Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro

2. Nation, Class, and the Limits of the Left

70 2 Nation, Class, and the Limits of the Left International Socialism, while not opposed to true nationality, is antagonistic to that anarchistic nationalism struggling to find markets and necessitating armed camps and war. True nationalism, based in the main upon language [and the natural characteristics and genius peculiar to the people of a particular locality], demands the right of a people to control its destiny . . . and is today the aspiration of millions. —Call, 27 March 1919 In the crucible of 1919, a class-based analysis of racism enjoyed widespread currency among liberals, progressives, and leftists; the struggle against racial inequality was frequently linked with the necessity to transform or abolish capitalist social relations. But if this was the case, why was this trend reversed? How did the New Negro devolve into The New Negro, with apparently little opposition? Theodor Adorno would have it that, with the failure of the bid for working-class power, politics flees to the realm of the aesthetic—that when the “time for political art” recedes, “politics . . . migrate[s] into autonomous art.” Adorno usefully reminds us that radical artistic movements, if they are to survive and develop, need to be underpinned by radical political movements; as Marx remarked in The German Ideology, “The existence of revolutionary ideas in a particular period presupposes the existence of a revolutionary class.” Adorno’s general insight begs the particular question, however, of why, when the U.S. proletariat failed to develop into a “revolutionary class,” Nation, Class, and the Limits of the Left 71 culturalism—the programmatic notion that the zone of culture should supply not merely support for but also the site of African American liberation —won the day among antiracists in the postwar United States.1 The causality here is more complex than may first appear, for an analysis of not only what happened but also what did not happen is necessary . To understand fully how the New Negro class struggle warrior of 1919 could reemerge as the culture hero of the Harlem Renaissance, the inquiry needs to be broken down into its component parts. In chapters 3 and 4, two principal developments of dominant ideology in the wake of 1919 are examined: the rise of racist antiradicalism and, simultaneously , the emergence of cultural pluralism. First, however, what is, in a sense, a nonevent must be investigated. Why did the revolutionary postwar upsurge fail to produce, if not a U.S. equivalent to the Bolshevik Revolution , at least a radical antiracist movement that would continue, after the early 1920s, to appeal to a broad range of leftists and progressives? Why did Bogalusa, hailed by many in 1919 as the harbinger of days to come, so rapidly recede from the contemporaneous imagination? Can the causality behind the waning influence of a class analysis of race and racism be attributed wholly to government repression, the crushing of the labor movement, the zealousness of anti-immigrant xenophobes, and the revived Ku Klux Klan? Or did various features of the Left’s own formulation of the relation of race to class and of class to nation contribute to the substitution of culturalism for class struggle? The Sombartian Query To pose questions of this kind involves, first, re-posing that irksome but never quite banishable question first formulated by Werner Sombart in 1906: “Why is there no socialism in America?” Most of the standard responses offered over the past century—influenced by the very terms in which the question is framed—entail one or another version of the thesis of American exceptionalism, according to which 1919 was an anomaly , a blip on the screen of history: instead of signaling fundamental and irresolvable contradictions in the U.S. body politic, the year’s intense class struggles constituted a rupture with traits and trends that have always differentiated the United States from other industrial nations. In one variant, as the doctrine of consensus, American exceptionalism proposes that the Left never exercised a significant influence on the U.S. working class, which, being “born free” in a nation lacking genuine revolutionary traditions, experienced what Louis Hartz has called “civic integration .” Frederick Jackson Turner, in a formulation of the consensus the- 72 Spectres of 1919 sis even predating Sombart, held that the frontier operated as a safety valve for worker insurgency, posing an ideal of agrarian independence that defused class consciousness. The cold war–era historian Seymour Martin Lipset stressed...