Happy Birthday, Zora Neale Hurston
In addition to her pioneering work as a folklorist and anthropologist, she was a novelist of considerable talent. She grew up in the all-black town of Eatonville, Florida, where her father once served as mayor. Eatonville was the setting for Hurston’s most famous novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). With much justification, Saturday Review ranked it with the works of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway.
While Hurston never expressed a systematic political philosophy, her instincts were those of a libertarian. Her comments on the destructive role of the welfare state were prescient. In 1951, she called it the “the biggest weapon ever placed in [the] hands of those who sought power and votes” and charged that it was responsible for turning once independent citizens into pawns of the “Little White Father” in Washington.
Like Lane and Paterson, Hurston showed an affinity for anti-imperialism. Not surprisingly, she championed Robert A. Taft’s campaign for president in 1952. In her autobiography,
Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), she declared “I do not mean to single out England as something strange and different in the world. We, too, have our marines in China. We, too, consider machine gun bullets good laxatives for heathens who get constipated with toxic ideals of a country of their own.”
Hurston was suspicious of anyone, from left or right, who judged individuals by category. “I found,” she wrote, “that I had no need of either class or race prejudice, those scourges of humanity. The solace of easy generalization was taken from me, but I received the richer gift of individualism.”