The Harlem Renaissance began with the fusion of two bohemias, when the talents of Greenwich Village began at last to appreciate the abilities of black actors. In 1920 Charles Gilpin, a black actor, starred in Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, establishing a vogue.35 Du Bois had always argued that the way ahead for the Negro in America lay with its ‘talented tenth,’ its elite, and the Harlem Renaissance was the perfect expression of this argument in action: for a decade or so there was a flowering of black stage stars who all shared the belief that arts and letters had the power to transform society. But the renaissance also had its political edge. Race riots in the South and Midwest helped produce the feeling that Harlem was a place of refuge. Black socialists published magazines like the Messenger (‘The only magazine of scientific radicalism in the world published by Negroes’).36 And there was Marcus Garvey, ‘a little sawed-off, hammered down black man’ from Jamaica, whose Pan-African movement urged the return of all blacks to Africa, Liberia in particular. He was very much part of Harlem life until his arrest for mail fraud in 1923.37
But it was literature, theatre, music, poetry, and painting that held most people’s hearts. Clubs sprang up everywhere, attracting jazz musicians like Jelly Roll Morton, Fats Wader, Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington, Scott Joplin, and later, Fletcher Henderson. Nick La Rocca’s Original Dixieland Jazz Band made the first jazz recording in New York in 1917, ‘Dark Town Strutter’s Ball.’38 The renaissance threw up a raft of blacks – novelists, poets, sociologists, performers – whose very numbers conveyed an optimism about race even when their writings belied that optimism, people like Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, and Jessie Fauset. McKay’s Harlem Shallows, for instance, portrayed Harlem as a lush tropical forest hiding (spiritual) decay and stagnation.39 Jean Toomer’s Cane was part poem, part essay, part novel, with an overall elegiac tone, lamenting the legacy of slavery, the ‘racial twilight’ in which blacks found themselves: they can’t – won’t – go back, and don’t know the way forward.40 Alain Locke was a sort of impresario, an Apollinaire of Harlem, whose New Negro, published in 1925, was an anthology of poetry and prose.41 Charles Johnson was a sociologist who had studied under Robert Park at Chicago, who organised intellectual gatherings at the Civic Club, attended by Eugene O’Neill, Carl van Doren, and Albert Barnes, who spoke about African art. Johnson was also the editor of a new black magazine to put alongside Du Bois’s Crisis. It was called Opportunity, its very name reflecting the optimism of the time.42
The high point and low point of the Harlem Renaissance is generally agreed to have been the publication in 1926 of Nigger Heaven, by Carl Van Vechten, described as ‘Harlem’s most enthusiastic and ubiquitous Nordic.’ Van Vechten’s novel is scarcely read now, though sales soared when it was first released by Alfred A. Knopf. Its theme was High Harlem, the Harlem that Van Vechten knew and adored but was, when it came down to it, an outsider in. He thought life in Harlem was perfect, that the blacks there were, as he put it, ‘happy in their skin,’ reflecting the current view that African Americans had a vitality that whites lacked, or were losing with the decadence of their civilisation. All that may have been acceptable, just; but Van Vechten was an outsider, and he made two unforgivable mistakes which vitiated his book: he ignored the problems that even sophisticated blacks knew had not gone away; and in his use of slang, and his comments about the ‘black gait’ and so forth, though he may have thought he was being ‘anthropological,’ he came across as condescending and embarrassing. Nigger Heaven was not at all ironic.43
The Harlem Renaissance barely survived the 1929 Wall Street debacle and the subsequent depression. Novels and poems continued to be put out, but the economic constraints caused a return to deeper segregation and a recrudescence of lynchings, and against such a background it was difficult to maintain the sense of optimism that had characterised the renaissance. Art, the arts, might have offered temporary respite from the realities of life, but as the 1930s matured, American blacks could no longer hide from the bleak truth: despite the renaissance, underneath it all nothing had changed.
The wider significance of the Harlem Renaissance was twofold: in the first place, that it occurred at all, at the very time that the scientific racists were introducing the Immigration Restriction Act and trying to prove that blacks were simply not capable of producing the sort of work that characterised the renaissance; and second, that once it was over, it was so comprehensively forgotten. That too was a measure of racism.*
In a sense, by the 1920s the great days of Greenwich Village were over. It was still a refuge for artists, and still home to scores of little literary magazines, some of which, like the Masses and the Little Review, enjoyed a period of success, and others, like the New Republic and the Nation, are still with us. The Provincetown Players and the Washington Square Players still performed there in season, including the early plays of O’Neill. But after the war the costume balls and more colourful excesses of bohemia now seemed far too frivolous. The spirit of the Village lived on, however, or perhaps it would be truer to say that it matured, in the 1920s, in a magazine that reflected the Village’s values by flying in the face of Time, Reader’s Digest, Middletown, and the rest. This was the New Yorker.
The fact that the New Yorker could follow this bold course owed everything to its editor, Harold Ross. In many respects Ross was an improbable editor – for a start, he wasn’t a New Yorker. Born in Colorado, he was a ‘poker-playing, hard-swearing’ reporter who had earlier edited the Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Army’s newspaper, published from Paris during the war years. That experience had given Ross a measure of sophistication and scepticism, and when he returned to New York he joined the circle of literary types who lunched at the famous Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel on Forty-Fourth Street. Ross became friendly with Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Marc Connelly, Franklin P. Adams, and Edna Ferber. Less famous but more important for Ross’s career was the poker game that some of the Round Table types took part in on Saturday evenings. It was over poker that Ross met Raoul Fleischmann, a baking millionaire, who agreed to bankroll his idea for a satirical weekly.44