Chapter 13: DU BOIS, GARVEY, AND THE RADICALS
During these years of intellectual ferment among Afro-Americans, Du Bois rebuilt his shattered reputation as a voice of militancy. Once again stridently attacking U.S. racism, he defended himself and the NAACP against Socialist and Garveyite criticism even while respectfully considering some of his critics' main ideas. By the end of the 1920s he was simultaneously emphasizing racial pride and culture, advocating a black economy, extolling Socialism, and praising Soviet Bolshevism. Like everyone else, however, Du Bois was stymied in whatever direction he turned.
Upon his return home, Du Bois penned "Returning Soldiers," which set the tone for his renewed militancy. However, Du Bois stubbornly insisted that the unconditional support offered the Wilson administration and the United States in "Close Ranks" had been fully justified. Indeed, Du Bois both defended his war-time role and displaced responsibility for all debacles on "vindictive fate" and "the world's madness."[1]
"We are returning from war!" Du Bois began--ignoring the simple fact that he had spent the war years comfortably at home. Ludicrously equating his voluntary journalistic efforts with the horrors inflicted on conscripts, he proclaimed that "the Crisis and tens of thousands of black men were drafted into a great struggle." Du Bois claimed that "we fought gladly and to the last drop of blood" (Du Bois referred to other people's blood) for "bleeding France" and America's highest ideals. However, Du Bois conceded that African Americans had also, and he said unavoidably, fought for a racist administration and nation. "For the America that represents and gloats in lynching, disfranchisement, caste, brutality, and devilish insult--for this, in the hateful upturning and mixing of things, we were forced by vindictive fate to fight also."[2]
Du Bois then listed the traditional NAACP causes to which he returned. Ignoring his wartime claims that German crimes were unprecedented, he reiterated his oft-repeated view that "lynching is a barbarism of a degree of contemptible nastiness unparalleled in human history." (Massacres of blacks were increasing in number and ferocity even as he wrote). Du Bois continued, "Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white." The United States "cheats us out of our land; it cheats us out of our labor. It confiscates our savings. It reduces our wages. It steals our profit. It taxes us without representation. It keeps us consistently and universally poor, and then feeds us on charity and derides our poverty."[3] Du Bois then thundered:
This is the country to which we Soldiers of Democracy return. This is the fatherland for which we fought. But it is our fatherland. It was right for us to fight. The faults of our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if, now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.
We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.
Make way for Democracy! We save it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.[4]
Du Bois never explained--he obviously could not explain--why he asserted that lynching, disfranchisement, Jim Crow, peonage, and other horrors were "our" (meaning Afro-Americans') faults. Nor did he repudiate his wartime accomodationism. Despite this, "Returning Soldiers" was a call for renewed struggle. As such, it evoked the wrath of the secret police; the Post Office held up the May Crisis for six days before releasing it for delivery.[5]
While attending the Paris Peace Conference, Du Bois had learned about the degradation and abuse inflicted upon Afro-American soldiers during the war. Although watched by the secret police (who censored his dispatches and extorted a promise that he would not criticize the allies), Du Bois on his return home castigated the military's racism, simultaneously emphasizing the positive effects of the war. Afro-American service had "gained the sympathy and respect of France and the civilized world--and what is more important, we gained a new self-respect and a new consciousness of power." Du Bois acknowledged that he had expected discrimination against and abuse of black soldiers, but, in a tone of outraged innocence, claimed that he was shocked beyond measure at their virulence and prevalence. Du Bois documented horrible food, accommodations, health care, and recreational facilities, the brutal treatment of many African-American soldiers, and the racist lies spread about those troops by their officers and the Wilson administration. Speaking of himself in the third person, Du Bois described himself as "utterly amazed and dumbfounded at the revelations poured upon him. He heard of conditions, acts, conspiracies, wholesale oppression and cruelty of which he had no previous inkling." In anguished tones, Du Bois demanded an explanation of "why it was that in this most critical period of the existence of the Negro race, 200,000 of the best blood of our young manhood--men who offered their lives for their people and their country, could be crucified, insulted, degraded and maltreated while their fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers had no adequate knowledge of the real truth."[6] Du Bois documented some of these abuses in his long article, "Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War" in the Crisis, although he omitted some of the more incendiary charges leveled by the radicals.[7]
Du Bois also endorsed self-defense against white terrorists, although he (unlike the radicals) explicitly condemned offensive violence. "When the murderer comes, he shall not strike us in the back," he said; however, "We must not seek reform by violence. We must not seek Vengeance."[8] After the wholesale violence of the immediate post-war years had subsided, Du Bois printed an essay by the rising Afro-American intellectual E. Franklin Frazier. Frazier denounced black pseudo-Christians who praised whites but secretly hated them, and who sanctimoniously worshipped Jesus even while ignoring his hatred of injustice. Frazier asserted that
Their deploring of hatred and praise of love is as superficial as [it is] despicable. Hatred may have a positive moral value. A few choice souls may rise to a moral elevation where they can love those who oppress them. But the mass of mankind either become accommodated to an enforced inferior status with sentiments consonant with their situation, or save themselves by hating the oppression and the oppressors. In the latter case, hatred is a positive moral force. So if hatred is necessary to prevent the Negro from becoming accommodated to his present state, how can anyone preach love?
Frazier concluded that "the Negro does not want love. He wants justice."[9]
The Crisis received letters denouncing this article, and Frazier defended his stance in a fashion that Du Bois endorsed as "eminently clear and sound." Frazier conceded that wholesale, systematic violence could not achieve the Negro's goals, but asserted that violence in specific situations would win respect. Japan had demonstrated this. Frazier praised those who could save themselves from the contagion of hatred without violent resistance, but he asserted that nonviolence was futile in the United States, a nation more barbarous even than the British Empire:
I believe it would be better for the Negro's soul to be seared with hate than dwarfed by self-abasement.... Suppose there should arise a Gandhi to lead Negroes without hate in their hearts to stop tilling the fields of the South under the peonage system; to cease paying taxes to States that keep their children in ignorance; and to ignore the iniquitous disfranchisement and Jim Crow laws. I fear we would witness an unprecedented massacre of defenseless black men and women in the name of Law and Order and there would scarcely be enough Christian sentiment in America to stay the flow of blood.[10]
The re-radicalized Du Bois also addressed the "social equality" bugaboo. The Crisis had once previously opposed anti-miscegenation laws because they encouraged white male predation on black women; but it generally shied away from this explosive issue until President Harding's infamous Birmingham speech, which posited an eternal difference between the races and opposed intermarriage, pushed the issue of "social equality" to the forefront once again. If "social equality" connoted free and voluntary association, Du Bois said, it was a prerequisite of civilization; construed as forced association, it was advocated by no sane person. No one, Du Bois said, claimed a right to invite himself to another man's dinner table. In condemning social equality, Harding must have advocated the separation of the races, a doctrine which branded Theodore Roosevelt's dinner with Booker T. Washington a crime. Harding proclaimed that "racial amalgamation there cannot be," but as a matter of historical fact such amalgamation had occurred and doubtless would continue. If Harding meant only that he opposed interracial sex, he should have said so.
And if he had said so, 99 percent of the Negroes would agree with him. We have not asked for amalgamation; we have resisted it. It has been forced on us by brute strength, ignorance, poverty, degradation and fraud. It is the white race, roaming the world, that has left its trail of bastards and outraged women and then raised holy hands to heaven and deplored "race mixture." No, we are not demanding and do not want amalgamation, but the reasons are ours and not yours.... It is because no real men accept any alliance except on terms of absolute equal regard and because we are abundantly satisfied with our own race and blood. And at the same time we say and as free men must say that whenever two human beings of any nation or race desire each other in marriage, the denial of their legal right to marry is not simply wrong--it is lewd.[11]
Du Bois contrasted two incompatible quotes from Harding's speech: one urging that blacks be good black men rather than imitation white men, the other deploring divisive class, race, and group consciousness. But forced segregation, Du Bois pointed out, inculcated group consciousness. Opposing his own integrationist universalism to Harding's racial essentialism, Du Bois said that "When Warren Harding or any white man comes to teach Negroes pride of race, we answer that our pride is our business and not theirs, and a thing they would better fear than evoke: For the day that Black men love Black men simply because they are Black, is the day they will hate White men simply because they are White."[12]
Du Bois defended, but did not recommend, intermarriage. He believed that so-called "races" periodically intermarried and generated a new "race"; therefore, "no race is permanent in its physical or mental characteristics." Most individuals would find their "greatest happiness and the greatest chance to do their best work if they marry within their own racial group." There were many individual exceptions to this rule, however, and any sane adult should demand the freedom to marry any other consenting adult. Du Bois went further in denigrating interracial marriage, however, asserting that the "self-respect" of any ostracized group demanded that it "minimize as far as possible any intermarriage with the group that assumes superiority." Furthermore--in a remark particularly applicable to Jews--Du Bois allowed that in many cases a particular racial group "working together and intermarrying [within itself]" has made "peculiar contributions to civilization" of lasting value; any such group may justly "confine its marriages to its own members so far as it does not seek also to insult other groups or deny them the same rights."[13]
About this same time, on the eve of the suffrage victory, Du Bois, who had always championed votes for women, penned a passionate plea for the sexual and economic equality. In "The Damnation of Women" he said that "the future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have knowledge. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion.... The uplift of woman is, next to the color line and the peace movement, our greatest modern cause. When, now, two of these movements--woman and color--combine in one, the combination has deep meaning." Du Bois denounced the custom by which women were judged only by their appearence, and treated merely as pets and breeding machines; he thundered against "the bestiality of free manhood" based upon enslaved womanhood. "Not in guarding the weak in weakness do we gain strength," he said, "but by making weakness free and strong." [14]
Although Du Bois ignored the role of black men in oppressing their sisters, he presciently addressed many of the particular problems afflicting black women. He sadly remarked that "the world that wills to worship womankind studiously forgets its darker sisters... these daughters of sorrow." He perceptively analyzed the chasm between the American ideal of the "sheltered harem with the mother... as nurse and homemaker" and the harsh realities of Afro-American women's economic and sexual exploitation by white men. Black men, devastated by low wages, intermittent work, and high unemployment, could not support their families, whereas Afro-American women often worked for wages. This resulted in greater freedom for black women, but also in high illegitmacy rates and broken families. Black women were denied even "the almost mocking homage" of chivalry. Considered ugly by white American culture, they had escaped the degrading impact of the cult of beauty. "Not being expected to be merely ornamental, they have girded themselves for work, instead of adorning their bodies only for play.... So some few women are born free, and some admist insult and scarlet letters achieve freedom; but our women in black had freedom thrust contemptuously upon them. With that freedom they are buying an untrammeled independence and dear as is the price they pay for it, it will in the end be worth every taunt and groan." In her independence and resilient courage, the Afro-American woman embodied "revolutionary ideals, which must in time have vast influence on the thought and action of this land."[15]
Du Bois's radical insights were truly remarkable for their time; few male Afro-American radicals so eloquently addressed women's specific oppressions. Unfortunately, Du Bois's comments were atypical even for him; he, too, usually ignored the specificities of Afro-American female oppression. Even in "The Damnation of Women" he extolled the Aframerican women's "dark and mysterious beauty of midnight eyes," their "modesty and womanliness," and their "sweetly feminine" qualities.[16]
Addressing another sensitive issue, Du Bois defended the NAACP and the Crisis from Afro-radical imputations of white finance and control. As early as 1915 Du Bois had exulted "that most of the money that supports the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People comes from black hands; a still larger proportion must so come, and we must not only support but control this and similar organizations and hold them unwaveringly to our objects, our aims and our ideals." Du Bois recurrently insisted that the Crisis was mainly self-supporting, the NAACP contributing only the editor's (Du Bois's) salary. In November 1915 he proudly announced that even this subsidy was no longer needed.[17]
Du Bois's most sustained defense of the NAACP against the charge of white domination occurred in 1920. Du Bois extolled the achievements of the NAACP and pointed out that almost eighty thousand of its ninety thousand members were black. Afro-Americans also dominated most offices and committees. Du Bois eloquently asserted that the NAACP embodied its own principles, and was itself a microcosm of the interracial world it advocated. "The Association is not an exclusively Negro organization. We do not believe in the color line against either white or black. The NAACP is a union of American citizens of all colors and races who believe that Democracy in America is a failure if it proscribes Negroes" in any area of life.
We do not believe that the time has come, or will ever come, when we will not need the help of white Americans. To bar them from our organization would be a monstrous discrimination; it would advertise the fact that we can not or will not work with white people. If this is true, what are we doing in America or indeed in the modern world? What are we fighting for, if it not the chance to stand with our white fellows, side by side and hand in hand, and fight for right?[18]
The NAACP embodied its interracial ideal: "What we have thus accomplished in the NAACP is a sample of what we aim to accomplish in the nation and the world." White racism may sometimes require that blacks pursue separate development, but this "is not our present aim and we cannot consistently or effectively at the same time pursue both" separatism and integration. "We cannot refuse to cooperate with white Americans and simultaneously demand the right to cooperate!" Blacks could ask for white cooperation "only as we are willing to work for a world democracy of all men. If we wish in hatred or in selfishness to work simply for ourselves--if we envision a future policy of up black, down white--we... invite the bitter opposition of the world; we invite race conflict of the oldest, cruelest sort; we deny and seek to crucify humanity even as our oppressors have done in time gone."[19]
Du Bois said that NAACP members champion "Negro blood and Negro genius; they seek, in voluntary unions, to develop a new Negro ethos--a music, a literature, a school of art and thought; but they will do this as freemen in a free democracy, joining wholeheartedly with their fellows of all colors whenever that freedom is menaced. Not narrow, excluding, other-hating particularism, but broad, sympathetic, all-embracing nationalism is our aim and spirit." Du Bois indignantly protested that "in the midst of this endeavor our own people accuse us of having white members and white fellow-officers."[20]
As the Allies pondered the fate of Germany's African colonies and their thirteen million inhabitants, Du Bois confronted the problems and opportunities posed by Afro-American attitudes toward Africa. Although the victorious Allies wanted these colonies for themselves--either as outright plunder or as League of Nations mandates--Du Bois demanded that they should be placed "under the guidance of organized civilization" and prepared for self-government. Du Bois noted that Europeans had committed atrocities in Africa that far exceeded the worst crimes of the natives. Foreshadowing more recent ideas concerning multiculturalism, Du Bois asked "Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different?" He answered that "the culture indigenous to a country, its folk-customs, its art, all this must have free scope or there is no such thing as freedom in the world."[21] Implicit in his proposals, however, lurked the assumption that the Africans were not presently equipped for full self-government, but required the tutelage of white Europeans or the Western intelligentsia of the African diaspora.
In early 1919, before Garvey's UNIA had attained great prominence, Du Bois mentioned some advantages that "the concept that Africa is for Africans" would confer upon Afro-Americans. African autonomy would afford "a chance for the colored American to emigrate and to go as a pioneer to a country which must, sentimentally at least, possess for him the same fascination as England does for Indian-born Englishmen."[22] Du Bois cautioned that Africa was in some ways an "inhospitable land" and reminded his readers that
We are Americans.... There is nothing so indigenous, so completely "made in America" as we. It is as absurd to talk of a return to Africa, merely because that was our home 300 years ago, as it would be to expect the members of the Caucasian race to return to the fastnesses of the Caucasus Mountains from which, it is reputed, they sprung.
But.... the African movement means to us what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews, the centralization of race effort and the recognition of a racial fount.[23]
The redemption of Africa, far from detracting from the fight for equality at home, was part and parcel of that struggle. The liberation of Africa would aid in the liberation of "colored peoples throughout the world."[24]
Du Bois initiated the Pan-African Congress (PAC) out of concern for the fate of the ex-German colonies. The first PAC demanded the cultivation of "racial genius," free education for each African in his or her native language and that of the trustee nation, and government-provided medical care. Some of its proposals, however, clearly indicated a paternalistic condescension toward the Africans. For example, the PAC demanded that "the land and natural resources shall be held in trust for the Natives" who shall have "effective ownership" only of "as much land as they can profitably develop." Self-government would be allowed only "to the extent that their development permits." Finally, equal rights were demanded only for "civilized Negroes," by which Du Bois and his colleagues (many of whom were officials of the white colonial governments) undoubtedly meant Westernized Africans. Indeed, en route to Paris, Du Bois had urged that "the actual government [of his proposed state in Central Africa] should use both colored and white officials and later natives should be worked in."[25]
The resolutions of the second PAC, written by Du Bois, echoed many of these condescensions. Du Bois openly avowed his contention--reminiscent of his "talented tenth" elitism and his much later CP vanguardism--that "for the purpose of raising [the backward and suppressed groups of mankind] to intelligence, self-knowledge and self-control, their intelligentsia of right ought to be recognized as the natural leaders of their groups." The delegates resented treating "civilized men as uncivilized" and "disfranchis[ing] the intelligent." Although Du Bois demanded for Africans "freedom in their own religion and social customs, and with the right to be different and non-conformist," his entire pronouncement reeked of Euro-centrism. Incredibly, after recounting the holocaust that European invaders had inflicted on Africans for centuries (and were yet inflicting), Du Bois nevertheless acknowledged as "fact" that Abyssinia, Haiti, and Santo Domingo were "behind the most advanced civilization of the day."[26] Even more fantastically, Du Bois believed that enlightened white Europeans could oversee African development in the interests of the Africans themselves. He even complained that the United States had "asked and allowed thousands of black men to offer up their lives as a sacrifice to the country which despised and despises them," forgetting that he himself had urged such self-sacrifice without any compensatory granting of elementary rights.[27]
However deluded his concrete proposals, Du Bois displayed stark realism regarding the contemporary situation in Africa. The relations between the main groups of humanity were
determined chiefly by the degree in which one can subject the other to its service, enslaving labor, making ignorance compulsory, uprooting ruthlessly religion and customs, and destroying government, so that the favored Few may luxuriate in the toil of the tortured Many. Science, Religion and Philanthropy have thus been made the slaves of world commerce and industry, and bodies, minds, souls of Fiji and Congo, are judged almost solely by the quotations on the Bourse.[28]
The contending classes in the developed world could never resolve their problems "as long as a similar and vastly greater problem of poverty and injustice marks the relations of the whiter and darker peoples." Contradicting his famous statement that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," Du Bois asserted that "the great modern problem is to correct maladjustment in the distribution of wealth." However, "the basic maladjustment is in the outrageously unjust distribution of world income between the dominant and suppressed peoples; in the rape of land and raw material, and monopoly of technique and culture. And in this crime white labor is particeps criminis with white capital." White workers, through self-interest and delusion, overwhelmingly voted for "imperialistic schemes to enslave and debauch black, brown and yellow labor, until with fatal retribution, they are themselves today bound and gagged and rendered impotent" by the "dominant, cruel and irresponsible few." Rejecting his previous strategy of alliance with an educated and moral white elite, Du Bois lamented that "the educated and cultured of the world, the well-born and well-bred, and even the deeply pious and philanthropic, receive their training and comfort and luxury, the ministrations of delicate beauty and sensibility, on condition that they neither inquire into the real source of their income and the methods of distribution or interfere with the legal props which rest on a pitiful human foundation of writhing white and yellow and brown and black bodies."[29]
With his usual rhetorical flourish (which concealed rather than elucidated meanings and problems), Du Bois concluded that "the answer [to our plea] is written in the stars."[30] However, Jessie Fauset (the literary editor of the Crisis), provided some telling details of the obstacles posed by white colonialist governments and their black kapos. As one example, M. Diagne, a high black official of the French government, postponed "the few paragraphs about capitalism" for consideration by the next PAC.[31]
Du Bois and the PAC presented their resolutions to the League of Nations, an institution vehemently opposed by most radicals. Du Bois, however (once again adumbrating a much later Afro-American strategy), editorialized that the League was "absolutely necessary to the salvation of the Negro race. Unless we have some super-national power to curb the anti-Negro policy of the United States and South Africa, we are doomed eventually to fight for our rights." The League would immediately include the free black republics and sympathize with the larger currents of civilization muted in the United States by Southern power. "What we cannot accomplish before the choked conscience of America, we have an infinitely better chance to accomplish before the organized Public Opinion of the World.... The refusal to adopt the Japanese race equality amendment is deplorable, but it is an argument for and not against a Nation of Nations." Du Bois was gleeful when a racist Missouri Senator quoted this editorial as a reason for opposing U.S. entry into the League. Du Bois echoed Garvey in his assertion that "the white world will be so busy fighting and hating itself during the next century that it will have scant leisure to keep black folk in their place."[32]
Du Bois's views on Africa did not, therefore, differ in principle from those of Garvey. Recognizing actual power relationships, however, Du Bois willingly cooperated with the white colonial governments, without whose permission the Pan-African Congresses would have been impossible. Garvey demanded the overthrow of those governments by armed force, a dream no more utopian than Du Bois's chimerical hope that they could be moved by moral suasion. Both Du Bois and Garvey claimed that they, Westernized blacks of the diaspora, could represent millions of Africans who had never heard of either of them, much less elected them as their representatives. The PAC no more represented genuine Africans than did the UNIA; indeed, the PAC far more deeply expressed the fact and ideology of European colonialism. Blaise Diagne, one of the PAC's leading lights, was, although himself of African extraction, absolutely loyal to white France and its "civilizing mission," in whose name he lorded over a huge swath of black Africa. (While Du Bois was "closing ranks" with the Wilson administratin, Diagne was raising almost a million troops and laborers for the French war effort.) Like Garvey, Du Bois had scant concept of the vast array of cultures that flourished in Africa; his proposed Central African republic ignored cultural boundaries as well as political realities.[33]
Du Bois's relations with Garvey followed his usual practice of ignoring his major critics and competitors. Although he privately criticized the UNIA and the BSL, Du Bois did not mention Garvey in the pages of the Crisis until late 1920, after the epochal second UNIA Convention rendered further silence impossible. In December 1920 and January 1921, Du Bois ran a two-part article on Garvey and the UNIA that mixed theoretical praise with practical damnation. Du Bois, indeed, tentatively endorsed the theory behind Garvey's black commercial enterprises. "Shorn of its bombast and exaggeration, the main lines of the Garvey plan are perfectly feasible," Du Bois claimed. "What he is trying to say and do is this: American Negroes can, by accumulating and ministering their own capital, organize industry, join the black centers of the south Atlantic by commercial enterprise and in this way ultimately redeem Africa as a fit and free home for black men. This is true. It is feasible," but only as race-wide enterprise over decades, not as a one-man instant project. "It will call for every ounce of ability, knowledge, experience and devotion in the whole Negro race," Du Bois concluded.[34]
However, Du Bois sharply criticized Garvey for his autocratic rule, extravagant promises of riches, absurd Napoleonic boasts of expelling the British from Africa, and shoddy financial practices. He accused Garvey of creating "more bitter color enmity inside the race than has ever before existed," of opposing the Afro-American crusade for civil rights, and of slandering, suing, and violently assaulting his critics. His failure, Du Bois said, "would be a calamity. Garvey is the beloved leader of tens of thousands of poor and bewildered people who have been cheated all their lives. His failure would mean a blow to their faith, and a loss of their little savings, which it would take generations to undo.... American Negro leaders are not jealous of Garvey--they are not envious of his success; they are simply afraid of his failure, for his failure would be theirs." Garvey threatened "with bankruptcy and disaster one of the most interesting spiritual movements of the modern Negro world." Du Bois later claimed that after these articles (which, in an outright misrepresentation, he called "favorable") appeared, Garvey's minions had deluged him with obscene letters and threatened him with death.[35]
Du Bois remained publicly distant from the radical attack on Garvey. Only after the bankruptcy of the Black Star Line (and Garvey's transparent lies about its financial condition) did Du Bois attack Garvey and his steamship line in a long article that quoted much court testimony. Although NAACP attorneys helped draft the notorious letter of eight Afro-American leaders to Attorney General Daugherty attacking Garvey, Du Bois vented his full fury only in May 1924, after Garvey had been convicted of mail fraud. His article, "A Lunatic or a Traitor" described Garvey as "the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world" and an "open ally of the Ku Klux Klan [who] should be locked up or sent home."[36]
In the 1920s Du Bois moved left, even as government and corporate terrorism decimated progressive industrial and political organizations. By the onset of the Great Depression he had almost abandoned hopes of rapprochement with white labor as represented by the AFL; advocated a "group economy" based on black cooperative enterprises; endorsed third parties in general and the SP in particular; and extravagantly praised the Soviet Union, even while remaining skeptical about American Communists. Du Bois, therefore, ended the 1920s as isolated as he had begun them (although for a directly opposite reason), and had clearly enunciated the positions that would cause his virtual expulsion from the NAACP in 1934.
Du Bois's attitudes toward the AFL fluctuated in the 1920s as they had in earlier decades. He grasped at every hint of an AFL overture toward blacks, but recoiled when the AFL's racist deeds belied egalitarian words. In 1919 Du Bois asserted that if white workers could enslave the black worker "they probably would; but since he can underbid their wage, they slowly and reluctantly invite him into the union. But can they bring themselves inside the Union to regard him as a man--a fellow-voter, a brother?" Du Bois sadly concluded "no--not yet. And there lies the most stupendous labor problem of the twentieth century--transcending the problem of Labor and Capital, of Democracy, of the Equality of Women--for it is the problem of the Equality of Humanity in the world as against white domination of black and brown and yellow serfs." At other times, however, Du Bois mustered a faint hope that economic self-interest would drive the AFL toward egalitarianism, whatever its conscious intentions.[37] Although Du Bois praised the IWW as genuinely egalitarian, he did not urge that blacks join; in fact, the Crisis almost totally ignored that radical and egalitarian union.[38]
In August 1924 Du Bois proposed a formal rapprochement between the NAACP and the AFL. Du Bois asserted that although the AFL had for years issued conciliatory statements concerning black labor, almost all black workers remained unorganized because "white union labor does not want black labor" and because "black labor has ceased to beg admittance to union ranks because of its increasing value and efficiency outside the unions.... The Negro is entering the ranks of semi-skilled and skilled labor and he is entering mainly as a 'scab.' He broke the great steel strike. He will soon be in a position to break any strike when he can gain economic advantage for himself." Du Bois asserted that black workers had greatly benefitted from the efforts of organized white workers and that "a blow at organized labor is a blow at all labor.... If there is built up in America a great black bloc of non-union laborers who have a right to hate unions, all laborers, black and white, eventually must suffer." Du Bois proposed an Interracial Labor Commission composed of representatives of the NAACP, the AFL, the railroad brotherhoods, and other labor bodies.[39]
When the AFL ignored Du Bois's overture, the NAACP nevertheless advocated an economic alliance "among the laboring people of the United States across the color line" and promulgated "a practical plan of future cooperation" based on actual history and current conditions.[40] Du Bois listed economic considerations as first among the NAACP's new priorities and pledged that the NAACP would focus on organizing Negro workers for the next three years. This evoked derision from the Messenger, which ridiculed Du Bois for supporting organized labor only when advocating class-based action had become perfectly safe (and ineffectual).
Du Bois was sincere in his new effort. After the three years had elapsed with few accomplishments, however, he despaired, lamenting in 1928 that although the class struggle of the two races was "at bottom the same struggle.... the essential identity of the problem is not recognized either by white workingmen or black." He again asserted that "Black workingmen are the heirs of every effort which the white working masses have made toward freedom," including a widened suffrage, public education, and collective bargaining. "On the other hand, all this story has not been told Negroes and they are not born knowing all about it.... To make the matter worse, both white and black workingmen have come under the sinister influence of the white employer." Du Bois blamed white capitalists for inculcating racism in white workers and telling Negro job applicants that their only opportunity resided in scabbing. Furthermore, white capitalists provided the Negro schools and colleges that white voters refused; such philanthropy was "a tremendous bribe" that made "Negroes hate white fellow workers." Du Bois reminded his readers that this problem was worldwide; "white workers are today as yesterday voting armies and navies to keep China, India, Mexico and Central America in subjection and being paid high wages to do this while 'niggers' and 'dagoes' and 'chinks' starve, slave and die."[41]
Two months later Du Bois strongly endorsed a black "group economy" organized upon cooperative lines. He began by outlining the dismal economic history and prospects of the Negro race. Blacks were excluded from most jobs and unions; chain stores remorselessly destroyed small businesses; farming was in inexorable decline. Only racially based economic cooperatives could surmount both racist exclusion and monopolistic competition and provide a secure economic foundation for the race. Du Bois therefore advocated "manufacturing and consumers cooperation" encompassing the raising and transportation of raw materials, manufacturing, and cooperative stores. "Such an organization.... would insure the economic independence of the American Negro for all time." Such a group economy was necessary because neither of the alternative strategies of allying with whites was realistic:
It is more than idiotic,--it is criminal, for American Negroes to stagger blindly on, hugging the fond illusion that white philanthropy through industrial education, is going to furnish them with future steady employment and economic independence. It is equally idiotic to hope that white laborers will become broad enough or wise enough to make the cause of black labor their own. These things will never be done in our day. Our economic future lies in the hands of carefully trained thinkers, technical engineers, and the unswerving will to sacrifice on the part of intelligent masses.[42]
Cooperative credit and banking institutions could link blacks worldwide into a thriving economic community, Du Bois hoped. Yet he did not specify any practical methods that would further his program, or even indicate a possible beginning. He did call for a convention of cooperatives and their advocates, but his efforts availed little.[43] Although Du Bois's endorsement of black economic nationalism seemed somewhat out of place in the late 1920s, such views did not represent a new departure; Du Bois had earlier endorsed Garvey's similar plan as feasible if properly executed. This issue would precipitate Du Bois's departure from the NAACP in 1934.
As well as advocating a "group economy," Du Bois became more favorable toward the Soviet Union during the 1920s. Skeptical at the outset of the decade when many Afro-Americans saw the Russian Revolution as the harbinger of worldwide class and racial liberation, Du Bois endorsed the Soviet Union and even flirted with the Communists only later in the decade, when most black radicals had grown disenchanted with both.
In late 1919, Du Bois defended the Messenger and the Negro World against Southern attempts at censorship, even while expressing his own disagreement with their views. Du Bois added that "THE CRISIS does not believe in violence as a method of social reform--it does not believe in Revolution, but it does believe in free speech." In July 1921 Claude McKay wrote the Crisis, complaining about a derogatory remark about the Russian Revolution made in passing in the May issue. (Du Bois had referred to "a hoard of scoundrels and bubble-blowers, ready to conquer Africa, join the Russian revolution, and vote in the Kingdom of God tomorrow.") McKay replied that the Bolshevik Revolution, "the greatest event in the history of humanity," had liberated the Jews from centuries of pogroms and oppression. McKay said that a Communist revolution in the United States might similarly liberate blacks and complained that although almost all blacks were workers, the NAACP could not "function as a revolutionary working-class organization."[44]
Du Bois replied that many criticized the NAACP for standing aside from broader currents of reform and suspected that it was intimidated by government surveillance. Du Bois said that "we have but one chief cause--the emancipation of the Negro, and to this all else must be subordinated--not because other questions are not important but because to our mind the most important social question today is recognition of the darker races." He denied sneering at the Bolshevik Revolution, which may prove the greatest event of recent centuries, though its outcome and even its very nature were as yet unknown. Du Bois saw some "splendid results" but "other things which frighten us" and asserted that "the immediate work for the American Negro lies in America and not in Russia." He praised the noble pronouncement of the Third International, repudiating the racism of the Second. "The editor of THE CRISIS considers himself a Socialist but he does not believe that German State Socialism or the dictatorship of the proletariat are perfect panaceas. He believes with most thinking men that the present method of creating, controlling and distributing wealth is desperately wrong" but "he is not prepared to dogmatize with Marx or Lenin."[45]
"How far can the colored people of the world, and particularly the Negroes of the United States, trust the working classes?" Du Bois asked McKay. Many radicals believed "that we have only to embrace the working class program to have the working class embrace ours.... THE CRISIS wishes that this were true, but it is forced to the conclusion that it is not." The Socialist, Communist, and union movements were all infected with racism. Evincing his usual elitism and emphasis on moral suasion, Du Bois said that such racism was not surprising: "Why should we assume on the part of unlettered and suppressed masses of white workers, a clearness of thought, a sense of human brotherhood, that is sadly lacking in the most educated classes?" Du Bois vowed that he would remind the white workers of the world that their darker brothers suffered from identical oppression, would espouse the cause of the white workers insofar as this did not jeopardize black labor, and would respectfully consider the broader programs for social betterment that were agitating the world. He would, however, advocate that blacks scab against white unions that excluded them. "We have an immediate program for Negro emancipation laid down by the NAACP. It is foolish for us to give up this practical program for a mirage in Africa or by seeking to join a revolution which we do not at present understand."[46]
Du Bois continued this discussion in the next Crisis. In an editorial that evoked a sharp rebuke from the Messenger, Du Bois equated revolution with organized murder, denied that Afro-Americans were a part of the working class, and asserted that the class struggle had little relevance for the black community. In a quasi-pacifist outburst surprising from one who had supported the imperialist bloodbath of 1914-1918, Du Bois proclaimed that
The NAACP has been accused of not being a "revolutionary" body. This is quite true. We do not believe in revolution. We expect revolutionary changes in many parts of this life and this world, but we expect these changes to come mainly through reason, human sympathy and the education of children, and not by murder. We know that there have been times when organized murder seemed the only way out of wrong, but we believe those times have been very few, the cost of the remedy excessive, the results as terrible as beneficent, and we gravely doubt if in the future there will be any real recurrent necessity for such upheaval.
Du Bois called for "light, more light; clear thought, accurate knowledge, [and] careful distinctions."[47]
Du Bois also hinted at the social construction of class--the insight that a person's class affiliation depended as much upon human perception as upon so-called "objective" factors:
How far, for instance, does the dogma of "class struggle" apply to black folk in the United States today? Theoretically we are a part of the world proletariat in the sense that we are mainly an exploited class of cheap laborers; but practically we are not a part of the white proletariat and are not recognized by that proletariat to any great extent. We are the victims of their physical oppression, social ostracism, economic exclusion and personal hatred; and when in self defense we seek sheer subsistence we are howled down as "scabs."[48]
Du Bois pointed out that Afro-American capitalists provided essential services for the race. The black capitalists who bought real estate in Harlem were a prime example. Blacks had initially moved into Harlem by paying higher rents than whites; if they looked for housing in white neighborhoods, "the white laborers would have mobbed and murdered them." But white capitalists kept rents high or tried to drive blacks from Harlem.
Manifestly there was only one thing for [the Negro] to do, and that was to buy Harlem; but the buying of real estate calls for capital and credit, and the institutions that deal in capital and credit are capitalist institutions. If now, the Negro had begun to fight capital in Harlem, whose capital was he fighting? If he fought capital as represented by white big real estate interests, he was wise; but he was also just as wise when he fought labor which insisted on segregating him in work and in residence.
If, on the other hand, he fought the accumulating capital in his own group.... then he was slapping himself in his own face. Because either he must furnish capital for the buying of his own home, or rest naked in the slums and swamps.[49]
Du Bois admitted that if a tiny coterie of black capitalists controlled all of the race's capital, "then we are destined to suffer from our own capitalists exactly what we are suffering from the white capitalists today. And while this is not a pleasant prospect, it is certainly no worse than the present actuality." In a striking parallel to Slavophiles and other advocates of distinctive, indigenous modernization, Du Bois hoped that Afro-Americans could show the world a more humane method of economic development based on the history, culture, and values of the blacks themselves. "If... because of our more democratic organization and our widespread inter-class sympathy we can introduce a more democratic control, taking advantage of what the white world is itself doing to introduce industrial democracy, then we may not only escape our present economic slavery but even guide and lead a distrait economic world."[50]
This discussion continued in the October Crisis. John Owens wrote Du Bois criticizing his response to McKay; Du Bois printed long excerpts from Owens's letter with his own reply. Owens said that the basic social changes which Du Bois downplayed might solve the Negro's problems more efficaciously than narrow race-based remedies. He also argued that fundamental economic change would benefit the overwhelming majority of blacks, who were workers, more than "some scheme which offers a questionable solution for the ills of the talented minority." Owens asserted that the vote was no solution for blacks, as it had not greatly benefitted white workers, and suggested that some variety of Socialism offered "a better solution to the problems of the proletariat than any scheme suggested by the exploiting classes.... Surely it is an extreme Utopian fantasy, which would shame a chauvinist, to hope that [fundamental economic transformation] will come about through any change of heart on the part of the possessing classes which will cause them to voluntarily share with the non-possessing masses, black or white." Owens admitted that Du Bois's doubts about the white working class were justified, but asserted that the white capitalists and imperialists were far worse.
Is it the English working classes which are exploiting India, sucking the very life-blood from a starving population and grinding the natives down into the desert dust in order to support English "gentlemen" in idleness and luxury? Are the English, French and Belgian working classes raping Africa, taking ill-gotten gains from a trusting population? Are the working classes of America attempting to fasten the yoke of subjugation upon the neck of Santo Domingo, and stifle liberty and freedom of speech in Haiti?[51]
Du Bois rebutted Owens point by point. He admitted that fundamental, class-based, non-racial changes might improve the Negro's condition, but warned that the Negro "must not assume that because a proposed solution settles many important human problems, for this reason it is necessarily going to settle his." The workers were themselves "through no fault of their own, ignorant, inexperienced men"; their proposals for self-betterment might backfire. Du Bois conceded that voting had not yet altered the economic condition of the workers of either race, but said that workers were learning and that "only through the use of the ballot is real reform in industry and industrial relations coming."[52]
Many Socialist and even Bolshevik proposals would vastly improve the world, Du Bois admitted, but "I do not believe that any such adoption can come through war or force or murder, and I do not believe that the sudden attempt to impose a new industrial life can be successful without the long training of human beings." Socialism must be evolutionary, the work of generations; "It is precisely because of our present ignorance and our widespread assumptions as to profit and business that we cannot immediately change the world." Du Bois, again evincing his redoubtable idealism, declared that "the change in industrial organization must come from those who think and believe. We cannot assume that necessarily redemption is coming from those who suffer. It may come from those who enjoy the fruit of suffering, but who come to see that such enjoyment is wrong." Any proposal "must be judged by itself and not by its source."[53]
Finally, Du Bois reiterated his condemnation of a working-class imperialism based upon super-profits, racial conceit, and capitalist hegemony. "I maintain that English working classes are exploiting India; that the English, French and Belgian laborers are raping Africa; that the working classes of America are subjugating Santo Domingo and Haiti. They may not be as conscious of all they are doing as their more educated masters, called Nationalists and Imperialists, but they are consciously submitting themselves to the leadership of these men; they are voluntarily refusing to know; they are systematically refusing to listen." The white worker was less culpable than the capitalist but "he cannot escape his responsibility. He is co-worker in the miserable modern subjugation of over half the world."[54]
However skeptical of class-based panaceas, Du Bois published two articles by Claude McKay describing his experiences in the Soviet Union in the December, 1922, and January, 1923, Crisis. McKay emphasized his own experiences rather than rigorous analyses of the Soviet experiment, but he praised the Bolsheviks' egalitarian racial policies and vivid concern for the American Negro.[55] In late 1925 Du Bois himself offered guarded praise for the Soviet Union and for the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC), a CP front organized that year in Chicago. "We should stand before the astounding effort of Soviet Russia to reorganize the industrial world with open mind and listening ears," he said. "Russia has not yet failed and Negroes must not swallow all the lies told about her. She may yet show the world the Upward Path." He "assert[ed] the right of any set of American Negroes to investigate and sympathize with any industrial reform whether it springs from Russia, China or the South Seas," and attacked the U.S. government for sending "spies to hound Negroes who dare to study Communism."[56]
The Crisis also published an article by Abram Harris (no friend of the Communists) that touted the ANLC. Attacking the canard that Soviet gold financed the organization, Harris sensibly rejoined that every organization received money from some source. Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the former Messenger staffer who headed the new organization, could presumably enrich himself more easily by allying with the Rotarians. The Soviets could not conjure up the ANLC ex nihilo if social conditions did not foster such an organization. The ANLC represented "a revolt against this color psychology in the labor movement" and in U.S. society generally. Harris, who had previously written of racism in CP ranks, now found "daily observance of equality in social practice" in the Party, and asserted that such unique biracialism "must have a tremendous appeal to a disadvantaged group" such as the Negro. Harris, however, cited a seemingly ineradicable racism within the white working class as an insurmountable barrier standing athwart plans for interracial, class-based revolution. Echoing McKay, Harris also ridiculed the (apparently sincere) belief of Afro-American Communists that proletarian revolution was imminent, jesting that, after talking with them, he expected to see surging masses rounding the corner.[57]
Du Bois, however, reserved judgment on the Soviet Union until his own visit in 1926. He emphasized that he had not taken an official, guided tour but had "wandered into all the nooks and crannies of [Moscow] unattended" except by a friend who knew Russian. (Du Bois was himself fluent in French and German.) He traveled alone over two thousand miles, visiting cities and towns, schools, factories, government offices, museums, stores, and theatres; he conversed with citizens of many classes and with members of numerous races and nationalities. "I know nothing of political prisoners, secret police and underground propaganda," he wrote--whether doubting their existence or admitting his partial view is unclear. The Soviet Union amazed and inspired him, and evoked a rhapsodic hymn of praise: "I stand in astonishment and wonder at the revelation of Russia that has come to me. I may be partially deceived and half-informed. But if what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik."[58]
Du Bois perceived that the main issues posed by the Bolshevik Revolution were those of governmental versus private enterprise and the question of which class would rule. "What we call efficiency in America is judged primarily by the resultant profit to the rich and only secondarily by the results to the workers," Du Bois said, whereas "Russia is trying to make the workingman the main object of industry. His well-being and his income are deliberately set as the chief ends of organized industry directed by the state." Du Bois exulted that "Russia has struck at the citadels of power that rule modern countries"; no other country has "shorn organized wealth of its power as the Bolshevik Revolution has done in Russia."[59]
Russia, Du Bois continued, was conducting "a great modern government without the autocratic leadership of the rich." Its success hinged not on economics or morality but on psychology. "Can Russia continue to think of the State in terms of the worker? This can happen only if the Russian people believe and idealize the workingman as the chief citizen. In America we do not." Russia believed that hard and disagreeable labor was necessary and would remain so for quite some time and "that the people who do this work are the ones who should determine how the national income from their combined efforts should be distributed; in fine, that the Workingman is the State; that he makes civilization possible and should determine what civilization is to be."[60]
Du Bois's remarks on the Communist party's vanguard role and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union reflected his longstanding elitist views that a "talented tenth" must lead Afro-Americans and that the Westernized intelligentsia of the diaspora properly represented the masses of Africa. For the worker to guide and create his own civilization, Du Bois said, "he must be a workingman of skill and intelligence and to this combined end Russian education is being organized. This is what the Russian Dictatorship of the Proletariat means. This dictatorship does not stop there. As the workingman is today neither skilled nor intelligent enough to any such extent as his responsibilities demand, there is within his ranks the Communist party, directing the proletariat towards their future dictatorship. This is nothing new," because every so-called democracy had provisions that fostered the rule of a guiding elite. The real question, Du Bois said, was whether the elite prepared the people for actual self-government. "In so far as I could see, in shop and school, in the press and on the radio, in books and in lectures, in trades unions and National Congresses, Russia is. We are not."[61]
Du Bois perceived in Russia the material underpinnings of the required revolution in working-class psychology: workers occupied the best houses, held major government offices, and crowded the museums and theatres. Yet some workers and peasants missed Czarist pageantry, clung to religious superstition, and feared that workers could not govern Russia (just as others had doubted that capitalists could supplant the nobility in France). "But it is the organized capital of America, England, France and Germany which is chiefly instrumental in preventing the realization of the Russian workingman's psychology," Du Bois asserted. "It has used every modern weapon to crush Russia," supplying thugs with weapons, instituting "the industrial boycott, the refusal of capital and credit which is being carried on today just as far as international jealousy and greed will allow." This was inevitable because the Western nations were not genuine democracies but plutocracies; but it severely limited democracy in Russia. "So long as the most powerful nations in the world are determined that Russia must fail, there can be but a minimum of free discussion and democratic differences of opinion within Russia." The immediate question, Du Bois concluded, was not the ethical dilemma posed by revolution, the political conundrum of dictatorship ("we are all subject to this form of government"), or even of state management, which all nations sponsored in some degree. "The real Russian question is: Can you make the worker and not the millionaire the center of modern power and culture? If you can, the Russian Revolution will sweep the world."[62]
When denounced as a Bolshevik, Du Bois replied that if by Bolshevik one meant "those who are striving with partial success to organize Industry for public service rather than for private profit, then I am also a Bolshevik and proud of it." Speaking for the Pan-African Congress, he thanked the Soviet Union "for its liberal attitude toward the colored races and for the help which it has extended to them from time to time." Despite this comment, Du Bois said surprisingly little about the Soviet Union's racial policies--its attack on anti-Semitism, recognition of the rights of national minorities, or its foreign policy. These were the issues that evoked most comment from Afro-American visitors in the 1920s and 1930s. Somewhat incongruously he also proclaimed "I am a Pacifist. So was Jesus Christ."[63]
Risking the alienation of the NAACP's rich white backers, Du Bois obliquely endorsed Bolshevism in the August 1927 edition of the Crisis, praised and excerpted Stalin's "Interview with the First American Trade Union Delegation to Soviet Russia" in May 1928, and printed without comment the manifesto on the Negro issued by the Workers' (Communist) Party in September 1928. This manifesto was much more sweeping in its demands than any NAACP document. The Communists demanded a federal anti-lynching law and recognition of the right of self-defense; full enfranchisement (including equal jury service); the abolition of Jim Crow in every area of public and private life; the right of intermarriage; the outlawing of discrimination in renting or selling real estate; full integration in the armed forces; the abolition of racial discrimination in the unions; and full equality for Afro-Americans in every area of employment, including equal pay for equal work.[64] Even Du Bois's advocacy of the distinctly un-Bolshevik strategies of a black racial economy and class collaboration within the race in some senses paralleled the CP's emerging demand for a separatist black nation in the Black Belt of the South--a stance seen by some as improperly privileging race over class.
Although Du Bois praised the Soviet Union and flirted with the Communists during the late 1920s, he simultaneously moved toward open endorsement of the SP--a stance he had not publicly taken even during his brief SP membership in 1912. By 1928, with the SP a tiny splinter sect deserted by virtually all black radicals (most of whom were either politically demoralized, independent, or affiliated with the CP), Du Bois endorsed SP candidate Norman Thomas for president.
By early 1920 Du Bois had learned something from his crushing experiences with the capitalist parties, although he still believed in Wilson's good intentions. He praised the Committee of Forty-Eight (a middle-class spearhead of a new progressive party) and the Labor Party as resolutely opposing racial discrimination. As the election approached, Du Bois condemned the betrayal of the Negro by both capitalist parties and said that "between their professed and their actual policies there is no difference worth noting." However, Du Bois was still immobilized by his recognition that third-party politics was futile. The Farmer-Labor and Socialist parties both "speak out bravely in our behalf. Neither of them can win and because of our defenseless position the triumph of either of the greater parties without our aid might be the signal for further aggressions upon our rights as citizens."[65]
Du Bois had no recommendation for President, but urged that blacks reward their friends and punish their enemies at the local level without regard for party. Ernest McKinney, a Messenger writer now also appearing in the Crisis, endorsed a similar strategy, but reserved his most scathing remarks for the Republicans, who made conciliatory noises as the election approached. Blacks rejoiced when one of their number secured a minor patronage job, McKinney said: "We forgot that we are still burned at the stake, crushed to the bottom in industry, refused food when we are hungry and crowded into the gallery when we seek amusement." After the election Du Bois commented that the dissident parties waged "a singularly spiritless campaign" and that the black voter had remained content with his role as "an automatic registration mark for the Republican party. He could not be otherwise." He "had but one political choice or mission: to defeat the South-ridden Democratic party. He could not even think of taking an off-shot at the Millennium by voting Socialist or Farmer-Labor--he must defeat the Democrats."[66]
In 1923 Du Bois had criticized the Socialists as racists in their private and personal lives, evoking criticism from Frank Crosswaith, an up-and-coming black SP member. Crosswaith said that "History shows no record so persistently spotless in its stand on the Negro question, as that of the Socialist movement.... Most Southerners are bitterly opposed to Socialism and the Socialist Party for no other reason than it has taken the right attitude on the Negro question." Socialists realized that before they could triumph in "the dark and barbarous Southland," they must first overcome "barriers of prejudice, ignorance, and hate, erected chiefly against the Negro."[67]
Echoing Randolph, Crosswaith accused the Crisis of studiously ignoring black SP candidates. In 1918 the SP had nominated George Frazier Miller--at that time an NAACP officer--for Congress, and yet the Crisis had ignored his candidacy. Du Bois had ignored Randolph when he ran for New York State Comptroller in 1920 and for New York Secretary of State in 1922 on the SP ticket. Crosswaith charged that Du Bois's magazine highlighted Negro candidates on mainstream party tickets, while consistently ignoring all other Negro candidates. "There must be a reason for this strange procedure, and I boldly ask the Crisis and the NAACP to state the reason." Crosswaith thundered that the masses needed "truths which will enable them to find a way out of their present chaotic condition" and boldly, but respectfully asked: "Is it, or is it not, to the best interest of the race to espouse the cause of Socialism and the social revolution; or, will the best interests of the race be served by further aligning ourselves with the Republican and Democratic parties?"[68]
Du Bois replied that "I know the record of the Socialist party toward the Negro very well. On the whole it has been exceptionally good as I have said from time to time. But for the most part its theoretical attitude has never been put to a practical test. Even the nominations which you speak of were of very little importance since there was not the slightest chance for any of these gentlemen and the Socialist [party] knew this quite well." Du Bois charged that the SP was wavering on the question of segregated locals in the South, an issue with "tremendous practical importance." He completely evaded Crosswaith's complaint concerning his censorship of news vital for an informed Afro-American political opinion--news that Du Bois himself had repeatedly called a prerequisite of meaningful racial political action.[69]
The NAACP and Du Bois came close to endorsing a third party in 1924. Their reasons closely resembled Randolph's that year: the general benefit of a third party, rather than the specifics of the actual party under consideration. The NAACP asserted that "nothing will more quickly bring the old parties to a clear realization of their obligations to us and the nation than a vigorous third party movement. Such a movement may save us from a choice between half-hearted friends and half-concealed enemies or from the necessity of voting for the same oppression under different party names. Such a movement may give the American Negro and other submerged classes a chance to vote more directly for economic emancipation from monopoly and privilege and for a fairer chance to work according to ability and share more equitably the social income." However, the NAACP--which did not regard the Farmer-Labor party as particularly egalitarian in itself--advised that blacks vote for the best individual candidates, regardless of party.[70]
Du Bois also praised La Follette in an editorial foreshadowing his 1926-1927 endorsement of the Soviet Union, in that he focused on class issues and ignored specifically racial concerns. Du Bois explained the platform of the Progressive party and said that "for the uplifting of the world this is one of the best programs ever laid down by a political party in America. It can be carried out and still leave black folk and brown and yellow disinherited from many of its benefits. It can triumph and by its very triumph bring new tyrannies upon hated minorities. And yet despite this it will be far better than the present America." Du Bois castigated La Follette for ignoring the Negro and his nemesis, the KKK, and implied that some blacks would support La Follette out of the conviction that his "industrial program will help me as a laborer more than his silence on the Negro problem hurts me." Responding to outcries by venal Negro Republican campaign sheets, Du Bois denied that the NAACP endorsed any particular candidate. The NAACP merely put the facts before the Negro voters and urged that blacks "vote with their brains and not with their prejudices." After the election Du Bois estimated that perhaps a half million blacks voted for La Follette, which he called "a splendid and far-reaching gesture. The Third Party has come to stay and the Negro recognizes its fine platform and finer leaders."[71]
Du Bois's disillusionment with the capitalist parties accelerated during the late 1920s. By early 1927 he complained that "to a larger and larger extent elections are bought and sold by rich men.... the rulership of wealth in the United States is more and more open and direct."[72] Although he initially greeted the campaign of 1928 as an unparalleled opportunity for blacks, it soon degenerated into a contest between two avowedly white supremacist parties, neither of which made even their usual token and hypocritical gestures toward black voters. Du Bois analyzed the depressing situation in the Crisis in May 1928. Afro-American voters, he lamented, were offered no real choice, and must often support corrupt machine politicians because they at least acknowledged the Negro's humanity. Although blacks must "vote or be enslaved," the racism of both parties meant that for blacks, "intelligent voting... becomes a disheartening farce." In Chicago, for example, blacks could choose between "open gambling, bootlegging, prostitution, and Thompson" or "segregation, denial of representation, loss of decent jobs and public insult under Deneen or the Democrats. What on earth is an honest black voter to do?" Du Bois in fact understated his case; he did not mention that a vote for Thompson (who shamelessly betrayed his black constituents at every opportunity) was itself a vote for treachery when any significant issue affecting Afro-Americans presented itself.[73]
The 1928 situation was so terrible that, in an unprecedented display of unity, a widely diverse group of Afro-American leaders (including even R. Moton, the head of Tuskegee, and Fred Moore, Republican alderman from New York City and editor of the ultra-conservative New York Age) issued "An Appeal to America" attacking the 1928 campaign as the most vile and disgusting ever.
The emphasis of racial contempt and hatred which was made in this campaign is an appeal to the lowest and most primitive of human motives, and as long as this appeal can successfully be made, there is for this land no real peace, no sincere religion, no national unity, no social progress, even in matters far removed from racial controversy.[74]
The Afro-American leaders did not expect equality or social mingling; they realized that a long road of poverty and toil must succeed slavery. But they did affirm that "somewhere and sometime, limits must be put to race disparagement and separation and to campaigns of racial calumny which seek to set twelve million human beings outside the pale of ordinary humanity." During the 1928 campaign, however, both parties agreed that any decrease in white racism was itself a vice, that Negro votes should not be appealed to, that Negroes should not hold elected or appointed public office, and that all contact between the races "calls for explanation and apology."[75]
Du Bois fully agreed with this assessment. "For the American Negro this has without doubt been the most humiliating presidential campaign through which he has passed," he said. The two parties had perfected their accord, in the making since 1877, on degrading the Negro. Hoover bid for southern white votes by disfranchising Negro Republicans and by promising that he would appoint no Negro officeholders; the Democrats ignored Negro voters even in the North. "The result of this is that the political strategy which thoughtful Negro voters have been pursuing for sixteen years comes to naught. Their ideal was political independence," that of rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies. "When, now, neither party makes any promises whatsoever, or any bid for the Negro vote; when both parties acquiesce in attacks of racial bigotry and assertions which show their utter contempt and indifference to the Negro voter, the Negro is compelled to seek a new political program.... With unswerving determination and careful planning, the Negro must prepare to throw his whole political influence with a Third Party." Blacks must demand enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments, federal supervision of federal elections, and "the socialization of wealth and income, so as to protect the interests of the poor laborer against the political power of the rich investor." Du Bois hoped that the many other politically homeless groups--women, workers, farmers, and southern liberals, who lacked even "a chance to vote against the thing they fear and hate"--would unite in a powerful third party.[76]
In 1928, then, Du Bois supported the SP candidate Norman Thomas. At first he merely suggested that blacks support some minor party, whether Socialist, Farmer-Labor, or Prohibitionist. "This will be in effect throwing a vote away," Du Bois admitted, "because no Third Party candidate can be elected as long as the minority party can depend upon the rotten boroughs of the Solid South. Nevertheless, a vote for the Third Party in this election is a moral protest, and moral protests are of importance, even in the United States of America and in the year of Grace, 1928." But in November, the Crisis published a symposium, "How Shall We Vote?" with one writer supporting Hoover, one Smith, and Du Bois endorsing Thomas. Although the SP candidate had made some tepid remarks about the Negro, and the SP platform attacked black disfranchisement as a major cause of "reaction, fraud and privilege," Du Bois asserted that "the chief reason for voting for Thomas is that he is a Socialist." Thomas advocated the distribution of wealth "on a basis of reason, need and desert" rather than "chance and the rule of the strong.... I do not pretend to know as to just how this can be accomplished but I insist that we must try to do it and then try again. Sometimes in the past I have voted the Socialist ticket because it indicated successful effort. Sometimes I have voted otherwise in the hope of more practical and immediate gain, as in the case of Wilson's first administration." But this year the SP platform "is the only platform before [the] American people that has common sense or justice, reason or hope, written into it."[77]
Du Bois, however, endorsed the SP at a time when his support could have no effect. By 1928 the SP was but a shadow of its former self. Even if all blacks had supported the SP, this would not have bolstered its fortunes; and in 1928 Du Bois's endorsement swayed few, if any, Afro-American votes. Even after the Great Depression, and the resultant upsurge of radicalism among both races, the SP remained moribund, never even approaching its record of 1912. Afro-Americans suffered from a major problem that afflicted white workers: huge numbers bolted their traditional political and economic loyalties at one time or another, but their rebellion was diffuse, uncoordinated, and of little effect. Had all whites (and blacks) who supported radical political and economic action at some time in the years 1912-1928 supported it at any one specific time, they would have comprised a mass whose power would have demanded recognition. However, blacks, like whites, remained always divided; as some moved left others became more conservative. Only when world-historical events beyond the control or foresight of white and black workers (the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II) disrupted the jobs, families, and lives of black and white workers, could workers of both races make modest advances, both separately and together. In 1928, the prospects for any form of political, economic, or cultural advance in the United States appeared virtually nil. Du Bois's endorsement of the SP was no more futile than any other option available to him or anyone else. For blacks (as for white workers or women) there was indeed "No Exit" in the 1920s.
Indeed, it is symbolic of the tragic divisions afflicting African-American intellectuals that while Du Bois was embracing socialism and class-conscious activism, Harrison, who had pioneered this approach, increasingly focused on a vapid, unrealistic racial unity that downplayed class. Moreover, Harrison's own vituperative attacks on Harlem life and black leaders sorely undermined his own calls for unity.
Shortly before his premature death in 1928, Harrison was boosting yet another short-lived organization, the International Colored Unity League [ICUL], and another ephemeral (two issues) periodical, The Voice of the Negro. Harrison now rejected unity of "thought and ideas" among African Americans as impossible and undesirable; unanimity was possible only "in the graveyard." The ICUL welcomed "all those of Negro blood, however diverse their purposes, provided those purposes be good." More specifically, it advocated black economic self-help in vague terms that could appeal to the followers of Washington, Garvey, and Du Bois. More controversially, Harrison demanded "a Negro homeland in America.... where we can work out the ultimate economic and racial salvation as a part of the American people."[78] (This idea had a spectacular future; incorporated as a centerpiece of the Communist party program, it both energized and alienated blacks for decades before being abandoned.)[79] At the same time, Harrison directly attacked both the goal and method of a major 1920s NAACP project, a federal antilynching law. Lynching, Harrison proclaimed, "can never be stopped by wasting money on 'publicity', whether that publicity takes the form of fervid appeals to a moral sense which exists only on paper, or bombastic ravings. Neither can lynching be stopped by national legislation." If the United States would not enforce the Reconstruction amendments, "what chance has any mere Congressional enactment?" The tone and content of this pronouncement, added to Harrison's inflammatory attacks on the Harlem intelligentsia, surely alienated most black leaders. Perhaps that is why the ICUL advertised itself, in a fashion redolent of the CP's "united front from below," as aimed at the Negro masses rather than leaders. Harrison extolled "those of our poor brothers and sisters who are despised and rejected of men" as "the real tests of our theories of brotherhood and racial solidarity."[80]
Harrison ended his life in the same poverty he had lived it, eking out some income as a lecturer for the New York School Board and some as an itinerant speaker for, among other organizations, the ICUL. His life was, in some sense, a personal triumph even if a political failure. Though Harrison never achieved his dream of retiring from the nitty-gritty of journalism and focusing on the criticism of life, he did spend most of his existence reading and commenting upon philosophy, literature, history, and sociology. Lacking personal financial resources, he availed himself of New York's literary and cultural treasures, and forged himself into a world-class "organic intellectual" whose range of expertise surpassed that of most credentialed scholars. Indeed, his lack of formal academic training and responsibilities may have liberated his intellect from the deadening weight of conventional wisdoms and helped generate his thought's dazzling originality and universal scope. More than an infinitesimal minority of his time (or any time), Harrison punctured the almost universally-embraced illusions of his day. He lived by his own script. He attempted, and to the limit of realistic possibility attained, a free life in a slave society--a life of integrity and justice in a society whose very basis was, and remains, murder, torture, and oppression.
Harrison ended his life on a rare note of peace with himself and the society to which he had emigrated many years before. Looking upon a world dominated by white imperialists, Harrison averred that he would have dedicated his life to the fight against injustice wherever he had lived. Many Americans of both races were hypocritical and vacuous, but others were intelligent and egalitarian. Harrison even believed that he perceived a gradual improvement in race relations. Happiness and meaning resided in the struggle for truth and justice, rather than their attainment:
I have had to contend against black, white, and colored people for my place in the sun, and often I have found the whites eager to extend me welcome and recognition where Negroes have not.... Looking the whole scene over, I am more in love with America than with any other place on earth. I have found here the full measure of manhood not in a nice, fat place prepared for me, but in the opportunity to battle for any place.... We are the participants in the greatest democratic experiment that the world has ever seen. It is not the American of today that fascinates me, but the American which is evolving out of it.... We will not expect anything to be given to us, but mean to fight for what we want.[81]
Notes:
[1] "DB, "Returning Soldiers," TC, May 1919.
[2] ibid.
[3] ibid.
[4] ibid.
[5] Jordan, Black Newspapers, 138.
[6] DB, Editorial, "Our Success and Failure," TC, July 1919.
[7] DB, "An Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War," TC, June 1919.
[8] DB, "Let Us Reason Together," TC, September 1919.
[9] E. Franklin Frazier, "The Negro and Non-Resistance," TC, March 1924.
[10] E. Franklin Frazier (with a comment by Du Bois), "The Negro and Non-Resistance," TC, June 1924.
[11] DB, Editorial, "President Harding and Social Equality," TC, December 1921. Du Bois praised those aspects of the speech demanding political and economic rights for blacks. Du Bois had previously said that a ban on intermarriage implied that blacks were tainted and inferior; interfered with the freedom of adults to marry whoever they please; and left Negro women unprotected from white lechers. Blacks oppose anti-miscegenation bills "not because we are anxious to marry white men's sisters, but because they are determined that white men shall let our sisters alone." DB, "Intermarriage," TC, February 1913.
[12] DB, Editorial, "President Harding and Social Equality," TC, December 1921.
[13] DB, "Correspondence," TC, March 1926. Du Bois was responding to the query of the president of a woman's club in Nebraska, who found his published statements on intermarriage confusing.
[14] DB, "The Damnation of Women," in DB, Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil (New York, 1969), 163-186. This book of essays was originally published in 1920.
[15] ibid.
[16] ibid.
[17] DB, "The Immediate Program of the American Negro," TC, April 1915; DB, "We Come of Age," TC, November 1915; DB, "The Crisis and the NAACP," TC, November 1915.
[18] DB, Editorial, "White Co-Workers," TC, May 1920.
[19] ibid.
[20] ibid.
[21] DB, "Africa," TC, February 1919.
[22] DB, "Reconstruction and Africa," TC, February 1919.
[23] DB, "Not 'Separatism,'" TC, February 1919.
[24] ibid.
[25] "The Pan-African Congress," (compiled from reports by Du Bois), TC, April 1919; Lewis, Du Bois, 564.
[26] DB, Editorial, "To the World: Manifesto of the Second Pan-African Congress," TC, November 1921.
[27] ibid.
[28] ibid.
[29] ibid.
[30] ibid.
[31] Jessie Fauset, "Impressions of the Second Pan-African Congress," TC, November 1921.
[32] DB, "The League of Nations," TC, May 1919; DB, "The Black Majority," TC, September 1919.
[33] Lewis, Du Bois, 564-568.
[34] DB, "Marcus Garvey," TC, December 1920; DB, "Marcus Garvey," TC, January 1921.
[35] DB, "Marcus Garvey," TC, December 1920; DB, "Marcus Garvey," TC, January 1921; DB, "A Lunatic or a Traitor," TC, May 1924.
[36] DB, "The Black Star Line," TC, September 1922; DB, "A Lunatic or a Traitor," TC, May 1924.
[37] DB, "Labor Omnia Vincit," TC, September 1919. For other criticisms of the AFL see "Unions and Scabs," TC, October 1920, and "Page Mr. Gompers," TC, November 1923. For Du Bois's hopes, see "The Negro and the Labor Union: An NAACP Report," TC, September 1919; DB, "New Aspects of the Labor Movement," TC, July 1922.
[38] DB, "The IWW," TC, June 1919. Du Bois was responding to criticisms of an earlier editorial which had in passing criticized the IWW; in response Du Bois said that he had not written the editorial and that it was perhaps "partially misleading."
[39] "To the AFL," TC, August 1924.
[40] "The New Crisis," TC, May 1925.
[41] DB, "Black and White Workers," TC, March 1928.
[42] DB, "Our Economic Future," TC, May 1928.
[43] DB, "Cooperation," TC, July 1928 lists his (scanty) achievements in promoting cooperatives.
[44] DB, "Radicals," TC, December 1919; "The Negro and Radical Thought," TC, July 1921; DB, "The Drive," TC, May 1921.
[45] "The Negro and Radical Thought," TC, July 1921.
[46] ibid.
[47] ibid.
[48] DB, "The Class Struggle," TC, August 1921.
[49] ibid.
[50] ibid.
[51] "Socialism and the Negro," TC, October 1921. For the full text of Owens's letter see Aptheker, The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois (Amherst, 1997) I, 251-254. The passage with the phrase "Utopian fantasy" was omitted from the portion printed in the Crisis, but did not alter the fundamental meaning of the letter except insofar as it condemned in advance Du Bois's response.
[52] "Socialism and the Negro," TC, October 1921.
[53] ibid.
[54] ibid. See "Radicals and the Negro" (TC, March 1925) for more complaints about white radicals' neglect of Afro-American issues. Du Bois noted that although white radicals belittled Negro grievances, they howled with anger if they suffered any scintilla of much lesser oppressions.
[55] CM, "Soviet Russia and the Negro," TC, December 1923; CM, "Soviet Russia and the Negro," TC, January 1924. McKay emphasized that Russians of all political persuasions, not merely the Bolsheviks, cared about the plight of the Afro-Americans.
[56] DB Editorial, "The Black Man and Labor," TC, December 1925.
[57] Abram Harris, "Lenin Casts His Shadow Upon Africa," TC, April 1926. In "Black Communists in Dixie" (OPP, August 1925), Harris had recounted a racist incident in a southern Communist local. Although Harris implied that the event was recent, the details make it clear that it had occurred in 1919-1920, at the very outset of the Communist movement.
[58] DB, "Russia, 1926," TC, November 1926; DB, "My Recent Journey," TC, December 1926.
[59] DB, "Judging Russia," TC, February 1927.
[60] ibid.
[61] ibid.
[62] ibid.
[63] DB, "War and Peace," TC, September 1927; DB, "The Pan-African Congress," TC, October 1927.
[64] DB, "Bolshevism," TC, August 1927; "The Browsing Reader," TC, May 1928; "Communists," TC, September 1928. The CP's resolution criticized A. Philip Randolph for endorsing Al Smith, and the SP for supporting AFL racism.
[65] DB, "A New Party," TC, February 1920; DB, "The Political Conventions," TC, August 1920; DB, "How Shall We Vote," TC, September 1920.
[66] DB, "How Shall We Vote," TC, September 1920; McKinney, "The Election Comes," TC, October 1920; DB, "The Unreal Campaign," TC, December 1920.
[67] Crosswaith to Du Bois, July 2, 1923, in Aptheker, Correspondence, I, 267-270.
[68] ibid.
[69] Du Bois to Crosswaith, July 10, 1923, in Aptheker, Correspondence, I, 270-271.
[70] "Public Announcement of the 15th Annual Conference [of the NAACP], TC, August 1924. James Weldon Johnson felt compelled to deny (Letter to George Cannon, TC, January 1925) that the NAACP had as an organization endorsed the Progressive party; but he added that he himself thought that party a positive step in the right direction.
[71] DB, "La Follette," TC, August 1924; DB, "The NAACP and Parties," TC, September 1924; DB, "The Election," TC, December 1924. William Pickens, a moderate NAACP official, condemned the Progressive party's deliberate neglect of the KKK issue and praised the SP (a part of the Progressive party coalition) for meeting separately, condemning the KKK, and demanding justice for blacks in the unions. "In this one example of courage and consistency, the Socialists therefore hold the palm among all party groups," Pickens said. Pickens, "Progressive Political Action," TC, September 1924.
[72] DB, "Elections," TC, January 1927.
[73] DB, "The Negro Politician," TC, May 1928.
[74] "An Appeal to America," TC, December 1928. This appeal was issued during the last weeks of the campaign.
[75] ibid.
[76] DB, "The Campaign of 1928," TC, December 1928.
[77] DB, "How Shall We Vote?," TC, October 1928; DB contribution to symposium, "How Shall We Vote?," TC, November 1928.
[78] HHH, "Program and Principles of the Colored Unity League," The Voice of the Negro, April 1927, in HHHR, 399-402.
[79] Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (New York, 1984), provides an excellent account of the trajectory and impact of the "Negro Nation" concept in the 1930s.
[80] HHH, "How to End Lynching," Boston Chronicle, June 28, 1924, in HHHR 270-271; HHHR, "The Common People," Boston Chronicle, May 17, 1924, in HHHR 404-405.
[81] "Hubert H. Harrison Answers Malliet," Pittsburgh Courier, October 22, 1927.
Upon his return home, Du Bois penned "Returning Soldiers," which set the tone for his renewed militancy. However, Du Bois stubbornly insisted that the unconditional support offered the Wilson administration and the United States in "Close Ranks" had been fully justified. Indeed, Du Bois both defended his war-time role and displaced responsibility for all debacles on "vindictive fate" and "the world's madness."[1]
"We are returning from war!" Du Bois began--ignoring the simple fact that he had spent the war years comfortably at home. Ludicrously equating his voluntary journalistic efforts with the horrors inflicted on conscripts, he proclaimed that "the Crisis and tens of thousands of black men were drafted into a great struggle." Du Bois claimed that "we fought gladly and to the last drop of blood" (Du Bois referred to other people's blood) for "bleeding France" and America's highest ideals. However, Du Bois conceded that African Americans had also, and he said unavoidably, fought for a racist administration and nation. "For the America that represents and gloats in lynching, disfranchisement, caste, brutality, and devilish insult--for this, in the hateful upturning and mixing of things, we were forced by vindictive fate to fight also."[2]
Du Bois then listed the traditional NAACP causes to which he returned. Ignoring his wartime claims that German crimes were unprecedented, he reiterated his oft-repeated view that "lynching is a barbarism of a degree of contemptible nastiness unparalleled in human history." (Massacres of blacks were increasing in number and ferocity even as he wrote). Du Bois continued, "Disfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white." The United States "cheats us out of our land; it cheats us out of our labor. It confiscates our savings. It reduces our wages. It steals our profit. It taxes us without representation. It keeps us consistently and universally poor, and then feeds us on charity and derides our poverty."[3] Du Bois then thundered:
This is the country to which we Soldiers of Democracy return. This is the fatherland for which we fought. But it is our fatherland. It was right for us to fight. The faults of our country are our faults. Under similar circumstances, we would fight again. But by the God of Heaven, we are cowards and jackasses if, now that the war is over, we do not marshal every ounce of our brain and brawn to fight a sterner, longer, more unbending battle against the forces of hell in our own land.
We return.
We return from fighting.
We return fighting.
Make way for Democracy! We save it in France, and by the Great Jehovah, we will save it in the United States of America, or know the reason why.[4]
Du Bois never explained--he obviously could not explain--why he asserted that lynching, disfranchisement, Jim Crow, peonage, and other horrors were "our" (meaning Afro-Americans') faults. Nor did he repudiate his wartime accomodationism. Despite this, "Returning Soldiers" was a call for renewed struggle. As such, it evoked the wrath of the secret police; the Post Office held up the May Crisis for six days before releasing it for delivery.[5]
While attending the Paris Peace Conference, Du Bois had learned about the degradation and abuse inflicted upon Afro-American soldiers during the war. Although watched by the secret police (who censored his dispatches and extorted a promise that he would not criticize the allies), Du Bois on his return home castigated the military's racism, simultaneously emphasizing the positive effects of the war. Afro-American service had "gained the sympathy and respect of France and the civilized world--and what is more important, we gained a new self-respect and a new consciousness of power." Du Bois acknowledged that he had expected discrimination against and abuse of black soldiers, but, in a tone of outraged innocence, claimed that he was shocked beyond measure at their virulence and prevalence. Du Bois documented horrible food, accommodations, health care, and recreational facilities, the brutal treatment of many African-American soldiers, and the racist lies spread about those troops by their officers and the Wilson administration. Speaking of himself in the third person, Du Bois described himself as "utterly amazed and dumbfounded at the revelations poured upon him. He heard of conditions, acts, conspiracies, wholesale oppression and cruelty of which he had no previous inkling." In anguished tones, Du Bois demanded an explanation of "why it was that in this most critical period of the existence of the Negro race, 200,000 of the best blood of our young manhood--men who offered their lives for their people and their country, could be crucified, insulted, degraded and maltreated while their fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers had no adequate knowledge of the real truth."[6] Du Bois documented some of these abuses in his long article, "Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War" in the Crisis, although he omitted some of the more incendiary charges leveled by the radicals.[7]
Du Bois also endorsed self-defense against white terrorists, although he (unlike the radicals) explicitly condemned offensive violence. "When the murderer comes, he shall not strike us in the back," he said; however, "We must not seek reform by violence. We must not seek Vengeance."[8] After the wholesale violence of the immediate post-war years had subsided, Du Bois printed an essay by the rising Afro-American intellectual E. Franklin Frazier. Frazier denounced black pseudo-Christians who praised whites but secretly hated them, and who sanctimoniously worshipped Jesus even while ignoring his hatred of injustice. Frazier asserted that
Their deploring of hatred and praise of love is as superficial as [it is] despicable. Hatred may have a positive moral value. A few choice souls may rise to a moral elevation where they can love those who oppress them. But the mass of mankind either become accommodated to an enforced inferior status with sentiments consonant with their situation, or save themselves by hating the oppression and the oppressors. In the latter case, hatred is a positive moral force. So if hatred is necessary to prevent the Negro from becoming accommodated to his present state, how can anyone preach love?
Frazier concluded that "the Negro does not want love. He wants justice."[9]
The Crisis received letters denouncing this article, and Frazier defended his stance in a fashion that Du Bois endorsed as "eminently clear and sound." Frazier conceded that wholesale, systematic violence could not achieve the Negro's goals, but asserted that violence in specific situations would win respect. Japan had demonstrated this. Frazier praised those who could save themselves from the contagion of hatred without violent resistance, but he asserted that nonviolence was futile in the United States, a nation more barbarous even than the British Empire:
I believe it would be better for the Negro's soul to be seared with hate than dwarfed by self-abasement.... Suppose there should arise a Gandhi to lead Negroes without hate in their hearts to stop tilling the fields of the South under the peonage system; to cease paying taxes to States that keep their children in ignorance; and to ignore the iniquitous disfranchisement and Jim Crow laws. I fear we would witness an unprecedented massacre of defenseless black men and women in the name of Law and Order and there would scarcely be enough Christian sentiment in America to stay the flow of blood.[10]
The re-radicalized Du Bois also addressed the "social equality" bugaboo. The Crisis had once previously opposed anti-miscegenation laws because they encouraged white male predation on black women; but it generally shied away from this explosive issue until President Harding's infamous Birmingham speech, which posited an eternal difference between the races and opposed intermarriage, pushed the issue of "social equality" to the forefront once again. If "social equality" connoted free and voluntary association, Du Bois said, it was a prerequisite of civilization; construed as forced association, it was advocated by no sane person. No one, Du Bois said, claimed a right to invite himself to another man's dinner table. In condemning social equality, Harding must have advocated the separation of the races, a doctrine which branded Theodore Roosevelt's dinner with Booker T. Washington a crime. Harding proclaimed that "racial amalgamation there cannot be," but as a matter of historical fact such amalgamation had occurred and doubtless would continue. If Harding meant only that he opposed interracial sex, he should have said so.
And if he had said so, 99 percent of the Negroes would agree with him. We have not asked for amalgamation; we have resisted it. It has been forced on us by brute strength, ignorance, poverty, degradation and fraud. It is the white race, roaming the world, that has left its trail of bastards and outraged women and then raised holy hands to heaven and deplored "race mixture." No, we are not demanding and do not want amalgamation, but the reasons are ours and not yours.... It is because no real men accept any alliance except on terms of absolute equal regard and because we are abundantly satisfied with our own race and blood. And at the same time we say and as free men must say that whenever two human beings of any nation or race desire each other in marriage, the denial of their legal right to marry is not simply wrong--it is lewd.[11]
Du Bois contrasted two incompatible quotes from Harding's speech: one urging that blacks be good black men rather than imitation white men, the other deploring divisive class, race, and group consciousness. But forced segregation, Du Bois pointed out, inculcated group consciousness. Opposing his own integrationist universalism to Harding's racial essentialism, Du Bois said that "When Warren Harding or any white man comes to teach Negroes pride of race, we answer that our pride is our business and not theirs, and a thing they would better fear than evoke: For the day that Black men love Black men simply because they are Black, is the day they will hate White men simply because they are White."[12]
Du Bois defended, but did not recommend, intermarriage. He believed that so-called "races" periodically intermarried and generated a new "race"; therefore, "no race is permanent in its physical or mental characteristics." Most individuals would find their "greatest happiness and the greatest chance to do their best work if they marry within their own racial group." There were many individual exceptions to this rule, however, and any sane adult should demand the freedom to marry any other consenting adult. Du Bois went further in denigrating interracial marriage, however, asserting that the "self-respect" of any ostracized group demanded that it "minimize as far as possible any intermarriage with the group that assumes superiority." Furthermore--in a remark particularly applicable to Jews--Du Bois allowed that in many cases a particular racial group "working together and intermarrying [within itself]" has made "peculiar contributions to civilization" of lasting value; any such group may justly "confine its marriages to its own members so far as it does not seek also to insult other groups or deny them the same rights."[13]
About this same time, on the eve of the suffrage victory, Du Bois, who had always championed votes for women, penned a passionate plea for the sexual and economic equality. In "The Damnation of Women" he said that "the future woman must have a life work and economic independence. She must have knowledge. She must have the right of motherhood at her own discretion.... The uplift of woman is, next to the color line and the peace movement, our greatest modern cause. When, now, two of these movements--woman and color--combine in one, the combination has deep meaning." Du Bois denounced the custom by which women were judged only by their appearence, and treated merely as pets and breeding machines; he thundered against "the bestiality of free manhood" based upon enslaved womanhood. "Not in guarding the weak in weakness do we gain strength," he said, "but by making weakness free and strong." [14]
Although Du Bois ignored the role of black men in oppressing their sisters, he presciently addressed many of the particular problems afflicting black women. He sadly remarked that "the world that wills to worship womankind studiously forgets its darker sisters... these daughters of sorrow." He perceptively analyzed the chasm between the American ideal of the "sheltered harem with the mother... as nurse and homemaker" and the harsh realities of Afro-American women's economic and sexual exploitation by white men. Black men, devastated by low wages, intermittent work, and high unemployment, could not support their families, whereas Afro-American women often worked for wages. This resulted in greater freedom for black women, but also in high illegitmacy rates and broken families. Black women were denied even "the almost mocking homage" of chivalry. Considered ugly by white American culture, they had escaped the degrading impact of the cult of beauty. "Not being expected to be merely ornamental, they have girded themselves for work, instead of adorning their bodies only for play.... So some few women are born free, and some admist insult and scarlet letters achieve freedom; but our women in black had freedom thrust contemptuously upon them. With that freedom they are buying an untrammeled independence and dear as is the price they pay for it, it will in the end be worth every taunt and groan." In her independence and resilient courage, the Afro-American woman embodied "revolutionary ideals, which must in time have vast influence on the thought and action of this land."[15]
Du Bois's radical insights were truly remarkable for their time; few male Afro-American radicals so eloquently addressed women's specific oppressions. Unfortunately, Du Bois's comments were atypical even for him; he, too, usually ignored the specificities of Afro-American female oppression. Even in "The Damnation of Women" he extolled the Aframerican women's "dark and mysterious beauty of midnight eyes," their "modesty and womanliness," and their "sweetly feminine" qualities.[16]
Addressing another sensitive issue, Du Bois defended the NAACP and the Crisis from Afro-radical imputations of white finance and control. As early as 1915 Du Bois had exulted "that most of the money that supports the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People comes from black hands; a still larger proportion must so come, and we must not only support but control this and similar organizations and hold them unwaveringly to our objects, our aims and our ideals." Du Bois recurrently insisted that the Crisis was mainly self-supporting, the NAACP contributing only the editor's (Du Bois's) salary. In November 1915 he proudly announced that even this subsidy was no longer needed.[17]
Du Bois's most sustained defense of the NAACP against the charge of white domination occurred in 1920. Du Bois extolled the achievements of the NAACP and pointed out that almost eighty thousand of its ninety thousand members were black. Afro-Americans also dominated most offices and committees. Du Bois eloquently asserted that the NAACP embodied its own principles, and was itself a microcosm of the interracial world it advocated. "The Association is not an exclusively Negro organization. We do not believe in the color line against either white or black. The NAACP is a union of American citizens of all colors and races who believe that Democracy in America is a failure if it proscribes Negroes" in any area of life.
We do not believe that the time has come, or will ever come, when we will not need the help of white Americans. To bar them from our organization would be a monstrous discrimination; it would advertise the fact that we can not or will not work with white people. If this is true, what are we doing in America or indeed in the modern world? What are we fighting for, if it not the chance to stand with our white fellows, side by side and hand in hand, and fight for right?[18]
The NAACP embodied its interracial ideal: "What we have thus accomplished in the NAACP is a sample of what we aim to accomplish in the nation and the world." White racism may sometimes require that blacks pursue separate development, but this "is not our present aim and we cannot consistently or effectively at the same time pursue both" separatism and integration. "We cannot refuse to cooperate with white Americans and simultaneously demand the right to cooperate!" Blacks could ask for white cooperation "only as we are willing to work for a world democracy of all men. If we wish in hatred or in selfishness to work simply for ourselves--if we envision a future policy of up black, down white--we... invite the bitter opposition of the world; we invite race conflict of the oldest, cruelest sort; we deny and seek to crucify humanity even as our oppressors have done in time gone."[19]
Du Bois said that NAACP members champion "Negro blood and Negro genius; they seek, in voluntary unions, to develop a new Negro ethos--a music, a literature, a school of art and thought; but they will do this as freemen in a free democracy, joining wholeheartedly with their fellows of all colors whenever that freedom is menaced. Not narrow, excluding, other-hating particularism, but broad, sympathetic, all-embracing nationalism is our aim and spirit." Du Bois indignantly protested that "in the midst of this endeavor our own people accuse us of having white members and white fellow-officers."[20]
As the Allies pondered the fate of Germany's African colonies and their thirteen million inhabitants, Du Bois confronted the problems and opportunities posed by Afro-American attitudes toward Africa. Although the victorious Allies wanted these colonies for themselves--either as outright plunder or as League of Nations mandates--Du Bois demanded that they should be placed "under the guidance of organized civilization" and prepared for self-government. Du Bois noted that Europeans had committed atrocities in Africa that far exceeded the worst crimes of the natives. Foreshadowing more recent ideas concerning multiculturalism, Du Bois asked "Is a civilization naturally backward because it is different?" He answered that "the culture indigenous to a country, its folk-customs, its art, all this must have free scope or there is no such thing as freedom in the world."[21] Implicit in his proposals, however, lurked the assumption that the Africans were not presently equipped for full self-government, but required the tutelage of white Europeans or the Western intelligentsia of the African diaspora.
In early 1919, before Garvey's UNIA had attained great prominence, Du Bois mentioned some advantages that "the concept that Africa is for Africans" would confer upon Afro-Americans. African autonomy would afford "a chance for the colored American to emigrate and to go as a pioneer to a country which must, sentimentally at least, possess for him the same fascination as England does for Indian-born Englishmen."[22] Du Bois cautioned that Africa was in some ways an "inhospitable land" and reminded his readers that
We are Americans.... There is nothing so indigenous, so completely "made in America" as we. It is as absurd to talk of a return to Africa, merely because that was our home 300 years ago, as it would be to expect the members of the Caucasian race to return to the fastnesses of the Caucasus Mountains from which, it is reputed, they sprung.
But.... the African movement means to us what the Zionist movement must mean to the Jews, the centralization of race effort and the recognition of a racial fount.[23]
The redemption of Africa, far from detracting from the fight for equality at home, was part and parcel of that struggle. The liberation of Africa would aid in the liberation of "colored peoples throughout the world."[24]
Du Bois initiated the Pan-African Congress (PAC) out of concern for the fate of the ex-German colonies. The first PAC demanded the cultivation of "racial genius," free education for each African in his or her native language and that of the trustee nation, and government-provided medical care. Some of its proposals, however, clearly indicated a paternalistic condescension toward the Africans. For example, the PAC demanded that "the land and natural resources shall be held in trust for the Natives" who shall have "effective ownership" only of "as much land as they can profitably develop." Self-government would be allowed only "to the extent that their development permits." Finally, equal rights were demanded only for "civilized Negroes," by which Du Bois and his colleagues (many of whom were officials of the white colonial governments) undoubtedly meant Westernized Africans. Indeed, en route to Paris, Du Bois had urged that "the actual government [of his proposed state in Central Africa] should use both colored and white officials and later natives should be worked in."[25]
The resolutions of the second PAC, written by Du Bois, echoed many of these condescensions. Du Bois openly avowed his contention--reminiscent of his "talented tenth" elitism and his much later CP vanguardism--that "for the purpose of raising [the backward and suppressed groups of mankind] to intelligence, self-knowledge and self-control, their intelligentsia of right ought to be recognized as the natural leaders of their groups." The delegates resented treating "civilized men as uncivilized" and "disfranchis[ing] the intelligent." Although Du Bois demanded for Africans "freedom in their own religion and social customs, and with the right to be different and non-conformist," his entire pronouncement reeked of Euro-centrism. Incredibly, after recounting the holocaust that European invaders had inflicted on Africans for centuries (and were yet inflicting), Du Bois nevertheless acknowledged as "fact" that Abyssinia, Haiti, and Santo Domingo were "behind the most advanced civilization of the day."[26] Even more fantastically, Du Bois believed that enlightened white Europeans could oversee African development in the interests of the Africans themselves. He even complained that the United States had "asked and allowed thousands of black men to offer up their lives as a sacrifice to the country which despised and despises them," forgetting that he himself had urged such self-sacrifice without any compensatory granting of elementary rights.[27]
However deluded his concrete proposals, Du Bois displayed stark realism regarding the contemporary situation in Africa. The relations between the main groups of humanity were
determined chiefly by the degree in which one can subject the other to its service, enslaving labor, making ignorance compulsory, uprooting ruthlessly religion and customs, and destroying government, so that the favored Few may luxuriate in the toil of the tortured Many. Science, Religion and Philanthropy have thus been made the slaves of world commerce and industry, and bodies, minds, souls of Fiji and Congo, are judged almost solely by the quotations on the Bourse.[28]
The contending classes in the developed world could never resolve their problems "as long as a similar and vastly greater problem of poverty and injustice marks the relations of the whiter and darker peoples." Contradicting his famous statement that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line," Du Bois asserted that "the great modern problem is to correct maladjustment in the distribution of wealth." However, "the basic maladjustment is in the outrageously unjust distribution of world income between the dominant and suppressed peoples; in the rape of land and raw material, and monopoly of technique and culture. And in this crime white labor is particeps criminis with white capital." White workers, through self-interest and delusion, overwhelmingly voted for "imperialistic schemes to enslave and debauch black, brown and yellow labor, until with fatal retribution, they are themselves today bound and gagged and rendered impotent" by the "dominant, cruel and irresponsible few." Rejecting his previous strategy of alliance with an educated and moral white elite, Du Bois lamented that "the educated and cultured of the world, the well-born and well-bred, and even the deeply pious and philanthropic, receive their training and comfort and luxury, the ministrations of delicate beauty and sensibility, on condition that they neither inquire into the real source of their income and the methods of distribution or interfere with the legal props which rest on a pitiful human foundation of writhing white and yellow and brown and black bodies."[29]
With his usual rhetorical flourish (which concealed rather than elucidated meanings and problems), Du Bois concluded that "the answer [to our plea] is written in the stars."[30] However, Jessie Fauset (the literary editor of the Crisis), provided some telling details of the obstacles posed by white colonialist governments and their black kapos. As one example, M. Diagne, a high black official of the French government, postponed "the few paragraphs about capitalism" for consideration by the next PAC.[31]
Du Bois and the PAC presented their resolutions to the League of Nations, an institution vehemently opposed by most radicals. Du Bois, however (once again adumbrating a much later Afro-American strategy), editorialized that the League was "absolutely necessary to the salvation of the Negro race. Unless we have some super-national power to curb the anti-Negro policy of the United States and South Africa, we are doomed eventually to fight for our rights." The League would immediately include the free black republics and sympathize with the larger currents of civilization muted in the United States by Southern power. "What we cannot accomplish before the choked conscience of America, we have an infinitely better chance to accomplish before the organized Public Opinion of the World.... The refusal to adopt the Japanese race equality amendment is deplorable, but it is an argument for and not against a Nation of Nations." Du Bois was gleeful when a racist Missouri Senator quoted this editorial as a reason for opposing U.S. entry into the League. Du Bois echoed Garvey in his assertion that "the white world will be so busy fighting and hating itself during the next century that it will have scant leisure to keep black folk in their place."[32]
Du Bois's views on Africa did not, therefore, differ in principle from those of Garvey. Recognizing actual power relationships, however, Du Bois willingly cooperated with the white colonial governments, without whose permission the Pan-African Congresses would have been impossible. Garvey demanded the overthrow of those governments by armed force, a dream no more utopian than Du Bois's chimerical hope that they could be moved by moral suasion. Both Du Bois and Garvey claimed that they, Westernized blacks of the diaspora, could represent millions of Africans who had never heard of either of them, much less elected them as their representatives. The PAC no more represented genuine Africans than did the UNIA; indeed, the PAC far more deeply expressed the fact and ideology of European colonialism. Blaise Diagne, one of the PAC's leading lights, was, although himself of African extraction, absolutely loyal to white France and its "civilizing mission," in whose name he lorded over a huge swath of black Africa. (While Du Bois was "closing ranks" with the Wilson administratin, Diagne was raising almost a million troops and laborers for the French war effort.) Like Garvey, Du Bois had scant concept of the vast array of cultures that flourished in Africa; his proposed Central African republic ignored cultural boundaries as well as political realities.[33]
Du Bois's relations with Garvey followed his usual practice of ignoring his major critics and competitors. Although he privately criticized the UNIA and the BSL, Du Bois did not mention Garvey in the pages of the Crisis until late 1920, after the epochal second UNIA Convention rendered further silence impossible. In December 1920 and January 1921, Du Bois ran a two-part article on Garvey and the UNIA that mixed theoretical praise with practical damnation. Du Bois, indeed, tentatively endorsed the theory behind Garvey's black commercial enterprises. "Shorn of its bombast and exaggeration, the main lines of the Garvey plan are perfectly feasible," Du Bois claimed. "What he is trying to say and do is this: American Negroes can, by accumulating and ministering their own capital, organize industry, join the black centers of the south Atlantic by commercial enterprise and in this way ultimately redeem Africa as a fit and free home for black men. This is true. It is feasible," but only as race-wide enterprise over decades, not as a one-man instant project. "It will call for every ounce of ability, knowledge, experience and devotion in the whole Negro race," Du Bois concluded.[34]
However, Du Bois sharply criticized Garvey for his autocratic rule, extravagant promises of riches, absurd Napoleonic boasts of expelling the British from Africa, and shoddy financial practices. He accused Garvey of creating "more bitter color enmity inside the race than has ever before existed," of opposing the Afro-American crusade for civil rights, and of slandering, suing, and violently assaulting his critics. His failure, Du Bois said, "would be a calamity. Garvey is the beloved leader of tens of thousands of poor and bewildered people who have been cheated all their lives. His failure would mean a blow to their faith, and a loss of their little savings, which it would take generations to undo.... American Negro leaders are not jealous of Garvey--they are not envious of his success; they are simply afraid of his failure, for his failure would be theirs." Garvey threatened "with bankruptcy and disaster one of the most interesting spiritual movements of the modern Negro world." Du Bois later claimed that after these articles (which, in an outright misrepresentation, he called "favorable") appeared, Garvey's minions had deluged him with obscene letters and threatened him with death.[35]
Du Bois remained publicly distant from the radical attack on Garvey. Only after the bankruptcy of the Black Star Line (and Garvey's transparent lies about its financial condition) did Du Bois attack Garvey and his steamship line in a long article that quoted much court testimony. Although NAACP attorneys helped draft the notorious letter of eight Afro-American leaders to Attorney General Daugherty attacking Garvey, Du Bois vented his full fury only in May 1924, after Garvey had been convicted of mail fraud. His article, "A Lunatic or a Traitor" described Garvey as "the most dangerous enemy of the Negro race in America and in the world" and an "open ally of the Ku Klux Klan [who] should be locked up or sent home."[36]
In the 1920s Du Bois moved left, even as government and corporate terrorism decimated progressive industrial and political organizations. By the onset of the Great Depression he had almost abandoned hopes of rapprochement with white labor as represented by the AFL; advocated a "group economy" based on black cooperative enterprises; endorsed third parties in general and the SP in particular; and extravagantly praised the Soviet Union, even while remaining skeptical about American Communists. Du Bois, therefore, ended the 1920s as isolated as he had begun them (although for a directly opposite reason), and had clearly enunciated the positions that would cause his virtual expulsion from the NAACP in 1934.
Du Bois's attitudes toward the AFL fluctuated in the 1920s as they had in earlier decades. He grasped at every hint of an AFL overture toward blacks, but recoiled when the AFL's racist deeds belied egalitarian words. In 1919 Du Bois asserted that if white workers could enslave the black worker "they probably would; but since he can underbid their wage, they slowly and reluctantly invite him into the union. But can they bring themselves inside the Union to regard him as a man--a fellow-voter, a brother?" Du Bois sadly concluded "no--not yet. And there lies the most stupendous labor problem of the twentieth century--transcending the problem of Labor and Capital, of Democracy, of the Equality of Women--for it is the problem of the Equality of Humanity in the world as against white domination of black and brown and yellow serfs." At other times, however, Du Bois mustered a faint hope that economic self-interest would drive the AFL toward egalitarianism, whatever its conscious intentions.[37] Although Du Bois praised the IWW as genuinely egalitarian, he did not urge that blacks join; in fact, the Crisis almost totally ignored that radical and egalitarian union.[38]
In August 1924 Du Bois proposed a formal rapprochement between the NAACP and the AFL. Du Bois asserted that although the AFL had for years issued conciliatory statements concerning black labor, almost all black workers remained unorganized because "white union labor does not want black labor" and because "black labor has ceased to beg admittance to union ranks because of its increasing value and efficiency outside the unions.... The Negro is entering the ranks of semi-skilled and skilled labor and he is entering mainly as a 'scab.' He broke the great steel strike. He will soon be in a position to break any strike when he can gain economic advantage for himself." Du Bois asserted that black workers had greatly benefitted from the efforts of organized white workers and that "a blow at organized labor is a blow at all labor.... If there is built up in America a great black bloc of non-union laborers who have a right to hate unions, all laborers, black and white, eventually must suffer." Du Bois proposed an Interracial Labor Commission composed of representatives of the NAACP, the AFL, the railroad brotherhoods, and other labor bodies.[39]
When the AFL ignored Du Bois's overture, the NAACP nevertheless advocated an economic alliance "among the laboring people of the United States across the color line" and promulgated "a practical plan of future cooperation" based on actual history and current conditions.[40] Du Bois listed economic considerations as first among the NAACP's new priorities and pledged that the NAACP would focus on organizing Negro workers for the next three years. This evoked derision from the Messenger, which ridiculed Du Bois for supporting organized labor only when advocating class-based action had become perfectly safe (and ineffectual).
Du Bois was sincere in his new effort. After the three years had elapsed with few accomplishments, however, he despaired, lamenting in 1928 that although the class struggle of the two races was "at bottom the same struggle.... the essential identity of the problem is not recognized either by white workingmen or black." He again asserted that "Black workingmen are the heirs of every effort which the white working masses have made toward freedom," including a widened suffrage, public education, and collective bargaining. "On the other hand, all this story has not been told Negroes and they are not born knowing all about it.... To make the matter worse, both white and black workingmen have come under the sinister influence of the white employer." Du Bois blamed white capitalists for inculcating racism in white workers and telling Negro job applicants that their only opportunity resided in scabbing. Furthermore, white capitalists provided the Negro schools and colleges that white voters refused; such philanthropy was "a tremendous bribe" that made "Negroes hate white fellow workers." Du Bois reminded his readers that this problem was worldwide; "white workers are today as yesterday voting armies and navies to keep China, India, Mexico and Central America in subjection and being paid high wages to do this while 'niggers' and 'dagoes' and 'chinks' starve, slave and die."[41]
Two months later Du Bois strongly endorsed a black "group economy" organized upon cooperative lines. He began by outlining the dismal economic history and prospects of the Negro race. Blacks were excluded from most jobs and unions; chain stores remorselessly destroyed small businesses; farming was in inexorable decline. Only racially based economic cooperatives could surmount both racist exclusion and monopolistic competition and provide a secure economic foundation for the race. Du Bois therefore advocated "manufacturing and consumers cooperation" encompassing the raising and transportation of raw materials, manufacturing, and cooperative stores. "Such an organization.... would insure the economic independence of the American Negro for all time." Such a group economy was necessary because neither of the alternative strategies of allying with whites was realistic:
It is more than idiotic,--it is criminal, for American Negroes to stagger blindly on, hugging the fond illusion that white philanthropy through industrial education, is going to furnish them with future steady employment and economic independence. It is equally idiotic to hope that white laborers will become broad enough or wise enough to make the cause of black labor their own. These things will never be done in our day. Our economic future lies in the hands of carefully trained thinkers, technical engineers, and the unswerving will to sacrifice on the part of intelligent masses.[42]
Cooperative credit and banking institutions could link blacks worldwide into a thriving economic community, Du Bois hoped. Yet he did not specify any practical methods that would further his program, or even indicate a possible beginning. He did call for a convention of cooperatives and their advocates, but his efforts availed little.[43] Although Du Bois's endorsement of black economic nationalism seemed somewhat out of place in the late 1920s, such views did not represent a new departure; Du Bois had earlier endorsed Garvey's similar plan as feasible if properly executed. This issue would precipitate Du Bois's departure from the NAACP in 1934.
As well as advocating a "group economy," Du Bois became more favorable toward the Soviet Union during the 1920s. Skeptical at the outset of the decade when many Afro-Americans saw the Russian Revolution as the harbinger of worldwide class and racial liberation, Du Bois endorsed the Soviet Union and even flirted with the Communists only later in the decade, when most black radicals had grown disenchanted with both.
In late 1919, Du Bois defended the Messenger and the Negro World against Southern attempts at censorship, even while expressing his own disagreement with their views. Du Bois added that "THE CRISIS does not believe in violence as a method of social reform--it does not believe in Revolution, but it does believe in free speech." In July 1921 Claude McKay wrote the Crisis, complaining about a derogatory remark about the Russian Revolution made in passing in the May issue. (Du Bois had referred to "a hoard of scoundrels and bubble-blowers, ready to conquer Africa, join the Russian revolution, and vote in the Kingdom of God tomorrow.") McKay replied that the Bolshevik Revolution, "the greatest event in the history of humanity," had liberated the Jews from centuries of pogroms and oppression. McKay said that a Communist revolution in the United States might similarly liberate blacks and complained that although almost all blacks were workers, the NAACP could not "function as a revolutionary working-class organization."[44]
Du Bois replied that many criticized the NAACP for standing aside from broader currents of reform and suspected that it was intimidated by government surveillance. Du Bois said that "we have but one chief cause--the emancipation of the Negro, and to this all else must be subordinated--not because other questions are not important but because to our mind the most important social question today is recognition of the darker races." He denied sneering at the Bolshevik Revolution, which may prove the greatest event of recent centuries, though its outcome and even its very nature were as yet unknown. Du Bois saw some "splendid results" but "other things which frighten us" and asserted that "the immediate work for the American Negro lies in America and not in Russia." He praised the noble pronouncement of the Third International, repudiating the racism of the Second. "The editor of THE CRISIS considers himself a Socialist but he does not believe that German State Socialism or the dictatorship of the proletariat are perfect panaceas. He believes with most thinking men that the present method of creating, controlling and distributing wealth is desperately wrong" but "he is not prepared to dogmatize with Marx or Lenin."[45]
"How far can the colored people of the world, and particularly the Negroes of the United States, trust the working classes?" Du Bois asked McKay. Many radicals believed "that we have only to embrace the working class program to have the working class embrace ours.... THE CRISIS wishes that this were true, but it is forced to the conclusion that it is not." The Socialist, Communist, and union movements were all infected with racism. Evincing his usual elitism and emphasis on moral suasion, Du Bois said that such racism was not surprising: "Why should we assume on the part of unlettered and suppressed masses of white workers, a clearness of thought, a sense of human brotherhood, that is sadly lacking in the most educated classes?" Du Bois vowed that he would remind the white workers of the world that their darker brothers suffered from identical oppression, would espouse the cause of the white workers insofar as this did not jeopardize black labor, and would respectfully consider the broader programs for social betterment that were agitating the world. He would, however, advocate that blacks scab against white unions that excluded them. "We have an immediate program for Negro emancipation laid down by the NAACP. It is foolish for us to give up this practical program for a mirage in Africa or by seeking to join a revolution which we do not at present understand."[46]
Du Bois continued this discussion in the next Crisis. In an editorial that evoked a sharp rebuke from the Messenger, Du Bois equated revolution with organized murder, denied that Afro-Americans were a part of the working class, and asserted that the class struggle had little relevance for the black community. In a quasi-pacifist outburst surprising from one who had supported the imperialist bloodbath of 1914-1918, Du Bois proclaimed that
The NAACP has been accused of not being a "revolutionary" body. This is quite true. We do not believe in revolution. We expect revolutionary changes in many parts of this life and this world, but we expect these changes to come mainly through reason, human sympathy and the education of children, and not by murder. We know that there have been times when organized murder seemed the only way out of wrong, but we believe those times have been very few, the cost of the remedy excessive, the results as terrible as beneficent, and we gravely doubt if in the future there will be any real recurrent necessity for such upheaval.
Du Bois called for "light, more light; clear thought, accurate knowledge, [and] careful distinctions."[47]
Du Bois also hinted at the social construction of class--the insight that a person's class affiliation depended as much upon human perception as upon so-called "objective" factors:
How far, for instance, does the dogma of "class struggle" apply to black folk in the United States today? Theoretically we are a part of the world proletariat in the sense that we are mainly an exploited class of cheap laborers; but practically we are not a part of the white proletariat and are not recognized by that proletariat to any great extent. We are the victims of their physical oppression, social ostracism, economic exclusion and personal hatred; and when in self defense we seek sheer subsistence we are howled down as "scabs."[48]
Du Bois pointed out that Afro-American capitalists provided essential services for the race. The black capitalists who bought real estate in Harlem were a prime example. Blacks had initially moved into Harlem by paying higher rents than whites; if they looked for housing in white neighborhoods, "the white laborers would have mobbed and murdered them." But white capitalists kept rents high or tried to drive blacks from Harlem.
Manifestly there was only one thing for [the Negro] to do, and that was to buy Harlem; but the buying of real estate calls for capital and credit, and the institutions that deal in capital and credit are capitalist institutions. If now, the Negro had begun to fight capital in Harlem, whose capital was he fighting? If he fought capital as represented by white big real estate interests, he was wise; but he was also just as wise when he fought labor which insisted on segregating him in work and in residence.
If, on the other hand, he fought the accumulating capital in his own group.... then he was slapping himself in his own face. Because either he must furnish capital for the buying of his own home, or rest naked in the slums and swamps.[49]
Du Bois admitted that if a tiny coterie of black capitalists controlled all of the race's capital, "then we are destined to suffer from our own capitalists exactly what we are suffering from the white capitalists today. And while this is not a pleasant prospect, it is certainly no worse than the present actuality." In a striking parallel to Slavophiles and other advocates of distinctive, indigenous modernization, Du Bois hoped that Afro-Americans could show the world a more humane method of economic development based on the history, culture, and values of the blacks themselves. "If... because of our more democratic organization and our widespread inter-class sympathy we can introduce a more democratic control, taking advantage of what the white world is itself doing to introduce industrial democracy, then we may not only escape our present economic slavery but even guide and lead a distrait economic world."[50]
This discussion continued in the October Crisis. John Owens wrote Du Bois criticizing his response to McKay; Du Bois printed long excerpts from Owens's letter with his own reply. Owens said that the basic social changes which Du Bois downplayed might solve the Negro's problems more efficaciously than narrow race-based remedies. He also argued that fundamental economic change would benefit the overwhelming majority of blacks, who were workers, more than "some scheme which offers a questionable solution for the ills of the talented minority." Owens asserted that the vote was no solution for blacks, as it had not greatly benefitted white workers, and suggested that some variety of Socialism offered "a better solution to the problems of the proletariat than any scheme suggested by the exploiting classes.... Surely it is an extreme Utopian fantasy, which would shame a chauvinist, to hope that [fundamental economic transformation] will come about through any change of heart on the part of the possessing classes which will cause them to voluntarily share with the non-possessing masses, black or white." Owens admitted that Du Bois's doubts about the white working class were justified, but asserted that the white capitalists and imperialists were far worse.
Is it the English working classes which are exploiting India, sucking the very life-blood from a starving population and grinding the natives down into the desert dust in order to support English "gentlemen" in idleness and luxury? Are the English, French and Belgian working classes raping Africa, taking ill-gotten gains from a trusting population? Are the working classes of America attempting to fasten the yoke of subjugation upon the neck of Santo Domingo, and stifle liberty and freedom of speech in Haiti?[51]
Du Bois rebutted Owens point by point. He admitted that fundamental, class-based, non-racial changes might improve the Negro's condition, but warned that the Negro "must not assume that because a proposed solution settles many important human problems, for this reason it is necessarily going to settle his." The workers were themselves "through no fault of their own, ignorant, inexperienced men"; their proposals for self-betterment might backfire. Du Bois conceded that voting had not yet altered the economic condition of the workers of either race, but said that workers were learning and that "only through the use of the ballot is real reform in industry and industrial relations coming."[52]
Many Socialist and even Bolshevik proposals would vastly improve the world, Du Bois admitted, but "I do not believe that any such adoption can come through war or force or murder, and I do not believe that the sudden attempt to impose a new industrial life can be successful without the long training of human beings." Socialism must be evolutionary, the work of generations; "It is precisely because of our present ignorance and our widespread assumptions as to profit and business that we cannot immediately change the world." Du Bois, again evincing his redoubtable idealism, declared that "the change in industrial organization must come from those who think and believe. We cannot assume that necessarily redemption is coming from those who suffer. It may come from those who enjoy the fruit of suffering, but who come to see that such enjoyment is wrong." Any proposal "must be judged by itself and not by its source."[53]
Finally, Du Bois reiterated his condemnation of a working-class imperialism based upon super-profits, racial conceit, and capitalist hegemony. "I maintain that English working classes are exploiting India; that the English, French and Belgian laborers are raping Africa; that the working classes of America are subjugating Santo Domingo and Haiti. They may not be as conscious of all they are doing as their more educated masters, called Nationalists and Imperialists, but they are consciously submitting themselves to the leadership of these men; they are voluntarily refusing to know; they are systematically refusing to listen." The white worker was less culpable than the capitalist but "he cannot escape his responsibility. He is co-worker in the miserable modern subjugation of over half the world."[54]
However skeptical of class-based panaceas, Du Bois published two articles by Claude McKay describing his experiences in the Soviet Union in the December, 1922, and January, 1923, Crisis. McKay emphasized his own experiences rather than rigorous analyses of the Soviet experiment, but he praised the Bolsheviks' egalitarian racial policies and vivid concern for the American Negro.[55] In late 1925 Du Bois himself offered guarded praise for the Soviet Union and for the American Negro Labor Congress (ANLC), a CP front organized that year in Chicago. "We should stand before the astounding effort of Soviet Russia to reorganize the industrial world with open mind and listening ears," he said. "Russia has not yet failed and Negroes must not swallow all the lies told about her. She may yet show the world the Upward Path." He "assert[ed] the right of any set of American Negroes to investigate and sympathize with any industrial reform whether it springs from Russia, China or the South Seas," and attacked the U.S. government for sending "spies to hound Negroes who dare to study Communism."[56]
The Crisis also published an article by Abram Harris (no friend of the Communists) that touted the ANLC. Attacking the canard that Soviet gold financed the organization, Harris sensibly rejoined that every organization received money from some source. Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the former Messenger staffer who headed the new organization, could presumably enrich himself more easily by allying with the Rotarians. The Soviets could not conjure up the ANLC ex nihilo if social conditions did not foster such an organization. The ANLC represented "a revolt against this color psychology in the labor movement" and in U.S. society generally. Harris, who had previously written of racism in CP ranks, now found "daily observance of equality in social practice" in the Party, and asserted that such unique biracialism "must have a tremendous appeal to a disadvantaged group" such as the Negro. Harris, however, cited a seemingly ineradicable racism within the white working class as an insurmountable barrier standing athwart plans for interracial, class-based revolution. Echoing McKay, Harris also ridiculed the (apparently sincere) belief of Afro-American Communists that proletarian revolution was imminent, jesting that, after talking with them, he expected to see surging masses rounding the corner.[57]
Du Bois, however, reserved judgment on the Soviet Union until his own visit in 1926. He emphasized that he had not taken an official, guided tour but had "wandered into all the nooks and crannies of [Moscow] unattended" except by a friend who knew Russian. (Du Bois was himself fluent in French and German.) He traveled alone over two thousand miles, visiting cities and towns, schools, factories, government offices, museums, stores, and theatres; he conversed with citizens of many classes and with members of numerous races and nationalities. "I know nothing of political prisoners, secret police and underground propaganda," he wrote--whether doubting their existence or admitting his partial view is unclear. The Soviet Union amazed and inspired him, and evoked a rhapsodic hymn of praise: "I stand in astonishment and wonder at the revelation of Russia that has come to me. I may be partially deceived and half-informed. But if what I have seen with my eyes and heard with my ears in Russia is Bolshevism, I am a Bolshevik."[58]
Du Bois perceived that the main issues posed by the Bolshevik Revolution were those of governmental versus private enterprise and the question of which class would rule. "What we call efficiency in America is judged primarily by the resultant profit to the rich and only secondarily by the results to the workers," Du Bois said, whereas "Russia is trying to make the workingman the main object of industry. His well-being and his income are deliberately set as the chief ends of organized industry directed by the state." Du Bois exulted that "Russia has struck at the citadels of power that rule modern countries"; no other country has "shorn organized wealth of its power as the Bolshevik Revolution has done in Russia."[59]
Russia, Du Bois continued, was conducting "a great modern government without the autocratic leadership of the rich." Its success hinged not on economics or morality but on psychology. "Can Russia continue to think of the State in terms of the worker? This can happen only if the Russian people believe and idealize the workingman as the chief citizen. In America we do not." Russia believed that hard and disagreeable labor was necessary and would remain so for quite some time and "that the people who do this work are the ones who should determine how the national income from their combined efforts should be distributed; in fine, that the Workingman is the State; that he makes civilization possible and should determine what civilization is to be."[60]
Du Bois's remarks on the Communist party's vanguard role and the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Soviet Union reflected his longstanding elitist views that a "talented tenth" must lead Afro-Americans and that the Westernized intelligentsia of the diaspora properly represented the masses of Africa. For the worker to guide and create his own civilization, Du Bois said, "he must be a workingman of skill and intelligence and to this combined end Russian education is being organized. This is what the Russian Dictatorship of the Proletariat means. This dictatorship does not stop there. As the workingman is today neither skilled nor intelligent enough to any such extent as his responsibilities demand, there is within his ranks the Communist party, directing the proletariat towards their future dictatorship. This is nothing new," because every so-called democracy had provisions that fostered the rule of a guiding elite. The real question, Du Bois said, was whether the elite prepared the people for actual self-government. "In so far as I could see, in shop and school, in the press and on the radio, in books and in lectures, in trades unions and National Congresses, Russia is. We are not."[61]
Du Bois perceived in Russia the material underpinnings of the required revolution in working-class psychology: workers occupied the best houses, held major government offices, and crowded the museums and theatres. Yet some workers and peasants missed Czarist pageantry, clung to religious superstition, and feared that workers could not govern Russia (just as others had doubted that capitalists could supplant the nobility in France). "But it is the organized capital of America, England, France and Germany which is chiefly instrumental in preventing the realization of the Russian workingman's psychology," Du Bois asserted. "It has used every modern weapon to crush Russia," supplying thugs with weapons, instituting "the industrial boycott, the refusal of capital and credit which is being carried on today just as far as international jealousy and greed will allow." This was inevitable because the Western nations were not genuine democracies but plutocracies; but it severely limited democracy in Russia. "So long as the most powerful nations in the world are determined that Russia must fail, there can be but a minimum of free discussion and democratic differences of opinion within Russia." The immediate question, Du Bois concluded, was not the ethical dilemma posed by revolution, the political conundrum of dictatorship ("we are all subject to this form of government"), or even of state management, which all nations sponsored in some degree. "The real Russian question is: Can you make the worker and not the millionaire the center of modern power and culture? If you can, the Russian Revolution will sweep the world."[62]
When denounced as a Bolshevik, Du Bois replied that if by Bolshevik one meant "those who are striving with partial success to organize Industry for public service rather than for private profit, then I am also a Bolshevik and proud of it." Speaking for the Pan-African Congress, he thanked the Soviet Union "for its liberal attitude toward the colored races and for the help which it has extended to them from time to time." Despite this comment, Du Bois said surprisingly little about the Soviet Union's racial policies--its attack on anti-Semitism, recognition of the rights of national minorities, or its foreign policy. These were the issues that evoked most comment from Afro-American visitors in the 1920s and 1930s. Somewhat incongruously he also proclaimed "I am a Pacifist. So was Jesus Christ."[63]
Risking the alienation of the NAACP's rich white backers, Du Bois obliquely endorsed Bolshevism in the August 1927 edition of the Crisis, praised and excerpted Stalin's "Interview with the First American Trade Union Delegation to Soviet Russia" in May 1928, and printed without comment the manifesto on the Negro issued by the Workers' (Communist) Party in September 1928. This manifesto was much more sweeping in its demands than any NAACP document. The Communists demanded a federal anti-lynching law and recognition of the right of self-defense; full enfranchisement (including equal jury service); the abolition of Jim Crow in every area of public and private life; the right of intermarriage; the outlawing of discrimination in renting or selling real estate; full integration in the armed forces; the abolition of racial discrimination in the unions; and full equality for Afro-Americans in every area of employment, including equal pay for equal work.[64] Even Du Bois's advocacy of the distinctly un-Bolshevik strategies of a black racial economy and class collaboration within the race in some senses paralleled the CP's emerging demand for a separatist black nation in the Black Belt of the South--a stance seen by some as improperly privileging race over class.
Although Du Bois praised the Soviet Union and flirted with the Communists during the late 1920s, he simultaneously moved toward open endorsement of the SP--a stance he had not publicly taken even during his brief SP membership in 1912. By 1928, with the SP a tiny splinter sect deserted by virtually all black radicals (most of whom were either politically demoralized, independent, or affiliated with the CP), Du Bois endorsed SP candidate Norman Thomas for president.
By early 1920 Du Bois had learned something from his crushing experiences with the capitalist parties, although he still believed in Wilson's good intentions. He praised the Committee of Forty-Eight (a middle-class spearhead of a new progressive party) and the Labor Party as resolutely opposing racial discrimination. As the election approached, Du Bois condemned the betrayal of the Negro by both capitalist parties and said that "between their professed and their actual policies there is no difference worth noting." However, Du Bois was still immobilized by his recognition that third-party politics was futile. The Farmer-Labor and Socialist parties both "speak out bravely in our behalf. Neither of them can win and because of our defenseless position the triumph of either of the greater parties without our aid might be the signal for further aggressions upon our rights as citizens."[65]
Du Bois had no recommendation for President, but urged that blacks reward their friends and punish their enemies at the local level without regard for party. Ernest McKinney, a Messenger writer now also appearing in the Crisis, endorsed a similar strategy, but reserved his most scathing remarks for the Republicans, who made conciliatory noises as the election approached. Blacks rejoiced when one of their number secured a minor patronage job, McKinney said: "We forgot that we are still burned at the stake, crushed to the bottom in industry, refused food when we are hungry and crowded into the gallery when we seek amusement." After the election Du Bois commented that the dissident parties waged "a singularly spiritless campaign" and that the black voter had remained content with his role as "an automatic registration mark for the Republican party. He could not be otherwise." He "had but one political choice or mission: to defeat the South-ridden Democratic party. He could not even think of taking an off-shot at the Millennium by voting Socialist or Farmer-Labor--he must defeat the Democrats."[66]
In 1923 Du Bois had criticized the Socialists as racists in their private and personal lives, evoking criticism from Frank Crosswaith, an up-and-coming black SP member. Crosswaith said that "History shows no record so persistently spotless in its stand on the Negro question, as that of the Socialist movement.... Most Southerners are bitterly opposed to Socialism and the Socialist Party for no other reason than it has taken the right attitude on the Negro question." Socialists realized that before they could triumph in "the dark and barbarous Southland," they must first overcome "barriers of prejudice, ignorance, and hate, erected chiefly against the Negro."[67]
Echoing Randolph, Crosswaith accused the Crisis of studiously ignoring black SP candidates. In 1918 the SP had nominated George Frazier Miller--at that time an NAACP officer--for Congress, and yet the Crisis had ignored his candidacy. Du Bois had ignored Randolph when he ran for New York State Comptroller in 1920 and for New York Secretary of State in 1922 on the SP ticket. Crosswaith charged that Du Bois's magazine highlighted Negro candidates on mainstream party tickets, while consistently ignoring all other Negro candidates. "There must be a reason for this strange procedure, and I boldly ask the Crisis and the NAACP to state the reason." Crosswaith thundered that the masses needed "truths which will enable them to find a way out of their present chaotic condition" and boldly, but respectfully asked: "Is it, or is it not, to the best interest of the race to espouse the cause of Socialism and the social revolution; or, will the best interests of the race be served by further aligning ourselves with the Republican and Democratic parties?"[68]
Du Bois replied that "I know the record of the Socialist party toward the Negro very well. On the whole it has been exceptionally good as I have said from time to time. But for the most part its theoretical attitude has never been put to a practical test. Even the nominations which you speak of were of very little importance since there was not the slightest chance for any of these gentlemen and the Socialist [party] knew this quite well." Du Bois charged that the SP was wavering on the question of segregated locals in the South, an issue with "tremendous practical importance." He completely evaded Crosswaith's complaint concerning his censorship of news vital for an informed Afro-American political opinion--news that Du Bois himself had repeatedly called a prerequisite of meaningful racial political action.[69]
The NAACP and Du Bois came close to endorsing a third party in 1924. Their reasons closely resembled Randolph's that year: the general benefit of a third party, rather than the specifics of the actual party under consideration. The NAACP asserted that "nothing will more quickly bring the old parties to a clear realization of their obligations to us and the nation than a vigorous third party movement. Such a movement may save us from a choice between half-hearted friends and half-concealed enemies or from the necessity of voting for the same oppression under different party names. Such a movement may give the American Negro and other submerged classes a chance to vote more directly for economic emancipation from monopoly and privilege and for a fairer chance to work according to ability and share more equitably the social income." However, the NAACP--which did not regard the Farmer-Labor party as particularly egalitarian in itself--advised that blacks vote for the best individual candidates, regardless of party.[70]
Du Bois also praised La Follette in an editorial foreshadowing his 1926-1927 endorsement of the Soviet Union, in that he focused on class issues and ignored specifically racial concerns. Du Bois explained the platform of the Progressive party and said that "for the uplifting of the world this is one of the best programs ever laid down by a political party in America. It can be carried out and still leave black folk and brown and yellow disinherited from many of its benefits. It can triumph and by its very triumph bring new tyrannies upon hated minorities. And yet despite this it will be far better than the present America." Du Bois castigated La Follette for ignoring the Negro and his nemesis, the KKK, and implied that some blacks would support La Follette out of the conviction that his "industrial program will help me as a laborer more than his silence on the Negro problem hurts me." Responding to outcries by venal Negro Republican campaign sheets, Du Bois denied that the NAACP endorsed any particular candidate. The NAACP merely put the facts before the Negro voters and urged that blacks "vote with their brains and not with their prejudices." After the election Du Bois estimated that perhaps a half million blacks voted for La Follette, which he called "a splendid and far-reaching gesture. The Third Party has come to stay and the Negro recognizes its fine platform and finer leaders."[71]
Du Bois's disillusionment with the capitalist parties accelerated during the late 1920s. By early 1927 he complained that "to a larger and larger extent elections are bought and sold by rich men.... the rulership of wealth in the United States is more and more open and direct."[72] Although he initially greeted the campaign of 1928 as an unparalleled opportunity for blacks, it soon degenerated into a contest between two avowedly white supremacist parties, neither of which made even their usual token and hypocritical gestures toward black voters. Du Bois analyzed the depressing situation in the Crisis in May 1928. Afro-American voters, he lamented, were offered no real choice, and must often support corrupt machine politicians because they at least acknowledged the Negro's humanity. Although blacks must "vote or be enslaved," the racism of both parties meant that for blacks, "intelligent voting... becomes a disheartening farce." In Chicago, for example, blacks could choose between "open gambling, bootlegging, prostitution, and Thompson" or "segregation, denial of representation, loss of decent jobs and public insult under Deneen or the Democrats. What on earth is an honest black voter to do?" Du Bois in fact understated his case; he did not mention that a vote for Thompson (who shamelessly betrayed his black constituents at every opportunity) was itself a vote for treachery when any significant issue affecting Afro-Americans presented itself.[73]
The 1928 situation was so terrible that, in an unprecedented display of unity, a widely diverse group of Afro-American leaders (including even R. Moton, the head of Tuskegee, and Fred Moore, Republican alderman from New York City and editor of the ultra-conservative New York Age) issued "An Appeal to America" attacking the 1928 campaign as the most vile and disgusting ever.
The emphasis of racial contempt and hatred which was made in this campaign is an appeal to the lowest and most primitive of human motives, and as long as this appeal can successfully be made, there is for this land no real peace, no sincere religion, no national unity, no social progress, even in matters far removed from racial controversy.[74]
The Afro-American leaders did not expect equality or social mingling; they realized that a long road of poverty and toil must succeed slavery. But they did affirm that "somewhere and sometime, limits must be put to race disparagement and separation and to campaigns of racial calumny which seek to set twelve million human beings outside the pale of ordinary humanity." During the 1928 campaign, however, both parties agreed that any decrease in white racism was itself a vice, that Negro votes should not be appealed to, that Negroes should not hold elected or appointed public office, and that all contact between the races "calls for explanation and apology."[75]
Du Bois fully agreed with this assessment. "For the American Negro this has without doubt been the most humiliating presidential campaign through which he has passed," he said. The two parties had perfected their accord, in the making since 1877, on degrading the Negro. Hoover bid for southern white votes by disfranchising Negro Republicans and by promising that he would appoint no Negro officeholders; the Democrats ignored Negro voters even in the North. "The result of this is that the political strategy which thoughtful Negro voters have been pursuing for sixteen years comes to naught. Their ideal was political independence," that of rewarding their friends and punishing their enemies. "When, now, neither party makes any promises whatsoever, or any bid for the Negro vote; when both parties acquiesce in attacks of racial bigotry and assertions which show their utter contempt and indifference to the Negro voter, the Negro is compelled to seek a new political program.... With unswerving determination and careful planning, the Negro must prepare to throw his whole political influence with a Third Party." Blacks must demand enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments, federal supervision of federal elections, and "the socialization of wealth and income, so as to protect the interests of the poor laborer against the political power of the rich investor." Du Bois hoped that the many other politically homeless groups--women, workers, farmers, and southern liberals, who lacked even "a chance to vote against the thing they fear and hate"--would unite in a powerful third party.[76]
In 1928, then, Du Bois supported the SP candidate Norman Thomas. At first he merely suggested that blacks support some minor party, whether Socialist, Farmer-Labor, or Prohibitionist. "This will be in effect throwing a vote away," Du Bois admitted, "because no Third Party candidate can be elected as long as the minority party can depend upon the rotten boroughs of the Solid South. Nevertheless, a vote for the Third Party in this election is a moral protest, and moral protests are of importance, even in the United States of America and in the year of Grace, 1928." But in November, the Crisis published a symposium, "How Shall We Vote?" with one writer supporting Hoover, one Smith, and Du Bois endorsing Thomas. Although the SP candidate had made some tepid remarks about the Negro, and the SP platform attacked black disfranchisement as a major cause of "reaction, fraud and privilege," Du Bois asserted that "the chief reason for voting for Thomas is that he is a Socialist." Thomas advocated the distribution of wealth "on a basis of reason, need and desert" rather than "chance and the rule of the strong.... I do not pretend to know as to just how this can be accomplished but I insist that we must try to do it and then try again. Sometimes in the past I have voted the Socialist ticket because it indicated successful effort. Sometimes I have voted otherwise in the hope of more practical and immediate gain, as in the case of Wilson's first administration." But this year the SP platform "is the only platform before [the] American people that has common sense or justice, reason or hope, written into it."[77]
Du Bois, however, endorsed the SP at a time when his support could have no effect. By 1928 the SP was but a shadow of its former self. Even if all blacks had supported the SP, this would not have bolstered its fortunes; and in 1928 Du Bois's endorsement swayed few, if any, Afro-American votes. Even after the Great Depression, and the resultant upsurge of radicalism among both races, the SP remained moribund, never even approaching its record of 1912. Afro-Americans suffered from a major problem that afflicted white workers: huge numbers bolted their traditional political and economic loyalties at one time or another, but their rebellion was diffuse, uncoordinated, and of little effect. Had all whites (and blacks) who supported radical political and economic action at some time in the years 1912-1928 supported it at any one specific time, they would have comprised a mass whose power would have demanded recognition. However, blacks, like whites, remained always divided; as some moved left others became more conservative. Only when world-historical events beyond the control or foresight of white and black workers (the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II) disrupted the jobs, families, and lives of black and white workers, could workers of both races make modest advances, both separately and together. In 1928, the prospects for any form of political, economic, or cultural advance in the United States appeared virtually nil. Du Bois's endorsement of the SP was no more futile than any other option available to him or anyone else. For blacks (as for white workers or women) there was indeed "No Exit" in the 1920s.
Indeed, it is symbolic of the tragic divisions afflicting African-American intellectuals that while Du Bois was embracing socialism and class-conscious activism, Harrison, who had pioneered this approach, increasingly focused on a vapid, unrealistic racial unity that downplayed class. Moreover, Harrison's own vituperative attacks on Harlem life and black leaders sorely undermined his own calls for unity.
Shortly before his premature death in 1928, Harrison was boosting yet another short-lived organization, the International Colored Unity League [ICUL], and another ephemeral (two issues) periodical, The Voice of the Negro. Harrison now rejected unity of "thought and ideas" among African Americans as impossible and undesirable; unanimity was possible only "in the graveyard." The ICUL welcomed "all those of Negro blood, however diverse their purposes, provided those purposes be good." More specifically, it advocated black economic self-help in vague terms that could appeal to the followers of Washington, Garvey, and Du Bois. More controversially, Harrison demanded "a Negro homeland in America.... where we can work out the ultimate economic and racial salvation as a part of the American people."[78] (This idea had a spectacular future; incorporated as a centerpiece of the Communist party program, it both energized and alienated blacks for decades before being abandoned.)[79] At the same time, Harrison directly attacked both the goal and method of a major 1920s NAACP project, a federal antilynching law. Lynching, Harrison proclaimed, "can never be stopped by wasting money on 'publicity', whether that publicity takes the form of fervid appeals to a moral sense which exists only on paper, or bombastic ravings. Neither can lynching be stopped by national legislation." If the United States would not enforce the Reconstruction amendments, "what chance has any mere Congressional enactment?" The tone and content of this pronouncement, added to Harrison's inflammatory attacks on the Harlem intelligentsia, surely alienated most black leaders. Perhaps that is why the ICUL advertised itself, in a fashion redolent of the CP's "united front from below," as aimed at the Negro masses rather than leaders. Harrison extolled "those of our poor brothers and sisters who are despised and rejected of men" as "the real tests of our theories of brotherhood and racial solidarity."[80]
Harrison ended his life in the same poverty he had lived it, eking out some income as a lecturer for the New York School Board and some as an itinerant speaker for, among other organizations, the ICUL. His life was, in some sense, a personal triumph even if a political failure. Though Harrison never achieved his dream of retiring from the nitty-gritty of journalism and focusing on the criticism of life, he did spend most of his existence reading and commenting upon philosophy, literature, history, and sociology. Lacking personal financial resources, he availed himself of New York's literary and cultural treasures, and forged himself into a world-class "organic intellectual" whose range of expertise surpassed that of most credentialed scholars. Indeed, his lack of formal academic training and responsibilities may have liberated his intellect from the deadening weight of conventional wisdoms and helped generate his thought's dazzling originality and universal scope. More than an infinitesimal minority of his time (or any time), Harrison punctured the almost universally-embraced illusions of his day. He lived by his own script. He attempted, and to the limit of realistic possibility attained, a free life in a slave society--a life of integrity and justice in a society whose very basis was, and remains, murder, torture, and oppression.
Harrison ended his life on a rare note of peace with himself and the society to which he had emigrated many years before. Looking upon a world dominated by white imperialists, Harrison averred that he would have dedicated his life to the fight against injustice wherever he had lived. Many Americans of both races were hypocritical and vacuous, but others were intelligent and egalitarian. Harrison even believed that he perceived a gradual improvement in race relations. Happiness and meaning resided in the struggle for truth and justice, rather than their attainment:
I have had to contend against black, white, and colored people for my place in the sun, and often I have found the whites eager to extend me welcome and recognition where Negroes have not.... Looking the whole scene over, I am more in love with America than with any other place on earth. I have found here the full measure of manhood not in a nice, fat place prepared for me, but in the opportunity to battle for any place.... We are the participants in the greatest democratic experiment that the world has ever seen. It is not the American of today that fascinates me, but the American which is evolving out of it.... We will not expect anything to be given to us, but mean to fight for what we want.[81]
Notes:
[1] "DB, "Returning Soldiers," TC, May 1919.
[2] ibid.
[3] ibid.
[4] ibid.
[5] Jordan, Black Newspapers, 138.
[6] DB, Editorial, "Our Success and Failure," TC, July 1919.
[7] DB, "An Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War," TC, June 1919.
[8] DB, "Let Us Reason Together," TC, September 1919.
[9] E. Franklin Frazier, "The Negro and Non-Resistance," TC, March 1924.
[10] E. Franklin Frazier (with a comment by Du Bois), "The Negro and Non-Resistance," TC, June 1924.
[11] DB, Editorial, "President Harding and Social Equality," TC, December 1921. Du Bois praised those aspects of the speech demanding political and economic rights for blacks. Du Bois had previously said that a ban on intermarriage implied that blacks were tainted and inferior; interfered with the freedom of adults to marry whoever they please; and left Negro women unprotected from white lechers. Blacks oppose anti-miscegenation bills "not because we are anxious to marry white men's sisters, but because they are determined that white men shall let our sisters alone." DB, "Intermarriage," TC, February 1913.
[12] DB, Editorial, "President Harding and Social Equality," TC, December 1921.
[13] DB, "Correspondence," TC, March 1926. Du Bois was responding to the query of the president of a woman's club in Nebraska, who found his published statements on intermarriage confusing.
[14] DB, "The Damnation of Women," in DB, Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil (New York, 1969), 163-186. This book of essays was originally published in 1920.
[15] ibid.
[16] ibid.
[17] DB, "The Immediate Program of the American Negro," TC, April 1915; DB, "We Come of Age," TC, November 1915; DB, "The Crisis and the NAACP," TC, November 1915.
[18] DB, Editorial, "White Co-Workers," TC, May 1920.
[19] ibid.
[20] ibid.
[21] DB, "Africa," TC, February 1919.
[22] DB, "Reconstruction and Africa," TC, February 1919.
[23] DB, "Not 'Separatism,'" TC, February 1919.
[24] ibid.
[25] "The Pan-African Congress," (compiled from reports by Du Bois), TC, April 1919; Lewis, Du Bois, 564.
[26] DB, Editorial, "To the World: Manifesto of the Second Pan-African Congress," TC, November 1921.
[27] ibid.
[28] ibid.
[29] ibid.
[30] ibid.
[31] Jessie Fauset, "Impressions of the Second Pan-African Congress," TC, November 1921.
[32] DB, "The League of Nations," TC, May 1919; DB, "The Black Majority," TC, September 1919.
[33] Lewis, Du Bois, 564-568.
[34] DB, "Marcus Garvey," TC, December 1920; DB, "Marcus Garvey," TC, January 1921.
[35] DB, "Marcus Garvey," TC, December 1920; DB, "Marcus Garvey," TC, January 1921; DB, "A Lunatic or a Traitor," TC, May 1924.
[36] DB, "The Black Star Line," TC, September 1922; DB, "A Lunatic or a Traitor," TC, May 1924.
[37] DB, "Labor Omnia Vincit," TC, September 1919. For other criticisms of the AFL see "Unions and Scabs," TC, October 1920, and "Page Mr. Gompers," TC, November 1923. For Du Bois's hopes, see "The Negro and the Labor Union: An NAACP Report," TC, September 1919; DB, "New Aspects of the Labor Movement," TC, July 1922.
[38] DB, "The IWW," TC, June 1919. Du Bois was responding to criticisms of an earlier editorial which had in passing criticized the IWW; in response Du Bois said that he had not written the editorial and that it was perhaps "partially misleading."
[39] "To the AFL," TC, August 1924.
[40] "The New Crisis," TC, May 1925.
[41] DB, "Black and White Workers," TC, March 1928.
[42] DB, "Our Economic Future," TC, May 1928.
[43] DB, "Cooperation," TC, July 1928 lists his (scanty) achievements in promoting cooperatives.
[44] DB, "Radicals," TC, December 1919; "The Negro and Radical Thought," TC, July 1921; DB, "The Drive," TC, May 1921.
[45] "The Negro and Radical Thought," TC, July 1921.
[46] ibid.
[47] ibid.
[48] DB, "The Class Struggle," TC, August 1921.
[49] ibid.
[50] ibid.
[51] "Socialism and the Negro," TC, October 1921. For the full text of Owens's letter see Aptheker, The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois (Amherst, 1997) I, 251-254. The passage with the phrase "Utopian fantasy" was omitted from the portion printed in the Crisis, but did not alter the fundamental meaning of the letter except insofar as it condemned in advance Du Bois's response.
[52] "Socialism and the Negro," TC, October 1921.
[53] ibid.
[54] ibid. See "Radicals and the Negro" (TC, March 1925) for more complaints about white radicals' neglect of Afro-American issues. Du Bois noted that although white radicals belittled Negro grievances, they howled with anger if they suffered any scintilla of much lesser oppressions.
[55] CM, "Soviet Russia and the Negro," TC, December 1923; CM, "Soviet Russia and the Negro," TC, January 1924. McKay emphasized that Russians of all political persuasions, not merely the Bolsheviks, cared about the plight of the Afro-Americans.
[56] DB Editorial, "The Black Man and Labor," TC, December 1925.
[57] Abram Harris, "Lenin Casts His Shadow Upon Africa," TC, April 1926. In "Black Communists in Dixie" (OPP, August 1925), Harris had recounted a racist incident in a southern Communist local. Although Harris implied that the event was recent, the details make it clear that it had occurred in 1919-1920, at the very outset of the Communist movement.
[58] DB, "Russia, 1926," TC, November 1926; DB, "My Recent Journey," TC, December 1926.
[59] DB, "Judging Russia," TC, February 1927.
[60] ibid.
[61] ibid.
[62] ibid.
[63] DB, "War and Peace," TC, September 1927; DB, "The Pan-African Congress," TC, October 1927.
[64] DB, "Bolshevism," TC, August 1927; "The Browsing Reader," TC, May 1928; "Communists," TC, September 1928. The CP's resolution criticized A. Philip Randolph for endorsing Al Smith, and the SP for supporting AFL racism.
[65] DB, "A New Party," TC, February 1920; DB, "The Political Conventions," TC, August 1920; DB, "How Shall We Vote," TC, September 1920.
[66] DB, "How Shall We Vote," TC, September 1920; McKinney, "The Election Comes," TC, October 1920; DB, "The Unreal Campaign," TC, December 1920.
[67] Crosswaith to Du Bois, July 2, 1923, in Aptheker, Correspondence, I, 267-270.
[68] ibid.
[69] Du Bois to Crosswaith, July 10, 1923, in Aptheker, Correspondence, I, 270-271.
[70] "Public Announcement of the 15th Annual Conference [of the NAACP], TC, August 1924. James Weldon Johnson felt compelled to deny (Letter to George Cannon, TC, January 1925) that the NAACP had as an organization endorsed the Progressive party; but he added that he himself thought that party a positive step in the right direction.
[71] DB, "La Follette," TC, August 1924; DB, "The NAACP and Parties," TC, September 1924; DB, "The Election," TC, December 1924. William Pickens, a moderate NAACP official, condemned the Progressive party's deliberate neglect of the KKK issue and praised the SP (a part of the Progressive party coalition) for meeting separately, condemning the KKK, and demanding justice for blacks in the unions. "In this one example of courage and consistency, the Socialists therefore hold the palm among all party groups," Pickens said. Pickens, "Progressive Political Action," TC, September 1924.
[72] DB, "Elections," TC, January 1927.
[73] DB, "The Negro Politician," TC, May 1928.
[74] "An Appeal to America," TC, December 1928. This appeal was issued during the last weeks of the campaign.
[75] ibid.
[76] DB, "The Campaign of 1928," TC, December 1928.
[77] DB, "How Shall We Vote?," TC, October 1928; DB contribution to symposium, "How Shall We Vote?," TC, November 1928.
[78] HHH, "Program and Principles of the Colored Unity League," The Voice of the Negro, April 1927, in HHHR, 399-402.
[79] Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression (New York, 1984), provides an excellent account of the trajectory and impact of the "Negro Nation" concept in the 1930s.
[80] HHH, "How to End Lynching," Boston Chronicle, June 28, 1924, in HHHR 270-271; HHHR, "The Common People," Boston Chronicle, May 17, 1924, in HHHR 404-405.
[81] "Hubert H. Harrison Answers Malliet," Pittsburgh Courier, October 22, 1927.