Schuyler and Schwarzschild Maimon Schwarzschild

I‘ve just found and bought a copy of George S. Schuyler’s auto-biography “Black and Conservative“.  It’s by a fascinating man: known in his day as the Negro H. L. Mencken, Schuyler was a rollicking and debunking Black journalist and in fact a friend and literary collaborator of Mencken’s.  After flirting with socialism in the 1920s, Schuyler was vigorously anti-Communist, and exuberantly sceptical of the leftish pieties.  Hence, no doubt, the fact that his books are out of print — and unknown, of course, in “Black Studies” programmes.  But Schuyler was prominent enough in Black America and beyond during much of the twentieth century.

Here is a perceptive piece about Schuyler by Mark G. Judge in “Policy Review”.

And here is a review by Thomas Sowell of a collection of essays of Schuyler’s.

I am especially pleased that Schuyler writes warmly in “Black and Conservative” about my (distant) uncle Leopold Schwarzschild, whom I claim as the first neo-conservative.  Says Schuyler:

I was delighted when in May, 1947, my friend Leopold Schwarzschild published “The Red Prussian: The Life and Legend of Karl Marx”.  Many of the reviewers being, at bottom, Marxists ducked it as if it were radioactive, but I reviewed it at length and with relish.  Working from such original sources as the voluminous correspondence between Marx and Engels, Schwarzschild had brilliantly assembled the facts of Marx’s life.  The founder of “Scientific Socialism” emerges as a lazy, envious, vicious pamphleteer whose few books were so unreadable that they have long been regarded as profound.  Actually, they are either nonsense or barefaced distortions of the obvious….

Schwarzschild’s “The Red Prussian” is out of print too, but here are a few stray copies at amazon.com. 

And here is “Black and Conservative” with the same proviso.