3 - Rendezvous with Modernism, Fascism – and Democracy

Summary

France is a country and Great Britain is several countries but Italy is a man, Mussolini, and Germany is a man, Hitler. A man has ambitions, a man rules until he gets into economic trouble; he tries to get out of this trouble by war.

– Ernest Hemingway, “Notes on the Next War” (Esquire, September 1935)

As I see it, the doctrines of democracy deal with the aspirations of men's souls, but the application deals with things. One hand in somebody else's pocket and one on your gun, and you are highly civilized. … Desire enough for your own use only, and you are a heathen. Civilized people have things to show their neighbors.

– Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942: 792–3)

Melvin Tolson began his weekly “Caviar and Cabbage” column for the Washington Tribune on October 9, 1937. Author of an unpublished collection of poems (A Gallery of Harlem Portraits), assorted unpublished fiction, and two plays (Moses of Beale Street and Southern Front), and professor of English at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, Tolson was the very embodiment of what he called “the New Negro in action,” anxious to forge an honest democracy out of the “verbal democracies” (1982: 118) hewn by “two-bit radicals and 2x4 liberals” (117). He was an avid reader of Chicago Defender columns by Langston Hughes and Pittsburgh Courier columns by George Schuyler and believed in the local immediacy and global reach of the African-American weeklies.