Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Not All Propaganda is Art 4: Propagande Noire

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

In 1956, Richard Wright spoke of islands of free men at the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris. James Baldwin critiqued the event for Encounter, the CIA’s propaganda magazine. We take a close listen to the original recordings. Shownotes: Merve Fejzula and Cedric Tolliver both wrote about the 1956 Congrès des écrivains et artistes noirs. Darryl Pinckney wrote on Norman Mailer and Denis Leroux wrote on Antoine Bonnemaison. Support ToE and get access to the incredible exclusive bonus companion series to Not All Propaganda is Art by subscribing at https://theoryofeverything.supercast.com/, or subscribe directly in Apple Podcasts by hitting “Subscribe” right on the show page.

You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. At Radiotopia, we now have a select group of amazing supporters that help us make all our shows possible. If you would like to have your company or product sponsor this podcast, then get in touch. Drop a line to sponsor at radiotopia.fm. Thanks. episode. Why is there something called influencer voice? What's the deal with the TikTok shop? What is posting disease and do you have it? Why can it be so scary and yet feel so great to block someone on social media? The Neverpost team wonders why the internet and the world because of the internet is the way it is. They talk to artists, lawyers, linguists, content creators, sociologists, historians, and more about our current tech and media moment. From PRX's Radiotopia, Never Post, a podcast for and about the Internet.

Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. Previously on Not All Propaganda is Art. Greetings from American artists who live in France and special greetings to those American artists who live in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Greenwich Village. The American writer Richard Wright moved to France because he loved freedom. America's Cold Warriors viewed his choice as a dangerous statement about U.S. racism. I wish it were in my power to project upon the screen of your television sets the kind of life where Americans live here in Paris. I think you'd find it interesting. In 1956, Richard Wright began to connect his anti-racist philosophy to pan-African nationalism, upsetting American, British, and French Cold Warriors.

One more time. Okay, so this episode, like the last two, begins in May of 1956. Only this time, we're checking out the scene in France. That's right, it's May in Paris, 1956. In the first episode of this series, I told you a story about Richard Wright, one of the three main characters in this series. In the spring of 1956, Richard Wright, who was living in Paris in exile, made a decision to covertly work with the US government to help them shape an upcoming conference of

black writers and artists, organized by the French magazine,ésence Africaine. I have two State Department cables from May that shed some light on this collaboration. On his own initiative, the first cable notes, Mr. Wright called at the embassy to express certain concern over a Congress of Scholars of the Negro World scheduled to take place in Paris in September. Many members of Présence Africaine, Richard Wright said, were in search of an ideal they could not obtain,

and as such would be fertile ground for communist exploitation. To counteract such a tendency, Mr. Wright, who is one of the United States members of the executive committee, wondered if the embassy could assist him in suggesting possible American Negro delegates who are relatively well known for their cultural achievements and who could combat the leftist tendencies of the Congress. Some of Richard Wright's biographers speculate he made this offer to work with the U.S. government because he was worried about his passport. Others believe he was

seeking protection after Reporter Magazine published a brutal hit piece on him in March. I told you why I think he did it in episode one, but here's a quick recap. Richard Wright believed that the liberation movements that were exploding in Africa were neither pro-communist nor pro-Western but pro-African. He also believed that he was the guy best positioned to communicate this crucial information to the world.

And most importantly, Richard Wright was worried that his patrons at the Congress for Cultural Freedom were showing more and more interest in someone he believed had no interest in Africa. James Baldwin. The second U.S. Embassy cable from May of 1956 tells us exactly who Richard Wright ended up working with. Mr. Mike Josselson, the American Executive Secretary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, it says, has expressed considerable interest in the forthcoming Congress sponsored by the journal Presence Africaine, and has called at the embassy on the suggestion of Mr. Richard Wright to discuss the implications and to offer his collaboration in combating communist

influences. Michael Jocelson is the CIA agent in charge of the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA's anti-communist front organization responsible for international publications like Encounter magazine. Now, Richard Wright, like many anti-communists on the left, was himself a former communist. He understood that both communism and the colonial West were threats to pan-African nationalism. On Richard Wright's recommendation, Jocelson invited the African-American conductor Dean Dixon, who was based in Sweden, to come to Paris and perform. Richard Wright had recently met Dixon and his wife, who fondly called her husband the Richard Wright of music.

On May 29th, Dixon cabled the Congress for Cultural Freedom his reply. Severe heart collapse. Stop. Now improving. Stop. But doctors forbid my taking on any new assignments. Many regrets. Stop. In the end, Michael Jostelson organized a five-man American delegation that included Mercer Cook and Horace Mann Bond. Both had worked on the Brown v. Board of Education case,

so it was a delegation that highlighted the progress America was making in regards to civil rights and racism. May of 1956 was also a big moment for Richard Wright's antagonist, James Baldwin. This is when he first met Norman Mailer. In May of 1956, the two young writers spent a couple of days and nights together carousing through the streets and bars of Paris. This encounter with James Baldwin inspired Norman Mailer to write his infamous essay, The White Negro. Well, in this essay I wrote,

The White Negro, what I was saying in that, and I think I would still say it, is that the white, certain whites, those whites who were young, adventurous, and felt themselves more or less alienated from society began to find that the experience of the Negro made more sense to them than the experience of a white man.

And so I said they became, in effect, a white Negro. Norman Mailer's downright racist essay is just wholly out of step with the counterculture of today. But in the mid-1950s, when it was first published, it was celebrated as a defining expression of underground counterculture style. Let's assume, for purposes of discussion, I'm a square, you're a hip. What's a hip? What does hip mean? Well, to begin with, as I've indicated, it about the white Negro depends on how much respect you want to pay the hipster as an American type. This is Daryl Pinkney. He's written essays on James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Norman Mailer.

In fact, when I spoke with him in New York, he was preparing a lecture on the white Negro for the Norman Mailer centenary. That whole bebop thing was real, was very serious. White guys really sort of latched on to this. Last episode, I told you about a book called The Angry Young Men and The Beat Generation, a 1958 book that connected England's counterculture with America's counterculture. That book included Norman Mailer's essay. In its review, the New York Times called The White Negro the book's standout essay. There were a lot of things going on in that world that,

of course, Baldwin didn't like because it was very druggy, sort of to him, they were just slumming, as we would say now. James Baldwin tried to sever his connection to the white Negro in an essay he wrote for Esquire magazine called The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy. Before I had met Norman, he wrote, I had only read The Naked and the Dead, The White Negro, and Barbary Shore. This is factually impossible because they first met before Norman Mailer wrote The White Negro. James Baldwin gets away with this historical revision by using a creative disclaimer. Though it may be that I only read The White Negro later and confuse my reading of that downright impenetrable piece with some of my discussions with Norman. When he writes The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy, he's kind of taking a lot back.

What he's doing is kind of revoking Mailer's membership in the cool club. He's saying that whatever I said, he got wrong or would not be able to appreciate the depths of what I was saying. Because he's a nice middle class white boy after all. And jazz musicians who accepted me, of course, thought he was corny. Daryl Pinckney told me James Baldwin did a lot of historical revising, especially when it came to his Paris years. The weird thing about Baldwin is he goes back later and kind of blacks up his Paris years. You know, I hung out with the Arabs and things.

No, you didn't. My name is Benjamin Walker, and this is episode four of Not All Propaganda is Art. This one is called Propaganda Noire, and it's a story about the Congress of Black Writers and Artists, an event that took place in Paris in September of 1956. and it's a story about the Congress of Black Writers and Artists, an event that took place in Paris in September of 1956. It's an event Richard Wright participated in and an event James Baldwin wrote about for Encounter,

the Congress for Cultural Freedoms, Propaganda Magazine. It was one of those bright, warm days, and by 10 o'clock, the lecture hall was already unbearably hot. People choked the entrances and covered the wooden steps. It was hectic, with the activity attendant upon the setting up of tape recorders. Those are the opening lines to James Baldwin's critique of the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists. It ran in the January 1957 issue of Encounter magazine, and it's called Princes and Powers.

Baldwin's critique contains a number of misrepresentations and outright distortions, but yet it remains the most famous and seminal account of this event. Good thing there were tape recorders. This is Alion Diop, one of the editors of the magazine Présence Africaine. In his opening remarks, he welcomes all the writers and artists who've come to Paris for this historic gathering.

And then he says something really interesting. He calls this Congress the second Bandung. The first Bandung conference took place the year before, in Indonesia. It was a significant political event, the first ever gathering of African and Asian world leaders and statesmen. And Richard Wright had written about it in his book, The Color Curtain. This second bandung, Alain Diop proclaimed,

would also address the problems of the Black world, but through culture. It was said not just by Diop. A lot of people at that Congress repeated it. By articulating this, interestingly, as a cultural bandung, lots of what these writers and intellectuals and artists were thinking about was framing this problem through culture. You know, what does it look like

when it's not exclusively a political problem, and what does it look like when it's not exclusively a political problem? And what does it look like when you take it into an intellectual space? They were also suggesting that the cultural element might have been overlooked in the Bandung conference. I've enlisted two incredible scholars

to help us make sense of these recordings, Merve Fizula and Cedric Tolliver. Both of them are engaged with the 1956 Congress and its legacy in their work. It is still kind of considered one of the most iconic 20th century, mid-century gatherings of Black intellectuals. And all of the people that would later become really quite famous, and some of them who already were at the time, were there.

So Leopold Senghor, who later became president of Independence Senegal. Aimé Césaire was there, who was the really famous Martiniquan poet. They were poets. The people who would go on to lead some of these post-colonial states, were representing themselves as writers and intellectuals. After Diop's welcome, Richard Wright and some of the other organizers read out messages from famous well-wishers and supporters. The message of Mr. Herskovits is as follows. Richard Wright read the ones in English from America and England.

The message of George Padmore, dear friends, I want to thank you for all your community... Including the message from his friend George Padmore, the London-based pan-Africanist who was unable to come to Paris due to a sudden illness. As I have been with high temperature during the past few days, and which has confined me to the house. Although the conference will be primarily concerned with problems of writers and artists, I hope it will not fail to take note of the political aspirations and demands of Africans and people of African descent in the present international context of pan-African nationalism.

George Padmore. But Richard Wright did not read the message from the American pan-Africanist and socialist Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois. The message of Dr. Du Bois, from America. Now, the reading of Du Bois' message is one of the most infamous and important moments of the Congress. I am not present at your meeting today because the United States government will not grant me a passport for travel abroad. Here is the person who would be considered the most famous intellectual of the Black world, unable to have a passport to travel to this conference. In many ways, the father of Pan-Africanism. Having been in Pan-African congresses since the turn of the 20th century,

it's just kind of amazing to hear that. Any Negro American who travels abroad today must either not discuss race conditions in the United States or say the sort of thing which our State Department wishes the world to believe. You can hear why Richard Wright didn't want to read this message. In fact, the entire American delegation was furious over Du Bois' implicit accusations. The government especially objects to me because I am a socialist and because I believe in peace with communist states like the Soviet Union and their right to exist in security. Especially do I believe in socialism for Africa.

I trust the black writers of the world will understand this and will set themselves to lead Africa toward the light and no backward toward a new colonialism. Dr. Du Bois. In Princes and Powers, James Baldwin wrote that Du Bois' message revealed the threat of communist expansion lurking behind the question of Pan-African nationalism. The way James Baldwin framed it, the conference itself was a Cold War battleground. Hanging in the air, as real as the heat from which we suffered, he wrote, were the great specters of America and Russia, of the battle going on between them for the domination of the world.

In terms of the Cold War, there is the political struggle that was happening between the Soviet Union and the United States, but what was it about? The United States was looking at Europe, and it was not just that France was important or that England was important and that you had to kind of like with the Marshall Plan like rebuild those like European economies but that those European economies had been dependent on their colonies and so once those

colonies if they were going towards independence hegemony or control of the world was going to involve those same colonies. The Cold War is like a kind of black hole that just sucks up everything and doesn't let you see some other longer-term patterns, right? You know, centuries of empire don't just get wiped out in this Cold War moment. They get kind of refracted and bent and reformed through them. The essential question of the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists centered around the exploration of what fundamental elements or shared experiences united Black people globally.

For Leopold Senghor, the Senegalese poet and statesman, the answer to this question was Black culture itself, or negritude, as he called it. And in his speech, he listed some of its primary characteristics. Black culture, Senghor insisted, was social in nature, committed and engaged. Senghor's lecture prompted a heated discussion among the delegates, and engaged. Senghor's lecture prompted a heated discussion among the delegates, which unfortunately was not recorded. All we have is the published transcript. But during this debate, Senghor actually claimed Richard Wright

as proof of Negritude's universality. Richard Wright's poetry and prose, he said, were examples of African committed and socially engaged art. Richard Wright was so critically important to the generation of Saint-Gaul. When they went to Paris to study, and they were in, they called Nomades Supérieurs, and they were doing their studies to become like part of like the French administrative bureaucracy, but also intellectuals. They were writing dissertations on people like Richard Wright. This for them was their kind of intellectual formation.

They are really finding those connections to, for lack of a better term, like the new world important to how they understand themselves. The claim that he's making by drawing Richard Wright into this kind of negritude nexus is to say that, you know, despite all of these imperial incursions, we're involved in this same project, right? And that there is something that you can identify that is Black culture. And that Americans are part of it, too. The diaspora is a part of it, too.

And in that sense of just kind of political unity, you can really forge, like, new horizons. In his critique of the conference for Encounter magazine, James Baldwin dismissed both Senghor's claim on Richard Wright and Senghor's idea of a universal, socially engaged black culture. The only thing in Western life, he wrote, which seemed even faintly to approximate Senghor's intense sketch of the creative interdependence, the active, actual, joyful intercourse obtaining among African artists and what only a Westerner would call their public, was the atmosphere sometimes created among jazz musicians and their fans during, say, a jam session. Senghorst culture, Baldwin concluded,

did not seem to need the lonely activity of the singular intelligence on which the cultural life, the moral life, of the West depends. Amis Césaire, the poet from Martinique, another one of the big names at the Congress, also believed there was something that unified all black men and women. Césaire directly addressed the actual specter hanging over the Congress. His lecture was called Culture and Colonialism. Césaire was one of the utter luminaries, you know,

of the black, frankfun intellectual world at this time. So lots of people were really queuing up to see Césaire speak. The audience erupted with applause numerous times during Césaire's speech. And this frustrated the American delegation. For them, colonialism was a political, not cultural issue. And on top of that, they viewed colonialism as something that differentiated the African-American experience from the African or European experience. But Césaire, who was from the Caribbean, argued differently.

Césaire has this kind of history of understanding Haiti and what happened in Haiti from the revolution, and then also the consequences of that revolution being a neighbor of the United States and what that meant for their history and their future. He's aware of those things. He understands the power and the influence that the United States has kind of exercised in the Western Hemisphere. As someone from the Caribbean, he understands what the Monroe Doctrine and all those things have meant. Hamid Cizer is one of colonialism's greatest critics. He's one of the first intellectuals to illuminate the connections between 20th century fascism and European colonialism. And in this lecture, he advances one of his strongest arguments.

There is no such thing as good colonialism. He has this really strong, really intense denunciation of this colonial kind of apologist argument. He just eviscerates it. Like, point by point, he destroys this notion that it's possible to think about the imperial project as a civilizing mission, that it hasn't brought anything but, you know,

violence and destruction. Listen to how the audience responded for Césaire's argument, but he countered it with a curt dismissal. Césaire's speech left out of account one of the great effects of the colonial experience, of its creation, precisely, of men like himself. Now, Césaire's lecture and its reception really complicated things for Richard Wright.

Because his lecture, which followed Césaire's, was in fact a celebration of what he considered the intellectually liberating impact of European colonialism. What rivets my attention in this clash of East and West is that an irrational Western world helped unconsciously and unintentionally to be sure to smash the irrational ties of religion and custom and tradition in Asia and Africa. This, in my opinion, is the central historic fact. This lecture that Richard Wright delivered at the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists is called Tradition and Industrialization,

but its original title was White Faces, Agent Provocateurs of Mankind. Sadly, there's no recording of this one, but in the transcription published by Présence Africaine, it's clear that the religious fervor of some of the delegates at the Congress, the Catholics and the traditionalists, took Richard Wright by surprise. The transcript includes a number of ad-libbed clarifications and asides that he made during his lecture. For example, after he stated his belief that the West had inadvertently given birth to an Africa that was more secular and rational than the West,

he said this, As a result of my being here at this conference, I question this statement. When I wrote that statement, I was hoping and dreaming for black freedom. But after listening to the gentleman of the cloth, who spoke here this morning, describe the African as being incurably religious, I wonder now if I can say that the African is more secular-minded than the West. I wonder, as a result of this conference, whether my description was idealistic or factual. We are now faced, it seems to me, in the world with a problem of trying to outwit, overcome

the irrational heritage of our lives. This is a recording of Richard Wright just after the Congress. He's lecturing on the same theme. He's arguing that a free and industrialized Africa needs a rational and secular foundation. This is the question I'm posing to you for discussion here this evening. Is it possible to extend the area of the rational in the world? Richard Wright's dreams and hopes of black freedom rested on men like Senghor and Césaire, men educated by the West, men capable of building rational and secular nations in Africa and Asia.

He called them lonely outsiders, and he dedicated this lecture, Tradition and Industrialization, to them. Tragic and lonely, and allization to them. poised, nervous, straining at the leash, ready to go, with no weight of the dead past clouding their minds, no fear of foolish customs benumbing their consciousness, eager to build industrial civilizations. In Princes and Powers, James Baldwin mocked Richard Wright's support for this new African and Asian elite and their efforts to unify their countries as misguided and naive. Wright said these men,

the leaders of their countries, once the new social order was established, would voluntarily surrender their personal power. Wright did not say what would happen then, but I suppose it would be the second coming. Richard Wright believed that the West should support African and Asian nationalist movements and their leaders. Rational secular pan-African nationalism, even if unaligned with the West, he argued, would enlarge the free world.

James Baldwin wasn't just mocking Richard Wright's position as naive or idealistic. He was advancing America's official 1956 position on unaligned countries, as well as its fear-mongering propaganda. Leaders like Sukarno, Nassar, and Nehru, etc., Baldwin wrote in Princes and Powers, could very well turn out to be dictators in their pursuit of national development. A few weeks before the Congress of Black Writers and Artists took place, Michael Joselson, the actual CIA agent in charge of the Congress for Cultural Freedom wrote to Francois Bondi, the editor of Prove, the CCF's French journal, to inform him that he had arranged for James Baldwin to write about the event for Encounter and Prove.

And he makes it clear that Baldwin will be critical of the ideas behind the conference. We've talked a lot about encounter in this series, mostly because all three of the main characters in this story wrote for the magazine. But I also want to acknowledge Encounter Magazine's profound influence on intellectual history. As Michael Jocelson makes explicit in his letter about James Baldwin and the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists, influence was the whole point. Princes and Powers is collected in James Baldwin's second book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, More Notes of a Native Son, which was published in 1961.

And thanks to James Baldwin's phenomenal popularity, it quickly became the canonical source on the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists. For most academics today, Cedric Tolliver says, it still is. At least for an American audience, the way that they even come to know about the 1956 conference is through Baldwin's essay. For Merve Fazula, who's writing a book on negritude and its various transformations throughout the 20th century, any reductive Cold War framing of this historic gathering of Black writers and artists needs to be seen for what it is. The way that the Cold War carves up that space is that it can only be either these two options, and if it's not a liberal politics, it's a communist one. And what those both mean also are

however white intellectuals are defining them. Over the last few episodes, we've examined a number of Cold War anti-communist propaganda operations executed by American and British security agencies like the CIA and the IRD. The French, well, they had their own way of doing propaganda or action psychologique? It's not, it's not very, how can I say? It's not very convenient to say we make propaganda when you're the government. So you say action psychologique. It's okay. Action psychologique, it's nice.

But in fact, there's no such distinction. Meet Denis Leroux. In French, we say Denis Leroux. In French we say Denis Leroux. Currently I'm a chef, which is the job I was doing before doing my PhD. When Denis Leroux is not cooking mussels in Lille, he's working on his book, based on the groundbreaking research he did for his PhD on French anti-communist psychological warfare and propaganda of the 1950s. I went to visit him because I wanted to better understand what the French security agencies

would have made of the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists and Richard Wright's support rights support for decolonial movements. I'm sure they interpret discourse like those of these black writers' conferences as communist psychological warfare. In the 1950s, France argued that its colonial wars were not struggles for liberation, but rather fronts in a revolutionary war between the West and the Soviet Union. And they called this the doctrine of revolutionary war. For them, at this point, the problem was not inequality in the colonial society or so on. It was foreign influence, Moscow and Soviet Union. The traditional French army consisted of four departments or bureaus.

They dealt with personnel, intelligence, operations, and logistics. To fight the Revolutionary War, the French government created a new bureau. In 1957, they created a fifth bureau dealing with psychological psychologic, and they intervene everywhere. The Battle of Algiers is perhaps the most famous application of the doctrine of revolutionary war. But the fifth bureau's primary target was the heart and mind of France itself. And on some occasions, it even resorted to fabricating documents. Black propaganda to link anti-colonial movements like Algeria's FLN to the Soviet Union.

For example, in my archive, I find funny stuff. Texts, which are supposed to be FLN documents, and it's diffused in the army by the top chef, Salon, under his signatures. But it's made by the 5th Bureau, and it's supposed to be read by all the officers in post in Algeria, in order to convince their workmates that they are not only fighting against colonial population wanting to be free from the French yoke, but communists hiding

behind nationalist movement. And this document, which is supposed to be an Algerian nationalist document coming from FLN, is obviously a forgery. Now, many of the individuals involved in the formation of the Fifth Bureau are French colonial luminaries. Men like Jacques Soustell, the spy chief and Algerian governor who forged close ties with Alan Dulles at the CIA. And General Raoul Salon, who was one of the

four generals who would try to overthrow the De Gaulle government in 1961 in a last-ditch effort to stop Algerian independence. But for Denis Leroux, the most important figure connected to the Fifth Bureau, Action Psychologique, and the doctrine of revolutionary war is a man who shied away from the main stage, a spy who preferred the shadows, a propagandist named Antoine Bonne Maison. Antoine Bonne Maison became the main responsible

of psychological warfare in the French Secret Service. He met something like, during the Algeria War, something like two or three conferences a week during nearly all the eight years of the war, mainly with military audiences, but also people with leading posts in the French society. During the second half of the 1950s, Antoine Beaumaison introduced the doctrine of revolutionary war to thousands upon thousands of French soldiers, engineers, academics, and businessmen.

His scope is Europe, not the colonies. In fact, I don't think he gives a lot of importance to colonial problems. The main goal of Bonne Maison is to immunize the French elite to communist idea. Antoine Bonne Maison was an officer in the SEDEC, the French CIA. But he also collaborated with anti-communist security agencies from other European nations, including the IRD. He was also a key member of Vichy collaborator Georges Albertini's CIA-funded operation East-West, an organization that closely monitored France especially intellectuals.

Back when he was doing his research, Denis Leroux actually tracked down Antoine Bonmaison's daughter. And he discovered her father's secret files. In her attic. It's his daughter. Keep everything, in fact. So thanks to Denis Leroux, Antoine Beaumaison's files are now housed at the French National Archives. And unlike other individuals who served in the security services, his papers are open

to researchers and podcasters. The most amazing thing I looked at on my visit to the French National Archives was a handmade book. Antoine Bonmaison made, or had made. It looks like a Bible. It has a special cardboard cover and tabs labeled doctrine,

method, technique, organization, reference, and realization. It's kind of like a master file for all of his propaganda work. It contains agendas for the conferences he put together in Algeria and in France, lectures he wrote on subversion and mass society. But the very first section is a policy paper on the doctrine of revolutionary war, and this version argues for a robust propaganda counteroffensive. The urgency and opportunism in this argument is perhaps explained by the date on the first page,

October 1st, 1956. This is the day after three FLN female revolutionaries placed bombs in Algerian cafes frequented by Europeans. And sure enough, on October 3, newspapers throughout France and Algeria were reporting false evidence that the bombings were carried out by an Algerian communist, Raymond Pichard. A blunt application of the doctrine of revolutionary war, to be sure. But this paper, in Antoine Bonmaison's Bible, written barely a week after the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists, is advocating for a propaganda counteroffensive,

not in response to bombs or freedom fighters, but ideas and intellectuals. Thank you. On the morning of December 8th, 1956, Richard Wright checked out of the Hotel St. Anne in Copenhagen. And as he made his way to Central Station to catch his sleeper train to Paris, he laughed to himself about the awkward, strange night clerk from the hotel. The clerk, used to renting back rooms by the hour to sailors, seemed unsure of what to make of the famous writer. Richard Wright was looking forward to returning home.

It had been a solid two months of international travel. Immediately following the Congress of Black Writers and Artists, the Congress for Cultural Freedom had sent him to West Germany and then London for a series of talks and conferences. And then he went on a Scandinavian lecture tour. Mr. Wright, is this your first visit to Sweden? Yes, this is the first time I've been in Sweden and in Scandinavia as a whole. And you're not going to stay only in Stockholm?

No, I shall go to Uppsala, Lund, Gothenburg, Oslo and Copenhagen to deliver lectures. On some of the tour dates, Richard Wright read a lecture called The Psychological Reactions of Oppressed People, and on others he read Tradition and Industrialization, the same lecture he delivered at the Congress of Black Writers and Artists. Both lectures went over well, and his Swedish publisher decided to publish them,

along with two other lectures, as a book that would be called White Man Listen. All Richard Wright had to do was compose an introduction for the book, a task he was determined to accomplish on his train ride back to Paris. But he couldn't stop thinking about the clerk from the hotel. Big Black Good Man is a short story about an encounter between a Copenhagen hotel clerk and an African-American businessman. Richard Wright wrote the first draft of this story on that train ride from Copenhagen to Paris. Instead of the introduction he was supposed to write, making it a story born of two powerful creative forces, inspiration and procrastination.

I find Big Black Goodman a much better introduction to white man listen than the one he eventually wrote. Because in this short story, Richard Wright lays bare his emotions and anxieties about the West's entrenched irrationality and its incapacity for meaning. Big Black Goodman is a story told from the perspective of Olaf Jensen, a Danish easygoing night porter who works at a waterfront hotel in Copenhagen. I'll be 60 tomorrow. I'm not rich, but I'm not poor either. Really, I can't complain. Late one night, Olaf is shaken from his reveries. His reflexes refused to function. It was not fear, it was just simple astonishment.

He was staring at the biggest, strangest, and blackest man he'd ever seen in all his life. Good evening, the black giant said in a voice that filled the small office. Say, you got a room? There was something about the man's intense blackness and ungainly bigness that frightened and insulted Olaf. He felt as though the man had come here expressly to remind him how puny, how tiny, and how weak, and how white he was. Olaf knew, while registering his reactions, that he was being irrational and foolish. Yet, for the first time in his life, he was emotionally determined to refuse a man a room solely on the basis of the man's size and color.

Olaf's lips parted as he groped for the right words in which to couch his refusal. But the big black giant bent forward and boomed. I asked you if you got a room. I gotta put up somewhere tonight, man. Yes, we've got a room, Olaf murmured. The big black man is Jim, and Olaf finds he's unable to say no to any of his requests. Every night, he fixes Jim up with a bottle of whiskey

and a local prostitute named Lena. But by the sixth night, Olaf starts to lose it. Olaf was nervous and angry with himself for being nervous. Other black sailors came and asked for girls and Olaf sent them, but with none of the fear and loathing that he sent Lena and a bottle of whiskey to the giant. I'm not prejudiced, no, not at all. But, he couldn't think anymore, God oughtn't make men as big and black as that. When Jim finally checks out, Olaf is relieved. But just before he departs, Jim reaches out and puts one of his giant hands around Olaf's neck.

Olaf could feel the giant's warm breath blowing on his eyelashes, and he felt like a chicken about to have its neck wrung and its body tossed to flip and flap dyingly in the dust of the barnyard. Then, suddenly, the black giant withdrew his fingers from Olaf's neck and stepped back a pace, still grinning. Olaf sighed, trembling. His body seemed to shrink. He waited. Shame sheeted him for the hot wetness that was in his trousers. Oh God, he's teasing me. He's showing me how easily he can kill me. He swallowed, waiting, his eyes stones of gray. Please don't hurt me, Olaf managed to say. I wouldn't hurt you, boy, the giant said in a tone of mockery. So long. And he was gone.

Olaf spends the following year agonizing over this encounter, angry and ashamed and confused. And then one night, resplendently dressed, suitcase in hand, the black looming mountain filled the doorway. Jim has returned to Copenhagen to live with Lena, and he's brought Olaf six white shirts as a thank you present. And as Jim had measured Olaf's neck on his last visit, the white shirts fit perfectly. And I thought you wanted to kill me, Olaf told him. I was scared of you. Me? Kill you? The giant blinked. When? That night, when you put your fingers about my throat. What? The giant asked, then roared with laughter. Daddy-o, you're a funny little man. I wouldn't

hurt you. I like you. You're a good man. You helped me. Olaf smiled, clutching the pile of white shirts in his arms. You're a good man, too, Olaf murmured, and then loudly, You're a big black good man! Daddy-O, you're crazy, the giant said. He swept his suitcase from the sofa, spun on his heel, and was at the door in one stride. Thanks, Olaf cried after him. The black giant paused, turned his vast black head, and flashed a grin. Daddy-O dropped dead, he said, and was gone.

Richard Wright didn't get to the actual introduction to White Man Listen until the day after Christmas, a few weeks later. These four lectures, he tells us, make a comment connected and coherent upon white-colored East-West relations in the world today. The introduction is brief and straightforward, except for a curious anecdote that he concludes with. Recently, a young woman asked me, but would your ideas make people happy? And before I was aware of what I was saying,

I heard myself answering with a degree of frankness that I rarely, in deference to politeness, permit myself in personal conversation. My dear, I do not deal in happiness. I deal in meaning. White Man Listen was published in Sweden, America, and France. And in all three markets, it flopped. The book fell on deaf ears.

I'm convinced Richard Wright knew this was going to happen from the beginning, or at least he knew on that train ride from Copenhagen to Paris when he began writing Big Black Good Man. He knew that the meaning of his four lectures, just like the six white shirts in his story, would be misconstrued

and misunderstood. In May of 1957, Stanley Plastrick, one of the editors of Dissent, a New York-based little magazine, read Richard Wright's lecture, Tradition and Industrialization in Présence Africaine. They'd published a special issue containing all of the lectures from the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists. Stanley Plastrick liked Richard Wright's lecture so much he wrote him a letter asking if Dissent could publish an excerpt from it for their fall 1957 issue. And by the way, he added, may I call your attention to our forthcoming summer issue? It contains something I'd particularly like to have your opinion about. It's a kind of offbeat appreciation of the hipster. A long article by Norman Mailer called The White Negro.

I do hope that you will call this to the attention to some of your friends in France. I'm willing to furnish any extra copies of this issue you may wish to have. Sadly, the Richard Wright archive only contains the telegrams Stanley Plastrick sent to Richard Wright. So I cannot tell you exactly how Richard Wright responded to this request to promote Norman Mailer's black propaganda in France. But I will tell you how I hope he responded. Daddy-O, drop dead. Not all propaganda is art is research written and produced by me Benjamin Walker

the one and only Andrew Calloway mixed it special thanks this episode go out to all the librarians and archivists who helped me during this series especially the folks at the Beinecke at Yale and the British Library. Also, thanks again to the amazing folks who appear in this episode. You can find links to their work in the show notes. Thanks also to the listeners who've reached out uh with some comments on the new series

yes i know it requires a lot and yes i know there are way too many names and people in this series and on that note i want to tell you about the companion podcast that I've created for this series, Propaganda Notes and Sources. The exclusive companion series for Not All Propaganda is Art is basically a series of audio footnotes. Each episode of Not All Propaganda is Art gets its own corresponding episode of Propaganda Notes and Sources. I take you through the script and I cite all the corresponding original sources I consulted and the archives I visited while reporting this series. So if you want to know more about Norman Mailer's concept of bravery

and how that too came from his interactions with James Baldwin. Check out the latest episode of Propaganda Notes and Sources. slash subscribe. All the info you need is right there. It's a really simple process. We're using Supercast and Apple subscriptions. And if you're listening on Apple podcast right now, just tap the subscribe button on the show page. Subscribing is the way to support this kind of work. Your one-time contribution will directly fund more standalone limited series like this one. You know, the podcast experts, they all say that nobody wants work like this. According to the podcast experts,

what you want, dear listener, is snackable, always on, always updating content. Help me prove the podcast experts wrong. Subscribe at theoryofeverythingpodcast.com slash subscribe. In the next episode of Not All Propaganda is Art, things start to get difficult for all three of our main cast members. Because in 1958, the Cultural Cold War takes a militant turn. The ideological struggle between the Soviet communist system and our way of life can never be solved by any treaties, any diplomatic conferences, any cultural exchanges. That's in one week on Not All Propaganda Is Our. Radiotopia. From PRX.