FrankRep
04-08-2013, 11:31 PM
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/George_Schuyler.jpg/220px-George_Schuyler.jpg
George S. Schuyler
The Prophetic Conservative: George S. Schuyler
The New American (http://www.thenewamerican.com/)
November 4, 1985
In recent days there has been much discussion of the growth and vitality of a new generation of black conservatives. Economists Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, Lincoln Review editor J.A. Parker, Civil Rights Commission Chairman Clarence M. Pendleton Jr., and a host of others are testimony to the fact that those who so frequently claim to speak in the name of black Americans are without any real constituency.
Less well known is that today's black conservatives have distinguished antecedents. One of them is George S. Schuyler, the respected author and first black journalist to attain national prominence.
George Schuyler, who died at the age of 82 in 1977, started his writing career as a socialist and a colleague of A. Phillip Randolph, the black labor leader, with whom he helped found the Messenger Magazine in 1926. His writing caught the eye of H.L. Mencken, who published his work in The American Mercury.
It became rapidly apparent to George Schuyler that freedom and the free market provided the best hope for achieving a society in which men and women would be judged on the basis of individual merit, rather than race. He abandoned his brief affinity for statism and became a lifelong enemy of all forms of both totalitarian government and racism.
Even those who disagreed with Schuyler respected his well-documented views and his pointed wit. He poked fun at many black leaders in the novel Black No More (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486480402/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0486480402&linkCode=as2&tag=libert0f-20), written in 1931. In the book, a mythical solution to the race problem employed the device of turning blacks white through use of a cream. "And as they began to disappear, black civil rights leaders began to fear their reason for being was slipping away," recalled Henry Lee Moon, who was then public relations director for the NAACP. "I remember W.E.B. Dubois laughing and recognizing himself in George's book," Moon stated.
Between 1926 and 1965, Schuyler was columnist, chief editorial writer and associate editor of The Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black weekly. As the U.S. Communist Party increased its efforts to attract black members in the 1930s, Schuyler became its most vocal opponent. In 1930, the Comintern invented the concept and slogan of "Self-Determination for the Black Belt," and the creation of a "Negro Republic" in the American South. "This puzzled and revolted the black comrades," Schuyler recalled. "I wrote at the time that this was merely a revival of the old slave plantation under Communist direction, and that Negroes would have none of it."
While many intellectuals on the American left contrasted Naziism and Communism in the years before World War II, George Schuyler understood that these tyrannies were mirror images of one another. He wrote in the Courier of February 11, 1939, "In practice there is no difference between Communism and Fascism. Both are anti-democratic, both are dictatorial and ruthless regardless of the alleged reasons, both brutally suppress minorities. It is a cruel jest to say there is any basic difference between them or any fundamental antagonism. There is privately more in common between Hitler and Stalin than there is between Roosevelt and Chamberlain. I should not be at all surprised to hear shortly of a Moscow-Berlin alliance."
On August 23, 1939, the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was signed in Moscow. On September 9, 1939, Schuyler wrote: "The sudden waltzing together of Hitler and Stalin has shocked the liberals and starry-eyed fellow travelers, and greatly embarrassed the naive majority of Communists, but it left me quite calm and chuckling. I have been saying all along that there is no difference between Fascism and Communism, and this position has brought shrill and frothy protestations from the Comrades and their stooges, especially from the black Reds on the Communist payroll. And yet nothing has been more obvious to an impartial and sensible observer."
In 1946, Schuyler became a contributing editor of Isaac Don Levine's Plain Talk, the first post-war magazine to expose the Communist danger in the U.S. and abroad. He wrote serious as well as satirical pieces, noting that, "The collectivists are deadly solemn folk who never allow wit and humor to penetrate their work, but the anti-Communists are scarcely less so."
Too many intellectuals, Schuyler lamented, have a tendency to support government control over individual lives. He was selected in June 1950 to be a U.S. delegate to the Congress of Cultural Freedom in Berlin, along with James T. Farrell, James Burnham, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Tennessee Williams and others. In his address to the meeting he stated: "The tragedy of so many intellectuals in the contemporary world is that while opposing extreme forms of totalitarianism, they are themselves half-totalitarians; that is to say, they express a desire for a society which is half-controlled, half-regimented, half-planned, part capitalist and part socialist. This strange hybrid they will find (indeed, have found) to be a Frankenstein monster which, ironically, they have a great responsibility for creating."
Without minimizing the remaining racial segregation and discrimination, Schuyler contrasted for his Berlin audience the improvement of life for black Americans with the evils of the Communist world. He concluded: "The cumulative effect of these broad, continued and statesmanlike efforts has been improvement of racial relations in geometrical progression. Thus the gains in the past ten years have far surpassed those made in the previous thirty. This explains not only the social, economic and educational well-being of the colored minority, but the latter's continued and surpassed loyalty. American Negroes understand, far better than Soviet propagandists, that in the American system lies the hope of all submerged peoples who have the ability and determination to rise to the full stature of free men."
This speech was later rewritten with the title "The Phantom American Negro" for The Freeman and was reprinted in the July 1951 Readers Digest. It appeared as well in the Danish, Finnish, Swedish, British, Canadian, Norwegian, Belgian, French and Australian editions.
In 1953, Schuyler was one of the first to point out that the Caribbean with heavy Communist infiltration was the "soft under-belly of the U.S." Immediately after Castro's capture of Havana, and while the bearded dictator was being congratulated in Caracas by his old Communist mentor, Romulo Betancourt, Schuyler wrote: "Cuba Swaps the Devil for a Witch," giving the lifelong Communist background of Castro when most U.S. newspapers were calling him a "liberator." Beginning in 1965, his powerful analysis could frequently be found in American Opinion and The Review Of The News magazines.
George Schuyler married a white woman from Houston, Texas. Their daughter Philippa -- a concert pianist, war correspondent, and one-time child prodigy -- was killed in 1967, in Vietnam, as a helicopter in which she was ferrying orphans to a safe haven crashed and burned.
In the last letter to her mother, Miss Schuyler wrote that "we must bring this war to a swift, merciful conclusion or else, if the Communists are allowed to win, they will sweep all religions out of Vietnam." Mrs. Schuyler died broken-hearted shortly thereafter. Slowly, aging and lonely, George Schuyler receded from public view and died.
While others followed intellectual fads and trends, George Schuyler sought to remain faithful to lasting values. As a result, his legacy lives on and is certain to grow.
George S. Schuyler
The Prophetic Conservative: George S. Schuyler
The New American (http://www.thenewamerican.com/)
November 4, 1985
In recent days there has been much discussion of the growth and vitality of a new generation of black conservatives. Economists Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, Lincoln Review editor J.A. Parker, Civil Rights Commission Chairman Clarence M. Pendleton Jr., and a host of others are testimony to the fact that those who so frequently claim to speak in the name of black Americans are without any real constituency.
Less well known is that today's black conservatives have distinguished antecedents. One of them is George S. Schuyler, the respected author and first black journalist to attain national prominence.
George Schuyler, who died at the age of 82 in 1977, started his writing career as a socialist and a colleague of A. Phillip Randolph, the black labor leader, with whom he helped found the Messenger Magazine in 1926. His writing caught the eye of H.L. Mencken, who published his work in The American Mercury.
It became rapidly apparent to George Schuyler that freedom and the free market provided the best hope for achieving a society in which men and women would be judged on the basis of individual merit, rather than race. He abandoned his brief affinity for statism and became a lifelong enemy of all forms of both totalitarian government and racism.
Even those who disagreed with Schuyler respected his well-documented views and his pointed wit. He poked fun at many black leaders in the novel Black No More (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0486480402/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0486480402&linkCode=as2&tag=libert0f-20), written in 1931. In the book, a mythical solution to the race problem employed the device of turning blacks white through use of a cream. "And as they began to disappear, black civil rights leaders began to fear their reason for being was slipping away," recalled Henry Lee Moon, who was then public relations director for the NAACP. "I remember W.E.B. Dubois laughing and recognizing himself in George's book," Moon stated.
Between 1926 and 1965, Schuyler was columnist, chief editorial writer and associate editor of The Pittsburgh Courier, a leading black weekly. As the U.S. Communist Party increased its efforts to attract black members in the 1930s, Schuyler became its most vocal opponent. In 1930, the Comintern invented the concept and slogan of "Self-Determination for the Black Belt," and the creation of a "Negro Republic" in the American South. "This puzzled and revolted the black comrades," Schuyler recalled. "I wrote at the time that this was merely a revival of the old slave plantation under Communist direction, and that Negroes would have none of it."
While many intellectuals on the American left contrasted Naziism and Communism in the years before World War II, George Schuyler understood that these tyrannies were mirror images of one another. He wrote in the Courier of February 11, 1939, "In practice there is no difference between Communism and Fascism. Both are anti-democratic, both are dictatorial and ruthless regardless of the alleged reasons, both brutally suppress minorities. It is a cruel jest to say there is any basic difference between them or any fundamental antagonism. There is privately more in common between Hitler and Stalin than there is between Roosevelt and Chamberlain. I should not be at all surprised to hear shortly of a Moscow-Berlin alliance."
On August 23, 1939, the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact was signed in Moscow. On September 9, 1939, Schuyler wrote: "The sudden waltzing together of Hitler and Stalin has shocked the liberals and starry-eyed fellow travelers, and greatly embarrassed the naive majority of Communists, but it left me quite calm and chuckling. I have been saying all along that there is no difference between Fascism and Communism, and this position has brought shrill and frothy protestations from the Comrades and their stooges, especially from the black Reds on the Communist payroll. And yet nothing has been more obvious to an impartial and sensible observer."
In 1946, Schuyler became a contributing editor of Isaac Don Levine's Plain Talk, the first post-war magazine to expose the Communist danger in the U.S. and abroad. He wrote serious as well as satirical pieces, noting that, "The collectivists are deadly solemn folk who never allow wit and humor to penetrate their work, but the anti-Communists are scarcely less so."
Too many intellectuals, Schuyler lamented, have a tendency to support government control over individual lives. He was selected in June 1950 to be a U.S. delegate to the Congress of Cultural Freedom in Berlin, along with James T. Farrell, James Burnham, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Tennessee Williams and others. In his address to the meeting he stated: "The tragedy of so many intellectuals in the contemporary world is that while opposing extreme forms of totalitarianism, they are themselves half-totalitarians; that is to say, they express a desire for a society which is half-controlled, half-regimented, half-planned, part capitalist and part socialist. This strange hybrid they will find (indeed, have found) to be a Frankenstein monster which, ironically, they have a great responsibility for creating."
Without minimizing the remaining racial segregation and discrimination, Schuyler contrasted for his Berlin audience the improvement of life for black Americans with the evils of the Communist world. He concluded: "The cumulative effect of these broad, continued and statesmanlike efforts has been improvement of racial relations in geometrical progression. Thus the gains in the past ten years have far surpassed those made in the previous thirty. This explains not only the social, economic and educational well-being of the colored minority, but the latter's continued and surpassed loyalty. American Negroes understand, far better than Soviet propagandists, that in the American system lies the hope of all submerged peoples who have the ability and determination to rise to the full stature of free men."
This speech was later rewritten with the title "The Phantom American Negro" for The Freeman and was reprinted in the July 1951 Readers Digest. It appeared as well in the Danish, Finnish, Swedish, British, Canadian, Norwegian, Belgian, French and Australian editions.
In 1953, Schuyler was one of the first to point out that the Caribbean with heavy Communist infiltration was the "soft under-belly of the U.S." Immediately after Castro's capture of Havana, and while the bearded dictator was being congratulated in Caracas by his old Communist mentor, Romulo Betancourt, Schuyler wrote: "Cuba Swaps the Devil for a Witch," giving the lifelong Communist background of Castro when most U.S. newspapers were calling him a "liberator." Beginning in 1965, his powerful analysis could frequently be found in American Opinion and The Review Of The News magazines.
George Schuyler married a white woman from Houston, Texas. Their daughter Philippa -- a concert pianist, war correspondent, and one-time child prodigy -- was killed in 1967, in Vietnam, as a helicopter in which she was ferrying orphans to a safe haven crashed and burned.
In the last letter to her mother, Miss Schuyler wrote that "we must bring this war to a swift, merciful conclusion or else, if the Communists are allowed to win, they will sweep all religions out of Vietnam." Mrs. Schuyler died broken-hearted shortly thereafter. Slowly, aging and lonely, George Schuyler receded from public view and died.
While others followed intellectual fads and trends, George Schuyler sought to remain faithful to lasting values. As a result, his legacy lives on and is certain to grow.