Review | Circulating Jim Crow: The Saturday Evening Post and the War Against Black Modernity
Reviewed by Rachel Farebrother, Swansea University
At the time it was edited by George Horace Lorimer (1899-1936), the Saturday Evening Post became the most widely read magazine in the United States. Adam McKible’s indispensable study Circulating Jim Crow: The Saturday Evening Post and the War Against Black Modernity demonstrates that anti-Black racism was hardwired into the magazine, with Lorimer using the Post as a platform “to deny the full humanity of his fellow citizens rather than defend their rights and challenge inequality” (226).
Circulating Jim Crow documents various dimensions of the magazine’s commitment to defining U.S. identity in white supremacist terms, including discussion of how contributors such as F. Scott Fitzgerald tailored submissions to Lorimer’s racial preferences. However, the study’s most original contribution is its examination of the Post’s repurposing of traditions of racial impersonation and caricature embodied in minstrelsy. Regular publication of stereotypical dialect fiction helped normalize white supremacist ideology, making “the dehumanization of African Americans seem like nothing more than common sense and just good fun” (5). The writers who published such fiction—Irvin S. Cobb, Hugh Wiley, and Octavus Roy Cohen—are forgotten today, but they were household names in the early twentieth century.
McKible’s revelatory, impeccably researched reassessment of the Post brings much-needed attention to Lorimer’s systematic efforts to undermine Black modernity. The magazine’s presentation of Jim Crow ideology as “an organic phenomenon rather than as a consciously developed social structure predicated on inequality, dehumanization, and theft” was vigorously contested by contemporary Black American writers and readers of the day, but it has escaped serious critical attention until now (7).
Lorimer’s Post updated stereotyped Black dialect fiction for the modern era, boosting “the palatability of white supremacy by denying its inherent violence” (108). Identifying an unremitting strategy to “register and recontain” Black modernity, McKible demonstrates that dialect fiction in the Post recorded fundamental shifts in historical experience – including the Great Migration, Black Americans’ military service overseas, and such technologies as the airplane and the cinema – only to fold them back into familiar tropes from minstrelsy (7). In the 1910s, Cobb’s journalism and short stories established many elements that would become familiar in such fiction, including the Black veteran of overseas military service, the burgeoning Black film industry, and morally bankrupt Black leaders. For example, Cobb’s “Young Black Joe,” a widely reprinted 1918 article that galvanized him to concentrate on Black American modernity in his subsequent fiction, used humor to undercut Black veterans’ heroism and political consciousness. Hugh Wiley made caricatures of the Black doughboy a staple in stories that ran from 1919 until 1934 and featured Wildcat, a clownish veteran. Lorimer’s racist project took globalist form in Cohen’s series of stories, published between 1924 and 1930, featuring a globetrotting race film company, the Midnight Motion Picture Company. Cohen’s stories registered the modern Black diaspora’s cosmopolitanism and transnationalism but undermined such developments through travesty and caricature. It is no wonder that W.E.B. Du Bois singled out Cohen’s dehumanizing portraits of Black Americans as “monstrosities” in his 1926 essay “Criteria of Negro Art” (177).
If Circulating Jim Crow scrutinizes the magazine’s promulgation of derogatory stereotypes, it also explores a neglected context for understanding the New Negro movement. As McKible explains, Lorimer’s promotion of white supremacy “constitutes a significant context for the creative and critical energies of contemporary Black writers and activists, whose work directly and indirectly engages with and challenges the racist material the Post sold for a nickel a week” (6). McKible identifies many instances when New Negro writers critiqued Cohen and his ilk. For example, he interprets Edward Christopher Williams’s When Washington Was in Vogue (1925-26) as a direct challenge to Hugh Wiley’s caricatures of Black servicemen. In contrast to Wiley’s manipulation of stereotypes, Williams harnesses the epistolary novel so that Davy Carr, an urbane, heroic Black veteran, communicates directly with readers as a modern subject.
Beyond analysis of critiques of the Post by Harlem Renaissance luminaries, McKible offers a subtle examination of how New Negro expression was “shadowed” by Jim Crow ideology and popular fiction that threatened to obscure the realities of Black American lives and history (105). In this context, McKible spotlights aspects of canonical New Negro texts that have been hiding in plain sight. For example, the back cover of Alain Locke’s iconic “Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro” issue of Survey Graphic features an advertisement for R. Emmet Kennedy’s Black Cameos, a white-authored collection of sketches and reminiscences set in rural Louisiana that deployed Black dialect, complete with an illustration of a man rendered in the style of Uncle Remus. As McKible notes, even Locke’s announcement of the arrival of the New Negro was “shadowed by a commercial, mass-cultural reiteration of fungible caricature, the Old Negro” (105).
Imagery of shadows and borders also proliferates in a searching chapter on Cohen, which explores the alignment of his dialect stories in the Post with “Jim Crow’s tendency towards ever-greater spatial expansion” (162). Exploring Cohen’s fiction as one dimension of Jim Crow ideology that cast its shadow upon Black American writers, McKible traces the deployment of motifs of shadows and borders in early twentieth-century Black American writing to encapsulate both “the lived realities and representational strategies of segregation” and the encroachments of colonialism (162). He assembles an intriguing array of evidence from the long New Negro era, including three texts by Du Bois—The Souls of Black Folk, “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” and Darkwater—and Locke’s “The New Negro.”
Re-reading the long New Negro movement in relation to Lorimer’s circulation of Jim Crow illuminates the extraordinary achievements of Harlem Renaissance writers who eventually eclipsed Post authors like Cohen in the canon of U.S. literature. In some ways, Circulating Jim Crow tells a story of the triumph of modern Black American writing against the odds. The monograph provides comprehensive analysis of the Post’s proliferation of Jim Crow culture, including the understudied phenomenon of amateur minstrelsy (monologues in dialect published in the magazine furnished material for performances in private and public settings). But analysis of the Jim Crow culture machine is always balanced with accounts of Black American resistance. Take, as examples, McKible’s thoughtful analysis of Charles Chesnutt’s fictionalization of the Wilmington insurrection in The Marrow of Tradition or the compelling story of Swan Kendrick, a Post reader who mailed Cohen a copy of Mary Burrill’s Aftermath, an anti-lynching play featuring a Black veteran who is newly attuned to connections between colonialism and segregation, after receiving an inadequate response to his criticism of Cohen’s use of stereotyped dialect and racial slurs. For McKible, Langston Hughes’s famous declaration of artistic independence—“we build our temples for tomorrow” (qtd. in McKible 229)—encapsulates the tenacity of Harlem Renaissance writers who labored for an alternative future and cultural marketplace.
Ultimately, Circulating Jim Crow warns of the risks of a collective failure to grapple with cultural institutions that normalize white supremacy. Circulating Jim Crow includes no images from the Post because the current owners refused permission for reproductions in a monograph scrutinizing the magazine’s history of bolstering Jim Crow. McKible interprets their denial as an attempt to protect the magazine’s lucrative popular association with Rockwellian nostalgia. Such a retreat into nostalgia resonates with what McKible diagnoses as a wider refusal to face up to racism and xenophobia in the past and present. This arresting, clear-sighted study demands recognition of the Post’s trafficking in anti-Black racism. Building upon the insights of Grace Elizabeth Hale and James Smethurst, it provides a new perspective on early twentieth-century Jim Crow culture and its complex entanglement with the long New Negro movement. Circulating Jim Crow is a brilliant, original book, which formulates a supple theoretical framework for interpreting the “shadow” cast by white supremacist cultures remade for the modern era of consumerism, airplane travel, cinema, and mass circulation periodicals.