True Sons of Freedom

"True Sons of Freedom," chromolithograph created by Charles Gustrine, United States, 1918

‘All hail the world October revolution!’ – a poster from 1933

The US entry into WW1 prompted a call to arms for a very segregated and dysfunctional American society. Colored people still faced racial discrimination and violence at a large scale; extra judicial killings were a lived reality for black Americans along with immense economic and social barriers. In this atmosphere, US war propaganda to recruit colored men and women into the war effort, such as the above displayed poster, fell nothing short of ironic.  Colored men who did not have basic economic and social freedoms were being called ‘True Sons of Freedom’. This hypocrisy was not lost on people like Claude McKay who looked elsewhere in the world for a greater sense of being than that which existed in the US.

McKay’s experience in Soviet Russian under the hype of communist internationalism is starkly different from his lived reality in the US, for the first time, as sir said in class a person of color has the experience of being a somebody rather than a nobody. Instead of having his existence just allowed or tolerated, his existence is welcomed and celebrated, and not just that he is also given privilege something someone of McKay’s color would not have experienced, “Wherever I wanted to go, there was a car at my disposal. Whatever I wanted to do, I did. And anything I felt like saying I said. For the first time in my life I knew what it was to be a highly privileged personage. And in the Fatherland of Communism!”

The picture that the Soviet propaganda posters paint is not very far from the on ground reality of what the Soviet Utopia is like, accounts like Dada Amir Haider’s and McKay’s are testaments of this. The US propaganda came out of a necessity to have colored people involved in the war effort, but when their participation was not required anymore, all the rhetoric about ‘the first Americans’ and ‘True Sons of Freedom’ disappeared. Even within the American Communist Party as McKay rightly pointed out the representation of black people is tokenistic and a means to gain their support without giving them any real power or agency to voice the needs of their own people , “The Republicans and the Democrats do the same thing. They give a few plum places to leading Negroes as representatives of the race and our people applaud vicariously.”

In the Soviet Union the reality was quite different, Claude McKay had the freedom to say what he wanted, and was often given the platform to voice his opinion even at the displeasure of higher ups in the communist party like Zinoviev.  The Soviet propaganda did not merely come out of a need for the involvement of the colored people of the world in the proletarian revolution, rather the very ideology on which this ‘propaganda’ was based on saw colored people from the same lens as white people and actively desired their equal involvement in the struggle. As Dada’s travelogue details, many of the students at the university were trained to start the communist struggle back in their countries, their struggle was not coopted by the Russian revolutionaries, and rather they were seen as competent enough to lead their own revolutions hand in hand with revolutionaries elsewhere in the world as the second poster shows. 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

While these words are a part of the American Declaration of Independence, they were more applicable in the Soviet Utopia than they were in McKay’s USA begetting the question, who really were the true sons of freedom?