Circulating Jim Crow, by Adam McKible (introduction)

INTRODUCTION

George Horace Lorimer’s declining health and death were big news in late October 1937. A titan of the publishing world, a patron of multiple cultural and charitable institutions, and a very rich and influential man, Lorimer had only recently retired as editor of the Saturday Evening Post and chairman of the behemoth Curtis Corporation. Newspapers in every state announced his illness, breathed a sigh of relief when he seemed to rally, and then sadly carried his obituary after his death on October 22, often on the front page. Admiration for Lorimer’s life and accomplishments was nearly universal, and the dispensation of his estate was also widely reported. According to the New York Times, Lorimer bequeathed land, art, and antiques to the public, and he left considerable wealth to his immediate family and a few of his closest employees. But Lorimer’s will also included this provision: “To each and every white person in my employ at the time of my decease . . . I give and bequeath the sum of $500 in cash absolutely.”1 In what was essentially his final piece of published writing, Lorimer underscored the open secret that went virtually unmentioned in the hundreds of obituaries that followed his demise: that he was a lifelong anti-Black racist who wanted to make certain that no African American would get any of his money. Writing for the Black newspaper the Chicago Defender in November 1937, Lucius C. Harper denounced Lorimer as “An Enemy . . . the Fascist of literature, so far as our Race was concerned.” Harper accurately

faulted Lorimer for publishing fiction that portrays African Americans as “nitwits and verb crackers,” and he bemoaned the fact that “white America laughed while black America protested to deaf ears.” He concluded with this emphatic condemnation: “We have no cause to regret Lorimer’s passing. He died as he lived, with hatred in his heart. His will epitomizes him. After making individual bequests to relatives, he dipped his pen and wrote: ‘To each and every WHITE person in my employ. . . .’ The tragedy of it is that for over thirty years such a man as this dominated American culture and the literature it fed on. If we were to write an epitaph, it would read: ‘Who they have injured, they also hate.’ ”2

By imagining Lorimer dipping his fountain pen into an inkwell with the intent to issue a final insult, Harper underscored the conscious steps Lorimer took to write his nakedly racist final instructions. And by noting that Lorimer’s white readers shared a laugh at the expense of their fellow citizens, Harper also indicated that the Post was central in shaping personal, domestic, and communal experiences in Jim Crow America. The New York Times, like pretty much every other news outlet in the nation, had nothing to say about the animus enshrined in Lorimer’s will, even though it directly quoted his hateful instructions. Decades of subsequent scholarship have been similarly silent.

By the time George Horace Lorimer retired at the end of 1936, he had made the Saturday Evening Post the most widely read magazine in the United States. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in 1925, “Everybody sees the Post ”; in 1929, Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd reported in their study of middle America that the magazine was delivered to one in every six homes in “Middletown”; and in his autobiography of 1936, the radical bohemian writer Joseph Freeman described the magazine as “the new American Bible.” In his foundational study Magazines in the United States (1949), James Playstead Wood emphasized the Post ’s ubiquity and its domination of American print culture: “For years it was virtually without a competitor as the largest weekly and, if such could be said to have existed at all, the most typical of American magazines. . . . It was seen and read everywhere. People came to know it as they knew their own names. Its influence was pervasive and immeasurable, spreading simultaneously in many directions. . . . The Post became both a powerful and continuing social force and almost a sign and symbol of the country itself.”3

Week after week, year after year for almost four decades, Lorimer produced a reliably consistent product that could be found in every state in the union and in the farthest reaches of the globe. The magazine was central to American power and national identity. Every week as many as one in ten Americans read the Post, and the other nine were almost certainly affected— for both good and ill—by Lorimer’s profound influence on culture and politics.

The consistency of the Saturday Evening Post as a reliable commodity is matched by a certain uniformity in earlier critical assessments of Lorimer’s tenure as editor. These appraisals tended to emphasize a shared set of key points: Lorimer’s absolute control over his magazine and his prowess as both an editor and a businessman; his advocacy for both “common sense” and the possibility of self-made success in America, a belief he exemplified especially through the publication of business fiction; his firmly held belief that his magazine was actively creating an American identity; and after World War I the fact that the Saturday Evening Post became a central player in the racist xenophobia that culminated in the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, a law designed to ban immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. In 1928, Leon Whipple described the Post as a “Niagara of print” read by “everybody—high-brow, low-brow, and mezzanine; the hardboiled business man and the soft-boiled leisure woman; the intelligenzia [sic], often as a secret vice”—and called it “a quintuple enterprise”: “(1) a giant money-making business; (2) a miracle of technical publishing; (3) a purveyor of entertainment in fiction and amusing articles by which it gathers perhaps the largest part of its great audience; (4) a supersalesman of things through advertising and so a main cog in our modern machine of mass-distribution; (5) an engine for propaganda in favor of American nationalism and the present economic system.” According to Whipple, Lorimer’s magazine not only reflected American life but also was, in fact, a machine that produced national identity and experience—American life, American psychology, and American bodies: “It creates us. What the SatEvePost is we are.” Because of Lorimer’s extraordinary control over every aspect of the magazine’s production, Whipple called him “the dictator” of arguably “the most powerful force ever exerted on the American people in print.”4

Two years later, Benjamin Stolberg echoed many of the same points, noting that Lorimer “profoundly believes that the editor should be the

dictator of his publication” and that the Post is “nothing but the character of George Horace Lorimer.” More pointedly critical than Whipple (who also threw a few punches at Lorimer), however, Stolberg castigated the Post editor for his nativist hostility: “He wants all aliens finger-printed, all foreign ideas suspiciously registered, a high tariff not merely on goods but also on culture.” Lorimer’s ideas, wrote Stolberg, are “muscular with ruthless prejudice.” Although Stolberg was (inaccurately) skeptical about Lorimer’s ultimate place in American history because of what he saw as the magazine’s tendency toward homogeneity and predictable mediocrity, he nonetheless credited Lorimer as “the Henry Ford of the periodical world . . . one of the great arbiters of public opinion and the greatest merchant in letters.”5 In its front-page obituary on October 23, 1937, the New York Times highlighted similar points; Lorimer edited the “magazine which has probably had more influence upon the cultural life of America than any other. [He was] an ardent apostle of the virtues of Big Business and the middle class, [and he] built its circulation to phenomenal heights and its profits to an equally phenomenal level.” The Times recorded that in addition to nurturing the talents of many successful authors, Lorimer shaped America by opposing child labor, unregulated monopolies, and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal as well as by fighting against the immigration of “unassimilable aliens.”6 Subsequent histories of Lorimer’s editorship of the Saturday Evening Post tend to highlight the same set of ideas—namely, Lorimer’s acumen and tight control, his abiding interest in business, and his aggressive promotion of an American sensibility that became increasingly hostile to immigrants from anywhere but northwestern Europe.

This widely shared critical consensus about the salient points of Lorimer’s Post is incontrovertibly true, but, of course, much more detail can be added about the magazine’s contents, general philosophy, innovations in technology and distribution, and centrality to the evolution of American mass culture in the early twentieth century. And there is one element of Post that has ever received only cursory treatment: Lorimer’s lifelong fondness for and regular publication of racist, anti-Black fiction written almost exclusively by white authors specializing in “humorous” dialect fiction. From his earliest days with the magazine— even before he assumed the editor’s chair—until his retirement, Lorimer published white-authored

Black dialect fiction on a near monthly and sometimes weekly basis. Starting his career at the Saturday Evening Post in the wake of the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 and rising to prominence as the nadir of Black experience cratered and Jim Crow rose and spread across the United States, Lorimer used humor to normalize twentieth-century American white supremacy and to make the dehumanization of African Americans seem like nothing more than common sense and just good fun.

Lorimer’s successful normalization of anti-Black racism can be gauged by the scant notice paid to this aspect of his work. Buried deep in Whipple’s essay, when he criticized the Post ’s “Machiavellian paternalism,” he faulted “the Post’s slant on our race problem: its pseudo-real, but farcical, tales of Negro life perpetuate old concepts, but it does nothing to probe racial discrimination or set forth the economic or cultural roots and changes. Its Negro is funny, not tragic.”7 Stolberg, who relished the opportunity to trash the Post as the purveyor of more “second-rate literature than any other periodical,” dedicated just a single sentence to one Post author’s “caricatures of the Negro[, which] are obtuse and offensive travesties of the American race problem.”8 Other studies of the Post follow the same pattern. No mention is made of Black dialect fiction in either Wood’s Magazines in the United States or in the forty-five pages dedicated exclusively to the Post in Frank Luther Mott’s five-volume History of American Magazines (1957).9 Wood’s elision of Lorimer’s long practice of publishing anti-Black fiction is even more pronounced in his book The Curtis Magazines, published in 1971 and devoted exclusively to the periodicals produced by the Curtis Corporation, where the closest he comes to recognizing the existence of such material is his anodyne mention of one of the magazine’s most consistent purveyors of Black dialect, Octavus Roy Cohen, whose “humor became a Post feature.”10 John Tebbel, author of the standard Lorimer biography, pauses just long enough to call Cohen’s fiction “hilarious”; he also claims Hugh Wiley, another white writer, churned out dialect stories that were “hilariously funny to his audience.”11 Subsequent scholarship on the Saturday Evening Post remains similarly silent on this topic. Jan Cohn, whose book Creating America: George Horace Lorimer and the Saturday Evening Post (1989) remains the definitive volume on the magazine and its editor, briefly excoriates Cohen’s “grossly racist comedies,”12 but she

otherwise ignores this topic altogether. Helen Damon-Moore’s monograph on the Post from 1994 and its sister publication, the Ladies’ Home Journal, is entirely silent on the subject.13 It is time to shine a light on this ignored element of Lorimer’s editorial practice and to argue that it was essential to the magazine’s history, and that is what this book does.

Lorimer’s lifelong practice of publishing stereotypical dialect fiction 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. Lorimer edited the magazine from 1899 to 1936, and these years fit snugly within—and are nearly coterminous with—the New Negro era, which Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarrett identify as extending from 1892 to 1938. While Lorimer and other cultural producers (writers, filmmakers, advertisers, composers, etc.) promulgated a sustained and static version of “the Old Negro [as] a trope that depicted the African diaspora as an inferior race” in which “Negro uncles, mammies, and chillun’ dressed, talked, behaved, and thought in ways that lacked the kind of sophistication and refinement generally attributed to Anglo America,” African Americans were constructing various iterations of a “New Negro” who would serve “generations of black intellectuals as a sign of plenitude, regeneration, or a truly reconstructed presence.” 14 At the same time that ideas about the New Negro were being developed and contested within Black America (for example, debates surrounding the efficacy of Booker T. Washington’s efforts, the militancy of the New Negro manhood movement, the aesthetic politics of Alain Locke, etc.), Lorimer was perpetuating the caricatures and stereotypes that insistently denied any possibility of agency for, self-awareness of, political empowerment of, or communal support for Black Americans. The Harlem Renaissance, which can be dated roughly between the return of Black doughboys from service in France during World War I in 1919 and the Harlem race riot in 1935, can be understood as an important period within the longer New Negro era, and it coincided with the Post ’s era of explosive growth and sociopolitical dominance.15 By considering how Lorimer’s magazine responded to the rise of African American modernity, we might better understand how New Negro and Harlem Renaissance writers encountered and contested America’s print culture in the first decades of the twentieth century.

In the early twentieth century, the Saturday Evening Post was the most popular magazine in the United States. But under the direction of longtime editor George Horace Lorimer, it helped justify Jim Crow. Adam McKible demonstrates how the Post used stereotypical dialect fiction to spread white supremacist ideology and explores how Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance pushed back against the Post.

“Gripping and doggedly researched, Circulating Jim Crow exposes the corrosion at the underbelly of the Saturday Evening Post. McKible reveals the larger cultural and political context that made the inherently anti-Black magazine popular. Through deft and energetic prose, he offers a fresh lens to understand the era of the New Negro Movement as a whole.”

Emily Bernard , author of Black in the Body:

Stories from My Grandmother’s Time, My Mother’s Time, and Mine

“Circulating Jim Crow deepens our understanding of the Saturday Evening Post, whose success in the first half of the twentieth century depended on George Horace Lorimer’s campaign to define American identity as white supremacist and anti-Black. McKible offers a crucial warning for our time.”

Darryl Dickson-Carr, author of Spoofing the Modern: Satire in the Harlem Renaissance

“McKible reveals that when not wrapping the American way in Rockwellian nostalgia, the Saturday Evening Post did its best to thwart Black modernity. Full of sobering detail and impassioned judgment, Circulating Jim Crow measures the forbidding height of the wall modern African American writing climbed and conquered.”

William J. Maxwell , author of F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature

Mark S. Morrisson , author of Modernism, Science, and Technology

“A brilliant book by a major scholar of American periodical culture, Circulating Jim Crow reveals the efforts to undermine Black modernity at the heart of one of the most successful purveyors of nostalgic Americana. As voices for white supremacy again grow louder, McKible’s compelling analysis of the role cultural institutions play in normalizing racism and xenophobia couldn’t be timelier.”

Adam McKible is associate professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is author of The Space and Place of Modernism: The Russian Revolution, Little Magazines, and New York (2002); editor of Edward Christopher Williams’s When Washington Was in Vogue (2004); and coeditor of Little Magazines and Modernism: New Approaches (2007).

Modernist Latitudes

Cover design: Elliott S. Cairns

Cover image: ClassicStock / Alamy Stock Photo