McKay began his epic journey around September 20, 1922, shortly before his thirty-second birthday. To conserve the modest funds he had collected from his friends, he signed as a stoker on a merchant ship bound for England and worked his way across the Atlantic. According to his subsequent description of life as a seaman in his first novel, Home to Harlem, he did not particularly enjoy his voyage. The ship he described “stank between sea and sky” and his fictional hero breathed relief at the thought of leaving it.1
After arriving in Liverpool in early October, McKay went directly to London, where he expected, through the intercession of his Communist friends, to secure a visa for Russia. At the International Socialist Club, he saw a number of old acquaintances, but several had already departed for the Soviet Union. A few had gone to stay; others had left to attend the Fourth Congress of the Third International scheduled to convene in November. The official delegation of the Communist Party of Great Britain offered McKay no aid. They remembered him as a former member of the quarrelsome Pankhurst group. One of their members, Arthur MacManus, told him that he should have secured the assistance of American Communists.
McKay did not let such rebuffs deter him. He learned that the former executive secretary of the Pankhurst group, Edgar Whitehead, was currently working for the Comintern in Berlin as a liaison agent and interpreter for the English-speaking radicals who were traveling to Russia. McKay knew Whitehead well. In the past, they had together “waxed satirical about Communist orthodoxy and . . . had often discussed the idea of a neo-radical magazine in which nothing in the universe would be held sacred.”2
McKay immediately left for Berlin. After a friendly reunion, Whitehead assured McKay he would get him to Russia in time to attend the Fourth Congress. While waiting, McKay had a good time discovering the wilder side of Berlin night life. His handsome face aroused interest wherever he went. He was especially welcome in the cabarets that had “sprung up like mushrooms” since the end of the war. In the general confusion that followed the collapse of the monarchy and the founding of Germany’s new republican government, the cabarets provided hedonistic relief from the economic uncertainty, political unrest, and social turmoil that daily confronted the defeated, divided, and embittered German populace. To McKay, the cabarets he visited “seemed to express the ultimate in erotomania,” where “youngsters of both sexes . . . were methodically exploiting the nudist colony indoors.” Such innovations, he concluded, were “more exciting than the outdoor experiment.” McKay also saw some of the new experimental theater of the German expressionists. His introduction to German cabaret and theater life must have been brief, however, because Whitehead soon escorted him before a Russian official for an interview.3
McKay showed him a letter of recommendation from Crystal Eastman. He also explained that although he was not a member of any official Communist party delegation traveling to Moscow, he nevertheless shared a belief in international communism and an enthusiasm for the accomplishments of the Russian Revolution. He wished to attend the congress and to write about his visit for the black American press. McKay received his visa and soon traveled to the Baltic port of Settin, where he boarded “an old potato boat” bound for Petrograd. Ironically, his companions on the voyage were a small group of British Communists. Among them was his friend, the former IWW organizer Charles Ashleigh, whom he had met the previous year in New York.4 From Petrograd, McKay went by train to Moscow and arrived there about a week before the Fourth Congress convened. It was scheduled to begin November 5, 1922, and would last for a month. Delegations were arriving from the Communist parties of all the major nations, including the United States.5 Once in Moscow, McKay still had to secure permission from Comintern authorities to attend the congress as an unofficial delegate-observer. But his right even to be in Russia, much less attend the congress, was immediately challenged by the American Communist delegation.
The American Communist party, long internally divided, had brought to Moscow for final settlement the bitterly disputed question of whether it should maintain or abolish its illegal, underground apparatus, which it had established after the Palmer raids back in 1919. Besides maintaining an old European conspiratorial revolutionary tradition, the underground party seemed to many still necessary in capitalist America. American radicals had suffered considerable persecution since World War I, and a majority of the American delegates at the Fourth Congress understandably favored a continuation of the underground organization. Opposing them was a smaller contingent representative of the Workers’ Party of America, the open, legal arm of the underground party, which had been created only in December, 1921.6
McKay’s position on the question was clear: the party could do more effective work if it organized openly and aggressively pursued its goals within the American labor movement. When asked by Rose Pastor Stokes, one of the leading defenders of the illegal party, what he thought about the matter, McKay stated flatly that there was no need for an underground party in the United States. By thus lining up with the minority delegates led by James P. Cannon, McKay incurred the wrath of the majority. Although Cannon’s group eventually won the Comintern’s support, the view of the majority prevailed before the congress started. They initiated a campaign to discredit McKay as a revolutionary and have him expelled from the Soviet Union.7
As representatives of the American Communist party, only they could recommend that he be seated as a delegate. This they refused to do. Instead they conspired to throw him out of the relatively comfortable Lux Hotel. With winter rapidly approaching, all McKay could find was a single room with broken windowpanes, furnished only with an army cot. It was in “a dilapidated house in a sinister pereulok” where many lived in worse circumstances. He immediately rushed out and bought two blankets and a pair of long felt boots that reached to his thighs, “the kind,” he later reported, “that Russian peasants wear.”8 He also set out to counter the increasingly dangerous campaign the American delegates had launched against him.
After considerable uncertainty and tension, McKay finally, and quite suddenly, won the right to attend the congress as “a special delegate.” His vindication resulted from two causes. In the first place, Sen Katayama, the leading Japanese Communist at the congress, had lived for years in the United States and had known McKay in New York. Katayama convinced Comintern officials that McKay spoke with authority about the potential role of blacks in the international Communist movement. In his younger days, Katayama had attended a small Christian college near Nashville. While there, he became familiar with the black side of the American racial dilemma. Although no student record survives, McKay later maintained that Katayama had also attended classes at Fisk University; perhaps he was an unofficial auditor. At any rate, unlike most Russian and American Communists, he was thoroughly familiar with American blacks.9
McKay had met him while working on the Liberator, and the two had gotten along well. Katayama had taken McKay to lunch in Oriental restaurants in New York. They had talked for many hours about the effect of communism on colonial peoples and national minorities and had almost certainly learned much from each other. Katayama was always friendly and exceedingly curious. His “was a sort of minute methodical curiosity” that McKay had never encountered before, and he remarked in A Long Way from Home that “like a permanent surprise he invaded my rooms at all hours and talked in his squeaky grandmotherly voice about Negro problems.” McKay had been impressed: “He demonstrated a vast interest and sympathy for Negro racialists and their organizations. I liked Sen Katayama immensely.” In Moscow, Katayama proved a real friend. As McKay put it, he was “the Japanese revolutionist” within the Comintern. As one of the elder statesmen of international communism, his position was secure. In 1922, Katayama occupied a place of authority within the Comintern and was a great favorite with Russian Communists. A word from him regarding McKay’s seat at the Fourth Congress probably carried more weight than the ill will of the entire American delegation.10
McKay’s second source of support was the people in the streets. His color, his unmistakable Negroid features, his unusually high, arching brows, and his bright smile and rollicking laughter, all made him instantly attractive to the crowds that gathered daily for the celebration of the Bolshevik Revolution’s fifth anniversary, which coincided with the opening of the congress. Years later McKay still marveled at the warm, spontaneous reception he had received from the Russian masses, and he felt that curiosity about his color alone was not responsible for it: “But, no! I soon apprehended that this . . . was a different thing. Just a spontaneous upsurging of folk feeling. . . . The Bolsheviks . . . soon . . . perceived the trend of the general enthusiasm for me and decided to use it. And I was not averse to that.” The crowd sometimes demonstrated its affection in novel ways. En route to the opening of the Fourth Congress, for example, McKay had trouble making his way through the dense crowds along the Tverskaya Boulevard, when suddenly he was picked up and tossed along by the people for an entire block. “The civilians started it. The soldiers imitated them. And the sailors followed the soldiers, tossing me higher than ever.”11 Such spontaneous displays of acceptance gave McKay great joy. He had not expected to see “crowds . . . happier and friendlier than the crowds of New York and London and Berlin.” The country had been at war for years, and the people were poorly housed and clad. Yet, far from being despondent and drained by their ordeal, they were exultant and hopeful about the future. Max Eastman, who had previously arrived in Moscow for the Fourth Congress, also noted this happy mood among the people. Late in his life, he remarked that the unusually festive atmosphere that pervaded the land in 1922 probably owed much to the revival of the economy that was occurring under Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which for a time allowed the return of capitalistic enterprise.12
Much lay in store for McKay in Russia, but after winning acceptance as a delegate, his first obligation was to attend the Fourth Congress. In A Long Way from Home, his account of his participation in the proceedings of the congress seems substantially accurate. In one way, however, it was misleading; just as he had failed to explain the full extent to which he had become involved in the politics of the British radical Left, so too, in his account of the Fourth Congress, he failed to acknowledge frankly that he spoke as both a black Communist and a black writer who desperately wanted the Comintern to understand the position and potential of blacks within the international Communist movement. By the time he got to Moscow, McKay had grown skeptical about the willingness or ability of his white comrades in England or America to embrace blacks as true equals within the movement. The Comintern provided him a platform to relate his experiences and explain his perspective, and he took full advantage of the opportunity; he had, in fact, come to Moscow primed to attack American Communists for their reluctance to deal with the race problem.
At the same time, he felt uncomfortable in his role as a black radical spokesman. He considered himself primarily a creative writer who happened to hold radical social views, and he denied repeatedly that he wished to become a disciplined, full-time party worker. Despite this fundamental ambivalence, the Comintern deemed his point of view important enough to be heard. Previous congresses had had no opportunity to hear blacks speak out on their relationship to communism. Although McKay had no prestige within the national parties of either the United States or Great Britain, the Comintern recognized the importance of “the Negro problem” and allowed him to speak his mind.13
Another Negro, Otto Huiswoud, was also present. He was an official American party delegate. A mulatto several shades lighter than McKay, Huiswoud attracted considerably less attention at the congress and in the streets, but he enjoyed the confidence of American Communists and shared with McKay the task of presenting the black perspective to the assembled delegates. He and McKay were the first blacks to discuss the American race problem before the Third International. Both happened to be West Indians, Huiswoud being a native of Dutch Guiana.14
Prior to the Fourth Congress, the Communist International’s first substantial investigation of the American race problem had been in 1920 at its Second Congress, when John Reed of the American delegation presented two long papers on the Afro-American in the United States. He presented one before a committee discussing “national and colonial questions” and the other before the assembled congress. In both papers he declared that American blacks were primarily interested in winning equal rights as citizens of the United States. He advised Communists to participate in Negro movements for social and political equality and at the same time endeavor to make blacks aware of how futile were their strivings for advancement in a “bourgeois society.” Reed minimized the importance of black nationalist movements and stated that blacks in the United States considered themselves “first of all, Americans.” After Reed’s report, the Second Congress decided to invite a group of black revolutionists to Russia. Reed actually sent McKay such an invitation in 1920, but nothing came of it.15
Some months after the Second Congress, Lenin admonished his American comrades not to neglect blacks in their infant party but to recognize them as “a strategically important element in Communist activity.” Only then did American Communists attempt any systematic recruitment of Afro-Americans. Their efforts led in 1921 and 1922 to the first substantial influx of blacks into the party, primarily through Cyril Briggs’s African Blood Brotherhood.16 This influx, of course, coincided with McKay’s association with the Liberator and with the brotherhood. Despite his later denials that he ever became a party member, McKay must have agreed with Briggs’s strategy of merger with the Communist party. He certainly considered himself a part of the Communist movement in the United States, no matter how far removed he may have been from its political center.
In fact, the available evidence suggests that McKay’s political activities within the African Blood Brotherhood may have been influential in moving that organization into the Communist orbit. In his introductory “Note” to McKay’s book, Negroes in America, the Russian translator said that when he became an editor of the Liberator, McKay had taken “an active role in the [American] revolutionary movement and [had] applied all his efforts to creating a group of Negro revolutionaries in New York.” This statement was made in the course of defending McKay’s credentials as a revolutionary, and too much should not be read into it. Nevertheless, it indicates that McKay was very likely instrumental within the African Blood Brotherhood in promoting its merger with the Communist Party of America. Finally, in Negroes in America, McKay himself stated that during the course of the Fourth Congress, he had asked that his Communist party membership be transferred from the illegal, underground party to the legal Workers’ party, which implied that he had joined the illegal party by 1921, before the Workers’ party came into existence. Otto Huiswoud had entered the American party even earlier, in 1920. Two years later he was rewarded—he was appointed the first black American delegate to a Comintern congress. McKay’s path had not been so easy or direct, but as it turned out, he achieved greater popularity, if not influence, at the congress.17
At the inaugural session of the congress, McKay entered “the vast Bolshoi auditorium” and saw the Danish author Martin Andersen Nexo waving to him from “the center front of the hall.” As McKay started to make his way toward Nexo’s seat, he suddenly became aware that the ushers had begun to move him along toward another destination: “At first I thought I was going to be conducted to the balcony, but instead I was ushered onto the platform to a seat beside Max Eastman and just behind Zinoviev [the Comintern’s chairman]. It seems as if the curious interest of the crowd focused upon me had prompted Zinoviev to hoist me up there on the platform.”18
Although McKay refused to speak on this occasion, despite everyone’s urging, both he and Otto Huiswoud subsequently addressed the congress. Huiswoud spoke first. He maintained that the Second Congress had not adequately discussed the relationship between the race problem and colonialism. He then went on to outline the Afro-American and colonial questions in general Marxist terms before beginning his survey of black reformist and revolutionary activity in the United States. Among Afro-American organizations, he pointed out the NAACP as the most influential, with the Garvey organization and the African Blood Brotherhood running a poor second and third. He dismissed the National Urban League as a strikebreaking organization, and he lamented the black’s inability to integrate American labor unions. He then mentioned the potentially important role of black newspapers in spreading Communist propaganda. Huiswoud ended his remarks by emphasizing the especially wretched conditions of Negroes in the South.19
McKay always felt inadequate as an orator and disliked the task. He therefore began his speech by declaring that he “would rather face a lynching stake in civilized America than try to make a speech before the most intellectual and critical audience in the world.” He then apologetically explained that “my public speaking has been so bad that I have been told by my own people that I should never try to make speeches but stick to writing, and laughing.” His poetry, he went on, and in particular one poem, “If We Must Die,” had nonetheless propelled him forward as “one of the spokesmen of Negro radicalism in America to the detriment of my poetical temperament.” After this deferential beginning, McKay went on to give a surprisingly strong, straightforward, and critical summary of the black relationship to the American Communist movement. Despite his limitations as a public speaker, he had, after all, concluded that “it would be an eternal shame if I did not say something on behalf of the members of my race” before the assembled revolutionaries of the world. Through the opportunity given to him by the Comintern to address its Fourth Congress, an honor had been extended to blacks everywhere. “My race on this occasion is honored, not because it is different from the white race and the yellow race, but [because it] is especially a race of toilers, hewers of wood and drawers of water, that belongs to the most oppressed, exploited, and suppressed section of the working class of the world.” He noted that the Communist International was for the full emancipation of all workers, and that its commitment did not remain “solely on paper as the 15th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States [does].”20
Like Huiswoud, McKay spoke at length on “the international bourgeoisie’s” efforts to create conflict between black and white workers in order to keep them both in slavery. Then, with characteristic frankness, McKay boldly switched his tone and declared that in the United States it had nevertheless been the “reformist bourgeoisie,” not the Socialists and Communists, who had done the most to improve the Negro’s social, political, and economic life:
The Socialists and Communists have fought very shy of [the race problem] because there is a great element of prejudice among the Socialists and Communists of America. They are not willing to face the Negro question. In associating with the comrades of America I have found demonstrations of prejudice on the various occasions when the White and Black comrades had to get together: and this is the greatest difficulty that the Communists of America have to overcome—the fact that they first have got to emancipate themselves from the ideas they entertain toward Negroes before they can be able to reach the Negroes with any kind of radical propaganda.
Theodore Draper has stated that McKay’s accusation of racial prejudice within the American party was only “the first of many such complaints.”21
Both McKay and Huiswoud agreed that Afro-Americans and colonial troops were used effectively by the Allied side in World War I, and could be used again if Communists failed to reach blacks with their message of international working-class solidarity. McKay in particular had long been concerned about the shameless exploitation by England and France of black colonial troops, and he concluded his speech by expressing the “hope” that “a few Negro Soldiers” would soon be included in “the Red Army and Navy of Russia” as “a symbol that the Negroes of the world will not be used by the international bourgeoisie in the final conflicts against the World Revolution.”22
At the Fourth Congress, the Comintern for the first time formed a Negro Commission which consisted of Huiswoud, a few white Americans and Europeans, and some Asian party members. The commission’s “Resolutions on the Negro Question,” formally adopted by the Fourth Congress, represented the Comintern’s “first real effort to state its position” regarding blacks. The resolutions noted the unrest that had developed among Afro-Americans and black colonials as a result of World War I. It then stated that “the history of the Negro in America fits him for an important role in the liberation struggle of the entire African race.” A brief Marxist survey of the black’s struggle against American oppression concluded that “the post-war industrialization of the Negro in the North and the spirit of revolt engendered by post-war persecutions and brutalities caused a spirit, which . . . places the American Negro ... in the vanguard of the African struggle against oppression.” The document ended by reminding blacks that their struggle was at base a struggle against capitalism and imperialism. It then outlined steps by which Communists could more effectively secure black support in the “proletariat struggle for freedom.”23
“The Fourth Congress,” Theodore Draper has written, “opened a period of Communist policy for the American Negro in which the international and especially the African aspect predominated.”24 McKay’s precise role in hammering out this policy cannot be determined. His presence and his analysis of the black American situation had some influence on the Comintern’s decision to set up a Negro Commission and to formulate resolutions on the topic. Besides addressing the congress, McKay also spoke with Leon Trotsky, who at the time seemed destined to succeed Lenin as the leader of the Soviet Communist party. Gravely ill, Lenin was only barely able to address the Fourth Congress. He was to die the next year.
McKay and Trotsky talked about the racial situation in the United States and about how best to combat the use of African troops by European colonial powers. McKay also told Trotsky of the antiblack propaganda the English socialists had used in their campaign against the French occupation of the Rhineland. Trotsky believed only class-conscious black activists could prevent European nations from using their black colonials in future European conflicts. He urged upon McKay the necessity for black Communists to organize within their own race to combat the evil effects of European colonialism. Their exchange of opinion was printed in Pravda and other leading papers. McKay also reprinted much of it in Negroes in America.25
In A Long Way from Home, McKay claimed that his remarks “about the Negroes of the South” and the tyranny under which they existed had “precipitated” the more extended discussion of “the Negro question” at the Fourth Congress, in which his friend Sen Katayama aggressively accused white American delegates of not understanding the racial problem in the United States. “It was an unforgettable experience to watch Katayama in conference. He was like a little brown bulldog with his jaws clamped on an object that he wouldn’t let go.” If nothing else, McKay exerted an influence on the deliberations through his friendship wih Katayama, who apparently shared his scorn of American Communists’ approach to racial issues. “Think not,” McKay wryly observed, “that it was just a revolutionary picnic and love feast in Moscow in the fifth year of Lenin[’s rule] I”26
McKay’s influence on the Fourth Congress’ “Resolutions on the Negro Question” can, of course, be overestimated. Otto Huiswoud also received a respectful hearing at the congress, and he actually served as an official member of its Negro Commission. McKay and Huiswoud together represented the general perspective of several West Indian radicals in the United States, who after World War I contributed substantially to left-wing black thought. In this respect, the official stance of the Comintern regarding blacks in 1922 was influenced by West Indians, who were simultaneously much more nationalistic, class conscious, and international-minded than were American-born blacks.
But there were certainly other, equally important factors that determined the Comintern’s emphasis on the international aspects of the Negro problem. Marxist-Leninist theory on the relationship between capitalism and imperialism would compel such emphasis. In addition, the response of urban Negroes in the North to Garvey’s UNIA perhaps provided the Comintern with some hope of eventually winning blacks to the Communist version of “universal improvement.”
Within the United States, the Comintern’s position made little or no impression on Afro-American leadership. Aside from Garvey’s followers and the relative handful of black radical activists in the United States, W. E. B. Du Bois was the only prominent black leader who had made any sustained effort to build an international movement after World War I. In 1919, Du Bois had attempted to unite black leaders from all countries into a Pan-African movement, whose purpose was to work for an end to colonialism in Africa. Du Bois’s first Pan-African Congress met in 1919 while the Versailles peace conference was in session. Several more Pan-African congresses met in the early 1920s, but Du Bois’s movement, at least in the short run, accomplished little except to provide a precedent for later attempts at Pan-African unity after World War II. The NAACP gave Du Bois only grudging support from the first, and it soon quietly withdrew all its aid. Du Bois’s ambitious plans were not Communist-inspired or -supported, but he did envision a socialist economy in Africa once freedom had been attained.27
After the conclusion of the Fourth Congress in December, 1922, McKay remained in Russia for six more months. During that time he became something of a celebrity: “Never in my life did I feel prouder of being an African, a black and made no mistake about it. . . . From Moscow to Petrograd and from Petrograd to Moscow I went triumphantly from surprise to surprise, extravagantly feted on every side. I was like a black ikon in the flesh. The famine had ended and the NEP was flourishing, the people were simply happy. I was the first Negro to arrive in Russia since the Revolution, and perhaps I was generally regarded as an omen of good luck! Yes, that is exactly what it was. I was like a black ikon.”28
Besides being commissioned to write articles, poems, and stories for the Soviet press, McKay was sent by Trotsky on a tour of Soviet military installations, where he was elaborately toasted by the Red army and navy. One memorable trip from Petrograd to the nearby naval base at Kronstadt was made by plane during a snowstorm. The pilot lost his way in the blizzard but made a safe landing not far from his destination. McKay arrived at the Kronstadt airfield by automobile to discover that a contingent of sailors had been forced to wait for him in the cold. Such incidents embarrassed him.29
Surprisingly, McKay had time to meet many “non-partisan and anti-Bolsheviks.” A year later he reported in the NAACP’s Crisis magazine that “I spent many of my free evenings [in Moscow] at the Domino Cafe, a notorious den of the dilettante poets and writers.” It was in such an atmosphere that McKay became acquainted with the poetry of Sergei Yesenin, who, in some of the most beautiful verses of the period, celebrated the peasants and soil of the old Russia now rapidly passing away. McKay felt a special affinity for Yesenin’s poetry. But Yesenin, who drank heavily, was never able to accommodate himself to the Soviet regime, and eventually committed suicide in 1925.30
The correspondent Walter Duranty, who toured the Soviet Union shortly afterward, wrote that “the black man” about whom Yesenin had written in a late poem of that tide had been Claude McKay. Duranty stated the two had known each other in Moscow. He may have heard stories about McKay’s visit from writers in Moscow who had known of his interest in Yesenin. But McKay and Yesenin never met. Yesenin had left Russia with the dancer Isadora Duncan about the time McKay was leaving Germany for Petrograd.31
Who then was “the black man” who tortured Yesenin by his presence? All critics agree he was a symbolic figure who constantly reproached the poet for his failure to achieve the fulfillment of his artistic potential, for being untrue to himself by wrecking his health and destroying his poetic gift. During the last two years of his life, Yesenin suffered from hallucinations and other mental afflictions connected with alcoholism. Nobody but Duranty ever identified “the black man” as Claude McKay.32
Could it be possible, however, that Duranty’s tale contained a germ of truth? Perhaps upon his return to Russia from America with Isadora Duncan, Yesenin had learned from friends about McKay’s high regard for him. In his last remorseful months, Yesenin may have conjured in his mind an image of this strange black man, who had once sung his praises above all other Russian poets, now returned to haunt and reproach him for his failures. Although it is only speculation, Duranty may not have been entirely wrong in his assertion that Claude McKay was in this sense “the black man” of the famous poem.
Although McKay did not meet Yesenin, he did become conversant with the various literary schools and trends competing with one another in the relatively free literary atmosphere of Moscow and Petrograd in 1922 and 1923. Before going to the Soviet Union, he had assumed that the Bolsheviks had imposed “a strict literary censorship,’’ but he soon found that “no such thing” existed. In Moscow and Petrograd, he encountered “Parnassians, Romantic Classicists, Formalists, Proletarians, Futurists, and Imagists. A member of the last named school,” he informed the overly skeptical H. L. Mencken, “gave me a copy of his latest book containing a creepy poem called: ‘Leprous Moscow’ which [Maxwell] Bodenheim might have written about New York, had he any vital power over the manipulation of words.”33
During his seven months in Russia, McKay met an impressive number of important literary figures. They included Korney Chukov-sky, a leading critic and author of children’s books; the novelists Boris Pilnyak and Yevgeny Zamyatin; and the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, the leading proponent of a new proletarian drama. With the possible exception of Mayakovsky, these writers all had serious reservations about the new Bolshevik regime; in his conversations with them, McKay must have heard much that tempered his enthusiasm for the new government.34
Throughout his visit, McKay stressed that he was primarily a poet. While accepting wholeheartedly the aims of international communism, he could never give himself wholly to political work within the party. To some party members, it was a maddeningly naive stance. For the moment, however, the Comintern leaders accepted McKay on his own terms and assiduously wooed him. Some probably appreciated his candor. Trotsky, for one, was not totally alienated by McKay’s position and probably even sympathized with it up to a point. In truth, the leaders of the Russian Revolution in 1922 and 1923 did not demand that artists conform strictly to any ideological line.35
For his articles, stories, and poems in Izvestia and other Soviet publications, McKay received fees well above those given to most Soviet writers. His literary activities, combined with public appearances, and his tour of Soviet military bases kept him constantly active. After his first perilous days in Moscow, McKay “awoke,” as he expressed it, “to find myself the center of pageantry in the grand Byzantine city” of Moscow. “The photograph of my black face was everywhere among the highest Soviet rulers, in the principal streets, adorning the walls of the city. . . . I was installed in one of the most comfortable and best heated hotels in Moscow. . . . Wherever I wanted to go, there was a car at my disposal. Whatever I wanted to do I did. And anything I felt like saying I said. For the first time in my life I knew what it was to be a highly privileged personage. And in the Fatherland of Communism! Didn’t I enjoy it.”36
The six months following the Fourth Congress proved hectic, exhilarating, and personally triumphant. Everywhere McKay received thunderous welcomes that left him wondering if, in truth, his actual achievements merited such receptions. “I felt that if I were to be a bolshoi as a literary artist in a foreign language, I should first make a signal achievement in my native adopted language, English.” Such thoughts, as well as his aversion to practical politics, kept McKay from being swept completely off his feet and into the ranks of the selflessly dedicated within the Third International. He still had to prove himself as a literary artist and went so far as to characterize his past literary production as “my trifling poems.”37
McKay in Moscow adopted a peculiarly complex stance. He wished to support the Bolshevik government in the Soviet Union and the Third Communist International abroad while retaining his independence as a poet, writer, critic, and political analyst. He urged blacks to become class conscious and to ally themselves with the Communist cause, yet as a black participant in Communist party politics, he remained wary of Communist motives, understanding, and strategy about race relations, imperialism, and the importance of African and Asian nationalism. McKay made his position quite clear by the time he left the Soviet Union: he would remain an iconoclastic rebel and a poet. As ideological lines and bureaucratic standards of acceptance hardened within the Comintern after the death of Lenin, McKay would eventually have had no choice but to disassociate himself from involvement in the Communist movement. It was his good fortune that he did not have to make that choice while in the Soviet Union.38
By the end of the congress, even McKay’s sharpest critics within the American delegation acknowledged his membership within their party. Zinoviev had at one point referred to him as “a non-party member.” The Congress’ daily newspaper, the Bolshevik, published Zinoviev’s remarks. This prompted letters from both McKay and the chairman of the American delegation, Ludwig E. Katterfield (using the pseudonym G. Carr), which McKay later reprinted in the appendix of Negroes in America. In his letter of December 2, 1922, Katterfield informed the Bolshevik that “the words ‘although he is not a communist’ must be discarded.” McKay, he pointed out, was a member of the Workers’ party and spoke “in the name of the African Blood Brotherhood.”39
The following day the Bolshevik printed McKay’s more detailed statement, in which he declared himself a Communist and attempted to justify his request for a transfer from the secret Communist Party of America to the aboveground Workers’ party. He did not obtain the transfer, he declared, because he was afraid of the danger involved in underground work. “In America,” he observed, “it is much less dangerous to be a Communist than to be a Negro.” He desired membership in a legal party because he was convinced that Communists could reach blacks only if the alliance were pursued openly and in the face of hostile white opposition. Black Communists would get nowhere by simply urging “solidarity with white workers” because blacks knew white workers as historically “their most bitter enemies.” The black Communist’s task was infinitely more complex.
The Negro Communist must not only be an interpreter of the moods of his own people for white comrades. . . , but he must also be capable of establishing contact with white reformers and the petty bourgeois leaders of his own race. He must prod them to make greater and greater demands for the Negro masses and undermine their authority by making counter-demands. When the petty-bourgeois Negro leaders and white reformers defend such American taboos as mixed marriages and the right of Negroes freely and completely to meet with whites in social places and in private homes, Communists must boldly implement all these in theory and in practice. Similarly, Communists must fight so that competent Negro workers are allowed into powerful white unions on an equal basis. This struggle must be carried out against hostilely inclined and unenlightened white workers . . . who must be turned towards international class consciousness. . . . To go to the very heart of the Negro Question for Communists means to incur the violent anger of American public opinion in the North as well as the South.
If such an aggressive policy were adopted, McKay predicted that much violence directed against blacks might ensue, that even black and white Communists might “accidentally” find themselves in “opposing camps”; but that it would be a price worth paying if it helped “to move the large complacent mass of reactionary America to the universal ideal of internationalism.”40
In Negroes in America, McKay took the articles he had written for the Soviet press and shaped them into a rough survey of black conditions in America. He elaborated on a Marxist interpretation of black American history that stressed the economic basis of race relations in the United States. The book included an extended discussion of the position of blacks within the American labor movement, the prospects for radical organization among blacks, and a critique of the Communist attitude and approach toward blacks since World War I. Against a historical backdrop of fundamental and consistent economic exploitation, McKay included chapters on the social and cultural ramifications of American race relations in which he pointed out the connections in American history between the black crusade for freedom and the women’s crusade for equality. Although the book clearly suffered because of the feverish haste with which it was composed, McKay nevertheless managed to make a detailed statement of his fundamental view of black history and contemporary race relations in the United States. In the process, he also revealed a great deal about himself and his relation to the international Communist movement.
McKay viewed U.S. history from both a class and a racial perspective. Black Communists, he insisted, had a dual responsibility to interpret black consciousness to their white comrades and to communicate to blacks an understanding of their historic position as workers within the capitalist economies of the West. Above all, McKay hammered home the point that black acceptance of Marxism was vital to the success of the Communist movement in America. Communists would attract the black masses only if the party demonstrated in theory and practice that it accepted blacks as unquestioned equals in every area of life and displayed a willingness to confront the issue of race relations head on.
In his chapter entitled “Labor Leaders and Negroes,” McKay claimed that only one American labor organization, the Industrial Workers of the World, had truly accepted blacks as equals in their organization and in their campaigns against American capital. The Workers’ party, and certainly the illegal Communist Party of America, had yet to match the IWW’s record.
McKay correctly observed that labor unions in America had lost membership since World War I. The postwar return to “normalcy” had placed them once again on the defensive after a period of wartime growth. Against the great unionization efforts of 1919, the large corporate interests had marshaled every resource, including black strikebreakers, to defeat union drives in major industries from steel to meatpacking. Labor strife between blacks and whites in the meatpacking industry had been a major contributing factor in the great Chicago riot of 1919. McKay wrote Negroes in America as an impassioned witness to the strife and bloodshed of workers who should have been allies. Having experienced such senseless strife, he insisted that blacks must be organized along class-conscious lines with or without whites if the American labor movement was ever to progress. In the absence of a radical spearhead of black and white laborers, the bourgeoisie in the United States imposed its paternalistic reforms and hired blacks where whites gave trouble, whether it was in the coal fields of West Virginia, the steel mills of Pittsburgh, or the stockyards of Chicago. Fear of black competition retarded the development of working-class consciousness among white American workers.41
In McKay’s view, the situation for blacks and whites could have hardly been worse, and he stated flatly that “the question of Whites and Blacks is mainly a question of self-preservation for American labor. The sentiment of brotherhood can be completely discarded. . . . The American worker’s movement finds itself at the crossroads. It must choose one of the following two paths: the organization of black workers separately or together with whites—or the defeat of both by the forces of the bourgeoisie.”42
In the accomplishment of such organization, McKay had no faith in the traditional leadership of the black American community—its church spokesmen, middle-class reformists, businessmen, educators, and social workers. They had all failed to advance either themselves or their race within the American class structure, whose upper class seemed determined “to keep the Negro intelligentsia, as well as the masses, at the bottom.”43
While providing this broadly generalized class analysis of American race relations, McKay also managed to include several important cultural phenomena within his Marxist framework. In his chapter “Negroes in Sports,” for example, McKay argued persuasively that in the United States, sport was both a corporate business and an important symbolic expression of white supremacy. As befitted a poet, McKay also included chapters entitled “Negroes in Art and Music” and “Negroes in Literature.” Black artists of all types, he noted, occupied a peculiarly lonely position in the United States; they were ignored by whites and misunderstood by black critics too insecure to encourage their talents. By and large, McKay concluded, “those who stay in the United States after flashing a first bright spark turn into mediocrities and thus find the place assigned to them.”44
Despite such dismal conclusions, McKay ended on an optimistic note that indicated the direction he would shortly take in his own literary efforts. “Our age,” he wrote, “is the age of Negro art. The slogan of the aesthetic art world is ‘Return to the Primitive.’ The Futurists and Impressionists are agreed in turning everything upside down in an attempt to achieve the wisdom of the primitive Negro.”45 Such an effort appealed enormously to McKay’s romantic nature, and in his novels and short stories he would within the next decade confound the conservative critics of black art and literature by extolling the apparently aimless existence of “primitive” black drifters who existed on the fringes of urban life in America, Europe, and the Caribbean.
In his last chapter, entitled “Sex and Economics,” McKay tried to explain in largely Marxist terms why the United States seemed so obsessively preoccupied with and fearful of black sexuality. According to McKay, this peculiarly American problem most likely began to manifest itself in the South, when its slaveholding oligarchy managed to isolate southern poor whites and black slaves from one another and to limit their possibilities for social intercourse and mutual work. As the distance between them widened, poor whites and blacks grew increasingly scornful of one another. “Thus,” McKay concluded, “by the time of the Civil War, the Southern oligarchy owned not only the bodies of white workers and black slaves, but it had succeeded completely in controlling the psychology of both races. The sexual taboo is a form of black magic and splendidly served the aims and intentions of the master class.” As far as McKay was concerned, the situation was not confined to the South but afflicted to varying degrees the entire nation. “In reality,” he wrote, “the whole white American nation is, in a strange way, possessed by a Negro neurosis.”46 Whites in the North appeared particularly fascinated with black crime, and the publication of the gruesome details of southern lynchings held for the northern tabloid reader an enormous fascination. In effect, northerners shared to a large degree the old morbid and fearful curiosity about blacks so long exhibited by poor whites in the South.
Throughout Negroes in America, McKay displayed a generally well informed interest in American history and made some interesting comparisons between race relations in the United States, the Caribbean, and colonial Africa. He explained that while blacks and other colonial peoples generally received better treatment in France, England, and other European countries, these same countries generally engaged in ruthless economic exploitation of their African, Caribbean, and Asiatic territories.
Negroes in America cannot be counted among McKay’s more polished prose works. It was hastily written under chaotic circumstances that did not allow him time to research his topics in any depth. For sources he relied heavily upon books, pamphlets, and journals he had brought with him from New York. McKay had had no idea he would write Negroes in America for the Soviet press when he left for Russia or that he could ever complete such a project from start to finish in only six months. And in its occasional hyperbole, misstatement of fact, questionable generalizations, and faulty organization it did betray the evidence of haste. On the other hand, McKay succeeded admirably in giving his Russian readers some idea of the historical complexity of American race relations, the peculiar position of blacks in the American labor force, the mutually antagonistic psychology of blacks and whites in America, and the urgent need of Communists to overcome the disruptive competition and deep-seated mutual enmity that existed between white and black workers.
The book bore the indelible stamp of McKay’s particular passion for racial justice and his complex dissatisfaction with his American and British comrades. In joining the Communist movement, he had expected understanding and positive action on racial and colonial questions, and he urged upon his comrades his conviction that no Marxist revolution would ever occur and no satisfactory interracial reconciliation would ever take place in the United States if the racial question could not be faced and overcome by American Communists. His book was a challenge to action on the racial front. On its tide page he quoted Whitman, “My call is the call to battle /1 nourish active rebellion.”47 Increasingly, it seemed to him, Communists in the United States were letting their opportunities slide back into the grasp of a resurgent capitalism that understood only too well how to divide and continue to conquer. Certainly, he saw little evidence within the American movement that its members were eager to place near the top of their revolutionary agenda the winning of blacks to their cause.
McKay had, of course, come to Russia full of resentment against his colleagues on the Liberator. In his original draft of Negroes in America, he had voiced all his dissatisfaction with them; he had, moreover, chosen to concentrate on those disagreements between himself and the other editors that related to the racial issue in order to expose the lack of understanding of black concerns that prevailed even among otherwise deeply committed radicals such as those who ran the Liberator. Max Eastman strenuously objected to McKay’s emphasis. He reminded McKay that his personal differences with Michael Gold and not disagreements over the racial problem had been the primary reason for his departure from the Liberator. Eastman also maintained that McKay had tried to introduce more black material than the other Liberator editors thought wise, but that their objections had been merely tactical. They did not wish to alienate a readership that was “practically entirely among whites” who were “full of peculiar ignorance and intolerance of the Negro.”48 Even McKay’s proposal that they devote at least 10 percent of the magazine’s contents to the race problem seemed to Eastman unsound.
McKay eventually deleted his section on the Liberator, but not before he wrote Eastman a blistering letter of rebuttal. Eastman’s criticism, McKay claimed, had cast doubt on the motive and honesty of his Liberator account. He accordingly adopted a tone of aggrieved superiority. “I do not,” he haughtily announced, “intend to argue with you about my motives and honesty—to prove or disprove anything, I am only attempting to enlighten you.” McKay stated that Eastman was wrong to think that his remarks concerning the Liberator would leave the impression that his departure from the magazine had been because of a dispute over racial issues. He instead wished to show how difficult it was for American radicals to understand the importance of the race problem in the class struggle. McKay stressed that he had never arrived at any agreement with Eastman or the other editors regarding the Liberator’s policy on racial issues. McKay concluded that he thought it important to state explicitly “the truth that the leading minds of the Liberator did not, to me, have a comprehensive grasp of the Negro question.” McKay had yet more to say.Liberator readers, he went on, far from being offended by the race material introduced into the magazine by him, had on the contrary sent him “letters of encouragement and appreciation.” And in response to his article “He Who Gets Slapped,” he said, “certain members of the Theatre Guild” had protested against their management’s practices of discrimination. Eastman had asked McKay whether he was living in the practical, “scientific” era of Lenin or the age of Tom Paine. In reply, McKay stated that both Lenin and Paine had to be judged by what they accomplished in their own eras, and in a savage thrust that must have hurt, he told Eastman that “if you had in your whole body an ounce of the vitality that Paine had in his little finger, you with your wonderful opportunities, would not have missed the chances for great leadership in the class struggle that were yours in America.”49
Eastman was appalled by McKay’s letter. He denied that he had ever accused McKay of dishonesty or had disparaged his motives. He reminded McKay that when he joined the Liberator, he had been “like some of the rest of us,” a poet eager to find the freedom to write his poems. Now he stood somewhat abashed before the “very solemnly consecrated political soul” that had somehow suddenly materialized in McKay. In reply, McKay stated:
I have no more my “solemnly consecrated political soul” today than at the time when I first went to the Liberator. I still love to laugh, dance and wine and delight in pleasure. If you had seen me standing on street corners and selling red literature in London, you would not make such a funny remark. If you had seen me doing propaganda work among the colored soldiers you would modify your “opinion.” And I never missed a single opportunity in enjoying living then as now. Do you think I was playing when twice in 1921 you saw colored men and women in the Liberator office discussing political and race problems with me—and you did not like it from fear of the Department of Justice? You have been entirely deceived about me, Max. I suppose it is due to this everlasting infectious smile of mine.
Eastman feared their friendship had ended. In the heat of the argument, McKay may have thought so too. But upon reflection he decided, after all, not to antagonize his former comrades. In its published version, Negroes in America contained scarcely a mention of the Liberator. Still, McKay left the Soviet Union without reconciliation with Eastman, and the question of their future relationship remained unsettled.50
As had happened so often in the past, McKay was preparing to leave the scene of his book’s publication. He would not capitalize on it or on his overwhelming personal reception in Russia. Just as he had previously done in Jamaica, the United States, and England, so in the Soviet Union he abandoned the field at the moment he seemed most assured of further successes. In the spring of 1923, he made a final trip from Moscow to Petrograd in preparation for departure.51
It had all been an exhilarating but exhausting experience. In Petrograd, McKay finally felt the strain. For the first time in his life, he had a tooth pulled. The painful extraction was performed under primitive conditions, but it was less ominous than the apparent paralytic stroke that for a time left one side of his face and neck without feeling. It was the first symptom of chronic hypertension. Although the paralysis soon passed, the underlying cause remained. Despite its seriousness, however, he soon threw himself into a last hectic round of social activities and public appearances.
McKay’s visit was brought to a grand climax in Petrograd during the May Day celebration of 1923. “For hours,” he later wrote, “I stood with Zinoviev and other Petrograd leaders in the reviewing stand in the Uritsky Square.” That night McKay returned to the former palace of the late Grand Duke Alexander where he was staying and tried to sleep, but the throngs continued to march before his eyes. He finally sat down at the late Grand Duke’s desk and penned a farewell poem to Russia. In the concluding stanza of “Petrograd: May Day, 1923,” McKay caught some of the exultation he felt, not only on that particular day, but throughout his Russian adventure.
Oh, Petrograd, oh proud triumphant city,
The gateway to the strange, awakening East,
Where warrior-workers wrestled without pity
Against the power of magnate, monarch, priest—
World fort of struggle, hold from day to day
The flaming standards of the first day of May!52
Shortly afterward, he left Petrograd for Germany. From there he went to France, where he strayed far from the Communist fold to embark upon a decade-long literary expatriation.
From 1919 to 1923, Claude McKay spent four intensely committed years as a poet, journalist, and black Communist radical of the literary Left. It was a momentous period that saw, among many other changes, the establishment of the world’s first modern socialist state and the rebirth under its auspices of the international Communist movement.
From the moment the Bolsheviks seized power in Moscow in October, 1917, expectations of truly revolutionary changes spread around the world. Claude McKay had been among the thousands who saw in the bright banners of Red Russia a new hope. For him and for those few hundred black revolutionaries of his generation who had seen the vision, Marxist revolution, and specifically the kind demonstrated under Lenin’s clear-sighted leadership, seemed to offer the only really practical and just resolution to the binding exploitation still experienced by the majority of black peoples the world over. From the first, therefore, McKay’s vision was of a world revolution in which his people, whether in Africa, the Caribbean, or the United States, would participate as equals with all others in the remolding of their mutual fates.
McKay enjoyed a tremendous personal triumph in Russia, but his independence and his increasingly bitter disillusionment with the American and British Communist movements made his future place within international communism increasingly problematic, even as he enjoyed the rich fruits of his Soviet reception. The dream of a truly egalitarian socialist revolution nevertheless remained alive in McKay. In New York, London, and Moscow, he had participated intimately in a movement whose significance would not dim, even as he and it diverged in the years ahead.
Finally, it must be said: there was something in McKay’s personality that made it impossible for him to accept success once he had achieved it. He had political success within his grasp in Moscow, but it seemed incompatible and somehow insignificant when compared with the purely literary success he sought. His poems seemed to him insufficiently important for the fame they had brought him. He felt the need to push on with his literary career, to prove himself—in a real sense, to start again, to quell the doubts, the fears, and the lonesome insecurity within by defining yet again what it meant to be black in the third decade of the turbulent and increasingly dangerous twentieth century.