REAL FOLKS

Race and Genre in the Great DepressionBy Sonnet Retman

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4925-9

Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………ixIntroduction………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………11. “A Combination Madhouse, Burlesque Show and Coney Island”: The Color Question in George Schuyler’s Black No More…………………………..332. “Inanimate Hideosities”: The Burlesque of Racial Capitalism in Nathanael West’s A Cool Million…………………………………………..723. “The Last American Frontier”: Mapping the Folk in the Federal Writers’ Project’s Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost State…………………1134. “Ah Gives Myself de Privilege to Go”: Navigating the Field and the Folk in Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men……………………………..1525. “Am I Laughing?”: Burlesque Incongruities of Genre, Gender, and Audience in Preston Sturges’s Sullivan’s Travels…………………………..191Afterpiece: The Coen Brothers’ Ol’-Timey Blues in O Brother, Where Art Thou?……………………………………………………………..241Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….251Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………287Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….311

Chapter One

“A Combination Madhouse, Burlesque Show and Coney Island”: The Color Question in George Schuyler’s Black No More

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.—W. E. B. DU BOIS, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)

In 1934, both the Daily Worker and the Negro Liberator denounced George Schuyler as one of “the most vicious pen prostitutes plying his trade in the Negro press” (qtd. in Schuyler, Black and Conservative, 220). Schuyler earned this distinction by publishing in 1931 several articles deriding the Communist Party USA’s legal support for the Scottsboro Boys, nine African American teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women on a freight run in Tennessee, and Angelo Herndon, the nineteen-year-old African American coal miner and leader of the local Young Communist League, who was indicted in 1932 under the charge of “insurrection” for organizing a hunger march of unemployed black and white protesters in Atlanta, Georgia. Schuyler believed that the Communist Party had “stolen” the Scottsboro case from the NAACP and cared little about its black defendants. To him, their International Labor Defense committee capitalized on both trials as publicity-generating causes célèbres (187). At least this is what he gleefully recounts in his red-baiting, late-in-life memoir Black and Conservative (1966).

In spite of the far-right cast of his autobiography, the actual record of Schuyler’s publications, activism, and affiliations tells a different tale, one more complex but no less outrageous. What Schuyler neglects to fully explain in his version of this confrontation with the communist press is his own reputation at the time as a radical, albeit a cynical and irreverent one. Throughout Black and Conservative, he downplays the fact that until the late 1930s he was very much a part of the African American Left: he became a member of the Socialist Party in 1921 (113); soon after, he joined the black socialist group, the Friends of Negro Freedom; he declared himself a “violent red” in a favorable review of an Upton Sinclair novel in 1925 (“New Books,” 331), and he would describe himself as a socialist well into the 1930s; all the while, he wrote for radical publications (Ferguson, Sage of Sugar Hill, 5). Although Schuyler was not a Marxist, he was a prominent progressive black intellectual, sometimes activist, for whom antiracist and class struggles were inseparable endeavors. Surely, then, in 1934, the communist press scorned Schuyler so publicly due to their expectation of shared political sympathy, their expectation that at the very least, he would curb his famously caustic opinions in regard to the Scottsboro and Herndon cases.

Journalist, essayist, satirist, novelist, science fiction writer, street speaker, socialist, union member, advocate of “race mixing,” atheist, raw foodist, affiliate of the John Birch Society—Schuyler was nothing if not unorthodox. The details of his life only add to his intrigue as a public figure. Schuyler came of age in the 1910s, having left behind his home town of Syracuse, New York, to enlist in the army. As a soldier traveling from base to base he was able to see a good deal of the United States, and he wrote his first satirical sketches for a military publication, The Service. Yet he bridled at the segregated constraints of military life and his shoddy treatment by civilians even when in uniform. Though he never spoke publicly of it, he eventually deserted and served nine months in prison before his discharge in 1918 (Ferguson 12–13). After working a variety of unskilled jobs in New York City, he returned to Syracuse to work as a hod carrier. There, he joined the International Hod Carriers Building and Common Laborers Union, Local 40, in 1922 (Black and Conservative, 117). He made his first foray into radical politics and public speaking when he joined the local division of the Socialist Party in Syracuse and became its educational director (113). Public speaking would become a lifelong and sometimes lucrative vocation for Schuyler. Among his many engagements, he spoke on behalf of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters at their inaugural meeting in August 1925, and in the 1930s and 1940s he toured the college and forum circuit addressing topics as varied as “Psychoanalyzing the Negro,” “Feminism and the Race Problem,” and “Consumer’s Cooperation” (113–15, 158, 164).

Notwithstanding Schuyler’s newfound political alliances in Syracuse, the place proved to be too sleepy for him. He moved back to New York City, working once more as a manual laborer, wintering in a “hobohemian” community in the Bowery before landing a job at A. Philip Randolph’s and Chandler Owner’s journal, The Messenger, in 1923. He worked there first as an office manager, then as a writer and a managing editor until the journal folded in 1928. As an editor, he published literature and essays by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and other luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance (Ferguson 17). In the 1920s and 1930s, he wrote for black publications such as The Crisis, Opportunity, Phylon, and Negro Digest, as well as journals with large white readerships such as The Nation, Modern Quarterly, H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, and Mike Gold’s New Masses (Peplow, “George Schuyler,” 21–22; Ferguson 2). He also began writing for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the most popular black newspapers in the nation, a position that he would hold for forty-four years until 1966; one that would provide a written record of his political transformation as he gravitated toward the anticommunist paranoia of the Far Right in the 1950s and 1960s.

Around the time Schuyler became the “preeminent personality in Negro journalism” in the late 1920s, he married Josephine Cogdell, a journalist and former model who hailed from a wealthy, white Texan family (Theophilus Lewis, qtd. in Ferguson 99). Wed in 1928, four months after they met in the offices of The Messenger, the couple took up residence in Sugar Hill, Harlem’s most exclusive neighborhood. In 1931, they had a baby girl, Philippa Schuyler, who would soon be known as a child prodigy, playing the piano at age three and a half and composing by the age of five. Philippa’s exceptional intelligence and achievements served as proof of the couple’s theory of “race mixing” as a means of attaining “hybrid vigor,” in their view, the biological trump card that would dismantle the canard of white supremacy at the core of the nation’s racist structure (Talalay, Composition, 13–14; Ferguson 76, 151). The Schuylers tempered their biological theories with a nod to nurture as well, believing that their evorts to raise Philippa following the recommendations of the behaviorist John Watson and a strict dietary regime of raw food had fostered her extraordinary abilities as much as her biological inheritance.

As Schuyler established himself both personally and professionally, he filed investigative reports on controversial topics in the nation and abroad. The Pittsburgh Courier sent him on a tour of the South in 1926 to document the living conditions of the region’s black residents; the New York Evening Post commissioned him to go to Liberia in 1931 to report on the selling of young male laborers to Spanish plantations ov the coast of Nigeria; and the naacp sponsored a trip with Roy Wilkins to investigate the exploitation of black workers on the Mississippi Flood Control Project in 1932 (Ferguson 19–20; Black and Conservative, 198). For Schuyler, these excursions further illuminated the striking correspondence between domestic racism and fascism and imperialism in the international realm, providing the basis for his novel Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia (1931) and his later serialized epic fictions, “Black Empire” and “Black Internationale,” published in the Pittsburgh Courier in the late 1930s.

Schuyler’s international perspective would also sharpen the political bite of his best-known novel, Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933–1940 (1931), a satirical work of science fiction published at the height of his long, remarkable career. That novel advanced Schuyler’s critique of race as absurd but essential to the workings of market capitalism. Its plotline brought together the themes of many of his most vitriolic editorials, including his rants against the glut of skin lighteners and bleaches on the market for black consumers (Ferguson 111); his screed against the mob mentality that pervaded American social life and politics; his debunking of the propensity of white and black leftists in the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Depression to romanticize the folk (93); his wary assessment of the technological progress of “machine civilization” (Schuyler, “Views,” 6); his contention that America’s claims of spreading democracy would mask the importation of Jim Crow race relations to other regions of the world (Ferguson 136); and his overarching view that the United States was embroiled in nothing less than an “economic race war” (121).

Black No More begins with a black scientist’s invention of a machine able to turn black people white and follows the twists and turns of a citizenry rapidly adopting “pork-colored skin” (19). For contemporary readers, this outline might seem to augur colorblindness and other “race-blind” policies advocated by present-day black neoconservatives such as Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, and Ward Connerly. The novel might even be read to exemplify the prediction by the progressive sociologist Orlando Patterson that in the new millennium, race will be supplanted by class by means of “biotechnology,” as he stated in an editorial entitled “Race Over” in the January 2000 edition of the New Republic. Yet, Schuyler’s text provides a conclusion that is radically diverent from Patterson’s priority of class as well as the black neoconservatives’ promotion of colorblindness. In Black No More, race cannot simply disappear; rather, it is made and remade in the context of cultural and social shifts. It is inextricably bound to capitalism, a relationship constitutive of the nation’s “modern racial regime.”

Most likely speaking to fellow leftists who prioritized class as the primary source of structural inequality over and above race, Schuyler anticipates and ultimately rejects “either/or” formulations like Patterson’s opposition of race and class. Instead, he unveils the violence of race in America as it is manifested in market-driven formulations of identity: his story speaks to fantasies and anxieties about increasing urban industrialization, racial assimilation, and the reproduction of raced bodies in the black modernist moment. This chapter investigates the ways in which race is manufactured and regulated through several sites of reproduction in the novel, including theatrical staging, assembly-line mass production, and biological procreation. In each of these instances, Schuyler’s protagonist capitalizes on race as a highly commercial, free-floating sign: while passing for white, he sells blackness and whiteness for personal gain. In his racial passing, he quite literally performs to collect, a plot of impersonation that proves to be central to modernist literary experimentation, whether in the realm of fiction or ethnography. Speaking more broadly, as Schuyler burlesques conventional narratives of race by enacting them, his book’s mocking impersonations are heavily indebted to the minstrel tradition as well as the novel of racial passing. In making the theatrical workings of such performances overt, by underscoring their mass commercial appeal, and by showing how they are animated by the era’s new Fordist possibilities for mass production and consumption, Schuyler works in a mode best characterized as modernist burlesque. He alludes to this particular satirical method in a letter to his fellow satirist H. L. Mencken: “I have tried … to portray the spectacle [of the color question] as a combination madhouse, burlesque show and Coney Island” (qtd. in Mills, “Absurdity,” 2). As we shall see, this explanation illuminates the intersection between his satirical work and Nathanael West’s and their mutual debt to vaudeville’s topsy-turvy staple of cross-class, cross-race, and cross-gender impersonation as a means of exposing the absurdity of their subject, racial capitalism, a debt the filmmaker Preston Sturges shares as well.

Given the critical role of masquerade and self-making in the plot of Black No More, it is not surprising that gender is a central node in Schuyler’s critique. Harnessing performance and mechanically reproductive technologies to the making of race, the scientific invention of Black-No-More supplants and usurps the racialized function of maternal labor for entrepreneurial aims (Mullen, “Optic White,” 77). In this gendered transaction, it is the male characters in the book who deploy theatrical and technological modes of making race in order to commandeer the central role of female biological reproduction in the production of racialized bodies and narratives of national belonging and exclusion. Yet counter to this plotline of male appropriation and the misogynist cast of many satires, the skepticism of the black women characters in the novel provides a vital model of critical reception for the reader.

Tracing a series of financial transactions in the novel that center on the manufacture of race, I argue that Black No More illuminates new market possibilities for the trade of racial property in commodity form during the Fordist era. In this way, Schuyler’s narrative overs a complex and prescient understanding of race, gender, and capitalism in the interwar period, one that allows us to reconfigure prevailing concepts of the cultural production of the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Depression, and that portends our contemporary negotiations with mass-mediated identity and consumer culture on a global scale.

Curiously, for all of its modern-day relevance, Schuyler’s writing has often been neglected in the conventional historiography of the Harlem Renaissance and the Depression. In most accounts and collections of black literary production in 1920s and 1930s, Schuyler’s work receives short shrift, except for his typically provocative exchange in 1926 in The Nation with Langston Hughes about the meaning of black art. This may have to do with Schuyler’s later renunciation of progressive politics and turn to the right after the Second World War, epitomized by his eventual membership in the ultraconservative John Birch Society. Though there are notable exceptions?—most recently, Jevrey B. Ferguson’s critical biography The Sage of Sugar Hill (2005)—present-day critics who examine Schuyler’s work in the 1930s have often read it through the scrim of his Cold War conversion, a revisionist move Schuyler colludes with in his autobiography, narrating himself in the 1920s and 1930s as a spy busy keeping himself “abreast of the Communist conspiracy” (Black and Conservative, 147).

Neither Schuyler’s later political self-characterization nor his choice of genre—modernist burlesque—should prevent us from seeing the radical and iconoclastic politics of much of his own interwar writing. Indeed, a reading of Schuyler’s Black No More that attends to its outrageous yet trenchant materialist critique opens up a fertile avenue of inquiry into the literary production of the Harlem Renaissance, a social movement described as “a cultural nationalism of the parlor” and famously criticized by Langston Hughes, for its failure to raise the wages of “ordinary Negroes,” and by Richard Wright, for its corrupt “liaison between inferiority-complexed Negro ‘geniuses’ and burnt-out white Bohemians with money” (Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, xxviii; Hughes, The Big Sea, 228; Wright, “Blueprint,” 1403). In these assessments, the Harlem Renaissance emerges as a tepid, bourgeois, and largely unsuccessful exercise in accommodation across the color line. Yet where does black modernist satire fit into these accounts? Few would disagree that satire overs a powerful vector of protest, one that is raucous, caustic, and no less angry than the literary mode most commonly denoted by “protest”—urban realism (Dickson-Carr, African American Satire, 2). Perhaps African American satire and its hybrid forms have been overlooked because they forgo the realist expectations and heavy burden of veracity that have weighed down black writers since the evidentiary aims of nineteenth-century slave narratives. By unseating our conventional conceptions of politically engaged fiction—if we momentarily depose urban realism—we might transform our notions of the Harlem Renaissance and the literary Left of the 1930s. We might recognize how other forms of fiction such as modernist burlesque occasioned paradigm shifts in a progressive key, performing the more abstract but no less important work of making readers see anew with regard to the social and material aspects of their world. This criterion extends the category of literature concerned with capitalism and race relations beyond the parameters of the social protest genre and its explicitly proletariat focus to include works that traverse new labor processes and class forces through a deeply satirical or ironic lens, texts such as Schuyler’s novel, Rudolph Fisher’s The Walls of Jericho (1928), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928), Wallace Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1932), Langston Hughes’s own The Ways of White Folks (1934), and others (Schockett, “Modernism,” 34; Dickson-Carr 10, 69).

(Continues…)

Excerpted from REAL FOLKSby Sonnet Retman Copyright © 2011 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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