by Philipp Blom
Hatred and fear erupt on cultural fault lines. In Europe different ethnicities, religions, and centuries-old grudges dressed up in scientific racism fueled anti-Semitism, along with Nordic, German, Gallic, Slavic, and assorted other supremacist visions of a clean, pure future. In the United States these debates did not revolve primarily around religion (despite the discrimination endured by Catholics and Jews) or around old European memories. Instead, they were haunted by the country’s original sin: a noble dream built on slavery and slaughter.
American heroes: The Harlem Hellfighters fought courageously on the Western Front. Their unit was incorporated into the French army, as their own (white) officers did not trust them in combat.
The veterans of the black battalions within the US Army had decided to risk their lives abroad for a fairer deal at home, but they had been cruelly disabused of any hopes of a better, more dignified life. During the time that one of these black units spent training in Spartanburg, South Carolina, the city’s mayor, J. T. Floyd, had declared that “with their northern ideas about race equality, [these black soldiers] will probably expect to be treated like white men. I can say right here that they will not be treated like white men. I can say right here that they will not be treated as anything except negroes. We shall treat them exactly as we treat our resident negroes.” Clarifying what that entailed, another citizen added, “I can tell you for certain that if any of these colored soldiers go in any of the soda stores and the like and ask to be served they’ll be knocked down. Somebody will throw a bottle. We don’t allow negroes to use the same glass that a white may later have to drink out of. We have our customs down here, and we aren’t going to alter them.” During the same month black soldiers in Houston, Texas, had rioted against the treatment meted out to them and had engaged in a gun battle with local whites that left seventeen locals dead. Thirteen black soldiers had been court-martialed and hanged.
Faced with such attitudes, black soldiers had experienced their service in Europe as a liberation. Embarking on the SS Pocahontas, the 369th Infantry Regiment, nicknamed the “Harlem Hellfighters,” sailed in November 1917 and arrived in Brest on New Year’s Day 1918. The arrival of the African Americans to the strains of the unit’s band playing the most amazingly riotous, danceable march music caused a stir in the French harbor town and in the country more generally. James Reese Europe was already a famous bandleader, and General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, understood the publicity potential of the Hellfighters and their musicians, though he also pleaded to keep blacks away from the front, calling them “inferior” and doubting that they could ever fight as white citizens could. Between February and March 1918 the band embarked on a tour covering two thousand miles of French territory, playing in twenty-five cities. Their concerts produced scenes of intense emotion, and they were treated as stars by French citizens, who had never before heard jazz.
Meanwhile, the fighting comrades of the Hellfighters had undergone a strange transformation. Forbidden from engaging the Germans as American soldiers, the unit had simply been assigned to the 16th Division of the French army. They were feared by their enemies, and at the New York victory parade on February 17, 1919, the band proudly marched down Fifth Avenue.
Their triumph, however, was short-lived. In civilian life the former Hellfighters found themselves transformed once more into second-class citizens. They were openly segregated in the South, where the Ku Klux Klan was gaining hundreds of thousands of new members and lynchings were on the rise again, and they were treated as dangerous competition in the industrial cities of the North.
Race was a constant theme during the uncertain years following the war, and many of the concerns and interests bound up with discrimination against African Americans mirrored Europe’s conservative revolution. Justifying injustice with paranoia, many whites associated the country’s black population with sedition, godlessness, revolution, and Bolshevism; even President Wilson apparently told his doctor in March 1919 that “the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying bolshevism to America.”11 This was particularly painful for black Americans who had had the opportunity to see what it was like to be treated differently and to be surrounded by different ideas while fighting for their country in Europe.
The original Ku Klux Klan had emerged in the post–Civil War Reconstruction era as a movement of southern white men (and women’s auxiliaries) protesting the end of slavery and the reincorporation of Confederate states into the Union. The Klan had enjoyed a brutal but brief reign in the 1860s and early 1870s before sinking into insignificance. But in 1915, director D. W. Griffith released his silent film of Thomas Dixon Jr.’s 1905 novel The Clansman. Dixon, a Southern Baptist minister from North Carolina, though opposed to slavery itself, had portrayed the Klan as a band of heroes fighting to defend white women against sexually aggressive and stupid blacks (who were played by white actors wearing blackface) and seeking to restore the “natural”—that is, white supremacist—order of things. The outspoken racism, transferred to Griffith’s film, made it highly controversial, but the film was hugely popular nonetheless. Griffith’s filming technique was innovative, and he had shrewdly cast the legendary Lillian Gish in a starring role.
The film and the book it was based on prompted a huge resurgence of the once almost defunct KKK, not only in the South but also in Detroit, Chicago, and other midwestern and northern industrial cities where blacks and whites were now competing for factory jobs. The Klan’s membership was limited to native-born white Protestants, and though its main target of hatred was black Americans, it was also ready to attack anyone suspected of being “un-American,” a category that included Jews, Catholics, and socialists. The Klan’s first leader, or “Imperial Wizard,” was William J. Simmons of Alabama, a former Methodist Episcopal minister suspended by his church for inefficiency. Directly inspired by Griffith’s film, Simmons obtained a copy of the original “prescript” or rules of the Reconstruction-era Klan and promoted the group anew using modern sales tactics, including a four-dollar commission for every new member recruited. By 1920, the Klan had four million members.
Though the ensuing decades were to witness a great many Klan-directed violent attacks on black men and women, including thousands of lynchings, the activities of this second-wave KKK were not limited to violence against blacks.12 The Klansmen began to turn on anyone who did not represent their vision of what it was to be American; they saw themselves as defenders of “pure womanhood” and guardians of morality, opposing abortion and drinking but also “loose dancing” and “roadside parking.” Those accused of violating the Klan’s strict moral code were abducted and subjected to a variety of tortures: flogging, branding, tarring and feathering, whipping, mutilation, or in some cases a cruel and slow death.
White supremacy? Amid the racial and political unrest in the years after 1918, the Ku Klux Klan swelled to unknown proportions, as did lynchings.
The years prior to 1919 had done much to aggravate racial tensions. During the war, the enlistment of millions of working-class white men had led to severe labor shortages in the industrial centers of the North, with some half a million southern black men being hired to take their place. Now, after the soldiers’ demobilization and return, competition for jobs had become intense, and the atmosphere was further strained by the returning black soldiers’ newfound confidence.
The labor situation was complicated by the unions themselves, generally white and generally unwilling to open their ranks to black workers. After a surge of growth immediately after the war, they had been swiftly beaten back by corporate interests in major industries from steel to meatpacking; when the white unions responded with strikes, businesses counterattacked by hiring black strikebreakers. “The sentiment of brotherhood can be completely discarded,” declared the leftist poet Claude McKay in Negroes in America, lamenting this classic divide-and-rule tactic. “The American worker’s movement finds itself at the crossroads. It must choose
one of the following two paths: the organization of black workers separately or together with whites—or the defeat of both by the forces of the bourgeoisie.”13
There was not much likelihood of brotherhood between black and white. In the summer of 1919, after a spring of labor unrest and strikes across the United States, racial tensions erupted in a series of race riots. In Charleston, South Carolina; Longview, Texas; Bisbee, Arizona; Norfolk, Virginia; and Knoxville, Tennessee, white mobs attacked local blacks, though only in a few cities, notably Chicago and Washington, D.C., where the local police refused to intervene, did the black population resist with violence.
All in all, there were bloody race riots in thirty-eight American cities, leaving the period of 1919 with the epithet “Red Summer.” But this time the blacks fought back. Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” was a clarion call to the defiant New Negro:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!14
Though never explicitly mentioning race hatred, “If We Must Die” was recognized by McKay’s readers as a defiant answer to the white lynch mobs. The poem was a call to arms, but it also staked a cultural claim. With its self-consciously traditional, almost biblical language and its strict sonnet form—the form of Petrarch and Shakespeare—it attacked the barbarity of the white mobs in an idiom that self-consciously referred back to the highest pinnacles of Western literary culture.
The rise in black defiance given expression by McKay brought on intensified fighting. On July 27 in Chicago, a black boy out swimming drifted close to a beach reserved for whites and was pelted with rocks until he drowned. The police refused to take action, and groups of black men decided to take the law into their own hands. During the ensuing thirteen days of pitched battles between African American men (many of them veterans) and police army units supported by vigilante groups from poor Irish neighborhoods, thirty-eight people were killed, hundreds were injured, and hundreds of homes were ransacked or burned to the ground. The government had to deploy six thousand troops to bring the situation under control. Having been victorious in the greatest war ever seen, America appeared to be on the edge of a race war.
The Rising Tide
“THE BASIC FACTOR OF HISTORY is not politics, but race,” wrote the American historian Lothrop Stoddard in 1921 in his widely read The Rising Tide of Color.15 Like Spengler, Stoddard believed that Western civilization was doing much to ruin itself—in this case, though, not through capitalism, which he supported, but through the “internecine warfare” of white peoples against one another, which gave inferior “colored races” a golden opportunity to exploit the white race’s weakened presence on the world stage. “The war,” he wrote, “was nothing short of a headlong plunge into white race-suicide. It was essentially a civil war between closely related white stocks; a war wherein every physical and mental effective was gathered up and hurled into a hell of lethal machinery which killed unerringly the youngest, the bravest, and the best.”16
Stoddard saw the noble “Nordic races” overrun by a stream of Africans, Asians, “mongrels,” and “ape-like aborigines,” who would invariably destroy the racial purity of the white races, particularly because the nonwhites appeared to have more “superabundant animal vitality” than the cultured whites: “In ethnic crossings,” he wrote, “the negro strikingly displays his prepotency, for black blood, once entering a human stock, seems never really bred out again.”17 Describing Africans as “savage” and “addicted to cannibalism,” Stoddard drew the inevitable conclusion: “The West has justified—perhaps with some reason—every aggression on weaker races by the doctrine of the Survival of the Fittest; on the ground that it is best for future humanity that the unfit should be eliminated and give place to the most able race.”18
The result of interbreeding could be observed in South America, the author argued. “Such is the situation in mongrel-ruled America: revolution breeding revolution, tyranny breeding tyranny, and the twain combining to ruin their victims and force them ever deeper into the slough of degenerate barbarism,” he wrote. “The whites have lost their grip and are rapidly disappearing. The mixed-breeds have had their chance and have grotesquely failed.”19
“Weakened, tired Europe” did not have an answer to this existential crisis “at the crossroads of life and death.” It was part of the problem: nationalist strife between European nations (first and foremost Germany, which Stoddard believed to be inhabited mainly by inferior “Alpines” instead of the more aristocratic “Nordic stock”) led to terrible wars between whites, weakening their hold on world power. America would have to deal with this question by limiting migration and segregating populations. “Migration peopled Europe with superior white stocks displacing ape-like aborigines, and settled North America with Nordics instead of nomad redskins,” he opined. “But migration also bastardized the Roman world with Levantine mongrels, drowned the West Indies under a black tide, and is filling our own land with the sweepings of the European east and south.”20
Stoddard’s racial rants were highly respected and widely circulated. No university library was complete without his “scientific” disquisitions about superior Nordics; his ideas were so well known that in his 1925 novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald has the rich but not unduly bright Tom Buchanan say: “Civilization’s going to pieces. . . . I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard? . . . Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
Proved or not, the ideas of the likes of Stoddard and Spengler had wide currency, and with them came a hardening of tone, a yearning for authenticity and authoritarian strength. The KKK’s brand of bigoted right-wing Protestantism was outside the law but widely tolerated for years; only toward the middle of the 1920s did it begin to be opposed effectively. This official indifference to the Klan’s activities can only be explained by the assumption that there was widespread tacit sympathy for the group’s brutal moral crusade, or at the very least a high degree of political opportunism: in 1919 “un-American” activities were ruthlessly suppressed.
The “Red Scare” haunted the country. Fearing a revolution on American soil, conservative politicians used a series of mail bombs sent to their homes by an anarchist splinter group as an excuse to round up hundreds of socialists, communists, and anarchists across the United States and to incarcerate them without trial. The campaign was energetically coordinated by the unforgiving young director of the Bureau of Investigations (later to be renamed the Federal Bureau of Investigation, or FBI), the twenty-four-year-old J. Edgar Hoover.
Some five hundred “undesirables,” including American citizens, were arrested and held without trial; many were deported. On December 21, 1919, 249 of them—suspected anarchists, communists, or other leftists—were placed on the US Army’s transport ship Buford (which came to be nicknamed the “Red Ark”) lying in New York Harbor, with as yet no publicly known destination. The deportations were perfectly legal; under the terms of the recent Immigration Act of 1918, any noncitizen who, as a matter of principle, opposed or simply did not believe in organized government, or who discouraged any US war effort, could be de
ported. All 249 fell into one or another of these categories. They finally would disembark in Finland, where they were transferred to the new Soviet Union.
The Fallen Archangel
GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO BOWED OUT of politics after his Fiume adventure, and his political fall was accompanied by a real and mysterious one. Around eleven o’clock on the evening of August 19, 1922, he fell out of a first-floor window of his villa on Lake Garda, where he had retreated into a life of self-obsessed literature and lechery. He had been sitting on the windowsill, dressed in his pajamas and slippers. Luisa Baccara, his current mistress, was playing the piano. He suddenly fell backward headfirst, fracturing his skull and becoming comatose.
A witness later described that at the time of the fall he had been closely intertwined with Luisa’s sister, his hands wandering across her figure. Had she pushed him away more strongly than intended, perhaps revolted by the almost sixty-year-old faun who was by now almost hairless and had only a few greenish teeth left? Or had he fainted from overuse of his habitual cocaine? Another explanation links his almost fatal plunge to the presence in the house of Aldo Finzi, one of Mussolini’s closest allies. The old master, it was said, had become dangerous competition to the duce’s claim to national leadership as well as an embarrassment, but he still had charisma and a reputation large enough to halt the Fascist march on Rome if his caprice led him to do so.
When he came out of his coma, the aging poet took the tumble in stride. An inveterate self-mythologizer, he labeled the incident “the archangelic fall”—his name was not for nothing Gabriel of the Annunciation—and remarked with some satisfaction that he too had now risen from the dead. But his star was indeed sinking. Mussolini had given his militias free rein to brutally eliminate the armed opposition on the streets, and they had brought him victory. The ranks of his Fascist Party had swelled to seven hundred thousand, and he felt ready to make his grab for power.