Max Yergan

by David Henry Anthony III

  The following year, on April 16, Dr. Lena Halpern Yergan died at home in Ossining at the age of sixty-four.99 Yergan clearly felt her loss deeply. His own medical state continued to cause problems.100 Then, nearing the end of his own life, Max sent a poignant letter of apology to Paul Robeson, lamenting the loss of what had once been a valued and vibrant friendship.101 Robeson apparently did not reply. In a year both men would be dead.

  On Friday, April 11, 1975, after a long illness, Max Yergan died in Mount Kisco, New York, at the age of eighty-two. Two days later his long life was recalled in the New York Times, and a month thereafter in the National Review. At his death he was convinced that no one could comprehend why his life went in the direction that it did, and he routinely resisted requests to discuss the matter—with one exception: acquaintance Ruby Pagano, with whom he spoke about the past and to whom he gave access to his papers, among them letters to and from Susie Wiseman, Mary White Ovington, and countless other confidantes, but that might not be seen by anyone else until perhaps some time in the twenty-first century. How is Yergan to be remembered? What did he leave for posterity? These are difficult questions. For decades, without access to his papers, they could not be answered; now they can.

  Epilogue

  In 2002, after pursuing leads on this biography for a quarter of a century, this writer was able to examine the Max Yergan papers at Howard University. Though they contained no “smoking gun” of any kind, as they had been vetted prior to their donation, they did confirm a number of the suspicions that arose from close study of Yergan’s letters, essays, speeches, sermons, and other documentary source material written about or by him. While space limitations have forced a drastic reduction of the work that this investigation had initially yielded, the contours of Yergan’s public life and its intersection with his private mind can now be reconstructed.

  Max Yergan left far more paper behind than anyone outside of his family may have known. An incessant writer, he seems to have put pen to paper on a daily basis. In addition to scores of articles in newspapers, journals, and pamphlets printed in the United States and South Africa, his papers contain several unpublished manuscripts, including at least one full-length book. Yergan was both more prolific and more intellectually accomplished than has thus far been acknowledged. This might be one of the reasons why he clung so tenaciously to his honorary doctorate, using it as if it had been earned in graduate study. In fact it had. Max’s postgraduate “school” was the YMCA and SCA mission field of South Africa, his thesis was “Africa, the West, and Christianity,” his dissertation, Christian Students and Modern South Africa. Though the last was an edited volume, it fully represented his thought.

  Embedded within his work and life story are several other sagas. There is, first, the tale of the Black YMCA, which Nina Mjagkij has addressed in such rich and nuanced ways. Equally arresting, however, is the legend of Nonwhite involvement in the South African YMCA and Student Christian Association, neither of which has yet found its historian(s). Yergan’s contribution is essential to any such reconstruction. Next is the body of work that Yergan produced, none of it anthologized —a fact that led this writer to create an edited volume bearing the working title “African Affairs: A Max Yergan Reader.” A second narrative, “Abundant Life: The South African Odysseys of Max Yergan,” is also in progress.

  Among the more challenging aspects of a Yergan biography is the fact that each of his associations yielded an intricate paper trail. My initial reaction to this reality was to produce a work that reflected the breadth of every one of these thematic and bibliographical pathways. I also quickly recognized that some of these stories could in turn lead to other examinations. For example, I thought about doing books on the National Negro Congress, the Council on African Affairs, and Blacks on the Left—again using Yergan’s experience as normative. Over time, however, rejecting these temptations, I settled down to do the best Yergan book I could.

  Because my time in the Yergan papers was limited, I cannot say I “know” them, but I am aware that accessing them was a privilege very few other scholars have had. In a very focused day and a half, I examined the entire list of items, examined every photograph, and copied all relevant manuscripts. I have tried to balance what I have seen against what I think about these events and the characters who took part in them, though space limitations have made it impossible to include everything I found, as I learned from the very first drafts of this work. In fact, this iteration is a fraction of the size of the original. Perhaps some day that version may make its way into print so that everyone will be able to benefit from the archive that I have accumulated of “Yergania,” as my colleague Bob Edgar has so aptly christened it. At the moment I am striving to find a home for this documentation, as it has outgrown each of my living and working spaces. The chronology alone approaches two hundred pages. None of this effort would have been necessary had the papers been available in 1975, when my work on this project started. But then I would not have learned that which has caused me to write what follows:

  In an earlier version of this book I ventured to offer that Yergan was a man out of time, either ahead of or behind many of his peers. At first he was very far advanced, meeting Gandhi and becoming exposed to Indian nationalism in World War One, a full generation before Howard Thurman and other African-Americans encountered India and Gandhi. In South Africa he made the transition from the social gospel to historical materialism that so distinguished Black South African ex-Christian communist radicals Moses Kotane, Edwin Mofutsanyana, Alfred Nzula, Walter Sisulu, and Yergan’s youthful protégé, Govan Mbeki. A race leader in the thirties and forties, by the fifties he had fallen far afoul of the freedom movement, fading into obscurity. Yet popular parts of his work outlived him.

  Until I gained access to the materials still available only in South African archives and repositories, I had no idea of the scale of his influence in that setting. This South African material has led me to conclude that the larger significance of the life and work of Max Yergan extends beyond the limits of this volume. He was a true diasporic figure. His contributions to the worldwide YMCA movement alone were formidable, and his dedication to broadening the base of the South African youth volunteer movement to embrace Africans was extremely momentous. I have begun to explore this in other publications and have sketched out a second biography that centers upon Yergan within and beyond South Africa. While clearly an extension of the work that began here, it has a distinct trajectory of interest to Pan-Africanists, South Africa, South Africans, and Southern Africanists. It will establish the fact that, irrespective of political changes, there was a surprising degree of consistency to Yergan’s commitment to Africa and Africans, in the terms of his place and time, a commitment to achieving their “redemption.”

  Because Max Yergan has many living descendants, I have tried to be even-handed in my discussions of his life. I do not regard this as a simple intellectual endeavor. It is not just something that one can sit at a café to discuss because this is not a work of fiction. Nor do we have the luxury of a century or more separating us from the action and great controversies described here. Yergan did not live to see the Berlin Wall fall or the collapse of the Soviet Union, or the bombings of the World Trade Center, for that matter. He did stop to express regret at the loss of his friendship with Paul Robeson. We do not know if he had second thoughts about the role he played in the final decades of his life. We do know that irony abounds in our consideration of his fate. Perhaps there is no greater irony than that the key to understanding Max Yergan’s life came from the land that both radicalized and then conservatized him, South Africa. I believe that it was there that he did his greatest work, between 1922 and 1936. That was also his laboratory for publicism and teaching. It was in interwar-era South Africa that Yergan was able to hone his talents as a lecturer, sermonizer, writer, impresario, manager, politician, and public relations specialist. For the remainder of his life he applied the lessons learned during that period, making himself a l
eader among African-Americans, Africans, church people, liberals, leftists, and, ultimately, ultraconservatives. At each stage of his life he occupied the space of the race pioneer, always modeling the profile of the “exceptional” Negro. In time his circle of familiars contracted to one in which race seemed to be of diminishing significance. In fact, at the end of his life, he may not have had more than a handful of fellow “race” men and women as friends; most of his acquaintances were White, in America, Europe, and Africa.

  In many ways, this turn of events was the logical conclusion of a life of standing apart from the stereotyped behavior expected of the mass of persons of African descent. Yergan made certain to distinguish himself from the downtrodden, the unlettered, the “sporting” underworld, and those damned to do menial tasks. He saw himself as a leader and did everything in his power to live out his destiny as one whose public posture would attract attention, even if this involved controversy. He “made it” in every sense of the world he inhabited, reproducing his social position among his progeny and theirs, so that now one encounters Yergans in prominent positions in many leading American cities. However they consider the various phases of his personal and political life, they readily recognize and acknowledge a debt to him. This is part of the story of how that patriarch organized his mental and material universe. He was a person of his place and time, but the space within which he operated was expansive indeed. While not a first-tier leader of the rank of Dr. Du Bois or the other elite trained members of the African-American professional stratum, he nevertheless made his mark. His major challenge was doing well by doing good. Over time the particulars regarding how this could be achieved altered profoundly in Yergan’s mind and work. Beyond his individual eccentricities, he also faced the contradictions of his class.

  From his early life as a campaigner against discrimination in the Jim Crow South, Yergan came from a milieu richly fusing spiritual and political combat against oppression. At the inception of his public career, that background led him into progressive politics. Depression and fascism sharpened the edge of the spiritual dimension, taking him into the secular realm. As the global struggle between good and evil seemed to him to require the anti-Axis alliance forged during the Popular Front and United Front eras, he felt able to straddle his old and new worlds as a secular humanist whose social gospel moralist sense had been christened, as it were, in the Christian church. However he strove to separate himself from that fact in his public utterances and writings, he was never able to sever his spiritual ties. In the end, when his confidence in communism and socialism was called into question by Cold War conflict and he increasingly questioned of the price of principle, on one hand, and the relentless, still largely secret pressures to which he and his family were subjected by the intelligence community, on the other, he cracked, breaking ranks and seeking the path of least resistance.

  It is almost certain that this happened because of some information that fell into the hands of the FBI that forced his hand, compelling him to assume an impossible position. Only Yergan himself and the small group of people who convinced him to “turn” knew precisely what this was. It is not to be found in the Yergan papers. It is hinted at in his FBI file, however, where among bowdlerized and redacted documents lie the traces of betrayal or vengeance or other emotionally laden acts by which sensitive material was leaked to the Bureau. Whatever the contents of these files, they must have deeply wounded Yergan, for they brought an end to his career as a progressive leader. That this did not immediately lead to an about-face appears to have reflected the fact that despite his defection from the Left, it took Yergan a full two years to completely capitulate to conservatism. In the interval he was still trying to negotiate a middle ground, to establish an increasingly critical position on communism while not completely breaking with the Left, as long as he could avoid doing so.

  By 1950, however, the CIA, the FBI, and the weight of McCarthy and McCarran had all but obliterated this narrow political space, which, while greatly diminished, feebly persisted beyond the demise of FDR and into the Truman era. It is likely that by then Yergan feared not only for himself but also for his children, and for them he was willing to sacrifice anything and everything, even if it meant denouncing and being denounced by progressive Africa. His junkets from then on, on behalf of the AFL-CIO, the South Africa Foundation, the Belgian Congo, and later the Portuguese, Rhodesian, and again South African governments, were all related to this campaign to protect by drawing fire as a “point man” for counterrevolution. If one compares the writing done during this period to that which immediately preceded it, one can see that neither has the force of the work he did during the twenties and thirties when he was at the height of his powers. This seems not only to have been a matter of ability; it also seems to have been reflective of the passion animating the work, passion that was at its highest and most fluent when his political ardor was married to his spiritual force.

  This confluence of political and spiritual energies was precisely what Gandhi manifested in satyagraha, “soul force,” which he transmitted to African-American theologian Howard Thurman and which the next generation of nascent civil rights leaders, among them James Farmer and ultimately Martin Luther King, integrated into their practice in the forties and fifties. While this should not be overstated, Yergan was way ahead of them. Because of the covert nature of the federal campaign against him, however, it is difficult to determine just what made Yergan leave the struggle to which he had dedicated his life. He sacrificed himself in that process, leaving himself open to all manner of charges of selling out, and causing friends and acquaintances alike to scratch their scalps in chagrin. Yet Max Yergan did not turn his back on Africa. In spite of serving as an apologist for the most odious systems on earth, he went to conferences to argue, sometimes single-handedly, for an appreciation of the “African Personality,” an idea progressive Africans had been touting for a century. Moreover, he was discussing the now popular South African notion of “Ubuntu” (personhood) in the fifties, a full three decades before it was popularized by historian Leonard Thompson. All of this adds up to a need for a reappraisal of Yergan, the man and his times. This book should serve as one contribution in that direction as we seek to unravel the lives of Max Yergan.

  Notes

  NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

  1. Ruby Pagano, “Max Yergan, A Biography.” Unpublished manuscript. Copy in author’s possession, 1, 4. Pagano indicated that Yergan’s mother hung a portrait of this emperor. It is not easy to verify whether this is accurate, for two reasons. First, there seems not to have been a Roman Emperor named “Maximilian,” although, to be sure, there were other rulers with names that seemed to bear a superficial resemblance to this, e.g., Aulus Maximian, r. 286–305 and 307–10; Maximinus, r. 235–38; or A. Maximus, r. 383–87. My thanks to Gary Miles for this insight. Secondly, an emperor who did go by the name “Maximilian” was the Austrian ruler of Mexico, not a contemporary of Yergan but a figure well known during the lifetime of his grandfather, Frederick. I am grateful to David Sweet for bringing this to my attention. In fact, unless the enumerator erred in copying Yergan’s name, it appears that he might well have altered it himself, as he evidently did for his surname, which he seems to have simplified, while his mother Lizzie continued to spell it “Yeargan.” L. B. Yeargan to J. E. Moorland, 6 February 1917, courtesy Moorland Collection, Manuscripts and Archives, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University (MSRC/HU).

  2. Yergan told Ralph Johnson Bunche during 1937 that his father had been “a prize s.o.b.” Bunche, Diary (unpublished), entry, 21 April 1937, Ralph Johnson Bunche Papers, UCLA. I owe this choice reference to Robert Edgar. For fuller descriptions of the Bunche-Yergan relationship, consult Robert R. Edgar, ed., An African-American in South Africa: The Travel Notes of Ralph J. Bunche, 28 September 1937–1 January 1938 (Athens: Ohio University Press, and Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1992), and Brian Urquhart, Ralph Bunche: An American Life (1st ed., New York: Norton, 1993).
Their interaction shall be examined in depth in succeeding pages.

  3. Jonathan Daniels, A Southerner Discovers the South (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 3.

  4. Daniels, A Southerner, 3–4.

  5. Raleigh News and Observer, 20 July 1892, 1.

  6. “He Got His Dues: A Camden County Fiend Hanged and Riddled: A Negro Brute Who Makes a Horrible Assault Is Visited with Retribution,” Raleigh News and Observer, 4 October 1892.

  7. Pagano, “Max Yergan,” 4. Attempts to contact the centenarian Delany sisters, who almost certainly knew Yergan, as they grew up in Black Raleigh during the same decade, proved unavailing. Through their publicity agent they communicated the sad news that they either would not or could not help in “any way, shape, form, or fashion.” Personal communication, 11 April 1994.

  8. Of course, this may be a deceptively simple characterization of a far more complex reality, especially in view of how little is known about Yergan’s absentee father. Perhaps grandfather Fred sought to provide his grandson with a more acceptable father figure than the man who actually sired him, for reasons that only a family could know. On the Raleigh upbringing of the Delany sisters, see Sarah and A. Elizabeth Delany, with Amy Hill Hearth, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First Hundred Years (Thorndike, Me.: G. K. Hall, and Kodansha International Publishing, 1993), 63 – 67, 70 – 77. Hubert Delany, younger brother of Sadie and Bessie and noted legal figure, became an associate of Yergan during their Harlem years.

  9. Ralph W. Bullock, In Spite of Handicaps (New York: Association Press, 1927), 111.

  10. Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” in William L. Andrews, ed., Up from Slavery (New York: Norton, 1996), 101–2.