The year 1929 began on a sour note for Alain Locke. A couple of weeks before New Years, he had learned that the Foreign Policy Association, to which he had submitted a report, “The Mandate System: A New Code of Empire,” in December, was so displeased with his report that it would not publish it in its current form, as had been planned previously. The rejection of this work hit Locke like a blow in the stomach, so unaccustomed was he to having his writing rejected outright, especially by influential White people. Worse, over the previous year, he had peppered the press with notices of his trips to Geneva conducting research for the report, fueling expectations that the finished project would appear in print. Now it would not, and its non-publication would heighten a perception he wanted to avoid—that as the heralded philosopher and promoter of the Negro Renaissance since 1925, when his epic anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation, had appeared, he was now, four years later, slipping, having not published a book since Four Negro Poets in 1927. Worried, perhaps overly, about the potential fallout from this failure, he chose his usual weekend visit with Mrs. Charlotte Mason, his millionaire Park Avenue patron, to pour out his frustration and seek consolation from a major personal setback.
As this diminutive, hypochondriac professor of philosophy fidgeted nervously in the drawing room of his psychic, overbearing matron, Locke, a man of almost clairvoyant personal diplomacy skills, confessed he had sensed something bad was going to result from a foreign policy project he had started years earlier. Locke had submitted his report late, after months of nagging by Raymond Leslie Buell. Although Locke knew its members were upset about his tardiness, he had hoped the brilliance of his approach would impress them. Rather than detailing the abuses of the British and French in administering Germany’s former colonies under the Mandates System, Locke had opted for a higher ground and a futuristic perspective. The Mandates System had been set up under the League of Nations, because of Woodrow Wilson’s insistence in Article 22 of its charter that Germany’s and Turkey’s former African colonies should be administered with international oversight now that they belonged to the Allies after the World War. The article stated that “to those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by people not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this covenant.”1 This “trust” would be exercised by putting these colonies under the administration and control of “advanced nations”—the French and the British—who “by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographic position, can best undertake” to provide the required “tutelage” of “such peoples” as a “responsibility” or “Mandatories on behalf of the League.”2 Of course, the “people not yet able to stand by themselves” were the Africans, since, by contrast those other peoples who belonged to the “Turkish Empire” were deemed to “have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized.” From a social Darwinist perspective, “those of Central Africa are at such a stage that the Mandatory must be responsible for the administration of the territory” to ensure “freedom of conscience and religion” and “prohibition of abuses, such as the slave trade,” among others.
As a philosopher, Locke had seized on Article 22 for its moral language—that the Mandatories had a “responsibility” for the “development of such peoples” toward a moment in the future when the existence even of the peoples of Central Africa “as independent nations” could “be provisionally recognized.” Rather than attack its failure to live up to that “sacred trust,” which the evidence of British and French Mandatories seem to suggest, Locke wanted to write a paper about the future—a vision of what the Mandates tended toward even in their imperfect iteration in 1919 as documents and in 1928 as practices. As he had put it in his proposal to the Foreign Policy Association for the study, “The administration of mandates in the spirit of international guardianship of the rights of the undeveloped peoples and their preparatory tutelage for participation in government and constructive self-adjustment is one of the most important and progressive aspects of the work of the League of Nations” (italics added).3
Locke had aimed for something higher than the Foreign Policy Association imagined he would produce—something more visionary than the typical foreign policy fact sheets that they were familiar with. Locke wanted to write something that spoke to a higher consciousness of what was possible in the world of foreign affairs that could be revealed only if the document and its promise were liberated from the maze of facts and claims that dogged discussions of the League of Nations. As a philosopher, Locke was committed to doing something more, something different, something high-minded rather than self-interested, as most foreign policy papers were—a New Negro approach that was more than simply acting out what would be an expected Black response to the system, that is, simply to blister the League of Nations project as handing over the destiny of Germany’s African nations to a patronizing band of thieves like the British and French imperialists after their victory in the World War. Something like that kind of “Black” indictment of the Mandates as a fig leaf of Western imperialism would be produced later by the Du Bois protégé Rayford W. Logan in The Operation of the Mandate System in Africa, 1919–1927 (1942). And it meant producing something other than the liberal, empathetic, but largely acquiescent study of the Mandates System that Raymond Buell, the White director of the Research Department of the Foreign Policy Association, and an adjunct professor of international relations, had produced in his magnum opus, the two-volume study, The Native Problem in Africa in 1928.4
But Locke had had problems finding his legs in writing his report, in part because he was not immersed in current foreign-policy research, not trained in international relations, and not sure that his prescriptive, non-empirical thought-piece about colonialism in general and the plight of Germany’s former colonies in particular would find sympathetic ears at the Foreign Policy Association. Like so many of the ventures that this nervous, brilliant, but opportunity-seeking philosopher produced after The New Negro: An Interpretation, the FPA report was not grounded in a firmly grasped intellectual trajectory that made sense to all those around him. He sought to uncover something embedded in the current situation, but unseen by the policymakers of the day. And like the New Negro positionality itself, the report, even when finished, was an unfinished statement that reflected the unfinished nature of the New Negro. The report was more than simply the latest iteration of race consciousness, but a new, more cosmopolitan, more transnational notion of Negro possibility—what African nations could become, not what they currently were. And that incompleteness had crept like a leprechaun into his writing of the report, such that a lack of firmness in where he was going stole some of the energy from the argument he was making.
Nevertheless, Locke’s proposal was brilliant, for by advocating a “third way” neither completely condemnatory of the Mandates nor acquiescent to the exploitation that they had allowed, Locke proposed strengthening the Mandates to allow them to become a real process of education in self-government, economic self-development, and responsible leadership among the colonized. By holding back on enslaving, debasing, and raping the raw materials of colonies, the European powers might model a behavior that the colonized would adopt, that of enlightened use of natural and human resources for the benefit of the colonized people and thus create the conditions for a sustainable path to eventual freedom and a more harmonious postcolonial world. While Locke did detail some of the abuses of the Americans or the Europeans in creating exploitative “closed-door” colonial relationships through shady loans and pressured deals with the colonized, he was a pragmatist. He advocated strengthening the path to freedom by utilizing African American and international criticism and pressure to embarrass abuser nations and stimulate rational development in the colonies even while they still remained under domination. In his doctoral dissertation on value theory, Locke had argued that the key to valuing by humans was their ability to transcend acting simply in their own naked self-interest to do that which seemed designed to reach beyond the immediate gratifications of desire, to aim at what Aristotle called that for which other things are done.5
This aiming higher and laying the groundwork for a better future for the colonized was really the revolutionary aspect of his report. Taking Woodrow Wilson’s insistence in Article 22 of the League of Nation’s charter that set up the Mandates System as his text, Locke argued that a policy of international restraint on the naked exploitation of Germany’s former African colonies was the beginning of a “new code” of empire. Article 22, Locke argued, established a new ethical principle for the West in its conduct toward Africa, to wit that the nations that seized the colonies of German, Turkish, and other Axis empires had to administer them as a “sacred trust of civilization.” England, France, and even South Africa, which acquired South-West Africa, were not to enslave the populations, not exploit the land and natural resources to the point of ecological disasters, not to raise colonial armies for offensive military purposes, and most important, not to look upon these colonies as their permanent possessions. Rather, the Allies, Locke referenced Woodrow Wilson as declaring, should administer these colonies as a trusteeship that should help the inhabitants transition, eventually, to self-government. This was the core outcome of a world war to make the world “safe for democracy.”
But the Foreign Policy Association did not like his report. Mrs. Moorhead dismissed it as inadequate. Locke did not know why. But it is not hard to guess. The committee had not wanted a high-minded “thought piece” from Locke, but a hard-nosed research and policy assessment in line with the Association’s incredibly detailed, case-by-case examinations of decisions by agencies like the Mandates Commission. The Foreign Policy Association produced passionate exposes of domestic and international crises and detailed, incredibly boring “reports”: both kinds of papers made it possible for the Foreign Policy Association to assert its liberalism, but do nothing radical or practical to change the conditions they exposed. By contrast, Locke’s report spelled out a practical course of action for intervention. Even so, the report was weak: beyond its lack of detail of abuses, it even lacked specific recommendations as to how to increase interest and participation of Black Americans in the operation of the Mandates Commission. The latter, ostensibly, was the reason the FPA had enlisted Locke in the first place. The FPA was not interested in a Black intellectual’s visionary reinterpretation of the Mandates possibilities for change. What they wanted was a detailed treatment of the current situation, with some tepid recommendations for European forbearance, which could be published, put in a drawer, and forgotten.
Locke was responsible in large part for their reaction. Had he turned the report in on time, the evaluation committee might have been less upset with its shortcomings and more willing to see it as a rushed, incomplete document that could still be shaped by their input. Under such circumstances they would have felt comfortable giving extensive suggestions for revisions. But his tardiness amplified that Locke was not suited for the type of work they wanted done. Indeed, he had really elbowed his way into this assignment, masqueraded as the right man for the job, and then refused to work more closely with Raymond Buell, the Harvard scholar enlisted by the FPA on such reports. Here, as elsewhere, Locke’s desire for autonomy in his work hurt him, because it alienated allies who might have helped avoid catastrophe.
Mrs. Mason likely smirked while listening to Locke pour out his frustration. The African Mandates work had been a source of tension in their relationship, going back to his unwillingness to preview his first speech to the League of Nations in 1927 with her. She had sensed he did not want to share with her his thinking on the matter, perhaps because he knew that she was a strong supporter of General Smuts of South Africa, an apologist for apartheid and continued racial domination in South Africa, whom Locke did not want to laud in the report. She had also criticized him for not telling Paul Kellogg, one of the members of the research committee who had recommended Locke for this work, that her money had partially subsidized his trips to Geneva to do the research for the project. She suspected that Locke had wanted to do this work on his own, and by carving out this independent space, perhaps create a diplomatic career for himself as an international broker of African liberation—a dream he had harbored since Oxford. He could forget that now. But his failure in this instance resulted from a more fundamental life problem that Locke needed to face—he had too many irons in the fire that distracted him from the really important work he was destined to do: to write the history and culture of his people in such a way that it would enlighten and catalyze them to greatness.
Mason let him finish his story. He concluded by saying that the only person on the Research Committee of the FPA who spoke up for him was Paul Kellogg, who said perhaps there had been a misunderstanding between Locke and the committee as to what was wanted. Locke had written Kellogg thanking him and admitting that he was not good at the kind of report the FPA obviously had expected. He would try and make the report the basis for a curriculum in the African Studies Program he hoped to start at Howard. “So, thank God, I won’t have to go back to Harvard myself for re-boring,” he had ended his letter to Kellogg. “You see I think I know my role and appreciate its limitations—I’m a fairly good starting battery—not a magneto.”6 That Locke, now forty-three, even contemplated a return to graduate work, shows how much he had hoped this report would lead him out of his current life at Howard in Washington, D.C.
Interestingly, Mason seemed to grasp the situation better than Locke. The major fault, according to Mason, was his audience. “Extreme hostility” is all that they will like. Oddly, she had captured one of the dynamics of White patronage of Black people in connection with Black issues: in her opinion, the Foreign Policy Association expected him to play the nigger—to attack the entire apparatus of colonial government and League of Nations sanction through the Mandates System. In that scenario, they would then be able to use the report to attack their enemies, while at the same time dismissing the report as hysterical and racially biased. In short, the report was not “Black enough.” Whether this was true or not, Mason did perceive accurately his dilemma as an African American scholar working on this type of subject. “Alain, your not being ready to tell what you think is the exact truth about the Mandate is the matter with your paper. It is not, of course the time to do it.” This was the deeper truth of his failure here and elsewhere in his professional life. Close reading of the report reveals Locke’s cautiousness, tentativeness, and self-consciousness in putting across what was, at base, a brilliant strategy for using the existing international apparatus to create a roadmap to freedom for colonized Africans. Locke was too nuanced in his writing for an audience used to the harangue of a Marcus Garvey or a W. E. B. Du Bois. Mason concluded: “They think your opinion is the best balanced of any among Negroes and that you won’t go to an extreme about anything. That was why they asked you to do it.”7
Locke could feel the knife twisting in his stomach as he sat nodding his head nervously and frenetically in assent, as he heard his life reduced to a formula. That formula could best be described as maternalism, a set of reciprocal obligations and expectations that the Foreign Policy Association, and particularly, Mrs. Moorhead, believed Locke had violated by his comeuppance. Mason could analyze it accurately, because she was a master of it. The historian Eugene Genovese developed a theory of paternalism to describe the ideology plantation masters utilized to justify their exploitation of slaves—a series of mutual obligations that structured the relationship between people with different kinds of power. Masters saw themselves as obligated to take care of their slaves, in exchange for the slaves being obligated to give the master their labor. The enslaved simultaneously accommodated and resisted the male masters meeting but also evading their expectations.8 Some one hundred years later, Locke had chosen to enter into a series of maternalist relationships with Mrs. Isaacs, Mrs. Mason, and now Mrs. Moorhead in the belief that he could enjoy a greater degree of autonomy under their protection than with such twentieth-century paternalist heirs as Barnes. Secretly, Locke had hoped to elude the encroaching power of Mason through serving the interests of Moorhead; but this episode showed that each of these maternalists wanted him not because of his intrinsic value—because of who he was, as had been the case with his first maternal guardian, his mother—but because of how he served their interests. When his attempts at resisting their program became obvious, they could simply discard him like yesterday’s papers. And maternalism was always changing the expectations—having groomed himself for years to be the “safe Negro” for Whites, he was losing out now because he was not militant enough!
It no longer mattered that he had made sacrifices to finish the report, despite its shortcomings according to the FPA. Without the kind of subsidy that would have been appropriate to his commission, he had had to secure money from Mrs. Mason just to get to Geneva, let alone tour Africa to get the kind of on-the-ground information that the FPA seemed to want in the report. It was not what this particular mistress wanted. He had experienced an illusion of freedom under Moorhead’s maternalism, had been able to show up in Geneva and disrupt the logic of segregation in the administration of African affairs by American diplomats, enjoy hanging out in Europe, only now to have his maternal patron in the Foreign Policy Association dismiss him for not being Black enough, not being detailed enough, not being more than simply another highly educated Uncle Tom she no longer needed. Here too was an inkling of what lay in store for him if he really ever disappointed Mason.
Maternalism was also a metaphor for Locke’s subject matter, for the nomenclature of the “Mother Country” suffused colonial discourse. It was not accidental. The Mandates System was itself an exercise in maternalism, captured in the metaphor that the victors in the Great War had a “mandate” to “care” for the colonies of the vanquished Europeans. Of course, even Locke’s cursory investigation revealed that abominations like slavery, forced labor, and raising of armies were present in the former German colonies now administrated by the English and the French. Since the United States had no African colonies, Wilson’s idea was that America as the good mother or aunt would come in and counsel “good parenting” to those “Mother countries” in charge of even more Black colonies because of the war. Du Bois’s analysis of “The African Roots of the War” had been borne out: the war had been a grab for more African colonies by warring European nations, and less a destruction of European right to empire, as Locke had predicted in “The Grand Disillusionment.” Maternalism had one other important role in this situation: Locke’s own proposal was a sympathetic maternalism on the ground, the idea that the European nations would prepare, through education and political-economic nurture, the African peoples for adulthood, maturity, that is, self-government. In effect, Locke’s plan was an extension of the logic of the Mandates’ “mothering” concept, except that, in reality, the Mandates System was a fig leaf to justify the continued extraction of economic and human resources from Africa for the benefit of England and France. Locke’s proposal, though brilliant, and logically consistent, had no chance of realization, as it would have undermined the real purpose of the Mandates System, which was to keep the colonials dependent “children.” The Foreign Policy Association and his difficult “mother” Mrs. Moorhead knew this. From her standpoint, he had wasted the Association’s time and money theorizing some other outcome. And he and Mason knew it.
It did not matter that in January 1929, the gentlemanly Raymond Buell wrote to him cordially stating that the committee felt he had “discharged” his “obligation” to the Foundation for the funds he had received for the research, and that it further believed that there was valuable information in the report that should be published, if he was willing to revise the report. And if he were to commit to such a task and succeeded, the committee would offer an additional $100 compensation for that labor. But Locke declined.
As he walked out of Mason’s apartment building onto Park Avenue, he was momentarily dazed. He could no longer dream of a life in Geneva, where he could hear one’s Wagner without humiliation. His transnational freedom pass had been confiscated. He was stuck in an America that consistently devalued him. During a visit in Chicago to continue the momentum in Negro visual and theater arts started years ago in the 1927 “Negro in Art Week,” the manager of the Hotel Potomac burst into Baber’s dinner party to exclaim that the hotel did not allow seating of a Negro—Locke—in its dining room. Afterward, Zona Baber, his dinner host, wrote: “This condition grieves me more than any other fault or sin of our body social.” Locke’s reaction was muted: “Please do not mention even the disagreeable aspect of matters like that of Friday evening—I personally feel the thrill of battle in them, and only wish we had more crusading companions.”9 That was another lie—he gritted his teeth even thinking of situations in which he was denied access to elite spaces because someone complained that he was Black. Such incidents were an ever more frequent part of his segregated life in America. “I am today facing a similar issue with Mrs. Wilson-Green over a Wagner series of opera for which I have of course tickets, and my bank, I hope, the cancelled check to Mrs. Green.” Locke was becoming increasingly pessimistic about serving as a “race-slave,” as he described himself to Hughes.
So far, 1929 was less energetic, less energizing, and more mired in old ruts of race than his escape to Fisk had been just twelve months earlier. And yet dreaming international was more than simply soul survival for Locke; he continued to envision it as the American Negro’s survival as well. Internationalism and Americanism were linked pairs for him, but also for the Negro, who had the most agency, Locke believed, when most African and international. For not only was White supremacy deeply international, but the praxis of racial advocacy by the Negro was inherently intertwined with the internationalist struggle against colonialism.
An instance of that arose that February when Locke was asked by Anson Phelps Stokes, the administrator of the Phelps Stokes Fund, to deliver remarks at the Harmon Foundation’s ceremony at which it awarded a gold medal to sculptor May Howard Jackson—“an old family friend,” Locke confided to Stokes—at Washington’s Nineteenth Street Baptist Church. That stint led to an invitation to visit Stokes’s home the afternoon of February 20 for a meeting with C. F. Andrews, a Scotsman and advisor to Gandhi, that included Howard University president Mordecai Johnson and several other official Negroes. “This afternoon,” Locke recounted to Mason, who wanted to influence the Gandhi movement, “was this stiff, rather condescending conference. … Andrews asked direct questions as to the attitude of the American Negroes on equality, religion, active revolt, etc. The conservatives assured him that all is well, that the Negro could not hate and further realized that the odds were against him, and that the Negro would have to win his way by conciliation.” Such talk irked Locke in the aftermath of the FPA debacle. “Mordecai Johnson was very wary—he said that the Negro’s job in America and throughout the world was to convert the white man back to the essentials of his own religion.” Locke contributed the core philosophy of the New Negro to the discussion: “I said the younger generation was interested in finding a point of view within themselves that could afford to ignore the white man’s attitude toward them; but that they had not yet discovered it.”10 Of course, Locke believed they had—in the arts; but once again, he did not voice that, for fear in this setting that it could be used against him or against the cause of relating the Gandhi movement in India to the Negro movement in America. But the problem for Locke and those at the Stokes meeting was the inability to speak the truth about what should be the Black agenda. Paternalism in this case would not let them in 1929.
Locke’s strength was his ability to keep going, even when he was running on empty. The pose of the literary cad bounding around Harlem sampling the latest literary wares hid an increasingly bitter and frustrated man, who was slipping into Mason’s negative outlook, including her anti-Semitism. Writing to Hughes after a spate of writer’s block, Locke sulked: “I am going up to New York this weekend to see God-mother, and to see what I can help [King] Amoah do. I’m having a time on this matter of the Jew. In Chicago it was of course the Rosenwalds. Mrs. Rosenfels, close friend of and relative of theirs, gave an elaborate buffet supper for thirty, and really did give us a fine send off last Sunday.” Mason’s anti-Semitism, part of her upper-class prejudice toward Jewish rivals in New York, was an ill-fitting cloak for Locke’s sense of failure. The only White people other than Mason who engaged in social reform efforts for the Negro in the 1920s and would work with him were generally Jewish women. He had no real Black allies. His letter to Hughes sought also to deflect Mason’s criticism. “Had a characteristic letter from Zora, Happy New Year, and all success on the last lap of the track. Barthe is coming East next week and will be staying sometime in Washington. Would you like to run down, and could you do it in fairness to your work? Of course, we would both be delighted if you could.” Once again, Hughes could not spare time to spend with Locke and Barthé. Indeed he did not even bother to write.11 The warmth and gratitude he received from young visual artists like Barthé compensated for the lack of courtesy from Hughes and Hurston.
Locke’s unrequited love for Hughes was cooling in 1929. That coolness slipped into his letters to Hughes that now were mere reportage. “I spent a wonderful week end with Godmother. … Barthe is here since yesterday and we are enjoying life together very much except for our Negro society friends whom we have to meet and shake hands with at dinner. Why will they do it? Barthe is quite anxious to meet you as I am to have you meet him—however both of us understand the importance of your work at this juncture and the inconvenience of the trip.”12 As usual, Locke continued to throw himself into “race-slave” work as a distraction from loneliness.
The stint at the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., to present the Harmon Award to Mary Howard Jackson was the kind of race work Locke excelled at. That event allowed Locke to introduce himself to the Harmon Foundation people, especially Mary Beattie Brady, its strong-willed director. The Harmon Foundation had started a national forum of annual exhibitions and cash prizes to Negro artists to stimulate production of quality work in the visual arts. Although not yet a serious platform for first-rate artists—many of the award recipients did not exhibit with the Harmon Foundation—the effort was gaining momentum. Locke’s talk at the awards ceremony opened up a correspondence between him and Brady, who, with a well-organized and staffed Foundation, was interested in upgrading the Negro artists’ effort. Here was another potential maternalist relationship for him. It was not clear that it would empower him more than Mason’s or compensate him for his growing alienation from the young New Negro writers.
As Hurston put it in a letter to Hughes, “Locke is utterly disgusted at Wallie.”13 Wallace Thurman’s play, Harlem, a burlesque comedy had opened on Broadway in March 1929 and was making a killing at the box office. When Locke saw the play, he was appalled that Thurman, who always posed as the serious artist of the movement, had written a cynical potboiler that made fun of working-class life in Harlem for no other purpose than to make money. For Locke, the play was the low watermark of the Negro Renaissance, although he refrained from writing about it publicly. Here again he echoed Mason’s refrain: “You’re not being willing to tell the truth” is the problem.
Locke began to pour out his feelings and woes to his friends, even some younger ones he had not known very long. One of them was Albert Dunham Jr., a brilliant young philosopher and brother of already-famed dancer and choreographer Katharine Dunham, whom Locke may have met through the “Negro in Art Week” festivities in 1927. After a year of casual correspondence about Dunham’s prospects for graduate education and dangling the possibility that Dunham would join Locke in a new, revitalized Philosophy Department at Howard, Locke began to confide in Dunham his deepening paralysis.
I just haven’t been able somehow to write. When I mentioned my depression, I think you thought I was joking or at least tried to joke me out of it. As a matter of fact, in spite of all pleasant developments, including an unexpected raise of salary, I have been in a mild lotus-eaters melancholy. Part of it is physical,—I have a spell of tired heart. But then, if I may borrow your mood of Easter night—“one cannot carry on indefinitely alone.” And it is lonely if one insists on keeping company with even one or two ideals in this day of God-forsaking. Everyone it seems can be bought off so cheap. These young Negroes especially.14
He concluded the letter by saying he would rather see Dunham go to Europe for a year and then come to Howard than go to Harvard. To comfort himself, Locke had Richard Bruce stay overnight.
One uplifting development was that Hurston had enough research for a collection of stories. Over the coming months, Locke, Godmother, and Hughes would get to see what Hurston had collected. Publication was not her only plan. She wrote Hughes that she also wanted to buy some property she had located in Florida “to start A Negro art colony. … You, and Wallie, and Aaron Douglas and Bruce and me and all our crowd.” Locke was not on the list. But before she could act on the property, she came down with a liver ailment in July and had to be hospitalized.15 By October 1929, she had recovered and was ready to begin crafting entries for publication. “Godmother wants the dirty words cut out.” Additionally, “Alain said that I was not definite enough about some of the religious cults of New Orleans so I am thinking of returning there shortly and correcting the errors and closing up the conjure volume too. He said I needed to clinch some of my statements by photostatic copies of documents plus some more definite information, which I had seemed to take for granted the reader would understand. I shall go in November for by that time I shall be about cleared up here.”16 Once Hurston had produced something tangible, Hughes wired her congratulations. “Well, honey, your wire did me so much good,” she replied. “Gee, I felt forlorn. Too tired. Been walking two years without rest + behind that all my school life with no rest, no peace of mind. But the Bahamas trip did me a world of good. I got rested while working hard. Do you need some money?” Hurston was flush after a year and a half of receiving $200 from Mason. With money, success in her research, and attention from all of the members of the “family,” Hurston was in a good mood as the year ended. Her letters oozed good feeling. “It is so good to have the counsel of both you and Alain,” she wrote Hughes. “Well, I tell you Langston, I am nothing without you. That’s no flattery either.” Zora was coming home to New Jersey, where she and Hughes would share an apartment-work place and begin to move forward on collaborations.17
What was under slavery was also true of the patronage relationship between Mason and her young Negro writers in the twentieth century: the “workers” had some power to shape how the system operated through various forms of resistance and accommodation. As one of the “enslaved,” Hurston had created her own hierarchy of whom she trusted and to whom she distributed trusted information. She confided to Hughes, “Dear Pal, I am glad that you saw the other material in New York for I was very eager to know what you thought about it. I am glad you like. About AL, he approves anything that has already been approved. I told him nothing but asked him about editing the material, and I only asked him that [because G. said she wanted me to be more cordial to him]. I have only written him about four times since I have been down. But thanks for the tip. I shall be even more reticent from now on. I’ll keep my big mouf shut.”18
Not only had Hurston decided that Locke was a kind of overseer and thus unreliable but also Hughes urged her not to confide her plans and discoveries to Locke, presumably because he told Godmother whatever they told him. In particular, Hughes sought to ensure that neither Locke nor Mason knew that Hughes was advising Hurston about how to manipulate the situation. “No, never would I speak of any of the things you tell me. I know they are for me only and I am most discreet. I know that you tell me things to guard my relations with G.” Langston as the “enslaved” was strategizing to control the patronage relationship by keeping Mason pleased and believing that they completely followed her dictums and proposals, while he and Hurston pursued their own agenda. Hurston had concocted her own plan to use Hughes to advance some of her plans to Mason, since he was the one most in Mason’s graces. Hurston figured he could propose potentially controversial ideas to Mason, such as her desire to write a magazine article on her research, because whenever she advanced such a topic it typically angered Mason.
Such strategies of resistance enabled Hurston to be more independent of “G” and more critical of Locke. “The trouble with Locke is that he is intellectually dishonest. He is too eager to be with the winner, if you get what I mean. He wants to autograph all successes, but is afraid to risk an opinion first hand.”19 Actually, this had not always been true—but it was increasingly true of Locke under the pressure of maternalism, increasingly fearful of uttering or supporting any idea that was not liable to win Mason’s approval. Here was the ultimate sin of the American scholar—the sacrifice of intellectual independence for the illusion of maternal protection.
But the reality was more complex. Excited by the discoveries that Hurston was making in rural folklore that documented a separate, post slavery southern culture, Locke was also a confirmed modernist, convinced that Black people had to embrace change in order to become a modern people. Locke was looking for a synthesis that would validate the persistence of cultural forms and formation of an independent racial world view in Hurston’s material, while also wanting her to approach that material as a scientist who documented how social forms ultimately changed and became modern over time. Locke was not simply a slave to Mason’s racial essentialism. In fact, Mason relied on Locke’s judgment as much as her own to point out places in Hurston’s material that needed to be improved. Rather than merely “parroting” Mason’s opinion, Mason was actually consulting Locke constantly about the written material she received from Hughes and Hurston before she responded to the artists. Indeed, Mason’s neurotic interruptions and interventions in their work signified that she was on uncertain ground, as they all were, in the pioneering business of documenting a culture unseen and unanalyzed because of the history of racial neglect by American scholars. Each was struggling to gain the most power from the “discovery” and representation of a culture that in the strictest sense belonged to none of them. Mason owned the material, but knew the least about it; Hurston and Hughes mined and refined it, but had no scholarly authority to advance it in the journals; and Locke was in the middle, half aware of its revolutionary importance, yet on uncertain ground unsure because he was not an anthropologist by training. Weaker than the others since he was neither a worker nor owner of the means of cultural production, Locke had the advantage of being a scholar whose forte was textual analysis and criticism.
In the midst of such conflicts, Locke soldiered on, serene if depressed about his permanent “bachelorhood,” as he put it, and his alienation from meaningful work. To Albert Dunham, whom he was still hoping to woo, he confided: “Barthe has done a bust of me, which is really good. I would like you to see it,—to see if you agree that it has caught something that as yet cannot be told”20 (see page 656). Dunham’s response was informed and coy. “Can I have a photo of the Barthe bust? Dick is so versatile, I’m anxious to see if its Rodin or Houdin. For you, I think the latter suits much better.”21 In another gender direction, Locke allowed Sue Bailey, a young Black woman student activist, to arrange for him to speak at a summer Young Women’s Christian Leadership Conference, an act of noblesse oblige for this gay Black man who usually disliked being surrounded by young women. Locke liked Bailey for her class and commitment to a student struggle at Black colleges that was all but forgotten in the late 1920s.
Locke was at ebb tide creatively. Few essays or articles flowed out of his pen as they had done the year before. Reviews of the literature that reached the public were perfunctory and bland. In “Heads or Tales on the Race Question!” published in the Survey Graphic in May, a review of Black America by Scott Nearing, and What the Negro Thinks by R. R. Moton, Locke saw the former as a superb history of Negro life, augmented by a consistent analysis of the need for a strong, solidified working class if the race was to excel, while the latter placed the blame for much of the ills of the race on Black people themselves. In “Both Sides of the Color Line,” published the next month, Locke found The Blacker the Berry by Wallace Thurman more sensitive in its portrayal of Negro life than Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun. In another review, he praised White writer Julia Peterkin for her novel, Scarlet Sister Mary.22
Only in “Beauty and the Provinces,” published in the June issue of the Stylus, a revived edition of the Howard University literary magazine, did Locke catch fire with the energy and vitality of his mid-1920s writing. Perhaps in the protected audience of the Howard literary community, Locke felt comfortable saying what he really felt. All of those critics who were charging that the Renaissance was not about Harlem, that it was happening everywhere there was a critical mass of Negroes, forgot their Italian Renaissance history and the art of Black creativity in recent American history. Capitals, he mused, had always been the centers of talent, the magnets that had drawn talent to them, nurtured them, and then spread their gifts back to the provinces. He chided that Negroes who were educated should not forget what it had been like to live in small-town Black America, which suffocated the artist with the kind of provincialism that strangled talent in White America as well. Even Philadelphia and Washington had starved artists. New York was America’s cultural capital, and Harlem its Black capital, because it welcomed, nurtured, and valued artists for themselves, not as window dressing for Black philistine posturing. Beauty always left the provinces for more fertile ground, ironically but consistently, in the city.23
As Locke prepared for his usual summer European vacation, he even was drained of energy to escape. Wherever Locke went in the Western world, he now realized, he was still on a virtual plantation. He longed to escape, but where to? On May 22, Locke wrote Dunham:”I even played with the idea of staying home this summer, and asking if you could spend a large part of it with me writing. My mind has begun again on the old subject of values. But it was a question of the time, the place, and the [not readable]. I even discussed it with my dear mentor in New York, and for a day or so we were making inquiries about places on Long Island. But [it] is really an impossibility, either you must put up with a family or eat precarious food, and I cannot eat precarious food. Moreover, I had no word from you.”24 As the year of teaching came to a close, there was at least the good news that Stewart Nelson, the assistant professor of religion appointed by Durkee to displace Locke, was leaving the department, while Ralph Bunche had joined the faculty. “In a year or so the youngsters here will be a great bunch,” and the stage would be set for Dunham’s arrival. But that still felt far-off to Locke.
The persistent problem for Locke as a lover was, of course, that he was often attracted to men who were not homosexual or at least did not consider or identify themselves as homosexual. Thus, often, they were surprised by the sudden revelation of the emotion he had for them. Because they did not pick up as quickly as those “in the know” that Locke was hitting on them, they sometimes did not respond quickly or appropriately enough for Locke to keep open the emotional door. Dunham wrote back June 1 that he was flattered by Locke’s interest, but disappointed that Locke did not have the courage of his convictions. “You were a little too severe not to push the Long Island idea to the limit. Nothing could have been more to my liking for the summer; and I’ve got a fresh start in value theory that bids fair to bear sound fruit. This year, from a dozen quarters, has given me what seems to be happy background for something good in values. But it will keep, though I hope we can tap it soon. How do you feel about the value terrain, particularly as a pragmatic development?” Staying in America did have some potential benefits for companionship. “Europe is simply out of reach,” as Dunham was financially responsible for his sister Katherine, who had been just expensive enough to keep him in America. “And now Mother is failing.”25 He had hoped that Locke would come to Chicago, so that they could plan when he would come to Howard. For Locke, this prospect was doubly invigorating, since through Dunham, Locke was journeying back to his discipline, philosophy, inspired by the young “research assistant” he had told Mason he needed to inspire him in his work.
Albert Dunham was eager to come to Howard. “Not only do I want to see an application, but to talk rank, salary, collaboration, with all of that in mind as a definite alternative to foundation research. My fellowship, so far as I know, is good again. Harvard seems certain if I want it, and why not with Lewis, Elliot, Whitehead, and Perry there? But I’m beginning to feel the spirit of what you, Just, and Johnson are doing at D.C. I see possibilities in a department that could five years hence take first place in value theory, aesthetics, and criticism. And still I realize that I’d be worth more to you after the discipline of a degree, and a year abroad a la Guggenheim.” Aware perhaps of the subtext of Locke’s interest in him, Dunham closed his letter with the tantalizing line, “Never more yours, Albert.”26
Locke would not let slip a chance for a consummating trip to Europe without one more attempt to entice Dunham. Locke lingered stateside, perhaps deliberately, using his heart—the tired one—as an excuse. “Your letter was just right and came at the right time,” he wrote Dunham on June 11. “And the reason that you hear from me from this side will somewhat explain why. In the exhaustion of over-work my heart began to cut up on you [sic] and I had to cancel a perfectly good sailing for the 11th. I am now indefinitely delayed, as you know what June sailings are. However, its up to me to be philosophical and that’s what I am. Though I had to feed considerably on your letter.” Locke was feeding on Dunham’s provocative letter, because a relationship with Dunham at Howard promised to reignite his career, his sense of purpose, and his will to live. “One other thing the letter served,—as a reminder to put you vividly before Dr. Johnson, who now I believe after our last conference understands fully my attitude toward you in connection to the Howard proposition, and your attitude toward our new program. He said to me, after a long chat,—‘I am happy to know this chap is interested in us,—by all means keep your hand on him, and let me know when he is ready to come.’ I quite agree that both Harvard for the fall, and the camp for the Summer are the best of all possible things.” Then, shifting to a more personal, confidential tone, Locke mused that “spells like I have recently had remind me of the precariousness of life. However folks of my sort live largely on enthusiasm and hope.”27
Dunham was not going to take the bait and come to Europe, but he nevertheless gave Locke hope by planning to see him in September. Dunham had been a nimble game player as well. He had offered just enough to get Locke’s support in front of President Johnson, but not so much as to be committed to anything more definite professionally or personally. And Dunham had found the one excuse that worked with Locke. As Locke wrote, “Don’t think I do not appreciate your family attitude. … In fact I admire it. And I particularly understand and sympathize how you must feel about your mother. I do hope there will be improvement in this direction. Does she know of me, and will you give her my warm regards?”28
After a restful trip in Europe, much of it at Nanheim taking his rest cure in the special waters, Locke returned for the fall quarter at Howard and the divisive intrigue of Mason maternalism. Without a clear compass himself, he could allow himself to be directed by her and others, like Hughes and Hurston, whom he admitted had more of the creative force in them than he did. But increasingly, Hurston dismissed Locke’s advice, even when it was wise and well intended. “Locke will be a great help too, but I am afraid he will not see it just as we do,” she confided to Hughes in October. Nevertheless, she did return to New Orleans to firm up her research, acting on his advice that she needed more detail and documentation to prove her points. No one of them—Hurston, Hughes, Locke, Mason, or even Boas—was an expert on the folklore collection of the Black material that she was doing. What did work for Hurston was that she could consult with all of them for suggestions about how to present her material. Hurston was not alone in having produced something: at the end of 1929, Hughes had finished a draft of his novel and Mason asked Locke to begin editing what would become Not Without Laughter. “When the manuscript comes, I shall do my lovable best,” he informed Hughes. There was no need of them getting together. “Work of this sort I can do alone. I am terribly handicapped however in my general work because of typing.”29
Other than Hughes and Hurston, the New Negro creative movement was drained of vitality as 1930 dawned. The Stock Market Crash of 1929 had had almost an immediate effect of making irrelevant to critics, publishers, and readers the kind of heady farce literature that Carl Van Vechten and Wallace Thurman were producing in the late 1920s. With little of merit published in 1929 to justify a retrospective review, Locke realized he was going to have to broaden his field into sociological literature if he was going to maintain an authoritative voice in Negro cultural affairs. His review of a dry report, The Negro in Richmond Virginia: Report of the Negro Welfare Survey Committee, was telling. After nearly a decade of denigration of sociology in favor of imaginative literature as the lens through which to see the Negro situation, Locke lauded this report as indicative of the new progressive “social conscience” arising in the South. Rather than apology or statistical survey, it offered constructive recommendations for change. It symbolized too Locke’s growing attraction to southern regionalism as the new paradigm for Negro studies. Why shouldn’t he embrace the South and draw attention to what liberal southerners were doing if finally, after hundreds of years of ignoring, if not repudiating, the Negro contribution to the South, they were willing to recognize the Negro in a rational, quasi-scientific way? That meant embracing White writers and social scientists as legitimate and worthy contributors in the area of Negro studies.
Such a position ran counter to the essentialism of Mrs. Mason and Hurston, both of whom, in different ways, were dismissive of White artists and researchers in the Negro cultural arena. But the contradictions in their positions showed the weakness of their thinking in these areas and often required Locke to step in to resolve the conflicts. In the fall of 1928, he had come to Hurston’s rescue when she improvidently reviewed a special issue on Negro folklore produced by White anthropologists associated with the University of North Carolina. In her review she dismissed the value of any research done by White social scientists. Allowing herself an ill-advised freedom in her letter to Mrs. Mason, Zora commented that the Indians had been correct, that no White person could be trusted to handle Negro materials with honesty and insight. She was surprised when Mason’s feelings were hurt. Hurston hurriedly wrote Locke and Hughes explaining that she was the one surprised. “I had just been saying what Godmother says all the time. I just forgot to say ‘Present company excepted.’ ”30 But she still sent Franz Boas and others copies of her collected material for validation and advice (in secret because such sharing was explicitly ruled out in her contract with Mason), a sign she valued “white opinion.” Of course, Hurston also denigrated other Blacks as authorities—not only Locke but also trained folklorists such as Arthur Fauset and writers like Helene Johnson. Mason and Hurston both said they preferred Black people and Black culture over that of the Whites, yet both held onto their White connections as firmly as Locke held to his Harvard accent and European tastes. Although both of them denigrated him, they relied on him to smooth over their conflicts. After some explanatory words from Locke, Mason seemed to forgive Hurston for calling her White and distrustful, and eventually the two resumed their easy familiarity in using racial categories to evaluate everyone—except themselves.31
Distrust was integral to the kind of patronage relationship Mason created because her maternalism was based on a contradiction: they were supposed to be her “godchildren,” but unlike real “godchildren,” Hurston and Hughes had to labor to keep her motherly love. Any suspicion that they were not faithful workers, like the slaves on the nineteenth-century plantations Genovese examined, would deem them ungrateful children! Such arrangements bred within them resistance to the master’s control and in this case destruction of the patronage system Mason had so meticulously constructed.
The situation began to unravel after Mason decreed that Hurston and Hughes should live in Westfield, New Jersey, a safe distance away from the spiritually “distracting” influence of devil New York. In January 1930, Hurston took an apartment blocks away from where Langston Hughes was already living, waiting for the proofs of his novel, Not Without Laughter. Hughes had completed a draft in June and worked on several revisions, requested by Mason and Locke, before submitting the final version late in 1929. When Hurston arrived in Westfield, she was busy turning her collected material into a book that Mason was eager to get published. After Hurston and Mason met that spring to review material Hurston had collected, Locke reported to Hurston that “I thought it would cheer you at this critical stage of your work that she [Mason] really thinks you have done well and is eagerly looking forward to pushing the book. She thinks it would be a mistake even to have a scientific tone to the book, so soft pedal all notions of too specific documentation and let loose on the things that you are really best equipped to give—a vivid dramatizing of your material and the personalities back of it.” Hurston felt this was a snub, especially as she was (secretly) trying to get Franz Boas to inform her about the best scholarly interpretation of the material she had collected. Further, because Locke knew that Mason, a now elderly woman, was eager to see the research she had sponsored reach the public, Locke suggested Hurston make the changes straight away: “You can do this in a feverish two or three days and then it will be all over, but the shouting.”32 Locke would then be happy to edit the manuscript immediately, so that perhaps Hurston could present the final draft of the manuscript to Mason as a gift on her birthday on May 18. Feeling her control over the volume was threatened, Hurston began to stall. She wrote Locke that “it has been very hard to get the material in any shape at all,”33 and she decided a more appropriate birthday gift was to write Mason a long, sweet, ingratiating letter. Here, Hurston was exhibiting the kind of resistance Locke had manifested when he had avoided turning in his report to Mrs. Moorhead a year and a half earlier.
Soon, Mason was furious with Hurston, although Hurston seemed not to understand why. Rampersad and Boyd, Hughes’s and Hurston’s biographers, respectively, believed that Locke told Mason that instead of working, Hurston and Hughes, along with Louise Thompson, whom Mason had hired as Hughes’s stenographer, were having too much fun. Zora was spending much of her time with Hughes acting out stories she had collected in her two years of research, rather than working on the book. Once aware that Mason was displeased, Hurston tried to contact Godmother, but was rebuffed. As usual, she turned to Hughes, who tried to reach Godmother, but was also unsuccessful. He then wrote an apologetic letter to Mason, where he expressed his confusion about what had angered her. The incident is often portrayed as another sign of Mason’s irrationality, but in fact, there was a rational explanation.
Mason wanted them to finish expeditiously their work for which they were being well paid, and turn in finished manuscripts on a schedule that conformed to her specifications. Locke did not think such demands were unusual, since as a student of the Italian Renaissance he knew what patrons typically required and got for their money. Indeed, patrons regularly sued painters and other artists during that Renaissance when they failed to meet deadlines for submission of material, or veered from the patron’s specifications of the kind of work to be produced. Patrons often dictated quality and schedule of work, without any racial motivation behind such demands. Perhaps because of her rhetoric of maternal love, these Black intellectuals could not see that they were in fact proletarians working for their patron. Eventually, Mason forgave her little “primitives,” but they knew she was watching them closely now.
But instead of working feverishly on the projects Mason had assigned them, Hughes and Hurston set to work on a theater project dangerously close in focus to what Mason had specifically told them not to work on in January 1929. Here, again, Hurston and Hughes evidently believed that maternalism gave them the right to shape the patronage relationship toward their agenda. Hughes had been encouraged by a friend in the theater to come up with a folk comedy that might be easily and quickly produced. Hughes and Hurston began to work on a play, Mule Bone, about two men in the South who fight over which one killed a turkey. Based on a story, “The Bone of Contention,” that Hurston had heard, the play took shape as Hurston acted out the parts, and Hughes altered the story, putting in additional elements that aided the dramatic presentation. Hurston may have delayed finishing the book project of her collected stories as an act of resistance, because the book, based on material Mason owned by contract, was actually not Hurston’s. Work on the collected stories was alienated labor. The play would be hers. Plus, working with Hughes was a chance for her to do something that would realize her aspirations for the drama, which, in some respects, was closer to her heart. But after sailing along with Louise Thompson, typing as fast as they created, Hurston grew restless and left. Since Hurston did not specify at the time what caused her to become disenchanted, it remains a mystery. She left first for New York and then went south, reputedly to continue her research and finish work on Act 2 of the play.
Before Hughes could figure out what had happened, Hurston had abandoned the play altogether, reputedly because of jealousy toward the beautiful Louise Thompson. During the composition and typing of the manuscript, Hughes had hit on the idea of giving Thompson part authorship of the resultant play as part compensation for her labor beyond what she was being paid by Mason. That angered Hurston. Then, Hughes made another mistake. In May, Hughes told Mason he planned to go to Washington with his former fellow students at Lincoln for a weekend of conviviality. Mason thought he should stay in Westfield and write. Rebelling against her, Hughes decided to go without her approval. Mason exploded, dressing him down about how much he was costing her—$150 a month, plus $75 a month for Louise Thompson’s typing services. Deeply hurt, Hughes carried himself to Washington and met with Locke—the first time in months that he had visited the man who had introduced him to Mason—and confided his frustrations and hurts. Suddenly, Hughes needed Locke, after having avoided close contact with him for years. When Hughes returned to New York, he went to Mason and asked her to end her payments to him. “The fault is mine. The darkness is mine,” he confessed to her. He wanted to go back to the time when he had first met her and was not receiving money, a time he recalled as happier than now. He then returned some of the money she had given him, borrowed some from Van Vechten, and then socialized some more with his Lincoln University friends.
On June 7, Mason wrote back her answer to his request. She turned his critique of their relationship’s pecuniary quality into a critique of him and his obsession with accounts. “Dear child, what a hideous spectre you have made for yourself of the dead thing money!”34 This was a fiendish maneuver from a woman who had complained one November that in his “accounting of your expenses for October you have forgotten to put what is remaining in your Bank account. This leaves me a little uneasy about your expenses and need of money at this juncture.” She had written this right after telling Locke he did not touch Hughes in his faithful accounting of the funds she gave him. “The dead thing money” was all-important to Mason as her way of controlling them and ensuring that they were worthy of her time. Hughes’s attempt to free himself from the financial basis of their relationship showed his naiveté: he was loved because he worked, not asked to work because he was loved. Mason wielded a similar kind of power in her relationships with White artists. She concluded her letter by announcing that he was not bound to her, which carried with it an ominous subtext he had not anticipated—she was no longer bound to him either. “I therefore enclose in this letter a check for 250.00. … Hail to Alamari! Love and good hope to you as you seek the sea. Success for whatever plan you make for revivification.”35 When he wrote her two weeks later asking to confer with her about his plans, she sent a telegram telling him “under present conditions it is useless for me to undertake any more than I have promised.”36 Swiftly and unequivocally, he had been cut loose like a slave freed from the plantation, but with nowhere to go. But it was 1930, not 1865, and it was the second year of the Great Depression.
Just as paternalism was not the true nature of the slavery relationship, but an ideology that disguised its naked economic exploitation, so too maternalism disguised the true nature of this patronage relationship, which was little more than a capitalist system of production in which Hughes and Hurston—and other artists—labored to produce commodities on a schedule. Maternalism was still useful to Mason, who used its language to characterize Hughes as the materialist: he was the worker obsessed with money, rather than the “primitive” devoted to the true “higher things” mother asked him to create. That language handcuffed him emotionally, because it was what he had believed he was asked to do. He had rebelled against what his mother had asked him to do. Who, especially a sensitive Black male, could support that?
Apparently, not Locke. When Hughes next heard from Locke, the young artist realized that Locke was in agreement with Mason’s decision. He congratulated Hughes on receiving his hefty farewell check and stated: “I am trying my best to cause her the least possible disillusionment,” a swipe that suggested Hughes was responsible for whatever disillusion she now experienced.37 Once Hughes realized that his desire for financial release meant he was emotionally discarded, he became ill, remaining in Westfield as his stomach knotted up with nausea. Publishing three poems in Opportunity focused on despair and death made his friends Joel and Amy Spingarn uneasy. Now, emotionally adrift without Mason’s support, he became despondent. Even the publication of Not Without Laughter (1930) and its favorable reviews did not lift his spirits. Interestingly, Locke, who had edited Not Without Laughter extensively, seldom gets any credit for this work. He was in fact insisting on revisions past the point when Mason had any additional recommendations. Locke’s involvement as an overseer in Mason’s operation had reduced his esteem as a critic and intellectual. Once the book was out, Hughes’s only use of Locke was to try and help him get back in Mason’s good graces.
But Locke was not interested in helping Hughes. From Paris in July, Locke wrote casually mentioning that he had visited the old building where he had climbed the steps every morning and awakened Hughes when they were there in 1924. Curtly, Locke concluded by noting that he had nominated Hughes for a literary prize worth $400 to the winner; but if he did not want the involvement, he recommended Hughes write the people and decline the nomination. Perhaps if Locke had been a larger, more sympathetic leader of the Negro Renaissance, he would have mortgaged whatever capital he still had with Mason to help out Hughes. The departure of Hughes from Mason was an abrupt end to the Golden Era of the Negro Renaissance and Locke’s dream of a Lorenzo-like stable of artists creating great works under patronage. But unlike Lorenzo de Medici, Locke did not have his own fortune and no control over the relationship he had spawned between Mason and Hughes. And now Hughes was gone.
Given the shenanigans Hughes had indulged in behind Locke’s back, it’s understandable why Locke no longer cared what happened to Hughes. For at least two years, Hughes had refused to respond regularly to Locke’s letters, had refused to meet casually with him in Washington even with third parties, had undermined Locke’s authority with Hurston, counseled Hurston not to confide in Locke information he probably wanted to have, and exulted in the knowledge that Locke had no authority over Hughes’s relationship with Mason. That last fact was his undoing. Since Hughes was so confident he knew how to manage his White patron, why should Locke come to his rescue now? Locke could not think of a reason.
But Locke was responsible for bringing Hughes into the relationship, losing control of it, and then standing by paralyzed while it collapsed and burned everyone associated with it. That he could not feel enough responsibility to try and repair the breach—or head it off when he met with Hughes in Washington before the break—showed Locke’s limitation as a steward of collaborations. He had unleashed racial and maternal feelings in the patronage scheme that he couldn’t manage psychologically. While Hughes had been disloyal to him, he had been disloyal to Hughes and Hurston and the larger notion, implicit in The New Negro, that New Negroes should refuse to allow themselves to be dictated to by Whites. His failure to be loyal to that concept had fundamentally undermined his authority with Hughes and Hurston. Some humility about that would have helped.
There was one more thing. Locke never seemed to consider that perhaps his sexuality contributed to the collapse of the patronage relationship. Did his lusting after Hughes even after the younger man made clear he did not want a romantic relationship with Locke contribute to the breakdown of the triangle between Mason, Hughes, and Hurston? It seemed so. Locke’s desire created a sense of threat in Hughes and the suspicion that the whole patronage scheme was really about sex, not the production of art. Getting the money for Hughes, taking care of him financially and psychologically, and then expecting some sexual favors made Hughes defensive and encouraged Hughes to undermine Locke’s leverage over him. Locke did not want to face that pursuing a “midwife” relationship with the artists while trying to sleep with them might be a reason he was never as successful a mentor to them as he wanted to be. Even the Westfield blowup between Hughes and Hurston turned on the suspicion that sex was the underlying motivation for Hughes bringing Louise Thompson into the arrangement, an echo of Locke sexual politics. He sowed seeds of suspicion and sexual competition that ultimately taught his mentees to be as guarded and manipulative as he was. Since they were not the masters of it that he was, they inevitably stumbled and crashed. He could then feel superior as he stepped away and watched Hughes fall.
But Locke’s stock fell as well. After Hughes’s abrupt departure, Mason began to wash her hands of all of the Negro artists—and some non-artists—she was supporting upon Locke’s recommendation. In September, Mason called in Louise Thompson and fired her, partly because she had not been producing any work in months. For her defense, it should be noted there was no work for her to produce: neither Hughes nor Hurston gave her any work to type after Hurston abruptly left Westfield. But that was around April; she had continued to cash the check Mason sent her until November. That may have been when Hurston fingered her as the reason why the collaboration in Westfield had collapsed.38
That November Hughes was in for another shock. In Cleveland with his mother, he visited his friends Russell and Rowena Jellife, who ran the Gilpin Players, Cleveland’s famous Black drama group, and made a startling discovery. They were going to produce a play in February written by Zora Neale Hurston. It was Mule Bone, but without his name or contribution acknowledged. Hurston had submitted the play as solely her creation, although later she stated she had cut out all his additions and rewritten it to her own specifications after leaving Westfield.39 Mule Bone was now a “bone of contention” between the two of them, fittingly enough. Once Hughes contacted Hurston and accused her of misrepresenting the work as her own alone, Hurston counter-attacked by bringing the whole thing to Mason and enlisting her support in defending her. Fortunately, Locke had not been involved in that work, since the work had gone on without Mason’s or his explicit approval. Mason came to Hurston’s support, believing her story that it was she who had been badly treated, rather than Hughes. And Locke supported Hurston’s side in the conflict, no doubt feeling there was nothing to gain by supporting the now-departed Hughes. Plus, Hurston was on a tirade. “I wish you could get Langston and me together before you,” she spewed venomously to Mason as the year 1930 ended. “Then I could prove that he is lying about what he contributed to my play.”40
As the larger goals of the patronage system evaporated, Locke’s relationship with Mason focused now on mentoring him rather than using him to manage others. She had pursued that goal all along when not distracted by managing the book production assembly line. As early as 1928, she had chided him for a lack of razor-like focus in his intellectual work. “Alain puts his mind on reading a book—intends to get what’s in it but when he’s read it he hasn’t got anything of what I call the book—if its a valuable one—its running between his two ears. … My whole relation with Alain is the life of a surgeon—mending broken relationships ‘broken bones.’ ”41 In 1929, she critiqued his approach to lecturing as unnecessarily obtuse. “Demand with might and manner that simplicity shall live and breathe and have its nests within my [your] Being. For example, in your yearning to attain simplicity of expression realize as you go down the street next time you are walking straight ahead one foot after the other. What would it be if you walked a step ahead then one foot over the fence? Can’t you see that what happens to your boys in the audience is that they don’t get your point—because it has so many pairs of trousers on it and keeps moving to the side and into the dark. Of course Langston’s Survey is running up and down the College campus with nothing on!”42
While often vicious and unfair, there was some truth telling in Mason’s criticism, as when she criticized Locke for not getting Hurston’s book out in May 1930, but went on to chide him for his dismissive attitude toward Hurston.
Alain, do you remember you promised me you would do everything in your power to help this work? Do not balk it or Zora. That Conjure book must be on the boards as soon as possible. Such a pity your tongue couldn’t be hung front to back so you could preach to yourself and not to the world! I suppose you think you know your classes … my boy … [but] you will never really know what is behind their faces till you learn to think and not to chatter. You had a chance in your classes to bring Zora out but you blockaded her and did not think she was anything. When you’re good you’re very, very good but when you are bad****!43
It was unfair to blame him for Hurston not finishing her book, but Mason correctly exposed here that Locke had refused to treat Hurston with the seriousness she deserved. For years, he could not see past Hurston’s crude, unsophisticated, and anti-bourgeois exterior to value her as a powerful anthropological thinker, who also was becoming a compelling writer. Mason saw those qualities in Hurston and recognized Locke did not. He could have brought Hurston to lecture to his Howard University classes, a gesture that would have helped her psychologically and conferred on her the status of a peer. But he did not, because he looked down on Hurston. Mason was not afraid to tell him he had much to learn from Hurston, because he did.
Mason’s goal in these “surgical” criticisms was to make him a more powerful spokesperson. “My dear Boy, it seems terrible to have to write you this kind of letter,” she wrote in a particularly critical letter of his accepting yet another assignment from Howard University president Mordecai Johnson, “but what can I do to help you in your growth. Your health and your message for your people if I let you submerge the Alain whom I believe can be born … to transfigure before [the] white race, what lies in the real Negro?”44 Despite the viciousness of her comments, Locke took them seriously.
As the Hughes-Hurston patronage scheme collapsed, Locke took his skills as a producer of other people’s work and applied them to the theater. In 1930 Locke arranged for the Rochester production of Richard Bruce’s Sadhji, which Locke had co-produced by getting Mrs. Mason to pay William Grant Still to compose and perform the music for this sensual African ballet by the homosexual rebel of the Negro Renaissance. Unfortunately, Locke’s cheapness spoiled some of the pleasure seeing the performance would have brought him. He decided not to attend the performance because he could not do so without stopping in New York and bringing Bruce with him. “That would have entailed considerable expense,” he wrote to Mrs. Mason, “as I would have had to buy him a suitable set of clothes to attend, along with the fare for the train trip.” Afterward, he regretted not having attended. With the funds he received from Mason declining, as she began to punish him for the many “missteps of the Negroes,” Locke was being more careful about how much money he expended for the sake of the New Negro.45
Fortunately for Locke, 1931 began with the possibility of his eventual freedom from Mason’s often withering criticism and rituals of deference. In January, he received a startling announcement. Forwarded from Cambridge, where it had been sent to a “Dr. Alain Locke, Harvard University,” the letter informed him that an Englishman, Thomas Clarke, had died and left his estate of roughly 40,000 pounds sterling to Locke, a man he had never met. The case was complicated, however, because Clarke had given his estate to an unnamed “missionary” of God “for the furtherance of God’s work,” and named only Locke as that missionary in an unwitnessed codicil executed one day before Clarke died. The will instructed his “Trustees to send to God’s missionary quickly after my death a moderate sum up to several thousand pounds on account.” Unfortunately for Locke, the trustees held up payment in response to the family’s challenge to the will and especially the codicil, claiming that Clarke was suffering from “testamentary incapacity,” or temporary insanity, when he composed them both. While elated by the prospect of a windfall, Locke knew realistically it was a long shot. Yet, he could not help hoping, when he wrote to L. Hollingsworth Wood, whom Locke retained to represent him. “The whole matter hangs by a very slender threat. … I think I ought to make a desperate stab for it, don’t you? Some of it would put the Harlem Museum account on its feet.” He requested that Wood ask his London representative to intervene in the case, and then Locke, almost in an afterthought to his own reference to the Museum, asked: “How is the Treasury—or does it really wait on my legacy. I hope I’m not like the African girl—but this isn’t the first fortune I’ve lost.”46 Surely tempting was the thought that with such a “legacy” he could become a patron rather than simply overseer for one.
Very depressing was the relative silence from former friends and artists. “I have heard almost nothing from New York,” he confided again to Mason in 1930. He had begun to avoid going there, as witnessing the poverty and suffering of young artists who “continued to flock to New York like moths to the flame,” became too much for him. Without Hughes in Mason’s stable of artists, there were few he could call his charges. Relations with Hurston continued to deteriorate early in 1931 as she ratcheted up her criticism of Hughes. She wrote Mason claiming that Hughes had borrowed some of her words for Not Without Laughter. These attacks seemed more important to her than moving forward on work she was supposed to publish with Locke’s involvement. She missed several meetings with him. Hurston was ducking him, while continuing to act like she still wanted his involvement. Mason was confused: “why is she doing this,” she wrote in her notebook. Hurston wanted to appear available for consultations, so that she could continue to receive money and dodge interference. Mason continued to support her, but reduced her allowance to $100 a month by November.
Locke’s self-confidence seemed to improve in 1931, perhaps because of the possibility of his English legacy. The tone of his letters to Mason began to change. He became less slavish, less confidential, and less pleading in his attempts to get her approval. Without Hughes and with less and less of Hurston, Mason seemed to be less needy of fawning attention she had required in the past. They still shared an abiding hatred of Van Vechten: “I have reports that Van Vechten has been hospitalized with blood poisoning. Why won’t he simply die!!”47 Locke turned to reporting gossip in the Black community over discussing how to manage shared projects because, in fact, there were not many. Artists like Aaron Douglas and Richmond Barthé still received a pittance, which was important as the Depression advanced and Locke continued to get money to distribute as he saw fit. But the sense was palpable of closing up the shop called Negro artistic idealism that he had opened up with her in 1927.
A more pressing concern emerged in his letters—Howard was under attack by members of Congress, who wanted to remove Mordecai Johnson from the presidency. Locke became a major organizer of the battle to save Johnson’s presidency. Some members of Congress accused the president of harboring communists; some malcontents on the faculty and in the alumni accused Johnson of autocracy in removing the old guard and hiring new faculty. Orchestrating a behind-the-scenes defense of the president kept Locke in Washington more than usual, as late-night and weekend meetings mended fences and supplied the president’s defenders on the board of trustees and in Congress with the ammunition to beat back the attacks. Hurston predicted Johnson would have to go in a May letter to Mason, claiming that Johnson was accused of the very abuses that had brought down Durkee. But Johnson’s presidency was saved, in no small part because of the efforts of Locke and the younger generation of social science professors, such as Ralph Bunche, who came to his defense. The effort, while invigorating, exhausted Locke.
Locke welcomed his trip abroad to fight for the Clarke legacy. Once he arrived in England that July, however, Locke learned that all was lost: the judge in the case ruled the codicil invalid, since it had not been witnessed. Given that there was no “missionary of God” to accept the funds, they would revert to the family of Thomas Clarke. Although Locke had known that getting the money was unlikely, realizing that the money was lost sent him into a deep depression. He confided in his letters to Mason, “I had begun to think of what I could do with the money to help some of the deserving people and advance some of the many projects I have hoped for over the years.” Mason, sensitive always when Locke was emotionally crushed, came to his aid by immediately wiring him some extra money. It helped; but it did not fundamentally change his mood. That became darker as he looked up Black artists in London and Paris and found them destitute, when he could find them at all. “The poverty here has been devastating.” Suddenly, it all had come to an abrupt end—the hoped-for breakthrough in literature, the spreading of creativity abroad as well as throughout the United States, the prospect of publishing a wealth of literature that would permanently transform the image and valuation of the Negro in world civilization.
Locke fell into an intense depression. Mason was concerned, sent him money to pay off the lawyers, and tried to buoy his spirits. Here was the other side of her maternalism, care and support in moments of crisis that he still needed. After a month or so wandering around Europe, Locke seemed to emerge from his dour mood. Something positive had happened to Locke in the process of coming so close to real financial independence and realizing he would still remain dependent on some kind of patronage in order to advance Negro subjectivity. Moreover, the disappearance of Hughes and the collapse of the patronage scheme was another death, another reason, along with the money that had just escaped from his hands, not to want to go on. All of his plans had come to naught.
Finally, after drifting around Europe in a kind of emotional daze, Locke came home renewed. Something about coming so close to getting that Legacy had transformed him. He—not Hughes, Hurston, or Mason—was the “missionary of God.” Something about no longer being responsible for running Godmother’s patronage system buoyed him as well. After a long period of separation after his mother’s death, Locke’s otherwise oppressive subservience to Mason had produced a kind of rapprochement, a refueling, that, ironically, had freed him to move forward on his own, without her constant support. Suddenly he was on his own, again, but with more power to act independently. He still checked back with Mason in times of stress; but it was different now: he was informing her of his plans, rather than having her plan his future.
The collapse of the patronage scheme had freed Locke. Maternalism was something more than a confusing ideology for Locke. He still had Mason’s love and attention despite the collapse of her fellowship payment plan. There was, despite all the criticism and humiliation, a bond with Mason that was the closest thing Locke experienced to the kind of unconditional love he received from his mother. There were still some conditions; but it was close enough. After Hughes left, Locke enjoyed her undivided attention and less constraining control. Indeed, as would begin to happen, he would produce the books Mason longed to see born, not for money on an assembly line, but out of his self-fulfillment empowered by her.
Hughes’s end was Locke’s rebirth as her “loving boy,” undistracted by side glances.