Circulating Jim Crow: The <i>Saturday Evening Post</i> and the War Against Black Modernity

In an often referred to chapter of A Moveable Feast (Scribner, 1964, 2009), Ernest Hemingway frames his initial conversations with F. Scott Fitzgerald about writing and publishing short fiction. According to Hemingway, Fitzgerald conceded that when he submitted short stories to the Saturday Evening Post, he “changed them [. . .] knowing exactly how they must make twists that made them into saleable magazine stories” (131). Hemingway relates being shocked by Fitzgerald’s declaration, claiming he shot back that altering one’s art in this way would be “whoreing” [sic] (131). Fitzgerald agreed, says the memoirist, but maintained he must make such changes to sell magazine fiction so that he would have “money ahead” to write “decent books,” insisting that adjusting the submissions did no harm to his serious fiction (131–32). Fitzgerald’s relationship with the Post was reciprocally supportive. The 1920s’ cultural trendsetter regarded the Post as his primary publication target, and the magazine would sustain the author’s reputation as America’s foremost cultural authority. However, though likely not deliberately shaped to participate in the magazine’s dissemination of white supremacist propaganda, in tailoring his stories to the publication, Fitzgerald’s stories conformed to Editor-in-Chief George Horace Lorimer’s racist portrayals by effortlessly reinforcing images of African Americans as recognizable minstrel types.Scholarship on US Black print culture has traced the rich “Jim Crow networks” African American intellectuals and artists employed1 while less attention has been paid to the other side of the dissemination divide: the mainstream and middlebrow print culture dedicated to propagandizing against the New Negro movement’s social, political, and artistic progress. Through meticulous, original research and brilliant analysis, Adam McKible’s trailblazing Circulating Jim Crow: The Saturday Evening Post and the War Against Black Modernity assesses the most influential mass readership periodical of the 1920s with respect to how Lorimer’s magazine consistently presented a racist representation of Black culture and identity. Circulating Jim Crow probes the efforts of such white supremacist cultural production in America’s most popular periodical, the stage for Norman Rockwell’s illustrations of a white America sanitized of racial oppression and struggle.To complicate the Post’s history, the magazine was, Circulating Jim Crow shows, a compound dialectical pastiche. McKible explores how writings by editor Lorimer’s most popular contributors, white supremacist propagandists Harris Dickson, Hugh Wiley, and Octavus Roy Cohen, appeared alongside the giants of progressive literary art, including Willa Cather, Theodore Dreiser, and Frank Norris. In the context of Lorimer’s A-team of hack writers profoundly manipulating white perceptions of Black life, works by literary authors who appeared in the Post, as the case of Fitzgerald shows, could not remain spotless. McKible refers to Fitzgerald’s “domestic minstrelsy” contributions to the magazine (95–99). Lorimer’s editorial aim was to erase authentic Black experience through repetitively depicting degrading Jim Crow characters. Circulating Jim Crow raises the question of how acutely such an influential project of erasure and cultural engineering lingers in the American imaginary.Circulating Jim Crow is equally interested in the question of how the Harlem Renaissance imagined a Black literary art composed in dissent against Lorimer’s mass influence. The Post’s racist campaign to dominate American print culture met with a tenacious resistance, as Black artists and intellectuals responded by waging a print countercultural crusade that played a key role in Black intellectuals envisaging the New Negro movement and Harlem Renaissance. McKible’s most groundbreaking contention may be how Black artists and intellectuals engaged directly with the Post, and that indeed the inspiration for the Harlem Renaissance may be read as a literary revolution against Lorimer’s no holds barred assault on Black modernity.Circulating Jim Crow’s organization and presentation of its exhaustive research and argument may serve as a starting point for a wide range of further scholarship, from work on print culture to a reassessment of the role of race in Lost Generation fiction and a reevaluation of the artistic stimulus for Harlem Renaissance writings. The introduction contextualizes the Post in the field of American periodical studies, and the ensuing chapters “are arranged in rough chronological order” (23). Chapter 1 examines the first two decades of Lorimer’s role as editor, “how his magazine became an increasingly firm advocate for Jim Crow ideology” (24).Chapter 2 delves into the virtually unknown Blanche Goodman, the magazine’s leading white female dialect fiction author, whose Post publications focused on “the domestic and public spaces of Jim Crow culture” (25), and then discusses Charles W. Chesnutt and Ann Petry’s responses to the prevalence of “in-home” minstrel performances (100–102). Chapter 2 also considers the question of how Black writers anticipated the white supremacist exploitation of humor and comedy as a means of manufactured consent even before Lorimer took charge of the Post’s editorial objectives. Where Chesnutt’s turn-of-the-century dialect writing gives the illusion of abiding by the rules of caricature, the Black Cleveland author’s fiction undermined the application of humor as a way to serve white hegemony. As McKible discusses, “The Passing of Grandison” (1899) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901) stage elaborate performances of a willing Black docility to white authority with the humorous disclosure that the Black characters have been staging obedience. Through Chesnutt’s command over the discourses of humor, these fictions reveal to their reader how a text written by a Black author may pass for minstrelsy (100–101). Chesnutt understood that deploying the ideology of humor could be a powerful weapon against supremacist representations of Black identity.Chapters 3 through 5, the core of the study, explore how the Post shifted vividly toward a more toxic ideological assault on African American progress, discussing the encouragement and popularity of writings by the most dedicated supremacist authors, Cohen, Cobb, and Wiley. Chapter 6 considers Lorimer’s final years as editor when the Post began publishing somewhat less noxious minstrel narratives—a sign of the pressure brought about by the rise of the New Negro movement and Harlem Renaissance.Circulating Jim Crow plunges deeply into the racist doctrine that lived at the heart of the beloved mainstream magazine, exposing Lorimer’s commitment to wield the weekly as a weapon against Black struggle. McKible explores how Lorimer’s objective was to define and thereby mold the discourses of racial hegemony by inserting its oppressive ideology into the very act of casual, shared reading. Circulating Jim Crow divulges how the Post’s relentless war on Black progress took place not in the political arena but in the trenches of the literate imagination, the place where discourses and thereby consciousness is formed. Not long into Lorimer’s sway over the Post—a period that lasted from 1899, when Lorimer’s name first appeared as editor on the masthead, until 1936, one year before his death—the editor sought out and fostered white authors like Harris Dickson, a Mississippi municipal judge and prose writer, who was urged to grind out Black dialect minstrel fiction aimed at undermining the evolution of African American modernity. The “narrow and dehumanizing confines of plantation fiction and the conventions of caricature and minstrelsy,” in other words, did not mythically, historically, and naturally materialize (70). The emergence of an oppressive, racist imaginary was a calculated act of cultural warfare.Lorimer’s encouragement of the white writer Irvin S. Cobb in the 1920s shows, as Black struggle progressed, how cunning the magazine’s project became. Rather than continuing with the formula of presenting African Americans as utterly immoral and disloyal, Cobb’s writing disseminated the image of a kind of Uncle Tom that spoke against the rising tide of Black agency, mapping out a past that never existed in order to invent a present that bypassed Black modernity: “Cobb’s work [. . .] reinforced the palatability of white supremacy by denying its inherent violence, [attempting] to elevate and enshrine the figure of the Old Negro as a rearguard action against the rise of the New Negro,” thereby launching “a nostalgic reclamation of supposed antebellum race relations” (108).The publication of Alain Locke’s “Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro,” the historic Survey Graphic March 1, 1925, special number, apparently had a momentous impact on Lorimer. Circulating Jim Crow examines regular contributor Chester T. Crowell’s “The World’s Largest Negro City,” appearing in the Post’s August 8, 1925, issue. McKible blows the whistle on Crowell’s transparent plagiarism of Locke’s Survey Graphic issue. Even with the theft of intellectual property, however, “For the first time in decades, a Post article reported on African American modernity without scorn, humor, or caricature” (185). Picking up on Locke’s assessment that the New Negro was “a ‘forced radical,’ a social protestant rather than a genuine radical,” Crowell stated, “Harlem is utterly baffling to foreign radical propagandists in New York,” posing that despite the conceded deprivation African Americans faced, Harlemites remained “intensely patriotic” (188). Although Black periodicals like the Pittsburgh Courier praised Crowell’s article, the piece nevertheless did not “herald a sea change” for the Post, with Harlem continuing “to be a target of their mockery” (189).McKible proposes an invaluable insight into the complex disposition of Chesnutt contemporary Paul Laurence Dunbar’s writings in the Saturday Evening Post. Lorimer published more than forty pieces of Dunbar’s fiction, poetry, and journalism, some of which was “occasionally subversive, [. . .] while also often capitulating to Lorimer’s appetite for demeaning caricatures” (44). Although the rendering of Black Southern speech and some of the content of Dunbar’s vernacular poetry are problematic, Dunbar’s language poetry often portrayed its African American characters as affectionate and loyal to family and community (43). Though Dunbar was a Lorimer favorite, the editor worked hard to erase such loving, human portrayals, displacing them with a multitude of white authored fictions populated with devious Black characters who were devoted to their masters.Circulating Jim Crow should serve as a beginning for fresh inquiries into the Harlem Renaissance and Black writing of the interwar period, including the prevalent theme of how the Great War affected New Negro literary arts. How might well-known New Negro texts be reread as challenges to Lorimer’s white supremacist editorial policy? McKible’s list of Harlem Renaissance novels that depict Black soldiers and veterans demonstrates how deeply the Post’s war period imagery cut during the interwar period: Jessie Fauset’s There Is Confusion (1924), Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint (1924), Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), Nella Larsen’s Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), Langston Hughes’s Not Without Laughter (1930), and Zora Neale Hurston’s Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), “and this roster is by no means complete and does not account for the short stories, nonfiction, and poetry that also address the topic” (141).In “A Note on Permissions and Nostalgia,” the final word of the introduction, McKible imparts why Circulating Jim Crow includes no images. McKible’s request for permission to use images from the Saturday Evening Post was categorically rejected. The present Post publishers “are invested” in the profitability of the former weekly’s “nostalgic image,” which means that the current incarnation of the periodical, published six times year, “rarely, if ever, acknowledges the magazine’s long history of promulgating racist ideologies and xenophobic legislation or its complicity in propping up the American segregationist regime” (31). McKible traces the periodical’s refusal to own its past to the Saturday Evening Post Society’s wish to safeguard its “Rockwellian” aura (31). By way of exploring this question in the context of twenty-first century America, McKible offers a perceptive discussion of the Clarence Thomas-Harlan Crow scandal. The Supreme Court Justice’s fascination with the right-wing billionaire’s collection of Nazi memorabilia and Norman Rockwell images is the “link between political violence and the yearning for a mythically simpler and more homogeneous past,” embodying the hurdle that nostalgia places in the way of facing up to the Jim Crow past (32). “Perhaps the current owners of the Post will someday come to a full reckoning of the magazine’s past, warts and all, but that time is apparently not yet here” (32). The same may be wished for present-day America.