Max Yergan

by David Henry Anthony III

  Following Oval Office snubs to requests for meetings and the successful Lincoln visit, Yergan sent out a circular to presidents and secretaries of state of all the American republics, the League of Nations, and the Pan-American Union, to all diplomatic representatives in Washington, D.C., and to all consular representatives in New York City condemning the callous killings and deportations of Haitians in Dominican territory by strongman Rafael Trujillo.65 A fortnight later he received a cable from Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles in response to a letter he had sent concerning American policy in the Caribbean, centering on Haiti, that had sparked off an NNC mass rally. Welles made clear his displeasure in what he probably took to be meddling in his affairs.66 However insignificant Welles may have considered Yergan’s action, it was added to the catalogue of Yergan-related correspondence now under close scrutiny by State Department and White House officials. Without knowing it, Max was attracting attention within the highest circles of government. The response to this informal investigation was that the organization was “not reputable.”

  With the beginning of 1938 the House Un-American Activities Committee began amassing material on the National Negro Congress, listing it as subversive. Its rationale for doing so was based upon three premises: (1) Some NNC members were also members of the Communist Party; (2) the NNC supported the right of the Communist Party to exist; and (3) the NNC endorsed statements on behalf of some Communists.67 At the time, however, Yergan and Davis were far more preoccupied with NNC matters, ranging from the printing of the proceedings of the second congress to a January 23 Yergan address on fascism at Leigh Street Methodist Church in Richmond, Virginia, to an invitation from Quaker Helen R. Bryan to speak at a February 6 afternoon gathering of the Friends on a topic Max had identified as “The Negro—A Determinant in the Future of American Labor.”68 In late January he spoke at an NNC forum at the Detroit YMCA.69 A week later Max, with Mary van Kleeck and Mary Fleddérus, met Quakers Clarence Pickett and Helen Bryan in Philadelphia to consult about an October conference presentation on Negro standards of living and labor conditions throughout the world, sponsored by the North America–and Europe–based International Industrial Relations Institute.70

  During late February Yergan spoke against Jim Crow in the colleges at a CCNY meeting sponsored by the Frederick Douglass society, the Meroë Society, the Teacher’s Union, the American Student Union, and the Communist Youth League.71 When in May the League of Nations Council, meeting in Geneva, discussed fascist Italy’s claims to Ethiopia, the International Committee on African Affairs sent telegrams of protest. Yergan met with Carnegie Foundation representatives seeking aid for a November ICAA conference run by Pickett, van Kleeck, and Yergan.72 In late July he set sail for Europe.

  Thanks to van Kleeck and Fleddérus, orders had been coming in for Gold and Poverty in South Africa before and after Yergan’s summer European trip.73 By autumn, the publication garnered a favorable review in the prestigious British journal International Affairs.74 Near Thanksgiving Yergan polled Bunche seeking information and his opinion regarding a British proposal to settle Jewish immigrants in Africa, a proposal that complicated the land question by setting it against the urgent need to relieve refugees from Nazi persecution:

  Undoubtedly, imperialist Britain and its allies elsewhere will seek to turn to their own advantage this proposed settlement of Jewish immigrants. It is likewise easily conceivable that propaganda from fascist countries will be promoted on a wide scale in Africa w/ the possible result that some Africans may be so misled as to look to the fascist powers as their protectors under the circumstances.75

  Bunche’s response, posted a month later, offered a detailed and incisive analysis of the statement in a way that reflected the quality of his acute mind:

  It seems to me that this offers no decent solution to the problem, particularly in view of the fact that the hands of the imperialistic countries which are now thinking along these lines, are not at all clean. As usual the English are seeking a way out at no cost to themselves. If England and her dominions showed any inclinations to let down the barriers against Jewish immigrants, my attitude might be less severe, but this they do not propose to do; consequently they are seeking to make another Palestine out of the congested areas in Africa in which Jews may be settled. The central question in such settlement will of course revolve about the problem of land. In east Africa, particularly in Kenya, this problem is already in the acute stage. The most desirable land areas have already been alienated—the natives have seen their most desirable land, which was the White Highlands, alienated to whites at terrific costs to their own welfare. The introduction of more whites, Jews or non-Jews, will certainly aggravate the situation, and of course, the natives as always, bear the costs. In none of the reports that I have seen, has there ever been any suggestion that in the alienation of further native land areas, would there be any compensation for the natives in terms of increased control over their own country as a means for protection against continuing encroachment.

  The suggestion relative to Tanganyika is particularly unhappy in my estimation. Tanganyika has a considerable German population and during my recent visit there, I was impressed with the extent to which pro-German and pro-Nazi propaganda is being disseminated among the natives. The natives, with no basis for understanding the full import of Nazi doctrine, and with many grievances against the British administration, would fall easy prey to this insidious propaganda. For these and many other reasons, such as the inevitable conflict that would arise in East Africa, not only between Jews and natives, but also between the established Indian traders and new Jewish traders, always at the expense of the native population of course, I do not think that the proposed settlement of Jewish refugees in Africa could be endorsed.76

  By year’s end, Gold and Poverty had been assessed by the International Labour Review.77 In January 1939, Rose Wright, in charge of missionary education for young people for the Indianapolis-based United Christian Missionary Society, endorsed it.78

  That same month the Journal of Negro History published Yergan’s article, “The Status of the Natives in South Africa,” which buttressed his position as an informed scholarly observer of the South African scene. Reprising some of the earlier statistics cited in Gold and Poverty and other prior works, it also helped strengthen Max’s case as a historian in two senses: first, it showed his African expertise and, second, it helped to reinforce his selection as a serious teacher of Negro history, as this was the subject of the journal.

  By the start of 1939 Gold and Poverty had been widely disseminated, reaching nearly seven hundred recipients throughout the world. This probably accounts for why it is still easily found in libraries today and remains high among Yergan’s better-known printed writings. Review copies and sales alike continued unabated well beyond the first quarter of the year.79 On August 31, Max delivered an address on “Standards of Living in Colonial Areas as Influenced by Governments” to the IIRI’s annual Hague Summer Study Conference.80

  October found Yergan back at Lincoln University speaking on “Man’s Struggles in the World of Today” for a Sunday morning chapel service and then for an afternoon forum on the condition of Africans in South Africa.81 The same campus newspaper issue that described this talk featured a Sunday interview with Max’s eldest son, Fred, a CCNY mechanical engineering student. Fred indicated that he was contemplating changing schools and had considered Lincoln.82

  By late November 1939 Yergan had written Franz Boas an ICAA form letter that began, “On my recent visit to Europe I heard or saw nothing that impressed me more strongly than the desire and effort of Africans and other colonials to improve their living conditions.” Inviting Boas along with his other correspondents to share his concern, he continued, “I recognized also the great importance of the growing knowledge among sections of the English, French and other people that injustice in the colonies is a chief enemy of democracy in the home country.” Then he continued, using familiar language:

  This
question of the status of millions of Africans and their right to a better life is at the heart of the present world struggle. The good life and world peace to achieve that life are goals which turn our thoughts to Europe and its relation to the struggling and oppressed everywhere.83

  Yergan’s goal was, of course, to interest Dr. Boas in the work of the ICAA. Boas responded in the affirmative, expressing his willingness to discuss the matter, but he also indicated that “it will not be easy to convince Europeans or Americans that people on lower stages of civilization are not there solely for purposes of exploitation.”84 While no other correspondence exchanged between the two appears to have survived in this period, Yergan did contact Boas again about African affairs and an equally pressing career concern two years later. In the meantime the ICAA focused upon its own growth.

  The ICAA on the Move

  Buoyed by the momentum of recent transatlantic successes, Yergan concentrated on building his new coalition. Among luminaries cultivated for ICAA membership and a leading light on the masthead of the group’s fresh stationery was Raymond Leslie Buell, a popular, prolific political scientist who had written extensively on a range of territorial and international administrative subjects. Buell published monographs and analyses for the Foreign Policy Association and a Boston-centered pacifist collective, the World Peace Foundation. Africa scholars knew Buell for his 1928 work, The Native Problem in Africa.

  Three years before The Native Problem Buell had compiled Problems of the Pacific: A Brief Bibliography Prepared for the American Group of the Institute of Pacific Relations. The IPR was launched precisely the same year by a zealous board, most of whom were ex-YMCA officials. Its first director, Edward C. (“Ned”) Carter, supervised Max in India. A building later housing the ICAA was owned by Frederick Field, the second director of the Institute of Pacific Relations and a close Carter associate who was later active in both the ICAA and its 1941 successor, the Council on African Affairs. Carter, Buell, and Field were each internationalist in outlook. Carter had also built a following from The Inquiry, an anti-isolation journal. Previously called the “National Conference on the Christian Way of Life,” the Inquiry circle was a liberal, social gospel–influenced collective. Much like the IPR, it was rooted in the YMCA, even using Y print facilities. Thus the ICAA sprang from both the YMCA and the Institute of Pacific Relations.

  Like Carter and Yergan, Field had overseas experience, in Asia. Field was a first cousin of itinerant recording producer and jazz impresario John Hammond (who later joined the Council on African Affairs). Field and Hammond were left-leaning heirs of the Vanderbilt family. Throughout Yergan’s term, Field corresponded regularly with John Davis and George P. Murphy of the National Negro Congress, directing the American Peace Mobilization while IPR American Council head Carter presided over Russian War Relief.

  From the start the ICAA was interracial in its composition. At least half of the membership was Black, the other half White. Males predominated, but there was rarely a time during which women did not occupy visible and prominent roles, wielding considerable influence. One such woman was Frieda Neugebauer, he previously mentioned activist secretary. At one juncture, Mary van Kleeck, director of Russell Sage Foundation’s Industrial Studies Department, held sway. In its heyday, the ICAA represented a cross-section of the interwar intellectual Left. Neugebauer and van Kleeck had IPR ties, the former as a stenographer, allegedly from 1934 to 1949,85 the latter intermittently contributing to Pacific Affairs. At its inception key board members were situated in colonial capitals, notably London and Paris. Although little else beyond surviving memoranda, press releases, letters, and news articles points to their effectiveness, the members maintained regular contact for two decades and were able to mount and sustain a powerful sequence of well-publicized actions and campaigns.

  Pioneer ICAA members were, besides Buell, Robeson, Bunche, Howard University president Mordecai W. Johnson, rising Howard trustee Channing H. Tobias (both Black YMCA officials), René Maran (aforementioned Paris-based, Afro-Antillean originator of Batouala), Leonard Barnes, Mary van Kleeck, Hubert T. Delaney, Mrs. John F. Moors, Ferdinand E. de Frantz, and Norman H. MacKenzie. Prominently named on its letterhead as director, Yergan commonly signed memoranda or news releases.

  Neugebauer and van Kleeck proved pivotal in this period of ICAA development. Individually and together, they seem to have accepted a major share of responsibility for its day-to-day operations. If Oswin Bull’s estimation of Yergan as an “idea man” had merit, office workers with detailed follow-through skills helped him look his best. Effective at generating concepts, speaking publicly, chairing meetings, and pressing the flesh, Max participated in far too many groups in any given week to stay abreast of his duties without assistance. Despite the very public role he played in many organizations, Yergan relied to a great extent on behind-the-scenes support from Neugebauer, van Kleeck, and other auxiliary personnel.

  Van Kleeck was then a seasoned scholar and respected foundation consultant. A Russell Sage associate since before World War One, she authored pioneer studies linking occupational-safety, workplace, and gender issues. An ardent social democrat, van Kleeck brought impressive progressive credentials and stature. From about 1925 on, she cultivated a discerning concern for Negro labor. She and Max both knew George Haynes, whose collaboration with Russell Sage dated from the fund’s first decade. Urban League founder, Federal Council of Churches Race Relations Bureau doyen, and 1930 Yergan Fort Hare Bantu-European Conference invitee Haynes, van Kleeck, and Carter all cooperated in creating an innovative 1928 National Interracial Conference for the Study and Discussion of Race Problems in the United States in the Light of Social Research.

  The year 1935 saw van Kleeck extensively furthering her contacts with Joint Committee on National Recovery (JCNR) triumvirs Ralph Bunche, John Davis, and George Haynes. In February Bunche and Davis invited van Kleeck to make a presentation to the upcoming three-day JCNR May conference on “The Position of the Negro in our National Crisis.” She had been asked to speak to the query, “For What Type of Social Planning Should the Negro Technician Work?” but this opportunity was precluded by previous commitments in the West Coast.86

  Van Kleeck also counted Quakers Helen R. Bryan and Clarence Pickett as cordial colleagues. She may have met Max through them, or maybe through mutual JCNR heads Bunche, Davis, or Haynes. Van Kleeck was also clearly of the Left as well. Davis, for example, had known of her work from winter 1935, when she served as one of seven expert witnesses testifying at City College before a labor subcommittee of the National Committee for Social Insurance.87 Her activist reputation estranged van Kleeck from the Russell Sage Foundation, leading it to distance itself from their employee’s “radical” social studies.88 More critically, late in 1935 van Kleeck’s chairing of the Interprofessional Association for Social Insurance brought accusations of communism from a New York City publication, Equity, prompting her to aver, “The Interprofessional Association is not and never has been a ‘communistic group.’ “ Such charges were to dog her for some time to come.89 At different points in the decade, Yergan and van Kleeck crossed one another’s paths. By June 1937 van Kleeck and Max had conversations in the course of which she decided to join the ICAA.

  By 1937 Yergan adroitly used his African expertise to fashion a new position in the National Negro Congress, that of a vice-president for International Affairs. It is likely that these credentials impressed van Kleeck, whose entrance into the ICAA came quite early in its life. She moved comfortably in those same circles that had facilitated Max Yergan’s rise: social gospel–minded liberals, corporate philanthropists, and left-wing militants. Together with her colleague and collaborator Mary L. Fleddérus, van Kleeck was positioned to help Yergan’s career. In June, for an upcoming meeting of the overseas International Industrial Relations Institute, van Kleeck interviewed Yergan on his draft on “Standards of Living of Native Workers in Africa.” Given her Dutch name, van Kleeck could also have had a special interest in Sou
th Africa, particularly regarding Black labor.

  Although neither a professional social scientist nor a degreed researcher, Yergan brought fifteen years of practical social service experience to bear on erudite discussions of conditions affecting Black South African labor. He had regularly published articles on the subject and now held an adjunct professorial position within a reputable New York university. In missionary, philanthropic, and ecumenical circles he won acceptance as an authority in this sphere of study, commanding respect from lay and specialist audiences alike on both sides of the Atlantic. In his time relatively little written on African labor in South Africa was accessible to nonspecialists— maybe deliberately so; knowledge was power, and the more the oppressed knew about the nature of their oppression, as Xuma saw, the closer they might come to power. Finally, few Black Americans had positioned themselves as pivotally and adroitly as Yergan had managed to do thus far with regard to acquiring African expertise. Since Fleddérus and van Kleeck devoted considerable energy to keeping their Hague-based International Industrial Relations Institute alive, Max Yergan could bring a critical global dimension to the Negro industrial question. This motive took Max to Europe to teach the IIRI about black burdens and white wealth in South Africa.90

  Yergan pursued a two-track strategy, providing Ralph J. Bunche with a lengthy IIRI document in order to interest him in the group and its activities. This he undertook during a June vacation spent in North Carolina.91 The second track involved direct contacts from van Kleeck. During the first week in July, van Kleeck corresponded with Ralph Bunche (probably at Max’s suggestion), informing him of the upcoming IIRI Hague conference on “The World’s Natural Resources and Standards of Living,” slated for August 30 and 31 and September 1, at which Yergan was scheduled to deliver a treatise on standards of living among Africans in South Africa. In her missive to Bunche, van Kleeck identified five main areas under consideration by the group: (1) the raw materials of the world and their distribution; (2) the work of the League of Nations Committee for the Study of Problems of Raw Materials; (3) natural resources and disasters; (4) the effects of power development in economic organization; and, as the focus of all the preceding papers, (5) economic organization and standards of living, considered with special reference to such areas as Africa and the United States. Yergan’s paper would fit into this last-named area.92 Within days of van Kleeck’s invitation, Bunche received a letter from Yergan, requesting that he be sent notes of periodicals of merit, as Bunche found them during his Eastern and Southern African travels, governmental and nongovernmental, as well as news on consumers’ and producers’ cooperatives. Max paused to “wonder if you plan to make your proposed trip to Eastern Europe before you go to South Africa.” Relative to the Union, he offered to serve as an intermediary in visa acquisitions and introductions.93 Then van Kleeck, knowing that Bunche had mentioned visiting Holland encouraged him to do so, communicating the possibility to Mary Fleddérus, pressing him to meet her at IIRI.94 Van Kleeck followed this with a letter from the Hague reminding him of the invitation.95