This section represents the conclusion of Part II

But from my perspective, the New Masses approach to racial politics is
most clearly on display in a series of extended articles on
African-American folk songs. After all, the Communist-led Popular Front
movement of the 1930s made its most enduring contribution to American
cultural life through the work of folk music singers like Woody Guthrie
and the Weavers.  The Weavers gave us Pete Seeger, who still commands
an audience, and Guthrie begat Bob Dylan. Sing Out! magazine is
arguably the most enduring Left-wing publication in the United States.
The New Masses series on African-American folk culture begins in the
May 1930, issue, with a piece titled "Songs of the Negro Worker," by
Philip Schatz (5:12, 6-8).  The article speaks disparagingly of the
current fashion for spirituals in "bourgeois culture," declares that
"Negro culture is perhaps the most genuine workers' culture in America
despite the face that it is being corrupted by bourgeois influences"
(6), and prints a series of "workers' songs."  "In the South," Schatz
declares,
race lines and class lines are generally the same.  Today as before the
Civil War, the ruling class is white, and the Negro worker's elementary
understanding of class distinction finds a place in his singing.
Missus in de big house,
Mammy in de yard,
Missus holdin' her white hands,
Mammy workin' hard,
Ole marse ridin' all time,
Niggers workin roun'
Marse sleepin' day time
Niggers diggin' in the groun'
Or else he sings of the class struggle even more articulately:
Niggers plant cotton,
Niggers pick it out,
White man pockets money,
Nigger does without    (6-7)
        In subsequent issues, Schatz's selection of "Negro Workers' Songs" was
followed by three selections of "Negro Songs of Protest," all by
Lawrence Gellert and published in November 1930 (6:6, 10-11), January
1931 (6:8, 16-17), and April 1931 (6:11, 6-8).  These are of particular
interest for my purposes, for Pound selects eight of the "Songs of
Protest" for his Profile anthology. Gellert is a more sophisticated
folk song collector than Schatz; for while the latter simply gives us
the songs, Gellert is careful to tell us where he collected each of the
songs that he presents.  Gellert is also somewhat more consistent in
transcribing the songs into what had become by 1930 a standardized set
of phonetic symbols for "Negro dialect,"  which became familiar to an
American mass audience through Green Pastures and Porgy and Bess and
innumerable movies of the 1930s.   Here is a sample of Gellert's
transcription method, the first of the poems that Pound included in
Profile.  Gellert says that he heard a group sing the song "on a
plantation near Hamburg, S. C. The tune is 'mulatto' traces of the
English ballad very much in evidence in the score":
Went to Atlanta
Neber been dere afo'
White folks eat de apple
Nigger wait fo' core

Went to Charleston
Neber been dere afo'
White folks sleep on feather bed
Nigger on the flo'

Went to Raleigh
Neber been dere afo'
White folks wear de fancy suit
Nigger de over-o

Went to heben
Neber been dere afo'
White folks sit in Lawd's place
Chase nigger down below  (6:6, 10)
        I admire the work of the Communist Party in placing racial injustice
on the American agenda, and I also admire the determination of Schatz
and Gellert to treat African-American culture as a legitimate object of
study. However, I would also argue that both collectors display a
condescending and reductive attitude toward African-Americans, which
reflects the dogma of the Communist Party as a whole. According to the
Party line, only the mediation of the Party itself can rescue the
African-American people from the historical cul de sac in which they
are caught. (The most famous example of this perspective is, of course,
Richard Wright s Native Son.) Accordingly, in the pieces by Schatz and
Gellert, Black people are presented almost entirely as victims: of
lynch mobs, of a deeply rooted system of oppression based on race. Only
in two of the 29 songs that Gellert offers ("Stan' boys stan' " in 6:6,
11, and "Sistern an' Brethern" in 6:8, 17) do the singers fight back
against this system of oppression, and then their resistance takes the
form, not of organized political action, but simply of a violent
counter-attack against white violence. And a far more common note is a
child-like self-indulgence and self-pity, as in a song in which the
singer declares he is "neber happy / Cep' ah's on a spree," and which
ends, "U-h, uh Lawsey.../ Pore me." (6:6, 10)  For the most part, then,
African-Americans do not enter these poems as historical actors in
their own right.
        This historical passivity is reinforced by the coding of
African-American speech as a conventionalized "dialect," which fixes
the singers of these songs in the status of the Other.  The "bourgeois"
observer might hear such speech as "quaint"; the Communist folk song
collector might instead regard it as a proto-revolutionary voice of
"protest." But in either case the encoding system is reductive. In the
articles of Schatz and Gellert, the dialect poems are embedded in a
discourse that implicitly declares itself to be "rational," "normal."
Gellert, for example, tells us that he collected one of his songs from
"a Negro boy-'maid of all work' at the little hotel in Columbus, N.C.
He must be the exception to the widely accepted rule that all Negroes
are good singers.  They generally have an excellent ear for music,
true. . . .  But screetchy, unmusical, blatant voices amongst the
Negroes are just as common as with us" (6:8, 17). We might note the
casual distinction between "us" (i.e., "not-Negroes") and "them," the
equally casual gender-neutering of the "boy" (how old was he, we would
like to know) to a "boy-maid," and the painful maneuvering around the
stereotype that Black people "got more rhythm" than White people. But I
would especially underscore the assumption that "their" inability to
talk like "we" talk, to speak the language of reasoned discourse,
condemns "them" to an eternal victimhood, from which only "we" can
rescue them.