Most of the studies of the Harlem Renaissance, or of the individual artists and writers associated with it, suffer from a form of historical amnesia: they rarely discuss the political climate of this period outside the context of "the race problem," they rarely engage the political nature of the art produced, and they often ignore the influence of radical ideologies such as socialism and communism on the artists and writers associated with the period. The accepted "definitive" study, Nathan Huggin’s Harlem Renaissance (1971), was guilty of such oversight, immersed as it was in an exploration of the aesthetic principles behind the art of the Renaissance. Considering the publication date and its position as standard bearer for such examinations, this is perhaps not surprising. It is somewhat more surprising to find this same tendency in recent studies, such as Victor Kramer’s The Harlem Renaissance Re-examined (1987) or Cary Wintz’s Black Culture and the Harlem Renaissance (1988), since these books appeared in a more politically charged academic climate, one that has increasingly emphasized multiculturalism, postcolonialism, and a renewed interest in the role of Marxist ideology in American radical movements. The body of material produced by African Americans during the Harlem Renaissance, especially its more radical manifestations, has been largely ignored as well by recent studies of leftism, radical and proletariat literatures, and intellectual communities centered in New York City. For example, in his study of the history of literary radicalism in America, Writers and Partisans, James Gilbert repeatedly employs the term "renaissance," which he defines at one point as "a cultural wing of a political revolution" (80). According to Gilbert, one of the goals of the proletarian arts movement in the United States was the coming of an "American renaissance," of a rebirth in art and literature expressive of the new society that would be created in the wake of socialist revolution. I find it peculiar that with the continual invocation of the word "renaissance" Gilbert never once addresses that which is most closely associated with the term in both literary circles and a significant portion of the period under examination in his book, namely the Harlem Renaissance.

One must question then why this significant body of work is being overlooked. In his essay on African Americans and the New York Intellectuals, Harvey Teres asks: "Was the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s not worthy of the attention of critics in the 1930s and after?" (209). I believe most scholars of the period would argue that it certainly was worthy; the salient point is that the Harlem radicals did not receive the attention they deserved. This lack of attention is attributable to numerous factors, which I intend to elaborate here. To do so, I want to turn a critical eye specifically upon the achievements of African Americans in the literary and political magazines and journals of the 1920s and 1930s. I believe that Robert Bone is correct in asserting that the dominant tendencies of an era are to be found in its little magazines. The received explanation for the rapid rise and equally rapid demise of the Harlem Renaissance is that the dominant aesthetic impulse of the twenties clashed with the dominant political impulse of the thirties. But the polarity is not nearly as rigid as history has led us to believe. African American artists and intellectuals were not living in a vacuum at the time: as the large body of both literary and social criticism attests, they were well aware of current events, and they struggled to express African American culture in legitimized ways while simultaneously dealing with the movements for socialism and communism, which appeared to offer viable solutions to the problems facing African Americans.

In his discussion of the intellectual work of the 1920s and 1930s, Harold Cruse argues that "any radical Negro writers or poets of the time who had anything to say had as media either the Daily Worker or New Masses" (149). This is not an inaccurate statement. Nevertheless, there was little opportunity for black radicals to speak out about African American life and culture in these Party sponsored publications because such actions might have raised the specter of Garvey and black nationalism, which went against the class-based Party line. However, the little magazines that repeatedly sprang up in the 1920s provided avenues for black writers to publish outside of Party ties. Since the time of Cruse’s study, there has been increased interest in black radical writing and the little magazines that provided an avenue for this. As Abby and Ronald Johnson point out in their invaluable study Propaganda and Aesthetics, although many of the little magazines did not often contain as much in the way of overt politics as did the Party sponsored magazines, they provided an important forum for independent perspectives on African American politics and culture. By closely examining the little magazines of the 20s and 30s, by viewing the achievements of African American intellectuals in the black publications against the backdrop of those of the (white) political and literary mainstream, we can thus help to illuminate the legacy of the leftism of the Harlem Renaissance.

The term "The New Negro" was brought into widespread use with the publication of Alain Locke's groundbreaking anthology The New Negro (1925). However, Locke did not coin the term, as is commonly believed. Gerald Early notes that the ideological concept of the New Negro, or the "racially conscious Negro," predates Locke's use and was in circulation in the two decades prior to the 20s. Numerous factors contributed to the concept; among the most important of these: the large-scale movement of the black population from a rural to an urban setting and lifestyle after 1900; the first World War and African Americans' contributions to it; the death of Booker T. Washington in 1915; the emergence of Marcus Garvey and the popularity of black nationalism by 1918; and the rapid development of jazz and blues music, which had a significant impact on American popular music in the so-called Jazz Age (Early 31). Actually, the literary and aesthetic intentions of the New Negro, which were to become the foundation of the Harlem Renaissance, were anticipated and articulated by James Weldon Johnson in his 1922 anthology The Book of American Negro Poetry. Johnson writes:

Such an idea very much in line with the philosophy of the renowned and influential W.E.B. DuBois. DuBois considered art to be a vehicle for enunciating and effecting social, political and economic ideas (Turner 11). The assumption of intellectuals such as DuBois was that a doubting and skeptical world had to be shown evidence of African Americans’ abilities, especially in the arts. This propagandistic notion was actively promoted through Harlem’s major magazines, most especially The Crisis, the official organ of the NAACP, established in 1910, and then in Opportunity, the official organ of the National Urban League, established in 1923. But the program outlined by DuBois for using art to effect social change was most fully articulated by Alain Locke in The New Negro (1925), a collection of essays, short stories, and poems which attempted to define the cultural changes then taking place. The aim of this work was to document the New Negro both socially and culturally. To do so, Locke included a representative survey of the work of young writers and numerous articles evaluating them, optimistically predicting a new era of black literary creativity. In the title essay, Locke declared that the stock-figure Old Negro would no longer suffice. A newly urban life and a reemergence of a folk heritage had assisted in breaking the image of a modest and unassuming "boy." And from this life the New Negro had developed enough self-respect and self-dependence to be assertive and seek a long-denied equality. The task of the New Negro with this aim was to discover and define his culture, and one method of doing so was through the arts.

However, many of Harlem's reformers were cultural elitists who paradoxically aspired to a high (white) culture, not that of the common (black) man. One of the difficulties was that Alain Locke, who wished to be the herald of the New Negro movement, had one foot on either side of the generation gap. In the end, The New Negro only gives lip service to the ideal of "pure art," offers little overt political commentary, and echoes the propagandistic tradition. In his otherwise favorable review of the book, DuBois noted this last aspect: "Mr. Locke has newly been seized with the idea that Beauty rather than Propaganda should be the object of Negro literature and art. His book proves the falseness of this thesis. This is a book filled and bursting with propaganda" (The Crisis 31 Jan 1926, 141). But this is not a pejorative statement, for such a situation is admittedly precarious. One could argue that in an age when lynchings were frequent events, the race could not afford to have artists subordinate the social conscience; yet one can also see why many Harlem Renaissance artists felt uncomfortable with this "responsibility" and believed that racial appeals would only compromise their art (Hemenway 42).

What the artists of the Harlem Renaissance wished to indicate is that their culture, African American culture, was unique and valuable. The ideas behind the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro movement thus "represented some independent spirit, some politicized sense of selfhood, some notion of self-determination" (Early 32). We therefore find during the Renaissance an unprecedented achievement in music, painting, poetry, and prose. Much of the latter had its source in the Harlem intellectuals who were interested in political issues and moral reform, struggling to make prominent "the race issue" in the belief that good would triumph when evil was exposed. During the 1920s, in the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, there was more material published by African Americans than at any time prior in American history, an achievement that would not be equaled until the Black Arts movement of the 1960s (Singh 33).

But in the period directly following this heyday, that is, during the Great Depression of the 1930s, there was a falling off of African American representation in the literary and political magazines and journals of the decade. Numerous factors contributed to the demise of black venues for publishing. Foremost among these was perhaps economics. As Nathan Huggins argues, the Great Depression had much to do with putting an abrupt end to the Renaissance: the repeal of prohibition deprived Harlem of some of its appeal--for it had been both exotic and illicit--and many of the artists of the self-conscious black culture found themselves struggling for relevancy at a time when survival was a notable achievement (190). Additionally, in the 1920s, writers in Harlem were necessarily dependent upon white patronage and had extremely limited force within the publishing and critical establishments. With the onset of the Depression, there was little support for the small magazines, from either patrons or subscribers. Thus, many would begin only to fold a short time later (Huggins 128). But the most significant contributor, I think, was the specific political agenda of the 1930s, which called with increasing stridence for a worker’s revolution and a Communist state. The Great Depression made the economic crises of the age painfully clear, and when writers and intellectuals began to more rigorously engage with Marxist analyses of class structure and Communist ideology, race became a less pronounced issue. According to Harold Cruse, the open-minded inquiry into the Negro question "went out of the Communist Party very quickly"; by 1929, "an unyielding narrow-minded rigidity permeated the Party's thoughts on all questions," and this, Cruse argues, led inexorable to the period of Jewish dominance in the Communist party (147). Cruse may well be overstating the degree of rigidity, but there is no denying that the younger group of Jewish intellectuals took command of the party organs (i.e., The Daily Worker, New Masses, and The Communist) and largely assumed the role of spokesmen for Negro affairs in the 1930s.

As noted, the dominant tendency of the 1930s was one of social and political reform. But the reformism of the Harlem Renaissance artists and writers was perhaps never more than implicit in their art. In large part, they were calling more for an understanding of their culture in order to efface racism than for direct political action. As Ann Douglas states it, "Harlem's New Negroes employed a strategy of self-empowerment through cultural ascendancy rather than direct economic or political protest" (8). This is not to say, however, that those associated with the Harlem Renaissance were apolitical. Art and politics are inextricably linked. Indeed, much of the art produced under the pretense of aesthetics--i.e., in the tradition of "art for art's sake," an early mantra of the New Negro movement--was highly politicized, actively engaging a proletarian style of literature long before that angle was programmatically promoted, notably by Mike Gold and other advocates of the Communist experiment. But this politicized material continually struggled to find outlets. Publications such as The Crisis, and to some degree even Opportunity, were designed by and for an elder generation of black intellectuals. For the "New Negro," who had recently rejected both assimilation and subservience, and who wished to emphasize the distinction of his African heritage or more radical political ideologies, there was still no forum.

With the onset of World War I, it was easy for The Messenger to criticize the conservative black intellectuals who upheld the "accommodationist" legacy of Booker T. Washington. It was somewhat harder for this group to criticize DuBois, by then the foremost black intellectual, and the man whose active protest consciousness had had great influence on the Harlem radicals. Nevertheless, critique him they did. What precipitated this was an editorial DuBois published in The Crisis in 1918 calling on blacks to "forget our special grievances and close our ranks" with whites in fighting for democracy (Anderson 100). The response from The Messenger was harsh; the radicals surrounding the magazine were shocked at the desire of the majority of blacks to support and participate in the war, especially while acknowledging the irony of fighting abroad for freedoms denied them at home. At a time when it was dangerous to take such stances, The Messenger adopted an anti-war Socialist stance. Shortly after DuBois' call for black support of the war and Randolph and Owens’ anti-war diatribes, Eugene Debs was arrested for giving a speech then deemed insurrectionist under the Espionage Act. At The Crisis DuBois began rejecting poetry and articles that might be considered "disloyal" by the government, specifically the Justice Department, which at the time had its eye closely on the activities of Harlem's radicals and the black press. Needless to say, Randolph and Owens were incensed: cultural criticism in The Crisis had always revolved around a political and social indictment of white America, and this is in many ways what they modeled their own magazine after. Now, however, they viewed the conservative strategies of DuBois as no better than the accommodationist ones of Washington. Thus The Messenger readily picked up and published most of the work rejected by The Crisis, confrontationally daring the powers that be, in both the black and the white establishment.

Initially, it was mostly Socialists and economic radicals who made up the New Negro Harlem radicals (Anderson 87). But they were an inconstant group due largely to the shifting political attitudes and allegiances surrounding the formation of the Communist Party in America. By 1921, the American Socialist Party was fractured, its revolutionary left wing breaking away to join the newly formed American Communist Party. These divisions were reflected in the relationships of the Harlem radicals, many of whom became bitter enemies in a short period of time. Largely as a result of this, The Messenger lost focus and direction in the early twenties. Of the group of intellectuals surrounding The Messenger, Wallace Thurman was perhaps the least interested in overt radical politics and socialism. Thurman, who held sway at the magazine for a few months in 1926, moved the magazine at this time into what Johnson and Johnson call its "third phase," which emphasized literature and art. But the effort was short lived: Thurman, anticipating the kind of work that would later define the Harlem Renaissance, wanted a radical magazine dedicated to art and literature not politics, labor unions, and socialist revolution. However, The Messenger’s forte had always been politics, not literature--although it did improve its quality in this regard by publishing some of the earliest works of Hughes, McKay, Wallace and Thurman. In short, The Messenger matched both The Crisis and Opportunity in quantity but not quality of literature in the 1920s because it remained focused on politics (Johnson and Johnson 60).

Theodore Kornweibel argues that The Messenger was never fully committed to the Harlem Renaissance and lacked a coherent editorial attitude toward the movement (107). True, it had little to do with aesthetic agenda promoted during the Harlem Renaissance, but The Messenger did present a united front on the issue of national identity. The magazine's specifically socialist agenda promoted "Americanness," taking an iconoclastic approach to the race problem and constantly stressing the "mulatto" character of the United States (Hutchinson [1994] 532). However, this definition of American as a mixture of black and white worked largely in opposition to the idea that African American culture was distinctly different. It therefore put many of those associated with The Messenger at odds with those Renaissance artists then advocating the development of a black aesthetic. This disparity, and the lack of involvement with the Harlem Renaissance, was most pronounced after George Schuyler joined The Messenger staff in 1922. Until that time, the magazine criticized DuBois and The Crisis for overemphasizing "culture" and propagandizing art. Schuyler attacked notions of distinct black culture, and any suggestion of cultural differences between black and white. Most particularly, he saw the equation of African with African American as racist exoticism, a view that set him apart from the majority of the Harlem Renaissance writers. For Schuyler, such exoticism only pandered to desires for primitivism and amounted to a "submission to the racialist absurdities of white supremacy" (Hutchinson [1994] 532).

Jervis Anderson argues that The Messenger succeeded at none of its radical and often admirable aims (83). This failure is partially attributable to Schuyler's reluctance to embrace the bohemian impulse behind the Harlem Renaissance. But economics also had much to do with the struggle of The Messenger, and with its ultimate demise. As Anderson notes, The Messenger was always in debt, seldom able to meet its rent on time and unable to appear at all some months, having to await the return of its coeditors from fund raising lecture tours (85). In addition, it became apparent that The Messenger did not reach its intended audience and was not read widely by those outside the middle class. Randolph himself would later confess that the magazine "went over the heads of the masses of people" (Anderson 145). The magazine circulated chiefly among white liberals and radicals, as opposed to the black masses. Indeed, some of the finest assessments of the magazine came from the white left. The Call, the publication of the Socialist Party, praised it highly, as did The Nation. Nevertheless, the magazine did not create the class consciousness it actively promoted to fight oppression nor the union of black and white laborers that would result in the workers’ revolution. The Socialist Party failed to engage the serious concerns of the black community. Its founders failed, for example, to sell blacks on the viability of the IWW, which they believed was the only labor organization in the United States that did not discriminate on the basis of race or color (Anderson 95). While it stood behind the notions of union solidarity for all workers, it failed to devote special attention to the racism which kept blacks at bay. Anderson succinctly states: "The Messenger's fate was a result of the failure of Socialism to catch on in Harlem" (139). This seems accurate when considering that the overt politics of the Harlem radicals was not nearly so evident in the later part of the 1920s. However, as I indicated in more detail above, it is a gross generalization to claim the era as depoliticized. The magazine limped on until 1928, but for the last few years of its life it was nearly a farce; its radical edge withered away and it became a broken relic of what had been. In The Big Sea, Langston Hughes would describe The Messenger of that period as nothing more than "a Negro society magazine and a plugger for Negro business, with photographs of prominent colored ladies and their nice homes" (233). Thus it was The Messenger occupied a valuable yet secondary position in the black cultural renaissance.

Another "independent radical magazine" to appear on the scene was the Modern Quarterly, launched by V.F. Calverton in 1923. Though white, Calverton was interested in African American life and dedicated to publishing radical writings that dealt specifically with issues relevant to blacks. Throughout his career, Calverton wrote, debated, and lectured frequently on the topic of the New Negro. He contributed to nearly every issue and kept the magazine alive when it seemed near dead (Genizi 247). Calverton celebrated black culture, having an especial fondness for the spirituals, jazz and blues music, and folk art. To the contemporary eye, this smacks of the type of "primitivism" denounced by Schuyler, and indeed Calverton had much to say about the "genuine" characteristics of Negro art. But his intentions were sincere. Without apology or censorship, Calverton opened the editorial pages of the Modern Quarterly to the black intellectuals and encouraged younger black artists and scholars to publish (Hutchinson [1995] 78). Between 1925 and 1929, at the true height of Renaissance achievement, Modern Quarterly was a forum for the thoughts of DuBois, Alain Locke, and E. Franklin Frazier among others. It was also a forum for the voices of many prominent Harlem Renaissance writers, especially those who engaged, however sporadically, in proletarian literature, e.g., Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Rudolph Fisher. By providing room for exposition of thought, he supplied the black intelligentsia, and especially the leftist literati, a powerful and influential forum, one that was significantly lacking in the white press and Communist Party publications.

According to Genizi, Calverton was an avowed Marxist, although he never joined the Communist Party. Calverton was close to the Communists during the 1920s, but he rejected the European Marxism dominant then and thus broke with the Communist Party over the effort to evolve an American socialism. Calverton was particularly dissatisfied with the Party line of the issue of race. He did not like the "segregationist" policy of seeing blacks as a subjugated nation within the US with rights to separation and self-determination. He felt this would undermine the workers struggle, alienating black and white, and thereby further exacerbate racial tensions (Genizi 246). At bottom, Calverton had an overriding belief in the Socialist agenda. He felt that class consciousness would replace race consciousness, and therefore often called for unity among black and white. He thus became excluded from Communist circles at a time when most American intellectuals were leaning left. Due to this, Calverton did not play a significant role in the 1930s as a radical intellectual; despite his contacts, Calverton did not become part of the core of what came to be known as the New York Intellectuals, although he did continue to stress that the social and racial prejudice against both Jews and blacks needed fighting (Genizi 242). Calverton was also dissatisfied with DuBois and others of the elder generation of black leaders because, as he saw it, they promoted a genteel literary tradition. Moreover, Calverton felt that DuBois and his peers operated within the framework of capitalism. As a good radical, Calverton argued for an open attack on this economic system, and was thus aligned with other radicals in the "class warfare" mentality as a way to end racial oppression (Genizi 244). In short, as regards both art and politics, Calverton thought DuBois was simply not radical enough.

For DuBois, the issue of race became an increasing problem in the 1920s as the Harlem Renaissance began to take shape. Although DuBois first urged black writers to represent life as they saw it, he later worried that these writers were over-emphasizing "lurid" aspects of black life, as evidenced, DuBois thought, by material published in Modern Quarterly. Thus, to promote a more balanced perspective, DuBois encouraged more conservative portraits of black life. As editor of The Crisis, DuBois had been working for many years to promote literary activity among blacks and to foster racial pride through literature. However, there was a great deal of ambivalence in DuBois' stance: on the one hand, he called for an "honest" art that would acknowledge the baser aspects of black life and the characters who inhabit the "underworld," but he was concerned that black artists would play into the hands of the white masses who expected black folk to be "bizarre and unusal and funny" (Turner 13). DuBois' comments in The Crisis during the flowering of the Renaissance are telling of his ambivalence. In an editorial in May of 1925, DuBois argued that "we are seriously crippling Negro art and literature by refusing to contemplate any but handsome heroes, unblemished heroines and flawless defenders" but then in the same breath called for an emphasis on "Beauty" and "high artistic merit" (The Crisis 30 May 1925, 9). Again, in 1926, likely in response to Locke's The New Negro and the works of some of the more prominent Renaissance writers, DuBois writes: "In The Crisis, at least you do not have to confine your writings to portrayals of beggars, scoundrels and prostitutes; you can write about ordinary decent colored people if you want. On the other hand, do not fear the Truth ... If you want to paint Crime and Destitution and Evil paint it" (The Crisis 31 Jan 1926, 115). As Darwin Turner sees it, DuBois' ambivalence stems from the fact that he could "identify the substance of that art but not the spirit" (16). It was a sort of primitivism associated with slavery that he disliked most: "Whenever the spirit manifested itself in an exuberance which offended his temperament, DuBois, wincing, felt compelled to excuse or denounce the work" (16). DuBois did not believe "wildness" to be characteristic of black life and believed instead that it was evidence of the way in which slavery had distorted or repressed the psychological development of blacks. He also thought these descriptions were opportunistic, attention-getting devices on the part of writers and artists who wished to attract a largely white audience.

Much of the work DuBois so actively denounced as opportunistic appeared in Opportunity, the publication of the National Urban League, which was established in 1923. This "journal of Negro life" began as a forum for political issues relevant to African American life, but shortly after its initial appearance Opportunity began publishing literature and actively calling for submissions of poems, plays, short fiction, and art sketches. Under the editorship of Charles Johnson, Opportunity became an integral part of the Harlem Renaissance, publishing nearly all of the prominent artists and writers of the decade. It began by actively recruiting and publishing the work the younger generation, and then sponsoring literary contests, which were instrumental in promoting some of the greatest voices of the Renaissance. The height of this activity came between the years 1925 and 1927. So popular were the contests, that Charles Johnson gave over a whole issue to the winners in 1927 (Johnson 50). Thus Opportunity differed greatly from Crisis, and in many ways was the magazine that defined the period for literary scholars. Whereas The Crisis, under DuBois’ direction, continually struggled to remain politically active, to maintain a militant air and radical tone--indeed, for a time it competed with The Messenger to be the most uncompromising in asserting "the cause"--Opportunity largely eschewed politics and explicitly emphasized an aesthetic agenda. Perhaps the most telling difference between the two magazines came with the publication of Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven in 1926. The novel was praised by many of the New Negroes in Opportunity, notably James Weldon Johnson and Gwendolyn Bennett, but it was shredded by DuBois in The Crisis. DuBois vehemently denounced the book as a "pernicious caricature" of black life and "a mass of half truths" (The Crisis 32 Dec. 1926, 81). His concern of course was that the younger writers, the New Negroes, would imitate Van Vechten, to the detriment of advancing the status of African Americans.

As I have noted, DuBois encouraged honesty in black art, but as the twenties progressed he increasingly sensed the weakness in his efforts to propagandize for the race by encouraging artists in this way. Due largely to DuBois' ambivalence concerning art and propaganda, The Crisis declined considerably in the 1920s. This decline was due as well to attacks from the younger generation of artists, many of whom accused DuBois of following outdated approaches. Claude McKay, for example, criticized DuBois for his "holy-clean and righteous-pure" approach to literature (Johnson 47). And of course, there was also the increased competition from Opportunity and its bohemian appeal. Thus it was that The Crisis became a closed avenue for many of the younger generation of writers and artists, who soon went looking for alternative outlets for their art. Many felt they could no longer rely on the elder statesmen and their publications. Although both The Crisis and Opportunity did much to further their careers, neither magazine could accommodate the younger generation in producing art informed by a more radical aesthetic and political aim. The young artists needed their own individual outlets.

Fire!!, subtitled "A Quarterly Dedicated to the Younger Negro Artists" was essentially created in response to the propagandizing of the New Negro by the older generation of black activists. Established in 1926 by Wallace Thurman, Fire!! brought together some of the most talented young artists then in Harlem with the intention of producing "art for art's sake." Thurman had arrived in New York City in 1925, at the inception of Locke's New Negro movement, and became a close associate of both Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes, who delighted in affronting their elders by referring to themselves as the Harlem "Niggerati." The idea for Fire!! developed out of Niggerati sessions in the summer of 1926 and came to fruition in November. Wallace Thurman functioned as premier editor for Fire!!, and the editorial board was comprised of six other contributors: Zora Hurston, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Bennett, Aaron Douglas, John Davis, and Richard Bruce. Initially, each editor was to contribute fifty dollars and patrons were expected to finance the remainder. But the project was beset with problems from its inception, the foremost being that only three of the seven editors actually produced the funds originally promised. The final cost of Fire!! was nearly $1,000, which Thurman personally guaranteed to the printer. The magazine, however, failed to live up to expectations, and after the reviews came out it was evident that much of its target audience was uninterested. Unable to obtain many sponsors, Thurman spent the next four years trying to pay the debt on this failed project (Hemenway 44-46). A final and tragic irony of this tale is that several hundred unsold copies of Fire!! were destroyed in a basement fire of an apartment house in which they were stored, making Volume I, Number I a valuable and rare piece of Americana.

Although only one issue was ever produced, it was a significant achievement for a group of relatively unknown artists, and it stands as a powerful testament to the reactions against what was seen at the time as the appropriation of art to social causes. Fire!! grew out of the younger generation's expressed need for a forum for their own views and art. True to the original intent, Fire!! was an inflammatory magazine that symbolized the spirit of revolt inherent in the New Negro movement. Fire!! interestingly reveals more about the political assumptions of the young New Negroes than Locke's celebrated anthology: whereas The New Negro was under Locke's full control, published by a major white publisher (Charles Boni of New York) and subtly designed in the DuBoisian tradition as propaganda, Fire!! was paid for, edited, and published by the artists themselves, and its politics were self-consciously aesthetic. Fire!! also underscored the disaffection the younger generation of writers felt with the conservative notions of art presented by The Crisis and Opportunity. For conservatives who wanted to educate whites into a respect for blacks, the stark realism and bizarre styles of the younger group was intolerable. The rather romantic focus upon the common man, i.e., the presentation of impoverished laborers, drunks, and prostitutes, was anathema to the belief that admirable qualities alone must be displayed.

Langston Hughes reports in his autobiography that "None of the older Negro intellectuals would have anything to do with Fire [sic] ... the Crisis roasted it [and] the Negro press called it all sorts of bad names" (237). It appears that the only exception to the negative criticism was in the November issue of The Bookman, which called Fire!! "particularly encouraging at a time when the Negro shows ominous signs of settling down to become a good American" (258; Qtd. in Dickinson 47). The interest here lies in the fact that Hughes and his partners wanted their critics to dislike Fire!! They did not want the praise that had been given to The New Negro, for this was what they were reacting against. Moreover, they believed that this disapproval would authenticate their aesthetic purpose, thus "proving" that their art could transcend both politics and morality.

The aspirations for Fire!! were quite high--its editors hoped that it would "burn up a lot of the old, dead conventional Negro-white ideas of the past, [and] epater le bourgeois into a realization of the existence of the younger Negro writers and artists" (Hughes 235). But Fire!! did not provide the shock its founders so desperately wanted it to, nor did it receive the harsh criticism that would have justified its creators' efforts and brought them notoriety. As Robert Hemenway notes, "the Fire!! writers were working within a code of behavior as ritualized as a child's adolescent revolt against his parents" (49). But their calculated anticipation of the censure of their elders failed to pay off--it was undermined by the fact that they were taken less seriously than expected. Fire!! was intended to be a non-commercial work interested only in the arts and unconcerned with social problems--according to its editors, it was an aesthetic mission they were on. However, the work in the magazine anticipated the more radical literary approaches that were to take hold in the 1930s. As Wallace Thurman stated in his essay "Negro Artists and the Negro": "Hoping to introduce a truly Negroid note into American literature, its contributors had gone to the proletariat rather than the bourgeois for characters and material" (Bontemps 151-52). Thus Fire!! constituted a political statement--the founders did, after all, wish to be considered a "threat" to the establishment--and the magazine was unavoidably taking stances, on both race and class issues. It was inevitable that the contributors to the magazine would also be politicizing the New Negro, though in a much different way than either Locke or DuBois had. As a literary magazine, Fire!! accurately mirrored the movement that created it: it blended an independent, bohemian and radical outlook, which emphasized freedom of expression and the quest for unique black identity, with a moderate attempt at respectability. The ambiguity of these intentions underscores two factors that contributed to the magazine's failure--its lack of a clearly defined aesthetic and the differing priorities of its participants--and parallels the ambiguous quality of the text itself, which is a combination of conservative form and liberal content, a characteristic that marked many of Harlem’s little magazines in the 1920s.

The black little magazines that thrived in the 1920s were less abundant in the 1930s. By mid-decade there were essentially only two of any significance: Challenge, edited by Dorothy West from 1934-1937, and then New Challenge, edited by West along with Marion Minus and Richard Wright for a short period in 1937 (Johnson 101). The idea behind both Challenge and New Challenge was to provide black artists and intellectuals with a continuing outlet for aesthetic and political concerns. In particular, West desired a literature of social realism, but she did not want to rely on established voices for this. In launching Challenge, West thus encouraged young and unknown writers to submit their work. However, submissions to the magazine did not live up to expectations--most were conventional in style and substance--and the venture did not last (Johnson 115). Harold Cruse attributes the failure largely to West: he criticizes West for having no clear agenda and rather uncharitably calls Challenge "very undistinguished" (185). But much of the magazine's undistinguished nature had more to do with the expectations of the young artists than with West’s lofty aspirations; in light of the many failed individual efforts of the 1920s, many felt the need to be published in the prominent and long-established black magazines, The Crisis and Opportunity.

Opportunity was an important outlet during the 1930s, and in many ways bridged the gap between the dominant tendencies of the 20s and the 30s. In the first years of new decade, Opportunity published a great deal of literary work, most significantly poetry of Sterling Brown, and an abundance of cultural criticism, notably the essays of Alain Locke. Like others of the elder generation, Locke struggled with the artistic and literary endeavors of the decade. Initially he viewed the 1930s with enthusiasm, seeing the promise of the New Negro fulfilled in a continuation of the aesthetic concerns of the 1920s. But in light of the increased presence of Communist organizations and the growing interest in revolutionary ideologies, Locke soon saw literature in propagandistic terms and began to place an emphasis on proletarian art, seeing it as perhaps distasteful but "necessary" (Johnson 105). Like DuBois before him, Locke thus staked out an ambivalent position toward the art around him: he found proletarian art personally hard to take yet politically expedient.

In 1932, DuBois proposed a symposium in The Crisis for leading black intellectuals to tell America what they thought of the Communist Party since it was then gaining so much influence. DuBois’ views were already well known, and they were not favorable. The biggest source of friction between DuBois and the Communist Party was the Scottsboro case. DuBois felt that the Party had used the case unscrupulously, manipulating the sympathies of blacks in order to get them to join. This led to a falling out between DuBois and the Communist party in 1934. For the Party this was a significant setback, since its leaders needed the sympathy of the black press. Specifically, it needed the respect and recognition of its leading organizations, which meant of course the NAACP's Crisis and the Urban League’s Opportunity, and both proved a tough challenge. Nonetheless, by the middle of the 1930s, the Communist Party was very influential in Harlem; it had been instrumental in organizing unemployed African Americans, who were angry, tired, hungry, and in search of radical solutions. In addition, as Harvey Teres has pointed out, the Communist Party played a major role in Harlem in the 1930s by promoting, among other things, the black theater and the teaching of black history, and by helping to popularize jazz and blues music (206-07). The Communist Party may not have had the respect it wanted from the leading black intellectuals, but it increasingly did have it from the black masses, which at least theoretically was more important. The Communist Party also strongly influenced many of the prominent writers, artists and intellectuals who made up the group of Harlem radicals and New Negroes. At least initially, and probably due to the pressure of black Party members, the Party saw value in the uniqueness of African American culture. Nonetheless, there were limits to this celebration and defense of racial distinctions. As Earl Hutchinson notes, the influential Party leaders at this time had still not changed their basic Marxian view that black culture was only valid if it depicted the struggles of the masses, that is, if it maintained the proletarian perspective (80).

New Challenge, which emerged in the fall of 1937, mostly under the influence of Richard Wright, showed a more thorough involvement of black writers with proletarian art. Wright, who had had experience with Left Front for a few months in 1934 before it folded, also called for a literature of social realism and promoted an explicitly Marxist agenda. Wright believed that by adopting a Marxist perspective, black artists and intellectuals would transcend nationalistic ideas and come to see the interdependence among people in modern society, particularly among the exploited working class. However, such an explicitly radical black magazine was not as popular as Wright might have imagined it would be: New Challenge did not attract enough subscribers or advertisers, and thus enough funds, to continue. Unfortunately, New Challenge went the way of Fire!!, Harlem and other black little magazines which could not meet their financial obligations during the Depression. The black bourgeoisie had been hit hard by the Depression, and many of the Harlem Renaissance writers, dependent as they were on a largely white audience also affected by the economic decline, felt it acutely. By the mid-thirties, white literary and political publications all but dominated the field of radical writing.

Despite leftist agendas and rhetoric supportive of the end of racial oppression, the larger mainstream white periodicals did not alter their publication practices of the 1920s, only occasionally accepting pieces from well-established black writers such as Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen. Johnson and Johnson argue that only the leftist periodicals, such as Partisan Review, New Masses, Anvil, and Left Front welcomed the contributions of the self-styled New Negroes (98). However, according to Harvey Teres, there were no articles on African American writers or the subject of race in the early issues of the Partisan Review (210). Many writers felt that the white radical publications were not concerned with creative literature. Additionally, many African American intellectuals felt there was little concern with specifically black literature and culture. These, of course, were issues of great importance to writers and artists who came of age at the height of Renaissance achievement and who were schooled in 1920s aestheticism. At bottom, the white radical publications at the time were still promoting a Marxist perspective and advocating a largely proscribed form of proletarian literature.

As James Murphy has noted, proletarian literature in the United States is not just a product of the radical 20s and 30s; indeed, it has quite a long history, in relation to issues of both class and race. As early as 1901, radicals sympathetic to the exploitation of the workers of the world published Comrade, a magazine specifically devoted to socialist art and literature (Murphy 55). The more commonly know publication is, of course The Masses, which appeared in 1911. The Masses notably published the work of John Reed, the man who would provide the guiding spirit for the proletarian literary efforts of those sympathetic to socialism and communism throughout the 1920s and 1930s. The Masses was succeeded first by the Liberator in 1918, which operated under the direction of Joseph Freeman and Mike Gold until 1924, and then by New Masses in 1926, also under the direction of Freeman and Gold. Mike Gold was the true directing spirit of New Masses; he fought to keep the magazine radical in intent, publishing propaganda pieces often quite didactic in nature, most of which came from members of the John Reed clubs that had been established nationwide under the guidance of the Communist Party. Shortly after its initial appearance, and largely under the influence of Gold, New Masses explicitly declared itself an organ of proletarian lit (Murphy 57). As editor of New Masses, Mike Gold often had the final word among Communists as to what was proper art and culture for the working class, particularly after he took over editorship of the magazine in 1928. According to Irving Howe, Gold "believed that the future of literature lay in the primitive propaganda sketches written by Communist workers or, more often, by young Communist quasi-intellectuals passing for workers" (275). Howe’s comments are less than kind, but the point is that it was never quite clear what the purpose of New Masses was: whether it was to publish the work of accomplished writers who had turned left or to provide the workers themselves with a forum of expression. Initially, such open inquiry held the promise of New Masses succeeding Modern Quarterly as a white radical publication, now Party sponsored, seriously dedicated to African American concerns. However, debate over the role of proletarian literature dominated the pages of New Masses, thus overshadowing any serious engagement with African American culture.

Gold's firm commitment was to the class struggle: echoing views presented a decade earlier in The Messenger, Gold argued that racial oppression was only a consequence of workers' oppression. Gold knew little about black culture and indeed was often quick to debase it (Hutchinson [1995] 79). Gold repeatedly clashed with Claude McKay when both worked as executive editors at the Liberator in the early twenties. Apparently McKay, who was increasingly interested in the bohemian aesthetic that would soon underlay the Harlem Renaissance, was not proletarian enough for Gold (79). Gold also clashed with Langston Hughes over the appropriate method of handling black themes in literature. Gold felt that white writers were actually doing it better and more effectively, citing as support the example of Eugene O'Neill. Not surprisingly, Gold encouraged black writers to leave the "debauchery" of Harlem and join the class struggle: in a 1930 New Masses editorial, he lectured blacks to stop their "saxophone clowning" and "wasting their time on the gutter side of Harlem" (3). In short, under Gold's leadership at the time, New Masses was extremely political though dedicated to rigid notions of proletarian literature and revolutionary agendas. Irving Howe argues that in the period from 1928 to 1932 the magazine suffered from a "mindless crudity," which he pins almost exclusively on Gold and the "half-baked" American Marxism then passing for radical thought (278). It is a harsh indictment, and perhaps a bit overstated, yet it is clear that New Masses did suffer from a narrowness of vision, and thus did not succeed in establishing itself as a leader in the literary movement of the 1930s.

Partisan Review, established under the direction of William Phillips and Philip Rahv in 1934, was designed to compensate in part for the deficiencies of New Masses (Gilbert 107). Partisan Review was to be a publication devoted exclusively to literature and criticism and avoiding the dogmatic position adopted by New Masses. At the onset, Phillips and Rahv attempted to reconcile the difficulties present in New Masses regarding the debate over proletarian literature. They viewed proletarian literature as art both for and about the working class. According to Gilbert, both editors felt it was wrong to make literature the vehicle for ideas that were politically expedient at the moment. Rather, literature should reflect what was permanent and new in proletarian culture. It should not merely promote the class struggle (122). A key distinction, then, between the New Masses and the new Partisan Review was that the former made politics its priority and the latter made culture its priority (Cooney 114). In short, there was a falling out over leftism between the two magazines. The standard interpretation is that the shortcomings in proletarian literature were due to the influence of New Masses, which called for utilitarian writing, tendentiousness and agitational art. This came most specifically from Mike Gold, who openly castigated writers, including many members of the Harlem Renaissance coterie, who insisted on aesthetic values (Murphy 6). According to Murphy, this insistence on agitational literature and a disregard for aesthetic values and a bourgeois literary heritage persisted into the mid 1930s (11). James Gilbert sees the situation in much the same way, arguing that New Masses encouraged sloganeering and simplistic propaganda, and Partisan Review opposed it.

After Partisan Review broke with the Communist Party in 1936, the approach was a bit different. Plans for the new Partisan Review included an emphasis on literary and cultural discussion more than political analysis. Terry Cooney notes that the editors of the new Partisan Review were busy seeking commitments from writers and critics of talent or reputation, attempting to build an alternative to the Popular Front (110). But the fact remains that the editors of Partisan Review did not look to the writers of the Harlem Renaissance, most of whom had by this point become well known and highly celebrated. If the literary hopes of the new Partisan Review included the publication of poetry, fiction, and criticism, then where were the New Negro radical and the Harlem Renaissance artists? The editorial statement of the debut issue stated that Partisan Review will "participate in the struggle of the workers and sincere intellectuals against imperialist war, fascism, national and racial oppression, and for the abolition of the system which breeds these evils (1). I think it is important to note the initial aims of Partisan Review, for this goes some distance in countering what I noted above as the accepted explanation for the demise of the Renaissance, namely, the assumed rigid polarity between 20s aestheticism and 30s proletarianism. However, it does not fully explain the lack of a radical black voice in the 1930s in general and in the Partisan Review in particular. Contrary to its editorial statement, Partisan Review did not appear interested in African American life and certainly did not distinguish itself by its coverage of African American writers in its earliest years.

A partial explanation lies in the philosophical beliefs of the New York Intellectuals. It is widely accepted that the group surrounding the Partisan Review exhibited an allegiance to cosmopolitan values. As Terry Cooney points out, cosmopolitan values demanded "a resistance to particularisms of nationality, race, religion, or philosophy" (5). I think this helps to explain why the intellectuals involved with the magazine did not initially look to the Harlem intellectuals or black artists who were actively mining and celebrating their particular cultural heritage. The lack of interest is also likely attributable to the fact that many of the New York Intellectuals, the majority of whom were Jewish, chose to avoid confronting their own ethnic heritage and experiences. It was not until the 1950s, after the horrors of the Holocaust, that many began to reassess their own ethnic identity. Once they did, branching out to discover African American identity was a logical and perhaps easier step. However, I think this is a generous allowance for the New York Intellectuals; their interest in "the Negro question" also had a great deal to do with the increased call for black civil rights during the 1950s: having adopted a leftist position, advocacy of civil rights was a near imperative.

But this independence could not be forever sustained. As the 1930s progressed, the increased fascination and commitment among radicals to Communism, proletarian literature and the class struggle made it difficult for African American writers. As indicated above, far left radicals viewed with a suspicious eye those who wished to remain apart from specific political organizations, or who wished to examine in art the issue of race alongside the issue of class. This attitude was particularly pronounced among those who formed the core of the New York Intellectual community. The New York Intellectuals, centered around Partisan Review, came to dominate the left press in the 1930s. Although known for their interest in the experimental literature of the previous decade, this interest apparently did not extend to the "hybrid" literature of the Harlem Renaissance, which joined modernist and vernacular traditions (Teres 209). It was largely a modernist literary aesthetic that the New York Intellectuals valued and promoted, and to the Partisan Review crowd, the Harlem Renaissance artists and writers were not modernist enough; they were blatantly racial, they toyed with conventions, and they were bohemian. James Gilbert accurately notes that the concept of bohemianism was denounced as bourgeois by the New York crowd and seen, therefore, as a competitor to the radical movement (96). Certainly much of the Harlem Renaissance literature was bohemian, especially after the publication of Carl Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven. Indeed, Harlem was in vogue mostly because of this bohemian appeal. Due to this, much of the literature of the 1920s was denounced as apolitical exotica.

As previously noted, I believe this generalization is inaccurate. The Harlem Renaissance was not an apolitical time, nor were its participants operating in a political void. As I hope to have demonstrated, the legacy of the leftism of the Harlem Renaissance is multifaceted: its roots lay in the Harlem radicals who began speaking out against racial oppression in the early teens in the pages of The Messenger and Modern Quarterly; it came to fruition with the New Negroes who capitalized on DuBois’ dicta for elevating the race and celebrating blackness, publishing largely in The Crisis and Opportunity; its most aesthetic moments came with the Harlem Niggerati who wished to celebrate black culture in less accommodating ways, and who created bold and independent magazines such as Fire!!; and it found an overtly political voice with those Renaissance writers who wished to actively engage the trends in proletarian literature in the 30s in magazines such as Left Front and Challenge. Harlem’s intellectuals and artists continually sought out new venues for political and artistic expression, and when the established publications would not suffice, they created their own, thus providing an important forum for independent perspectives on African American politics and culture.

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