Chapter 4: THE DESCENT OF DU BOIS
Harrison's eclipse created a vacuum in Afro-American leadership because W.E.B. Du Bois, the outstanding champion of black militancy, had severely compromised himself by the end of 1917. A tormented soul, Du Bois famously articulated the Afro-American's "two-ness" as "an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings," his "double self" which he would "merge... into a better and truer self."[1] In the 1910s, Du Bois's impossible quest led him into accommodation with Woodrow Wilson's white supremacist and terrorist state. Du Bois's endorsement of Wilson in 1912, his support of America's entry into World War I, and his disastrous "Close Ranks" editorial of July 1918, graphically displayed the futility of working for racial betterment within mainstream institutions. By the end of the 1920s Du Bois was again endorsing militant protest, Socialism, and even Bolshevism; during the crucial war years, however, his temporary accommodationism left a vacuum in militant black leadership.
Du Bois had declared himself a "Socialist-of-the-Path" in his publication the Horizon in early 1907. Du Bois favored "a far greater ownership of the public wealth for the public good than is now the case" and had proclaimed that such socialized ownership constituted "the one great hope of the Negro American.... Our natural friends are not the rich but the poor, not the great but the masses, not the employers but the employees. Our good is not wealth, power, oppression and snobbishness, but helpfulness, efficiency, service and self-respect." Although Du Bois did not agree with the Socialists "in all things," he concluded that "in trend and ideal they are the salt of the present earth.[2]
Du Bois's Socialism was a quasi-Christian, middle-class version based on altruism and service and emphasizing engineering and efficiency; it ignored the class struggle, that pillar of Socialist party (SP) philosophy. Yet he was impressed by the racial egalitarianism of many Socialists, and in 1908 praised the SP as "the only party today which treats Negroes as men, North and South."[3] The next year a handful of white Socialists, horrified by the Springfield, Illinois pogrom, conceived the idea of an interracial organization which would fight for complete racial equality. They recruited a broader leadership and founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a biracial organization that most members of Du Bois's militant, all-black Niagara Movement joined.[4]
The hugely disproportionate number of white Socialists involved in the NAACP's founding impressed Du Bois with Socialism's racial egalitarianism. When he launched the NAACP's organ the Crisis in 1910 (its title was suggested by William English Walling, the left-wing Socialist who first envisioned an NAACP), Du Bois reprinted articles and editorials from the SP's New York paper, the Call. Two of these editorials are particularly noteworthy because they repudiated the orthodox, Debsian view that the SP had "nothing specific to offer the negro, and we cannot make special appeals to all the races"--a view that historians have assumed characterized the SP as a whole.[5] In the second issue of the Crisis (December 1910) Du Bois quoted a recent Call editorial which embodied the very philosophy and ideals for which Afro-American Socialists would fight:
It is a principle universally acknowledged by Socialists that although Socialism is primarily the movement of the working class for the overthrow of capitalist rule, it nevertheless must rush to the assistance of every oppressed class or race or nationality. The working class cannot achieve its ultimate grand aim of freeing itself from exploitation unless it frees all other elements of the community from exploitation. It cannot put an end to its own oppression unless it puts an end to all forms of oppression. Our party must stand everywhere on the side of the weak and oppressed, even if this course should bring upon us temporary reverses. Ultimate victory can be achieved in no other way.[6]
In March 1911 Du Bois reprinted another Call editorial that proclaimed that the struggle for Socialism "cements everywhere the unity of all who are engaged in it" and would inevitably "open the doors of the trade unions to the negro workers" who would be admitted "on a footing of perfect equality." While the class struggle for Socialism was in progress,
it is the duty of the Socialist movement everywhere to champion the rights of the negro. This course, which is the only one we can take, will undoubtedly retard our growth in the States of the South. But steadfast adherence to principle has been demonstrated again and again to be the only course that leads to Socialist success. And in the long run our success in the South is as certain, as preordained, as our success in the rest of the country and in the world.[7]
Another Call editorial proclaimed that the Negro "suffers under a double kind of slavery--wage slavery and color slavery." Soon afterward Du Bois commented that "the Socialists are again deeply stirred over the race question. In the South the party stands right in some places and wrong in others. In the North, where, of course, the vastly greater number of Socialists are found, the attitude is very good so far, and whenever prejudice crops up a score of friends come to the Negro's defense."[8]
While Du Bois was extolling the SP in the pages of the Crisis, however, he elsewhere criticized its equivocal stance on race. In a speech in early 1911, he noted that all previous movements for social betterment--the Reformation, the American and French revolutions, and the Reconstruction era--had ignored or ultimately abandoned the Negro. Even the AFL had repudiated its earlier egalitarianism and admitted openly racist unions. Condemning "the ban upon Asiatic labor sanctioned by the international Socialist congress," Du Bois (referring to a weasel-worded slap at Asian immigration to the United States, carried by racist American Socialists led by Morris Hillquit) proclaimed that "The negro race will not take kindly to Socialism so long as the international Socialist movement puts the bars against any race, whether it be yellow or black." The SP could recruit blacks only if it changed "its attitude toward the yellow races."[9]
Du Bois, therefore, recognized the SP's somewhat ambivalent racial attitudes when he joined the party in 1911. But so many of the whites who had initiated the NAACP were SP members, and the New York Call so stridently demanded equal rights, that Du Bois felt membership was important. Du Bois's comments on Harrison's Colored Socialist Club evinced his guarded optimism. The SP was far ahead of the capitalist parties, and indeed of almost all American organizations, in its active espousal of racial egalitarianism; yet its record was not spotless. And Du Bois was acutely aware of the AFL's much more dismal record. Both the SP's hesitations and the AFL's active racism were highlighted at the SP's epochal 1912 convention, when the SP anathematized the IWW, condemned sabotage, and reaffirmed its policy of non-intervention in union affairs--thus interfering against IWW strategy and tactics while implicitly countenancing AFL racism.
At this very time Du Bois was penning a scathing article addressed to the AFL. Du Bois said that "THE CRISIS believes in organized labor," which had raised the living standards of all races. For that reason the Crisis carried the printer's union label, despite the fact that white union members demanded "the deliberate exclusion from decent-paying jobs of every black man whom white workingmen can exclude on any pretense." Du Bois listed the many trades from which blacks were excluded and charged that the AFL policy would gladly "beat or starve the Negro out of his job if you can by keeping him out of the union; or, if you must admit him, do the same thing inside union lines." Blacks who retook "the jobs out of which the white waiters have driven them" during a waiters strike did "the natural and sensible thing, howsoever pitiable the necessity of such cutthroat policies in the labor world may be. So long as union labor fights for humanity, its mission is divine;" but when union members constituted themselves a labor monopoly "while other competent workmen starve, they deserve themselves the starvation which they plan for their darker and poorer fellows." Shortly afterwards Du Bois praised the Brotherhood of Timber Workers and the IWW, which maintained integrated locals in the face of Southern law.[10]
Despite his membership in the SP, Du Bois supported Woodrow Wilson in 1912. (This was not an eccentric gesture; Boston militant Monroe Trotter also backed Wilson.) Du Bois recognized that blacks had gained nothing from their traditional Republican loyalties, which only ensured that both parties could ignore their demands. Du Bois excoriated Theodore Roosevelt for his dishonorable discharge, without trial, of black soldiers accused on misbehavior during the Brownsville Affair, and Taft for his blatant repudiation of even the GOP's traditional token regard for black officeholders. The Crisis for September 1912 reported the lengthy and detailed assurances of fair treatment Wilson gave to a delegation of black leaders, promising impartial enforcement of the law, continued appointment of black officeholders, and opposition to racist legislation. The delegation reported that Wilson "expressed himself as feeling the need of and desiring the colored vote and stated that he was willing to do anything that was right and legal to secure that vote." If he were elected, Wilson promised, blacks would not regret voting for him. In a widely heralded and viciously violated promise, Wilson assured blacks of his "earnest wish to see justice done them in every matter, and not mere grudging justice, but justice executed with liberality and cordial good feeling."[11]
Du Bois supported Wilson with open eyes, as an experiment in black balance-of-power politics. Wilson, he acknowledged in August 1912, had long been "president of a college [Princeton] which did not admit Negro students and yet was not honest enough to say so, resorting rather to subterfuge and evasion." If left to himself, Wilson would exclude Chinese and Jews as well as blacks. But he was "a cultivated scholar and has brains"; he recognized political realities and "will treat black men and their interests with farsighted fairness. He will not be our friend, but he will not belong to the gang of which Tillman, Vardaman, Hoke Smith and Blease are the brilliant expositors." Du Bois explained why he, a SP member, was supporting a Democrat: "Of Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, we can only say this frankly: if it lay in our power to make him President of the United States we would do so, for of the four men [running] he alone, by word and deed, stands squarely on a platform of human rights regardless of race or class." In November Du Bois reiterated his belief that the Democratic, Republican, and Progressive parties were all despicable and that the Democrats had offered nothing concrete for Negroes. But "because the Socialists, with their manly stand for human rights irrespective of color, are at present out of the calculation, the Negro must choose between these three parties." Du Bois endorsed Wilson to see if the Democratic party "dares to be Democratic when it comes to black men" nationally as it had in some sections of the north. "We hope so and we are willing to risk a trial."[12]
After Wilson's victory, Du Bois claimed that between 20 and 30 percent of the New York City race vote was cast for Wilson, and rejoiced that the black vote was now an unknown quantity for which the parties must compete. Yet he acknowledged that those blacks who voted Democratic had "helped call to power not simply a scholar and a gentleman, but with him and in his closest counsels all the Negro-hating, disfranchising and lynching South. With Woodrow Wilson there triumphs, too, Hoke Smith, Close Blease, Jim Vardaman...." Du Bois trusted Wilson's good intentions, fearing only that his advisors would prevent Afro-Americans from presenting their grievances to him.[13]
Immediately after the election Du Bois, smarting from SP criticism, curtly wrote an official of the Manhattan SP that "my recent attitude in the political campaign has been called in question and as I do not feel that I ought to change it, I hereby offer my resignation as a member of the Socialist Party."[14] Although political expediency rather than dissatisfaction with SP racism had motivated his endorsement of Wilson and his subsequent resignation from the SP, Du Bois, perhaps seeking justification for his action, strongly criticized SP racial attitudes in two articles in the recently founded left-Socialist theoretical journal, the New Review, of which he was a contributing editor.
Du Bois directed his remarks at Socialist theorists who insisted that "we must not turn aside from the great objects of socialism to take up this issue of the American Negro" that socialism would inevitably solve along with all other problems. Echoing Wobblies, feminists, anarchists, and other left-wing dissidents who attacked the policy of "revolutionary waiting" and the concept of the "inheritor party," Du Bois denied that any great human problem could await the advent of Socialism. "If socialism is going to settle the American problem of race prejudice without direct attack along these lines by socialists, why is it necessary for socialists to fight along other lines? Indeed, there is a kind of fatalistic attitude on the part of certain transcendental socialists, which often assumes that the whole battle of socialism is coming by a kind of evolution in which active individual effort on their part is hardly necessary." Du Bois denied "that ultimately when the ninety millions [of white workers] come [in]to their own, they will voluntarily share with the ten million serfs."[15] Such a consoling fantasy contravened the orthodox Socialist position that justice was secured only by struggle of the oppressed, rather than by the altruism of the exploiters. White workers, Du Bois ruefully predicted, would surrender their privileges no more than would capitalists.
"The essence of social democracy is that there shall be no excluded, exploited classes in the socialistic state," Du Bois continued; "that there shall be no man or woman so poor, ignorant or black as not to count .... I have come to believe that the test of any great movement toward social reform is the excluded class." Du Bois castigated the "socialistic opportunism" which would construct a white Socialism upon the bent backs of the 20 percent of the American working class who were black, and who would therefore "find it not simply to their interest, but a sacred duty to underbid the labor market, vote against labor legislation, and fight to keep their fellow laborers down." In addition to this practical argument, Du Bois asked white Socialists about the ultimate meaning of the movement: "What becomes of socialism when it engages in such a fight for human downfall? Whither are gone its lofty aspirations and high resolve--its songs and comradeship?"[16]
Du Bois argued that "the Negro problem" was "the great test of the American socialist." Most Socialists simply could not comprehend the extent of Southern white racism, which countenanced the mass murder, torture, and rape of blacks. Southern whites would tolerate appeals for racial justice only upon the basis that "the murder and mistreatment of colored men may possibly hurt the white man. Consequently the Socialist Party finds itself in this predicament: if it acquiesces in race hatred, it has a chance to turn the tremendous power of southern white radicalism toward its own party; if it does not do this, it becomes a 'party of the Negro,' with its growth South and North decidedly checked." Du Bois worried that SP leaders might countenance racism in hopes of winning the South "whatever its cost." Du Bois asked such hesitating leaders a crucial question: "After you have gotten the radical South and paid the price which they demand, will the result be socialism?"[17] Du Bois, however, ignored the implications of this argument for any electoral strategy which aimed at class, gender, or racial liberation. The need that any vote-catching, majority-seeking party pander to popular prejudices, however despicable, severely undermined any bourgeois-democratic solution to America's most egregious injustices.
Du Bois's second article, perhaps prompted by the SP's neglect of Afro-Americans after the dissolution of Harrison's Colored Socialist Club, stressed the catastrophic consequences of SP racism. He warned white Socialists that "there is a group of ten million persons in the United States toward whom the Socialists would better turn serious attention." Negroes were "the most thoroughly exploited class in the United States." Their huge numbers and concentration in the South (and increasingly in Northern cities) made them a force that the SP could not neglect. White workers hated blacks because they undercut white wages, first as slaves and later as oppressed freedmen. "The laborer who hated slave labor was thoughtlessly led to hate the slave"; after emancipation "the wrath of the laborers was forthwith directed not against the low wages and the men who paid them, but virulently against the men who received them."[18]
The Afro-American, Du Bois continued, believed that "his greatest enemy is not the employer who robs him, but his white fellow workingman. For thirty years he has been taught this lesson by the working man himself." Whites had launched at least fifty hate strikes against the employment of blacks in the years 1881-1900, and probably another one hundred strikes ostensibly against the hiring of non-union men, "when in reality the Negro was not permitted to join the union." Du Bois insisted that "the Socialist Party must know and heed this history" and also recognize that "employing class [philanthropy] has given huge sums of money wrung from underpaid white laborers to furnish Negro schools and other institutions, which the States controlled largely by the white laborers' vote refused to furnish." Afro-Americans, therefore, viewed scabbing as justifiable retaliation toward their enemies. Du Bois concluded by asking: "Facing such a situation what has Socialism to say to these black men? Is it going to ignore them, or segregate them, or complain because they do not forthwith adopt a program of revolution of which they know nothing or a movement which they are not invited to join?"[19] Du Bois's strictures, however justified, came with ill grace from one who had just embraced the white-supremacist Woodrow Wilson. Whatever his motives, however, Du Bois excoriated the SP at the very time when Harrison was encountering its intractable racism, and simultaneously with the SP's repudiation of the racially-egalitarian IWW and reaffirmation of its de facto alliance with the racist AFL.
Du Bois, however, quickly criticized Wilson's embrace of the lynch-law Southerners who elected him. In March 1913 Du Bois published a respectful "Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson." As late as August 1913, when emboldened Southern Democrats had openly avowed their racist intentions and some of Wilson's cabinet members were segregating their federal departments, Du Bois claimed that "bad as the Democrats may prove, they cannot outdo William H. Taft." But he also proclaimed that lynching "begins not with the drunken blood lust of a wild gang of men and boys, but with the every-day white citizen who finds that race prejudice pays as an investment; helps him to win over his black competitor in the civil-service examination; helps him to get his fellow workman's job; helps to indulge the beast instinct to despise and trample on the weak. This is the kind of thing that Woodrow Wilson must fight and he must fight it in his own cabinet."[20] The next month Du Bois decried Wilson's neglect of black interests and the "positive action on the part of your advisers, with or without your knowledge, which constitutes the gravest attack on the liberties of our people since emancipation. Public segregation of civil servants in government employ, necessarily involving personal insult and humiliation, has for the first time in history been made the policy of the United States government." Du Bois concluded, however, that "we are still hoping that present indications are deceptive."[21]
By November 1913, however, Du Bois was losing heart. He described the Wilsonian policy of placing "iron bars, screens and closed doors" around black federal employees, and the stationing of watchmen at bathrooms to force blacks to use the one assigned to them. With typical Wilsonian deceit and hypocrisy, the Jim Crow signs were removed after public protests, but verbal orders continued the racist policy. In a rhetorical flight of terrible prescience in the December Crisis, Du Bois exclaimed that American whites would bitterly regret their welding of ten million Afro-Americans "into one great self-conscious and self-acting mass.... At present it is still possible to make Negroes essentially Americans with American ideals and instincts." Soon, however, we will have in this country a mass of people acting together like one great fist for their own ends, with secret understanding, with pitiless efficiency and with resources for defense which will make their freedom incapable of attack from without.... Those who advise 'race pride' and 'self-reliance' do not realize the Frankenstein which they are evoking.... What can America do with a mass of people who move through their world but are not of it and stand as one unshaken group in their battle? Nothing. The yell of the segregationist is the last scream of beaten prejudice. After that American civilization will be compelled through long centuries to tear down the walls which they are now building around the finest and most gifted single group in its polyglot population.[22] Disgusted with Wilson by 1916, Du Bois proclaimed that no intelligent black could vote for him. And as Wilson edged the United States toward involvement in Europe's Great War, Du Bois's disenchantment deepened.
Du Bois's first detailed pronouncement on World War I, appearing in the November 1914 Crisis, embodied some of the crucial contradictions that bedeviled his stance throughout the next four years. The war, Du Bois said, was caused "by race and color prejudice" and "the wild quest for Imperial expansion among colored races" by European powers. Colonies offered "a chance to confiscate land, work the natives at low wages, make large profits and open wide markets for cheap European manufactures." Germany, "shut out from acquiring colonies" in Africa by her European rivals and in South America by the United States, decided "to seize English or French colonies." Du Bois catalogued the horrors inflicted by white Europeans upon peoples of color and remarked that in justification of such atrocities "a theory of the inferiority of the darker peoples and a contempt for their rights and aspirations has become all but universal in the greatest centers of modern culture. Here it was that American color prejudice and race hatred received in recent years unexpected aid and sympathy. To-day civilized nations are fighting like mad dogs over the right to own and exploit these darker peoples."[23]
Although such an analysis might have resulted in a plea for neutrality, Du Bois urged that blacks support the Allies on the grounds that England's conduct, however atrocious, was improving. "As compared with Germany, England is an angel of light. The record of Germany as a colonizer toward weaker and darker people is the most barbarous of any civilized people and grows worse instead of better." Only sentences later, however, Du Bois admitted that "Belgium has been as pitiless and grasping as Germany and in strict justice deserves every pang she is suffering after her unspeakable atrocities in Congo." Du Bois admitted that Germans had treated him well during his studies there; "they made [me] believe in the essential humanity of white folk twenty years ago when [I] was near to denying it." However, the Germans were even then "starting on the same road with the southern American whites toward a contempt toward human beings and a faith in their own utter superiority to all other breeds."[24] This direct equation of German racism and chauvinism with the attitudes of Southern whites did not bode well for a Du Bois rapprochement with the Wilson administration.
In May 1915 Du Bois published his seminal "The African Roots of the War" in the Atlantic Monthly. This brilliant article laid the groundwork for much subsequent Afro-American radical thought, anticipated key insights later propounded by European revolutionaries, and devastatingly exposed a key dilemma of modern socialism. Du Bois summarized the proud and degraded history of Africa, the mother of civilization, the pride of many an empire, and the exploited source of modern European riches. Du Bois mentioned the depredations of the slave trade and stated that more recently "lying treaties, rivers of rum, murder, assassination, mutilation, rape and torture have marked the progress of Englishman, German, Frenchmen, and Belgian on the Dark Continent." White racism caused, extenuated, and resulted from these depredations; Africa became "another name for bestiality and barbarism." Thus Europe "invest[ed] in color prejudice. The 'color line' began to pay dividends."[25]
The rise of Socialism, "the dipping of more and grimier hands into the wealth-bag of the nation," alarmed the white elites, who recognized "that democracy in determining income is the next inevitable step to democracy in political power. With the waning of the possibility of the big fortune, gathered by starvation wage and boundless exploitation of one's weaker and poorer fellows at home, arose more magnificently the dream of exploitation abroad." The profits of this exploitation trickled down to the mass of laborers, who for the first time were allotted a share in the profits of oppression. The workers' share of the profits was as of yet small, and "and there are still at the bottom a large and restless excluded class." Yet white unions were inevitably increasing their share of the booty. The advance of democracy in the United States, therefore, rested upon "hatred of darker races... [and] an inhumanity which does not shrink from the public burning of human beings."[26]
It is no longer simply the merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, of even the employing class, that is exploiting the world: it is the nation, a new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor.... Such nations... rule the modern world. Their national bond is no mere sentimental patriotism, loyalty, or ancestor-worship. It is increased wealth, power, and luxury for all classes on a scale the world never saw before. Never before was the average citizen of England, France, and Germany so rich, with such splendid prospects of greater riches.... The present world war is then, the result of jealousies engendered by the recent rise of armed national associations of labor and capital whose aim is the exploitation of the wealth of the world mainly outside the European circle of nations.[27]
Du Bois argued that "successful aggression in economic expansion calls for a close union between capital and labor at home." White workers increasingly demanded higher pay, better working conditions, and a voice in the management of industry. Capitalists mitigated conflict by the concessions of state socialism and "by public threats of competition of colored labor" at home and abroad. Yet they granted concessions only to "the aristocracy of labor," meanwhile threatening the increasingly revolutionary white underclass with underbidding by workers of color. Peace necessitated treating the darker races "as free and equal citizens in a world democracy of all races and nations" because the usual pacifist arguments were ineffectual. How could nations be won for peace when "by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand million in diamonds and cocoa?" How could pacifists rely on humanitarian sentiments when approaching "nations whose love of luxury is built on the inhuman exploitation of human beings, and who, especially in recent years, have been taught to regard these human beings as inhuman?" Unless peoples of all colors were treated justly, war would inevitably result from European contests for colonies, from the revolutionary upsurges of an oppressed proletariat increasingly burdened by the insupportable costs of the ever-escalating arms race, and from the revolt of the peoples of color themselves. When these latter rise in rebellion "the War of the Color Line will outdo in savage inhumanity any war this world has yet seen. For colored folk have much to remember and they will not forget."[28]
Du Bois's analysis implied that no outcome of the imperialistic war would long solve the problems that generated it. Nevertheless, he backed the Allies. Perhaps aware of this ambiguity, Du Bois ensured that the Crisis neither unreservedly supported the Allies or concealed blemishes on their record. In fact, it published biting pictures and cartoons satirizing U.S. and Allied atrocities. In December 1914 it ran "The Paradox," a picture of "a Black 'Heathen' of the Congo, fighting to protect the wives and daughters of white Belgians, who have murdered and robbed his people, against 'Christian' Culture represented by the German trophy [a war helmet] in his hand!" A February 1915 cartoon depicted a white lynch mob triumphantly leaving the smoldering ashes of its victim; the caption read "O say, can you see by the Dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the Twilight's last gleaming." In March 1916 the Crisis depicted Uncle Sam deploring the barbarity of the European war, even while ignoring lynch-law in the South. In March 1917 an armless Congolese (this referred to Belgium's mutilation of thousands of Congolese) told Belgium's leader "if your uncle had left us our hands, Albert, we could be of more use to you now!"[29]
Although favoring the Allies, Du Bois did not advocate preparedness, much less American entry into the war. He attacked Wilson's increasingly vicious treatment of Afro-Americans, covering in great depth Wilson's eviction of Monroe Trotter from a White House interview. He printed widely diverse comments from prominent Afro-Americans on the effect of black service in the event of war; some believed patriotic service would benefit the race while others highlighted betrayals of Afro-Americans after previous wars.[30] Du Bois himself believed that the self-destruction of white European civilization ("the civilization by which America insists on measuring us and to which we must conform our natural tastes and inclinations") would generate both increased racial pride among blacks and a universal, trans-race world civilization. He rejected "the blue-eyed, white-skinned types which are set before us in school and literature" in favor of those ancient exemplars of beauty, "rich, brown and black men and women with glowing dark eyes and crinkling hair. Music has always been ours... [and] the planation song is more in unison with the 'harmony of the spheres' than Wagner's greatest triumph." Africans would contribute a distinctive ethos, art, and literature to world civilization. "Life, which in this cold Occident stretched in bleak, conventional lines before us, takes on a warm, golden hue that harks back to the heritage of Africa and the tropics." World War I had revealed "the cruelty of the civilization of the West. History has taught us the futility of the civilization of the East. Let ours be the civilization of no man, but of all men. This is the truth that sets us free."[31]
Threatened war with Mexico elicited further Du Bois condemnations of American racism. When the U.S. invaded Mexico, resulting in casualties for Afro-American soldiers, Du Bois commented that "in America, in Europe and in Africa black men are fighting for the liberties of white men and pulling their chestnuts out of the fire. One of these bright mornings black men are going to learn how to fight for themselves." With withering sarcasm, Du Bois called Carrizal (a Mexican victory over black U.S. troops) "a glory for the Mexicans who dared to defend their country from invasion and for Negro troopers who went singing to their death. And the greater glory was the glory of the black men, for Mexicans died for a land they love, while Negroes sang for a country that despises, cheats and lynches them." The black soldiers died for their country even as the shrieks of agony from the victim of the recent Waco lynching, and the laughter of white terrorists, resounded across Texas. "Why should they not laugh at death for a country which honors them dying and kicks and buffets them living. God laughed. It was a Joke." The Crisis also quoted Northern and Southern white newspapers which openly advocated sending "worthless" Negroes to their death in Mexico, thus cleansing the South of vermin and saving the lives of valuable white men.[32]
Denouncing Wilson as "war-mad" and as "yelling for the largest navy in the world" instead of advocating "preparedness" for Christianity or human culture, Du Bois opposed Wilson's militarization program. In July 1916 the Crisis featured an eight-page illustrated supplement (printed at the front of the magazine) on the particularly gruesome lynching of Jessie Washington in Waco, and thundered that "any talk of the moral leadership of this country in the world; any talk of the triumph of Christianity, or the spread of human culture, is idle twaddle so long as the Waco lynching is possible in the United States."[33]
Du Bois also printed occasional socialistic remarks, as in his January 1914 statement that "political democracy cannot be linked with industrial despotism, else the result is the rule of the rich." White workers must compete against exploited Negroes, "and the votes stolen from Negroes are used by white capitalists to keep the laborer in bondage." He proclaimed that "the accumulation of wealth is for social rather than individual ends. We must avoid, in the advancement of the Negro race, the mistakes of ruthless exploitation which have marked modern economic history."[34] Yet as the 1916 elections approached, Du Bois was again confronted with the perennial problem: the major parties humiliated and oppressed blacks, and the SP, which treated them fairly, had no chance.
In 1912 American blacks had embarked upon a great experiment, Du Bois commented, voting for a Democrat whom they believed might rise above the barbarism of his party and keep his solemn promises. But Afro-Americans had learned that Wilson's promise of justice for blacks was "a peculiarly miserable campaign deception." Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican candidate, was equally worthless. "We say nothing concerning the Socialist candidate[s]. They are excellent leaders of an excellent party; God send them success! But the effective voter has a choice between two parties, [and] the vote for the third party is at least temporarily thrown away." Du Bois despaired that "No intelligent Negro can vote for Woodrow Wilson, but he can vote for Allan L. Benson [the SP candidate] or HE CAN STAY HOME ON ELECTION DAY" unless Hughes actively sought their votes.[35]
Du Bois had always worked within the mainstream parties. Yet in a startling editorial revealing his extreme despair, Du Bois (suggesting a tactic later acted upon by Harrison, William Bridges, and other left-oriented black nationalists) advocated a Negro party. Du Bois had opposed this as "a move of segregation" which "separates us from our fellow Americans." However, he now realized that "self-defense knows no nice hesitations. The American Negro must either vote as a unit or continue to be politically emasculated." The Democratic party was controlled by the terrorist, one-party South; "consequently it can never, as a party, effectively bid for the Negro vote." The Republicans, as "the party of wealth and big business," were "the natural enemy of the humble working people who compose the mass of Negroes." Neither mainstream party, therefore, offered a viable alternative for blacks, who must, therefore, organize a Negro party which would endorse candidates, of whatever party, who best served the interests of justice.[36]
Du Bois reluctantly concluded that Negroes' "only effective method" was organization "in every congressional district as a Negro Party" which would "endorse those candidates, Republican, Democratic, Socialist, or what-not, whose promises and past performances give greatest hope for the remedying of the wrongs done the Negro race."[37] The Negro party must run its own candidates if none of the others were acceptable. Such cohesive, organized political action "would make the Negro vote one of the most powerful and effective of the group votes in the United States." After Wilson's re-election, Du Bois acknowledged that the terrorist governments of the South, unconstitutionally overrepresented in Congress and the Electoral College in direct violation of the fourteenth amendment, "made a real verdict on Mr. Wilson [by] the rest of the country impossible."[38]
Du Bois, however, had learned little from Wilson's betrayal of his democratic promises. When Wilson dragged the United States into World War I, Du Bois supported him. This volte-face alienated most SP members, who resolutely opposed U.S. involvement. However, a few of Du Bois's closest white allies, including NAACP co-founders William English Walling and Charles Russell, noisily repudiated the SP and spewed vituperation and hate upon their erstwhile comrades who still opposed war and conscription. Perhaps feeling a twinge of guilt over his own sudden reversal, Du Bois also lashed out at his Socialist ex-comrades, and, in a series of breathtaking non sequiturs, accused them of hypocrisy and veiled racism.[39]
Addressing a convention of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS) in late December 1917, Du Bois summarized the history of U.S. race relations in terms reminiscent of Harrison's. Whites, he charged, had never cared about blacks. Lincoln had in 1861 supported a proposed 13th amendment which would have made Southern slavery perpetual and unalterable; when America unwillingly emancipated Afro-Americans as an emergency war measure, it devised new forms of slavery in the South (peonage, convict labor, and the sharecropping system, all enforced by terroristic violence). Labor unions barred freedmen, thus protecting the privileges of white workers. Writing only months after the gruesome East St. Louis pogrom, Du Bois echoed Harrison when he charged that even as he spoke "white northern laborers find killing Negroes a safe, lucrative employment which commends them to the American Federation of Labor."[40]
Du Bois next accused the assembled Socialists and pacifists of similar rank hypocrisy. Leftists wailed about the suppression of free speech, but, except for an occasional perfunctory comment, deliberately avoided discussing racial problems. Elaborating a key insight of "The African Roots of the War"--that capitalist super-profits cemented an alliance between workers, capitalists, and reformist state socialists, erected upon the broken backs of peoples of color--Du Bois told his audience of ISS members and supporters that
You are discussing the conscription of wealth for the common weal, and yet this great, rich country has allowed generation after generation of American Negroes to grow up in ignorance and poverty and crime, because [whites] will not spend as many dollars upon a decent public school system or a system of social uplift for Negroes as they are perfectly willing to spend upon a single battleship. Under such circumstances it will be hard to make conscientious people believe that you believe in conscription of wealth for the common weal.[41] Pacifists loudly opposed the present bloodbath, "but yesterday, when war was confined to the Belgian Congo, to the headwaters of the Amazon, to South Africa and parts of India and the South Seas it was not war, it was simply a method of carrying civilization to the natives, and there were no national conventions on the subject."[42]
Similarly, Du Bois charged, the numerous peace proposals advocated by antiwar activists all ignored the disfranchised blacks in the West Indies and the United States: "What you are asking for is a peace among white folks with the inevitable result that they will have more leisure and inclination to continue their despoiling of yellow, red, brown and black folk." Du Bois thundered that "frankness and honesty on your part is almost impossible" because "you would not want to live in a world where Negroes were treated as men. Under such circumstances you must remember that the integrity of your own souls and minds is at stake."[43]
Du Bois warned that blacks would not remain forever quiescent, and closed with a thundering peroration, advising that every white American family choose a person of Negro descent, invite him to their home, entertain him and then through some quick and painless method kill him. In that way, in a single day, we would be rid of twelve million people who are today giving us so much concern or rather so little concern. Remember, that as ghastly as a proposal of this sort appears that it is a good deal better than forcing these Negroes into slums and ghettos and letting them die slowly by a high death rate. It is a good deal better than forcing them to the lowest wages and letting them die of inanition.... [and] the only one decent alternative to treating them as men.[44] Du Bois did not repudiate Socialism, however. A few months later he praised the SP's Rand School for teaching socialism, economics, and history in the modern way and for extending "a genuine welcome to colored men and women."[45]
Du Bois's attack on leftist racial insensitivities, however accurate, in no way justified his own support of a bloodbath which, as he well knew, was largely precipitated by imperialistic greed. Moreover, he further compromised himself by silently acquiescing in Wilson's reign of terror against dissidents. Fearing personal repression, he remained silent about atrocities inflicted upon others. His reasons were personal and political. Like many oppressed people, he sought inclusion in and identification with the society that rejected him. In a remark that also explains Afro-American loyalty to the Republican party and to the United States, despite all their betrayals, Du Bois later said that "I became during the World War nearer to feeling myself a real and full American than ever before or since." This was undoubtedly a gratifying feeling. Like many other progressive Americans, Du Bois also believed that war-induced national mobilization, government intervention in the economy, and patriotic unity would provide unprecedented opportunities for social advancement. In September 1916 he had predicted that the war would advance "the greater emancipation of European women, the downfall of monarchies, the gradual but certain dissolution of caste, and the advance of a true Socialism." Now that America was at war, Du Bois insisted that Afro-Americans participate as soldiers and war workers while simultaneously insisting upon full equality. In a passage that could have been written by John Dewey or any number of white progressive intellectuals, Du Bois proclaimed that "we are facing a new world.... New forces have been loosened and a new situation has arisen. It is the business of the American Negro not to sit idly by and see this rearrangement of the world, hoping that something will come out of it of good for him. It is rather his business actually to put himself into the turmoil and work effectively for a new democracy that shall know no color." Randolph Bourne would soon attack this misuse of pragmatism.[46]
Du Bois, however, perceived a hopeful precedent in the Civil War, which had generated emancipation, Afro-American service in the military, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the (still unenforced) Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. Such hopes were widespread in the African-American community. Indeed, Richmond Plant editor John Mitchell--remembering that Lincoln emancipated and enlisted blacks only as an emergency war measure--proclaimed that "the longer the war and the bloodier, the better it will be for Colored folks." When prolonged bloodshed rendered whites dependent on black help, "then will the Colored folks come into their own.... This can only come from a long and from a bloody war. From a short, quick war, Good Lord deliver us." This editorial was reprinted in Trotter's Boston Guardian, and evoked hostile notice from the secret police.[47]
Du Bois avoided such incendiary statements but did seek, as Lewis has said, "civil rights through carnage." Well before America's entry into the war, Joel Spingarn, NAACP chair and close friend of Du Bois, had launched a campaign for a segregated Negro officer training school in Des Moines, Iowa. Spingarn was motivated both by American patriotism and the fear that African Americans would suffer exclusion from the armed forces, and especially from the officer corps. In Spingarn's view, an integrated camp was simply impossible. Although Spingarn encountered opposition when he toured black colleges touting his proposal, Du Bois, after hesitating, supported his friend.[48]
In an important Crisis editorial, Du Bois confronted "the damnable dilemma": blacks must, as usual, either temporarily accept segregation or suffer total exclusion from American life. "We cannot escape it," he said. "We must continually choose between insult and injury; no schools or separate schools; no travel or 'Jim Crow' travel; homes with disdainful neighbors or homes in slums." In all of these circumstances blacks rightfully made their decisions according to the merits of the case, sometimes accepting segregation and sometimes not, depending on which option best fostered education, travel, and comfortable living. African Americans must once again choose, Du Bois said, this time "between the insult of a separate camp" and "the irreparable injury" of total exclusion from positions of leadership. "It is a case of [the segregated] camp or no officers." Replying to militant integrationists, Du Bois urged that neither the Army nor the white South wanted black officers; repudiating the only possible entree into leadership would play into the hands of the worst racists. However, Du Bois's stance evoked severe criticism. Trotter charged that Du Bois had "weakened, compromised, deserted the fight, betrayed the cause of his race." Others murmured that Du Bois had succumbed to hidden pressures. Du Bois, however, exulted when the camp was, in his revealing word, "granted."[49]
While ardently supporting the American war effort, Du Bois combined that support with militant criticism of American racism. "Let us enter this war for liberty with clean hands," he said. "May no blood-smeared garments bind our feet when we rise to make the world safe for democracy.... Let us be true to our mission. No land that loves to lynch 'niggers' can lead the hosts of Almighty God." Du Bois demanded the entire panoply of civil rights for which he and the NAACP had always fought: the end of lynching, segregation, disfranchisement, judicial prejudice and exclusion, and discrimination in every area of American life.[50]
Du Bois also published the resolutions of an independent, nationwide Washington conference of Afro-Americans as the lead editorial in the June 1917 Crisis. Du Bois almost certainly wrote these resolutions, which repeated his central ideas in his own words. They began by reasserting Du Bois's views on the imperialist origins of the war as a contest over African booty, with its concomitant "despising of the darker races"; asserted that permanent peace required self-government "not simply among the smaller nations of Europe but among the natives of Asia and Africa, the Western Indies and the Negroes of the United States"; and claimed that Germany's colonial record was far more brutal than that of the Allied powers. The resolutions urged that Afro-Americans enlist in the armed forces and perform war work "despite our deep sympathy with the reasonable and deep-seated feeling of revolt among Negroes at the persistent insult and discrimination to which they are subject and will be subject even when they do their patriotic duty."[51]
Yet Du Bois and the other black leaders asserted that "this country belongs to us even more than to those who lynch, disfranchise, and segregate.... Absolute loyalty in arms and in civil duties need not for a moment lead us to abate our just complaints and just demands. Despite the gratuitous advice of the white friends who wish us to submit uncomplainingly to caste and peonage, and despite the more timid and complacent souls in our own ranks, we demand and of right ought to demand" all American rights. These included: equality in military service under black officers; the immediate cessation of lynching; suffrage for black men and women; universal education; the abolition of Jim Crow cars; the repeal of segregation ordinances; and equal rights in all public institutions. "These are not minor matters. They are not matters that can wait. They are the least that self-respecting, free, modern men can have and live.... The denial of them is death and that our enemies and some of our false friends well know." Demanding these rights was an integral part of "unfaltering loyalty to our country."[52]
Du Bois also continued his bitter criticisms of U.S. atrocities and hypocrisy for over a year after U.S. entry into the war. The September 1917 Crisis featured "The Massacre of East St. Louis," one of the longest, most bitter, and most profusely illustrated articles the magazine had ever printed. It also published an illustrated account of the massive New York silent parade protesting this pogrom. The next month Du Bois, discussing the rebellion of maltreated black soldiers in Houston, expressed his gratification that "here, at last, white folk died." In April 1918, under the caption "Safe For Democracy," the Crisis ran parallel accounts of the mobbing of Kerensky in Russia and the murder-by-torture (with a red-hot crowbar) of a black in Tennessee. The May issue reprinted a postcard (sold on the streets for a dime) with an actual photograph of a hanging black man, surrounded by proud and smug white lynchers, none of whom were punished.[53]
In light of his militant opposition to racism and discrimination, Du Bois's totally unexpected July 1918 editorial "Close Ranks" amazed and disheartened his friends and emboldened his left-wing critics. Du Bois's pronouncement was variously regarded as servile, opportunistic, or merely deluded. In a complete reversal of his previous position, Du Bois admonished Afro-Americans:
Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy. We make no ordinary sacrifice, but we make it gladly and with our eyes lifted to the hills.[54]
Du Bois's motives for this astounding reversal have been heatedly debated by historians. Two culprits have been identified: Du Bois's need to avoid censorship and repression, and his hopes for the offer of a captaincy in the army's military intelligence division.[55]
Du Bois feared that increasing repression threatened both his free speech and the Crisis itself. Du Bois was aware of America's long history of terrorist violence against the Afro-American press, of which Ida B. Wells was only the most prominent victim. Even the ultra-patriotic Chicago Defender had some of its subscription agents killed, and others forced from their homes, by white terrorists. The Wilson administration, backed by officially-sanctioned vigilante thugs, was destroying the organized left. Dozens of radical publications had been suppressed, and editors charged under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. A huge secret police apparatus, spread out over the Army, the Department of Justice, and the Post Office, and augmented by amateur informers everywhere, monitored every word and action (including invented ones) of Afro-American activists.[56]
Du Bois and the Crisis had been directly threatened. The Bureau of Investigation, in a crude attempt at intimidation, visited the Crisis's offices in April 1917, and the Post Office began intensive surveillance after Du Bois heatedly denounced the East St. Louis pogrom. Two issues were formally banned from the mails in 1918 months after their publication date, when the local secret police agents belatedly discovered their "subversive" nature. Had a single issue been excluded from the mails in a timely fashion, the Post Office could then have denied the Crisis its second-class mailing permit, without which almost any magazine would fold. Only the NAACP's prominent white backers saved the Crisis from suppression.
Despite its white connections, however, the Crisis was treading on increasingly thin ice as the war progressed. On May 1, 1918, a government official met with Charles Studin (white), an attorney and member of the NAACP board, and warned him of possible suppression. The NAACP established a self-censorship committee and Spingarn assured the government that Du Bois had "promised to change his tone." He would make the Crisis "an organ of patriotic propaganda." Many white NAACP officials, including Spingarn, had often viewed Du Bois as obstreperous, and may have actually welcomed the opportunity to bring him under control. At any rate, on June 3, 1918, the Army's Intelligence Division threatened the Crisis with suppression if it published "carping and bitter utterances likely to foment dissatisfaction and destroy the morale of the people for winning the war." Such writings were considered "seditious and disloyal." This letter, signed by the head of Army Intelligence, was in fact written (and cosigned) by none other than Joel Spingarn, now working for the MID. A separate letter demanded the names of all NAACP officers, including those in the group's 117 branches. The NAACP supplied this list.[57]
Du Bois believed that he could function under the censorship. As he told a correspondent on August 8, 1918, "It is necessary in the time of war to be careful of one's utterances. The Crisis will never say anything that it does not believe: but there are a great many things which it does believe which it cannot say just now."[58] Such temporizing ignored the fact that context determines meaning: omitting key facts and beliefs decisively alters the meaning of those that are expressed. In stating only part of what he believed, Du Bois distorted the meaning even of what he was permitted (or permitted himself) to say.
While the U.S. was threatening the Crisis (and dozens of other Afro-American publications) and inducing self-censorship, Spingarn also fostered active African-American support of the war. In this he aided George Creel, chief of America's propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information, which sponsored a June, 1918 Washington Conference of black editors. (Although almost all of those invited attended, Trotter, Wells, and Harrison refused.) The editors listened as U.S. officials lectured them on their patriotic duties. Booker T. Washington's old lieutenant Emmett Scott, now a War Department official responsible for corralling Afro-American opinion, opened the conference by saying "This is not the time to discuss race problems. Our first duty is to fight, and to continue to fight until the war is won. Then we can adjust the problems that remain in the life of the colored men. This is the doctrine we are teaching to the Negroes of the country."[59]
Spingarn later exulted that the editors had left feeling "pleased at having been taken into the confidence of the Government and asked for advice and cooperation." In fact, the editors had mostly listened rather than talked; Spingarn gloated that he had let them vent between speeches only "so as to permit each man to 'let off steam' as much as he desired, and to guide the discussion in the right direction."[60]
Du Bois wrote the Conference's official resolution, which was published in the August Crisis. The editors disdained "the pushing of irrelevant personal grievances as the price of loyalty" and offered their race's "active, enthusiastic and self-sacrificing participation in the war." However, they also declared that continuing outrages and injustice would impede Afro-American leaders in their efforts to mobilize black support for the war. "German propaganda among us is powerless," the resolution said, "but the apparent indifference of our own Government may be dangerous." The resolution demanded the immediate cessation of lynching, the abolition of Jim Crow cars, and white acceptance of black assistance in the war effort. "All these things," it concluded, "are matters, not simply of justice, but of National and group efficiency." A more specific list of grievances, modelled after Wilson's Fourteen Points, was sent to various government departments.[61]
When Du Bois wrote the conference's resolution (about the time he was penning "Close Ranks"), he knew that he would soon be offered a captaincy in the Army Intelligence. This helps explain its generally accommodating tone. Yet the fact that the other editors and leaders (none of whom had been tempted with a high-ranking position, and none of whom knew of the offer to Du Bois) had to approve the resolution, meant that the resolution could not give the unconditional loyalty Du Bois soon proffered on behalf of himself and his race. Nevertheless, some blacks accused the confreres of betraying the race and debasing themselves. Their anger turned to fury when they learned that Du Bois was secretly maneuvering for military honors.
The captaincy itself was the product of Spingarn's fertile imagination. Spingarn had joined the MIB in the hopes not only of controlling black opinion, but of winning important concessions under the guise of reinforcing black morale, boosting efficiency, and helping win the war. Spingarn had grandiose hopes that the government would foster black rights as war emergency measures, as Lincoln did during the Civil War. Feeling confident that "the bait of olive drab is strong even for such a man as [Du Bois]," Spingarn persuaded the Crisis editor that, by accepting the captaincy, he could fight for Afro-American rights from within the Wilson administration at the very time that censorship and repression made such efforts by private citizens increasingly dangerous and ineffectual.[62] Apparently neither Spingarn nor Du Bois reflected on the fact that while Lincoln had been fiercely antislavery, Wilson was viciously antiblack.
Du Bois was never offered his captaincy. Indeed, when the idea was publicly broached it ignited a firestorm of opposition from every possible source. African-American leaders, including many editors who had been duped (as they now felt) into signing the Washington Conference's resolution, felt personally betrayed. The NAACP itself erupted into bitter acrimony because Du Bois insisted that, as a condition of his accepting the Army commission, he remain in overall charge of the Crisis even while working for the government, and that the NAACP make up the difference between his officer's salary ($2400 per year) and his Crisis stipend ($4200). A bitterly divided NAACP rejected Du Bois's request, while the powerful District of Columbia branch, headed by Archibald Grimke, threatened mutiny if Du Bois was accommodated. Abuse fell on Du Bois from every segment of African-American opinion. In a bizarre twist, Hubert Harrison wrote a memo (published in altered form as "The Descent of Du Bois") at the behest of Major Walter Loving, the most effective black secret police agent, claiming that Du Bois's appointment would alienate rather than conciliate Afro-American opinion. Finally, white racists in the Military Intelligence Bureau itself scuttled Du Bois's appointment. All of Spingarn's plans for racial betterment (never acted upon in any case) were unceremoniously repudiated, and Spingarn himself booted out of Military Intelligence and shipped to Europe.[63]
Meanwhile, just after the Government's official Negro editors' conference adjourned, Monroe Trotter and Hubert Harrison convened their National Liberty Conference, successor to the New York and Boston gatherings of 1917, in the District of Columbia. Trotter and Harrison had been planning this congress for some time; Spingarn, fearing its potential radicalism, had first demanded that it not meet, and had then hurriedly convened the government-sponsored conference in order to undermine it. When the Military Intelligence Division accused Trotter of spreading pro-German propaganda, the Boston militant wryly replied that "if there was any German money available, the convention would be very much larger than it will be." As it was, the convention was attended by 115 delegates from 29 states, far more than had attended the government's meeting. The secret police gathered the names of almost every participant, and shadowed Harrison.[64]
The National Liberty Congress, which Trotter and Harrison chaired, used Wilsonian rhetoric for radical ends. Wilson, it said, was "the moral leader and spokesman of the allied nations which are resisting Germanic aggression"; his words on self-government and freedom must be implemented in the United Sates, if only to preserve "the morale and esprit de corps" of African American soldiers and civilians. The Liberty Congress proclaimed that African Americans were victimized by officially-sanctioned "robbery, ravishing, mob violence, murder, and massacre" and could not "protect our daughters, wives, or mothers from violation by white men or murder by the mob." The Congress demanded an end to segregation in federal buildings and on federal land; equal treatment within the federal civil service; an end to Jim Crow on railroads managed by the federal government (which, during the war, included most major railroads); integration of the armed forces and all federally operated schools; enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments; and a national law against lynching. These resolutions, of course, implicitly yet forcefully denounced the Wilson administration's segregation policy, as well as the Des Moines officer training camp which Du Bois and the NAACP had endorsed. Harrison was unanimously elected president of the permanent organization which resulted. This conference foreshadowed the Afro-America's postwar militancy.[65]
Du Bois, however, not only continued but even intensified his accommodationist editorials. Immediately following his printing of the Washington editors' resolutions, Du Bois unleashed "A Philosophy in Time of War," the fatuous patriotism of which made even "Close Ranks" appear positively militant in contrast. Du Bois declared that the United States "is OUR country" and that "this is OUR war. We must fight it with every ounce of blood and treasure." (Du Bois, of course, never risked a drop of his blood, and was rather stingy with his treasure as well; he had demanded, as a condition of his acceptance of the captaincy, that the NAACP supplement his officer's salary so that his income would remain at its previous level.) With the maudlin sentimentality that often characterized Du Bois's rhetorical excesses, and that effectively concealed a lack of thought or moral coherence, he proclaimed that
We shall not bargain with our loyalty. We shall not profiteer with our country's blood. We shall not hesitate the fraction of a second when the God of Battles summons his dusky warriors to stand before the armposts of his throne. Let them who call for sacrifice in this awful hour of Pain fight for the rights that should be ours; let them who make the laws writhe beneath each enactment that oppresses us,--but we? Our duty lies inexorable and splendid before us, and we shall not shrink....
We are the Ancient of Days, the First of Races and the Oldest of Men. Before Time was, we are. We have seen Egypt and Ethiopia, Babylon and Persia, Rome and America, and for that flaming Thing, Crucified Right, which survived all this staggering and struggling of men--for that we fight today in and for America--not for a price, not for ourselves alone, but for the World.[66]
Du Bois even descended to equating demands for equal rights with cowardice, protesting that "we want victory for ourselves.... [but] it must be clean and glorious, won by our manliness, and not by the threat of the footpad." When confronted with substantial NAACP opposition to his captaincy, Du Bois threatened to publicly denounce his organization as "dangerously unpatriotic and anti-American." He even implied that opposition to Wilson's war policy was tantamount to the murder of children and the rape of women.[67] At the time Du Bois made this statement, conscientious objectors were being tortured in U.S. prisons, blacks publicly mutilated and killed with impunity by white mobs, and opponents of Wilson's war policy jailed, deported, and sometimes murdered.
Confronting a firestorm of opposition, Du Bois responded to critics in the Crisis of September, when he falsified his own record, lied about the timing of the writing of "Close Ranks," and distorted history in a vain attempt to prove that blacks had benefitted from their service in past wars. "The Crisis says, first your country, then your rights," he thundered. Du Bois denied the existence of the "corrupt bargain" alleged by his opponents, claimed that he remained "in unruffled serenity" despite his critics, and sniffed that "no one who essays to teach the multitude can long escape crucifixion."[68] Nevertheless, Du Bois's self-interested accommodationism undermined his reputation and crippled his leadership among Afro-Americans of many persuasions, not merely the radicals. For decades afterwards, Du Bois extenuated, justified, agonized over, and apologized for his wartime accommodationism.
Du Bois's and Spingarn's attempt (as well as that of reformers of all stripes) at collaborating with the Wilson administration proved a catastrophic failure. Eerily foreshadowing Afro-American experience for most of the twentieth century, Du Bois's "Close Ranks" and Military Intelligence fiasco demonstrated the futility of working within the structures of capitalist and white supremacist power. Far from improving the plight of African-American troops, Du Bois (as he later discovered) inadvertently helped conceal and gloss over the horrendous abuse, sometimes amounting to sadistic torture and enslavement, inflicted upon blacks in uniform. Archibald Grimke's advice that blacks eschew military service and seize lucrative jobs in wartime industry was far more prescient. Although the segregated Des Moines camp did train 1200 Afro-American officers, these constituted a mere .7% of the Army's corps, far less than Afro-America's 13% of the army. They, too, acted mostly as tokens whose presence seemingly validated America's vapid protestations of equal justice even as they fostered a misguided black patriotism. Most officers placed in command of blacks were Southern whites, many of whom abused and slandered their charges. Wilson continued his disgusting racist policies throughout the war and beyond; having unctuously proclaimed that the segregation he imposed on the civil service was "distinctly to the advantage of the colored people themselves," he now accused Negroes of fomenting Bolshevism. Efforts to secure even a temporary wartime antilynching law proved unavailing. Although Wilson did eventually condemn lynching, he did so only after a white man (Robert Prager) was lynched; Wilson's speech avoided any mention of blacks or of the South. Lynching actually increased in 1918 and again in 1919; in the year after the war ten black soldiers in uniform were publicly tortured to death. Spingarn himself inadvertently fueled white racist hysteria by capitalizing on white fears of black disloyalty and insurrection to argue for his proposed reforms.[69]
Du Bois, Spingarn, and the loyal coterie of black secret police agents were motivated by a twisted idealism, a vastly inflated sense of self-importance, a naive belief in the fundamental decency of the U.S. government and society, and (in the case of Du Bois and other blacks) a pathetic desire to belong. They wanted to prove their own loyalty and usefulness. Some agents used their position to settle old scores and enjoy the exaggerated sense of self-esteem that comes with secret information and power over others. Spingarn himself manipulated Du Bois and countless other blacks into serving as the voices of a white supremacist regime based upon the murder and torture of people of color at home and abroad. His complementary efforts to manipulate the U.S. Army and the Wilson administration into fostering black rights fell flat.
This result was both inevitable and predictable, even on purely pragmatic grounds. Du Bois, and numerous other black editors and leaders, claimed that if the Wilson administration behaved decently towards blacks and respected their most basic rights, this would increase African-American morale and efficiency, and thus help win the war. However, they ignored not only the contumacious racism of Wilson and his cabinet members, but another simple reality: any action on behalf of black Americans risked alienating racist whites, who far outnumbered blacks and their tiny band of white allies. The merest hint of racial egalitarianism incited mass hysteria, and often enough violence, especially but not exclusively in the South. Any gestures towards Negro equality would have spurred disaffection, resistance, and even sabotage throughout the nation, and particularly in the old Confederacy. From the standpoint of military efficiency, civilian discipline and morale, and winning the war, such gestures would have lost far more than they won. The Wilson administration, of course, represented the white South and shared its sentiments; Wilson and his cronies resisted, rather than fostered, civil rights for black Americans (and women and workers). Neither inclination, political interest, or real efficiency would be fostered by ameliorating the condition of African Americans in the Army or in civilian life.
Did the debacle over "Close Ranks" have any positive consequences? Perhaps. Du Bois resumed a militant stance in 1919; and his temporary lapse no doubt facilitated the rise of a new generation of militant, uncompromising Afro-Americans, represented in part by A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, Wilfred A. Domingo, and other radicals associated with the Messenger.
Notes:
[1] Du Bois used this phrase at least twice: in "Strivings of the Negro People," Atlantic Monthly, August 1897; and in The Souls of Black Folk, first published in 1903. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York, 1993), 198-201, 277-296, discusses both of these works. The quote is on 198-199 and 280-281.
[2] DB "Socialist of the Path," Horizon, February 1907, in Meier, Rudwick, and Broderick, eds., Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century (Indianapolis, 1971), 63-4; DB, "Negro and Socialism," ibid.
[3] DB in Horizon, February 1908, quoted in Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans (Westport, 1977), 194.
[4] Foner, American Socialism, 182-201.
[5] This statement by Debs, repeated in almost every discussion of SP attitudes towards race, occurs in Eugene Debs, "The Negro in the Class Struggle," ISR, November 1903. This article was in fact a bitter attack on white racism, and Debs fully acknowledged the specially horrendous oppressions endured by Afro-Americans. The article is reprinted, among other places, in Sally Miller, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Early Twentieth Century American Socialism (New York, 1996), 165-168.
[6] "Socialists in Oklahoma," TC, December 1910.
[7] "The Socialists," TC, March 1911.
[8] "Socialism Again," TC, April 1911; "The Socialists Again," TC, November 1911.
[9] NYC, January 21, 1911, in Herbert Aptheker, ed., Writings by W.E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others (Millwood, New York, 1982), 40-41. In fact, the Socialist International condemned the American party's stance and demanded open immigration.
[10] "Organized Labor," TC, July 1912; "Along the Color Line," TC, August 1912.
[11] DB editorial, "Politics," TC, August 1912; DB editorial, "The Last Word in Politics," TC, November 1912; DB, "Along the Color Line, Political" TC, September 1912; DB editorial, "The Election," TC, December 1912. For a full account of Brownsville, see John Weaver, The Brownsville Raid (New York, 1970); for Taft's dismissal of Afro-American officeholders see Louis Harlan Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1905 (New York, 1983), 338-358. Harlan also discusses the Brownsville raid, 309-322.
[12] DB editorial, "Politics," TC, August 1912; DB editorial, "The Last Word in Politics," TC, November 1912.
[13] DB, "Along the Color Line, Politics," TC, December 1912; DB editorial, "The Election," TC, December 1912; DB editorial, "Burleson," TC, August 1913.
[14] Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, Volume I, (Amherst, 1997) 180.
[15] DB, "Socialism and the Negro Problem," New Review, January 1, 1913. In a curious phrase, Du Bois contrasted Socialist theorists who charted the outcome of social evolution, seeking information on "just what the outcome is going to be," with "those who suffer from the present industrial situation and who are anxious that, whatever the broad outcome may be, at any rate the present suffering which they know so well shall be stopped." Du Bois acknowledged that "it is this second class of social thinkers who are interested particularly in the Negro problem." These latter must have included (or even been comprised by) IWW activists. Du Bois, however, explicitly directed his remarks to the first group of theorists.
[16] ibid.
[17] ibid.
[18] DB, "A Field for Socialists," New Review, January 11, 1913.
[19] ibid.
[20] DB, "An Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson," TC, March 1913; DB editorial, "Burleson," TC, August 1913.
[21] DB editorial, "Another Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson," TC, September 1913.
[22] DB, "Federal Segregation," TC, November 1913 (the quote about closed doors is taken from an editorial in another periodical describing the NAACP's protest); DB editorial, "The Strength of Segregation," TC, December 1913.
[23] DB, Editorial, "World War and the Color Line," TC, November 1914.
[24] ibid.
[25] DB, "The African Roots of the War," Atlantic Monthly, May 1915, in Philip Foner, ed., W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890-1919 (New York, 1986), 244-257.
[26] ibid.
[27] ibid.
[28] ibid.
[29] TC, December 1914, February 1915, March 1916, March 1917.
[30] DB, "William Monroe Trotter," TC, December 1914; DB editorial, "Mr. Trotter and Mr. Wilson," TC, January 1915; "The War, Effect on Prejudice," TC, July 1915.
[31] DB, "The Battle of Europe," TC, September 1916.
[32] DB, "To the Rescue," TC, May 1916; DB, "Carrizal," TC, August 1916; "Black Soldiers," TC, August 1916; "A Discrepancy," TC, September 1916.
[33] DB, "Preparedness," TC, March 1916; "The Waco Horror," TC, July 1916; DB Editorial, "Lynching," TC, July 1916.
[34] "Free, White, and Twenty-One," TC, January 1914; DB, "The Immediate Program of the American Negro," TC, April 1915.
[35] DB, "The Presidential Campaign," TC, October 1916; DB Editorial, "Mr. Hughes," TC, November 1916. The Crisis carried numerous Republican party campaign advertisements in the November issue.
[36] DB, "The Negro Party," TC, October 1916.
[37] ibid.
[38] DB, "The Negro Party," TC, October 1916; DB editorial, "The World Last Month," TC, January 1917; DB editorial, TC, November 1916.
[39] Du Bois's petulance towards his former Socialist comrades at this time (which echoed his conduct after he was criticized for supporting Wilson in 1912) probably evinces Du Bois's own ambivalence and even guilt. NAACP official Joel Spingarn had written Du Bois in 1914: "You have an extraordinary unwillingness to acknowledge that you have made a mistake, and if accused of one, your mind will find or even invent reasons and quibbles of any kind to prove you were never mistaken." Spingarn to DB, October 24, 1916, quoted in Mark Ellis, "'Closing Ranks and 'Seeking Honors': W.E.B. Du Bois in World War I," JAH, June 1992, 104.
[40] DB, "The Problem of Problems," Address to the Ninth Annual Convention of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, December 27, 1917, The Intercollegiate Socialist, December 1917-January 1918, in Foner, ed., Du Bois Speaks, 258-267.
[41] ibid.
[42] ibid.
[43] ibid.
[44] ibid.
[45] DB, "The Rand School," TC, March 1918.
[46] DB, "The Battle of Europe," TC, September 1916; DB, "The Present," TC, August 1917; DB, Dusk at Dawn (reprint, New York, 1970), 256. For one account of Dewey's controversy with Bourne, see Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, 1991), 195-212. This debate was paralleled by a simultaneous controversy between Max Eastman, editor of the Masses, and ex-Socialist supporters of the war.
[47] Kornweibel, Investigate, 233-234.
[48] Lewis, Du Bois, 528-532.
[49] Lewis, Du Bois, 528-533; DB, "The Perpetual Dilemma," TC, April 1917; DB, "Officers," TC, June 1917.
[50] DB, "Awake, America," TC, September 1917.
[51] DB, "Resolutions of the Washington Conference," TC, June 1917.
[52] ibid.
[53] "The Massacre of East St. Louis," TC, September 1917; "The Silent Parade," TC, September 1917; "Safe For Democracy," TC, April 1918; Postcard of the lynching of George McNeel in Monroe, Louisiana, TC, May 1918. Du Bois did concede that the Houston rebels had broken the law; unlike some radicals, therefore, he said that they merited punishment.
William English Walling, who soon denounced all critics of Wilson's war policy as traitors, said of the East St. Louis massacre: "As it was deliberately preparing for a whole month and in accord with American mob precedents and without military excuse it was worse than anything Germans did in Belgium and comparable only to [anti-]Jewish pogroms of the Czar." Ominously, Walling attributed racial outbreaks partly to German spies. "A Telegram," TC, October 1917.
[54] DB, "Close Ranks," TC, July 1918.
[55] Mark Ellis, "'Closing Ranks' and 'Seeking Honors': W.E.B. Du Bois in World War I," JAH, June 1992, 96-124; William Jordan, "'The Damnable Dilemma': African-American Accommodation and Protest During World War I," JAH, March 1995, 1562-1583; Mark Ellis, "W.E.B. Du Bois and the Formation of Black Opinion in World War I: A Commentary on 'The Damnable Dilemma,'" JAH, March 1995, 1584-1590. Ellis concludes that Du Bois's "intention in writing the editorial--to secure a role in the unprecedented program of government-led reform mapped out by Joel Spingarn--was consistent with his career and his wartime approach for equal rights. But the content of the editorial has seemed to fellow radicals and to most subsequent students of Du Bois's life an aberration..... 'Close Ranks' was a quid pro quo, and... the editorial and the captaincy were firmly linked." JAH, March 1995, 1590.
Ellis later devoted an entire chapter of Race, War, and Surveillance (Chapter 5, pp. 141-182) to the affair of Spingarn, Du Bois, Military Intelligence, and "Close Ranks." He concludes that Du Bois's "deliberate purpose" in writing he editorial was to secure the captaincy. "To explain it simply as the apogee of his pro-war thinking, or as a frightened response to pressure exerted on the NAACP by the New York United States attorney general's office, is to miss the point. Although his enthusiasm for the war was genuine and he was certainly being careful not to offend the Justice Department, the meekness of the July editorial was an astonishing departure from the magazine's declared commitment to exposing and attacking all racial injustice. Above all, it did not square with the editor's known rejection of accommodationism." Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance, 180.
William Jordan, however (Black Newspapers and America's War For Democracy, 1914-1920, 113-115) says that "the offer of a captaincy in the army was likely a minor inducement since Du Bois seemed to be lukewarm about the prospect of military service." Jordan credits threats of repression and "all of the same forces leading to optimism among other black editors" as the key factors motivating Du Bois.
Lewis, Du Bois, discusses this and related incidents, 525-534, 552-560.
[56] Kornweibel, Investigate; Ellis, Surveillance; Jordan, Newspapers. Kornweibel, Investigate (10-36) gives an excellent account of the various secret police agencies. His Federal Surveillance is a vast microfilm collection of secret police reports on African-American activities.
[57] Kornweibel, Investigate, 142-143.
[58] Jordan, Newspapers, 113.
[59] Ellis, Surveillance, 149.
[60] Ellis, Surveillance, 149-151.
[61] "Help Us to Help," TC, August 1918.
[62] Ellis, Surveillance, 161.
[63] In addition to the sources listed above, see Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., Archibald Grimke: Portrait of a Black Independent (Baton Rouge, 1993), 214-230.
[64] Stephen R. Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New York, 1971), 219-221; JBP, 668-673; Ellis, Surveillance, 122.
[65] Stephen R. Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New York, 1971), 219-221; JBP, 668-673; Herbert Aptheker, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (Secaucus, 1977), III, 215-218.
[66] DB, "A Philosophy in Time of War," TC, August 1918.
[67] Lewis, Du Bois, 558; DB, "A Philosophy in Time of War," TC, August 1918. Du Bois said that "In the day of our lowest travail we did not murder children and rape women to bring our freedom nearer." This reference is unclear; it obviously refers directly to alleged German atrocities in Belgium, but the context strongly suggests that Du Bois was equating opposition to Wilson's war policy with countenance of, and even participation in, such atrocities.
[68] "Our Special Grievances," TC, September 1918' "A Momentous Proposal," TC, September 1918; "The Reward," TC, September 1918. Mark Ellis compares Du Bois's claims about the timing "Close Ranks" vis-a-vis the offer of a captaincy in "'Closing Ranks' and 'Seeking Honors': W.E.B. Du Bois in World War I," JAH, June 1992, 96-124 and in Ellis, Surveillance, 141-183, especially 178.
[69] Ellis, Surveillance, xv, 50-51, 180-182; Jordan, Newspapers, 137.
Du Bois had declared himself a "Socialist-of-the-Path" in his publication the Horizon in early 1907. Du Bois favored "a far greater ownership of the public wealth for the public good than is now the case" and had proclaimed that such socialized ownership constituted "the one great hope of the Negro American.... Our natural friends are not the rich but the poor, not the great but the masses, not the employers but the employees. Our good is not wealth, power, oppression and snobbishness, but helpfulness, efficiency, service and self-respect." Although Du Bois did not agree with the Socialists "in all things," he concluded that "in trend and ideal they are the salt of the present earth.[2]
Du Bois's Socialism was a quasi-Christian, middle-class version based on altruism and service and emphasizing engineering and efficiency; it ignored the class struggle, that pillar of Socialist party (SP) philosophy. Yet he was impressed by the racial egalitarianism of many Socialists, and in 1908 praised the SP as "the only party today which treats Negroes as men, North and South."[3] The next year a handful of white Socialists, horrified by the Springfield, Illinois pogrom, conceived the idea of an interracial organization which would fight for complete racial equality. They recruited a broader leadership and founded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a biracial organization that most members of Du Bois's militant, all-black Niagara Movement joined.[4]
The hugely disproportionate number of white Socialists involved in the NAACP's founding impressed Du Bois with Socialism's racial egalitarianism. When he launched the NAACP's organ the Crisis in 1910 (its title was suggested by William English Walling, the left-wing Socialist who first envisioned an NAACP), Du Bois reprinted articles and editorials from the SP's New York paper, the Call. Two of these editorials are particularly noteworthy because they repudiated the orthodox, Debsian view that the SP had "nothing specific to offer the negro, and we cannot make special appeals to all the races"--a view that historians have assumed characterized the SP as a whole.[5] In the second issue of the Crisis (December 1910) Du Bois quoted a recent Call editorial which embodied the very philosophy and ideals for which Afro-American Socialists would fight:
It is a principle universally acknowledged by Socialists that although Socialism is primarily the movement of the working class for the overthrow of capitalist rule, it nevertheless must rush to the assistance of every oppressed class or race or nationality. The working class cannot achieve its ultimate grand aim of freeing itself from exploitation unless it frees all other elements of the community from exploitation. It cannot put an end to its own oppression unless it puts an end to all forms of oppression. Our party must stand everywhere on the side of the weak and oppressed, even if this course should bring upon us temporary reverses. Ultimate victory can be achieved in no other way.[6]
In March 1911 Du Bois reprinted another Call editorial that proclaimed that the struggle for Socialism "cements everywhere the unity of all who are engaged in it" and would inevitably "open the doors of the trade unions to the negro workers" who would be admitted "on a footing of perfect equality." While the class struggle for Socialism was in progress,
it is the duty of the Socialist movement everywhere to champion the rights of the negro. This course, which is the only one we can take, will undoubtedly retard our growth in the States of the South. But steadfast adherence to principle has been demonstrated again and again to be the only course that leads to Socialist success. And in the long run our success in the South is as certain, as preordained, as our success in the rest of the country and in the world.[7]
Another Call editorial proclaimed that the Negro "suffers under a double kind of slavery--wage slavery and color slavery." Soon afterward Du Bois commented that "the Socialists are again deeply stirred over the race question. In the South the party stands right in some places and wrong in others. In the North, where, of course, the vastly greater number of Socialists are found, the attitude is very good so far, and whenever prejudice crops up a score of friends come to the Negro's defense."[8]
While Du Bois was extolling the SP in the pages of the Crisis, however, he elsewhere criticized its equivocal stance on race. In a speech in early 1911, he noted that all previous movements for social betterment--the Reformation, the American and French revolutions, and the Reconstruction era--had ignored or ultimately abandoned the Negro. Even the AFL had repudiated its earlier egalitarianism and admitted openly racist unions. Condemning "the ban upon Asiatic labor sanctioned by the international Socialist congress," Du Bois (referring to a weasel-worded slap at Asian immigration to the United States, carried by racist American Socialists led by Morris Hillquit) proclaimed that "The negro race will not take kindly to Socialism so long as the international Socialist movement puts the bars against any race, whether it be yellow or black." The SP could recruit blacks only if it changed "its attitude toward the yellow races."[9]
Du Bois, therefore, recognized the SP's somewhat ambivalent racial attitudes when he joined the party in 1911. But so many of the whites who had initiated the NAACP were SP members, and the New York Call so stridently demanded equal rights, that Du Bois felt membership was important. Du Bois's comments on Harrison's Colored Socialist Club evinced his guarded optimism. The SP was far ahead of the capitalist parties, and indeed of almost all American organizations, in its active espousal of racial egalitarianism; yet its record was not spotless. And Du Bois was acutely aware of the AFL's much more dismal record. Both the SP's hesitations and the AFL's active racism were highlighted at the SP's epochal 1912 convention, when the SP anathematized the IWW, condemned sabotage, and reaffirmed its policy of non-intervention in union affairs--thus interfering against IWW strategy and tactics while implicitly countenancing AFL racism.
At this very time Du Bois was penning a scathing article addressed to the AFL. Du Bois said that "THE CRISIS believes in organized labor," which had raised the living standards of all races. For that reason the Crisis carried the printer's union label, despite the fact that white union members demanded "the deliberate exclusion from decent-paying jobs of every black man whom white workingmen can exclude on any pretense." Du Bois listed the many trades from which blacks were excluded and charged that the AFL policy would gladly "beat or starve the Negro out of his job if you can by keeping him out of the union; or, if you must admit him, do the same thing inside union lines." Blacks who retook "the jobs out of which the white waiters have driven them" during a waiters strike did "the natural and sensible thing, howsoever pitiable the necessity of such cutthroat policies in the labor world may be. So long as union labor fights for humanity, its mission is divine;" but when union members constituted themselves a labor monopoly "while other competent workmen starve, they deserve themselves the starvation which they plan for their darker and poorer fellows." Shortly afterwards Du Bois praised the Brotherhood of Timber Workers and the IWW, which maintained integrated locals in the face of Southern law.[10]
Despite his membership in the SP, Du Bois supported Woodrow Wilson in 1912. (This was not an eccentric gesture; Boston militant Monroe Trotter also backed Wilson.) Du Bois recognized that blacks had gained nothing from their traditional Republican loyalties, which only ensured that both parties could ignore their demands. Du Bois excoriated Theodore Roosevelt for his dishonorable discharge, without trial, of black soldiers accused on misbehavior during the Brownsville Affair, and Taft for his blatant repudiation of even the GOP's traditional token regard for black officeholders. The Crisis for September 1912 reported the lengthy and detailed assurances of fair treatment Wilson gave to a delegation of black leaders, promising impartial enforcement of the law, continued appointment of black officeholders, and opposition to racist legislation. The delegation reported that Wilson "expressed himself as feeling the need of and desiring the colored vote and stated that he was willing to do anything that was right and legal to secure that vote." If he were elected, Wilson promised, blacks would not regret voting for him. In a widely heralded and viciously violated promise, Wilson assured blacks of his "earnest wish to see justice done them in every matter, and not mere grudging justice, but justice executed with liberality and cordial good feeling."[11]
Du Bois supported Wilson with open eyes, as an experiment in black balance-of-power politics. Wilson, he acknowledged in August 1912, had long been "president of a college [Princeton] which did not admit Negro students and yet was not honest enough to say so, resorting rather to subterfuge and evasion." If left to himself, Wilson would exclude Chinese and Jews as well as blacks. But he was "a cultivated scholar and has brains"; he recognized political realities and "will treat black men and their interests with farsighted fairness. He will not be our friend, but he will not belong to the gang of which Tillman, Vardaman, Hoke Smith and Blease are the brilliant expositors." Du Bois explained why he, a SP member, was supporting a Democrat: "Of Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist candidate, we can only say this frankly: if it lay in our power to make him President of the United States we would do so, for of the four men [running] he alone, by word and deed, stands squarely on a platform of human rights regardless of race or class." In November Du Bois reiterated his belief that the Democratic, Republican, and Progressive parties were all despicable and that the Democrats had offered nothing concrete for Negroes. But "because the Socialists, with their manly stand for human rights irrespective of color, are at present out of the calculation, the Negro must choose between these three parties." Du Bois endorsed Wilson to see if the Democratic party "dares to be Democratic when it comes to black men" nationally as it had in some sections of the north. "We hope so and we are willing to risk a trial."[12]
After Wilson's victory, Du Bois claimed that between 20 and 30 percent of the New York City race vote was cast for Wilson, and rejoiced that the black vote was now an unknown quantity for which the parties must compete. Yet he acknowledged that those blacks who voted Democratic had "helped call to power not simply a scholar and a gentleman, but with him and in his closest counsels all the Negro-hating, disfranchising and lynching South. With Woodrow Wilson there triumphs, too, Hoke Smith, Close Blease, Jim Vardaman...." Du Bois trusted Wilson's good intentions, fearing only that his advisors would prevent Afro-Americans from presenting their grievances to him.[13]
Immediately after the election Du Bois, smarting from SP criticism, curtly wrote an official of the Manhattan SP that "my recent attitude in the political campaign has been called in question and as I do not feel that I ought to change it, I hereby offer my resignation as a member of the Socialist Party."[14] Although political expediency rather than dissatisfaction with SP racism had motivated his endorsement of Wilson and his subsequent resignation from the SP, Du Bois, perhaps seeking justification for his action, strongly criticized SP racial attitudes in two articles in the recently founded left-Socialist theoretical journal, the New Review, of which he was a contributing editor.
Du Bois directed his remarks at Socialist theorists who insisted that "we must not turn aside from the great objects of socialism to take up this issue of the American Negro" that socialism would inevitably solve along with all other problems. Echoing Wobblies, feminists, anarchists, and other left-wing dissidents who attacked the policy of "revolutionary waiting" and the concept of the "inheritor party," Du Bois denied that any great human problem could await the advent of Socialism. "If socialism is going to settle the American problem of race prejudice without direct attack along these lines by socialists, why is it necessary for socialists to fight along other lines? Indeed, there is a kind of fatalistic attitude on the part of certain transcendental socialists, which often assumes that the whole battle of socialism is coming by a kind of evolution in which active individual effort on their part is hardly necessary." Du Bois denied "that ultimately when the ninety millions [of white workers] come [in]to their own, they will voluntarily share with the ten million serfs."[15] Such a consoling fantasy contravened the orthodox Socialist position that justice was secured only by struggle of the oppressed, rather than by the altruism of the exploiters. White workers, Du Bois ruefully predicted, would surrender their privileges no more than would capitalists.
"The essence of social democracy is that there shall be no excluded, exploited classes in the socialistic state," Du Bois continued; "that there shall be no man or woman so poor, ignorant or black as not to count .... I have come to believe that the test of any great movement toward social reform is the excluded class." Du Bois castigated the "socialistic opportunism" which would construct a white Socialism upon the bent backs of the 20 percent of the American working class who were black, and who would therefore "find it not simply to their interest, but a sacred duty to underbid the labor market, vote against labor legislation, and fight to keep their fellow laborers down." In addition to this practical argument, Du Bois asked white Socialists about the ultimate meaning of the movement: "What becomes of socialism when it engages in such a fight for human downfall? Whither are gone its lofty aspirations and high resolve--its songs and comradeship?"[16]
Du Bois argued that "the Negro problem" was "the great test of the American socialist." Most Socialists simply could not comprehend the extent of Southern white racism, which countenanced the mass murder, torture, and rape of blacks. Southern whites would tolerate appeals for racial justice only upon the basis that "the murder and mistreatment of colored men may possibly hurt the white man. Consequently the Socialist Party finds itself in this predicament: if it acquiesces in race hatred, it has a chance to turn the tremendous power of southern white radicalism toward its own party; if it does not do this, it becomes a 'party of the Negro,' with its growth South and North decidedly checked." Du Bois worried that SP leaders might countenance racism in hopes of winning the South "whatever its cost." Du Bois asked such hesitating leaders a crucial question: "After you have gotten the radical South and paid the price which they demand, will the result be socialism?"[17] Du Bois, however, ignored the implications of this argument for any electoral strategy which aimed at class, gender, or racial liberation. The need that any vote-catching, majority-seeking party pander to popular prejudices, however despicable, severely undermined any bourgeois-democratic solution to America's most egregious injustices.
Du Bois's second article, perhaps prompted by the SP's neglect of Afro-Americans after the dissolution of Harrison's Colored Socialist Club, stressed the catastrophic consequences of SP racism. He warned white Socialists that "there is a group of ten million persons in the United States toward whom the Socialists would better turn serious attention." Negroes were "the most thoroughly exploited class in the United States." Their huge numbers and concentration in the South (and increasingly in Northern cities) made them a force that the SP could not neglect. White workers hated blacks because they undercut white wages, first as slaves and later as oppressed freedmen. "The laborer who hated slave labor was thoughtlessly led to hate the slave"; after emancipation "the wrath of the laborers was forthwith directed not against the low wages and the men who paid them, but virulently against the men who received them."[18]
The Afro-American, Du Bois continued, believed that "his greatest enemy is not the employer who robs him, but his white fellow workingman. For thirty years he has been taught this lesson by the working man himself." Whites had launched at least fifty hate strikes against the employment of blacks in the years 1881-1900, and probably another one hundred strikes ostensibly against the hiring of non-union men, "when in reality the Negro was not permitted to join the union." Du Bois insisted that "the Socialist Party must know and heed this history" and also recognize that "employing class [philanthropy] has given huge sums of money wrung from underpaid white laborers to furnish Negro schools and other institutions, which the States controlled largely by the white laborers' vote refused to furnish." Afro-Americans, therefore, viewed scabbing as justifiable retaliation toward their enemies. Du Bois concluded by asking: "Facing such a situation what has Socialism to say to these black men? Is it going to ignore them, or segregate them, or complain because they do not forthwith adopt a program of revolution of which they know nothing or a movement which they are not invited to join?"[19] Du Bois's strictures, however justified, came with ill grace from one who had just embraced the white-supremacist Woodrow Wilson. Whatever his motives, however, Du Bois excoriated the SP at the very time when Harrison was encountering its intractable racism, and simultaneously with the SP's repudiation of the racially-egalitarian IWW and reaffirmation of its de facto alliance with the racist AFL.
Du Bois, however, quickly criticized Wilson's embrace of the lynch-law Southerners who elected him. In March 1913 Du Bois published a respectful "Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson." As late as August 1913, when emboldened Southern Democrats had openly avowed their racist intentions and some of Wilson's cabinet members were segregating their federal departments, Du Bois claimed that "bad as the Democrats may prove, they cannot outdo William H. Taft." But he also proclaimed that lynching "begins not with the drunken blood lust of a wild gang of men and boys, but with the every-day white citizen who finds that race prejudice pays as an investment; helps him to win over his black competitor in the civil-service examination; helps him to get his fellow workman's job; helps to indulge the beast instinct to despise and trample on the weak. This is the kind of thing that Woodrow Wilson must fight and he must fight it in his own cabinet."[20] The next month Du Bois decried Wilson's neglect of black interests and the "positive action on the part of your advisers, with or without your knowledge, which constitutes the gravest attack on the liberties of our people since emancipation. Public segregation of civil servants in government employ, necessarily involving personal insult and humiliation, has for the first time in history been made the policy of the United States government." Du Bois concluded, however, that "we are still hoping that present indications are deceptive."[21]
By November 1913, however, Du Bois was losing heart. He described the Wilsonian policy of placing "iron bars, screens and closed doors" around black federal employees, and the stationing of watchmen at bathrooms to force blacks to use the one assigned to them. With typical Wilsonian deceit and hypocrisy, the Jim Crow signs were removed after public protests, but verbal orders continued the racist policy. In a rhetorical flight of terrible prescience in the December Crisis, Du Bois exclaimed that American whites would bitterly regret their welding of ten million Afro-Americans "into one great self-conscious and self-acting mass.... At present it is still possible to make Negroes essentially Americans with American ideals and instincts." Soon, however, we will have in this country a mass of people acting together like one great fist for their own ends, with secret understanding, with pitiless efficiency and with resources for defense which will make their freedom incapable of attack from without.... Those who advise 'race pride' and 'self-reliance' do not realize the Frankenstein which they are evoking.... What can America do with a mass of people who move through their world but are not of it and stand as one unshaken group in their battle? Nothing. The yell of the segregationist is the last scream of beaten prejudice. After that American civilization will be compelled through long centuries to tear down the walls which they are now building around the finest and most gifted single group in its polyglot population.[22] Disgusted with Wilson by 1916, Du Bois proclaimed that no intelligent black could vote for him. And as Wilson edged the United States toward involvement in Europe's Great War, Du Bois's disenchantment deepened.
Du Bois's first detailed pronouncement on World War I, appearing in the November 1914 Crisis, embodied some of the crucial contradictions that bedeviled his stance throughout the next four years. The war, Du Bois said, was caused "by race and color prejudice" and "the wild quest for Imperial expansion among colored races" by European powers. Colonies offered "a chance to confiscate land, work the natives at low wages, make large profits and open wide markets for cheap European manufactures." Germany, "shut out from acquiring colonies" in Africa by her European rivals and in South America by the United States, decided "to seize English or French colonies." Du Bois catalogued the horrors inflicted by white Europeans upon peoples of color and remarked that in justification of such atrocities "a theory of the inferiority of the darker peoples and a contempt for their rights and aspirations has become all but universal in the greatest centers of modern culture. Here it was that American color prejudice and race hatred received in recent years unexpected aid and sympathy. To-day civilized nations are fighting like mad dogs over the right to own and exploit these darker peoples."[23]
Although such an analysis might have resulted in a plea for neutrality, Du Bois urged that blacks support the Allies on the grounds that England's conduct, however atrocious, was improving. "As compared with Germany, England is an angel of light. The record of Germany as a colonizer toward weaker and darker people is the most barbarous of any civilized people and grows worse instead of better." Only sentences later, however, Du Bois admitted that "Belgium has been as pitiless and grasping as Germany and in strict justice deserves every pang she is suffering after her unspeakable atrocities in Congo." Du Bois admitted that Germans had treated him well during his studies there; "they made [me] believe in the essential humanity of white folk twenty years ago when [I] was near to denying it." However, the Germans were even then "starting on the same road with the southern American whites toward a contempt toward human beings and a faith in their own utter superiority to all other breeds."[24] This direct equation of German racism and chauvinism with the attitudes of Southern whites did not bode well for a Du Bois rapprochement with the Wilson administration.
In May 1915 Du Bois published his seminal "The African Roots of the War" in the Atlantic Monthly. This brilliant article laid the groundwork for much subsequent Afro-American radical thought, anticipated key insights later propounded by European revolutionaries, and devastatingly exposed a key dilemma of modern socialism. Du Bois summarized the proud and degraded history of Africa, the mother of civilization, the pride of many an empire, and the exploited source of modern European riches. Du Bois mentioned the depredations of the slave trade and stated that more recently "lying treaties, rivers of rum, murder, assassination, mutilation, rape and torture have marked the progress of Englishman, German, Frenchmen, and Belgian on the Dark Continent." White racism caused, extenuated, and resulted from these depredations; Africa became "another name for bestiality and barbarism." Thus Europe "invest[ed] in color prejudice. The 'color line' began to pay dividends."[25]
The rise of Socialism, "the dipping of more and grimier hands into the wealth-bag of the nation," alarmed the white elites, who recognized "that democracy in determining income is the next inevitable step to democracy in political power. With the waning of the possibility of the big fortune, gathered by starvation wage and boundless exploitation of one's weaker and poorer fellows at home, arose more magnificently the dream of exploitation abroad." The profits of this exploitation trickled down to the mass of laborers, who for the first time were allotted a share in the profits of oppression. The workers' share of the profits was as of yet small, and "and there are still at the bottom a large and restless excluded class." Yet white unions were inevitably increasing their share of the booty. The advance of democracy in the United States, therefore, rested upon "hatred of darker races... [and] an inhumanity which does not shrink from the public burning of human beings."[26]
It is no longer simply the merchant prince, or the aristocratic monopoly, of even the employing class, that is exploiting the world: it is the nation, a new democratic nation composed of united capital and labor.... Such nations... rule the modern world. Their national bond is no mere sentimental patriotism, loyalty, or ancestor-worship. It is increased wealth, power, and luxury for all classes on a scale the world never saw before. Never before was the average citizen of England, France, and Germany so rich, with such splendid prospects of greater riches.... The present world war is then, the result of jealousies engendered by the recent rise of armed national associations of labor and capital whose aim is the exploitation of the wealth of the world mainly outside the European circle of nations.[27]
Du Bois argued that "successful aggression in economic expansion calls for a close union between capital and labor at home." White workers increasingly demanded higher pay, better working conditions, and a voice in the management of industry. Capitalists mitigated conflict by the concessions of state socialism and "by public threats of competition of colored labor" at home and abroad. Yet they granted concessions only to "the aristocracy of labor," meanwhile threatening the increasingly revolutionary white underclass with underbidding by workers of color. Peace necessitated treating the darker races "as free and equal citizens in a world democracy of all races and nations" because the usual pacifist arguments were ineffectual. How could nations be won for peace when "by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand million in diamonds and cocoa?" How could pacifists rely on humanitarian sentiments when approaching "nations whose love of luxury is built on the inhuman exploitation of human beings, and who, especially in recent years, have been taught to regard these human beings as inhuman?" Unless peoples of all colors were treated justly, war would inevitably result from European contests for colonies, from the revolutionary upsurges of an oppressed proletariat increasingly burdened by the insupportable costs of the ever-escalating arms race, and from the revolt of the peoples of color themselves. When these latter rise in rebellion "the War of the Color Line will outdo in savage inhumanity any war this world has yet seen. For colored folk have much to remember and they will not forget."[28]
Du Bois's analysis implied that no outcome of the imperialistic war would long solve the problems that generated it. Nevertheless, he backed the Allies. Perhaps aware of this ambiguity, Du Bois ensured that the Crisis neither unreservedly supported the Allies or concealed blemishes on their record. In fact, it published biting pictures and cartoons satirizing U.S. and Allied atrocities. In December 1914 it ran "The Paradox," a picture of "a Black 'Heathen' of the Congo, fighting to protect the wives and daughters of white Belgians, who have murdered and robbed his people, against 'Christian' Culture represented by the German trophy [a war helmet] in his hand!" A February 1915 cartoon depicted a white lynch mob triumphantly leaving the smoldering ashes of its victim; the caption read "O say, can you see by the Dawn's early light, What so proudly we hailed at the Twilight's last gleaming." In March 1916 the Crisis depicted Uncle Sam deploring the barbarity of the European war, even while ignoring lynch-law in the South. In March 1917 an armless Congolese (this referred to Belgium's mutilation of thousands of Congolese) told Belgium's leader "if your uncle had left us our hands, Albert, we could be of more use to you now!"[29]
Although favoring the Allies, Du Bois did not advocate preparedness, much less American entry into the war. He attacked Wilson's increasingly vicious treatment of Afro-Americans, covering in great depth Wilson's eviction of Monroe Trotter from a White House interview. He printed widely diverse comments from prominent Afro-Americans on the effect of black service in the event of war; some believed patriotic service would benefit the race while others highlighted betrayals of Afro-Americans after previous wars.[30] Du Bois himself believed that the self-destruction of white European civilization ("the civilization by which America insists on measuring us and to which we must conform our natural tastes and inclinations") would generate both increased racial pride among blacks and a universal, trans-race world civilization. He rejected "the blue-eyed, white-skinned types which are set before us in school and literature" in favor of those ancient exemplars of beauty, "rich, brown and black men and women with glowing dark eyes and crinkling hair. Music has always been ours... [and] the planation song is more in unison with the 'harmony of the spheres' than Wagner's greatest triumph." Africans would contribute a distinctive ethos, art, and literature to world civilization. "Life, which in this cold Occident stretched in bleak, conventional lines before us, takes on a warm, golden hue that harks back to the heritage of Africa and the tropics." World War I had revealed "the cruelty of the civilization of the West. History has taught us the futility of the civilization of the East. Let ours be the civilization of no man, but of all men. This is the truth that sets us free."[31]
Threatened war with Mexico elicited further Du Bois condemnations of American racism. When the U.S. invaded Mexico, resulting in casualties for Afro-American soldiers, Du Bois commented that "in America, in Europe and in Africa black men are fighting for the liberties of white men and pulling their chestnuts out of the fire. One of these bright mornings black men are going to learn how to fight for themselves." With withering sarcasm, Du Bois called Carrizal (a Mexican victory over black U.S. troops) "a glory for the Mexicans who dared to defend their country from invasion and for Negro troopers who went singing to their death. And the greater glory was the glory of the black men, for Mexicans died for a land they love, while Negroes sang for a country that despises, cheats and lynches them." The black soldiers died for their country even as the shrieks of agony from the victim of the recent Waco lynching, and the laughter of white terrorists, resounded across Texas. "Why should they not laugh at death for a country which honors them dying and kicks and buffets them living. God laughed. It was a Joke." The Crisis also quoted Northern and Southern white newspapers which openly advocated sending "worthless" Negroes to their death in Mexico, thus cleansing the South of vermin and saving the lives of valuable white men.[32]
Denouncing Wilson as "war-mad" and as "yelling for the largest navy in the world" instead of advocating "preparedness" for Christianity or human culture, Du Bois opposed Wilson's militarization program. In July 1916 the Crisis featured an eight-page illustrated supplement (printed at the front of the magazine) on the particularly gruesome lynching of Jessie Washington in Waco, and thundered that "any talk of the moral leadership of this country in the world; any talk of the triumph of Christianity, or the spread of human culture, is idle twaddle so long as the Waco lynching is possible in the United States."[33]
Du Bois also printed occasional socialistic remarks, as in his January 1914 statement that "political democracy cannot be linked with industrial despotism, else the result is the rule of the rich." White workers must compete against exploited Negroes, "and the votes stolen from Negroes are used by white capitalists to keep the laborer in bondage." He proclaimed that "the accumulation of wealth is for social rather than individual ends. We must avoid, in the advancement of the Negro race, the mistakes of ruthless exploitation which have marked modern economic history."[34] Yet as the 1916 elections approached, Du Bois was again confronted with the perennial problem: the major parties humiliated and oppressed blacks, and the SP, which treated them fairly, had no chance.
In 1912 American blacks had embarked upon a great experiment, Du Bois commented, voting for a Democrat whom they believed might rise above the barbarism of his party and keep his solemn promises. But Afro-Americans had learned that Wilson's promise of justice for blacks was "a peculiarly miserable campaign deception." Charles Evans Hughes, the Republican candidate, was equally worthless. "We say nothing concerning the Socialist candidate[s]. They are excellent leaders of an excellent party; God send them success! But the effective voter has a choice between two parties, [and] the vote for the third party is at least temporarily thrown away." Du Bois despaired that "No intelligent Negro can vote for Woodrow Wilson, but he can vote for Allan L. Benson [the SP candidate] or HE CAN STAY HOME ON ELECTION DAY" unless Hughes actively sought their votes.[35]
Du Bois had always worked within the mainstream parties. Yet in a startling editorial revealing his extreme despair, Du Bois (suggesting a tactic later acted upon by Harrison, William Bridges, and other left-oriented black nationalists) advocated a Negro party. Du Bois had opposed this as "a move of segregation" which "separates us from our fellow Americans." However, he now realized that "self-defense knows no nice hesitations. The American Negro must either vote as a unit or continue to be politically emasculated." The Democratic party was controlled by the terrorist, one-party South; "consequently it can never, as a party, effectively bid for the Negro vote." The Republicans, as "the party of wealth and big business," were "the natural enemy of the humble working people who compose the mass of Negroes." Neither mainstream party, therefore, offered a viable alternative for blacks, who must, therefore, organize a Negro party which would endorse candidates, of whatever party, who best served the interests of justice.[36]
Du Bois reluctantly concluded that Negroes' "only effective method" was organization "in every congressional district as a Negro Party" which would "endorse those candidates, Republican, Democratic, Socialist, or what-not, whose promises and past performances give greatest hope for the remedying of the wrongs done the Negro race."[37] The Negro party must run its own candidates if none of the others were acceptable. Such cohesive, organized political action "would make the Negro vote one of the most powerful and effective of the group votes in the United States." After Wilson's re-election, Du Bois acknowledged that the terrorist governments of the South, unconstitutionally overrepresented in Congress and the Electoral College in direct violation of the fourteenth amendment, "made a real verdict on Mr. Wilson [by] the rest of the country impossible."[38]
Du Bois, however, had learned little from Wilson's betrayal of his democratic promises. When Wilson dragged the United States into World War I, Du Bois supported him. This volte-face alienated most SP members, who resolutely opposed U.S. involvement. However, a few of Du Bois's closest white allies, including NAACP co-founders William English Walling and Charles Russell, noisily repudiated the SP and spewed vituperation and hate upon their erstwhile comrades who still opposed war and conscription. Perhaps feeling a twinge of guilt over his own sudden reversal, Du Bois also lashed out at his Socialist ex-comrades, and, in a series of breathtaking non sequiturs, accused them of hypocrisy and veiled racism.[39]
Addressing a convention of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society (ISS) in late December 1917, Du Bois summarized the history of U.S. race relations in terms reminiscent of Harrison's. Whites, he charged, had never cared about blacks. Lincoln had in 1861 supported a proposed 13th amendment which would have made Southern slavery perpetual and unalterable; when America unwillingly emancipated Afro-Americans as an emergency war measure, it devised new forms of slavery in the South (peonage, convict labor, and the sharecropping system, all enforced by terroristic violence). Labor unions barred freedmen, thus protecting the privileges of white workers. Writing only months after the gruesome East St. Louis pogrom, Du Bois echoed Harrison when he charged that even as he spoke "white northern laborers find killing Negroes a safe, lucrative employment which commends them to the American Federation of Labor."[40]
Du Bois next accused the assembled Socialists and pacifists of similar rank hypocrisy. Leftists wailed about the suppression of free speech, but, except for an occasional perfunctory comment, deliberately avoided discussing racial problems. Elaborating a key insight of "The African Roots of the War"--that capitalist super-profits cemented an alliance between workers, capitalists, and reformist state socialists, erected upon the broken backs of peoples of color--Du Bois told his audience of ISS members and supporters that
You are discussing the conscription of wealth for the common weal, and yet this great, rich country has allowed generation after generation of American Negroes to grow up in ignorance and poverty and crime, because [whites] will not spend as many dollars upon a decent public school system or a system of social uplift for Negroes as they are perfectly willing to spend upon a single battleship. Under such circumstances it will be hard to make conscientious people believe that you believe in conscription of wealth for the common weal.[41] Pacifists loudly opposed the present bloodbath, "but yesterday, when war was confined to the Belgian Congo, to the headwaters of the Amazon, to South Africa and parts of India and the South Seas it was not war, it was simply a method of carrying civilization to the natives, and there were no national conventions on the subject."[42]
Similarly, Du Bois charged, the numerous peace proposals advocated by antiwar activists all ignored the disfranchised blacks in the West Indies and the United States: "What you are asking for is a peace among white folks with the inevitable result that they will have more leisure and inclination to continue their despoiling of yellow, red, brown and black folk." Du Bois thundered that "frankness and honesty on your part is almost impossible" because "you would not want to live in a world where Negroes were treated as men. Under such circumstances you must remember that the integrity of your own souls and minds is at stake."[43]
Du Bois warned that blacks would not remain forever quiescent, and closed with a thundering peroration, advising that every white American family choose a person of Negro descent, invite him to their home, entertain him and then through some quick and painless method kill him. In that way, in a single day, we would be rid of twelve million people who are today giving us so much concern or rather so little concern. Remember, that as ghastly as a proposal of this sort appears that it is a good deal better than forcing these Negroes into slums and ghettos and letting them die slowly by a high death rate. It is a good deal better than forcing them to the lowest wages and letting them die of inanition.... [and] the only one decent alternative to treating them as men.[44] Du Bois did not repudiate Socialism, however. A few months later he praised the SP's Rand School for teaching socialism, economics, and history in the modern way and for extending "a genuine welcome to colored men and women."[45]
Du Bois's attack on leftist racial insensitivities, however accurate, in no way justified his own support of a bloodbath which, as he well knew, was largely precipitated by imperialistic greed. Moreover, he further compromised himself by silently acquiescing in Wilson's reign of terror against dissidents. Fearing personal repression, he remained silent about atrocities inflicted upon others. His reasons were personal and political. Like many oppressed people, he sought inclusion in and identification with the society that rejected him. In a remark that also explains Afro-American loyalty to the Republican party and to the United States, despite all their betrayals, Du Bois later said that "I became during the World War nearer to feeling myself a real and full American than ever before or since." This was undoubtedly a gratifying feeling. Like many other progressive Americans, Du Bois also believed that war-induced national mobilization, government intervention in the economy, and patriotic unity would provide unprecedented opportunities for social advancement. In September 1916 he had predicted that the war would advance "the greater emancipation of European women, the downfall of monarchies, the gradual but certain dissolution of caste, and the advance of a true Socialism." Now that America was at war, Du Bois insisted that Afro-Americans participate as soldiers and war workers while simultaneously insisting upon full equality. In a passage that could have been written by John Dewey or any number of white progressive intellectuals, Du Bois proclaimed that "we are facing a new world.... New forces have been loosened and a new situation has arisen. It is the business of the American Negro not to sit idly by and see this rearrangement of the world, hoping that something will come out of it of good for him. It is rather his business actually to put himself into the turmoil and work effectively for a new democracy that shall know no color." Randolph Bourne would soon attack this misuse of pragmatism.[46]
Du Bois, however, perceived a hopeful precedent in the Civil War, which had generated emancipation, Afro-American service in the military, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the (still unenforced) Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments. Such hopes were widespread in the African-American community. Indeed, Richmond Plant editor John Mitchell--remembering that Lincoln emancipated and enlisted blacks only as an emergency war measure--proclaimed that "the longer the war and the bloodier, the better it will be for Colored folks." When prolonged bloodshed rendered whites dependent on black help, "then will the Colored folks come into their own.... This can only come from a long and from a bloody war. From a short, quick war, Good Lord deliver us." This editorial was reprinted in Trotter's Boston Guardian, and evoked hostile notice from the secret police.[47]
Du Bois avoided such incendiary statements but did seek, as Lewis has said, "civil rights through carnage." Well before America's entry into the war, Joel Spingarn, NAACP chair and close friend of Du Bois, had launched a campaign for a segregated Negro officer training school in Des Moines, Iowa. Spingarn was motivated both by American patriotism and the fear that African Americans would suffer exclusion from the armed forces, and especially from the officer corps. In Spingarn's view, an integrated camp was simply impossible. Although Spingarn encountered opposition when he toured black colleges touting his proposal, Du Bois, after hesitating, supported his friend.[48]
In an important Crisis editorial, Du Bois confronted "the damnable dilemma": blacks must, as usual, either temporarily accept segregation or suffer total exclusion from American life. "We cannot escape it," he said. "We must continually choose between insult and injury; no schools or separate schools; no travel or 'Jim Crow' travel; homes with disdainful neighbors or homes in slums." In all of these circumstances blacks rightfully made their decisions according to the merits of the case, sometimes accepting segregation and sometimes not, depending on which option best fostered education, travel, and comfortable living. African Americans must once again choose, Du Bois said, this time "between the insult of a separate camp" and "the irreparable injury" of total exclusion from positions of leadership. "It is a case of [the segregated] camp or no officers." Replying to militant integrationists, Du Bois urged that neither the Army nor the white South wanted black officers; repudiating the only possible entree into leadership would play into the hands of the worst racists. However, Du Bois's stance evoked severe criticism. Trotter charged that Du Bois had "weakened, compromised, deserted the fight, betrayed the cause of his race." Others murmured that Du Bois had succumbed to hidden pressures. Du Bois, however, exulted when the camp was, in his revealing word, "granted."[49]
While ardently supporting the American war effort, Du Bois combined that support with militant criticism of American racism. "Let us enter this war for liberty with clean hands," he said. "May no blood-smeared garments bind our feet when we rise to make the world safe for democracy.... Let us be true to our mission. No land that loves to lynch 'niggers' can lead the hosts of Almighty God." Du Bois demanded the entire panoply of civil rights for which he and the NAACP had always fought: the end of lynching, segregation, disfranchisement, judicial prejudice and exclusion, and discrimination in every area of American life.[50]
Du Bois also published the resolutions of an independent, nationwide Washington conference of Afro-Americans as the lead editorial in the June 1917 Crisis. Du Bois almost certainly wrote these resolutions, which repeated his central ideas in his own words. They began by reasserting Du Bois's views on the imperialist origins of the war as a contest over African booty, with its concomitant "despising of the darker races"; asserted that permanent peace required self-government "not simply among the smaller nations of Europe but among the natives of Asia and Africa, the Western Indies and the Negroes of the United States"; and claimed that Germany's colonial record was far more brutal than that of the Allied powers. The resolutions urged that Afro-Americans enlist in the armed forces and perform war work "despite our deep sympathy with the reasonable and deep-seated feeling of revolt among Negroes at the persistent insult and discrimination to which they are subject and will be subject even when they do their patriotic duty."[51]
Yet Du Bois and the other black leaders asserted that "this country belongs to us even more than to those who lynch, disfranchise, and segregate.... Absolute loyalty in arms and in civil duties need not for a moment lead us to abate our just complaints and just demands. Despite the gratuitous advice of the white friends who wish us to submit uncomplainingly to caste and peonage, and despite the more timid and complacent souls in our own ranks, we demand and of right ought to demand" all American rights. These included: equality in military service under black officers; the immediate cessation of lynching; suffrage for black men and women; universal education; the abolition of Jim Crow cars; the repeal of segregation ordinances; and equal rights in all public institutions. "These are not minor matters. They are not matters that can wait. They are the least that self-respecting, free, modern men can have and live.... The denial of them is death and that our enemies and some of our false friends well know." Demanding these rights was an integral part of "unfaltering loyalty to our country."[52]
Du Bois also continued his bitter criticisms of U.S. atrocities and hypocrisy for over a year after U.S. entry into the war. The September 1917 Crisis featured "The Massacre of East St. Louis," one of the longest, most bitter, and most profusely illustrated articles the magazine had ever printed. It also published an illustrated account of the massive New York silent parade protesting this pogrom. The next month Du Bois, discussing the rebellion of maltreated black soldiers in Houston, expressed his gratification that "here, at last, white folk died." In April 1918, under the caption "Safe For Democracy," the Crisis ran parallel accounts of the mobbing of Kerensky in Russia and the murder-by-torture (with a red-hot crowbar) of a black in Tennessee. The May issue reprinted a postcard (sold on the streets for a dime) with an actual photograph of a hanging black man, surrounded by proud and smug white lynchers, none of whom were punished.[53]
In light of his militant opposition to racism and discrimination, Du Bois's totally unexpected July 1918 editorial "Close Ranks" amazed and disheartened his friends and emboldened his left-wing critics. Du Bois's pronouncement was variously regarded as servile, opportunistic, or merely deluded. In a complete reversal of his previous position, Du Bois admonished Afro-Americans:
Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy. We make no ordinary sacrifice, but we make it gladly and with our eyes lifted to the hills.[54]
Du Bois's motives for this astounding reversal have been heatedly debated by historians. Two culprits have been identified: Du Bois's need to avoid censorship and repression, and his hopes for the offer of a captaincy in the army's military intelligence division.[55]
Du Bois feared that increasing repression threatened both his free speech and the Crisis itself. Du Bois was aware of America's long history of terrorist violence against the Afro-American press, of which Ida B. Wells was only the most prominent victim. Even the ultra-patriotic Chicago Defender had some of its subscription agents killed, and others forced from their homes, by white terrorists. The Wilson administration, backed by officially-sanctioned vigilante thugs, was destroying the organized left. Dozens of radical publications had been suppressed, and editors charged under the Espionage and Sedition Acts. A huge secret police apparatus, spread out over the Army, the Department of Justice, and the Post Office, and augmented by amateur informers everywhere, monitored every word and action (including invented ones) of Afro-American activists.[56]
Du Bois and the Crisis had been directly threatened. The Bureau of Investigation, in a crude attempt at intimidation, visited the Crisis's offices in April 1917, and the Post Office began intensive surveillance after Du Bois heatedly denounced the East St. Louis pogrom. Two issues were formally banned from the mails in 1918 months after their publication date, when the local secret police agents belatedly discovered their "subversive" nature. Had a single issue been excluded from the mails in a timely fashion, the Post Office could then have denied the Crisis its second-class mailing permit, without which almost any magazine would fold. Only the NAACP's prominent white backers saved the Crisis from suppression.
Despite its white connections, however, the Crisis was treading on increasingly thin ice as the war progressed. On May 1, 1918, a government official met with Charles Studin (white), an attorney and member of the NAACP board, and warned him of possible suppression. The NAACP established a self-censorship committee and Spingarn assured the government that Du Bois had "promised to change his tone." He would make the Crisis "an organ of patriotic propaganda." Many white NAACP officials, including Spingarn, had often viewed Du Bois as obstreperous, and may have actually welcomed the opportunity to bring him under control. At any rate, on June 3, 1918, the Army's Intelligence Division threatened the Crisis with suppression if it published "carping and bitter utterances likely to foment dissatisfaction and destroy the morale of the people for winning the war." Such writings were considered "seditious and disloyal." This letter, signed by the head of Army Intelligence, was in fact written (and cosigned) by none other than Joel Spingarn, now working for the MID. A separate letter demanded the names of all NAACP officers, including those in the group's 117 branches. The NAACP supplied this list.[57]
Du Bois believed that he could function under the censorship. As he told a correspondent on August 8, 1918, "It is necessary in the time of war to be careful of one's utterances. The Crisis will never say anything that it does not believe: but there are a great many things which it does believe which it cannot say just now."[58] Such temporizing ignored the fact that context determines meaning: omitting key facts and beliefs decisively alters the meaning of those that are expressed. In stating only part of what he believed, Du Bois distorted the meaning even of what he was permitted (or permitted himself) to say.
While the U.S. was threatening the Crisis (and dozens of other Afro-American publications) and inducing self-censorship, Spingarn also fostered active African-American support of the war. In this he aided George Creel, chief of America's propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information, which sponsored a June, 1918 Washington Conference of black editors. (Although almost all of those invited attended, Trotter, Wells, and Harrison refused.) The editors listened as U.S. officials lectured them on their patriotic duties. Booker T. Washington's old lieutenant Emmett Scott, now a War Department official responsible for corralling Afro-American opinion, opened the conference by saying "This is not the time to discuss race problems. Our first duty is to fight, and to continue to fight until the war is won. Then we can adjust the problems that remain in the life of the colored men. This is the doctrine we are teaching to the Negroes of the country."[59]
Spingarn later exulted that the editors had left feeling "pleased at having been taken into the confidence of the Government and asked for advice and cooperation." In fact, the editors had mostly listened rather than talked; Spingarn gloated that he had let them vent between speeches only "so as to permit each man to 'let off steam' as much as he desired, and to guide the discussion in the right direction."[60]
Du Bois wrote the Conference's official resolution, which was published in the August Crisis. The editors disdained "the pushing of irrelevant personal grievances as the price of loyalty" and offered their race's "active, enthusiastic and self-sacrificing participation in the war." However, they also declared that continuing outrages and injustice would impede Afro-American leaders in their efforts to mobilize black support for the war. "German propaganda among us is powerless," the resolution said, "but the apparent indifference of our own Government may be dangerous." The resolution demanded the immediate cessation of lynching, the abolition of Jim Crow cars, and white acceptance of black assistance in the war effort. "All these things," it concluded, "are matters, not simply of justice, but of National and group efficiency." A more specific list of grievances, modelled after Wilson's Fourteen Points, was sent to various government departments.[61]
When Du Bois wrote the conference's resolution (about the time he was penning "Close Ranks"), he knew that he would soon be offered a captaincy in the Army Intelligence. This helps explain its generally accommodating tone. Yet the fact that the other editors and leaders (none of whom had been tempted with a high-ranking position, and none of whom knew of the offer to Du Bois) had to approve the resolution, meant that the resolution could not give the unconditional loyalty Du Bois soon proffered on behalf of himself and his race. Nevertheless, some blacks accused the confreres of betraying the race and debasing themselves. Their anger turned to fury when they learned that Du Bois was secretly maneuvering for military honors.
The captaincy itself was the product of Spingarn's fertile imagination. Spingarn had joined the MIB in the hopes not only of controlling black opinion, but of winning important concessions under the guise of reinforcing black morale, boosting efficiency, and helping win the war. Spingarn had grandiose hopes that the government would foster black rights as war emergency measures, as Lincoln did during the Civil War. Feeling confident that "the bait of olive drab is strong even for such a man as [Du Bois]," Spingarn persuaded the Crisis editor that, by accepting the captaincy, he could fight for Afro-American rights from within the Wilson administration at the very time that censorship and repression made such efforts by private citizens increasingly dangerous and ineffectual.[62] Apparently neither Spingarn nor Du Bois reflected on the fact that while Lincoln had been fiercely antislavery, Wilson was viciously antiblack.
Du Bois was never offered his captaincy. Indeed, when the idea was publicly broached it ignited a firestorm of opposition from every possible source. African-American leaders, including many editors who had been duped (as they now felt) into signing the Washington Conference's resolution, felt personally betrayed. The NAACP itself erupted into bitter acrimony because Du Bois insisted that, as a condition of his accepting the Army commission, he remain in overall charge of the Crisis even while working for the government, and that the NAACP make up the difference between his officer's salary ($2400 per year) and his Crisis stipend ($4200). A bitterly divided NAACP rejected Du Bois's request, while the powerful District of Columbia branch, headed by Archibald Grimke, threatened mutiny if Du Bois was accommodated. Abuse fell on Du Bois from every segment of African-American opinion. In a bizarre twist, Hubert Harrison wrote a memo (published in altered form as "The Descent of Du Bois") at the behest of Major Walter Loving, the most effective black secret police agent, claiming that Du Bois's appointment would alienate rather than conciliate Afro-American opinion. Finally, white racists in the Military Intelligence Bureau itself scuttled Du Bois's appointment. All of Spingarn's plans for racial betterment (never acted upon in any case) were unceremoniously repudiated, and Spingarn himself booted out of Military Intelligence and shipped to Europe.[63]
Meanwhile, just after the Government's official Negro editors' conference adjourned, Monroe Trotter and Hubert Harrison convened their National Liberty Conference, successor to the New York and Boston gatherings of 1917, in the District of Columbia. Trotter and Harrison had been planning this congress for some time; Spingarn, fearing its potential radicalism, had first demanded that it not meet, and had then hurriedly convened the government-sponsored conference in order to undermine it. When the Military Intelligence Division accused Trotter of spreading pro-German propaganda, the Boston militant wryly replied that "if there was any German money available, the convention would be very much larger than it will be." As it was, the convention was attended by 115 delegates from 29 states, far more than had attended the government's meeting. The secret police gathered the names of almost every participant, and shadowed Harrison.[64]
The National Liberty Congress, which Trotter and Harrison chaired, used Wilsonian rhetoric for radical ends. Wilson, it said, was "the moral leader and spokesman of the allied nations which are resisting Germanic aggression"; his words on self-government and freedom must be implemented in the United Sates, if only to preserve "the morale and esprit de corps" of African American soldiers and civilians. The Liberty Congress proclaimed that African Americans were victimized by officially-sanctioned "robbery, ravishing, mob violence, murder, and massacre" and could not "protect our daughters, wives, or mothers from violation by white men or murder by the mob." The Congress demanded an end to segregation in federal buildings and on federal land; equal treatment within the federal civil service; an end to Jim Crow on railroads managed by the federal government (which, during the war, included most major railroads); integration of the armed forces and all federally operated schools; enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments; and a national law against lynching. These resolutions, of course, implicitly yet forcefully denounced the Wilson administration's segregation policy, as well as the Des Moines officer training camp which Du Bois and the NAACP had endorsed. Harrison was unanimously elected president of the permanent organization which resulted. This conference foreshadowed the Afro-America's postwar militancy.[65]
Du Bois, however, not only continued but even intensified his accommodationist editorials. Immediately following his printing of the Washington editors' resolutions, Du Bois unleashed "A Philosophy in Time of War," the fatuous patriotism of which made even "Close Ranks" appear positively militant in contrast. Du Bois declared that the United States "is OUR country" and that "this is OUR war. We must fight it with every ounce of blood and treasure." (Du Bois, of course, never risked a drop of his blood, and was rather stingy with his treasure as well; he had demanded, as a condition of his acceptance of the captaincy, that the NAACP supplement his officer's salary so that his income would remain at its previous level.) With the maudlin sentimentality that often characterized Du Bois's rhetorical excesses, and that effectively concealed a lack of thought or moral coherence, he proclaimed that
We shall not bargain with our loyalty. We shall not profiteer with our country's blood. We shall not hesitate the fraction of a second when the God of Battles summons his dusky warriors to stand before the armposts of his throne. Let them who call for sacrifice in this awful hour of Pain fight for the rights that should be ours; let them who make the laws writhe beneath each enactment that oppresses us,--but we? Our duty lies inexorable and splendid before us, and we shall not shrink....
We are the Ancient of Days, the First of Races and the Oldest of Men. Before Time was, we are. We have seen Egypt and Ethiopia, Babylon and Persia, Rome and America, and for that flaming Thing, Crucified Right, which survived all this staggering and struggling of men--for that we fight today in and for America--not for a price, not for ourselves alone, but for the World.[66]
Du Bois even descended to equating demands for equal rights with cowardice, protesting that "we want victory for ourselves.... [but] it must be clean and glorious, won by our manliness, and not by the threat of the footpad." When confronted with substantial NAACP opposition to his captaincy, Du Bois threatened to publicly denounce his organization as "dangerously unpatriotic and anti-American." He even implied that opposition to Wilson's war policy was tantamount to the murder of children and the rape of women.[67] At the time Du Bois made this statement, conscientious objectors were being tortured in U.S. prisons, blacks publicly mutilated and killed with impunity by white mobs, and opponents of Wilson's war policy jailed, deported, and sometimes murdered.
Confronting a firestorm of opposition, Du Bois responded to critics in the Crisis of September, when he falsified his own record, lied about the timing of the writing of "Close Ranks," and distorted history in a vain attempt to prove that blacks had benefitted from their service in past wars. "The Crisis says, first your country, then your rights," he thundered. Du Bois denied the existence of the "corrupt bargain" alleged by his opponents, claimed that he remained "in unruffled serenity" despite his critics, and sniffed that "no one who essays to teach the multitude can long escape crucifixion."[68] Nevertheless, Du Bois's self-interested accommodationism undermined his reputation and crippled his leadership among Afro-Americans of many persuasions, not merely the radicals. For decades afterwards, Du Bois extenuated, justified, agonized over, and apologized for his wartime accommodationism.
Du Bois's and Spingarn's attempt (as well as that of reformers of all stripes) at collaborating with the Wilson administration proved a catastrophic failure. Eerily foreshadowing Afro-American experience for most of the twentieth century, Du Bois's "Close Ranks" and Military Intelligence fiasco demonstrated the futility of working within the structures of capitalist and white supremacist power. Far from improving the plight of African-American troops, Du Bois (as he later discovered) inadvertently helped conceal and gloss over the horrendous abuse, sometimes amounting to sadistic torture and enslavement, inflicted upon blacks in uniform. Archibald Grimke's advice that blacks eschew military service and seize lucrative jobs in wartime industry was far more prescient. Although the segregated Des Moines camp did train 1200 Afro-American officers, these constituted a mere .7% of the Army's corps, far less than Afro-America's 13% of the army. They, too, acted mostly as tokens whose presence seemingly validated America's vapid protestations of equal justice even as they fostered a misguided black patriotism. Most officers placed in command of blacks were Southern whites, many of whom abused and slandered their charges. Wilson continued his disgusting racist policies throughout the war and beyond; having unctuously proclaimed that the segregation he imposed on the civil service was "distinctly to the advantage of the colored people themselves," he now accused Negroes of fomenting Bolshevism. Efforts to secure even a temporary wartime antilynching law proved unavailing. Although Wilson did eventually condemn lynching, he did so only after a white man (Robert Prager) was lynched; Wilson's speech avoided any mention of blacks or of the South. Lynching actually increased in 1918 and again in 1919; in the year after the war ten black soldiers in uniform were publicly tortured to death. Spingarn himself inadvertently fueled white racist hysteria by capitalizing on white fears of black disloyalty and insurrection to argue for his proposed reforms.[69]
Du Bois, Spingarn, and the loyal coterie of black secret police agents were motivated by a twisted idealism, a vastly inflated sense of self-importance, a naive belief in the fundamental decency of the U.S. government and society, and (in the case of Du Bois and other blacks) a pathetic desire to belong. They wanted to prove their own loyalty and usefulness. Some agents used their position to settle old scores and enjoy the exaggerated sense of self-esteem that comes with secret information and power over others. Spingarn himself manipulated Du Bois and countless other blacks into serving as the voices of a white supremacist regime based upon the murder and torture of people of color at home and abroad. His complementary efforts to manipulate the U.S. Army and the Wilson administration into fostering black rights fell flat.
This result was both inevitable and predictable, even on purely pragmatic grounds. Du Bois, and numerous other black editors and leaders, claimed that if the Wilson administration behaved decently towards blacks and respected their most basic rights, this would increase African-American morale and efficiency, and thus help win the war. However, they ignored not only the contumacious racism of Wilson and his cabinet members, but another simple reality: any action on behalf of black Americans risked alienating racist whites, who far outnumbered blacks and their tiny band of white allies. The merest hint of racial egalitarianism incited mass hysteria, and often enough violence, especially but not exclusively in the South. Any gestures towards Negro equality would have spurred disaffection, resistance, and even sabotage throughout the nation, and particularly in the old Confederacy. From the standpoint of military efficiency, civilian discipline and morale, and winning the war, such gestures would have lost far more than they won. The Wilson administration, of course, represented the white South and shared its sentiments; Wilson and his cronies resisted, rather than fostered, civil rights for black Americans (and women and workers). Neither inclination, political interest, or real efficiency would be fostered by ameliorating the condition of African Americans in the Army or in civilian life.
Did the debacle over "Close Ranks" have any positive consequences? Perhaps. Du Bois resumed a militant stance in 1919; and his temporary lapse no doubt facilitated the rise of a new generation of militant, uncompromising Afro-Americans, represented in part by A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, Wilfred A. Domingo, and other radicals associated with the Messenger.
Notes:
[1] Du Bois used this phrase at least twice: in "Strivings of the Negro People," Atlantic Monthly, August 1897; and in The Souls of Black Folk, first published in 1903. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race (New York, 1993), 198-201, 277-296, discusses both of these works. The quote is on 198-199 and 280-281.
[2] DB "Socialist of the Path," Horizon, February 1907, in Meier, Rudwick, and Broderick, eds., Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century (Indianapolis, 1971), 63-4; DB, "Negro and Socialism," ibid.
[3] DB in Horizon, February 1908, quoted in Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans (Westport, 1977), 194.
[4] Foner, American Socialism, 182-201.
[5] This statement by Debs, repeated in almost every discussion of SP attitudes towards race, occurs in Eugene Debs, "The Negro in the Class Struggle," ISR, November 1903. This article was in fact a bitter attack on white racism, and Debs fully acknowledged the specially horrendous oppressions endured by Afro-Americans. The article is reprinted, among other places, in Sally Miller, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Early Twentieth Century American Socialism (New York, 1996), 165-168.
[6] "Socialists in Oklahoma," TC, December 1910.
[7] "The Socialists," TC, March 1911.
[8] "Socialism Again," TC, April 1911; "The Socialists Again," TC, November 1911.
[9] NYC, January 21, 1911, in Herbert Aptheker, ed., Writings by W.E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others (Millwood, New York, 1982), 40-41. In fact, the Socialist International condemned the American party's stance and demanded open immigration.
[10] "Organized Labor," TC, July 1912; "Along the Color Line," TC, August 1912.
[11] DB editorial, "Politics," TC, August 1912; DB editorial, "The Last Word in Politics," TC, November 1912; DB, "Along the Color Line, Political" TC, September 1912; DB editorial, "The Election," TC, December 1912. For a full account of Brownsville, see John Weaver, The Brownsville Raid (New York, 1970); for Taft's dismissal of Afro-American officeholders see Louis Harlan Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1905 (New York, 1983), 338-358. Harlan also discusses the Brownsville raid, 309-322.
[12] DB editorial, "Politics," TC, August 1912; DB editorial, "The Last Word in Politics," TC, November 1912.
[13] DB, "Along the Color Line, Politics," TC, December 1912; DB editorial, "The Election," TC, December 1912; DB editorial, "Burleson," TC, August 1913.
[14] Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, Volume I, (Amherst, 1997) 180.
[15] DB, "Socialism and the Negro Problem," New Review, January 1, 1913. In a curious phrase, Du Bois contrasted Socialist theorists who charted the outcome of social evolution, seeking information on "just what the outcome is going to be," with "those who suffer from the present industrial situation and who are anxious that, whatever the broad outcome may be, at any rate the present suffering which they know so well shall be stopped." Du Bois acknowledged that "it is this second class of social thinkers who are interested particularly in the Negro problem." These latter must have included (or even been comprised by) IWW activists. Du Bois, however, explicitly directed his remarks to the first group of theorists.
[16] ibid.
[17] ibid.
[18] DB, "A Field for Socialists," New Review, January 11, 1913.
[19] ibid.
[20] DB, "An Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson," TC, March 1913; DB editorial, "Burleson," TC, August 1913.
[21] DB editorial, "Another Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson," TC, September 1913.
[22] DB, "Federal Segregation," TC, November 1913 (the quote about closed doors is taken from an editorial in another periodical describing the NAACP's protest); DB editorial, "The Strength of Segregation," TC, December 1913.
[23] DB, Editorial, "World War and the Color Line," TC, November 1914.
[24] ibid.
[25] DB, "The African Roots of the War," Atlantic Monthly, May 1915, in Philip Foner, ed., W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890-1919 (New York, 1986), 244-257.
[26] ibid.
[27] ibid.
[28] ibid.
[29] TC, December 1914, February 1915, March 1916, March 1917.
[30] DB, "William Monroe Trotter," TC, December 1914; DB editorial, "Mr. Trotter and Mr. Wilson," TC, January 1915; "The War, Effect on Prejudice," TC, July 1915.
[31] DB, "The Battle of Europe," TC, September 1916.
[32] DB, "To the Rescue," TC, May 1916; DB, "Carrizal," TC, August 1916; "Black Soldiers," TC, August 1916; "A Discrepancy," TC, September 1916.
[33] DB, "Preparedness," TC, March 1916; "The Waco Horror," TC, July 1916; DB Editorial, "Lynching," TC, July 1916.
[34] "Free, White, and Twenty-One," TC, January 1914; DB, "The Immediate Program of the American Negro," TC, April 1915.
[35] DB, "The Presidential Campaign," TC, October 1916; DB Editorial, "Mr. Hughes," TC, November 1916. The Crisis carried numerous Republican party campaign advertisements in the November issue.
[36] DB, "The Negro Party," TC, October 1916.
[37] ibid.
[38] DB, "The Negro Party," TC, October 1916; DB editorial, "The World Last Month," TC, January 1917; DB editorial, TC, November 1916.
[39] Du Bois's petulance towards his former Socialist comrades at this time (which echoed his conduct after he was criticized for supporting Wilson in 1912) probably evinces Du Bois's own ambivalence and even guilt. NAACP official Joel Spingarn had written Du Bois in 1914: "You have an extraordinary unwillingness to acknowledge that you have made a mistake, and if accused of one, your mind will find or even invent reasons and quibbles of any kind to prove you were never mistaken." Spingarn to DB, October 24, 1916, quoted in Mark Ellis, "'Closing Ranks and 'Seeking Honors': W.E.B. Du Bois in World War I," JAH, June 1992, 104.
[40] DB, "The Problem of Problems," Address to the Ninth Annual Convention of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, December 27, 1917, The Intercollegiate Socialist, December 1917-January 1918, in Foner, ed., Du Bois Speaks, 258-267.
[41] ibid.
[42] ibid.
[43] ibid.
[44] ibid.
[45] DB, "The Rand School," TC, March 1918.
[46] DB, "The Battle of Europe," TC, September 1916; DB, "The Present," TC, August 1917; DB, Dusk at Dawn (reprint, New York, 1970), 256. For one account of Dewey's controversy with Bourne, see Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, 1991), 195-212. This debate was paralleled by a simultaneous controversy between Max Eastman, editor of the Masses, and ex-Socialist supporters of the war.
[47] Kornweibel, Investigate, 233-234.
[48] Lewis, Du Bois, 528-532.
[49] Lewis, Du Bois, 528-533; DB, "The Perpetual Dilemma," TC, April 1917; DB, "Officers," TC, June 1917.
[50] DB, "Awake, America," TC, September 1917.
[51] DB, "Resolutions of the Washington Conference," TC, June 1917.
[52] ibid.
[53] "The Massacre of East St. Louis," TC, September 1917; "The Silent Parade," TC, September 1917; "Safe For Democracy," TC, April 1918; Postcard of the lynching of George McNeel in Monroe, Louisiana, TC, May 1918. Du Bois did concede that the Houston rebels had broken the law; unlike some radicals, therefore, he said that they merited punishment.
William English Walling, who soon denounced all critics of Wilson's war policy as traitors, said of the East St. Louis massacre: "As it was deliberately preparing for a whole month and in accord with American mob precedents and without military excuse it was worse than anything Germans did in Belgium and comparable only to [anti-]Jewish pogroms of the Czar." Ominously, Walling attributed racial outbreaks partly to German spies. "A Telegram," TC, October 1917.
[54] DB, "Close Ranks," TC, July 1918.
[55] Mark Ellis, "'Closing Ranks' and 'Seeking Honors': W.E.B. Du Bois in World War I," JAH, June 1992, 96-124; William Jordan, "'The Damnable Dilemma': African-American Accommodation and Protest During World War I," JAH, March 1995, 1562-1583; Mark Ellis, "W.E.B. Du Bois and the Formation of Black Opinion in World War I: A Commentary on 'The Damnable Dilemma,'" JAH, March 1995, 1584-1590. Ellis concludes that Du Bois's "intention in writing the editorial--to secure a role in the unprecedented program of government-led reform mapped out by Joel Spingarn--was consistent with his career and his wartime approach for equal rights. But the content of the editorial has seemed to fellow radicals and to most subsequent students of Du Bois's life an aberration..... 'Close Ranks' was a quid pro quo, and... the editorial and the captaincy were firmly linked." JAH, March 1995, 1590.
Ellis later devoted an entire chapter of Race, War, and Surveillance (Chapter 5, pp. 141-182) to the affair of Spingarn, Du Bois, Military Intelligence, and "Close Ranks." He concludes that Du Bois's "deliberate purpose" in writing he editorial was to secure the captaincy. "To explain it simply as the apogee of his pro-war thinking, or as a frightened response to pressure exerted on the NAACP by the New York United States attorney general's office, is to miss the point. Although his enthusiasm for the war was genuine and he was certainly being careful not to offend the Justice Department, the meekness of the July editorial was an astonishing departure from the magazine's declared commitment to exposing and attacking all racial injustice. Above all, it did not square with the editor's known rejection of accommodationism." Ellis, Race, War, and Surveillance, 180.
William Jordan, however (Black Newspapers and America's War For Democracy, 1914-1920, 113-115) says that "the offer of a captaincy in the army was likely a minor inducement since Du Bois seemed to be lukewarm about the prospect of military service." Jordan credits threats of repression and "all of the same forces leading to optimism among other black editors" as the key factors motivating Du Bois.
Lewis, Du Bois, discusses this and related incidents, 525-534, 552-560.
[56] Kornweibel, Investigate; Ellis, Surveillance; Jordan, Newspapers. Kornweibel, Investigate (10-36) gives an excellent account of the various secret police agencies. His Federal Surveillance is a vast microfilm collection of secret police reports on African-American activities.
[57] Kornweibel, Investigate, 142-143.
[58] Jordan, Newspapers, 113.
[59] Ellis, Surveillance, 149.
[60] Ellis, Surveillance, 149-151.
[61] "Help Us to Help," TC, August 1918.
[62] Ellis, Surveillance, 161.
[63] In addition to the sources listed above, see Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., Archibald Grimke: Portrait of a Black Independent (Baton Rouge, 1993), 214-230.
[64] Stephen R. Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New York, 1971), 219-221; JBP, 668-673; Ellis, Surveillance, 122.
[65] Stephen R. Fox, The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New York, 1971), 219-221; JBP, 668-673; Herbert Aptheker, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States (Secaucus, 1977), III, 215-218.
[66] DB, "A Philosophy in Time of War," TC, August 1918.
[67] Lewis, Du Bois, 558; DB, "A Philosophy in Time of War," TC, August 1918. Du Bois said that "In the day of our lowest travail we did not murder children and rape women to bring our freedom nearer." This reference is unclear; it obviously refers directly to alleged German atrocities in Belgium, but the context strongly suggests that Du Bois was equating opposition to Wilson's war policy with countenance of, and even participation in, such atrocities.
[68] "Our Special Grievances," TC, September 1918' "A Momentous Proposal," TC, September 1918; "The Reward," TC, September 1918. Mark Ellis compares Du Bois's claims about the timing "Close Ranks" vis-a-vis the offer of a captaincy in "'Closing Ranks' and 'Seeking Honors': W.E.B. Du Bois in World War I," JAH, June 1992, 96-124 and in Ellis, Surveillance, 141-183, especially 178.
[69] Ellis, Surveillance, xv, 50-51, 180-182; Jordan, Newspapers, 137.