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In 1933, Langston Hughes's career was on an upswing. He had just returned from his second trip to Moscow. There he had journeyed along with twenty-one other African American writers, artists, and activists to make a film about U. S. race relations entitled "Black and White" that would be produced by a state-backed Soviet motion picture company (Rampersad 235). The film was never made, and the trip ended in "international scandal," with headlines such as the New York Herald-Tribune's "NEGROES ADRIFT IN 'UNCLE TOM'S' RUSSIAN CABIN" (248, 251). Nevertheless, Hughes was energized. As biographer Arnold Rampersad describes, while Hughes was in Russia, where he remained after the collapse of the film, "for the first time in his life, he could live by his writing, and handsomely so" (252). It was there that he would write such poems as his parody of Carl Sandburg's "Good Morning, America": "Good-morning, Revolution: / You're the best friend / I ever had" (ll. 1-3). And perhaps his most infamous verse, "Goodbye Christ," which would enjoin his readers to
Make way for a new guy with no religion at all- a real guy named
Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME- I said, ME! (ll. 20-23)
In such poems, Hughes fashioned a sardonic yet affirmative vision of radicalism, one that would be shared by many of the literary leftin the 1930s.
While critics have made much of Hughes's turn to protest poetry in this period, the ways in which he uses parody and satire as a form of social protest deserves more attention. Beyond Hughes's insurrectionary verse, we might look to The Ways of White Folks, a brilliant collection of satirical short stories composed in the wake of his riftwith his wealthy white patron, Mrs. Charlotte Osgood Mason, in 1930 (Rampersad 185-88). The mercurial and domineering Mason resisted Hughes's radical turn, responding to his more overtly politicized work with such admonitions as "powerful but not you!" (Douglas 285). According to Mason, Hughes's protest poetry lacked "negro warmth and tenderness." In 1933, with his recent literary successes abroad and his growing distance from Mason, Hughes was emboldened to write The Ways of White Folks, a volume animated by his ongoing personal and political transformation. Riffing on W. E. B. Du Bois's The...