World War I

Michael brings up some good points in his post below about the influence of promotion culture on the production and packaging of Blast magazine. The editorial design choices made (presumably by Lewis) in light of this push for promotional value caught my attention while I was reading both issues of Blast as well. The idea of text placement and font sizes as extensions of avant-garde artistic sensibilities make sense, especially in light of Vorticism's close ties with Imagism. The "Blast" section of the 1914 issue provides an ideal in-your-face display of the "diagonal text lines and striking layout and font choices" Morrison alludes to in his introduction.

Let's look at page 13 in particular, where Lewis blasts the French. The balance of the text placement is immaculate. Centered, capitalized, bolded phrases unify off-shooting branches of text placed on the right and left of the page. Considering this text (imagine making an outline of it as if it were an object) as its own image raises a number of artistic queries generally reserved for more traditional visual art or posters. Where is the page's focal point? How is this emphasis achieved? I would argue it falls somewhere around "OH BLAST FRANCE" (achieved by size dominance) and the "BLAST" situated about halfway down the page (achieved by its sense of isolation). The hierarchy of words in terms of their sheer size establishes an energetic and parallel relation between form (typography and font) and the relative importance of the corresponding content. Apparently, the French's "poodle temper" and "bad music" are secondary considerations compared to their "sensationalism" and "fussiness" (in larger text size).

Now I want to focus on the page's font choice. Notably, the font is sans-serif (like Helvetica), which is normally reserved in the printing world to headlines and sub-heads. For longer text lengths, graphic designers generally use serif fonts (with the footies on the bottom of the letters, like Times New Roman) because of their enhanced readability in smaller sizes. The use of sans-serif works to establish each piece of text as its own design element. Notice how the page designer has worked so fastidiously to balance the page by making each idea its own element and "blocking it off," so to speak. The words adjacent to "Parisian parochialism" and underneath "Blast" act as their own, independent square shape. It's basically artistic principles, with definite cubist influences, at work. Of particular interest is this design's obsession with clean, straight lines. The geometric nature of the text placement distances Blast's design from the organic shapes its editors so despise in more romantic or impressionistic art (and dedicate many pages to disparaging). The text is streamline, boxy, and inorganic, like a machine. Holistically, the page itself, in its energy and geometry, stands as a textual display of the Vorticist principles heralded throughout Blast.

In his Modernist Journals Project article “BLAST: An Introduction,” Mark Morrison writes of the influence of promotional culture on both the form and intellectual methods of the modernist magazine Blast. By the time the first issue was published in 1914, there had been a union of new printing technology and mass advertising methods. The circulation of popular magazines, such as Collier’s and Scribner’s, boomed because the publishers were able to sell at less than cost, profiting by the sale of advertising. A low cost allowed a larger readership, which generated a larger consumer base for print ads.

The creators of Blast absorbed the promotional methods of the day to propagate their message. Morrison writes of Blast’s use of attention-grabbing “shock tactics” such as exaggerated font sizes and antagonistic language (the cover being the most obvious and immediate example), which connects the magazine to the methods contemporary advertising-posters. They even recognized, in 1915, that the war itself could have “promotional value,” and Wadsworth encouraged Lewis to give the second issue its title, “The War Number.”         

In Blast, we see the melding of art with this new promotional culture. While artists have always had to promote themselves to some extent in order to make a living off their art, the promotion of Blast seems more politically and egoistically motivated than economic­, although Morrison does mention that Lewis and his companions hoped for a wide readership and, presumably, for the economic success this would bring in addition to the artistic. There is an almost evangelistic urgency in the magazine’s message of Vorticism—a desire for a cleansing violence against Victorian mores and aesthetics, so that even new forms still rooted in the old—such as, in Lewis’s view, Italian Futurism—must be rejected.

Progress, as Dr. Drouin duly noted in class, is not linear and Blast No. 1, despite its fervent work towards a new and better future, takes on a rather anti-woman tone at various moments. Women, in fact, often become a sacred object sacrificed on the alter of change. Rebecca West plays with the idea of woman as necessary sacrifice in her short story “Indissoluble Matrimony” (98-117), in which an unhappy husband attempts to kill his overly-sexual, overly-political wife. West writes of the unhappily married couple, “With an uplifiting sense of responsibility they realised that they must kill each other” (110), and she goes on to describe this sudden resolution as an “experience of religious passion” (110). Despite the wife’s equal desire to kill her husband, she is unable to and succumbs instead to a momentary “illusion”: “There entered into her the primitive woman who is the curse of all women: a creature of the most utter femaleness, useless, save for childbirth” (111). This momentary faltering leaves her husband to attempt, unsuccessfully, to act out his “religious” fervor—the text notes, afterall, “God might be war” (111)—and sacrifice his wife on the alter of newness.

The note “To Suffragettes” (151-152) is another startling and obvious instance of calling upon female sacrifice for the better good of all. As our introduction notes, this section has been read in various ways: "as affirming, patronizing, and guardedly admiring” towards the suffragettes. The tone is certainly fitting with the sardonic, combative nature of the magazine; in writing to the suffragettes, Blast instructs them to be careful and commands the women not to destroy artwork. In doing so, Blast establishes art as something that the suffragettes do not understand, as a practice that exists completely outside of the feminine realm of expertise or knowledge. This of course, disregards any female artists or female-created artwork, and instead totally separates the ability to create art from any woman. In doing so, Blast reinforces a binary understanding of man/woman or masculine/feminine, in which serious artwork is seen as fitting into the masculine side of the binary. In “To Suffragettes,” serious artwork exists in binary opposition to senseless destruction as woman are marked in this section as energetic, wild, active, and “the only things...with a little life in them” (151). Women are revolutionary, but too much so; they are destructive, but senselessly. Thus, the revolutionary work of the Vorticists is situated within a context of change with a purpose, while the activism of suffragettes is change without a purpose—or at least, change without the right purpose. The image of the suffragette created in Blast, to borrow the importance of the image from our Vorticist comrade Ezra Pound (154), is that of a two-year-old throwing a tantrum and accidentally breaking one of daddy’s important possessions in the process.

The destructive and active nature of women, as Blast implies, must then be sacrificed for the more important cause of male artistic creation. For art is a “greater soul than...a whole district of London” (152). If art is greater than a multitude of male and female souls, then certainly art is greater than one or many female souls or one or many female passions. Thus, woman are called upon to do their duty and "stick to what [they] understand" (151).

(Image from Tate)

In a nice case of serendipity, I’ve been reading Charles Olson’s collection of writings on Pound the past few weeks, and he mentions EP’s relationship to Gaudier. Just days into his visits to see Pound at St. Elizabeth’s in 1946, as EP awaits his treason/insanity trial, Olson reflects:

“Everything Pound has to say and feel politically is…thirty years old and dead as a duck. He talks about the middle of the century just as young pacifists did during the first world war. It is clear he only experienced war and politics once: in England, World War I. And the sickness he describes in Mauberley…became Pound’s sickness—and he suffers from it today. Maybe it was accidental, but the conjunction of Gaudier Brzeska’s death to the whole conversation appears to me important. It is as though Pound has never got over it, that Gaudier’s death is the source of his hate for contemporary England and America, that then, in 1915, his attack on democracy got mixed up with Gaudier’s death, and all his turn since has been revenge for the boy’s death.”     (Olson 44-45)

If much of our focus in this class revolves around preserving, paying respect to the lasting impact of WWI, maybe it’s worth starting with the people who “never got over it” and passed on their trauma(s) to those who came after them. Olson also describes EP’s fixation on the remaining Gaudier drawings, outlining with grave Poundian authority what he would do with them if he could get his hands on them. In an innocent attempt at sympathy, Olson remarks to Pound, “’You make Gaudier seem so young’—and I went on with what I have thought so often, ‘as you seem to me yourself, so young.’ And he crushes his head and face in his hands, and says nothing” (Olson 60).

Thirty years after Pound published his memoir of Gaudier-Brzeska, his absence remained ever present for the poet in ways that perhaps only war can produce. The impact is also more immediately evident in BLAST. His voice between the 1914 and 1915 issues, while no less essentially EP’s, differs in tone and range. The poems in Issue 1 still contain echoes of Whitman’s influence, a voice prophetic in its cocky defiance (and already demonstrating the rage that will only grow worse later on):

                “BUT I will not go mad to please you.
                 I will not FLATTER you with an early death.
                OH, NO ! I will stick it out,
                I will feel your hates wriggling about my feet,
                And I will laugh at you and mock you,
                And I will offer you consolations in irony,
                O fools, detesters of Beauty.” (“Salutation the Third” 45)

By the time we get to the War Number, EP sounds simultaneously more reflective and more resigned to the deepening presence of war: “Friends fall off at the pinch, the loveliest die. That is the path of life, this is my forest” (“Et Faim Sallir le Loup des Boys” 22). In the midst of his shifting rhetoric, Gaudier’s parting words to the BLAST world stand frozen in time in more than one sense: “LIFE IS THE SAME STRENGTH.…MY VIEWS ON SCULPTURE REMAIN ABSOLUTELY THE SAME” (“Written from the Trenches” 33). How do you live on past your friends when your view of the world changes beyond the one they died for—or does it just stay the same, like Olson says of Pound? How else do you keep honoring them other than producing art? These questions don’t have immediately evident answers for me, but they make me hurt even more for the ways in which this particular friendship contributed to EP’s implosion down the road.

I love Ezra Pound. I love him in a sense that defies ethics or rationality—for a number of reasons, but perhaps most poignantly for the fact that he was part of this vital group of friends and colleagues during such a watershed in literary-cultural history, that he supported their genius inasmuch as he aggressively asserted his own (I mean, he bought Gaudier a rock so he could make his most famous work of art; it just happened to be of EP’s head--interesting that it gets a place in the War Number as well). And yet, despite all this, even art ultimately could not save them from death; even “the loveliest die.” This growing reality of the hell on earth war becomes in the twentieth century makes their continued faith and hope in art all the more powerful for its run through the fire—even if they have to use a few more “Goddamns” (EP’s “Ancient Music” 20) after they come out on the other side.

Swift and Juvenalian Satire in BLAST Magazine, Issue 1

When first reading BLAST, the reader is handed (if not hit with) many criticisms of the art and culture of the 1910s.  The writers “BLAST” the figureheads of the movements of which they disapprove. As we read in the introduction, BLAST was trying to establish Vorticism as the artistic movement in England (as well as the rest of the world).  Vorticist painters/artists were trying to establish the movement as being separate from Futurism and as being English in origin; however, the magazine goes far beyond just announcing the problems—and the BLAST writers’ hatred—of Futurism.  It quickly and poetically scrutinizes many elements of popular culture.  They even go so far as to “BLAST HUMOR” and claim that humor is merely “a drug for stupidity and sleepiness” (BLAST 17).  Additionally, they describe it as “freezing” the “REAL” aspects of life in the “ferious chemistry/of laughter” (17).

However, it is important to note that the BLAST writers—specifically, Wyndham Lewis who wrote the introduction to the magazine—do not completely shun humor.  In fact, they later “BLESS” it on page 26 of the magazine.  They mention specifically two great writers of English humor: Jonathan Swift and William Shakespeare.  They praise both for their specific style of humor, but these styles share a common element: they both wield humor as “a barbarous weapon” as geniuses of their respective ages.  Shakespeare brings both a “bitter Northern Rhetoric” to his humor and “a mysticism, madness and delicacy…[and brings] equal quantities of Comic and Tragic together” (26, 37).  He makes the humorous slightly tragic and vice versa.  However, in this blog post, I want to specifically discuss Swift.  Of Swift, Lewis praises his “solemn bleak/wisdom of laughter” (26).  Lewis appreciates Swift, because he is able to use his humor and the “bleak wisdom” of his words for a very primitive and barbaric purpose.  This purpose is the use of wit and humor to ridicule and correct behavior.  Lewis is applauding the use of satire—literary art written to correct human behavior, practices, mores, etc.

There are two main forms of satire: Horation and Juvenalian.  Horation satire is more conversational and is known for playfully and wittily trying to correct societal behavior.  Swift, however, used mostly Juvenalian satire which focuses on berating and harshly mocking something in society which the satirist sees as grotesque.  An example of his Juvenalian satire would be “A Modest Proposal.”  It comes as no shock that Lewis (and as I will discuss later, Pound) channel Swift for BLAST.  BLAST itself has a very strong, forceful use of satire and irony.  It has an entire page devoted to the specific people that it is BLAST-ing. 

Additionally, Pounds poem “Salutation The Third” on page 45 should be read as a piece of Juvenalian satire.  He calls out the people in “The Times” for going against “newness” (l. 1-4).  He mentions that they will deserve it “when the worms are wriggling in their vitals” (l. 3).  He goes on to call out other people that will go against their pursuits of the avant-garde.  He ends the poem commanding that one come and lick his boots for not realizing the importance of their new art.  He also makes what I find to be a reference to Swift in lines 18 and 19: “It has been your HABIT for long to do away with true poets,/You either drive them mad or else you blink at their suicides.”  The fear of insanity permeated Swift’s works.  Works like Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, D.S.P.D.—in which Swift discusses his not-so-idealistic view of how the world will look at his life’s work after he has died—exposes this view, and at a certain point in the poem, people say that he was starting to lose his mind (l. 84-98).  Swift was afraid that at some point he would lose his mind, and towards the end of his life, he did.  Pound may be attributing some of Swift’s madness to the critics that hounded him, and he might be connecting his and the other contributors to BLAST's situation to Swift’s plight.     

I also noticed the “optimistic tone” throughout The Crisis regarding the possibilities for greater postwar status for African Americans. As Jennifer D. Keene notes in “Images of Racial Pride: African American Propaganda Posters in the First World War,” along with a genuinely patriotic desire to win the war, many African Americans in 1918 also connected other motivations and hopes to their part in the war effort. They hoped that by proving their willingness to fight and die for America, and by proving their ability to bolster the home-front economy by a greater presence in the work force, that the basic rights of black Americans would finally be given proper recognition after the war (207).

In hindsight, many would perhaps have preferred a more defiant stance, resenting the need to prove anything to the dominant white culture, especially since the hopes for post-war justice were not immediately realized (or ever completely, some would argue). Racial tensions in Tulsa, for example, were as high as ever after the war. In the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot, both black and white World War I veterans participated, with reports of black veterans even digging trenches to prepare for an attacking white National Guard and American Legion.

But surely DuBois and the NAACP felt the same resentment. Their optimistic and peaceful stance was a practical necessity, working for long-term results. Even if the economic freedom expressed in the political cartoon “War: The Grim Emancipator” was not immediately forthcoming (The Crisis 72), DuBois and The Crisis knew that African American involvement in the war effort, both abroad and at home, would contribute to eventual social change. 

For this post, I want to start out by responding to Annie’s post below about the optimism exhibited in the 1918 edition of the Crisis as a way to contrast this optimism with an essay I found in an earlier edition of The Crisis magazine. By this time (1918), the US has entered the war, spurring the various types of war propaganda that emerge through posters and newspapers. In magazines like The Crisis writers are similarly putting forth sentiments of encouragement, hope, and the belief that the soldiers fighting against the Germans are promoting a myriad of crucial social, racial, and national causes.

Within this positive propaganda, one of the rhetorical techniques used is references to the impact of the war on families, and particularly children. In “A Comrade to Comrades,” Germany’s advancement means “slavery chains for our wives, sweethearts, mothers, fathers and children, more galling and hopeless than those of ant-bellum days in the United States” (59). Here the concern is for the people who are not soldiers – the family members and the children for whom the soldiers are fighting and the prospect of their failure in Europe has the potential for extremely drastic and terrible racially constructed consequences. In the “War Profiles,” the soldiers and the oppressed (be they from Ethiopia, India, Israel, or Poland) are likened to children. Section V begins “God heard his children in the night” and later Johnson writes “Tis the children of the oppressed crying for succor” (65).

In an earlier publication of The Crisis, there is an edition entitled “the children’s number,” dated October 1914, which is solely dedicated to the subject of children. In one particular creative essay, entitled “of the Children of Peace” we see the same rhetorical linking of soldiers and perhaps citizens to children as we did in the 1918 edition, though this essay offers a harrowing contrast to the optimism and support for the war that emerges four years later. This particular essay, disguised through some of the language it uses as a story that a parent might tell their child, actually describes the wholesale and needless slaughter of the soldiers in Europe, and displays an overwhelming disillusionment and harsh critique of the war. The essay gets extremely graphic: “Then six million human beings left their fields of golden grain and the busy hum of their factories and taking their own children for weapons dashed them against the trees and the lampposts and the churches and wallowed and gasped in their blood!” (290) and even includes a side note to the reader: “Nay, shrink not, my children; horrible as the tale may be, the truth is worse and you must know it” (290). The way that this essay not only condemns the war as barbaric murder but also the way that it aligns the soldiers with children and fuses the language that you would speak to a child with the graphic language of war is extremely interesting, especially if we contrast this essay with the type of discourse that this same magazine is publishing four years later. Rather than the glossing of war atrocities that exists in the later war propaganda, this essay is telling readers to look more closely, to find the truth, and to realize that, as horrible as this essay is, the reality of the war is much worse. There obviously grew a huge change in the way that people thought about the war, undoubtedly spurred by propaganda and America’s entering the war, but it is interesting that, not only do these different types of propaganda (for and against the war) adopt seemingly opposite messages, but also that they utilize similar rhetorical devices in different ways to put forth opinions about the war.

Immediately following this essay from the 1914 magazine is an advertisement for joining the NAACP in which the author states “The bogey of race prejudice, again brought to the fore by those who seek to disguise the real issues of the ghastly war now raging and to justify its awful carnage, we are pledged to defy” (291). So, to bring this post back to the issue of race, it seems that the authors are trying to actually downplay the issue of “race prejudice” in light of the greater concern for the atrocities of the “ghastly war”. As Keen’s article demonstrated, this does not seem to be a universal position for citizens or for African American citizens throughout different periods of the war, but the way that the two issues are linked (or not linked) here in this edition of the magazine is definitely an important and interesting facet to our larger discussion. 

(Photo from The Crisis Supplement, July 1916)

I’m often naïve about how much else was going on during World War I beyond the war itself. It’s easy to look back and think that it was the only thing defining everyone’s lives for that four-year stretch.

This was not so—for most people, I imagine, but especially for African Americans (and perhaps most Americans until 1917). Keene’s article sheds valuable light on the black campaign to use the war for political enfranchisement, finally getting their chance for equality. The NAACP’s modernist magazine, The Crisis, details much of this process. The June 1918 issue (the “Soldier’s Number”) highlights the various realities of wartime, including a passage about lynch law that particularly caught my attention. To gain more context, I found a supplement to the July 1916 issue that describes “The Waco Horror,” in which a young black man in Texas is brutally lynched and burned alive for killing a white woman. The piece retells the story in horrific detail while also providing general background about Waco, the political situation, and the town’s feeling in the aftermath of the event. His description of the lynching is not only disturbing in its specifics, but in its implications for the pervasive “blood lust” mentality present even beyond the actual “presence” of the war at the time (the total dehumanization of the black boy, the mob’s scramble for “souvenirs” after he’s dead). The reporter then closes the piece with larger assertions about “the lynching industry,” stating, “This is an account of one lynching. It is horrible, but it is matched in horror by scores of others in the last thirty years, and in its illegal, law defying, race-hating aspect, it is matched by 2842 other lynchings which have taken place between January 1, 1885, and June 1, 1916” (18). After providing a chart of how many lynchings have occurred each year in that time period (already 31 in 1916 after only five months), the writer implores, “What are we going to do about this record? The civilization of America is at stake. The sincerity of Christianity is challenged” (8). He pragmatically closes the article with the NAACP’s fundraising campaign to end lynching, a “crusade against this modern barbarism” (8).

The following year, America enters the war and the world changes, in some respects. Less than a year after the Waco Supplement, The Crisis quotes Attorney General Gregory saying, “For us to tolerate lynching is to do the same thing that we are condemning in the Germans. Lynch law is the most cowardly of crimes” (71). The New York Evening Post even equates lynching with “Prussianism” (71), expressing fear that the enemy could use examples of lynch law to turn black Americans away from their own country. The New York Post excerpt ends imploring Americans to “purge the country of this monstrous wrong” (71). Drawing from other editorials to marshal their evidence, the piece then quotes from the New York Evening Globe, which reminds readers that 222 lynchings occurred in 1917 alone as a testament to the insistence that “before these primary needs [education, right to work] comes the elementary need—…simple security of life and limb” (71). By insisting that “enforcement” (71-72) is the way to improve the lynching situation (talk about a euphemism on my part), the author takes a utilitarian approach unsurprising in the midst of total war. In wartime, as in all times, the major events of the day can be appropriated for larger political and cultural purposes. This idea has been particularly striking to me in how African Americans managed to defend their country not only as patriots but as human beings, valiantly fighting their way to equality in increasingly deeper senses of the term. And this focus on lynching provides a palpable illustration of the ways in which outdated ideas and practices become increasingly unacceptable in the emergence of a modern world.

I did some searching in the MJP for the phrase "corn fed" and "victory gardens," and I'm surprised to say that I couldn't come up with anything too interesting. I was hoping to find some item like an advertisement or poster about Americans or troops being "corn fed." Perhaps a poster proudly displaying some stout, healthy, and young black or white man and/or woman working in his/her victory garden husking corn for the war effort. Or, I thought that maybe I would find a poster displaying happy soldiers sitting together for a hearty moment sharing a basket of corn, or, maybe a happy family scene at the table after a hard day's work with bags of wheat by the door (presumably to be sent off to the troops as part of the conservation movement) and a bundle of bright yellow corn and a stick of butter before the smiling eyes of a happy, American family. But, alas, no such luck. As a Midwesterner, I wondered (and still wonder) if the phrase "corn fed" could be traced back to the food conservation effort during World War I.

Jennifer D. Keene's article "Images of Racial Pride: African America Propaganda Posters in the First World War" discusses how the Food Administration and the Committee on Public Information went to great lengths to tap in to the patriotic sympathies of African American citizens. Keene notes, "Food Administration propaganda designed to underscore the key economic role that black cooks played in controlling food resources throughout the South provided official recognition of black women's power within the southern economy" (221). She goes on to explain that the Food Administration's propaganda would make its way into movie theaters that were known to service large black communities (221). The Food Administration also  "created a productive partnership with privately run black newspapers" and established a Negro Press Section (213). Keene states, "Many of the Food Administration's most famous propaganda  posters urging citizens to conserve sugar, wheat, and meat appeared as advertisements in black newspapers" (213). As a "helpful" suggestion to African American citizens and farmers, the Food Administration recommended that farmers grow more corn so they can send more wheat overseas as wheat stays fresh longer (213).

Certain press releases sent to the black press targeted the negative racial and class stereotypes behind having to eat a lot of corn in such a way to make corn, corn recipes, and the 'idea' of corn seem more appealing. Keene explains, "Press releases directed at the black press specifically addressed the prejudice that some blacks might have against incorporating corn into their daily diet. 'Corn, once upon a time, was always on the table either as cereal, bread, vegetable or desert....As a child we remember the humiliation we felt at having to eat corn bread, but how times have changed! In exclusive tea rooms...we find a large demand for corn bread, corn griddle cakes, mush, etc., and little or no call for pastry made of wheat" (213-14). If this press release (sent by the Food Administration) was sent to and appeared in the black press and used the term "we," then the use of "we" intends to cause the black press's African American readers to 'believe' that the writers of this press release as similar, like-minded blacks that share the same poverty stricken and racially scarred past. It describes how "we remember" that corn "was always on the table" like it was the poor, black man's only food choice "once upon a time" when blacks were even more disenfranchised than they are now. However, the (presumably) black writers of this press release want to reassure their black readers that not only has the "taste" of corn become more appealing in society, so too have these black writers become more "appealing" in society. They joyfully proclaim, "how times have changed" and imply to their readers that as black writers they have access to "exclusive tea rooms" that have an exorbitant, or "a large demand" for a wide variety of corn-based food. This seems to be a subtle move on the part of the writers of this press release because it implies that the writers - (presumably) black men - have bettered themselves by not only becoming writers but have improved their social status by gaining access into the private drawing rooms (presumably because of their profession) of the upper-crust, white society (read "exclusive" rooms that have "large demand[s]") where they revel together in a utopian scene full of corn! Aside from the subtle suggestion that the "we" of the press release - featured in the black press - are black writers who have moved up in the world and that their audience is similarly capable of doing so because "times have changed," at the very least, the press release wants black people to think that being "corn fed" is no longer something to avoid or dislike, but, instead, it is something that is "exclusive" and desirable. 

Growing up, I always thought that being "corn fed" just meant that you lived in the country (near corn), and you were strong. I wonder if my sanitized, modern-day understanding of the idiom "corn fed" may actually have more racially motivated, class related, and governmentally propagandistic roots.

The June 1918 edition of The Crisis is a unique mixture of the realistic and the optimistic. While the magazine reports on injustices, such as lynchings, The Crisis also maintains an often optimistic tone towards the American government and the status of race relations in the country. While the magazine clearly acknowledges oppressions, these oppressions are rarely discussed from a bitter or angry tone. Rather, The Crisis consistently maintains a tone of professional distance or even one of positive thinking. An example of this optimistic tone can be found in the Editorial section in which the author writes, “This war is an End and, also, a Beginning. Never again will darker people of the world occupy just the place they have before...Out of this war will rise, too, an American Negro, with the right to vote and the right to work and the right to live without insult” (60). Despite this positive tone, The Crisis understands the true and horrendous state of racial oppression in America and depicts it boldly, without fear of consequence.

This bold, distanced tone is seen clearly in the short article titled “North Carolina” (70-71). While the author of the article refers to a white superintendent beating a black teacher as “an astonishing event” (70), the author does not go much further to editorialize. Rather, he simply provides the facts, and includes both the black teacher’s statement as well as that of the white superintendent. He swiftly and triumphantly sums up the end of the story: “As a result of all this, the colored teachers have resigned in a body, the colored principal has been thrashed and will not return to his job, and the white superintendent has been arrested, charged with assault” (71). Yet the author avoids any bitterness or raged-filled rants.

I think I am so impressed with—and maybe startled by—this distanced, optimistic, realism is because it exists so strongly in contrast to the polarizing nature of current media and news publications. A story as horrendous as the one The Crisis reports on would now be spun into a news extravaganza with every channel putting their best commentator forward to argue about the occurrence. Despite the extreme nature of racial discrimination and oppression witnessed in “North Carolina,” The Crisis refrains from politicizing. As the name would imply, the state of race relations in 1918 was at a point of crisis, yet the authors of this journal maintained calm and collected attitudes despite the heightened political and cultural context they lived in. This optimism is unique in a time marked, at least in our 20th century understanding, by disillusionment. Despite America’s presence in World War I and the black men serving—and dying—overseas, The Crisis does not reflect the same disillusionment we see in other writings of the time, such as in Brittain’s Testament of Youth, for example. Instead of fighting out against the entire system of racial oppression and government intervention, The Crisis chooses to operate within this system. The Crisis, instead, writes as if incidents like the one that occurred in North Carolina will soon be long gone as the black involvement in World War I, and the war in general, is the “Beginning” and the “End.” The Crisis chooses to believe something that we have unfortunately still not fully witnessed: that the long history of racial oppression is finally reaching its long-anticipated conclusion.