Langston Hughes' Propaganda Poetry
Hold fast to dreams...
In 1938, Langston Hughes, along with Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy Parker, Henry Roth, Irwin Shaw, Marguerite Young, and many other great American writers signed a letter in support of Stalin, and in condemnation of Trotsky.
This may not be an aspect of the great poet Hughes that students of American literature get exposed to in school—certainly not in my case.
Certainly the Langston Hughes we're more familiar with is the jazz-age documentarian of the Harlem renaissance in the mid to late 1920s. This was the phase in which Hughes had written lines like My soul has grown deep like the rivers, which clinches an incredible salvo of a first poem, which he’d published in W. E. B. Du Bois’s new magazine The Crisis. In which Hughes dropped out of Columbia University and essentially committed class suicide, working on a cargo ship, then as a hotel busboy, where he bathed himself in the speech and cadence of Harlem’s night life.
For Hughes in this period, jazz “is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America; the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul—the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.”
But several key things happen to Hughes at the turn of the decade. For one, he witnesses the devastation of the Great Depression, the upshot of which was a gain in popularity for the political left. In 1930, he visited Cuba and Haiti, meeting with revolutionary intellectuals like Jacques Roumain. He met with Aimé Césaire, and with the great Chinese socialist writer Lu Xun. He visited the Soviet Union with a group of Black American artists and filmmakers in 1932.
The world’s first state proletarian dictatorship was 15 years old by then. It had gone through a brutal civil war that required short-term solutions, including state purchasing of food at fixed prices, then allowing markets (and thereby capitalist relations) to return to stabilize the postwar economic environment.
Meanwhile, it had implanted modern heavy industry, transport, and electrification; legalized abortion; and—chiefly—placed the legal ownership of almost all means of production and land wealth in the working class, as well as the total national product—part of it in wages like before, but the rest of it in the distribution of rent and profits by the soviet deputies for societal needs, rather than for the appropriation of a handful of financial oligarchs.
Americans like Langston Hughes would have grown up hearing news about this revolutionary socialist state, and compared it against the terrorism of the Klan and Jim Crow in the American south.
What is certain is that the impact of these experiences on Hughes’s poetry was immediate. He began contributing to the Communist Party’s organs like Daily Worker and New Masses, like Richard Wright. After his trip to the USSR he submitted his famous poem “Good Morning Revolution” to the Saturday Evening Post.
Good-morning, Revolution: You're the very best friend I ever had. We gonna pal around together from now on. Say, listen, Revolution: You know, the boss where I used to work, The guy that gimme the air to cut down expenses, He wrote a long letter to the papers about you: Said you was a trouble maker, a alien-enemy, In other words a son-of-a-bitch. He called up the police And told 'em to watch out for a guy Named Revolution. You see, The boss knows you're my friend. He sees us hangin' out together. He knows we're hungry, and ragged, And ain't got a damn thing in this world — And are gonna do something about it. The boss's got all he needs, certainly, Eats swell, Owns a lotta houses, Goes vacationin', Breaks strikes, Runs politics, bribes police, Pays off congress, And struts all over the earth — But me, I ain't never had enough to eat. Me, I ain't never been warm in winter. Me, I ain't never known security — All my life, been livin' hand to mouth, Hand to mouth. Listen, Revolution, We're buddies, see — Together, We can take everything: Factories, arsenals, houses, ships, Railroads, forests, fields, orchards, Bus lines, telegraphs, radios, (Jesus! Raise hell with radios!) Steel mills, coal mines, oil wells, gas, All the tools of production, (Great day in the morning!) Everything — And turn 'em over to the people who work. Rule and run 'em for us people who work. Boy! Them radios — Broadcasting that very first morning to USSR: Another member the International Soviet's done come Greetings to the Socialist Soviet Republics Hey you rising workers everywhere greetings — And we'll sign it: Germany Sign it: China Sign it: Africa Sign it: Poland Sign it: Italy Sign it: America Sign it with my one name: Worker On that day when no one will be hungry, cold, oppressed, Anywhere in the world again. That's our job! I been starvin' too long, Ain't you? Let's go, Revolution!
The vernacular and the telegraphic, incantatory language (Hughes was harshly received by Black newspapers of the day, who called his poetry “trash” and called him a “sewer-dweller”) both creates a specific situation while also pointing to a more general, historical narrative. It’s an elegant meditation grounded in a particular voice: the unity of the capitalists, police, and the bourgeois state to maintain the rule of capital (“Runs politics, bribes police,…”) to a concrete illustration of common ownership of industrial enterprise—Hughes prefers these chains of noun clauses in his political pieces; they’re practically list poems.
But by the end of the poem we’ve moved to a story of revolutions erupting everywhere, announced on the radio: “Another member the International Soviet's done come.” That is, another proletarian democracy has emerged that can join the group of socialist states (the Third International would exist for another decade and change) to make a consequential front against the dictatorship of capital on the stage of world politics. “That’s our job!” That’s the historical mission of the working class—the class in a position to end class society and exploitation in all forms.
Shockingly, the Saturday Evening Post rejected this great poem.
In reaction to the snub, Hughes penned a satirical lyric called “Goodbye, Christ.” The following are stanzas 3 and 4.
Goodbye, Christ Jesus Lord God Jehova, Beat it on away from here now. Make way for a new guy with no religion at all — A real guy named Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME — I said, ME! Go ahead on now, You're getting in the way of things, Lord. And please take Saint Ghandi with you when you go, And Saint Pope Pius, And Saint Aimee McPherson, And big black Saint Becton Of the Consecrated Dime. And step on the gas, Christ! Move!
(McPherson and Becton were like televangelists avant la lettre.)
Clearly at a certain level the church and popery in this poem stand in for the Post (explicitly mentioned earlier), and bourgeois publishing. It’s funny to link the book market to the reactionary institution that silenced Galileo among other things. Wasn’t it the Russian and Chinese revolutionaries that were putting art and literature in a stranglehold, with their socialist realism?
But the “creative freedom” question has always been beside the point for good Marxists, as it should be for Left-intellectuals and critics, who would do well to closely revisit the history of proper Marxist discussions on aesthetics.
I’ve been aware of a feeling that writers appear to be more particularly “libertarian” about creative work than other artists. We’re constantly digging into our own “identities.” Literary writing is a process that depends on personal initiative, more so than other processes of imaginative labor that we can think of. At the same time, literature is but one aspect of a social class’s existence, and is not the same as the other aspects.
There are lines by Lenin on the question of literature and “freedom” that have resonated very deeply. Such outcries about a “bureaucratic” stranglehold on artistic freedom, he said in 1905, are “nothing more than an expression of bourgeois-intellectual individualism.” He made fun of intellectuals who postured themselves as rising above the common causes emerging from the class struggle, calling them “literary supermen.”
Since the bourgeoisie constricts democracy to their class, the majority of professional writers are not “free” under capitalism beyond an abstract, legal sense. Even in the indie space (so helpful to dispel the brain fog that plagues me when I try to read mainstream stuff with the contemporary liberal stamping, if only momentarily), we are captive to “bourgeois-shopkeeper literary relations.”
It is the transformations of the socialist revolution that will create the conditions for genuinely free literature and press, in Lenin’s words, “free not simply from the police, but also from capital, from careerism, and what is more, free from bourgeois-anarchist individualism.”
Apparently this poem caused a bit of a kerfuffle for Hughes, and the Saturday Evening Post even ran this poem, without his permission!
Hughes’s propaganda poems could be polemical as well as agitational. In a poem called “Open Letter to the South,” he writes in a couplet:
Let us forget what Booker T. said, "Separate as the fingers." Let us become instead, you and I, One single hand That can united rise To smash the old dead dogmas of the past-- To kill the lies of color That keep the rich enthroned And drive us to the time-clock and the plow Helpless, stupid, scattered, and alone--as now-- Race against race, Because one is black, Another white of face.
He directly rejects a famous slogan from Booker T. Washington, that served as an apologia for segregation. Hughes is speaking against a pessimism of healing America’s racial friction. The answer is education with revolutionary content, explaining that racist ideas “keep the rich enthroned” and keeps the working class internally divided. (He also compares the agricultural labor in the south with new industry, an economic dimension to go along with this open hand and closed fist dyad.)
Hughes continued to write pro-Communist poetry in the early 40s, including a poem called “Good Morning Stalingrad.” Once again you’re placed in the mind of a Black sharecropper, meditating on the current imperialist war, reflecting on the alliance between the US and the Soviets at this time, and a class belonging that transcends national boundaries, the aspiration for new political and economic powers against fascism.
Goodmorning, Stalingrad! Lots of folks who don’t like you Had give you up for dead. But you ain’t dead! Goodmorning, Stalingrad! Where I live down in Dixie Things is bad — But they’re not so bad I still can’t say, Goodmorning Stalingrad! And I’m not so dumb I still don’t know That as long as your red star Lights the sky, We won’t die. Goodmorning Stalingrad! You’re half a world away or more But when your guns roar, They roar for me — And for everybody who want to be free. Goodmorning Stalingrad! Some folks try to tell me down this way That you’re our ally just for today. That may be so – for those who want it so. But as for me – you’re my ally Until we all free. Goodmorning Stalingrad! When crooks and klansmen Lift their heads and things is bad, I can look way across the sea And see where simple working folks like me Lift their heads, too, with gun in hand To drive the fascists from the land. You’ve stood between us well, Stalingrad! The folks who hate you’d Done give you up for dead — They were glad. But you ain’t dead! And you won’t be As long as I am you And you are me — For you have allies everywhere, All over the world, who care. And they Are with you more Than just today. Listen! I don’t own no radio — Can’t send no messages through the air. But I reckon you can hear me, Anyhow, away off there. And I know you know I mean it when I say, (Maybe in a whisper To keep the Klan away) Goodmorning, Stalingrad! I’m glad You ain’t dead! GOODMORNING, STALINGRAD!
And “Lenin,” a lyric that’s been reprinted in Left newspapers innumerable times:
Lenin walks around the world. Frontiers cannot bar him. Neither barracks nor barricades impede. Nor does barbed wire scar him. Lenin walks around the world. Black, brown, and white receive him. Language is no barrier. The strangest tongues believe him. Lenin walks around the world. The sun sets like a scar. Between the darkness and the dawn There rises a red star.
Hughes was forced to testify publicly before HUAC in 1953, and since then distanced himself from proletarian politics. He cut these poems out of his own edition of Selected Poems in 1959.
Are Hughes’s beautiful Communist poems a model for writers who want to be attuned to a sense of social responsibility and commitment to Left politics? I would say no. The socialist revolutions of the last century were still a living political example for Hughes as well as the workers movement in the US; and considering that, it most likely can’t be a working example for us now.
Socialist realism was a style that met a specific set of needs, in a situation that is very different from our own in many ways. But luckily that fact pushes us away from copying the past and trying to figure out what the task of our arts could be now.
The New Masses issue containing the open letter linked above also contains a poem by Louis Zukofsky, the subject of an earlier letter.
Hughes’s “Little Lyric (Of Great Importance)” sung by the late Harry Belafonte.
I wish the rent Was Heaven sent.
These days anything can be a poem, even a note toward a poem, which could have been the origin of Hughe’s 1925 piece called “Johannesburg Mines,” published in The Messenger, a Black periodical connected to the Socialist Party. An analysis of this short poem appears in Barbara Foley’s book on Marxist Literary Criticism (which I reviewed for Full Stop a while back).
In the Johannesburg Mines
There are 240,000
Native Africans working.
What kind of poem
Would you
Make out of that?
240,000 natives
Working in the
Johannesburg mines. 