The Successful Censorship

of Langston Hughes’s Poem

“Goodbye Christ”

 

By Joshua B. Good

Saturday, Feb. 17, 2007

 

    In Langston Hughes’s poem “Goodbye Christ,” the poetic voice tells Jesus Christ that “They ghosted you up a swell story, too,” insinuating the Bible is fiction. The poetic voice also orders Christ to “Beat it on away from here now.”   

    Ironically, the poem came to haunt Hughes like a ghost. Because of Langston Hughes’s poem “Goodbye Christ” the Harlem Renaissance writer suffered personally and financially, his works were removed from public libraries, his speaking engagements were banned, and he was targeted by religious groups, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Army, Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and the U.S. press, according to Hughes’s biographer, Arnold Rampersad.

      “Goodbye Christ” is not only a vehicle for exploring two sides to Hughes’s life—his radical youth and his mid-life failure to live up to his own poetic bravado — but how the poem was attacked is an example of the success of American censorship during the mid 20th century.

      In this paper, I will partially explicate the poem, concentrating especially on the political elements that foreshadowed events in Hughes’s life, and explore what

pressures prompted Hughes to denounce his own poem.

      Hughes began the poem in a familiar tone, writing in the first line “Listen, Christ.” The tone is that of a mocking, antagonistic prayer. In the second line, the poetic voice grudgingly gives Jesus Christ some credit. It reads “You did alright in your day, I reckon.”

      The mocking, praying poetic voice tells Christ that Jesus’s “ ...day’s gone now,” and blames Christ’s fall on the commercialization and hypocrisy of Christianity. The poem lists those who have co-opted Christianity, including “Kings, generals, robbers, and killers,” and “THE SATURDAY EVENING POST.”

      Christ, Jesus, Lord God and Jehova are replaced with a new religion, of sorts, that the poetic voice declares is “A real guy named Marx Communist Lenin Peasant Stalin Worker ME.” Hughes wrote the poem in 1932 while on a trip to the Soviet Union. He was there with a group of American blacks to film a movie about Jim Crow laws in the United States (The Life of Langston Hughes 4). The movie project failed and Hughes returned to the U.S.

      The poem continues to demand that Christ leave, and exhorts the Christian son of God to take along Saint Ghandi (sic); head of the Catholic Church, Pope Pius; Saint Aimee McPherson; and Saint Becton. Aimee Semple McPherson was the evangelist who founded and headed the Church of the Four-Square Gospel, a mega-church in Echo Park, California (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 642). The Becton mentioned in the poem was George Wilson Becton, leader of the “Harlem-based sect called The World’s Gospel Feast, (The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes 642).

      Hughes ended the poem with a declaration that “The world is mine from now on--/And nobody’s gonna sell ME/To a king, or a general,/Or a millionaire.” Hughes seemed to be saying, through the poetic voice, that the character in the poem would not be a slave to the false religion of Christianity and the sundry powerful figures that have manipulated Christianity for their own uses.

      But in real life, Hughes backed down to those very same figures he cited in the poem, including The Saturday Evening Post, McPherson, a general and a millionaire. I found no instance of Hughes backing down to a king, but he did back down to the U.S. government. 

     According to Rampersad, Hughes chose to include McPherson in “Goodbye Christ” because of controversies within her church about sex scandals and money pilfering. McPherson paid Hughes back with interest. In 1940, Hughes was to go on a book tour promoting his autobiography The Big Sea. One of the most important events was a reading at a hotel in Pasadena, California, according to Rampersad. But McPherson’s followers staged a raucous protest at the hotel and passed out copies of Hughes’s poem “Goodbye Christ,” Rampersad wrote. To avoid a confrontation, Hughes left before speaking to his audience (The Life of Langston Hughes 5-10). It wasn’t the last time he would back down to McPherson. In 1941, The Saturday Evening Post ran a story about Hughes and printed “Goodbye Christ” and comments from McPherson criticizing Hughes. Hughes contemplated suing the magazine and McPherson, but decided against it. He wrote his legal advisor, Arthur B. Spingarn, “Let’s do no more about the poem,” (The Life of Langston Hughes 10). 

     Because of the controversy in Pasadena, the Federal Bureau of Investigation began looking into Hughes’s communist connections. Rampersad wrote that FBI director  J. Edgar Hoover opened an investigation into Hughes and Hoover often provided politicians, civic groups and religious organizations with damning material about Hughes, according to Rampersad. The poem and its political controversy prompted cancellations of Hughes’s speaking engagements in California, the mid-west and in the south. Sales of his autobiography were meager and early in 1941, Hughes requested his publisher, Knopf, give him an advance of $400 (The Life of Langston Hughes 10). Instead, Knopf officials offered to give him the $400 in exchange for all rights to five of his books, The Weary Blues, Fine Clothes to the Jew, Not Without Laughter, The Dream Keeper and The Ways of White Folks. Hughes, desperate for money, agreed (The Life of Langston Hughes 10).

      Rampersad wrote that the FBI investigation never led to any hard evidence that Hughes was a member of the communist party. But it did lead to Hughes having to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy. 

     Hughes testified on March 26, 1953. Under the glare of hot television lights and under questioning from McCarthy, Hughes denounced his own poem “Goodbye Christ” during his testimony and tried to explain that the poem was misunderstood. 

      “Perhaps the most misunderstood of my poems was “Goodbye Christ,” Hughes told the committee, as he read from a prepared statement (The Life of Langston Hughes 214). “Since it is an ironic poem (and irony is apparently a quality not readily understood in poetry by unliterary minds) it has been widely misinterpreted as an anti-religious poem. This I did not mean it to be, but rather a poem against racketeering, profiteering, racial segregation, and showmanship in religion which, at the time, I felt was undermining the foundations of the great and decent ideals for which Christ himself stood. And behind the poem is a pity and a sorrow that this should be taken by some as meaning to them that Christianity and religion in general has no value. Because of the publication of this poem — which more than fifteen years ago I withdrew from publication and which has since been used entirely without my permission by groups interested in fomenting racial and social discord, I have been termed on occasion, a Communist or an atheist.

      “I am not now an atheist and have never been an atheist.” (The Life of Langston Hughes 214).

      Hughes also testified he was not a communist. He was not required to name anyone who he believed was a communist, nor was he charged with any crime.

      The previous year, Hughes had also backed down to a U.S. Army general over the poem. In the book Shanghai Conspiracy, General Charles A. Willoughby, “who had been chief of intelligence for Douglas MacArthur for a decade,” attacked Hughes, Rampersad wrote. “The poem, Willoughby argued, was evidence of the “traitorous and corrosive quality” of the League of American Writers (“this poisonous outfit”), to which Hughes had belonged, and of other allegedly communist front organizations,” (The Life of Langston Hughes 197). Hughes contemplated suing Willoughby and the book’s publisher, but again decided to do nothing, according to Rampersad.

      Hughes’s own patron, Noël Sullivan, was a staunch Catholic and initially was disturbed by the “Goodbye Christ” poem, according to Rampersad. Sullivan had provided Hughes with a home, rent-free, near Carmel, California, where Hughes could write. Sullivan also sometimes gave Hughes money, Rampersad wrote. Hughes convinced Sullivan the poem was meant as ironic and he did not lose Sullivan’s patronage, according to Rampersad.

      Hughes poem was written at a time when some laborers and minorities were enchanted with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics because of the communists’s professed ideals of equality for all races and better working conditions for wage earners. After World War II, those ties came back to haunt many left-leaning liberals. The Cold War censorship of Hughes cost him money, prestige and pride. Whether in his heart he truly renounced the poem, I can’t say. But it is obvious he lacked the power and financial resources to ignore his critics. He relied on his writing to make a living and his writing was censored and threatened by his ideas in “Goodbye Christ.” That censorship came from the government in cooperation with religious groups and the very capitalist who supported Hughes. To gauge the success of the censorship, just look at current anthologies. In them you will find such poems as “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Mother to Son,” “The Weary Blues,” and “I, Too.” They are all moving poems that speak about the power of the descendants of Africans. But rarely do we find in these anthologies “Goodbye Christ,” the one poem that, perhaps, had the most impact on Hughes’s life.

 

Works Cited

 

Hughes, Langston. “Goodbye Christ.” The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Knopf, 2002.

 

Rampersad, Arnold. The Life of Langston Hughes: Volume II: 1941-1967: I Dream a World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

 

Post Comments About This Story.