Wednesday, May 26, 2021

George Schuyler: Journalist, Individualist, and Courageous Contrarian by Lawrence Reed

Very recommendable! One of the early well known black conservatives in America! He sure was outspoken and eloquent! Impressive!

"... He wrote, The tragedy of so many intellectuals in the contemporary world is that while opposing extreme forms of totalitarianism, they are themselves half-totalitarians; that is to say, they express a desire for a society which is half-controlled, half-regimented, half-planned, part capitalist and part socialist. This strange hybrid they will find (indeed, have found) to be a Frankenstein monster which, ironically, they have a great responsibility for creating. ..."

"... Schuyler once called politicians “the only class in society that is charlatan enough to offer a cure for everything.” ...
In his autobiography, Black and Conservative, he wrote:

I asked my stepfather what a socialist was, and he told me that the Socialists were people who wanted to divide up all the wealth other people had accumulated by industry and thrift. I couldn’t see the sense in that, and I can’t see it now, after having read much of the standard socialist propaganda “literature” available. Indeed, it was reading socialist tracts and apologetics that turned me definitely against all collectivism.
By 1925, when he was hired to write for the Pittsburgh Courier, America’s leading black-owned newspaper, Schuyler was well down the ideological path that would eventually put him on the campaign trail for Barry Goldwater in 1964. For almost 40 years, Schuyler wrote the Courier’s editorials and two columns per week. He exerted an influence in the country well beyond the Courier’s peak subscriber base of 350,000. ...
In 1931, Schuyler found time to do something no African American author had previously done: He published a successful science fiction novel. Titled Black No More, it told a story of a scientist who invents a process that turns blacks into whites. In his biography, George S. Schuyler: Portrait of a Black Conservative, Oscar R. Williams hailed it as “a masterful satire on racism.” ...
In February 1939, six months before the infamous Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact stunned most of the world (and which secretly agreed to divide Poland via joint invasion by Germany and the Soviet Union), Schuyler wrote in the Courier:
"In practice there is no difference between Communism and Fascism. Both are anti-democratic, both are dictatorial and ruthless regardless of the alleged reasons, both brutally suppress minorities. It is a cruel jest to say there is any basic difference between them or any fundamental antagonism. There is privately more in common between Hitler and Stalin than there is between Roosevelt and Chamberlain. I should not be at all surprised to hear shortly of a Moscow-Berlin alliance." ...
In 1956, he wrote The Case for the Private School ... This passage from it is even more relevant today than it was 65 years ago:
"Many American parents feel rightly that they, and not the State, should be responsible for what their children become; that education should be divorced from political control; and that those who prefer private instruction for their children should not be taxed for the upkeep of facilities which they did not choose nor curricula to which they do not want them exposed. There is a growing feeling that top administration and control of government school systems are too remote and too difficult to influence, that parents are mere robots in a machine that leaves little individual choice." 
Never one to eschew controversy, Schuyler was the most prominent African American journalist to criticize the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. He saw most white Americans as non-racist people of goodwill and feared that protests and civil disorder would stall the racial progress he observed over his lifetime. In this, he was old-school, typified decades before by Booker T. Washington. Both men believed in self-help; gradual, organic change; moderation and compromise; and a focus on black enterprise. Their preferred route to eventual equal rights for blacks was to cultivate fair treatment from whites through entrepreneurship and personal character. ...
he felt, civil rights laws would not be enforced, or would be counteracted by white hostility, or would inflame tensions between the races, or all three. ..."

"... Schuyler opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While acknowledging that white discrimination against blacks was “morally wrong, nonsensical, unfair, un-Christian and cruelly unjust,” he opposed federal action to coerce changes in public attitudes. “New countries have a passion for novelty," he wrote, "and a country like America, which grew out of conquest, immigration, revolution and civil war, is prone to speed social change by law, or try to do so, on the assumption that by such legerdemain it is possible to make people better by force.” Despite the inherent unfairness of racial discrimination, he considered federal intrusion into private affairs an infringement on individual liberty, explaining that "it takes lots of time to change social mores, especially with regard to such hardy perennials as religion, race and nationality, to say nothing of social classes.” ..."

George Schuyler: Journalist, Individualist, and Courageous Contrarian - Foundation for Economic Education



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