"I would have been hailed with approval if I had died at fifty," W.E.B. Du Bois famously quipped. "At seventy-five my death was practically requested." The long-in-the-tooth Bay State academic had never made so keen an observation.
David Levering Lewis chronicled Du Bois's first fifty years in his 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography. The first African American to earn a postgraduate degree from Harvard; the release of his much discussed Souls of Black Folk; the Niagara Movement; his role in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and the famous intellectual give-and-take with Booker T. Washington were all events that put Du Bois on the map as a major thinker. The remaining 45-years of his life, unfortunately, were an embarrassment. It is these disgraceful years that David Levering Lewis covers in W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, his sequel to 1993's award-winning tome.
It is difficult to think of any major question during the last half of W.E.B. Du Bois's life on which he didn't stand on the wrong side. From his endorsements of racial seperatism to his unmitigated enthusiasm for Stalin to his naïve interpretations of life in Hitler's Germany or Imperial Japan, Du Bois had a penchant for backing the wrong horse. On some occasions, he simply got caught up in the intellectual fashions of his time. Other instances can't be explained away so easily.
Lewis describes the recruitment of Du Bois by Soviet agents to travel to the USSR in 1926. His scripted trip sparked him to declare his allegiance to Bolshevism. For most of the rest of his life he would serve as an apologist for some of the most brutal killers in the history of man. For his service to Communism, he was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1959, with China holding a national holiday in his honor that same year. In 1961, he formally joined the Communist Party of the United States before renouncing his citizenship and immigrating to Ghana.
Much of Du Bois's fawning over Communism, however, is omitted from the recent biography. Stalin, for instance, Du Bois eulogized as a "great" and "courageous" man, "attacked and slandered as few men in history have been." In Mao's China, site of the state-induced killings of more than 60 million people, Du Bois beheld "a sense of human nature free from its most hurtful and terrible meanness." The suppression of religion behind the Iron Curtain was the "Russian Revolution's greatest gift to the modern world." While Lewis takes note of Du Bois's infatuation with Communism, he provides excuses and downplays it.
Just as Soviet agents were able to cozy up to Du Bois and use him disseminate their propaganda, Japanese agents utilized him to transmit their party line. The Empire of the Sun was ruled by colored people, Du Bois reasoned, how could it do wrong? When he delivered this message in China, his audience, correctly anticipating a Japanese invasion, reacted with anger. It mattered little to them what color their oppressors were. "Enough can be gleaned from the spotty record of correspondence and Justice Department files," Lewis reveals regarding the man who directed the academician's travels to the Orient, "to deduce that Hikida [Yasuichi] was the point-man for Japan's low-budget operation to influence black American public opinion." Du Bois was one of his dupes. Lewis confesses, "Du Bois would shave the edges of responsible opinion when writing about the Japanese."
Similarly unscholarly were the NAACP founder's writings on Hitler's Germany. "In a desire to be objective, as well as from awe, some of Du Bois's readings of National Socialism ran from equivocal to complimentary," Lewis admits. Conspicuous among these is "The German Case Against Jews," printed in 1937. While Du Bois was critical of Hitler's racialist policies, they were in some cases more enlightened, he offered, from the ones governing the American South. His opposition to American entry into World War II was only reversed when the Nazis attacked the Soviets in June of 1941.
His trips to Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union were funded by a foundation in the case of the first and, in the case of the latter two countries, the nation's governments themselves, raising questions about his scholarly independence. The three nations shared in common a hatred for the United States. Du Bois's reflexive anti-Americanism blinded him to the possibility that oppression existed outside of the scope of the offenses committed against black people by white people in America. Preoccupied with color to a greater extent than some of the Southern whites he held in contempt, Du Bois willingly overlooked any sins committed by nations that stood against America. An enemy of America was a friend of his. This intellectual straitjacket led down a path fraught with danger.
Although Du Bois was content to vilify white America in general terms, his most viscous attacks were reserved for other blacks. Lewis reveals Du Bois's underhanded tactics to undermine the demagogue Marcus Garvey, such as an anti-Garvey whisper-campaign by Du Bois to State Department officials and African diplomats. Eventually, Garvey's famed Black Star Line of ships would go bankrupt and he would be deported. Du Bois's demagogic rhetoric would echo his nemesis Garvey two decades later. "Walter White is white," Du Bois said of the NAACP leader. "He has more white companions and friends than colored. He goes where he will in New York City and naturally meets no Color Line, for the simple and sufficient reason that he isn't 'colored.'" Du Bois made similarly caustic utterances against White's colleague, Roy Wilkens. Like White, Wilkins's offense was to garner praise that Du Bois jealously regarded as rightfully belonging to him. Whether it was Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, Walter White, or Roy Wilkens, the reaction of Du Bois to other leading blacks was often one of disdain. When so much was needed to further black progress, Du Bois too often resorted to infighting.
White and Wilkens saw the path of black achievement linked with the integration of American society. Increasingly during the second half of his life, Du Bois advocated the opposite course of action: racial separatism. Du Bois's unpleasant racial views led to his departure as editor of The Crisis (the intellectual journal of the NAACP), and, coupled with his support for Communism, his dismissal from the NAACP in 1948. That the position of White and Wilkens was vindicated by Brown v. Board of Education, the lunch-counter strikes, and Rosa Parks is hardly necessary to point out. Yet it is W.E.B. Du Bois that is today curiously held aloft as a civil rights icon.
At times, David Levering Lewis reveals too much, e.g., his very descriptive passages regarding Du Bois's bacchanalian sex-life (one unfortunate sentence points out to the reader how one of Du Bois's mistresses regarded him as "well-hung"). Elsewhere, he seems to protect his subject. He reveals just enough to scratch the surface regarding his subject's dalliances with foreign ideologies, for instance, but never remains long enough for a serious exploration.
W.E.B. Du Bois is the father of the multiculturalism that is currently pervasive on American campuses. This is a multiculturalism that is strangely indifferent to foreign cultures, but is preoccupied with the negative aspects, both real and imagined, of our own culture. The bad history Du Bois put forward (e.g., suggesting that Alexander Hamilton was black, overstating the extent of the African slave trade, claiming that the ancient Greeks stole their knowledge from black Egyptians), was a dress rehearsal for the college classroom of the future. Likewise, his hints that only blacks can properly teach black history, sociology, literature, etc., is today a far more common call. Blacks that disagreed with him, Du Bois sometimes alleged, were in fact whites in disguise. All of this, coupled with his anti-Americanism, Communism, and sometime advocacy of racial separatism, makes him a worthy candidate for patron saint of multiculturalism.
If the last half of his life was an unmitigated disaster, the 37 years since his death stand as a model for reputation resuscitation. Harvard has an institute named in his honor, Penn a campus building, and the University of Massachusetts its 26-story library. Public television documentaries have lauded him as the forebear of Rev. King. Though it would be unfair to categorize either Lewis book as a hagiography (they do, after all, include much damaging information), the author clearly admires his subject and conveys a positive impression of him to the reader.
That W.E.B. Du Bois is considered a civil rights hero by modern claimants to that noble mission tells us little about the near-century long life of the most famous son of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. What it tells us about the judgment of modern civil rights activists is far more revealing.
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