, said that "without any aid from Negro editors or publications, [McKay] made his way because white people who noted his gifts were eager to give him a chance while Negro editors, as usual, were either too blind to see or too mean-spirited to proclaim [those gifts] to the world."[20]
While McKay's experience in the British radical movement was highly positive, the shadow of racism hovered forever over him. Even at the International Socialist Club he encountered racist barbs; McKay brought charges against one member for inciting race hatred. He could never relax his guard. In 1920 McKay wrote to a friend "I approach the whole crowd [at the ISC] from the critical artistic standpoint--only to measure and weigh and discount them." McKay's art would depict and comment on reality, rather than idealizing the revolutionary movement. His personal interview with George Bernard Shaw was also in one respect a disappointment, although not one without precedent. Even Frank Harris had told McKay--and this amid the latest European bloodbath--that Africans had little respect for human life (a remark that McKay had diplomatically ignored). Shaw displayed an equal racial obtuseness when he solicitously asked McKay why he had chosen poetry over pugilism (a stereotypical black avocation). McKay gamely responded that "poetry had picked me as a medium instead of my picking poetry as a profession."[21] Later, however, he ironically entitled a chapter in his autobiography "Pugilist vs. Poet," and remarked that, given British prejudice against black boxers, the black poet might have the advantage.[22] Shaw refused McKay's request that he write an introduction for Spring in New Hampshire, saying that McKay's poems must stand or fall on their own merits.
McKay endured no racial slights on the Dreadnought, but he did suffer occasional rebuffs. Pankhurst rejected McKay's important exposé of George Lansbury's use of scab labor against striking workers, citing her reliance on Lansbury's past and present assistance. As McKay later mused, "there are items which the capitalist press does not consider fit to print for capitalist reasons and items which the radical press does not consider fit to print for radical reasons." Pankhurst also criticized McKay's praise for labor leader Robert Smillie as contravening her policy favoring rank-and-file workers over their official leaders.[23]
McKay must also have felt distress at Pankhurts's encounters with the dictatorial Third International. Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation (WSF) stressed industrial over political action much like the IWW. Pankhurst herself, while favoring affiliation with the Third International, balked at its demand that all leftist groups unite with the reformist Labour party. McKay attended the founding convention of the British Communist Party, in which the WSF was in opposition. (After some resistance, Pankhurst finally capitulated. But after her release from prison, she repudiated the Third International in favor of retaining autonomy for her magazine.) Finally, a police raid which arrested a secret Comintern agent working for the Dreadnought (the very comrade who had stiffened McKay's articles) evoked suspicion (justified, as it turned out) that the publication harbored a police spy. No one, including Pankhurst and McKay, was immune from corrosive distrust. The consequent reign of paranoia upset McKay, who decided upon a return to the United States. An IWW friend helped raise the necessary funds.[24]
Upon returning to New York in 1921, McKay exulted that he was once again "just one black among many... lost in the shadows of Harlem."[25] However, he was soon immersed in the nearly all-white milieu of the Liberator. While in England, McKay had remained in contact with his American comrades and had published four poems in the Liberator. When he returned, Max Eastman offered him a job as associate editor. McKay used this platform as a vehicle to enlighten white radicals about Afro-American racial concerns. He also resumed his friendship with Harrison and joined Briggs's African Blood Brotherhood, furthering its efforts to inject a class-conscious radicalism into the UNIA.
McKay informed the Liberator about the combination of social radicalism and nationalism that characterized the Irish revolutionary movement and about the disdain shown for the Irish by many English revolutionaries. McKay said that he sympathized even with the Irish bourgeoisie. "I suffer with the Irish.... My belonging to a subject race entitles me to some understanding of them.... They think, as do all subject peoples with foreign soldiers and their officers lording it over them, that even the exploited English proletariat are their oppressors." And English workers did indeed "merrily ship munitions and men across the Channel for the shooting of their Irish brothers." Although British racism made the Irish of all classes intensely nationalistic, McKay believed that "the Irish revolution--nationalistic though it is--is an entering wedge directed straight to the heart of British capitalism."[26]
McKay said that "it is with the proletarian revolutionists of the world that my whole spirit revolts." However, his own situation was worse than that of his white fellow workers:" Besides being an economic slave as they, I am what they are not--a social leper, of a race outcast from an outcast class." Despite the chasm between the races, McKay continued, "I see no other way of upward struggle for colored peoples, but the way of the working-class movement, ugly and harsh though some of its phases may be. None can be uglier and harsher than the routine existence of the average modern worker. The yearning of the American Negro especially, can only find expression and realization in the class struggle." Despite the occasional black professional, capitalism and white supremacy place "the entire Negro race alongside the lowest section of the white working class." These two groups were "fighting for identical things. They fight along different lines simply because they are not as class-conscious and intelligent as the ruling classes they are fighting." McKay warned white radicals that racial oppression solidified race consciousness among blacks (and whites) to the exclusion of class consciousness. "When an American Negro is proscribed on account of his color," McKay said, "when the lynching fever seizes the South and begins to break out even in the North, the black race feels and thinks as a unity" and loses all "sense of its unity as a class--or as a part, rather, of the American working class.... The Negro must acquire class consciousness. And the white workers must accept him and work with him, whether they object to his color and morals or not. For his presence is to them a menacing reality."[27]
McKay revealed his incendiary views on Afro-American life and art--later embodied in Home to Harlem and other novels that would generate unending controversy among Afro-American intellectuals--in his review of Shuffle Along, an all-Negro revue. Shuffle Along, McKay said, "somewhat conflicts with my international intelligence and entices me to become a patriotic barker for my race." McKay assailed the effete, respectable Afro-American intelligentsia that disdained such shows as demeaning to the race. In terms resembling Chandler Owen's praise of the interracial cabarets, McKay denounced the
convention-ridden and head-ossified Negro intelligentsia, who censure colored actors for portraying the inimitable comic characteristics of Negro life, because they make white people laugh! Negro artists will be doing a fine service to the world, maybe greater than the combined action of all the white and black radicals yelling revolution together, if by their efforts they can spirit the whites away from lynching and inbred prejudice, to the realm of laughter and syncopated motion.[28]
George Lansbury had brought the American Southern Orchestra into the very heart of English race riots, which dissipated under impulse of "syncopated songs." Song and laughter, McKay asserted, bound the races together in terms of shared enjoyment.[29]
McKay lamented that the absence of authentic Afro-American performances meant that whites turned to inferior "bastard exhibitions," white imitators of Negro life and song. Afro-American servility and fear of white criticism had corrupted black critical judgment. Negro critics declared that Negro art
must be dignified and respectable like the Anglo-Saxon's before it can be good. The Negro must get the warmth, color and laughter out of his blood, else the white man will sneer at him and treat him with contumely. Happily, the Negro retains his joy of living in the teeth of such criticism; and in Harlem, along Fifth and Lenox avenues, in Marcus Garvey's Hall with its extravagant paraphernalia, in his churches and cabarets, he expresses himself with a zest that is yet to be depicted by a true artist.[30]
While Shuffle Along did adopt many of the conventions of white Broadway theatre, McKay denied that this lessened its value as an authentic expression of Afro-American life. In an implicit slap at Garvey, McKay said that Afro-Americans, "who by an acquired language and suffering, are closer knit together than all the many tribes of Africa, alien to each other by custom and language, cannot satisfy the desire of the hypercritical whites for the Congo wriggle, the tribal war jig, and the jungle whoop. The chastisement of civilization has sobered and robbed them of these unique manifestations. American Negroes have not the means and leisure to tour Africa for ancestral wonders.... The conventions of Shuffle Along are those of Broadway, but the voice is nevertheless indubitably Africa expatriate." McKay did criticize the show for its very light-skinned chorus, which should have represented the "diversity of shades" among Afro-Americans and thus given "more distinction and realism" to the performance.[31]
McKay and other Afro-American radicals hoped that they could capture the UNIA for their class-conscious radical movement. When these efforts failed (the ABB having been unceremoniously expelled from the UNIA) and Garvey was indicted for mail fraud, McKay publicly criticized "the Negro Moses," even while acknowledging his tremendous success in galvanizing Afro-American militance. In Harlem Garvey "struck the black belt like a cyclone;" the Black Star Line "had an electrical effect upon all the Negro peoples of the world--even the black intelligentsia." While other black leaders hardly made a dent in white opinion, McKay said, "Garvey succeeded in bringing the Associated Press to its knees every time he bellowed. And his words were trumpeted round the degenerate pale-face world trembling with fear of the new Negro."[32]
Although Garvey's spirit was revolutionary, McKay wrote, he did not understand "modern revolutionary developments," ignoring industrial unions and criticizing integrated organizations such as the SP and the NAACP. Garvey also talked of Africa "as if it were a little island in the Caribbean Sea. Ignoring all geographical and political divisions, he gives his followers the idea that vast continent of diverse tribes consists of a large homogeneous nation of natives struggling for freedom and waiting for the Western Negroes to come and help them drive out the European exploiters."[33]
McKay charged that Garvey inflicted "five years of stupendous vaudeville" upon the Afro-American community. He criticized Garvey's racist preference for dark skin (a predilection which McKay partly shared), his dictatorial tendencies, his floating of unseaworthy boats, and his comical claim that he could harness "African mysteries"; but in the end he recognized Garvey as "the biggest popularizer of the Negro problem, especially among Negroes, since Uncle Tom's Cabin."[34] Sadly, McKay did not analyze the main reasons for Garvey's popularity--the white terrorism and violence that rendered class consciousness self-defeating among black workers and other plans for black liberation as illusory as Garvey's schemes. Indeed, McKay and his black Communist cohorts hardly recognized the reasons for their own failure among the black masses who flocked under Garvey's banner.
McKay not only rejected American racism; he denounced American civilization in toto in his review of John Dos Passos's novel, Three Soldiers. McKay characterized the American government as "a state whose energy is organized to make money on a vast scale to the exclusion of every individual and social ideal of man." Chesterfield, one of the novel's main characters, epitomized
the highest composite type of the United States civilization. A strong, sentimental ape-man who refuses to use his intellect under any circumstances and touches everything that is fine in civilized life... with the hand of the brute. In him is embodied the new war-strengthened America that means to trample on all the cultural values of life, in the West Indies, the Philippines, Europe and the East, armed with Yankee bluff and money-power. He is the terrible vital soul of lynching, mob chivalry, the posse, rough-house movies, Billy Sundayism, strike-breaking firms, state constabularies, election-campaign thugs, the American Legion, pulpit pimps, the Hearst headlines, the Trusts and Wall Street.[35]
Death, McKay implied, was vastly preferable to such a life.
Yet in a prophetic article, McKay rejected exile in Europe as a suitable option for a black artist. Europe lacked America's virulent racism. "But for all its twilight charm, old Europe is no haven for a young, striving American Negro," McKay said, virtually predicting his own future. "After a while he will tire even of kindly, but unrelieved pale-pink faces, and his heart will turn with sad longing to the dark limited areas of his own country. He will see through a mist, soft and indefinable, their colorful loveliness, and yield to the irresistible call to return to his own, to laugh and struggle and hope with them."[36] McKay, however, could not merge into the black masses in America any more than he could in Jamaica; he would remain truly "a long way from home" wherever he was.
As an editor of the Liberator, McKay became close friends with many whites, notably Crystal and Max Eastman.[37] Yet McKay's presence in the very center of an otherwise all-white radical milieu exposed him to contumely and abuse, despite the best intentions of the other Liberator editors. "When I went to work on the Liberator I knew that I would have to face social problems even greater than before," McKay later said, "but I was determined to face them out. But what happened to me hurt more because it came from an unexpected source." The magazine's theatre critic having left for the season, McKay "elected myself dramatic critic by acclamation" and attended a performance of Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped at the avant-garde Theatre Guild. McKay anticipated a good seat at the front of the theatre in the Press section, but when he and his white friend and Liberator artist William Gropper presented their tickets, the usher (confused and incredulous that a black and white man would attend together) confiscated them, hurriedly consulted the manager, and shunted both men into the balcony. "Suddenly the realization came to me," McKay wrote in the Liberator. "I had come here as a dramatic critic, a lover of the theatre, and a free soul. But--I was abruptly reminded--those things did not matter. The important fact, with which I was suddenly slapped in the face, was my color. I am a Negro.... I had come to see a tragic farce--and I found myself unwittingly the hero of one. He who got slapped was I."[38]
McKay took consolation in his recognition that the forces which fostered racism were not eternal, and would be destroyed. Despite his humiliation he rationalized the Theatre Guild's conduct:
Big business thrives on color lines and race differences. Its respectable institutions and criminal governments draw strength and power from race hatreds, class distinctions and social insults and discriminations against Negroes. I know the mighty world forces that reach out to control even such organizations as the tiny Theatre Guild that are doubtless, so far as they can be, radical.... I know the cruel competition of the theatre business. I know that most of the productions are financial failures.
McKay, therefore, would not "ask any business, however exquisitely artistic, however moral and aloof from the market, to shoulder the burden of the Negro race."[39]
Consumed with rage, McKay could not enjoy the performance. Unconsoled when the Theatre Guild telephoned the Liberator and explained the necessity for its policy, he exclaimed:
Poor, painful black face, intruding into the holy places of the whites. How like a specter you haunt the pale devils! Always at their elbow, always darkly peering through the window, giving them no rest, no peace. How they burn up their energies trying to keep you out! How apologetic and uneasy they are, yes, even the best of them, poor devils, when you force an entrance, blackface, facetiously, incorrigibly smiling or disturbingly composed. Shock them out of their complacency, blackface, make them uncomfortable, make them unhappy! Give them no peace, no rest. How can they bear your presence, blackface, great, unappeasable ghost of Western civilization![40]
McKay's hurt and estrangement was magnified by the conduct of the Liberator staff, which, however sympathetic, took no concrete action against the offending theatre. Joseph Freeman, who soon replaced McKay at the Liberator, later commented that "no boycott or demonstration was organized against the theatre which humiliated a gifted poet and through him his entire people." Incredibly, McKay (who similarly vastly romanticized his vagabond existence in Marseilles) later asserted "many a white wretch, baffled and lost in his civilized jungles, is envious of the toiling, easy-living Negro."[41] This statement was certainly belied by the horror he had just endured; but it represented a contradiction that forever informed his art. Home to Harlem, Banana Bottom, and Banjo would exemplify the theme that blacks, however oppressed, retained the gift of enjoying life.
The American caste system intruded even into the intimate relations of McKay and his white friends. Eastman, for example, could not fully understand the humiliations blacks faced in routine public situations. In his autobiography McKay described his feelings about a particularly lacerating incident in which he and some white friends were driving about and wanted to stop for a meal, but found no restaurant that would serve them together. Finally a restaurant allowed them to dine at a servants' table amidst the heat, noise, and garbage of the kitchen. "It was one of the most miserable meals I ever ate," McKay remembered. "I felt not only my own humiliation, but more keenly the humiliation that my presence had forced upon my friends... I did not want friends to make such sacrifices for me. If I had to suffer in hell, I did not want to make others suffer for me." On a similar occasion Eastman remarked, "If I were a Negro I couldn't be anything but a revolutionist!"--which McKay thought frivolous.[42] Eastman probably regarded the entire situation as something of an adventure, an initiation into an aspect of life virtually unknown to him. He, of course, could dine in any restaurant whenever he wished, as long as he was not accompanied by McKay. Nothing McKay could do, however, would make him welcome. This incident symbolized the chasm that separated Eastman from McKay--a chasm that neither of them wanted, and yet neither could fully surmount. Only earnest communication could begin to assuage the devastations inflicted by the pervasive racism of American life. But Eastman and McKay did not discuss their feelings about the incident with each other.
McKay certainly did not communicate the depth of his alienation and resentment. Sometimes, giving no reason, he would refuse invitations from his white friends. "I did not always like to intrude the fact of my being a black problem among whites," he later said. "For, being born and reared in the atmosphere of white privilege, my friends were for the most part unconscious of black barriers. In their happy ignorance they would lead one into the traps of insult.... No white person, however sympathetic, can feel fully the corroding bitterness of color discrimination." Eastman, for his part, was surprised by what he considered McKay's occasional outbursts of "unaccountably spiteful behavior."[43] But Eastman (as he himself acknowledged) simply could not sufficiently identify with McKay. McKay, unsurprisingly, recognized the problem. He viewed segregation as "the most powerful instrument in the world" for preventing "rapprochement and understanding between different groups of people.... Ultimately it can destroy even the most devoted friendship. Only super-souls among the whites can maintain intimate association with colored people against the insults and insinuations of the general white public and even the colored public. Yet no white person, however sympathetic, can fully feel the corroding bitterness of color discrimination."[44] McKay's lacerating experience with Eastman was not exceptional; Mike Gold later said that when he and McKay associated in New York, "we were always being thrown out of restaurants. Once, for race reasons, we were thrown out of a chop suey house by an indignant Chinese!"[45]
A revealing difference in the racial situations of Eastman and McKay was highlighted when McKay invited Eastman to an all-black cabaret. McKay later recounted that "I had become so familiar with Max Eastman, and his ideas and ways were so radically opposed to the general social set-up of white-without-black, that it was impossible to feel about him as a black does about a white alien. And I was such a good and regular customer of Ned's that I thought he would waive his rule for me. But I thought wrong that time.... [Max] said he was happy that there was one place in Harlem that had the guts to keep white people out."[46] Eastman could respond with equanimity to his exclusion, for, as he fully recognized, it was very rare. McKay, however, could at any time find himself, and his white companions, ignominiously evicted from any public establishment without warning.
Although Eastman struggled tenaciously to transcend the racist structures of American society, an incident in his own home revealed the obstacles he confronted. The Liberator held an informal reception for H.G. Wells, despite Wells's racist and imperialist views. This itself was an unintentional, but common, slap at McKay; in an era of pervasive racism even on the Left, white radicals could hardly repudiate Socialist luminaries, whatever their racial views. Yet McKay suffered an additional indignity when Charlie Chaplin's southern companion, Neysa McMein, ruined the party when she discovered that McKay "was a guest and not a servant in Max Eastman's house." Undaunted, Eastman later read her some of McKay's poems without disclosing the poet's identity. "She expressed great appreciation and a desire to buy a book of some of them," McKay later reported. But when Eastman triumphantly revealed that the author was none other than the black man whose presence at the party McMein had resented, she remained obstinate in her bigotry. "She did not like the verses any less or the idea of my equal association with whites any more," McKay said.[47] This incident shows that Eastman would push the limits in undermining the racism even of associates; but it also reveals his lack of success. Indeed, the New York police violently broke up an interracial Liberator ball because, in McKay's words, they "were aghast at the spectacle of colored persons mixed with white in a free fraternal revel."[48] (Garvey, as related above, misrepresented this imbroglio for his own purposes.) When the entire social, legal, and economic structure denigrated blacks as inferior and besmirched the reputations of any whites who risked association with them, how could the relatively puny efforts of isolated individuals bridge the chasm?
McKay also found himself embroiled in literary and political controversies on the Liberator. Such uproars were not at all unusual--in a sense they constituted the lifeblood of the magazine--yet in McKay's case they often acquired racial overtones. For instance, McKay clashed with Robert Minor over the merits of some early verses by e.e. cummings that McKay advocated publishing in a special two-page spread. In McKay's later account, Minor said "that if I liked such poems I was more of a decadent than a social revolutionist. I protested that the verses were poetry, and that in any work of art my natural reaction was more for its intrinsic beauty than for its social significance. I said that my social sentiments were strong, definite and radical, but that I kept them separate from my aesthetic emotions, for the two were different and should not be mixed up." This was a purely literary disagreement; even Eastman was not enthusiastic about the verses. The Liberator printed a few, but did not highlight them. But Minor (a Texas native) raised the stakes when he charged that McKay was not "a real Negro."[49]
On another occasion, Eastman chanced by the Liberator offices when McKay, Minor, and the Harlem black radicals (including Harrison, Domingo, Briggs, Moore, Huiswood, and Grace Campbell) were discussing strategies for radicalizing the UNIA. Eastman jocularly said, "Ah, you conspirators!" However, fearing Justice Department repression (he had already endured two trials under the Espionage Act), Eastman asked that McKay hold such meetings elsewhere--a request which angered and offended McKay.[50]
Eastman and McKay, however, were not only close friends, but also artistic collaborators who shared political and literary tastes. Eastman was a political revolutionary who esteemed "art for art's sake," championed traditional rhymed and metered poetry against avant-garde verse, and denounced the priggish, artificial refinement of much contemporary literature. Although he strongly favored literature with social themes, he condemned propaganda that masqueraded as literature. He deeply regretted the lack of high-quality revolutionary verse. "There just wasn't any blending of poetry with revolution," he lamented. "Nobody wrote revolutionary poetry that was any good." Eastman himself tried but failed. "It just happens that political emotions did not move me to write poetry.... It was a limitation of my nature that I would occasionally try to overpass. But there's no use trying to write poetry." Eastman suspected that he failed because his political emotions were "less profound, less organic, less clear perhaps, less wholly myself."[51]
Because Eastman and McKay shared such artistic and political predilections, they developed a warm literary and personal friendship. McKay, in fact, almost perfectly embodied Eastman's own ideal of a literary artist. McKay was a member of the working class and a revolutionary; he crafted magnificent poems of revolt as well as lyrics of love and nature; he used classical forms such as the sonnet; and he gave white readers vivid intimations of a universe previously unknown to them. Unlike Eastman, he could write highly charged, authentic protest poetry from the heart, rather than out of a sense of political duty. Introducing McKay's Harlem Shadows (1922), Eastman extolled his friend as embodying the ideal of a poet simultaneously expressing individual, racial, and universal themes. Eastman also expressed the very stereotypes about blacks which McKay himself shared:
Here for the first time we find our literature vividly enriched by a voice from this most alien race among us. And it should be illuminating to observe that while these poems are characteristic of that race as we most admire it--they are gentle-simple, candid, brave, and friendly, quick of laughter and of tears--yet they are still more characteristic of what is deep and universal in mankind.... The subject of all poetry is the experience of the poet, and no man of any other race in the world can touch or imagine the experience of the children of African slaves in America.[52]
McKay, Eastman continued, "found himself by an instinctive gravitation singing in the forefront of the battle for human liberty.... He knew that his voice belonged not only to his own moods and the general experience of humanity, but to the hopes and sorrows of his race." McKay had dropped out of college and "cast in his lot with the working-class Negroes of the north"; he "has earned his living in every one of the ways that northern Negroes do." Eastman compared McKay to Catullus and Villon "and all the poets that we call lyric because we love them so much.... It is the poetry of life, and not of the poet's chamber."[53]
When Michael Gold raised a rebellion against Eastman's editorship, alleging that Eastman was insufficiently revolutionary, Eastman--who had longed chafed under his administrative duties--gladly resigned and departed for a long sojourn in the Soviet Union. Before leaving, he engineered an agreement by which Gold and McKay became joint editors. McKay, an emigrant black, was now coeditor of one of the most influential American revolutionary publications--a magazine that, whatever its intentions, reached an almost exclusively white audience. However, as McKay ruefully observed, "there could have been no worse combination, because personally and intellectually and from the first time we met, Michael Gold and I were opposed to each other."[54]
McKay performed his editorial duties with confidence and competence. But he soon ran afoul the growing dogmatism of his coeditor, who espoused with increasing stridency the virtues of proletarian literature. Gold proclaimed that "I was born in a tenement.... It was in a tenement that I first heard the sad music of humanity rise to the stars.... All I know of life I learned in the tenement..... What is art? Art is the tenement pouring out its soul through us, its most sensitive sons and daughters. What is Life? Life for us has been the tenement that bore and molded us through years of meaningful pain." He apotheosized the masses as the wellsprings of the primitive, uncorrupted life in which the artist must immerse himself. He denounced solitary artists, aloof and isolated from the people, who considered themselves spiritual aristocrats and were "therefore sick to death." Artists must lose themselves in the people and "learn through solidarity with the people what Life is."[55]
Gold declared that the masses would now "put forth those huge-hewn poets, those striding, out-of-door philosophers and horny-handed creators of whom [Whitman] prophesied"; such earth-spawned artists would create "the spiritual cement of a literature and art [that] is needed to bind together a new society." In what must have seemed a personal affront to McKay, many of whose poetic forms and sentiments were shaped by Victorian conventions, Gold denounced bourgeois artists as sterile, isolated, and diseased, and thundered that "the boy in the tenement must not learn of their art. He must stay in the tenement and create a new and truer one there."[56] McKay later claimed that Gold wanted the Liberator to become "a popular proletarian magazine, printing doggerels from lumberjacks and stevedores and true revelations from chambermaids. I contended that while it was most excellent to get material out of the forgotten members of the working class, it should be good stuff that could compare with any other writing."[57]
McKay, however, caricatured Gold's position. Gold's call for a popular literature as exemplified by Walt Whitman hardly constituted a lowering of standards. Gold also expressedly stated that his ideal was "not an artificial theory evolved in the brains of a few phrase-intoxicated intellectuals, and foisted by them on the masses. Art cannot be called into existence that way. It must grow from the soil of life, freely and without forethought." The social revolution, rather than dictating to artists or demanding formulaic literature, would liberate the innate creativity of the masses, repressed by "the economic barriers and social degradation" imposed by capitalism. Artistic liberation, like social, economic, and political revolution, required the conscious creation of new forms and institutions.[58]
McKay's own views at the time were not as far removed from Gold's as he later claimed. Indeed, less than two years after he left the Liberator, McKay told the Crisis that although his childhood mentor had emphasized the chasm between literature and propaganda, experience had altered his own views. "I lighted upon one of Milton's greatest sonnets that was pure propaganda, and a widening horizon revealed that some of the finest spirits of modern literature--Voltaire, Hugo, Heine, Swift, Shelley, Byron, Tolstoy, Ibsen--had carried the taint of propaganda." McKay claimed that he had then embraced "another extreme where I have always sought for the motivating force or propaganda intent that underlies all literature of interest." McKay himself, of course, wrote poetry of passionate protest that hostile critics could attack as propagandistic. Moreover, McKay exemplified in many respects Gold's own ideal of the proletarian artist: he was of working-class origin, and wrote vivid protest poetry about the life of common blacks in language fully intelligible to the black masses, who adopted him as their poet laureate.[59] McKay later wrote realistic novels of working-class Negro life and claimed that he was a proletarian novelist in the truest sense.[60]
Ironically, in view of their controversy over "propaganda vs. aesthetics," McKay and Gold also squared off over the amount of racial material published in the Liberator. McKay asked that the magazine include more material on black concerns and issues, eventually demanding that the space given to such stories equal the proportion of blacks in the American working class, roughly 10 percent. Appraised of this dispute, Eastman predictably considered McKay's attitude formulaic and counterproductive; it would, Eastman feared, cause whites to dismiss the Liberator. "You began to introduce so much material about the race question into your magazine," he later wrote McKay, "that it was destined to have the exact opposite effect from the one we desired.... You have a magazine circulating practically entirely among whites. You have these whites full of peculiar ignorance and intolerance of the Negro and the Negro problem, which you describe in your book as the chief problem of the revolution in America.... What you will do is destroy your instrument, that is all." McKay called Eastman (who had endured the suppression of The Masses, two trials under the Espionage Act, and a near lynching) "a nice opportunist always in search of the safe path and never striking out for the new if there are any signs of danger ahead."[61] Eastman, however, recognized the deeply ingrained racism of even the relatively enlightened whites who read the Liberator--a recognition difficult to reconcile with his belief that proletarian revolution would automatically eliminate such tenaciously held sentiments.
Sadly, Mckay expressed the depths of his feelings only after he had left the Liberator and was about to publish, in Moscow and in Russian, his Negroes in America. This book contained a chapter (excised from the published version) criticizing the racism of the American revolutionary movement and depicting the Liberator in an unflattering manner. McKay apparently sent Eastman a draft copy of this chapter. Hurt and bewildered, Eastman wrote McKay that he had never known of any disputes over editorial policy concerning racial issues. McKay tellingly replied that "You never discussed the Negro problem as a policy of the Liberator with me. Nor did any of the other editors.... My position on the Liberator I discussed seriously only with the radical Negro group in New York."[62] Why was there no discussion? McKay perhaps despaired of ever communicating his perceptions to a solid phalanx of whites who could not understand; he attempted to break through on particular issues without success, and thus avoided broaching his larger concerns.[63] He knew that the downtrodden cannot criticize their "benefactors" in the dominant group without being accused of ingratitude; this must have acted as a major constraint on a free and equal exchange of views.
McKay was bitterly but realistically aware of his plight as a black. He was seldom viewed simply as a person, but always as an exotic and as a representative of his race, whose every act was rigorously scrutinized. In an exchange of letters with Eastman in Russia in 1923--a time when McKay was very angry and somewhat unfair in his accusations--he claimed that he had worked at the Liberator in the same spirit as he worked at menial jobs, "with the full knowledge that I was not merely an ordinary worker, but that I was also a Negro, that I would not be judged on my merits as a worker alone, but on my behavior as a Negro.... [I] was on trial not as a worker but as a strange species."[64] McKay undoubtedly would have had such feelings regardless of the attitudes and actions of the Liberator's editors; they were based on solid experience in the larger, racist society. He did not discuss these feelings with Eastman at the time--the feelings virtually precluded their being discussed--and even later, by letter, described them somewhat obliquely. The hurt and estrangement from even his best friends were far too deep to be bridged by words. Only his anger at the circumstances of his departure from the Liberator caused him to express his feelings--and even then in a book scheduled for publication in Russia and in Russian, rather than directly to his friend.
McKay was embittered because of the denouement of his controversy with Gold. In June 1922 Gold assailed McKay, as editor, for publishing in that month's Liberator a devastating, understated account of the legal lynching of a shy, young African-American man.[65] Finally, Gold--who had adopted the persona of a rough-and-tumble working-class tough--challenged McKay to a boxing match (presumably, in his eyes, the proletarian equivalent of a duel) over an alleged personal slight. Gold's belligerent challenge of a boxing match to McKay revealed a deep-seated, if unconscious, racism. Gold was an amateur boxer, which McKay was not; but whites (as George Bernard Shaw had earlier reminded him) often associated blacks with boxing. Gold's macho bluster, therefore, was as demeaning as Robert Minor's assertion that only he could define a real Negro, and all the more devastating in its impact on McKay for Gold's obliviousness to his insult.[66]
McKay temporarily mollified Gold, but "saw clearly that our association could not continue." He demanded that the editorial staff of the Liberator choose between him and Gold. Despite Gold's racism, bluster, and dogmatism, the staff (partly on Eastman's advice, proffered from abroad) sided with him against McKay. This virtually forced McKay's resignation, although the July Liberator somewhat mendaciously announced that McKay had resigned as an executive officer so that he could devote more time to writing and travel. McKay remained a contributing editor, and the Liberator promised that his work "would have the same high place in the pages of the Liberator as heretofore."[67] However, except for a farewell article criticizing his comrades for their racial blindness, and a single poem, McKay never again published in the Liberator.[68]
Because McKay's stance on the literary controversies that divided him from Gold was exactly the position Eastman had long championed, Eastman's preference for Gold as editor must have been especially painful for McKay. McKay later charged that racial issues underlay what was in effect his dismissal.[69] Although Eastman pled ignorance of the specific incidents mentioned by McKay, his own explanation for his decision--that the issues produced by Gold had "more pep"--is hardly convincing, given Eastman's strident opposition to Gold's literary philosophy. In fact, it was Gold's raising of a rebellion against Eastman's editorship that had precipitated Eastman's own withdrawal.[70] Eastman had wanted to leave in any case, and Gold's outburst provided a convenient excuse. Nonetheless Eastman could not have been pleased with Gold, and must have known the significance of siding with him in his dispute with McKay. McKay, a black poet, would have symbolized continuity in the values Eastman had embodied in the Masses and the Liberator.
As it was, McKay's dismissal reverberated throughout the black world. Noting that McKay "has since severed his connection" with the Liberator, Du Bois printed a long excerpt from McKay's valedictory article, "Birthright," which excoriated radical whites for their racism. The Negro World gloated that Michael Gold objected to "Negroizing" the Liberator and "objected to working side by side with a Negro." Garvey's weekly concluded that "in the McKay incident the lesson to our group is obvious. If we must pal around with a white man, let us do so with a bourgeois white man! No hypocritical radical trash for us!"[71]
Why did Eastman let McKay down? Perhaps he worried that McKay would, as sole editor, implement the 10 percent formula for materials relating to African Americans, and thus vitiate the Liberator. But there were alternatives to a sole editorship by McKay. Joseph Freeman, elected to replace McKay, could just as easily have replaced Gold. At any rate, the decision against McKay proved disastrous, as was predictable. The Liberator soon encountered financial difficulties, and in 1924 merged with two more doctrinaire Communist magazines and disappeared. This fate may well have befallen the Liberator in any case--Eastman's departure exacerbated a severe shortage of funds and rendered more difficult the solicitation of great creative writing. (McKay, in fact, had implored reactionary H.L. Mencken to contribute an article, hoping that Mencken's name would boost circulation.[72]) McKay, therefore, may have lost nothing more than blame for an inevitable catastrophe. Nevertheless, the fact that Eastman and a majority of the staff sided against him hurt McKay deeply.
After his departure from the Liberator, McKay published an article in the August issue that hinted at the subterranean disagreements over racial issues among the staff:
Some friendly critics think that my attitude towards the social status of the Negro should be more broadly socialistic and less chauvinistically racial as it seems to them. These persons seem to believe that the pretty parlor talk of international brotherhood or the radical shibboleth of "class struggle" is sufficient to cure the Negro cancer along with all the other social ills of modern civilization. Apparently they are content with an intellectual recognition of the Negro's place in the class struggle, meanwhile ignoring the ugly fact that his disabilities as a worker are relatively heavier than those of the white worker.[73]
McKay, however, claimed explicating for whites the peculiar condition of the black proletarian as his "proud birthright" and asserted that "the problem of the darker races is a rigid test of Radicalism," more fearsome for some radicals than "the barricades." Racial divisions constituted "the monkey wrench thrown into the machinery of American revolutionary struggle..... [Blacks] might remain a tool of the ruling class, to be used effectively, as in the past, against radical labor. And in that event the black workers will suffer--the white workers will lose--the ruling class will win."[74]
McKay saw himself as a mediator between radical whites and the black masses; his duty was "to educate the black worker" and "interpret him to the uninformed white radical who is prone to accept the colorful fiction rather than the stark reality of the Negro's struggle for full social and economic freedom." The white radical who ignored the special experiences, sensibilities, and needs of blacks "not only aids the bourgeoisie, but also the ultra-nationalist Negro leaders" who preached racial hate while ignoring the class struggle.[75]
McKay felt it necessary to repudiate white stereotypes about blacks--particularly that they were licentious and dirty:
Whitetown does not exert itself to work. It lives a leisurely life on the back of Niggertown. Whitetown has a double standard of sex morals by which its best young blood flows regularly into the rising stream of Niggertown and gives America the finest results of mixed mating in the world. Niggertown itself is very dirty, filthy, and immoral. It transgresses all the superficial standards of the moral code by which Whitetown lives. Niggertown, according to the standards of Whitetown, is lazy and unthrifty, yet, by its labors, Niggertown keeps Whitetown clean, respectable and comfortable. Niggertown, like most servants' quarters, is ugly because it gives its best time to making Whitetown beautiful.[76]
One might hope that the revolutionaries and cultural rebels who read the Liberator were aware of such realities. But McKay later charged that even the Liberator's white editors lacked "a comprehensive grasp of the Negro's place in the class-struggle." Eastman denied this, at least as far as he himself was concerned, replying that "so far as you interpret the Negro from the standpoint of the class struggle, there is not a hair's difference between you and me--except of course your more sustained thoughtfulness about it." In truth, both McKay and Eastman believed that blacks suffered horrendous disabilities above and beyond those inflicted upon white workers, but that they were nevertheless an integral part of the working class. They agreed that white racism was the primary obstacle to the organization of black workers. Both acknowledged that racial and class oppression were inextricably related, but were also semi-autonomous, requiring separate analysis and attack. Both vacillated and hedged on whether class or race was the more important factor, and neither precisely delineated the relationship between the two. After the Bolshevik Revolution, however, Eastman stressed class almost to the exclusion of race, and veered toward the orthodox Marxist belief that a working-class revolution would automatically abolish racial oppressions.[77]
This was precisely the kind of sterile dogma that Eastman had previously disdained, and it upset McKay. When Eastman claimed that the proletarian revolution in Russia had immediately and automatically abolished anti-Semitism and pogroms (and that working-class revolution in the United States would probably abolish white racism in similar fashion), McKay indignantly replied that the Red Army, rather than any instantaneous and miraculous change in consciousness, had ended the pogroms. Could any fool "think that with the revolutionary overturn in Russia all class, national and racial differences would disappear as if by magic?" he asked Eastman. "Do you think the Communist leaders and the rank and file could by a single stroke change the minds of all the fossil-minded, stereotyped and mannikin wrecks of humanity that have been warped by hundreds of years of bourgeois traditions and education?"[78] McKay's own experiences among white workers and radicals continually reminded him of a truth that had momentarily escaped Eastman: cultural patterns are deeply embedded and not easily overturned, even by conscious effort. Whether a transformed consciousness or the Red Army had abolished the pogroms, however, the fact remained that they had ceased.
Ironically, however, McKay had previously made exactly the arguments he now found so wrongheaded in Eastman. In the Crisis for July 1921, McKay had heralded the Bolshevik Revolution as "the greatest event in the history of humanity." Afro-Americans must understand that "a mere handful of Jews," greatly fewer proportionately than blacks in American, had won "through the Revolution, all the political and social rights that were denied to them under the regime of the Czar." Class, not race, was paramount; the Afro-American was "ostracized only technically by the distinction of color; in reality the Negro is discriminated against because he is of the lowest type of worker."[79] McKay allowed that "this economic difference between the white and black workers manifests itself in various forms, in color prejudice, race hatred, political and social boycotting and lynching of Negroes." All American institutions collaborated in this. "Still, whenever it suits the business interests controlling these institutions to mitigate the persecutions against Negroes, they do so with impunity." As evidence McKay cited scabbing blacks, who worked "under the protection of the military and the police," which would not under ordinary circumstances protect blacks from the mob. Yet McKay concluded not that Communist revolution would inevitably liberate blacks; on the contrary, he asserted that if the plutocrats granted equal rights to Negroes, it would cause immediate "revolution in the economic life of the country."[80]
While tension was building on the Liberator, McKay achieved one of the literary triumphs of his life--an expanded, American edition of his poems, now titled Harlem Shadows. McKay had visited Frank Harris shortly after McKay's return to the United States, and had shown Harris his Spring in New Hampshire. Harris, however, had immediately noticed the absence of "If We Must Die"; told by an apologetic McKay that "I was advised to keep it out," Harris exploded:
You are a bloody traitor to your race, sir! A damned traitor to your own integrity. That's what the English and civilization have done to your people. Emasculated them. Deprived them of their guts. Better you were a head-hunting, blood-drinking cannibal of the jungle than a civilized coward. You were bolder in America. The English make obscene sycophants of their subject peoples. I am Irish and I know. But we Irish have guts the English cannot rip out of us. I am ashamed of you, sir.[81]
McKay said that "Harris's words cut like a whip into my hide" precisely because he felt them fully deserved. Rather than simply a traitor to his race, McKay said, "I felt worse for being a traitor to myself. For if a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything." He vowed that he would "plug hard for the publication of an American edition, which would include the omitted poem."[82]
With the help of Joel Spingarn, a white NAACP official who had also placed McKay's poems in Seven Arts, and aided by Max Eastman's enthusiastic preface, McKay's new volume was published by Harcourt in the spring of 1922. Hubert Harrison, writing in the New York World, praised McKay as "the greatest living poet of Negro blood in America today." Harrison also touted McKay's verse in the Negro World as "high in aim, in thought, in technique." In a review which McKay thought evinced genuine understanding, Hodge Kirnon also greeted the volume enthusiastically in the Negro World. James Weldon Johnson praised the beauty of McKay's language and the bitterness of some of his sentiments, enthusing that "what [McKay] has achieved in this little volume sheds honor upon the whole race." McKay said that despite the flattering reviews, "I was too broke and hungry and anxious about the future to cultivate conceit." Nevertheless, he pronounced the publication of his first American book "the greatest joy of my life."[83]
Whatever his poetic success, McKay still encountered difficulties in making a living. In the fall of 1922, after the Liberator debacle, McKay, aided by James Weldon Johnson and Crystal Eastman, embarked for the Soviet Union. (Despite Johnson's help in raising money for the trip, McKay paid his passage to Liverpool by working as a stoker.) By the time McKay departed all hopes of Communist revolution or meaningful Afro-American insurgency in the United States had vanished. The black radicals were in disarray: Garvey had repudiated the radicals, who now lacked any possible social base, and was himself entangled in the legal complications that would land him in jail. Even the NAACP was in steep decline. Further, McKay had quarreled with Harrison over the latter's publication, in the Negro World, of McKay's private, disparaging remarks about top NAACP officials.[84] Yet one aspect of his departure was a harbinger of things to come. James Weldon Johnson arranged a farewell party for McKay, attended by literary figures of both races. Much later, Johnson wrote McKay that the party "was the first getting together of the black and white literati on a purely social plane.... I think that party started something." That "something" was the black/white collaboration inaugurating the Harlem Renaissance.[85]
Mckay, "as a social-minded being and a poet," was moved by the Russian experiment. "I desired to experience all the sensations of the new order struggling to extricate itself from the old," he wrote, "[so] I never turned aside from anything or anybody that might possibly add something to the fullness of my exciting adventure." Although the official Workers party delegation opposed and obstructed him (partly because McKay advocated a legal party, except in the South, and insisted that revolution in the United States was a distant prospect[86]), he found himself lionized by the common people, who hoisted him into the air and carried him on their shoulders. "Even the Russian comrades, who have a perfect pat social-economic explanation for all phenomena, were amazed," McKay marveled. "For the first time in my life I knew what it was to be a highly privileged personage. And in the Fatherland of Communism! Didn't I enjoy it! The American comrades were just too funny with envy and chagrin." McKay poked fun at Otto Huiswood, an official Workers party delegate: "The mulatto delegate was a washout. He was too yellow." At one point in the massive Fourth Convention of the Comintern McKay was grabbed by an usher. "At first I thought I was going to be conducted to the balcony, but instead I was ushered onto the platform to a seat beside Max Eastman and just behind Zinoviev [the head of the Comintern]."[87]
The intervention of McKay's friend Sen Katayama (and also, most probably, Max Eastman), won him entry into the circles of top Soviet officials.[88] He interviewed Leon Trotsky; and Trotsky's written answers to McKay's questions were publicized in the United States by Briggs's Crusader News Service. Zinoviev also publicly addressed McKay's concerns about Soviet, and Communist International, policy on racial questions. Because both McKay and Trotsky advocated recruitment of Afro-Americans and Africans into the Red Army and Red Navy officer corps, McKay was sent on an inspection tour of Soviet military installations. Nevertheless, McKay downplayed his own radical sentiments, telling the Fourth Congress that because of the acclaim "If We Must Die" had won among Afro-Americans, "I have been pushed forward as one of the spokesmen of Negro radicalism in America to the detriment of my poetic temperament."[89] McKay's protestations, his open association with bohemian, anti-Bolshevik writers, and his lack of accreditation as a Workers party delegate apparently convinced Zinoviev that McKay was not a Workers party member--an impression that McKay energetically dispelled.[90] Eventually McKay was accepted as comrade and a representative of the African Blood Brotherhood.
McKay affirmed that the Communist movement could liberate blacks everywhere. He told the Fourth Congress that his race was among "the most oppressed, exploited, and suppressed section of the working class of the world. The Third International stands for the emancipation of all the workers of the world, regardless of race or color," a stance that--unlike American constitutional guarantees--was "real." In his Russian-language book Negroes in America, McKay said that he disagreed with his comrades who denied that international communism could solve the race problem. "All local and national remedies applied to the Negro problem" had failed; but "I believe in the Communist International." Blacks "should turn for the solution of their problem to the Third International, since local and national measures are obsolete methods applied by the exploiting bourgeoisie.... In our day the solution of the Negro question by social reform methods is much further from its goal than it ever was." (This sentiment accorded with that of many Afro-American Communists, who joined the CP precisely because the Comintern dictated CPUSA racial policy.) Writing in the Crisis, McKay said that "the actual government [of the Soviet Union] is now in the hands of the national minorities, the peasantry, and the proletariat."[91]
Yet McKay warned the Fourth Congress, and the Soviet public in general, that the revolutionary task in the United States was difficult, partly because of the false consciousness (inculcated, however, by very real experiences) prevalent among Afro-Americans. "Some comrades may think that I am too harsh and too imbued with race consciousness," he said; but although class consciousness was better, "the Negro in America is not permitted for one minute to forget his color, his skin, or his race."[92] Therefore, the Negro was merely "race-conscious and rebellious, not revolutionary and class-conscious." Most Negroes, except for some intellectuals resentful at their enforced segregation with the mass of blacks, were "anti-socialistic."[93] McKay warned the Fourth Congress that the nature of radical propaganda and strategy concerning blacks would determine whether Afro-Americans sided with the capitalists or the white workers. At present, blacks were "very hostile to the radical propaganda of the whites."
The blacks are hostile to Communism because they regard it as a "white" working-class movement and they consider the white workers their greatest enemy, who draw the color line against them in factory and office and lynch and burn them at the stake for being colored. Only the best and broadest minded Negro leaders who can combine Communist ideas with a deep sympathy for and understanding of the black man's grievances will reach the masses with revolutionary propaganda. There are few such leaders in America today.[94]
McKay's address received widespread publicity in the United States; the Messenger and the Amsterdam News praised it, as did Abram Harris. However, Charles S. Johnson denounced McKay's charges against the National Urban League in that organization's magazine, Opportunity, in September 1923.[95]
While in the Soviet Union McKay also complained that because Afro-American intellectuals lacked the leisure and means required for serious reflection and analysis, not a single book explained the "close affinity" of the workers of both races, or informed blacks of "their true place in the class struggle and their role in the international workers' movement." Further, many black intellectuals wanted inclusion in the white supremacist, capitalist system rather than mass working-class revolution. (McKay cited Du Bois as one such individual, but said that "for the Negro masses and for America, it is better that Dr. Du Bois cannot be swallowed by the bourgeoisie.") The black elite was also seduced by the assiduous philanthropic work of the white "reformist bourgeoisie, who divert [the race question] from its true path and obscure its proletarian character with Christian philanthropy." Different racial attitudes among white imperialist powers had convinced many black intellectuals "that one imperialist exploiter can be better than another." The warm reception accorded Afro-Americans in France "is valued so highly by Negroes that they are beginning to forget about the vile exploitation of Africans by the French." Especially during the war, the French military and civilians treated Negro soldiers equally with white. "Thus the sympathy of the Negro intelligentsia is completely on the side of France. It is well informed about the barbarous acts of the Belgians in the Congo, but it knows nothing at all about the barbarous acts of the French in Senegal"--acts that included exploitation, impoverishment, and the "annihilation of whole tribes."[96]
McKay warned that prejudice was deeply ingrained in the American working class and would not dissipate quickly or easily. In the meantime, blacks must organize separately, as Russian Jews had under the Czar. Until recently, all attempts at black self-organization had "ended in nothing since ministers, politicians, and reformers have seized the leadership." However, the African Blood Brotherhood and the Friends of Negro Freedom exemplified recent class-and-race based efforts. While organizing separately, McKay said, Afro-Americans should also join the militantly interracial IWW, "a revolutionary union in which not the slightest distinction is made on the basis of race, nationality, or skin color, and which is imbued with class consciousness."[97]
McKay also warned the Fourth Congress of endemic racism within the Communist movement, of which he was personally familiar. "The reformist bourgeoisie have been carrying on the battle against discrimination and racial prejudice in America," McKay said. "The Socialists and Communists have fought very shy of it because there is a great element of prejudice among the Socialists and Communists of America. They are not willing to face the Negro question... The Communists of America... must first emancipate themselves from the ideas they entertain towards the Negroes" before they could "reach the Negroes with any kind of radical propaganda." The Workers party had overwhelmingly rejected a resolution demanding social equality between the races; its recent 48-page program never mentioned race. President Harding, McKay said bitterly, was further left than the Workers party on the racial question. Many Communists would risk death on the barricades before demanding equality for blacks in unions or defending intermarriage and social equality "in theory and practice." Confronting racism, McKay warned, would incur "the violent anger of American public opinion in the North as well as the South," and could even provoke "a race war."[98]
McKay said that American capitalists incited black workers against white, and warned that they would "mobilize the entire black race of America for the purpose of fighting organized labor" unless class-conscious workers of both races intervened. Capitalist hegemony over both races had existed for centuries, and was reenforced by social practice. Under slavery, the masters had completely controlled "the psychology of both races" by artful divisive techniques; after the Civil War, "the northern bourgeoisie," which had crushed their Southern competitors, abandoned Afro-Americans "even if they were being burned alive in bonfires." The distinctly American practice of lynching, encouraged by the capitalists, created insurmountable divisions between the races. "Women and children armed with red-hot pokers compete with the men, and add to the torments of the victim by pouring on kerosene. The men are always castrated, and the sexual organs, fingers, toes, hair, and other parts of the victim's body are removed triumphantly by men, women and children as souvenirs." The Northern states participated in this; "the whole white American nation" was "possessed by a Negro neurosis."[99] All large capitalist newspapers publicized alleged Negro crimes in screaming two-inch headlines, and "the literate proletariat of the North avidly swallows this news while rushing to work on streetcars and subways."
Thus, the well-staged propaganda of the American bourgeoisie directed against Negro workers has had great success. In the South Negroes are indiscriminately exploited and oppressed by the oligarchy and lynched by the white proletariat; in the North they are exploited and ostracized by the plutocracy and boycotted by the white proletariat.[100]
McKay advocated the devious Leninist "united front" tactics aimed at working within mainstream Afro-American organizations, discrediting their liberal leaders, and recruiting the rank-and-file for the revolutionary cause--the very strategy that the ABB had disastrously attempted within the UNIA. McKay concluded that "the Negro Communist must not only be an interpreter of the moods of his own people for white comrades who do not know this people," but must also establish contact with "white reformers and the petty-bourgeois leaders of his own race. He must prod them to make greater and greater demands for the Negro masses and undermine their authority by making counter-demands." McKay also warned blacks that they must "realize that the supremacy of American capital today proportionately increases American influence in the politics and social life of the world. Every American official abroad, every smug tourist, is a protagonist of dollar culture and a propagandist against the Negro." Afro-Americans must counter insidious American propaganda, publicize their grievances in every international forum, and ally themselves with all who resisted the stranglehold of American capitalism. The United States held the world, except for the Soviet Union, in its power or debt; and Soviet racial egalitarianism would evoke the undying enmity of the United States.[101]
The complications of American racism were well illustrated by McKay's analysis of the racial issue in American sports. Complaining that Afro-Americans could not compete in most American sports, McKay described the persecution of heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. "The Negro must not show himself capable of fighting and winning; it is not entirely safe for capitalistic America, which makes twenty million Negroes bow down.... Thus, in the United States there is no room for a Negro, even in the area of sports. Only in the national American sport called lynching is he assigned first place." In an ironic commentary on the social construction of race, McKay explained that Afro-Americans were barred from baseball, but that black Cubans could play; similarly, in a football match a dark-skinned player was saved from lynching by a quick-thinking sympathetic white who shouted that the player was a Cuban, not a "nigger. Emphasizing capitalist control over the minds of white workers, McKay said that a few extraordinary blacks could compete in American sports; where profits beckoned, the capitalist did an abrupt about-face and "stuffs the black champion down the throats of a submissive white public."[102]
McKay despaired at the enormous symbolic significance of black athletic achievement in the Afro-American community. He viewed such achievement (and, implicitly, popular culture generally), as a surrogate for meaningful lives and victorious social struggle. "When Jack Johnson was beaten by Jess Willard, in all the Negro billiard halls, barbershops, and nightclubs of American cities the crying and moaning could be heard," he said. (McKay was apparently not aware that this match was fixed, and that white authorities had threatened Johnson with a long jail term on trumped-up charges unless he threw the match.) In capitalist America, profits trumped even racism. The white boxer Jack Dempsey would soon confront the black Harry Wills in the ring. "Everything will be arranged in the most splendid manner," McKay said. "The entrance fee will be high, the proceeds will be huge, both sides will place large bets, and at the same time that part of the black and white proletariat which has not been imbued with class consciousness will think that those radical [racial?] differences which exist between them can be settled by fist fights arranged for a commercial purpose."[103]
McKay also decried the white American's hysterical phobia about interracial sex. The American bourgeoisie, he said, "artfully maintains a war between the races over sex. Every crime--be it class inequality, lynch law, or the exploitation of labor--is concealed by the fetish of sex as behind a smoke screen." The taboo on sex between black men and white women, cultivated by the slaveowners before the Civil War (even as these owners indulged themselves with their slave property), remained "a form of black magic" which "splendidly served the aims and intentions of the master class." Southern whites, indeed, were gripped by a "neurotic fascination with the naked body and sexual organs of Negroes." The master class encouraged lynchings, "that exclusively American sport," as a mechanism for hiding "the disgusting economic situation of the South." However, the North also revelled in this barbaric sport; "the whole white American nation is, in a strange way, possessed by a Negro neurosis." In a starling yet undeveloped insight, McKay perceived that "the Negro question is inseparably connected with the question of woman's liberation" because white men used the specter of the bestial black rapist to control white women, whose morals were also cast into doubt.[104]
McKay's writings from the Soviet Union also commented on the tragic dilemma of the Afro-American artist. McKay complained that the Afro-American intelligentsia, angered at stereotypical and racist depictions of blacks, stigmatized authentic Afro-American artistic achievement as demeaning. It "would replace genuine Negro folksongs and jazz songs with mediocre Negro singers performing Italian arias, German songs and Chopin waltzes in decorous drawing rooms." It had abandoned "the profound aspiration" of remaining true to itself and "realiz[ing] its ideals as a group inside a certain society" in favor of imitating whites. This generated only "spiritual impotence" and the neglect of race traditions at the very time that the white world was discovering Negro art.[105]
In a capitalist society there is no slave equal to the artist. He is the greatest slave because his instinctively revolutionary spirit is harnessed like a mechanical machine. And still the artist prides himself on the fact that he is free and stands above propaganda..... Our age is the age of the Negro in art. The slogan of the aesthetic art world is "Return to the Primitive.".... The Congo, it turns out, has an interest independent of rubber and savages.... The artists have discovered art. It is often strange to see how an ultra-civilized pupil sits at the feet of a simple savage teacher and gleans so little from him because he is too civilized to learn.[106]
McKay disparaged much Afro-American literature as cheap imitations of bad white writing or of Negro dialect writers who, however expressive of their own times, could not represent the urbanized Afro-American of industrial America. Dunbar's dialect poems, for example, authentically expressed "the very soul of the Negro during the period of emancipation"; his other writings, however, were execrable. Many Negro short stories were "unreal, wrapped in an idealistic religious fog," and depicted angelic blacks much like "the black angels, cherubims, and cupids sold in Negro shops and stands." McKay insisted that truly great Afro-American literature retained "the character of national propaganda." Almost any black writer, however seemingly detached from social issues, was in reality a propagandist; the racial situation was so urgent that "not a single person can stand aloof." McKay, however, discerned a new spirit in Afro-American literature, "a vivid poetry and prose of a more intimate and subjective character in its expression, but more widely objective in its content." He urged that Afro-American writers abandon the old dialect mode and emulate "the new school of critics, chiefly Jews, who have a great heritage of racial community expression in literature" and who "strike definite racial notes in art rather than express general and universal ideas."[107]
In an impish slap at orthodox "proletarian literature" theorists like his old bête noir, Michael Gold, McKay noted that Soviet workers appreciated the traditional ballet and classical plays, while the intelligentsia frequented the experimental and revolutionary theatre. "The workers and soldiers really preferred the ballet of the Bolshoi theatre, the Moscow art theatres, the expressionist theatre and the ordinary vulgar theaters.... While the workers and soldiers showed a distinct preference for the straight familiar entertainment, it was the intelligentsia that was avid [for] revolutionary drama."[108]
During his sojourn in the citadel of world revolution, McKay frequented both the Arbot, a rendezvous of serious proletarian writers, and the Domino Cafe, "a notorious den of the dilettante poets and writers." At the latter, "there was an undercurrent of hostility to the Bolshevists. But I was invited to speak and read my poetry whenever I appeared at any [reading] and [was] treated with every courtesy and consideration as a writer. Among those sophisticated and cultured Russians, many of them speaking from two to four languages, there was no overdoing of the correct thing, no vulgar wonderment and bounderish superiority over a Negro's being a poet. I was a poet, that was all, and their keen questions showed that they were much more interested in the technique of my poetry, my views on and my position regarding the modern literary movements than in the difference in my color." Revealing the stark difference between Leninist and Stalinist Russia, McKay said that many writers freely expressed their criticisms of the Bolshevik regime, although they knew that he was "very sympathetic to it."[109]
McKay remained in Soviet Russia for six months following the Fourth Congress. His writings, for which he was well paid, appeared prominently in major Soviet publications, and (along with his two articles in the Crisis) indicate that he was very favorably impressed with Soviet ideology and achievements. Indeed, writing H.L. Mencken, he expressed surprise at the freedom of speech prevailing in Soviet Russia, praised the Soviet Department of National Minorities, and predicted that the United States would disintegrate under the force of diverse and incompatible interests much as Czarist Russia had.[110]
Why then did McKay leave the Communist heartland? First, he had alienated American Communists by his ridicule of their conspiratorial mentality, his denunciations of their racism, his loud insistence on artistic independence, and his refusal to accept disciplined Party assignments. McKay wrote Walter White that American Party members feared him because "although I am a Communist, I am a fearless champion of race rights even when that championship should reflect on American comrades." More importantly, he desperately required medical treatment for syphilis, and believed that he could obtain superior care in Europe. Partly because of fears of secret police harassment, he did not seriously consider returning to the United States. Many secret police agencies had monitored McKay ever since the publication of "If We Must Die"; his meetings with other black radicals had not escaped their notice. His Soviet connections would predictably render him even more persona non grata. William Burns, head of the Bureau of Investigation, warned agents that the Jamaican "may carry instructions and documents from the Communist International to the Communists in this country, together with a considerable sum of money." The U.S. planned to detain and question McKay should be attempt re-entry. McKay could not have known specifically of these plans; but he was not a citizen, and was well aware of U.S. persecution of radicals.[111]
McKay had no fixed plans when he entered Russia, and had no specific plans when he left. Without ever making a definite decision, he remained in Europe for twelve years, becoming a semi-voluntary exile from the United States (of which he was not, of course, a citizen.) During these years he gradually drifted away from radical politics of all kinds, focusing instead on scrounging a living and writing novels of Afro-American life. McKay had found only a marginal place for himself in the United States even during its brief years of radical ferment; he deemed the reactionary United States of the 1920s even less hospitable. He could not participate in the (similarly suppressed and failed) revolutionary movement in Europe, where he was truly a foreigner (he spoke only English). His experiences with left-wing censorship, suspicion, and political maneuvering in England, the United States, and the Soviet Union, and his acute awareness of the white racism that pervaded even the International Communist movement, also discouraged him. His admiration for, and brief association with, Leon Trotsky, doubtless led to further alienation when Trotsky was vilified by Stalin and his henchmen worldwide.[112] Much later he called himself "a truant by nature and undomesticated in the blood"; he also said that "I could never be a disciplined member of any Communist party, for I was born to be a poet."[113]
Whatever the precise reasons for McKay's subsequent political quiescence, the Jamaican poet and former revolutionary would dramatically re-enter the American scene only in 1928, with the publication of his sensational novel, Home to Harlem. This novel, which created an uproar in both white radical and Afro-American literary circles, epitomized the declension of Afro-American social radicalism into a tepid literary rebellion--a rebellion which, however tame and inconsequential from the standpoint of revolutionary social change, fostered divisions within and between the Afro-American literati and white radicals as ferocious as the political and social controversies of the previous decade.
[1] Claude McKay, My Green Hills of Jamaica (Kingston, 1979), 44-87.
[2] Wayne Cooper, Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1987), 1-103. This excellent biography is the source of all uncited information about McKay's life.
[3] CM, "A Negro Poet," Pearson's Magazine, September 1918, in PCM, 48-50.
[4] ibid.
[5] ibid.; LWFH, 53. In LWFH, 4, McKay said that he became "a vagabond with a purpose.... I looked for the work that was easy to my hand while my head was thinking hard."
[6] RSHR, 81-84.
[7] LWFH, 20-21, 26-28.
[8] TLB, April 1919. The poem appeared directly after Mary Burrill's "Aftermath: A One-act Play of Negro Life."
[9] Max Eastman, "Claude McKay," TLB, July 1919. Eastman was apparently unaware of Jekyll's important role in cultivating McKay's talent.
[10] CM, "The Negro Dancers," TLB, July 1919.
[11] CM, "Sonnets and Songs," TLB, July 1919.
[12] CM, "If We Must Die," TLB, July 1919. McKay later said (LWFH, 31) that "this grand outburst is [the blacks'] sole standard of appraising my poetry."
[13] WAD, "If We Must Die," TM, September 1919; LWFH, 32-34.
[14] LWFH, 68-69, 77. RSHR, 103-133, treats McKay's English years.
[15] CM, "Socialism and the Negro," Workers Dreadnought, January 31, 1920, in PCM, 50-54.
[16] ibid.
[17] ibid.
[18] LWFH, 74-77; CM, "A Black Man Replies," Workers Dreadnought, April 24, 1920, in PCM, 54-57. Ironically, the original "black scourge" articles were authored by E.D. Morel, who had exposed Belgian King Leopold II's mass murders of blacks in the Congo. McKay said that George Lansbury, who had criticized white British riots against blacks in English seaports, was not personally racist. Both men merely and obliviously used racial hatred as part of their Socialist propaganda. RSHR, 113.
[19] LWFH, 73-85; RSHR, 133. RSHR, 130, says that McKay wrote twenty articles and letters for the Workers Dreadnought; but in PCM, he lists many fewer in his bibliography. McKay published most of his articles under various pseudonyms, so we cannot ascertain with certainty which articles are his. RSHR, 123, says that it is "very likely" that McKay wrote "The Yellow Peril and the Dockers," which appeared under the name of Leon Lopex. This appeared in the same issue (October 16, 1920) as the final article about the royal navy, "Discontent on the Lower Deck," signed "S. 000 (Gunner). H.M.S. Hunter." "The Yellow Peril and the Dockers" advocated looting of West End shops as a palliative for unemployment. It was written by a West Indian, and is fully consistent with McKay's style and point of view. Pankhurst was indicted for four articles in the October 16 issue: in addition to "Discontent" and "Yellow Peril," Rubinstein's "How to Get a Labour Government," and an unsigned editorial, "The Datum Line." McKay, therefore, may have written one of the four articles for which Pankhurst was imprisoned, as well as discovering the sailor who wrote another.
[20] RSHR, 118-119, 125-126, 132, 165; LWFH, 86.
[21] RSHR, 130-131; LWFH, 61, 71-2. Shaw had told McKay, "It must be tragic for a sensitive Negro to be a poet. Why didn't you choose pugilism instead of poetry for a profession?" Shaw said that "poets remain poor, unless they have an empire to glorify and popularize like Kipling." These remarks hardly represent conscious racism; but their underlying assumptions are certainly racist. Shaw's question evokes Countee Cullen's poem, "Yet Do I Marvel," which, praising the inscrutable goodness of God, ends with the stanzas
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!
[22] McKay recounted the tale of a black boxer, lionized until the crowd learned that he had a white wife, whereupon it nearly lynched him. He also said that Africans were denied the chance for title fights in England, and concluded that "Perhaps the black poet has more potential scope than the pugilist. The literary censors of London have not yet decreed that no book by a Negro should be published in Britain--not yet!" LWFH, 72.
[23] LWFH, 79-82; RSHR, 123-127.
[24] ibid.
[25] LWFH, 95-96.
[26] CM, "How Black Sees Green and Red," TLB, June 1921, in PCM, 57-62.
[27] ibid.
[28] CM, "A Negro Extravaganza," TLB, December 1921, in PCM, 62-65.
[29] ibid.
[30] ibid.
[31] ibid. With a bitter facetiousness, McKay added that "If black men in general favor the lighter women of their race, it is a natural phenomenon beyond criticism."
[32] CM, "Garvey as a Negro Moses," TLB, April 1922, in PCM, 65-69.
[33] ibid.
[34] ibid.
[35] CM, "The American Type," TLB, January 1922.
[36] CM, "A Black Star," TLB, August 1921.
[37] RSHR, 148-149; LWFH, passim.
[38] CM, "He Who Gets Slapped," TLB, May 1922, in PCM, 69-73. McKay repeated some of the best lines from this article verbatim in LWFH, 144-145.
[39] ibid.
[40] ibid.; LWFH, 145.
[41] Jospeh Freeman, American Testament: A Narrative of Rebels and Romantics (New York, 1936), 258. Freeman commented that although "on a small scale the Liberator group represented that ideal society which we all wanted, that society in which no racial barriers could possibly exist," no one, including the Communists, "seriously considered organizing writers and artists for political action." Freeman, 246, 258.
[42] LWFH, 137 (cf. 132-133); "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 83; RSHR, 134-192.
[43] LWFH, 134-135; Max Eastman, Love and Revolution: My Journey Through an Epoch (New York, 1964), 222.
[44] LWFH, 135.
[45] Mike Gold, "Drunk With Sunlight," New Masses, July 1929. This was a review of Banjo, McKay's second novel.
[46] McKay added that "There are no such places [which exclude whites] left today. Harlem is an all-white picnic ground and with no apparent gain to the blacks. The competition of white-owned cabarets has driven the colored out of business, and blacks are barred from the best of them in Harlem now." LWFH, 132-133.
[47] LWFH, 117-118.
[48] LWFH, 149.
[49] LWFH, 102-103.
[50] "An Eastman--McKay Exchange," PCM, 89. For McKay's later, and more forgiving, account, see LWFH, 109.
[51] Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York, 1977), 25, 50n.
[52] Eastman, introduction to Claude McKay, Harlem Shadows (New York, 1922), ix-x. In his autobiography, McKay called this introduction "splendid." LWFH, 148. To our eyes it seems condescending because Eastman considered, even while rejecting, the idea of innate Negro inferiority. For two vastly different views of the Eastman-McKay relationship and its context see Leslie Fishbein, Rebels in Bohemia: The Radicals of The Masses, 1911-1917 (Chapel Hill, 1982), 160-167, and George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge, 1995), 250-268.
[53] ibid.
[54] LWFH, 138-139.
[55] Michael Gold, "Towards Proletarian Art," TLB, February 1921.
[56] ibid.
[57] LWFH, 138-140.
[58] Gold, "Towards Proletarian Art," TLB, February 1921, 20-24. It was the New Masses, a distant successor to the Liberator, which advertised (July 1928) for "revelations by rebel chambermaids and night club waiters" as well as "letters from hoboes, peddlers, small town atheists, unfrocked clergymen and schoolteachers" and "the poetry of steelworkers." Gold was editor of the New Masses.
[59] Revealing his continuing ambivalence about "pure" art and propaganda, McKay lamented (to no less an audience than the Fourth Congress of the Communist International) that "If We Must Die" had made him, against his will, "one of the spokesmen of Negro radicalism in America to the detriment of my poetic temperament." McKay, "Report on the Negro Question," International Press Correspondence (January 5, 1923), in PCM, 91-95.
[60] McKay's later career is covered in RSHR and LWFH; Cooper gives a generous selection of McKay's articles and letters in PCM.
[61] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-90.
[62] ibid., 78-90, especially 83.
[63] ibid. McKay said that "little instances indexed for me your attitude on the race problem. It was never hostile, always friendly, but never by a long stretch revolutionary."
[64] ibid., 84.
[65] RSHR, 159. The controversial article was "Out of Texas," by Lucy Maverick. It contained no explicitly anti-capitalist message, and in fact quoted many of the victim's former employers as certifying his innocence. McKay indicated that other members of the staff of the Liberator disagreed with his decision to publish this piece. "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 82.
[66] Robert Minor had earlier published in Current Literature (October 1912) a cartoon entitled "PUGILISM IN EXCELSIS: The Grinning Negro as He Appears to Robert Minor." In Leslie Fishbein's account (Rebels, 165), "This cartoon depicts the black boxing champion as a grinning cannibal surrounded by what are presumably human bones. The most lurid southern fantasies of blacks could do no worse."
[67] RSHR, 160-162, 167; LWFH, 138-141. Although the Liberator concealed the political infighting on the magazine, McKay had indeed planned to resign in the near future so he could write and travel. PCM, 82. Eastman's departure, was, like McKay's, immediately prompted by an ugly faction fight within the staff; but the public announcement also emphasized that Eastman wanted to travel and write. Eastman, apparently like McKay, was in fact waiting for an opportunity to depart. Floyd Dell had also taken a long leave of absence to write a second novel; leaving the editorial staff for such purposes was a tradition by June 1922.
[68] RSHR, 167.
[69] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-90; CM to Max Eastman, December 19, 1934, PCM, 212-213. Eastman told McKay that "as far as I am informed the race question had nothing whatever to do" with his dismissal. In words that must have devastated McKay, Eastman said that his choice and that of the editors of Gold over McKay was "made entirely upon the basis of intrinsic fitness for that particular job. For my part when I left New York I should have chosen you, but on the basis on the magazines you each put out, in spite of the superior reliability and delicacy of yours, I was in favor of Mike because his magazine had more 'pep'."
McKay did concede, in the course of his exchange with Eastman, that "the race matter was incidental to my quitting the executive work," but he was obviously upset at how he had been treated.
In 1934, McKay wrote Eastman that "We had one important difference--that was in Moscow and it was over an abstract intellectual point--regarding the Negro problem and the Liberator.... It was purely intellectual--never degenerating into [a] personal wrangle.... As far as I remember we have never had any real personal differences."
Because we have only Eastman's and McKay's accounts of what happened, and are obviously missing important letters and other documents which would illuminate even their own views, we cannot be sure exactly why McKay was unceremoniously pushed aside. We do know that he and Gold detested each other and that most of the editors of the Liberator, including Eastman, sided with Gold.
[70] Eastman, Love and Revolution, 265-272.
[71] "Duty of the Black Radical," TC, October 1922; "Black and White Labor," NW, August 12, 1922.
[72] RSHR, 159. Mencken, while politically very conservative, was also a racial egalitarian who encouraged black writers.
[73] McKay, "Birthright," TLB (August 1922), in PCM, 73-76.
[74] ibid.
[75] ibid.
[76] ibid.
[77] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-90. These letters concerned McKay's proposed chapter on the Liberator in his Negroes in America, which was soon published, in Russian, in the Soviet Union. Whether because of Eastman's entreaties, or because the Soviets would not print an attack on one of their chief American supporters, this chapter was excised from the published version. For an example of McKay stressing class over race, see his exchange with Du Bois, "The Negro and Radical Thought," TC, July 1921, discussed above. This exchange is reprinted in Philip S. Foner and James S. Allen, American Communism and Black Americans: A Documentary History (Philadelphia, 1987), 12-14. Foner and Allen printed the entire exchange as Du Bois published it; the ellipses in McKay's letter are in the text as it appears in the Crisis.
[78] "An Eastman-McKay Exchange," PCM, 78-90, especially 89.
[79] "The Negro and Radical Thought," TC, July 1921. Du Bois excised part of McKay's letter, which may have somewhat modified McKay's thesis.
[80] ibid.
[81] LWFH, 98-99.
[82] LWFH, 98-99.
[83] RSHR, 165-166; LWFH, 148; Tyrone Tillery, Claude McKay: A Black Poet's Struggle for Identity (Amherst, 1992), 54. Harrison's NW review (which Perry dates as May 21, 1921), is reprinted in HHHR, 392-394. Perry says that the New York World review of McKay's Harlem Shadows also appeared on May 21, 1921; however, McKay's American collection did not appear for another year. RSHR dates the NW review of Spring in New Hampshire in 1920 and the World review of Harlem Shadows as 1922.
[84] RSHR, 145-6.
[85] RSHR, 169. McKay never saw either Hubert Harrison or Crystal Eastman again. In his autobiography, McKay says that Crystal had left him a short farewell note, which he carried forever with him, "transferring it, when one pocket book was worn out, to another." When he heard of Crystal's death, "I took her farewell note out of my pocket and cried." LWFH, 154-155.
[86] LWFH, 174. McKay said that "I had listened to the American delegates deliberately telling lies about conditions in America, and I was disgusted. Not only the Communist delegates, but radical American intellectuals really thought it was right to buoy up the Russians with false pictures of the American situation." McKay was ignored when he told the Russians that revolution was not imminent in the United States.
[87] LWFH, 153, 217, 159-162, 174-6, 179-80, 167, 170-172.
[88] LWFH, 166. McKay said, LWFH, 180, that "Sen Katayama had no regard for the feelings of the white American comrades, when the Negro question came up, and boldly told them so. He said that though they called themselves Communists, many of them were unconsciously prejudiced against Negroes" and "that really to understand Negroes they needed to be educated about and among them as he had been." (Katayama had attended Tuskegee).
[89] CM, "Report on the Negro Question," International Press Correspondence, January 5, 1923, in PCM, 91-95. Tillery, 62, argues that neither Trotsky nor Zinoviev realistically addressed McKay's concerns.
[90] NIA, 88-90. In LWFH McKay denied that he had ever joined the Workers party.
[91] CM, "Report on the Negro Question," International Press Correspondence, January 5, 1923, in PCM, 91-95; NIA, 5-6, 18; CM, "Soviet Russia and the Negro," TC, January 1924.
[92] NIA, 4.
[93] CM, "The Racial Issue in the United States of America: A Summary," International Press Correspondence, November 21, 1922, in PCM, 90-91.
[94] ibid.
[95] Tillery, 73; "Claude McKay Before the Internationale," OPP, September 1923.
[96] NIA, 3, 52, 71, 44, 52.
[97] NIA, 5, 35-6.
[98] CM, "Report on the Negro Question," International Press Correspondence, January 5, 1923, in PCM, 91-95; NIA, 37-38, 41, 90.
[99] CM, "Report on the Negro Question," International Press Correspondence, January 5, 1923, in PCM, 91-95; NIA, 79-80, 82.
[100] NIA, 82.
[101] NIA, 90; CM, "Soviet Russia and the Negro," TC, December 1923.
[102] NIA, 53-55.
[103] NIA, 53-55.
[104] NIA, 76-82.
[105] NIA, 61-64.
[106] NIA, 63-64.
[107] NIA, 69-75. McKay's reference to black angels "sold in Negro shops" provides an interesting commentary on Garvey's complaint that blacks pictured angels as "white peaches from Georgia."
[108] LWFH, 189-90.
[109] CM, "Soviet Russia and the Negro," TC, January 1924.
[110] CM to H.L. Mencken, September 5, 1923, in Tillery, McKay, 64-65.
[111] Maxwell, New Negro, 89-91; Tillery, McKay, 69-70, 76-78.
[112] For McKay on Trotsky, see LWFH, 182, 208-209. McKay recounted his interview and correspondence with Trotsky in NIA, 6-10. The American secret police were very interested in this interview (widely publicized in the Soviet Union at the time); accounts of it are found in secret police files from many different agencies.
[113] LWFH, 150, 173.