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Du Bois and the Origins of the Black Aesthetic: Rivalry, Resistance, and Renaissance Construction, 1905-1926 Joseph Carson Spooner PhD in History 17 February 2013 University of Edinburgh Declaration I confirm that the following thesis has been composed by me, and is completely my own work. None of the information has been submitted for any other degree or professional qualification. 17 February 2013 Joseph C. Spooner Date 1 Acknowledgments This project could not have been completed without the support and faith of many wonderful teachers and friends who have shared their time and expertise selflessly throughout my life. I am fortunate to have had so many role models who have taught me the power and value of an education. As an undergraduate, the late Michael Cooke and Carla Kaplan inspired a lifelong curiosity about race, social constructions, and the Harlem Renaissance. Maxine Jones, Fred Standley and Leo Sandon, since my days as a Masters student, have given the most helpful advice, professionally, intellectually, and personally. They have waited patiently for this project to come to fruition. Frank Cogliano and Fabian Hilfrich have shared thoughtful insight and feedback to this project, devoted so much energy to my intellectual development, and made the PhD process as smooth and as manageable as anyone could hope for it to be. I searched for 17 years to find the ideal supervisors to complete a PhD and am thrilled to have work with and learned from them. Jill Haines and Katie Stewart offered incomparable research support and made the process of finalising the project possible. I am also grateful to Tony Beauchamp, Betty Spooner, and Karen Wedderburn for reading versions of this thesis and offering feedback and editorial suggestions. And without question, this thesis would have never been written without the love, patience, and never-ending support and encouragement of my parents, Joe and Betty Spooner, both of whom have made innumerable sacrifices to help me become a person I hope someday will be worthy to be called their son. 2 Abstract My thesis reconsiders Du Bois’ role in creating a black aesthetic, challenging prevailing notions about his opposition to the New Negro Renaissance and broadening the scope of his contributions in developing an indigenous, self-determined aesthetic. Currently, Harlem-centric historiography remains over-reliant on Du Bois’ own interpretations and unconcerned about his motives for misrepresenting the catalysts and the outcomes of the aesthetic and intellectual debates that define the period. By examining aesthetic controversies outside his dominant ‘failure’ interpretation and beyond the narrow geographical perimeters of a romanticized Harlem, the vital contributions Du Bois made to an intellectual dialogue that inspired artists to articulate a black aesthetic can be recognized. While some scholars have acknowledged the history of the renaissance has been unfairly shrouded in failure, none have explored Du Bois’ role as an aesthetic visionary, a position complicated by his categorical denunciation of the New Negro Renaissance. My research repositions Du Bois as a major ideological force at the genesis of the Black Aesthetic, both as an advocate and antagonist of the aesthetic ideals that define the movement. By tracing his intellectual evolution throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century, my thesis identifies how ideological conflicts within the NAACP and intellectual rivalries with Marcus Garvey, Charles S. Johnson, and Alain Locke impact Du Bois’ vacillating beliefs, and how his writings about art and his leadership as editor of The Crisis define the intellectual foundation and embody the racial dilemmas through which New Negroes create a revolutionary aesthetic. Du Bois’ insistence that artistic decadence and deleterious white commercial interests undermine the renaissance is reconsidered, allowing him, ironically, to be recognized as the New Negro Renaissance’s most important intellectual force in defining the Black Aesthetic. 3 Table of Contents Declaration ............................................................................................................ 1 Acknowledgments ................................................................................................. 2 Abstract ................................................................................................................. 3 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 5 Chapter One: Editorial Crisis: Race, Rivalry, and W.E.B. Du Bois’ Struggle to Create an Authentic Negro Journal .............................................. 49 Chapter Two: Nationalizing the Black Aesthetic, Politicizing the New Negro: The Evolution of Purpose and Persona in Du Bois’ ‘Great War’ Editorials ............................................................................................................. 81 Chapter Three: Du Bois’ Aesthetic Glorification of the ‘Other 90 Percent’ and the Emergence of a New Negro Cultural Ideology ................................ 127 Chapter Four: Opportunity Seized, Opportunity Missed: Charles S. Johnson Announces the New Negro Renaissance ......................................... 159 Chapter Five: Du Bois’ Anxiety of Influence: Alain Locke’s The New Negro as Catalyst for Alienation and Evolving Aesthetics ...................................... 200 Conclusion: Du Bois’ Anxieties and the Irony of His Influence ................. 236 Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 260 4 ‘Each generation should produce at least one literary history of the United States, for each generation must define the past in its own terms’.1 In the Postscript to his autobiography, The Big Sea, Langston Hughes lamented ‘(t)hat spring [1930] for me (and, I guess, all of us) was the end of the Harlem Renaissance. We were no longer in vogue, anyway, we Negroes. Sophisticated New Yorkers turned to Noel Coward. Colored actors began to go hungry, publishers politely rejected new manuscripts, and patrons found other uses for their money. The generous 1920’s were over’.2 Hughes devoted the final one hundred pages of his 1940 memoir to what he labelled ‘Black Renaissance’, and while he wrote fondly about the Harlem Literati, the grand salon-inspired parties hosted by A’Lelia Walker where all classes and colours met face to face, and white New York’s sudden fascination with Negro life, Hughes unknowingly, and innocently enough, gave an identity to this period in African American history that would become pervasive throughout the remainder of the 20th century. Before Hughes, whom Amiri Baraka proclaimed ‘the most satisfying reporter of the Black Renaissance’,3 the phrase ‘Harlem Renaissance’ had never been written, and the artistic movement that ignited the rise of African American culture had only ever been qualified by a word (Negro) or phrase (New Negro) that gave the cultural phenomenon a racial, not spatial, identity. Ironically, Hughes spent the better part of his autobiographical accounts of the ‘Black Renaissance’ conveying events and experiences that took place outside of Harlem. He acknowledged that ‘(a)t the height of the Negro Renaissance, I was a student at Lincoln University [a theological seminary 40 miles outside of Philadelphia], spending my week-ends and holidays in New York’,4 and much of what he recounted from his life in The Big Sea during the renaissance took place in Pennsylvania, in New Orleans, in Cuba, at Fisk University in Tennessee, and on a farm that served as Jean Toomer’s childhood home in Georgia. In part, because of Hughes’ fame as a poet, in part, because of Harlem’s ascension as the 1 Robert E. Spiller, et al (eds). Literary History of the United States: Volume I. (New York: Macmillan, 1953), vii 2 Langston Hughes. The Big Sea. (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1986), 334. 3 Ibid, iii. 4 Ibid., 278 5 cultural and race capital of the black world, the idea that a race-specific, national cultural re-emergence could be localized seemed reasonable, almost natural. Hughes, innocently enough, replaced the racial modifier (Negro, Black) in the final pages, and from that moment forward, Harlem replaced the terms used, almost without exception, by those artists and intellectuals who had led, supported, and crafted the renaissance. The history of the Harlem Renaissance, from the autobiographies of James Weldon Johnson (1933) and Langston Hughes (1940) to George Hutchinson’s landmark cultural history (1995), has been conveyed predominantly