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1Today, most people probably do not recall George Horace Lorimer’s name. Those who do may remember him as the towering editor of the Saturday Evening Post, who hired Norman Rockwell as an illustrator, managed to raise the circulation of the magazine to millions of subscribers, and published the early short stories of writers such as William Faulkner, Francis Scott Fitzgerald or Willa Cather. Lorimer’s editorship lasted from 1899 to 1936, a period in which he exercised “absolute control over his magazine” (3). Although much has been written about the Post and Lorimer, Adam McKible remarks that little attention has been given to “Lorimer’s lifelong fondness for and regular publication of racist, anti-Black fiction written almost exclusively by white authors specializing in ‘humorous’ dialect fiction” (4). His book, Circulating Jim Crow: The Saturday Evening Post and the War Against Black Modernity addresses this lacuna directly, offering fresh perspectives on a magazine which, at one point, was the “most widely read” (2) in the United States and was perceived by contemporaries as “the new American Bible” (2).

2McKible’s recurrent argument is that the Post “registered and recontained social change” through the regular publication of Black dialect fiction which

chronicled new historical developments back into older, stereotypical forms of knowledge and racially stratified social norms and practices. Black characters moved through history in the Post, but they were forever squeezed back into a predictable, debased representational schematic. (8)

3The book is divided into six chapters. The first focuses on Lorimer’s early years as editor, and discusses the cases of Paul Laurence Dunbar who wrote “for the magazine” and Booker T. Washington who “was instead written about” (38). The following four chapters analyze the stories of four white Post authors who specialized in Black dialect fiction. The authors covered are Blanche Goodman, Irvin S. Cobb, Hugh Wiley, and Octavus Roy Cohen. The sixth and final chapter highlights Lorimer’s final years as editor, and investigates the contributions by Chester T. Crowell, Roark Bradford, Charles Garland Givens, Julia Peterkin, and William Faulkner. The introductory paragraphs for each chapter can make the argument of registering and recontaining Black modernity a bit repetitive at times, but they also provide an opportunity to read each chapter almost independently. Although the study does, to some extent, tackle the racist caricatures, illustrations and ads published in the magazine, McKible informs us that the Post denied him the right to reproduce any of them once he made it clear that Circulating Jim Crow was to deal with the magazine’s often overlooked and chilling legacy.

4Although he chose not to discuss “the linguistic complexity” (22) of Black dialect at any length, McKible adeptly conveys the subtle differences in tone, narrative structures and the slight inflections of rhetorical strategies which existed between these authors. He assesses equally well the inevitable and brutal racism undergirding these stories, which ranged from advocacy of extralegal violence to the normalization of racial hierarchy, by way of “a more sympathetic paternalism that relies on primitivism and essentialism rather than racial scorn” (195). Thus, Circulating Jim Crow effectively delineates how the defense of Jim Crow America and white supremacy were part and parcel of the magazine’s editorial DNA, almost from the very beginning of Lorimer’s tenure. So much so that some authors such as Faulkner or Scott Fitzgerald appear to have tailored some of their stories in order to cater to Lorimer’s tastes, at a time when their main objective was to get published in the magazine.

5Borrowing from Richard Ohmann’s argument that magazine readers at the turn of the twentieth century were seen to the same degree—if not more—as consumers, McKible’s study of the Saturday Evening Post bears witness to the intertwining which existed between the cultural and capitalist economies on the one hand, and the violent system of white supremacy on the other. He reminds us of the centrality and ubiquity within the larger American culture of these white authors and the characters they created—Irvin S. Cobb served as a celebrity endorsement for a brand of cigars, Hugh Wiley’s character “Wildcat” was used in an advertising campaign for the Associated Oil Company, while Blanche Goodman’s stories were republished as handbooks destined for amateur minstrels performing at school or at private events across the entire country. As McKible convincingly argues throughout the book, “the Post was central in shaping personal, domestic, and communal experiences in Jim Crow America” (2) and much of its influence was used to propagate “the soft power of Jim Crow” (161).

6Circulating Jim Crow subtly suggests the crucial role played by the Post for many African Americans at the time: the magazine appeared both despicable and inescapable. One of the study’s particular strengths lies in its analysis of the relationship which existed between the magazine and African American periodicals. Indeed, McKible delineates the perimeter of this relationship and skillfully underlines how voices of the Harlem Renaissance across multiple publications were raised in unison against the never-ending stream of racist caricatures churned out by the Post week after week. In this regard, through the study of these white authors of Black dialect fiction, McKible’s ultimate concern is to “contextualize and underscore the achievements of the African American authors who challenged and subverted the images of Black life that dominated American print culture for much of the twentieth century” (181).

7McKible seems to have paid attention to the bridges existing between the early twentieth century and our day and age. Some readers may be amused to learn that local newspapers used to function “as the social media of the day” (78) or that “the Blanche Goodman of the 1930s was woke” (76-77). They are also invited to ponder on McKible’s warning that there are underlying effects lurking behind discourses and practices which pretend to merely hark back to an older and—always fantasized—simpler time, whether it be Joel Chandler Harris bemoaning the antebellum period in the Post in 1904, or the 2023 revelations that conservative billionaire and Justice Clarence Thomas’s friend, Harlan Crow, collects Nazi memorabilia and has a special room with paintings by George W. Bush, Norman Rockwell, and Adolf Hitler. McKible’s study provides an unwavering assessment of the centrality of American racism at the beginning of the twentieth century.