Negro with a Hat

by Colin Grant

  7

  HOW TO MANUFACTURE A TRAITOR

  Shall an instrument of oppression

  drawn from the repertory of the star chamber,

  assailed by our colonial forebears as destructive of liberty,

  and condemned by the Supreme Court as ‘abhorrent’ …

  shall such an instrument be revived in the twentieth century?

  The New Republic, 9 July 1919

  THE Negro agitators posed only one of a myriad problems to unsettle America in its transition from war to peace. The country had to brace itself for the unexpectedly early return of 4 million soldiers, at a time when the economy was spiralling towards recession. The speed of the German army’s collapse, following America’s entry to the war, had caught military planners off guard. Industries that had been cranked up for war were suddenly no longer required; their contracts cancelled with little thought given to how their productivity might be converted to peace-time use. The black workforce was particularly vulnerable. As always, the Negro was last to be hired and first to be fired. But this time round, poor white families were only marginally better off than their black neighbours. Empty bellies and no prospect of work were bad enough, but worse was in store. Amongst the returning heroes were carriers of a deadly virus.

  God-fearing Americans were not spared the worldwide influenza pandemic that settled on the land towards the end of 1918. Turning to the Bible for an explanation they pictured themselves cast in a re-enactment of the plague that had befallen the Egyptians in the time of Pharaoh. But neither prayers, nor holy water, nor lintels crossed in blood offered protection from the virulent angel of destruction that brought fevers, heartache, anxious bedside vigils and finally death to hundreds of thousands of households.1 Within the space of a few months bodies began to pile up at the mortuaries, and undertakers struggled to keep up with the demand for their services. All day long funeral processions crossed paths. These were the lucky ones. Many more corpses remained unburied through lack of funds, their coffins stacked up at cemeteries or awaiting collection from porches up and down the country – no part of the Union was exempt.

  The state of Kentucky exemplified the scale of America’s woes. There the coal mines had to close their gates for lack of both healthy and willing men. The flu epidemic stripped the mines down to a core of key workers and the subsequent wave of strikes depleted the workforce to the point where the coal pits became inoperable. It was a question of priority; and wavering strikers who were still strong enough to wield a shovel found their services in greater demand at cemeteries, putting their tools to use digging graves.

  Millions of disgruntled labourers joined the miners in working to rule. On an average month in 1919, the country was paralysed by up to fifty independent strikes – the most potent and damaging was wrought in the steelworks. From Pittsburgh to Seattle, 350,000 steel men walked out on strike, threatening a seismic shift in the balance of power between workers and bosses. Steelworkers formed the backbone of America’s industry. They were, at once, both superhuman and subhuman, performing dirty, dangerous and vital work for a pittance. Steel had made America: steel ringed its railroads, sharpened bayonets and held up its skyscrapers. The men who descended daily into the furnaces of the steel mills exercised a fascination over Americans. In the midst of the strike, the country’s leading playwright, Eugene O’Neill, turned his sympathetic socialist pen to the plight of the workers. In his bruising tragedy, The Hairy Ape, a transatlantic ocean liner owned by a steel magnate serves as metaphor for American society. Below deck, in the stokehole, the ship’s brutish Neanderthal men shovelled the coals that kept the engines turning; they were the same industrial slaves who fed the furnaces of the steel mills. ‘I’m what makes iron into steel!’ screams the semi-literate antagonist, Yank. ‘Steel, dat stands for de whole ting! And I’m steel-steel-steel! I’m de muscles in steel, de punch behind it.’2 The refined and pampered passengers considered Yank and his foreign-born fellow workers barely human, if they considered them at all. The play turns on this realisation when, on a tour of the ship, the desirable, lily-white young lady recoils in horror at the sight of the ‘filthy beast’, the coal-blackened, sweating and semi-naked Yank. He is the hairy ape made suddenly and sharply aware of his lowly state; and, beginning to think for the first time, is undermined by unflattering thoughts. Yank’s eventual rage mirrored the rising tide of resentment expressed by the nation’s steelworkers over their primitive working conditions.

  Twelve-hour shifts – half of that time spent shovelling, throwing and carrying bricks and cinder out of the furnaces – would no longer be tolerated. Over four bitter and hungry months on a diet of graveyard stew (hot milk and bread) the workers clung desperately to their demands with naive conviction. But the steel companies were determined to preserve a non-unionised system and offered no alternatives. The bosses’ intransigence eventually won out through violent intimidation, the propaganda of a sympathetic press and the use of strike breakers – the Negroes who arrived in sealed carloads shipped into plant-yards. The shareholders’ fantastic profits remained intact. That victory, though, had been tempered by the glimpse into a terrifying future. And when angry and confused Americans looked through the smoke and mirrors for the root causes of the turmoil, they could clearly discern an ominous red flag. The young social anthropologist Charles Rumford Walker was among the first to record his compatriots’ overwhelming sense of bewilderment. On the ferry returning the demobbed first lieutenant and his men home from the war, Walker asked the civilian pilot about the state of the nation. ‘It’s a mess over here,’ said the pilot ‘There ain’t any jobs, and labor is raising hell. Everybody that hez a job strikes.’ Pressed further the sailor offered the most favoured explanation of the time: ‘I don’t know what we’re comin’ out at. Russia, maybe.’3

  American readers of the Harvard-educated Communist, John Reed, had had ample opportunity to understand the meaning of ‘the Russians are coming’. Published in March 1919, and by July reproduced in its fourth edition, his Ten Days that Shook the World was a first-hand account of the tumultuous first few days of the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917. In it, Reed pieced together the capture of Petrograd and the old Winter Palace where ‘servants in their blue and red and gold uniforms stood nervously about’. Penetrating the ‘malachite chamber with crimson brocade hangings where the Ministers had been in session all that day and night’, Reed found ‘the long table covered with green baize [and] before each empty seat was pen and ink and paper … scribbled over with beginnings of plans of action, rough drafts of proclamations … scratched out, as their futility became evident’. The provisional government had, inevitably, fallen to Lenin and the Bolsheviks in ten memorable days.4 Even the least subtle American mind could make the connection: Winter Palace today, White House tomorrow.

  It took a further two years for the aftershock of the revolution to reach the shores of the USA. What had inspired workers around the world – the Soviet decrees which proclaimed the abolition of all private ownership of land, and the establishment of a workers’ and peasants’ government – were viewed in Washington as dark and satanic, as well as being just plain wrong. They stood in opposition to every tenet of the American way of life. And, lest anyone should be swayed by the romance of a final levelling of society, there were plenty of commentators on hand to warn decent Americans, such as the hard-working farmers with a small amount of savings, that, come the revolution, they had just as much to lose as the shipping magnate or coal baron.5 Newspapers encouraged the population to be vigilant. Surely it was true of any disease – the New York Times, the Washington Post and Salt Lake Tribune all argued – that early detection was essential for a favourable prognosis. Of particular concern was the fear that undeclared Bolshevik sympathisers were already at large in the schools’ system. Brooklyn’s Commercial high school provided an early warning in January 1919. During a class debate on the Great War one of the teachers became suspicious when pupils unexpectedly offered up a defenc
e of the Bolshevik revolution. His report prompted an urgent inquiry by the school’s governors; the leading, and only, suspect, an inspiring but provocative history teacher, Benjamin Glassberg, was quickly identified. The children were summoned and, when invited to, one by one lined up to denounce their teacher. Glassberg was suspended indefinitely, and when he was brought before the city’s education board, his defence was further undermined by revelations that he was also a director of the Socialist weekly, the New York Call, and a part-time lecturer at the Rand School of Social Science: both were cited as evidence of his guilt.6 Benjamin Glassberg’s prosecution foreshadowed the widescale introduction of loyalty oaths for public-school teachers and other government employees. It was an indication of the first shoots of intolerance springing up throughout the country. Legislators on Capitol Hill even proposed a law that would lead to the imprisonment of any person displaying the red flag (warning flags raised by railroad or public-highways employees were to be exempted). That Marcus Garvey found himself caught up in this conflagration was no reflection of the inflammatory rhetoric of his speeches, heard at massed meetings and reported assiduously by excited BOI agents. Rather, the combination of the suspect radicals that his movement appeared to be associated with, as well as the overall tone of his recently launched publication, the Negro World, caused most alarm.

  Marcus Garvey celebrated his thirty-first birthday with the launch of the Negro World. On 17 August 1918, admittedly four years after he’d first promised to send Booker T. Washington a copy, the official organ of the UNIA rolled off the printing press. Six sheets of news reports – especially national stories told from a black perspective, and world events that might impact on Negro people – together with essays, poems and uplifting editorials, would set readers back a mere 5 cents. On the front page, the proprietor’s own contributions reflected the cadences and rhythms of his voice – he wrote as he spoke, in a simple, forceful and rhetorical manner – and pledges, promises and proclamations were laid before the reader much as they’d previously been laid before the King. In an editorial on 27 March 1919, he greeted readers, the ‘Fellowmen of the Negro Race’, with the news that, ‘The Russian people have issued a proclamation of sympathy … towards the labouring people of the world … We are not concerned as partakers in these revolutions, but we are concerned in the destruction that will come out of the bloody conflict between capital and labour, which will give us a breathing space to declare our freedom from the tyrannical rule of oppressive overlords.’

  Marcus Garvey reserved a Victorian formality for these earnest and respectful addresses to the members. The formality added water to the wine of an otherwise explosive content. Everything was for the greater good of the race. Only occasionally did vanity seep out from the edges of his prose when the strain of wanting to be taken seriously was all but exposed. The UNIA president was actually far more thrilled by the publication’s solidifying of the movement. 17 August was a great day for the UNIA, for Garvey and the race. From the outset, Marcus Garvey announced the paper’s intention to agitate and propagandise. In early issues – written under the title in bold type – three simple words were reproduced: ‘Negroes Get Ready’.7

  Four years of dress rehearsals and dreaming up headlines weren’t necessarily to the paper’s advantage. The Negro World would have to take its place in a lively and competitive market, clamouring for attention alongside the more than 400 newspapers and magazines now published by African-Americans. Most of these were local journals full of tinsel and piffling gossip. The sensationalist yellow journalism practised by the Chicago Defender – with its unsparing, explicit depiction of the vile acts heaped upon the Negro, published alongside hair-straightening adverts like ‘Kink-No-More’ – was the most widely circulated black paper in the USA.8 The Negro World struck a much more sober note. It positioned itself somewhere between the national newsletter of a high church and a political review with literary and international ambitions. There was nothing quite like it available to Negro readers, either north or south of the Mason-Dixon Line. But in New York, Garvey’s weekly had to find its way amongst a number of established and robust publications such as the New York Age and Crisis, as well as fearless, lacerating left-wing upstarts typified by the Messenger. All race leaders recognised the importance of newspapers in disseminating their ideas beyond the immediate sphere of influence. Marcus Garvey was no exception. The New York Age had been a subtle vehicle for Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Machine. W. E. B. Du Bois and the Crisis enjoyed the financial and spiritual backing of the NAACP: soon after its inception in 1910, the monthly magazine had become synonymous with its editor. The Crisis was W. E. B. Du Bois. The Negro World would serve as a platform for Garvey and an organisation now more often referred to as the Garvey Movement.

  Garvey’s paper emerged at the third stage of a tradition of African-American journals stretching back to 1827. The first phase had been characterised by campaigning newspapers, such as Freedom’s Journal (founded by another remarkable Jamaican, John B. Russworm) that argued politely but cogently for the abolition of slavery. In its very first edition, Freedom’s Journal begged to plead the Negroes’ cause, ‘too long have others spoke for us [such that] our vices and our degradation are ever arrayed against us, but our virtues are passed unnoticed’. Russworm nibbled at the conscience of white liberals for a few years before he answered a greater calling and emigrated to the newly colonised Liberia.9 The disillusionment which followed the American Civil War gave way to a second phase of African-American journalism in which black papers largely fell in line with Booker T. Washington’s conciliatory, unthreatening approach to white dominance. After Washington’s death and the Great War, a third phase had emerged with a return to protest journalism, with its gentlemanly velvet glove removed.

  On the front page of every edition, the Negro World proudly proclaimed itself to be ‘Devoted to the Interests of the Negro Race without the Hope of Profit as a Business Investment’. Profit margins were indeed tight. Six months after its launch the paper carried a special appeal. Without an immediate injection of $3,000 cash, it would be dead in two weeks. An emergency editorial called upon all Negroes interested in the salvation of the race (and in particular the salvation of the paper) to make a dollar donation. The core of UNIA supporters – casual workers, earning 50 cents an hour on ten-hour shifts – was unlikely to heed the call. Given his experience in launching papers in Panama, Costa Rica and Jamaica, it’s surprising that Marcus Garvey hadn’t foreseen such a likely outcome. But then this was an altogether more ambitious project, on a much grander scale; a less impetuous man might have proceeded more cautiously and not jumped straight in with a print run of several thousand. Of course a more cautious man might not have proceeded at all.

  Garvey had spurned lucrative advertising contracts, and in honouring the UNIA mission of linking all the scattered people of the race, the paper was given away for free in certain sections of the world, without hope of return – never mind hope of profit. Financial fragility was the perennial problem that every black journal faced. It would have been difficult for any newcomer to stay afloat without some form of subsidy. But with patronage came the threat of unwanted interference and accusations of partial, if not wholesale, surrender of editorial independence. Few would contest that assessment. The previous generation of black journals, including Colored American Magazine and Voice of the Negro, had been subject to ugly struggles for control. It was often (privately) alleged that the then primary race leader, Booker T. Washington, had ruthlessly preserved his influence and stifled dissenting voices simply by buying shares in troublesome papers or lending them money. Such was Washington’s unmistakable command over black papers that when, for instance, the African scholar Edward Wilmot Blyden wrote a personal letter to him endorsing his tactical, subordin ate stance towards white authority, Washington wrote back, ‘What you say is so entirely in keeping with my own views, that I have taken the liberty of asking Mr Thomas Fortune, editor of the New York Age, to l
et it appear.’ A Washington request to an African-American editor was synonymous with an instruction.10

  Despite the signs of a paper in distress, Marcus Garvey maintained confidence in the Negro World’s eventual pre-eminence in becoming the most important international black journal. In the interim, any shortfall in the donations necessary for the paper’s survival would have to be met by the association’s slender resources. None of the directors, including Garvey, as yet drew a salary, and judging by the trickle of disgruntled journalists who took him to court, Garvey expected the same sacrifice from the paper’s employees. Such embarrassing beginnings were picked up gleefully by rival black newspapers. The Chicago Defender, which perhaps had most to lose from any encroachment on its readership, gave undue prominence to reports that the ‘editor of a little weekly is being sued for [unpaid] wages’.11 The Virgin Islander, Anselmo Jackson, was first on the witness stand in September, just a month after the launch of Garvey’s paper; and the Defender was further pained to report in November that ‘Marcus M. Garvey, who is still getting out a little two-page paper in Harlem’ was again sued by a disgruntled reporter, Dorothy Hensen. The speed with which both freelance journalists pre-empted the usual explanation of ‘the cheque is in the post’ and sought redress in the courts confirmed a peculiar Caribbean tendency (from which Garvey was not immune) of viewing litigation as a first resort. Judgement, in each case, against Garvey dramatically depleted the organisation’s meagre funds. Nonetheless, his gamble seemed to pay off as the Negro World weathered the storm of its early financial losses; circulation figures steadily climbed towards 10,000 by the end of its first year.12