Harlem Renaissance

One of the most important cultural movements of the 20th century, the Harlem Renaissance was a movement in literature, music, art, and performance that celebrated the African-American heritage and revitalized American arts through its incorporation of African traditions and themes. Reaching its peak in the years between 1923 and 1929, the movement fostered an emerging generation of African-American writers, musicians, and composers and formed the center of a more general cultural revival centered in New York City. National in scope, this explosion of creativity was not so much a rebirth of African-American cultural expression as its integration into modern literature and art. For most of the 19th century, African-American music and literature had been excluded from mainstream culture. Beginning in the 1920s, audiences across the racial divide were given new access to the mythology, language, and musical traditions of African Americans.

The Harlem Renaissance was the product of the social movement of African Americans from the rural South to northern cities in the Great Migration. Southern migrants brought with them musical forms derived from gospel and secular songs and helped to create new genres of JAZZ and urban blues. New migration from the West Indies to New York in particular introduced new African and West Indian elements into the mix. The growth of Harlem set the stage

Langston Hughes (Library of Congress) for a cultural revival among African Americans and the diffusion of their ideas to a national stage.

Revitalized political organizations also furthered the cultural revival. First, the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) brought African Americans and white supporters into a coalition to protest discrimination and open the door for expanded civil rights. Their political coalition became a cultural one, as white patrons of African-American education and art supported new cultural institutions and individual careers. Second, the NAACP, the Urban League, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) under leader Marcus Garvey fueled social and cultural activism in African-American communities. The UNIA also contributed to the spread of race pride and fostering of African-American traditions. Finally, the publication of new journals, including the NAACP’s Crisis, the Urban League’s Opportunity, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters’ Messenger, opened up new venues of publication for literature, criticism, and communication. Literary editor Jessie Fauset of the Crisis played a significant role in sponsoring new authors.

African-American novels, plays, and art proliferated with the spread of black journals and newspapers and a growing white audience and white patronage for African-American artists. Alain Locke captured this ferment in his 1925 book, The New Negro. Among the writers associated with this cultural flowering were Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Hughes in particular became the voice of the black community, moving from cultural modernism in the 1920s to sharper social and political critique in his later work. All of the writers shared the concern of defining African-American identity as dualistic, a product of both African and American experience. They came to explore the dimensions of racial life and consciousness in Toomer’s Cane (1923), Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925), Larsen’s Passing (1929), and Hughes’s Weary Blues (1925) and Not without Laughter (1930).

Visual artists were an important part of the Renaissance. For the first time, numbers of African-American artists attended art schools, often with the support of white patrons. Painters Aaron Douglas, Palmer Hayden, Malven Johnson, William H. Johnson, and sculptor Augusta Savage developed artistic styles that incorporated African elements with European techniques. Musicians and composers of blues and jazz similarly developed styles that incorporated the diverse elements of African-American and popular American culture into a music of growing popularity. In recordings that crossed race lines, African-American music reached white audiences as well as African-American ones. Their influence was seen in the work of white composers, songwriters, and musicians who adopted elements of jazz into their work.

Unlike the white counterparts of the Lost Generation to whom they might be compared, African-American writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance neither repudiated religion as a formative and critical force in their culture, nor embraced a postwar pessimism about the future. Ironically, World War I, which had been followed by severe racial conflicts, also opened the doors for African-American participation in American life in economic, cultural, and political terms. Rather than a lost generation, the Harlem Renaissance writers were a “found” one, newly discovered or recovered by the white cultural establishment. The influence of the Harlem Renaissance continued through the decade of the Great Depression.

See also race and racial conflict.

Further reading: Ann Douglass, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995); Nathan Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Carla Kaplan, Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters (New York: Doubleday, 2002); David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Knopf, 1981).

Haywood, William Dudley (1869-1928) labor organizer

One of the major labor leaders of the early 20th century, Haywood was associated with the upsurge in labor militancy, first in the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) and later in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). An advocate of industrial unionism, he organized workers by industry and not by specific trade or occupation. Haywood was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on February 4, 1869, as the son of a one-time Pony Express rider who died when Bill Haywood was three. He began work in the mines at 15, then married Nevada Jane Minor, the daughter of a rancher, and filed for and then lost a homestead claim. After returning to the mines, Haywood joined the WFM. His organizing skills brought him to the forefront of labor struggles in Idaho and Colorado, especially the violent Cripple Creek strike of 1904. In 1905, Haywood led the WFM into the newly formed Industrial Workers of the World, a militant labor organization. Like the WFM, the IWW advocated organizing the unorganized into industrial unions and stood in contrast to the trade unionist American Federation of Labor. Haywood opened the founding convention of the IWW in Chicago by proclaiming it “the Continental Congress of the working class.” A year later, the boisterously militant Haywood was accused of conspiracy in the 1905 murder of Frank Steunenberg, former governor of Idaho. Ably defended by Clarence Darrow, Haywood was tried and acquitted in a showcase trial.

Having left the WFM and the Socialist Party, Haywood became an organizer at large for the IWW and participated in some of the major strikes of his era. In the Lawrence Strike of 1912 and the Paterson Strike of 1913, his persuasive oratory and personal skills helped to maintain worker unity and drew public support for the beleaguered strikers. For his role in these strikes, he earned the admiration of a new generation of intellectuals and radicals centered in Greenwich Village, and the hostility of employers and government officials alike.

During World War I, while Haywood cautioned against violating the Espionage Act, he argued against the U. S. entry into the war. He advocated resistance to the military draft. For these reasons, he was arrested and jailed during the war. Despite the lack of evidence, Haywood was convicted and received a 20-year prison sentence. Awaiting a new trial, he fled the country on bail and went to the recently formed Soviet Union. He died there on May 18, 1928, and he is buried in the Kremlin Wall, alongside American communist John Reed.

Haywood was renowned as a speaker at labor rallies. As he once told Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, words were tools and not every one had access to a full tool chest. He was, therefore, always straightforward in address and spoke at the level of his audience. A proponent of a particular kind of pragmatic unionism, he often counseled workers to use the leverage they had at the workplace, rather than to seek political power through the ballot box. Labeled a dangerous agitator, Haywood knew that the workers’ chief power was in limiting or stopping production. He repeatedly counseled against violence, despite his reputation as an advocate of worker sabotage. Calling for a broad-based unionism that went beyond skilled trade unions and brought in workers in every industry, he understood the importance of worker unity and the cost of divisions between workers, whether by ethnicity, race, skill, or gender.

Further reading: William Haywood, Bill Haywood’s Book (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983); J. Anthony Lukas, Big Trouble; A Murder in a Small Western Town Sets Off a Struggle for the Soul of America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).

Hearst, William Randolph (1863-1951) newspaper magnate

William Randolph Hearst created the first American media empire by using family money to purchase newspapers and magazines and to found syndicates and movie newsreel companies throughout the United States. Born in San Francisco, California, on April 29, 1863, to millionaire parents who had amassed a fortune in mining properties, Hearst had the best of everything in life, including education. Two years after being expelled from Harvard, he wrote his father, George, “I want the San Francisco Examiner,” a newspaper that his politician father had taken for payment of a gambling debt. Granted his request, Hearst returned to California in 1887 and began a decades-long career in newspapers during which he both embraced and furthered the “new journalism” of scandalous stories, gossip, and exposes. Critics questioned Hearst’s brand of reporting on prurient stories and labeled most of his “news” fakery. With the San Francisco Examiner as his springboard, he began to build an empire of 42 newspapers.

In 1895, after his father’s death, Hearst moved his headquarters to New York City. He used some of the $7.5 million his mother, philanthropist Phoebe Apperson Hearst, gave him to purchase the New York Morning Journal. Again, he boosted circulation with society gossip, tales of sex and scandal, and sensational stories. The Journal’s coverage of atrocities in Cuba aroused the public and helped spark support for the Spanish-American War. He also lowered the price of the paper. In so doing, he began a newspaper war with Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, especially for Sunday circulation. Hearst hired away the World’s entire Sunday staff, including Richard Outcault, who drew the popular comic strip “The Yellow Kid.” Pulitzer hired the artist, George Luks, to continue the comic in the World, and both publishers advertised the strip widely, leading to the term “yellow journalism” as shorthand for the sensationalism spawned by newspaper rivalry.

Having made a splash in San Francisco and New York, Hearst moved on. Continuing to acquire major newspapers, he purchased the Chicago American in 1900, the Chicago Examiner in 1902, the Boston American in 1904, and the Los Angeles Examiner that same year. Hearst also founded King Features Syndicate and published and acquired magazines, including Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan, and Harper’s Bazaar A true multimedia maven of his day, Hearst also made a foray into movie newsreels.

Hearst was a maverick, and his papers took controversial positions. A progressive in his early years, he sup-

William Randolph Hearst (Library of Congress)

Ported labor unions and the eight-hour workday, attacked monopolies, favored public ownership of utilities, and a progressive income tax. Although he thought of the Spanish American War as the Journal’s war and of himself as a flag-waving patriot, Hearst was an isolationist prior to both world wars. Not an ideologue, but an undiscriminating, impulsive admirer of men of action, he at first welcomed the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, admired Benito Mussolini, initially supported Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, and published columns by Nazis. He later attacked communism and Roosevelt. Upon meeting Adolf Hitler in 1934, Hearst tried to move him away from anti-Semitism.

Hearst owned gold and silver mines, and at one time he was one of the leading real estate owners in New York City, California, and Mexico. Politically active like his father, who had been a senator, Hearst served two terms in the U. S. House of Representatives from New York City (1903-07) and ran unsuccessfully for mayor of New York City (1905) and governor of New York State (1906). He moved permanently to his 200,000-acre ranch in San Simeon, California, in 1927, where he amassed art and archaeological treasures. As a result of reckless spending in acquiring newspapers, real estate, and art, and investing millions in the movies of his mistress, actress Marion Davies, Hearst’s empire came crashing down in 1937. The corporation owning his media conglomerates was $126 million in debt. Hearst managed to stave off bankruptcy by selling off art, real estate, and 25 newspapers. In 1940 he still had a publishing empire that included 17 newspapers. He died at San Simeon on August 14, 1951, at the age of 88.

Further reading: David Nasaw, The Chief: The Life of William Randolph Hearst (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000); W. A. Swanberg, Citizen Hearst: A Biography of William Randolph Hearst (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1961).

—Ellen Tashie Frisina