FEMINISM AND RACIAL EGALITARIANISM IN AN AGE OF UPHEAVAL
The Liberator continued and indeed strengthened the feminist and racial egalitarian policies of The Masses. Socialist and feminist Crystal Eastman (Max Eastman's sister) was a co-owner of the new publication and for a time the managing editor, while Claude McKay, a revolutionary writer from Jamaica, contributed important articles on racial issues and was temporarily a co-editor. Like its predecessor, The Liberator insisted that although genuine freedom for both women and blacks required workers' emancipation, gender and race issues were not reducible or automatically included in working-class liberation.
Max Eastman extolled Alice Paul's militant suffragist tactics in early 1918, and the next year again proclaimed that the "militant solidarity" exemplified by her National Woman's party (NWP) provided a model for those lacking economic power. "The right of women to be as free and as happy as men is a right not included under, and automatically provided for, any of the other conditions of democracy," he insisted. "It is a right that women, conscious of their sex, and the problems of their sex, must imperiously take and establish for themselves." Debunking revolutionists who denigrated feminism as peripheral to the class struggle, Eastman said that although feminism was a women's rather than a workers' crusade, "it is not by any means a side issue in the progress of mankind towards liberty."[416]
As Eastman increasingly emphasized union organization rather than electineering, however, he urged that women, as men, concentrate on industrial rather than political power, and thus "bring a more substantial and lasting victory to their own cause." Rather than fighting for the vote in the political state, "an institution that is crumbling and whose power is of the past," feminists should demand contol and ownership of the real citadel of power, the means of production. However, Eastman denied that feminists should subordinate gender struggles beneath the rubric of the class struggle; indeed, he recognized that organized labor would obstruct feminism unless women entered and transformed the unions. "The American labor movement is more anti-feminist than the American government," he said. "And it is the government of the future. Assuming that this future is not too distant, would it not be more far-sighted to seize a place of power in the American labor movement than in the senile and bankrupt institutions of the ruling minority that it will displace?" Eastman also echoed IWW pronouncements that women were superior to men as unionists and strikers.[417]
Eastman's sister Crystal also propounded a far-reaching program of feminist revolution that encompassed every area of life and unified the disparate concerns of The Masses and The Liberator. Crystal had been an expert on workmen's compensation and other labor issues, a suffrage leader, and a co-founder or leader of key radical organizations--the Congressional Union (predecessor of the NWP), the Woman's Peace party (which became the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom), the American Union Against Militarism, and the National Civil Liberties Bureau (predecessor of the American Civil Liberties Union). A contributor to Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Review, she attacked AFL conservatism, favored the general strike, and demanded revolution rather than reform in the pages of The Liberator.[418]
Like her brother, Crystal was driven left by the tumultuous events of 1917-1920. In Hungary during Bela Kun's short-lived Communist experiment, she declared that "I shall never go into a big, comfortable house again, whether it is a house of a Socialist professor or a railroad president, without quietly figuring up the number of rooms and the number of people, to determine whether the family will be allowed to continue in possession of the whole house when communism comes. So real was my experience in Hungary." She regretted that hopeful experiments usually began during times of chaos, misery, and destitution, but reluctantly recognized that "revolution and starvation come hand in hand."[419] Indeed, her experiences in a revolutionary Hungary suffering armed invasion undermined her fervent pacifism:
There is no use having any illusions about the revolution. It was born in starvation, and its first business is war. There is no freedom, no plenty, no joy, except the joys of struggle and faith. Cherished dreams of scientists, educators, artists, engineers, who were waiting for a free society, must be set aside, while the whole proletariat organizes in desperate haste to check the invading hosts of the enemy. And war means recruiting propaganda, conscription, military discipline, the death penalty, the whole damnable business of organized dying and killing.[420]
Her brother had convinced her that a working-class army fighting the class war would attract sufficient volunteers without conscription, but Crystal now repudiated this view. "Now I know there can be no such thing as a democratic army. People don't want to die, and except for a few glorious fanatics they are not going to vote themselves into the front line trenches." The Hungarian Communist state conscripted soldiers and shot deserters, claiming that without these measures, the invading Czech army would extinquish the revolution. Somewhat despairingly Crystal said "I hope there is some pacifist revolutionary with an answer to that. I have none."[421]
Crystal became bitterly disillusioned with Woodrow Wilson, whom she had relied upon first to prevent American entry into World War I, and then to preserve civil liberties during the war. Indeed, her experience with Wilson undermined her belief in American democracy and in politics as the main mechanism of social change. The capitalist state, she now perceived, was merely a ruling-class instrument, whatever its forms and ideals; although the workers should utilize bourgeois institutions wherever possible, industrial unions were the true epicenters of the revolution. The Socialist party should define and interpret the economic struggle and educate the workers in its primacy. In analyzing the Socialist party convention of 1920, Crystal described her own discarded illusions:
The war, which brought socialists and liberals together in the fight to maintain civil liberty, was as bad for the socialists as it was good for the liberals. The fight for free speech demanded constant reference to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. To demand that these documents be lived up to, was the most revolutionary thing a socialist leader could do, except go to jail. And from demanding that they be lived up to, some of these leaders have apparently gotten into the habit of believing they will be lived up to, and that when they are, that will be the Social Revolution.[422]
Reform Socialist Morris Hillquit was correct, Crystal stated, in his claim that the SP was "the only conservative party in the United States." The two capitalist parties had "progressed rapidly during this military and economic crisis. They have thrown over the old-fashioned political ways of thought, along with the old documents, and are bending almost all their energies to perfecting the economic dictatorship of the capitalists. The Socialist Party leaders have taken the opposite course. They have abandoned their former economic view-point, ceased to criticize the political forms of democracy, and taken refuge in pre-Marxian documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. They are the party of old-fashioned Americanism."[423]
Crystal Eastman, therefore, recognized that winning the vote was the beginning rather than the end of women's liberation in America. Women, she declared, suffered not only the abuses afflicting men in a militarized and capitalist state, but gendered oppressions of their own: low pay, the slave marriage contract, discrimination and exclusion from most unions, and the denial of control over their own bodies. "We will not wait for the Social Revolution to bring us the freedom we should have won in the 19th century," she proclaimed. She favored affirmative action for women as much to overcome women's timidity and thwart male chauvinism. Although the Socialist and the two Communist parties virtually ignored women, a Labor Party gathering in Chicago in late 1919 had appointed a National Executive Committee of one man and one woman from each state, thus earning Crystal Eastman's accolades. "To force women to take an equal share in the actual business of building up the executive machine.... means more for feminism than a million resolutions," she said. "For after all these centuries of retirement women need more than an 'equal opportunity' to show what's in them. They need a generous shove into positions of responsibility."[424]
Although Crystal's revolutionary self denied that the ballot was a panacea, her feminist self demanded every right that men enjoyed. After the suffrage amendment was ratified she proclaimed that "Now We Can Begin." During the campaign for suffrage women had downplayed their demands for total freedom and a revolution in every sphere of life. Now, however, they could launch that liberation struggle in the home, the workplace, the schools, and the political state. Crystal demanded removal of legal and cultural barriers in every field of human endeavor; feminist education of both boys and girls in the home and the school; legalized birth control; and government support for mothers.[425]
She began her analysis of the feminist task by warning her readers that although many feminists were socialists and communists
the true feminist, no matter how far to the left she may be in the revolutionary movement, sees the women's battle as distinct in its objects and different in its methods from the workers' battle for industrial freedom. She knows, of course, that the vast majority of women as well as men are without property, and are of necessity bread and butter slaves under a system of society which allows the very sources of life to be privately owned by a few, and she counts herself a loyal soldier in the working-class army that is marching to overthrow the system. But as a feminist she also knows that the whole of woman's slavery is not summed up in the profit system, nor her complete emancipation assured by the downfall of capitalism.
Woman's freedom, in the feminist sense, can be fought for and conceivably won before the gates open into industrial democracy. On the other hand, woman's freedom, in the feminist sense, is not inherent in the communist ideal.... The proletarian dictatorship may or may not free women. We must begin now to enlighten the future dictators.[426]
Many a male leftist, she said, imprisoned his wife in a dreary, isolated flat without comprehending her need for a full life; proletarian revolution alone would not change his attitude or her situation.
Like her brother, Crystal demanded a world in which women could "exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destinied by the accident of their sex to one field of activity--housework and childraising." Housewives must "have that occupation recognized by the world as work, requiring a definite economic reward and not merely entitling the performer to be dependent on some man." Crystal's program was four-fold: full equality on the job, feminist education in the home and school, legal and available birth control, and direct government support of mothers.[427]
Crystal believed that freedom of occupation, equality in pay, and equal opportunities in the unions were "the easiest part of our program". Much more difficult was the necessary "revolution in the early training and education of both boys and girls," which necessitated a cultural revolution in the home on the part of both sexes of all ages.
It must be womanly as well as manly to earn your own living, to stand on your own feet. And it must be manly as well as womanly to know how to cook and sew and clean and take care of yourself in the ordinary exigencies in life. I need not add that the second part of this revolution will be more passionately resisted than the first. Men will not give up their privilege of helplessness without a struggle. The average man has a carefully cultivated ignorance about household matters... a sort of cheerful inefficiency which protects him better than the reputation for having a violent temper. In was his mother's fault in the beginning, but even as a boy he was quick to see how a general reputation for being "no good around the house" would serve him throughout life, and half-consciously he began to cultivate that helplessness until today it is the despair of feminist wives.[428]
Crystal Eastman decried the contemporary appearence of the double shift for working women. She noted that wives increasingly worked for wages outside the home because of poverty and the rising cost of living. However, "these breadwinning wives have not yet developed home-making husbands. When the two come home from the factory, the man sits down while his wife gets supper, and he does so with exactly the same sense of foreordained right as if he were 'supporting' her." A single working woman found making a home together with a female friend "a pleasant partnership, more fun than work." But if her partner was a man, "the woman simply adds running the home to her regular outside job," became "tired and bitter over it," and most likely abandoned her outside job "and condemns herself to the tiresome half-job of housekeeping for two."[429]
Cooperatives and electrical appliances, regarded as panaceas by some reformers, would not solve this problem; any home would require some monotonous drudge work. "How can we change the nature of man so that he will honorably share that work and responsibility and thus make the homemaking enterprise a song instead of a burden?" she asked. "Most assuredly not by laws or revolutionary decrees. Perhaps we must cultivate or simulate a little of that highly prized helplessness ourselves. But fundamentally it is a problem of education, of early training--we must bring up feminist sons."[430]
While Crystal demanded that husbands share household responsibility with their childless wives, she apparently believed that childraising was innately a woman's task. She regarded not only birth control but also motherhood endowments as necessary for genuine sexual equality. In this she disagreed with many contemporary feminist-socialists who insisted that the raising (as opposed to bearing) of children was not particularly woman's role--that society, not biology, decreed that mothers rather than fathers nurture children. Denouncing mothers' pensions as reinforcing the patriarchal family, these feminist-socialists demanded socialized childcare that would free women for productive work outside the home.[431]
Crystal's approach was different. "If the feminist program goes to pieces on the arrival of the first baby, it is false and useless," she said. Most women wanted children and wished an intimate involvement in their raising that precluded any other full-time occupation (and thus economic independence) for ten or fifteen years. Birth control would ensure that women could plan how much of their lives they would devote to motherhood, or avoid that occupation altogether if they wished. But mothers could attain freedom "in a capitalist society" only if society recognized both that raising children was "directly a service to society, and that the mother upon whom the necessity and privilege of performing this service naturally falls is entitled to an adequate economic reward from the political government."[432] Although advocates of such a stipend did not examine its class implications, any such proposal entailed a radical redistribution of wealth. Any affordable mother's pension would disproportionately benefit poor women with large families, and be financed by a progressive income tax.
Crystal's final Liberator essay described "Alice Paul's Convention," The NWP's first massive post-suffrage gathering. Sadly prescient, her article was an elegy for organized feminism. Crystal said that although Paul was no revolutionary, she embodied "a quality that only the revolution can understand." Nevertheless, Crystal criticized Paul for throttling discussion of vital issues such as birth control and the rights of Afro-American women. Instead, Paul's executive committee proposed a vague resolution demanding the removal of all remaining forms of women's subjugation. The opposing, minority resolution (which Crystal may well have written) reiterated Crystal's four-fold program in her own words. It also demanded the equalization of marriage, divorce, and child custody. However, Paul's "steam roller" prevented a thorough discussion. As a result, the delegates adjourned "without a quickened understanding, without a new vision." Crystal sadly remarked that "if some such program could have been exhaustively discussed at that convention, we might be congratulating ourselves that the feminist movement had begun in America. As it is all we can say is that the suffrage movement is ended." The bright hopes of the previous year had proven illusory.
By 1921 virtually every insurgent movement in the United States had been crushed by governmental terrorism and violence, sectarian division, or pure exhaustion. Crystal was herself gravely ill, and at her doctor's insistence resigned her position as managing editor of The Liberator. Along with skyrocketing medical bills, this forced decision devastated her family's finances and impelled her husband to move to England, where he found a higher-paying job. (Crystal had earned far more than her husband, and more than the other main Liberator editors, Max Eastman and Floyd Dell). Blacklisted in the United States, she lacked a full-time job between 1921 and her premature death in 1928. Dividing her time between England and the United States, she discussed the highly contentious Equal Rights Amendment controversy in feminist publications. Controversy over the ERA pitted stauch "equity" feminists (mainly elite women) against "social feminists" who insisted that working-class women needed the protection of special labor laws that the ERA would nullify. This conflict irrevocably divided the feminist movement and, in conjunction with the suppression of the left and the general conservatism of the 1920s, ensured that feminism remained moribund for decades. Crystal Eastman's departure from The Liberator in 1921, therefore, signified the end of the epoch of "first wave" feminism, much as her brother's departure the following year coincided with the demise of the "lyrical left." Her career on The Liberator, however, demonstrates that the feminism embodied by The Masses survived and flourished in its successor until overwhelming social oppression destroyed organized feminism in the United States.
Max Eastman and his associates similarly continued their fight for racial equality; however, paralleling its stance on feminism, The Liberator increasing emphasized the relations between working-class and African-American liberation. From his first days on The Masses, Eastman faced political problems when treating racial issues; his relationship with black poet Claude McKay, who became a Liberator editor, was troubled by the social pressures similar to those which undermined equal gender relations. The Masses and The Liberator confronted American racism in stories, cartoons, letters, and news items. They assiduously attacked lynching, segregation, and economic discrimination against blacks, Mexicans, and Asians, with a seriousness and frequency unknown outside the "race press" and publications which specifically fought racism. Whites who read Eastman's publications understood the racial injustices and atrocities that characterized American life more than almost all their contemporaries outside the afflicted groups themselves. While Eastman persistently linked racism and capitalist exploitation, he often attacked it as an evil in its own right, and occasionally denounced the racism of the white labor movement. Yet he found that the pervasive racism of American society significantly obstructed his articulation of a conscious and strident racial egalitarianism.
As early as May 1915 a Masses reader had complained that Stewart Davis's cartoon depictions of blacks reinforced white racist stereotypes of blacks. Eastman replied that many Masses cartoons directly criticized racism, quoted John Sloan's opinion that "Davis is absolutely the first artist who ever did justice to the American negro," and asserted that Davis used "the same cruelty of truth" in portraying whites as blacks. In any event, Eastman asserted that Davis's intent was art, not propaganda. Eastman acknowledged, however "that because the colored people are an oppressed minority" The Masses should take special care "not to publish anything which their race-sensitiveness, or the race-arrogance of the whites, would misinterpret." He promised more care in the future.[i]
Eastman found that in a color-conscious society, his obliviousness to race had unintended effects. Treating blacks exactly as if they were white--as if their color did not matter in American society--could prove counterproductive. In this case, the imbalance of power in the larger society skewed the social meaning and effect of Davis's cartoons, regardless of his and Eastman's intentions. Masses readers would seldom view caricatured whites simply as whites representing their racial group, but rather as either concrete individuals or members of more specific groups such as capitalists, suffragists, or workers. Even whites depicted as brutalizing or humiliating blacks would be understood as representing a particular kind of white such as a racist planter or capitalist. But Americans of all races would interpret a caricatured black as representing his race, especially if that caricature evoked traditional racist stereotypes.
"Race Superiority," a John Sloan cartoon, epitomized this dilemma. Sloan depicted an obviously miserable white family, including four children, trudging off to work; in the foreground a grinning black boy sits on a fence, eating a large slice of watermelon. Many people today would consider this drawing as pandering to conventional racist stereotypes, but neither Sloan nor Eastman visualized it that way. Although there is no record of any protest against Sloan's cartoon, a year later The Masses printed a short unsigned article, "Another Negro Outrage." This cited a Commission on Industrial Relations report that blacks would not "stand the treatment" meted out to white children who worked as oyster shuckers. "No, uncivilized creature that he is," The Masses sardonically commented, "he prefers to sit in the shade and eat watermelon.... The Negro is utterly incorrigible. He objects to working except under decent conditions. And, worst of all, he manages to get away with it."[ii] Eastman himself believed that blacks were "gentle-simple, candid, brave and friendly, quick of laughter and of tears." He added, however, that "it is the peculiarity of his experience, rather than of his nature" that accounted for racial differences, and declared that "no man of any other race in the world can touch or imagine the experience of the children of African slaves in America."[iii]
In Eastman's time (and today) many blacks claimed that they possessed a distinct sensibility, and could therefore make a unique racial contribution to mankind. They often accepted, but inverted their evaluation of, traditional white stereotypes of the "primitive darky." No less an intellectual than W.E.B. Du Bois, who was well aware of the social construction of race, claimed (1897) that blacks were "destinied to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic today. We are that people whose subtle sense of song has given American its only American music, its only American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and humor amidst its mad money-getting plutocracy." Years later (in 1940) he was still asserting that "the soul of the Negro" was characterized by sensuality, laughter, and a love of leisure. White machine civilization, he complained, engenders "the drab uniformity of uninteresting drudgery" rather than joy, community, or beauty. Blacks, however, are "the supermen who sit idly by and laugh and look at civilization."[iv] However, whites using this same language are often resented.
Racial egalitarians in a racist society, Eastman found, risk misinterpretation whatever they do. Whites can treat blacks just as they do whites, as everyone would in a rational and decent society; but this ignores the pressing fact that blacks are stigmatized in actually existing society. Words and actions affecting blacks are interpreted differently from those same words or actions directed at whites; treating blacks as if race does not matter, as if we already live in a just society, belies reality. Acknowledging, and thereby implicitly accepting and even legitimizing traditional social definitions of race, however, also has dire consequences. Relating to a person with dark skin as a black person, a special case, exotic and somehow "other," stereotypes and thus demeans the victim, reducing her from a person to a category. A third option is accepting racial definitions while inverting their meaning and giving them a positive connotation. This, however, not only alienates integrationist, as opposed to nationalistic, blacks, but mires in a contradiction of wanting blacks to have a distinctive sensibility which is by definition as good or better than that of the whites. This is a precarious enterprise in a society where whites define goodness, beauty, and truth. It is also inconsistent, in the long run, with the reality of race as a cultural construction rather than a biological fact.
The very terms of this debate, engendered by a white supremacist society, are established by that racist culture, which provides the categories, language, and options. We cannot fully transcend this intrinsically flawed discourse until we overthrow and destroy racism, rendering it an incomprehensible relic of our barbarous age. We cannot create an island of perfect egalitarianism amidst a virulently racist society. Within the confines of a white supremacist society, blacks and whites together can only create inevitably flawed, partial, and distorted relationships based on such equality, dignity, friendship, and self-respect as we can salvage in a sociey based on the negation of every high value.
In The Liberator Eastman castigated white lynchings of blacks and extolled black self-defense as he had "Niggers and Nightriders" and other Masses articles. In 1918 he exclaimed that hundreds of blacks had been ritually murdered in the previous year; describing one gruesome festival, Eastman claimed that "such horrors, equalled only by the Turks' massacres in Armenia, are a part of the routine history of our country." Eastman said that "we must see this happen, because no one else will see it. No one will allow himself to see it, save only those mobs that drink up the death and agony."[433] The next year he praised widespread black resistance to white violence even while reminding blacks (as he did whites) that mere localized self-defense and retaliation would not achieve liberation:
If large groups of Negroes have learned enough in the army about their own value and power, so that they are ready to defend themselves unitedly against criminal assaults from the Whites, these assaults will be far less frequent.... It is to be hoped, however, that the Negroes will realize that the economic problem, the problem of exploitation and class-rule in general, lies in the heart of the race problem, and that it is more important for them to join revolutionary organizations of the general proletariat than the special organizations of their race.[434]
Eastman soon recognized, however, that working-class whites opposed racial egalitarianism as vehemently as gender equality.
In the very first issue of The Liberator Floyd Dell's review of James Weldon Johnson's Fifty Years and Other Poems incited a controversy reminiscent of that over the depiction of African-Americans in Masses cartoons. Dell championed "a peculiar racial way of writing poetry" and complained that "many of Mr. Johnson's poems might as well have been written by a white man." Dell specifically asserted that a Negro poet would feel differently about a sunset, a woman, or a battle than a white poet, and that the differences between them were racial and not individual.
I believe there is a Negro way of seeing a sunset. And I believe it is a more splendid way.... A sunset seen through Negro eyes, seen by one of a race that wore gay bandanna hankerchiefs even at work, and the most joyous colors in all the world at play, the race that has all the colors of the sunset in its heart--I think that sunset would be a sunset! I expect some time to discover that we white folk never knew what a sunset is.... I expect, moreover, to learn from a race that knows how to "laze," the secret of the butterfly's perpetual and lovely holiday.... And without going into details, I think the Negro has something to say, as yet unsaid, on the subject of love.... There is a Negro music that s different from any other music, a new thing under the sun, more irresponsibly joyous and more profoundly tragic, I think, than any other.
Dell hoped that "the Negro genius will express some of these same things in the words and rhythms of poetry.... The world is waiting for a Negro poet who can release the beauty which his people have, locked in their breasts."[435]
Dell anticipated many future black authors and critics, including Langston Hughes, whose poetry and literary theory soon fulfilled his expectations. Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926) called for a distinctive black literature whose subjects and form expressed black life and sensibility. Like Du Bois, Hughes endorsed, even as he inverted the meanings of, racial stereotypes popularized by hostile whites. To racial themes "the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears." Hughes demanded a distinctively Afro-American painting, theatre, and literature. His own poetry evoked "the meanings and rhythms of jazz." To Hughes, jazz was "one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul--the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile." Many Harlem Renaissance writers echoed Hughes's ideas, including his condemnation of black writers who would "pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization" and "be as little Negro and as much American as possible."[436]
James Weldon Johnson, however, was not among Hughes's partisans. Citing Dumas and Pushkin, he sternly told Dell that blacks need not depict specifically Negro themes or employe Negro dialect. Dell's focus on the past would categorize the Negro "as a happy-go-lucky, singing, shuffling, banjo-picking being or as a more-or-less pathetic character.... Negro dialect is the natural instrument for voicing that phase of Negro life, but the poet finds it is too limited for any higher or deeper notes." Unlike the Irish, whose example Dell cited, "the Negro in the United States is thrown into the whirl of American life, and, whether he wills it or not, he must become a part of it. If he does not, he perishes." Johnson celebrated the black northward migration and predicted that it would change both blacks themselves and their white oppressors in both sections. He insisted that he did express himself and "the vanguard of the American Negro today" in his poems, and complained that what Dell wanted, "perhaps unconsciously, from the Negro poet is something not necessarily good, but something different, something strange, something novel, something new." This criticism resounded throughout the twenties as many blacks (including, ironically, Du Bois) criticized Harlem Renaissance writers for titillating whites and reinforcing their stereotypes.
Dell's critique of Johnson, however, echoed his more general praise for premodern alternatives to industrial capitalism and his view that such cultures could generate oppositional cultures more authentic and enduring than Marx's arid and scientific socialism. Dell's ideas reflected Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's and Horace Kallen's ethnic pluralism and the "ethnic gifts" philosophy of the settlement houses. But although Johnson did publish dialect poems and others expressing African American life and sensibilities, Dell's demand that he limite himself to such verse was indeed unreasonable. Yet black artists and critics themselves disagreed on this issue. Since some blacks were resolute integrationists and others cultural nationalists (and others sported more subtle opinions), any white pronouncing on black aesthetics risked alienating some blacks. Of course, any critic invites judgment of his or her own artistic standards; yet whites aware of the atrocities routinely inflicted upon blacks understandably avoid activities and opinions that may offend blacks and evoke accusations of racism. Sensitive whites have sometimes found tiptoeing around blacks and foregoing honesty a powerful temptation; but blacks have justly resented such conduct, which renders authenticity, understanding, and friendship impossible. In Eastman's day such distortions intruded upon the most intimate interracial friendships, as Eastman's relationship with Claude McKay demonstrated.
McKay was a Jamaician poet who had arrived in the United States in 1912. After brief stints at Tuskegee Institute and a college in Kansas, he was by 1918 working at odd jobs and composing verse, some of which was published in Pearson's and Seven Arts. The Liberator published one of McKay's poems in April 1919 and featured a two-page spread of his work a few months later. The Jamaician bard condemned capitalism and racism while extolling the beauties of Afro-American life. "The Negro Dancer" foreshadowed his later novels in its stress on the sensuality and joy of living which blacks retained despite their oppression; "If We Must Die" urged that blacks defend themselves even unto death against white lynch mobs. Endlessly reprinted, this poem made him a celebrity throughout the Afro-American world. After joining the IWW McKay visited England, where he worked for Sylvia Pankhurt's Workers' Dreadnought. In England he honed his Marxist theory, supported nationalist movements as entering wedges for Communism, learned a wide variety of editorial and publishing skills, published in the prestigious Cambridge Magazine, and issued his first post-Jamaician collection, Spring in New Hampshire. McKay also struggled against racism within the English left. When he returned to the United States, Eastman made him an associate Liberator editor.
McKay energized Eastman's racial egalitarian project of fusing class and racial awareness among workers of both races. He informed The Liberator's largely white readership about the peculiar difficulties which racism imposed upon black proletarians. McKay agreed with orthodox Marxists that capitalism placed all blacks amidst "the lowest section of the white working class," that capitalists fostered racism to divide the workers, and that blacks could achieve liberation only within the class struggle. Nevertheless, McKay realized that as a black he was not only an economic slave like white workers, but also "a social leper, of a race outcast from an outcast class." White racism exacerbated the racial consciousness of both races while diluting class consciousness; blacks, victimized by white violence, viewed themselves as members of a race rather than as part of the working class. "The Negro must acquire class consciousness," McKay said. "And the white workers must accept and work with him, whether they object to his color and morals or not." Otherwise, blacks would break white strikes and crush the labor movement. While criticizing white racism, McKay also attacked Marcus Garvey for misunderstanding "modern revolutionary developments" and ignoring the class struggle.[437]
Ironically, McKay's stress on the uniqueness of black life and sensibility echoed Floyd Dell rather than James Weldon Johnson. He extolled the black revue Shuffle Along for portraying "the inimitable comic characteristics of Negro life"; he also asserted that black artists improved race relations by dampening race hatred and encouraging interracial sympathy. Unlike many black literary figures, McKay heralded a distinctive Afro-American life and culture:
The Negro critics can scarcely perceive and recognize true values through the screen of sneering bigotry put between them and life by the dominant white race.... Negro art, these critics declare, 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.[438]
Despite his close friendships with many Liberator editors, McKay found that his unusual position as a black in a white mileau actually fostered the misunderstandings and humiliations generated by America's white racist culture. One one occasion, McKay and a white editor attended a performance of Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped at the left-leaning Theatre Guild. As representatives of The Liberator they expected good seats but found themselves rudely consigned to the balcony. "Suddenly the realization came to me," McKay wrote. "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."[439]
McKay recognized that capitalism fostered racism and that "mighty world forces" impinged upon even the Theatre Guild. White hostility would wreck any business which implemented a racially egalitarian policy. McKay, therefore, bravely said that he would not demand that "any business, however exquisitely artistic, however moral and aloof from the market, to shoulder the burden of the Negro race." And indeed, the Theatre Guild telephoned The Liberator and justified its segregation policy as a business necessity. The insult, however, devastated McKay:
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![440]
On another occasion McKay and some Liberator friends were driving about in search of an eatery which would serve their interracial group. Finally a restaurant reluctantly seated them at the waiters' table amidst the noise and heat of the kitchen. Eastman--who could enter whatever restaurant he wished--probably regarded the incident as an absurd adventure; but McKay felt degraded. "It was one of the most miserable meals I ever ate," he said. "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 another such occasion Eastman remarked "If I were a Negro I couldn't be anything but a revolutionist!"--which McKay thought incomprehending and frivolous. Such incidents recurred; Mike Gold later reported that he and McKay "were always being thrown out of restaurants. Once, for race reasons, we were thrown out of a chop suey house by an indignant Chinese!"[441]
Such experiences alienated McKay from his comrades, who, while sincerely opposing racism, sometimes regarded its manifestations as faintly amusing or quaint rather than as the horrors inflicted upon McKay. Sometimes McKay would refuse invitations from his white friends without giving any reason. "I did not always like to intrude the fact of my being a black problem among whites," he 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."[442] But Eastman (as he himself acknowledged) simply could not sufficiently identify with his black friend. McKay, unsurprisingly, recognized the problem, viewing segregation as "the most powerful instrument in the world" for preventing interracial understanding. "Ultimately," he said, "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."[443]
Yet another incident illustrated the difficulties confronting an interracial friendship within a virulently racist society. Neysa McMein, a guest at one of Eastman's parties, vociferously objected when she discovered that McKay was one of Eastman's friends rather than a servant. Eastman later read her some of McKay's poems without disclosing the author's identity; when McMein expressed appreciation, Eastman triumphantly revealed that their author was none other than the black whose presence at the party McMein had so resented. However, McMein was not mollified; McKay later reported that "she did not like the verses any less or the idea of my equal association with whites any more."[444] Eastman had valiently tried to combat racism even among one of his own associates, but found that mere reason could not overcome bigotry. Indeed, the New York police violently suppressed an interracial Liberator dance because blacks and whites were mingling on terms of equality. American racism was a systematic structure of social, legal, economic, and political power backed by armed violence; against it, the most sincere individual efforts at understanding foundered.[445]
McKay also endured racial insults from Liberator editors. When McKay championed the verse of e.e. cummings, native Texan Robert Minor questioned his revolutionary purity and charged that he was not "a real Negro." Reflecting widespread white stereotypes of blacks as natural pugilists, Mike Gold (himself an amateur boxer) once challenged McKay to a boxing match over some trivial disagreement. Even Eastman once deeply offended his friend. In an attempt to radicalize Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, McKay occasionally met with Afro-American revolutionaries at The Liberator's offices; Eastman, fearing Justice Department repression, asked that McKay desist.
McKay's dilemma was sharpened by the fact that even his fellow editors regarded him not simply as an individual person, but as representing an exotic race. McKay's own racial romanticism, which extolled his own race as unique, facilitated this. For example, McKay loved Eastman's introduction to Harlem Shadows, the expanded, American edition of his poetry. Eastman reaffirmed McKay's own racial stereotypes even while praising McKay's class-conscious revolutionism:
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.[446]
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, "cast in his lot with the working-class Negroes of the north," and "earned his living in every one of the ways that northern Negroes do."[447]
Racial tensions on The Liberator intensified in late 1921 when Eastman resigned his editorship and engineered the joint appointment of Gold and McKay in his place. McKay, an immigrant black, was now co-editor of one of America's foremost revolutionary magazines--a periodical which was read almost exclusively by whites. But as McKay later said, "there could have been no worse combination, because personally and intellectually and from the very first time we met, Michael Gold and I were opposed to each other."[448] The adversaries argued over the merits of proletarian versus more traditional literature and the Liberator's racial policy. After a short time, these disagreements forced McKay's resignation.
Gold had earlier proclaimed that art was "the tenement pouring out its soul" through "its most sensitive sons and daughters." The traditional artist, isolated and aloof from social struggle, was "sick to death." Rather than imitating sterile bourgeois conventions, emerging writers must immense themselves in the uncorrupt life of the masses and create a newer and truer art from "the tenement that bore and molded us through years of meaningful pain." McKay, in turn, later claimed that Gold envisioned The Liberator as a vehicle for formulaic propaganda--"doggerels from lumberjacks and stevedores and true revelations from chambermaids"--rather than literature.[449]
This particular disagreement between McKay and Gold was more apparent than real, however. Gold demanded authentic art which grew "from the soil of life, freely and without forethought" rather than contrived propaganda. Indeed, McKay exemplified Gold's ideal of a proletarian poet: he had emerged from the working class and wrote vivid protest poetry about common blacks in language they understood. McKay's racial position generated intense and authentic poetry of protest; indeed, McKay naturally composed the kind of revolutionary verse that Eastman himself despaired of writing. Moreover, both before and after his imbroglio with Gold, McKay had extolled the virtues of politicized literature, at times claiming that all genuine self-expression embodied the author's social perspective.[450]
A more important dispute concerned the amount of material The Liberator would publish on racial issues. McKay urged that it devote about 10 percent of its space to racial matters because blacks comprised roughly that proportion of the American proletariat. Gold disagreed and in June 1922 assailed McKay's editorial decision to publish Lucy Maverish's "Out of Texas," a devastating, understated account of the legal lynching of a young African American. Although McKay temporarily mollified Gold, he recognized that the two could not continue as co-editors, and demanded that the staff choose between them. The other editors (including Eastman, who weighed in from abroad) chose Gold, thus in effect forcing McKay's resignation. The Liberator somewhat disingenuously informed its readers that McKay had resigned so he could travel and write creative literature; it claimed it would continue to publish his work. However, except for a farewell article attacking his comrades' inadvertent racism (and a single, unrelated poem), McKay's voice in The Liberator fell silent.
McKay's exit from The Liberator symbolized the failure of Eastman's racially egalitarian enterprise. Why did Eastman side with Gold? McKay much more closely embodied Eastman's ideal as an author. He not only stemmed from the working class (as did Gold), but championed lyrical, non-political verse written in classical rather than avant-garde forms; he also composed revolutionary poems that expressed a world distant indeed from that of most Liberator readers. Eastman's own explanation--that the issues Gold supervised had "more pep"--is hardly convincing because Eastman opposed Gold's new emphasis on proletarian literature. Indeed, Gold had precipitated Eastman's withdrawal from The Liberator by accusing him of being insufficiently revolutionary--the very charge he levelled at McKay. McKay as editor would have symbolized continuity in the values Eastman had embodied in The Masses and The Liberator. Eastman did oppose McKay's 10 percent formula, but there were alternatives to sole editorship by McKay. Joseph Freeman, elected to replace McKay, could more appropriately have replaced Gold. It is difficult to dismiss the possibility that the staff's (including Eastman's) racial affinity with Mike Gold influenced their decision. At any rate, their rejection of McKay proved disastrous. Both W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey commented unfavorably upon McKay's dismissal, while The Liberator slid towards bankruptcy and death. This fate may have befallen it in any case; McKay may have lost nothing more by his dismissal than blame for an inevitable catastrophe. Nevertheless, the result deeply hurt McKay, further alienated prominent black leaders from the white left, and undermined the "fragile bridge" tenuously uniting the movements for working-class liberation and Afro-American freedom.
In his valedictory article McKay hinted at the unspoken disagreements over racial issues that divided him from the rest of the staff, and commented on the unbridgeable chasm which separated the workers (and intellectuals) of the two races.
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.
Being a Negro, I think it is my proud birthright to put the case of the Negro proletarian, to the best of my ability, before the white members of the movement to which I belong. For the problem of the darker races is a rigid test of Radicalism. To some radicals it might seem more terrible to face than the barricades. But this racial question may be eventually 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.[451]
McKay perceived himself as mediating between white radicals and the black masses. He would "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 revolutionary who mouthed pious slogans while ignoring the real needs of blacks "not only aids the bourgeoisie, but also the ultra-nationalist Negro leaders" who preached racial seperatism while ignoring the class struggle.[452]
McKay emphatically repudiated 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.[453]
McKay obviously believed that even Liberator readers required an education in the realities (including the class aspects) of racial oppression.
McKay, however, did not discuss the depths of his alienation with The Liberator staff. Indeed, we know of the imbroglio over racial matters only by accident. When McKay was visiting Russia, the Soviets asked that he write a short book on the condition of Africans in America. McKay apparently showed the manuscript of Negroes in America to Eastman, who was also in the Soviet Union; and Eastman protested McKay's criticism of The Liberator's racial attitudes. Eastman denied having known of McKay's disaffection; McKay 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."[454] McKay 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."[455] Such suspicions doubtless reflected McKay's experiences in a racist society more than the attitudes of The Liberator's editors; but McKay did not vent his feelings at the time, and even later broached them only obliquely, in a book. The hurt and estrangement from even his best friends were far too deep to be bridged by words.
Eastman also sided with Gold in the dispute about racial material in The Liberator. During his exchange of letters with McKay over Negroes in America, Eastman wrote that "you began to introduce so much material about the race question into your magazine 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 a near lynching and two trials for obstructing the draft) "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." Eastman, however, regarded himself as merely pragmatic and realistic. He fully recognized the tenacious, even if largely unconscious, racism of even the relatively enlightened whites who read The Liberator. But McKay angrily told Eastman that 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."[456] In truth, both men believed that blacks suffered horrendous disabilities above and beyond those inflicted upon white workers, but that they were nevertheless integral to the working class. They agreed that white racism was the primary obstacle to the organization of black workers. Both acknowledged that race and class were inextricably related in the oppression of black workers, 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 deliniated the relationship between the two.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, however, Eastman stressed class over race, and veered towards the orthodox Marxist belief that a working-class revolution would automatically abolish racial oppressions.[457] 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?"[458] McKay's own experiences among white workers and radicals continually reminded him that cultural patterns are deeply embedded and not easily overturned, even by conscious effort. Eastman had conceded as much when he warned McKay that over-emphasizing racial matters would alienate The Liberator's readers.
Ironically, however, McKay had a short time 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."
For American Negroes the indisputable and outstanding fact is that a mere handful of Jews, much less in ratio to the number of Negroes in the American population, have attained, through the Revolution, all the political and social rights that were denied to them under the regime of the Czar...
The [American] Negro in politics and social life is ostracized only technically by the distinction of color; in reality the Negro is discriminated against because he is of the lowest type of worker....[459]
McKay conceded that "this economic difference between the white and black workers" manifested itself "in color prejudice, race hatred, political and social boycotting and lynching of Negroes" and that 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," agencies that ordinarily aided white mobs. Although McKay believed that Communist revolution might liberate blacks, he also asserted that if the plutocrats granted equal rights to Negroes, it would generate "revolution in the economic life of the country."[460]
As a person of African descent, McKay found himself feted in the Soviet Union by populace and party leaders alike. He was accepted as an official delegate to the Comintern's Fourth Convention and seated upon the platform next to Eastman and right behind Comintern chairman Zinoviev. Invited to address the world gathering, McKay extolled the Communist International but warned that American racism--including racism within the Communist movement--divided the races and imperilled the revolutionary enterprise. Although the Afro-American was objectively a proletarian, he could not "for one minute" forget "his color, his skin, or his race." Therefore, blacks were merely "race conscious and rebellious" rather than "revolutionary and class conscious." Unless radicals overcame their own racism and addressed the "special needs" of the blacks, Negroes would continue to align themselves with the reformist bourgeoisie and break strikes. At present blacks disdained radical propaganda emanating from 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.[461]
Communists as well as ordinary workers alienated blacks by their racism, as McKay personally could well attest. "The reformist bourgeoisie have been carrying on the battle against discrimination and racial prejudice in America," he 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." American Communists "must first emancipate themselves from the ideas they entertain towards the Negroes" before they could "reach the Negroes with any kind of radical propaganda." President Harding, McKay bitterly charged, was better on the racial question than the Workers' Party. Many Communists would rather risk death on the barricades than squarely confront their racism, demand equality for blacks in unions, or defend intermarriage and social equality. McKay admitted that any forthright antiracist stance would alienate white American workers and could even lead to race war. "To go to the very heart of the Negro question for the Communists means [incurring] the violent anger of American public opinion in the North as well as the South," McKay said.[462]
McKay's speech to the Communist International, and indeed his entire experience within the American radical movement, epitomized the dilemmas afflicting American radicals of both races. Virulent American racism infected not only mainstream society but also the labor, Socialist, and Communist movements. White American workers clung to whatever shreds of respectability and economic privilege racism afforded them. Afro-Americans similarly hoped for a precarious acceptance and respectability; they embraced patriotism, religion, and capitalist morality, while eschewing radicalism of all kinds. The corporations and the government, they properly recognized, had far more power than American labor and leftist dissidents. The IWW, the only fully egalitarian organization outside the NAACP, was crushed by corporate and government terrorism during the Red Scare. Misunderstandings centered upon race alienated McKay even from his Liberator friends and comrades, and caused his departure from that magazine, which itself soon folded.
By the time McKay departed for the Soviet Union (Eastman himself had already left), the American radical movement was in tatters. The Socialist and Communist parties were crushed, the unions weakened or destroyed, feminism moribund, and the Afro-American liberation struggle derailed. For a golden moment, however, Eastman's two publications, The Masses and The Liberator, had courageously analyzed and confronted the structures of American racism, and given voice to Afro-Americans fighting on their own behalf. Eastman's racially egalitarian enterprise foundered, indeed, because it necessarily repudiated the entire social, economic, political and cultural structures of American society--structures devastatingly internalized to some extent even among those who would most overcome them.
McKay's own efforts at fostering interracial understanding and Afro-American proletarian consciousness also failed. Whites, more interested in oppressing blacks than in fighting for their own welfare, flocked to the Ku Klux Klan by the millions. This made the blacks' response inevitable; if blacks acted as members of a class while white workers behaved as members of a race, the blacks would have denied themselves those few opportunities (often as strikebreakers) the capitalists allowed them. Blacks, therefore, showed far more interest in Garvey's racial pride, pageantry, and economic self-help than in class-conscious organization. (Garvey's movement, however, was also disintegrating by 1922.) McKay's association with The Liberator isolated him from radical and reformist blacks alike, while only partly integrating him into the radical white subculture. Both in personal meaning and political effect, therefore, the friendship and political association of Eastman and Claude McKay was undermined by the racism of mainstream American society. Sustaining an egalitarian, inter-racial friendship and political alliance was difficult amidst the hostility of conventional American institutions, practices, and attitudes.
Despite the deformities imposed by mainstream society, however, Eastman achieved wonders in the area of race relations. His magazines featured cartoons, fiction, and news items of interest to blacks, and often written by blacks, on a scale unprecedented outside the Afro-American press itself. If a small portion of those items offended some blacks, Eastman offered them full opportunity to reply. These exchanges must have greatly enlightened a white readership almost completely cut off from black life and sensibilities. The Masses told its readers about black publications, and The New York Age, New York's largest black newspaper, itself greeted The Liberator with enthusiam. Eastman's friendship with McKay was indeed flawed, as friendships (especially most literary friendships) often are; but it survived the vicissitudes of almost three decades. Eastman knew that he, as a white outsider, could not liberate the blacks; he could only offer his support for their own efforts at self-liberation. This he did, to an extent almost unprecedented in his time.
Max Eastman extolled Alice Paul's militant suffragist tactics in early 1918, and the next year again proclaimed that the "militant solidarity" exemplified by her National Woman's party (NWP) provided a model for those lacking economic power. "The right of women to be as free and as happy as men is a right not included under, and automatically provided for, any of the other conditions of democracy," he insisted. "It is a right that women, conscious of their sex, and the problems of their sex, must imperiously take and establish for themselves." Debunking revolutionists who denigrated feminism as peripheral to the class struggle, Eastman said that although feminism was a women's rather than a workers' crusade, "it is not by any means a side issue in the progress of mankind towards liberty."[416]
As Eastman increasingly emphasized union organization rather than electineering, however, he urged that women, as men, concentrate on industrial rather than political power, and thus "bring a more substantial and lasting victory to their own cause." Rather than fighting for the vote in the political state, "an institution that is crumbling and whose power is of the past," feminists should demand contol and ownership of the real citadel of power, the means of production. However, Eastman denied that feminists should subordinate gender struggles beneath the rubric of the class struggle; indeed, he recognized that organized labor would obstruct feminism unless women entered and transformed the unions. "The American labor movement is more anti-feminist than the American government," he said. "And it is the government of the future. Assuming that this future is not too distant, would it not be more far-sighted to seize a place of power in the American labor movement than in the senile and bankrupt institutions of the ruling minority that it will displace?" Eastman also echoed IWW pronouncements that women were superior to men as unionists and strikers.[417]
Eastman's sister Crystal also propounded a far-reaching program of feminist revolution that encompassed every area of life and unified the disparate concerns of The Masses and The Liberator. Crystal had been an expert on workmen's compensation and other labor issues, a suffrage leader, and a co-founder or leader of key radical organizations--the Congressional Union (predecessor of the NWP), the Woman's Peace party (which became the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom), the American Union Against Militarism, and the National Civil Liberties Bureau (predecessor of the American Civil Liberties Union). A contributor to Margaret Sanger's Birth Control Review, she attacked AFL conservatism, favored the general strike, and demanded revolution rather than reform in the pages of The Liberator.[418]
Like her brother, Crystal was driven left by the tumultuous events of 1917-1920. In Hungary during Bela Kun's short-lived Communist experiment, she declared that "I shall never go into a big, comfortable house again, whether it is a house of a Socialist professor or a railroad president, without quietly figuring up the number of rooms and the number of people, to determine whether the family will be allowed to continue in possession of the whole house when communism comes. So real was my experience in Hungary." She regretted that hopeful experiments usually began during times of chaos, misery, and destitution, but reluctantly recognized that "revolution and starvation come hand in hand."[419] Indeed, her experiences in a revolutionary Hungary suffering armed invasion undermined her fervent pacifism:
There is no use having any illusions about the revolution. It was born in starvation, and its first business is war. There is no freedom, no plenty, no joy, except the joys of struggle and faith. Cherished dreams of scientists, educators, artists, engineers, who were waiting for a free society, must be set aside, while the whole proletariat organizes in desperate haste to check the invading hosts of the enemy. And war means recruiting propaganda, conscription, military discipline, the death penalty, the whole damnable business of organized dying and killing.[420]
Her brother had convinced her that a working-class army fighting the class war would attract sufficient volunteers without conscription, but Crystal now repudiated this view. "Now I know there can be no such thing as a democratic army. People don't want to die, and except for a few glorious fanatics they are not going to vote themselves into the front line trenches." The Hungarian Communist state conscripted soldiers and shot deserters, claiming that without these measures, the invading Czech army would extinquish the revolution. Somewhat despairingly Crystal said "I hope there is some pacifist revolutionary with an answer to that. I have none."[421]
Crystal became bitterly disillusioned with Woodrow Wilson, whom she had relied upon first to prevent American entry into World War I, and then to preserve civil liberties during the war. Indeed, her experience with Wilson undermined her belief in American democracy and in politics as the main mechanism of social change. The capitalist state, she now perceived, was merely a ruling-class instrument, whatever its forms and ideals; although the workers should utilize bourgeois institutions wherever possible, industrial unions were the true epicenters of the revolution. The Socialist party should define and interpret the economic struggle and educate the workers in its primacy. In analyzing the Socialist party convention of 1920, Crystal described her own discarded illusions:
The war, which brought socialists and liberals together in the fight to maintain civil liberty, was as bad for the socialists as it was good for the liberals. The fight for free speech demanded constant reference to the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. To demand that these documents be lived up to, was the most revolutionary thing a socialist leader could do, except go to jail. And from demanding that they be lived up to, some of these leaders have apparently gotten into the habit of believing they will be lived up to, and that when they are, that will be the Social Revolution.[422]
Reform Socialist Morris Hillquit was correct, Crystal stated, in his claim that the SP was "the only conservative party in the United States." The two capitalist parties had "progressed rapidly during this military and economic crisis. They have thrown over the old-fashioned political ways of thought, along with the old documents, and are bending almost all their energies to perfecting the economic dictatorship of the capitalists. The Socialist Party leaders have taken the opposite course. They have abandoned their former economic view-point, ceased to criticize the political forms of democracy, and taken refuge in pre-Marxian documents like the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. They are the party of old-fashioned Americanism."[423]
Crystal Eastman, therefore, recognized that winning the vote was the beginning rather than the end of women's liberation in America. Women, she declared, suffered not only the abuses afflicting men in a militarized and capitalist state, but gendered oppressions of their own: low pay, the slave marriage contract, discrimination and exclusion from most unions, and the denial of control over their own bodies. "We will not wait for the Social Revolution to bring us the freedom we should have won in the 19th century," she proclaimed. She favored affirmative action for women as much to overcome women's timidity and thwart male chauvinism. Although the Socialist and the two Communist parties virtually ignored women, a Labor Party gathering in Chicago in late 1919 had appointed a National Executive Committee of one man and one woman from each state, thus earning Crystal Eastman's accolades. "To force women to take an equal share in the actual business of building up the executive machine.... means more for feminism than a million resolutions," she said. "For after all these centuries of retirement women need more than an 'equal opportunity' to show what's in them. They need a generous shove into positions of responsibility."[424]
Although Crystal's revolutionary self denied that the ballot was a panacea, her feminist self demanded every right that men enjoyed. After the suffrage amendment was ratified she proclaimed that "Now We Can Begin." During the campaign for suffrage women had downplayed their demands for total freedom and a revolution in every sphere of life. Now, however, they could launch that liberation struggle in the home, the workplace, the schools, and the political state. Crystal demanded removal of legal and cultural barriers in every field of human endeavor; feminist education of both boys and girls in the home and the school; legalized birth control; and government support for mothers.[425]
She began her analysis of the feminist task by warning her readers that although many feminists were socialists and communists
the true feminist, no matter how far to the left she may be in the revolutionary movement, sees the women's battle as distinct in its objects and different in its methods from the workers' battle for industrial freedom. She knows, of course, that the vast majority of women as well as men are without property, and are of necessity bread and butter slaves under a system of society which allows the very sources of life to be privately owned by a few, and she counts herself a loyal soldier in the working-class army that is marching to overthrow the system. But as a feminist she also knows that the whole of woman's slavery is not summed up in the profit system, nor her complete emancipation assured by the downfall of capitalism.
Woman's freedom, in the feminist sense, can be fought for and conceivably won before the gates open into industrial democracy. On the other hand, woman's freedom, in the feminist sense, is not inherent in the communist ideal.... The proletarian dictatorship may or may not free women. We must begin now to enlighten the future dictators.[426]
Many a male leftist, she said, imprisoned his wife in a dreary, isolated flat without comprehending her need for a full life; proletarian revolution alone would not change his attitude or her situation.
Like her brother, Crystal demanded a world in which women could "exercise their infinitely varied gifts in infinitely varied ways, instead of being destinied by the accident of their sex to one field of activity--housework and childraising." Housewives must "have that occupation recognized by the world as work, requiring a definite economic reward and not merely entitling the performer to be dependent on some man." Crystal's program was four-fold: full equality on the job, feminist education in the home and school, legal and available birth control, and direct government support of mothers.[427]
Crystal believed that freedom of occupation, equality in pay, and equal opportunities in the unions were "the easiest part of our program". Much more difficult was the necessary "revolution in the early training and education of both boys and girls," which necessitated a cultural revolution in the home on the part of both sexes of all ages.
It must be womanly as well as manly to earn your own living, to stand on your own feet. And it must be manly as well as womanly to know how to cook and sew and clean and take care of yourself in the ordinary exigencies in life. I need not add that the second part of this revolution will be more passionately resisted than the first. Men will not give up their privilege of helplessness without a struggle. The average man has a carefully cultivated ignorance about household matters... a sort of cheerful inefficiency which protects him better than the reputation for having a violent temper. In was his mother's fault in the beginning, but even as a boy he was quick to see how a general reputation for being "no good around the house" would serve him throughout life, and half-consciously he began to cultivate that helplessness until today it is the despair of feminist wives.[428]
Crystal Eastman decried the contemporary appearence of the double shift for working women. She noted that wives increasingly worked for wages outside the home because of poverty and the rising cost of living. However, "these breadwinning wives have not yet developed home-making husbands. When the two come home from the factory, the man sits down while his wife gets supper, and he does so with exactly the same sense of foreordained right as if he were 'supporting' her." A single working woman found making a home together with a female friend "a pleasant partnership, more fun than work." But if her partner was a man, "the woman simply adds running the home to her regular outside job," became "tired and bitter over it," and most likely abandoned her outside job "and condemns herself to the tiresome half-job of housekeeping for two."[429]
Cooperatives and electrical appliances, regarded as panaceas by some reformers, would not solve this problem; any home would require some monotonous drudge work. "How can we change the nature of man so that he will honorably share that work and responsibility and thus make the homemaking enterprise a song instead of a burden?" she asked. "Most assuredly not by laws or revolutionary decrees. Perhaps we must cultivate or simulate a little of that highly prized helplessness ourselves. But fundamentally it is a problem of education, of early training--we must bring up feminist sons."[430]
While Crystal demanded that husbands share household responsibility with their childless wives, she apparently believed that childraising was innately a woman's task. She regarded not only birth control but also motherhood endowments as necessary for genuine sexual equality. In this she disagreed with many contemporary feminist-socialists who insisted that the raising (as opposed to bearing) of children was not particularly woman's role--that society, not biology, decreed that mothers rather than fathers nurture children. Denouncing mothers' pensions as reinforcing the patriarchal family, these feminist-socialists demanded socialized childcare that would free women for productive work outside the home.[431]
Crystal's approach was different. "If the feminist program goes to pieces on the arrival of the first baby, it is false and useless," she said. Most women wanted children and wished an intimate involvement in their raising that precluded any other full-time occupation (and thus economic independence) for ten or fifteen years. Birth control would ensure that women could plan how much of their lives they would devote to motherhood, or avoid that occupation altogether if they wished. But mothers could attain freedom "in a capitalist society" only if society recognized both that raising children was "directly a service to society, and that the mother upon whom the necessity and privilege of performing this service naturally falls is entitled to an adequate economic reward from the political government."[432] Although advocates of such a stipend did not examine its class implications, any such proposal entailed a radical redistribution of wealth. Any affordable mother's pension would disproportionately benefit poor women with large families, and be financed by a progressive income tax.
Crystal's final Liberator essay described "Alice Paul's Convention," The NWP's first massive post-suffrage gathering. Sadly prescient, her article was an elegy for organized feminism. Crystal said that although Paul was no revolutionary, she embodied "a quality that only the revolution can understand." Nevertheless, Crystal criticized Paul for throttling discussion of vital issues such as birth control and the rights of Afro-American women. Instead, Paul's executive committee proposed a vague resolution demanding the removal of all remaining forms of women's subjugation. The opposing, minority resolution (which Crystal may well have written) reiterated Crystal's four-fold program in her own words. It also demanded the equalization of marriage, divorce, and child custody. However, Paul's "steam roller" prevented a thorough discussion. As a result, the delegates adjourned "without a quickened understanding, without a new vision." Crystal sadly remarked that "if some such program could have been exhaustively discussed at that convention, we might be congratulating ourselves that the feminist movement had begun in America. As it is all we can say is that the suffrage movement is ended." The bright hopes of the previous year had proven illusory.
By 1921 virtually every insurgent movement in the United States had been crushed by governmental terrorism and violence, sectarian division, or pure exhaustion. Crystal was herself gravely ill, and at her doctor's insistence resigned her position as managing editor of The Liberator. Along with skyrocketing medical bills, this forced decision devastated her family's finances and impelled her husband to move to England, where he found a higher-paying job. (Crystal had earned far more than her husband, and more than the other main Liberator editors, Max Eastman and Floyd Dell). Blacklisted in the United States, she lacked a full-time job between 1921 and her premature death in 1928. Dividing her time between England and the United States, she discussed the highly contentious Equal Rights Amendment controversy in feminist publications. Controversy over the ERA pitted stauch "equity" feminists (mainly elite women) against "social feminists" who insisted that working-class women needed the protection of special labor laws that the ERA would nullify. This conflict irrevocably divided the feminist movement and, in conjunction with the suppression of the left and the general conservatism of the 1920s, ensured that feminism remained moribund for decades. Crystal Eastman's departure from The Liberator in 1921, therefore, signified the end of the epoch of "first wave" feminism, much as her brother's departure the following year coincided with the demise of the "lyrical left." Her career on The Liberator, however, demonstrates that the feminism embodied by The Masses survived and flourished in its successor until overwhelming social oppression destroyed organized feminism in the United States.
Max Eastman and his associates similarly continued their fight for racial equality; however, paralleling its stance on feminism, The Liberator increasing emphasized the relations between working-class and African-American liberation. From his first days on The Masses, Eastman faced political problems when treating racial issues; his relationship with black poet Claude McKay, who became a Liberator editor, was troubled by the social pressures similar to those which undermined equal gender relations. The Masses and The Liberator confronted American racism in stories, cartoons, letters, and news items. They assiduously attacked lynching, segregation, and economic discrimination against blacks, Mexicans, and Asians, with a seriousness and frequency unknown outside the "race press" and publications which specifically fought racism. Whites who read Eastman's publications understood the racial injustices and atrocities that characterized American life more than almost all their contemporaries outside the afflicted groups themselves. While Eastman persistently linked racism and capitalist exploitation, he often attacked it as an evil in its own right, and occasionally denounced the racism of the white labor movement. Yet he found that the pervasive racism of American society significantly obstructed his articulation of a conscious and strident racial egalitarianism.
As early as May 1915 a Masses reader had complained that Stewart Davis's cartoon depictions of blacks reinforced white racist stereotypes of blacks. Eastman replied that many Masses cartoons directly criticized racism, quoted John Sloan's opinion that "Davis is absolutely the first artist who ever did justice to the American negro," and asserted that Davis used "the same cruelty of truth" in portraying whites as blacks. In any event, Eastman asserted that Davis's intent was art, not propaganda. Eastman acknowledged, however "that because the colored people are an oppressed minority" The Masses should take special care "not to publish anything which their race-sensitiveness, or the race-arrogance of the whites, would misinterpret." He promised more care in the future.[i]
Eastman found that in a color-conscious society, his obliviousness to race had unintended effects. Treating blacks exactly as if they were white--as if their color did not matter in American society--could prove counterproductive. In this case, the imbalance of power in the larger society skewed the social meaning and effect of Davis's cartoons, regardless of his and Eastman's intentions. Masses readers would seldom view caricatured whites simply as whites representing their racial group, but rather as either concrete individuals or members of more specific groups such as capitalists, suffragists, or workers. Even whites depicted as brutalizing or humiliating blacks would be understood as representing a particular kind of white such as a racist planter or capitalist. But Americans of all races would interpret a caricatured black as representing his race, especially if that caricature evoked traditional racist stereotypes.
"Race Superiority," a John Sloan cartoon, epitomized this dilemma. Sloan depicted an obviously miserable white family, including four children, trudging off to work; in the foreground a grinning black boy sits on a fence, eating a large slice of watermelon. Many people today would consider this drawing as pandering to conventional racist stereotypes, but neither Sloan nor Eastman visualized it that way. Although there is no record of any protest against Sloan's cartoon, a year later The Masses printed a short unsigned article, "Another Negro Outrage." This cited a Commission on Industrial Relations report that blacks would not "stand the treatment" meted out to white children who worked as oyster shuckers. "No, uncivilized creature that he is," The Masses sardonically commented, "he prefers to sit in the shade and eat watermelon.... The Negro is utterly incorrigible. He objects to working except under decent conditions. And, worst of all, he manages to get away with it."[ii] Eastman himself believed that blacks were "gentle-simple, candid, brave and friendly, quick of laughter and of tears." He added, however, that "it is the peculiarity of his experience, rather than of his nature" that accounted for racial differences, and declared that "no man of any other race in the world can touch or imagine the experience of the children of African slaves in America."[iii]
In Eastman's time (and today) many blacks claimed that they possessed a distinct sensibility, and could therefore make a unique racial contribution to mankind. They often accepted, but inverted their evaluation of, traditional white stereotypes of the "primitive darky." No less an intellectual than W.E.B. Du Bois, who was well aware of the social construction of race, claimed (1897) that blacks were "destinied to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic today. We are that people whose subtle sense of song has given American its only American music, its only American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and humor amidst its mad money-getting plutocracy." Years later (in 1940) he was still asserting that "the soul of the Negro" was characterized by sensuality, laughter, and a love of leisure. White machine civilization, he complained, engenders "the drab uniformity of uninteresting drudgery" rather than joy, community, or beauty. Blacks, however, are "the supermen who sit idly by and laugh and look at civilization."[iv] However, whites using this same language are often resented.
Racial egalitarians in a racist society, Eastman found, risk misinterpretation whatever they do. Whites can treat blacks just as they do whites, as everyone would in a rational and decent society; but this ignores the pressing fact that blacks are stigmatized in actually existing society. Words and actions affecting blacks are interpreted differently from those same words or actions directed at whites; treating blacks as if race does not matter, as if we already live in a just society, belies reality. Acknowledging, and thereby implicitly accepting and even legitimizing traditional social definitions of race, however, also has dire consequences. Relating to a person with dark skin as a black person, a special case, exotic and somehow "other," stereotypes and thus demeans the victim, reducing her from a person to a category. A third option is accepting racial definitions while inverting their meaning and giving them a positive connotation. This, however, not only alienates integrationist, as opposed to nationalistic, blacks, but mires in a contradiction of wanting blacks to have a distinctive sensibility which is by definition as good or better than that of the whites. This is a precarious enterprise in a society where whites define goodness, beauty, and truth. It is also inconsistent, in the long run, with the reality of race as a cultural construction rather than a biological fact.
The very terms of this debate, engendered by a white supremacist society, are established by that racist culture, which provides the categories, language, and options. We cannot fully transcend this intrinsically flawed discourse until we overthrow and destroy racism, rendering it an incomprehensible relic of our barbarous age. We cannot create an island of perfect egalitarianism amidst a virulently racist society. Within the confines of a white supremacist society, blacks and whites together can only create inevitably flawed, partial, and distorted relationships based on such equality, dignity, friendship, and self-respect as we can salvage in a sociey based on the negation of every high value.
In The Liberator Eastman castigated white lynchings of blacks and extolled black self-defense as he had "Niggers and Nightriders" and other Masses articles. In 1918 he exclaimed that hundreds of blacks had been ritually murdered in the previous year; describing one gruesome festival, Eastman claimed that "such horrors, equalled only by the Turks' massacres in Armenia, are a part of the routine history of our country." Eastman said that "we must see this happen, because no one else will see it. No one will allow himself to see it, save only those mobs that drink up the death and agony."[433] The next year he praised widespread black resistance to white violence even while reminding blacks (as he did whites) that mere localized self-defense and retaliation would not achieve liberation:
If large groups of Negroes have learned enough in the army about their own value and power, so that they are ready to defend themselves unitedly against criminal assaults from the Whites, these assaults will be far less frequent.... It is to be hoped, however, that the Negroes will realize that the economic problem, the problem of exploitation and class-rule in general, lies in the heart of the race problem, and that it is more important for them to join revolutionary organizations of the general proletariat than the special organizations of their race.[434]
Eastman soon recognized, however, that working-class whites opposed racial egalitarianism as vehemently as gender equality.
In the very first issue of The Liberator Floyd Dell's review of James Weldon Johnson's Fifty Years and Other Poems incited a controversy reminiscent of that over the depiction of African-Americans in Masses cartoons. Dell championed "a peculiar racial way of writing poetry" and complained that "many of Mr. Johnson's poems might as well have been written by a white man." Dell specifically asserted that a Negro poet would feel differently about a sunset, a woman, or a battle than a white poet, and that the differences between them were racial and not individual.
I believe there is a Negro way of seeing a sunset. And I believe it is a more splendid way.... A sunset seen through Negro eyes, seen by one of a race that wore gay bandanna hankerchiefs even at work, and the most joyous colors in all the world at play, the race that has all the colors of the sunset in its heart--I think that sunset would be a sunset! I expect some time to discover that we white folk never knew what a sunset is.... I expect, moreover, to learn from a race that knows how to "laze," the secret of the butterfly's perpetual and lovely holiday.... And without going into details, I think the Negro has something to say, as yet unsaid, on the subject of love.... There is a Negro music that s different from any other music, a new thing under the sun, more irresponsibly joyous and more profoundly tragic, I think, than any other.
Dell hoped that "the Negro genius will express some of these same things in the words and rhythms of poetry.... The world is waiting for a Negro poet who can release the beauty which his people have, locked in their breasts."[435]
Dell anticipated many future black authors and critics, including Langston Hughes, whose poetry and literary theory soon fulfilled his expectations. Hughes's "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" (1926) called for a distinctive black literature whose subjects and form expressed black life and sensibility. Like Du Bois, Hughes endorsed, even as he inverted the meanings of, racial stereotypes popularized by hostile whites. To racial themes "the Negro artist can give his racial individuality, his heritage of rhythm and warmth, and his incongruous humor that so often, as in the Blues, becomes ironic laughter mixed with tears." Hughes demanded a distinctively Afro-American painting, theatre, and literature. His own poetry evoked "the meanings and rhythms of jazz." To Hughes, jazz was "one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul--the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile." Many Harlem Renaissance writers echoed Hughes's ideas, including his condemnation of black writers who would "pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization" and "be as little Negro and as much American as possible."[436]
James Weldon Johnson, however, was not among Hughes's partisans. Citing Dumas and Pushkin, he sternly told Dell that blacks need not depict specifically Negro themes or employe Negro dialect. Dell's focus on the past would categorize the Negro "as a happy-go-lucky, singing, shuffling, banjo-picking being or as a more-or-less pathetic character.... Negro dialect is the natural instrument for voicing that phase of Negro life, but the poet finds it is too limited for any higher or deeper notes." Unlike the Irish, whose example Dell cited, "the Negro in the United States is thrown into the whirl of American life, and, whether he wills it or not, he must become a part of it. If he does not, he perishes." Johnson celebrated the black northward migration and predicted that it would change both blacks themselves and their white oppressors in both sections. He insisted that he did express himself and "the vanguard of the American Negro today" in his poems, and complained that what Dell wanted, "perhaps unconsciously, from the Negro poet is something not necessarily good, but something different, something strange, something novel, something new." This criticism resounded throughout the twenties as many blacks (including, ironically, Du Bois) criticized Harlem Renaissance writers for titillating whites and reinforcing their stereotypes.
Dell's critique of Johnson, however, echoed his more general praise for premodern alternatives to industrial capitalism and his view that such cultures could generate oppositional cultures more authentic and enduring than Marx's arid and scientific socialism. Dell's ideas reflected Elizabeth Gurley Flynn's and Horace Kallen's ethnic pluralism and the "ethnic gifts" philosophy of the settlement houses. But although Johnson did publish dialect poems and others expressing African American life and sensibilities, Dell's demand that he limite himself to such verse was indeed unreasonable. Yet black artists and critics themselves disagreed on this issue. Since some blacks were resolute integrationists and others cultural nationalists (and others sported more subtle opinions), any white pronouncing on black aesthetics risked alienating some blacks. Of course, any critic invites judgment of his or her own artistic standards; yet whites aware of the atrocities routinely inflicted upon blacks understandably avoid activities and opinions that may offend blacks and evoke accusations of racism. Sensitive whites have sometimes found tiptoeing around blacks and foregoing honesty a powerful temptation; but blacks have justly resented such conduct, which renders authenticity, understanding, and friendship impossible. In Eastman's day such distortions intruded upon the most intimate interracial friendships, as Eastman's relationship with Claude McKay demonstrated.
McKay was a Jamaician poet who had arrived in the United States in 1912. After brief stints at Tuskegee Institute and a college in Kansas, he was by 1918 working at odd jobs and composing verse, some of which was published in Pearson's and Seven Arts. The Liberator published one of McKay's poems in April 1919 and featured a two-page spread of his work a few months later. The Jamaician bard condemned capitalism and racism while extolling the beauties of Afro-American life. "The Negro Dancer" foreshadowed his later novels in its stress on the sensuality and joy of living which blacks retained despite their oppression; "If We Must Die" urged that blacks defend themselves even unto death against white lynch mobs. Endlessly reprinted, this poem made him a celebrity throughout the Afro-American world. After joining the IWW McKay visited England, where he worked for Sylvia Pankhurt's Workers' Dreadnought. In England he honed his Marxist theory, supported nationalist movements as entering wedges for Communism, learned a wide variety of editorial and publishing skills, published in the prestigious Cambridge Magazine, and issued his first post-Jamaician collection, Spring in New Hampshire. McKay also struggled against racism within the English left. When he returned to the United States, Eastman made him an associate Liberator editor.
McKay energized Eastman's racial egalitarian project of fusing class and racial awareness among workers of both races. He informed The Liberator's largely white readership about the peculiar difficulties which racism imposed upon black proletarians. McKay agreed with orthodox Marxists that capitalism placed all blacks amidst "the lowest section of the white working class," that capitalists fostered racism to divide the workers, and that blacks could achieve liberation only within the class struggle. Nevertheless, McKay realized that as a black he was not only an economic slave like white workers, but also "a social leper, of a race outcast from an outcast class." White racism exacerbated the racial consciousness of both races while diluting class consciousness; blacks, victimized by white violence, viewed themselves as members of a race rather than as part of the working class. "The Negro must acquire class consciousness," McKay said. "And the white workers must accept and work with him, whether they object to his color and morals or not." Otherwise, blacks would break white strikes and crush the labor movement. While criticizing white racism, McKay also attacked Marcus Garvey for misunderstanding "modern revolutionary developments" and ignoring the class struggle.[437]
Ironically, McKay's stress on the uniqueness of black life and sensibility echoed Floyd Dell rather than James Weldon Johnson. He extolled the black revue Shuffle Along for portraying "the inimitable comic characteristics of Negro life"; he also asserted that black artists improved race relations by dampening race hatred and encouraging interracial sympathy. Unlike many black literary figures, McKay heralded a distinctive Afro-American life and culture:
The Negro critics can scarcely perceive and recognize true values through the screen of sneering bigotry put between them and life by the dominant white race.... Negro art, these critics declare, 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.[438]
Despite his close friendships with many Liberator editors, McKay found that his unusual position as a black in a white mileau actually fostered the misunderstandings and humiliations generated by America's white racist culture. One one occasion, McKay and a white editor attended a performance of Andreyev's He Who Gets Slapped at the left-leaning Theatre Guild. As representatives of The Liberator they expected good seats but found themselves rudely consigned to the balcony. "Suddenly the realization came to me," McKay wrote. "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."[439]
McKay recognized that capitalism fostered racism and that "mighty world forces" impinged upon even the Theatre Guild. White hostility would wreck any business which implemented a racially egalitarian policy. McKay, therefore, bravely said that he would not demand that "any business, however exquisitely artistic, however moral and aloof from the market, to shoulder the burden of the Negro race." And indeed, the Theatre Guild telephoned The Liberator and justified its segregation policy as a business necessity. The insult, however, devastated McKay:
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![440]
On another occasion McKay and some Liberator friends were driving about in search of an eatery which would serve their interracial group. Finally a restaurant reluctantly seated them at the waiters' table amidst the noise and heat of the kitchen. Eastman--who could enter whatever restaurant he wished--probably regarded the incident as an absurd adventure; but McKay felt degraded. "It was one of the most miserable meals I ever ate," he said. "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 another such occasion Eastman remarked "If I were a Negro I couldn't be anything but a revolutionist!"--which McKay thought incomprehending and frivolous. Such incidents recurred; Mike Gold later reported that he and McKay "were always being thrown out of restaurants. Once, for race reasons, we were thrown out of a chop suey house by an indignant Chinese!"[441]
Such experiences alienated McKay from his comrades, who, while sincerely opposing racism, sometimes regarded its manifestations as faintly amusing or quaint rather than as the horrors inflicted upon McKay. Sometimes McKay would refuse invitations from his white friends without giving any reason. "I did not always like to intrude the fact of my being a black problem among whites," he 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."[442] But Eastman (as he himself acknowledged) simply could not sufficiently identify with his black friend. McKay, unsurprisingly, recognized the problem, viewing segregation as "the most powerful instrument in the world" for preventing interracial understanding. "Ultimately," he said, "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."[443]
Yet another incident illustrated the difficulties confronting an interracial friendship within a virulently racist society. Neysa McMein, a guest at one of Eastman's parties, vociferously objected when she discovered that McKay was one of Eastman's friends rather than a servant. Eastman later read her some of McKay's poems without disclosing the author's identity; when McMein expressed appreciation, Eastman triumphantly revealed that their author was none other than the black whose presence at the party McMein had so resented. However, McMein was not mollified; McKay later reported that "she did not like the verses any less or the idea of my equal association with whites any more."[444] Eastman had valiently tried to combat racism even among one of his own associates, but found that mere reason could not overcome bigotry. Indeed, the New York police violently suppressed an interracial Liberator dance because blacks and whites were mingling on terms of equality. American racism was a systematic structure of social, legal, economic, and political power backed by armed violence; against it, the most sincere individual efforts at understanding foundered.[445]
McKay also endured racial insults from Liberator editors. When McKay championed the verse of e.e. cummings, native Texan Robert Minor questioned his revolutionary purity and charged that he was not "a real Negro." Reflecting widespread white stereotypes of blacks as natural pugilists, Mike Gold (himself an amateur boxer) once challenged McKay to a boxing match over some trivial disagreement. Even Eastman once deeply offended his friend. In an attempt to radicalize Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association, McKay occasionally met with Afro-American revolutionaries at The Liberator's offices; Eastman, fearing Justice Department repression, asked that McKay desist.
McKay's dilemma was sharpened by the fact that even his fellow editors regarded him not simply as an individual person, but as representing an exotic race. McKay's own racial romanticism, which extolled his own race as unique, facilitated this. For example, McKay loved Eastman's introduction to Harlem Shadows, the expanded, American edition of his poetry. Eastman reaffirmed McKay's own racial stereotypes even while praising McKay's class-conscious revolutionism:
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.[446]
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, "cast in his lot with the working-class Negroes of the north," and "earned his living in every one of the ways that northern Negroes do."[447]
Racial tensions on The Liberator intensified in late 1921 when Eastman resigned his editorship and engineered the joint appointment of Gold and McKay in his place. McKay, an immigrant black, was now co-editor of one of America's foremost revolutionary magazines--a periodical which was read almost exclusively by whites. But as McKay later said, "there could have been no worse combination, because personally and intellectually and from the very first time we met, Michael Gold and I were opposed to each other."[448] The adversaries argued over the merits of proletarian versus more traditional literature and the Liberator's racial policy. After a short time, these disagreements forced McKay's resignation.
Gold had earlier proclaimed that art was "the tenement pouring out its soul" through "its most sensitive sons and daughters." The traditional artist, isolated and aloof from social struggle, was "sick to death." Rather than imitating sterile bourgeois conventions, emerging writers must immense themselves in the uncorrupt life of the masses and create a newer and truer art from "the tenement that bore and molded us through years of meaningful pain." McKay, in turn, later claimed that Gold envisioned The Liberator as a vehicle for formulaic propaganda--"doggerels from lumberjacks and stevedores and true revelations from chambermaids"--rather than literature.[449]
This particular disagreement between McKay and Gold was more apparent than real, however. Gold demanded authentic art which grew "from the soil of life, freely and without forethought" rather than contrived propaganda. Indeed, McKay exemplified Gold's ideal of a proletarian poet: he had emerged from the working class and wrote vivid protest poetry about common blacks in language they understood. McKay's racial position generated intense and authentic poetry of protest; indeed, McKay naturally composed the kind of revolutionary verse that Eastman himself despaired of writing. Moreover, both before and after his imbroglio with Gold, McKay had extolled the virtues of politicized literature, at times claiming that all genuine self-expression embodied the author's social perspective.[450]
A more important dispute concerned the amount of material The Liberator would publish on racial issues. McKay urged that it devote about 10 percent of its space to racial matters because blacks comprised roughly that proportion of the American proletariat. Gold disagreed and in June 1922 assailed McKay's editorial decision to publish Lucy Maverish's "Out of Texas," a devastating, understated account of the legal lynching of a young African American. Although McKay temporarily mollified Gold, he recognized that the two could not continue as co-editors, and demanded that the staff choose between them. The other editors (including Eastman, who weighed in from abroad) chose Gold, thus in effect forcing McKay's resignation. The Liberator somewhat disingenuously informed its readers that McKay had resigned so he could travel and write creative literature; it claimed it would continue to publish his work. However, except for a farewell article attacking his comrades' inadvertent racism (and a single, unrelated poem), McKay's voice in The Liberator fell silent.
McKay's exit from The Liberator symbolized the failure of Eastman's racially egalitarian enterprise. Why did Eastman side with Gold? McKay much more closely embodied Eastman's ideal as an author. He not only stemmed from the working class (as did Gold), but championed lyrical, non-political verse written in classical rather than avant-garde forms; he also composed revolutionary poems that expressed a world distant indeed from that of most Liberator readers. Eastman's own explanation--that the issues Gold supervised had "more pep"--is hardly convincing because Eastman opposed Gold's new emphasis on proletarian literature. Indeed, Gold had precipitated Eastman's withdrawal from The Liberator by accusing him of being insufficiently revolutionary--the very charge he levelled at McKay. McKay as editor would have symbolized continuity in the values Eastman had embodied in The Masses and The Liberator. Eastman did oppose McKay's 10 percent formula, but there were alternatives to sole editorship by McKay. Joseph Freeman, elected to replace McKay, could more appropriately have replaced Gold. It is difficult to dismiss the possibility that the staff's (including Eastman's) racial affinity with Mike Gold influenced their decision. At any rate, their rejection of McKay proved disastrous. Both W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey commented unfavorably upon McKay's dismissal, while The Liberator slid towards bankruptcy and death. This fate may have befallen it in any case; McKay may have lost nothing more by his dismissal than blame for an inevitable catastrophe. Nevertheless, the result deeply hurt McKay, further alienated prominent black leaders from the white left, and undermined the "fragile bridge" tenuously uniting the movements for working-class liberation and Afro-American freedom.
In his valedictory article McKay hinted at the unspoken disagreements over racial issues that divided him from the rest of the staff, and commented on the unbridgeable chasm which separated the workers (and intellectuals) of the two races.
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.
Being a Negro, I think it is my proud birthright to put the case of the Negro proletarian, to the best of my ability, before the white members of the movement to which I belong. For the problem of the darker races is a rigid test of Radicalism. To some radicals it might seem more terrible to face than the barricades. But this racial question may be eventually 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.[451]
McKay perceived himself as mediating between white radicals and the black masses. He would "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 revolutionary who mouthed pious slogans while ignoring the real needs of blacks "not only aids the bourgeoisie, but also the ultra-nationalist Negro leaders" who preached racial seperatism while ignoring the class struggle.[452]
McKay emphatically repudiated 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.[453]
McKay obviously believed that even Liberator readers required an education in the realities (including the class aspects) of racial oppression.
McKay, however, did not discuss the depths of his alienation with The Liberator staff. Indeed, we know of the imbroglio over racial matters only by accident. When McKay was visiting Russia, the Soviets asked that he write a short book on the condition of Africans in America. McKay apparently showed the manuscript of Negroes in America to Eastman, who was also in the Soviet Union; and Eastman protested McKay's criticism of The Liberator's racial attitudes. Eastman denied having known of McKay's disaffection; McKay 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."[454] McKay 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."[455] Such suspicions doubtless reflected McKay's experiences in a racist society more than the attitudes of The Liberator's editors; but McKay did not vent his feelings at the time, and even later broached them only obliquely, in a book. The hurt and estrangement from even his best friends were far too deep to be bridged by words.
Eastman also sided with Gold in the dispute about racial material in The Liberator. During his exchange of letters with McKay over Negroes in America, Eastman wrote that "you began to introduce so much material about the race question into your magazine 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 a near lynching and two trials for obstructing the draft) "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." Eastman, however, regarded himself as merely pragmatic and realistic. He fully recognized the tenacious, even if largely unconscious, racism of even the relatively enlightened whites who read The Liberator. But McKay angrily told Eastman that 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."[456] In truth, both men believed that blacks suffered horrendous disabilities above and beyond those inflicted upon white workers, but that they were nevertheless integral to the working class. They agreed that white racism was the primary obstacle to the organization of black workers. Both acknowledged that race and class were inextricably related in the oppression of black workers, 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 deliniated the relationship between the two.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, however, Eastman stressed class over race, and veered towards the orthodox Marxist belief that a working-class revolution would automatically abolish racial oppressions.[457] 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?"[458] McKay's own experiences among white workers and radicals continually reminded him that cultural patterns are deeply embedded and not easily overturned, even by conscious effort. Eastman had conceded as much when he warned McKay that over-emphasizing racial matters would alienate The Liberator's readers.
Ironically, however, McKay had a short time 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."
For American Negroes the indisputable and outstanding fact is that a mere handful of Jews, much less in ratio to the number of Negroes in the American population, have attained, through the Revolution, all the political and social rights that were denied to them under the regime of the Czar...
The [American] Negro in politics and social life is ostracized only technically by the distinction of color; in reality the Negro is discriminated against because he is of the lowest type of worker....[459]
McKay conceded that "this economic difference between the white and black workers" manifested itself "in color prejudice, race hatred, political and social boycotting and lynching of Negroes" and that 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," agencies that ordinarily aided white mobs. Although McKay believed that Communist revolution might liberate blacks, he also asserted that if the plutocrats granted equal rights to Negroes, it would generate "revolution in the economic life of the country."[460]
As a person of African descent, McKay found himself feted in the Soviet Union by populace and party leaders alike. He was accepted as an official delegate to the Comintern's Fourth Convention and seated upon the platform next to Eastman and right behind Comintern chairman Zinoviev. Invited to address the world gathering, McKay extolled the Communist International but warned that American racism--including racism within the Communist movement--divided the races and imperilled the revolutionary enterprise. Although the Afro-American was objectively a proletarian, he could not "for one minute" forget "his color, his skin, or his race." Therefore, blacks were merely "race conscious and rebellious" rather than "revolutionary and class conscious." Unless radicals overcame their own racism and addressed the "special needs" of the blacks, Negroes would continue to align themselves with the reformist bourgeoisie and break strikes. At present blacks disdained radical propaganda emanating from 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.[461]
Communists as well as ordinary workers alienated blacks by their racism, as McKay personally could well attest. "The reformist bourgeoisie have been carrying on the battle against discrimination and racial prejudice in America," he 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." American Communists "must first emancipate themselves from the ideas they entertain towards the Negroes" before they could "reach the Negroes with any kind of radical propaganda." President Harding, McKay bitterly charged, was better on the racial question than the Workers' Party. Many Communists would rather risk death on the barricades than squarely confront their racism, demand equality for blacks in unions, or defend intermarriage and social equality. McKay admitted that any forthright antiracist stance would alienate white American workers and could even lead to race war. "To go to the very heart of the Negro question for the Communists means [incurring] the violent anger of American public opinion in the North as well as the South," McKay said.[462]
McKay's speech to the Communist International, and indeed his entire experience within the American radical movement, epitomized the dilemmas afflicting American radicals of both races. Virulent American racism infected not only mainstream society but also the labor, Socialist, and Communist movements. White American workers clung to whatever shreds of respectability and economic privilege racism afforded them. Afro-Americans similarly hoped for a precarious acceptance and respectability; they embraced patriotism, religion, and capitalist morality, while eschewing radicalism of all kinds. The corporations and the government, they properly recognized, had far more power than American labor and leftist dissidents. The IWW, the only fully egalitarian organization outside the NAACP, was crushed by corporate and government terrorism during the Red Scare. Misunderstandings centered upon race alienated McKay even from his Liberator friends and comrades, and caused his departure from that magazine, which itself soon folded.
By the time McKay departed for the Soviet Union (Eastman himself had already left), the American radical movement was in tatters. The Socialist and Communist parties were crushed, the unions weakened or destroyed, feminism moribund, and the Afro-American liberation struggle derailed. For a golden moment, however, Eastman's two publications, The Masses and The Liberator, had courageously analyzed and confronted the structures of American racism, and given voice to Afro-Americans fighting on their own behalf. Eastman's racially egalitarian enterprise foundered, indeed, because it necessarily repudiated the entire social, economic, political and cultural structures of American society--structures devastatingly internalized to some extent even among those who would most overcome them.
McKay's own efforts at fostering interracial understanding and Afro-American proletarian consciousness also failed. Whites, more interested in oppressing blacks than in fighting for their own welfare, flocked to the Ku Klux Klan by the millions. This made the blacks' response inevitable; if blacks acted as members of a class while white workers behaved as members of a race, the blacks would have denied themselves those few opportunities (often as strikebreakers) the capitalists allowed them. Blacks, therefore, showed far more interest in Garvey's racial pride, pageantry, and economic self-help than in class-conscious organization. (Garvey's movement, however, was also disintegrating by 1922.) McKay's association with The Liberator isolated him from radical and reformist blacks alike, while only partly integrating him into the radical white subculture. Both in personal meaning and political effect, therefore, the friendship and political association of Eastman and Claude McKay was undermined by the racism of mainstream American society. Sustaining an egalitarian, inter-racial friendship and political alliance was difficult amidst the hostility of conventional American institutions, practices, and attitudes.
Despite the deformities imposed by mainstream society, however, Eastman achieved wonders in the area of race relations. His magazines featured cartoons, fiction, and news items of interest to blacks, and often written by blacks, on a scale unprecedented outside the Afro-American press itself. If a small portion of those items offended some blacks, Eastman offered them full opportunity to reply. These exchanges must have greatly enlightened a white readership almost completely cut off from black life and sensibilities. The Masses told its readers about black publications, and The New York Age, New York's largest black newspaper, itself greeted The Liberator with enthusiam. Eastman's friendship with McKay was indeed flawed, as friendships (especially most literary friendships) often are; but it survived the vicissitudes of almost three decades. Eastman knew that he, as a white outsider, could not liberate the blacks; he could only offer his support for their own efforts at self-liberation. This he did, to an extent almost unprecedented in his time.