The Genial Anarchist

In October 2016, fifty years after the publication of George S. Schuyler’s autobiography, Black and Conservative, I sat in the archives of Syracuse University Library, gently reviewing Schuyler’s papers to avoid their further disintegration. They included letters to the editor protesting the segregated transportation of troops written from Schofield Barracks, Hawaii, signed in well-practiced penmanship, “George S. Schuyler, Corporal Company ‘H’ 25^th Infantry.” A Jan. 19, 1916, letter’s postscript had nearly faded away. A letter dated June 11, 1927, from one of the many enemies Schuyler acquired during his 42-year tenure as editorialist at the Pittsburgh Courier was missing the full signature. A telegram received from the Baltimore Sun on Feb. 8, 1930, was so frayed at the bottom that most of the handwritten note was gone. 

As I signed out at 5 o’clock, a student worker scooped up the brittle broken-off pieces of paper and deposited them in the trash can.

I had become intrigued by the occasional mention of Schuyler, usually by a footnote, in books about anti-communists. In July 2011, when I had begun to research him, I had already noticed the disintegration of his papers and had asked the flannel-shirted fellow behind the desk if they could find plastic sleeves. He replied that there was a backlog for such projects, and “We have priorities.”

The library worker had admitted that Schuyler was “an interesting guy” even though there was not much demand for his papers, which were acquired in the 1960s when a blanket request was made to a “who’s who” list in the area. Schuyler’s biracial daughter, Philippa, a prodigy and internationally known composer and pianist, had received more attention. Schuyler had grown up in Syracuse in a family that was solidly bourgeois despite the limitations on black employment in those days. He left when he joined the Army in 1912 at age 17, and returned for a year in 1921–1922. Thereafter, aside from multiple trips to Africa, Europe, and Latin America, he lived in Harlem. 

Schuyler made several “firsts.” He was the first African American to write a full-length satire, the novel Black No More (1931), described by English professor Arthur Davis as a “highly audacious” Juvenalian satire that “slashes” at “all American color shibboleths, black and white.” One of my favorite scenes in the book is an emergency meeting of the fictional National Social Equality League (a stand-in for the NAACP). It was presided over by the character Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard, based on W.E.B. Du Bois, “graduate of Harvard, Yale and Copenhagen” (the last two added by Schuyler) who discussed the threat of a new skin-whitening process. 

English professor Michael Peplow called Schuyler “a master of caricature” and parody. Schuyler’s dispatches during his eight-month-long tour in 1925–1926 of black communities in the South often “approached poetry.” For several years, Schuyler produced serialized fiction at a greater pace than did Charles Dickens, in addition to reporting, editing, and writing two weekly columns, editorials, and book reviews. In 1931, after a two-month trip to Liberia to investigate the enslavement of natives by the ruling class descendants of the original mid-19th-century freed black American settlers, Schuyler had his articles syndicated by the New York Post, making him the first black international correspondent for a major newspaper. From that trip, he wrote the muckraking novel Slaves Today, revealing the horrific exploitation of the natives for the opulent lifestyles of the black rulers. It was also the first novel about Africa written by an African American. 

Du Bois at least publicly accepted being poked fun of as “Shakespeare Agamemnon Beard” with good humor, but he began an all-out war on Schuyler after the publication of Slaves Today, which dared to criticize a black-led nation. Schuyler called Du Bois, who was seeking to represent Liberia at the League of Nations, a “racial mystic.” As others joined in the attack, Schuyler doubled down, vowing never to “whitewash wrongdoers” “white or black,” though he was “desirous … to see Liberia continue as a free and independent nation.” 

Du Bois was focused on the creation of a black elite class (the “Talented Tenth”) and the promotion of international Pan-African Congresses. Schuyler, however, focused on advocacy for the black working class. He had worked as a dishwasher, hod-carrier, and factory worker. He remembered fondly the interracial group of Bowery hobos who took him in when he came to New York.

Schuyler had started criticizing Du Bois and other promoters of the “Back to Africa” movement when he joined the black socialist magazine The Messenger in 1923. He caricatured Marcus Garvey as a Jamaican carpetbagger in military regalia, complete with feathered helmet, ripping off sweepers, elevator boys, and washerwomen with promises to settle them in Africa, where he would be president. In a Messenger column titled “A Tribute to Caesar,” Schuyler called Garvey “the little giant of the Caribbean.” 

Both Du Bois and Garvey were deluded about Mother Africa. To Schuyler, “race internationalism or Pan-Africanism” was a “childish manifestation of race romanticism”—the belief that “there is something in common between peoples widely divergent in culture, language and residence because accidentally they happen to be non-whites.” 

Race romanticism was the theme of Schuyler’s article “The Negro Art Hokum,” published in the June 16, 1926, issue of The Nation. There Schuyler’s wrote one of his most-quoted statements, that the “Aframerican” was “merely a lampblacked Anglo-Saxon.” 

Schuyler attracted the attention of libertarian literatus  H. L. Mencken, editor of the American Mercury, who was seeking a black writer who could shed “politeness.” Schuyler came through with “Our White Folks,” the feature story of the December 1927 issue, which reversed white assumptions about their understanding of blacks. The Negro, forced by the circumstances of economic dependency, knew the lives and characters of whites very well, but whites didn’t have the same knowledge about blacks, who concealed their lives and thoughts from them.

By 1927, Schuyler was three years into his tenure at the Pittsburgh Courier (The Messenger would fold in 1928). By 1933, Schuyler had “the most discussed column in Negro America,” according to black poet Melvin Tolson. 

Had he stayed a socialist, and even more so had he been a communist or communist sympathizer who participated in civil rights protests, Schuyler would be well-known today, as the academic rehabilitation of communists as “civil rights activists” indicates. Instead, he’s been largely forgotten because of his opposition to the communist “conspiracy,” for which he was gently mocked by earlier scholars who studied his work, Davis and Peplow.

John A. Williams, a black writer popular with white liberals, met Schuyler in 1963 when they appeared on radio programs together. He called Schuyler a “Red-baiter” and “a charming, good-looking man with a little of the poppycock about him.” After the shows, they’d go have “a drink, or two, or four.” Williams also claimed that Schuyler had not signed his name to the “fiercely negative” reviews of Williams’ books and that, when he confronted Schuyler about them, “Schuyler did not deny he had written them; he simply shrugged off my charges of journalistic cowardice, turned his usually well-tailored back, and sidled off.” 

I could not find any of the unsigned scurrilous reviews. But even though Williams’ assessment of Schuyler was couched in bitterness, he presented a man who in the 1960s had still maintained his anti-communist attitude and his formal mode of dress that he had worn since the 1920s, when he was one of the well-dressed black men sporting a cane while strolling down Seventh Avenue. 

Although Henry Louis Gates Jr. called Schuyler’s postwar writing “reactionary venom,” his 1992 New York Times review praised the first of two book collections of Schuyler’s serialized fiction, Black Empire (1936–1938), for combining “action-packed adventure with futuristic technology” in a “black utopia.” Gates denied that Schuyler really believed his own statement that this fiction was “hokum and hack work in the purest vein.” Plumbing Schuyler’s psyche, Gates claimed that Schuyler, through “black utopia” fiction, was able to carry “Garveyism to an extreme” under the nom de plume, Samuel I. Brooks. This collection of what was essentially parody was republished in 2023 as a Penguin Classic, even as the rest of Schuyler’s work is ignored. 

In Black Empire, Schuyler’s actual, subversive aim was to portray an Afrocentric dystopia under a cartoonishly diabolical leader of the Black Internationale, Henry Belsidus, a character with traits of both Du Bois and Garvey. The stories were written as entertaining adventures because, as a result of FDR’s New Deal policies, Schuyler had to work harder than ever to provide for his family, churning out pulp fiction that also included romances and detective stories. 

The interwar years were angry ones for Schuyler, as he witnessed the abandonment of Ethiopia and then Roosevelt’s maneuverings to help Europe, while ignoring the Pittsburgh Courier’s military equality bill introduced by Republican Congressman Hamilton Fish in 1938.

Critics on the left do not ask how a card-carrying Socialist Party of America member like Schuyler became conservative. Others question whether he really was a conservative in 1923, as he claimed. 

Schuyler (like other Messenger socialists) viewed socialism as a means by which to escape white patronage, or the “Higher Mendicancy,” as he put it humorously in a May 1925 column, coauthored with sometime writing partner Theophilus Lewis. Negroes who “attain the greatest fame are dubbed ‘leaders of the Negro race’ by the whites” and seek funds from “white plutocrats whose eyes are dimmed by the heart-rending stories.” Such capitalist patronage was intended to keep the working class docile, Schuyler wrote, while leaders like Du Bois wrote stultifying tomes with titles like The Relation Between the Decline of Lynching and a Change of Editorial Policy: Conclusions Arrived at in My Usual Scientific Manner.

When Schuyler joined The Messenger in 1923, the Socialist Party was facing a Moscow-directed hostile takeover by the Communist Party. Schuyler mocked Communists as “loud-mouthed, rattle-pated agitators” and sent out warnings—the party received “funds and orders from Moscow.” Schuyler became especially angry in 1931 when the Communists forced the Scottsboro rape case against eight young black men away from the NAACP, to make them martyrs for publicity purposes. A keen observer of Communist agitation worldwide, Schuyler knew their aim in the United States was to foment civil war.

In addition to fighting off Communists, Schuyler, like the Messenger Socialists, promoted black cooperatives as a way to achieve economic independence. The effort was recognized by Albert Jay Nock’s The Freeman. Under managing editor Suzanne La Follette, the Sept. 26, 1923, issue excerpted Schuyler’s promotion for The Friends of Negro Freedom, titled “The Economic Ballot.” (La Follette would later introduce Schuyler to National Review founder William F. Buckley, Jr.)

The Freeman’s editors wrote that they could not “commend too heartily for its common sense” Schuyler’s advertisement.

Once a year, says the writer of the notice, Mr. George S. Schuyler, the people ‘go to the polls and vote either for or against somebody or thing—usually against.’ … There is, however, another kind of ballot that can be employed every day for purposes of construction: ‘With intelligent use of the economic ballot, the wide masses of the people can eliminate the middleman by collectively buying their food and clothing from wholesalers; eliminate the landlords by collectively purchasing their dwellings… [and] establishing banks, insurance companies, grain elevators, factories, dance halls…

They wished the Friends of Negro Freedom “all success in their attempt to turn the discussion of the race-question into economic channels where it can accomplish something.”

Nock, as George Nash points out in his seminal history of the postwar conservative movement, is remembered by conservatives primarily for his warnings about the growth of the State. Nash credits Frank Chodorov with perpetuating Nock’s ideas after his death in 1945. But long before then, there was Schuyler, whose outlook could have been described by a back-page advertisement for the Freeman:

The FREEMAN treats serious matters with the respect that they deserve, but it is unmerciful to the buncombe, the fake and the shoddy that infest and infect current social, political, economic and aesthetic interests and that obstruct the progress of the good, the true and the beautiful. All that can be said for the over-supply of solemn ignorance is that it provokes ridicule and thus affords amusement, and that it keeps the springs of satire well lubricated. 

As Nash points out, Nock, pessimistic about the ability to enlighten humanity, “verged on anarchism,” but nevertheless felt that it was the duty of the “Remnant” to continue as modern-day Isaiahs. Which, as Schuyler’s 1935 New Year’s column declared, was his resolution: to continue the “pursuit of cold, hard facts,” even though 

true anarchism, what Kropotkin called mutual aid, will probably never come on this earth. Humanity, it seems, prefers to have things done for them.… That is why society has been ruled by medicine men, braggarts, gangsters, and such ilk.… It has an infinite capacity for being fooled. I can see no reason, however, why the person who knows better should remain silent.…

He added, “That leaves one pretty much alone. But I have always been uncomfortable in crowds. And I always find here and there a kindred soul.” Schuyler, self-described in a later column as a “genial anarchist,” seemed to qualify for membership in the “Remnant.” 

“Dr. Roosevelt,” with his “gabble about social justice,” was among the “ilk” of politicians fooling people. While a small number of Negroes had plum government jobs, most suffered discrimination under the New Deal. The masses of black agricultural workers in the South “roam the countryside, homeless,” Schuyler wrote. “Negro labor has discovered that NRA [the New Deal’s National Recovery Administration] means Negroes Robbed Again.”

Furthermore, FDR’s programs had fostered “an unprecedented paternalism” with “the greatest politically controlled bureaucracy outside the frankly collectivist states like Russia, Germany and Italy.” Schuyler complained in an April 1938 column, “An increasing percentage of Americans would now rather loaf on a WPA [the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration] job.” With the State “essaying to do everything for us from the cradle to the grave, including thinking,” the character of “HOMO AMERICANUS” was being corrupted. “In less than a decade, we have descended from manhood to mendicancy.”

As Roosevelt’s war maneuverings became bolder, Schuyler’s humor became darker. The devilish Belsidus engaged in mass murder of whites and vanquished disloyal blacks in vats of acid. Schuyler chaired the Negroes Against War Committee, where John T. Flynn, Chairman of the New York City Keep America Out of War Committee, spoke one evening. As a result, Schuyler was investigated by the FBI and placed on a register of enemies.

Upon FDR’s death in 1945, Schuyler wrote a scathing “eulogy.” Later that year, he commented that the “fashion” since Emancipation for “a Negro … to go begging … rich white people” had changed only in the “tendency to solicit government instead of the individual.” The “beggary” now involved “card-indexing, speakers’ bureaus, sucker lists and public relations.” The “Great White Father, Roosevelt,” through the New Deal bestowed “new college buildings, Y’s, orphan asylums, hospitals, clinics, playgrounds,” but Schuyler pointed out that all those New Deal buildings were still surrounded by black poverty. He concluded, “the only way for any group of people to become manly and independent is to do for itself the things that need
to be done.” 

In 1946, Schuyler urged readers to vote for a Republican Congress, which could reveal “the grimy details of political skullduggery during the past thirteen years of New Deal rule,” including war profiteering, the Pearl Harbor “mystery” (referring to Flynn’s argument in The Truth About Pearl Harbor that FDR had deliberately provoked the Japanese to attack), and “jimcrowism in the armed forces.” 

By the 1950s, Schuyler was also writing for the Spadea syndicate, the Manchester Union Leader, and Human Events. In 1950, he served on the Congress for Cultural Freedom. Schuyler’s speech given in Berlin, “The Negro Question Without Propaganda,” was distributed to all U.S. embassies and consulates and condensed and reprinted in the revived Freeman, Reader’s Digest,and other publications. When the Congress revealed itself to be unserious about fighting Communism, Schuyler and James Burnham stormed out. Reviving the idea of self-help through “economic channels,” Schuyler promoted Booker T. Washington, especially as the Communist Party was agitating for a comeback through “civil rights.”

In 1955, the year of National Review’s launch, Schuyler identified himself as belonging to the Republican Party, but to the “Bricker-Jenner-McCarthy constitutional nationalistic, free enterprise wing … rather than the Dewey-Ford-General Motors-Chase National Bank-One-World-United Nations group which currently controls the party.” 

William F. Buckley, Jr., however, Nash wrote, “forcefully rejected what he called ‘the popular and cliché-ridden appeal to the ‘grassroots.’” His National Review would appeal to intellectuals, “consolidate the right,” and influence policy, including Cold War interventionism. 

Nash also wrote that an “indication of the almost forlorn minority status of libertarianism in [the war period 1939–1945] was the quiet discovery by many future conservative intellectuals of the writings of Albert Jay Nock,” among these John Chamberlain, who said that Nock’s Our Enemy, the State “hit me between the eyes when I read it in the thirties.” Nock was a friend of Buckley’s parents. Schuyler is mentioned only once by Nash, as putting his signature on a 1954 letter opposing the censure of Joseph McCarthy, alongside Buckley, Frank Hanighen, Eugene Lyons, Freda Utley, James Burnham, and John T. Flynn.

Schuyler had had his columns excerpted and promoted by Mencken (who had been unsuccessful in the 1920s in convincing his editors at the Baltimore Sun to hire Schuyler), John Chamberlain, Westbrook Pegler, and others. John T. Flynn prodded Reader’s Digest to run his columns, while Phyllis Schlafly invited Schuyler to give a talk about the United Nations. Although Schuyler, through Young Americans for Freedom, mentored Jay Parker, a young black man from Philadelphia, and served on the board of the anti-Marxist American African Affairs Association, co-chaired by National Review publisher William Rusher, his writing, except for one or two very brief items, did not appear in National Review. 

In 1961, as Schuyler informed Pittsburgh Courier readers, he had recently gone into regions of Portuguese Africa “in the Angolan areas of disaffection and interviewed refugees from the Red-led jungle terrorists.” Schuyler, helping philosopher Thomas Molnar, a National Review contributor, on his book about Africa, pointed out that Communists had been in Africa long before the 1950s. (Schuyler had corresponded with and met with the Communist Pan-Africanist journalist George Padmore.)

Schuyler’s publication in John Birch Society publications began in November 1965. In his Pittsburgh Courier column, Schuyler tried to make light of Buckley’s famous denunciation in the October 1965 National Review of John Birch members as occupying “the fever swamps of the crazed right.” 

Schuyler said he was “in stitches” over “the fright of the Republican party bosses.” He had “discussed this with Bill Buckley some time back,” but “the best that [Buckley] could come up with was the charge that [John Birch Society Founder Robert] Welch was too reckless in smearing prominent people, including Eisenhower, as Communist dupes or, worse, conscious agents of the Kremlin.” 

By this time, Schuyler had suffered numerous public humiliations and demotions by his editors at the Pittsburgh-Courier, especially for his criticism of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “beggary” and for his support for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater. Yet Schuyler never backed down from insisting on open, uncensored warfare on Communism and criticizing weak-kneed Republicans. He continued writing for John Birch Society publications and the Manchester Union Leader until at least 1976, the year before he died. 

Buckley was distantly polite. When Schuyler’s daughter Philippa was killed in a helicopter crash in 1967 in Vietnam while on a mission to rescue orphans, Buckley expressed his condolences. But he regretted not being able to attend the memorial service for Schuyler’s wife in 1969. 

In the 1970s, a few prominent black writers made the pilgrimage to Schuyler’s Harlem apartment to ask him about the 1920s and the Harlem Renaissance. In 1972, during a visit by Ishmael Reed and Steve Cannon, Schuyler commented on the Renaissance novelist and screenwriter Wallace Thurman: 

There was a man with a sense of humor and not chained to any racist chariot. He had ability, shown by the fact that even in that early day he was able to get a job out in Hollywood as a writer.

Reed commented that good writers were independent: “Rudolph Fisher, you, Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston to an extent,” but one could not find a copy of Thurman’s Infants of the Spring. Schuyler explained why: “Because they’ve been played up and built up.” It was “a clique. Who would ever think of Malcolm X as a leader?” 

On “African art” by black Americans, Schuyler said, “I think that such art as Negroes produce will be American art, and all the rest of this is hokum. Usually it’s hokum because they don’t know anything about Africa. They’re not African.”

“Whom did Schuyler admire?” they asked. He responded: 

There are a lot of people that I’ve crossed their paths, among Negroes … for whom I have great respect and in many instances admiration as individuals. For example, I knew a man in Charleston, West Virginia—Mr. James. Now, this man had a wholesale fruit and vegetable business and he had agents—this was back in the twenties—who went around and bought up crops from the farmers … and he had a big warehouse, and a spur on the railroad coming in there. And I don’t think you could find his name on anything in any of these Negro histories but this was an important thing. It made some Negroes ambitious to do likewise.

(Correction: the sixth paragraph of an earlier version of this article incorrectly characterized Schuyler’s novel Slaves Today. The description that the novel “revealed the horrific exploitation of the natives for the opulent lifestyles of the black rulers” has been added.)