5

With the Liberator, 1921–1922

While in England, McKay had maintained his connection with the Liberator, which had published during his absence four of his poems. His friendship with Max and Crystal Eastman was firmly established, and he looked forward to seeing them again.¹ When he arrived in New York in the winter of 1921, however, he did not immediately contact the Eastmans. He went instead to Harlem, where he stayed for a time with an old friend from Jamaica, a bewitching woman whose solid business instincts and personal allure had enabled her to succeed in New York, first as the operator of an intimate “buffet flat” and then, with the advent of Prohibition, as the owner of an equally cozy speakeasy. In A Long Way from Home, McKay characteristically identified her only by a pseudonym, Sanina, but he dropped some suggestive if vague hints about her identity. She was “an attractive quadroon . . . who could pass as white,” and her family evidently was closely allied to the McKays, for “her dominating octoroon grandmother” had been McKay’s “godmother.” He wrote, “I felt a congeniality and sweet nostalgia for her company, for we had grown up together from kindergarten. Underneath all her shrewd New York getting-byness there was discernible the green bloom of West Indian naivete. Yet her poise was a marvel and kept her there floating like an imperishable block of butter on the crest of the dark heaving wave of Harlem.”² Sanina may have been one of the “Woolsey clan” mentioned by McKay in My Green Hills of Jamaica.³ Whatever her origins or her attractions, she did not hold McKay for long. After ten days, he began to grow restless. He had spent the fifty dollars he had managed to bring back from England and had to think once again about a livelihood. Fortunately, Max Eastman made him an offer he joyfully accepted.

While relaxing at Sanina’s, McKay had informed the Eastmans of his return and Max had invited him to spend a weekend in his home at Croton-on-Hudson, just north of New York City. While McKay was there, Eastman invited him to join the Liberator staff as an associate editor.⁴

Both Crystal and Max had long been anxious to devote less time to editorial duties and more time to their own writing. In February, 1921, Crystal had resigned as editor. Max, who had himself previously resigned, now returned to inform Liberator readers that he, Floyd Dell, Robert Minor, and Claude McKay would share editorial duties. “It is our purpose,” he wrote, “to make the Liberator in spirit more like its honorably annihilated predecessor, The Masses, on subject-matter a little more closely related to the American labor movement. We wish our contributors—and especially those rare and obstreperous geniuses who contributed to The Masses—would take note of this fact.” Claude joined the Liberator at a high point in its fortunes. The U.S. Post Office Department had recently restored its second-class mailing privileges and had refunded more than eleven thousand dollars paid in first-class postage while the second-class application was pending. With this unexpected bonanza, the new Lib erator editorial staff could for the next year look forward to adequate operating funds.⁵ Thanks to Crystal Eastman’s editorship, they also had a very capable business manager in Margaret Lane, who had previously been active in the management of the Women’s Peace party. Crystal had also hired an excellent secretary and several good stenographers. At least for a while, the Liberator’s future seemed secure.⁶

For Claude, the magazine’s new stability meant he could look forward to a regular salary, small but adequate for room and board. From the beginning, McKay’s role involved substantial editorial responsibilities. Eastman had agreed to return as editor only if McKay assumed the editorial duties previously handled by Floyd Dell, who was currently writing a book. As McKay put it, “I responded with my hand and my head and my heart. . . . My experience with the Dread nought in London was of great service to me now.”⁷

Although in effect still editor-in-chief, Eastman during this period left all but the final assembly of the Liberator to Minor, McKay, and Dell. Eastman depended on them to give him the free time he needed for his writing, and he appeared at the Liberator offices only to prepare the monthly issues for printing. “Then,” McKay remembered, “he worked with devilish energy, sifting and scrapping material, tiding articles and pictures. And the magazine was always out on time.”⁸ Eastman wrote many, if not most, editorials while Dell continued to write his reviews and social criticisms. Despite the editorial input of Robert Minor, who was rapidly evolving into a fully committed Communist party functionary, and of McKay, whose contributions ranged across a broader spectrum of concerns, the Liberator still bore the decisive imprint of Max Eastman’s editorship.

Still spellbound by the cataclysmic transformations occurring in Russia, Eastman and his staff devoted a great deal of space in 1921 to a discussion of events there. They tried to understand and faithfully report Lenin’s strategy and tactics and to help fashion in the West a similar Marxist-Leninist approach to change. They were attempting to infuse into the idealistic “lyrical” Left of the old Masses a more serious revolutionary realism, seemingly exemplified by the Bolsheviks under Lenin’s leadership. In this effort, Eastman led the way, but the metamorphosis was never complete. The Liberator, after all, was not a party magazine. Its contributors were a varied lot of artists, writers, social reformers, and revolutionary zealots whose commitments to socialism as yet conformed strictly to no party line. Some, such as Robert Minor, Joseph Freeman, and Irwin Granich (Michael Gold), were in the process of transforming themselves into advocates of the Comintern’s emerging revolutionary orthodoxy. For others, such complete adherence to the cause never occurred. They retained the old libertarianism and individualism displayed in the Masses. To maintain such a stance, however, inevitably led to conflict, and one of the prices of this conflict was a gradual erosion of the carefree spirit, the optimistic naivete, and the spontaneous humor that had characterized the Masses. When McKay joined the Liberator staff in March, 1921, these tensions had not grown intolerable, but they were there, working within and among the individuals who composed the magazine’s inner circle. Eastman gave them indirect, perhaps unconscious expression in his March editorial assertion that the new editorial group intended to bring the Liberator closer to the spirit of the old Masses while also drawing closer ideologically to the revolutionary wing of the labor movement. In Eastman’s case, and surely with many others, the conflict between ideology and individuality was an inner conflict well before it developed into a public controversy between opposing individuals and groups.⁹

When McKay assumed his new duties, the differences that existed among the Liberator staff members had not yet disrupted the informal union that united them around Eastman and the monthly production of his magazine. Many artists who had worked with him on the Masses still contributed their wonderfully vivid, almost naively absurd drawings and cartoons of bloated capitalists and embattled workingmen. Floyd Dell still wrote earnestly of youth, marriage, and changing social values. And a wide variety of talented contributors still lent excitement to the Liberator.

Above all, however, the question that dominated its pages was the future of the Bolshevik experiment in Russia and of international socialism. The two now seemed inextricably linked. Revolutionary changes had been thwarted in central and western Europe and in the United States since the war. Only in Russia had significant change occurred. Counterrevolution had not succeeded in toppling the new government there. The civil war between White Russians and Red seemed to be drawing to a close with the Red flag triumphant everywhere. The magazine’s position was that the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics must be understood, encouraged, and supported, and its example must be followed by serious revolutionaries if socialism was ever to be realized in the West.

One co-worker on the old Masses had already sacrificed his life to the cause of the Russian Revolution, the youthful and energetic John Reed, whose sympathetic reportage of events in Russia had early won the confidence of Lenin. Reed had recently died of fever in Moscow and had been given a hero’s burial in the Kremlin wall. His death had only intensified the concern, sympathy, and commitment the Liberator displayed toward the Communist cause of revolutionary Russia.¹⁰

For McKay, a commitment to Communist revolution and life as an artist as yet posed no insurmountable contradictions. He thoroughly enjoyed his new position. Like Joseph Freeman, who was also contributing poems and occasional reviews to the Liberator, Claude had begun as an outsider, as an admiring reader of the Masses. Now, he had at last arrived on the inside. For the first time since boyhood, he had found, no matter how briefly, a home. As Max Eastman declared in his editorial announcing the new composition of his staff, “Floyd Dell, Robert Minor, and Claude McKay naturally belong to the editorial staff of The Liberator, and everybody will be pleased to see them where they belong.”¹¹

For McKay, one of the pleasures of the job was the unexpected, often unusual, and sometimes famous people who constantly turned up at the Liberator offices. Many of them were women. Some, like the statuesque English artist Clare Sheridan, were friends of Crystal Eastman’s. Others, like Elinor Wylie, came to discuss their poetry. A few were Greenwich Village characters and hangers-on, like the exotically maniacal Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven. She visited McKay often, “always,” he remembered, “gaudily accoutered in rainbow raiment, festooned with barbaric beads and spangles and bangles, and toting along her inevitable poodle in gilded harness. She had such a precious way of petting the poodle with a slap and ejaculating, ‘Hund-bitch!’” Many of the women who visited the Liberator offices came to meet its handsome chief editor. For Max Eastman, McKay believed, “was an ikon for the radical women.” But Eastman was seldom there, “and so I acted like a black page, listening a lot and saying very little, but gratefully acknowledging all the gifts of gracious words that were offered to The Liberator.”¹² McKay was being unduly modest. Some of the women also became his friends. Clare Sheridan expressed admiration for him in her American diary, and the youthful and earnest Dorothy Day, who would later found her own weekly, also befriended him from time to time.¹³

In his capacity as editor, McKay also became acquainted with some notable men. E. E. Cummings one day dropped by the office and engaged McKay in a long discussion about some poems he had submitted. McKay wished to publish several in a prominent spread, but Robert Minor emphatically refused. He maintained that Cummings’ verse contained nothing to advance the revolutionary consciousness of Liberator readers. McKay “protested that the verses were poetry, and that in any work of art my natural reaction was more for its intrinsic beauty than for its social significance.” While he argued that his “social sentiments were strong, definite and radical,” they were different from his “esthetic emotions. . . and should not be mixed up.” Despite Minor’s objections, McKay managed to insert a few of Cummings’ poems in the Liberator.¹⁴

Everyone on the Liberator staff respected one celebrated visitor, the great silent-film star, Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin sympathized with the Liberator’s radical politics, and by chance he also shared for a while with Max Eastman the same mistress, the actress Florence Deshon. Their tangled affairs ended tragically with Deshon’s death by suicide in 1922.¹⁵

During his tenure with the Liberator, McKay several times enjoyed Chaplin’s company. Chaplin liked McKay’s poetry and quoted it in his early travelogue, My Trip Abroad. He also remembered McKay in his autobiography.¹⁶ One day at the Liberator, Chaplin also met and liked Hubert Harrison. Later, he asked McKay to invite Harrison to a party at the Greenwich Village home of Eugen Boissevain, who was shortly to marry the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Besides Chaplin, Max and Crystal Eastman were there, along with the civil liberties lawyer Dudley Field Malone, Doris Stevens, “a leader of the woman’s movement,” and McKay’s friend William Gropper. Harrison knew many women and McKay had suggested he bring a date to the party. Harrison arrived late with “an old brown girl who was neither big nor little, short nor fat, or anything.” McKay concluded that “erotically he was very indiscriminate and I suppose that descending from the soap-box, he remembered the party and invited the first pick-up he met to accompany him.” As it turned out, the woman and everyone else had a grand time. For McKay, the party turned into one of those rare, memorable occasions when “no white shadow and no black apprehension, no complexes arising out of conscious superiority or circumstantial inferiority” intruded to spoil the “spirit of happy relaxation.”¹⁷

Such contacts between whites and blacks in New York would grow as the decade advanced and would play an important role in launching the black literary and artistic awakening known as the Harlem Renaissance. Informal gatherings smoothed the way to publishers, editors, and theatrical producers and directors. McKay had been among the first to take full advantage of this new development, which in itself had been encouraged and promoted by the officials—black and white—of the NAACP and the National Urban League. As early as 1917, through the intercession of the NAACP’s Joel Spingarn, McKay had succeeded in publishing two poems in Seven Arts. Now, as an associate editor of the Liberator, he was in an even better position to advance his literary career.¹⁸

McKay had returned to New York determined to find a publisher for an expanded American edition of Spring in New Hampshire. As early as September, 1919, he thought he had received from the young publisher Alfred A. Knopf a firm commitment to publish his poems, but over a year later he wrote William Stanley Braithwaite from London that he still was looking for an American publisher, “Knopf having failed me at the last moment.”¹⁹

Assistance in finding a publisher eventually came, once again, from Joel Spingarn. In the fall of 1921, Spingarn persuaded Harcourt, Brace and Company to accept McKay’s poems for publication in the spring of 1922. The certainty of an American book of verse meant much to McKay. On the advice of his English publishers, he had omitted from Spring in New Hampshire his most militandy racial poems, including “If We Must Die.” This had bothered him at the time, and it upset him even more when, upon his return to New York, Frank Harris had discovered the omission and had indignantly called him a “traitor” to his race and to his “own integrity. That’s what the English . . . have done to your people,” Harris exclaimed, “emasculated them. . . . You were bolder in America. The English make obscene sycophants of their subject peoples. I am Irish and I know. But we Irish have guts the English cannot rip out of us. I’m ashamed of you, sir. It’s a good thing you got out of England. It is no place for a genius to live.”²⁰

McKay left Harris’ “uncomfortable presence” thoroughly castigated but determined to see the publication of all his poems in an expanded American edition. He had not hesitated to seek Spingarn’s assistance, even though he had never felt completely at ease in his company. McKay thought Spingarn disapproved of his radicalism, and he resented what he saw as Spingarn’s presumptuous role as strategist and spokesman for the black race within the NAACP. On the other hand, he admired the man’s personal integrity and his dedication to the cause of racial justice. Above all, he could not deny Spingarn’s usefulness to himself. McKay’s attitude to Spingarn remained ambivalent, though the relationship proved to be of personal benefit. In general, however, ambivalence could be said to characterize his attitude toward most of the national NAACP leadership in New York.²¹

Before his trip to England, McKay had not had a chance to get to know the officials and staff at the NAACP’s national headquarters. After his return, his successes as a poet and a radical journalist soon enabled him to meet the leaders of black protest and black “society” in New York City. Among the leaders of the NAACP, only its executive secretary, James Weldon Johnson, won McKay’s unqualified admiration. As a former teacher, U.S. consul, lawyer, musician, poet, and novelist, Johnson moved with self-possession and dignity among blacks and whites. Like Claude’s elder brother, U’Theo, he was clearly a superior man among men, who had never allowed his aspirations or interests to become limited and ingrown because of his race. Among Afro-American leaders, Claude admired and trusted Johnson alone without reservation.²²

McKay’s relations with the other NAACP leaders during this period were cordial but not close. He appreciated the passionate dedication of W. E. B. Du Bois, who, as editor of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, pushed relentlessly for the advancement of blacks in every area. He had himself been profoundly influenced by Du Bois’s writings, but like many who met him, McKay found Du Bois too aloof and formal for any genuine friendship to develop between them. Besides, during this period, they were ideologically at odds. Du Bois had briefly joined the Socialist party in 1912, but he had soon left it to support Woodrow Wilson’s first candidacy. With the advent of the Russian Revolution, he had reserved judgment about the future of revolutionary socialism. On this point, Du Bois revealed his differences with McKay in an exchange of opinion in the July, 1921, Crisis. In a letter to the editor, McKay criticized Du Bois for “sneering” at the Russian Revolution, which he ardently defended as “the greatest event in the history of humanity.” McKay readily admitted that the NAACP had done great work and should be supported by all “progressive Negroes,” but it was doing nothing to bring black and white labor together in a revolutionary front. Du Bois replied by calmly questioning whether blacks should or could place as much trust in the working-class struggle as McKay seemed to be doing.²³

McKay’s ideological differences with NAACP leaders did not prevent them from associating with him on a social basis, and during 1921 and 1922 he met Walter White, Johnson’s young assistant from Atlanta; Jessie Fauset, the literary editor of Crisis; and Mary White Ovington, one of the founding members on the NAACP’s board of directors. All proved friendly and helpful. Although middle-class herself, Jessie Fauset enjoyed socializing with young bohemian writers and artists and did not object to McKay. Neither did Walter White, whose extensive connections with white writers, publishers, and journalists in New York would later prove helpful to McKay.²⁴

While outwardly friendly, McKay harbored reservations about most of the NAACP group. Like Spingarn, Ovington was white and not completely to be trusted as a spokesperson for a Negro organization. Walter White presented another problem, one deeply rooted in McKay’s background. In Jamaica, he had grown up resentful of those mulattoes and octoroons whose self-advancement compelled them to identify with the white elite. Walter White, blond-haired and blue-eyed, came from a long-established, light-complexioned Atlanta family. McKay had trouble identifying him as a Negro. He nevertheless soon found he liked Walter White, whose natural ebullience and charm put McKay at ease. The stories of White’s “undercover” investigations of lynchings in the Deep South, where discovery of his true identity might have meant death, also inspired respect. While none of the other Negro leaders in the national offices of the NAACP was as pink-cheeked as Walter White, neither (with the exception of William Pickens) were they as dark as McKay. Even the racially obsessed W. E. B. Du Bois had Caucasian features and an olive complexion. And James Weldon Johnson, who was darker, had once passed as a Latin American on a southern train.²⁵

McKay’s ambivalence toward the NAACP persisted, as did his ingrained suspicion of light-skinned racial leaders. In Jamaica, such an elite had formed a class apart. They considered themselves superior to the black peasantry and aspired to equality with the British ruling class. In pursuit of this end, they had time and again acted contrary to the interests of the black majority. McKay was never convinced that the integrationist policies of the NAACP did not encourage the development of a similar situation in the United States. By the 1930s, he would articulate a comprehensive criticism of the NAACP’s racial integration policies, but in 1921 he only criticized the NAACP’s middle-class orientation and lack of sympathy with Bolshevism.²⁶

Although the NAACP certainly adopted no official policy of support for socialism, McKay may have exaggerated the leadership’s opposition to it. Several NAACP leaders published articles and book reviews in the militandy socialist Liberator. James Weldon Johnson, Walter White, and Mary White Ovington had all contributed articles and reviews on the contemporary racial situation before McKay joined the editorial staff.²⁷

Interestingly, while these NAACP leaders all appeared in the Liberator , none of McKay’s black radical associates in Harlem ever wrote for it, though all were articulate, well read, and much further to the left than Johnson, White, or Ovington. After McKay became associate editor, he twice invited (at Hubert Harrison’s suggestion) Harlem’s black socialists to discuss with Robert Minor how they might effectively influence Garvey’s Back to Africa movement. “Besides Harrison,” McKay later recalled, “there were Grace Campbell, one of the pioneer Negro members of the Socialist Party; Richard Moore and W. A. Domingo, who edited The Emancipator, a radical Harlem weekly; Cyril Briggs, the founder of the African Blood Brotherhood and editor of the monthly magazine, The Crusader; Mr. Fanning, who owned the only Negro cigar store in Harlem; and one Otto Huiswoud, who hailed from Curagao, the birthplace of Daniel De Leon. Perhaps there were others whom I don’t remember.”²⁸ The meetings were intense and lively, but nothing came of them. Garvey and his chief lieutenants had no intention of espousing socialism. They were more interested in enshrining themselves as the reigning imperial aristocracy of a resurgent Pan-African nationalism and had no patience with socialist ideas.

By chance, Eastman dropped by the Liberator offices while the second meeting of Harlem’s “black Reds” was in progress. Although he greeted them cordially, he was alarmed by the prospect that such gatherings might inspire the government once again to take action against him and his fellow editors. Having twice faced trial as editor of the Masses, he did not wish to provoke a third indictment and cautioned against any more meetings by the group in the Libera tor offices.²⁹

McKay’s association with the individual members of this group, of course, continued; but none became contributors to the Liberator. They remained uptown and tried to develop their own organs of expression. When they did reach out for white contact, it was toward the newly formed American Communist party, in the case of Briggs’s African Blood Brotherhood, or toward the Socialist party, in the case of A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. On the whole, they must have felt that the literary and artistically inclined group at the Liberator had little to offer them. They may have enjoyed the magazine, but unlike McKay’s, their primary orientation was toward politics and labor organization, not art and literature.³⁰

While McKay contributed an occasional poem, article, or letter to their various periodicals, and while he joined Briggs’s African Blood Brotherhood and almost certainly encouraged its affiliation with the American Communist party, his center of focus remained with the Liberator group. He sought to contribute as an individual and as a poet to the Communist cause, but aside from his involvement with Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation, he never really became a disciplined, working member of any political organization inside or outside Harlem. Although he joined the IWW during the war, the WSF in London, and Briggs’s brotherhood and the underground Communist Party of America once he returned to New York, he never subordinated his own ideas or ambitions to any party program. In this sense, his later assertion that he never joined any Communist party was half true but hardly the whole story.³¹

Although McKay maintained connections with Harlem’s small, diverse band of socialists and made a few friends among the moderate NAACP leadership, he had little success with the members of Harlem’s status-conscious, middle-class social set. He disliked reciting his poetry before their organizations, and they were offended by his casual attire, bohemian air, and lack of polish as a public speaker. He complained to Hubert Harrison about the invitations he received to perform before such audiences, but Harrison, an excellent public speaker himself, chided McKay and advised him that “he owed it” to his race to make such appearances. From his experiences, McKay concluded that “poets and novelists should let good actors perform for them.” McKay did not lack sophistication, wit, or even social pretensions of his own, but these all seemed to fail him when confronted by black middle-class social consciousness, which he felt was at base only a tragic, futile imitation of its white counterpart. What he loved about Harlem was the richly textured, complex, and emotionally charged social life of its working class, whom he had discovered in his early days in New York. “And now that I was legging limpingly along with the intellectual gang, Harlem for me did not hold quite the same thrill and glamor as before. Where formerly in saloons and cabarets and along the streets I received impressions like arrows piercing my nerves and distilled poetry from them, now I was often pointed out as an author. I lost the rare feeling of a vagabond feeding upon secret music singing in me.” Despite his love for its folk culture, McKay never really learned to function in black American society. As a dining-car waiter he had managed well enough, but in his vocation as writer, poet, and intellectual he never found a comfortable niche. A part of him remained always the outside observer and critic. As a West Indian, he had encountered some resentment, suspicion, and hostility among the black working class, but it never seemed serious enough to bother him. He recognized that, like most Americans, blacks knew very little of their ancestors and kinsmen elsewhere in the world. That did not, however, lessen their decided sense of superiority over West Indians, whom they were prone to dismiss contemptuously as “monkey-chasers.” To McKay, this only proved their need of education. He reserved his real resentment for the black middle class and the direction and thrust of its civil rights movement, whose goal seemed to him to be assimilation for the few at the expense of any advancement for the majority of their fellow blacks.³²

During McKay’s tenure with the Liberator, Hubert Harrison remained his closest friend among New York’s black intelligentsia, most of whom were, like himself, precariously situated, both economically and socially. Harrison’s views about black American society, its civil rights leadership, and its relationship with the larger white society coincided with and had a lasting influence upon McKay’s social thought. After passing through the Socialist party and the IWW, and after working briefly with Garvey’s UNIA, Harrison had by 1921 come “to the conclusion that out of the purgatory of their own social confusion, Negroes would sooner or later have to develop their own leaders, independent of white control.” In this regard, he had a certain contempt for the NAACP, which he liked to call the “National Association for the Advancement of Certain People.” He once remarked to McKay “that the NAACP was the progeny of black snobbery and white pride, and had developed into a great organization, with Du-Bois like a wasp in Booker Washington’s hide until the day of his death.” Harrison combined an “ebony hard” sense of humor with clarity of intellect and immense learning. And he laughed in a “large sugary black African way, which sounded like the rustling of dry bamboo leaves agitated by the wind.” McKay delighted in his company. Harrison’s tragedy was that he, too, never really found a secure place in the upper echelons of Afro-American society. In his day, there was no leadership position available to accommodate his large, egocentric personality.³³

While McKay agreed with Harrison about the limitations of the NAACP, he was never ready, as was Harrison, to ridicule its leaders publicly. He respected their genuine accomplishments, and they had, after all, been good to him. Consequently, when Harrison in the Negro World reported that McKay had told of dining recently with certain “pseudo intellectuals” from the NAACP, McKay responded by castigating Harrison in a letter, copies of which he sent to Walter White and James Weldon Johnson, along with a cover letter in which he disassociated himself from Harrison’s remarks. To Harrison, he wrote:³⁴

I have just noticed your reference to me in the “Negro World” of today which, in my opinion, is in extraordinary bad taste. You are simply hurting me personally by such methods. . . . I could not dream of referring to people who have had me as their private guest in such an indecent and uncalled for public way, nor have I given you any reason to make such a covert attack on them.

You have by your action, violated the simplest proprieties of social intercourse that even a kindergartener or an idiot would respect, and it is your duty as a newspaperman, if you have any moral obligation to your profession, to correct your statement in the next issue of the “Negro World.”

You are very wrong to think that you can praise my work by a personal attack on intelligent minds, that whatever their faults, are working for the common cause in their own way.*

McKay’s letter revealed that Harrison had probably not engaged in any blatant untruths in reporting his conversation with McKay, but he had committed a serious indiscretion. Despite his haste in correcting Harrison and in apologizing to Johnson and White, McKay’s entree into Harlem’s inner circle of civil rights leaders (not to mention into Harlem society) was, in fact, limited by his own ambivalence and iconoclasm.

In addition, as an editor of an influential radical magazine downtown, McKay had access to the literary bohemia of Greenwich Village. This aspect of his social life had its own satisfactions and frustrations. For the most part, he enjoyed the friends and acquaintances he made while serving with the Liberator. He was often surprised, flattered, and pleased by their generosity. “Friends vied with friends in giving me invitations to their homes for parties and car rides and in offering tickets for plays and concerts.” The Liberator still had a few wealthy supporters. One of them, Elizabeth Sage Hare, thought enough of McKay’s accomplishments to present him a check for five hundred dollars. His less affluent friends introduced him to those “Village tearooms and gin mills which were not crazy with colorophobia.” McKay “reciprocated by inviting some of them up to the cabarets and cozy flats of Harlem.”

Despite such amiability, McKay, unlike his white friends, could never forget the color bar that still imposed itself between him and the larger American society. In New York, the color bar lacked formal sanctions or any consistent pattern, which made it all the more treacherous when it suddenly confronted the unwary black, like a hidden trap in a flowering garden.

McKay knew that in accepting invitations from white friends, he risked exposing them, as well as himself, to insults and humiliations. And although he was aware, when racially motivated rebuffs did occur, they almost invariably wounded and angered him. The hurt burned deepest on those occasions when the simplest human pleasures were spoiled by the sudden, unexpected raising of the color bar in public places. Once, for example, he accompanied Max Eastman and Eugen Boissevain on a leisurely automobile trip to various points in New Jersey, where they viewed the Manhattan skyline and enjoyed the summer countryside. Toward the end of the day, they decided to eat but could find no restaurant in New Jersey that would seat McKay. One place finally offered to serve them in the kitchen at a table reserved for the hired help during their breaks from work. For lack of a better alternative, they agreed and ate a miserable meal amid the heat, noise, and clatter of a busy commercial kitchen. For McKay, the experience not only spoiled the day’s enjoyment, it made him extremely wary of venturing on any excursion that might conceivably lead to a similar incident. His white friends did not always understand his refusal of their invitations. “Sometimes they resented my attitude. For I did not always choose to give the reason. I did not always like to intrude the fact of my being a black problem among whites.” His white friends were often unaware of the pervasiveness of racial barriers in their own society, and, McKay recalled, “in their happy ignorance they would lead one into the traps of insult.” Such circumstances made really close friendships difficult to maintain. On segregation and discrimination in public places, McKay later wrote, “I think the persons who invented discrimination in public places to ostracize people of a different race or nation or color or religion are the direct descendants of medieval torturers. It is the most powerful instrument in the world that may be employed to prevent rapproachement and understanding between different groups of people. It is a cancer in the universal human body and poison to the individual soul.”³⁵ For McKay the bitterness it engendered often left him silent before his white friends or, more perplexingly, ill-humored and spiteful. As Eastman remembered him during these years, “[Claude] was an aristocrat in the Liberator crowd, slightly aloof, as people of superior sensitivity have to be, but not priggish. Indeed his genial understanding and quick-witted hilarious laughter vastly promoted the spirit of equalitarian fellowship without which [the Liberator] would not have existed. Underneath these urbane qualities, Claude was a complex knot of tangled impulses out of which fits of unaccountably spiteful behavior would at times burst. But most of the time he was merely mischievous and altogether lovable.” From the perspective of a lifetime, Eastman eventually concluded that “[McKay] was my best friend on the Liberator, and a good friend also of Crystal’s.”³⁶

Another more casual acquaintance of McKay’s, Alfred Tiala, socialized with him only in “three or four brief get-togethers in a Greenwich Village cafe named Three Steps Down.” He also remembered McKay’s air of detachment and reserve. Not being a close friend or an advocate of McKay’s poetic genius, Tiala’s observations provide an interesting contrast to Eastman’s; Tiala’s remarks, moreover, generally substantiate McKay’s own account of his relation with most of his Greenwich Village associates. “To me, at least,” wrote Tiala,

he was a charming, very likable person. He struck me as being wistfully idealistic—not a bold, forward crusading type. . . . Among us white acquaintances of his I wonder if there was anyone in the position of a friend. We were merely on the fringe of his feelings—none of us were close to him. . . . It was as if he were probing as to how near to us he could come without being affronted. Perhaps the basis of it was an innate shyness.

Perhaps you can make something of the fact that personalities like Maxwell Anderson and Eugene O’Neill frequented the cafe Three Steps Down. Claude McKay had his lunches there and saw Anderson and O’Neill and others often. . . . Yet he had seemingly not become acquainted with them.

. . . McKay had a wistful, pleasant style; but at no time did I see him become exuberant or even joyous. He was quietly, pleasantly sombre on [every] occasion. . . . Perhaps it was I who caused him to deport as he did when with me.³⁷

In the memory of those with whom he was closer, Claude always remained a much more dynamic presence. Most members of the Liberator staff, for example, came closer to Eastman’s estimate of him than to Tiala’s. The Liberator artists John Barber, Maurice Becker, and William Gropper, as well as the writer Joseph Freeman, all remembered him with affection.

In addition, as the solitary black editor on a predominantly white radical magazine, McKay’s very presence lent credence to the staff’s insistence that to a man, it was working for genuine racial equality and justice. In no sense did they treat McKay as an outsider. On the contrary, John Barber recalled that “it would be nearer the truth to point out that the whole lot of us liked Claude more than we ever liked each other.” To Barber, he had a “wonderful personality and. . . limitless generosity. Yet there was nothing Pollyanna or humble about him. His acute critical sense and sharp knowledge of human nature and people made us only wish to be acceptable to him—to ‘pass muster’ so to speak and earn his approval. And all these qualities gave him great influence.”³⁸ Maurice Becker also stressed McKay’s cordial relations with the Liberator group: “As to the relations between the Liberator contributors and Claude McKay, there was never anything but the closest comradeship. Claude was on the office staff and whenever we others dropped in and time permitted, off we’d go to a cafeteria for a snack and spell of loafing. On several occasions we spent an evening at Claude’s Harlem basement flat, and I am reminded that the white-haired Max Eastman and Claude once confronted one another on a tennis court in Croton.”³⁹

Perhaps the Liberator contributor closest to McKay was William Gropper, whose art Claude greatly admired. Gropper’s political cartoons were vivid, forceful, and revealing. Unlike Robert Minor’s larger-than-life statements, they combined political shrewdness with a touch of whimsical humor that revealed the fallible, human elements in every political situation. Gropper and McKay got along well together and saw a great deal of each other in 1921 and 1922. Gropper later recalled that “we went to many parties together, as well as poetry readings and meetings at the Liberator.” He thought “Claude was special ... a fine poet and very sensitive.” He remembered that McKay had “many likes and dislikes” about both white and black people, “particularly [because] he had come from the West Indies and there were Negroes who seemed to feel different about West Indian Negroes, so Claude once explained to me, when one night at a party in Harlem it ended in a scrap. . . . I don’t remember Claude having many Negro friends. He was at that time spending most of his time with white intellectuals. When he suffered isolation or loneliness, nobody was his people. . . . His poetry . . . challenged and stimulated everyone around him. He was definitely a great guy to know.”⁴⁰

Not everyone on the Liberator staff responded so positively to McKay. Robert Minor questioned his revolutionary zeal. McKay’s acceptance of E. E. Cummings’ poetry led Minor to observe that such tastes revealed McKay to be “more of a decadent than a social revolutionist.” McKay’s British West Indian sophistication, his often caustic wit, and perhaps his sexual preferences made him difficult for Minor to classify. In A Long Way from Home, McKay wrote that “Robert Minor said he could not visualize me as a real Negro. He thought of a Negro as of a rugged tree in the forest. Perhaps Minor had had Negro playmates like that in Texas and he could not imagine any other type.”⁴¹

Another Liberator artist, Adolf Dehn, shied away from McKay for an even more personal reason. In A Long Way from Home, McKay wrote of his fascination with New York “as an eye-dazzling picture” and told of his endless exploration of it by ferry, train, and on foot. In particular, he remembered “some nocturnal wanderings with Adolf Dehn, the artist, spanning blocks upon blocks along the East River, and the vast space-filling feeling of the gigantic gas tanks.”⁴² Many years later Dehn also recalled their long walk together, and he, too, remembered that it had been a fine evening until toward the end, “when I was startled and disturbed to realize that [McKay] was indubitably making homosexual overtures to me. They were fairly delicate but became quite insistent. It took me a long time to get him to leave. This all took place on the waterfront so at least I was not in the position of getting him out of my small apartment where we had been earlier. He did not want to accept the simple fact that I was not interested in such activities. This all was done in a most friendly if a somewhat embarrassed manner on my part. My notion of him is that he was a most lecherous fellow with considerable charm and that it did not matter whether he took on man or woman.” Dehn found McKay’s attempted seduction so unsettling that it destroyed what might have otherwise been a good friendship. “No ill feeling existed between us as far as I know, but it did not allow for a continued friendship. We saw each other accidentally after that.” Dehn did note, however, that the rest of “the Liberator crowd got along with [McKay] very well.”⁴³

McKay met many people in his capacity as an associate editor of the Liberator. Not surprisingly, only a few became really close friends. He did, however, solidify his relationship with Max and Crystal Eastman, and he also began fruitful friendships with James Weldon Johnson, Grace Campbell, and Arthur A. Schomburg, the black bibliophile. And despite the public disclosure of a private remark about certain members of the NAACP, McKay also valued Harrison’s company. With these few special friends he maintained lasting contact.⁴⁴

To be sure, he also developed other friendships while on the Liberator. Some were significant, but they did not endure for long. One such friendship was with the British IWW organizer Charles Ashleigh, who had been imprisoned in Chicago after World War I. The Liberator published several of his prison poems, appealed to its readers to contribute toward his release on bail, and eventually welcomed him to New York. There in 1921 he and McKay met and began an intense affair that lasted intermittently until the mid-1920s. Ashleigh eventually became a dedicated Communist. He never considered McKay a committed revolutionary, but he enjoyed his company, and in his old age fondly remembered their first dinner together in a New York restaurant.⁴⁵

Another more casual acquaintance of McKay’s in the 1920s was James Ivy, who subsequently became a skilled teacher of English, French, and Spanish, as well as an accomplished journalist and editor of the NAACP’s Crisis magazine. In 1922, he was a college student at Virginia Union University in Richmond, visiting New York over the summer. One day in the Rand School’s bookstore, he chanced upon a white youth named Donald Duff who had met McKay in Greenwich Village. In 1929, Ivy described his meeting with McKay:

Claude was then living at... 23East 14th Street. Duff knocked at room number eight. A mellow voice bade us enter. . . . Duff opened the door and ushered me into a small, neatly furnished room.

There in one corner was McKay stretched out on an army cot. He wore a shirt open at the throat and trousers. The cot was littered with books and magazines and manuscripts. He was courteous. His accent was British West Indian. In physical appearance he was well built, muscular, of average height, dark brown in complexion. Eyes, smiling, brown, and challenging. The head set off with a mop of rather heavy, long hair.

McKay must have responded positively to Ivy’s alertness, intelligence, and curiosity, for they “immediately became friends.” McKay invited Ivy to join him the next day for a meal at John’s Italian Restaurant on the Lower East Side. “It was on this occasion,” Ivy recalled, “that he told me of his London days.” Ivy was not homosexual, but he was decidedly curious about sex and sexual behavior and would eventually collect a large library of erotica. He soon found out about McKay’s marriage, but Claude would say little about it or about his relation with black women, beyond coyly remarking that “I’m all out of touch with the dusky beauties.” Because Ivy was a student, McKay proudly showed him his old English composition papers from Kansas State; Ivy judged them “all quite good. Above the average for undergraduate papers.” He also noted that McKay wrote out all his poems “in a very careful longhand” and then had them typed. While composing his verse, “he also [made] use of one of Haldeman-Julius’ little rhyming dictionaries.”⁴⁶ Ivy became another long-term friend and would see McKay often in the 1930s.

While establishing and extending his rather elaborate, if for the most part casual, network of friends and acquaintances, McKay continued to play a vital role on the Liberator staff. After joining it, he contributed occasional articles and book reviews, as well as a steady stream of poems. During these years, the style and content of his poetry matured rapidly, and he wrote his most significant American poetry. Like his earlier American verse, it was uneven in quality, often derivative, and sometimes just plain bad. By 1922, most of his verses were short, mostly conventionally rhymed and structured sonnets, whose unusual subject matter and passion alone gave them force, originality, and distinction. Yet, to a degree, they represented some loss of poetic imagination. For all its faults, his dialect verse had an originality of form, diction, rhythm, and subject matter absent in his sonnets and short lyrics.

On the other hand, the best of his American poems represented distinct advances in self-knowledge and in a more mature understanding of the black dilemma in Western culture. They were, in fact, fully realized expressions of the tragedy inherent in the Afro-American experience. They also powerfully focused on the principal themes he had first begun to develop in the dialect poems—the bittersweet brevity of love, the lost innocence of his Jamaican childhood, and the alienation, anger, and rebellion he felt in a world unfairly dominated by a white culture that refused to concede justice, humanity, and equality of human feelings to the black race. For all their obvious echoes of his English literary inheritance, McKay’s Liberator sonnets sometimes stated profound truths about the black condition in American society that were not equaled in literature until James Baldwin’s great prose essays of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, McKay’s forceful expressions of despair and rebellion marked an important departure in American literature, for his angry rebelliousness laid bare for all to see a genuinely intolerable estrangement, shared in varying degrees by all black Americans. As McKay clearly revealed in such poems as “Outcast” and “In Bondage,” blacks were alienated not only from the society that oppressed them but also from their own human potential and from the fullness of life itself.

Something in me is lost, forever lost,
Some vital thing has gone out of my heart,
And I must walk the way of life a ghost
Among the sons of earth, a thing apart.

For I was born, far from my native clime,
Under the white man’s menace, out of time.

And in “In Bondage,” he wrote:

Somewhere I would be singing, far away.
For life is greater than the thousand wars
Men wage for it in their insatiate lust,
And will remain like the eternal stars,
When all that shines today is drift and dust
But I am bound with you in your mean graves,
O black men, simple slaves of ruthless slaves.⁴⁷

The only alternative to such a living death was uncompromising resistance, a continuous exertion of human will against the forces of death. As McKay later expressed it:

      I stripped down harshly
      To the naked core of hatred
      Based on the essential wrong.⁴⁸

Like W. E. B. Du Bois before him, McKay did not flinch from expressing his hatred:

My being would be a skeleton, a shell,
If this dark passion that fills my every mood,
And makes my heaven in the white world’s hell,
Did not forever feed me vital blood.⁴⁹

This was strong medicine, but it was not the whole story. McKay also recognized that he did not simply hate; he also loved America’s liberating energy and vitality:

... I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.⁵⁰

This affinity for America and, more broadly, for Western culture derived from genuine feelings of kinship. Western culture had shaped him, and he felt for it a love that, because it was denied in return, placed him, symbolically at least, in the position of the speaker in “Mulatto,” who could exclaim:

There is a searing hate within my soul,
A hate that only kin can feel for kin,
A hate that makes me vigorous and whole,
And spurs me on increasingly to win.
Because I am my cruel father’s child,
My love of justice stirs me up to hate,
A warring Ishmaelite, unreconciled,
When falls the hour I shall not hesitate
Into my father’s heart to plunge the knife
To gain the utmost freedom that is life.⁵¹

McKay’s best poems in the years after World War I stand like concisely compressed essays on the black condition in the modern world. Sympathetically read, their continuity with later developments in black literature is clear.

McKay’s adherence to the “classical” conventions of English poetry received much encouragement from his chief critic, mentor, and literary editor, Max Eastman. Though perhaps unfortunate, Eastman’s influence was not sinister. McKay essentially agreed that “real” poetry adhered to Victorian poetic conventions, and that the modernists substituted novelty for discipline and incomprehensibility for beauty. More important, as McKay’s chief editor and critic, Eastman apparently quite frequently changed McKay’s poems for the better. That, at least, was McKay’s opinion to the very end of his life. As late as 1945, he was sending poems to Eastman and admonishing him to “make any corrections you think necessary. . . . I should like to get your opinion and also see the mark of your blue pencil, for I am aware there is no more excellent judge.” Eastman obliged, and McKay responded by exclaiming, “And the poems! They are wonderful to look at after you chop them up! That makes me think of the old days.”⁵² On his side, Eastman believed in McKay’s poetic genius and died firm in the belief that Claude McKay was the greatest Afro-American poet.

Altogether, McKay published forty-two poems in the Liberator. The first appeared in April, 1919, and the last in August, 1923. His articles and book reviews numbered far less—only eleven appeared between June, 1921, and August, 1922. With a few exceptions, they can be broadly divided into two subject categories. One group expressed his political and social preoccupations; in the other he explored the great significance and potential of the black artistic developments occurring around him. In all his articles, he displayed critical acuity and a consistent maturity of style. In his first Liberator article, “How Black Sees Green and Red,” he analyzed the international significance of the Sinn Fein revolution for Irish independence and gave his impression of the Irish. His last piece in August, 1922, was a review of T. S. Stribling’s Birthright. In it, he confessed his growing doubts that American Communists could ever free themselves sufficiently from racial prejudices to win the black masses to their cause. In the fourteen months between these first and last Liberator articles, he also wrote, among other things, a review of the pioneering black musical, Shuffle Along, which appeared on Broadway in 1922, several other theater and book reviews, a commentary on Marcus Garvey as a “Negro Moses,” and an impassioned denunciation of racial segregation in New York theaters.⁵³

In “How Black Sees Green and Red,” he displayed his familiarity with the British and Irish scene by using the Sinn Fein movement to illustrate a number of points. McKay loved the Irish. He considered them racially prejudiced, like other whites, but not hypocritical, like the Anglo-Saxons. He believed that Irish independence represented the first step in “the dissolution of the British Empire and the ushering in of an era of proletarian states, [which] will give England her proper proportional place in the political affairs of the world.” At the same time, McKay had no illusions about Ireland’s “bourgeois nationalists.” For this reason, despite his admiration for Sinn Fein, McKay declared that “it is with the proletarian revolutionists of the world that my whole spirit revolts.” Moreover, he added,

the yearning of the American Negro especially, can only find expression and realization in the class struggle. . . . For the Negro is in a peculiar position in America. In spite of a professional here and a businessman there, the maintenance of an all-white supremacy in the industrial and social life, as well as the governing bodies of the nation, places the entire race alongside the lowest section of the white working class. They are struggling for identical things. They fight along different lines simply because they are not as class conscious and intelligent as the classes they are fighting. . . . The Negro must acquire class consciousness. And the white workers must accept him and work with him, whether they object to his color and morals or not. For his presence is a menacing reality.

In this regard, he now found Marcus Garvey’s black nationalist leadership totally deficient, and in his article on him, McKay stressed that Garvey had repudiated “all the fundamentals of the black worker’s struggle.” Garvey, McKay wrote, “talks of Africa as if it were a little island in the Caribbean Sea. . . . He has never urged Negroes to organize in industrial unions.”⁵⁴

McKay’s criticism of Garvey appeared only after the latter’s federal indictment for alleged mail fraud. Like many black intellectuals, and especially most black socialists, McKay had earlier viewed Garvey’s movement as an unprecedented opportunity for racial organization and advancement. Garvey, however, believed in the great-man theory of history. He would have nothing to do with ideas that conflicted with his basic belief that “the fundamental issue of life [is] the appeal of race to race. . . of clan to clan... of tribe to tribe, of observing the rule that self-preservation [is] the first law of nature.” Others, such as Mussolini and Hitler, as well as members of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, thought along similar lines. Such opinions meant only an intensification of racial antagonisms. “All who think broadly on social conditions,” McKay declared, “are amazed at Garvey’s ignorance and his intolerance of modern social ideas.” At the same time, McKay admitted that Garvey was “beyond doubt a very energetic and quick witted mind, barb-wired by the imperial traditions of nineteenth-century England.” And he had proven himself a “universal advertising manager” by becoming “the biggest popularizer of the Negro problem, especially among Negroes, since Uncle Tom’s Cabin” Garvey’s spirit, McKay concluded, was revolutionary, “but his intellect does not understand the significance of modern revolutionary developments.” But then again, “maybe he chose not to understand” because “a resolute facing of facts would make puerile his beautiful schemes for the redemption ... of Africa.”⁵⁵

If Garvey disappointed him, other developments in black American life provided encouragement. In particular, McKay saw in the new musical Shuffle Along, written and directed entirely by blacks, proof that black artists might soon break through “the screen of sneering bigotry put between them and life by the dominant race” and begin to express for all to see that zestful “warmth, color and laughter” in black communities that had “yet to be depicted by a true artist.” McKay had special praise for Florence Mills, “the sparkling gold star of the show.” And his review, together with Hugo Gellert’s illustrations, caused “a sensation among the theatrical set in Harlem.” McKay never forgot Shuffle Along. In A Long Way from Home, he stated that “it definitely showed the Negro groping, fumbling, and emerging in artistic group expression.” Others have since concluded that Shuffle Along was indeed a milestone in black theater.⁵⁶

As the sometime drama critic of the Liberator, McKay reviewed other productions in 1921 and 1922, notably Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones and the musical review Chauve Souris, which featured Russian entertainers, musicians, and themes. His most brilliant review by far, however, was his report in the May, 1922, Liberator of his experience at the Theatre Guild’s presentation of Leonid Andreyev’s He Who Gets Slapped. When the Theatre Guild tickets arrived at the Liberator offices, McKay elected himself “dramatic critic by acclamation” and invited along his friend William Gropper, whom he described as that “Liberator artist of the powerful punch and vindictive line, and master of the grotesque.” On the appointed night, McKay arrived at the theater in high spirits. He keenly relished the prospect of sitting “in a free front-row parquet along with The Press,’ instead of buying a ticket for the second balcony.”⁵⁷

When he and Gropper presented their stubs, however, the usher hurried off in search of the manager, who presently appeared and presented the startled pair with a new set of tickets for the rear balcony, where, according to Gropper, they were placed behind a post and “could neither see nor hear the performance.” In his subsequent review of He Who Gets Slapped McKay rose to polemical heights that he never again equaled in his prose. “I had . . . come as a drama critic,” he wrote, “a lover of the theatre, and a free soul.”

But I was abruptly reminded that all these things did not matter . . . the important fact, with which I was suddenly slapped in the face, was my color. I am a Negro. . . . I had come to see a tragic farce—and I found myself unwillingly the hero of one. As always in the world-embracing Anglo-Saxon circus, the intelligence, the sensibilities of the black clown were slapped without mercy.

Poor painful blackface, intruding into the holy place of the whites. How like a spectre you haunt the pale devils! Always at their elbows, always darkly peering through the window, giving them no rest, no peace. How they burn up their energies trying to keep you out! How apologetic and uneasy they are, yes, even the best of them, poor devils, when you force an entrance, blackface, facetiously, incorrigibly smiling or disturbingly composed. Shock them out of their complacency, blackface, make them uncomfortable, make them unhappy! Give them no peace, no rest. How can they bear your presence, blackface, great unspeakable ghost of Western civilization.⁵⁸

McKay’s last article in the August, 1922, Liberator, was superficially a review of T. S. Stribling’s novel Birthright. It was actually a warning to his radical friends not to ignore “the ugly fact” that the Negro’s sufferings as a worker were relatively greater than those of the white worker. He warned that without this recognition of the Negro’s special problems, “the pretty parlor talk of international brotherhood” and “the radical shibboleth of class struggle” would be insufficient to resolve the race problem. Above all, he warned that radicals themselves were often prone to succumb to racism when it suited their convenience. McKay stated that such articles as Morel’s “Outcry Against the Black Horror” not only aided the bourgeoisie in pitting white against black “but also the ultranationalist Negro leaders, who, in their insistent appeal to the race prejudice of blacks against whites declare that no class of white people will ever understand the black race.” McKay then scored his main point:

This racial question may be eventually the monkey wrench thrown into the machinery of the American revolutionary struggle. The Negro radical wants more than anything else to find in the working class movement a revolutionary attitude toward the Negroes different from the sympathetic interest of bourgeois philanthropists and capitalist politicians. And if the interest is not practially demonstrated, Negro leaders can hardly go to the ignorant black masses and show them why they should organize and work by the standard of the white workers. Karl Marx’s economic theories are hard to digest, and Negroes .. . may find it easier to put their faith in the gospel of that other Jew, Jesus. .. . And in that event the black workers will lose—and the ruling classes will win.⁵⁹

In large measure, McKay’s remarks reflected the tensions on the Liberator staff that by August, 1922, led him to resign his editorship. During his first seven months with the Liberator, no serious problems developed. The magazine had sufficient money to meet its monthly costs, a sizable readership, and a relatively unified editorial staff. Then, in October, 1921, its bookkeeper, E. F. Mylius, embezzled $4,500 from the Liberator’s operating funds and squandered it in stock market speculations. The editors suddenly discovered they had almost no money in the bank.⁶⁰

For Eastman, who had earlier attempted to lessen his involvement with the Liberator, it was the last straw. At a special staff meeting a few weeks later, the increasingly dogmatic Michael Gold assailed his “lackadaisical” attitude and “remoteness from the suffering proletariat” and challenged his right to remain as editor. Instead of defending himself, Eastman quietly took the opportunity to tender his resignation and to announce plans for a trip to western Europe and Russia. He mischievously suggested that Gold himself assume the editorship of the magazine. An anxious discussion ensued and “in the small hours of the night,” at Eastman’s suggestion, it was finally agreed that Gold and Claude McKay would assume joint editorship of the Liberator.⁶¹

Eastman no doubt reasoned that McKay’s sophistication and radical skepticism would balance Gold’s tendency toward revolutionary extremism. Over the last year Gold had first suffered a nervous breakdown and had afterward rededicated himself with increased zeal to furthering his revolutionary convictions.⁶² Eastman knew McKay possessed none of Gold’s fanaticism. He hoped that McKay’s “political intelligence” and “literary tastes” would balance Gold’s strident, increasingly humorless Communist absolutism. In private, Eastman suspected that neither really had the patience and tact necessary to manage “the rather impractical bunch of creative geniuses that had gathered around [the magazine]. . . . They were both richly endowed with complexes.” And, Eastman later wrote, “Claude looked upon Mike’s tobacco-stained teeth, and his idea of [a proletariat literature] as the opposite of a poised loyalty to art and the proletariat.”⁶³

Nonetheless, beginning with the January, 1922, issue their names appeared as the new “executive editors” of the Liberator. For a brief while, ideological and temperamental differences were subordinated to the practical necessities that confronted them. Money had to be raised immediately. Appeals were made for contributors; a variety of Liberator forums, social affairs, and even a sporting evening were staged as fund-raisers. Eastman stayed around long enough to help them put out their first two issues before sailing for Europe in February. His departure hurt. No one else had his ability to extract generous contributions from wealthy liberals who seemed alternately sympathetic to and frightened by radical-bohemian literature and politics. With his relaxed, aristocratic charm, Eastman had consistently put them at ease. After his departure, the Liberator had to struggle as never before, but it survived, at least for a while.⁶⁴

Along with everyone else on the staff, McKay did his bit as a fundraiser. It was McKay’s urging, for example, that induced his friend Grace Campbell to persuade “Chris Huiswoud, the only Negro basketball referee in the country, to feature two black and white basketball games and [a] dance for the Liberator at the New Star Casino on the 10th of March, [1922].” Apparently Huiswoud had some misgivings, for a Liberator editorial (probably by McKay) remarked that “Chris . . . notwithstanding a most top-lofty aloofness toward economic and class differences, is a real sport and takes a sporting interest in a magazine like the Liberator. All Liberators should make it their business and pack New Star Casino to the roof.”⁶⁵

McKay also made a special effort to attract good writers to the Liberator. Like most irreverent spirits of the day, he had a special fond ness for the caustic humor of H. L. Mencken, who since World War I had edited Smart Set. He had once expressed to Mike Gold a willingness to contribute to the Liberator, and at the end of March, 1922, McKay informed Mencken that “anything” from him “at this time . . . would be a big help to us, for now that Max Eastman is away, we are finding it harder than ever to get good writing to keep up the standard of the magazine.” Mencken responded with four pen-and-pencil sketches of eastern European radicals that he had acquired in the course of his editorial duties. In June, McKay thanked him but insisted that he still wanted an article. Lest Mencken hesitate because of ideological considerations, McKay pointed out that “our gang here hold divergent views on politics too—what holds us together is that we are all rebellious and have a vague idea of revolutionary change, however far away it may be.” McKay went on to say that he and Eastman held “radically different” views from Gold and Minor, and that Floyd Dell and Charles Wood went off at yet another angle. Liberator contributors, moreover, included everyone from anarchists to the liberal bourgeoisie. “So,” McKay concluded, “there is room for you even if you only want to say ‘why my love of free expression, etc. makes me seem revolutionary to radicals though I am at heart a very old style Southern Gentleman.’”⁶⁶ McKay came closer to the truth than perhaps he realized. Mencken never wrote for the Liberator, and by the end of his life he revealed himself to be a political reactionary. He did answer McKay’s letters, however, and the two corresponded periodically over the next three years.

One prospective contributor whose striking originality had caused “lively discussions” among the Liberator staff in December, 1921, was Jean Toomer, a young Afro-American author. Through the spring of 1922 he sent the magazine extracts from his as yet unpublished novel Cane, now generally recognized as a great work of eccentric genius.⁶⁷ McKay was intrigued by Toomer’s stories, but along with the rest of the editorial staff, he initially decided against their publication. On December 6, 1921, he wrote to “Miss Toomer” that his story was “a little too long, not clear enough, and quite lacking in unity. Perhaps if you would send us a very short sketch that could hold the reader’s attention all through, we might be able to use it.” Through June, McKay persisted in thinking Toomer a woman. He liked the “bright local coloring and individual poetic power” of Toomer’s stories but “none ever seemed to carry clear through from beginning to end on a high level.” He nevertheless urged Toomer to continue to submit his pieces to the Liberator and agreed with him that the magazine would “always be a living force whilst it retains [a] free artistic spirit.”⁶⁸

In July, McKay finally learned Toomer’s true gender and apologized for “my mistaking you for the other sex. But,” he added, “it wasn’t such a bad mistake if you are not anti-feminist.” Eventually, in September and October, 1922, the Liberator published two stories and a poem by Toomer, but even then McKay accorded them only qualified approval: “I liked your poem in the September Liberator— the sketch not so particularly well in spite of its high points. Some day I hope I shall be able to talk to you about such things.”⁶⁹

By September, McKay’s active participation in Liberator editorial decisions had ceased. Despite a real effort on his part to ignore Michael Gold’s strident concentration within himself of all the world’s proletarian anger, the two could not get along.

Michael Gold, born Irwin Granich, was a Jew who had grown up in the wretched tenements of New York’s Lower East Side. His past quite clearly haunted him in complex and ambiguous ways. “We cling to the old culture [of capitalism],” he wrote, “and fight for it against ourselves. But it must die. The old ideals must die. . . . Let us fling all we are into the cauldron of the Revolution.” Seeing no way to take the whole of his capitalist or his Jewish inheritance through the revolutionary struggle, Gold frantically fashioned for himself a self-image that would survive the upheavals to come. He became the class-conscious, street-tough child of the tenement. “Intellectuals have become bored with the primitive monotony of Life—with the deep truths and instincts,” he declared. “The boy in the tenement must not learn of their art. He must stay in the tenement and create a new and truer one there.” He must identify wholly with the masses, for “they are the eternal truth.”⁷⁰

Joseph Freeman remembered that Gold “affected dirty shirts, a big, black uncleaned Stetson with the brim of a sombrero; smoked stinking, twisted Italian three-cent cigars, and spat frequently and vigorously on the floor—whether that floor was covered by an expensive carpet in a rich aesthetic’s studio or on the bare wooden floor of [his]. . .smalloffice.”⁷¹

To McKay such behavior seemed childish. When in June, 1922, word reached him that Gold, a former amateur boxer of repute, had strode through the Civic Club, a gathering place of liberal reformers, in his usual dress and with a noticeably aggressive manner, McKay remarked that he “didn’t see any point in doing that to the pacifist Civic Club; that he might have gone instead to the Union League Club.” The comment eventually reached Gold’s ear, and he found McKay one evening at John’s Italian Restaurant and challenged him to box. McKay shrugged and said he would, but he explained that their differences were actually intellectual and could not be settled by fighting. “So we laughed the matter off,” McKay recalled, “and drank a bottle of dago red together. However, I saw clearly that our association could not continue.”⁷²

Shortly afterward, McKay resigned his post as executive editor and Joseph Freeman succeeded him. Gold wanted desperately for the Liberator to “express ... the punch and the raw stuff of life and labor,” and had earlier attacked Eastman for being “too much of an esthete, too Baudelaire-like in his poetic expression.” McKay had sided with Eastman. He thought Gold too sentimentally enthralled by the idea of bringing forth in the pages of the Liberator a new literature produced by the proletariat. This preoccupation, McKay believed, undermined Gold’s critical judgment. From the start, there had been little agreement between them. The six months of their joint editorship from January to June, 1922, provided everyone on the Liberator staff a chance to see their essential incompatibility. In fact, according to Eastman, McKay and Gold had eventually “announced” their differences to be irreconcilable and had “compelled the board of editors to choose between [them].” The other editors, partly because of Eastman’s advice from abroad, chose Gold to carry on as executive editor. Only then, according to Eastman, did McKay resign.⁷³

Eastman’s account was essentially correct. McKay had no desire to work under Gold, and rather than remain as a disruptive force, he simply withdrew from all editorial work on the Liberator. Eastman later explained to McKay the reason for his recommendation that Gold continue as chief editor: “On the basis of the magazines you each put out, in spite of the superior reliability and delicacy of yours, I was in favor of Mike because his magazine had more ‘pep.’”⁷⁴

Like Eastman before him, though for different reasons, McKay did not find it too difficult to give up his Liberator responsibilities. In addition to his differences with Gold, McKay by June had also become disenchanted with what he considered the Liberator staff’s myopic approach to the race question. With both the Workers’ Dreadnought in London and the Liberator in New York, he had found a rare personal camaraderie, but he had also found that in general neither the British nor the American Left had the foresight regarding racial matters he thought essential if radicals were to win blacks to their cause. On the contrary, he found that far too many communists and socialists were themselves still afflicted with the racist phobias common to the age and that, when it suited their purposes, they did not hesitate to voice them.⁷⁵

McKay actually functioned on two levels as a Liberator editor. On one level, he was simply an artist among equals and was accepted as such. There was always room for disagreements and arguments at staff meetings, and the Liberator often reflected the chaotic diversity of opinions current among its editors and writers. It was in this highly individualistic atmosphere that McKay debated with Gold and others about the relationship between art and revolution. On a strictly racial level, however, McKay was disadvantaged in such a freewheeling atmosphere. As the magazine’s solitary black man, he brought a perspective on the racial question that the other staff members could share only up to a point. For McKay, the revolutionary’s handling of the racial problem was necessarily of decisive importance, while to the other Liberator editors it was only one important problem among many. Because of their other preoccupations and also because their readership was overwhelmingly white (and potentially flighty where race was concerned), the white staff members sometimes questioned the amount of space devoted to racial matters. McKay never actually demanded more space on the subject than his fellow editors were willing to give, but their fearfulness where race was concerned annoyed him. He pointed out that since blacks constituted 10 percent of the nation’s population, it would not be unfair to devote at least that amount of space in the Liberator to their problems. Even this seemed to some a proposal that, if carried out, would jeopardize the magazine’s appeal to white readers. In short, McKay’s position as a black man vitally concerned with pushing forward a black radical perspective on a predominantly white journal created for him problems that figured prominently as an unspoken though underlying reason for his willingness to leave the Liberator in June, 1922.⁷⁶

Almost a year later, McKay voiced these racial considerations in a manuscript he was preparing for publication in the Soviet Union, and his frankness resulted in a heated correspondence with Max Eastman. Eastman felt that McKay had made his resignation appear to be the “direct result of a disagreement about the race question,” that he had distorted “completely” the nature of such disagreements as did exist, and that he had demonstrated a highly emotional, subjective conception of “the Negro problem,” instead of a “scientific” perspective on the class struggle. His accusations, Eastman observed, seemed to have been dictated “by some obscure motive of resentment.” McKay replied that he had “no intention of letting the public think I withdrew. . . solely because of a disagreement over the race question.” In any event, he reminded Eastman, their personal correspondence clearly showed he had long been preparing to leave the Liberator. “But,” he stressed, “I want to state emphatically . . . that [Michael Gold] made the race story in the June Liberator the basis of his attack on me, and his opinion . . . and the discussions . . . by the Liberator group revealed to me that the group did not have a. . . comprehensive grasp of the Negro’s place in the class struggle.” McKay admitted that “the race matter was incidental to my quitting the executive work,” but he had seen clearly that “the leading minds” of the Liberator understood little about the revolutionary implications of the racial struggle in America or abroad. McKay stressed that Eastman was mistaken to think that the Liberator group had ever arrived at any agreement about its policy on race. “In fact,” McKay declared, “as a group we never even discussed the labor movement seriously. My position on the Liberator I discussed seriously only with the radical Negro group in New York. . . . I tried to discuss the Irish and Indian questions with you once or twice,. . . but with little sympathy you said that they were national issues. I never once thought you grasped fully the class struggle significance of national and racial problems. . . . I don’t know why, my dear Max, but the atmosphere of the Liberator did not make for serious discussion on any of the real problems of Capitalist Society much less the Negro.”⁷⁷

McKay stated that in joining the Liberator, he had hoped “to further a solution of the Negro problem in the revolution.” In criticism, Eastman replied he must have had other motives as well, “because I know that you are not a more simple person than others; rather you are more complex.” In reply, McKay acknowledged that his job on the Liberator had secured him food and shelter. As to being complex, he pointed out that no black man in America could get anywhere if he were not complex. “And,” he concluded, “I am complex enough to forgive your sneer at my saying that... I was ‘moved by the desire to further a solution of the Negro problem in the revolution.’”⁷⁸

If nothing else, their quarrel demonstrated the social, cultural, and ideological differences and misunderstandings that have often existed between even the closest white and black radicals in the United States. Probably as a consequence of their argument, McKay deleted from the published version of his manuscript all details relating to his resignation from the Liberator staff. Since the manuscript has been lost, their correspondence is all that remains of the deleted “chapter” from what became McKay’s Russian-language book, Ne groes in America.

In the spring of 1922, however, as his dispute with Michael Gold approached its inevitable climax, McKay’s Harlem Shadows finally appeared. By far his most important book of poetry, it contained all the best poems he had written since his first arrival in the United States in 1912. There were seventy poems in Harlem Shadows. Thematically they could be about equally divided into three categories— nostalgic poems concerning Jamaica and nature, love poems, and poems bearing on his racial experience. Almost all the poems in his previous book, Spring in New Hampshire, were included in Harlem Shadows.

With its appearance, McKay was immediately acclaimed the best black poet since Paul Laurence Dunbar. The New York Times noted that McKay’s efforts marked a clean break with the dialect tradition of Dunbar. It also pointed out McKay’s preference for “the more conservative verse forms” and speculated that he was perhaps attempting to portray the spirit of the modern Negro “in a high and lofty manner.” The reviewer concluded by stating that although “certain portions unravel into mere sentiment,” McKay had by and large succeeded in his purpose.⁷⁹

The most searching review was Robert Littel’s in the New Republic. Littel considered McKay “a real poet, though by no means a great one. . . . A hospitality to echoes of poetry he has read has time and again obscured a direct sense of life and made rarer those lines of singular intensity which . . . reveal [his] naked force of character.” Littel nevertheless praised McKay where he thought praise was due, and he was especially impressed by his protest poetry. In the same review, he also wrote about James Weldon Johnson’s Book of American Negro Poetry and concluded that “if McKay and the other poets don’t stir me unusually when they travel over the poetic roads so many others have traveled . . . they make me sit up and take notice when they write about their race and ours. They strike hard and pierce deep. It is not merely poetic emotion they express, but something fierce and constant, and icy cold, and white hot.”⁸⁰

Black reviewers were generally less reserved in their assessment of McKay’s poetry. This was especially true of Walter White and James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP. White called McKay “without doubt the most talented and versatile of the new school of imaginative, emotional Negro poets.” He concluded by boldly asserting that “Mr. McKay is not a great Negro poet—he is a great poet.” James Weldon Johnson in the New York Age reaffirmed White’s contention: “Mr. McKay is a real poet and a great poet. . . . No Negro has sung more beautifully of his race than McKay and no poet has ever equalled the power with which he expresses the bitterness that so often rises in the heart of the race. . . . The race ought to be proud of a poet capable of voicing it so fully. Such a voice is not found every day. . . . What he has achieved in this little volume sheds honor upon the whole race.”⁸¹

In 1920, Hubert Harrison in a review of Spring in New Hampshire in the Negro World had already praised McKay’s accomplishments and had lambasted the black press for having failed to recognize his talents. “Without any aid from Negro editors or publications,” Harrison argued, “he made his way because white people who noted his gifts were eager to give him a chance while Negro editors, as usual, were either too blind to see or too mean-spirited to proclaim them to the world.” In 1922, Harrison also reviewed Harlem Shadows, this time for the New York World. Perhaps because of McKay’s angry letter back in January, it contained less fervent praise than his earlier review, though he concluded by asserting that “there can be no doubt that in range, technique and mastery of the medium of verse Claude McKay is the greatest living poet of Negro blood in America today.”⁸²

In Garvey’s Negro World, a fellow West Indian, Hodge Kirnon, wrote perhaps the longest and most appreciative review of Harlem Shadows. Kirnon had long held the menial position of elevator operator at 291 Fifth Avenue, the location of Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photographic studio and art gallery. Running an elevator had not prevented Kirnon from becoming a sensitive and skilled observer of the Harlem cultural scene. In his review of Harlem Shadows, he strove to point out McKay’s real strengths as a poet. Kirnon praised McKay’s simplicity, his “rare” balance of thought and emotion, and his “revelation of the spiritual isolation and loneliness which many of us—rich and poor, white and black—have felt quite often in the heart of the noise and bustle of this great city.” As an immigrant, Kirnon had special words of praise for the poem “America,” McKay’s declaration of love for the vitality and strength he had found in the United States. For Kirnon, the poem expressed “in a most satisfactory manner what I have always felt and thought to be the main redeeming feature of America. And I daresay many other aliens like myself have felt and thought in like manner without ever giving [it] expression.” In a letter, McKay thanked Kirnon for his review and emphasized that he appreciated the “real feeling” Kirnon had shown for his poetry. “I am so sick,” he wrote, “of pretentious critics posturing about creative work which they haven’t the understanding heart to comprehend.”⁸³

There were other black poets writing in 1922 whose work was in some ways more attuned than McKay’s to the modernist trends in American poetry. The critic Clement Wood noted two in his review of Harlem Shadows. “Fenton Johnson and Anne Spencer among Negro poets,” he observed, “have gone much further in the newer modes of singing.” But McKay’s verse still struck him as “modern in its directness and simplicity, its vigor and variety.”⁸⁴

McKay’s sensitivity, his “naked force of character,” and, above all, as James Weldon Johnson noted, his ability to voice “so fully . . . the bitterness that so often rises in the heart of [his] race,” placed him in 1922 at the forefront of black American poets. If his style was in most respects anachronistic and sometimes clumsy, his essential message of alienation, anger, and rebellion was thoroughly modern. And while T. S. Eliot and James Joyce in 1922 were proclaiming in The Waste Land and Ulysses the bankruptcy of Western culture, McKay in the Liberator was passionately exhorting his people to live in the full knowledge that their days of triumph lay ahead:

Icry my woe to the whirling world, but not in despair. For I understand the forces that doom the race into which I was born to lifelong discrimination and servitude. And I know that these forces are not eternal, they can be destroyed and will be destroyed. They are marked for destruction. Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Arabia, Babylonia, Tyre, Persia, Rome, Germania! The whole historical pageant of the human race unfolds before me in high consolation.

Cherish your strength, my strong black brother. Be not dismayed because the struggle is hard and long, O, my warm, wonderful race. The fight is longer than a span of life; the test is great. Gird your loins, sharpen your tools! Time is on our side. Carry on the organizing and conserving of your forces, my dear brother, grim with determination, for a great purpose—for the Day!⁸⁵

With Harlem Shadows, McKay became in effect the pacesetter for a new generation of black American poets and novelists. As the 1920s progressed, they would move significantly beyond the genteel and the old dialect traditions of previous generations in their exploration of the black American experience. Jean Toomer’s Cane was already finished and would be published in 1923. By the middle of the decade a cluster of even younger writers would appear. Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, Eric Wald-ron, and Wallace Thurman would all contribute their diverse talents to the awakening of Harlem as the black literary and artistic capital of America.⁸⁶

The ground for this harvest had been broken over a decade earlier when the NAACP and the National Urban League established their national offices in New York. They started monthly magazines that attracted young black writers and began to cultivate among white publishers, editors, and producers a receptivity to black art and artists. McKay was among the very first to take advantage of these new developments.⁸⁷ By the time Alain Locke formally introduced the “New Negro” in his famous anthology of 1925, McKay was far from Harlem and older by some ten years than the average young writer represented in Locke’s volume.⁸⁸

The July, 1922, Liberator announced that Claude McKay was “resigning as an executive officer of the Liberator to be free to write poetry and to see more of the world than is permitted to an office worker on a magazine.” He would continue as a contributing editor, and his work would “have the same high place in the pages of the Liberator as heretofore.” In fact, McKay’s career with the Liberator was over; he published only one more article, “Birthright,” his angry polemic against socialist shortsightedness concerning the Negro. It appeared in the August issue. A single poem entitled “Petrograd: May Day, 1923,” appeared exactly a year later.⁸⁹

When Eastman left the Liberator early in 1922, the remaining editors had promised him to turn the magazine over to the Workers’ party if they could no longer keep it afloat. In November, 1922, a new financial crisis delayed the magazine’s appearance for a month. When it reappeared in December, 1922, the Liberator announced it would “direct attention more deliberately than heretofore to the Workers’ Party.” Over the next year, party affairs and ideology dominated its pages. Finally, in 1924, the Liberator “combined with William Z. Foster’s Labor Herald and with Soviet Russia Pictorial to form a regular propaganda organ called the Communist Monthly, owned by the American Communist Party and edited by its future leader, Earl Browder.”⁹⁰

Joseph Freeman, Robert Minor, and Michael Gold all became party members, subject to the regulation and discipline of the party executive and bureaucratic chain of command. As Daniel Aaron has observed, the Gold-McKay dispute in its larger significance thus represented the decisive battle between those on the Liberator who refused to subordinate their art wholly to revolutionary political considerations and those willing to shape their art to fit party policies.⁹¹

In alluding to McKay’s position in the conflict, Joseph Freeman later stated that “Claude McKay’s warm, sensuous, . . . heart swam in thoughdessness; he was aggressively antirational on the principle that art comes exclusively from the emotions and that he was primarily an artist.”⁹² Freeman oversimplified McKay’s position; he was less thoughtless and more rational than most supposed.

By the summer of 1922, McKay had worked almost three years with radical magazines in London and New York. And although he had grown impatient with and discouraged by the many obstacles to black and white revolutionary cooperation in Europe and America, the Soviet example still attracted him. It represented a fresh departure in the affairs of men. Its triumph promised a resolution to the Russian empire’s centuries-old national and ethnic problems, and its leadership of the international Communist movement could not be ignored. McKay had wanted to visit the Soviet Union for several years. Jack Reed had urged him to come, and he had since read accounts of many who had made the journey. Having just published Harlem Shadows and without editorial responsibilities, McKay at last felt free to see for himself “the grand experiment” taking place in Russia.⁹³

After leaving the Liberator, he loafed for a while with “a small circle of friends. We convived together,” he later explained, “consuming synthetic gin.” During this summer of relative inactivity, the unexpected reappearance of his wife, whom he had not seen in more than seven years, galvanized him into action and sealed his determination to visit the Soviet Union. Among other things, her sudden return made him acutely aware of how weary he had grown of the never-ending race consciousness that was part of life in the United States. He longed to find a freer atmosphere. As he recalled, he wished to “escape from the pit of sex and poverty, from domestic death, from the cul-de-sac of self-pity, from the hot syncopated fascination of Harlem, from the suffocating ghetto of color consciousness.”⁹⁴

Deciding to go was one thing. Actually getting there presented another set of problems. Despite the critical success of Harlem Shad ows, it did not sell well enough for him to afford a trip to the Soviet Union. He had no influence within the emerging American Communist party, nor did he have any official invitation from the Soviet government. To finance his projected trip, friends once again had to come to his aid.

At the suggestion of James Weldon Johnson, McKay sent autographed copies of Harlem Shadows to “a select list of persons connected with the NAACP” and asked each for a five-dollar donation. In addition, Crystal Eastman appealed to friends of the Liberator on McKay’s behalf. Between his black and white admirers—liberals, radicals, and bohemians—enough money was raised by September, 1922, for him to depart. He hoped to arrive in time to attend the Fourth Congress of the Third Communist International scheduled to begin in Moscow in November.⁹⁵

McKay knew of course that once in the Soviet Union, he would be on his own, financially, so he asked H. L. Mencken to recommend him to the Baltimore Sun as a special correspondent. McKay explained that he wished to study the status of “the old-estate peasantry” and the Jews under the new Soviet regime and to compare their past and present conditions with those of southern Negroes in the United States. “I want to ask you,” he concluded, “(if you consider my project commendable) to use your influence in getting me a commission from the Sun to do a series of special articles. Is there any chance?” There was none; despite Mencken’s intercession, he got no commission from the Sun or from anyone else. He would have to take his chances that, once abroad, he could find an income.⁹⁶

McKay left the United States around September 20. On the eve of his departure, James Weldon Johnson gave him a farewell party and invited prominent writers of both races. Years later, Johnson wrote McKay: “We often speak of that party back in ‘22. . . . Do you know that was the first getting together of the black and white literati on a purely social plane. Such parties are now common in New York, but I doubt any has been more representative. You remember there were present Heywood Broun, Ruth Hale, F. P. Adams, John Farrar, Carl Van Doren, Freda Kirchwey, Peggy Tucker, Roy Nash—on our side you, DuBois, Walter White, Jessie Fauset, [Arthur] Schomburg, J. Rosamond Johnson—I think that party started something.”⁹⁷

As he prepared to leave New York that fall, McKay could not have known all that would await him in Russia. Nor could he have foreseen that he would afterward spend the next twelve years in western Europe and North Africa. The night before his departure, he was nevertheless in a reflective mood. He had planned a last meal with his good friend Crystal Eastman, but after waiting half the evening for her arrival, he went out alone and dropped in at several of his favorite Harlem haunts where he drank “a farewell to the illegal bars” of Prohibition America. At one speakeasy, he ran into Hubert Harrison, and they had a drink together. But McKay did not tell him he was leaving the next day. Perhaps their relationship had not fully recovered from the incident that had caused McKay so much embarrassment, or as McKay later put it in A Long Way from Home, he may simply have refrained from mentioning his sailing to Harrison “or any of my few familiars” because “sentimental adieux embarrass me.” Back home in the early morning hours, he found Crystal had, after all, dropped by and had left him a note—“Claude dear: I just dashed in to give you a hug and say goodbye—Bon Voyage, dear child!”⁹⁸ He slipped the note into his billfold and went to sleep.

Since his return from England in February, 1921, McKay had broadened his contacts with both black and white intellectuals in New York City and had, on the surface at least, secured his reputation as an important black poet and perceptive journalist and editor. On a more personal level, however, he remained in a state of transition. Although he was still a self-proclaimed revolutionary, he no longer trusted most of his comrades on the Liberator. They seemed to him increasingly committed to the emerging Communist party ideology at the expense of their artistic independence, and he knew them to be quite limited in their comprehension of the importance of blacks to the success of any revolutionary movement in the United States. Despite his continued commitment to communism, he still clung to his independence as a literary artist and openly proclaimed his belief that an artist should not subordinate his aesthetic freedom to his political convictions.

McKay’s primary loyalties unquestionably lay with the black quest “to gain the utmost freedom that is life.”⁹⁹ Socialism still seemed to him the theory that best explained the historic injustices under which all blacks lived, and Marxist communism still appeared to him the path for blacks and whites in their quest for justice. But by 1922, McKay had begun to question whether or not Marx’s program for world history would automatically fulfill itself. In large part, he left for Russia in the hope that he could find there evidence that the equality, justice, freedom, and humane treatment of his fellow men he had envisioned under socialism was actually taking place. He already had his doubts.