George Schuyler was a black writer who was most prominent from the 1930s to the 1960s. His name won’t be mentioned in any of the celebrations of Black History Month, however. That’s because he saw right through the leftist propaganda meant to lure black Americans into supporting the Soviet Union. Schuyler grasped that more freedom was the path forward for them, not a totalitarian state.
In this article, Mary Grabar discusses Schuyler’s life and work.
Here’s a savory sample:
Throughout the 1930s, Schuyler, while inveighing against “the methods of the old Russian Okhrana,” expressed hope in an Americanized “sensible evolutionary program of socialism” that would assure “private property and economic opportunity for all.”
But Schuyler was disabused of this idea by the Franklin D. Roosevelt presidency, under which the state did, indeed, tell farmers “what and how much they must plant”! After World War II, Schuyler emerged as a defender of constitutionalism, states’ rights, and entrepreneurship. In 1947, he declared, “[T]he primary struggle today is between collectivism and individualism as represented by the U.S.S.R. and the U.S.A.”
If Schuyler were alive today, I think he’d say that the primary struggle is between collectivism and individualism as represented by the “Progressive” movement and the remnant of liberalism (in the word’s true meaning).
Read the whole thing.