The Truth About Zora Neale Hurston
Damon W. Root at Reason pretty convincingly argues that African-American involvement in the mainstream conservative movement has somewhat deeper roots than I said here. He cites this Saturday Evening Post article from author Zora Neale Hurston, who was apparently a Robert Taft supporter in ‘52 and New Deal hater:
Throughout the New Deal era the relief program was the biggest weapon ever placed in the hands of those who sought power and votes. If the average American had been asked flatly to abandon his rights as a citizen and to submit to a personal rule, he would have chewed tobacco and spit white lime. But under relief, dependent upon the Government for their daily bread, men gradually relaxed their watchfulness and submitted to the will of the “Little White Father,” more or less. Once they had weakened that far, it was easy to go on an on voting for more relief, and leaving Government affairs in the hands of a few. The change from a republic to a dictatorship was imperceptibly pushed ahead.
Seeing as how Hurston is a mainstay of high school curricula, it seems like there should be more awareness of these facts about her perspective. Obviously she was unrepresentative of black opinion during that period, but it’s interesting history.
61 Responses to “The Truth About Zora Neale Hurston”
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October 27th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Oh, come on, don’t fall for the conservative trap of insisting that anyone whose politics could be construed as vaguely supportive of their agenda, especially minorities, be held up as a politically convenient “good” one of “them.” Conservatives aren’t interested in Zora Neale Hurston or her work in the slightest.
You’re right, in historical terms the different political traditions among the black community are interesting. But please don’t imagine that the National Review gives a fuck.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Obviously she was unrepresentative of black opinion during that period, but it’s interesting history.
i didn’t know matt was such the expert on mid-century black political thought…
every time matt uses the words “clearly” or “obviously” it means prepare yourself for some assertion that will be neither clear nor obvious unless you happen to share my particular world view.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:48 am
I suspect introducing Hurston’s politics would be less valuable in a curriculum (especially a high school curriculum) than you imply. Her fiction is built more upon her training as an anthropologist than it is on her politics.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:48 am
marshall,
that’s funny, because i feel the exact same way about progressives. who knew we’d have so much in common?
October 27th, 2009 at 11:50 am
who knew we’d have so much in common?
Well, other than the fact that white conservatives don’t give a shit about black people unless they can be roped into a debate about school vouchers or something, I guess you’re right.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Why should blacks have been fans of the New Deal? Historian Ira Katznelson has written a book, When Affirmative Action Was White, documenting how the New Deal (and Truman’s Fair Deal) were implemented in racist ways that benefited whites at the expense of blacks, actually widening the gap between blacks and whites.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:53 am
She wasn’t so opposed to the New Deal that it kept her from working for the WPA.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:55 am
Bear in mind that Hurston also opposed desegregation (under the curious rationale that it was insulting to imply that black schools were not equal to white ones). Important to know in terms of understanding Hurston, but she had basically no impact on black politics in her day or ours.
Easy to see why Reason and the National Review would love her, though.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:57 am
@7: Just like Milton Friedman!
October 27th, 2009 at 11:59 am
She was a wonderful writer — her politics may have been misguided — or deplorable, but others have argued that many vibrant black-owned and operated institutions were destroyed when segregation ended. See Sayles’ movie, The Sunshine State, about the loss of a black resort in Florida to white real estate speculators.
At any rate, she was not alone in being a black “bootstraps” conservative, and these people deserve respect and recognition rather than contempt — if nothing else for trying to survive through independence and hard work in a hostile atmosphere where everything was stacked against them.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
marshall,
see, and i would say that white progressives don’t give a shit about black people unless its to keep blacks voting solidly democratic and supporting progressives own solipsitic social justice narrative in which righteous white people descend into the great unwashed brown hordes to deliver them up from oppression.
of course, maybe we’re both wrong and attempts by both right and left to claim the interests of “black people” are little more than bold-faced excercises in political calculation. and maybe the truth is that the best thing for “black people” would be the development of new and fresh political thought across the entirety of the progressive-conservative spectrum. but hey, i have these crazy ideas sometime, so who knows…
October 27th, 2009 at 12:04 pm
Seeing as how Hurston is a mainstay of high school curricula
You went to a different high school than I did. I never heard of Hurston until I was well into college and even then I only learned of her from an (earlier) article in Reason.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:11 pm
Can you please write a post addressing the fact that the New Deal provided employment for her?
I’m curious when and under what conditions she opposed the New Deal. You often hear about her opposition – you never hear about the fact that she was a WPA writer.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
progressives own solipsitic social justice narrative
See, a social justice narrative is premised on the idea that the wealthy and powerful have a moral obligation to help, rather than exploit, the poor and oppressed. The fact that conservatives can only construe this phenomenon as somehow self-serving and exploitative just shows their inability to comprehend any other moral code than their own: I have mine, so screw you.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
Can someone find me the larger context of this quote highlighted by John McWhorter writing about the Ricci case?
One of the comments in that thread says she’s arguing against dismantling Jim Crow.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
See, a social justice narrative is premised on the idea that the wealthy and powerful have a moral obligation to help, rather than exploit, the poor and oppressed.
i believe the term you’re looking for is “the white man’s burden.”
The fact that conservatives can only construe this phenomenon as somehow self-serving and exploitative just shows their inability to comprehend any other moral code than their own: I have mine, so screw you.
and dude, do you really believe that shit. the purpose of my last comment was to say that attempts by both liberals and conservatives to coopt blacks and amalgamate them into their own pre-existing doctrine without stopping for a minute to consider what, if any, value the black experience has to offer to the larger political debate is base political calculus at its worst. and, more relevant to this conversation, it’s something done by both the right and the left.
if you want to persist in your simplistic, children’s book version of the work where progressives wear white and conservatives kick puppies, then fine. keep your head in the sand.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:32 pm
This is ridiculous. “Reason” magazine? Black people with more than one opinion? Protecting high schoolers from getting the wrong idea about Zora Neale Hurston? Please–just stop while you’re not too far behind, okay?
October 27th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
if you want to persist in your simplistic, children’s book version of the work where progressives wear white and conservatives kick puppies, then fine. keep your head in the sand.
As the fine author of “Heads in the Sand” has argued many times. it would be folly to attribute good faith on matters of race to conservatives since their movement repeatedly reveals its belief that the central issue of race in contemporary society is that white people are encumbered with political-correctness-inspired prohibitions against racism in one form or another. Thus, I would be keeping my head in the sand if I took seriously any conservative argument on the subject of race.
And, as for the white man’s burden, I’ll only repeat my point that conservatives are only capable of understanding decency as a self-serving apologia for imperialism.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
The idea that black people can believe all manner of things, both wonderful and kooky, doesn’t strike me as anything worthy of note. It’s like being interested by how black people breathe just like everyone else.
It might be interesting to consider exactly how and when Conservative ideology became so enmeshed with racism, as opposed to simply exploiting it politically, that the existence of black conservatives became an oxymoron.
Mike
October 27th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
What would Tea Cake say?
October 27th, 2009 at 12:48 pm
‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ is what Cliffs notes are for.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:50 pm
She was employed by the WPA writers project and her supervisor was Stetson Kennedy.
She worked on a project called The Florida Negro directed from Washington by Sterling Brown. She quarreled with the other members of the project because she wanted to leave out all reference to the racial massacres that had occurred in Florida in the 1920s (I think it was). She definitely had issues of denial. She had been the adored daughter of a white father to whose views she was loyal all her life — to her great emotional cost.
I don’t think this affects the quality of her writing though. She was a poetic genius (IMO). (A lot of our poets have been conservative).
October 27th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ is what Cliffs notes are for.
Are you employed by the National Review?
October 27th, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Harold has it. She was an engaging writer with crackpot political views. She wasn’t the first nor the last.
October 27th, 2009 at 12:58 pm
Links above don’t work. Try again:
Stetson Kennedy
Sterling Brown
October 27th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
it would be folly to attribute good faith on matters of race to conservatives since their movement repeatedly reveals its belief that the central issue of race in contemporary society is that white people are encumbered with political-correctness-inspired prohibitions against racism in one form or another.em>
huh? dude, i don’t even know what you’ve just written. is you intention to score some sort of TKO by writing something so convoluted that i am rendered unable to comprehend and, therefore, reply? or is your thinking just that engrained with progressive orthodoxy?
i hate to be the one to break this to you. i feel like i’m telling a little kid that there’s no santa claus. the world is not as simple as liberal good, conservative bad. furthermore, the idea that only liberals have the “true interests” of black people in mind is a little bit paternalistic and more than a little bit insulting.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Hey I am just being honest. I actually read the book, but if I had it to do over Cliff’s notes it would be. I don’t know anyone who liked that book.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:10 pm
If you need it in short, simple sentences that even the home-schooled can understand, conservatives don’t think that racism is a big problem. They do think that anti-racism is a big problem. Anyone with that set of beliefs is not worth a serious conversation about race.
And I haven’t said a word about the true interests of black people or anything remotely like that. I’ve said that what liberals rightly view as decency conservatives can only understand as exploitation because evil cannot fathom good.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:12 pm
j r Says:
October 27th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
it would be folly to attribute good faith on matters of race to conservatives since their movement repeatedly reveals its belief that the central issue of race in contemporary society is that white people are encumbered with political-correctness-inspired prohibitions against racism in one form or another.em>
huh? dude, i don’t even know what you’ve just written. is you intention to score some sort of TKO by writing something so convoluted that i am rendered unable to comprehend and, therefore, reply? or is your thinking just that engrained with progressive orthodoxy?
i hate to be the one to break this to you. i feel like i’m telling a little kid that there’s no santa claus. the world is not as simple as liberal good, conservative bad. furthermore, the idea that only liberals have the “true interests” of black people in mind is a little bit paternalistic and more than a little bit insulting.
===========================================================
Sad isn’t it. Please don’t burst his bubble about the Easter Bunny or the Tooth Fairy. “Four legs good, two legs bad” is so much easier
October 27th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
see, and i would say that white progressives don’t give a shit about black people unless its to keep blacks voting solidly democratic and supporting progressives
It’s worth noting that this describes a perfectly reasonable bargain that respects of the automony of all factions. If blacks and low-income whites find they have some interests in common and decide to fight side-by-side, I’m not seeing what exactly is so patronizing or imperialist about that.
There’s a huge difference between reaching out to people because you want their votes and reaching out to them because you want a few of them as symbolic tokens to ward off criticism. Perhaps in neither case do you genuinely “care” about the people you’re soliciting, but in the former case you’re at least forced to respect their power.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:15 pm
I don’t know anyone who liked that book.
I thought it was great. But I’m sure the NR editorialists who have recently taken up Hurston as they would any tool that can be made politically useful would agree with your assessment, if they even bothered to go as far as the Cliffs Notes.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
See, a social justice narrative is premised on the idea that the wealthy and powerful have a moral obligation to help, rather than exploit, the poor and oppressed.
i believe the term you’re looking for is “the white man’s burden.”
Interesting the way “wealthy and powerful” got transmuted into “white” and “poor and oppressed” into “black or brown” there. But yes, some of us are pretty comfortable with the ideal of “the wealthy person’s burden.” Pretty hard to STAY rich without a larger society to live in, despite the wealthy fantasy that they’s do just as well or better in some kind of state of nature. So pay up to keep that society together.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:22 pm
furthermore, the idea that only liberals have the “true interests” of black people in mind is a little bit paternalistic and more than a little bit insulting.
Right, because black people cannot be liberals, of course. They’re another monolith altogether. They’re not Real Americans — they’re only 3/5ths Americans (also, one part French and one part Shaft. Eek!). And if they overwhelmingly support liberal politicians, it’s only because they’ve been plied with handouts so long that they slavishly follow their liberal benefactors, right?
October 27th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
MY – obviously, you didn’t crack your library of america copy of Hurston’s work, otherwise you would have known about her politics. Hurston opposed Brown vs. Board of Education, and the civil rights movement. At one point in her life, Hurston said, the Jim Crow system works.
Politically, Hurston was a conservative republican.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Can we get a link to the 1951 Saturday Evening Post piece?
Neither Matt nor Reason provides one, and it would be useful to have more than that one paragraph.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
She was a pro-segregation black, no wonder conservatives love her. Just like they love anti-feminist Ann Coulter or anti-anchor baby Michelle Malkin.
October 27th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
If you need it in short, simple sentences that even the home-schooled can understand…
sorry bud, writing big convoluted sentences does not a smart man make. all it does is obscure your argument, which in this case may have been a plus.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
“I don’t know anyone who liked that book.”
Well, allow me to make your acquaintance!
Your opinion is your own, but if you’re going to turn to the question of how appreciated Their Eyes is, I think you’ll find you’re in the minority of those who have an opinion.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
sorry bud, writing big convoluted sentences does not a smart man make. all it does is obscure your argument, which in this case may have been a plus.
Um, j r, what obscures your argument is the fact that you are too goddamned lazy to hit the goddamned shift key.
October 27th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Maybe it’s an international school, class of ‘78 thing, but I hadn’t heard of Hurston until reading this post.
October 27th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
what obscures your argument is the fact that you are too goddamned lazy to hit the goddamned shift key
really? do you mean that my lack of capitalization is literally making it difficult to understand my argument in the same manner that an unweildy sentence structure might?
i think what obscures my argument is you. and that’s because you have nothing meaningful to say about it, so you throw out some potshot instead.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
There’s also, stranger & sadder, George Schuyler.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
I’ve read all kinds of great authors who also had political or other views I found unconvincing or absurd or even offensive. It didn’t make them a bad writer, but them being great writers didn’t make crappy opinions any better, either.
Disputes among political opinions were not obscure among African American thinkers late in the 19th century or early in the 20th century, either — W. E. B. DuBois certainly had rather strong disagreements with certain views of Booker T. Washington, with whose views Hurston might generally align.
October 27th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
The Secret Zora Neale Hurston
by Steve Sailer
Published in National Review, 4/3/95, 1800 words
Zora Neale Hurston — Novels and Stories (Vol. I) and Folklore, Memoirs and Other Writings (Vol. II) (Library of America, Vol. I: 1,054pp., Vol II: 1,024 pp., $35.00 each)
… Zora Neale Hurston’s induction into this quasi-official pantheon does offer a timely occasion to look back upon the first African-American woman writer of note. To traditionalists who haven’t read her, Zora’s emergence as a mainstay of trendy college reading lists epitomizes the decline of academic standards. To multiculturalists, her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God has become “perhaps the most widely known and privileged text in the African-American literary canon,” according to black studies professor Mary Helen Washington. Alice Walker (author of that anti-black male bestseller, The Color Purple) claims, “There is no book more important to me.” And Oprah owns the movie rights.
Nobody, however, seems terribly interested in Zora’s own ideas. Although the reading public would have been better served by, say, a 700 page “Best of Zora” collection, these portly volumes do at least copiously document her unfashionable world view. Never before has Zora been so widely read, but seldom has any author been so uniformly misread by her self-proclaimed (but self-absorbed) heirs. Stereotyping her by skin color and sex, the diversicrats ignore much of the inner Zora: a disciple of the greatest dead white European male authors, a connoisseur of macho braggadocio, and a shamelessly conservative Republican who scorned victimism and leftist conformism.
What produced such a woman? Zora’s father combined carpentry and preaching with the less Christ-like calling of being mayor of what may have been America’s first self-governing black town. Eatonville, Florida’s singular status sheltered young Zora from the worst of Jim Crow, giving her an almost unique foretaste of our post-Civil Rights world. After leaving Eatonville, Zora scraped by as a maid and waitress, educating herself (once finding a copy of Paradise Lost in a rubbish pile). Finally, her ebullience and wit attracted patrons who helped her become in 1925 the first black at Barnard College. She soon became known as the most irreverent personality of the Harlem Renaissance.
Studying anthropology under Franz Boas, she collected black folklore in Florida logging camps and New Orleans hoodoo dens. An aged ex-slave told her how the King of Dahomey had conquered his West African village, then peddled him to white slavers. Zora reflected, “[M]y people had sold me . . . It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory. Lack of power and opportunity passes off too often for virtue.”
Zora reworked her mountain of sermons, songs, and “lies” (tall tales) into beguiling folklore, fiction, and memoirs, imbued with her love for both the oral inventions of poor black folk and the “canonical” masterpieces from Chaucer to Kipling. She maintained that Southern black speech fused two exuberantly innovative traditions: the West African and the Elizabethan.
Her hopes for literary prestige, however, were undermined by the leading black male intellectuals. Their disdain, though, stemmed less from their chauvinism than from their socialism. Unlike her Communist rival, Richard Wright (whose best-selling Native Son made him leader of what she tartly termed the “sobbing school of Negrohood”), she refused to view blacks primarily as victims.
While trying to escape an unworkable love affair with a domineering younger man, Zora wrote Their Eyes in seven weeks. Today, a vast academic literature struggles to reconcile this rushed but irresistible love story with feminist literary doctrine, explicating it as a “text” about the evolving selfhood of an autonomous, intelligent woman achieving her own voice, etc. Yet, as Yale’s independent-minded Harold Bloom notes, “Hurston herself was refreshingly free of all the ideologies that currently obscure the reception of her best book. Her sense of power has nothing in common with . . . contemporary feminism,” as the plot makes clear:
Read the rest at http://www.isteve.com/zora.htm
October 27th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
… Feminists looking for a role model might be expected to turn from Their Eyes’ Janie to Zora’s most memorable character, vividly displayed in her zestful yet trenchant autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942). Revealingly, they are embarrassed. Poet Maya Angelou finds the autobiography “puzzling,” since Zora doesn’t linger enough on all the sexism and racism she overcame. Alice Walker is disconcerted by its “weird politics,” which grew from Zora’s hardheaded view of human nature: “It is foolish to expect any justice untwisted by the selfish hand. Look into the Book of Books . . . The Lord wanted [the Hebrew slaves escaping Egypt] to have a country full of big grapes and tall corn. Incidentally, while they were getting it, they might as well get rid of some trashy tribes that He never did think much of, anyway.” She had little use for the politics of race: “All clumps of people turn out to be individuals on close inspection,” and “The Race Leader is a fiction that is good only at the political trough.”
Did Zora eschew racial militance out of greed? Well, Richard Wright made far more money by smiting the white man hip and thigh. Or was she naive? It’s widely assumed that black militants are more disillusioned with whites than conservatives like Zora or Thomas Sowell. In truth, the confrontationists show a touching faith in the patience of the white majority. Having studied the universality of group antagonisms, black conservatives lack all confidence in the kindliness of white people.
Nor do Zora’s other works support current dogmas. In this time of Afrocentric postulates about black pharaohs, her Moses, Man of the Mountain, an idiosyncratic retelling of Exodus, reminds us that African-American have long been fascinated by tales of Egypt. Before Afrocentrism, though, blacks identified with Egypt’s slaves, not its slaveowners.
After WWII, Zora’s conservatism became even more outspoken. She campaigned for Adam Clayton Powell Jr.’s Republican opponent, published “Why the Negro Won’t Buy Communism” in American Legion magazine, and endorsed Robert Taft for the GOP nomination in 1952. Most controversially, she denounced as demeaning to blacks the Supreme Court’s Brown decision that separate always meant unequal. While questionable in 1954, this proved a prescient critique of the 1970’s school busing rulings, which implied that the White Child’s Burden was to civilize his dusky classmates.
Largely estranged from the black establishment, Zora’s finances deteriorated until her death back home in Florida in 1960, alone and broke, but still proud. Upon hearing the news of her impending pauper’s burial, old friends rallied around to send her off with the kind of rousing funeral she had always reveled in growing up in Eatonville.
http://www.isteve.com/zora.htm
October 27th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
One other note on Hurston’s complicated politics. Zora didn’t like FDR’s maneuvers to alienate Japan before Pearl Harbor, such as his oil embargo, because she welcomed the rise of Japan as a non-white imperial power puncturing white pride.
October 27th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
Matt’s readers don’t think much of Zora’s Their Eyes Were Watching God because it’s basically a florid romance novel and they’re almost all guys. Feminist English professors like it because it’s basically a romance novel and they’re women. Matt’s readers would be more impressed with Zora’s autobiography Dust Tracks on the Road, but that’s not taught in high school because of its heterodox political opinions.
October 27th, 2009 at 5:17 pm
Per Steve Sailor’s (#45) quotes from the NR: “In truth, the confrontationists show a touching faith in the patience of the white majority.”
Oh, that’s rich! Just for the sake of clarity, how did this patience manifest itself? By not killing them all?
October 27th, 2009 at 6:15 pm
Since FDR prolonged the depression for a total of 16 miserable years and simultaneously fire bombed and incinerated hundreds of thousands of non-white Japanese civilians (followed by Democrat Truman’s unnecessary incineration of hundreds of thousands more Japanese civilians with atomic bombs), what is surprising here is that more black Americans haven’t figured out the truth about the Party of Death and Depression.
October 27th, 2009 at 7:02 pm
IT should be pointed out, as Sailer’s comments on Japan have, that Hurston was somewhat more on the paleoconservative/paleolibertarian side of the right. It is doubtful that she would have been comfortable in the modern “Invade the World” GOP.
In fact, she would probably be writing for VDARE or The American Conservative, and I would like to think that she would have been disgusted by the warmongering Larry Elder, and disappointed in the interventionist attitude of Thomas Sowell.
Marcus Epstein once wrote an article about her.
October 27th, 2009 at 7:40 pm
she would probably be writing for VDARE
I highly doubt that.
Marcus Epstein once wrote an article about her.
There must be a name for this sort of “rehabilitative hagiography” where we take someone who turned out to be stupendously wrong about something and look back and try to point out that their beliefs were actually valuable and how all our problems today came about because we didn’t listen to them. Hurston seems to have taken a moral gamble at a certain moment in history and bet on the wrong horse. Nothing wrong with that; nobody is perfect. But it’s not a good idea to then go at lengths to explain how this philosophical failure was really the right decision.
However, I fully expect in 50 years to read a retrospective of Douglas Feith’s life and how our problems of 2060 are with us today because we didn’t listen to him.
October 27th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
The Our Kind of People set was conservative – both socially and economically. They had prospered under segregation and opposed policies that would upset the status quo.
October 27th, 2009 at 11:34 pm
There must be a name for this sort of “rehabilitative hagiography” where we take someone who turned out to be stupendously wrong about something and look back and try to point out that their beliefs were actually valuable and how all our problems today came about because we didn’t listen to them. Hurston seems to have taken a moral gamble at a certain moment in history and bet on the wrong horse. Nothing wrong with that; nobody is perfect. But it’s not a good idea to then go at lengths to explain how this philosophical failure was really the right decision.
You seem to have cause-and-effect backwards here. People are not trying to rehabilitate Ms. Hurston because of an apolitical love for her, and then condoning her “mistakes” in order to rehabilitate her.
Rather, the people who fete her views are generally reactionaries who agree with her statements (most of whom had those ideas even before hearing of her) and who have an affinity for her because of them.
However, I fully expect in 50 years to read a retrospective of Douglas Feith’s life and how our problems of 2060 are with us today because we didn’t listen to him.
There will probably also be a retrospective of Michael Moore’s life that says the same thing, written by partisans of the opposite side.
Although of course, the real reasons for our problems in 2060 will largely be due to lack of listening to Ron Paul.
October 28th, 2009 at 5:40 am
The Our Kind of People set was conservative – both socially and economically.
Zora’s background, however, was extremely obscure. She was from a tiny farm town in Florida. We don’t really know when she was born. She claimed 1901 but the 1900 Census lists a 9 year old girl with her name.
She lived a knockabout life until surfacing in New York in the 1920s, either in her 20s or her 30s. She became the personal assistant of the best-selling novelist Fannie Hurst, whose twice-filmed melodrama “Imitation of Life” was somewhat inspired by Zora, then wound up at Columbia studying anthropology under Boas with people like Margaret Mead. She had no use for the Communist Party, which had much control over black literature at the time (see “Invisible Man”), so that caused her trouble.
Her autobiography, “Dust Tracks on a Road,” is very entertaining, much more interesting for a male audience than the somewhat pulpy romance “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”
October 28th, 2009 at 7:00 am
You seem to have cause-and-effect backwards here. People are not trying to rehabilitate Ms. Hurston because of an apolitical love for her, and then condoning her “mistakes” in order to rehabilitate her.
I understand the cause and effect sequence– Marcus and those who wrote for his online magazine were obviously highlighting her because of her ideological views– but those views were wrong ones whose failure was apparent even in their lifetime. There is no use trying to pretend otherwise. Just as Feith was shown to have failed in his own lifetime.
Not sure what your Michael Moore point was about, though I see he does come up whenever conservatives are called to account for inappropriate praise for the moral failures of their past.
October 28th, 2009 at 8:38 am
I think that there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of Robert Taft at work here, as well. Taft, while “Mr. Conservative” of his generation, was *well* to the left of anyone who uses that title today. While his stance on labor issues was reactionary, he was a strong supporter of public housing programs, supported Federal grants for education 20 years before they came to pass, had a stance on the cold war which was to the left of many Democrats (seeing NATO as an unnecessary provocation), and supported a national health care plan far more liberal than anything that’s being seriously considered now.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Marcus Epstein was convicted of attacking a black woman, whom he karate chopped and called a “n****r”. The fact that Epstein and Sailer both praise Hurston’s political views is all the comment one needs to make about the cogency and relevance of her ideas. Lots of great writers have wrong-headed political ideas: Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, J.P. Sartre, Celine, Brecht, etc., etc.
October 28th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
I’m finding it difficult to understand how these debates about black historical figures figure.
October 28th, 2009 at 3:43 pm
[...] Even Matthew Yglesias admits it. [...]
October 28th, 2009 at 5:57 pm
I think Hurston also wrote against the Voting Rights Act–possibly in National Review. Her more conservative pieces tend not to be mentioned in “official” bibliographies.
As I recall, she grew up in an all-black middle class enclave in Florida, a bit like Condi Rice in Birmingham. It was not crazy for these people to think the civil rights revolution would threaten what they had–if only by galvanizing white violence.
October 28th, 2009 at 6:19 pm
but those views were wrong ones whose failure was apparent even in their lifetime.
Failed as in they failed to pass, or failed as in they were tried and didn’t work?
Could you elaborate a little more?