The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro

2. “Civilization has met its Waterloo”: The Great War, Race, and the Canon

2 “Civilization has met its Waterloo” The Great War, Race, and the Canon If Jim-Crow cars must still convey me home When I return from fighting o’er the foam, If I am still to fill the worthless job And be the same old plaything for the mob; If after all my sacrifice and pain, Your segregation laws would still remain— Then better would it be for me to crave A little spot in Flanders as my grave. Andrea Razafkeriefo, “A Parting Word” (1918) From the outset, there was a powerful—if not dominant—trend for the significance of the war to be discussed in terms not of conflicting nationalities, ideologies, spheres of influence, or imperial rivalry, but in racial terms.1 In America, popular hard-line eugenicists such as Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, and Clinton Stoddard Burr decried the “dysgenic” effects of the war in killing off the “fittest” of Nordic “stock”; Grant’s 1916 bestseller The Passing of the Great Race (revised in 1918) was just one of several texts predicting the decline of the West, a decline of which the war was the ultimate expression.2 The war, indeed, served both as a vindication and a crisis for American Nordics, the subdivision of European whiteness that Grant and Stoddard believed lay behind America’s rise to economic, scientific, and political prominence. On the one hand, according to Grant, it had demonstrated “the Anglo-Saxon branch of the Nordic race is again showing itself to be that upon which the nation must chiefly depend for leadership, for courage, for loyalty, for unity and harmony of action, for self-sacrifice and devotion to an ideal” (xi). On the other, war was “in the highest sense dysgenic . . . it is destructive of the best strains, spiritually, morally and physically ” (xiii). For Grant, Anglo-Saxons from America, Germany, and England slaughtering each other in France and Belgium was effectively a racial civil war with dangerous consequences for the future of American and European civic and political life. 17 “Civilization has met its Waterloo” Such nervousness among the ranks of white supremacists and supporters of European imperialism was greeted enthusiastically by several African American commentators, particularly those committed to political radicalism . Cyril Briggs, the editor of the Crusader—which would become one of the few organs committed to a principle of combining black nationalism with socialism—reprinted huge chunks of Stoddard’s best-selling 1920 book The Rising Tide of Colour with something almost approaching approval in his article “Rising Tide of Color Sets White World A-Trembling.”3 He urged his readers to disregard “the natural prejudices of the author” but to nonetheless “[digest] the lessons of the necessity of solidarity, organization and the use or show of force in order to obtain our rightful place in the sun” (“Rising Tide” 770). The black radical Hubert Harrison even corresponded with Stoddard on this issue, agreeing with him about the eugenic consequences of the devastation of white masculinity the war had unleashed upon Europe, but informing him that as a Negro, “that which you fear, I naturally hope for” (Harrison Reader 305). Briggs and Harrison were fairly extreme in crowing over the damage done to white global hegemony due to the huge white casualties of the war. The more consistent hope voiced across all African American periodicals was that the war would instigate a reform in domestic racial politics, due both to Wilson’s articulation of the war effort in terms of securing global democracy and national self-determination, and to the weakening of white moral and intellectual (rather than demographic) authority. In addition, the reciprocal politics of expecting reward for offering service was paramount. The quid pro quo that African Americans expected—that support for the U.S. war effort must be rewarded with greater civic freedoms, protection, and opportunities following the conflict—was enunciated forcefully throughout black America’s substantial press, and the sentiment appeared in many poems , stories, articles, and editorials of the time. Notably, the poetry and fiction was almost uniformly what might be called populist, utilizing form and language that could be described as traditional and often even “genteel.” In many cases, the work was quickly produced or written by people who would not have identified their primary public role as poets or novelists—by newspaper editors, activists, soldiers, and teachers. As Mark Van Wienen has persuasively argued, writers of what he dubs this “partisan poetry” used the cultural authority vested in fiction and especially poetry as...