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jeffrey b. ferguson

The Sage
of Sugar Hill
g e o r g e s . s c h u y l e r a n d the harlem
renaissance

yale university press new h a v e n & l o n d o n


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Dedicated to the memory of my father


Theodore Watson
who was

Copyright 2005 by Yale University.


All rights reserved.

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form
(beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except
by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Set in Scala and Scala Sans type by Duke & Company, Devon, Pennsylvania.
Printed in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data


Ferguson, Jerey B., 1964
The sage of Sugar Hill : George S. Schuyler and the Harlem Renaissance / Jerey B. Ferguson.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-300-10901-6 (alk. paper)
1. Schuyler, George Samuel, 1895 2. Harlem (New York, N.Y.)Intellectual life
20th century. 3. African AmericansIntellectual life20th century. 4. Novelists, American
20th centuryBiography. 5. ConservativesUnited StatesBiography. 6. Journalists
United StatesBiography. 7. African American journalistsBiography. 8. African American
novelistsBiography. 9. Harlem Renaissance. I. Title.
PS3537.C76Z66 2005
813.52dc22
2005005779

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee
on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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preface

f e w c o n c e p t s a p p e a r m o r e deserving of satirical treatment than


race. Yet very few American writers have devoted themselves to the
task. Mark Twain, Herman Melville, H. L. Mencken, and Sinclair Lewis
stand out on this account among white canonical authors. Among black
writers, from whom one might expect great enthusiasm for derisive ridi-
cule of racist thought, Wallace Thurman, Rudolph Fisher, Ralph Ellison,
Ishmael Reed, and Charles Johnson provide the best-known examples.
One might quibble a bit with this particular selection of authors, but add-
ing or subtracting a few would do little to alter the main point. For the
most part the American discourse on race has provided a stronghold for
sincerity, melodrama, sentimentalism, and deep seriousness, but it has
admitted the spirit of irony and humor only with the greatest discomfort
and trepidation.
For George S. Schuyler, who devoted a large portion of his career
as a black journalist and novelist from the early 1920s to the late 1970s
to a thoroughgoing satire of the race concept, this discomfort indicated
a telling weakness. In his view the facts of American race relations re-
duced to a dynamic of wholesale cultural and biological intermixture made
even more powerful in some ways by repression and denial. According
to Schuyler, this granted the ironist clear advantages of insight over the
moralist, who tended to ground his or her antiracist appeal in stale rules

vii
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v i i i p r e f a c e

and regulations that every racist enjoyed violating. Schuyler also rejected
the gradualist and the conformist, both of whom believed that blacks had
to become more like whites to demonstrate their qualication for the fruits
of American democracy. He believed that black and white Americans
shared the same fundamental values and the same cultural shortcomings.
Although he protested mightily against unjust racial practices, Schuyler
also challenged the protester, whose need to cast blacks as victims had
both utility and debilitating eects when taken to extremes.
Schuylers keen challenge to the moralist, the gradualist, the conform
ist, and the protestercombined with his fty-ve-year career as a promi-
nent black journalistwould in itself make him a good subject for a
critical book about American race relations. But his use of the satirical
mode as a means to this end really sets him apart among American intel-
lectuals in general and among black American intellectuals in particular.
Rather than simply advocate open intellectual, cultural, social, and biologi-
cal mixture of the races, Schuyler fashioned a satirical style that employed
racial transgression as an inherent feature of intellectual practice. His
social and cultural ideal, which conicted in every way with the sentimen-
tal dreams of those who desired uninterrupted harmony at the table of
interracial brotherhood, involved a confrontational and sometimes violent
process of interchange among individuals, groups, and the ideas that
they represented. In the process of advancing his turbulent and in many
ways contradictory alternative solution to the Negro problem, Schuyler
criticized, cajoled, and dismissed almost everyone in his erawhite and
black, conservative and radical, racist and antiracistwho had anything
of signicance to say about the race question. He did this mainly for the
black audience of the Pittsburgh Courier, whose assumptions about race he
challenged, almost always with a laugh, for four decades. This fact alone
speaks volumes concerning the diversity of discussion among blacks,
which our treatment of American intellectual history has only begun to
recognize. In his most becoming guise, Schuyler symbolizes this diversity
even as he challenges the liberal values that stand behind the celebration
of diversity for its own sake.
I rst encountered George Schuylers unique approach to the race
question in an introductory black literature course in the early 1980s. At
the time Schuylers raucous satire Black No More (1931)which told the
story of a treatment that allowed blacks to turn whitewas something
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preface ix

of an experimental choice. Although more than fty years had passed


since its publication, the brilliant absurdist humor of Schuylers satire still
seemed somewhat ahead of the pace of Black Studies, then a young and
embattled eld still more in need of heroes than iconoclasts. Also, Schuy
lers reputation as a prominent archconservative and anticommunist, es-
tablished during the second half of his career, from the late 1940s until
the 1970s, contributed further to his exclusion. In fact, for the few people
in the eld who knew about him, he seemed the closest approximation of
a black poster child for all the wrong causes. In this spirit the introduction
to the 1971 edition of Black No More that we used for class (written by
Charles R. Larson) sincerely discouraged the reader from contaminating
her mind with Schuylers caustic sacrilege.
In the context of the early 1980s, with most Black Studies professors
involved in one way or another with a long series of strugglesfrom
South African divestment to armative action to multiculturalism to
the civil rights backlash of the so-called Reagan Revolutionthe eld
had something of a circled wagons character, even as it struggled to
expand its theoretical, ideological, and substantive range. The prevailing
perception of threat, rooted in the fear that earlier gains might be lost,
made talk of loyalty and disloyalty so prominent in the eld that even as
a student I found it palpable. I also found such talk, and the battles that
formed around it, a bit confusing. A threatened and embattled area of
study required some loyalty, I thought, but I could not make up my mind
concerning what this meant. I also worried that excessive constraints on
intellectual freedom might render the study of black Americans static and
stale when thriving meant propagating in all directions, even in the ones
that appeared dangerous at the time. My reservations notwithstanding,
this last thought granted creative disloyalty a decidedly positive valence
in my emerging list of intellectual valuesand this made Black No More
a fantastically liberating and cathartic reading experience.
Among the several books I had read at the time from the Harlem
Renaissance, nothing came close to the irreverent force of Schuylers
satire. Unlike the authors of these other books, I thought, Schuyler could
genuinely laughand make me laughat the many ridiculous dilemmas
of race in America. While I had known something of this comic ability
to exist among ordinary blacks, I had never encountered it in a black
intellectual. Although I would not have articulated it this way then, I was
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in my own way reacting against the overwhelming weight of representa-


tiveness that made black thinkers adopt styles of self-representation that
would confer a kind of standardized dignity on the group. This impera-
tive severely narrowed the eld for independent forms of self-fashioning
among black thinkers. As an aspiring black intellectual, and as a college ju-
nior addicted to independence, I considered this a negative constraint that
did not bode well for my own hopes and dreams. Therefore the example
Schuyler oered as a black intellectual who had rejected the prevailing
mood of seriousness and sincerity among his peers struck me as some-
thing of a revelation. It seemed signicant not because Schuyler always
laughed at the ideas or people that I would have imagined myself laughing
at; indeed, I regarded some of his targets as mistakes. Still, the sheer fact
that he laughed, and did so with such consistency and self-possession,
made him a unique gure in my mind, one of those rare people who did
not sound or act like anyone else.
Years of subsequent research in graduate school and beyond have
added a great deal of detail to the basic picture of Schuyler that I formed
as an undergraduate, but the main theme remains essentially the same.
This book presents Schuyler as a centrally important twentieth-century
black intellectual and as an essentially liberating gure for his unique
application of satire to the race question. Although it does not shy away
from pointing out the satirists most amboyant moments of nearsighted-
ness, farsightedness, and outright blindness, the books central concern
remains the complex intellectual and political commitments that make
Schuyler irreducible to such one-word descriptions as socialist, conserva-
tive, amalgamationist, integrationist, or antiessentialist. In his eort to
fashion and project a unique black American identity, he took pleasure in
playfully pitting such typical categories against one another. At dierent
points in his career he embraced almost all of them, especially the ones
he found useful in disputing what he regarded as the narrow racially
motivated standard of his average reader.
In its fundamentals this book stands as an act of recovery. As such
it reveals many previously unknown facets of Schuylers life and works.
Still, it does not aspire to the work of a full biography. Instead, the volume
explores the most important strain in Schuylers thought and focuses
most heavily on the years in which that strain received the broadest and
deepest expression in his published works. In the following pages, read-
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preface xi

ers will nd ample commentary on the entire span of Schuylers career,


but the main trajectory of the book extends from his rst days as a writer
in the early 1920s to the publication of Black No More in 1931. These
years, which corresponded with creative explosions in American and black
American literature, set the mold for the rest of Schuylers career. Beyond
the concern of explaining Schuylers trajectory of personal development,
a focus on the 1920s also provides an opportunity to explore a larger set
of questions: What good can it possibly do to write satire about race? How
can irony, nay-saying, and fun-poking dismissal lead to a worthwhile racial
politics? Does satire oer an alternative to the predominant norms of the
race discourse? Can it have a healing eect in this context? Questions like
these force us to consider the broader range of tendencies that constitute
the American discourse on race at the same time that they compel close
attention to the specics of what Schuyler satirized and why.
As a whole, The Sage of Sugar Hill provides a detailed portrait of an
important black intellectual in a formative period of his development.
Yet, as it analyzes Schuylers intellectual mission in the 1920s, it remains
concerned with issues of contemporary relevance. In the postcivil rights
era we have become increasingly aware of the many complicated issues
that have made race in America much more than a simple matter of black
and white. Class, gender, globalism, and multiracial identities have all
exerted their complicating inuence in recent decades. Schuylers ironic,
open approach to the race question anticipates in many ways this new
historical circumstance, where the invention of multiple racial identities
has begun to supersede accounts of group distinctiveness based on narrow
assumptions of biological essence or static notions of tradition. Schuyler
struck an early blow for audacious independence on racial issues. This
book attempts to bring this challenge to the reader in a way that does the
satirists mission some justice. If I am successful, the reader may well
nd, to borrow from Ralph Ellisons protagonist in Invisible Man, that on
lower frequencies, George Schuyler does indeed speak for you!

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