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“The Only Real White Democracy” and the Language of Liberation: The Great War, France, and African American Culture in the 1920s

Whalan, Mark.

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 51, Number 4, Winter 2005, pp. 775-800 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2006.0012

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"THE ONLY REAL WHITE

DEMOCRACY" AND THE

LANGUAGE OF LIBERATION:

THE GREAT WAR, FRANCE,

AND AFRICAN AMERICAN

CULTURE IN THE 1920S

Mark Whalan

". . . I found that many subjects were taboo from the white

man's point of view. Among the topics they did not like to

discuss with Negroes were the following: American white

women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers

fared while there; French women; Jack Johnson; the entire

northern part of the United States; the Civil War; Abraham

Lincoln; U. S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope;

Jews; the Republican Party; slavery; social equality; Com-

munism; Socialism; the 13th and 14th Amendments to the

constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or

manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro."

Richard Wright, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow"

Richard Wright's famous—and famously lengthy—list of taboos for interracial conversation in 1920s Tennessee exhibits much of his

The Great War, France, and African American Culture in the 1920s776

talent for grim humor on the subject of white southern racial preju- dice. It is also a revealing litany of the totems and shibboleths around which African American struggles for social, material, and cultural inclusion were enacted in the first half of the twentieth century. Each item on Wright's list had historically been a site of contestation for the status of African American masculinity, a contest the white southerners at the Memphis optics company Wright was working for avoided by their prohibitive silence. It is interesting that France is the only country whose name is subject to this taboo, a prohibition due to African American participation in the Great War of 1914 to 1918, which the US joined in April 1917. The largest transatlantic movement of black men since the days of the middle passage (200,000 African Americans would serve in France during and after the Great War) to a country without the social and sexual racial segregation of the US left a lasting legacy—in France, in the white South, and in African America. Wright's inclusion of France among the unmention- able aspects of "living Jim Crow" from the distance of 1938 is per- haps only the best known of several testaments to the fact that the figure of the African American soldier returning from the Great War retained a powerful range of political connections in the imaginations of both black and white Americans, long after the immediate social consequences of demobilization.1

Despite this, critics have often been silent on the importance of France and French culture to the prolific outpouring of cultural ex- perimentation known as the Harlem Renaissance. This is surprising as the Great War in France afforded African American men opportu- nities many had not experienced before. As Wright noted, participat- ing in models of masculinity grounded in martial heroism and "manly self-assertion" was crucial, but so was the engagement with a range of global cultures far removed from their peacetime experiences. Such an engagement was often written about in fiction and memoirs dealing with African American participation in the Great War through the trope of the acquisition of the French language, a language that often came to represent democracy, liberty, and a cosmopolitan so- phistication. Indeed, white writers committed to the racist paradigms of eugenics or minstrelsy would attempt to mollify the type of white fears that Wright referred to above by dramatizing episodes of inept, or incompetent, African American assimilations of French language and culture. As such, African American servicemen acquiring French culture and language became an area of racial and political conflict, both in terms of representation and in the realities of servicemen returning home.2 Such a conflict exemplified that the mobility in which African American members of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) engaged was not exclusively spatial, as their participation in

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what Modris Eksteins described as the single most important event in establishing the "life in the fast lane" mentality of modern con- sciousness represented an inclusion in the temporal configurations of modernity (xiv). It was a chance to escape the historical-political system that proclaimed the temporal "belatedness" of peoples of African descent, to assert that the temporal lag so often used to justify their exclusion from the privileges of modernity was a chi- mera.

While it is true that the transatlantic and diasporic traffic in culture and language were sites of change, agency, and emancipatory politics for what came to be known as America's soldats noirs, I do not wish to suggest that the Great War was a uniformly positive experience for those African American servicemen who participated in it. The harshness of work in the Services of Supply labor battal- ions in which most African American soldiers were posted, the wide- spread racism within the army and the government (which continu- ally curtailed opportunities and privileges for promotion, leave, and training for African American soldiers), the rough justice many of those soldiers received at the hands of white MPs and a dispropor- tionately Southern, white officer cadre, and the often hostile reac- tion from whites on their return to Southern communities—not less than the casualties of front line combat—were all very real. Nonethe- less, what Alain Locke described as the "brilliant opportunity" for the American Negro to implement "cultural democracy and the concept of cultural pluralism" that the cosmopolitan possibilities of service in France in the Great War provided existed in constant tension and often struggle with these hardships and oppressions, just as it fre- quently sat uneasily with French colonialism and primitivism (qtd. in Butcher 294). Rather, it was an opportunity that was often recog- nized, explored, and celebrated, and how this was so is the subject of what follows.

There is often a tendency to see the significance of the Great War to the Harlem Renaissance in nationalistic terms, to view its major effects on African American cultural experience as the impe- tus it gave to the Great Migration from rural South to urban North, and its configuration of an aggressive new militancy in postwar black literature and politics.3 Yet such a focus on the Harlem Renaissance as a movement rooted in the indigenous cultural products of Ameri- can regionalism, with the heavy emphasis on folk art that this often involves, has served to elide the sheer frequency and significance of the figure of the returning African American soldier in New Negro

The Great War, France, and African American Culture in the 1920s778

literature. Current or ex-African American soldiers are major charac- ters in numerous Harlem Renaissance novels.4 Moreover, many white writers of the time—Howard Odum, I. A. R. Wylie, John Dos Passos, e. e. cummings, George Mack, Ransom Rideout, and others—repre- sented black soldiers in fiction, autobiographical fiction, film, and drama. This cultural response—and the journalism, popular science, photography, and popular history that accompanied it—was, of course, of various opinion over the legacy of the war to the African American community. Many saw it as another broken promise on the part of white America, as wartime service did not correlate to the peacetime political gains many had hoped for. Conversely, in the case of white America, cultural responses to African American military service were often nervous about the implications of mass black martial mascu- linity. Yet many of the more optimistic examples of this wide range of material configured African American participation in the Great War in ways that proposed it as a basis for greater civic entitlement, for the radical revision of black male subjectivities, for reimaginations of the African American body and the African American mind, and as a chance to engage with a form of cosmopolitanism that would indeed serve as a "brilliant opportunity" for political and social advance- ment.5 In the past ten years critics have begun to take more interest in the international and transnational paradigms of African American and black cultural production in the 1920s and 1930s, yet few have focused on the representation of African American soldiers in that production, and how those figures engage with what Brent Hayes Edwards has recently called the "practice of diaspora."6 The use of France as a rhetorical figure for a truly egalitarian and democratic politics was important in many of these representations, as was the acquisition of French as a gateway to new and progressive subjectivities.

In his account of inspecting African American troops in Europe following the armistice, W. E. B. Du Bois remarked that "there is not a black soldier but who is glad he went,—glad to fight for France, the only real white Democracy; glad to have a new, clear vision of the real, inner spirit of American prejudice" ("An Essay" 922). Similarly, in his welcome address to returning African American soldiers in Washington in April 1919, the Reverend F.J. Grimké told the troops that in France they had had "the opportunity of coming into contact with another than the American type of white man; and through that contact you have learned what it is to be treated as a man, regard- less of the color of your skin or race identity. Unfortunately you had

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to go away from home to receive a man's treatment, to breathe the pure, bracing air of liberty, equality, fraternity" (242). In the writing by African American leaders and activists in the immediate after- math of the war, this trope of a truly democratic and unprejudiced France is often mentioned as a powerful example of the possibility of interracial democratic equality, and served as a political spur to the Civil Rights struggle in the US. Such enthusiastic celebrations of the "colorblindness" of France were not new, and as Tyler Stovall has discussed grew from a tradition of similar reports from nineteenth- century visitors such as Ira Aldridge, Bishop Daniel Payne, Booker T. Washington, and Frederick Douglass (3). Yet in the writing of Du Bois, Grimké, and others following the war, such an example of de- mocracy, brought back as the direct experience of servicemen who had fought or worked in France, was often configured not just as a political but also as a cultural experience, something—to paraphrase Grimké—en l'air.

This move was, to a degree, strategic. Figures like Du Bois were well aware of the economic exploitation of African colonies within France's extensive empire, and indeed in essays written before US entry into the conflict he had seen competition for colonial spheres of influence and African natural resources as one of the main rea- sons the war began in the first place.7 Moreover, in his extensive travels in Europe before the war he must have been aware that most French people were far from free of demeaning preconceptions about black people; Stovall suggests that "for the average French man and woman, blacks meant Africa, where sensuous dark-skinned natives danced in the jungle or labored under the benevolent tutelage of the French Empire" (16). France had conscripted 620,000 soldiers from its colonies to fight the war, often under deeply unpopular and brutal circumstances; and its treatment of colonial labor troops was often as harsh as the treatment black American labor troops received at the hands of white American officers. Yet for Du Bois—facing a gov- ernment locked into the patterns of reaction, red-baiting and curtail- ing civil liberties, and seeking to galvanize a Crisis readership disqui- eted by his accommodationist editorial "Close Ranks" of June 1918—turning to lauding French democracy as a tactical move seemed necessary to address these problems and thereby maintain the pres- sure for reform in the US.8 However, this tactic would not have had the longstanding resonance that it did had it not enjoyed such a widespread appeal and if so many returning soldiers had not written about the revelatory experience of living without a color line during their time in France. In addition to well-established figures like Grimké and Du Bois, new radical black socialist and black nationalist publica- tions such as The Messenger and The Crusader praised French stan-

The Great War, France, and African American Culture in the 1920s780

dards of democracy, and hailed it as a territory on which they could pivot demands for greater civil rights in the US.9 In the African Ameri- can imaginary, France became both a romantic location of liberation and a set of codes for articulating political demands at home. In this willful blindness, this phenomenon gestures both to what Gilroy has called "the tension between . . . local, parochial, and more cosmo- politan commitments" and to the way that political models with the severest of limitations for black self-determination could be appro- priated and through a kind of radical romanticism become a set of cultural reference points for bolstering black political struggle in the US (289).

It is this that lies behind Grimké's discussion of the relevance of returning servicemen having experienced the "bracing air of liberty, equality, fraternity" (242). In configuring this experience as cultural— and therefore learnable—Grimké tacitly challenges the primacy of personal experience in the memory of Army service and combat, the widespread epistemological configuration of warfare which suggests that "not only did their experiences authorize soldiers to speak, they denied that right to those that had not shared them" (Sherman 16). Often, the vehicle through which this wartime experience of color- blind France could be transmitted, learned and become part of Afri- can American political sensibility was figured as language. Through drawing on the Romantic ethnolinguistics of cultural nationalists like Herder, writers such as Du Bois suggested that the medium of a foreign language could reconfigure black soldiers' personal experi- ence of greater racial tolerance in a predominantly white country, turning it from something distinctly individualized and in a sense nontransferable into a cultural experience. Rather than seeing French as a colonial language, and in finding "in the conversion of an en- slaving medium into an insurgent weapon" a use of what Wole Soyinka has called the "linguistic blade" to carve "new concepts into the flesh of white supremacy"—a tactics of linguistic appropriation that a later generation of anticolonial black intellectuals would advocate—Afri- can American writers often chose to take the French political rhetoric of liberty, egalitarianism, and fraternity at face value (88). Accord- ingly, acquisition of the French language—the medium and the struc- turing grammar and vocabulary of that culture—often comes to rep- resent a powerful vehicle of democracy in its own right in much of this writing. One example is an often overlooked African American account of the war, Addie Hunton's Two Coloured Women with the American Expeditionary Forces (1920).

Hunton had worked in France from June 1918 until late 1919 as an assistant for the YMCA, and later wrote a fascinating memoir of her service looking after African American soldiers.10 It recounted

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both the bravery and decency of these soldiers in France, and also the difficult and aggravating working conditions faced by African American workers in the voluntary support organizations that ac- companied the American Expeditionary Forces (A.E.F.) to Europe. Indeed, so often were they hampered by military disregard for Afri- can American soldiers' welfare that until spring 1919 there were only three African American women YMCA workers for the 150,000 Afri- can American men stationed in France. Hunton's memoir is unspar- ing in its criticism of the military authorities and many of the white elements in the YMCA organization, whose often rigid policies of seg- regation and callousness meant that "the service of the colored wel- fare workers was more or less clouded at all times with that biting and stinging thing which is ever shadowing us in our own country" (27). Yet Hunton saw the war as highly significant in the develop- ment of American racial politics and African American subjectivity, as "there was being developed in France a racial consciousness and racial strength that could not have been gained in half a century of normal living in America. Over the canteen in France we learned to know that our young manhood was the natural and rightful guardian of our struggling race" (197).

Like many others, she remarked on the relative absence of rac- ism in France, and the warm welcome extended by the French to the African American servicemen stationed there; as she said, "the rela- tionship between the colored soldiers, the colored welfare workers, and the French people was most cordial and friendly and grew in sympathy and understanding, as their association brought about a closer acquaintance" (230). In these circumstances, learning French became a mode of "racial strength"; it represented a cultural ex- pression of (and conduit towards developing) the political "sympa- thy" she believed existed between the French and the African Ameri- can servicemen, their shared commitment to humanistic and democratic principles. Hunton saw this affinity as existing at very deep levels of the culture and consciousness of both groups and believed it was most manifest through the ability of African American soldiers to learn French quickly. She noted that "the understanding ear of the colored man seemed attuned to the French language, and he learned more quickly, it seemed, how to converse with this ro- mantic people. The French people are affectionate and demonstra- tive, which corresponds to the deep emotional spirit which seems the heritage of the colored American" (249). This was not intended to extol the supposed African American talent for "universal mim- icry" that was such a common assumption, and which Zora Neale Hurston would see as significant to the "Characteristics of Negro Expression" (Hurston 1019). Instead, it betokened an affinity borne

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of a feeling of "delight" at being in a "sister democracy" which "fur- nished to some of us the first full breath of freedom that had ever come into our limited experience" (230).

Such a repetition of Grimké's notion of democracy and racial equality existing in the "air," an image that suggests its nature as an enveloping and naturalized milieu, indicates again the cultural con- figurations of democratic politics that Hunton hoped could be learned and transported (242). Accordingly, she intimates that if African Americans were adept at picking up the French language, it is be- cause French democracy and the absence of racial discrimination in France is part of a national spirit that is implicit in that language. As such, in a Barthesian process of mythologization, Frenchness be- comes naturalized as democratic and egalitarian, with all of the his- torical and specific complexities of French involvement with those concepts being cast aside (especially, for an African American con- text, the complexities of French colonial rule). Such a step implies that the adequate practice of democracy relies on more than demo- cratic electoral and legislative procedures being in place. Instead, the guarantee of a fully democratic practice relies both on these procedures being in place, and a consensus on democratic ideals within a nation akin to a democratic consciousness or style. As Ken Hirschkop suggests, "one cannot underestimate the importance of legally sanctioned democratic procedures; but where these have an impact, it is because they coexist with a democratic consciousness which supports them" (34).

This democratic consciousness, which underpins adequate de- mocracy and prevents the kind of hypocrisy that saw the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments regularly ignored in the US, is a funda- mentally cultural phenomenon; and it was clear that authors such as Hunton and Du Bois saw this culture as embedded in the French language. In a Crisis editorial of April 1919, Du Bois himself would urge all African Americans to learn French and Spanish, remarking that it was essential for any pan-African movement but also because "the only white civilization in the world to which color-hatred is not only unknown, but absolutely unintelligible is the so-called Latin, of which France and Spain are the leading nations" ("French and Span- ish" 269; emphasis added). Du Bois suggests that racial prejudice does not translate into French, that its grammar and vocabulary refuse the accommodation of discrimination, and that its conceptual range allows only for a Weltanschauung of universal justice free from a racialized vocabulary and practice found in languages of Germanic origin. Such a comment built on his remarks in the earlier essay "The Conservation of Races," in which he described a temperament in what he called the "Romance nations" which had a deeply unique

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"spiritual, psychical" character (86, 87). In the later editorial he clearly hitches a "democratic consciousness" into this "spiritual, psychical" character, a character both embedded and reproduced in romance languages. In an echo of Herder—a thinker who had often informed Du Bois's theories—and supporting recent developments in linguistic theory by anthropologists such as Edward Sapir, Du Bois therefore unfolds a concrete link between national-racial character, political history, and language, a linkage that stresses that racial egalitarian- ism can be lexicographically encoded and learned. As Sapir noted, "Would we be so ready to die for 'liberty,' to struggle for 'ideals,' if the words themselves were not ringing within us? And the word, as we know, is not only a key; it may also be a fetter"(17). For Du Bois, the Romance languages were both free from the "fetter" of "color- prejudice," and replete with the "key" of democratic consciousness.11

The seeming self-contradiction of a committed Pan-African such as Du Bois espousing French as a language of democracy was only exacerbated by the fact that this article appeared in the same num- ber of The Crisis as his report from the Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919, a report that also praised French democracy and repeated (without demur) the words of Blaise Diagne, the black representa- tive for Senegal in the Chamber of Deputies, in support of French Colonial rule.12 Yet this report also included a list of proposals that the Congress resolved to be given to the postwar Peace Conference of the Allied governments then in session; and it included resolutions against the economic exploitation of colonial labor, in support of na- tive land ownership, and asserting the right of colonial subjects to education in both native and European languages. As David Levering Lewis notes of these resolutions, "while their immediate and practi- cal consequences would be negligible, a powerful idea to bind up the wounds of the world had been launched in Paris" (W. E. B. Du Bois 578). Du Bois's seeming enthusiasm for France's colonial mission civilisatrice, and rapturous endorsement of the French language, must be placed in balance with these commitments to anticolonialism and native cultural self-determination. For Du Bois French was valuable both as a conceptual vehicle for democracy, and as a medium for communicating across the diaspora for the purposes of contesting white global hegemony—ideas that at best had an uneasy relation to each other. Accordingly, he can of course be faulted here for Eurocentrism, placing national struggles for black civil rights over internationalist commitments in his tactical use of French, or favor- ing a political system grounded in the benevolent leadership of cul- tured elites. Yet to do so misses much of the complexity of his en- gagement with French language and culture at this moment, and to ignore the fact that diasporic communication is commonly marked

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precisely by such complexity and misrecognition. As Brent Hayes Edwards has recently reminded us, the cultures of black internation- alism are typified as much by "new and unforeseen alliances and interventions on a global stage" as by "unavoidable misapprehen- sions and misreadings, persistent blindness and solipsisms, self-de- feating and abortive collaborations, a failure to translate even a ba- sic grammar of blackness" (5).

If Du Bois's grand vision for the political possibilities of French saw its primary importance both as a somehow racially neutral lan- guage, and as a medium for pan-global exchange among peoples of color, other writers who dealt with the trope of soldiers learning French were much more interested in the concrete examples of advantage such fluency could provide. Indeed, in certain stories a local, tactical use of French becomes something so localized that it becomes a tool for personal advantage uncoupled from a progressive drive for racial uplift, indeed from any kind of collective politics. As exemplified in Rudolph Fisher's short story "City of Refuge," French in the vocabu- lary of the returning African American soldier becomes a marker and a medium of cosmopolitanism and urbanity that is used not just to exploitative purpose, but to the exploitation of another black resi- dent of Harlem. Yet the hitching of the acquisition of French to no- tions of African American modernity—a move that becomes a force- ful challenge to the "racial politics of temporality" that Gilroy has discussed as so important in the racial configurations of modernity— make Fisher's text an interesting one to examine (Gilroy 334). Al- though all of these authors seek to configure French as a medium for eliminating the racist chronologies of black temporal lag, the shift in focus Fisher introduces—from French as langue to French as pa- role—also becomes an implicit critique of generalizations about the meaning of French as made by figures like Du Bois and Hunton. Specifically, the critique lies in the reminder that language only gen- erates meaning through the concrete utterances wherein it appears. A particular use of French might endorse a democratic and egalitar- ian politics—but then again, it might not.

Fisher's story, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1925, centers on the greenhorn migrant King Solomon Gillis, recently ar- rived in Harlem from South Carolina. The opening sections describe his awe-stricken reaction to the sensory barrage of urban Harlem; he is both excited and bewildered by the subway, the crowds, and the dense traffic. Yet it is the sight of a "colored policeman" that totally dumbfounds him. As Maria Balshaw notes, this reflects his

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surprise that urban space can be African American; indeed, "he can- not get over the sight of a thoroughly developed, socially progres- sive urban race capital" (15).13 The visceral shock that Gillis experi- ences at being faced with this "Bang Clash" modernity is indicative of the contemporary perception that African Americans occupied a dif- ferent temporal schema to the epoch of modernity, a modernity of- ten conflated with Anglo-Saxonism (qtd. in De Jongh iii).14

The racialization of temporalities was a common feature of primi- tivism in the 1920s, and what Felipe Smith calls segregated "racial time spaces" were often exercised to position black people as exte- rior to modernity (37). Indeed, such a temporal schema has a his- tory of being "invoked by white supremacism as a principle of exclu- sion and social discipline" (Gilroy 334). Yet such exclusions do not work solely on a racial basis in Fisher's story; Gillis had learned about Harlem from the Uggams, a family he had known in South Carolina, who were "always talking about" Harlem because one of their own had been drafted to serve in France and stayed in New York on his return (1176). In contrast to Gillis, the drafted Uggam—Mouse by name—is located firmly in the fast lane of modernity, and this is often linked to his experience of wartime service in France.

Gillis is soon befriended by Mouse, who sees in Gillis exactly the gullible fall guy he had been seeking to do the dirty work of his drug-dealing business. Mouse's ability to carry off his plan is based in his three-point geographical mobility, in his experiences in South Carolina, New York, and France, and this is communicated through the range of what linguists would term his language repertoire. For example, in defending Gillis against an irate West Indian shop assis- tant, Mouse remarks "this here's my friend, an' I'll be john browned if there's a monkey-chaser can gyp him in Harlem if I know it, see? Bes' thing for you to do is catch air, toot sweet" (1180). This perfor- mance—mixing black Harlem speech with the Anglicisation of the French tout de suite—helps persuade Gillis to take up Uggam's seem- ingly above-board offer of a job. Soon afterwards, Uggam persuades Gillis that the pills he wants him to sell are legitimate because "in France he had learned about some valuable French medicine" as yet unavailable in the United States (1181).

In contrast to the idea of the returning soldier as a militant "soldier of democracy" (to use Du Bois's phrase) replete with a cul- tural equipment capable of fighting for a more egalitarian American racial politics, then, Fisher sees martial service as serving Uggam well in the quasi-Darwinian struggle occurring within the newly Afri- can American urban space of Harlem (Du Bois, "Returning Soldiers" 171). This street-sharp brand of cosmopolitanism decisively shifts Mouse from his Carolina origins into the temporal schema of moder-

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nity, and this shift is one which he reflects upon directly. Earlier in the story, he dismisses Gillis as a "baby jess in from the land o'cotton and so dumb he thinks ante bellum's an old woman" (1178). Mouse links Gillis's status as a "baby" to his lack of awareness of the divi- sion between the pre- and postwar eras; both testify not just to his lack of intelligence, but to his inability to understand the complexi- ties of an urban space that is relentlessly coded as emblematic of modernity. Although "antebellum" is probably a reference to the Civil War, there is a conflation here, collapsing the vast difference in the situation of African Americans before and after the Civil War with a similar difference in the situation of African Americans before and after the Great War. Awareness of these two wars as watersheds in African American identity and temporalities of subjectivity is crucial, Mouse suggests: in positioning Gillis as ignorant of these, and there- fore "antebellum," he jokingly identifies him as a hapless ingénue in the urban space of black modernity. Awareness and experience of the war thus conferred a cosmopolitanism and what Balshaw calls an "urbanity" on certain African Americans in Harlem. Urbanity in Balshaw's account is a complex and often contradictory social ideal, but for Fisher and for Mouse the expression of the concept that ap- plies is where "the pursuit of urbanity [functions] as a mode of self- projection," a projection which allows for the successful negotiation of urban space (36).15

In the urban space of Harlem, Mouse's use of French works as one such mode of self-projection. Recalling Henry Louis Gates's dis- cussion of signifying—in which meaning derives "not [from] what is played or said [but rather from an] on-the-streets exercise in the use of troping, in which the play is the thing—not what is said, but how" (69–70)—Mouse's French becomes a style with a set of asso- ciations far beyond the concrete referent of the sentence.16 His use of the French phrase codes him as a soldier, as worldly, experienced, and dangerous; but it also codes him as having an affiliation with a specifically French type of urbanity and ability in "self-projection." That this is embedded within an African American tradition of signi- fying illustrates that the French language added a significant range of possibilities to this rhetorical tradition of self-affirmation, a new lexicon and range of options in the "on-the-streets exercise" of ver- bal mastery. This incorporation of French also potentially presented useful strategies for negotiating "attempts at domination," particu- larly the domination of a white culture not attuned to the complexity and dexterity of the resources of Black English—a negotiation which Gates found central to the practice of signifying (77).

However, in Fisher's example, Mouse's use of French serves a much more intraracial agenda. His signification verbally outwits the

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shopkeeper, but simultaneously employs a much more subtle tactic with Gillis—namely an example of the "indirect intent" which Gates sees as one of the signal features of signifying (85). Through his performance the direct intent is that Mouse triumphantly vanquishes the shopkeeper, but also more insidiously he gains Gillis's trust, which he goes on to abuse to his own advantage. Gillis's fate of arrest is therefore the upshot of Mouse's verbal mastery, reflecting Fisher's awareness of the polyvalence of linguistic strategies, their ability to be used in a huge array of different and even contradictory ways and to a vast range of purposes. Such an opinion is a more pragmatic approach to the uses and potential advantages of French than is offered by Du Bois and Hunton. French is still coded as a tool in "self- projection," and proof of a passage that is both transatlantic and about passing into the temporalities of modernity; but Mouse's self- projection in this story is at the expense of Gillis's liberty.17 That this is so implicitly casts Du Bois and Hunton's view of French as both overly utopian and hopelessly generalized; while French is still seen as a potent resource in the African American lexicon, and is of de- cided personal benefit to Mouse, it carries within it no inherent com- mitment to democracy, racial solidarity, or freedom.

The converse of the trope of the possibilities inherent in African American soldiers learning French was the failure of that process. For both black and white American authors, the inability of African American soldiers to learn French tended to indicate the inevitability of the status quo of American racial politics—an inability that was consequently represented as either frustrating or reassuring, depend- ing on the racial politics of the writer. The African American writer Gwendolyn Bennett's short story "Wedding Day" is one such example, wherein the inability to learn French becomes a marker for the protagonist's inability to shrug off a racialized inferiority complex that is represented as inextricable from Anglophone culture.

Bennett's story follows the fortunes of the expatriate African American musician Paul Watson, loosely based on the famous air- man, drummer, and nightclub owner Eugene Jacques Bullard (Stovall 3–4, 36). Watson's inability to learn French demonstrates how the sexualization of American racial inequality has been deeply stamped into his identity, and determines the pattern of his sexual life. Paul is an expatriate living and playing music in Montmartre; he has a furi- ous temper when faced with white American racism, and is eventu- ally imprisoned for shooting two white sailors who call him "nigger." He is freed to fight for the French in the Great War, in the aerial

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division, and becomes a hero. Following the war he resumes his old life, which—to the bewilderment of his friends and acquaintances—is a celibate one. He tells a friend that French women are "all white," and that "I ain't got nothing for no white meat to do. If a woman eva called me nigger I'd have to kill her" (366). Yet he falls for a white American prostitute in Paris, Mary, and plans to marry her; the talk of the bars is that "that's the way with them spades. They beat up all the white men they can lay their hands on but as soon as a gang of golden hair with blue eyes rubs up close to them they forget all they ever said 'bout hatin' white folks" (367). On his wedding day he finds out that his fiancé, Mary, can't go through with marrying a black man, and thinks this over while riding in a "subway" coach:

A bit out of breath he stood inside the train and looking down at what he had in his hand he saw it was a tiny pink ticket. A first class ticket in a second class coach. The idea set him to laughing. Everyone in the car turned and eyed him, but that did not bother him. Wonder what stop he'd get off—funny how these French said descend when they meant get off—funny he couldn't pick up French—been here so long. First class ticket in a second class coach!—that was one on him. Wedding day today, and that damn letter from Mary. (369)

This passage couples Paul's feelings of cultural awkwardness—de- spite having lived in France for many years he still feels like an alien— with (it is suggested) a very American sense of racial abjection. In- advertently, Paul enters the second-class coach, despite holding a first class ticket—a situation enforced on African Americans traveling by rail in several Southern states at the time, and one that discour- aged many people, especially middle class black women, from trav- eling at all. The ignominy of having imposed an episode of Jim Crow on himself parallels his inability to escape the straightjacket of a history of the racialized psychosexuality of America, where hatred of whiteness among African Americans was often represented as coex- isting with powerful sexual desire for the white body.18 That Paul's sexuality exists within these contours illustrates his inability to es- cape the closed circuit of hate and impersonal desire of interracial sexuality which exists in the "psychological-economic" system of rac- ism; indeed, his violent swings from vitriolic aggression to abased devotion signifies the stranglehold that America's Manichean racial politics has on him (Fanon 35). Yet Paul's inability to become "un- American" is represented by his failure to learn the French language, which becomes the synecdoche of his failure to embrace a more democratic, racially-egalitarian frame of mind. The story ends with

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Paul literally going nowhere on the tellingly misnamed "subway" (or, more properly, Metro) and with his complete alienation: from his adopted homeland, from an American system he despises but can- not escape, and from himself.

If Bennett's story was a cautionary tale about the persistence of racialized psychology and the problems this might cause for dreams of a more egalitarian society, other writers dealing with African Ameri- cans failing to learn French had different motives. Indeed, Bennett's subtle tale about the persistence of racialized ideology, dramatized through Paul's inability to both unlearn his own culture and to learn another, was crudely paralleled in how the trope of African American soldiers unable to learn French was treated in the racist writing of white apologists for segregation. In 1928 the white minstrel author Charles E. Mack published Two Black Crows in the A.E.F., a spin-off of his popular blackface vaudeville act with George Moran. Known as the "Two Black Crows," the pair were famous stage entertainers be- fore embarking on a radio career, and Two Black Crows in the A.E.F. was also made into a film in 1930 entitled Anybody's War. Mack's novel represents African Americans, particularly its two Tennessee protagonists, Amos and Willie, as exactly the type of "happy-go- lucky, singing, shuffling, banjo picking . . . more or less pathetic figure[s]" that James Weldon Johnson had railed against at the be- ginning of the decade (Preface xl). They spend most of their time avoiding work, thieving corn, or gambling, and speak in comedy- dialect that doubtless formed the backbone of Mack and Moran's stage act; they are prone to drunkenness and superstition, and when they are drafted, they are physically incapable of being drilled. They are cowardly and self-interested, and the only exception to this is their filial attachment to certain white, male authority figures such as Steve Reinhart or Major Crawford Robinson. Shiftless, unreliable, and childish, they are the exact opposite of the type of black mascu- linity Du Bois hailed as the "soldiers of democracy" returning from France.

A racial politics of temporality was at play in "The City of Ref- uge" in the story's representation of African American participation in the space-time of modernity, evident in Mouse's ability to learn French, and a similar politics is at play in Two Black Crows in the A.E.F.—but with opposite intent. We are told early on that Amos, "like the rest of his race, never wasted time worrying about the fu- ture," and much of the comedy of the book rests on the unchanging nature of its protagonists, despite their first experiences of sea travel, a different country, a different language, military life, and combat (27). One way in which this perpetual sameness generates humor is in Amos and Willie's encounters, often ending in incomprehension,

The Great War, France, and African American Culture in the 1920s790

with different languages. French proves perplexing to them; at one point they ask a Frenchman for directions to the levee of the river, hoping to find a catfish joint. The Frenchman provides his reply, which prompts Amos to exclaim "sound like, 'Jenny say pa'. . . .De words was good American but way he put 'em together was just foolish- ness. Don't help us find no levee" (228). Later, after getting lost, they end up in a trench with a regiment of Senegalese soldiers—a moment ripe with the unvoiced white apprehension of exactly what would happen if these armed, trained and exploited men from across the black diaspora could communicate. Shortly afterwards, though, Willie and Amos are captured by the Germans and interrogated in French. This is conducted by a professor in linguistics and an expert on African languages; but he begins by asking them "Parley voo Frawn-say?", which Willie translates as "Polly jump over de fence to- day" (284). The pair are interrogated in Senegalese, a "Gold Coast dialect," "Zulu, Congo, Somali, Moroccan, and fifteen other African dialects" before the professor calls in a Major Lohman (at great in- convenience, as he is a five-hour journey away) because he is a specialist in "Tanganyika" (285). He realizes that they are American, and had been talking English to each other all along—a realization humiliating in the extreme for the Professor, as he had spent five years at Harvard. The punch line comes when Lohman informs the Professor that "they are American Negroes and they speak English. But it is not the kind of English used at Harvard" (286).

The racial politics of Amos and Willie's encounters with French culture and the French language is deeply conservative: in being unable to learn or understand French, they illustrate their occupa- tion of a static temporality wherein dynamism or change is impos- sible, and which relegates them as exterior to the progressive space- time of an Anglo-Saxon modernity. This is similar to what James Snead calls a "metaphysical stasis" in representations of black people, which typifies "the black . . . as eternal, unchanging, unchangeable" which serves to "justify blacks' continuing economic disadvantage" (3). Moreover, this confirmation of the "naturalness" of the racial status quo in Tennessee is reinforced by the explicit renunciation of any affinity between French democracy and what Hunton called the "emotional spirit which seems the heritage of the colored Ameri- can"; if the language is strange and becomes gibberish in translation for Amos and Willie, then so, by implication, do French racial politics (249). Finally, moreover, their English is not of the variety that Bakhtin called the "unitary language," namely the dialect variety of a lan- guage invested with prestige and authority, and which often repre- sents a literary and national standard. Instead, their dialect is so far from that standard that a speaker of that standard finds their lan-

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guage incomprehensible. They become both parochial and immu- table, a literal embodiment of "local color," and statements of the inevitability and naturalness of the prewar rural economy in the South- ern states.

In Two Black Crows in the A.E.F, therefore, the alien and unlearnable nature of French language and culture for the two black protagonists becomes confirmatory and reassuring for the racial sta- tus quo, rather than providing a progressive politics of cosmopoli- tanism as envisaged by writers like Hunton—and the comedy (such as it is) of Two Black Crows in the A.E.F. frequently rests precisely on this reassurance. If, in "Wedding Day," the reason for the African American soldier's inability to learn French is the persistence of Ameri- can racial ideology, in Mack's story it is racial essence—but the solid- ity of the American racial status quo is affirmed either despondently or triumphantly in both. In making such an affirmation, both authors gesture towards the extremely politicized terrain of language acqui- sition, and the significance that France had in the postwar imagina- tion of a racially emancipatory politics.

Both the imaginative appeal of France as a space of democracy and black freedom and misgivings about that appeal continued to be present in the African American press well into the 1920s. The Crisis published accounts in the early 1920s about France's colonial fail- ings, remarking on the practices of forced labor in the French Congo, unrepresentative elections in Guadeloupe, and the colonial promo- tion of the opium industry in Indochina.19 Alain Locke was taken to task by the Martiniquean writer Renè Maran for praising France's treatment of its colonial troops in their exchange of open letters in Opportunity in 1924 (261–263).20 Similarly, Du Bois had been far from a consistent champion of French involvement in the war, or French culture. As well as his observations in 1915 about the "Afri- can Roots" of the Great War, the battle for colonial territory that had undergirded the European hostilities, in 1916 he had remarked that the war exhibited the bankruptcy of Enlightenment thinking, the "cru- elty of the civilization of the West" ("Battle" 88). Yet the vocal pres- ence of black delegates in the French chamber of deputies, the warm reception of black troops by the French population during and after the war, and the lavish praise and decorations given to black Ameri- can units deployed with the French army during the conflict led to many African American leaders overlooking the details of how colo- nial rule actually worked. Instead, they chose to emphasize these wartime events to their African American audience, an embrace of a

The Great War, France, and African American Culture in the 1920s792

French rhetoric of equality and democracy that provided useful le- verage for their struggles at home—effecting a situation where, at its crudest, "transnational black solidarity [was] traded in for a cer- tain kind of national currency, an anti-racism in one country" (Edwards 6). Limited as it was, the "national currency" of a particularly French- inflected vocabulary of democratic Enlightenment thinking appealed as a political strategy to African American leaders during a time when other political strategies began to seem more difficult and risky.

This was evident as early as September 1917, when Du Bois remarked on the American "Black Bastille of Prejudice," a "mon- strous superstructure" that had swallowed up the "democracy of a nation," and that cried out for destruction in the manner of 1789, to be replaced by "that liberty, fraternity and equality which is in verity the pride of France" ("Black Bastille" 217). Du Bois's revolutionary choice of metaphor, in the year of the two revolutions in Russia, gives a good indication of some of the reasons that France became such an important cultural resource for the spokespeople of Ameri- can black civil rights both during the war and in its immediate after- math. France provided an alternative emancipatory political model to Soviet Russia at a time that the American mainstream parties were in the midst of the first-ever American "red scare," a scare that resulted in overbearing scrutiny on African American leaders for any signs of communist affiliation. Indeed, The Chicago Defender and The Crisis were nearly suspended from the mails in 1919; the editors of The Messenger, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, were ar- rested on charges of sedition in the same year.21 In establishing France's seeming ability to combine democratic procedure with demo- cratic consciousness, the embrace of French culture by African Ameri- can intellectuals proposed a return to the ideals of an earlier revolu- tionary moment, a moment much less threatening than a Bolshevik vision of proletarian revolt. Such a proposal took the less confronta- tional strategy of striking at American hypocrisy over its democratic constitution, rather than representing a frontal assault on its eco- nomic principles.

However, this tactic should not be seen solely as a parochial move to co-opt French democratic rhetoric for a national civil rights program, one which necessitated the cool overlooking of French co- lonial policy and the refusal of transnational black solidarity. As Du Bois demonstrated in 1919, he hoped the use of such a tactic would better situate African Americans in the vanguard of a Pan-African movement—a movement whose goals were to effect greater self- determination of colonized peoples, including self-determination in the sphere of culture. Moreover, whatever the limitations or ironies of this position, the embrace of France as "the only real white de-

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mocracy" demonstrated a faith in the politics of culture that George Hutchinson found typical of much of the Harlem Renaissance—a movement marked by the belief that "aesthetic experience could be a powerful impetus to the destruction of social convention, the awak- ening of new types of consciousness, and the creation of new forms of solidarity across traditional boundaries" (13).

The writings of Du Bois, Hunton, and Fisher are full of new solidarities across traditional boundaries. Fisher's writing exempli- fies how the incorporation of French lexical items into African Ameri- can English increased its already considerable resources for play, creativity, self-affirmation, and resistance to authority—even if he was circumspect about the rather utopian claims for French culture being promulgated by some of his contemporaries. Du Bois and Hunton were more eager to believe that the French language was the repository of the "democratic consciousness" that America so urgently needed to fulfill the racially democratic legislation of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments—a belief that can also be tac- itly seen in the distinctly nervous rejection of that language in the comedy of Mack. Moreover, the African American use of French em- phasized their place within the landscape of urban modernity, and accentuated a brash confidence, urbanity, worldliness, and quick- wittedness long associated with urban culture. These features were to appear in much of the distinctive (and often self-congratulatory) Harlem style that was to emerge in the 1920s.

As Jessie Fauset said in a Crisis essay entitled "Nostalgia"— which again eulogized the experience of France for African American soldiers—the "great principles" of America always seemed "just be- yond, always beyond," rooted in a "dream country . . . founded on that document which most realizes and sets forth the primal and unchanging needs of man—the Constitution of the United States" (157). Yet for both rhetorical purpose and in the lived experience of many black soldiers France seemed like this "dream country," and this easily became configured as a story linking travel with emanci- pation in a way that had long been important as an inspiring prin- ciple in African American culture. Osceolo E. McKaine, a black officer with the 367th, alluded to this fairly directly when he conflated trav- eling to France with a narrative of Christian salvation; in February 1919 he remarked that "The Black Crusaders landed in France with the same emotions Elijah must have had when he landed in heaven." Moreover, this journey was "from the terra firma where they had played and toiled, which they hated and loved, to a strange semi- mythical region, where a grand reception and a cordial welcome, where a square deal and an absolute equality awaited them" (3). It was this tangible location for emancipatory idealism, as well as the

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embedding of this idealism in the resources of a culture that could be brought back to the US, that was one of the main reasons the Great War was so exciting for African American writers. France's role was indeed "semi-mythical," both real and imagined; it emerged as a trope through a type of romantic radicalism that despite its blind spots over colonialism held a real power in postwar struggles for black rights in the US. Conversely, these were also the reasons it proved so threatening to segregationist white authors. Experiences (and representations) of France also informed the Harlem Renais- sance in more thoroughgoing ways than have been previously ac- knowledged, of which language acquisition was just one; they pro- vided a significant counterweight to the currents of cultural nationalism and Afrocentrism in the movement that have taken up so much criti- cal attention. Service in France undoubtedly involved racism, disap- pointment, injury and death for many. Yet it also provided the expe- riences of linguistic expansion, defamiliarization, technological modernity, and mobility that would typify much of the African Ameri- can writing of the decade, and much of this served to unsettle the naturalized foundations of the racial status quo in the US. Perhaps the last word in this regard should go to Addie Hunton:

The many ports of France were particularly the home of the colored soldiers, so that landing at Bordeaux it did not seem strange to be greeted first of all by our own men. But it did seem passing strange that we should see them guard- ing German prisoners! Somehow we felt that colored sol- diers found it rather refreshing—even enjoyable for a change—having come from a country where it seemed everybody's business to guard them. (17)

The "passing strange" experience of colorblind France—however myopic, strategic or romanticized—would continue to be a touch- stone for the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Whether unsettling the ethics of living Jim Crow, making white people guarded, or seeming like the promised land, France indeed proved a rich store of the refreshing and enjoyable in the African American imagination.

Notes

1. This influence was brutally realized in the spate of lynchings of ex- servicemen in uniform in the aftermath of the war. For summaries of the African American role in the Great War, see Arthur E. Barbeau and Florette Henri; also Bernard C. Nalty, especially chapters 7–9; W. E. B. Du Bois's "An Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the

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Great War"; Robert H. Zieger, particularly chapter 5; David M. Kennedy; Jack D. Foner; Gerald Astor; and Tyler Stovall, chapter 1.

2. Examples of how these conflicts were played out in representation will be discussed later in the essay. For a detailed assessment of how black Americans' experiences in France fuelled often brutal clashes between black and white Americans over civil rights in Texas, see Steven A. Reich.

3. This is obviously a highly abbreviated charge, but books dealing with the impact of the Great War on the Harlem Renaissance that broadly (if not absolutely) follow this pattern include David Levering Lewis's When Harlem Was In Vogue, George Hutchinson, Ann Dou- glas, and Houston Baker.

4. Some examples include Claude McKay's Home to Harlem and Banjo (1928 and 1929), Walter White's Fire in the Flint (1924), Langston Hughes's Not Without Laughter (1930), and Jessie Fauset's There is Confusion (1924). The war plays a significant role in Zora Neale Hurston's Jonah's Gourd Vine (1934) and in Dorothy West's The Liv- ing is Easy (1948). African American protagonists fought in the war in stories such as Rudolph Fisher's "City of Refuge," "High Yaller" (both 1925), and "Fire by Night" (1927), in "Wedding Day" (1926) by Gwendolyn Bennett, and in poetry by Georgia Douglas Johnson (a section entitled "Martial" dealing with the Great War is included in her 1922 collection Bronze), Jean Toomer ("Seventh Street," in Cane [1923]), Sterling Brown ("Sam Smiley" [1932]), Langston Hughes ("The Colored Soldier" [1931], "Poem to a Dead Soldier" [1925] and "America" [1925]), and James Weldon Johnson ("St. Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection Day" [1930]). The war is also fea- tured in one-act plays such as Mary Burrill's "Aftermath" (1919), Alice Dunbar-Nelson's "Mine Eyes Have Seen" (1918), and Joseph Seamon Cotter Jr.'s "On the Fields of France" (1920).

5. Such a range of ways in which African American participation in the Great War affected the Harlem Renaissance lies outside the scope of this essay, but will be addressed in the monograph I have in prepa- ration (Soldiers of Democracy: The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro, appearing with the University Press of Florida). The ac- count of how the Great War affected the discursive configuration of African American bodies and intelligence is closely connected to the mass physical and IQ testing of recruits to the army, which governed much discussion of African American intelligence and bodily charac- teristics for the next decade. For more information see Gould, 222– 263, and Daniel J. Kevles.

6. Important recent work in this field includes Brent Hayes Edwards, Tyler Stovall; Michel Fabre, William J. Maxwell, Sieglinde Lemke, and Michelle A. Stephens. Key points of transatlantic exchange addressed by several of these writers are international socialism, popular cul- ture and entertainment, relations between the African American and the black francophone press, and also the imperialistic black nation- alism of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association.

The Great War, France, and African American Culture in the 1920s796

7. See his 1915 essay "The African Roots of War."

8. For details of the way the wartime Espionage act and Sedition act curtailed what African American periodicals were able to publish, as well as the huge increase in the size and power of the American intelligence services which resulted from the war, see Theodore Kornweibel, especially chapters 3 to 5. Du Bois's "Close Ranks" edi- torial was one of the most controversial of his long career; it urged African Americans to "forget our special grievances" in order to "close ranks with our fellow white citizens" for the duration of the war (170). This caused a storm of protest within the African American press and the NAACP, which only intensified when it transpired that Du Bois had recently been offered a commission in the Military Intelligence Bureau. For a full discussion of this incident, see Mark Ellis and also David Levering Lewis's W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868– 1919, 552–557.

9. See, for example, William N. Colson's "Propaganda and the Negro Soldier," "An Analysis of Negro Patriotism," and his "The Social Ex- perience of the Negro Abroad." See also Lieut. Osceolo E. McKaine, Steven A. Reich, 265–267; and Cyril V. Briggs.

10. Michel Fabre provides a brief account of Hunton's memoir and her experiences with the YMCA in France. See pages 55–58.

11. For a discussion of Herder's importance for Du Bois, see Helbling, 19–41. Sapir's theory, while disavowing the concrete links between language, nation, and culture that Herder's cultural nationalism was famous for, nonetheless saw language as the fundamental concep- tual medium for political systems. See Sapir, 16–17.

12. Du Bois's most authoritative biographer, David Levering Lewis, ac- counts for Du Bois's praise of France and benign attitude to its colo- nial rule in 1919 by suggesting this was "a measure of the eccentric Eurocentrism and radicalism-from-above that still resided in the marrow of the author of the Souls of Black Folk. Perhaps European imperialism was ultimately reprehensible to Du Bois less for its ineq- uities than because, at its Anglo-Saxon worst, it was founded on skin color" (566–67). For Lewis's detailed account of the 1919 Pan- African congress, see 564–578.

13. Important for this section is Maria Balshaw's reading of Fisher's oeuvre.

14. The phrase is Amiri Baraka's. For more on how racialized temporali- ties functioned in the US at this time, see Felipe Smith (37).

15. For a fuller explanation of the multiple and complex meanings of "urbanity" at this time, particularly in the work of Robert Park, see Balshaw, 18.

16. Gates discusses Mezz Mezrow's definiton of signifying in particular in this section of his account.

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17. Such use of French in "on-the-streets" exercises of troping and self- projection can also be seen in Iceberg Slim, in which verbal dexter- ity is a key distinguishing factor between those who are successful on the Chicago streets and those who are not. As proof of this, Slim includes a glossary of Chicago Black English of the 1920s and 1930s; and it includes the term "boo koos," an Anglicization of beaucoup, which Slim lists as meaning "plenty" (273).

18. This dynamic of racialized psychosexuality forms a key point of Fanon's. It also formed an important part of the black power move- ment: see Eldridge Cleaver, particularly section IV, "White Woman, Black Man." This dynamic was also described in the Harlem Renais- sance; see James Weldon Johnson's poem "The White Witch." Fanon and Cleaver's accounts have been criticized for their privileging of male sexuality in their texts, and Cleaver's in particular for its mi- sogyny; see Gwen Bergner. As Cornel West has noted of the con- temporary period, in observations which apply with even more force in the early twentieth century, the mythologizing of black sexuality in America has led to a situation where "much of black self-hatred and self contempt has to do with the refusal of many black Ameri- cans to love their own black bodies" (85). Such a situation is impli- cated in the assumption of a "machismo identity" by many young black men, as a form of "self-identification and resistance in a hos- tile culture" that "usually results in a direct confrontation with the order-imposing authorities of the status quo, that is, the police or criminal justice system"—much as Paul seeks confrontation with white Southerners (85, 90–91). Yet such a system also means that in- stead "of black women being the most sought after 'objects of sexual pleasure'—as in the case of black men—white women tend to oc- cupy this 'upgraded,' that is, degraded [situation], primarily because white beauty plays a weightier role in sexual desirability for women in racist patriarchal America" (90).

19. See the anonymous "The Reverse of the Medal" (227–28).

20. Edwards discusses this exchange; see 104–118. See also Locke 6– 9.

21. See Theodore Kornweibel, especially chapters 3 to 5.

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