Dogma, Romance and Double Consciousness
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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: [email protected] Supervisor: George Blaustein University of Amsterdam Faculty of Humanities Master Thesis in American Studies 39700 words 4 July, 2018 “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.” -Alain Locke, The New Negro (1925) 2 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. 3 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 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................................... 89 4 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 5 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