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Studies of the Harlem Renaissance have so far paid insufficient attention to American cultural nationalism as an important locus of transracial ideological contestation during the 1920s. Since Nathan Huggins's rather surprising conclusion that "New Negro" authors "failed" in part because of a failure to claim their "American nativity" (308), scholars have focused on the black cultural nationalist, integrationist, and pan-Africanist aspects of the multi-faceted literary movement but have not carefully examined the diverse approaches of black authors to the issue of their "Americanness," despite Robert Hayden's insistence on the importance of this issue in his preface to the 1968 edition of The New Negro (x-xi). Perhaps one reason for this wariness has been the fear that stressing the "Americanness" of the movement would soften the distinction between "black" and "white" cultural traditions that has been an important impetus to much African Americanist scholarship since the 1960s. Perhaps it derives from the continued difficulty of reconciling the "double-consciousness" famously defined by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk: "One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body" (5). Whatever the case may be, the intimate yet multifarious relationship between the writing of the Harlem Renaissance and American cultural nationalism is a rich subject for inquiry at the current moment, when the relative claims of Afrocentricity, American multiculturalism, and cultural "hybridity" demand attention.

One way of approaching this issue is by way of discursive "field" analyses, including examinations of specific institutions that helped structure the literary field in which African American authors worked during the 1920s, institutions offering diverse, sometimes conflicting, and even self-contradictory positions on issues of fundamental import to the re-imagining of the mediation between "American" and "Negro" cultural identity. So far, such examinations have stressed the tensions between The Crisis and Opportunity magazine, yet even these discussions have neglected an important dimension of the cultural debates - the flux of racial and cultural theory at the time, and the variety of views about the likelihood and/or desirability of wholesale "amalgamation" of the "races" in the United States. Views on this crucial issue were remarkably varied; Jean Toomer's, for example, were not so unusual as is often assumed. The Messenger is an especially important journal to examine on this count, as it addressed issues of racial and cultural amalgamation more boldly than did any other publication, and it did so within the context of addressing the "Americanness" of African American culture in provocative and often satirical fashion, with as yet unexamined consequences for understanding the "racial" culture of the United States.

American cultural nationalism took a very different form in the pages of The Messenger than it did in The Crisis and Opportunity. The Crisis's cultural criticism revolved around a political and social indictment of white America on the grounds of "American ideals," served by the propaganda of art; Opportunity emphasized cultural self-revelation as such, the aesthetics of experience, and "cultural racialism" (a "harder" form of cultural pluralism than that of The Crisis). In contrast, The Messenger adopted a stridently iconoclastic approach, more often than not ridiculing the notion that African American culture was distinctly different from European American culture and stressing the "mulatto" character of U.S. culture. One gleans from The Messenger the notion that cultural similarities between black and white Americans are hidden by a shared racial discourse, a culturally specific "American" (that is, U.S.) phenomenon sustaining the widely shared faith in essential racial differences. Moreover, at the heart of the rituals of this faith one finds an ironic deconstruction of it, a flirting with the color line that hides while enacting the "amalgamation" continually going on beneath the cover of racial reasoning.

Theodore Kornweibel has argued that The Messenger was never fully committed to the Harlem Renaissance and lacked a coherent editorial attitude toward the movement. The magazine's editorial columns "never embraced the cultural movement or attempted to spell out a coherent philosophy for it. What philosophy did appear was incidental, the product of columnists and reviewers, chiefly drama critic Theophilus Lewis" (107). However, while Kornweibel is right in saying that the magazine did not present a coherent philosophy, The Messenger presented a more united front on the issue of racial and national identity than Kornweibel suggests. In fact, Lewis's interest in the development of a black aesthetic went counter to the general drift of the magazine's cultural politics, which stressed that the U.S. was or would become a "mulatto" nation. Despite The Messenger's eclecticism, the editors most concerned with "cultural" history and aesthetics other than Lewis shared similar views about the relationship between "white" and "black" cultural identity in the U.S., and these views had definite ramifications for their attitude toward efforts to develop a "black aesthetic" in literature and the "fine arts." Moreover, their views of the shared cultural identity of black and white America fit the magazine's specifically North American socialist ideology.

The main force behind the magazine, A. Philip Randolph, had a long-standing interest in literature; according to Arna Bontemps, Randolph provided the "original literary impulse of the magazine" (see Kornweibel 120). A. Philip Randolph was no black cultural nationalist. He disapproved of blues and jazz, preferring Western classical music, and his favorite author was the Bard of Avon. Indeed, Randolph (a Southerner by birth) picked up his arresting "Oxford-style" English accent learning to recite Shakespeare with the help of a tutor before World War I, when he performed Shakespearean roles in amateur theatre in Harlem. Some of his first acting experience along these lines was with the drama club at the Salem Methodist Church, where Countee Cullen's father was minister, and where he met Theophilus Lewis, later drama critic for The Messenger. Subsequently, Randolph and his wife Lucille organized a Harlem-based amateur troupe known as "Ye Friends of Shakespeare" (Anderson 57-59, 71; Pfeffer 8; Kornweibel 30).

Although he often rightly stressed the importance of autonomy for black groups involved in the movement for justice, Randolph conceived of the racial struggle within the context of "an indigenous movement for social and economic change" (Anderson 344). Both the "indigenous" and the ultimately anti-racialist aspects of Randolph's vision help account for the virulence of The Messenger's attack on Marcus Garvey, and led to W. A. Domingo's withdrawal from the editorial staff (Pfeffer 17-18). Randolph and others at the magazine viewed the programs of such West-Indian-led groups as the UNIA and the communist, black nationalist African Blood Brotherhood (Garvey's bitter opponent) as "foreign" to the realities of black life in the United States.(1) The Messenger attributed racial prejudice to capitalism, insisted on the "Americanness" of African Americans, and continually called for interracial worker solidarity, even when it promoted black control of black groups as a tactical necessity. A. Philip Randolph opposed affiliation of American socialists with the Third International in Moscow, believing that they should resist direction from outside the United States - in part, it would seem, because of the specific conflict between Marxist ideology and American racial reality. His struggle on this point during the 1920s developed into the virulent anti-Communism that typified the rest of his career (Pfeffer 17). But if the U.S. was to be the site of a new form of "indigenous" socialism, it also, The Messenger often suggested, would give birth to a new people and a "mulatto" national culture. Race pride did not conflict with a militant integrationism or even assimilationism; it seems, overall, to have been considered essential to achievement of true integration. Thus J. A. Rogers, one of the most persevering historians of global black achievement, was at the same time an avowed proponent of American "amalgamation."