4,000 words
[B]ecause it is very easy for the writing of a Black man or a West Indian to be admired for the wrong reasons.
– from ‘A Tribute to C L R James’ by Derek Walcott in C L R James: His Intellectual Legacies (1994)
In late 1949, the West Indian intellectual C L R James
sat down in his residence in Compton, California and, in a burst of
creative energy, composed what turned out to be a frightfully prophetic
analysis of the historical fate of democracy in the United States.
Titled ‘Notes on American Civilization’, the piece was a thick
prospectus for a slim book (never started) in which James promised to
show how the failed historical promise of its unbridled liberalism had
prepared the contemporary republic for a variant of totalitarian rule.
‘I trace as carefully as I can the forces making for totalitarianism in
modern American life,’ explained the then little-known radical. ‘I
relate them very carefully to the degradation of human personality under
Hitler and under Stalin.’
![Black-and-white portrait photo of a Black man in a suit and tie against a plain background, looking directly at the camera.]()
C L R James in 1938. Courtesy Wikipedia
At the climactic centre of this ominous analysis was the contemporary
entertainment industry, which, James argued, set the stage for a
totalitarian turn through its projections of fictional heroic gangsters
as well as its production of celebrities as real-life heroes. A
manufactured Hollywood heroism, he warned, had the potential to cross
over from popular culture to political rule. ‘By carefully observing the
trends in modern popular art, and the responses of the people, we can
see the tendencies which explode into the monstrous caricatures of human
existence which appear under totalitarianism.’ Completed in early 1950, James’s proposal remained underground for decades until it found publication under the abbreviated title American Civilization in 1993. Four years earlier, the author had passed on into history as one of the finest minds of the 20th century.
Given the din of bookish discussion about the spectacular
antidemocratic turn in US politics in recent years, one would expect
mention of American Civilization somewhere alongside, say, the work of the Frankfurt School.
James, after all, stands today as one of the most renowned, even
revered, thinkers in the North Atlantic. A novelist, journalist,
pamphleteer, philosopher, Marxist theoretician and, in the words of V S Naipaul,
‘impresario of revolution’, this West Indian has acquired a posthumous
stature in the West that would stun most people in the region where he
was born in 1901. James is to the world of critical intellect as Brian
Charles Lara is to the world of cricket – to use an apt analogy. His
obituary in the The Times of London employed the sobriquet ‘Black Plato’. And, within a year of his death, The C L R James Journal
was established in his name. In the ensuing decades, there has been an
outpouring of books, anthologies and articles about his life and work,
the vast majority coming out of the United Kingdom and the US, where
James spent most of his mature years. A veritable ‘Jamesian industry’
now thrives in the 21st-century North Atlantic. Yet, for all this
First-Worldly industriousness, or maybe because of it, James’s analysis
of totalitarianism in American Civilization remains ignored.
At the base of this ignorance is a 30-year-old tale of radical misreading. Beginning in the 1990s, commentaries on American Civilization
have erased its concern with the dark cultural politics of
totalitarianism, dismissing the manuscript as quixotic and optimistic,
even embarrassingly romantic. James, according to reviewers, fell for
the US with the naive zeal of what Trinidadians would call a never-see-come-see.
This radical was so dazzled by the North American republic that his
radicalism disappeared once he sat down to write about its history and
culture. In American Civilization, James was ‘enthusing with
the greatest passion about the democratic capacity of the civilization
with which he had fallen in love,’ the UK-based historian Bill Schwarz wrote. In a review for The New Yorker,
Paul Berman concurred, describing the work as proof that ‘James
basically loved the United States’. Yet, far from love and happiness,
the manuscript was inspired, we will see, by a concern with the despair
and hopelessness of US citizens and by a worry about the political
portent of these mass feelings.
James’s basic contention in American Civilization was that a
critical mass of the population had become so desperately distressed by
the failure of the promises of liberal democracy that they were
prepared to give up on it and elect, instead, to live vicariously
through violently amoral political heroes. ‘The great masses of the
American people no longer fear power,’ wrote James near the end of the
manuscript. ‘They are ready to allocate today power to anyone who seems ready to do their bidding.’
This popular disenchantment with liberalism and the accompanying
vulnerability to totalitarian leadership manifested in the entertainment
industry, according to James. In films, novels, magazines and comics,
he identified a contemporary archive of the cultural politics of
totalitarianism – not a source of special affection for the modern
republic (James actually trashed much of US popular culture as
‘ephemeral vulgarity on a colossal scale’). For him, moreover, the dire
US situation was not exceptional but simply a richer symptomatic case of
a modern derangement. The conceit that James was seduced by the
achievements of ‘American civilisation’ is one of those strange North
Atlantic fictions; one that reveals more about those who study James
than about James himself.
Cyril
Lionel Robert James led a wonderfully itinerant life. A British
colonial, ‘Nello’, as intimates called him, was raised in the town of
Tunapuna on the eastern edge of Trinidad’s capital of Port of Spain.
James would go on to live in many places over the next eight decades but
would never settle in any one. He was a man ‘on the run’, as his fellow
Trinidadian Naipaul put it in his thinly veiled fictional sketch of
James in A Way in the World (1994). Or, maybe James said it
best with regard to his record of endless movement: ‘I have no
conception of home,’ he told Alan Warhaftig for the Los Angeles Review of Books. ‘My home is where I find myself most happy in the political work that I’m doing.’
![Black-and-white photo of a man speaking to a large crowd at Trafalgar Square with a lion statue visible in the background.]()
C
L R James denouncing Benito Mussolini’s intention to invade Abyssinia
(later Ethiopia) in Trafalgar Square, London in 1935. Photo by
Keystone/Getty
James’s history of happy homelessness began in 1932 when, as a young
modern renaissance man with writerly gifts and ambitions, he left
Trinidad for Lancashire, England before moving to London the following
year. The colony was not enough for his rebellious, restless intellect.
Already a local legend as a debater and littérateur, the
confidently self-educated James flourished in the metropole. In just
over five years, he established himself as an adept cricket journalist, a
charismatic public speaker and a well-regarded author on the
anticolonial, Trotskyite scene. By 1938, James had a few books under his
belt, including the novel Minty Alley (1936), World Revolution, 1917-1936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International (1937), and the now classic The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
(1938). Indeed, it was his obvious facility as a persuasive mouthpiece
of Marxist views that got James invited to the US on a speaking tour
later that year – ‘born to talk’ is how Naipaul described him. He had
planned to spend only a few months in a republic that he once described
as ‘dreadful’, intending to return to England in time for the following
cricket season. James wound up in North America for the next 15 eventful years.
James proposed a book about how US liberal society could degenerate into a totalitarian one
It was a sojourn that he would recall as the most fertile episode of
his intellectual career. Improvising a life that took on new expansive
dimensions, James travelled across the continent, including Mexico,
where he met – now famously – with Leon Trotsky. As part of his
increasingly radical political work, James also studied and taught
himself philosophy in concert with Raya Dunayevskaya and Grace Lee
Boggs, mastering, in particular, the dense dialectics of G W F Hegel.
Personally, and perhaps most notoriously, James fell in love with a
young California-born creative and activist named Constance Webb, who
became his second wife. By 1949, they had a son, Nobbie. It was around
this time that James produced ‘Notes on American Civilization’, the
lengthy proposal for a shortish book about how this liberal society
could degenerate into a totalitarian one.
Before he could begin the proposed work, however, the wedded US
forces of McCarthyism and immigration law landed James in an Ellis
Island detention centre (doubts about the validity of his divorce from
his first wife in Trinidad were used to undermine the legal status of
his marriage to Webb). From a cell in 1952, James authored a book-length
take-off from his proposal, a literary study that elaborated the
significance of the totalitarian theme in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). Titled Mariners, Renegades and Castaways,
it was published in the following year. A few months later, James chose
to return to London rather than be deported. His proposal for a work on
‘American civilisation’ languished, remaining virtually unknown until
1983, when the historian Robert Hill rediscovered one of the seven
circulated copies (the one belonging to James’s colleague, the activist
and scholar Nettie Kravitz).
Back in England, James gradually turned away from his Americanist
scholarly concerns and in the late 1950s focused his writerly attention
on a cultural history of cricket told from an autobiographical angle.
Published as Beyond a Boundary in 1963, this piece of
literature sealed the author’s place within the world of British
letters. In that same year, too (in an exquisite irony appropriate for
James), a second edition of Black Jacobins was published,
assuring the author’s place in the annals of the Black radical
intellectual tradition. From then until his death, the increasingly
eminent James made London not so much a home as a base for his travels,
which included visits to Africa, a return to the US in 1968 to teach,
and a final trip to Tunapuna two decades later to be buried.
James’s prolific, peripatetic 20th-century life is well captured in a lively biography by John L Williams, C L R James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries
(2022). This rendition of James stands out for its willingness to dwell
in the creases of the protagonist’s private life, and the result is an
image of the man that is fresh for its fleshiness. To a degree before
unseen, the James that we have become used to regarding as a
philosophical genius is featured in this book as vulnerable and very
human, especially during his years in the US. Williams casts ‘Jimmy’, as
the American James was known, as a seducer, a philanderer and, above
all, a domestic failure. Readers discover, for example, that the
middle-aged James, after finally catching Webb, whom he had passionately
pursued for nearly a decade, suffers from bouts of impotence. Williams
respects James’s intellectual accomplishments, but his account hardly
conceals a doubtful judgment of James the man, especially the American
incarnation, as a jejune dreamer, a rebel with an unrealistic cause. The
sum effect is a biography that appealingly humanises a man too often
heroised, and there’s a good chance that C L R James: A Life Beyond the Boundaries becomes the biographical standard.
For this reason, it is important to highlight that Williams reinforces the erasure of the concern with totalitarianism in American Civilization.
He, too, dismisses this text as a somewhat embarrassing romantic
detour, treating James as something of an America groupie rather than
the serious Americanist ethnographer James intended to be. In Williams’s
view, American Civilization was an _expression_ of the author’s
generally unhinged ideas about the US, including the belief that
‘America was on the brink of revolution’. Despite not ‘denying the
brilliance of many of the insights’, Williams finds the work to be
formless, unfinished and fundamentally flawed. That James failed to
secure a contemporary publisher does not surprise him. In fact, like
many other critics, Williams feels compelled to rationalise the
manuscript, echoing the common tendency to explain it as a product of
convenience if not desperation. James’s text was a tactical plea to
remain in the US legally, with his comrades and newly formed family,
according to Williams. American Civilization, he suggests, was effectively a praise song for a green card.
If this piece of writing was praise,
we can only wonder what condemnation would sound like. Here was a
terrifying critique of US society through its mass culture, containing
an analysis resonant with the views of Frankfurt School critics like
Theodor Adorno, with whom James met in New York in the 1940s. Indeed, American Civilization
reminds us that James’s geopolitics presumed a humbling historical
regard for the republic. He wrote unimpressed by the Cold War triadic
view of the planet, imagining the North American nation as part of not
the First World but the New World. In James’s historical imagination,
the US was an unexceptional product of European colonialism, a point he
made frankly in Beyond a Boundary:
[F]rom the first day of my stay in the United States to the
last I never made the mistake that so many otherwise intelligent
Europeans make of trying to fit that country into European standards.
Perhaps for one reason, because of my colonial background, I always saw
it for what it was and not for what I thought it ought to be. I took in
my stride the cruelties and anomalies that shocked me and the immense
vitality, generosity and audacity of those strange people.
This effectively postcolonial view, lost on commentators who
encountered the document in the wake of the Cold War, is essential to
the argument in American Civilization.
James’s text rooted the vulnerability of the US to totalitarian rule
in its history of European colonialism, specifically in its British
inheritance of liberal political culture. The import of this colonial
legacy appeared early. ‘Ideologically,’ he explained in the first
chapter, ‘the European past hangs over the country. Jefferson is the
product of Locke.’ But the issue for James was not simply the
derivativeness of North American liberal ideology; it was the deviance,
the extravagant difference from what obtained in the metropole.
According to him, a peculiarly passionate investment in British
liberalism prevailed in the colonies and the subsequent republic. In
North America, the concept of ‘free individuality’ flourished with an
uninhibited and consensual character unknown in Europe, making for a
political culture that was unphilosophical, unreflective, resistant to
probing the intellectual premises of its dominant liberal ideology.
Instructive in this regard was the Jacksonian era (c1820s-50s),
argued James, who viewed the period as one in which the issues of
liberal politics were worked out not in speculative theory (as was
happening in Europe) but through violent practice. This romantic quality
of hegemonic US liberalism was foundational to the analysis in American Civilization,
for the temptation to turn toward antidemocratic politics, James
contended, was a product of the failure of the nationalist romance with
free individuality.
By the mid-20th century, hope in the idea of Americanism as heroic individual freedom was exhausted
James’s argument about the hyper-individualistic and
anti-intellectual way of liberal life in the US explains his heavy and
explicit debt to Democracy in America (1835, 1840),
the 19th-century classic by the French political sociologist Alexis de
Tocqueville. In conceiving the republic’s history, he adopted a
framework that essentially combined the insights of Karl Marx and
Tocqueville (a combination, by the way, that explains why James’s
interpretation anticipates the work of consensus historians like Louis
Hartz). Tocqueville was, in James’s view, ‘the most remarkable social
analyst, native or foreign, to examine personally the United States’,
and, in American Civilization, he promised to ‘write an essay
closer to the spirit and aims of de Tocqueville than any of the writers
who have followed him’. It was from Tocqueville that James derived his
depiction of the North American environment as having provided the
liberal notion of ‘bourgeois individualism’ its best start. The same
held true for James’s reasoning when he wrote that the UK’s New World
colonies, historically ‘without the political and ideological relations
of feudalism and a landed aristocracy’, represented, in effect, ‘the
ideal conditions for which Europe struggled so hard’. The point for
James, it should be emphasised, was not to celebrate US exceptionalism.
As with Tocqueville (and Hartz), he aimed at a sober warning about the
republic’s unthinking liberalism and its susceptibility to the support
of tyrannical rule.
Indeed, American Civilization sounded an alert that liberal democracy had arrived at a moment of palpable historic crisis. By the mid-20th century,
hope in the idea of Americanism as heroic individual freedom was
exhausted. Disenchantment with the nationalist liberal creed had been
growing over the course of the 19th century,
according to James, especially with the rise of corporate capital in
the Gilded Age. With the Great Depression, however, its fate was sealed.
For the masses of Americans, the ‘struggle for happiness’, once real,
had become futile. ‘The worker during the last twenty years no longer
has any illusions that by energy and ability and thrift or any of the
virtues of Horatio Alger, he can rise to anything,’ observed James.
Instead, the average American felt demoralised and objectified, not
unlike another ‘piece of production as is a bolt of steel, a pot of
paint or a mule which drags a load of corn’. Their dreams and
aspirations lay strangled by the undemocratic organisation of economic
life, which, under corporate capital, ‘imposed a mechanized way of life
at work, mechanized forms of living, a mechanized totality which from
morning till night, week after week, day after day, crushed the very
individuality which tradition nourishes and the abundance of
mass-produced goods encourages.’ What most struck James about the masses
of working people in the US was the ‘bitterness, the frustration, the
accumulated anger’ that lurked within them. He saw in them the kind of
despair and alienation that stalked interwar Europe.
Although these despairing masses had
not yet gone the barbarous route of totalitarianism, James found ominous
signs in the kind of fictions they chose for entertainment. In the
films, books, magazines and comics patronised by the US working classes,
he diagnosed a desire for a new kind of fundamentally and violently
undemocratic hero. The public were entertaining themselves with stories
of protagonists with ‘totalitarian tendencies’. In his view, it was
their way of negotiating the tensions between the promise of individual
freedom and the reality of ‘the endless frustration of being merely a
cog in a great machine’. Here was the analytical climax to American Civilization:
a critical examination of ‘what is so lightly called the “entertainment
industry”’ as an _expression_ of the deepest feelings of the people.
James justified this approach by pointing out that the products of the
business had to appeal to the audience, that they ‘must satisfy the
mass’ or, at the least, must not offend them. The people were not
‘passive recipients of what the purveyors of popular art give to them,’
James insisted. Granting more agency to consumers than most of his
Marxist contemporaries, he noted that the paying mass ‘decides what it
will see. It will pay to see that.’ And in the materials that the public
were electing to see, listen to and read, he concluded, lay evidence of
an attraction to a vicious fictional character.
Hinted at a century earlier in Moby Dick, this totalitarian
protagonist had been flourishing on the entertainment scene since the
Great Depression, according to James. Whether discussing the comic strip
Dick Tracy, the film The Public Enemy (1931) or the
bestselling fiction of the now largely forgotten African American writer
Frank Yerby, he underlined the avid popular demand for a new type of
hero, one who was amoral, primitivistic and endowed with more than a
twist of misogyny. Embodied in what James called the
‘gangster-detective’, this character displayed a brutal disdain for the
established order. Here was a protagonist who ‘lives in a world of his
own according to ethics of his own’, a man who was ready to ‘break every
accepted rule of society’. For James, the gangster-detectives
epitomised the legendary free individuality of US nationalist myth. They
‘live grandly and boldly. What they want, they go for.’ And although
virtually all of them eventually learn that ‘crime does not pay’, they
nevertheless give audiences the pleasure of seeing them acting out
heroically, dying while trying. In this way, according to James, the
fictions churned out by the entertainment industry served ‘to many
millions a sense of active living, and in the bloodshed, the violence,
the freedom from restraint to allow pent-up feelings free play, they
have released the bitterness, hate, fear and sadism which simmer just
below the surface.’ The American dream was degenerating into the image
of the American gangster.
James worried about the crossover of manufactured Hollywood heroism from entertainment to politics
The popular demand for this new totalitarian hero was not accidental
but indexical, James stressed: ‘The gangster did not fall from the sky
nor does he represent Chicago and the underworld.’ Rather, expressed in
this protagonist was an unmistakably American desire for what was no
longer possible in society, for the ‘old heroic qualities in the only
way he can display them’. The gangster-detective was ‘the derisive
symbol of the contrast between ideals and reality’ in a society where
the myth of ‘Americanism’ no longer held; he was ‘the persistent symbol
of the national past which now has no meaning – the past in which
energy, determination, bravery were certain to get a man somewhere in
the line of opportunity.’ For James, this fictional hero betrayed the
real-life frustrations of audiences, providing them ‘an esthetic
compensation in the contemplation of free individuals who go out into
the world and settle their problems by free activity and individualistic
methods.’ In the world of popular entertainment, he saw Americans
indulging totalitarianism as a resolution to their nationalist crisis of
liberalism.
Finally, and maybe most originally, James identified resources for
totalitarianism not only in the industry’s projections of fictional
protagonists but also in its production of ‘stars’ in reality. Since the
Great Depression, he noted, a vital development in popular culture
involved the professional packaging of celebrities (Hollywood actors,
especially) into ‘synthetic characters’, produced by a ‘vast army of
journalists, magazine writers, publicity men, etc’. The rise of these
stars concerned James because he believed that through them the masses
‘live vicariously, see in them examples of that free individuality which
is the dominant need of the vast mass today.’ Celebrities, he wrote,
‘fill a psychological need of the vast masses of people who live limited
lives.’ In this regard, James saw an intrinsic connection between the
industrial fabrication of these real-life heroes to be consumed by the
admiring masses and the conditioning of the public for totalitarian
rule: ‘We have seen how, deprived of individuality, millions of modern
citizens live vicariously, through identification with brilliant notably
effective, famous or glamorous individuals. The totalitarian state,
having crushed all freedom, carries this substitution to its last
ultimate.’ The entertainment industry’s heavy investment in the
production of stars readied the republic for an antidemocratic regime.
In fact, the ultimate worry in James’s analysis of US popular culture
was the potential crossover of manufactured Hollywood heroism from
entertainment to politics. The feared translation of the celebrity into a
totalitarian leader had not yet happened, but the potential had
appeared in the figure of the ‘radio priest’ Charles Coughlin: ‘For a
brief period Father Coughlin showed the political possibilities that
slumber behind these manifestations of our time. Other countries in the
modern world have shown not only the possibilities but the realities.’
Though not even the genius of James could have predicted the celebrity
presidency of Donald Trump, it is almost impossible to read American Civilization faithfully in our times and not find a forewarning. (Indeed, this text gives new meaning to mass entertainment fictions like The Sopranos and The Wire and to entertainers like Jay-Z.)
And read it should be. Even if we can no longer avoid the
antidemocratic predicament about which James warned, we can still turn
to James’s writing for some illumination as to how the US ended up here
in this darkening place.