Dogma, Romance and Double Consciousness
The Dilemmas of the New Negro Generation Through the Travels of Otto Huiswoud and Claude McKay
Lennart Bolwijn, 10271589
Address of correspondence: bolwijnlennart@gmail.com Supervisor: George Blaustein
University of Amsterdam Faculty of Humanities
Master Thesis in American Studies 39700 words
2 “Jazz is a marvel of a paradox: too fundamentally human, at least as modern humanity goes, to be typically racial, too international to be characteristically national, too much abroad in the world to have a special home. And yet jazz in spite of it all is one part American and three parts American Negro, and was originally the nobody’s child of the levee and the city slum. Transplanted exotic – a rather hardy one, we admit – of the mundane world capitals, sport of the sophisticated, it is really at home in its humble native soil wherever the modern unsophisticated Negro feels happy and sings and dances to his mood. It follows that jazz is more at home in Harlem than in Paris, though from the look and sound of certain quarters of Paris one would hardly think so. It is just the epidemic contagiousness of jazz that makes it, like the measles, sweep the block. But somebody had to have it first: that was the Negro.”
-J.A. Rogers, Jazz at Home (1925)
“As with the Jew, persecution is making the Negro international.”
“Garveyism may be a transient, if spectacular phenomenon, but the possible role of the American Negro in the future development of Africa is one of the most constructive and universally helpful missions that any modern people can lay claim to.”
3 Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jessica de Abreu, Mitchell Esajas and Miguel Heilbron for their work in establishing the Black Archives in Amsterdam and introducing me to Otto and Hermina Huiswoud. That many more Afro-Dutch histories may be written due to the books, sources and people on the attic of the Hugo Olijfveldhuis at the Zeeburgerdijk. Furthermore, I want to thank George J. Weinmann from New York, who helped me with my research in the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Archives. Special thanks to Renee de Groot, a girl smarter than me. Finally, I want to express my gratitude towards Loran van Diepen and George Blaustein for their comments, inspiration and willingness to discuss this important and weird niche of history with me. I am grateful for so much help and of course, solely responsible for any mistakes.
4
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ...3
Table of Contents ...4
Introduction ...5
Chapter One: Communists and Black Dandies ... 12
Chapter Two: The Long Argument of the Black Belt Thesis ... 36
Chapter Three: Popular Front Promiscuity, A Reading of Amiable With Big Teeth ... 66
Epilogue ... 84
5
Introduction
On January 17, 1910, the only sixteen-years-old Otto Huiswoud arrived in New York. He worked on a ship from Dutch Guyana that was bound for Amsterdam, but as the captain was an untrustworthy alcoholic, Huiswoud and two other sailors decided to take their chance on shore leave. They did not return to the ship but strolled through the snowy streets of New York looking for shelter, without any travel documents or money. The very same night they met an African-American man on the streets of Bowery, who invited them into one his saloons and arranged a job for Huiswoud in a small printing shop. His fellow sailors found it hard to settle in America and returned after a short while to their native land, but Huiswoud would become a true New Yorker in the following years, experiencing both its cosmopolitanism and the severe discrimination against African-Americans. It was this combination that drew him to the political left.
As a young laborer in New York in the 1910s, with Eugene Debs running for president in 1912 and soapbox orators like Hubert Harrison preaching the gospel of Marx on the Harlem streets, Huiswoud became attracted to socialism. When the Russian Revolution erupted in 1917, his world would never be the same again. In 1919, he became the only black founding member of the Communist Party of America, and traveled to the Soviet Union as an official Party delegate three years later. In Moscow, Huiswoud met Lenin, spoke to the Comintern about the “Negro Question”, to return to the States as the foremost black figure of the CPUSA in the early 1920s. His work for the American Party and the Comintern would bring him to Moscow again several times, but also to Chicago, Cape Town, Paris, Antwerp, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and several islands in the Caribbean, then called “the West Indies”. There is an intriguing pamphlet from Kingston in 1929 that announces a “great debate between Mr. O. Huiswoud, Representative of the American Negro Labour Congress (ANLC), and Hon. Marcus Garvey, President of the Universal Negro Improvement Association”. Huiswoud argued that the “Negro problem can only be solved by International Labor Co-Operation between Black and White Labour”. A question about the Great Themes of the Era. Of course, the black particularistic Garvey argued against this thesis as he wanted black capitalism to flourish. For Huiswoud, only an interracial collaboration of workers could overthrow the economic system of power, as capitalism was at the root of all oppression.
Whether class or race is the foremost factor in Afro-diasporic oppression is the question that runs through the entire history of the black left. Huiswoud belonged to the group of people who believed that the revolutionary spirit of the Soviet Union would erase every tribalism that got in the way of proletarian unity. Yet, he was always tenacious in arguing that racism was at the heart of American capitalism, used by economic elites to set up workers against each other. White workers were exploited too, but their “psychological wage” of belonging to the superior caste made them
6 participants in a more harsh and violent oppression of American-Americans. Not only did the combination of capitalistic oppression and racism require specific solutions, it also transcended American borders. Huiswoud believed the “Negro Question” had to be solved on an international dimension, as European could only be beaten if all “Negro workers” united. This mission would bring Huiswoud to the Caribbean Islands in 1929 in an attempt to found unions, to South Africa and Western-Europe, where he would spend most of the 1930s as executive committee of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUC-NW). Together with life partner Hermina Dumont Huiswoud or “Hermie”, they spread the radical magazine The Negro Worker around the world, backed and financed by the Soviet Union. In 1941, Huiswoud went back to Dutch Guyana, as he needed a warmer climate for his health problems. Because of his Soviet affiliations he was seen as a political enemy by the government of Dutch Guyana and incarcerated. Eventually, after almost two years of continuous protest, he managed to receive pardon from the Dutch government in 1942. After the war, he reunited with Hermie, who was as radical Party member as Otto, and they moved to Amsterdam. Almost forty years after Huiswoud departed from Paramaribo, he settled at his original destination, to become again an active member of an organization with anti-capitalistic and decolonial endeavors, Vereniging Ons Suriname (VOS) or Society Our Suriname.1 Formerly a
predominantly social place, Huiswoud’s chairmanship turned the VOS into a very political society with its own radical magazine. Eventually, the VOS would belong to the intellectual groups that paved the way for Surinamese independence in 1975, fourteen years after Huiswoud passed away.
Figures like Otto and Hermina Huiswoud are valuable for filling in the framework of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. The Black Atlantic is essentially an argument to understand modernity as a phenomenon that transcends ethnic categories, as a process of hybridity. Words as peripatetic, rhizomorphic, creolized, mobility and mutability belong to the vocabulary of diaspora studies wherein Gilroy participates. The assumption is thus that European and African (or black and white) people have influenced, contrasted and nurtured each other in the making of their identities. For Europeans, the colonization of the New World and their enslavement of Africans on the way there, meant the making of their whiteness. For the descendants of the African diaspora a perpetual insider/outsider duality characterizes their experiences with modern citizenship, as they are citizens of a colonial-settler state that is founded on perceiving them as a commodity rather than as human beings. Gilroy makes clear that the Black Atlantic is therefore not just any part of the modern world, but a very counterculture of modernity.2
But although Afro-diasporic humans are uprooted and paradoxical to the nation state, they
1 Suriname and Dutch Guyana are names for the same place, but Suriname is more common among the
Dutch-speaking populations. In Sranan Tongo, the language spoken by Afro-creoles, the country is called Sranan.
7 are not without a people. Gilroy argues that their peoplehood knows quintessential characteristics such as the intergenerational trauma of the slave experiences, diasporic movement and dislocation, a never fading double consciousness and, of course, black music. To make his arguments about modernity and transnational peoplehood stronger, he includes two chapters on the respective travels of W.E.B. Du Bois and Richard Wright. Through these travels we see their dialogue with modernity and their agency in its becoming. The movement of people is used as the ultimate counterargument against the classic Enlightenment or Herderian approach of studying history through the specter of the nation state and the folk. With this thesis I aim to strengthen the legitimacy of this argument in the Netherlands by following the travels, ideas and hopes of Otto and Hermina Huiswoud.
Why do I want to make the general argument that the framework of the Black Atlantic deserves more credit in the Netherlands? This might seem as an obvious or unoriginal argument. “Everyone should read this canonical book in postcolonial studies!” And is it not also redolent of contradiction? An argument for an embrace of transnationalism, but in one particular nation? The reason why I deem this argument necessary and am comfortable with this contradiction is as followed. First, the studies of the Black Atlantic have been dominated by Anglophone and Francophone discourses, which makes sense because more people from the African Diaspora speak these languages than all people on the world who speak Dutch. But the predominance of these discourses made the development of a Dutch decolonial vocabulary lean on others, mostly the Anglo-American one. When I interviewed the Afro-Surinamese Mitchell Esajas about the Black Archives in Amsterdam and their exposition on Otto and Hermina Huiswoud, he told me about the debate between Huiswoud and Garvey. Esajas had been inspired by Garvey for a great part of his life and found it “strange, that I, as a Surinamese person only heard of Huiswoud a few years ago.”3
But the need for a better decolonial narrative in the Dutch context has not only been expressed by Dutch postcolonial citizens. Before she was chosen as the mayor of Amsterdam, Femke Halsema told De Volkskrant that Dutch anti-racist activists do not help themselves by using “for example, the American term “white privilege”. In the Netherlands, black people did not have to sit in the back of the bus. You cannot import a discourse of a country that has known systematic oppression and tell the Dutch: You are doing the same. That is incorrect and distracts from the actual
3 The Black Archives is a grassroots initiative to elevate the Dutch knowledge of “black history”, founded by
Mitchell Esajas, Jessica de Abreu and Miguel Heilbron. When sociologist Waldo Heilbron, the father of Miguel, passed away in 2009, he left an enormous collection of books and boxes with private documents of Huiswoud. The Black Archives will use these materials in their endeavor to augment the knowledge of “black history” in the Netherlands.
The interview can be read here: Lennart Bolwijn, Zwarte geschiedenis komt tot leven in The Black Archives, “Folia”, 26 april 2017, #https://www.folia.nl/actueel/110084/zwarte-geschiedenis-komt-tot-leven-in-the-black-archives, accessed at 4-7-2017.
8 racism that certainly exists in the Netherlands.”4
Halsema, furthermore, used the “Americanness” of anti-racist discourses as a badge of inauthenticity or disqualifying strangeness. “If you call everyone a racist you can’t find the actual racists anymore”, Halsema continued, as if anti-racist critique in the Netherlands is merely the occupation of a small group of unreasonable, Americanophile radicals who are foaming at the mouth when they hear the word “exclusion”, and for whom the struggle against racism means so much to their identity that they actually do not want it to end. Take note that she is an icon of the progressive Left in the Netherlands and the new mayor of the city that Russel Shorto has named “the world’s most liberal city.”5
Mostly, I think there are many American intellectual tools that might help in the Dutch decolonization process, but to do that we need to ask some specific questions about the differences and similarities between white normativity in the Netherlands and American caste hierarchies, which is not my purpose. My aim is to convince the reader that the history of Dutch racism and colonial discourse should also be understood as diasporic, complex and hybrid, as a part of the Black Atlantic.
To discuss the essentials of this Black Atlantic and its Dutch elements is our larger quest. Although I subliminally aim to answer in what ways the history of the Black Atlantic transcends into the “now”, it is necessary to perceive our protagonists in the context of their own time if we want to know wie es eigentlich gewesen. First, two efforts to write the story of Otto and Hermina Huiswoud have been made already. Maria van Enckevort’s Marxist-oriented The Life and Work of Otto Huiswoud is a massively resourced account of the life of Otto Huiswoud, just like the better written Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance by Joyce Moore Turner. In addition to her vast historiographical inquiry, Turner reconstructed the journey of the Huiswouds as a couple by interviewing Hermina Dumont Huiswoud in Amsterdam in the 1990s. Turner’s story is highly detailed but leaves many questions unanswered about the nature of the “Harlem Renaissance” . She delivers rather a very personal account of the lives of two people and their travels, communities, networks and ambitions, in times wherein Harlem and the young Soviet Union became strange bedfellows. It is not the aim of this thesis to rewrite Turner’s biography, or to find more sources about Huiswoud’s life. Rather, I want to place his ideological aspirations of an interracial overthrowing of capitalism with the help of a strong black internationalism in the context of the New Negro generation. If we want to denominate Otto Huiswoud, as Ulbe Bosma did, a courrier de Black Atlantic, we need first a
4 Herien Wensink, ‘Als je alles racisme noemt, kun je de echte racisten niet meer vinden', in: “De Volkskrant” 11
januari, #https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/-als-je-alles-racisme-noemt-kun-je-de-echte-racisten-niet-meer-vinden-~b6b8851a/ The translation is mine.
9 historiographical and cultural analysis of Harlem between the wars.6
Namely, one of Turner’s major claims is that the Caribbean radicalism of the Harlem Renaissance was the driving force of Otto Huiswoud’s international activity and succeeded to expand over the Atlantic in the 1930s with the foundation of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers (ITUC-NW). To respond to this claim, we need an answer to the complex question of what the Harlem Renaissance is and which definitions and periodizations are used. The first chapter gives an introduction about the “Harlem Renaissance” and the better fitting “New Negro”, to describe the interplay of these New York microcosms wherein Otto and Hermina Huiswoud moved. Many of its people, were they train workers, strikers, writers, Caribbeans, whites or African-Americans, sought pleasure or escape in the speakeasies, bars and cabarets of Harlem’s nightlife. This dynamic of black New York has been portrayed best in literature by the Jamaican-born Claude McKay, especially in Home to Harlem (1928). The writer, who became the foremost symbol of New Negro radicalism with his militant poem “If We Must Die” in 1919, is used in this thesis as a mirror, an amplification of the story of Huiswoud, a socialist and bureaucrat. Both men spoke at the Fourth Comintern Congress in Moscow in 1922, but McKay stayed a year longer to publish in Russian about the “Negro Question”. McKay’s Russian works, next to his fiction and non-fiction about Harlem, function to portray the Harlem Renaissance not only as a Marxist counterculture of modernity, but also as a Modernist revolt against racial segregation and yes, a sexual revolution.
The first chapter introduces a versatile picture of Harlem through a generational contrast between the youngsters of the New Negro Renaissance and the Jazz Age (1885-1905), and their parents who were raised during the Victorian Era, some even born in slavery. I argue that the aspect of interracialism is at the core of their struggle, which is expressed in the rhetoric of Soviet internationalism and New Negro radicalism, but also by New York’s Jazz Age and the Modernist revolt against the suffocating mores of the Victorian age and the Jim Crow era. After positioning Huiswoud and McKay in categories of Modernism and modernity, we will follow them on their way to the Fourth Comintern Congress in Moscow, 1922. Their travels show us how they brought the New Negro’s Marxist racial critique, double consciousness and internationalism to Moscow, with a legacy that is profound and yet at times also opaque.
One of the unclarities of the legacy of their trip is covered in the second chapter about the
6 Maria van Enckevort, The Life and Times of Otto Huiswoud: Professional Revolutionary and Internationalist (1893-1961). Unpublished PhD dissertation, Department of History, University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica (2000).
Joyce Moore Turner, with the assistance of W. Burghardt Turner, Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance (Urbana 2005).
Ulbe Bosma Otto Huiswoud, courrier de la Black Atlantic (1893-1961) in: “Autour De L’Atlantique Noir: Une polyphonie de perspectives” (Paris 2009). Accessible at: #https://books.openedition.org/iheal/2764, visited at 04-07-2018.
10 Black Belt Thesis, a long, technical argument in Marxist theory whether the African-Americans were an oppressed race or a “nation” like other nations that suffered under the yuk of European imperialism. This debate for ivory tower theorists would develop in the Comintern-backed argument for a separate black state in the South. Absurd and interesting of course, but most of all a doctrine that became a crucial “football” in Party politics. The chapter is essentially about historical debates on categories of “race” and “nation”, in which we will also answer some questions about; (1) the agency of relatively small figures as Huiswoud in the Stalinizing world of Communism; (2) the usefulness of the category of nationalism in debates about diasporic people; (3) the damage of Communist sectarianism to black unity. Through this chapter, we see an exhausting and never-ending oscillation between black particularism and the interracial solidarity of the Communists. The uprooting violence that marked the African diaspora disrupted black souls to such extent that an equilibrium on this spectrum of “race solidarity” could not take shape in the modern world. With knowledge of the disorienting effects of this racial terror and displacement, even the puritanical dedication to the strange doctrine for a separate black state in the South becomes an understandable tendency.
The third chapter elaborates on the 1930s and the internationalism of the Popular Front, with a satirical reflection through McKay’s newly discovered novel (!) Amiable With Big Teeth. McKay had rejected and ridiculed the Soviet Union and Communist Harlem in his nonfictional Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940) and was still eager to express this sentiment in Amiable with Big Teeth. The novel, written in 1940, would however only be published in 2016. With McKay’s mocking of the pieties of the Left and his interesting remarks on the dating racism within the Communist Party, I treat the question to what extent interracial progress is limited. Secondly, I discuss McKay’s suggestion in Amiable With Big Teeth that the New Negro, in its becoming of socialist bureaucrats, editors, writers and artists, has matured as the Talented Tenth, the vanguard of the “race”. Herein, I argue that interracial romance and communism in tandem, ironically had become part of the characteristics that “made” Harlem’s upper class, wherein class is a denomination of a social group rather than a description of financial wealth.
Finally, there is the note on language. In this thesis I have used often the term “Negro”, a word academics would not consider appropriate today when referring to African-Americans. But in discussing historical movements and denominations as the “New Negro” or “Negro Renaissance”, it would be harmful to our understanding of these phenomena to give them new names conforming to the more polite standards of today. The racial essentialism of the word “Negro” is particularly crucial for grasping the ways of thinking about blackness and whiteness in America and by Pan-Africanists like Du Bois and Garvey, but also for the Soviets’ treatment of the “Negro Question”. As the New Negro is a recognized artistic and socialist movement that is been named by people of color and a
11 term that has been worn as a badge of pride, I have not put the term in parentheses. But I have done so with the “Negro Question”, a socialist project to free all “Negroes” under communism that can be seen as Pan-Africanist through the specter of Soviet internationalism, but is in a way also redolent of the Soviets’ racial essentialism and white savior complex. Secondly, I do switch between the use of the Harlem Renaissance and the Negro Renaissance. Whenever I specifically name the Harlem Renaissance I refer to the dynamics between New York’s Communist Party, Jazz Age and artistic scene, while the Negro or Black Renaissance describes the general rebirth of African-American literature in the 1920s. Thirdly, I vary between the use of “Communist”, which refers to all protagonists related to the Comintern or the Communist Party of America (CPUSA) and the decapitalized “communist”. The latter describes people who were not necessarily Party members but thought of themselves as communists in the sense that they supported the anticapitalistic ideology, in the same way that people today call themselves a “feminist” or “liberal”. For the sake of readability, the Party, which was not called the CPUSA before 1930 but the “Workers’ (Communist) Party”, is described as “the Communist Party, “the CP”, “CPUSA” or just “the Party” from here on.
To choose Huiswoud because of his Dutch or Surinamese background is in a certain way quite arbitrary, maybe even out of place in a historiographical inquiry in the field of diaspora studies. However, the delegitimization of intersectional feminism and Anglo-American critical race theory as “non-Dutch” anti-racist discourses, makes the story of the Huiswouds worth debating in the Netherlands, a globalizing nation in awkward denial. We will conclude that not only Stuart Hall, C.L.R. James, Richard Wright, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, bell hooks and Ta-Nehesi Coates are part of this Black Atlantic, but also Claude McKay, Otto and Hermina Huiswoud, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin and Sigmund Freud. After studying the mobility of ideas, we (in the Netherlands and beyond) are hopefully better capable of judging the grounds on which the reflex to reject “other” discourses is legitimized. In the end, only the people from North Korea are in quarantine from the rest of the world.
12
Chapter One
Communists and Black Dandies
There is a photograph of Claude McKay and Otto Huiswoud standing in Moscovian snow, a picture that overflows with the symbolism of the duality of the Harlem Renaissance. This chapter aims to describe the Harlem-Soviet connection of these two men, Otto Huiswoud and Claude McKay, who met in the fall of 1922 in Moscow, where they were invited to speak at the Fourth Congress of the Comintern. Their Comintern speeches and the Russian works of McKay have a significant place in historiography, as they put the “Negro Question” on the Soviet agenda and shaped the Soviet view of both blackness and the plight of African-American lives. It is fair to say that Otto Huiswoud and Claude McKay were two men with different personalities and convictions. Huiswoud was known to be a disciplined party member who stayed loyal to the party even when he was banned for a year because he spoke out against a racist farmer in 1925. He was a talented striker and organizer but nevertheless a timid and humble man, obedient to the rightful cause of toppling capitalism, a struggle led by the Soviet Union. McKay was a dandy, a bohemian poet and in some ways a romantic. He moved in social circuits with writers like George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and the publishers from downtown Manhattan where he worked for the Liberator, a socialist cultural magazine with editors like Robert Minor and Michael Gold. 7
To put it loosely, the New Negro, although a mosaic of black identities, can be seen in both of these two men and the countercultures of their generation. The alliance of the rebellion against the mores and racial oppression of the Victorian Era is expressed in black Modernism and Marxism, in the words of William J. Maxwell, “one of modernity’s immanent counterlogics”. The syncretism and blending of these politics and culture can be seen when studying the use of the term “New Negro”. Seven years before it was adopted and popularized by literary critic Alain Locke in 1925, socialist magazine The Messenger already used the term: “The New Negro is awakening. After having been the political Rip Van Winkle of America for fifty years, sleeping in the cesspools of Republican reaction, he has at last opened his eyes. In New York City, the very heart of Negro settlement, there has been organized the Twenty-first Assembly District Socialist Branch which includes all white and colored Socialists in the district.”8
Huiswoud’s Marxism cannot be called anti-Victorian in the Modernist sense but is rather an
7 Jacob Zumoff, “Mulattoes, Reds, and the Fight for Black Liberation in Claude McKay’s “Trial By Lynching” and
“Negroes in America”, Journal of West Indian Literature, Vol. 19-1 (November 2010), 22-53.
8 “Negroes Organizing in Socialist Party”, The Messenger 2, (July 1918),8. Quoted in: Joyce Moore Turner, Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance, 51.
William J. Maxwell, New Negro Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (New York 1999) 7.
13 anti-capitalist critique that is also part of a “counterculture of modernity”. We might categorize his interracialism with Modernist New York’s contrast to Victorian segregation, but Huiswoud’s aim to topple capitalism with a movement of workers who are united despite their difference in skin color is of course something different than blacks and whites drinking and dancer together in the bars of Upper Manhattan. The question is, thus, where do these countercultures touch or connect with each other? Perhaps their internationalism, anti-bourgeois moralism, interracialist in working class solidarity, pleasure, or even sex? And where do they diverge? The rebellious hedonism and decadence of the culturalists, versus the communist puritanism that co-opted some of the same Calvinist/Victorian values of abstinence of pleasure and wealth? Was Huiswoud’s revolt directed not only against the industrial capitalism of the Victorian Era, but also against its mores?
Claude McKay’s writings function as a mirror throughout this thesis, as these questions are not easily answered when centered around the person of Otto Huiswoud alone. Especially because Huiswoud has only produced Marxist theorizations about global racial oppression, colonialism, Dutch Guiana and trade unions that are exactly what a scholar would expect from black communist writings from the interbellum. There are no elaborations on black-white social or intimate interactions, or the joy of rebellion in transgressing bourgeois segregationist mores. Speaking of his character, we know he was a calm, serious and timid man, nicknamed “the Sphinx” and dedicated to the cause. Characteristics that would have been appreciated in Victorian New England, with its admiration for patience, diligence and perseverance. Does that make him less of a radical socialist? And how do we interpret the close friendship between his partner Hermina Dumont Huiswoud with Langston Hughes, one of the key literary figures in the Negro Renaissance and the socialist movement? One of the problems of this study is of course that it is limited to textuality and the texts Huiswoud produced himself. But did he dance the Charleston? Did he enjoy jazz music? He might have read McKay’s Home to Harlem, in many respects a proletarian novel wherein Modernism and social realism are fused. And what about Huiswoud’s s white girlfriend, Anna Leve, whom he met at the socialist Rand School before he knew Hermie? Did he experience pride in such a cross-racial romance, or catch himself thinking he gave the good example? Did white communists grant him more acceptance when he was with her? As the sources don’t tell us, we can only speculate about these questions. But among the things that Huiswoud’s socialism and McKay’s literary renaissance have in common is a mentality that challenged and halted late nineteenth century optimism and its celebration of modernization’s triumph. Both rebel against the supremacy of Anglo-American civilization under the Victorian Era and what Daniel Joseph Singal called its “guiding ethos [that] was
14 centered upon the classic bourgeois values of thrift, diligence, and persistence, so important for success in a burgeoning capitalistic economy”.9
Modernity, Modernism, New Negro
For many scholars of the Harlem Renaissance the starting point is Alain Locke’s anthology The New Negro, named after the essay he had written in 1925 about the swift change in African-American culture and spirit. In the essay and introduction to the book, which aimed “to document the New Negro culturally and socially”, Locke made clear what the New Negro meant to him. Although there was little social change and progress to be content with, Locke noticed that “the younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology in the internal world of the Negro mind and spirit”, a generation that rejected slave mentality and was able to shed of “the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority”. The New Negro rejected the accomodationism of Booker T. Washington and the aesthetics of the sentimentalist poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, with its extensive use of African-American dialect: “Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on.” However, the myth of the Old Negro in the American mind, “a stock figure perpetuated as historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism” was a stubborn one that kept haunting African-Americans: “His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality.” But now, in 1925, Locke observed “renewed self-respect and self-dependence,” among black Americans, which caused a leap forward “spiritually in the life-attitudes and self-expression of the Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his education and his new outlook”. For Locke, the shadow of the past was countered with the New Negro’s artistic production.10
However, the rise of the New Negro had been accompanied by a black militancy that the historical circumstances of the early twentieth century had required. The segregation and violence in the Jim Crow South had driven millions of black people to the industrial cities in the North. This migration process was accelerated during the years of the First World War, when European Americans went “back” to Europe to fight for their mother countries and left many jobs vacant in the factories. When the war ended and its survivors returned, a series of violent attacks was unleashed on the African-Americans who had settled in the North, months now known as the Red Summer of 1919. The militant spirit that came into being among African-Americans was born out of survival instinct but amplified by the fact that about 350.000 black soldiers were also sent to World War One, although they were placed in segregated ranks and delegated secondary, supportive military tasks instead of fighting at the front. Claude McKay would later criticize this military degradation in Home
9 Daniel Joseph Singal, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism” American Quarterly Vol. 39, No. 1,
Special Issue: Modernist Culture in America (Spring, 1987), 9.
15 To Harlem, but his first novel was not what made him famous. His radical poem “If We Must Die” (1919) was a militant response to the violence of the Red Summer and is often seen as the onset of the “Negro Renaissance” in both its radical and artistic voices.
Although both McKay and Huiswoud would become members of the African Blood Brotherhood, the socialist organization that anticipated the Black Panthers in their call for black armed self-defense, Alain Locke’s New Negro was a poet rather than a fighter. The “Negro” or “Harlem” Renaissance was above all part of the Modernist culture of New York that opposed itself against Victorianism and “its guiding ethos” of thrift and abstinence that fits capitalism so well. According to Daniel Joseph Singal, the Victorians “characterized societies as either civilized or savage, drew a firm line between what they considered superior and inferior classes, and divided races unambiguously into black and white”, and “insisted on placing the sexes in separate spheres”, with a rigid distinction between “rational” masculinity and “emotional” womanhood. The aim of the Modernists is best characterized not as a rejection of either rationalism or romanticism, but as the attempt “to reconnect all that the Victorian moral dichotomy tore asunder- to integrate once more the human and the animal, the civilized and the savage, and to heal the sharp divisions that the nineteenth century had established in areas such as class race and gender.” This departure from the Victorian age is dubbed as “a revolt against of the matriarch” in Ann Douglas’s Terrible Honesty (1996), her mammoth study of American Modernism: “Once the matriarch and her notions of middle-class piety, racial superiority, and sexual repression were discredited, modern America, led by New York, was free to promote, not an egalitarian society, but something like an egalitarian popular and mass culture aggressively appropriating forms and ideas across race, class, and gender lines.” Modernist culture, supported by Freud’s theories on sexuality and William James’s pragmatism, challenged both “natural” gender roles and the scientific racism that determined the inner needs and psyche of women, men, non-whites and whites. 11
Singal’s definition of Modernism as “integrationist” suits the New Negro’s identity quest well when we speak of an integration of past and future that is both distinctively “Negro” and American Modernist. Arthur Schomburg declared in the essay “The Negro digs up his Past” (included in Locke’s anthology) that he observed an exploration of black history. “The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. (..) For him, a group tradition must supply compensation for persecution, and pride of race the antidote for prejudice. History must restore what slavery took away”. 12
This past, rural with conservative, Victorian conventions, which must be abandoned in the
11 Singal, “Towards a Definition of American Modernism” American Quarterly Vol. 39, No. 1, Special Issue:
Modernist Culture in America (Spring, 1987), 7-26.
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty, Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York 1996) 8.
16 near, modern and urban future is well evoked in, for example, Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1930), according to the author a novel about “a typical Negro family in Kansas”. It is in some aspects redolent of the racial romanticism that Hughes did not eschewe in poems like “The Negro speaks of Rivers”, “Black Seed”, and “Our Land”. Sandy, a smart little black boy grows up under one roof with his mother, aunts and grandmother in a small town in Kansas. His father Jimboy is mostly absent, playing guitar somewhere, working in Detroit factories and eventually fighting in World War One. The matriarch finds an African-American personification in Sandy’s grandmother, Aunt Hagar. Although they are poor she is a pious, severe, woman who spends most of her time doing the laundry of white people and complaining about Jimboy’s laziness, the sinful people in the bad part of town and the moral degeneration of her children. Sandy is only thirteen years old and has no choice, but Hagar’s daughters all want something else than staying in the small village. The successful, elegant and haughty Tempy has little contact with her sisters and mother, as she and her man endeavor to be as white and civilized as possible. Harriet follows the fair that travels around, becomes a prostitute out of necessity and ends up in Chicago as a jazz singer and dancer, where she meets Sandy’s mother Annjee, who followed her heart and moved after Jimboy, leaving Sandy behind with his grandmother Hagar. The old Hagar is the personification of the Old Negro, conditioned by the horrors of slavery and the hellish Jim Crow segregation, rejecting interracial love yet telling stories about slavery on the porch or how some slave masters were actually not that bad for their slaves. She dies at the end, after years of working too hard for white people, after which Sandy joins his mother in the noisy and intimidating city of Chicago. Naturally, he could not stay in
Kansas.13
Works like Not Without Laughter contain a nostalgia for a primordial premodernity that has been lost, but nevertheless tinged with the knowledge that, when rationally considered, modernity is preferred to the difficult past that is left behind. But this “road to Northern modernity” is also often rejected by people who did not like the portrayal of “the Southern Negro” as sentimental, violent, primitive and piteous. These critics liked the art of the future that the New Negro produced better: Duke Ellington’s jazz music, the Charleston dance, Langston Hughes’s Modernist jazz poetry of The Weary Blues (1926) and Jean Toomer’s Cane with its unconventional novelist style. Thus, the central question for the New Negro is: “Where do we come from and where to go now?”. The past, its hardships and the aspiration for a better future are all part of the answers that are essential to the Harlem Renaissance. This is exactly what Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, editor of The Harlem Renaissance Revisited, means when he writes that the Renaissance connects both the hopes and the frustrations of African-Americans, two notions which “are not mutually exclusive but intrinsically bound, the
17 latter inspiring the former into action”.14
But the contrast of the Negro as the soul of humanity--emotional, savage, pitiful, joyful--versus the white “brain”--rational, civil, tempered, boring--was not left behind in the rural South. To the contrary, Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven (1925) and McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928) were criticized by blacks and hailed by whites for their portrayal of the working, singing, dancing and drinking people in Harlem. Older black leaders like Du Bois, who had an interest in a positive imagery of African-Americans, were deeply annoyed: “Home to Harlem for the most part nauseates me, and after the dirtier parts of its filth I feel distinctly like taking a bath. . . . It looks as though McKay has set out to cater to that prurient demand on the part of the white folk for a portrayal in Negroes.” Besides McKay’s proletarian portrait of Harlem, including descriptions of train workers, strikers and prostitutes, the novel is also a quintessential part of the Modernist Jazz Age culture with its nightlife, music, cabarets and forbidden use of alcohol. In the revolt against Victorian sobriety, McKay’s protagonist Jake is a young person’s claim to the right to be crass, juvenile and drunk in times of decadence and mass consumption. God is dead. Have fun. 15
Furthermore, the identity quest for “the Negro” corresponded with the rise of Harlem as “the Negro Capital of the World”, as McKay reflected in Harlem, Negro Metropolis (1940): “As New York is the most glorious experiment on earth of different races and diverse groups of humanity struggling and scrambling to live together, Harlem is the most interesting sample of black humanity marching along with white humanity.” New York attracted not only migrants from Europe but also from Africa and the Caribbean, causing a large diversification of the black community, which Jamaican-born Wilfred A. Domingo called a “Gift of the Tropics”. Harlem attracted more Jamaicans like McKay and Garvey, Barbadian Richard B. Moore, Otto Huiswoud from Dutch Guiana and Hermina Dumont from British Guiana and Cyrill Briggs from the British West Indies. The Afro-Caribbeans were often known to be more radical and affiliated with socialism than African-Americans who had moved from the South. Historian Winston James concluded that “all the evidence suggests that Caribbeans were among the most outspoken members of the Communist Party, including on racism and on the ‘Negro Question’”. The psychology of belonging to an ethnic majority group in the West Indies contrasted with the African-Americans who came of age on the bottom of a caste society. Secondly, the context of European imperialism gifted these Afro-Caribbeans with a broader black internationalism than black Americans, who were, say, narrowed by their American outlook.16
14 Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, “The Harlem Renaissance Revisited” (Baltimore 2010) 3. 15 W.E.B. Du Bois, “Two Books,” The Crisis, 35 (1928) 202.
16 Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia (London 1998) 286.
Joyce Moore Turner, Caribbean Crusaders 39.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of Races” (1897) The American Negro Academy Occasional Papers, No.2. Washington, D.C. 12. Accessed online at # http://www.webdubois.org/dbConsrvOfRaces.html at 04-07-2018.
18 The Caribbean character of the Harlem community is one of the divergent complications that make it impossible to capture a satisfying mentality of “the” New Negro, as many different streams and counterreactions of black identity competed and clashed in these rhizomorphic moral arenas. These were the times when Marcus Garvey’s racial essentialist Back to Africa-movement gained millions of sympathizers and the NAACP made some successful attempts to vitalize black life within capitalism under the leadership of W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. One key aspect that united the New Negro with Garvey and Du Bois is, in tandem with the Harlemist search for the primordial Negro, a rediscovery of an “African”, “Negro” or pan-African identity that fueled different black internationalisms. Black “America”, and its capital Harlem, was chosen to fulfill a special position in the Pan-African struggle. Du Bois had already written in The Conservation of Races (1897), that “the advance guard of the Negro people” were “the 8,000,000 people of Negro blood in the United States of America”. The man who aspired to be the black Moses by bringing black people “back to Africa”, also known as the other “father of Pan-Africanism”, Marcus Garvey, settled his UNIA office in Harlem. For Communists like Huiswoud, this attempt at a spiritual and political Pan-African connection was, of course, compatible with Soviet internationalism. In our general question about the Americanization of the discourse on “race”, it is remarkable that the Soviet officials of the 1920s likewise attributed a vanguard role to the American “Negroes” in the liberation of Africa.17
But this distinctive “Negroness” also received opposition from African-American writers. Jean Toomer, often cited as one of the most experimental novelists of the Harlem Renaissance, rejected association with the New Negro movement for its racial particularism, even though a part of his major work Cane (1923) was included in Locke’s anthology. Toomer was of African-American heritage but so light-skinned that he could pass as white, and declared not to be black or white but of the “American race”. With a literary culture that was obsessed with the question “Who is the Negro in America?”, it is not surprising that race-boundary challenging themes as “passing” and the figure of the “tragic mulatto” were used much in the works of Harlem Renaissance authors as Hughes, Toomer, Schuyler and Larsen. 18
With all its pluralism, the Negro Renaissance can be described as the attempt to realize the deepest self-expression of black artists as both distinctively “Negro” and therein a part of American Modernism. Black and American, the New Negro is an integration of past and future, of hope and frustration. Most of all, the New Negro is a plea for the recognition of the diversity in black humanity
17 Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line. 36-37.
William J. Maxwell, New Negro Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (New York 1999), 90.
18 George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge 1995).
George Hutchinson “Jean Toomer and the American Racial Discourse” (1993) in: Werner Sollors, Interracialism, Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (Oxford, 2000) 369-390.
19 and the individual right to fill in or even reject that “black” or “Negro” identity. Therefore, Locke writes in one of the articles in his anthology, that he does not merely want to define and explain, but to give space for those “who speak so adequately for themselves”.19
Performing Black in New York’s Jazz Age
One of the core arguments of George Hutchinson, William J. Maxwell and Kate Baldwin is that many new interracialisms were explored and forged in 1920s New York. Although in a sense racially particularistic, the New Negro was part of a Modernist bloc that rebelled against Victorian mores. Next to bourgeois capitalist norms like thrift and diligence, revolted the Modernists against religious values of “civility” and a sexual and hedonistic humility. In the American context, these sexual norms were merged with racial segregation and sometimes a particular disgust of “miscegenation”. And besides the black-white labor unity Otto Huiswoud and other communists tried to realize, the Negro Renaissance coincided with the rise of New York as the scene of literary modernism, wherein Harlem’s nightlife would develop as an epicenter of interracial encounter. In the bars, cabarets and speakeasies of black Manhattan, class and race distances disappeared easier than during the formalities and hierarchies of the working day. 20
In several ways, the urban Modernism of the generation that spawned from, say, patrons Carl van Vechten (1880) and Alain Locke (1885) to Claude Mckay (1889), W. A. Domingo (1889), Zora Neale Hurston (1891), Nella Larsen (1891), Otto Huiswoud (1893), Jean Toomer (1894), F. Scott Fitzgerald (1894), Mike Gold, (1894), Bessie Smith (1894), George Schuyler (1895) John Dos Passos (1896), Duke Ellington (1899) Ernest Hemingway (1899), Thomas Wolfe (1900), Sterling Brown (1901), Langston Hughes (1902), Hermina Huiswoud Dumont (1903) and Countee Cullen (1903), desired to escape the segregation that the foregoing generations had inherited under slavery and remade in the Reconstruction era. As Alain Locke noted: “What began in terms of segregation becomes more and more, as its elements mix and react, the laboratory of a great race-welding.”21
Although Locke’s words suggest a post-racial paradise, the white-black dynamic was defined by the crucial hinge of entertainment and far from non-racist, as Emily Bernhard notes: “The Harlem Renaissance flourished alongside the Jazz Age”, when “nightclubs like the Cotton Club (..) featured black performers like Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Bessie Smith, but catered only to a white clientele. Black patrons had to sit in segregated, “Jim Crow” sections in order to enjoy black entertainment. Black people were relegated to classless citizenship in venues devoted to the
19 Alain Locke, Negro Youth Speaks, “The New Negro”, edited by Alain Locke, 53. 20 Daniel Joseph Singal, “Towards a definition of American Modernism”.
21 Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 6.
20 celebration of blackness. It was unavoidable: black art needed white patronage to survive.”22
Langston Hughes called this the period “When the Negro was in Vogue”, a peculiarly striking term as it describes not only the young generation of black writers and jazz musicians that claimed a position in the cultural vanguard of New York, but also the black exoticization that was internal to a white longing for black entertainment. Thus, it was “in vogue” for white people to enjoy black music or cabaret in a way that could not escape the shadow of the racist past. Yet it was also the very strength of cultural New York to mock and criticize the white gaze. In “Slave on the Block”, Langston Hughes makes his readers cringe over the sentimentalism of a bohemian white couple, who show artistic interest and provide patronage to a teenage black girl and boy. Their paternalism springs from sincere care for the children’s fate but takes a twist of fetishizing black suffering when the woman asks the boy to pose for a painting of a chained kid at a slave market. Eventually, the boy and the girl decide to depart, leaving the couple questioning what they have done wrong. Playwright Dorothy Parker brilliantly satirized this black exoticization in her sketch “Arrangement in Black and White”, which takes place at a little party in honor of the fictive black singer Walter Williams. The key protagonist is a fancy dressed white woman who is obsessed with showing her acceptance of African-Americans. However, she mocks her husband’s outspoken racism in a casual, humoristic way, as if it is part of the unavoidable order of things, while her comments show a desire for a romantic non-Western spiritualism she finds in the black singer: “Oh, can't he sing! Isn't it marvelous, the way they all have music in them? It just seems to be right in them.” 23
The performativity of blackness for a white audience and the dialectic between the black primitive and the white rationale are continuities in the dynamics of Harlem Renaissance production and its receptive black and white critique. The deep psychological split the black artist is confronted with, a confusion caused by writing for two audiences, fits Du Bois’s description of double consciousness: an extra black introspection through white eyes. Du Bois himself did not shy away from commenting that New Negro literature often was “written for the benefit of white people and at the behest of white readers”. Clearly, this controversy had not come to an end in 1937, when Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God was heavily criticized for her characterization of African-Americans and her “stereotypical” use of a distinctive black vernacular. Critic Otis Ferguson was compelled to compare her use of “speech difference” with blackface minstrelsy and Richard Wright argued that Hurston “exploited that phase of Negro life which is ‘quaint,’ the phase which evokes a piteous smile on the lips of the ‘superior’ race.” Not black enough, too appealing for
22 Emily Bernard, “The New Negro Movement and the politics of art”, in: Graham, M., & Ward, Jr, J. (Eds.). The Cambridge History of African American Literature (Cambridge 2011), 271.
23 Langston Hughes, The Ways of White Folks [1933] (New York 1990).
21 whites, too assimilationist or overly racially essentialist. A New Negro’s existence could be puzzling. 24
In The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Paul Gilroy put double consciousness and ethnic hybridity at the center in his definitions of modernity, calling the Black Atlantic a “counterculture of modernity”. Gilroy elaborates that the double consciousness that disoriented, split and displaced the subjects of the African diaspora and thus the artists and the critics of the Harlem Renaissance, double in being both modern and anti-modern, American (or European/ “Western”) and black, “emerges from the unhappy symbiosis between three modes of thinking, being and seeing. The first is racially particularistic. The second is nationalistic in that it derives from the nation state in which the ex-slaves but not-yet-citizens find themselves, rather than from their aspiration towards a nation state of their own. The third is diasporic or hemispheric, sometimes global and occasionally universalist.” Gilroy’s book, arguing against ethnic absolutism, shows how black and white modernisms are, reflexive agents and subjects of double consciousness, and that the counterculture of modernity of the Black Atlantic, and especially the expressive cultural forms of music, “derive their power from a doubleness, their unsteady location simultaneously inside and outside the conventions, assumptions and aesthetic rules which distinguish and periodise modernity (sic)”.25
Positioning the Modernist works of the Harlem Renaissance in the modernity of the Black Atlantic yields many examples of double consciousness, interracialism and transnationalism. In our discussion about modernity and literary Modernism a certain clarification about terminology is necessary here to avoid misunderstanding. The capitalized “Modernist”, the cultural anti-Victorian movement at the turn of the twentieth century, should be sharply distinguished from “modernity” or “modernism”, a periodization of the historical processes of industrialization, urbanization, the development of capitalism and the rise of a civil society, which can be traced back to the seventeenth century. Although this distinction is required, the concept of double consciousness is epicentral to both modernity and Modernism. The aesthetics of Negro Renaissance Modernism are relevant in the Black Atlantic frame, as Gilroy asks not only to focus on the making of blackness and whiteness in Western thought by the means of scientific racism, but also on what is perceived as “the true, the good, and the beautiful which characterise the junction point of capitalism, industrialisation, and political democracy and give substance to the discourse of western modernity (sic)”.26
However, in the interracialism of Gilroy’s modernity, the transnationalism Brent Hayes
24 Du Bois quoted in: George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 21.
Quoted in: Mónica González Caldeiro, African American Representation on the Stage, Minstrel Performances and Hurston’s Dream of a “Real” Negro Theater, in: Jeffrey O.G. Ogbar, “The Harlem Renaissance Revisited”. 7. 25 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (London 1993), 127.
Ibid., 8.
22 Edwards has elaborated in The Practice of Diaspora, and the Harlem Renaissance’s crossing and reevaluation of racial boundaries that Ann Douglas and George Hutchinson have shown, there is one obvious omission, which is Marxism. Anna Snaith, Cedric Robinson, William J. Maxwell, Kate Baldwin, Holger Weiss and Hakim Adi have attempted to answer the question to what extent it is Karl Marx who beats on the drums of the Black Atlantic. Maxwell even speaks of “Harlem Renaissance Bolshevism”, and that unification is where McKay and Huiswoud’s visit to Moscow becomes relevant. The Promise of the Russian Revolution
“It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all”, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in Echoes of the Jazz Age (1931). Ann Douglas’s Terrible Honesty puts forth the same argument about Harlem, where the era of exuberant mass consumption caused a certain political carelessness: “Black Manhattan put its money on culture, not politics; Negroes were to write and sing and dance their way out of oppression”, Douglas writes, and “the 1920s were at least as post-Marxist as anti-Marxist.” As the Communist Party gained only real successes and victories in the 1930s, when the economic hardships of the Depression and the need for leftist collaboration under the Popular Front drew communism more to the center, it is tempting to place communism at the margins of New Negro consciousness.27 Of course, figures like Otto Huiswoud, Cyrill Briggs, W. A. Domingo and
Richard B. Moore are fantastic exceptions to this narrative. These New Negroes were inspired by the world-shocking events of the Russian Revolution in their struggle against racial injustice. So was Claude McKay, often the most important protagonist for historians of the Harlem-Moscow connection, although he would turn his back on Communism in the 1930s. Here I will elaborate the leftist networks that rose in New York in order to introduce New York’s socialist interracialism that reached Moscow in 1922.
In New York, the Communist Party was founded underground in 1919, with Otto Huiswoud as the only founding member of color. Next to the “official” political parties who declared themselves as socialist or communist, organizations as the African Blood Brotherhood were instituted, which was the first group to call for black armed self-defense and was also known for peculiar Ethiopian rituals of mutual blood-sharing among the brothers. Black socialist magazines were founded after the Russian Revolution, like Cyrill Briggs’s The Crusader and W. A. Domingo’s The Messenger, both of which published Claude McKay’s poem If We Must Die. Huiswoud contributed an article about Dutch Guyana in 1919 to the latter magazine, wherein he elaborated that “in order to understand colonialism it is necessary to understand the development of capitalism”, a quote that characterizes Huiswoud’s base/superstructure approach in which the economy guides history first, followed by everything else: culture, civil society, racist ideology. McKay worked for “white” socialist magazine
23 the Liberator, established by Max and Chrystal Eastman, not only as the “Negro poet” but also as an editor. This socialist and cultural hive is the New York that Joyce Moore Turner describes, a political and cultural biotope full of soapbox orators, pamphleteers, workers and Caribbean and African immigrants. As Maxwell has shown, the history of these communist and labor circles is inseparable from the literary scene, as the cultural and political field are no segregated arenas but hybrid microcosms. Primarily, New Negro, Old Left is an argument for the crucial influence of the interracial collaboration between African-Americans and the Old Left, “in the history of U.S. racial and radical cultures, from the stumbles and small victories of American anticapitalism, to the mapping of African-American writing into modernity, to the intimate contact between black and white modernisms.”28
Huiswoud, already deeply drawn to the left by Harlem’s soapbox orators, was studying agriculture at Cornell University when the Russian Revolution broke out, but left when he was offered a scholarship at the Rand School of Social Science. The Rand School saw his talent after he successfully led a strike at the Fall River Line, a company that offered pleasure boat trips between Boston and Maine and where Huiswoud worked during the summer. At Rand School, he became close with influent socialists like the Japanese Sen Katayama and Sebald Justinus Rutgers, with whom he could discuss Marxist theory in Dutch.
McKay, too, quit a study in agriculture because he decided that his passion was somewhere else: “..I was gripped by the lust to wander and wonder. The spirit of the vagabond, the daemon of some poets, had got hold of me,” McKay wrote in his autobiography A Long Way From Home (1937). He moved to New York, London and New York again when he was invited to come to speak to the Comintern in 1922. James Weldon Johnson from the NAACP helped McKay to raise money for crossing the Atlantic by selling some of his books with a signed photograph. Johnson even gave a farewell party for McKay, who writes positively about the fancy company he experienced that night: “a few of Harlem’s élite came: Dr. DuBois, Walter White, Jessie Fauset, Rosamond Johnson, and from among downtown liberal intellectuals, Heywood Broun (..), John Farrar and Ruth Hale. It was a pleasant evening and the first of bohemian-élite interracial parties in Harlem which became so popular during the highly propagandized Negro renaissance period.” A few pages earlier, McKay writes highly amused how his friend Hubert Harrison always used to mock these NAACP people and their fancy parties by calling them the “National Association for the Advancement of Certain People”. However, even though the socialists and the NAACP had their differences, the former thinking about the latter as a “bourgeois” organization, they could bear to celebrate and financially contribute to McKay’s visit to Moscow. There is probably no better metaphor for the Harlem Renaissance and its
24 simultaneously bourgeois and proletarian character than the twenty-four hours McKay experienced that evening, night and morning. After the bourgeois-bohemian atmosphere of the party, McKay stayed awake in Harlem, “drinking a farewell to the illegal bars”, to work as a stoker on the ship to Liverpool to procure the required sum for his crossing. 29
McKay accounts that he was incredibly excited when he finally arrived in Leningrad and Moscow, but “was soon brought out of the romantic feeling of the atmosphere to face the hard reality of the American Communist delegation.” Symbolic for the sectarianism that would follow over “the Negro Question”, the delegation despised him for several reasons: he was no official member, had criticized the Party for continuing the policy of staying underground and took the attention away from “their Negro delegate” in Moscow, Otto Huiswoud. Later, Sen Katayama described to the Comintern how McKay was treated: “A pure or full-blooded Negro representative of the ABB, Comrade Claude McKay, was kicked out of the Hotel Lux and even was pursued or chased out from the Lux restaurant with his own money.” 30
A Long Way From Home illuminates the particular importance of Huiswoud’s light complexion for McKay and the Russians. In the seven chapters of McKay’s autobiography that cover the “magic pilgrimage”, McKay calls Huiswoud invariably “the mulatto delegate”. Jacob Zumoff has explained these comments as coming from McKay’s own contempt for light-skinned people, who had a higher status than dark-skinned Africans under Caribbean colonial race hierarchies. For the Americans, Huiswoud was a “Negro”, but when the Russians invited him for the first meeting they asked: “But where is the chorny (the black)?”. The Russians, in their endeavor to construct an international cross-racial alliance, needed a dark-skinned African, a “typical Negro” in McKay’s words. Even though Huiswoud was an official member of the Communist Party, his light skin disqualified him from getting the celebrity status that McKay achieved. “He was too yellow.” However, Huiswoud was not afraid to tell McKay: “you’re all right for propaganda, but you will never make a disciplined party member.” 31
McKay, who saw his face on banners and posters everywhere in the city, writes that he smugly enjoyed how the Russians were more interested in him than in Huiswoud because of his dark skin: “Didn’t I enjoy it! The American comrades were just too funny with envy and chagrin. The Mulatto delegate who had previously high-hatted me now began to cultivate my company. It was only by sticking close to me that he could be identified as Negroid.” Whatever their differences, they
29 Claude McKay, A Long Way From Home, (New York, 1937), 153-184. 30 Ibid. 169.
Sen Katayama, “Action for the Negro Movement Should Not Be Postponed” (RTSKhIDNI, 495-155-17, 9), quoted in: Kate Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line and the Iron Curtain: Reading Encounters Between Black and Red, 1922-1963 (Durham, London 2002), 55.
31 Jacob Zumoff, “Mulattoes, Reds, and the Fight for Black Liberation”.
25 spent some time together and discussed socials affairs, among others when they were invited at Karl Radek’s apartment in the Kremlin. The contrast between Huiswoud’s Party obedience and McKay’s call for black leftist collaboration is apparent in the conversation that followed when the host asked about McKay’s thoughts on “Negro organization”: 32
“I said that I had no policy other than the suggestion of a Negro Bund, that I was not an organizer or an agitator and could not undertake or guarantee any practical works of organization. The Negro delegate said that I was a poet and a romantic. I said I was not as romantic as he and his illegal party with their secret names and their convention in the wilds of Michigan.”33
Thereafter, McKay recalls that Radek “said that the Communists should adopt a friendly attitude to all writers who were in sympathy with the soviets. For example, Upton Sinclair”. According to McKay, Huiswoud copied the exclusive right of the Bolsheviks to declare who was a rightful supporter of the Revolution and who was not: “The mulatto said that Upton Sinclair was a bourgeois Socialist.” We do not know if Huiswoud actually said this, of course, but denouncing other leftists as bourgeois is not alien to the sectarian left where Huiswoud was part of, a tendency McKay liked to ridicule after he had turned his back on communism.
Huiswoud’s Moment
Even though A Long Way From Home is subjective, apocryphally ironic and written in 1936-1937 with a strong strain of anti-Communism, these phrases do illuminate Huiswoud and McKay’s relationship with each other and the American Party, and what the Russians expected from them. McKay was disliked by the CPUSA among other reasons because he expressed his discontent about racism in the Party, including in his speech at the Fourth Congress. Both McKay and Huiswoud criticized the racism in leftist movements in their speeches in front of the Comintern, for which they have received credit from historians ranging from Theodore Draper to Kate Baldwin, as the men who put the “Negro Question” on the agenda of American and Soviet Communists.34
How the “Negro Question” moved between New York, Moscow, the South, the Caribbean, France, South Africa, Mexico and Germany, is captured in the following chapter with the career of the Black Belt Thesis as parameter, the doctrine and from 1928 on official party line that African-Americans in the South should get their own nation state when the revolution was there. How influential McKay and Huiswoud were on the genesis of this doctrine is ambivalent. Even Kate Baldwin agrees to this, the historian who made the strongest argument for the importance of their visit to the Russian reception of “the Negro” and “the Negro question”. First, neither Huiswoud or
32 Claude McKay, A Long Way, 171. 33 Ibid., 182.
