Dogma, Romance and Double Consciousness

The Dilemmas of the New 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 than in , 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, (1925)

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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.

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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

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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 preaching the gospel of Marx on the Harlem streets, Huiswoud became attracted to . 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 of America, and traveled to the as an official Party delegate three years later. In , 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 . His work for the American Party and the Comintern would bring him to Moscow again several times, but also to , Cape Town, Paris, Antwerp, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and several islands in the , 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. , 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 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 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. 2 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, Modernity and Double Consciousness ( 1993). 6 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 . 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, 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. 7 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 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. 5 Russel Shorto, Amsterdam, The World’s Most Liberal City (Amsterdam 2013). 8 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, , 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 “” 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 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 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. 9

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 ; (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

10 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, , Toni Morrison, bell hooks and Ta-Nehesi Coates are part of this Black Atlantic, but also Claude McKay, Otto and Hermina Huiswoud, , 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.

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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 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 , 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 , 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. 12 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 , 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

13 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 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 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 Quarterly Vol. 39, No. 1, Special Issue: Modernist Culture in America (Spring, 1987), 9. 10 The New Negro, Alain Locke, in: Alain Locke, “The New Negro, an interpretation” (1925), 3-16. 14

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 .” 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 . 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. 12 Arthur Schomburg, “The Negro Digs Up His Past, The New Negro (1925) edited by Alain Locke, 231. 15 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 ’s 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

13 Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter (New York 1930).

16 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,” , 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. 17

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. 18 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), , (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 (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. Alain Locke, The New Negro, 7. 19 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). Dorothy Parker, “An Arrangement in Black and White”, The New Yorker Magazine (October 8, 1927) 22. 20 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. 26 Ibid. 21

Edwards has elaborated in , 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 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

27 Ann Douglas, Mongrel Manhattan, 20. 22 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 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

28 Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, 1. 23 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”. Claude McKay, A Long Way, 177. 24 spent some time together and discussed socials affairs, among others when they were invited at ’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 , 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. 34 Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia; The Formative Period (New York 1960) 315-356. 25

McKay plead for anything like self-determination for African-Americans in the South. However, with their speeches and remarks about the South, and especially McKay’s Russian publications Th Negroes in America and Trial by Lynching, the racial parameters were set for how the Soviets aimed to handle the “Negro question”, how they thought about the South and how later African-American travelers were to be received. McKay himself considered his Russian works to be of great influence on the Comintern’s policies and solutions for African-Americans, he proclaimed in A Long Way From Home. However, Baldwin writes that “McKay’s assertion should be approached with caution. As indicated by the Comintern files, Negroes in America was heavily indebted to others with more intimate connections to Moscow, such as Otto Huiswoud and Sen Katayama, who addressed similar questions.” We cannot know the exact impact of Huiswoud and McKay’s visit to Moscow on the Black Belt Thesis doctrine, but we can read the sources and try to construct what image they left behind. In the following paragraphs I elaborate how McKay and Huiswoud addressed these questions exactly, how they applied Marxism to analyses of racism, American capitalism, and the racist terror in the South, and how both of them emphasized the need for a strong black internationalism under African-American leadership. 35 First of all, Huiswoud and McKay’s Comintern speeches contain severe criticism of the American Communist movement, tired as they are of the indifference and the racism within party ranks, having heard too often the argument that “race” should be considered as just another part of class exploitation. Although Huiswoud is most of all a Marxist thinker who uses economic materialism in his theories, calling the situation of the American Negro “fundamentally an economic problem”, he elaborates how the intricacy of the problem of racism and class struggle requires specific solutions, as the exploitation of the working class is “aggravated and intensified by the friction which exists between the white and black races.” This friction expresses itself most violently in the rural South, which he compares with the deepest hells from Dante’s Inferno, a region that is so different from the North that he calls it interestingly enough, “almost a country all by itself.” Although this phrase is too meager to recognize as a call for black self-determination, Huiswoud transferred here the distinctiveness of the horror of Southern anti-black violence to the Comintern: “You find there that the lynching of a Negro is something to be enjoyed in the South as a picture show is enjoyed elsewhere.” Still, Huiswoud truly believed that black-white solidarity was required in the overthrowing of capitalism, and also aimed at the racist mechanisms of the industrial North, where African-Americans were disadvantaged in the competition of labor, racially degraded by “the badge of slavery”. This racial antagonism actually enforced the power of the true enemy, American

35 Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 30. 26 capitalist elites, who continued the quintessentially American strategy of setting up black and white workers against each other:

“At the present time when there are big strikes in the Northern United States, you find that the capitalist class and its hirelings hurry to the South in order to draw the Southern Negroes into the Northern districts as strikebreakers. They promise them a higher wage and better conditions, and so induce them to enter those areas in which strikes are in progress. That is a constant danger to the white workers when on strike. Of course, the entire blame for this must not be placed upon the Negroes. The labor unions in America, and I am speaking of the bonafide trade unions, have for the last few years insisted that although a Negro is a skilled worker, he cannot by virtue of the fact that he is a Negro enter the trade union.” 36

Besides an analysis on the American situation, Huiswoud declares that the struggle of the “Negroes” is most of all part of European colonization around the globe. Some of the “oriental and colonial comrades” had complained that colonialism “has been treated rather in the form of a step-child than as a part of the general world revolutionary problem.” Huiswoud calls for the Comintern to organize a Negro conference as soon as possible, which the Comintern approved of although it would never materialize. Ten years later, however, Huiswoud would be a central part of the attempted “Negro international”, the International Trade Union for Negro Workers (ITUC-NW). Although the ITUC-NW did not survive until 1938, it its history is crucial for our understanding of the Radical Black Atlantic. Huiswoud’s internationalism comes forward in his careful admiration for one of the “other Negro organizations”, namely that one led by Marcus Garvey: “an organization that is ultra- nationalist yet composed of a rebel rank and file element. It Is an organization which, in spite of the fact that it has drafted on its program various cheap stock schemes, influencing the mind of the Negroes against imperialism.” Although Huiswoud is loyal to the socialist African Blood Brotherhood, he lures with satisfaction to Garvey’s achievements: “the race consciousness has been planted and used to a very large extent, far into the interior of Africa, where hardly anyone could expect that an organization could be planted there which had its origin in America.”37 Later, in his warnings for the penetration of Africa by French and American capitalism, Huiswoud promises to provide the Comintern with a network of “organizations that are stretching out and developing as far as Sudan, which can be utilized by Communists (..) if the means of propaganda are carefully, deliberately, and intensively used to link up these movements.” Interestingly enough, Huiswoud tells how these organizations “get their direct inspiration from America, the headquarters and center of political thought among Negroes”, a phrase that precedes the Comintern consensus that African-Americans were to fulfill a black vanguard position in “the

36 Billings, speeches published in Bulletin of the IV Congress of the , No. 22 (Dec. 2, 1922), pp. 17-23 . The italics are mine. 37 Ibid. 27 liberation struggle of the entire African race”. The idea of the African-American vanguard has often returned in other ways, shapes and tones, but was only a Communist consensus until Moscow’s adoption of the Black Belt Thesis in 1928.38 Eventually, the official Comintern theses of the Fourth Congress attributed African-Americans “a place in the vanguard of the fight against oppression in Africa”, which touches on the Marxist, historical teleological view on capitalism: the tougher the exploitation, the sooner the revolution would come. After having read these theses, one has to conclude that the cultural status of New York in Soviet Russia cannot be underestimated, especially not because it was the bulwark of American Communism and, of course, the New Negro. “The postwar industrialization of the Negro in the north” gave the American Negroes a further developed workers’ consciousness, as did the militancy and the “spirit of rebellion” that followed in the postwar race riots of Chicago in 1919 and Tulsa in 1921. The still predominantly socialist New Negro movement did not go unnoticed in Moscow: “The world struggle of the Negro race is a struggle against capitalism and imperialism” and “must be organized on this basis; in America, the center of Negro culture around which the Negro protest crystallizes”. 39 In his speech for the Comintern, McKay, articulates a few of the same points. Among others, he elaborates how the international bourgeoisie set black and white workers against each other, referring to France’s use of colonial troops in the Rhine area, and how he has experienced the effects of similar divisions himself in the American workers movement:

“In associating with the comrades of America, I have found demonstrations of prejudice on the various occasions when the white and the black comrades had to get together, and this is the greatest difficulty that the Communists of America have got to overcome – the fact that they have got to emancipate themselves from the ideas they entertained towards the Negroes before they can be able to reach the Negroes with any kind of radical propaganda.”

In the end, McKay emphasizes his hopes for “the Negroes of the world” to fight “not only for their own emancipation, but for the emancipation of the working class of the whole world.”40

McKay’s Russian Works: A Black Freud in Moscow

Thus, Huiswoud called for an interracial socialist struggle wherein there is an understanding of the specific dynamics of racial oppression that characterize the “Negro Question”. But as a

38 Billings, Speeches. Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 36. 39 “Theses of the Fourth Comintern Congress on the Negro Question”, in Jane Degras, “The Communist International 1919-1943”, Vol I., 1919-1922, (London 1956) 398-408. 40 Claude McKay, “Report on the Negro Question.” International Press Correspondence (English ed.) 5 January 1923: 16-17. 28

“counterculture of modernity”, Huiswoud’s Marxism is rather an anti-capitalist critique than a Modernist revolt against the suffocating mores of the Victorian Age. In our quest for the interconnection between these two countercultures, an exploration of McKay’s Russian works is more fruitful. For during the 1920s, McKay was both a Modernist poet and deeply influenced by socialism, with The Negroes in America and the short stories Trial By Lynching as the best textual proof available. Although written for a Russian audience and only translated in English in the late seventies, he declares in The Negroes of America to have the aim “of explaining to black and white workers their close affinity, and of indicating to dark-skinned people their true place in the class struggle and their role in the international workers’ movement.” Besides his explanations about slavery, racism, capitalism, strikes, strikebreakers and lynchings, McKay complements his earlier Comintern speech with writings on the arts, music, literature and sports. Throughout the book, he shows how the hardships of anti-black racism touch every vein of black life, but also how they differ, move and connect in the diaspora. He starts with the Afro-Caribbeans who migrated to the U.S.: “The Negro of the West Indies has much better food, dress, and shelter in the United States than he could have in his native land. He has contact with a much more developed civilization, and his mind, much more imbued with , is aroused and fortified by the greatly developed race consciousness of the American Negro.”41 When we take Ann Douglas’s reading glass and zoom in on aspects of anti-Victorianism, there are a few interesting remarks McKay makes about sexuality, fetishization and the woman question, which are worth paying attention to. But first, more explicitly, he criticizes Queen Victoria and the “philistine art world of hypocrisy and puritanism” during her reign, “which was filled with the mawkishness of Dickens, the optimism of Browning, the elegance of Tennyson, and the innovations of the pre-Raphaelites”. As a native Jamaican, he expresses his indignation towards the haughty superiority complex of protestant Anglo-Saxons and their former matriarch. Especially the confiscation of Benin art, perceived as an exotic treasure without understanding its sociocultural and artistic context, used as a contrast to British civilization, is problematic to McKay:

“Queen Victoria, the pompous idol of English decorum, sat on her throne surrounded by all the archaic appurtenances of a barbaric feudalism: courtier lords and ladies, a poet-laureate, regalia, scepter and orb, Indians, Disraeli, and John Brown, enjoying the respect of the contemporary civilized world. (..) During this same period the hypocritical and slavish Anglo- Saxon mind on both continents mocked the courtly functions of a prince from Timbuctoo or a

41 Claude McKay, Negry y Amerike [1923], translated by Robert J. Winter as The Negroes in America (ed. by Alan L. McLeod, London 1979), introduction.

Ibid., 51.

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king of the Zulus, and the immortal sculpture of black kings and their slaves in Benin still lay in the ethnological section of the British museum.”

One of McKay’s aims here is to show how the Russians should be cautious in their consumption of Anglo-American views on Africans and African art, as the business model of the culture industry compels them to continue Jim Crow-ish stereotypes. In his critique he dismisses “Old Negro” art like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin:

“Why, among contemporary American Negroes, is there this tendency (which always ends unsuccessfully) to improve composers’ works which are as finished and complete as spirituals or the melodies of Negro plantation slaves? Simply because the Anglo-Saxon critic (hypocritical, incompetent, filled with racial , and stupid) takes as a model the classical works of the period of slavery and thrusts this model onto the contemporary Negro artist.”

According to McKay, “not a single serious critic of Germany, France, Italy or Russia would demand that the contemporary artist create in the spirit of masters.” But the Anglo-Saxons “have established limits for the creative capabilities of the Negro, “which originates in the bourgeois psychology of the ruling race – the desire to keep the Negro in his place.” McKay broadens his critique of Anglo-American civilization with an almost Weberian analysis of why the “Negro” is treated better in Catholic Europe than in Protestant countries: “The separate, individual black-skinned man from the West Indies or America receives much better treatment in London or Berlin than in New York or in Kingston, Jamaica”, but he “responds more quickly to the cordial atmosphere of Paris than to London.” Catholic countries, “by tradition, treat Negroes tolerantly and in a friendly fashion”, as “the Catholic church had more experience and contact with black-skinned peoples than the Protestant church.” The latter, “has always held a high opinion of its own prerogatives”, but “was never a completely devoted ally in the imperialist adventures of European peoples.” For McKay, who converted to Catholicism in the last years of his life, Rome contained a truer universalism in its “pagan tolerance” than the protestant countries with their white savior complex and their “evangelical conscience”: “In their justification of the enslavement of the black man, they speak about the fact that he stands incomparably lower in his development and that contact with civilized peoples will aid the cause of saving his soul. Protestantism has become a kind of Roosevelt of imperialism: Catholicism has remained a sister of mercy.” But besides his somewhat superficial judgements of Christian empires, McKay is also cautious, and writes that the friendly attitudes towards blacks in France are “valued so highly by Negroes that they are beginning to forget about the vile exploitation of Africans by the French”. He warns that “American Negroes are beginning to believe that one imperialist exploiter can be better than another”, a warning for Africans not to be divided that coheres with his other hints to Pan-

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African unification throughout the book. In addition to his critique of Anglo-Saxon imperialism and Protestants, his chapter “Economy and Sex” conforms to a resistance to Victorian prudery and the culture of shame around female and the threat of “Negro” sexuality. “When a white man is defeated on every point where he comes out against giving Negroes equal rights, he rushes wildly at his opponents and shouts, “would you agree to let your daughter or sister marry a Negro?” In a few pages, McKay argues how the triangle between the sanctity of white womanhood, the irrational fear of the black male rapist and the masculine aggression of the white male protector oppresses both women and African-Americans. In his critique at the “unusually sharply developed attitude Americans have towards sex”, McKay connects race and gender with the Freudian theory that sexuality is the foremost impetus for human behavior: “The American bourgeoisie (..) artificially maintains a war between the races over sex. Every crime--be it class inequality, lynch law, or the exploitation of labor--is concealed by the fetish of sex as behind a smoke screen.” America is obsessed with the protection of white women from black rape and the prevention of race-mixing, McKay writes, after which he points out the very hypocrisy of the American taboo on interracial sex: “Meanwhile, only thirty percent of the Negro population consists of mulattoes.” McKay elaborates how “the Negro question is inseparably connected with the question of woman’s liberation”, as “the white man directly confesses the white woman to be weak, and immoral in sexual conduct in her relations with a Negro man. The American woman must still give her response to this open campaign against her virtue.” Secondly, he is critical on the racism of white women too, giving an example of a white feminist “who declared in a speech that the denial of the right to vote to a white woman put her on the same level as Negroes and apes.” Without solidarity between women and black people, neither would achieve emancipation. McKay finds it easy to understand why the division between black and white workers is central to American capitalism but admits to have more difficulty explaining the “congenital reaction of the masses of white worker”, the “sexual fear of Negroes that is so deeply and strongly rooted in the white proletariat that it has acquired the force of an instinct.” To find a gratifying answer, he develops a historical explanation for American sexual psychology that is rooted in slavery, wherein he borrows more words from the Freudian vocabulary, as for example “taboo” and “fetish”. The taboo over interracial sex is a quintessentially American phenomenon, as “one cannot observe on a single one of the Caribbean islands that sex plays such a role in the economic struggle”, and can be traced back to the plantation, where “slave owners took strict measures against social contact between hired white workers and slaves.” Although the enslaved people and hired workers inevitably must have experienced some sexual attraction towards each other, McKay says, “every social contact or sexual relation between members of the races was considered a serious crime and severely

31 punished”. Due to this strictness, “the southern proletariat does not have any real conception of the sexual life of Negroes; among it there has developed an unusual neurotic fascination with the naked body and sexual organs of Negroes”. “However,” McKay continues, “at the same time that the slave owners did not allow any social sexual relations between white workers and black slaves, they themselves took nice-looking slave girls as concubines for themselves and thus aided the growth of a mulatto population.” Simultaneously, “white workers could only look upon what the slave-owning class ate as forbidden fruit which they were not allowed to touch. Thus, hostile feelings between the races were fanned and magnified to a large extent by the sexual taboo.” In McKay’s analysis, the history of slavery has forged a particular American “psyche” that is centered around the taboo of interracial sex, which has created a need for black subordination in the white proletariat that is often satisfied with racist terror. Barbara Foley has interpreted “McKay’s suggestion of the centrality of sexuality to racial violence” as “an early foray in the direction of supplementing Marxism-construed as economic determinism- by psychoanalysis.” Indeed, words as “congenital”, “neurotic fascination”, “deeply and strongly rooted” or “instinct” do not hint towards man-made, socially constructed oppression, but to a description of human nature. Nevertheless, McKay emphasizes many times how actors like “the northern bourgeoisie”, “the [former] slave owners and “the ruling classes” shaped, stimulated and maintained these divisions over sex, which is of course a narrative that coheres better with the villains of Marxist economic determinism than the defeatism of a psychoanalysis wherein American human nature would forever divide the black and white proletariat. McKay considers sexuality to be a major factor in American race relations, but the taboo, which is so deeply rooted in the psyche of the white proletariat and transcendent in the rest of the country, is a product of the “well-staged propaganda of the American bourgeoisie”.42 We would do well to remember that the author was no experimenting, revolutionary psychoanalyst from Vienna, but a socialist-oriented Claude McKay who wrote for a Soviet audience in 1923. In an earlier chapter, The Workers’ Party and the Negroes, McKay even questioned whether sex was the main reason for lynchings: “Statistics show that of the 3,436 men lynched from 1889 to 1921 only 571 were accused of rape. The remaining lynchings occurred on purely economic bases. The victims of this “institution” either were trying to improve working conditions or had declared their civil rights.” Throughout the book, McKay gave an elaborate explanation about the mechanisms of race, white status anxiety or “psychological wage” and most of all, sexuality in American capitalism. However, this emphasis on economic reasons for racial violence, together with the broader critiques and analysis of the dynamics between Southern oligarchy and Northern corporate

42 Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919, Class & Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Urbana 2003), 272. 32 capitalism, suggests that McKay, in front of a Soviet audience, did not dare or want to deviate too much from a worldview wherein history is dictated by mere economic laws. Therefore, Foley’s observation of The Negroes of America “supplementing” economic determinism with psychoanalysis is a correct one.

The Question Over Legacy

The Harlemite African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans who radicalized due the Russian Revolution and the Red Summer of 1919 are not so easily defined. The militant consciousness of black identity that developed in this momentum would be interpreted by historians and historical protagonists as “race consciousness”, “”, “class consciousness” and was variably expressed as the “New Negro”. The rest of the interbellum would prove how versatile and how globally oriented the New Negro actually was. We can think of communists, literary Modernists, Garveyite black nationalists, jazz musicians, dancers and in a sense also civil rights organizations as the NAACP. Many of these divergent figures admired and enjoyed each other’s radicalism, art and expressions of blackness, but the growth and articulation of a modern race consciousness brought the edges of the insider/outsider duality to the surface in clearer and sharper ways. The double consciousness of the Negro Renaissance, the presence of “two audiences” -black and white- split the artist and raised discomfort in the American public, as the “Negro” was aiming to escape “its place”. It is a characteristic of the postcolonial tragedy that subjects of the African diaspora police each other in fear of a judgment by the emblematic white gaze, and shows to what extent capitalism, colonialism and slavery have torn humanity apart. We have seen that the past was not easily escaped, but it was exactly the point of the New Negro movement to put a halt to this and to urge Afro-diasporic people to find strength in their own identity. What followed were black militancy, Modernist artistic expressions, Garvey’s nationalism and ethnic particularism, and of course salvation through the ending of capitalism. All these are related in their articulations of the New Negro Zeitgeist, sometimes syncretic forms of black nationalism and in their own way part of what Gilroy called “the Black Atlantic as a counterculture of modernity”. To make the disunity of this political history even more complex, socialism is also known for its bitter sectarianism and its multiple claims to the universal truth by power-hungry men, people who supported violence to achieve their holy cause of turning the world upside down. Think of the accusations McKay and Huiswoud made, received or heard in communist circles: one step in the wrong direction one was called too radical and uncompromising, a weak reformist for suggesting pragmatic strategies, a black chauvinist when lacking an open attitude towards whites, or an “Uncle Tom” when the black cause was put at the second place for a moment. McKay’s status as a radical black poet did not keep Huiswoud from calling him a token black for Russian propaganda, and of

33 course the most generalizing socialist slur, “bourgeois”. Claude McKay and Otto Huiswoud both grew up in the Caribbean under European colonialism, moved to New York in the 1910s and became affiliated with socialism. Two men who differed only four years in age and had so much in common, but where yet so different. McKay fits Ann Douglas’s frame of the Modernist revolt against the matriarch better than Huiswoud, with his demeaning criticism of Queen Victoria and the “hypocrisy and puritanism” of the Victorian Era. Most of all, his Freudian deliberations on interracial sexuality break away from the Puritan mores on white womanhood, with a strong denunciation of the hypocrisy of white feminists who are too blind to see they participate in their own oppression by rejecting black sexuality as impure and immoral. About Huiswoud, even though we know he had had a white girlfriend before he met “Hermie”, there is no sign that he aligns socialism with the same sexual revolution as the Jamaican poet. As McKay already explained, interracial sexuality was not a topic of such gravity in the Caribbean as in America, so the sexual revolution was in a sense less of a personal revolt against their parents and more of a pragmatic solution for a country that could not untie its social knots of prudery and racism. Nevertheless, both men revolted against the racial, economic, and ,in McKay’s case, thus also sexual injustices of the country where they had lived for more than a decade. It was moreover the racist hatred they experienced in America that forged the radicalism that brought them to Moscow. Now we have covered in what ways the “Harlem Renaissance Bolshevism found a second home in Moscow”, with Maxwell’s words, let us elaborate briefly what Kate Baldwin and William J. Maxwell said about the plausible legacy of Huiswoud and McKay’s visit. First, the idea or feeling of an African-American “folk” that had strengthened because of “1919”, traveled to Moscow with McKay and Huiswoud. The Negroes in America and Trial By Lynching “linked the idea of emergent (black) nationalism with the equally debated woman question”.43 Although McKay was ambivalent about black nationalism and Huiswoud opposed the idea in 1930, their representation of black America would precede the most modern doctrine that developed under African-American Marxism: The endeavor to form an African-American state with the right to self-determination, also known as the Black Belt Thesis. In this doctrine, race consciousness was blended with Marxist theories of nationalism and the Leninist view of a nation’s right to self-determination, which are broadly covered in the next chapter. These theories are modern because they are rooted in the Herderian school of thought wherein the nation state is the driving force of history. This mode of thinking, wherein peoples, nations and histories are syncretic and essentialist phenomena that, also shaped the diasporic nationalisms of Zionism, Pan-Africanism, Ethiopianism and thus, with the Black Belt Thesis, a strange Marxist doctrine that was redolent of revolutionary hubris. Although Baldwin also admits

43 Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 56. 34 that “it is of course difficult to determine the impact McKay had on the Russian cultural imagination of blackness”, they brought African-Americans on the radar of the Soviet imagination as a modern people who were not only a potential ally in the , but people who needed communist salvation. However, although a disappointing answer, we cannot conclude that the Black Belt Thesis would not have been there if Huiswoud and McKay had stayed at home. Moreover, Baldwin makes clear that certain elaborations about the woman question by McKay were ignored, even though the Soviet Union claimed to support the emancipation of women: “In spite of legislation endorsing women’s rights, commitment to sexual emancipation remained a theoretical pipe dream for agitators like Alexandra Kollontai and Inessa Armand.” When the Black Belt thesis was adopted in 1928, the woman question disappeared completely from the rhetoric for black liberation. Baldwin argues that McKay’s call for women liberation fell on deaf ears, and that McKay’s male representativeness of “the Negro question” was partially to blame for this. In other words, McKay and his argument for the sexual dimensions of racial oppression would have had more chance to establish a feminist revolution if a woman had been sent to Moscow in 1922.44 Moreover, the racial essentialism of the Russians’ decolonization project (where is the chorny?) could not fully be challenged by McKay’s warning to the Russians that Anglo-American “Negro art” would intoxicate their generalist view of “Negroes”. Only a naïve communist would think so, as the evidence for Soviet white chauvinism is “overwhelming”, says Baldwin. For example, when Langston Hughes, a decade later, came to the Soviet Union to make a movie with a similar message of cross-racial internationalism, the script was full of stereotypical caricatures. And what about the other African-Americans who went to study Marxist and Leninist theories in Moscow and who reported to experience many forms of racial stereotypes and discrimination? Nevertheless, this essentialist view of “the Negro” does cohere with the development of a basic Pan-African identity that is reflected in both the Negro renaissance and in the Soviet idiom of a “Negro” international, where the latter is largely indebted to the efforts of Otto Huiswoud. However, that racial essentialism can be a double-edged sword in the black liberation struggle is ironically symbolized by the artistic and political development Claude McKay chose after his visit to the Soviet Union. He departed from communism to become an artist who was dedicated to, in line with the Negro renaissance, a quest for the essential “Negro”. 45 And yet, the travels of McKay and Huiswoud are, indeed, an intervention in the myth that Soviet dogma was the only agent in the history of black Communism. If we dare to imagine how the Negro Question would have been handled in the Third International without their visit, a cynic could

44 Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 59. 45 Ibid., 58. Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans 1917-1936 (Jackson, Mississippi 1998) 90. 35 point to the meager successes of African-American Communism in the interbellum and argue that it would only have mattered in written theories for the armchair intellectuals in their Kremlin ivory towers, if they were not altered by Stalin’s capriciousness. But if we are interested in the roots of black Marxism and the interdependency between the Negro Renaissance and Communism, we can explain to the cynic that the magic pilgrimage of Huiswoud and McKay fostered the African-American and Soviet imagination of an alternate society without racism. From this moment on, the road to black internationalism went through Moscow first, with a call for the unity of workers of all skin colors. We can speculate that the racial integrationism of American leftists would have been further away if black and white American communists had not forged these Soviet alliances and felt backed by an emerging superpower that had commenced the largest social experiment in the history of humankind and championed the liberation of all workers of the world. However, the American underground Left did not erase a caste system that took four hundred years of oppression to take shape, among others due to their racism and their sluggish factionalism. As we will see, the sexual revolution McKay argued for in Russia and the workers’ integration Huiswoud continued to fight for, would arrive in American communist circles only after the Black Belt Thesis was adopted in 1928. There we will see again that American Communists shaped their own utopian interracialisms and could forge their own course.

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Chapter Two

The Long Argument of the Black Belt Thesis

A promise Vladimir Lenin had made, and that Woodrow Wilson would forsake at the end of the 1910s, was that oppressed colonial nations would get “the right to self-determination” in their respective new world orders. A question that was at the core of Communist debates was whether African-Americans should also be accounted as one of those peoples. Are the African-Americans “a nation within a nation”, as wrote in the Crusader in 1920, or is their oppression one of racial character? Although this question would mostly be debated in the ivory towers of Soviet and American Communism, it did eventually evolve in the political endeavor to raise a separate state in the Southern Black Belt by the CPUSA. The ambitious plan was accompanied by theoretical justifications and a map with the alleged territory of the Black Belt Republic: a large strip of African- American majority counties that covered parts of Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia, broadly from Shreveport to Richmond. This doctrine, known as the “Black Belt Republic” or “Black Belt Nation” Thesis, but mostly described as “Self-determination for the Black Belt”, has been a useful tool for historians to illustrate the unequal power relationship between the Comintern and American Communists as one of unilateral Bolshevization. Jacob Zumoff wrote that Robert Minor, one of the major party figures, “was not altogether wrong when he described the ‘development towards Bolshevization as indicated by the thermometer of the Negro question.'” For Theodore Draper, known for his classic American Communism and Soviet Russia (1960), the strange career of the Black Belt Thesis was the ultimate proof for his argument that Moscow pulled at the strings of American Communism. Take note that most American Communists, white and black, opposed the idea of African-American self-determination and argued against it at the Comintern’s Sixth World Congress in 1928, but that it became official CPUSA policy nevertheless. Hereafter, the thesis became a factional football in the interior political fights in the American Party, which led to Stalin’s expulsion of party leader . The ugly character of these internal factional struggles and Cold War sentiments of anti-communism helped the Black Belt Thesis go down in Cold War historiography as an absurd and impossible plan which the hubristic Comintern forced upon the CPUSA, never to leave the margins of American politics. 46 Naturally, historians who focused on hybridity, agency and discourse, as Kate Baldwin, Barbara Foley, Mark Solomon and William J. Maxwell, have raised more critical questions about

46Cyrill Briggs, “The Crusader”, 1920, quoted in Klehr, Harvey, The Communist Experience in America; A Political and Social History (New York, London 2010) 91-101. Jacob Zumoff, The Communist Party of the United States and the Communist International, 1919–29, PhD, (London, 2003). The most prominent among those Cold War historians are Theodore Draper and . 37 power that have yielded completer narratives of American Communists, wherein they were also helped by the opening of Russian archives in the 1990s. How much historical agency did (African-) American Communists have in the evolving Soviet dictatorship? Did Huiswoud and McKay change the inner logic of the Soviet discourse with their visit, making them perceive African-Americans as an oppressed nation? In an attempt to answer these difficult questions, I will argue that there were multiple ways wherein American Communists could exercise agency, even within the limits of the ascending of the Soviet Union. Next to the general “career” of the Black Belt Thesis and the debate over the agency of its originators, the legacy of the Black Belt Thesis is a disputed topic. Interestingly enough, the Communist Party became an active defender of “Negro rights” when the Black Belt Thesis was officialized in 1928, after years of sluggish action and weak statements that the “Negro Question” was just another part of the general class struggle. In the 1930s, the CPUSA maneuvered itself into the position of black civil rights defender, gaining public attention with their protests against lynchings and the unfair imprisonment of black striker Angelo Herndon. But the largest public relationship campaign wherein the CPUSA presented itself as the champion of black-white collaboration was in their defense of the Scottsboro Boys, a group of black youths who were unfairly accused of raping two white women on a train. Historians as Robin D.G. Kelley and Mark Solomon have credited the CPUSA for this momentum of interracial solidarity, and interesting questions can be asked about the sudden Communist motives to become, after years of carelessness and sometimes stubborn denial, the most outspoken (largely white) protector of black liberation. Was this improvement in “Negro Work” due to the officialization of the Black Belt Thesis? Were the harsh circumstances of the Depression a large factor in the African-American move towards communism? Or did Huiswoud’s critiques and hard work have an effect after all? With Stalin’s declaration of the Popular Front policy in 1935, the Black Belt Thesis disappeared from party rhetoric, as the collaboration with other leftist parties demanded a more moderate attitude and a provisional removal of the most radical policies. In spite of its short momentum, the history of the Black Belt Thesis can guide us through a stubborn amalgamation of Marxist doctrine and black nationalism that was in many ways symbolic for both the problematic sectarianism of the Left and the discrepancies between written theories and the real world. However, we will also see the tenacity of figures as Huiswoud to draw racism into Marxist scientific theories of oppression and to end blind spots for racism among white communists. Huiswoud, McKay and other Communists did exercise influence within the power dynamics between New York, the South and Moscow.

38

Lenin and Stalin on the National Question

For an exploration of interbellum communist lexicon on “nation”, “nationalism”, imperialism and self-determination we have to start with the foremost tactician and theorist of the Soviet Union: Vladimir Lenin. The debates on the “national question” counted contributions among others of Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Otto Bauer and Karl Kautsky, and were, among others, concerned with the positions of oppressed nations within European empires. What would remain of nations and nationalism in the eventual communist super state of universal brotherhood, was the core question here. It is an understatement to say that the question was convoluted and its debaters inconsistent. According to historian Horace B. Davis the topic was so complex and exhausting that the debate was in “a state of disarray” in the early twentieth century. A peculiarly complex problem was the issue of nationalism among colonized peoples. Before the Russian Revolution there was a consensus under Marxists that capitalism had to proceed to its logical and natural end. The question was if national turmoil and resistance in the colonies would fasten the revolution against European and American bourgeois imperialism or instead delay capitalism from running its full course. To understand what self-determination for the Black Belt was supposed to be, it is necessary to gain some insights from Lenin and Stalin’s integration of self-determination in Marxist theory and the historical context wherein these concepts were produced.47 In “On the Question of National Policy” (1914) Lenin made clear that “we Social-Democrats are opposed to all nationalism and advocate democratic centralism.” Lenin saw nationalism mostly as a bourgeois instrument to divide and delude workers from their consciousness as international proletariat and he raged in particular against “Great Russian” chauvinism, as the Russian Czar oppressed Ukrainian, Georgian, Azerbaijani and several Siberian “nations” in its empire. In a communist future, Lenin saw only a role for a few large states, or maybe eventually just one federation. A small amount of large states would prevent national primitivism among the people but could also “solve the problems of economic progress and of the struggle between proletariat and the bourgeoisie far more effectively than small states can.”48 On the other hand, Lenin understood nationalism could not be eradicated by mere wish or command. In his polemics with the German Liebman, a Bundist who advocated for communist nations with a certain amount of cultural autonomy- Lenin agrees in a passive-aggressive tone with Liebman’s words that “international culture is not non-national”. Lenin illuminates these words with an example of the situation of Russian , who are “kept forcibly in their caste”. He calls Jewish

47 Horace B. Davis, “Lenin and Nationalism: The Redirection of the Marxist Theory of Nationalism, 1903-1917” in: Science & Society, 31- 2 (1967), 164-185. 48 “On the Question of National Policy”, Written in 1914, but first published in 1924 in the journal Proletarskaya Revolutsia, No. 3, Collected Works Vol 20, 222-223. 39 minorities in Russia “the most oppressed and persecuted nation”, but emphasizes that “Jewish national culture is the slogan of the rabbis and the bourgeoisie, the slogan of our enemies.” However, the Jews outside the semi-barbaric Russia, who live in the “civilized world”, can proudly claim their Jewish nationality as a badge of globalism: “There the great world-progressive features of Jewish culture stand clearly revealed: its internationalism, its identification with the advanced movements of the epoch”, wherewith he means the participation of Jews in the struggle of the proletariat. Although Lenin only allows a kind of nationalism that resembles the internationalism of the Jewish diaspora, he sees a future with separate territories for different “nations”. The essay ends with a futuristic prospect of a communist state that includes “autonomous areas, however small, with entirely homogeneous populations, towards which members of the respective nationalities scattered all over the country, or even all over the world, could gravitate...”. 49 Lenin did not believe in a socialist empire wherein the needs and historical origins of different peoples were not respected, as such ignorance would only create fertile ground for the growth of the desire for autonomy and separation. He wrote to value “only voluntary ties, never compulsory ties” and declared to defend the right of independent nations even to secession, a statement he would further explain in The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914). In this article, besides his usual critique on the chauvinism of Russian Czarism, Lenin opposes Rosa Luxemburg’s argument that the right to self-determination was outdated within socialist internationalism. Although bourgeois-nationalism would be expunged in the future of a communist federation, Lenin understood a revolution would not wipe out nationalistic sentiments per se. He was cautious for the Social-Democratic Internationalists to overplay their hand in their anti-patriotism. If they would not handle the revolution in a pragmatic way, they might waste opportunities to make potential allies in the struggling colonies. 50 The definition of self-determination in Marxist debates of the early twentieth century is often vague and contradictory, but the context of the oppressed nations within the German, Austro- Hungarian and especially Russian empires is largely defining for the antonym of self-determination. However, to what extent this self-determination had to be executed, according to Lenin and Stalin, is a question that can be answered by their disapproval of the idea of “national-cultural autonomy”. This vision of a multinational socialist state was proposed by Austrian communist Otto Bauer when he wrote about the future of the multi-ethnic Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy in 1907. Afterwards,

49 Vladimir Lenin, “Critical Remarks on the National Question” (1913), Collected Works Vol. 20, 19-51. The italics are mine. Ibid., “On the Question of National Policy”. Ibid., “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination” (1914), 393-454. 50 Ibid., “On the Question of National Policy”. Ibid., “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”. Erik van Ree, De communistische beweging, van Marx tot Kim Jong Il (Amsterdam 2005) 59-61. 40 a polemical pro-Bauer camp rose that argued for decentralized communism and a federation between nations with self-governance of Volk-ish concerns as culture and educational institutions, but without the right to secede. In Lenin’s view this was traitorous bourgeois-nationalism that weakened the Second International and polluted workers’ consciousness over the rightful ownership of the means of production. More Bolshevists were with him. In 1912 Lenin wrote to writer Maxim Gorki: “About nationalism, I fully agree with you that we have to bear down harder. We have here a wonderful Georgian who has undertaken to write a long article for Prosveshchenie after gathering all the Austrian and other materials."51 This very article called “Marxism and the National Question” was published in 1913 by the “wonderful Georgian” Joseph Stalin. Stalin, a figure of minor influence in the Bolshevik Party at the moment of publication, proclaimed that cultural autonomy would eventually lead to federalism and separatism. The issue of ethno-national identification was further complicated by the history of European migration: "Is it conceivable that the Germans of the Baltic Provinces and the Germans of Transcaucasia can be welded into a single nation?", Stalin asked, to answer that a certain amount of regional autonomy was a more practical and realistic idea. The status of this essay grew after the October revolution, when Stalin became the Bolshevist’s most prominent theoretician of the national question and the chairman of the Soviet Union’s People's Commissariat of Nationalities, which insisted on equal rights for all citizens and the right for nations to speak in their own mother tongue. The article became mostly known for the definition of a nation that became dominant at the Sixth World Congress in 1928 and would gain an almost sacred status under Stalin’s regime: “A nation is a historically evolved, stable community arising on the foundation of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make- up, manifested in a community or culture.” In summary, Lenin and Stalin understood nationalities could survive when articulated as a message of “unity in multiplicity”. In contrary to the dystopian depictions of communism wherein all diversity and individualism is smothered out of every person for the public cause, Lenin actually expected that the revolution would lead to “the ‘differentiation’ of humanity, if we are to understand by this the wealth and variety of spiritual life, trends of idea.” Thus, he integrated the right to self- determination within Marxist theory, knowing that the dreamed socialist state would create separatist conflicts in the future if it denied the selfhood of peoples. He valued patriotism in an anti- establishment context, expecting the nationalism of colonized people to hasten the collapse of

51 V.I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Complete Collected Works). Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1964; pg. 162. Quoted in: Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary 1878–1929. A Study in History and Personality, (New York 1973), pg. 152. 41 capitalism and imperialism.52 However, only the course of history could show how applicable these theories were to reality. Especially for the most oppressed nations, Lenin and Stalin both saw the usefulness of separated territories, but of the two Stalin would prove to have a tougher interpretation about the repression of deviating nationalism. The Georgian Affair in 1922 delivered an ideological split between Stalin and the sick Vladimir Lenin, who criticized Stalin’s use of brutal force with the oppression of separatists in the land of his own birth. In his testament, Lenin accused Stalin of “Great Russian Chauvinism”-, recommended that he should be removed from his position, where after could best take over the Georgian question.53 Interestingly enough, the Russo-Jewish population-- the most comparable group to the caste position of African-Americans in light of social status and the historical parallel between pogroms and lynchings --got their own “nation” within the Soviet-Union. In 1934, Stalin founded the Jewish Autonomous Oblast with the administrative center of the city of Birobidzhan, almost at the furthest Eastern point of the Union, at the border with China. Hereafter, the incongruity of self-determination within such a highly centralized economy and state would reveal itself, as there was nothing democratic about the monstrous Stalinist bureaucracy that had emerged. Thousands of Jewish people moved to Birobidzhan, but due to regional anti-Semitism and Stalin’s purges of Jews, it would never become the Promised Land that was hoped for.54

Lenin on the “Negro Question”

Before the Theses on the National and Colonial Questions were declared at the Comintern’s Second Congress in 1920 -wherein the overthrowing of colonial governments was stated as an official goal, Lenin had already produced some texts about the United States and its black population. In some of these texts he despised America for its oligarchical character, showing the woes of capitalism in its most ugly and inegalitarian forms. But Marxists have always had high hopes for a revolution in America, as capitalism was most advanced in the United States and further developed than the semi- feudal agrarian society of Russia in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Lenin looked ambivalently to the United States also for the Russian cause, as the fast development of American industrial capitalism during the Gilded Age gave Lenin some courage as well for how fast capitalism could run its course and reach its final stage of a heavy industrialized society that preceded a farmer- proletarian allied revolution and a socialist super state.55

52 Horace B. Davis, “Lenin and Nationalism”. 53 Ibid., 54 #http://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/11/world/birobidzhan-journal-a-promised-land-in-siberia-well-thanks- but.html, visited at 12/12/2017. 55 R. Laurence Moore, European Socialists and the American Promised Land (New York 1970), 166-194. 42

Lenin mentions the position of “American Negroes” in Capitalism and Agriculture in the United States of America (1913) but there is no hint of him thinking of black America as a separate nation, let alone a people that must strive for self-determination. In the chapter The Formerly Slave- Owning South, Lenin says the following about the South: “Segregated, hidebound, a stifling atmosphere, a sort of prison for the “emancipated” Negroes--this is what the American South is like.” He ends the chapter with a notion of similarity of “the economic status of the Negroes in America and the peasants in the heart of agricultural Russia who were formerly landowners’ serfs”. Obviously, this comparison does not apply to a national, racial or caste question--as he did with the Jewish population of Russia--but to one of feudalism.56 A particular paragraph of a large study, “Statistics and Sociology”, that Lenin worked on in early 1917 but never finished, is a wanted prey for Black Belt historians: “In the United States, the Negroes (and also the Mulattos and Indians) account for only 11.1 per cent [of the population. Bolwijn]. They should be classed as an oppressed nation…” But this particular phrase cannot have steered Comintern policy in the twenties. Not only because it was not published till 1935, but also because Lenin nuances his statement immediately in the next paragraph. The “favourable conditions” and the immensely rapid development of America’s capitalism “have produced a situation in which vast national differences are speedily and fundamentally, as nowhere else in the world, smoothed out to form a single “American” nation.”57 So Lenin understood national sentiments could be fluid and transformative, especially when the fast changes of industrial capitalism had steered the American melting pot. Both Mark Solomon and Theodore Draper are not convinced that Lenin’s scattered writings on black Americans before the Second Comintern Congress in 1920 contain solid, consistent ideas of African-American nationhood or self-determination. However, the English translation of the “Preliminary Draft on the Theses on the National and Colonial Question” that Lenin articulated at the Second Congress contains an interesting ambiguity concerning “American Negroes” in the ninth thesis: “Communist parties must give direct support to the revolutionary movements among the dependent nations and those without equal rights (e.g., in Ireland, America Negroes, etc.) and in the colonies.” As Draper elaborates, the American communists received this inaccurate translation because there is no adjective for “without equal rights” in the English language. In the original Russian and German texts, the words nicht gleichberechtigden and neravnopravnikh both come before the word for “nation”, implying that Lenin considered the “American Negroes” a nation similar to Ireland. But

56 Vladimir Lenin, “Capitalism and Agriculture in the United States of America” (1913) in: Collected Works, 4th edition(Moscow, 1964) access at: #http://www.marx2mao.com/Lenin/ND15.html and visited at 03-07-2018. 57 Lenin, Statistics and sociology (1917) Quoted in: Theodore Draper, American Communism (New York 1960) 315-356. 43 it is doubtful that Lenin actually equated the “American Negroes” with the oppression of Ireland by the British Empire, as Lenin was not very tenacious about this particular point. However, the important aspect about this ambiguous statement is that it turned up at the decisive Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928 wherein the Comintern stated the Black Belt Thesis as the official party line that the CPUSA had to follow. Sen Katayama, the Japanese communist and intellectual mentor to Huiswoud in the late 1910s, referred to the Second Congress when he said that that Lenin “considered the American Negroes as a subject nation, placing them in the same category as Ireland.”58 At the 1920 congress, Lenin asked the Comintern delegates to give their thoughts about the theses, to which American journalist John Reed responded with the first rejection of viewing African- Americans as a nation. A year earlier, in a letter to the coming president of the Third International, Gregori Zinoniev, Reed had written that a militant spirit of resistance against lynching and violence was spreading under black Africans, calling A. Philip Randolph’s The Messenger “semi-nationalist, semi-communist.” This time, speaking to the Comintern, Reed proclaimed that “the Negroes do not pose the demand of national independence. (..) They hold themselves above all to be Americans, they feel at home in the United States. That simplifies the tasks of the communists considerably.” He also made a remark about the “back to Africa” adepts, according to him a movement that would never succeed in America. Ironically enough, Reed said this at the dawn of Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association that gained tens of thousands of followers in the 1920s. At the Third Congress in 1921, a South African delegation convinced the Comintern that although they were glad that the problem of colonialism was treated, the “Negro Question” deserved specific attention. For the understanding of the American characteristics of the Negro Question, Moscow decided to invite black Americans for the Fourth Congress in 1922. One was the official delegate of the Communist Party, the light-skinned Otto Huiswoud, the other the radical poet Claude McKay.

The Agency of Figurants

The studies by Draper and Solomon, mostly focusing on the Comintern and the figures surrounding the American Communist Party, take a leap from 1920 to the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928. The Negro and colonial questions were often discussed at the Comintern congresses, but between 1920 and 1928 there was, as Draper states, “no record in the Comintern or in the American party of any reference to the American Negroes as a “nation” or any implications of Negro “self-determination.” Actually, all the sources point in the opposite direction. At the Fifth Congress in 1924, the suitableness of the right to self-determination for “the American Negro” was doubted already in the writing of the Comintern agenda for the next months. The German August Thalheimer noted about

58 Quoted in: Draper, American Communism, 315-356. 44 the program debates that: “It was pointed out that a number of national questions exist in countries like the United States with an extraordinary mixture of populations where it cannot be said that the slogan of the right of self-determination is the solution for all national questions, in which the race question is also involved.” CPUSA-delegate John Pepper agreed, and warned for the misleading idea that one size fits all: 59

“In many countries the nationalities are such that we cannot in any way separate them. (..) Let us take the Negro race of America for example. Why should they want to have anything to do with the slogan for the right of self-determination of the Negro? They do not want to establish any separate state within the United States. There exists a Negro-Zionist movement in America which wishes to go to Africa, but the thirteen million Negroes wish to remain in America and demand ‘social equality.’ We should change this slogan to the following: ‘Complete Equality in Every Respect.’”

Theodore Draper adds that “no one disputed Pepper” and it looked like the Black Belt Thesis was off the table. The question is, if there were no serious attempts to revive the thesis before 1928 and there were actually more voices to consider the American Negro Question as a racial issue, then why did it turn up again at the Sixth Congress in 1928? First of all, it was Sen Katayama who reminded the Comintern at the Sixth Congress that Lenin had considered African-Americans as a distinct nation. The personality cult around Lenin and the emerging power of Stalin, a self-proclaimed expert on the national question, are partially the answer to this question. But is this just the history of Great Men? Although Draper deserves some credit as a labor historian for recognizing “people’s history”, it is of course his core argument that Moscow had sovereign power over American Communism. He describes the Black Belt Thesis as the “boldest effort ever made by the Russian party and the Comintern to demonstrate that they understood the dynamics of American society better than the Americans did.”60 Mark Solomon, also, does not defy the argument “that self-determination was “made in Moscow”, as “the transcripts of the debates certainly show the Russians swarming around the issue and bringing it to fruition.” But he criticizes how the theory of Stalin as the creator of the Thesis has been a reason for some historians “to discredit the theory beyond the point of consideration”. Namely, Solomon makes the argument that the Black Belt Thesis, although in many ways ridiculous, did have a significant effect on the black revolutionary consciousness of the 1930s, and he rejects the association with Stalin, “the prime symbol of genocidal totalitarianism and the failure of the Soviet model”, as a disqualification for any deeper historiographical consideration.61 However, Kate Baldwin and William J. Maxwell remind us not to forget the cultural counterparts of political history. Baldwin has criticized the historiography of American communism

59 Quoted in: Draper, American Communism, 315-353. 60 Ibid., 354. 61 Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 89. 45 that merely focused on the dynamics of the Comintern and the CPUSA, and argues that the works of Draper as well as Mark Solomon neglect the importance of the cultural production of the interbellum, and especially the Russian reception of Claude McKay. First, however, Baldwin also concludes from studying the Comintern files “that in the period between 1920 and 1928, there existed antagonism toward the very notion of national self-determination, which was described in one file as ‘owing its origin to the illusion that Negroes can find a promised land where the tentacles of imperialism cannot touch them..’.” Nevertheless, seeking to “intervene in the myth that the Soviet Negro Project was one of unimpeded Soviet dogma”, she argues that the influence of figures as Huiswoud and McKay on the Russian reception of “the Negro”, the American South, and “the Negro Question”, should not be underestimated. 62 Let us state that it is unclear what exactly happened with the Black Belt Thesis between the Fourth Congress in 1922 and the Sixth Congress in 1928, as these were years of such political and factional chaos in both Soviet and American Communist bureaucracies that it is difficult to attribute power and agency to historical protagonists and entities. But however the Black Belt Thesis was received and treated in these years, it is evident that the Negro Question as such was not considered of minor importance. To the contrary, the colonial question and the liberation of Africa were officially put on the Comintern agenda in this period, brought forth by delegations from colonized people like South Africans, but also by Claude McKay and Otto Huiswoud. Although both of these men did not consider African-Americans a singular nation that should endeavor self-determination, their Comintern speeches were full of the idea that black Americans were believed to hold a key position in the struggle for African freedom, transcending the radical peoplehood of the New Negro to Moscow.63 One of the core arguments of Baldwin’s book is that earlier historiography has failed to acknowledge the agency, receptiveness and reciprocity of the Russian/Soviet discourse. Herein, she gives striking examples about how the Black Belt Thesis fits in the frame of the multi-nationality under the Russian Czarist empire, how the heritage of Russian patriarchy failed to liberate Soviet women, but also about blackness in the Russian mind. Concerning the latter example, she quotes African-American Communist Fort-Whiteman in a letter to the Comintern:

“In America, one of the common social evils against which we Negroes are constantly in active opposition is the practice of caricaturing Negro faces in advertisement literature. In Russia, one would note expect to find such practices. Nevertheless, at present throughout Russia, it is common to notice prints of caricatured faces of Negroes advertising cigarettes,

62 Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 37. 63 Ibid., 36. 46

films, pictures, etc. Though there be no anti-Negro feeling behind it, the results are the same.”64

Think about how McKay was invited as “Stand-in African” to establish an alliance that was truly cross-racial and how Huiswoud was too light-skinned to see his face celebrated on banners in the city. Furthermore, Baldwin elaborates how the Russian sense of non-Europeanness had caused such an inferiority complex that the Soviets took up the mantle of international salvation, but that this sentiment was also at the root of the alliance with Africans and other colonized people, as they found each other in being Western-Europe’s “other”. Herein, she argues that Huiswoud and especially McKay’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1922 were of crucial importance for the Russian perception of black America, as they established a “prism” for further African-American visitors.65 Despite her elaborate research, Baldwin is humble in her statement that McKay’s two publications “perform an ambivalent repositioning of black self-determination in the South, leaving open the question of McKay’s shaping influence on what emerged from the later 1928 Comintern congress as ‘the black belt thesis’.” William J. Maxwell also states that “McKay is surely not the unacknowledged legislator of “The Theses on the Negro Question” and the Black Belt Nation line.” We should see these, according to him, “as amalgams of New Negro and Soviet interests underwritten by the latter’s dominance of the Comintern and by both parties’ obligations to Lenin’s and Stalin’s teachings on the National Question.” Despite his carefulness, he attributes great influence to the Jamaican poet, stating that “Stalin and the remaining Bolsheviks had fully registered the advice that bold moves would be necessary to draw many black workers to Communism. What was called the “Black Belt Republic” or “Black Belt Nation” thesis was in some ways the fulfillment of the analysis that McKay had promoted in Moscow in 1922-23.” 66 Maxwell helpfully reminds us that, in addition to McKay and Huiswoud, more Africans, Caribbeans and African-Americans who were awakened by Pan-Africanism, socialism and black nationalism, traveled to Moscow. The eventual architect of the Black Belt Thesis was the “African- American Communist Harry Haywood, a former ABB recruit, fan of “If We Must Die.” This is a keen observation. If McKay and Huiswoud did not influence the Russians, they at least contributed to the New Negro nationalism that shaped Harry Haywood. Herein, we must not forget that the versatile New Negro in 1919 already expressed nationalist sentiments with, in the words of Barbara Foley, “the rhetoric of self-determination” that ranged from “the entire spectrum of postwar politics, from Versailles to the Kremlin”.67 We could state that, if McKay and Huidwoud had not gone to Moscow, two of the many

64 Ibid., 25-85, quote at 65. 65 Baldwin, Beyond the Color Line, 30. 66 Maxwell, New Negro 91-93. 67 Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919, 15. 47

other black communists would have been the topic of this thesis. In the Comintern files, Baldwin has found evidence that Huiswoud was hastily chosen to partake in the trip to Moscow, which even caused annoyance among the racist party members. His light skin made his election a little more tolerable for them. We might assume that other African-Americans would have addressed similar questions, but such “what-if”-history neglects the agency of these particular individuals. McKay and Huiswoud were couriers of black internationalism, socialism or New Negro radicalism and provided the parameters for the “theses on the Negro question” from 1922 and perhaps the theses from 1928 as well. Thus, they succeeded in involving racism into Marxist theory of capitalistic oppression and in putting the “Negro Question” on the Soviet agenda. Moreover, Huiswoud’s calls for an international “Negro Congress” meant the inception of the International Trade Union Committtee of Negro Workers, the radical black International Otto and Hermie helped to build in the 1930s. Only McKay’s arguments to perceive the “Negro question” and the woman question as intertwined problems of one white supremacist patriarchy clearly fell on deaf ears. Baldwin makes the sharp argument that the woman question could have been perceived by the Soviets as central to the Negro question (instead of mentioned by McKay and ignored) if a female Communist had traveled to Moscow. McKay and Huiswoud’s “male representativeness” gave the “Negro question” a masculinist aura that transcended in the nationalist frame of the Black Belt Thesis. There is something to say for this argument. If we study the cult that black Communists launched of masculine black heroes as Toussaint L’Ouverture, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey and Frederick Douglass after the officialization of the Black Belt Thesis, the interconnectedness between masculinity and nationalism as a political-military trope, falls into place.68

The Third Period

We need to consider the process of Stalinization that swept through Russian and international communism in the three years towards the Third Period if we want to understand why the bandwagon of the Black Belt Thesis turned up at the Sixth Congress. Stalin--who regarded the national question as his personal expertise, given his 1913 essay and his earlier leadership of the Soviet Union People's Commissariat of Nationalities--had begun his combat for total control over the Communist Party and had expulsed prominent party figures as Trotsky, Zinoviev and Bukharin by 1928. One of the core problems the Bolshevists were facing was that the expected crisis of global capitalism wherefrom socialism would rise, failed to happen. After the World War had left Europe in ruins, Lenin was deeply disappointed that the German revolutions from 1918-19 and 1923 had failed.

68 Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill 1990) 46. Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 184. 48

When capitalism prospered in the United States and even Germany stabilized a little with the Dawes Plan in 1924, tensions rose in Moscow. Trotsky’s ideology of “permanent revolution”, which stated that communism could only succeed worldwide, became less and less plausible and Stalin expelled him from the party in 1927, to banish him from the Soviet Union two years later. For Bukharin’s idea of “Socialism in one country” to succeed, Stalin wanted to commence the heavy industrialization and collectivization of land that would make the Soviet Union both into the promised socialist hail state and a global super power. Bukharin warned Stalin nevertheless that his plans of forced land collectivization and quick, heavy industrialization were undemocratic and too rigid. He recommended more patience with Lenin’s New Economy Policy, which allowed some forms of capitalism within the Soviet Union until global communist hegemony was established, which turned out to fall on deaf ears. Stalin had no time for patience and announced the Third Period in 1928, wherein capitalism would, after the stabilization in the years following the revolution, finally collapse. Workers would radicalize all over the world and the last stage of communism was about to be fulfilled. When the first Five Years Plan commenced in 1928, Bukharin was already expelled from the party, to be banished from the Comintern in March 1929. The American Communist Party, at its turn, had its own struggles between the Lovestone and the Foster faction after the death of party leader Ruthenberg in March 1927. These disputes were not so much caused by the “Negro Question” but more over the functionality of trade unions and capitalist stabilization. The twenty-nine-years-old Jay Lovestone won the party leadership after a bitter political fight but lost all his power within two years when he made Joseph Stalin his enemy. Lovestone was known to view American capitalism as stronger and more resistant to a revolution than European capitalism, and the fact that American communism was still of such miniscule size, ten years after the Russian revolution, compelled him to state that he could not see why or where this hypothetical American revolution would be executed. Because the United States had a different course of history than Europe, with a deviating development of capitalism that lacked the stage of feudalism, Marxist teleology might not suit America. Even though Lovestone expected a new crisis soon, he saw so little revolutionary potential in the United States that he hoped to convince Stalin that the road to American socialism asked for a more moderate approach than the Third Period strategies, an approach that included trade unionism and parliamentary democracy. For Stalin, these “reformist” arguments were incongruent with the Third Period, and above all, sounded too much like the words of Lovestone’s ally, the “Right deviationist” Bukharin. The nascent dictator charged Lovestone with disobeying the Comintern and disturbing the unity in the CPUSA in the ongoing factionalism.Moreover, Stalin refused to believe that the United States was resistant to revolution. In the speech wherein he justified Lovestone’s banishment from the CPUSA and the Comintern in 1929, he condemned this view as “the heresy of American Exceptionalism”.

49

Within the context of Stalin’s political elimination of every person who obstructed his road to total power, the Black Belt Thesis became official Comintern and CPUSA policy. Lovestone paid the price for opposing the thesis, as in his vision it was a continuing of the segregation or “Jim- Crowization” of the communist movement that had already been set in motion with the founding of a separate black department of the CPUSA, the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC). When an American communist state was finally realized, a separate black state could be topic of discussion, but when Lovestone considered the deplorable state of American communism in 1928, that seemed a topic of zero priority to him. He had altogether been pessimistic about the revolutionary potential in the South and gave African-Americans a better chance to improve their lives if they continued moving to Northern industrial cities like Chicago, New York, and Detroit. He drew upon Marx’s and Engels’ theory of reserve army of labor when he called Black Americans in the South “a reserve of capitalist reaction”, which meant that their stay in the South gave American elites only the opportunity to consolidate their power over African-Americans and the workers who were allowed to call themselves white. As migrating North was the most logical thing to do for African-Americans, Lovestone expected that the Black Belt Thesis would die naturally, for the simple reason black Americans would cease to be a majority in the alleged Southern counties. When Lovestone abstained from voting about the Black Belt Thesis in the Comintern, the Foster faction betted on the most powerful horse. When the Black Belt Thesis came forward as the desired policy during the Sixth Congress, Foster, Bittelman and even former Lovestone-ally John Pepper jumped, in Draper’s words, on the “self-determination bandwagon.” A year later, when Stalin wanted to get rid of the Lovestone faction, he was not afraid to make violent threats: “Who do you think you are?” Do you want to defy me? Do you know what happened to Trotsky? Where is he now? Don’t you know there is lots of place in our cemeteries?”69

The Sixth Congress

Historians have attributed major influence to the young Charles Nasanov and African-American Harry Haywood, the writers of the first draft resolution of the thesis in 1928. Like another handful of African-Americans, the brothers Otto Hall and Harry Haywood were sent to Moscow to study at the Far Eastern University (KUTV) and the Lenin School. Here, they became acquainted with the writings of Lenin and Stalin on the national question and the idea to regard the American “Negro question” as a national problem. Haywood writes in his autobiography that it was Sen Katayama who told “us black KUTV students that Lenin had regarded U.S. blacks an oppressed nation”, referring to Lenin’s draft resolution of the Second Congress in 1920. Also, his brother Otto told Haywood that other black students and he “got a similar impression from their meeting with Stalin at the Kremlin shortly after

69 Quoted in: Draper, American Communism, 422. 50 their arrival in the Soviet Union.” 70 Although the exact influence of Stalin is enigmatic in this question, I find Theodore Draper’s denomination of Stalin as éminence grise particularly striking. Namely, it was Stalin’s definition of a nation that became central to Haywood and Nasanov’s theory: “a historically evolved stable community arising on the foundation of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up, manifested in a community or culture.” When the duo was appointed to develop a first draft resolution for the Sixth Congress, they attributed these characteristics to the “American Negroes”, with English as common language, the cotton-growing sharecroppers as economic life, and certain counties in the Black Belt where black Americans were in the majority or highly concentrated as territory, which later compelled Haywood to draw a map of the possible “Black Belt Nation”. The historical and social circumstances, mostly defined by the history of slavery, had given the Negro its psychological and cultural character. Although the historical argument seems quite similar to the “horrors of the slave experience” that tied the black subjects of Paul Gilroy’s transatlantic framework, Haywood differentiated the post-slavery black American nation by the failed emancipation of the Reconstruction era, where the corporate northern order had betrayed black people by extending American imperialism in the fin-de siècle. Now, African-American communists had a double mission, to fight both for the struggle for socialism, as for the national liberation of the “Negro”.71 The draft resolution Haywood and Nasanov presented to the Negro subcommittee of the Anglo-American secretariat emphasized the growth of an African-American urban proletariat and called for the Communist Party to become their foremost defender. Rather than soft “petty- bourgeois” organizations and intellectuals like the NAACP and Garvey’s UNIA, the CP should lead the black liberation struggle by fighting harder against lynching and the injustices of the Jim Crow jurisdiction. The part of the resolution that handled the question of perceiving the American Negroes as a nation received immediate disagreement in the preparatory Negro subcommittee. Overall, the document was ambiguous, as the Negro question was called “one of an oppressed national (or racial) minority” the and the word “self-determination” did not appear anywhere in the text. The words “or racial” in parentheses caused annoyance and great confusion, and shows the pioneer insecurity of Haywood and Nasanov in a fast-changing, intellectually intimidating environment. They were so cautious that they dared not to speak of a black American nation, but only that in the South there were “some perquisites which MAY lead to the future development of a national (racial)

70 Harry Haywood was born in 1893 as Heywood Hall, as Otto Hall’s younger brother. Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik, Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago, 1978), 219. 71 Joseph Stalin, “Marxism and the National Question” (1913). 51 revolutionary movement among the Negroes.” 72 In spite of the early confusion and critique, the eventual resolution was applauded at the Sixth Congress for its attack on white chauvinism within the party and its call for action in the South. Although the were skeptical about an American revolution, most involved communists at the Sixth Congress thought spreading communism among black workers in the South could only augment the revolutionary potential. For too long, white American communists were overly focused on a revolution that was led by an urban proletariat, neglecting the black Americans in the South as a revolutionary ally. In the draft resolution, Haywood defied Lovestone’s view of southern blacks as “a reserve of capitalist reaction”, declaring that such a view had “nothing to do with Leninism”. Haywood declared that many American communists focused too much on the black urban proletariat, while the real roots of the Negro problem could be found in the agrarian South. In an apparently contradictorily conclusion he states that however the rural South was the key axis of black oppression, the revolution was to be led by the urban proletariat. Haywood anticipated the revolution and deliberated over the “Third Period" revolution that the South had to execute, which included a taking over of land from the white owners for the purpose of collectivization and quick industrialization.73 However, self-determination for the Black Belt was more disputed, with the pro- and counter arguments coming from both corners of integrationism and segregationism. Some opponents argued that the effectivity of black socialism worsened with the encouragement of a separate state, which would be another misrecognition of their potential as revolutionary ally. The segregationist voices within the party and the solution of the separate black ANLC department had often been scorned. If the proletarian revolution could only succeed with black-white solidarity, why was there another separatist endeavor? Some communists recognized in the Black Belt Thesis a Garveyan-like or black bourgeois trick to control African-American economies. The Hungarian Andre Shiek even hints that the Thesis is a product of a Lockean bourgeois New Negro. “The American Negroes (..) are divided into classes. (..)” and that the black upper classes are not “averse to having a monopoly in the super-exploitation of the millions of toilers of his own race.” To pollute the Negroes with black nationalism, they “invent all sorts of legends anent “a special Negro culture,” the “brotherhood of the whole African race” and similar nonsense. It is they who project the various “nationalist” movement of Negroes demanding self-determination.” Black Americans like Otto Hall, William L. Patterson and James W. Ford agreed that black class division already splintered the “Negro movement” to such extent that the Black Belt

72 Jones, International Press Correspondence 76, 28 October 1928, 1392-1394, in: Philip Foner and James S. Allen, American Communism and Black Americans, A Documentary History 1919-1929. Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 70-72. 73 Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 71. 52

Thesis was undesirable. Patterson and Ford wrote in that “the unification of the entire Negro people under the leadership of the black bourgeoisie would mean the abandonment of a real revolutionary struggle against the racist policy of the white bourgeoisie”. However, this critique did not keep the latter from running for vice-president in 1932 with the slogan of “Self-determination for the Black Belt” on the campaign poster. 74 Besides the warning for the black bourgeoise’s attempt to hijack the revolution with the Black Belt Thesis, many Americans declared that Haywood and Nasanov’s analysis was just plain wrong. In a last call to reconsider his brother’s thesis, Otto Hall concluded in October that “the historical development of the American Negro has tended to create in him the desire to be considered a part of the American nation. There are no tendencies to become a separate national minority within the American nation”, where after he advised the Negro Commission to study the subject deeper before definitive steps were taken or revolutionary slogans adopted. He declared that his side did not object “an independent Soviet Socialist Republic in America for Negroes”; but asked the Comintern to prioritize. A more important concern was “how to organize these Negroes at present on the basis of their everyday needs for the revolution. The question before the Negroes today is not what will be done with them after the revolution, but what measures are we going to take to alleviate their present condition in America.” However, although the Black Belt thesis was frowned upon by many, Haywood and Nasanov’s critique on American Communists yielded the important consensus that the party needed a radical change to its racial politics. Like many other black Communists, they blamed “white chauvinism”, carelessness and inactivity from within the Communist movement for the fact that the party contained only around fifty black members. Just like McKay and Huiswoud had complained six years earlier, black Americans experienced racial antagonism even within the party ranks. Many unions throughout the country had refused black workers multiple times, and when black communists asked for acknowledgement of not only the class but also the racial character of the exploitation of African-Americans, they were often disappointed with the answer that racism would be overthrown with capitalism, which was the prime concern. Even party leader Jay Lovestone was ambivalent about the racial aspect of the Negro question, seeing it most of all as part of the class struggle. The separate black ANLC that was created to draw more blacks into the party had left everyone dissatisfied. As one of the prominent members, Huiswoud complained that it was a

74 André Shiek, “The Comintern Program and the Racial Problem”, The Communist International, August 15, 1928, in: Philip Foner and James S. Allen, American Communism and Black Americans, A Documentary History 1919-1929, 163-166. James Ford and William Wilson [William Paterson], “On the Question of the Work of the American Communist Party among Negroes (Discussion Article), Die Kommunistische Internationale, August 29, 1928, 2132-2146, in: Ibid., 166-172. 53 bureaucratic party organ out of touch with the black working class. Many others saw the ANLC as a continuation of Jim Crow segregation, the result of white communists refusing to collaborate with black workers. For Hall and many others at the Sixth Congress, self-determination was the wrong answer to a legitimate problem. He did not want a new policy, but first an actual execution of the policies that had been developed: “Up till now nothing has been done.” The dissatisfaction Hall and many other Communists experienced over the American passivity on “the Negro Question” made them positive towards the final resolutions on the American Negro question of the Congress, in spite of its inclusion of the slogan for the right of self-determination. No African-American except Harry Haywood favored the Black Belt Thesis at the end of the Sixth Congress. It was a radical solution that was vied by many Communists as unfit and unrealistic, but it paralleled the revolutionary attitude of the Third Period that the demanding personality of Joseph Stalin had asked for.75 Two months after the thesis was adopted, William Foster emphasized his intolerance of segregation in the magazine of the American party: “those workers who are not willing to join a common branch with the Negroes and participate with them in party activities are not yet ready for membership in the Workers (Communist) Party.” In the same article, however, Foster mentions that the revolutionary struggle of “the Negroes (..) must be carried out under the slogan of full social, political and industrial equality for Negroes,” and “the right of self-determination for the Negroes.” After this phrase, there is zero elaboration on what Foster perceives as self-determination, or how these two slogans are positioned against each other. The mentioning of the slogan here is an empty shell to pose himself as the anti-Lovestone towards Joseph Stalin. The flexibility of Foster to take the seeming contradictory position of rejecting segregation within the party and simultaneously advocating a separate black state, is an evocative example of the complexity of the “Negro question”, the inconsistent solutions that were designed to solve it and the importance of choosing the right bandwagon in the Stalinizing world of Communism.76

Huiswoud’s Criticism and Lie

At the congress of the Communist Party in March 1929, Otto Huiswoud delivered a critical speech about the Party’s failure on “Negro Work” in the last decade. Yet, he also declared to have seen a certain recent improvement: “The Party’s work among the Negro masses is being taken much more seriously now and an effort is being made to do something concrete to win the Negro workers for the Party.” This improvement would continue in the 1930s. In 1932, William Z. Foster ran for president with the black James W. Ford as running mate and the slogan “self-determination for the

75 Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 73. 76 William Z. Foster, “The Workers (Communist) Party in the South”, The Communist, November 1928. In: Philip Foner and James Allen, American Communism and Black Americans, 1919-1929. A Documentary History (Philadelphia 1987). 54 black belt” on the election pamphlet, covering a map of the counties in the American South that were supposed to be under black government in the future. Finding this powerful statement on such a visible and central party document, drawing the struggle for black liberation right into the Communist frontline, one might get the misleading impression that there had been a broadly shared approval of the Black Belt Thesis since the Sixth Congress. Naturally, the bickering, betrayal and sectarianism continued unabated after 1928. Haywood and Nasanov noted in 1929 that, although the party’s activity for the African-American struggle had improved, the question of self- determination had not been taken seriously enough. The Comintern sent a few warnings to the CPUSA not to deviate from the line of self-determination and specifically criticized a few dissident black leaders, among whom Huiswoud. A letter dated May 3rd, 1929 stated that “all comrades who persist in disagreement with the line should be removed from leading positions in Negro Work.” 77 Besides the unwillingness of American Communists, the Comintern’s Negro Commission blamed also the unclarity and theoretical ambiguity of the 1928 resolutions. The right of self- determination was only posted as a slogan that the communists had to execute, a slogan that was moreover a second priority next to the other points of attention that the resolution raised: racism within the American communist movement and the importance of drawing African-Americans in the North and the South into the proletarian struggle. The Commission that was led by the Finnish Otto Kuusinen and counted Browder, Ford, Haywood and Nasanov among its prominent members, wrote a new resolution in October 1930, partly to clarify its endeavors but most of all to reestablish its authority. Whereas the slogan of self-determination had only been the fifth point on the 1928 resolution, the 1930 version was centered around the recognition of African-Americans as a nation. It recognized the differences between the North, where African-Americans were to pursue political and social equality, and the South, were the right to self-determination had to be claimed. Moreover, it included a concrete plan for what had to be done: “(1) Confiscation of the landed property of the white landowners and capitalists for the benefit of the Negro farmers”, “(2) Establishment of the State Unity of the Black Belt”, a state which would have the “(3) Right of Self-Determination.” In line with Lenin’s view, the resolution supported the right for the Black Belt to secede but stated as well that "the Communist Negroes will not come out for but against separation of the Negro Republic federation with the United States.” Thus, all the debates and theories over the right to self- determination were about a right that the Communists ought not to be executed. The earlier mentioned role that Du Bois, Garvey, Locke and Lenin had attributed to African- Americans as international vanguard for the “Negro” liberation, was also present on the 1928

77 Quoted in: Maria van Enckevort, The Life and Work of Otto Huiswoud, 65-98. 55 resolution. Interestingly enough, this idea was completely omitted on the renewal from 1930. The international fight for African freedom was now to be fulfilled by the ITUC-NW in Hamburg that was led by George Padmore, and which Huiswoud would join in Europe in 1933. The focus of the resolution shifted towards “the Negro question in the United States” as a national problem. Because it was a “national question, but also because it was historically unique compared to other oppressed nations, “not only in view of the prominent racial distinctions (marked difference in the colour of skin, etc.), but above all because of considerable social antagonism (remnants of slavery)”.78 This nationhood, as Haywood had already emphasized at the Sixth Congress, was rooted in slavery and had grown out of the disappointing Reconstruction era. Because of this failed emancipation, the resolution noted, the “remnants of slavery” still stood at the basis of the super- exploitation of black people in the South. The exploitation by peonage and sharecropping that were enhanced by the “racial antagonisms” of lynching violence and Jim Crow segregation, marked the African-American national soul. It is never entirely clear how “race” functions in the 1930 resolution, but the notion of “prominent racial distinctions” in the document hints at the obvious acknowledgement that a dark skin was definitive for one’s position in the American caste system. But despite this clear racial demarcation, Harry Haywood attacked Otto Huiswoud’s argument that African-Americans were victims of racial and not of national oppression. Namely, Huiswoud had elaborated this argument in a critical article entitled “World aspects of the Negro Question”, in the February 1930 edition of American party organ The Communist. He responded to the 1928 resolution on the American “Negro Question” that the same magazine had published a month earlier. Huiswoud was content with the resolution’s acknowledgement that racism mattered in addition to class, but warned for a narrow approach wherein the solution for European and American imperialism also had to solve the American “Negro Question”:

“It is essential that we distinguish the situation of the Negro masses in the colonies -Africa and the West Indies; the semi-colonies -Haiti and Liberia, who suffer from colonial exploitation, from that of the Negro in America, a racial minority, subjected to racial persecution and exploitation. We must take into consideration the National-colonial character of the Negro question in Africa and the racial character of this question in the United States.”79

Huiswoud elaborated his argument carefully, without mentioning explicitly that he opposed self- determination for the Black Belt. Nevertheless, it was an open deviation from the Comintern line. Harry Haywood responded in his article that “comrade Huiswoud” and his “co-thinkers” who

78Resolution of the ECCI political secretariat on the Negro question in the United States (extracts) In: Jane Degras, “The Communist International 1919-1943”, Vol 3., (London 1964) 124-134. 79 Otto Huiswoud, “World Aspects of the Negro Question”, The Communist February 1930, 132-148, in: in: Philip Foner and Herbert Shapiro, American Communism and Black Americans, a Documentary History, 1929- 1934 (Philadelphia 1991) 56 supported the notion that the “Negro question” was a “race question”, were sliding down “into the swamp of the most sterile bourgeois liberalism”. He identified Huiswoud’s plea for the acknowledgement of the race factor in capitalist exploitation as a racist notion that denied the universal equality of blacks and whites and classed Huiswoud with, first, scientific racism, and secondly, the “chauvinistic” kind of tribalism: the black pride Marcus Garvey, Du Bois and the New Negro movement had claimed. At the Sixth Congress, Haywood had already proclaimed that race prejudice was in the interest of the black upper classes to protect their economies from white competition. A similar warning was included in the 1930 resolution, stating that “Negro Communists must clearly dissociate themselves from all bourgeois currents in the Negro movement”. 80 Opponents of African-American self-determination, like André Shiek at the Sixth Congress, used a blunt rejection of “race chauvinism” as well in their arguments that the Black Belt thesis was, as a bourgeois-nationalistic project, designed by upper and middleclass blacks to draw African- Americans into their stores by applauding the uniqueness of “Negro Culture”. Although Shiek and Haywood disagreed about the Black Belt Thesis, they shared the common enemy of black bourgeois nationalism, a tribalism that did not contribute to the revolutionary liberation but rather prevented blacks and whites from uniting. The authors in these abstract debates switch between the terms “race” and “nation”. Shiek and Haywood both reject the racial essentialism of black and white upper classes that was legitimated by the “radically false theory of “superior” and “inferior races”,” but both authors also use the word “nationalism” to denominate the enemies of the revolution. The complexity of distinguishing Leninist admiration for colonial liberation movements from national sentiments and race theories that would count as “false consciousness” within Marxist theory shines through all phases of Haywood’s solo incursion into American communism. But even Haywood did not always know exactly when the denominations of race or nation were suitable, as he wrote more than once about “the real meaning of all national (racial) oppression”. However, the apparent interchangeableness of “race” and “nation” did not keep him from discrediting Huiswoud, an opponent of self-determination for the Black Belt, over hypertechnical definitions. 81 Haywood’s political agility to differentiate between the good and wrong forms of nationalism comes forward in his earlier appreciation of “Negro Culture” in an article that was published during the Sixth Congress. First, he criticizes the race pride of the black upper class and their longing for Africa and “Negroness”: “The feeling of togetherness among the Negroes of the US, which had its source in oppression and segregation, is the best ground for the development of an ideology which

80 Harry Haywood, “Against Bourgeois-Liberal Distortions of Leninism on the Negro Question in the United States”, The Communist August 1930, 694-712, in: Philip Foner and Herbert Shapiro, American Communism and Black Americans, a Documentary History, 1929-1934 (Philadelphia 1991)17-35. 81 Harry Haywood, “Against Bourgeois-Liberal Distortions of Leninism on the Negro Question in the United States”, The Communist August 1930, 694-712. 57 harmonizes with the interests of the petty bourgeoisie. Race loyalty and race pride are preached by every means, in press and church.” He criticizes the “Negro intellectuals” who “have to create an historic foundation” for their misleading narrative, “in which they incorporate the old African culture and the whole list of historical persons”, but is surprisingly positive about the Harlem Renaissance:

“In the cultural field, the Negro intellectuals are pushing into the foreground Negro art, Negro music, Negro literature, the products of which are not entirely differentiated from the culture of the ruling race; but they do bear the stamp of the distinctive conditions under which the Negro lives. Before long, elements of nationalistic ideology are at hand.” 82

Here, Haywood is eager to use the New Negro movement in proving his point that African- American nationalism is very real, but he is in general critical of black “bourgeois nationalism”. In a 1931 article entitled “The Crisis of the Jim-Crow Nationalism of the Negro Bourgeois”, he judges black moral leaders who encourage African-Americans to spend money only in black shops, as this strategy of “race solidarity” contributes to segregation, thus allowing the economic elites to divide the back and white proletariat. But in addition to Haywood’s ideological critique, we could understand his inconsistent anti-bourgeois struggle as a crusade against the urban arrogance of New York’s cultural elite. Since Haywood, born in Omaha and living in Chicago, argues for the importance of the rural question and a revolution in the South in most of his writings, his criticism of the New Negro implies a classic contradistinction between urban and rural economies. So of course he criticizes the black upper class dandies from New York who are so well-evoked in Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem and Amiable with Big Teeth: decadent, cosmopolitan bohemians who are more concerned with European socialism, black literary modernism and the hedonism of the Harlem nights, than with the proletarian revolution in the South. When we see how Haywood is so clearly against the urban Modernism of the Harlem Renaissance, but yet in a sense content with the artistic depiction of “the distinctive conditions under which the Negro lives” when it suits his political theory of self-determination, the schizophrenic quality of this particular New Negro is revealed.83 Since the zealot Haywood easily imitated the Soviets’ habit of claiming the exclusive right to universal truth, he was also inclined to discredit heretics. Next to the black and white “petty bourgeoisies” and “faker reformists”, he attacked other Communists like Huiswoud, who was forced to atone and justify his deviation from the Black Belt Thesis in Moscow in December 1931. In a mea culpa, he admitted his “error”, which was of “twofold character”. First, he had emphasized “race” instead of “nation” because of “the racial distinctions and social antagonisms” that characterize the

82 Harry Haywood, “The Negro Problem and the Tasks of the Communist Party of the United States”, Die Kommunistische Internationale, September 5, 1928, 2253-2262, in: Philip Foner and James S. Allen, American Communism and Black Americans, a Documentary History, 172-178. 83 Harry Haywood, “The Crisis of the Jim-Crow Nationalism of the Negro Bourgeoisie”, The Communist, April 1931, pp. 330-338. 58

American problem. Secondly, Huiswoud said to the Comintern, that he had failed to understand “that the agrarian problem is the very basis of the Negro national movement”, and that the “Negro peasantry” could only achieve equal rights through self-determination for the Black Belt. “My opposition to the slogan of Self-determination therefore, was based on my lack of understanding of the character of the oppression of the Negro masses in the south.”84 Huiswoud was blatantly lying here. He had argued multiple times that the American Party had to invest more time and energy to help the “Negro peasantry and to organize in the South.” He even tried to forge an alliance between the American Party and the Farmer-Labor movement at the Farmer-Labor Convention in 1924, where he spoke out so fiercely against a racist farmer from Texas that he was suspended from the Party for a year. Maria van Enckevort sees his “deviation from the Black Belt Thesis” as deliberate quarreling to force a departure from the American Party so he could work for the Negro bureau in Moscow, which he did. Although I believe that it was not necessary for Huiswoud to forge a fracas for a transfer, it is clear that he was shifting his career from the CPUSA to the international “Negro” liberation movement, if we consider his travels through the Caribbean and South Africa in the three years prior to his move to Moscow. But a more important indicator for Huiswoud’s priority shift from American Communism to the Comintern, is that his partner Hermina Dumont Huiswoud went along to Moscow in 1930. Joyce Moore Turner, who interviewed Hermie in the 1990s, suggests that the couple was already on their way to his job at the Negro Bureau in Moscow, when the “Eastern Department” suddenly opposed his appointment over his earlier flouting of the Comintern line. When they arrived in Moscow, it was arranged that Huiswoud had to admit his “mistake” first before he could go to work and Hermie could study at the Lenin School. A minor sacrifice for escaping the wearying world of the CPUSA for a position in Moscow he deemed of crucial importance for his aspirations to build a black international. If we think about the agency question again, a reprimand for not following the party line is, first and foremost, an example of Huiswoud’s limited power within the politically correct realm of Stalinist puritanism. But Huiswoud lying, confessing and atoning for his own aspirations and ideals of black internationalism also evokes the ability of individual protagonists to fool totalitarianism by maintaining the Soviet self-image of total control.85

The Third Period, Golden Age of the Black Belt Thesis?

In a little brochure called “the Communist position on the Negro question. Equal rights for Negroes. Self-determination for the Black Belt”, Party member Elizabeth Lawson emphasized the positive change on racial issues in the CPUSA in the foregoing years. “I myself can recall the furious battles

84 Maria van Enckevort, The Life and Work of Otto Huiswoud, 91. 85 Ibid. 59 conducted in 1924 on the question of whether or not it is Communist policy to raise special demands for Negro rights – a discussion that in the present, more highly-developed sage of our Party life, would be impossible and incredible.” Lawson could not celebrate this moment of highly-developed sages without a degrading comment about the repudiated heretics: “I recall also the struggle against the renegade Lovestoneites, who could not understand the Negro question in the United States as a national question, which must be solved by a struggle for equal rights and national liberation.”86 Philip Foner and Herbert Shapiro write that after the 1930 resolution, “the Communist party took up the question of black liberation with boldness, vigor, and skill.” There were around two hundred black Party members in March 1929, but “a year later, the CP launched a membership drive through which brought it nearly 6200 new members, including some 1300 blacks.” Indeed, after the formalization of the Black Belt Thesis, the party would transform into the CPUSA and display itself to the public as the real defender of African-American rights. The juridical defense of the Scottsborough boys was the Party’s best documented public relations campaign, as it received attention from the national and international press. Other examples are the defense of black striker Angelo Herndon and the Yokinen trial, where a Japanese-American member was expelled from the Party for expressing “white chauvinism”. There was also the antilynching campaigns and the organizing in black communities in the South, with the Alabama Sharecroppers Union as most impressive result. A look at the propagandist pamphlets spread by the CPUSA in the 1930s yields the insight that white workers who wanted to call themselves Communist definitively had to join the black liberation struggle as well. It mattered that the vice-presidential candidate was the black James W. Ford, and that Party leader wrote: “No one denies that white chauvinist errors were committed; but we do not see white comrades coming forward as the champions for their correction, as is your duty”. 87 Historians like Barbara Foley and Mark Solomon have been eager to call this development the legacy of the efforts of Harry Haywood and others at the Sixth Congress, with the slogan of the right to self-determination not so much a direct cause of this development, but rather a manifestation of the Communists’ perseverance: they were bringing the big guns in their fight against anti-black racism. It may be clear that the cause for self-determination cohered with the changing attitude of the Party, but there were, of course, also the historical circumstances of the financial

86 Lawson, E., Browder, E., Hathaway, C., & Haywood, H. The communist position on the negro question. Equal rights for negroes. Self-determination for the Black-Belt. [With an introd. by E. Lawson and contribs. of E. Browder, C.A. Hathaway, and H. Haywood]. [New York: Workers Library Publishers] 2 (year of publication is estimated somewhere between 1932 and 1934), Internationaal Instituut der Sociale Geschiedenis: Inventory Number: Bro Am 1160/30. 87 Philip Foner and Herbert Shapiro, American Communism (1991) xi-xxix. “Earl Browder, “For National Liberation”, The Communist 11 (April 1932), published in: Lawson, E., et al. The communist position on the negro question. 60 crash of 1929, which drew African-Americans to the Left. It must have helped that nervous Party members like Foster, Pepper, Bittelman and “useful idiot” Harry Haywood were eager to prove their good intentions to the Stalinizing Comintern.88 Another question: did the call for self-determination alter African-American national consciousness? Maxwell argues that we cannot understand Richard Wright without his appreciation for the Marxist theories on nationalism, referring to Bigger’s lawyer Max in Native Son, who speaks of the African-American oppression as one of such magnitude that it is a national oppression. However, the Black Belt Thesis disappeared in Party rhetoric in the period that attracted most African- Americans to communism, the Popular Front. Thereafter, it appeared a few times in little pamphlets or in the theories of armchair intellectuals, but according to Solomon this was just an echo of Third Period radicalism. Moreover, did African-Americans in the 1930s really need a strange Marxist doctrine to form a group or national or race consciousness? Were they not already bound by a history of extreme exploitation and the hardships of the Depression, expressed in the cultures of the New Negro Renaissance and the Cultural Front? Above all, we have also seen that McKay and Huiswoud’s generation was not only one of race consciousness but also of the radical consciousness of a modern and Modernist time. There was a reason they were called the generation of the New Negro. Furthermore, in picturing this apparent African-American nationalism, it is worth noting that there was a huge gap between common workers and communists in Northern cities and in the Southern countryside, and between the party leaders and theoreticians. James S. Allen was one of the most tenacious supporters of the Black Belt Thesis and wrote a few scholarly works and pamphlets to justify the theory of self-determination in the 1930s, among which a bookwork that counted no less than two hundred and forty two pages. Eventually, Allen, too, dropped the idea when the whole CPUSA removed the Black Belt Thesis of the agenda in 1958. In his memoir, Organizing in the Depression South, he describes how he was confronted with the immense discrepancy between the Marxist theories that were so dear to him and the harsh reality of the lives of African-American farmers during the Depression: 89

“Strange as it may seem, the Party placed little emphasis in its agitation of the goal of Black self-determination. It may have been explained as an ultimate program at educational sessions of the of the Party units, or at training classes held from time to time. During a trip to the South Carolina Black Belt, I did describe to a small gathering of sharecroppers the

88 Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 68-91. Barbara Foley, “Reviewed works: Race and Revolution by Max Shachtman and Christopher Phelps”, Science & Society, 70-3 (Jul., 2006), 418-421. 89James S. Allen, Negro liberation. The American negroes as an oppressed nation; the struggle for equal rights and the right of self-determination ([3rd rev. ed.].). [New York: Union Labor] 1935. IISG-Bro Am 1160/70. Ibid., The Negro Question in the United States (1936). ISSG-US 190/3. 61

extent of the area of Black majority in the South, and the objective of full self-government there. Those present knew that Blacks were in the majority not only in their own area but also toward the south into Georgia. But few realized that the Black Belt stretched from Virginia southward well into Georgia, across the southern tier of states as far as Texas and into Arkansas. But self-determination evoked hardly any response there. The croppers were most concerned with how they were going to get through the winter. I can only conjecture that they probably felt Black self-government was utopian and, in any case, far off. It is noteworthy that not a word was said about self-determination in the credo of the Southern Worker. Three articles on that question by Tom Johnson did appear in the paper, and it was mentioned in the occasional literature of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights. Otherwise practically no mention was made of the slogan. Obviously, this was not then considered a suitable agitational theme in the daily work of the Party, at least in the South.”90

Apparently, the Southern organizers received so little response to the Black Belt Thesis that even their propaganda was written strategically to convey little enthusiasm for the idea. Mark Solomon has found a similar example of this discrepancy in a speech from organizer Al Murphy about the Sharecroppers Union in Alabama. Murphy admitted that “the Negro masses in the Black Belt do not know what the right of self-determination means” but blamed the Party for being unclear about the concept. According to Solomon, Murphy “was convinced that the land hunger of the rural black population would ultimately turn them toward the Party and toward a conscious embrace of self- determination.” Despite the obvious non-understanding of the Black Belt Thesis by its alleged future citizens, Murphy was convinced the spiritual awakening of the workers would come soon. 91 The perception of Communist theory as indisputable and the almost religious and at times narcissistic idea that the course of history will follow the theories that are proclaimed as truthful, characterizes Communist scientists like Harry Haywood and Al Murphy. One will not be surprised to read that Haywood, and some others, supported self-determination for the Black Belt right up to his death in 1985. Party leader Earl Browder also showed his subjugation to the theory in the previously mentioned article in which he admitted former mistakes of “white chauvinism”: “we have shown that our program is correct, and that we are beginning to find the form and methods of work, whereby it can be brought into life among the masses.” The relatively little success made on the front of African-American liberation in the 1920s was not due to “the lack of sincerity, determination, energy, in carrying on our work” but to “the unclarity of our program” and “the lack of Leninist theoretical approach.” All the idiosyncratic and overly technical debates which we have seen in this chapter had caused so much sectarianism because of incorrect applications of “Bolshevik theory”. On this subject, Browder states, “we fell into errors in the nature of bourgeois liberalism, and of social- democratic approach to the Negro masses, (..) with the attitude of bourgeois-liberal

90 James S. Allen, Organizing in the Depression South : A Communist's Memoir. (Minneapolis 2001). IISG 2002/947. 51-52 (My italics). 91 Quoted in: Solomon, The Cry Was Unity, 292 62 humanitarianism, unrelated to the consideration of the Negro masses as an oppressed nation.” Browder expresses his gratitude to the Comintern for providing the right Leninist material, and says once more that the division among Party students, “with the main line of division being whites versus Negroes”, caused by “bourgeois ideas” “could take effect because our students have been insufficiently armed with Bolshevik theory.” In a political environment where a swamp of theories had disillusioned and led to the purging of many Party members, more theory was the answer for Browder. Reality would adjust itself to the theories that the puppets of totalitarianism had deemed worthy.92 However, the bandwagon of the Black Belt Thesis turned out to be unwanted after all. In 1943, also Earl Browder abandoned the Thesis, declaring that African-Americans had executed self- determination by rejecting it. When he was expelled in 1946, self-determination was put back on the CPUSA agenda, but in 1958 the Party revised its dogma and got the slogan off its program. Of course, this was to the fury of Harry Haywood, who left the Party for another communist branch with Maoist sympathies because, according to him, the CPUSA had deviated from true Marxist-Leninism.

An Endnote on Some Other Expelled Heretics: the Trotskyist Branch

Historians in the camp of Barbara Foley, Mark Solomon and Susan Campbell have argued that the Black Belt Thesis deserves some respect and credit for its good work, as there was a clear watershed in African-American Communist activity and the CPUSA’s role as defender of interracial equality before and after the 1930 resolution. Foley has actually expressed some annoyance over the ironic tone of Christopher Phelps’s introduction to a Trotskyist pamphlet by Max Schachtman. The pamphlet was never published for unclear reasons, but nevertheless contains a few interesting arguments in its hundred and two pages. First of all, Schachtman disagreed with Haywood’s theory that the rural South was still a semi-feudal area that had to go through the historical stage of industrialization and rising workers consciousness first. Nay, the "bourgeois-democratic" revolution in America was fulfilled with the victory of Northern capital at the end of the Civil War. The proletarian revolution was at hand and an alliance with the white working class was the only way to achieve black freedom. Secondly, Schachtman argued that the revolutionary consciousness was deeply rooted in the African-American mind, due to the history of slave revolts. In this he anticipated Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction (1935) and Herbert Aptheker’s American Negro Slave Revolts (1943) by interpreting slave revolts as class struggle.93 But most of all, Schachtman describes how the Black Belt Thesis must be seen in line with

92 Earl Browder, “For National Liberation of the Negroes!” The Communist (April 1932). 93 Barbara Foley, “Reviewed works: Race and Revolution” (2006). Max Schachtman, Race and Revolution (1933, unpublished), ed. Christopher Phelps (London 2003) liv. 63

Stalin’s seizing of power in the Soviet Union and his expulsion from Rightists Bukharin and Lovestone, which followed the banishment of Schachtman’s political hero, Leon Trotsky. Although the pamphlet was never published, Phelps considers it highly plausible that Trotsky and C.L.R. James had read and absorbed it, as he sees a lot of the argumentation on the specifics of the American “Negro Question” coming back in their 1939 conversation in Mexico. James perceived self-determination for the Black Belt as an undesirable endeavor, but Trotsky was interestingly enough less negative: “I do not propose for the party to advocate, I do not propose to inject, but only to proclaim our obligation to support the struggle for self-determination if the Negroes themselves want it.” James had his doubts, and would later describe the course of the CPUSA in the Third Period as “a line of social-fascism. (..) They called Roosevelt and the New Dealers the worst enemies of the working class and the initiators of fascism in this country. They foamed at the mouth whenever they mentioned the NAACP and other petty-bourgeois Negro organizations.” 94 Barbara Foley suggests that Phelps copies Schachtman’s critical tone about the Third International, showing her understandable bias of a historian who attributes agency to the protagonists with whom he or she has been involved. Foley argues that Phelps lacks a strong foundation for his perhaps subliminal preference for “the Trotskyist” articulations of black nationalism. She and criticizes his conclusion that Communist antiracist collaboration “occurred in spite of, rather than because of, the larger aims and strategies of the Third International.” Does he not know how much the Black Belt Thesis meant for black people in the 1930s? That they dared to express their hopes and dreams of a better future due to the efforts of the CPUSA? Would the Left have realized anything without the radicalism of the Communist wing? She decides: “Others may seek more substantive answers, in a realm beyond irony.”95 Foley is right. It would be superfluous to state that the Black Belt Thesis was just a ridiculous, dogmatic and pathetically utopian policy that was forced upon the CPUSA by the ruthless and blind Soviet dictatorship. But historiography should not avoid ironizing the pieties of Communists because of the Left’s credible job in the emancipation struggles. Phelps reflects on James S. Allen’s anecdote about the lackluster attitude of the Party on self-determination in the South and the even more unenthusiastic response by black farmers, which illustrates “that the “self-determination” policy’s main positive effect was to encourage bold interracial organizing, not agitation for a Black Belt state. Neither Comintern fantasies of iron discipline nor Trotskyist emphasis on programmatic correctness

94 Barbara Foley, “Reviewed works: Race and Revolution”. Max Schachtman, Race and Revolution. C.L.R. James, “The Communist Party’s Zigzags on Negro Policy (1939)” in: C.L.R. James on the Negro Question, ed. By Scott McLemee (Jackson, Mississippi, 1996), 116. Leon Trotsky, “Leon Trotsky On Black Nationalism Documents on the Negro Struggle”, ed. By George Breitman, accessed at #https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1940/negro1.htm#prinkipo on 10-06-2018. 95 Foley, “Reviewed works: Race and Revolution”. 64 leaves much room for appreciating such ironies.”96 Irony is the enemy of any passionate idealist. But if any “useful past”-lessons must be learned from this chapter, it is that irony and an attitude of relativizing self-reflection should be preferred over exclusive and absolute claims to truth. The polemical maze on the question of African-American self-determination, at times so contradictorily absurd, with its actors switching position all over the spectrum and flexibly moving with the political tide, is characterized by dogma, self-righteousness and a thirst for purging a small circle of theoreticians of “bourgeois tendencies”. Despite the agency of individuals to lie, change or ignore, the theoretical debates over the Black Belt Thesis were held in a political climate in which free speech was narrowed and dissident voices were discouraged from speaking. Disobedient citizens were robbed of their autonomy because they had the label “bourgeois-nationalism” applied to them, with self-censorship like Huiswoud’s lie and atonement as a result. Besides the dogmatic treatment of the Black Belt Thesis and its career as a “factional football”, it was also an oversimplification of a complex diasporic identity. To quote Paul Gilroy, the “consciousness of diasporic affiliation stands opposed to the distinctive modern structures and modes of power orchestrated by the institutional complexities of the nation-state”. The ethnic nation states that fitted Stalin’s theories bordered the “blood and soil”-ideology of Germany’s national- socialism. But diasporic identities transcend national borders, as they are not bound to territories but created through a history of dislocation. Why found a distinct black state when the modern Afro- diasporic identity was not forged on soil but on ships? 97 If the incongruency of ethnic nationalism and fluid, modern and diasporic identities is still incomprehensible, try to imagine for a second how all these theories would have been exercised if an American revolution had materialized with Soviet support. Would Stalin and Browder have dislocated all African-Americans to the South, as was the aim with the Jews in Birobidzhan? Or if they rebelled, deported them like the Chechens? Would the Native Americans get their own nation? Would the Amish have been sent to Germany?

96 Max Schachtman, Race and Revolution (1933, unpublished), ed. Christopher Phelps. The James S. Allen anecdote Phelps quotes is the same as on page 59/60. 97 Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Harvard 2000) 123-124. 65

Chapter Three

Popular Front Promiscuity

A Reading of Amiable With Big Teeth

“Rosie O’Donnell could walk into any bar in Harlem tonight and get herself a black man. And she doesn’t even like men. (..) But there ain’t no bunch of black woman out there who wanna fuck George from Seinfeld. If you see a black woman with an overweight white man, that means her credit is fucked up.” -Chris Rock, Kill The Messenger (2008)

“The only ones we hate more than the Romans, are the Judean People’s Front.” -Reg, leader of The People’s Front of Judea. Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)

As “the Jazz Age” was over with the collapse of credit, so were the Harlem Renaissance and the financial resources of white patronages that provided black artists with monetary income. Langston Hughes reflected in his first autobiography: “We were no longer in vogue, anyway, we Negroes… Colored actors began to go hungry, publishers politely rejected new manuscripts, and patrons found other uses for their money (..) The generous 1920’s [sic] were over.” However, black artistry was not at all over in the 1930s. Some writers were attracted to funded programs like The Federal Writers Project and “as the Depression strangled the nation, the politics of at least some writers shifted demonstrably to the left, with the various publications and organizations founded or dominated by members of the Communist Party USA, influencing the content and direction of African-American art.” 98 The leftist shift towards social realism, with Richard Wright as its foremost champion, coincides with the Communist transition from the Third Period to the Popular Front, opening the Communist mind for other leftist groups. We have seen the Third Period radicalism that reigned the CPUSA, causing both its positive interracial work and its intolerance of dissidence. But due to the rise of Hitler, the Comintern promoted the opposite strategy in 1934: to extend a hand to socialists and social-democrats until the threat was extinguished. Simultaneously, due to rising growth under the Depression, the CPUSA was encircled not only by more Communists but also by communists with a small c. Non-party members would call themselves a communist in the same idealist sense of people today who would call themselves a feminist, antiracist, liberal or, maybe, patriot or conservative. Naturally, not everybody was fond of (what they felt to be) the diminishing

98 Langston Hughes, The Big Sea [1940] (New York 1986), 316. Darryl Dickson-Carr, “African American literature and the Great Depression” in: Graham, M., & Ward, Jr, J. (Eds.) The Cambridge History of African American Literature, (Cambridge 2011) 288-310. 66 authenticity of the “Communist” character of the Party. Several non-Party members and even a few black religious figures were involved when there was a Harlem march for the defense of the Scottsborough boys in 1933. Of course, Harry Haywood was furious that these “faker reformists” were invited. Was the CPUSA still Communist if it allowed all those “reformists”, or just the utter left- wing of Roosevelt’s New Deal liberalism? Despite these criticisms, this broader coalition between artists, workers, and black religious or non-communist leaders as the NAACP, is emblematic of both Communism and communism in the Popular Front. The CPUSA had received the order to attract more members from Harlem and to get more in touch with the community, resulting in a larger circle of black cultural figures. Mark Naison writes:

“For many prominent blacks, particularly the entertainers, the relationship with the left was not marked by towering political passions. The Popular Front Party carefully avoided pushing its black sympathizers beyond their limits and allowed black intellectuals in its ranks considerable freedom to maintain bohemian lifestyles or participate in the spirited social world of Harlem’s middle class. “Many people didn’t take the political stuff too seriously,” Louise Thompson admitted. “It was fashionable at the time and we enjoyed it.””99

Interestingly enough, the changing proletarian character in art also yielded more cynical and satirical perspectives in (African-)American literature. Dickson-Carr writes that several authors who wrote during the 1930s, “the salad days of the New Negro Renaissance”, mostly satirized “the state of African-American leadership; the successes and failures of the New Negro Movement; black intraracial discrimination along color and class lines; white racism; black nationalism; white patronage and its effect upon black cultural movements and ideas.” Dickson-Carr names writers as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman and , but also George Schuyler and his major work Black No More (1931). This novel describes the moral panic that erupts when a particular machine called Black No More can physically transform African-Americans into white people. Both the racist groups of white nationalists and the Harlem elites who persuade moral authority in the black community feel threatened by this machine, as the existence of both “race leaders” groups would become redundant with the disappearance of the color line.100 McKay’s recently discovered Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel Describing the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem must be added to the list of satires of black authorities. McKay, who had turned his back on the Soviet Union already in his 1937 autobiography , further developed his criticisms of Communism in his journalistic work and especially

99 Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression, (Urbana 1983) 218. 100 George Schuyler, Black No More (New York 1931). 67 in his quasi-sociological study Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1940). In Amiable With Big Teeth, he satirized the Harlem he had so thoroughly researched in the foregoing years. He ridicules the sectarianism of the figures of influence--black, white, Stalinist, Trotskyist--who thoroughly hate each other over differences so small that outsiders are not able to distinguish them. The developments in international politics functioned as a hinge in this and McKay skillfully evoked the complications of black allegiances during the Popular Front. “The tides of Italy’s war in Ethiopia had swept up out of Africa and across the Atlantic to beat against the shores of America and strangely to agitate the unheroic existence of Aframericans”, McKay writes. For many black communists, the invasion of the Abyssinian Empire in 1935 made it hard to digest that the Soviet Union traded war goods with Mussolini. For others, the slightest feeling of doubt to “the line” was treason to Stalin. Were you loyal to your race or to the proclaimed international struggle for equality and salvation led by the Soviet Union? Was the CPUSA still the party where African-Americans could find shelter, or did they misuse the black struggle for their own cause of promoting the Soviet Union as defender of all oppressed peoples of the world? Were Communists actually wolves in sheep’s clothing? These were questions that bothered every African-American communist during the period of the Popular Front. We can find McKay’s answers to them in the title of his posthumously published novel.101 A second aspect that is interesting for my argument about the sexual component of the New Negro generation is that McKay constructed a few interracial romances in the book, based on the high prevalence of interracial relationships within the CPUSA in real life. Jazz trumpetist Dizzy Gillespie noted in his memoirs: “White-black relationships were very close among the communists…. I thought it was pretty funny myself, being from the South. I found it strange that every couple almost, was a mixed couple one way or the other. That was the age of unity.” We will see how this “intimate equality” was becoming part of the mores of a new cultural vanguard and a new definition of “bourgeois”. I draw heavily on Pamela Caughie’s argument that the New Negro writers, although born and nurtured in socialism, were responsible for “the making” of a new black bourgeoisie. This “making” was not fulfilled through a certain distribution of capital, but by the development and distinguishing of taste, fashion and values, in which the latter includes an embrace of interracial sex. By putting McKay’s newly discovered novel in the context of these sexual relations, I will argue that exogamy was part of the radical consciousness of this modern time. 102 Yet many limits of the radical newness of interracial love became visible, as many old, racist,

101 Claude McKay, Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel Describing the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem, eds. Jean Christophe Cloutier and , written in 1941 but published by Penguin, New York 2016, 27. Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York 1940). 102 Dizzy Gillespie, To Be, or Not . . . to Bop: Memoirs (1979). Quoted in: Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, 124. Pamela L. Caughie, ““The best people”: The Making of the Black Bourgeoisie in Writings of the Negro Renaissance” in: Modernism/modernity 20-3 (September 2013) 519-537. 68 violent monsters reared their heads when blacks and whites slept together. But even among the well-meaning Communists, the explorations of black-white romance were characterized by awkwardness. We see this in the inescapability of the race and gender roles which are rooted in a history of rape and slavery, but also when hypogamy took the form, perhaps unwanted, of a coquettish showing-off. Could “marrying down” be progressive, but sometimes also self- congratulatory? After a reading of the novel against the sexual politics of interracial solidarity, we will bring McKay’s observations about women in the CPUSA, observations that are rich but controversial, in dialogue with the Communist activities of Hermina Huiswoud Dumont.

You’re Bourgeois Yourself

Amiable with Big Teeth is truly a rough diamond. As Brent Hayes Edwards and Jean-Christophe Cloutier point out in their foreword, it could have used some streamlining here and there, but the minor faults give the reader a peak into the working process of the author. For example, not all the protagonists’ story lines have a clear ending and some scenes have illogical causal transitions that lack clear elaboration. But the apparent difficulty to distinguish a single story line is also due to McKay’s multiperspective structure. The novel does not have one chief protagonist, but rather covers a mosaic of black figures with different personal and political endeavors in Harlem who all move around two typical Popular Front charity organizations; the black “Hands to Ethiopia” and the “White Friends of Ethiopia”. In Maxim Tasan, the mysterious leader of the latter organization, we can find a main antagonist. Tasan is the personification of the book’s title: a fraudulent Communist who compels African-Americans to support the Soviet cause but for the benefit of his own agenda. A wolf in sheep’s clothes who seems amiable but actually has nothing to offer the African-American community. The exact reason that Aimable was not published in 1941 is unclear. It was only revealed to the world in 2016, seven years after Jean-Christophe Cloutier found the manuscript in the archives. For us, there is an intriguing satire of Harlem in 1935, mocking the many black and white organizations in New York that claimed to pursue the rightful path to universal justice. The story starts off with a spectacular parade that is based on the 1935 visit of Lij Tasfaye Zaphiro, an Ethiopian representative who went to Harlem to raise international banners against the Italian invasion. His main goal was to gain funds to finance the Ethiopian soldiery, resulting in the founding of the United Aid For Ethiopia organization. McKay’s fictionalized account depicts a parade in honor of a self-proclaimed representative of Ethiopian Emperor Hail Selassie named “Lij Tekla Alamaya”, who end turns out to be a fraud in the end. The warm sentiments Harlemites harbor for the Lij are expressed through “the tri-color green-yellow-red of Ethiopia blazoned from many windows.” The crowd gathers around the marchers guiding three cars, with “the first two cars” carrying “the notables of Harlem” and the third “the Ethiopian envoy. “The people applauded,

69 clapping, whistling and shouting “God Save Ethiopia!”.” Harlem’s international outlook is evoked in a way not only Soviet internationalists are intrigued by the Lij’s visit but also its common residents. The different intellectual and political sections that make the book such an intriguing mess are immediately present in this first scene. All three cars are on their way to a gathering in a church where the Lij is welcomed. A divergent lot of organizations that are part of the Harlem Reception Committee are present and among the speakers are “another outstanding preacher, a prominent doctor, a high official of a popular fraternal order, a leader of the Back-to-Africa movement, a university professor, a woman representing the Colored Women’s Club and a representative of the White Friends of Ethiopia.” Also Professor Koazhy, an intellectual dressed in a Garvey-esque military uniform, delivers a speech that is received with more enthusiasm by the crowd than the words of the Ethiopian visitor, to the annoyance of Pablo Peixota, the president of the Hands to Ethiopia charity. For Peixota, a strategic use of the Ethiopian delegate’s presence can make or break the success of his organization’s mission to help the defense of Ethiopian. The next day, he is even more frustrated when the papers run a picture of Koazhy with their article on the Lij’s visit. Why did the Lij not wear a uniform, as he had advised? The internal struggles and shifting loyalties of Peixota and his organization is one of the main themes of the book. Peixota is an Afro-Brazilian man with much moral authority in the African- American community, despite the fact that he made his fortune by doing shady real estate business in Harlem. His Hands to Ethiopia is exclusively for black people and Peixota cares more about what the Communists can do for his “race” than the other way around. Although his relationship with Maxim Tasan is not hostile, he does reject the moralistic accusations of unreasonable black chauvinism. When the members of the Hands’ Executive Committee gather together at Peixota’s house, they agree to respect “the overwhelming sentiment” for separated organizations and “that Alamaya was the most suitable person to act as go-between in connection with their work and that of the White Friends of Ethiopia”. Newton Castle, one of the younger communists, argues that if black organizations deny white people, “it will give the whites the justification for maintaining barriers against Aframericans and keeping them out of their private clubs and public places.” When Peixota argues that blacks will be excluded anyway and that he does not want the whites “from the lowest vilest sediment of society” in his organization, “[t]he more cultured members of the committees laugh (..) at his bluntness, thinking of his former connection with the plebeian racket”. But he defends furiously what has been achieved by a black particularistic strategy: “We have colored churches, colored fraternal orders, clubs, newspapers, and other enterprises”. He continues his critique on the arrogance of the hipster communists, “the social tea-hounds who appear to know everything but what life is all about, they tell us what we should admit any white person who wants to join in every colored organization, otherwise we are chauvinists, segregationists and isolationists.”

70

As a successful, self-made and somewhat older man, Peixota expresses his annoyance with the younger generation of bohemian communists and their high-hatted idealism: “Your fathers and mothers didn’t learn to organize their benevolent and protective societies from drinking cocktails with bohemian white folks. They learned it cleaning the white man’s W.C. and over the washtub in the kitchen.”103 The intergenerational divides of the interbellum also become complicated in this scene, reminding us that generational histories and definitions are always too abstract. Although Peixota’s age is unknown, his position and full-grown daughter suggest that he is between forty-five and sixty years old, and thus just a little older than the New Negro generation of say, 1885-1905. As a quite modern man who was not born on American soil Peixota cannot be classified as a “typical Old Negro” either, but he is nevertheless the older black man who imparts moralistic messages to youths who embody all the characteristics of the New Negro: bohemianism, socialism and interracialism. More important, Peixota defends his generation’s approval of black particularism, telling the youths that their modern ideals of working with whites squanders the efforts of their parents: “And they learned their lesson hard enough to use it to give you an education. Yes, you who are using that education now to destroy the things which your parents worked so hard to build.” McKay here reflects on the divergent ways the New Negro has matured and shows us the tragic motto of this generation: The anti-segregationist enlightenment of the New Negro (or, in 1935 already Newer Negro?) required a betrayal of their parents, whose tribalistic survival strategy in a white supremacist society had made their own elevation possible.104 However, there are different representations of the black bourgeoisie involved here. Peixota’s relative wealth combined with a rejection of the Soviet Union and his black particularism make him an ardent representative of what black socialists called the black bourgeoisie. Interestingly enough, Peixota depicts the younger generation as upper-class in contrast with their working-class parents, while the young ones share the socialist values of the New Negro generation. So has the New Negro become the black bourgeoisie here, as part of the cultural elite? Are they actually the Talented Tenth in socialist disguise? In “The Making of the Black Bourgeoisie in Writings of the Negro Renaissance”, Pamela Caughie has deliberated on how the writings of the Negro Renaissance, including socialist magazines as the Messenger, had made a black intelligentsia that was not necessarily defined by capital but by an embrace of “a class-based vision of racial amalgamation (..) in favor of the notion of a black aesthetic.” Shortly, the black “bourgeois” is constituted, made and defined by the writers of the Negro Renaissance just as they “made” the workers: “If in 1903 W.E.B. Du Bois could say the Negro people had “no well defined social classes,” by the 1920s, writers of all

103 Claude McKay, Amiable With Big Teeth, 30-31. 104 Ibid. 71 kinds were following his implicit program in crafting such social distinctions”.105 Another important element here is that the forces of the Enlightenment project, the aspiration towards the fulfillment of liberal democracy, have created an endeavor towards equality in which strict class or caste boundaries are rejected. Caughie elaborates how, in the making of a class, Bourdieu’s concept of a social space is more useful than speaking of class, where the latter involves “the act of classification itself” and the former focuses on the “characteristic traits of distinct social groups”. The nuances of a social space “attend to relationships rather than substances, proximity rather than similarity”, and focus on “principles of differentiation”. The created social distinctions function due to the developments of these different principles or tastes, “for food and fashion, literature and décor, manners and morals”. The preference of space as a social monitor in which individuals can adjust to the rules, tastes and values, above an essentialist determination of race, class or caste, paves the way for the myth of meritocracy. Coherently, Caughie argues that the Negro Renaissance created a new black class that was perceived as “the best”, writers and social activists who were preoccupied with grand questions like the uplifting of the race and the rise of the proletariat. In this, with the denomination of those who needed salvation, the writers moved themselves into the position of the elite, the vanguard or the Talented Tenth, who would arrange this revolution or black uplift. The culture of such groups and their mores, clothes and tastes is where Caughie finds her ultimate occasion to quote Pierre Bourdieu: “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.”106 Throughout the novel we see that the principles of the “intelligentsia” contain cultural refinement, (sometimes Russian) dancing, participating in dialogues about the Modernist black esthetic, and also include a social code of a civilized interracialism. McKay contrasts “the more cultured members” and Castle’s interracial plea, with Peixota’s black particularism, and especially with “his bluntness” about the white working class. By depicting Peixota and Castle as representations of the “bourgeois”, McKay plays with the arguments that the radical socialist New Negro and Alain Locke’s poetical New Negro are both culpable in the making of a black bourgeoisie. In this “making”, Caughie attributed importance to “symbolic power, the power to name and thereby to bestow aesthetic and moral value on a people, the power wielded by writers and critics in the Negro Renaissance”. This connects to the protagonists in Amiable With Big Teeth, who are no workers but well-dressed writers, editors, and activists from New York. McKay suggests that this is what the New Negro has become: A never-ending quarrel between dogmatic Lefties and upper class dandies for whom idealism is mostly a social convention of the cultural vanguard. In Addition to McKay’s portrayals of the divergent maturing of the New Negro generation, he

105 Pamela L. Caughie, ““The best people”, 522-523. 106 Ibid., 524-525. 72 shows how leftist sectarianism, black particularism and institutional racism have distorted the loyalties of his already confused protagonists. The absurdity of these loyalties are portrayed with striking humor. First, there is the struggle over moral authority between the “Hands” and Peixota’s rivals -the White Friends of Ethiopia group- who contain, to the amusement of the reader, also a token black member. But even within Peixota’s group there is no unity, illustrated by the dispute between Soviet-loyalist Newton Castle and the Trotskyist Dorsey Flagg. In a telling scene, Castle suggests that Flagg be taken off the committee, to which Peixota replies that he is already elected and that he does not want to start a useless quarrel. Castle warns him that he is “a Trotskyite Fascist, (..) an anti-Soviet mad dog and Nazi sympathizer. A man like that should never serve with a Help Ethiopia group.” Lij Alamaya declares it to be impossible for Flagg to be a fascist, but Castle is insistant: “He is anti-Soviet and every enemy of the Soviet is a friend of Mussolini and Hitler.” Peixota is furious about this conflict, especially because it distracts from the common cause: “Goddamit! I won’t listen to that,” said Peixota. “What’s Russia got to do with us and Ethiopia? (..) We’re fighting Fascist Italy in Ethiopia and Dorsey Flagg is one of us. We don’t want any Soviets in our organization.” However, Castle has genuinely? put his faith in the Soviet Union: “We won’t get anyplace without the Soviets, I’ll tell you (..) They are the only ones who understand colored people’s problems and take us seriously like other human beings.”107 As a Trotskyist, Dorsey Flagg only believes in the concept of “world revolution” and therefore opposes the Popular Front strategy. Flagg and Castle call each other fascists throughout the whole book, driving Peixota crazy in doing so. In any case, their differences are negligible for outsiders, McKay jokes in a scene depicting a fancy art gathering where “Harlem was worthily represented by its professional and intellectual groups”, including the familiar Popular Front figures. However, “[t]he anti-Popular Front Dorsey Flagg was invited by a mistake; the girl who forwarded the invitation to the chairman of the Hands to Ethiopia had confused that organization with the Friends of Ethiopia.” The quarreling over small differences between groups who share a clear common enemy evokes a sense of the absurd, which is augmented when Newton Castle joins the White Friends of Ethiopia.108 Eventually Peixota’s suspicions of white Communists turn out to be legitimate, which illustrates the thin layer of white solidarity for black uplift. Maxim Tasan tries to discredit Lij Alamaya’s campaign when the Ethiopian hinders the interests of the Comintern. He reveals him as an imposter by stealing the? Lij’s only possession that provides him legitimacy: a letter proving/attesting Hail Selassie’s approval of Alamaya. After a short correspondence with Ethiopia, the Abyssinian government denies any involvement or knowledge of an official representative in New York. It turns

107 Claude McKay, Amiable With Big Teeth, 33. 108 Ibid., 224. 73 out that Alamaya is not a Lij, but an Ethiopian student who has been trained by the Comintern in Paris. He has lost his faith in the Soviet Union whilst in Harlem. The series of media attacks on his person that are fostered by Tasan succeeded: the Hands of Ethiopia falls apart. Thus, the Hands of Ethiopia is destroyed by the “White Friends”, although they commenced their struggle in relatively good harmony. When the erupts, the White Friends of Ethiopia is “rechristened the Friends of Ethiopia-and-”, and new slogans are adopted for the new political trend: “Fight for Spain to Free Ethiopia”; A Fascist Spain Will Help Perpetuate a Fascist Ethiopia…”. McKay ridicules the narcissism of the White Friends of Ethiopia, who have ruined the campaign for Ethiopia in their desperation attempt to be seen as the only saviors of all Africans and now Spain, too.

Awkward Romance

Besides the shifting loyalties between generations, race or Party, Stalin or Trotsky, anti- imperialism or anti-fascism, McKay added an elegant touch of romance to his novel, which is in dialogue with the interracial relationships within the CPUSA. With a growing dedication to the new mores of antiracism, communism reached into the personal and intimate sphere, which yielded interesting questions about the frictions between the political and the personal. Was an interracial love affair among the social distinctions that “made” New York’s cultural elite? Was it “in” to have a partner with a different skin color? It seems not illogical, because how can a communist better prove his sincere solidarity with the other race, than with an exogamic romance? In “Intermarriage and the Social Structure: Fact and Theory”, sociologist Robert K. Merton explores the different categories of interracial romance with the intersection of class. An upper class marriage between a black man and a white woman, “would be expected to occur among “emancipated” persons, so-called radicals, who repudiate legitimacy of caste distinctions.” We might jump immediately to cynicism and call such an “emancipated”relationship vain and coquettish, but a cultural vanguard that promulgates creolization is a true moment of interracial progress. The resistance to this “intimate equality” brought to the surface the questionto what extent a long history of gendered caste making could be escaped”. Among the restrictions imposed, we count the mutual disapproval of black and white communities and, more interesting, an aspect of gendered imbalance in black-white relationships. Merton saw in 1941 how “the most striking uniformity in the statistics of Negro-white intermarriage is the non-institutional pattern of caste hypogamy, i.e, marriage between white females and Negro males. In our samples, such pairings are from three to ten times as frequent as the Negro female- white male combination.”109 It is easy to see the twofold rebellion in the relationships between black men and white

109 Robert K. Merton, “Intermarriage and the Social Structure: Fact and Theory” (1941), in: Werner Sollors, Interracialism, Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (Oxford, 2000), 473-492. 74 women, which is directed against both the hypersexualization of the black man and the sanctity of white womanhood. Yet, this taboo is also where the sexual tension originates, as two forbidden fruits are picked at once. In addition, there can also be found a tendency of hypersexualization in the very dimension of class, if we look again at Merton’s categories of interracial relations: “It is consistent with our interpretation that the upper class white woman”, when married to a lower class black male, “believed that her Negro husband is ‘the only man who could satisfy her sexually.’” Both Claude McKay and Mark Naison studied an interesting conflict over the relationships between black and white Party members. McKay noted that “the Negro men among the Communists appear romantic and confused. But the Negro women, who are not the artistic, bohemian type, are different.” The following had happened within the CPUSA: Many black women expressed discontent over the fact that many black leaders, among them “James Ford, Theodore Bassett, Abner Berry, and William Fitzgerald”, were married to white women, “while the reverse relationship rarely occurred.” Naison has deduced from interviews with old Communists, that “at Party dances and social affairs, black men would often ask white women to dance, leaving black women without partners because few white men were willing to dance with them, in part because of ingrained prejudice, in part because they felt too inadequate as dancers to play the approved male role of initiating contact.” Black female member Grace Campbell complained that the Communist Party turned into a space where black men sold out, resulting even in a request to Stalin to forbid such relationships. The most bitter remarks, not only from black women but also from racist whites, stated even that Communists compelled black men to join the Party with the temptation of white female companionship as “bait”, an argument that floated on the stereotype of communism as com-mune-ism. Nevertheless, there was also a broad consensus among Communists that there should be no Party intervention in such personal matters and that every individual was entitled to the freedom of choosing his or her own partner. Of course, the controversy and assumed hipness about black-white relationships does not mean that sincere love and tenderness could not be real between these individuals. 110 Despite the unsuccessful attempt to involve Stalin in the question, black women’s criticism was taken seriously. Naison writes that some of the younger black men jokingly “called a ‘movement back to the race,’ breaking off relationships with white wives and girlfriends” to find black female partners and make them feel more included. Risibly enough, also “party organizers made a concerted effort to teach white male Communists in Harlem to dance, so that they would not be ashamed to ask black women to dance at Party social affairs”. The visual of white Communists receiving dancing lessons to improve their ability to charm black women makes one chuckle, but also raises probing questions about the racial dimensions of gender and sexuality. Is there an American subliminal

110 Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem (1986), 136-137. 75 association with rape and slavery that blocked the desire between black women and white men? Or, as the dancing scene suggests, did the men perceive themselves as inadequately masculine, especially compared to the usual black partners of the women? The subject invites humor, as these are very generalizing questions that can only be answered with unease. The Chris Rock quote at the beginning of this chapter was received with great laughter by the mixed audience, but also with a little booing here and there, as it pokes into an uncomfortable discrepancy between ideal and reality and the inconvenient truth of romantic preferences. Dating racism does not jive with New York’s enlightened universalism in which race does not matter on how people should perceive each other personally, or that black men are somehow associated with a masculine hypersexuality. In Harlem, McKay was eager to reveal the awkwardness and occasional dysfunctionality of these relationships. In doing so, he is himself vain and coquettish on his turn, showing off his bold critique on the morality of the left. First, there is an anecdote about a relationship between a white woman and a black man, named Charles White. Both are members of the Party, but White is more interested in black uplift than in the Soviet Union. He corresponds with African-Americans who were expelled from the Party for “black chauvinism”, as they apparently stressed the black cause too much in the eyes of the Communists. When his wife finds his letters with the ostracized blacks, she shows them to the Party leadership, resulting in the expulsion of Mr. White. She claims to have married him “as a duty to the Communist Party and she could be reconciled to him only if he confessed his error and begged to be readmitted to the Party.” To McKay, “the White case illustrates (..) that the Communist whites who marry Negroes make the sacrifice solely in the interest of the Party. They are more like missionaries, or spies, whose primary purpose is holding Negroes to the party line.”111 In Amiable with Big Teeth, McKay reverses this romantic dynamic in a relationship between a black female protagonist and a white Communist man. Perhaps he did so to blur the essentialist and abstract categories of gender and race from his earlier writings. Maybe it just suited the plot better, since the black woman here is not just some inconsequential side character but Pablo Peixota’s daughter Seraphine. She initially falls in love with Lij Tekla Alamaya, the young and charming prince. Her parents would rather she marry an American, as Alamaya’s title might become worthless should Mussolini triumph in Ethiopia. Seraphine is cautious as well and admits that “Tekla may have a harem in Africa”. The political complications and the temporary nature of Alamaya’s stay make their relationship impossible, which Seraphine blames on the activities of her father and the resistance her mother showed to their relationship from the beginning. Heartbroken, she leaves home after a bitter fight with her parents, after which she walks right into the arms of Maxim Tasan.

111 McKay, Harlem, 235-237. 76

Tasan is eager to gain control over the vulnerable homeless daughter of the leader of the “Hands” and gets her a job at The Interlink. This downtown magazine is run by a white woman named Abigail Hobison and connects writers from different nations. McKay hints vaguely at the Black Belt Thesis with Maxim Tasan’s request for the Interlink to add Seraphine to their staff. “The Aframericans are like a small foreign nation within the United States. As foreign as the Chinese in China and Eskimos in Alaska.” The Interlink sends a monthly newsletter to all the participating nations, which “circulated among important people: bankers, industrialists, scions of great fortunes, ministers of religion, editors, publishers, educators, social workers, governors, congressmen and other politicians.” Take note that there is a special emphasis here on the egalitarian mores of the cultural elite: “It was slanted to combat prejudice of all kinds and chiefly race prejudice, class prejudice and caste prejudice. It advocated the free promotion of literature, art and science, and also the aristocratic conception of society.” Despite the liberal rhetoric of her magazine, Hobison represents the betrayal of the corporate northern order during the Reconstruction period: “She was a widow and the scioness of an abolitionist family which became rich through wise investments in the dynamic industrial expansion that developed from the Civil War.” Personally, Tasan despises Hobson’s “lofty ideas about intellectual and cultural achievement and her bourgeois egoism in bracketing the class struggle with class prejudice and race prejudice”, but as “a loyal soldier of the Soviet, he was fulsome in praise of the Interlink, hoping thus to win another recruit for the Popular Front.”112 McKay refers to his own experience of tokenism in Soviet Russia, when he was met with more approval than Huiswoud because of his darker complexion. Abigail Hobson at first finds Seraphine too “Euro-American”, making her unfit to represent the “distinctively representative” of the “Aframericans”: “However, she was doubly interesting as a type and as a symbol, thought Mrs. Hobison; she would be excellent to illustrate the absurdity of the new Nordic theories of race.” Nevertheless, besides pointing out the blind spots in Hobson’s antiracism, McKay highlights her sense of humor about the combination of hubristic leftist messianism and Communist bureaucracy. When Seraphine eventually does work for The Interlink, she confuses different Committee’s and the Comintern, finding it “kind of complicated”. McKay jokes through Mrs. Hobison response: “Now that Soviet Russia is collaborating with the democratic nations in mutual collective security, it is important that we should know the precise meaning of all those abbreviated words and algebraic letters which the Bolsheviks have loosed upon the poor world.”113 When Seraphine goes to her parental house to pick up some personal belongings, she is confronted by her mother, who accuses her of betraying her people. Seraphine tells her mother that

112 Claude McKay, Amiable With Big Teeth, 168-172. 113 Ibid. 172. 77 she has no people. Although she is not fully tried and tested in Communism yet, she believes “in the Popular Front.” Mrs. Peixota’s response is peculiarly evocative of the divergent generational perception of interracial marriage and truly typifies a caring mom’s misunderstanding of a modern term:

“You’re crazy like all the rest about the latest fad. And you may be the most ‘popular front’ downtown for all I know.” “But let me tell you this, if you get mixed up in that Communist comradeship with a lot of free-loving and easy-riding white men, you’re no daughter of mine, you understand?” -“Mother!” Seraphine whined. -“I mean what I say. I have heard enough about your free and easy carrying on with white men. And let me tell you: no decent colored girl can afford to be careless with a white man. For she isn’t protected by the law or by public opinion. Our black mothers paid the price in servitude and concubinage so that we could learn and acquire a little self-respect. You chits imagine you’re modern and can teach your elders. White men are modern and ready to make a ‘popular front’ of you all right, but they won’t marry you. They’ll use you--- (…)”114

McKay involves a common metonymic use of communism as a nineteenth-century American “commune-ism” that defined small utopian communities practicing “Free Love”. Take note that the social equality which communists argued for was often imagined and retranslated as an encouragement of a polygamous, interracial lovemaking that transgressed all dominant sexual mores. William J. Maxwell notes how a “1934 strike wave in Birmingham, Alabama, was met with editorials against “Red literature preaching free love [and] inter-marriage” and a bulletin from the White Legion posing the routine segregationist question with a quaint addition: “How would you like to awake one morning to find your wife or daughter attacked by a Negro or a Communist!” Americans ranging from members of the KKK or Christian “Old Negroes” to people from the black upper class -like Mrs. Peixota- disapproved of the breaking of this traditional “racial-sexual order”. 115 In a chapter built around the Scottsboro case, appertaining to the group of young black boys who were unfairly accused of raping two white women on a train, Maxwell has demonstrated how two gendered and racial triangles worked in tandem in the dys- or utopian imagination of American communism. First, the public sentiments around Scottsboro were dominated by the “anxious masculinism” of the triangle of the black rapist, a white female victim and the white male protector. The fact that the Communists took up the mantle of interracial justice worsened their negative reputation among people who feared miscegenation, as if the communists supported rape and the destruction of pure white womanhood. The second triangle has less to do with a fear of the waning of and the apparent role of communists in the execution of that process, but more

114 Claude McKay, Amiable With Big Teeth, 192-193. 115 Maxwell, New Negro, 128. Maxwell quotes nevertheless in: Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, 79. 78 with the interracial relations within communist circles that were described earlier by McKay in Harlem. Besides the Communists’ interracial rhetoric in respect to the Scottsboro case, Maxwell suggests that the frequency of relationships between black men and white women fostered “anti- Communist myths of the traffic in red women”. In this image, Communism became a manly, “homosocial” affair, where black men were tempted to join the party by white men who promised them romantic affairs with white women. Consequently, the men bonded over their romantic interest in white women, who only figured “locally as integration’s conduit rather than as segregation’s tripwires.”116 With these “segregation’s tripwires”, Maxwell refers to the first triangle in which the purity of white womanhood functions as an obstacle for integration as they must be protected from black sexuality rather than amalgamate with black men. But black women have also been characterized as decelerating factors in the integration process. In McKay’s elaborations about the complaints of black women about interracial relationships, he wrote about them as “a bitter lot”. The Communists and their endeavors to abolish the taboo of interracial sex, “discover that their most formidable enemy is the Negro woman.” McKay is very suggestive about the sexual undertones that swarm around the Communists’ image. The African American woman “remains the bulwark against the Communist penetration of the Negro minority.” Thinking about Maxwell’s argument about the Communists’ image as a masculine, homosocial affair, this is an interesting choice of words. No “invasion”, “confiscation” or “take-over”, but penetration, a “phallic invasion” that emphasizes male sexual power. McKay further writes that exogamy is limited “because the white wife will be ostracized by all the “high-toned” Negro women. The white wives of Harlem have had such a rough time from the Negro matrons that recently there was organized an Association of White Wives of Negro Men to promote friendly social intercourse among themselves.”117 Although McKay was very careful in describing black women’s agency, complaints and their awkwardness in Communist circles, these anecdotes did yield an image of black communist women as nagging wallflowers instead of passionate idealists and defenders of equality, when these latter images are often attributed to men. Seraphine in Amiable With Big Teeth, although a strong, autonomous and stubborn character, is naïve and easily manipulated for the men-made lines of the Communist Party. Moreover, she is seduced by two white men in scenes where McKay plays with the element of promiscuous communism. Maxim Tasan, Dandy and Seraphine drink and dance at Tasan’s apartment at night, talking about international politics and the colored Russian writer Pushkin, when Dandy has suddenly disappeared. As their dialogue continues, Tasan becomes more amiable and charms her by calling her blackness beautiful, advising her to be herself and black. “You ought to

116 Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left, 125-151. 117 Claude McKay, Harlem, 233. 79 marry a white man”, he nevertheless tells her, as they continue flirting. As it is getting late, Seraphine suggests that she should go home. “You haven’t got to go home”, Tasan replies, after which he pours her another drink.118 When Seraphine wakes up, Tasan is gone and she finds Dandy instead in the apartment. This is the weakest part of the book, as she suddenly marries Dandy, who has been a side character up until this point. Shortly afterwards, they are happily married and her mother never wants to see her again. There is a sense of drama when she finds Alamaya’s missing letter at Tasan’s apartment, through which she and the reader discover that Tasan has been a power-hungry villain all along.

Hermie Against McKay

Both Maxwell’s gender/race triangles are present in McKay’s novel, but we must conclude with Maxwell’s argument that they were no fulfilling representation of communist reality. They are too abstract and insufficient, as “black women appear to be either absent or distant, indistinct constituents of a racial minority gendered male or a remote fourth term awaiting the deliverance of male alliance making.” He makes a strong case to perceive women as more than romantic extras in the communist movement, drawing on the case of Louise Thompson and Ruby Bates, the woman who -falsely and under pressure- claimed that she had been raped by the Scottsboro boys, but later withdrew her accusation and called for their freedom. Many scholars have pointed to McKay’s gender roles with the activities and publications of communist women, like Joyce Moore Turner about Hermina Huiswoud Dumont in Caribbean Crusaders. This thesis has focused more on the activities of her husband in the 1920s as his travels and publications yielded useful sources for ruminations about (inter-)nationalism, the Harlem-Soviet connection and Marxist race theory, but it should be said that the story of Otto Huiswoud is actually the history of a black couple. Even the FBI noted that “Mrs. Huiswoud was understood (..) to be very active in the Communist Party.”119 “Hermie”, who was originally from British Guyana, was only seventeen years old when Otto addressed the Comintern in 1922. Two years later, he asked her if she would wait for him when he had to work in Chicago for a few months, where after they married in 1926. She became a Party member in 1928 and traveled to the Caribbean in 1929 for Otto’s Comintern mission to establish Caribbean unions, eventually moving to Moscow in November of 1930. There, she went to the Lenin School to study Marxist literature while Otto worked for the Negro Department of the Profintern until February 1934. They would spend the rest of the 1930s in Western Europe, where the Huiswouds wrote, edited and distributed for The Negro Worker, the magazine that connected black

118 Claude McKay, Amiable With Big Teeth, 202-203. 119 FBI files from 1947, online access through #https://dynamic.decorrespondent.nl/downloads/mitchell- esajas/FBI-files-Otto-Huiswoud.pdf on 27-6-2018, 67. 80 communists and workers from all over the world. The magazine was circulated secretly through communists in port cities after it was forbidden by European colonial powers. After former chief editor George Padmore turned his back on the Soviet Union in 1934, Otto Huiswoud moved into his position, under the pseudonym of Charles Woodson. This responsibility would lead them to Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and eventually to Paris, the European cultural center of the African diaspora where communist sympathies were also very strong. I want to emphasize that the duo held these positions/did this work from the deep conviction that the black international that Otto had argued for in 1922 was absolutely necessary. If we read editions of the magazine The Negro Worker, we find the same unyielding, ideological and also dogmatically stubborn tone of every other Communist pamphlet, with many enemies being named as “bourgeois reformists”, “petty-bourgeois” and “Negro bourgeois”. Take note that George Padmore was excommunicated after his “incorrect attitude to the national question”, and his contacts with “provocateur Garan Kouyaté” and bourgeois organizations on the question of Liberia ". Hermie, under the secret name of Helen Davis, criticized him after his expulsion in an article in 1934 called “The Rise and Fall of George Padmore as a Revolutionary Fighter”.120 Moreover, there is an interesting connection between the erudite Hermie and the Harlem “intelligentsia”, the prime example being her close relationship with Langston Hughes. Hughes visited the Huiswoud’s in Paris for Christmas in 1937, and large parts of the correspondence between Hermie and Hughes are kept at the Tamiment Library in New York. There is more room for exploring the blending of literature and socialist politics in the relationship between Hughes and the Huiswouds by future scholars and students. More personal documents from the Huiswouds are kept at The Black Archives in Amsterdam. One of their most valuable documents is an edition of Hughes’ The Ways of White Folks, with as epigraph: “May 1946, a Happy New Year for Hermie – who remembers when many of these stories were written – Sincerely, Langston Hughes.” Although McKay’s novel and his earlier comments in Harlem are sometimes necessary provocations aimed at the interracial pieties of the Left, we should see his portrayals of interracial romance as insincere or doomed to fail as unrepresentative for the entire communist movement. Women like Hermie could be equally radical, inventive or dogmatic in carrying out the work of the USSR. McKay openly opposed communism during the Popular Front but the Huiswouds were more faithful believers. Otto even co-signed a condolence on the occasion of Stalin’s death in De Waarheid, the daily paper of the Dutch Communist Party (CPN), in 1953. For the Huiswouds, it was not the Soviet Union they no longer wanted to belong to as the 1930s developed, but the CPUSA. For Otto, being a black Party member had been a frustrating experience since 1919, and the CPUSA

120 Helen Davis (alias of Hermina Dumont Huiswoud), “The Rise and Fall of George Padmore as a Revolutionary Fighter”, The Negro Worker Vol. IV- 4 (Aug. 1934. 81 continued to annoy and neglect him while he worked on building a black international in Europe.. In 1935, in a letter to Zusmanovich of the Negro Commission in Moscow, he wrote that the American Communists did not answer his letters, nor were they sending contributions to Huiswoud and the Negro Worker:121

“Our friends there are too ‘busy’ to answer our numerous letters, (..) Although constantly requesting them to inform us whether they receive [the Negro Worker], how the distribution is developed and suggestions from us as to how they could increase the circulation and build up a group around the journal in and outside the US, not one word from them for a year!”122

Whether it was due to the strange Black Belt Thesis, the anti-communist climate, the “white chauvinism” within the Party or just the neglect they experienced, the Huiswouds decided not to return to New York after the war. Furthermore, the wisdom the Huiswouds gained through their travels was not easily achievable for the ordinary Harlem worker. In a sense, Otto and Hermina Huiswoud also belonged to Harlem’s “upper class”, defined not so much by property but rather by education, high moral concerns and jobs as bureaucrats or writers. Their socialism was less a revolt against their parents’ ethnic particularism than Seraphine Peixota’s, but I assume that they would not have disapproved of the romances between black and white Party members. Of course, for Caribbean immigrants like the Huiswouds, interracial sex was already less of a taboo than for Americans. McKay was courageous when he pointed out that many of the desired “romantic equalities” of this new generation did not grow organically, despite the bohemian night life of New York and its jazz. In Amiable With Big Teeth and in the awkward romances of Harlem, we see the tragic dilemmas and obstacles of black uplift. Do you choose for the race or for universal equality? Do I listen to my parents, to “society”, or do I decide myself whom to love? We see a paradox between the rhetoric of Communist universalism and the specific needs of the African-American community in its struggle against white supremacy. In view of the many disappointments, exclusions and humiliations experienced by black Communists under white Party leadership, the attraction of black particularism is to a large extent understandable because of the basic tribalism of these segregated communities. The desire to transcend this tribalism, to include all people in one proletarian paradise where equality and comradeship are promised, contrasts with another human need: to belong to a tribe your own. “Workers of the world, unite!” For real? Of the world? How? A tribe stops being a tribe

121 Maria van Enckevort, The Life and Work of Otto Huiswoud, 156. 122 Letter from Edward to ‘Dear Friends’, 24.6.1935, RGASPI 495/155/102, fol. 8. Quoted in: Holger Weiss, “Comintern Working Paper” 4/2011 The Collapse and Rebirth of the ITUCNW, 1933-1938. Part One. From Hamburg via Paris to Antwerp and Amsterdam (1933-1935) 59. 82 when all of humanity is part of it, as an orgasm that last forever is no orgasm at all. This was hard to admit for the communists of the Popular Front, but no less true. We have seen how uneasily the personalization of the political occurred, how sincere sexual attraction could not be forced and, mostly, how difficult it was to escape the historical constructions of gendered black and white sexuality. The question for the Communists was: to what extent does one want to go against the grain and promote interracialism to the world, if the world does not always want it? Solidarity in Party theories? Forced amalgamation until everyone looks the same? No wonder there were attempts to form an independent black state, or as Yuri Slezkine wrote, no wonder that the USSR “promoted ethnic particularism”.123

123 Yuri Slezkine, “The USSR as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer 1994). 83

Epilogue

How to end after all these pages of Marxist theories, a multitude of black expressions of the New Negro and a satirical account of a deserted communist writer? In general, this has been a political and cultural between the wars, its Caribbean migration influx and the political connection with Moscow. We have seen the dilemmas of the New Negro and the friction between Huiswoud and McKay’s generation with those before them. The New Negro’s plea for interracial unity, were it expressed by Huiswoud’s socialism or McKay’s Modernism, often clashed with the ethnic particularism of the Victorian Age, a conflict that mutated over and over again during the entertainment of the Jazz Age and the political art of the Popular Front, the sexual “age of unity”- but has nevertheless not ended yet. We may ask which dilemmas are still relevant today, being careful in our understanding of the differences between contemporary problems and their historical and geographical origins. During World War II, Otto and Hermina Huiswoud were separated, as Otto could not leave Suriname and Hermie was still in New York. In 1946, they managed to reunite in Cuba, where they decided to move to Amsterdam. Naturally, Otto and Hermie became active members of the Surinamese community in Amsterdam. Under Otto’s chairmanship, Vereniging Ons Suriname changed from a social community, or gezelligheidsvereniging, to an organization with more political gravity, concerned with decolonization of the Dutch empire and independence of Surinam. Ruud Beeldsnijder, fellow committee member of the VOS, calls Huiswoud the “promotor of this spiritual awakening” and describes how he used his extensive network in Africa and America to connect the Surinamese in the Netherlands with the African diaspora. “He and his colleagues received the American singer Lenora Lafayette, folk dancers from Guinee”, and also “W.E. Burghardt-Dubois, the American scholar and champion of emancipation” addressed the VOS. “Political autonomy, independence even, is not enough,” Du Bois told his audience, according to Beeldsnijder. “What matters is economic independence. The possession over the own riches. They will try to keep you from that until the last moment.”124 Beeldsnijder is laudatory about Huiswoud’s professionalism, which he contrasts to the jolly character of young Surinamers who came to the VOS for social events and companionship:

“Huiswoud did not have an easy time, finding his place with the contemporary active Surinamers, who wanted to be progressive, search a new course, but mostly made jokes, danced and thought the organization would grow anyway. Huiswoud was in fact, (..) no Surinamer anymore, but had become an American and internationalist. Otto Huiswoud was

124 Ruud Beeldsnijder, “Nogmaals Otto Huiswoud”, Onvoltooid Verleden 3, 1998. Online access at # http://www.onvoltooidverleden.nl/index.php?id=222 at 30-6-2018. The translation is mine. 84

from a caliber that nobody actually knew back then and ahead of his time and fellow countrymen.”125

The denomination of Huiswoud as simultaneously “American” and “ahead of his time” is an intriguing quote to end our story. As the American century had just commenced and the Netherlands would be overrun with Donald Duck cartoons, McDonald’s restaurants and spaghetti westerns, was the American race discourse, dominated by a black-white binary, also destined to cross the Atlantic? Europe had its own story of white superiority, of course, as it had just been confronted with the horrific convergence of militarism and extreme white racism, leaving the continent in ruins. Interestingly enough, when the VOS founded De Koerier, a magazine for Surinamese people that breathed the radicalism, internationalism and anti-capitalism of its chief editor; Huiswoud, readers complained that the magazine focused too much on American and African issues, while they were more interested in Surinam. The editors of the Koerier responded that their global focus was necessary, as the hardships in Africa and the USA were worse than in Suriname and Amsterdam: 126

“Colonialism and racism are companions in arms, appearing together everywhere, depending on the local circumstances dressed in a different garb: they are international phenomena, closely interconnected and operating in a worldwide system. Understanding this is imperative for the development of the national consciousness of our Surinamese people.”127

Huiswoud was confronted here with the limits of solidarity, similar to the boundaries of the sexual revolution we have seen in chapter three. The Surinamese readers were more concerned with the position of their own group and Huiswoud’s universalism was apparently too modern for them in 1954, whether we call it “Americanization” or “Soviet internationalism”. However, it is not a surprising complaint, after having studied the way the New Negro movement oscillated endlessly between black particularism and interracial solidarity. In the post-slavery era, the New Negro was the ultimate claim of Afro-diasporic people to a place in the modern world and it derived its very uniqueness from the double consciousness it tried to understand, express and escape. If anything may be the legacy of the literature of the New Negro Renaissance, Americanization or not, it is the comfort and inspiration it offers for more people who experience exclusion from citizenship and the nation state, the double consciousness of the desire to express the outsider status versus the aspiration to be an insider. Despite the understandable tendency towards segregationist politics, we have also seen that constructions of modernity in which ethnic and cultural hybridity are denied or ignored are invalid,

125 Ruud Beeldsnijder, “Nogmaals Otto Huiswoud”. 126 De Koerier. Orgaan Van De Werkcommissie Vereniging Ons Suriname. [Paramaribo, etc.] Internationaal Instituut der Sociale Geschiedenis, Amsterdam, Archief: Nederlands Instituut Voor Beeld en Geluid (Perscollectie). Inventory number: PM 12306. 127 Ibid. Quoted and translated by Maria van Enckevort, The Life and Work of Otto Huiswoud, 151. 85 even when they were promoted by Communists with their pious egalitarianism. Despite some of its small successes in raising black consciousness, the long argument of the Black Belt Thesis has been a farce that divided African-Americans rather than united them under national banners. Despite some calls for separate black trading unions, Huiswoud deserves credit for his attempts to escape black particularism in a climate of so much anti-black racism and frustrating humiliations. Huiswoud’s successes and failures may yield a few “useful past” lessons for the left, especially in his emphasis on both interracial solidarity and the international dimensions of capitalism, with an admirable patience and tenacity. Another aspect of this “useful past” as an obvious cautionary tale for today is the damage caused by the sectarianism produced by a handful of theorists who took up the heavy mantle of universal proletarian revolution, even though they were often not working-class themselves. We can make a parallel with some contemporary semantic discussions on identity politics, where well- educated lefties construct an intellectual competition in being progressive, “woke” and pious, with the implicit rule that participants do not punch to the left. It does not help to the quality of these debates that they are often held on Twitter, where the whole online world is watching and cheering and cursing at its competitors. The comparison with a religious dedication to Stalinism is of course not valid, as the historical context of an actualized “promised land” has ended with the fall of the USSR. The obvious lesson is that a public sphere where people feel discouraged to participate out of fear to say something that will be condemned by puritanical and judgmental bullies does not yield constructive conversations. Although more “white” people (in Europe, in America, basically everywhere) do need to develop a thicker skin when talking about race, we have seen what happened with the American Communists who discredited heretics in the hope of making the theories that would unite the proletariat seem right, but succeeded only in alienating and dividing everyone around them. Nevertheless, it was the largest skeptic of American democracy, Malcolm X, who said: “Don't be in a hurry to condemn because he doesn't do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn't know what you know today.” The tragic element in this is that it asks of people of color an amount of patience and mental labor that seems without end. We must understand that a tendency to ethnic particularism grows in the exhausting process of explaining racism to white people. In “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason”, Pierre Bourdieu and Loïc Waquant’s make the argument that the Americanization of “race”, must be understood through the context of cultural imperialism:

“[C]ultural imperialism (American or otherwise) never imposes itself better than when it is served by progressive intellectuals (or by intellectuals of colour in the case of racial

86

inequality) who would appear to be above suspicion of promoting the hegemonic interests of a country against which they wield the weapons of social criticism.”128

In light of this, a specific carefulness must be applied to the copying of American emancipatory vocabularies, as Bourdieu and Waquant warn for the “dehistoricization” of specific problems and “false universalism”. Most interesting is that they perceive the “globalization of American problems as part of a larger process of neo-liberalization, globalization and the commodification of public goods. One could make a strong argument about how third way capitalism enforced the legitimacy of the meritocratic myth by incorporating anti-racism and cuddly emancipatory rhetoric as “diversity policy”, or emphasizing the importance of “role models”. It is interesting how the Americanization of “race” can be seen as twofold. At the one hand, there are the traditions of critical race theory and intersectional feminism that are deeply influenced by Marxism, and at the other hand -in the most cynical expression- the etiquettes of a very polite neoliberal meritocracy. I am convinced that both -and everything in between- can be useful in the European context. Among others because the American critical attitudes towards “whiteness”, Eurocentrism and colonialism are historically better developed and expressed in a rich intellectual and literary tradition. The treatment of implicit bias, educating about micro-aggressions and a more complete historical education in national institutions as schools and museums, might significantly improve the lives of non-white Dutch people. This can be done with a critical eye towards the loud American voice in the cacophony that is the conversation of anti-racism. To defend oneself against the accusation of participating in American imperialism when reading Ta-Nehesi Coates, but also because there are obvious similarities and differences between America and Europe. It can be helpful to keep in mind what Huiswoud told to the Soviets about the Black Belt Thesis: “one size fits all” does not work. One of the differences is that the dominant American black-white binary is less applicable in the Netherlands, where the “debate” over the opening (or closing?) of the Dutch identity is dominated by the question if Islam can find a definitive place in the nation. However, since the protests against the blackface tradition of Zwarte Piet have erupted, Afro-diasporic people, together with other (postcolonial) migrants and their children, have become more articulate about their discontent with institutional racism. A study into the use of American “race” vocabularies in the arguments about identity politics can be interesting and provoking. Through the work of Philomena Essed and Gloria Wekker, who both earned their PhD in the United States, as well as others like them, more people in the Netherlands have become equipped with ways of thinking about race that are in harmony with Americanisms. Of course, decolonization is more than the globalization of American manners, or even the

128 Pierre, Bourdieu Loïc Wacquant, “On the Cunning of Imperialist Reason”, Theory, Culture & Society, 1999, 16•1, 41•58. 87 manners of its “professional class”, to paraphrase Thomas Frank.129 After four hundred years of colonial expansion, the Netherlands cannot easily get rid of what Stuart Hall called “Europe’s other self”. The colonization of the Americas (and the rest of the world) equated Europe’s whiteness with superiority, the greatness of its nations, and the status of slave masters. The legacy of caste hierarchies is more severe on the soil where slavery was executed, but it casts a reflexive shadow over the Old World. Nevertheless, the need for new “Dutch”, or “European” narratives is understandable, and the good news is that it is becoming more available and better articulated. By academics like Fatima El Tayeb, Philomena Essed and Raphael-Hernandez, but also by grassroots initiatives as the Black Archives in Amsterdam. The Black Archives aim to create more space for “black history” through a broader prism, with many sources of Caribbean migrant communities in the Netherlands, especially of Otto and Hermina Huiswoud. Founders Mitchell Esajas, Jessica de Abreu and Miguel Heilbron are among the Dutch Afro-Caribbean activists and intellectuals who are creating this new narrative, in connecting the past with the present experiences of being black in the Netherlands. 130 To conclude, Huiswoud’s imposition of his Americanness on a postcolonial community in Amsterdam could have made a good figure of speech in an argument about the Americanization of racism. However, it would go too far to name him an agent of American imperialism, as the flood of American culture that came after the Marshall Plan is a more complex process that stretches over a longer period of time. Moreover, in following Huiswoud’s unique movements we have also been guided through Harlem’s process of becoming the cultural magnet of the African diaspora, as well as the rise of New York as the cultural and intellectual hub of the world at the dawn of the American Century. Perhaps the largest irony in this whole thesis that I aspired to be a critical account of “Americanization”, is that it is written in English, with my Word software correcting the British English I learned in high school along American grammar standards, for a Master in American Studies. Nevertheless, I aimed to show that the “American” tradition of postcolonial studies, literature and critical race theory is not only the result of the American hegemony in the academic sphere. New York’s Modernism, Caribbean radicalism and the promise of the Soviet Union are all part of this tradition. And even more. I hope the story of Otto and Hermina Huiswoud can be a helpful reminder for the Netherlands, where we sometimes tend to forget that the Dutch were part of the world that came to the Americas, before Americanization came to the world.

129 Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal (New York 2016) 130 Stuart Hall, “Globalisation Europe’s Other Self”, Marxism Today (August 1991). Heike Raphael-Hernandez, Blackening Europe: The African American Presence (New York, London, 2004) El-Tayeb, Fatima, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (Minnesota, 2011) Philomena Essed, Alledaags Racisme (Amsterdam, 1984) Philomena Essed & Isabel Hoving, Dutch Racism (New York, Amsterdam, 2014). 88

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Wensink, Herien ‘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.

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