Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik

In the summer of 1919, Claude McKay was working as a dining car waiter on the Pennsylvania Railroad, a dead-end service position exclusively reserved for Black men. The end of the Great War, he recalled in his autobiography, was "a signal for the outbreak of little wars between labor and capital and, like a plague breaking out in sore places, between colored folk and white" (A Long Way from Home: An Autobiography 1937; repr. New York: Harcourt Brace they "stuck together, some of us armed," because no one knew "what was going to happen." McKay, a poet (and later a novelist) as well as a service worker, put feelings to paper. It "exploded out of me," he said of "If We Must Die," his call to dignity and resistance in the face of racial violence (Long Way from Home, 31). Initially published in the left-wing monthly The Liberator, "If We Must Die" was widely republished in Black magazines and newspapers. While not entirely unknown to American readers before then, McKay now became a prominent symbol of the New Negro. As his latest biographer, Winston James, argues, his "militant response to the momentous events of 1919" brought him "into the limelight in America" (232). The Red Summer of 1919 "cleared up any lingering doubts McKay may have harbored about crossing the political Rubicon. . . . More than anything else, it made McKay into a revolutionary" (232). The poet and his poetry "shifted into a higher gear of radicalism," as McKay "no longer restrained and smothered his bursting anger and rage" (231).In Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik, James addresses what he believes is a "large lacuna" in previous McKay scholarship: detailed attention to McKay's political trajectory (2). By the end of the war, McKay had declared himself a revolutionary socialist, one who saw in the Bolshevik model a hope for the future. He was also receptive to the antisocialist nationalism of his fellow Jamaican activist, Marcus Garvey, whose Universal Negro Improvement Association was attracting considerable numbers of followers in New York and beyond. McKay's political thinking was "uncommonly sophisticated," James believes; in his work "we have one of the most intellectually rewarding, sustained, and engaging dialogues between the seemingly incompatible and competing ideologies of Black liberation—Black nationalism and socialism" (3–4). How and why McKay arrived at that position of attraction to both socialism and nationalism is what James seeks to explain in his exploration of McKay's life from 1889 to early 1921 in what he admits is "not a conventional 'political biography'" (7). His is a study that is "first and foremost, a work of interpretation, analysis, and explanation" that defies a "prefabricated genre" and instead highlights "contexts and processes" (7).James devotes considerable attention to recounting McKay's early years in Jamaica and reconstructing the political economy of the island of his birth. A British colony, the Jamaica of McKay's youth was undergoing dramatic economic changes and deepening economic inequality. His family's status was secure and above that of the majority of Jamaican peasants; his father was a small, religious, and respected landholder, and his older brother, U. Theo, a prominent teacher, freethinker, and then farmer whose influence on young Claude was more pronounced than some have previously recognized. While the mentorship and patronage of Walter Jekyll, "an English aristocrat, folklorist, and eccentric man of letters," was important, James argues that scholars have placed too much weight on it while underestimating his brother's contributions (9). Claude was already a published poet who pioneered dialect poetry to capture the rhythms and textures of Jamaica's urban and rural workers when he briefly joined the Jamaican constabulary, a painful experience that deepened his insight into the lives of Jamaica's poor, which he translated into more powerful poetry.Like many Jamaicans, McKay joined the migrant stream out of the island, arriving in the United States to study agriculture at Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Institute in 1912. That proved to be a brief and unhappy experience, and he continued his studies at Kansas State College in Manhattan before moving to that other Manhattan in New York. His efforts at operating a restaurant in Brooklyn failed, prompting him to pick up numerous unskilled positions that were available to Black men at the time. The vibrancy of Harlem, however, was an unmistakable attraction. "It was as if he were a blue-gilled, gasping fish thrown back into the water just in the nick of time after being stranded on dry land," James writes. "Harlem saved him" (210). McKay spent time at branches of the New York Public Library, indulging his "love of books [which remained undiminished by exile" (219). He also immersed himself in a radical intellectual milieu, becoming close friends with one of Harlem's most significant political intellectuals, Hubert Harrison, whose influence, James convincingly argues, was "profound." (217). If McKay "had entered the United States as a twenty-three-year-old Jamaican with Fabian socialist sympathies—gradualist, nonviolent, social democratic, reformist," James notes, seven years later "McKay, as he put it, 'became Bolshevik' and a publicly committed Black radical" (6).McKay's brief sojourn in London, James makes clear, was decisive in shaping the poet's politics. From the fall of 1919 to early January 1921, McKay lived in England, hoping to publish a book of poetry there. He ultimately did—but more important was his full immersion in British radicalism through his newfound friends at the International Socialist Club, his affiliation with Sylvia Pankhurst's Workers' Socialist Federation, and his employment on her journal, Workers' Dreadnaught, where he published poetry and effectively covered labor strife on London's docks. He furthered his self-education, spending hours in the British Museum studying Marx's Capital and acquainting himself "with the other socialist classics" and expanding "his knowledge of revolutionary currents and anti-imperialist struggles around the world" (316). By this point, McKay's admiration for the new Soviet Union was on full display; the Russian Revolution, he noted in 1921, was "the greatest event in the history of humanity" (1). Whatever his affection for Bolshevism, its white adherents in England, along with other liberals and leftists, disappointed him, as did England itself. White progressives at times readily engaged in racist propaganda, while others "remained muted, or, more often than not, fell in line" (306). His time in London he "described . . . as 'that most miserable of years'" and as an "ordeal" (327). One effect was that it "destroyed any residual notion he might have had about his Britishness" (314). The notion that Britain was the Mother Country that was instilled in him in his Jamaican youth was gone. "Just as the stark reality of United States' racism shocked him," James writes, "so was he taken aback by British racism despite an abstract knowledge of its existence before going to London. In the end, he felt more misled and cheated—conned, even—than disappointed" (328). Another effect was his conclusion that communism alone was insufficient; hence his verbal support of Garvey's nationalist movement. James concludes that for McKay, "there was no intrinsic contradiction between the two; the potential contradiction was obviated by his deep and abiding commitment to the Black working class" (312).Claude McKay: The Making of a Black Bolshevik ends with McKay's return to the United States, where he quickly joined the Workers' Party, the African Blood Brotherhood, and the Communist Party. In subsequent years, McKay had no shortage of critics. He was, James tells us, "the most controversial figure of the Harlem Renaissance, reviled and loved in equal measure but for different and incommensurate reasons" (4). That story, which includes McKay's subsequent rejection of communism, his embrace of nationalism, and his eventual conversion to Catholicism, awaits the sequel. But this volume, which covers "the crowded first thirty-two years" of McKay's life (5), provides a necessary context that renders plausible, even if it doesn't definitively explain, the evolution of the poet's politics. Readers who don't necessary share McKay's—or James's—politics can arrive at different readings of McKay's nonfiction oeuvre, just as other Black writers and activists living through McKay's troubled times arrived at different political orientations, some at odds with the Bolshevism (and nationalism) McKay adopted. What James sees as the "uncommonly sophisticated character of his political thinking" and his "exceptional analytical skill" might appear to others as pedestrian Marxist jargon of the high Bolshevik era or as a failed attempt to marry Marxism and nationalism (3). Appreciation of McKay's poetry and fiction doesn't require an equal appreciation of the variants of radicalism (or, later, anticommunism) he espoused or the arguments he advanced on their behalf.