Although McKay may have portrayed himself in A Long Way from Home as a poet “apart from other men,” by 1937 he was trying desperately to communicate to his fellow blacks in New York his belief that they needed to improve radically the scope and quality of their group activities and communal life. As a member of the FWP in New York City, he had himself become actively involved in trying to direct a black writers’ guild, composed largely of FWP workers in Harlem, toward a group commitment to foster a spirit of community improvement.
McKay had always thrived in a topsy-turvy environment, and his experiences in New York City with the FWP provided all the stimulation he needed to descend into the pit of public controversy. The New York FWP was by far the most faction-riven and turbulent of all the many projects around the country. Within it Communists, Trotsky-ists, anarchists, socialists, liberals, conservatives, reactionaries, non-political idealists, and opportunistic cynics battled with each other and with the federal bureaucracy in a no-holds-barred effort to win positions of power and privilege within the FWP and the union that 322 represented its workers. In this struggle, the Communists generally were the most united, if not the most numerous, and they controlled the writers’ union on the project from its inception.1
McKay opposed neither the union nor the leading role of the Communists in it. He believed, however, that blacks on the project should have their own organization, and in the winter of 1937 he joined in Harlem a group of black FWP members who had formed a Communist-backed Negro Authors’ Guild. His intention was to rally to himself those who believed as he did that blacks could do without Communist leadership. All proceeded quietly until midsummer. Then on July 9, 1937, one of the guild’s members, Edward Bryant, sponsored for membership a white woman named Helen Boardman. McKay saw no necessity for white members in a Negro Authors’ Guild and vehemently objected to the action, one which Communist party members and their “fellow-travelers” had made standard practice in all the groups they helped to organize in Harlem during the 1930s.2
McKay believed that blacks needed white allies, but he believed they also needed self-confidence and enough faith in one another to launch their own organizations in which they could plan and carry out community programs they themselves designed, free from the subtle inhibitions even the most sympathetic whites injected into black groups by their very presence. In his view, other minorities on the FWP were free from the pressure to integrate their particular ethnic organizations. He saw no reason why blacks should not enjoy a wholly black Negro Authors’ Guild. In McKay’s opinion, black churches, mortuaries, fraternal organizations, and barbershops hardly sufficed to meet the overwhelming problems confronting Harlem. Blacks needed to start thinking about organizing both locally and nationally for sustained communal self-improvement, and he hoped a Negro Authors’ Guild might help to steer black thinking in that direction. He was determined, at any rate, to prevent the guild from becoming simply another experiment in racial integration.3
When Helen Boardman was presented to the group, only a few guild members were present. Any final decision, McKay argued, should be made at a later date. A week later, the group convened again, this time with most members in attendance. According to the New York Amsterdam News, McKay again “vociferously opposed” Boardman’s membership. The discussion soon became so “acrimonious” that Boardman finally jumped up, yelled, “I resign! I resign!” and “left in a dither.” Her supporters, however, insisted that she be retained as a member. They pointed out that the constitution of the guild forbade discrimination based on race. Neither side budged. McKay was not alone. He had won to his side the guild’s officers, as well as many of the rank and file. Finally, according to the Amsterdam News, “Ted Yates, the executive secretary, Ellen Tarry, the recording secretary, McKay, and others [snatched] up the minutes and other official data of the guild and [branded] those who voted for Miss Boardman’s membership in it... a rump group.” They then “left the meeting in a huff.” According to the Amsterdam News, the guild had, in effect, been destroyed because of “the one man campaign” McKay had begun on July 9 when Boardman’s “name first came up.”4
McKay fully realized that Helen Boardman, a non-Communist long involved with black causes, had been well intentioned, and he immediately wrote to express his regrets that she had become “the goat” in the organizational difficulties of “our little Guild.” He had wanted the guild to become part of a larger strategy he envisioned for “intensive group work and consolidation.” Most blacks, he stated, would at first disagree with him. “But,” he continued, “the Negro group badly needs self-confidence, self-reliance, and group unity in order that it may overcome the morbid fear of Segregation and take action to build itself upon a sound foundation.” He emphasized his belief that blacks as a group were not facing their problems in a realistic, progressive manner. He feared, he concluded, that they would retard “radical” social progress and change in the United States if they did not overcome their obsession with integration as the sole solution to America’s race problems.5
Like all his critics, Boardman replied by stating that McKay’s ideas, if implemented, would lead to self-segregation, narrow ethno-centrism, and isolation. Boardman’s conclusions enraged McKay. Among other things, he advised her to take her ideas to those Negroes who felt, as she did, that group unity meant segregation. “They prefer to remain guinea pigs for sentimental persons to praise and investigate. I am not a guinea pig.” Why, he asked, did she have to work with Negro organizations? She should instead “start a movement against Anglo-Saxon arrogance.” Boardman ended the exchange by concluding in her final letter to McKay that “I agree with you. Whatever kind of pig you may be, it is not a guinea pig.”6
Over the next year, McKay worked assiduously to build another black writers’ guild that would function along the fines he envisioned. To give his efforts the stamp of respectability, McKay sought the public endorsement of James Weldon Johnson. The retired executive secretary of the NAACP was a highly respected, essentially non-controversial figure, and his own literary accomplishments made him especially acceptable to black writers.
Ever since his return from Europe, McKay had confided to Johnson all his hopes of becoming a useful contributor to Afro-American life and letters. As early as April, 1935, he had explained that “I am certain that Negroes will have to realize themselves as an organized group to get anything.” While abroad, he continued, “I observed that people who were getting . . . anything were those who could realize the strength of their cultural group; their political demands were considered and determined by the force of their cultural grouping.”7 In the same letter, he asked Johnson for help and advice about how best to approach the problems of strengthening black group life.
Johnson understood McKay’s concern and gave him his blessing, but he really did not share McKay’s conviction that Afro-Americans had to reorient their basic goals and reconstitute themselves in any fundamental way as a group. Among prominent Afro-American leaders, only W. E. B. Du Bois had ideas similar to McKay’s. Before McKay’s return to the United States, Du Bois had suggested in Crisis that blacks had to retrench and try to establish an independent, cooperative group economy that would give them the economic power to survive the depression and the strength to demand better treatment in America. His espousal of such a plan had immediately been denounced by the NAACP’s executive secretary, Walter White, and Du Bois had resigned as editor of Crisis.8 In contrast to Du Bois, Johnson in 1934 published Negro Americans, What Now?, in which he basically advocated a continuance of the NAACP-sponsored civil rights approach to black problems.9
McKay read the book with great sympathy, but he wrote Johnson that it failed on two counts: 1) it did not stress sufficiently the Communist threat to Negro unity, and 2) it did not adequately discuss the Negro’s stake in the labor movement. Labor, McKay reminded Johnson, was the most important class opposing capital. The old “rentier and investing class,” McKay told him, had been squeezed out as effective forces by giant corporations and government inflation and tax measures. Blacks had to group themselves with either labor or capital, and it should be labor because most blacks were workers. McKay also told Johnson that he had read Du Bois’s opinions “and wondered ... if both of your views could not be reconciled in the interests of Negro unity and for a working program. . . . Du Bois makes it clear that he is opposed to Segregation where it means Discrimination.” He added that he saw nothing wrong with black communities fighting for “New Deal money.” They could use the profit that accrued to fight segregation.10
Johnson replied that he supported an integrated labor movement and opposed a segregated black union movement. It would lead to scabbing and “drive the wedge deeper between black and white labor.” As to self-help, he was not opposed to blacks “taking the utmost advantage offered by imposed segregation,” but he emphasized that Du Bois’s idea of a separate, self-sufficient black economy simply could not be achieved.11
After the breakup of the Negro Authors’ Guild in July, 1937, McKay wrote Johnson that earlier “the Communists tried the same trick on the Harlem Artists’ Guild sending up artists from downtown to join,” but they had not been allowed in by the all-black guild membership. Later, McKay contended, the Harlem Artists had won certain concessions for their members from the Federal Artists’ Project that they probably could not have gotten as an integrated group. McKay asked Johnson to head his new writers’ group “so it will be possible for all Negro writers who are sincerely group conscious and not communist crazy to pull around you.”12
Although he could savagely attack them when provoked, McKay in 1937 could still view with humor the Communist party’s efforts to manipulate black affairs in Harlem. “These are the days,” he wrote Johnson, “when the black-red hand disguised tries to pull all the strings, even your pajamas.”13 Times had, indeed, changed from the days on the Liberator when battles had been fought openly and differences had often been tolerated where they could not be changed. “What I mainly dislike about the Communists of these times is their chicanery and intrigue,” McKay complained to Johnson.14
In October, 1937, McKay wrote a circular letter for the creation of a new, “democratic association of Negro writers” and announced an organization meeting for November 1. He stressed that the committee for whom he spoke was “not thinking in terms of narrow sectarianism, but rather in universal aspects of group culture.” By the end of the year, the new group was launched. From the beginning, McKay was its driving force, but a fairly large number of Harlem writers, journalists, and intellectuals attended one or more of its meetings and contributed to its discussions. Among them were James Weldon Johnson, Jessie Fauset, Countee Cullen, Henry Lee Moon, Gwendolyn Bennett, Ted Yates, Ellen Tarry, Arthur Schomburg, and Earl Brown. By and large, however, the new writers’ guild had an irregular, fluctuating membership. Most attended only a few meetings. None had quite the same enthusiasm as McKay for an independent black writers’ guild. He had hoped that such a group, meeting regularly once a month, would help its members “clarify” their thinking about the differences between literature and politics. At the same time, he also envisioned them drawing closer to the problems of the black masses. He wanted them to solidify their literary traditions and work to improve their position in the world of letters. He did not want the organization to be politically oriented but to concentrate on the unique functions of literature in society, functions that he believed set it above mere politics. Politicians of every stripe, McKay believed, were ultimately pragmatists and/or opportunists. Artists were concerned with the quality of human values, whether moral, aesthetic, personal, or social, not with the simple mechanics of material existence.15
His objectives were fine. But modern writers of whatever race have seldom worked long together as equals, and those McKay brought together in Harlem proved no exception. By the spring of 1938, he had begun to doubt that it would be possible “to build up an organization of writers who are . . . infused with a group spirit.” Real enthusiasm, he concluded, was not something that could be manufactured. To James Weldon Johnson, he wrote, “I always think of that letter you wrote to me abroad years ago, advising me to return and take part in the literary movement.” He revealed that certain people had expressed doubts about his motives for organizing a writers’ group. “Some people,” he told Johnson, “think I am interested in a literary organization to use it to keep up my prestige, as my recent books were not good sellers. But in reality it was more your letter which gave birth to the idea.” McKay expressed disappointment to find “many members of the old group mourning the good days past, instead of doing something to make the present day significant.”16
Among those who encouraged McKay to continue was Countee Cullen. He enjoyed the meetings and McKay’s friendship. Their correspondence throughout the late 1930s and 1940s contained on McKay’s side none of the irritability, special pleading, or desperation that characterized so much of his correspondence. In his letters to Cullen, McKay always wrote as a relaxed, warm, and considerate friend.17
With the support of Cullen and a few others, the writers’ group continued awhile longer. During the late spring and early summer of 1938, McKay and Cullen even began to see the possibility of realizing McKay’s old dream of editing a literary magazine. In October, 1937, an organization calling itself the Universal Ethiopian Students’ Association began a monthly magazine entitled the African: A Journal of African Affairs. It sought to expose the injustices committed by European imperialism in Africa, to inform readers about black problems in the United States, and to encourage American blacks to see their problems in broad, international perspective. It also sought to keep alive the strong black interest in the fate of Ethiopia, which only the year before had been overrun and occupied by Mussolini’s armies. The magazine was antifascist, noncommunist, and concerned specifically with making blacks aware of the dangers they faced from fascism and traditional European imperialism and racism.18
It was the kind of journal McKay could support, and in the spring of 1938 he contributed to it an article about his experiences in Tangier. By then, the organization that controlled the magazine (McKay described them in one letter as former Garveyites) was experiencing the usual difficulties in publishing a new journal—namely, leadership, organizational, and financial problems. In April, 1938, McKay and Cullen began negotiating with the group to take over the editorship of the magazine. By the end of May, it appeared they had succeeded in obtaining the free hand they sought, and they announced to prospective supporters that they would begin in July to edit the magazine, renamed the African: A Journal of Literary and Social Progress. Their optimism proved premature. The Ethiopian Students’ Association wavered, then reneged on their agreement, and McKay and Cullen soon withdrew from their involvement with the group. In a letter to McKay in late July, Cullen expressed regret about the failure of their efforts to take over the African, but he speculated that they would not in any case have been able to work with such “narrow-minded” people who only wanted to publish “propaganda.”19
By the summer of 1938, McKay’s role as the active leader of Harlem’s most prestigious noncommunist black writers’ guild had come to an end. It was probably just as well. McKay could be charming, witty, and incisive, but he was no leader of men. To have built his guild into the kind of permanent, influential cultural force he had envisioned would have taken a politician endowed with much more patience, practical resourcefulness, and, above all, financial means than McKay ever possessed. In the long run, what counted most, perhaps, was not that he failed to establish a permanent guild but that he made so great an effort.
Although his attempt as a practical organizer failed, the articles he began to write in 1937 remain as durable testimony to the consistency and integrity of the stands he took on a wide variety of public issues throughout the 1930s and beyond. In his articles, McKay always sought to disentangle rhetoric, whether of the Right or the Left, from the hard realities it usually obscured. In a decade beset by extreme partisanship on every side, McKay actually argued consistently for tolerance, moderation, and the defense of democratic freedoms To many, however, the positions he took on specific issues seemed excessive. Even as a moderate, McKay almost always managed to stir heated controversy and extreme partisanship. Few appreciated the genuine personal disinterestedness with which he advanced his ideas. In fact, during his last years he was often much more perceptive and far-sighted than his critics realized.
While busily organizing his writers’ group in 1937, McKay began to publish articles in which he spelled out the reasons for his anti-communism and his belief in the necessity for stronger black unity. He also commented upon the state of labor organization in Harlem.20 As an old radical, McKay succeeded better in his articles than he had in his autobiography in explaining his opposition to the Communist party. Beginning in 1935, the emphasis within international communism had shifted from militant opposition to existing capitalist governments and non-Communist parties of all description, to a policy that emphasized a united front with all antifascist governments, parties, and individuals. The rise of nazism in Germany, combined with the existence of Italian fascism and the menace of Japanese expansion into Manchuria, caused Moscow to seek allies abroad in the hope of containing the threats the Soviet Union now faced in both Western Europe and Asia. Because the fascist threat to world peace was very real, many of all political persuasions welcomed Moscow’s new policy.21
In the United States, the American Communist party had created a League of American Writers as part of its efforts to bring influential American writers into its united front against war and fascism. In July, 1937, the league held its second congress in New York, and McKay, who had been invited to participate at the opening session, found himself seated on the dais. The proceedings had hardly begun when he discovered himself in opposition to the keynote speaker, Earl Browder, the chairman of the Communist party of the United States. Although the Communists generally had sought non-Communist cooperation since 1935, their war against Trotskyists and other critics of the Soviet Union was unending. This led to serious consequences for its united front policy. By 1937, for example, the united front against Franco’s counterrevolution in Spain was already being subverted by Communist efforts there to eliminate its left-wing foes within the forces loyal to the beleaguered republican government. Of more immediate concern to the liberals and non-Communists at the Second League Congress in New York, however, were the first trials of old Bolsheviks, which had recently occurred in Moscow itself. Their execution by Stalin’s government had caused many to question the true nature of Soviet communism. To some, it seemed as bad as the emerging totalitarian regime in Germany. In May, the titular chairman of the League of American Writers, Waldo Frank, had called for a jury of Communists and socialists to investigate the assertion by Trotsky and others that the Moscow trials had been cynically staged in order to eliminate all possible rivals to Stalin within the Russian Communist party.22
For American Communist leaders, Frank’s actions ended his usefulness in the League of American Writers, and at the opening session of its second congress he was denounced by Earl Browder. McKay thought such an attack was completely unjustified, and he reacted immediately. As Browder spoke, McKay left the stage and walked out of the meeting. Shortly afterward, he publicly stated his opposition to the League of American Writers in “An Open Letter to James Rorty,” which appeared in the Socialist Call, July 17, 1937. Rorty had already denounced the league in the Call, but McKay maintained that mere statements of opposition were not enough. He believed that all American writers who valued independence and freedom of expression should be organized in a league of their own, and he urged Rorty to think about the steps necessary for the creation of such a league.
McKay rejected most emphatically Communist efforts to suppress all criticism of the Soviet Union by its Popular Front allies of the Left and center. Throughout human history, he asserted, critical opinion and the questioning of authority had been a prerequisite for progress in human affairs. The Soviet Union should welcome criticism, not try to quash it. Those writers who valued their historic role as independent critics and social commentators should make clear their opposition to all dictatorship, whether from the Right or the Left. McKay saw the situation presented by the League of American Writers as more than “merely a difference of tactics between radical factions.” It had become “fundamentally a part of the great struggle between genuine democracy and dictatorship.” McKay told Rorty that “more and more” the world’s people were being forced to choose between dictatorship and democracy. “But because there exists on the left flank of bourgeois democracy a . . . proletarian dictatorship in Russia some liberal intellectuals argue that as Russia is a proletarian state they should suspend criticism of its mistakes and criticize only the fascist. . . maneuvers which menace the social progress of the world.” Such people, McKay stated, were “either led or maneuvered by those who give their allegiance to the Comintern, who believe only in the principle of dictatorship and have nothing but contempt (which is sometimes concealed) for genuine workers’ democracy. Such a situation naturally produces intellectual confusion.” Since it was the scene of “perhaps the greatest social experiment in the history of the human race,” McKay stoudy affirmed that “more than any the Soviet state stands in need of radical criticism and analysis.” He then defined “independent intellectuals as the spiritual descendants of the prophets and skeptic philosophers, who always fearlessly opposed and criticized the priests, while the Communist and Fascist intellectuals, intolerant of criticism, stem straight from the scribes who always blindly and faithfully served the hierarchy of the priests.” There could be no compromise between these two types of intellectuals, he avowed.
After having lived under Russian communism, Primo de Rivera’s relatively mild dictatorship in prerepublican Spain, and a colonial dictatorship in North Africa, McKay stated that “in the intellectual sphere” he had found they all had “something in common ... a feeling of fear among those who desired to think and express themselves independendy.” McKay concluded by affirming his belief in “the social revolution and the triumph of workers’ democracy, not workers’ dictatorship.” But he warned that “the scribes” were “highly organized” and could accomplish much. “Is it not possible,” he asked Rorty, “to have an organization of independent writers?”23
McKay’s open letter to Rorty in the Call marked only the first of several articles over the next three years in which he defined and clarified his objections to communism. Most appeared first in the New Leader, and they were often reprinted in the New York Amsterdam News. Among the many journals in New York in the 1930s that published former Communists and other radical socialists of anti-Stalinist persuasion, the weekly New Leader was perhaps the one most filled with contemporary news and rumors from the badly fragmented left-wing community in New York. On July 23, 1938, for example, it published an article that alleged that the Communist party had recently decided at a special meeting to drive all “Trotskyists” off the FWP in New York City. At the same meeting, the article said, party chieftains also “resolved to continue the present drive of the Communists to gain the favor of the Negroes working on the WPA.” The article informed New Leader readers that “this is a pet project of the Communist Party and up to now they have met with the opposition of Claude McKay, Negro leader, who has fought vigorously against Communist domination of the Negroes on work relief. And so McKay was also denounced at the meeting and a drive against him and his activities was agreed on.”24
This prompted an article from McKay in which he argued that it would have been more correct for the New Leader to have written that he had spoken out against “Communist persecution of non-Communist workers,” rather than that he “fought against Communist domination of the Negroes on work relief/” To have fought Communist domination he would have had to fight against “the union of the unemployed and the WPA workers and I stand by the principle of unionism. . . . More than any other group the Communists should be credited with the effective organizing of the unemployed and relief workers.” He approved the Communist party’s commitment to unionization and worker protection. What he adamantly opposed was “the basic political ideology of Communism.” McKay proceeded to list his objections to Communist politics:
(1) I reject absolutely the idea of government by dictatorship, which is the pillar of political communism. (2) I am intellectually against the Jesuitical tactics of the Communists: (a) Their professed conversion to the principles of Democracy which is obviously false since they defend the undemocratic regime in Russia and loudly laud its bloodiest acts; (b) Their skunking [sic] behind the smoke screen of People’s Front and Collective security, supporting the indefensible imperialistic interests of European nations and deliberately trying to deceive the American people; (c) Their criminal slandering and persecution of their opponents, who remain faithful to the true traditions of radicalism and liberalism.
He was not, he said, as concerned about Communists dominating Negroes on work relief as he was about “the Communists capturing the entire colored group by cleverly controlling such organizations as the so-called National Negro Congress.”25 This was never a real fear, it might be noted, of established black leaders, though the NAACP had waged a losing battle earlier in the 1930s to retain control of the defense of the Scottsboro boys in Alabama.26
In several articles, McKay registered his scorn for the united front policy, which he maintained was being cleverly used by imperialist forces in France and by the Soviet Union to advance their own undemocratic policies abroad. Under Leon Blum’s French Popular Front government, McKay charged, progressive nationalist and socialist movements in Morocco were ruthlessly suppressed while the forces of French reaction in North Africa were given a free hand to rule as they liked, all in the name of antifascism. “How cruel the delusion of the native intellectuals,” McKay wrote in March, 1938, “who find themselves stripped by a People’s Front Government of the few liberties which their Socialist and Communist supporters helped them to win.!”27
Over the next few years, McKay wrote several other perceptive articles on North Africa in which he never failed to discuss the harsh, reactionary nature of French colonial administration in the region. Long before Franz Fanon, McKay was pointing out the pernicious consequences of such rule for colonized and colonizer alike. In one article published in the New Leader in 1939, for example, McKay asserted that the Spanish republican government in the early 1930s might have adopted a more liberal regime in Spanish Morocco or might even have granted it independence if the French had not insisted upon the maintenance of the colonial status quo in North Africa. The consequences for Spain had been disastrous, for Spanish Morocco, like French North Africa, continued as a stronghold of reaction; it had been from there that General Francisco Franco in 1936 finally launched his fateful attack upon republican Spain.28
McKay saw the Spanish Civil War as a double tragedy. He ardendy admired the Spanish people and passionately supported the young Moroccan intellectuals whom he had witnessed rejoicing with Spanish republicans in Morocco on the advent of republican rule in 1931. To William A. Bradley he had written that “I am very pleased ... the way the Republic was put over and I admire the sanity and clear realism of the Spaniards and am more firmly convinced than ever that they are the first people of Europe and the most interesting.”29 Less than eight years later, both North African nationalists and Spanish republicans were besieged by reactionary forces thirsting for their annihilation.
In his articles written after 1937, McKay showed a clear recognition and understanding of the dangers to world peace presented by Italian and German totalitarianism, but its dangers disturbed him less than those that he perceived had arisen within the Soviet Union. In 1939, after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he advanced his argument clearly and succinctly. Both the Nazi and the Communist dictatorships were built upon mass movements, but the former had openly “declared itself the enemy of progress, international culture, and labor as a liberating force.” It was clearly retrogressive. “On the other hand the Communist dictatorship sets itself up as the high protector of labor and international culture, while it actually suppresses all criticism and progressive opposition and reduces labor to subservience to a ruling clique. The forces of progress may unite to struggle against Nazism even as they have eternally fought reaction. But against pharisaical Communist dictatorship they were hopelessly divided, disarmed and confused.” The new alliance between nazism and Russian communism, McKay hoped, would help to reveal the truth about Stalin’s Russia. And in Harlem, where “fellow-travelers were as numerous and noisy as the angels of Father Divine,” Communist propaganda would no longer be as effective as in the past.30
As a black man and a colonial who lived daily with the consequences of European racism, McKay considered Hider a kind of Frankenstein monster, spawned by European imperialism, who had at last turned to menace his creator. In McKay’s view, Hider threatened Europe with the same kind of domination it had long imposed upon non-Europeans. He could understand the anguish of German Jews who had been “dramatically and brutally” reduced to “an inferior” minority status in Nazi Germany, but in his articles on black-Jewish relations in the United States, he constandy reminded American blacks and American Jews that blacks had existed under a racist tyranny in the United States that in essence differed little from Hitler’s persecution of German Jews.31
Ever since Sufi Abdul Hamid picketed merchants along 125th Street in the early 1930s, Jewish leaders in New York had been worried about the possibility that Harlem blacks might fall prey to anti-Semitism. McKay consistently denied that any such danger existed. He insisted there was no anti-Semitism in Harlem. Blacks had picketed Jewish merchants, McKay pointed out, because Jews happened to own many businesses in Harlem that exploited blacks, just as white businessmen did in all-black ghettos.32
In December, 1938, McKay in the Amsterdam News pointed to a recent appeal in the journal Jewish Frontier for closer cooperation between blacks and Jews in the United States. The article urged as a first step that both “minorities purge their ranks of all prejudice and intolerance.” McKay agreed but went on to spell out what he believed to be the two major problems hindering closer black-Jewish cooperation.
First, according to McKay, Jews in fact constituted “an important unit of the white world which discriminates against colored people. . . . Jews control many theaters, apartment houses, hotels, restaurants, cabarets, newspapers, moving pictures and other establishments which discriminate against colored people.” Second, blacks as a group would have to develop enough unity to confront forthrighdy American Jews and demand they purge themselves of all discriminatory practices against blacks as a price for active black cooperation against the rising tide of anti-Semitism at home and abroad. “To stand together with the Jews, we Negroes must first be able to stand up on our feet!. . . Let us force our Negro leaders and organizations to take such a stand instead of mouthing sentimental piffle about anti-Semitism which does not exist among Negroes.” McKay did not deny that resentments toward Jews existed among blacks, but he denied that these resentments had anything to do with traditional European anti-Semitism. At their core, they involved real issues of housing and control of retail trade and jobs in the Harlem community that too often pitted Jewish entrepreneurs against the community’s black population. This, McKay maintained, was “a social and labor issue, that should not involve anti-Semitism. Jewish businessmen exploit Negroes exactly as they exploit Jewish workers and not especially because of the former’s race. Three or four decades ago the Jewish workers were ruthlessly exploited in sweatshops by Jewish employers, until the Jewish workers organized and with agitation and strikes compelled their employers to give them better conditions.”
On one issue, McKay in the 1930s definitely parted company with many Jewish leaders and groups, including the Jewish Frontier. He firmly opposed the Zionist policy of settling European Jews in Palestine. On this issue, as on all public issues he confronted in the 1930s, he was absolutely clear: “Personally I am as opposed to the Palestine policy of the Zionists as much as I am opposed to the anti-Jewish measures of Hider. Upon this issue I stand with Oswald Garrison Villard’s Nation, which is the most impressive anti-Nazi organ of opinion in the United States. If the Jews sincerely believe in majority rule and minority rights, then the Zionist attitude toward Palestine is untenable. Also it tends to confuse the issues and dilute the sympathy which the liberal and radical world feels for the persecuted Jews.”33
McKay’s opposition to the Jewish Frontier’s militant Jewish nationalism had not prevented him in October, 1937, from publishing in it a major public statement in advocacy of greater black self-help as opposed to a continued reliance upon integration as the major means of improving black existence in the United States. McKay had earlier in 1937 debated this subject over the radio in New York City with George Schuyler, the black journalist. His Jewish Frontier article in October represented a distillation of his radio presentation.34
If McKay had an obsession after 1934, it was his belief that since the days of Booker T. Washington, blacks in the United States had effectively abandoned any serious efforts toward community self-improvement. According to McKay, the black masses had been too long abandoned in their misery by leaders single-mindedly focused on integration as the solution, leaders who even secretly resented and feared black people as inferior and degraded. Indeed, McKay argued, the masses of blacks had for too long been a body without a head. Their leadership, he repeatedly insisted, had abandoned them for an “Uncle Tom,” “Do-Nothing” policy of integration.35
McKay vehemently denied that he in any way supported forced segregation; he also denied with equal fervor that he advocated black nationalism. The former was inhumane, and the latter a waste of intellectual time and energy. He was no black Zionist.36
He did, however, admire and hold up for black emulation the many Jewish community institutions that had done so much to elevate the Jewish standard of living in New York City. Above all, he pointed to the “militant” United Hebrew Trades Association, which had done much to improve the lives of Jewish workers. McKay stressed that unless blacks organized to win a secure place for themselves as workers in the economic life of the nation, “integration” would remain a pipe dream.37
While arguing for greater group organization, McKay continued to report upon Harlem’s grass-roots movements and to compare their inventiveness and direct approaches to practical problems with the general ineffectiveness of established black leadership. On October 16, 1937, for example, in an article for the Nation entitled “Labor Steps Out in Harlem,” McKay surveyed the contemporary Harlem labor scene and compared it to the days of Sufi Abdul Hamid earlier in the decade. He noted that since the Harlem riots of 1935, the area had benefited by the creation of a Negro Labor Committee, headed by the old-line black socialist Frank Crosswaith, and by the organizing activities of the newly created Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). The Negro Labor Committee was an umbrella organization representing several established labor unions. Its purpose was “to remedy the acute problem of the Negro worker’s relationship to organized labor through the existing unions.” It worked closely with the CIO. Competing with both the Negro Labor Committee and the CIO for the allegiance of black workers in Harlem, McKay contended, was an all-black group, the Harlem Labor Union, led by a black soapbox orator and local Republican politician, Ira Kemp, whose orientation was, like the Sufi’s before him, almost purely racial. McKay warned that such leaders still had a large potential following if organized labor could not deliver practical benefits to black workers. “There are,” he warned, “many potential Harlem Labor Unions in the colored communities. . . . They will have to be reckoned with. For the Negro group will not remain contented with the white workers in the superior and the colored worker in the inferior position throughout the ranks of labor.” Negro and white labor leaders would eventually have to act, he concluded, to place blacks in all job levels.38
McKay’s persistent criticism of established black leadership did not go unnoticed in the black press. It made good reading and stirred controversy, which increased circulation. Among others, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., questioned McKay’s assessment of the current labor scene, and George Schuyler sniped at McKay’s emphasis on group solidarity. Without marshaling any contrary facts, Powell intimated in the Amsterdam News that McKay’s survey of the Harlem labor scene was inaccurate, and Schuyler accused McKay of “wallowing in the black fascist trough.”39
McKay’s presentation of his case for “group survival” in the Jewish Frontier and his comments on Harlem labor for the Nation had both been forceful and clear, but at the same time restrained, well organized, and free from personal attacks on anyone. He did not appreciate either Powell’s or Schuyler’s penchant for name calling. In his rejoinders to them in the Amsterdam News, he exhibited scant patience with either. Powell he dismissed as a “political acrobat,” an “opportunistic careerist,” and a “loose-thinking would-be intellectual” who did not even understand his Nation article.40
To answer Schuyler, McKay simply consulted the “Schuyler dossier” of newspaper columns over the years and found numerous instances where he had in the past advocated the very things McKay stood for in 1937. “Today,” McKay concluded, “he denounces his own brain child as black fascism. . . . Schuyler’s inept attempt to slander me merely discredits himself.” McKay closed by dismissing Schuyler and Powell together as the “Scribe” and the young “Pharisee,” neither of whom would ever understand him.41
He summarized his own position: “My faith in the cause of social justice and a new social order broadly based on the dignity and democracy of labor has never wavered. But my intellect is not limited to the social interpretation of Marx and Lenin. It. . . finds its roots in the logic of the Greeks who actually used their brains to think, who approached social theories and problems with open minds; and from them extracted the genuine and rejected the spurious.”42
From all this one should not conclude that McKay had no friends in Harlem or black America. In fact, he had many. James Weldon Johnson, for one, always respected McKay’s efforts and provided encouragement and support. McKay idolized Johnson, whom he saw as the Afro-American equivalent of someone like Max Eastman. Like Eastman, Johnson was a man of varied talents, real sophistication, and many accomplishments who recognized McKay’s genius and whom McKay in turn could accept as a kind of reassuring intellectual father figure, even though on some points he differed profoundly with him. After returning to the United States, McKay literally adopted Johnson as his father confessor, and the two men carried on a regular correspondence and often managed to see each other whenever Johnson was in New York City. Since his retirement as the executive secretary of the NAACP, Johnson had divided his time between Fisk University in Nashville, New York City, and various vacation spots in the Northeast. On June 26, 1938, he met an untimely death when a train struck his automobile at a railroad crossing in Wis-casset, Maine. His death shocked and grieved McKay and deprived him of the most prestigious supporter he had in black America.43
Others whom McKay saw frequently in the 1930s included Countee Cullen, James Ivy, Arthur Schomburg, Harold Jackman and his sister, Ivie, and Earl Brown, the editor of the New York Amsterdam News. McKay also knew almost all of Harlem’s young artists, including Bruce Nugent, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence. On the FWP, McKay was on friendly terms with Ted Poston, Henry Lee Moon, and Ellen Tarry, the young Catholic author, whose friends within the church would play a decisive role in McKay’s later years.44
Two men who joined the New York FWP around 1937 but with whom McKay never became friendly were Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Differences in ideology, age, and personality kept McKay from seeking their companionship. Wright was a member of the Communist party, and Ellison was his close friend. They could not see that McKay, an aging “spiritual truant” from earlier decades, had much to teach them, and he scornfully dismissed the possibility that any of the Communist party’s black minions on the FWP had any real talent.45
Ironically, McKay was much closer in spirit to young artists such as Bearden, Selma Burke, and Lawrence than he was to most of the apprentice writers of the 1930s. He was friendly with young Dorothy West and had contributed a poem to her magazine, Challenge, in 1936. But by the time A Long Way from Home was published, her quarterly had reappeared as the New Challenge, a decidedly Left-leaning literary journal that featured, among other things, Locke’s bitter review of McKay’s autobiography and Richard Wright’s “Blue Print for Negro Writing,” in which he discounted the achievements of the Negro Renaissance generation.46
Although McKay’s autobiography had been widely reviewed when it came out in 1937, it sold poorly. Shortly after its appearance, Lee Furman went out of business as an independent publisher.A Long Way from Home received very little promotion and soon disappeared from view. For the third time in five years, McKay had failed to make money on a soundly written book that a decade earlier might have brought him a handsome return. He still had, however, his FWP job. His articles also brought him a little additional money. And with one book achieved since his return, he felt his chances for a Guggenheim were better than they had been in 1934. In the fall of 1937, he again applied to the Guggenheim Foundation for a grant to write a novel of Harlem life. To Edwin Embree, he explained that no one had written a Harlem novel since Home to Harlem had been published in 1928, and he wished to write one “dealing with its numerous movements and different moods.” He added that he had “accumulated some interesting material,” and a grant would enable him to leave New York in order to write the novel in better perspective. He would be glad, he said, to give up his job with the FWP. “[Its] effect upon me,” he complained, “is utterly demoralizing, acting like a brake against spontaneous expression.” But he hastened to add that “this is no reflection on [the] WPA as a whole, which I regard as a great work and vastly beneficial, but my being on it as a writer works like a damper on my thinking.” McKay felt that it was “just possible” that he might get a Guggenheim with his second application, since “every creative writer of any significance” had been granted one, except him. He asked Embree to help him find a distinguished university professor who might recommend him. He knew none but understood academic recommendations carried great weight in deciding among candidates.47
Embree tried to help, but McKay again failed to win a Guggenheim. He had asked at least ten individuals, including James Weldon Johnson and Edwin Embree, for recommendations. The others were mostly journalists and writers who had favorably reviewed his books or whom he knew and admired. They included Edmund Wilson, Lewis Gannett, John R. Chamberlain, Charles S. Johnson, Horace Gregory, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Benjamin Brawley of Howard University. His chances may have been hurt by those less candid than Lewis Gannett, who frankly told McKay that he would include in his recommendation that A Long Way from Home had disappointed him but that he still believed McKay a good writer who could do better work.48
There had begun to grow among some critics, black and white, a setded conviction that McKay had, after all, never quite lived up to his potential, or at least what they judged to be his potential. As a result, the best McKay could do in 1937 was to get a small grant of two hundred dollars from the Authors’ Club of the Carnegie Fund. He continued with the FWP, where through most of 1937 he helped compile a series of short portraits of “famous or notorious Negroes who have lived more or less in New York.” After failing to secure a Guggenheim, McKay in 1938 abandoned, at least temporarily, his plans for a novel and decided to do a factual portrait of Harlem, using all the rich material he had found on his own and through the FWP Harlem project. With the aid of a literary agent, Carlisle Smith, he got a small advance from E. P. Dutton and Company and set to work with the diligence characteristic of him whenever money and a firm contract presented themselves. He remained busy throughout 1938 and 1939, checking in whenever necessary with the FWP, socializing with friends, researching and writing his new book, and contributing numerous articles to the New Leader, the American Mercury, Common Sense, Opportunity, and the Amsterdam News. From the end of April through May, 1939, McKay had a regular weekly column in the Amsterdam News. At the same time, the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., and the youthful Roy Wilkins of the NAACP also had columns in the paper, often on the same page as McKay’s. Appropriately, Powell called his column “The Soapbox”; Wilkins called his “The Watchtower”; and McKay tided his “Looking Forward.”49
Finally, in October, 1940, Harlem: Negro Metropolis appeared. At first, all seemed to go well. But trouble soon developed. Despite its adoption by the Book-of-the-Month Club as an alternate selection, it was neither as widely nor as favorably reviewed as A Long Way from Home. The comparative silence that greeted it in New York newspapers and journals particularly disturbed McKay. As usual, he had no money. He had counted on Harlem being a financial success, because sometime late in 1938 or in 1939 (the exact date is not clear), he had finally left the Federal Writers’ Project. Although still in existence in 1940, it had been drastically reduced in personnel. McKay had no chance for any more government relief. On November 10, 1940, he requested that Edwin Embree write Dutton “and if possible give [him] some points on circulation among colored people.” McKay explained that Harlem had been out “almost a month” and only the New York Herald Tribune had reviewed it. He feared “a kind of passive resistance against the book by New York reviewers.” He did not believe it was because his book was bad. If that were the case, he would have “already been belabored.” He feared instead a conspiracy of silence because of the book’s contents. “From private reports,” he wrote, “the opposition to the book comes from my detailed account of labor and Communist activities in Harlem . . . the last seven years. I could not honesdy write about Harlem without reporting such activities.”50
In Harlem: Negro Metropolis, McKay repeated and elaborated upon all the arguments he had previously made for a stronger emphasis by black leaders on community development and less emphasis upon integration as a panacea for black woes. In the process, he created a portrait of a desperately poor, crime-ridden, and demoralized community whose population, for lack of adequate leadership, constantly improvised religious, economic, and labor solutions that fell far short of coping with the actual problems. And in his last chapter, he charged that the Communist party’s disproportionate influence within Harlem over the last decade had only confused and misled many of the black intelligentsia into supporting the Soviet Union and its foreign policy instead of working single-mindedly on behalf of the Afro-American population.
The core of McKay’s concern in Harlem, as it had been since his return from North Africa in 1934, was his belief that the Afro-American’s real problem in the United States was one of group adjustment, not integration. The general elevation of their living standards would allow blacks to view themselves as just another minority among a nation of minorities instead of as a people unhappily “living under an eternal grievance.”51 In essence, McKay desired that all Afro-Americans find what he had sought for himself during his long exile abroad, namely, “the instinctive and animal and purely physical pride of a black person resolute in being himself and yet living a simple civilized life” like everyone else.52 Blacks in America could only achieve such freedom, McKay believed, through intensive and sustained community self-improvement. Why, McKay asked, did black neighborhoods inevitably turn into disease-ridden slums? In such communities, McKay explained, there was a lamentable “lack of community commerce among the residents” that was peculiar to blacks in the United States. WTiy? McKay blamed the lack of a fully developed community infrastructure not only on white America’s forced ghettoization of blacks but also on the Afro-American’s response to his condition. In effect, he wrote, “Negroes realize that they are segregated and . . . hate their community. . . . Thus in Negro communities there is a tacit evasion of direct social responsibility that is peculiar to them.” To counter this condition, McKay maintained,
The idea of the constructive development of Negro communities commercially, politically and culturally, should be actively prosecuted, in spite of intellectual opposition. The Negro minority has been compelled of necessity to create its own preachers, teachers, doctors and lawyers. If these were proportionately complemented by police officers, sheriffs and judges, principals of schools, landlords and businessmen, etc., the Negro community, instead of remaining un-American, would take on the social aspect of its white counterpart. Undoubtedly this would result in the easing of the tension of the race problem and Negroes would begin to regard themselves more as one other American minority.
As it was, McKay continued, the “overwhelming majority of blacks ... see the world divided as white humanity against colored humanity.” In such a world view, the responsibility for all black problems is simply shifted onto whites. “Most of their social difficulties,” McKay observed, “the setbacks in the struggle for existence, even congenital handicaps, are attributed to white malevolence. A perusal of the Negro Press attests this. It is a dismal, negative lamentation of prejudicial discriminations of the white world against the colored.” McKay maintained that the black common folk had a better intuitive understanding of their community needs than did the educated elite. “Even white-collar movements . . . were initiated by the common people,” he charged. “Unlike the Negro intelligentsia ineffectually fretting its soul away over a symbolic gesture, the inarticulate Negro masses realize that they have special community rights.” Not surprisingly, the strongest chapters in Harlem: Negro Metropolis were those in which McKay examined in detail the phenomenon of Father Divine and the grass-roots labor movements of Sufi Abdul Hamid and Ira Kemp. He also included chapters entitled “The Occultists,” “The Cultists,” “The Business of Numbers,” “The Business of Amusements,” and “Marcus Aurelius Garvey.” He had shorter chapters on the Harlem businessman and the Harlem politician, as well as descriptions and comparisons of the West Indians and Spanish in Harlem.53 By and large, however, as McKay explained to Mrs. Catherine Latimer of the Schomburg Library, “My book is mainly about the popular movements of Harlem and so there is not much space given to the academic and cultural features.”54
Harlem: Negro Metropolis was argumentative and frank in its anti-Communist bias, as well as in its attack upon conventional Negro leadership. At the same time, it was perceptive, engaging, thoughtful, and novel in its argument. It was a good book, and one that in many ways took up where A Long Way from Home left off. It clearly revealed that McKay had done an enormous amount of firsthand investigations of everything from Father Divine and his “Heavens” to obscure occult parlors in seedy tenements. His intimate acquaintance with all classes and minorities within Harlem, his careful study of the labor movement there, even his inside glimpses into Communist affairs, all were evidence of how completely he had researched his topics.
For all his understanding, McKay again failed to win much support within the black intellectual community. His analysis of the inner paralysis of black America was perceptive and largely true, but he failed to appreciate fully how thoroughly the problem of segregation versus integration had already been debated within the black community and how truly difficult it had been for black Americans ever to function as members of a normal community given the hostility of an overwhelmingly powerful white majority. He might have qualified his criticisms more if he had spent a lifetime, instead of just two or three months, in the high-pressure incubator of southern race relations. Then he might have been more ready to concede how truly monumental was the task faced by black leadership, whose people were trapped simultaneously by extreme discrimination, abject poverty, and limited educational resources. They were enclosed within a vicious circle where at least three elements—discrimination, poverty, and ignorance—fed upon and nourished one another. In all probability, no people similarly situated would have had the energy to concentrate upon more than one element of their imprisonment at a time. Once a single element of the triad fell, however, the way would be open for the destruction of the other two. Concentration on one of the elements did not mean abandoning the fight against the others. McKay argued with Booker T. Washington that the main attack should be on community poverty; the NAACP school of thought had chosen to concentrate on discrimination.55
In one way, Claude differed radically from both the NAACP and Washingtonian self-help schools. In discussing the problems of black Americans, he believed, as he had long ago told W. E. B. Du Bois, in the “utter absence of restraint.”56 There were no secrets within the black community too embarrassing to be discussed; McKay did not hold to the etiquette of American race relations. He did not believe in indirection, circumlocutions, or empty rhetoric. In public discussions of black problems, he did not speak one way to blacks and another way to whites. Even in 1940, therefore, his frank discussion of black problems and obsessions left some, including librarian Catherine Latimer, “almost” embarrassed.57 For instance, he admitted frankly that blacks in Harlem used huge amounts of Vaseline to help straighten their hair. And he talked frankly and truthfully about the problems interracial sex had caused among black Communists. Black male leaders tended to marry only white women, a situation fiercely resented by black women members of the party who did not see white Communist leaders rushing to marry them. In general, McKay wrote, blacks might argue for the right of racial intermarriage, but in fact they were as opposed to it as were whites.58 McKay’s candor might have gone largely unnoticed in the 1980s. In 1940, it was startling to many black readers.
Harlem contained in essence the core argument later presented by Harold Cruse in his Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, minus Cruse’s distortions of history, anti-Semitism, personal rancor, petty spite, extreme tediousness, and essential lack of humor. As McKay told Edwin Embree, his book “was a labor of love written from a deep desire to project the measure and manners, the mood and aspiration of the entire Community.”59
Predictably, not all in the black community recognized it as such. The journalist Ted Poston, whom McKay had counted as a friend on the FWP, condemned his arguments in two reviews for the New Republic and the New Leader. He considered McKay’s book a bitter indictment of Negro intellectual leadership. McKay, he maintained, failed to prove that the Negro masses desired segregation, which he accused McKay of favoring, whether voluntarily or enforced. He also said that contrary to McKay’s denials, the Sufi was anti-Semitic, and Ira Kemp, the organizer of the indigenous Harlem Labor Union, was a labor racketeer who extracted money from helpless merchants and from his rank and file.60
Roi Ottley in the New York Times Book Review repeated more emphatically the same charges. He said McKay emphasized the bizarre personalities of Harlem’s popular leaders but provided a weak analysis of their movements. He advocated “a fierce racialism” and supported uncritically both the growth of black businesses and independent black unions in Harlem, neither of which could get far in the new age of “corporate control.” McKay, Ottley concluded, was simply a sour “penitent from the radical movement,” who had “become one of Harlem’s most captious critics, allowing the deep undercurrents of Negro life and their broad social import to escape him.” His chosen subjects needed “serious treatment and analysis.” In short, Ottley concluded, “McKay did not approach his subject with the thoroughness that it deserves.”61
McKay got some good reviews from black reviewers, but they were not printed in important organs of opinion. For example, Zora Neale Hurston wrote in Common Ground that McKay
know[s] what he is talking about. He knows what is really happening among the folks. . . . What is more, he fixes a well-travelled eye on the situation and thus achieves proportion. . . .
The author has done an amazing thing. He has been absolutely frank. He had spoken out about those things Negroes utter only when they are breast to breast, but by tradition are forbidden to break a breath about when white ears are present. The book is as frank and open as twelve o’clock noon. For that reason it will not find favor among the large class of Negroes who plump for window-dressing for whites. Yet it is valuable to both races.62
Others also praised Harlem in personal letters, which McKay would have rather seen in print. A. Philip Randolph, whom McKay had praised extensively in his book for his herculean efforts in organizing the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (he even sympathized with Randolph’s recent efforts to lead the Communist-inspired National Negro Congress), wrote McKay a warm letter of endorsement. It arrived in April, 1941, seven months after his book appeared. Randolph informed McKay that he agreed with his analysis in all its essentials. “As I see it,” Randolph wrote, “the Negroes have a fight to wage for themselves, of themselves and by themselves.” He assured McKay that “your description of the Sufi movement and other currents in Negro Harlem is brilliant, penetrating and constructive.” Even before Harlem: Negro Metropolis appeared, Randolph had written McKay to praise him for his criticisms of the National Negro Congress and other Communist-front activities. As far as Randolph was concerned, McKay was “doing a most necessary and vital work... in helping to clarify these questions of ideological importance to the Negro.”63
Another friend, the socialist Benjamin Stolberg, thought McKay’s book “an important revaluation of American Negro life in its relation both to America and contemporary history.” He conceded that its effect on him had been profound. He had always thought “that there must be no ‘segregation’ of any kind. But you have persuaded me that the Negro had better not wait until Kingdom Come before he does anything for himself.” Stolberg also predicted that McKay’s latest effort would not sit well with the established leaders of opinion. “You may be sure,” he wrote, “that the intelligentsia of both races will ignore or knife your book. Partly, they are still scared of the Communist Party issue, whose fashionableness is dying slowly, and partly you have committed the moral sin of seeing through the Briefcase Brigade. That the Sufi, for all his absurdities, was closer to the masses than the Urban Leaguers or Mr. Walter White or Carl Van Vechten— that hurts. To deny that ideological fashion plates are leaders’— whatdyamean?”64
Despite such praise, Harlem: Negro Metropolis soon sank from sight. With its failure, McKay lost his last chance to reestablish himself as a popular and financially successful creative writer. He had since 1929 waged a valiant but losing fight for success. Time and the last energies of youth were now running out for him. He had less than a decade to live, and during that increasingly lonely time, his career, his accomplishments, and even his name went into an eclipse from which they have not yet fully emerged.
Essentially, McKay was advocating in the 1930s the development of “black power,” a general term that only gained wide currency in the late 1960s, after it became evident that the achievement of abstract legal victories in the area of civil rights would not by themselves materially improve the position of Negroes in the United States. By then both McKay and his ideas lay buried and well-nigh forgotten by the black communities he had wished to serve.65
As an opponent of communism, a critic of Negro middle-class leadership, and an uncompromising advocate of cultural pluralism, McKay found himself in the 1930s almost completely isolated from the main currents of American opinion. He nevertheless developed in this period a clear, lucid journalistic style, and in his articles, essays, and two books composed between 1934 and 1940, he achieved some of his best writing, in both style and content. The positions he took on the great public issues of the 1930s were always clear, disinterested, principled, and consistendy moderate. Privately, of course, it was a different matter. He had no patience with his critics, and when personally attacked, he returned barb for barb, often with devastating accuracy. Such quarrels did little to advance McKay’s position among black leaders. In fact, whether justified or not, his reputation as a temperamental iconoclast had become a trap from which he could not escape. Unfortunately, his image as an irascible personality obscured the essential moderation and the truth of his public positions through the 1930s.
Broadly speaking, McKay tried to maintain throughout the 1930s the independent, left-wing stance he had first adopted as a Liberator editor after World War I. In this regard his position resembled George Orwell’s in England.66 Unlike the younger Orwell, however, McKay’s greatest days as a creative writer were largely behind him by 1940. The failure of Harlem: Negro Metropolis left him bitter and more isolated than ever. He had failed to win the critical acceptance he needed either to make the book a success or to revitalize his career. He consequendy found himself at the age of fifty with no position, no money, and no prospects. He had eight more years to live.