W E. B.

D U B O I S
ana American Political Thought
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W. E. B. D U BO I S
ana American Political Thought

FABIANISM AND THE COLOR LINE

Adolph L. Reed Jr.

New York Oxford Oxford University Press 1997

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reed, Adolph L., 1947-

W. E. B. Du Bois and American political thought : fabianism and the
color line / Adolph L. Reed, Jr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-505174-2
1. Du Bois, W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963-
Philosophy. 2. Afro-Americans — Intellectual life. 3. United
States–Intellectual life–1865–1918. 4. United States-
Intellectual life —20th century. I. Title.
E185.97.D73R44 1997
305.896'073'092-Dc20 96-847

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
 To the memory of Earl E. Thorpe (1924-1989)

—neighbor, benefactor, friend, colleague, and, most of all,

trailblazer in the critical study of Afro-American intellectual
history and historiography.
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 Acknowledgments

This book is first of all, obviously, an explication of Du Bois's political thought

as it evolved over the course of his life. As such, however, it grows from three
broader, overlapping concerns. First, the study emerges from an effort to locate
the ideological premises and presumptions that have undergirded black politics
and political thought in the twentieth century. Most specifically, the impetus
derived from my attempt to make sense of the decline of radicalism's constitu-
ency and persuasive capacities in black politics during the 1970s and 1980s by
examining ways that the theoretical and ideological underpinnings of black pro-
test thought have converged on the imperatives of conventionalist American
liberal politics. A second, related objective is exploring how the dominant pat-
terns of black American political debate historically have connected with the
premises, frames, and issues contemporaneously shaping American political dis-
course more generally. Finally, this book is bound up with my concern to de-
velop a clear and practically grounded, nonidealist perspective on the history of
political thought. I have sought an approach that does not reduce to an ahistor-
ical, teleological account of Great Men, Great Books, and Great Ideas extracted
from the purposive contexts within which their meanings were shaped—the
pragmatic politics and political debates of their specific times. For many reasons
Du Bois seemed an ideal template for pursuing these objectives simultaneously.
The motives impelling this study, to that extent, are political as well as
intellectual. It should not be surprising, therefore, that on occasion the press of
current events took me away from the book altogether for lengthy stretches—for
instance, to write a short article on the 1984 Jesse Jackson campaign that turned
into another book—even in the midst of what I imagined to be final revisions.
I've revised, reshaped, and rethought the manuscript several times, often in
small but consequential ways, in response to developments in my own under-
standing, as likely as not brought about through interaction with the evolving
political situation. All this has been to the good, I believe. The text and argu-
ments have become clearer for the effort, partly as I've worked out conceptual
issues more firmly, partly because the continuing elaboration of dynamic histori-
cal processes exposes more of their embedded tendencies and possibilities.
viii Acknowledgments
Along the way, many people have read all or parts of the study that became
this book and have provided useful comments, suggestions, sources, and per-
spectives. Among those who stand out are: Bruce Ackerman, Jean-Christophe
Agnew, Claude W. Barnes, John Blassingame, John Bracey, William Boone,
Timothy Breen, Michael K. Brown, James T. Campbell, John Brown Childs,
Michael Dawson, Michael Ford, Victoria Hattam, Rickey Hill, David Hollinger,
Gerald Home, M. Njeri Jackson, Gerald Jaynes, Mack H. Jones, Jennifer Jor-
dan, Ivan Karp, Martin Kilson, Corinne Kratz, Jim Lee, Willie Legette, Chris
Lowe, Charles Mills, James Morone, William Munro, Earl Picard, David
Plotke, Adolph Reed Sr., Clarita M. Reed, Dorothy Ross, James Scott, Stephen
Skowronek, the late Earl E. Thorpe, Robert Wiebe, Brett Williams, Hoda M.
Zaki, and Patricia Zavella.
James Oakes and Judith Stein have read the manuscript with great seri-
ousness and care. The quality of their suggestions is matched by the quality of
their friendship and support. They exemplify the clearest and most honest possi-
bilities of engaged historical thinking, and they live as they work.
Gerard Fergerson's work on Du Bois and race and medicine at the turn of
the century ran in some ways parallel to and has helped to sharpen my own.
Stuart Clarke hectored me into confronting the literary-theoretical turn in the
writing of Afro-American intellectual history. Mary L. Dudziak was among the
first to be subjected to reading revisions of the manuscript, and her comments
were as useful as her own work on the Cold War's impact on the civil rights
movement. Kathryn Oberdeck and the mentally indefatigable Jacquelyn Dirks,
fellow diggers in fin de siecle American intellectual history, have contributed
much to this project in a conversation that we have shared for well over a
decade. In addition to specific insights and other suggestions, I have gained
substantially from the intellectual breadth and critical depth with which they
approach American Studies and their emphasis on the field's openness to social
scientific sensibilities, not to mention their friendship and comradeship.
Jonathan Scott Holloway, Michele Mitchell, and Dean Robinson have been
important sounding boards and careful, critical readers. More than that, both
individually and as a group they have been an inspiration, and not only for
their enthusiasm for the project. Their scholarly work promises to make major
contributions to establishing the study of the history of Afro-American thought
on the theoretically and contextually textured, tough-mindedly engaged founda-
tion for which critics have called for more than half a century. I feel especially
fortunate to have been able to participate in an intellectual community with
them and to count them as friends. The same is true of Nikol Alexander, Mi-
chelle Boyd, Claire Jean Kim, Steven A. Light, Desiree Pedescleaux, Francesca
Polletta, and Drew Smith. They also have been careful, enthusiastic, and help-
ful readers, and their work, though not in the history of thought, similarly prom-
ises to broaden and deepen the conceptual and theoretical base of Afro-
Americanist scholarship. Gordon Lafcr and Eve Weinbaum, Americanists of yet
another sort, also have inspired me both in their important scholarship and
 Acknowledgments ix
their theoretically sophisticated insistence on approaching political science as
an instrument of political action.
Linda Seidman at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst provided invalu-
able assistance, with good cheer and impressive acumen, in the Du Bois Papers.
Phil and Sharon McBlain, of McBlain's Books in Hamden, Connecticut, have
been bibliographers and supportive friends as much as booksellers. David Roll
was a wonderfully sympathetic and encouraging editor, even as one more imme-
diately pressing commitment after another delayed the last chapter. I wish him
the best in his new career and hope this book repays his confidence.
I am uniquely indebted to Timuel Black, Ishmael Flory, Vernon Jarrett,
Tony Mazzocchi, Frank Rosen, and the late Lois Ann Rosen, as well as to my
father—all of whom connected with Du Bois's life through the postwar political
involvements they shared with him. Not only do their reflections and perspec-
tives, indeed their lives, link Du Bois's time concretely to ours; they also under-
score the practical significance of his political development, notwithstanding its
theoretical inner tensions and incompleteness, and the deeper continuity of his
courage and commitment to the ideal of a just society.
I have learned much more than I can indicate here from Micaela di Leo-
nardo, whose contributions run throughout this book and extend far beyond it.
Mary Summers has been a dear friend, colleague, useful critic, and comrade,
but more; she has been and is family, and a model of human decency.
Toure F. Reed disengaged from his own dissertation prospectus to throw
himself into constructing this book's index. I appreciate and cherish his efforts
as I do every breath he has taken in his life.
This leaves a special group of individuals, best described by saying that I
imagine them as readers for everything I write because they are the audience
closest to home. Preston Smith has been a friend, confidant, and intellectual
compatriot for more than two decades; much of this book's shaping and reshap-
ing over the years shows the traces of our interaction around the larger intellec-
tual project we share. I couldn't wish for a better friend, collaborator, and critic
than Kenneth Warren, whose work realizes the greatest possibilities of politically
engaged Americanist and Afro-Americanist scholarship; his presence nearly com-
pensates for the Chicago winters. Joe Wood is a similarly kindred spirit who has
helped me especially to think through the historical and contemporary nexus of
cultural ideology and politics. None are more closely implicated in this book
than Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, and Alex Willingham. My work is saturated
with the effects of an interaction with Rogers and Ian that has nurtured and
helped me since we all came together in New Haven in the early 1980s. In a
way, we grew up together intellectually, and our lives have been entwined ac-
cordingly. In particular, Rogers and I, as Americanists who wander around the
nineteenth century a lot, discovered early on that we shared a common intellec-
tual and political agenda, though we came at it from rather different directions.
That turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg, as we grew from junior col-
leagues to pals to trusted friends to family; he'll blush and deny it, but he's
x Acknowledgments
simply one of the very best, most consistently principled, and decent people I've
ever known. Alex's relation to this book goes longest and deepest. My first expo-
sure to the problem of Afro-Americanist intellectual historiography came in his
graduate seminar (after he helped to recruit me to graduate school), as did my
initial encounter with the systematic, grounded study of Afro-American or any
other political thought, and he directed the dissertation in which this book origi-
nated. Over thirty years he has been my hanging partner, fellow activist, profes-
sor, advisor, and oldest friend, the one who can always be counted on and
whose judgment always counts.
Finally, 1 want to note the contribution of someone who has no idea that
he has made it—Johnny Adams, New Orleans's famous "Tan Canary," from my
own Holly Grove neighborhood. The beauty of his incomparable warblings has
been solace and splendor for me for decades and a powerful link to home and
ground; his combination of brilliant artistry, personal warmth, and insistent dig-
nity embody the best of the sensibility of the era that spawned us both.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Du Bois—Afro-American and American Political

Thought, 3

2 Corporate Industrialization, Collectivism, and the New Intellectuals:

Historical Context in the Formation of Du Bois's Thought, 15

3 The Philadelphia Negro and the Consolidation of a Worldview, 27

4 Science and Progress: The Unity of Scholarship and Activism, 43

5 Stratification, Leadership, and Organization: The Role of the Black

Elite, 53

6 Three Confusions about Du Bois: Interracialism, Pan-Africanism,

Socialism, 71

7 Du Bois's "Double Consciousness": Race and Gender in Progressive-Era

American Thought, 93

8 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life, 127

9 From Historiography to Class Ideology, 163

Conclusion: A Generativist Approach to the History of Political

Thought, 177

Notes, 187

References, 243

Index, 276
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All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory
to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the
comprehension of this practice.
— Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

One final word about giving instruction as to what the world ought
to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to
give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is
already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been
completed. The teaching of the concept, which is also history's ines-
capable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature that the
ideal first appears over against the real and that the ideal apprehends
this same world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the
shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in
grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey
it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva
spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.
— Hegel, Philosophy of Right
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W. E. B. D U B O I S
ana American Political Thought
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 1
Introduction

Du Bois—Afro-American ana
American Political Thought

\y / ILLIAM EDWARD BURGHARDT Du Bois is generally recognized as a central

W figure in the history of Afro-American politics, a major contributor to more
than a half-century's debate over the condition of and proper goals and strategies
for blacks in the United States and, more broadly, peoples of African descent,
worldwide. He enjoyed an unusually long and prominent career as a scholar,
essayist, and activist. He was a pioneer in the formation of sociology as an aca-
demic discipline in the United States, author of one of the first revisionist histor-
ies of Reconstruction, a founder of the National Association for the Advance-
ment of Colored People (NAACP), shaper—along with first Booker T.
Washington and then Marcus Garvey—of two pivotal controversies over racial
strategy, elder statesman of the Harlem Renaissance, hero of Nkrumahite Pan-
Africanism, militant foe and victim of McCarthyism. Moreover, among promi-
nent Afro-American political actors in this century Du Bois is perhaps the most
systematic thinker (at least insofar as coherent writing is the expression of sys-
tematic thought). No other black intellectual or activist has written so much or
so widely, and few have been so insistent on grounding strategic thinking on
clear normative and theoretical principles.
It is, therefore, something of an anomaly that Du Bois, more than others,
has been claimed by advocates of many different, often diametrically opposed,
ideological positions. Sometimes he is linked simultaneously with apparently

3
4 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
contradictory stances. Against Washington, he has been understood as a de-
fender of radical activism and as a pristine idealist. Against Garvey, he has been
cast as an elitist integrationist; yet he was to leave the NAACP a few years later
in part because the organization rejected his proposals for strengthening institu-
tions within the black community even in the context imposed by segregation.
Communists have claimed him, his elitism notwithstanding, as have anticom-
munist Pan-African nationalists.
This anomalous legacy, which makes the intellectually rigorous Du Bois
appear as a champion who can be appropriated on an equal basis by any and
all political tendencies, becomes less puzzling with the recognition that (even
though he has been the object of a considerable secondary literature) little book-
length scholarly work has concentrated on the theoretical dimension of Du
Bois's political thought. Those who do attend to his political ideas typically ei-
ther consider Du Bois's thought in an ancillary way, restrict themselves to cata-
loging his various positions on racial strategy, or are flatly hagiographical.
Only two major studies of Du Bois have attempted — though not with equal
success—to develop interpretations that account carefully for his theoretical and
philosophical commitments and their relation to his strategic positions. Arnold
Rampersad's The Art and Imagination ofW. E. B. Du Bois is an exemplary work
in that regard; Joseph P. DeMarco's The Social Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois is
noteworthy more for its attempt than its execution.' Rampersad's study may per-
haps best be described as a critical intellectual biography; he wants to unravel
the antinomies of Du Bois's consciousness, the existential tensions that defined
his individuality and expressed themselves throughout his intellectual activity,
particularly in his creative work. The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois
certainly informs the study of Du Bois's political thought, but it is not primarily
a study of his political ideas; its interpretive thrust is more broadly cultural and
philosophical, although Rampersad is obviously alive to the political-theoretical
implications of Du Bois's artistic and philosophical dispositions. By contrast,
DeMarco is more directly concerned with political ideas, but his account tends
to sanitize Du Bois's thought to conform with more contemporary liberal, social
democratic sensibilities. DeMarco's volume is weakened also by an often super-
ficial and sometimes questionable approach to the philosophical tendencies to
which it relates Du Bois, but the deeper problem is his impulse to represent Du
Bois, without tension and irony, as a hero for our time.2

The Dangers of Racial Vindicationism

The hagiographical, sanitizing impulse is all too common in the study of Afro-
American thought and especially prevails in Du Bois scholarship, in part be-
cause Du Bois's prominence overloads the ideological significance of character-
izing him and defining his legacy. Examination of the historically conditioned
foundations of his thinking, therefore, has taken a backseat to establishing or
reaffirming his position in history. Despite its manifest focus on setting straight
 Introduction 5
the historical record, that orientation — which I have associated elsewhere with
a principle of racial vindication 3 —is acutely vulnerable to and virtually defense-
less against producing anachronistic interpretations. Those who use it tend to
seek "anticipations" of later (usually current) ideas in the thinking of those to
be elevated, and tend to exaggerate their uniqueness as thinkers or political
agents. The former tendency reinforces the natural temptation to impose con-
temporary or otherwise congenial meanings on the utterances of past agents; the
latter, in diminishing the need to consider agents as participants in historically
specific modes of political discourse, removes an important source of interpre-
tive discipline.4 So Manning Marable, for example, claims Du Bois, who was
conscientiously agnostic in his public life, for a putative tradition of "prophetic
Christianity" in Afro-American politics, on the basis of his occasional use of
biblical metaphor 5 and defends a contention that he was most of all a "radical
democrat" by arguing that the "Talented Tenth was a strategy to win democracy
for all black Americans." 6
There is, of course, a clear, objective basis for this vindicationist orientation.
Not only has there been a real need to restore awareness of Du Bois's place in
American history after his vilification and persecution in the last years of his life,
but the Afro-Americanist tendency to affirm the significance of blacks' contribu-
tions to history is also a deeply embedded and organic legacy of generations of trivi-
alization, denial, and disparagement by intellectual convention. Moreover, the
vindicationist temper has produced useful and important biographical scholarship.
Francis L. Broderick and Elliott M. Rudwick in separate but closely related biogra-
phies provided what has been perhaps the standard view of Du Bois as race leader
or black activist spokesman.7 R. Charles Key 8 and Dan S. Green and Edwin D.
Driver 9 focus on reconstructing his role in the development of academic sociology
in the United States. Arthur L. Johnson has attempted to situate him in the canon
of sociological theory.10 Charles H. Wesley and Jessie P. Guzman have emphasized
his contributions as an academic historian. 11
Some of this scholarship clearly succumbs to excessive claims, as with Eu-
gene C. Holmes's presentation of Du Bois as a notable figure in the develop-
ment of American positivist philosophy, but the most serious limitation of the
vindicationist literature is that, in giving priority to affirming blacks' rightful
claim to historical contribution, it accepts a propagandistic imperative that hin-
ders critical reflection on its subject matter. As early as the 1940s, William T.
Fontaine examined implications of this racial "defense psychology," noting that
it often leads to a conceptual narrowness and atheoreticism. 13 Since that time
the study of Afro-American thought has congealed as an academic endeavor
largely circumscribed by the intellectual constraints that Fontaine described.
Unhappily, the vindicationist orientation has been institutionalized, solidifying
its ideological attractiveness with the force of disciplinary orthodoxy.
Scholars' confusions and disagreements in categorizing Du Bois are evi-
dence of the inadequacy of vindicalionism. Moreover, the Du Bois anomaly
arises as much from his being ignored by Americanists as from his being at-
tended to hagiographically by Afro-Americanists. Thus, Du Bois illuminates the
6 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
persistence among Americanists of a scandalous disposition to construe blacks
(if including them at all) simply as objects of American civic discourse—to de-
fine the American "we" as inherently white. This orientation produces a funda-
mentally impoverished understanding of the evolution of American political life
and debate, and two of its forms in particular have reinforced intellectual nar-
rowness among Afro-Americanists. First, there is the propensity to define the
history of American political thought as a narrative that marginalizes or excludes
both race as an issue and nonwhites as participants. Second, there is the subordi-
nation of research and commentary concerning black Americans to an extrinsic
objective of race relations management, that is, constraint by the imperatives of
the "Negro Problem" framework. These two tendencies —as well as the broader
orientation they embody—have taken different substantive forms, and even the
new revisionist intellectual historiography has reproduced the equation of
"American" and "white" (and all too often "male").14 Specifically, however,
when the study of Afro-American thought began to develop as an academic
specialty, its received bias toward atheoretical, racial vindication was buttressed
in different ways by the consensualist framework overtaking American intellec-
tual historiography and a distinctive, new scholarly approach to race relations.

Consensualism in Cold War Intellectual Historiography

The study of Afro-American thought began to form a body of significant litera-

ture and a broadly cohesive problematique in the 1950s and early 1960s, during
a period when the larger study of American political thought—reflecting the
Cold War cultural milieu —centered on the idea of a transhistorical normative
(or spiritual) consensus: an overarching American national character.15 That
representation of an essentially noncontroversial foundation of shared values and
ideals had limiting consequences for Afro-Americanists. Locating this consensus
demanded definition of the essential American character on a level so abstract
that all areas of structurally grounded conflict receded from view. This meant,
among other such devices, construing "American" to mean white (perhaps even
"native" white) and thereby reducing the messy race issue to epiphenomenal
status —an ultimately exogenous problem to be noted parenthetically, if at all.16
Of course, the normative consensus merely reasserted the long-standing exclu-
sion of blacks from the main narrative of American history, but it also formalized
the intellectual and institutional barriers separating the two areas of inquiry and
restricted Afro-Americanists to the study of strategies for (what had been called
in the early twentieth century) "race adjustment."
The consensual frame imposed a static backdrop to examine Afro-American
thought against, helping further to restrict the scope of Afro-Americanist inquiry.
Holding "American ideals" or "American society" constant analytically obscures
the extent to which blacks have participated in an evolving national grammar of
political debate and thereby reinforces the vindieationist disposition to ignore
the historical specificity and contextuality of black political discourse. Moreover,
 Introduction 7
reifying the idea of a normative consensus exclusive of blacks fuels the tendency
to conceptualize black thinking narrowly as a set of debates over strategies for
reacting to the alien consensus. This view has authorized the familiar approach
of categorizing black thought into sets of strategic or tactical dualisms (mili-
tance/moderation, protest/accommodation, integrationism/nationalism), and it
has meshed especially well with the other intellectual development that influ-
enced the formation of the Afro-Americanist field.

The "American Dilemma" as Heuristic and Ideology

The study of Afro-American thought took shape also in the context of a general
expansion of scholarly interest in the Afro-American experience beginning in
the decade or so following World War II. That broader expansion cohered
around a reformulation—most cogently articulated by Gunnar Myrdal 17 —of the
"Negro Problem" as both a matter for national moral (and pragmatic) concern
and an appropriate object for enlightened social engineering at the hands of
national policy elites. Two elements of the postwar climate helped this new
focus take root. First, the changing geographic distribution of the black popula-
tion destabilized the view that the status of blacks was a peculiarly southern
problem.18 Second, concern with resolving the race problem converged with
and received a boost from the Cold War imperative. Existence of a formalized
racial hierarchy in the United States was an embarrassing contradiction of the
new national image as leader of the "Free World." America's new role as princi-
pal exemplar of the virtues of capitalist democracy in a global ideological strug-
gle required greater sensitivity to the ways in which "world opinion" viewed
domestic caste arrangements.
Underlying both those practical sources of interest, however, was the famil-
iar perception of the black population as an exogenous appendage to American
society. The Cold War perspective and the impetus to recast the Negro Problem
in national terms equally approach black Americans primarily as objects of ad-
ministration; in each case the purposive stimulus instrumentalizes the Afro-
American condition and experience to the goal of race relations management.
Cold War-inspired interest has been more likely cynical, and its objectives have
been more likely cosmetic. But even well-intentioned racial liberalism has been
predisposed toward an ethnocentric purblindness to the relatively autonomous
dimensions of black thought and action. The initial formulation that "America"
has a "Negro Problem" not only reproduces the principle of black marginaliza-
tion in the national experience; it also implies that the black experience exists
only insofar as it intersects white American concerns or responds to white initia-
tives. Ralph Ellison identified the latter implication in Myrdal's unquestionably
sympathetic study as an instance of a general tendency to view blacks "simply
as the creation of white men." 20
I cannot here undertake systematic discussion of the various ways in which
this outlook imprinted itself on postwar scholarship about blacks, although that
8 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
is an important line of inquiry to pursue. 21 A general effect of the "Negro Prob-
lem" focus on the study of Afro-American thought, however, has been to lend
privilege to an approach that conceptualizes black political discourse only in its
tactical dimension, as a debate over alternative styles of response to white
agendas. Like the exclusionist consensualism, the Negro Problem viewpoint lim-
its Afro-Americanists to charting a terrain of recurring, typically bipolar debates
over racial program or political style. While a few scholars have pointedly
noted the intellectual inadequacies of this approach, 23 it has nonetheless domi-
nated discourse about Afro-American political thought. Even self-conscious at-
tempts to transcend it have not been able to break entirely with its narrow focus
on racial tactics and its penchant for ahistorical dualism. 24
However, attributing this problem solely to white racism or ethnocentrism
or even to Cold War anti-intellectualism does not adequately account for it.
There is, after all, a concrete basis for reading the terms of Afro-American politi-
cal debate as a pragmatic, reactive discourse. Even when Myrdal observed that
"Negro thinking in social and political terms is thus exclusively a thinking about
the Negro problem," 25 he was not so much empirically wrong as analytically
incomplete. The same is true of his following elaboration:

Negro thinking is almost completely determined by white opinions —negatively

and positively. It develops as an answer to the popular theories prevalent among
whites by which they rationalize their upholding of caste. In this sense it is a
derivative, or secondary, thinking. The Negroes do not formulate the issues to
be debated; these arc set for them by the dominant group. Negro thinking
develops upon the presuppositions of white thinking. 26

The Unheard Internal Critique

Nearly a decade before Myrdal, black historian L. D. Reddick issued a call for
the study of Afro-American history to "escape the provincial nature of its first
phases . . . [and to] re-define the area of subject matter in terms of a larger focus;
[to] re-cast its catalog of the determinative influences affecting Negro life and re-
examine the social philosophy implicit throughout the work" (emphasis in origi-
nal). 27 I have already mentioned Fontaine's critiques, and E. Franklin Frazier
was perhaps the most trenchant critic with this contention:

Most Negro intellectuals simply repeat the propaganda which is put out by
people who have large economic and political interests to protect. . . . We
have no philosophers or thinkers who command the respect of the intellectual
community at large . . . men who have reflected upon the fundamental prob-
lems which have always concerned philosophers such as the nature of human
knowledge and the meaning or lack of meaning of human existence.28

Earl E. Thorpe, author of the first—and still uiiequaled — general Afro-

American intellectual history has maintained that the black intellectual typically
has suffered from "restriction of his Weltanschauunq to the narrow confines of
 Introduction 9
race, hypersensitivity, and an inferiority complex which displays itself in a thou-
sand and one ways."29 He went on to proclaim, echoing Reddick from a genera-
tion earlier, that as of 1960 "the time had probably come when Negro History
should be subjected to more comparative studies and to broader interpretive
emphases."30 Afro-Americanists' tendency toward interpretive narrowness,
Thorpe acknowledged, is in part a direct function of their subject matter in
that much of Afro-American thought is "basically accommodation and attack
thought." 31 (In another volume he examined the debilitating implications of
that bias for Afro-American historiography in particular.) 32 At the same time
he —like Myrdal, Reddick, Fontaine, and Frazier—found this discourse of "ac-
commodation and attack" to be a natural, predictable consequence of racial
exclusion and denigration both in the society at large and in the study of Ameri-
can life.
Myrdal's depiction is eloquent, if rather paternalistic:

The Negroes are so destitute of power in American society that it would, in-
deed, be unrealistic for them to try a flight into a wider range of problems. It
seems functional and rational that they restrict their efforts to what is nearest
home. They are not expected to have a worth-while judgment on national and
international affairs, except in so far as Negro interests are concerned. To most
groups of white Americans it would be preposterous and impudent, or at least
peculiar, if Negroes started to discuss general problems as ordinary Americans
and human beings. They are allowed —in various degrees —to protest; or it is,
at any rate, taken for granted that they should protest. But they are neither
expected nor allowed to participate. So the Negro protest and the white expec-
tation harmonize and accumulate in their effects to narrow the range of Negro
thinking. 33

He then recalled the "queerness . . . felt by the foreign observer when he turns
over the leaves of the hundreds of recent books and articles by white Americans
on American democracy and its implications . . . [to find that| the subject of
the Negro is a void or is taken care of by some awkward, mostly uninformed
and helpless, excuses."34
In those observations Myrdal, like Thorpe and the other black critics, iden-
tified the practical historical bases for the circumscription of both black dis-
course about politics and the study of Afro-American thought within a tactical,
racial frame. Unfortunately—and ironically, given his intentions — in construing
the question of the status of blacks in the United States as the "Negro Problem,"
he inadvertently committed precisely the transgression he lamented. Positing an
abstracted "American Creed," in relation to which the treatment of blacks is
held to be anomalous, already separates the Afro-American population in princi-
ple from the notion of "American society." Thereby, in representing them as
outside —indeed as objects of—the only pertinent normative discourse, the Myr-
dalian view deprives blacks of any basis for autonomous agency. 35 That is what
Ellison detected and recoiled from as a profound and dangerous flaw in Myr-
dal's work. Where Myrdal differed from Reddick, Fontaine, and the others was
10 W. E. B. Du Boz's and American Political Thought
not so much in what he saw in black thought but in how he responded to it.
Because he was not particularly concerned with the state of black social or
political agency, let alone with advancing it, he could take the apparent absence
of normative autonomy in black political discourse simply as given. For Myrdal
that lack of autonomy was a fact of life, an inexorable, though deplorable, conse-
quence of racial subordination; moreover, for him the alternatives were only
assimilation or continued "racial provincialism." 36 To the others it was, while
historically and sociologically understandable, a problem to be confronted and
overcome, hence their various calls for self-conscious reflection on the theoreti-
cal commitments underpinning black intellectual activity.3'
It is natural enough—given the primacy of racial subordination and oppres-
sion—that Afro-American thinking has been so thoroughly dominated by issues
of racial strategy. What Myrdal overlooked, however, is that even the narrowest,
most "provincial" lines of debate derive from and are structured by a norma-
tively significant language of politics, a discourse bound by shared "values, be-
liefs, perceptions, and concepts."38 In their various critiques Fontaine, Reddick,
Thorpe, and Frazier in effect were calling for black intellectuals to adopt a more
critically reflective stance vis-a-vis the foundations of prevailing patterns of black
social and political discourse.
Those critiques might usefully have informed the problematique of Afro-
American intellectual history, but they were overwhelmed by a combination of
the cultural force of the Myrdalian view and the endemic racial vindicationism
that was the critics' main target. Those two outlooks, strengthened by association
with postwar successes in the civil rights struggle, undercut reflection on embed-
ded norms by devaluing, in slightly different ways, the historical contextuality
of political debate. The consensual American Creed view, because of its own
ahistoricism, uncoupled scholarship from the need to ground interpretations in
historical specificity. The predictable result has been a tendency toward interpre-
tive presentism.39 Vindicationism is almost by definition a form of presentism;
in seeking to elevate black thought by showing its elegance or pertinence to
skeptics in the here and now, the vindicationist orientation is intrinsically sus-
ceptible to viewing the past "in abstracted relationship to analogues in the
present."40
Under these influences, Afro-Americanist scholarship congealed around an
intellectual core characterized by naivete concerning both the historical auton-
omy of political thought and the theoretical and epistemic foundations of its
own enterprise. As a consequence, research has been largely blind to the regions
of deeper normative meanings that are tacit within expressly pragmatic black
political debates; for penetrating those regions requires reconstructing the histor-
ically specific intellectual conventions that set the terms of episodic controversy.
Not having access to the conventional groundings of black discourse, further-
more, undermines the project of commenting other than trivially on the durable
features and self-driving characteristics of Afro-American thought. Instead, such
commentary has tended to depict either a perennial chase after platitudinous
 Introduction 11

symbols—"freedom," "equality," even "struggle" —or a Whiggish saga of the lin-

ear unfolding of a grand idea.41

Poverty of Interpretation in Contemporary

Afro-American Thought

For students of Afro-American thought the call for critical reflectiveness is there-
fore most importantly a call for making the normative underpinnings of black
thought accessible. Thus we must examine texts as historical artifacts of specific
discursive communities. This in turn entails a need for greater theoretical self-
consciousness about two discrete aspects of our approach to our subject matter;
one bearing on the relation between the Afro-Americanist and Americanist
fields, and the other more generally on the history of ideas. First, to the extent
that black thought takes shape within a broader American language of politics,
credible recovery of the normative principles tacit in black discourse requires
accounting for that constitutive grammar of political debate. Eric Foner, for
example, has suggested a new angle on black strategic thinking during Recon-
struction by noting its relation to contemporaneous republican strains in Ameri-
can thought.42 The study of Afro-American thought can be enriched by rigorous
study of American thought and should be so informed.
Second, we should be more attentive to the ways in which interpretation is
itself a normatively pregnant activity. Thus far the field's methodological inno-
cence has foreclosed that issue and in the process has hampered development
of coherence. This methodological innocence—a function of the prevailing nai-
vete about historical contextuality—has left Afro-Americanists without a basis for
discussing either interpretive standards or purposive orientations to research.
This point should not be taken to suggest a call for a research "paradigm." Such
an effort hints of solipsism and would deploy scholarly resources most ineffi-
ciently. Besides, exercises in paradigm building very likely invert their Kuhnian
inspiration anyway. By forgetting that paradigms—when and where they exist—
are born, not made, efforts to call them into existence commit a version of
the well-known error of confounding the history of science and its summary
reconstruction as a sequential logic in the philosophy of science. In this area
Hegel's dictum holds: "The way is the long way around"; one might add, "if
there is any way at all." Rather, what I am suggesting is simply that we inform
our work with the insights — and the ambiguities—generated by hermeneutical
and otherwise procedural discussions throughout the broader history of ideas
(and, for that matter, literary criticism).
Proper attentiveness to historical contextuality requires breaking the thrall
of presentism and similar forms of interpretive naivete, which in turn requires
cultivating an attitude of humility and cautious self-doubt in approaching texts.
These qualities can be enhanced by making the field's reigning assumptions and
procedures objects of scrutiny and by considering Afro-American thought to be
12 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
a "relatively autonomous" subset of American thought in general and the history
of ideas writ large. This is the path, consonant with the critiques articulated by
Thorpe, Fontaine, Reddick, and Frazier, to locating the distinctive foundations
of Afro-American discourse.
There are in fact signs of growing scholarly concern to relate Afro-American
thought to broader intellectual currents. Although that concern seems keenest
in works on Du Bois, who was among the most intellectually cosmopolitan
black political actors, scholarship throughout the field has become more likely
in recent years to express an interest in connecting black thought to European
and white American theories and theorists. In addition to the studies by Ramper-
sad and DeMarco, Wilson J. Moses and William S. loll also have sought with
very productive results to provide intellectually contextualized accounts of epi-
sodes of black thought. Cornel West's and Marable's efforts are somewhat less
successful. Both volumes are oriented more toward demonstrating that their
black subjects were intellectually comparable to and/or conversant with the
work of prominent European and white American theorists than toward situating
those subjects within some constraining pattern of discourse.43
s latter approach, which is only an elevated vindicationism, opens to two re-
lated interpretive failings. First, making the link rests on extracting the principal
subject matter from its immediately constitutive discourse. No matter what might
plausibly be said about the putative links, therefore, this interpretive style actually
impedes recovery of the autonomous bases of black thought. Second, the vindica-
tionist concern with asserting an intellectual tie between black and white "greats"
leads to seeking links between agents operating within quite different problema-
tiques. The issues most meaningful to Hegel, for example, were not of the same
sort as those of greatest priority to Du Bois.44 To the extent that the agents being
linked respond to different questions, comparison must focus on their answers, that
is, on their positions on reified issues such as "the state," "justice," "democracy."
While this approach may inform our understanding of the vectors of influence
running between individuals joined through texts,4 it does not convey much sense
of the discursive communities in which those texts are embedded, the concrete
issues they seek to resolve. David A. Hollinger describes this problem clearly:

Questions are the points of contact between minds, where agreements are consoli-
dated and where differences are acknowledged and dealt with; questions are the
dynamisms whereby membership in a community of discourse is established, re-
newed, and sometimes terminated. To focus instead on a belief or value attribut-
able to an individual or to a collectivity of individuals is at once to move back from
those authentic, contingent relationships; when historical subjects are said to hold
a belief or value, those subjects are endowed with merely abstract, static character-
istics (for example, a belief in "progress" or in "republicanism") that may or may
not be shared by a virtual infinity of other subjects who may or may not interact
with each other. Yet when these same ideas are viewed in their capacity as answers
to questions shared with other persons (for example, "What is the national destiny
of America?" or "What kinds of political conduct are virtuous?"), they become
contributions to discourse. 46
 Introduction 13
The search for explicit links to Euroamerican philosophical luminaries orig-
inates, obviously, in a desire to exalt black thought, to demonstrate the existence
of a complex Afro-American intellectual tradition that is worthy of scholarly
estimation. Ironically, the means undermines the end in part because it rests
on counterproductive premises concerning "greatness" and intellectual tradition.
What greatness is, how it is determined, or how far it exists beyond the ideologi-
cal dispositions of those who proclaim it are very much unsettled issues about
which, for present purposes at least, I shall take refuge in agnosticism. However,
seeking to compare or to find signs of "influence" across discursive contexts
forces argument by analogy; that is, this search consists in finding positions or
stances —"answers"—that appear similar in the texts of the respective agents.
This sort of interpretation readily lends itself to the "reification of doctrines."
The latter can ensue in a variety of anachronisms,47 to which studies of Afro-
American thought hardly have been immune. Yet its most damaging implication
for the field is that it confounds the philosophical and historical dimensions of
the history of ideas48 and thereby substitutes arguments concerning the internal
consistency of texts for confrontation of Afro-American discourse squarely in its
own context. Frank examination of and critical reflection on the black experi-
ence are foiled, once again, by the impulse to vindicate it.
Although it is important to draw attention to these interpretive problems
as methodological issues, the fundamental challenge is actually to reconstruct
contextually grounded currents of Afro-American discourse. Debates about sub-
stantive interpretations are in the long run more invigorating and rewarding
than debates about how to interpret, and accounts of the specifically political
elements of black intellectual history, now that the major framework for debate
for two-thirds of the present century—the struggle against formal racial segrega-
tion—has lost its strategic foundation, may be especially important. Because the
antisegregationist imperative no longer imposes a reasonable semblance of stra-
tegic unity, inquiry into the normative presuppositions of Afro-American dis-
course may indeed produce arguments that have value not only for scholars but
also for citizens. At any rate, that hope is one vanity that students of Afro-
American thought might in this context forgivably indulge.
Du Bois is, for reasons that I indicated above, ideally suited as a focal point
for such a study. Because he was a central participant in and commentator on
debates over most of that two-thirds of a century, unraveling the foundations of
his thought may contribute significantly to critical reconstruction of the norrna-
tively structured discourse about politics shared by black intellectuals during the
segregation era. Moreover, because Du Bois was more attentive than most
agents to theoretical debates and problematiques outside the black community
over that period, his thought reflects with particular clarity and immediacy the
embeddedness of the categories of black debate in broader patterns of American
political discourse. Those at least are premises on which this study rests.
This page intentionally left blank
 2

Corporate Industrialization,
Collectivism, ana tne
New Intellectuals

Historical Context in the

Formation of Du Bois's Thought

Corporate Hegemony

^"T^ HE EARLY YEARS of Du Bois's life were also the early years of the develop-
J_ ment of industrial capitalism as the dominant cultural force in the United
States and in much of Europe. Those were the years of European colonial
expansion into Africa and Asia and of American experimentation with and un-
certainty about resolution of the "Negro Problem." Du Bois was born in 1868,
the year of the Fourteenth Amendment's ratification. He began his studies at
Fisk University in 1885, the year of the Berlin conference that divided Africa
into spheres of influence for the European colonial powers, and he married and
undertook his Philadelphia study in 1896, the year of the Plessy decision. He
joined the faculty at Atlanta University at the crest of popularity of the ideology
of the New South, of which Atlanta was considered the capital, and he joined
the debate with Booker T. Washington over industrial education at the high
point of the corporate merger movement.1 Perhaps most important for Du Bois's
development, though, was his matriculation at college just as the social role and
focus of the university were being redefined. He matured, moreover, in a critical
intellectual environment dominated by three ideological responses to the con-
solidation of corporate industrialism: collectivism, the cooperative common-
wealth (the font of a homegrown American socialism), and antimodernism.

15
16 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
8

Carol S. Gruber has noted that in the decades following the Civil War, the
structure of higher education in America underwent a major reorganization.
The related dynamics of urbanization and industrialization increased the social
need for scientific and technical knowledge; simultaneously, original and experi-
mental work in science and engineering increasingly commanded more respect
from students and others than the classical curriculum. 2 At the same time c>grow-
ing economic concentration increased the demand for mechanization in indus-
try, and the status of technical and scientific education rose with rising demand.
Those factors combined to create a perceived need among practitioners to pro-
fessionalize the technical fields, especially engineering. The desire to regulate
entry to the field and further to enhance status led to establishment of licensing
requirements and of intensification of university courses of study.3 However, the
guild activities of the nascent technical professions were not alone sufficient to
reshape higher education. Professionalism was one of several currents in the
society that happened to flow together into a tide of higher education reform.
The last quarter of the nineteenth century was a period in which American
culture began to show signs of an erosion of religious influence, and the univer-
sity community was greatly affected. University professors and independent intel-
lectuals were in the forefront of what Gruber calls the "advancing secularism"
of the era.4 Evolutionism's influence was felt widely in the culture, as the spread
of Social Darwinist ideology attests,5 and religiosity suffered accordingly. How-
ever, secularization was spurred even within theology itself. "Like the doctrine
of natural selection, textual criticism of the Bible also called into question the
infallibility of the Scriptures. Imported from German university centers, the
higher criticism, as it was known, subjected Holy Writ to rigorous historical
analysis."6 Both faculty and administration — a distinction that became increas-
ingly meaningful as the university rationalized itself—were imbued with the
new optimistic, secular orientation. In fact, a marked secularization could be
seen over the late 1800s in the composition of college trustee boards, which
traditionally had been dominated by clergy.7
The university was affected not only by the changing cultural climate and
the increasing importance of technical knowledge in the burgeoning industrial
economy. A third development also fed change more directly. Growing govern-
ment interest in education as a social utility—an interest that was demonstrated
as well in the public education movement—led to increases in funds available
for support of initiatives in higher education. At the same time, the coffers of
universities were blessed by the caprice, "pecuniary emulation," and bad con-
science of the Gilded Age's robber barons, as well as the latter's interests in
social and economic rationalization. Gruber suggests in this regard that "accu-
mulation of great fortunes made private capital available just at the time that
the business community was beginning to identify education with material suc-
cess."8
As a consequence of those developments a climate came into existence
that favored the extension of two related processes of professionali/ation in the
university. Originating in the natural sciences and reflecting the impact of sci-
 Industrialization, Collectivism, and the New Intellectuals 17
ence on American thought, a pattern formed in the latter years of the nineteenth
century for "the professionalization of knowledge characterized by the emer-
gence of discrete scholarly disciplines."9 Psychology was reconstituted on an
experimental basis during this period, and moral philosophy yielded the social
sciences and history.10 At the same time, the academic vocation both reflected
the curricular division of labor and congealed as a profession whose identity was
secured by "definition of standards of preparation, performance, protection and
rewards."11 The German experience exerted a major influence on the profes-
sionalization and scientization of American higher education through the
Gilded Age, and during those years as well came the signs among intellectuals
of a developing ideology of social intervention based on expertise.'2 If American
academics came to an an sich consciousness as a professional group in the post-
Civil War era, by the First World War the institutional apparatus — complete
with specialized disciplines, guild associations, and trade journals—had been
generated to mediate passage to the fur sich of a social stratum joined by certain
common premises about themselves and the world.
The changing shape and thrust of the university was in fact an element of
a more profound sociological phenomenon involving redefinition of the roles
and self-perceptions of intellectuals in response to the industrial reorganization
of American society. The functional basis for this redefinition lay in the steady
growth of the corporation as the pivotal economic form and its impact on the
social division of labor. Large-scale corporate production not only precipitated
increasing demand for technical labor; but the impetus to rationalization of
production and distribution processes, which ensued in separation of mental
and manual tasks, generated increasing demand for purely administrative, mana-
gerial, and language-manipulating labor.13 At the same time, proceeding indus-
trial concentration and urbanization were accompanied by growth in the social-
administrative apparatus. The administrative responsibilities of the state became
more important at national and local levels, and rationalization of social life in
general became an issue for conscious social policy.14 Intellectuals' place in the
society grew accordingly as the demand for functionaries grew.15 These histori-
cal circumstances accommodated proliferation of the distinctive type of intellec-
tual associated with the new university and professional subcultures. In articulat-
ing various theoretical and administrative responses to large scale industrial
capitalism, this new intellectual type became a driving force in constitution of
the distinctive ideological baseline of the twentieth century. Not only did they
share a common functional location in the social division of labor, but the new
intellectuals congealed around certain shared attitudinal characteristics. Among
those characteristics are (1) a disposition toward puzzle solving as an orientation
to purposeful activity; (2) an inclination to think in terms of systems and wholes
and parts; and (3) a commitment—at least in principle—to self-correcting, re-
flexive language which delegitimizes claims to validity based on references to
ascriptive authority and grounds validation on a relatively impersonal standard
of truth. 16
Those shared dispositions and attitudes about the proper conduct of social
18 W. E. B. Du Boz's and American Political Thought
discourse were enforced institutionally by means of credentializing and licensing
requirements to generate what Gouldner has referred to as the "public ideolo-
gies"17 of the intellectuals. Professionalism and related therapeutic, techno-
cratic, and meritocratic postures are grounded in a common outlook that ac-
knowledges the social and ethical propriety of a hierarchy of knowledge and
expertise. The fact that talent or knowledge appears as an intrinsically rational,
and therefore unquestioned, "natural" basis for stratification discloses an aspect
of the ideological self-interestedness of the new intellectuals; for, under critical
scrutiny, hierarchy of knowledge is no more a manifestation of immanent social
rationality than is any other hierarchical scheme.18 Indeed, the fundamental
views of the proper organization of human society around which intellectuals
tend to converge emphasize the importance of precisely those activities that are
characteristic to intellectuals.
The positive valuation of consciously organized society is a distinctive out-
look of corporate-era intellectuals.19 Planning and systematically rational organi-
zation as ideological commitments stress the importance of anticipation, predic-
tion, and control as orienting principles of social organization. Planning, the
application of formalistic rationality as a model for social life, technicization of
experience, and assertion of administration as the proper mode for maintenance
of the social fabric do not merely stress the importance of the activities engaged
in by intellectuals. By their intrinsic appeal to supranormative, allegedly objec-
tive or scientific standards of efficacy, these value premises remove the structur-
ing of human institutions from the realm of political discussion. Because the
notion of an objectively rational social organization denies the appropriateness
of interest-groundedness for decision making, it thereby disallows consideration
of the relation of those very premises to the pursuit of intellectuals' —or any
other group's—stratum interests.20 Consequently, even when intellectuals have
participated in broad social reform movements and have deployed their skills to
service in the generation of ideologies for those movements, their participation
has been conditioned, overtly or not, by the particular interests of their stratum.
It is in that sense that James Gilbert writes, discussing the period in question,
Often the reform role of the intellectual was quite distinct and self-consciously
different from the interests of the rank-and-file of reform movements. The intel-
lectual's assumptions and the implications of his actions were sometimes special
for the very reason that they expressed the interests of a developing intellectual
elite as well as allegiance to a set of reform ideas.21

Collectivism

Gilbert proposes "collectivism" as a common rubric that "signifies the general

area of agreement among those intellectuals who committed their careers and
hopes to such different movements as socialism, progressivism and manageri-
alism."22 The collcctivist outlook entails typically an emphasis on expertise as a
 Industrialization, Collectivism, and the New Intellectuals 19
legitimate, decisive social force, notions of the impartiality and neutrality of the
state and resonant assumptions of the neutral, guiding role of technology. In the
collectivist outlook realization of social justice depends on neutrality and scien-
tific impersonality as major weapons.23 Additionally, collectivism advances mod-
ern secularism by its commitment to a view of the centrality of the economy in
society. Pace Gilbert:
Collectivism, then, emerged as a general theory of society in which economic
institutions were the key element. Possibilities for social interaction and politi-
cal reform derived from the mass nature of these economic institutions. Al-
though many collectivists wished to preserve such older values as individualism,
they were nonetheless forced by their understanding of the scale of social prob-
lems to consider as a solution pitting social organization against injustice, or
translating such older economic ideas as laissez-faire into theories of competing
groups. Pluralism, a variant of collectivist thought, is an example of one direc-
tion which these assumptions often took. But other concrete theories also ex-
pressed the same central assumptions about social organization; only the details
varied.24

Viewed thus, the collectivist rubric subsumes theoretical continuities that

unite the various social programs—socialism, progressivism, managerialism, and
social engineering in general—advocated by the new intellectual stratum. The
essence of the industrial democracy and rationality around which many of those
intellectuals converged tends toward a technicization of social life that amounts
to extension of the civil service model to the private sector.25 This view entails
not only a commitment to a certain notion of equality but it also authorizes the
principle of meritocracy on which intellectuals typically base their claims to
special status. In fact, Gilbert observes, "even those intellectuals who seemed
willing to sacrifice the rights of private property for the sake of social control
over production were unwilling to surrender their belief in a hierarchical soci-
ety. Many wished only a more truly meritocratic class system."26
In both progressivism and the mercurial and eclectic phenomenon that was
American socialism, similar technicist and hierarchical moments were promi-
nent. At a theoretical level, in fact, the socialist and progressivist visions often
are difficult to distinguish. Gilbert observes that "[sjocialism, to many radical
intellectuals, was merely a set of demands completely divorced from a specific
system of empiricism. The ideological distinction between a Progressive and a
socialist intellectual could often be eliminated by juggling their demands."27
For Gilbert, however, socialism provides a central theme around which
other collectivist ideologies oscillated. He differentiates "two broad strains of
socialist thought [that] were distinguishable in the writings of Americans," one
of which came directly from Marx and the other of which "more closely resem-
bled liberal reformism."28 He notes:
Evolutionary socialism and reform capitalism shared a common theory of a
vanguard, whether of experts or political leaders, who would lead the way to-
20 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
ward a radical alteration of American society. Both movements relied upon
Darwinian metaphors and the predictions of modern social science. Both de-
fined the trust or corporation as the central problem and the primary force of
progress. And both, feeling that modern society's problems were universal, ap-
pealed to an international reform community. . . .
In practice, however, the intellectuals saw themselves at the leading edge
of civilization.29

Gilbert does not, however, confront a deeper sense in which Marxist and
non-Marxist stances converged. A clear attraction of the collectivist outlook—
socialist or otherwise—lay in its validation of that perception of the intellectuals'
importance. Having observed that the collectivist intellectuals tended to believe
that progress "would inevitably rest . . . upon the emergence of an intellectual
vanguard which could articulate the half-hidden laws of social development,"30
Gilbert avers:

Their writings often reflected a familiarity with the past and the future, as if
both were familiar terrain. This sense of predicting the future course of society
fed an almost irresistible urge toward utopianism. The "discovery" of sociologi-
cal laws, the belief in rapid change, the interchangeability of knowledge from
one broad field to another, suggest a carelessness which is often the mark of
excessive enthusiasm. However sure or unsure intellectuals were about where
society was going, they felt certain that it was on the verge of immense change
which they could influence. 31

It is understandable in this regard that Gilbert asserts that the collectivism

he describes should be juxtaposed conceptually to Marxism; the tendency was
elaborated specifically as an alternative to the Marxist critique's radicalism and
embrace of class conflict. Yet, Gilbert's own investigation uncovers threads con-
necting the Fabianism that he discusses even with Bolshevism. The "inter-
changeability of knowledge" finds its apotheosis in the dialectics of nature and
Lysenkan biology.32 The special relationship to history and the transcendent
vanguard speak as clearly of Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, and Stalin as of Charles
Steinmetz and Edmund Kelley. Beneath their certainly quite significant differ-
ences over the question of violent seizure of power and class struggle, revolution-
ary Marxism and Fabianism in some ways are strikingly similar in outlook. Both
exalt science and scientificity; both advocate rationalistic organization led by an
intellectual vanguard, and both display elements of inevitability and utopianism.
Karl Korsch proffered one of the earliest and most coherent critiques of
Bolshevism from a radical Marxist perspective. Writing in the early 1920s,
Korsch detected the fundamental theoretical similarities undergirding Leninism
and Kautskyan social democracy, and among those similarities he included their
common deprecation of the subjective, volitional realm of human experience.33
By 1930 Korsch had concluded that Bolshevism was separated from evolutionary
social democracy mainly by the peculiarities surrounding Russian society and
the decomposition of its ancien regime. Revolutionary Marxism, Korsch argued,
in grounding its critical vision in a scicntistic automatism, had opted to swim
 Industrialization, Collectivism, and the New Intellectuals 21
along with the philosophical and ideological mainstream of twentieth-century
bourgeois society.
While Korsch focused his critique on Lenin and Plekhanov, Albrecht Well-
mer has gone on to identify tendencies in Marx's own work that resonate with
the positivist assumptions lying at the base of other collectivist ideologies.34
Moreover, Alvin W. Gouldner has presented a view of the Marxist heritage that
emphasizes an ambivalence at its core. He finds a coherent, fully developed
tendency in Marxism toward a positivist scientism and deterministic objectivism
that characterize other, nonrevolutionary industrial-era ideologies; on the other
hand, Gouldner also identifies a "critical Marxism" which, in addition to em-
phasizing historicized critique and the relative autonomy of subjectivity, tends
toward a secularized, apocalyptic, and egalitarian utopianism. The former ten-
dency, which Gouldner calls "scientific Marxism," shares with antirevolutionary
collectivism and social management ideology biases toward evolutionism, au-
tomatism, and the reduction of social life to the object of administration. Ac-
cording to Gouldner's view, both tendencies are distinctly present in Marx, and
for that matter Hegel, and their dialectical interaction has constituted the libera-
tory and sometimes repressive legacy of Marxism.
Nor is Bolshevism's continuity with evolutionary socialism and other collec-
tivist variants visible only in the philosophical realm. Lenin and his cohorts'
fascination with scientific management indicates that even a newly triumphant
and enthusiastic revolutionary Marxism might well be considered in one sense
simply a more politically aggressive and successful version of Gilbert's collectiv-
ism.36 The commonalities were observable from 1917 and before. Formalization
of social development in the centralized plan; homogenization of human inter-
ests before the requirements of administration; enforcement in the party, factory,
state, and society at large of a hierarchical organization that allocates privileged
positions to intellectuals and intelligentsia —all are characteristics of a Bolshe-
vism that does not fully transcend but apotheosizes the collectivist rhythm of
the twentieth century. Lenin himself already in 1902 had identified revolution-
ary socialism and its consciousness as the original property of intellectuals; Bol-
shevism became a radical program for molding society to their vision.37 The
Hungarian sociologists George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi contend that, in part
through its professionalization of revolution,

Bolshevism enabled the intellectuals to rid themselves of the ideological ballast

which they had been obliged to carry as representatives of the working class.
For in treating the proletarian state as the sine qua non of socialism the Bolshe-
viks made an end of socialism as a political, economic, and social problem,
simplifying it to a mere matter of organizing state and economy. The Bolshevik
intellectuals did not ask in what sort of institutional order the associated produc-
ers would find maximum political and economic freedom, but only: How can
state and economy be organized so that every decision-making position will be
monopolized by the party's trained cadres, and in such a way that those power
positions cannot be limited in scope by other kinds of legitimation (be it tradi-
tion, capital ownership, or political representation)? 38
22 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
After noting the brevity of the period of democratic experimentation and
workers' control that followed the seizure of power in Russia, the authors con-
clude:
Bolshevism, then, offered the intellectuals a program for freeing themselves of
the duty of representing particular interests once power had been secured, and
it used particular interests simply as a means of acquiring power. With the
expropriation of the expropriators—that is, with the transfer of the right to dis-
pose over the surplus product from landlords and capitalists to intellectuals in
power, or to worker cadres whose political positions and functions made intel-
lectuals of them—and with the destruction of the immediate producers' organs
of management and control, the Bolsheviks traced the outlines of a new ratio-
nal redistributive system and, within it, indicated the position of the teleological
redistributors, called to represent the interests of all society expertly and profes-
sionally.39
It is noteworthy in this context that Lenin defined the revolutionary Social-
Democrat as a "Jacobin who totally identifies himself with the organization of
the proletariat, a proletariat conscious of its class interests."40 Bolshevism, as a
model of revolutionary Marxism in the period of industrial social reorganization,
is distinguishable from other collectivist ideologies principally in its Jacobinist
radicalism, its political aggressiveness and willingness to force its program of
rationalist homogenization on society through rupture. In its fundamental intel-
lectual impulse, Bolshevism joins other collectivist stances as a realization under
contemporary historical circumstances of a central strain of the telos of the bour-
geois Enlightenment, the domination of the concept over its object.
Thus Gilbert's contraposition of Marxism and collectivism overstates the
differences in their philosophical and epistemic foundations. While other collec-
tivists stood apart from and reacted against revolutionary Marxism as a social
and political program, what separated many Marxists from other collectivist in-
tellectuals was less their visions for the ultimate organization of society than
disagreement over appropriate means and agencies for realizing that vision. A
strain of Marxism, therefore, is revolutionary more for its Jacobinism than its
goals; it represents, rather than a critical alternative to the social order of mass
industrialization, the "unhappy consciousness" of its managers.
This clarification is important with respect to Du Bois because in diminish-
ing the difference between Marxism and "collectivism" it also diminishes the
significance of the issue of when or whether he actually became a revolutionary
Marxist. Insofar as collectivism can be seen as an intellectual orientation en-
compassing at least some variants of revolutionary Marxism, the issue loses its
relevance for interpretation of the organizing principles of Du Bois's thought. In
fact, in the remainder of this study, I shall demonstrate that throughout his
career Du Bois's writings rested on a conceptual foundation that is compatible
with the collectivist outlook and that this orientation is evident in his attitudes
about the importance of science in social affairs and the proper organization of
the Afro-American population as well as in his specific concerns with political
positions, such as Pan-Africanism and socialism.
 Industrialization, Collectivism, and the New Intellectuals 23
The developing tendency to cast the world in collectivist terms was more
than an ideological expression of the self-perception and guild interests of the
new stratum of intellectuals. Its origins lay more broadly in an attempt to re-
spond to the sense of cultural dislocation attendant to the processes of institu-
tional reorganization taking hold in American society at the end of the nine-
teenth century. In that context of passage from a familiar mode of national
existence to one that was not only quite new and different but also did not seem
to develop organically from its predecessor, the canon of values that had consti-
tuted the legitimating framework for bourgeois social relations was destabilized,
if not rendered flatly inappropriate. This phenomenon, which T. J. Jackson
Lears has summarized as a "crisis of cultural authority,"42 provoked searches in
a variety of venues for paths to restoration or reconstitution of a national norma-
tive order. The collectivist outlook was attractive in this regard because it prom-
ised to resolve the problem of teleological drift and to do so, moreover, in a
manner that both emphasized order as inherently virtuous and accepted the
new structural arrangements more or less happily on their own terms.
The cultural crisis derived most directly from displacement of the immedi-
ate community as primary context for defining and comprehending one's place
in the world and relation to others. The development of a national market sys-
tem, carried by the railroads, not only brought communities closer together; it
also redefined relationships within and between communities in a variety of
ways, including "incorporation of space and time as factors among the elements
of production," overrode the autonomousness of the idiosyncratic patterns of
community life and subordinated them to the imperatives of homogenizing
logic.45 This logic destroyed the dual bases on which rested the local communi-
ty's authority as a source of social order: "its ability to manage the lives of its
members, and the belief among its members that the community had such
powers."44 Already by the 1870s and '80s the "island community" was no longer
an adequate ground on which to orient social and political—let alone eco-
nomic—life, and the concerns of businessmen and public figures reflected this
decline through a recurring emphasis on the problems of splintering and frag-
mentation. 45
As the community lost its power to provide cultural self-definition for the
stratum of respectable burghers, that function came to be performed for a stead-
ily growing body of Americans by impersonal affiliations and attachments. Over
the 1880s and '90s, for example, a truly national, sociologically cohesive upper
class congealed, largely by means of elite intermarriage across cities. Identifica-
tion of suitable partners and associates in this far-flung network was made possi-
ble by the development of a set of shared symbols and criteria that denoted
propriety and signified membership in the group.46
At the same time that the upper class was rationalizing itself on a national
basis, a new middle class was forming, mainly in the growing cities. This new
middle class included professionals and specialists in business, labor, and agri-
culture who were "awakening both to their clistinctiveness and to their ties with
similar people in the same occupation . . . |developing) . . . consciousness of
24 W. E. B. Du Boz's and American Political Thought
unique skills and functions, an awareness that came to mold much of their
lives."47 The members of this middle class "found their rewards more and more
in the uniqueness of an occupation and in its importance to a rising scientific-
industrial society."48 Their ability to see their functions in the new system led
them to look toward the future with optimism, to see progress, which indeed
they often sought to hasten by an "earnest desire to remake the world upon their
private models," as Robert H. Wiebe describes the reform impulse among
them.49 It was that reform-oriented element of this new middle class that nur-
tured the various expressions of the collectivist outlook generated among its in-
tellectuals, in part as a project of "building a new structure of loyalties to replace
the decaying system of the nineteenth century communities."50
Of course attraction to a collectivist Weltanschauung was not the only prom-
inent ideological response to the cultural crisis wrought by capitalist industrial-
ization. Wiebe indicates that in the 1880s the "most significant characteristic
shared by [the] many anxieties was the desire for community self-determination,
and anti-monopoly was its most common means of expression."51 In that con-
text, a considerable strain of reform thinking over the 1880s and '90s contained
a protest against what was perceived to be a closing off—or even a hijacking—
of the social "commons" by large private interests, against the corporation's pre-
emption of values of community and on behalf of a call "for the community to
reabsorb the corporation." 52 Populism, and still later, an element of the home-
grown variety of American socialism were to grow out of this strain of thought,
which was structured largely around the image of the "cooperative common-
wealth." This image, which received perhaps its most systematic expression in
the writings of Laurence Gronlund, Edward Bellamy, and Henry Demarest
Lloyd, was both a widely propagated social-organizational ideal and an emblem
of the community's reassertion of its control over industrialization. 53
Yet, as Gilbert observes, the image of the cooperative commonwealth was
not intrinsically incompatible with the collectivist outlook; Bellamy's Looking
Backward in particular, he notes, "appears again and again as a kind of uncon-
scious archetype in writings about the solution to industrial problems" among
later collectivist ideologues—both socialist and not.54 Certainly, Bellamy's uto-
pia indicated that the commonwealth could be constituted in an enlightened,
corporatist despotism, and for him as well as for Gronlund the path to resolution
of cultural crisis lay in vesting the national state with a more highly rationalized,
administrative version of the cultural and normative responsibilities that had
been sundered from the community by the development of private power in the
large corporation. The state, in other words, was to become the community,
substituting the precision of self-regulating—and thus totalitarian—rational ad-
ministration for the more personal and relational basis of legitimacy that had
been abolished by large-scale industrialization. 55 In this regard, even though
these critics were more attentive than others to the cultural disruption and other
evils spawned by the new institutional arrangements and were therefore less
likely to champion industrialism as pure progress, the heart of their critiques —
as expressed in their reconstructive vision —affirmed the functionalist rationality
 Industrialization, Collectivism, and the New Intellectuals 25
that drove the corporate-industrial juggernaut. They were, therefore, predisposed
to an authoritarian-bureaucratic resolution by both the centralizing logic of their
presumptions concerning rationality and the conformism inherent to the com-
munitarian ideal. The small town, after all, is saved from a frightful totalitarian-
ism only because its face-to-face framework provides some space for negotiation
of tolerance for idiosyncrasy, but even that applies only for those judged to be
insiders.
Another tendency among intellectuals disclosed quite a different reaction to
the late nineteenth century's cultural crisis. For those associated with this ten-
dency, as for the advocates of cooperative commonwealth, the new industrial
culture developing around them could not be seen as unmitigated progress.
However, their response differed inasmuch as they rejected — at least rhetori-
cally—the entire normative apparatus of industrialism. These antimodernists'
critiques "stemmed from revulsion against the process of rationalization first de-
scribed by Max Weber—the systematic organization of economic life for maxi-
mum productivity and of individual life for maximum personal achievement;
the drive for efficient control of nature under the banner of improving human
welfare; the reduction of the world to a disenchanted object to be manipulated
by rational technique."56 That is, they reacted against the core principles of the
new industrialism.
Strategically, this reaction entailed embracing "premodern symbols as alter-
natives to the vagueness of liberal Protestantism or the sterility of nineteenth-
century positivism" and adapting those symbols to modern ends.57 Antimodern-
ists typically understood the cultural crisis as a problem of overcivilization for
which the quest for authenticity of experience was held out as an antidote.
Pursuit of arts and crafts, the cult of the strenuous life and the martial ideal,
and exaltation of the "primitive" were among the more common avenues
through which the antimodernist impulse was realized. However, without re-
hearsing the complexity of the antimodernist epicycle that Lears describes so
provocatively, the most important aspect of the antimodernist critique is its am-
bivalence. Lears notes:

[A] drive toward autonomous action coexisted with a longing for dependent
passivity. Alongside pastoral poetry, magazines printed hymns to material prog-
ress. Maples and ferns acquired greater romantic appeal as more were uprooted
by enterprising frontiersmen. . . . By remaining linked to activism, oceanic
feelings helped to generate the pastoral haze which obscured the rise of indus-
trial capitalism; they also incorporated temporary, revitalizing respites from
achievement. They reinforced accommodation as well as protest.58

Collectivism, the "cooperative commonwealth," and antimodernism were not

only the three major types of intellectual response to industrialism. Each has a
direct bearing on Du Bois's political thought. His views on black culture cer-
tainly reflected the tracings of an antimodernist tension, and his substantive view
of socialism was very much influenced by the cooperative commonwealth. Most
of all, Du Bois's thought was formed in the great cauldron of collectivist ideas
26 W. E. B. Du Bofs and American Political Thought
in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade or two of
the twentieth. He was very much a man of his time; as I shall show in the
remainder of this study, he approached all his intellectual and practical activity
throughout the course of his career from a vantage point heavily conditioned by
a distinctive commitment to collectivist and related assumptions.
 3

The Philadelphia Negro and the

Consolidation or a Worldview

The Philadelphia Negro and the Social-Scientific Ideal

T HE PHILADELPHIA STUDY demands the attention of those concerned with Du

Bois's political thought for several reasons. It is practically a commonplace
at this point to refer to the place of Du Bois's study in the history of American
sociology.1 In that sense The Philadelphia Negro is important because it helps
to disclose aspects of Du Bois's early attitudes about sociological knowledge, its
nature and purposes, and the relation between knowledge and action. His work
in Philadelphia also, since it represents his first systematic confrontation of the
structures of Afro-American existence, is significant as an indicator of his early
thinking about Afro-American life. Consideration of the assumptions that he
brought to the investigation and the findings that he constructed helps locate
Du Bois's thinking in relation to that of his contemporaries and suggests themes
and attitudes that recur or are elaborated in his later work. The Philadelphia
study in fact lays out core themes and perspectives that persisted through the
remainder of his life. Finally, the idea that such a study should be commis-
sioned in the first place originated from the social ideology prominent among
liberal-progrcssivist reformers of the time. The fact, therefore, that Du Bois was
selected to conduct the research is significant; 'ihe Philadelphia Negro is the

27
28 W. E. B. Du Boz's and American Political Thought
major artifact of Du Bois's dialogue with both social-scientific and reform ideas
and movements at the turn of the century.
Philadelphia in the 1890s was held widely to be a political-machine town
of first-order disrepute in which the bugbears of graft and corruption that so
disturbed the sensibilities of middle-class citizens abounded. In a fit of reform
the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Samuel McCune Lindsay were
charged with documenting the extent to which "the corrupt, semi-criminal vote
of the Negro Seventh Ward" was the engine that propelled the machine. 2 Du
Bois, who says that he was unaware of and uninterested in "the theory back of
the plan of this study of Negroes,"3 leaped at the opportunity to engage in the
meat of scientific sociological research.
The Philadelphia study provided Du Bois with an opportunity to follow his
heartfelt desire "to put science into sociology"4 by generating factual data to
discipline discussion within the field, and, moreover, he shared with the reform-
ers a concern with what both he and they perceived to be a certain moral laxity
and softness of character that existed within the black community. The "Creed"
of the American Negro Academy, in whose organization Du Bois was involved
during the time he worked on the Philadelphia study, maintained that the first
and greatest step toward settlement of black-white friction lay in "correction of
the immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes themselves."5 The young
sociologist would agree with reformers that undesirable traits existed within ele-
ments of Philadelphia's black population. Unlike impatient liberals, however, he
would go on to seek to identify the "removable causes" of those traits and to
demonstrate that they were characteristic only to a certain segment of the popu-
lation and by no means were endemic to Philadelphia blacks as a whole.6
Thus Du Bois's intellectual orientation made him an attractive candidate to
direct the study in the eyes not only of McCune Lindsay but also of Susan P.
Wharton, a prominent member of the Executive Committee of the Philadelphia
College Settlement. Wharton in fact played a major role in bringing Du Bois
to Philadelphia.7 The Wharton connection underscores the sense in which The
Philadelphia Negro is an example of the union of social science and reform
ideology.
The Philadelphia Negro proceeds from a definite view of proper urban so-
cial organization. This view suffuses the study and serves as a model according
to which the black Philadelphia population is analyzed. The model, not unex-
pectedly, reflects the norms of turn-of-the-century middle-class propriety. The
strengths of Philadelphia's black community are seen as those of its characteris-
tics that most approximate the model of bourgeois convention; the weaknesses
that Du Bois identifies are those characteristics that most flaunt the conven-
tional model. Broadly speaking, this model emphasizes, among other things: (1)
monogamous nuclear family organization; (2) temperance and orderliness as
behavioral principles, including thrift and internalization of disciplined work
habits; (3) favorable disposition toward formal education and training in the
ways of urban civilization; and (4) legitimation of class hierarchy within the
racial community. These elementary values are stated explicitly or are strongly
 The Philadelphia Negro 29
implied in Du Bois's text, and his analysis of black Philadelphians in their light
provides insights to his view of the world at the time.
Family organization figures prominently in Du Bois's concern, which is that
of the scholar as social activist, and his approach typifies the "social problems"
research orientation that has organized a strain of sociological inquiry through-
out the history of American sociology.8 Moreover, the family specifically was
becoming a matter of growing interest among progressive reformers, largely be-
cause of their concern with Americanization of immigrant populations; social
science was mobilized to assist in the noble cause, and the family appeared as
weak link and unavoidable obstacle in the chain of socialization which had to
be adjusted to modern American conditions.9 Du Bois shared his contemporar-
ies' concern with the family as the hub of social life and sought in his study to
identify "weaknesses" in black family structure and to suggest appropriate reme-
dial action. His commitment to demonstrating the Negro's equality also im-
pelled him to laud the black family's strengths when appropriate.
Having identified a "low condition of morals" which had persisted as a
serious problem—although one that was only to have been expected in its ori-
gins among a "barbarous people forced to labor in a strange land"—within cer-
tain strata of the black population in Philadelphia, Du Bois then set out to
locate the sources of that problem.10 One that he identified lay in the dispropor-
tion of women to men in black Philadelphia. This disproportion, he contended,
led to illegitimate birth—a condition whose stigma he presumed—and "an un-
healthy tone in much of the social intercourse among the middle class of the
Negro population."11 He noted a tendency toward casual sexual involvement
and was disturbed that the "lax moral habits of the slave regime still show them-
selves in a large amount of cohabitation without marriage."12
The immediate socioeconomic basis for this phenomenon did not escape
Du Bois; for he cited the dislocation accompanying the migration experience
and black males' chronic inability to earn enough money to support a family as
pressures that disposed toward the unstable coupling and uncoupling patterns
that he observed. On the one side, urban loneliness could prompt youths to
"thoughtlessly marry"; on the other hand, once marriage proved not to allow the
wife's withdrawal from the labor force, pressures toward dissolution of the union
were likely to mount. These circumstances, combined with the migrants' linger-
ing orientation to a casual morality, made desertion, separation, and divorce all
too common, as was indicated by the proportion of all charity aimed at blacks
that was requested to alleviate the conditions spawned by broken households.13
Although he observed that this moral easiness tainted the entire community
in some degree, he made it clear that the problem did not permeate the popula-
tion at all levels. Principally affected were the "masses" of working people,
whom he characterized as "willing, honest and good-natured; but . . . careless,
unreliable and unsteady," M and the "lowest class of recent migrants and other
unfortunates" who were "absolutely without social standing" among the vast ma-
jority. 1 ' For this underclass of loafers Du Bois had little sympathy; he saw them
as the "dregs which indicate the former history and dangerous tendencies of the
30 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
masses."16 While he strove to identify structural bases for loose family bonding8
and cohabitation among the masses of working blacks and suggested possibilities
for remediation, of the loafers he noted only that they are "absolutely without
home life" and implied that their promiscuity was intrinsic to their class and
irremediable. He found their easy lifestyle so repugnant as simply to wish it
swept away, and he indicated thereby the breadth and depth —at least in his
estimation — of stratification in the black community. He not only showed the
"aristocratic" and middle working strata to have different, more appropriate fam-
ily structures; he also perceived the former strata to have certain exemplary
responsibilities toward the rest of the community, excluding the dregs, of course.
He identified the "widespread custom of seeking amusement outside the
home" as a threat to the development of stable family and community life.18
This custom he felt to be "of no particular moment" when practiced by "the
richer and more ostentatious," but he was troubled that the tendency toward
partaking of public entertainments would "set an example to the masses which
may be misleading."19 Du Bois's reasons are made clear in a statement that
equally illustrates the relation that he believed should pertain between the differ-
ent strata of the black community: "The mass of the Negro people must be
taught sacredly to guard the home to make it the centre of social life and moral
guardianship. Thus it is largely among the best class of Negroes, but it might be
made even more conspicuously so than it is."20
Du Bois's views on the family reflect the peculiar situation of a black pro-
gressive intellectual in turn-of-the-century American culture. On the one hand,
the desire to safeguard the family by eschewing external entertainments can be
seen as—and indeed Du Bois argued for it in these terms —an attempt to stabi-
lize community life to provide a rudder for an increasing urban population. In
this context the family was to Du Bois a more effective institutional foundation
for the community than the church, which he saw as the family's principal rival
for associational commitment. The church ultimately was linked to residues of
the "tribal system" and therefore was inappropriate for satisfaction of the organi-
zational requirements of a modern urban community. Therefore, Du Bois main-
tained that the increased emphasis on family life that he recommended "un-
doubtedly means the decreased influence of the Negro church, and that is a
desirable thing." 21 The exhortation to shore up family life, then, is in this sense
an expression of Du Bois's commitment to cultural evolution and progress.22 On
the other hand, Du Bois was defending the family—it should be understood
that he meant specifically the family in its monogamous, nuclear form —in part
against the centrifugal pressures associated with urban life. It was not only the
church that drew people away from the home, but the family suffered also in
the face of "hall concerts" and "elaborate parties" in addition to saloons and
other haunts. 23 Moreover, it was not merely the nuclear family that suffered.
The lure of outside entertainments weakened the organic community in which
the nuclear family remained encompassed once it has been cut away from its
extended bondings; for, as Du Bois pointed out, "simple neighborhood gather-
 The Philadelphia Negro 31
24
ings and visits" also diminished in significance. The family was to be protected
against the atomizing depredations and excesses of urban civilization.
There is a troubling ambivalence here. Du Bois posited the family as a
requirement for development of the stable organization of social life needed to
permit the Negro to ascend the "scale of civilization." However, this family form
had to be instituted, as a matter of conscious social action, at a time when the
nuclear model, as well as the "homely virtues of honesty, truth and chastity"25
with which the Victorian bourgeois model had made its mark, were losing their
historical foundation and legitimacy—even among Du Bois's progressive con-
temporaries.26 Du Bois appears to have been aware that the family form that he
recommended for black progress was elsewhere a drag on progress; he was a
consistent supporter of the principle of gender equality. His ambivalence, how-
ever, mirrors the position of the Afro-American population at the time. As the
era of corporate consolidation opened, blacks had not yet begun to participate in
small-scale capitalist accumulation and the elaboration of classically bourgeois
institutions. Du Bois, unlike spokesmen who ignored the historical thrust, ob-
served that the economic foundations of the entrepreneurial social order had
been superseded by large-scale capitalism. Nevertheless, without an effective
critique of industrial capitalism's organization of life or an alternative vision of
social relations, Du Bois was forced to uphold the orthodox institutional model
characteristic to the entrepreneurial order as the base from which to develop a
productive, stable community infrastructure among Afro-Americans.28 More-
over, like many of his contemporaries he identified corporate collectivization
with Progress while at the same time rejecting the social ills with which this
collectivization was organically connected. A consequence was that he often
tended to oscillate between romanticization of folklife and exaltation of the ide-
ologies of social rationalization, including social engineering. This tension can
be seen in the essays comprising The Souls of Black Folk, and Du Bois reveals
it perhaps most clearly during the prewar era in the ambivalent reaction of
Blessed, the largely autobiographical hero of his first melodramatic novel, to the
gradual civilization of Zora, the "heathen hoyden" folk girl with whom Blessed
is involved in the rural South.29
Notwithstanding his wistfulness about folk culture, Du Bois considered the
Negro character generally to be in need of substantial "uplift," to use the term
of the day. This need was demonstrated in various facets of black life besides the
problem of weak family structure. Du Bois observed, for example, that poor—as
distinct from "very poor"—black families tended to be "inefficient, unfortunate,
and improvident."30 More than efficiency had, in his view, to be taught, how-
ever; he noted that "in habits of personal cleanliness and taking proper food and
exercise, the colored people are woefully deficient." 31 Eating habits could stand
improvement, as well as could general household organization benefit from
training in efficiency. Nor were these undesirable traits entirely restricted to the
poor; they even fettered and distorted blacks' attempts to lift themselves from an
undesirable condition. He noted that "|t|hc tendency of the classes who are just
32 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
struggling out of extreme poverty is to stint themselves for food in order to
have better looking homes; thus the rent in too many cases eats up physical
nourishment." 32
Nevertheless, despite the persistence of these traits Du Bois did not see
them as intrinsic to the race, a view which was one of the "misconceptions" that
his study intended to correct. Instead he was careful to identify the historical
and environmental origins of the undesirable characteristics:

Here then we have two great causes for the present condition of the Negro:
Slavery and emancipation with their attendant phenomena of ignorance, lack
of discipline, and moral weakness; immigration with its increased competition
and moral influence. To this must be added a third as great—possibly even
greater in influence than the other two, namely the environment in which a
Negro finds himself—the world of custom and thought in which he must live
and work, the physical surrounding of house and home and yard, the moral
encouragements and discouragements which he encounters.33

The combination of the slave experience, the cavalier way in which eman-
cipation had been conducted and the pressures of the urban environment gave
vent to the various weaknesses among Du Bois's black Philadelphians. These
weaknesses, at the same time, were symptoms of the ultimate failing in the
black community. This failing, that area in which "the Negro shows his greatest
deficiency" and which was "the one hardest for the freedman to learn" was in
the "art of organization."34 Organization, which Sheldon Wolin considers a key
theme in contemporary western political thought,35 figures prominently in Du
Bois's assessment not only of the black condition but also of social life in gen-
eral. For the Afro-American to be deficient in organization was a serious matter
because "[t|he real test. . . of the advance of any group of people in civilization
is the extent to which they are able to organize and systematize their efforts for
the common weal; and the highest expression of organized life is the organiza-
tion for purely benevolent and reformatory purpose."36
The weakness in organization was evident in a number of instances of Afro-
American group life, and the signs among the general population of "lack of
discipline"37 or of "parents untrained for their responsibilities"38 or of lack in
"foresight and forehandedness, and in 'push' indicated a need for conscious
organization and guidance of the community so as to counteract the ultimate
consequences of poor organization — crime and general corruption. Crime, to
Du Bois, constituted "the open rebellion of an individual against his social envi-
ronment."40 Indeed, he traced criminal activity to "lack of harmony with social
surroundings."41 The unsettling influence of the migration experience, unfair
limitations on opportunities for social and economic advancement, crowded and
otherwise undesirable living conditions—all combined with the historical ten-
dencies toward disorganization and improbity to form an environment in which
criminal activity was a predictable occurrence.
Du Bois took care, naturally enough, to distinguish his point about pressures
toward black criminality from currently popular interpretations that linked crim-
 The Philadelphia Negro 33
42
inality to biological characteristics. For the apostle of scientific sociology and
committed racial advocate, environmental and historical factors lay at the source
of the embarrassing fact of a black crime rate that was significantly higher than
the general population's. However, notwithstanding blacks' greater likelihood to
be arrested when innocent of any crime or when having committed minor of-
fenses for which whites might not be arrested, Du Bois underscored the personal
dimension of criminal behavior and tied the latter to his perception of histori-
cally ingrained characterological weakness. Emphasizing personal responsibility
also helped Du Bois to avoid the pitfalls of a facile social determinism that was
in later years to become the bane of black intellectuals.43 In this regard he
maintained that education, or the elimination of illiteracy, by itself would not
solve the problem of black crime, an assertion that was backed by what appeared
to be the increasing intelligence of black criminals.44 However, the responsibil-
ity was not only individual; the race, even though "consciously and intentionally
wronged," had an obligation to reform itself as a group to act in accord with
demands made upon it by "members of a civilized community." Meeting this
racial obligation for group rehabilitation—and this is in part what distinguished
Du Bois from Booker T. Washington—also required demanding the institutional
wherewithal to effect self-development, but organization for reform was nonethe-
less a critical vehicle for improvement of the black condition.45 Not only formal
education and training were required to better the black Philadelphian, but
considerable doses of character instruction were needed as well. Without this
tutelage even political participation—the remedy with which Du Bois's name is
so often identified—would turn sour and reinforce the group's negative qualities.
Du Bois observed that suffrage had produced mixed indications of black
Philadelphians' capacity to employ the tools of popular government. Vote sell-
ing, patronage, and blind allegiance to party label—the cardinal electoral vices
in the eyes of progressive reformers —abounded among blacks in Philadelphia,
to Du Bois's dismay.46 Added to these problems was a brazen assumption among
many at all levels of the community that the purpose of political activity should
be to generate or secure a job for oneself.47 However, the black experience with
the franchise hardly was to be seen as a failure; for he noted in a statement that
also indicates his substantive political preferences:

At the same time the Negro has never sought to use his ballot to menace
civilization or even the established principles of this government. . . . Instead
of being radical light-headed followers of every new political panacea the
freedmen of Philadelphia and of the nation have always formed the most con-
servative element in our political life and have steadfastly opposed the schemes
of inflationists, socialists and dreamers.48

The lack of discipline and temperateness which were manifest to Du Bois

indicated that the group needed to be organized to overcome its bad traits, those
residues of bucolic life and by-products of oppression that adversely affected
black integration into urban civilization. However, organization for its own sake
was no panacea for the race's problems; the group was to be organized to be led
34 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
down the correct path for its future. That path did not, as Du Bois's statement
about "inflationists, socialists and dreamers" made clear, enter the terrain of
general social reorganization; nor did it make any demands upon the social
context in which the Philadelphia black community found itself other than that
specifically racial barriers to opportunity be removed. Rather, the purpose of
organization in Du Bois's eyes was to assist in effecting the adjustment of the
race to a social environment from whose hegemony he was not exempt. He
quickly decided that the group as a whole needed tutelage and preparation for
modern civilization, and nearly as quickly he decided upon the "better classes"
of the Negro community as the historical agency responsible for carrying out
the mission of organization and tutelage.
Despite occasional utterances that acknowledged exploitative behavior on
the part of the wealthy and powerful, Du Bois accepted the capitalist division of
labor and its accompanying system of social hierarchy as given. He talked of the
dignity and necessity of domestic service,49 and with a condescension that car-
ries tones of the feudum he assured that "even a Negro bootblack could black
boots better if he knew he was a menial not because he was a Negro but be-
cause he was best fitted for that work."50 Similarly, he proclaimed that the Amer-
ican employing class of his day, although "not . . . wholly philanthropic" pos-
sessed "the best average intelligence and morality of the community." 51 In this
observation Du Bois only stated an assumption that was held by progressives
generally—even, sometimes ambivalently, by the radical dreamers. At any rate,
acceptance of the prevailing dynamic of capitalist organization left him little
better equipped than his contemporaries to perceive its dependence on tragic
human consequences.
A clear demonstration of this problem is provided by his comments on the
Midvale Steel Works in a section that was then outside Philadelphia. 52 He ab-
stracts management's comparatively enlightened racial policies from the overall
work context in this plant which was the site of Frederick Winslow Taylor's
highly publicized initial experiments at industrial engineering and "scientific
management." Those experiments figured prominently in the regimentation and
standardization of the American labor force and the consolidation of manage-
ment control over the production process.53 Still, the point is not so much that
Du Bois's automatic commitment to the current social order prevented him
from developing a critique of scientific management; few if any of his intellec-
tual contemporaries maintained such a critique, and overwhelmingly they were
enthusiastic supporters—-Du Bois among them —of what purported to be the
application of scientific principles to work organization. What distinguishes Du
Bois's discussion of Midvale is that he gives no indication of being aware that
Taylor's experiments had gone on there only a few years earlier and with a good
deal of publicity. His restricted focus on adjustment of the black community to
its institutional surroundings may have led Du Bois to overlook completely this
interesting coincidence of racial liberalism and Taylorization. However, it is in
his proposals for the training and guidance of the black population —including
explicit and implicit identification of who should be responsible for that training
 The Philadelphia Negro 35
and guidance—that Du Bois most exemplifies his adherence to progressivist
intellectual conventions.
Though he was emphatic that the race's future lay in education and train-
ing for growth in addition to unity and organization, in his Philadelphia study
Du Bois did not provide a detailed view of the focus that he would give that
training. Bemoaning the circumstance that "no benevolent despot, no philan-
thropist, no far-seeing captain of industry" had been available to provide or was
interested in providing industrial training to compensate for competition from
whites in masonry and related trades, Du Bois recounted the loss of blacks'
position in Philadelphia's artisanry market.54 He noted as well that discrimina-
tion forced into domestic service numbers of blacks who had no facility for those
professions, but who either were failures or looking for something better to come
along. He pointed out that if discrimination were overcome, "there would have
been room for a second movement, namely, for training schools which would
fit the mass of Negro and white domestic servants for their complicated and
important duties." Training should be geared to employment, the inadequa-
cies of opportunities for which Du Bois saw at the root of many other black
problems; therefore, as a matter of priority, "the object of social reform should
be so to diversify Negro employment as to afford proper escape from menial
employment for the talented few, and so as to allow the mass some choice in
their lifework."56 Beyond these comments, which provide more a sense of gen-
eral orientation and tone than substance, Du Bois said little in The Philadelphia
Negro about the specifics of the training that he recommended. However, in an
essay published some four years after the Philadelphia study he made more
explicit remarks.
Training the people, Du Bois indicated, must begin with training those who
will train them. "The very first step toward the settlement of the Negro prob-
lem," he declared, "is the spread of intelligence," which in turn required the
spread of free public schools and, by extension, colleges.58 He did not hold
general intelligence, though, to constitute a sufficient definition of the training
mission. Specific skills for employment also needed to be taught, and of course,
those values in which the black masses had been found to be deficient also
needed shoring up by the racial training program.59 Indeed, intelligence and
skill were not enough to uplift the black population; also required was instruc-
tion in that "combination of homely habits and virtues which we may loosely
call thrift."60
So far as the method for advancement of the race was concerned, therefore,
Du Bois presented the following brushstroke: "What is the remedy? Intelli-
gence—not simply the ability to read and write or sew—but the intelligence of
a society permeated by that larger vision of life and broader tolerance which are
fostered by the college and university. Not all men must be college-bred, but
some men, black and white, must be, to leaven the ideals of the lump."61
Therein is embedded the agency appropriate to undertake this program of train-
ing for transformation. Du Bois's faith in education and training necessarily im-
plied faith in the educated arid trained, and the latter, the Talented Tenth with
36 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
whom Du Bois so often is identified, occupied a more significant place in his
early work than is apparent in what has become by now a banal identification.
From the outset Du Bois was motivated by a desire to distinguish conceptually
and ideologically an elite stratum within the black community and to articulate
a social agenda for that elite. At the very beginning of the study Du Bois cau-
tions that "every group has its upper class, it may be numerically small and
socially of little weight, and yet its study is necessary to the comprehension of
the whole — it forms the realized ideal of the group, and as it is true that a
nation must to some extent be measured by its slums, it is also true that it can
only be understood and finally judged by its upper class."62
One of the tasks that Du Bois set for himself was to document the existence
of this "best class of Philadelphia Negroes . . . who constitute the aristocracy of
the race" and who were often "forgotten or ignored" when considering the black
population of Philadelphia. 63 Much later in the exposition he again deplored
the general tendency in the community to see the black population as "one
practically homogeneous mass," and, while allowing that some broad cultural
and historical justification might exist for this blurring of social vision, he felt
obliged to note that "wide variations in antecedents, wealth, intelligence and
general efficiency have already been differentiated within this group."64 More-
over, it was not only he, the social scientist, who was displeased with the popular
failure to discern the variegations of the black community. "Nothing more exas-
perates the better class of Negroes," Du Bois confided, "than this tendency to
ignore utterly their existence."65 To rectify the oversight and to assuage the sensi-
bilities of the overlooked, he then proceeded to define the four classes or
"Grades" that he perceived to populate black Philadelphia:

Grade 1. Families of undoubted respectability earning sufficient income to live

well; not engaged in menial service of any kind; the wife engaged in no occu-
pation save that of house-wife, except in a few cases where she had special
employment at home. The children not compelled to be bread-winners, but
found in school; the family living in a well-kept home.

Grade 2. The respectable working-class; in comfortable circumstances, with a

good home, and having steady remunerative work. The younger children in
school.

Grade 3. The poor; persons not earning enough to keep them at all times
above want; honest, although not always energetic or thrifty, and with no touch
of gross immorality or crime. Including the very poor, and the poor.

Grade 4. The lowest class of criminals, prostitutes and loafers; the "submerged
tenth."66

The distinction of these strata was not to be taken lightly. For the lowest
stratum Du Bois had no sympathy and was disturbed that segregated housing
patterns too often made it impossible for the "better classes" to escape proximity
to this "criminal class." To relieve the upright community of the burden of that
 The Philadelphia Negro 37
lowest class, he advocated slum clearance, a project that he likened to cleaning
a cesspool; he did intimate, however, that one first should know "where the
refuse can be disposed of without general harm."57 Indeed, he did not seek
democratic social intercourse for the black community across class lines; one of
his concerns about what he perceived to be the surplus of women in the black
population was that, in addition to the strains it forced onto general morality,
that situation led to "lowering the standard of admission to certain circles, and
often gives one the impression that the social level of the women is higher than
the level of the men."68
When Du Bois spoke of class, he referred not so much to groups defined
on the basis of their relation to the process of social production. Nor did he
have in mind groups aggregated principally on the basis of income or any other
readily identifiable characteristics. Rather, his view of class was an amalgam of
behavioral criteria and morals, beliefs, and sentiments. What separated the
classes in the black community was more than anything else the variation in
their behavioral and attitudinal responses to the social order of urban capitalism.
That a behavioral criterion was primary for Du Bois's categorization, however,
reflects the structure of the community as well as the Victorian ideal of gentility.
Income variation by and large was not that great, as employment opportunities
were restricted. Therefore, the distinctions among the population tended to be
most pronounced in such spheres as "push," "drive," constancy, and refinement.
Education, of course, was another yardstick, but even here the differences could
not be very great because higher education was uncommon even for the higher
status families. Nevertheless, this is not to suggest that these distinctions were
either artificial or without meaning. The type of differentiation proposed by Du
Bois indicates the priorities and self-perceptions of the developing elite within
the black community as well as Du Bois's commitment to that elite as the natu-
ral leadership and highest expression of the aspirations of the race. Like Frazier
over twenty years later,69 Du Bois determined that the "best Negro families,"70
which together constituted what he perceived to be the "germ of the great mid-
dle class,"71 should be responsible for providing instruction, models of behavior,
and a social agenda for the rest of the population. He decided that this stratum
was that by which the race should be judged because the elite represented the
possibilities of the Negro, the attributes and station to which others in the group
should aspire.72
Du Bois understood that the members of the turn-of-the-century urban
black elite were "not to be sure people of wide culture and [that] their mental
horizon is as limited as that of the first families in a country town."73 He deter-
mined that they nevertheless constituted an "aristocracy" of the race and as such
should not only enjoy their status but also, like any aristocracy, had obligations
to their people. A problem, however, was that the elite forgot that "the first duty
of an upper class is to serve the lower classes."74 In part this problem ensued,
so Du Bois felt, from the circumstance that the Negro's development had not
been autonomous. The appropriate patterns of interaction and mutual obliga-
tion had not taken hold among the various black strata because of the way in
38 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
which the Afro-American social structure was mediated by the larger society.
Therefore, even though the elite formed an "aristocracy of their own people
with all the responsibilities of an aristocracy, . . . they, on the one hand, are
not prepared for this role, and their own masses are not used to looking to them
for leadership."75 In an extraordinarily revealing passage Du Bois linked the
retardation of development of institutionalized role relationships among the
race's strata to the inappropriateness of democracy as a social form at that stage
of Afro-American development: "If the Negroes were by themselves either a
strong aristocratic system or a dictatorship would for the present prevail. With,
however, democracy thus prematurely thrust upon them, the first impulse of the
best, the wisest and richest is to segregate themselves from the mass."76 Just as
he saw this impulse to intraracial segregation as natural enough, Du Bois main-
tained that whites' tendency to lump all blacks together produced an unhealthy
reaction among aristocratic blacks who felt the need to distinguish themselves
from the mass. The black upper class, therefore, in order to avoid the indignity
of being mistaken for servants refused to take leadership of the race and even
shrank "from the free and easy worship of most of the Negro churches . . . and
. . . from all such display of publicity as [would] expose them to the veiled
insult and depreciation which the masses [suffered]."' 7
That Du Bois construed this particular circumstance to be a major problem
of black life is instructive and portentous of his subsequent development. His
perception that "premature" participation in certain aspects of American society
was dysfunctional opened the possibility of a call to close ranks within the race
and to insulate it institutionally from the dominant society, if only in a limited
way for the purposes of survival and incubation of institutional structures vital
for the race's development. Repeatedly over the following years, most dramati-
cally during the Depression, when his advocacy of racial-group economic co-
operativism contributed to his demise at the NAACP, Du Bois would advocate
precisely such a position. Already at the turn of the century he had decided that
black advancement would be enhanced by a period that combined insulation
of the community from aspects of the society as a whole with institutionalization
of a regime of preparatory tutelage, organized and administered by the race's
aristocracy and aimed at inculcating in the masses the values and techniques
appropriate for urban industrial civilization. Throughout Du Bois's career the
related principles of insulation and tutelage recur even as the specific purposes
for them vary. His commitment to these two principles indicates his fundamen-
tal adherence to a view of the Afro-American population as a more or less back-
ward mass which had to be molded organizationally for modern life.
Running through both his advocacy of insulation and tutelage of the race
and his concern that whites acknowledge the differentiation of the black com-
munity is his commitment to what he perceived to be the elite among the black
population. The community needed to be insulated to some extent so that the
elite's program of uplift could take shape and be implemented. White acknowl-
edgement of the existence of stratification was important not only because white
 The Philadelphia Negro 39
legitimation would encourage the black aristocracy to perform its historical mis-
sion but also because the aristocracy deserved special acknowledgement on the
basis of talents, accomplishments, and character. This commitment to a view of
social organization built upon elite-orchestrated movement toward progress also
remained constant through Du Bois's life, in both the national and international
spheres. This is hardly a startling observation, since elitism is associated with
Du Bois's name as frequently as are Pan-Africanism and protest, if not more so.
What is important here, though, is that the characteristics of his elitist commit-
ment be made concrete and grounded conceptually and historically.
One of the interesting aspects of Du Bois's early intellectual work, in fact,
is the manner in which his evolutionism and his adherence to prevailing notions
of racial group ideals combined to lay the basis for, or to reinforce, his commit-
ment to consolidation of a historical agenda for the nascent black elite.
Du Bois's early notions of race suggest echoes of Herbert Spencer's pacific
evolutionism and bear a family resemblance to Lester F. Ward's "social karyoki-
nesis"—the process of nationbuilding through a cycle of conquest, subjugation,
caste, noncaste inequality, replacement of military subjugation with a system of
law and right, state formation, forging of the population into a coherent people,
and the rise of patriotism and appearance of a nation.78 Du Bois defined a race
as "[a] vast family of human beings, generally of common blood and language,
always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and
involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less
vividly conceived ideals of life."79 Although he shared with Ward's reform-
Darwinist teleology the view that racial evolution was progressing toward a
united world, for him the end often seemed to be more pluralist than assimila-
tionist. Du Bois, like most of his contemporaries, at that point saw race as a
central and unalterable force in human society. There was no doubt, he main-
tained, as to the "universal prevalence of the race idea, the race spirit, the race
ideal, and as to its efficiency as the vastest and most ingenious invention for
human progress."80 The united world, while bound by the universalization of
civilization, would be more harmonic than homogeneous.
Presaging the "cultural nationalism" with which he later was to be identi-
fied,81 he emphasized cultural and historical factors over biological and pheno-
typic ones in accounting for racial differences and continuities. "The deeper
differences," he averred, "are spiritual, psychical differences —undoubtedly based
on the physical but infinitely transcending them." 82 He then elaborated a notion
of "national character" by articulating what he contended were pivotal elements
of the racial/national character of various groups, each of which in its own way
strives to develop "for civilization its particular message, its particular ideal,
which shall help to guide the world nearer and nearer that perfection of human
life for which we all long."83
Within this scenario of racial-group idealism, blacks had not yet given their
full message, and, moreover, if that message were to be given, a precondition
would have to be that the race unite. For development of higher culture and
40 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
refinement of spirit, Du Bois maintained, "only Negroes bound and welded
together, Negroes inspired by one vast ideal, can work out in its fullness the
great message we have for humanity."84 Of course, such unity could not exist
without organization, and to that end he proposed a recomposition of the black
community under the leadership of an elite of social engineers. Among other
organizations required to express the race's message, the Negro needed, ac-
cording to Du Bois, an "intellectual clearinghouse, for all those products of the
Negro mind, which we may call a Negro Academy."85 The purposes envisaged
for this academy were to unite and lead blacks, for the academy "aims at once
to be the epitome and expression of the intellect of the black-blooded people of
America, the exponent of the race ideals of one of the world's great races."86 In
spite of the fact, though, that the Academy was to be "(a) Representative in
character, (b) Impartial in conduct, (c) Firm in Leadership," it was to represent
not "all interests or all factions . . . but the best thought, the most unselfish
striving and the highest ideals."87
This recommendation, that intellectuals take over stewardship of the race,
suggests a link between the reform-Darwinist fascination with expertise and the
developing collectivist focus on social engineering. The outcome in either case
was legitimation of an expanded, managerial role for intellectuals in American
society, and Du Bois was equally at home with either vantage point, as well as
their shared implication. Du Bois's scientific interests led him just as naturally
to the need to consolidate the influence of intellectuals and other members of
the germinal elite. In an article published shortly before The Philadelphia Negro
he threw down the gantlet to the ministerial spokesmen whom he perceived to
be carryovers from an earlier, less sophisticated day. Du Bois expected that they
should yield their privileged place in group affairs to trained, secular intellectu-
als: "I now wish to insist that the time has come when the activities of the Negro
church must become differentiated and when it must surrender to the school
and the home, and social organizations, those functions in a day of organic
poverty it so heroically sought to bear. . . . Upon the school and the home
must rest the burden for furnishing amusements for Negro youth."88
So Du Bois stood at the turn of the twentieth century, with a commitment
to social-scientific progressivism and on the verge of being caught in the tug-of-
war between the poles of his own epistemological orientation, the tension be-
tween the competing practical imperatives implied in his call for systematic
study of the Afro-American community: advancement of "scientific knowledge
and social reform."89 In chapter 4 I shall examine the eruption and resolution
of this tension as an intellectual and ideological phenomenon. However, his
various oscillations and manifold interests notwithstanding, certain core princi-
ples of Du Bois's thought—the faith in science, reason and expertise, and a
corollary, fundamental assumption of the efficacy and propriety of an elite-
driven model of social life—were set. In this respect the remainder of his career
can be seen as modifying and elaborating these principles through changing
historical circumstances. Nor does that appear an unseemly corralling of intel-
lectual growth; after all, The Philadelphia Negro appeared when its author was
 The Philadelphia Negro 41
thirty-one years old. His association with a variant of socialism, his move into
political activism and opposition to imperialism all, as I shall argue in subse-
quent chapters, retain the premises of the liberal collectivist paradigm, adjusting
and extending them through personal intellectual maturation and confrontation
of particular historical conditions.
This page intentionally left blank
 4

Science and. Progress

The Unity oj Scholarship

ana Activism

D U Bois's CAREER can be read from one vantage point as a series of oscilla-
tions between scholarly pursuit and social activism. Such a reading would
be suggested by reflection on his movement, after thirteen years on the Atlanta
University faculty, to the NAACP for nearly two and one-half decades, then back
to Atlanta University for ten years and then back to the NAACP. Furthermore,
within his writings scholarly detachment and a hortatory posture often coexist
even in a single text.1 His simultaneous commitments to scholarship and activ-
ism might appear unusual or even contradictory in an era when ideological
conventions and a de facto division of intellectual labor assign the two categories
to quite distinct spheres and agencies. However, in the cultural and intellectual
milieux in which Du Bois undertook his career, a different set of conventions
governed the relationship between academic and temporal activity. Scholars
showed little reluctance to intervene in practical affairs, and professionalistic
ideologies had not yet hardened the boundaries separating proper academic en-
deavor and social or political engagement.
For Du Bois the bases of that orientation are visible in his views on science
and the purpose of knowledge; in this chapter I shall demonstrate how those
views led him to a normative presumption of the unity of scholarship and activ-
ism. Moreover, not only was that presumption immanent in Du Bois's work
from the beginning of his career, but it also illuminates a link between his

43
44 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
attitudes on science and knowledge and his well-known conceptions of the na-
ture and functions of race leadership.
On completion of his work at the University of Pennsylvania, Du Bois took
what was to become a fateful step by moving in 1897 to Atlanta, where he had
been hired by Atlanta University to "take charge of the work in sociology, and
of the new conferences which they were inaugurating on the Negro problem."2
Still imbued with his sense of a mission to rectify racial misconceptions by
means of enlightenment, he saw an excellent opportunity to take off full tilt on
his chosen course. Moreover, going back to his days at Fisk University in Nash-
ville, when he had taught in rural Tennessee during the summer, Du Bois felt
a call to participate in the education of those black young people who were fit
by their talents for academic pursuits.3 The thirteen years that he spent at At-
lanta constituted perhaps his most fertile period as an empirical social scientist,
and the series of monographs published under his direction there were the first
attempts at comprehensive study of Afro-American life.4
Du Bois assumed his faculty position at Atlanta University with three objec-
tives that were, characteristically, not altogether modest.5 His expectation was
that his work would be able (1) to expand the boundaries of sociological inquiry,
(2) to document the Negro, and (3) to assist in training the black intellectual
elite, which he felt to be the necessary motor for advancement of the race.
These objectives were mutually reinforcing. The study of the black community
was to provide, in Du Bois's view, a basis for expanding the boundaries of the
field;6 scientific knowledge stood as an aid to blacks as a tool of social reform
and enlightenment,7 and what became the "Talented Tenth," if it were to lead
properly, would have to be trained in the laws and principles of social organiza-
tion and would need to be equipped with scientific information about the black
community and the world at large.8 The undergirding principle of his work at
Atlanta University, though, was his high valuation of science, as he demon-
strated in his wholeheartedly positivistic approach to sociology.9
For Du Bois sociology was exclusively a positivist discipline. He character-
ized the field as the "science that studies the actions of human beings and seeks
laws and regularities among those actions"10 and as "the science that seeks to
measure the limits of chance in human action."11 His concern, furthermore,
was with unification of "theory and practice," both within the sociological
field—for which he defined this unification as the crucial task of the first half
of the twentieth century 12 —and between the findings of social science research
and social decision making. His reflections, as contained in his 1940 volume
Dusk of Dawn, on the intellectual milieu that prevailed in the social sciences
when he undertook the Atlanta enterprise are instructive in this regard. After
noting the then greatly constraining "difficulties of applying scientific law and
discovering cause and effect in the social world,"13 he observed:

Social thinkers were engaged in vague statements and were seeking to lay down
the methods by which in some not too distant future, social law analogous to
physical law would be discovered. Herbert Spencer finished his ten volumes of
 Science and Progress 45
Synthetic Philosophy in 1896. The biological analogy, the vast generalizations,
were striking, but actual scientific accomplishment lagged. For me an opportu-
nity seemed to present itself. 1 could not lull my mind to hypnosis by regarding
a phrase like "consciousness of kind" as a scientific law. By turning my gaze
from fruitless word-twisting and facing the facts of my own social situation and
racial world, I determined to put science into sociology through a study of the
conditions and problems of my own group.14

He continued:
I was going to study the facts, any and all facts, concerning the American Negro
and his plight, and by measurement and comparison and research, work up to
any valid generalizations which I could, primarily with the utilization object of
reform and uplift; but nevertheless, I wanted to do the work with scientific
accuracy. Thus, in my own sociology, because of firm belief in a changing
racial group, I easily grasped the idea of a changing developing society rather
than a fixed social structure.15

These comments indicate that Du Bois was not—at least by his later years-
insensitive to some concerns of the sociology of knowledge, but they also affirm
Arthur L. Johnson's claim that Du Bois at the turn of the century was "in com-
plete agreement with the new trend of sociological thinking at that time . . .
which emphasized . . . change and process as characterizing the nature of soci-
ety."16 A problem, though, is that a disjunction exists between what Du Bois
held to be the focus of scientific activity and his stated commitment to a model
of a "changing developing society." The search for laws and regularities closes
off the ends of inquiry in a way that implies an epistemic bias against social
dynamism.17 For Du Bois, however, as for many of his contemporaries, this
tension was bridged by a call to activism, by definition of the teleological pur-
poses of scientific inquiry so as to include explicitly its mobilization in service
to the universal social goals of progress and reform.
Elliott M. Rudwick notes that Du Bois, especially early in his career, shared
the "faith of an important segment of America's social scientists that knowledge
would lead to the solution of social problems."18 Indeed, four broad intellectual
"schools" or approaches organized patterns of discourse within the nascent social
sciences during those years, and beneath each lay a pair of related "background
assumptions"—that certainty is both realizable and desirable as a goal around
which to organize the pursuit of knowledge, and that attainment of such certain
knowledge provides a necessary basis for ensuring social progress.19 On the one
hand, Social Darwinism—at least in its "reform" version —and German rational-
ist historicism beckoned with their neat, elegantly global interpretations. These
approaches not only promised certitude by virtue of their pretensions toward
nomological coherence; as unabashed teleologies they incorporated the princi-
ple of progress into the texture of the social laws they discovered and charted.
On the other hand, positivist scientism promised a more detailed and precise
model of certitude, even though it sacrificed the macroscopic coherence of the
rationalist and Darwinist orientation. While that sacrifice tended to require col-
46 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
lateral scaling down of the notion of progress to "the bloodless entelechy of a
society-centered dynamic equilibrium," 20 pragmatism compensated the loss, not
so much by restoring a macroscopic dimension as by emphasizing the necessity
for human agency and the possibility of "intelligently guided melioristic social
reform." Although pragmatism originated in a critique of positivism's mecha-
nistic excesses, in at least one important sense it constituted a literal "fleshing
out" of the positivist framework rather than an alternative to it. As R. Jeffrey
Lustig notes, positivists and pragmatists shared a "central commitment to
method . . . preoccupation with one step in the process of inquiry and confu-
sion of it with the whole." This shared commitment "revealed itself in the as-
sumption—sometimes explicit, sometimes hinted, but always there —that the
important questions of life were really questions of technique and method."22
Thus, pragmatism can be construed as a "humanized" positivism that invigor-
ated the latter's notion of progress by emphasizing the importance of human
action—an emphasis which, more likely than not, was rendered in practical
terms to mean social engineering.
Du Bois was amply exposed to each of those four orientations, and his
writings reflect their influence on his thinking as it matured. In chapter 3 I
noted tracings of reform-Darwinist and other evolutionist influences on his out-
look; about this view there is a general consensus among scholars. Arnold Ramp-
ersad even contends that it was the influence of Spencerian ideas that led Du
Bois through his fifteen-year concentrated focus on empirical sociology.23 (In
that respect his intellectual trajectory would have been representative of those
of many of his contemporaries in the social sciences.) His German experience
built on a rationalist foundation that had been laid several years earlier in his
Victorian-inspired education at Fisk. His senior paper there had been on Otto
von Bismarck, and in that essay he disclosed the depth of his rationalist bent as
well as an emphatically Prussophile tendency that must have been reinforced at
Harvard and no doubt induced him to look favorably on German intellectual
styles.24 Joseph DeMarco finds evidence of Ludwig Gumplowicz's influence in
The Conservation of Races, and Du Bois's connections with and favorable im-
pressions of Gustav von Schmoller and Heinrich von Treitschke are well
known. 25 By 1897 all four strains were visible in Du Bois's texts; while The
Conservation of Races displayed rationalist and reform-Darwinist tendencies, his
"Program for a Sociological Society" proclaimed an unambiguously positivistic
model of social science and a pragmatist-like commitment to the wedding of
knowledge and action.26 Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver argue convinc-
ingly for a view of Du Bois's scholarly commitment that identifies social reform
as an ultimate end of intellectual pursuit. However, those authors, perhaps as a
by-product of their concern to categorize him among the precursors of contem-
porary scientific sociology, on the one hand tend overly to emphasize the extent
of his partisanship on the "fact" side of the fact/value dichotomy and his com-
mitment to "pure" research; on the other hand, they read into his thinking a too
early and sweeping rejection of the "philosophical speculations and armchair
theorizing of sociologists like Herbert Spencer." 27 Despite the statements quoted
 Science and Progress 47

above from 1940, at the time of his direction of the Atlanta University series Du
Bois did not show such signs of "impatience." In fact in one of the publications
of that series he praised the work of both Spencer and Franklin Giddings spe-
cifically and recommended them for study.28 Du Bois's view was that one should
not engage scientific inquiry specifically in service to reform purposes but
should conduct "objective" research and then employ the findings to inform
reform efforts. Nevertheless, science and reform were linked in his thinking; he
saw the former as giving direction to the latter. In this respect science was not
simply a method for making sense out of natural and social phenomena; it
functioned also as an ideology, an element of an agenda for realization of the
interests of a particular stratum of the American social order.
Du Bois's early views on the need to define the role of and cultivate the
cultured and educated elite within the Afro-American community demonstrate
the ideological character of his view of science. He stated clearly—and in a way
that reflected the unabashedly optimistic scientism of the day—what he believed
to be the importance of scientific knowledge for social uplift. "Since now scien-
tists have begun to study men and conditions of group life so carefully, persons
who would better the world in any way must study and learn from the material
collected here, just as in other lines we use the wisdom of the geologist or
psychologist."29
Alluding to the requirements of "modern methods of reform" he pointed
out that to have any likelihood of success a reform agenda must include three
sequential elements: (1) study, (2) knowledge of work of others, and only then
(3) actual effort.30 This view warrants a privileged role for intellectuals, particu-
larly social scientists, in formulation and direction of reform activities and im-
plies the inefficacy of spontaneous, popularly based or self-organized political
activity. Du Bois shared the perspective of his progressive peers for whom popu-
lar activism was marked with the stamp of dangerous irrationality.31 Both main-
stream corporate liberalism and much of what understood itself as socialism
were predicated upon models of orderly, technicistically rational societal devel-
opment—without the disruptive participation of the rank-and-file citizenry.32
James Gilbert's observations on the social role of collectivist intellectuals
like Du Bois and their appropriation of science for their own purposes illumi-
nate ideological ramifications of such an outlook:

Occupying a position above the dialectic of social struggle, they felt able to
judge the aspirations of the other classes. To support this position they invoked
social science and the assumed objectivity of scientific observation. This be-
came a common ideal which ran through much reform and socialist thought,
and which developed as a guiding assumption of the academic world, of much
modern legal theory, of research organizations and foundations, and of civil
service and government bureaucracies. In effect, this emphasis upon expertise
was a reverberation from similar theories which claimed that the state could be
impartial toward competing social classes; or that technology had a neutral,
guiding function in the development of industry; or even, that behind the pro-
cess of evolution was a benign, directing nature. Neutrality and scientific impcr-
48 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
sonality were decisive weapons in the struggle to achieve social justice in a
world of bias and corruption. 33
Du Bois's view of the special, guiding role of science, and corollarily of
intellectuals, persisted over his lengthy career. At eighty-two years of age he was
disturbed that "the scientific and ethical boundaries of our industrial activities
are not in the hands of scientists, teachers, and thinkers." 34 However, consonant
with his increased attention to perspectives resonant with concerns of the sociol-
ogy of knowledge, his faith in science's capacity to realize rational social organi-
zation increasingly was mediated by his perception of the necessity of active
intervention. Of his epistemological awakening, Du Bois recalled: "Gradually
and with increasing clarity, my whole attitude toward the social sciences began
to change: in the study of human beings and their actions, there could be no
such rift between theory and practice, between pure and applied science as was
possible in the study of sticks and stones."3
He intimated that this developing modification of his outlook exerted some
influence on his decision to leave Atlanta University the first time. After having
confronted the depths of racial oppression during his first appointment at At-
lanta, he was moved to make the "great decision." "What with all my dreaming,
studying, and teaching was I going to do in this fierce fight?"36 He had been
struck by the impossibility of being a "calm, cool, and detached scientist while
Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved."37 From his earlier conviction
that the social world could yield unambiguous truths he came to see the partial-
ity and the limited rationality of truth. "Facts, in social science, I realized, were
elusive things: emotions, loves, hates, were facts; and they were facts in the souls
and minds of the scientific student, as well as in the persons studied." 38
The injunction seemed clear—that is, from the perspective of subsequent
reflection:

I fell back upon my Royce and James and deserted Schmoller and Weber. I
saw the action of physical law in the actions of men; but I saw more than that:
I saw rhythms and tendencies; coincidences and probabilities; and I saw that,
which for want of any other word, I must in accord with the strict tenet of
Science, call Chance. I went forward to build a sociology, which I conceived
of as the attempt to measure the element of Chance in human conduct. This
was the Jamesian pragmatism, applied not simply to ethics, but to all human
action, beyond what seemed to me, increasingly, the distinct limits of physical
law.39
Francis L. Broderick discusses Du Bois's affinity for pragmatism as a means
through which ethics could be freed from "scholastic dogma" and reconstituted
on the basis of empirical observation and reason; pragmatism thus was attractive
to Du Bois from this vantage point because it seemed to offer a way to save
metaphysics in the modern age by making it a science.40 Similarly, another
student of Du Bois's thought finds that during the years before World War I he
"participated in [the] intellectual tradition, emergent in the United States at the
turn of the century, which was concerned to describe the relation between rcli-
 Science and Progress 49
able investigation and ethically committed social practice."41 However, his inter-
est was not simply in description; he sought practical reconciliation—within
both the world and himself—of the "dualism James saw as central to philosophy,
and which he variously described as a conflict between empiricism and rational-
ism, positivism and religion, practicality and idealism, and the 'tough-minded
and the tenderminded.' " 4Z Pragmatism could give practical justification for pur-
suing the life of the mind, and furthermore it privileged intellectual activity
above all other kinds of social practice because all human problems were to be
understood as knowledge or information problems.
While this viewpoint elevates the sociological role of intellectuals as infor-
mation verifiers, it also determines the value of knowledge ultimately by its util-
ity. Thus Du Bois criticized the black "college man" for losing sight of the
concrete social purpose of his education. It was necessary to recall that "[t]he
object of the Negro college is to place in American life a trained black man
who can do what the world wants done; who can help the world know what it
ought to want done and thus by doing the world's work well may invent better
work for a better world."43
Moreover, Du Bois often tended to see his scholarly work in a utilitarian
vein as well. He declared the intention of The World and Africa to be a demon-
stration "that black Africans are men in the same sense as white Europeans and
yellow Asiatics, and that history can easily prove this."44 The Gift of Black
Folk,*5 Black Folk: Then and Now, and Black Reconstruction*16 were to some
degree similarly motivated. The point here is not that Du Bois's scholarship
suffered from any lack of objectivity or impartiality; all ideas are partial. Rather,
it is that for Du Bois scholarly pursuit always was linked directly and consciously
with some purpose of social reform. Not so much a self-contained activity di-
rected toward a community of scholars concerned first of all with the expansion
of knowledge, research's fundamental purpose was to Du Bois the correction of
popular misconceptions in the interest of social improvement. To that extent
Du Bois shares a basic view of the role of scholarship —if explicitly political
differences were held constant—with policy-oriented social scientists, the practi-
cal inheritors of the liberal tradition in the United States.47
At the same time, just as Du Bois defined the purposes of scholarly activity
in relation to a notion of social intervention for realization of progress, the activ-
ism to which he adhered was more didactic than militant. Even after he became
more trenchantly critical of capitalism, his strategy for opposition was ultimately
the same — informing people of the facts. When considering major social issues
confronting a war-torn world in the 1940s and opportunities for political im-
provement, he declared: "We must first, then, have wide dissemination of truth.
But this is not all: we need deliberate and organized action on the front where
race fiction is being used to prolong economic inequality and injustice in the
world."48
Specifically, he emphasized the need for a type of reform education compa-
rable to "missionary" work, whose purpose would be to educate the public to
"facts of the distribution of property and income . . . accurate details of the
50 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
sources of income and conditions of production and distribution of goods and
use of human services in order that we know who profits by investment in Asia
and Africa as well as in America and Europe, and why and how they profit."49
This stress on public education as a political weapon is not so simple as it
may seem, however. Du Bois was sensitive to the propagandistic character of
mass-information culture as well as the nonrational sources of popular attitudes,
especially dangerous and retrograde attitudes like racism. The program of sys-
tematic popular education was one of two prongs of his strategy for eliminating
racial antagonism, the one directed toward the white population. He main-
tained:

White leaders and thinkers have a duty to perform in making known the con-
clusions of science on the subject of biological race. It takes science long to
percolate to the mass unless definite effort is made. Public health is still handi-
capped by superstitions long disproved by science; and race fiction is still taught
in schools, in newspapers, and in novels. This careless ignorance of the facts of
race is precisely the refuge where antisocial economic reaction flourishes.50

For oppressed nonwhites his program differed. The exigencies of the situa-
tion of racial oppression required more active intervention on the part of the
oppressed, Du Bois felt. For the latter therefore "we need organized effort to
release the colored laborer from the domination of the investor." Even within
the nonwhite group, however, education remained the ultimate lever of prog-
ress; for here also he stressed the tutelary function of leadership. 51 Du Bois's
emphasis on education and information as the principal tools of social activism
tied his views on science and progress to his ideas about leadership for uplift.
The uplift mission was from the outset an integral element of his approach to
knowledge and education. Preparation of a complement of race leaders was for
Du Bois one of the principal purposes of the black college. The prospect of
carrying out that mission was a source of great excitement for him early in his
tenure at Atlanta University the first time. In one of the earliest studies he pub-
lished under the university's auspices he declared that that institution "seeks, by
maintaining a high standard of scholarship and comportment, to sift out and
train thoroughly talented members of this race to be leaders of thought and
missionaries of culture among the masses."52
In the modern world effective leaders must have, Du Bois argued, "knowl-
edge of the forces of civilization that make for our survival, ability to organize
and guide those forces, and realization of the true meaning of those broader
ideals of human betterment."53 The university, then, was charged with the re-
sponsibility to train these leaders. Moreover, as I shall demonstrate in chapter 5,
when not primarily concerned with correcting misconceptions about the race in
general, Du Bois's discrete research efforts were grounded in his desires to iden-
tify, describe, consolidate and orient a leadership elite in the Afro-American
population. These desires suffused his research, coloring everything, from his
choice of projects and problems for examination to his specific findings. Science
and knowledge, then, were for Du Bois simultaneously above the fray of particu-
 Science and Progress 51

lar interestedness and beyond the confusions of everyday understanding; yet the
value of knowledge was to be understood in relation to the requirements of
social uplift and progress. He defined the dynamic of progress in interventionist
terms as the extension of rational organization through society. Knowledge and
progress were dialectically connected; intervention was the interest driving aca-
demic activity, and realization of the objectives of scientific activity by means of
mass tutelage was the basis of activism. In this sense, for Du Bois academic and
activist interests dovetailed. This was to some extent a function of his concep-
tions of and proposals concerning the social role of an intellectual elite in the
black community and the latter's social-organizational needs.
This page intentionally left blank
 _5_

Stratification, Leadership,
ana Organization

The. Role of the Black Elite

r is GENERALLY KNOWN that Du Bois—at least in his early years —embraced

an elitist program for Afro-American racial strategy. This aspect of his views
may be, in fact, too well known. Because it has been so widely recognized, all
too often his elitism is mentioned offhandedly, without critical examination or
careful description of its substantive characteristics. As a consequence, especially
among those who find it to be a blemish on an otherwise agreeable corpus of
ideas, even scholars have tended to collapse that elitism into one of its histori-
cally specific artifacts—the famous "Talented Tenth" concept. That perspective
is attractive because it helps to salvage a view of Du Bois that is neatly reconcil-
able with egalitarian values. Joseph DeMarco, for example, in striving to make
Du Bois a consistent egalitarian, falls back on a claim that the "role of the
Talented Tenth was dropped, by and large, from his writing" shortly after 1907.'
Similarly, Gerald Home sidesteps the elitism issue by contending that Du Bois
"altered" his views on the Talented Tenth by the 1940s and by repeating the
latter's claim that he had never advocated "building of an aristocracy with ne-
glect of the masses."2
Despite these and other such no doubt well-intentioned circumventions,
Du Bois's elitism docs not appear only with the Talented Tenth, nor for that
matter only with respect to his explicitly racial strategies. On the contrary, the
elitist strain in his thought runs far deeper and is connected with his most basic

53
54 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
views concerning proper social organization in general and organization of the
Afro-American population in particular. He advocated a hierarchical model that
accorded certain elements of the black population claims to special status and
privilege; in his view the relation of this elite stratum to other Afro-Americans
was mediated by a form of tutelary noblesse oblige. In this chapter I shall dem-
onstrate that Du Bois remained committed throughout his life to the realization
of a fundamentally elite-driven organizational model for the black population;
that this model constituted the concrete link between his scholarly and activist
pursuits; and that his interest in actualization of what he considered to be the
mission of that elite was a core unifying principle of his thought, notwithstand-
ing his various changes of political affiliation and program between 1900 and
his death in 1963.
Du Bois went to Atlanta University already imbued, from his academic
training, disposition, and work in Philadelphia, with ideas concerning the histor-
ical mission of the black elite. His social-scientific research program —indeed
much of his entire academic project—was predicated upon a wish to cultivate
that stratum and guide it toward realizing its mission. Three of the first four of
the major publications of the Atlanta University series during the period of Du
Bois's association were intended specifically to indicate the accomplishments of
the achieving stratum of the black population (see chapter 4, note 4).
In his second study of the series, Du Bois investigated general community
conditions in Petersburg, Virginia; Augusta, Georgia; Atlanta; Mobile, Alabama;
Bowling Green, Kentucky; Clarksville and Fort Smith, Arkansas; Galveston,
Texas; and the District of Columbia to find that race prejudice, by isolating
blacks, threw upon the black community responsibility for "evolving its own
methods and organs of civilization." 3 He found also that in those communities
mechanisms of institutionalized benevolence were scarce among blacks and that
instead a pattern of spontaneous, informal provision of welfare needs prevailed.
These findings led Du Bois to conclude that the "problem of cooperation
among members of the group becomes then the central serious problem."4 Co-
operation meant, however, the ability of the trained elite to generalize an
agenda for the community, for Du Bois took the general situation of blacks in
those cities as another indication of the necessity of the organizational role that
he had advocated a year earlier for the American Negro Academy.5 In the 1898
study he reiterated his earlier call for support and recognition of the Academy
as an opinion-setting entity in the black community. Moreover, as a practical
objective for the race and a goal of intraracial cooperation, Du Bois enthusiasti-
cally supported Alexander Crummell's call for black political participation and
quoted approvingly the latter's assertion, endorsed by the Academy, that, "Our
people can't be a people unless their leading men get positions and take part in
government."6 Significantly, the call to political participation was justified not
by appeal to any specific social vision that could be realized but a claim that
the Afro-American elite should have a share in governmental activity.
The next two studies in the series focused on business 7 and education 8
among blacks. Each sought to document characteristics of prominent and well-
 Stratification, Leadership, and Organization 55
educated blacks and attempted to describe their significance among the black
population as a whole. In addition to general documentation of black life, these
studies were intended to provide a possible impetus to the Negro elite's develop-
ment of self-consciousness as a stratum and to advocate to pertinent whites on
behalf of the elite's claims to representation of black interests. These two horta-
tory objectives stand out when the studies—summary empirical monographs as
they mainly are —are read through the filter of some of Du Bois's other work
during this period. Most telling is his contention that one of the most important
reasons for the study of Afro-American life is to aid social reform. 9
Within three years after the study of "college-bred" blacks, Du Bois stated
directly that one of the objectives of his work was to bring broader public atten-
tion to what blacks had done and were doing, and he proceeded to list black
accomplishments in what he identified as the four chief fields of endeavor in
the United States: "commerce and industry . . . ; . . . political life . . . ; the
learned professions —law, medicine, preaching, and teaching; and . . . literature
and art."10 In that same year he published the article in which he argued most
forcefully for his famous notion of the "Talented Tenth."
Actually, the views Du Bois expressed in his manifesto for the elite are
only extensions and more explicitly argued affirmations of the outlook that had
permeated The Philadelphia Negro several years earlier. However, in addition to
being his most articulate call for elite primacy, the 1903 essay also reflects the
growing readiness to adopt an activist posture and attitude that was visible in his
writing during those years. He opened the essay with an assertion that the race
was to be saved by its exceptional men, 11 and he declared a threefold task in his
exposition: first, to show that the Talented Tenth was "worthy of leadership";
second, to show how this necessary elite might be educated and developed; and
third, to show the elite's relation to the "Negro problem." 12
He felt the issue of the elite's elevation to its rightful place at the head of
the Afro-American community to be of critical import for two reasons at least.
First of all, black Americans, because of their peculiar situation, were objectively
more dependent than other peoples on organized guidance. He argued that "the
Negro people need social leadership more than most groups; they have no tradi-
tions to fall back upon, no long established customs, no strong family ties, no
well defined social classes. All these things must be slowly and painfully
evolved."13
The reason for this unfortunate situation, of course, was the mediation of
slavery as the fundamental constitutive element of the Afro-American experi-
ence. He averred: "[Slavery is] the legalized survival of the unfit and the nullifi-
cation of the work of natural internal leadership[.] Negro leadership, therefore,
sought from the first to rid the race of this awful incubus that it might make
way for natural selection and the survival of the fittest." 14 So to all the other
reasons that slavery was oppressive or irrational must be added its transgression
of social-evolutionist rationality and unfair suppression of the aspirations of the
most talented of the slaves. This perspective is interesting in two respects. It
underscores the importance that Du Bois attached to the black elite's right to
56 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
priority within the race and his general lack of sympathy for the rabble. Regard-
ing the latter, he contended that they were to be "raised" by the "effort and
example of this aristocracy of talent and character," and, noting that culture
always filters down from the top, he argued for a relation in which the Talented
Tenth "rises and pulls all that are worth saving up to their vantage ground."15
Du Bois's observation about slavery is noteworthy also because it led to an
indirect identification of social activism as a vehicle for elite training. Discussing
responses to slavery, he quotes Maria Weston Chapman on how the abolitionist
movement trained "a throng of authors, editors, lawyers, orators and accom-
plished gentlemen of color."16 He pointed out, however, that of the prominent
black abolitionists some were self-trained and others had in fact received sub-
stantial formal education apart from the movement,17 and that observation set
the stage for a strong plea for university training for the Talented Tenth.18
In addition to his research program, during his years on the Atlanta Univer-
sity faculty, Du Bois made any number of attempts to generate vehicles around
which the black elite could begin developing a program for the race. For in-
stance, although the National Negro Business League came to be identified
with Booker T. Washington, the idea originated with Du Bois. In fact, his early
career is studded with a number of such efforts, ranging from his involvement
with the American Negro Academy, to the various special committees for whose
organization he called, to his efforts to organize journals targeted for elite con-
sumption. These efforts culminated first in the predominantly black Niagara
movement, then finally in the predominantly white-led NAACP. By the time
The Souls of Black Folk appeared, Du Bois was clearly committed to identifying
an appropriate vehicle through which to galvanize black protest of the sort he
had been advocating.19
Protest, however, was not his exclusive goal. Equally important was creation
of a sense of cohesion among the black elite. Since publishing his Philadelphia
study, Du Bois had been disturbed at the Talented Tenth's reluctance to claim
its rightful position of stewardship of Afro-American life. His first two magazines,
the Moon and the Horizon, were aimed just as much at creating a sense of
common identity and purpose among the black elite as at informing their read-
ers and agitating against racial inequity. In each of these short-lived magazines
he combined excerpts and summaries from foreign and domestic newspapers
and journals, reading lists, editorials, and announcements in an attempt to mold
and inculcate what might be termed a class outlook. The Horizon outlasted the
Moon—which limped through a single volume — in part by becoming the offi-
cial organ of the Niagara movement, which extended the publication's life to
three years. Du Bois's real journalistic success awaited the Crisis, which he ed-
ited throughout his tenure with the NAACP. The Crisis also, despite its organi-
zational affiliation, was under Du Bois a class/race magazine that followed the
same basic formula as its predecessors, and his success is suggested by William
Allison Davis's reminiscence; he recalls Du Bois's Crisis editorials as "the most
powerful and terrifying experiences in the lives of middle class Negroes of both
my father's and my own generation. The great majority of black children and
 Stratification, Leadership, and Organization 57
adolescents who later became scholars, teachers, lawyers, and professional men
during the second, third, and fourth decades of the twentieth century read The
Crisis as a family magazine each month." 20
The Crisis was very much geared toward black middle-class readership, and
to that extent strove for general —not just political or educational—appeal, even
to the point of running photographs of the "Crisis Maids."21 And Du Bois in-
cluded in his mission the propagation among his readership of positive images
and its accomplishments. In this vein he declared, in a reversal of his contention
of previous years, that the "American Negro does NOT stand in unusual need
of moral training. It is the American white man who needs that." 22 This racial
assertiveness did not end there.
Early in the magazine's history Du Bois asked his readers to take out
enough subscriptions to guarantee "complete financial independence and the
assurance of permanence" for the Crisis. He was concerned, as he saw it, not
only for his own welfare but for the editorial integrity of the magazine. 23 Simi-
larly, he called on his Talented Tenth readers to buy books so that black authors
would acquire the latitude to break out of the straitjacketecl molds imposed by
a white clientele and become "privileged to follow the leadings of their own
hearts and the laws which imperatively rule in the creation of literature." He
continued in a passage that, while probably overstating the duress under which
he previously had labored, nonetheless reflects the growth of his own convic-
tions about addressing a black audience principally:

One can see in almost every book written by a colored author that the work
has been done under foreign dictation. The author has wished his book to be
read and to be sold; he has written too much under this influence. The book
has been planned for white readers. The transition from the custom of writing
books of explanation and defense intended for white men to read to that of
depicting our own experiences, giving our own interpretation of events transpir-
ing or past, pouring out our own realities of feelings and longings, telling of
God and his works as we see them has as yet hardly begun.24

Elsewhere he declared, "Instead of being led and defended by others . . . Amer-

ican Negroes are gaining their own leaders, their own voices, their own ideals."25
Yet he was at that point the only black officer of the NAACP.
In this context Du Bois's association with the Harlem Renaissance is inter-
esting, to the extent that that movement might be seen in part as an expression
of the congealing consciousness of the elite. Alain Locke's manifesto for the
period, the New Negro: An Interpretation, illustrates that aspect of what usually
is thought to have been an aesthetic-folkloric movement. 25 Contributions by
Charles S. Johnson, 27 Kelly Miller, 28 and R. R. Moton 29 proclaimed a new
unity and commonality of purpose among blacks and officially buried the idea
of "the two historic 'schools of thought' clashing ceaselessly and loud over the
question of industrial and higher education for the Negro." 30 EJ. Franklin Fra-
zicr extolled the virtues of the new elite as a standard-bearer and force for the
progress and uplift of the race as a whole. 31
58 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
Besides his contribution to The New Negro Du Bois was quite visible in
that celebration of a certain conception of Afro-American culture marketed by
black intellectuals and white patrons during the 1920s. The pages of the Crisis
regularly were turned over to the apostles of the "Negro Renaissance"; moreover,
his volumes The Gift of Black Folk (1924) and Darkwater (1921) rank as major
statements of the Renaissance cultural ideology.
For Du Bois the cultural celebration was tied up with both general race
pride and a particular group sensibility. His references to black folklife, both in
Africa and the United States, emphasized what he considered its primitive as-
pects. He lauded blacks' "sensuous, tropical love of life, in vivid contrast to the
cool and cautious New England reason."'2 "The Negro," he proclaimed, "is
primarily an artist." 33
At the same time he was sensitive to the cultural responsibilities of the black
middle class, deploring blacks' reluctance to buy books and art, even those
blacks who enjoyed artistic consumption. 34 He also expatiated against the mam-
monism that he felt tended to accompany affluence among the new black mid-
dle class.35 In a vein going back to The Philadelphia Negro he charged the New
Negro exclusively with the cultural stewardship and civilizing mission that he
originally had assigned them to share with the reigning white elites.
There appears to be a disparity between Du Bois's advocacy of the civilizing
mission of the black middle class in relation to the rest of the black population
and his exultation in the very "primitive," folkloric values that were the raw
material of his Talented Tenth's civilizing mission. Several factors can be ad-
vanced to explain this anomaly. First, there is the racial defensiveness that takes
the form of self-conscious exaltation of those values and behaviors that are gen-
erally considered by whites to be unacceptable.36 Second, Du Bois retained into
the 1920s at least vestiges of two Victorian commitments —a presumption of a
nature/culture axis as a mechanism for characterizing human populations and a
belief in the existence of inherent group temperaments or ideals.37 In light of
these views—and entirely consistent with the premises of the Renaissance—the
civilizing mission lay not in extirpating the primitive, folkish qualities that
marked the race's specific contribution to the world, but in refining and cultivat-
ing them. Finally, and in a similar vein, postulation of an exotic black particular-
ity emphasizes a role for the black elite as keepers and translators of the culture.
That role buttresses the latter's centrality within the black community; in that
sense, then, the aesthetic-folkloric celebration was an ideology of the elite's
spokespersons. It is likely that one or more of those factors had some role in
generation of Du Bois's apparent ambivalence over exalting both the primitive
and that which would transcend it. However, the Renaissance phenomenon
indicates another ambivalence that Du Bois shared with his cohorts as propo-
nents of black leadership.
For all its advocacy of black primacy over black affairs, the Negro Renais-
sance was dependent upon and reflected its clientage to white patronage. 38
Hence Du Bois often was ambivalent in identification of his audiences, alter-
 Stratification, Leadership, and Organization 59
nately and sometimes in a given text simultaneously addressing the black elite,
which he exhorted to be independent and to meet its historic duties, and liberal
whites. In the Renaissance case the material condition underlying the ambiva-
lence was ironic because of the assertiveness that characterized his praise of the
racial spirit.
The pursuit of white patronage had been a central feature of Afro-American
political and intellectual activity at least since the Age of Washington. Washing-
ton directed his appeal definitively to indigenous white advocates of the New
South and their eastern capitalist affiliations, 39 and Du Bois's criticism seems
largely directed at that same constituency—as, for example, when he exhorted
the "Men of America" to make the Talented Tenth the leaders of the race.40
Those "Men" were white elites—philanthropists and other opinion makers. Not-
withstanding its literary merits and other substantive accomplishments, herein
lies much of the historical significance of The Souls of Black Folk: in that vol-
ume Du Bois raised most coherently the demand for expanded access to the
white elite agencies that were or could have been involved in disposition of
the place of the Afro-American population in the developing order of corporate
capitalism.41 Moreover, despite its occasional stridency of tone, Du Bois's vol-
ume of essays was grounded in a perspective that was in some respects no less
palatable than Washington's to the reform-oriented progressive intellectuals who
were influential in the legitimation of black spokesmanship.
Du Bois expressed his sympathetic recognition of the dual losses of slave
and master:
Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so intense was the
feeling, so mighty the human passions that swayed and blinded men. Amid it
all, two figures ever stand to typify that day to coming ages,—the one, a gray-
haired gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose sons lay
in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery because its abolition threat-
ened untold ill to all; who stood at last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined
form, with hate in his eyes; — and the other, a form hovering dark and mother-
like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had aforetime quailed at
that white master's command, had bent in love over the cradles of his sons and
daughters, and closed in death the sunken eyes of his wife, —aye, too, in his
behest had laid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child to the
world, only to see her dark boy's limbs scattered to the winds by midnight
marauders riding after "damned Niggers." These were the saddest sights of that
woful [sic] day.42
He pointed out as well that
to no class is the indiscriminate endorsement of the recent course of the South
toward Negroes more nauseating than to the best thought of the South . . .
the ignorant Southerner hates the Negro, the workingmen fear his competition,
the money-makers wish to use him as a laborer, some of the educated see a
menace in his upward development, while others — usually the sons of the mas-
ters—wish to help him rise. 4 '
60 W. E. B. Du Boz's and American Political Thought
This notion —that the "best" of the southern whites meant blacks well —
recurred and may well have grown from, or at least reinforced, Du Bois's as-
sumptions concerning reasonable men and civilized behavior. He reiterated
from his undergraduate days at Fisk the call to build a university in the South
so that the region could every year produce "a few white men and a few black
men of broad culture, catholic tolerance, and trained ability, joining their hands,
and giving to this squabble of the Races a decent and dignified peace."44
If broadly cultured black and white men were to be allies, however, their
alliance could not be one of equals, since whites controlled the monetary and
other resources necessary for social- or racial-uplift activities. Therefore, assertion
of black aspirations was conditioned by the ironic circumstance that legitimation
of those aspirations had to come from outside the Afro-American community in
genera] and from upper-class whites in particular. Du Bois's conflict with Wash-
ington should be considered in the context of competition for access to that
white patronage. The famous controversy derived largely from the fact that
Washington had established monopoly over access to patronage sources. Al-
though they clearly were in programmatic competition and articulated sharply
different visions of blacks' place in American civic life, their conflict did not
grow from deep philosophical differences about internal organization of the
black population. After noting, on reflection in 1940, that their actual differ-
ences were more of emphasis than substance, Du Bois made clear the impor-
tance of Washington's monopolistic position as an issue:

Contrary to most opinion the controversy as it developed was not entirely

against Mr. Washington's ideas, but became the insistence upon the right of
other Negroes to have and express their ideas. Things came to such a pass that
when any Negro complained or advocated a course of action, he was silenced
with the remark that Mr. Washington did not agree with this. Naturally the
bumptious, irritated, young black intelligentsia of the day declared, "I don't
care a damn what Booker Washington thinks! This is what I think, and I have
a right to think."45

The conflict, therefore, was the culmination of a tension between the spe-
cific agendas and the legitimacy claims of different elements of the black elite
and the various white support groups — New South ideologues, northern indus-
trialists and reform intellectuals —to which those elements related for patronage
and for other forms of validation. This view implies a necessary amendment of
Mary Law Chaffee's contention that the industrial/classical education dichotomy
originated in the respective interests of "Northerners" and white southerners.46
That contention, while tending toward the right direction, is simplistic in three
respects. First, it lumps together as "Northerners" both industrialists and reform
intellectuals, who often saw the race issue rather differently. Second, that inter-
pretation does not account for the mediation of intraelite conflict—generational
or otherwise — among Afro-Americans. Finally, Chaffee's interpretation does not
clearly conform to the facts; Robert L. Factor finds, for example, that northern
industrialists as well as southerners favored industrial education. 47
 Stratification, Leadership, and Organization 61
Of course, the differences between Washington and Du Bois were not en-
tirely limited to the issue of the power of the Tuskegee Machine. The central
fault line separating them and the political tendencies they represented was the
demand for black civic equality and political participation. Du Bois and others
unequivocally opposed Washington's acquiescence in the alliance of Redeemers
and New South ideologues, an alliance predicated on expulsion of blacks from
public life and codification of a regime explicitly based on white supremacy.
The urgency of critics' objections to the Tuskegeean's stranglehold on black
debate and access to support for uplift activity, in fact, derived principally from
recognition that his machine's main function was to stifle challenges to the
emerging Jim Crow social order. They understood that disfranchisement and
loss of civil rights would ultimately destroy black aspirations. This fault line
redefined the broad orientations toward racial strategy that had formed under
the conditions of relative openness and expansive political mobilization that had
flourished during the first two decades after Emancipation.
William S. loll observes that by the end of Reconstruction three distinct
views had emerged among black spokespersons with respect to the character
and condition of the freedmen. From one perspective they were mainly seen as
citizens seeking rights. From another they were ignorant peasants needing guid-
ance, and in a third view they were "romantic evangels in search of a promised
land."48 These three views did not exhaust the articulated possibilities. The Col-
ored Farmers Alliance represented an indigenous strain of black populism, and
others emphasized blacks' status as laborers and workers. Yet by the 1880s the
three perspectives Toll describes had converged around a general pattern of elite
racial-strategy discourse premised on a nodal background assumption, namely,
that the simultaneous and uneven development of slave and free strains in the
black population decreed that the freedmen "needed a specially trained elite to
help them replace the habits of slavery with the assertiveness of free men."49
This elite black discourse became increasingly hegemonic as white supremacist
victories narrowed the scope for more popular action. However, as Toll argues,
two distinct approaches to the problem of racial agenda formation developed
within that common rhetoric of elite tutelage.
On the one hand, Washington symbolized an approach that focused on
"social rehabilitation," a concrete project of expunging the "social primitivism"
that had taken root among blacks largely because of the slave experience. As
Toll puts it succinctly: "While Yankee farmers and western yeomen had identi-
fied hard work as a means to freedom through the acquisition of a homestead,
slaves had toiled through fear of the lash to enrich others. The problem for
Washington lay in taking what Blacks had learned as southern workers and
transforming it into an ideology that would enable them to benefit from the
modernization of the region." For Washington, therefore, the tutelary project
was informed primarily by the earlier strain of thinking—most identified with
Frederick Douglass — that emphasized the backwardness of the masses. More-
over, in Washington's view the road to progress was simple and direct; he ac-
cepted reflexively the Gospel of Wealth and had little sympathy for the ethical
62 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
ambivalence with which more macroscopically inclined reformers assayed the
dynamics of industrialization. His programmatic agenda settled happily on im-
parting a few rudimentary "skills," but most of all inculcating the social disci-
pline required of good laborers and subordinate entrepreneurs. Thus the irony
of this program that Du Bois pointed out becomes more sensible. The artisanal
and yeoman skills on which the Tuskegee model rested rhetorically were indeed
obsolescent, but they were not the ultimate point. The contradictory relation of
industrial ideology and republican practicality probably reflected Washington's
own confusions as a man caught between two eras. The ideology, however, was
the real practicality; the substantive training was only a vehicle for effecting the
characterological—and essentially ideological—project of rehabilitation.
On the other hand, Du Bois represented an approach to uplift that com-
bined the three earlier perspectives to form a rhetoric and a programmatic orien-
tation that emphasized "cultural revitalization," a focus that entailed combating
the stigma attached to the race and building racial pride by taking note of black
accomplishment.51 Beneath this orientation lay a broader view than Washing-
ton's of the social dynamics to which the black population had to be adjusted
and a more complex sense of the elite's mission, even though it shared some of
Washington's enthusiasm about industrial progress and certainly shared the tute-
lary commitment. In a sense, the two approaches ran parallel. Du Bois never
disputed, as his propositions in The Philadelphia Negro and later reflections in
Dusk of Dawn and elsewhere attest, that vocational training and proletarianiza-
tion were foremost objectives for the general black population. In fact as late as
1913 he held that it was still possible, though he lamented that the possibility
was slipping away, "to make Negroes essentially Americans with American ideals
and instincts."52 However, in part because of his greater sensitivity to the teleo-
logical dimension of progress and his insistence that oversight of the accultura-
tion project should be as much as possible in black hands, Du Bois stressed the
need to prepare and strengthen the indigenous elite on which tutelary responsi-
bilities rested. From that vantage point cultivation of a stratum of broadly
trained, eminently civilized blacks who exercised full citizenship rights was a
logical precondition for the commonly accepted task of racial uplift.
Intellectually, this perception probably derived from Du Bois's early notions
concerning racial-group idealism. Politically, cultivation of such a stratum ex-
pressed the ideology most appropriate to the practical project that he and Wash-
ington shared, even though the latter, for biographical and other reasons, re-
coiled from the notion of an aristocracy of gentility. Sociologically (and this is
perhaps one of the reasons that Washington—a thoroughgoing philistine — could
not accept its ideological attributes), this focus carried the aspirations of a rising
cohort of educated, comparatively urbane, reform-oriented black men and
women 53 for whom the mission of race leadership was ultimately connected
with individual and group status claims.
Despite their differences, though, the two black elite tendencies shared cer-
tain basic dispositions. Both Washington and Du Bois accepted the essential
model of social hierarchy that prevailed in the society and maintained that "up-
 Stratification, Leadership, and Organization 63
lift" of the black population entailed an elite-driven accretion of the characteris-
tics of "civilization."54 This conception of uplift in turn implied an approach to
social problems in general and to group organization in particular that con-
nected with the general black population only as an object of social engineering.
Therefore, the substantive alliances required to realize its programmatic agendas
had to be sought outside the race. The common need for those alliances exerted
pressure to harmonize the Afro-American elite's agendas and strategies—whether
oriented toward "protest" or "accommodation"—with the main thrusts of corpo-
rate capitalism and therefore with each other as well.
In this regard August Meier notes that the gradualism of the "accommoda-
tionists" and their appeals to white morality were based on a perception of white
loyalty to the Constitution, and he notes that the NAACP became the source of
a lengthy legal struggle that also sought to capitalize on that perceived loyalty.
Elliott M. Rudwick notes that "Du Bois portrayed Washington's emphasis on
industrial education as an essential link with the expansion of the Southern
economy,"56 and he points out that at a 1904 meeting representatives of the two
camps agreed that "potential Negro leaders could profit from higher education,
while the rest of the race should attend grammar schools and industrial
schools."57 The antagonists, moreover, were united in their programmatic advo-
cacy of moral-institutional reorganization of the black population and in identi-
fication of upper-class whites as the appropriate element with which black lead-
ership should be aligned.58 This last commonality is of special moment for
interpretation of Du Bois, as the relationship to white patronage figures promi-
nently as a source of tension in the leadership competition within the black
elite and at the same time suggests a practical confluence with the mainstream
of the liberal collectivist social program. Since white support came by and large
from corporate and other reformers who tended to move from the collectivist
outlook, it is likely that black initiatives that were supported at all would at least
be compatible with that outlook.
Du Bois had long sought to organize systematic research on Afro-American
life, and he maintained a collateral interest in organizing the black intellectual
elite for the purpose of establishing cultural and political hegemony within the
race. Regarding the former concern, he called in 1900 for formation of a "Spe-
cial Committee for the Study of the Negro Problems" that "should have general
oversight of a series of social studies into the condition of the American Ne-
gro." This initiative died for lack of funding support. Several years later he
attempted to generate support for a "high class journal to circulate among the
intelligent Negroes, tell them of the deeds of themselves and their neighbors,
interpret the news of the world to them, and inspire them toward definite ide-
als."60 Toward that end he wrote unsuccessfully to Jacob Schiff in 1905 for a
financial contribution. Schiff was not moved by Du Bois's estimation of the
need for the black intellectual elite to consolidate itself. In fact, the philan-
thropic community not surprisingly appears to have had little interest in inde-
pendent black activity of any type. Rudwick indicates the operative sentiment;
after identifying the Niagara movement as the congelation of black intellectual
64 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
interests,61 he then points out that an "essential failure" of that initiative was "its
inability to attract the support of more than a handful of whites."62 Thus the
paradox: Du Bois found himself in the position of appealing for support of inde-
pendent black political and academic initiatives to upper-class whites whose in-
terests in black "uplift" activities were tied to criteria that were at best lukewarm
to black self-organization.63 So it was that after several years of attempting with
not much success to compete for philanthropic support with Washington—who
did not seem bound by any formal commitment to visions of independent initia-
tive—Du Bois in his frustration castigated his opponent for having become so
dependent on "the rich charitable public" that he was too compromised to pow-
erful interests and therefore was unable to tell the truth about the needs of the
race.64 Yet the paradox was not transcended; indeed, it eventually would help
force Du Bois out of the NAACP.
Du Bois, of course, as is attested to by his comments about the need for the
black community to safeguard the autonomy of its intellectual workers, was
never fully sanguine about this patronage relation. His insistence upon black
support of black efforts doubtless was intensified by his conflicts with whites
within the NAACP. All along, however, he had felt that white support should
be oriented toward assisting in creation of an indigenous black leadership stra-
tum and acknowledging the primacy of such modern black leadership as did
exist. Apparently, during the period between the two world wars, he became
unequivocally convinced that sufficient black leadership existed to assert its pri-
ority in Afro-American affairs.
One issue remains to be clarified concerning Du Bois's views on stratifica-
tion of the black community. This issue relates to a subtle shift that occurred in
his thinking during the years between The Philadelphia Negro and his approach
to the Communist Party. In the early period Du Bois had taken the elite in its
totality to constitute an aristocracy among the Afro-American population. He
made no real normative or socially functional distinction among the different
elements of the elite; the various segments—businessmen, teachers, profession-
als, functionaries—shared the common historical mission of uplift, and all en-
joyed the same elevated status over the rest of the population. However, after he
had been at Atlanta University for a few years he took greater note of the elite's
internal differentiation and expressed disturbance over the appearance of a rela-
tively philistine but well-off stratum of "farmers and gardeners, the well-paid
porters and artisans, the businessmen" 65 that he felt lacked sufficient breadth of
culture to act as true representatives of the race.
Several years later, after he had left Atlanta, Du Bois expressed concern that
the intellectual elite had not received its proper recognition in relation to other
strata. He reasoned that because black professionals had the vast majority of
their interactions within the black community and workingmen had most of
their daily interactions with whites, whites seeking to communicate with the
black community did not even know the "natural leaders" and would wind up
going to and forming opinions on the basis of intercourse with artisans.66
 Stratification, Leadership, and Organization 65
His commitment was to the "cultured classes," that is, not simply the black
middle class writ large, but that complement that was trained in the techniques
of modern civilization, the professional stratum that claimed knowledge and
expertise as capital. It was this stratum that he saw leading his cooperative com-
monwealth in the 1930s and 1940s, and to whom he assigned a place atop the
black population.
In 1940 he proposed a pyramidal view of the status hierarchy of the black
community, in which "the poor, ignorant, sick and antisocial form a vast founda-
tion" and whose "highest members, although few in number, reach above the
average not only of the Negroes but of the whites, and may justly be compared
to the better-class white culture."67 He expressed a need for caution, however,
in assessing this stratum's actual sociohistorical role, noting, for example, the
group's propensities to "conspicuous consumption" and frivolousness. He ob-
served that upper-class blacks felt isolated and alone as a result of segregation.
They were often unable or unwilling to share in middle-class white society on
the terms in which it was offered, and at the same time they tended to recoil
from the vulgarity of their own lower classes.68
Nevertheless, he was optimistic in 1940 that blacks were building, as he felt
they must, a class structure of their own. He felt that whether his "Talented
Tenth" would be a "threat to the development of the whole race" or the vehicle
"by which the level of culture in the whole group is going to be raised . . .
depends upon the relations that develop between these masses and the cultural
aims of the higher classes."69 But on balance he was generally hopeful about
the liberatory potential held out by the dynamic elite that he identified, even
though after discussing the vector of its growth all he could fall back on for
assurance was a call for unity across groups.70 That is a point at which his
consumer-cooperative strategy dovetails with the historical agenda that Du Bois
imputed to the black elite.
One strength of the consumer organization was that its thrust could provide
a means through which the elite could mobilize "training" of the masses.71 In
this way Du Bois allayed his fear that the elite's "leadership and authority within
the group" would come to be constituted on the basis of wealth rather than
talent. The consumer-cooperative strategy, then, was in this sense a mechanism
for the germinal professional elite to consolidate and institutionalize its hege-
mony over other elements in the black community by virtue of claims to special
expertise, appeals to unity and collectivity of interest (class invisibility), and an
ideology of service.
Throughout the interwar years Du Bois was hardly a radical democrat al-
though— partly in response to the growth of mass organization and protest—he
showed signs of modifying his thinking with respect to intraracial stratification.
As Arnold Rampersad points out, Du Bois disclosed in the novel Dark Princess
(1928), that he "had nothing against kings and princesses, provided some were
black. Indeed, he seemed to prefer royalty and saw no contradiction between it
and his propaganda for the masses."72 That observation recalls his alternation of
66 W. E. B. Du Boz's and American Political Thought
extravagant pro-Bolshevik rhetoric and effusion over debutante balls in the pages
of the Crisis a decade earlier. Indeed, Du Bois's commitments were not without
apparent ambivalence.
Within four years after publication of Dark Princess he took refuge in the
rationale of changing times to proffer a self-criticism, taking the NAACP as a
vehicle for his partial retreat from the elitism with which he had been associated
for nearly a third of a century. He maintained that the organization

was formed at a time when the phrase, "the talented tenth," meant something
for the advancement of men, when we were thinking along lines of that sort.
We said "The people who are the exceptional people must of necessity be the
ones who lead any group out of the wilderness. It is not a question of their
advantages." And then we went further than that and quite naturally said, "This
organization must also be for the advancement of the 'talented tenth.' " After
all, if the talented tenth is the judge, the tool by which we are going to raise
the Negro race, then the more we ourselves are raised, the more advantages we
have, the more in the long run we are going to solve this problem.
But there comes a question. "Are you thinking of the advancement of this
tenth for your own sake or for the sake of the great mass of people? When it
comes to the advancement of the great mass of people who is to be the judge
as to what these people want and ought to have?" We are the ones who know
what the masses ought to want, therefore, we are the ones who go ahead and
lay down the program for these people, who manage; and while we have been
going on with our program there has come actually a change in the thought of
the world, a change . . . which says not only is the object of the organization
advancement for the masses of people but that it must be dominated by the
masses of people. That change is so fast that there are large numbers of people
who have not heard it at all; large numbers who do not believe it. It is going
to have a hard time making its way but it is going to make its way. The world
more and more is going to be organized not simply for the masses of people but
by the masses of people. They are going to be the ones who will dominate.' 3

He pointed out as well that the NAACP program was dominated by a nega-
tive eighteenth-century conception of freedom that not only did not address the
populace's economic needs but also tacitly endorsed an agenda that would
"build up inside of the Negro race an economic class, not quite clear as yet."74
Despite that self-criticism, Du Bois did not uncouple from his commitment
to the black elite. His intimation that adherence to an agenda favoring the "Tal-
ented Tenth" had been historically appropriate at some earlier point may well
have been sound, especially given disfranchisement and other conditions demo-
bilizing the black population in the early 1900s. At that time, though, he had
supported class-based suffrage restriction in principle for both whites and blacks,
apart from the need to adjust to the practical realities of white supremacist
exclusion. And the defense of historical appropriateness not only allows the
critic to save face; it also, by interposing reified time between the agent and his
ideas, prevents the critique from penetrating to the relational and ideological
core of the discarded position.' 5 Indeed, we already have seen that eight years
 Stratification, Leadership, and Organization 67
after this self-criticism he proposed a pyramidal view of the Afro-American social
structure that recycled almost identically the normative premises that had under-
lain his interpretation in The Philadelphia Negro. And his defense of his
consumer-cooperative "Nation within a Nation" strategy against labor radical
and former Crisis protege George Streator's sharp criticism in 1935 indicates
how much that strategy rested on the old Talented lenth vision. In response to
Streator's charge that he had too much faith in the black petite bourgeoisie's
race leadership, Du Bois asserted that under current conditions he saw "but one
path of salvation for American Negroes . . . and that is to get a growing group
of young, trained, fearless and unselfish Negroes to guide the American Negro
in this crisis, and guide him toward the coming of socialism throughout the
world."76
Most instructively, in a 1948 address to the Boule, a national organization
explicitly for upper-status black men, Du Bois unveiled a fully reconstituted,
"historically appropriate" version of the Talented Tenth, one that indicated that
his view of the elite's mission (and, as I shall show in chapter 6, his conception
of socialism) remained cast in essentially the same liberal colleetivist mold as at
the turn of the century, with only tactical modification induced by an admirable
openness to empirical realities. Citing Marx as his influence, he commented
that he had gradually come to see that the Tenth's "passport to leadership was
not simply learning. Learning, knowledge, science carefully inculcated and
deeply studied it must have; but fundamental would be its willingness to sacri-
fice and plan for such economic revolution in industry and just distribution of
wealth as would make the rise of the group possible."77
He acknowledged that for quite some time he had answered class-based
criticisms of his Talented Tenth strategy by arguing that class analysis did not
apply to black Americans. He suggested however, that as time went on either he
began to see more clearly or conditions changed, because he saw more class
contradictions among blacks.78 He noted as well that he had apprehended what
was from his vantage point the paradox that "Negroes who had long trained
themselves for personal success and individual freedom were coming to regard
the end of segregation as an ideal and not as a means." To his dismay they were
uncritical of what American society was in their insistence on being accepted in
whatever it was/ 9 He found it ironic, if not perfidious, that he and much of his
cohort had developed the "idea of the Negro problem as being an evangel, a
gospel where chosen men were trained and armed, and went out to take the
leadership of the mass." Unlike the tendency he saw developing, his generation
had not regarded themselves as "separate and superior to the masses, but rather
as a part of the mass which was being equipted [sic] and armed for leadership
and that leadership was of course for the benefit of the mass."80
As we have seen, this contrast nostalgically sanitizes his earlier views regard-
ing intraracial differentiation. But we certainly cannot deny Du Bois the human
prerogative of trying to assert a retroactive consistency over his life. Moreover,
his observations demonstrate certain powerful insights. His critique of the new
middle class's consumerism and facile acceptance of desegregation as an end
68 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
rather than a means presaged the trenchant criticisms to be leveled by Frazier
and Harold Cruse—who also felt that the black bourgeoisie had betrayed its
historical mission — and the radical wing of the civil rights movement. And his
criticism of the black church seems in retrospect to have anticipated Martin
Luther King Jr., if it did not actually call him into existence. Du Bois declared:
"Our religion with all its dogma, demagoguery, and showmanship can be a
center to teach character, right conduct and sacrifice. There lies here a career
for a Negro Gandhi and a host of earnest followers."81
When all was said and done, in the Boule text Du Bois clearly established
that he retained his commitment to the privileged role of the black elite; his
practical response to the disturbing tendencies that he had identified was to
raise the ante and exhort the Talented Tenth to adopt more concrete—and
rather extreme —measures to live up to its mission. After identifying undergradu-
ate fraternities (as he had done in his desperation toward the end of his first
tenure at the NAACP) as providing a basis for a large race organization among
the enlightened elite,82 he strove to impress the emerging generation with the
need to adopt an "ideal of plain living and high thinking." 83
Because the ranks of the truly committed were small and, he feared, dwin-
dling, he advocated solidifying and expanding them internally by several meth-
ods, including eugenics. He proposed child bearing and adoption as strategies
to build the Talented Tenth,84 as well as arranged marriages of children of Boule
archons. The elite's newly specified mission mandated "the rehabilitation of
the indispensable family group by deliberate planning of marriages with mates
selected for heredity, physique, health and brains with less insistence on color
comeliness or romantic sex lure miscalled love: youth should marry young and
have a limited number of healthy children."86 This, it turns out, was his substan-
tive strategy for streamlining the Talented Tenth into the "Guiding Hun-
dredth."87
In this respect, then, the change of position in Du Bois's thought that is
most apparent in the post-World War II period turns out on examination not to
constitute so much of a change at all. Such change as did occur in this regard
reflects a reasonable adaptation of his basic premises to a new historical context
and a desperate attempt to identify an appropriate historical lever, a critical
agency to effect social reorganization. This change took two forms: (1) reformu-
lation of his decades-long assertion of the Talented Tenth as bearers of the col-
lective subjectivity of the Afro-American population, and (2) identification of
the international proletariat as the embodiment of universal reason in the cur-
rent period. The first position he saw as a response to changing historical condi-
tions among black Americans. Central among those in his view was the progress
of stratification within the black population:

The outstanding fact about the Negro group in America, which has but lately
gained notice, is that it is flying apart into opposition economic classes. This
was to he expected. But most people, including myself, long assumed that the
American Negro, forced into social unity by color caste, would achieve ceo-
 Stratification, Leadership, and Organization 69
nomic unity as a result, and rise as a mass of laborers led by intelligent planning
to a higher unity with the laboring classes of the world.
This has not happened. On the contrary, and quite logically, the American
Negro is today developing a distinct bourgeoisie bound to and aping American
acquisitive society and developing an employing and a laboring class. This divi-
sion is only in embryo, but it can be sensed.88
Moreover, Du Bois already had been soured by having been ostracized by
the black middle class when he was arrested as a Soviet agent in 1951. He
recalled:
While, then, most of my educated and well-to-do friends . . . were scared by
the war propaganda and went quickly to cover, an increasing mass of the Negro
working class, especially the members of the so-called left-wing unions, rallied
to my side with faith and money. This gave me a new outlook on social stratifi-
cation within this group, which I once hoped would never develop. My faith
hitherto had been in what I once denominated the "Talented Tenth." I now
realize that the ability within a people does not automatically work for its high-
est salvation.89

However, Du Bois did not in his revision eliminate the black elite from its
historic mission. Finally—after pointing out that black people on issues other
than race are neither intrinsically radical nor intrinsically conservative 90 —he
asserted that "the Negro intelligentsia must reassert its influence on the mass of
Negro labor and wheel it into step with the world labor movement, especially
in Asia and Africa."91 Nor was this all; he went on once again to amend his
Talented Tenth thesis, noting that in the present context "many educated and
gifted young black folk will be as selfish and immoral as the whites who sur-
round them and to whom the Negroes have been taught to look as ideals."92
The historically responsible elite would be drawn and trained from the proletar-
iat instead:
Naturally, out of the mass of the working classes, who know life and its bitter
struggle, will continually rise the real, unselfish and clear-sighted leadership.
This will not be automatic or continuous, but the hope of the future of the
Negro race in America and the world lies far more among its workers than
among its college graduates, until the time that our higher training is rescued
from its sycophantic and cowardly leadership of today, almost wholly dependent
as it is on Big Business either in politics or philanthropy.93

Not only the black working class was to march in the forefront of history.
Du Bois noted that a "new era of power, held and exercised by the working
classes the world over, is dawning and while its eventual form is not yet clear,
its progress cannot be held back by any power of man."94 So Du Bois, long-time
proponent of a view of the inability of untrained workers to manage political
affairs, in the postwar era seemed to assign to them a world-historical mission.
However, there was an important though subtle wrinkle in his argument.
Regarding his revised perception of the role of the black elite, he made a
tacit distinction in his text between intelligentsia and bourgeoisie. On the one
70 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
hand, he disparaged the development of an acquisitive capitalist stratum in the
black community; on the other, he identified with the "dream among the intelli-
gentsia of an independent Negro vote devoted to Negro progress"95 and ex-
horted the latter stratum to "reassert its influence" on the masses. The intellectu-
als and intelligentsia were, of course, the stratum for which Du Bois actually
spoke all along. What is most likely the case is that he simply had attached the
intelligentsia's agenda to that of the minuscule black bourgeoisie, who after all
were status peers. Then, as the bourgeois stratum grew, elaborated itself, and
declined as a source of critical politics, Du Bois was moved to focus his strategy
for the intellectuals toward more direct stewardship over a mass, working-class-
based—but intellectual-led-—movement. Seen thus, this key reflex in Du Bois's
class commitments and views of the proper organization of the Afro-American
population for collective action remained fundamentally the same over his en-
tire career.
 6

Three Coniusions about Du Bois

Interracialism, Pan-Africanism,
Socialism

D u Bois's PROMINENCE in this century's Afro-American political life is widely

recognized. Yet attempts to categorize him with respect to the various stra-
tegic and ideological programs constitutive of black political debate have yielded
an uncommonly confusing picture. The confusion about locating Du Bois pro-
grammatically has two sources. The first is quite simple: Du Bois lived and
acted through several discrete social and political situations that seemed to him
to require different strategic responses for the race. Sometimes, especially when
sundered from the situations to which they were responses, the strategies that
he proposed appear to contradict one another. Analysts, then, have chosen and
defended one or another set of strategies or one or another period as authenti-
cally Du Boisian. This is a problem of temporal or contextual focus.
The other source of confusion has to do with conceptual focus. If examina-
tion is restricted to Du Bois's various racial strategies, which were usually the
central concerns of his writing, analysis will record a melange of discrete politi-
cal positions, but will gloss the normative and conceptual logic that organized
his worldview.
As I indicated in chapter 1, inattentiveness toward those social-theoretical
foundations of political discourse is a major problem in scholarship on Afro-
American thought in general. 1 Its role in generating confusion about Du Bois,
however, stands out for two key reasons. First, his prominence has increased the

71
72 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
likelihood that partisans of all sorts would want to claim him for their various
agendas. Second, his unusually clear, self-reflexive intellectual approach makes
confused and widely conflicting interpretations seem especially anomalous.
Through examination of Du Bois's utterances on three political programs
with which he is typically associated, I shall argue in this chapter that his pro-
nouncements cohere around certain core assumptions and values that he main-
tained over the course of his lengthy intellectual career. I examine Du Bois's
views on (1) interracialism as an organizational principle for American society;
(2) Pan-Africanism as an interest of the black world; and (3) socialism as a
model for social organization in general. My concern here is to establish Du
Bois's actual positions on those issues and to uncover the structuring logic of his
thought by locating those positions in relation to one another as well as to the
historical and discursive contexts within which they were developed.

Interracialism

Greater interpretive ambiguity surrounds the character of Du Bois's interra-

cialism than other aspects of his thought. This is so in part because the status
of interracialism as a political value was not controversial in the same way for
Du Bois and his communicants as it has been among subsequent political theo-
rists and intellectual historians.2 The search for Du Bois's position requires ex-
trapolation, often from incidental comments scattered over several decades and
situations. When the broad range of possibly germane utterances is combined
with the intentionality of the analysts, it is not surprising that conflicting, if not
incompatible, interpretations occur.
Howard Brotz, for example, describes Du Bois as a "cultural nationalist."'
Harold Cruse identifies him, although with qualifications, as a principal mem-
ber of the integrationist tendency in the history of Afro-American thought. 4 Ster-
ling Stuckey claims that Du Bois advocated nationalism even in the face of the
latter's explicit disclaimer.5 And Vincent Harding proposes that Du Bois should
be seen as an anticipation of both radical nationalism and radical anticolonial-
ism, as well as militant integrationism.6 Moreover, each of these assessments is
or could be derived directly from statements made by Du Bois. Yet consideration
of certain contextual and intentional mediations on Du Bois's thinking allows
an interpretation that integrates those discrete stances that have provided the
basis for the varied and conflicting assessments of his position on this issue.
These mediations are as follows: (1) his dual commitments to race pride and
the heuristic of "racial group idealism" on the one side and the Victorian out-
look that values "progress," defined as increasingly unitary, rational organization,
on the other; (2) his commitment to the hegemony of the black elite within
the Afro-American population; (3) his growing perception, influenced by the
Depression and his reassessment of the sources of racism, of a need for the
development of a self-help program within the race; and (4) his experiences
within the NAACP.
 Three Confusions about Du Bois 73
Du Bois's pride in race coexisted with his enthusiasm at participating at the
forefront of modern (European) culture and values; he could equally deprecate
spontaneous Afro-American behavior and exalt black behavior and values and
decry the bankruptcy of the European heritage. The dissonant ring to his ambiv-
alent race pride to some extent is a function of his bombastic literary style; but
the oft-mentioned phenomenon of his "two-ness" or "double consciousness,"
which I consider at greater length in chapter 7, is an expression of his antinomi-
cal commitment to what he perceived to be the Dionysian attractions of black
culture and the Apollonian virtues of Euro-American civilization. Writing dur-
ing the Harlem Renaissance, for example, his references to black folklife, both
in Africa and in the United States, emphasized what he considered its primitive
aspects. He lauded blacks' "sensuous, tropical love of life, in vivid contrast to
the cool and cautious New England reason."7 "The Negro," he proclaimed, "is
primarily an artist."8 However, this racial characteristic did not imply for Du
Bois, as it did for many who extolled black spirituality, that the race required
external tutelage to prepare it for modern civilization.
He asserted very early a conviction that Afro-Americans best handle Afro-
American affairs. About this he was insistent, even in the early 1900s, as he
advocated formation of a coalition of the best men of black and white races to
attempt rationally to reorganize life in the South.9 Du Bois's insistence on Afro-
American primacy in determination and pursuit of Afro-American interests —
regardless how elementally reasonable and appropriate that position was—also
resonates with his intentions concerning the role of the elite within the Afro-
American population. If the group is to speak for itself, still not everyone can
speak at once —especially not if a single, collective agenda is to be fashioned.
Cacophony could be avoided by allowing the race's "natural leaders" to rise. In
an early call for unity and protest, Du Bois observed in 1903:

Here is the path out of the economic situation and here is the imperative
demand for trained Negro leaders of character and intelligence —men of skill,
men of light and leading, college-bred men, black captains of industry, and
missionaries of culture; men who thoroughly comprehend and know modem
civilization, and can take hold of Negro communities and raise and train them
by force of precept and example, deep sympathy, and the inspiration of com-
mon blood and ideals.10

As he noted in his Philadelphia study, blacks' developmental needs actually

would have been best served in his view by a dictatorship of the elite; however,
because the race had been thrust prematurely into interaction with the more
advanced society and democratic institutions, the incubative stage of elite dicta-
torship was blocked.11 Nevertheless, the historical mission of the elite stratum
included demonstrating "the ability of the Negro to assimilate American cul-
ture." 12 In this sense, Du Bois's view of the collective racial interest in the black
community's generation of its own spokesmen at least coincided with the hege-
monic interest of the elite. However, although this position acknowledges a need
for intraracial organization that at least in principle qualifies opposition to sepa-
74 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
ration, it was not until the Depression that Du Bois sought to work out a pro-
gram that accepted segregation as given. However, this program was not so
much a radical departure from his previous views; his emphasis may only have
stood out more because protest against Jim Crow had become overwhelmingly
consensual as the organizing imperative of black politics.
He had begun developing his program of cultural-economic nationalism in
the 1920s. The foundation of this program was advocacy of racially based coop-
erative economics. Cooperativist racial economics long had held an attraction
for Du Bois. Both as an economic practicality and as a model for economic
democracy, the cooperative recommended itself to him. 13 After World War I,
though, Du Bois credited two realizations with gradually pushing the consumer-
cooperative organization idea to prominence. In the postwar environment he
felt that the slogans of political democracy developed a hollow ring; the pressing
problems were then economic rather than political "in an oligarchic world."14
Thus was he prepared to emphasize a strategy of economic organization. Al-
though he had little support from the NAACP, by 1930 Du Bois was convinced
that the organization needed to adjust its program to meet needs generated by
"economic dislocation." Simultaneously, he came to appreciate the extent to
which deep-seated complexes and subrational behaviors shape public attitudes.
From this perspective he decided, as he reflected in 1940, that the "present
attitude and action of the white world is not based solely upon rational, deliber-
ate intent. It is a matter of conditioned reflexes; of long followed habits, customs
and folkways; of subconscious trains of reasoning and unconscious nervous re-
flexes. 'Ib attack and better all this calls for more than appeal and argument. It
needs carefully planned and scientific propaganda." 1 '
What this meant, in his view, was that there needed to be a shift of empha-
sis in black uplift activity. Previously, when Du Bois had assumed rational moti-
vations to explain racial prejudice and exclusion, the focus of his activism was
directed toward education and changing whites' attitudes. Once he determined
that the bases of much racial prejudice are nonrational, his stress moved away
from education and propaganda among whites—which had not by any means
been Du Bois's only previous concern anyway—to what he identified as his
post-1928 strategy; that is, "[sjcientific investigation and organized action among
Negroes, in close cooperation, to secure the survival of the Negro race, until the
cultural development of America and the world is willing to recognize Negro
freedom." 18
In the meantime, in Du Bois's view, simple good judgment called for forti-
fying such black institutions as existed behind the walls of segregation. That
practical viewpoint at times forced him into conflict with doctrinal foes of segre-
gation, as when he supported the chartering of Cheyney State College in
Cheyney, Pennsylvania, as a black school. Du Bois made clear that, although he
opposed segregation as a principle, when confronted with the choice between a
black school and no school, the black school would have to be supported. In-
deed, when faced with already segregated institutions, he was left with a "para-
dox": "We must oppose segregation in schools; we must honor and appreciate
 Three Confusions about Du Bois 75
the colored teacher in the colored school. . . . We recognize one thing worse
than segregation and that is ignorance."19 The consumer-cooperative organiza-
tion strategy, however, was not only defensive; the consumer movement could
develop into a powerful vehicle for social transformation as well. He main-
tained, "The consuming public, who should also be the real working producers
of the world, must resume its logical and rightful place as the final directing
force in industry. This can be done without violence or revolution."20 Con-
sumer groups then would be able to take over production, filling their own
needs, breaking the chain of external dependence, and installing industrial de-
mocracy.21 Nor was the consumer model restricted to the United States; Du
Bois explored its possibilities for "freeing thought and action in the colonial
areas."22
The consumer-cooperative organization strategy never really took off; in
part its failure recalls a tragic aspect of political thought. As other than ideology
for group mobilization, the strategy likely was too late when proposed. A "new
industrial democracy established on a firm basis of individual knowledge and
initiative built up to contest the occupation of the industrial field with the pres-
ent individualists, monopolists, high-binders, and free-booters"23 probably faced
overwhelmingly bad odds in 1939. However, as a mobilization ideology, the
consumer-cooperative organization that Du Bois advocated also resonated with
the legitimation needs of the Afro-American elite as Du Bois saw them. He
indicated that the program was designed, among other things, to answer the
following question: "Can ten million Negroes, led by cultured classes number-
ing less than a million, achieve efficient and voluntary democracy without force,
without police power, without the domination of wealth and capital?"24
Du Bois was concerned, however, about the black elite's readiness to shoul-
der its group responsibility in what he saw as a "long siege against the strong-
holds of color caste."25 He expressed the basis for his concern:

The upper class Negro has almost never been nationalistic. He has never
planned or thought of a Negro state or a Negro church or a Negro school. This
solution has always been a thought up-surging from the mass, because of pres-
sure which they could not withstand and which compelled a racial institution
or chaos. Continually such institutions were founded and developed, but this
took place against the advice and best thought of the intelligentsia.26

He reminded them, however:

When the NAACP was formed, the great mass of Negro children were being
trained in Negro schools; the great mass of Negro churchgoers were members
of Negro churches; the great mass of Negro citizens lived in Negro neighbor-
hoods; the great mass of Negro voters voted with the same political part)'; and
the mass of Negroes joined with Negroes and cooperated with Negroes in order
to fight the extension of this segregation and to move toward better conditions.
What was true in 1910 was still true in 1940 and will be true in 1970. But with
this vast difference: that the segregated Negro institutions are better organized,
more intelligently planned and more efficiently conducted, and today form in
76 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
themselves the best and most compelling argument for the ultimate abolition
of the color line. 27

He continued:
To have started out in this organization with a slogan "no segregation," would
have been impossible. What we did say was no increase in segregation; but
even that stand we were unable to maintain. Whenever we found that an in-
crease of segregation was in the interest of the Negro race, naturally we had to
advocate it. We had to advocate all sorts of organized movement among Ne-
groes to fight oppression and in the long run end segregation.28

Despite the elite's reluctance, Du Bois was consistent throughout the period
of his active commitment to this nationalistic, or race-solidaristic, organizational
strategy—roughly through World War II —on the importance of the elite's role;
he was emphatic about the need for "trained" leadership. 29
Although, as has been noted, he seems always to have been committed
without reservation to black leadership of blacks, his experience with the white-
dominated NAACP at least reinforced his disposition toward black self-
organization. As his antagonism toward the NAACP's board grew over the issue
of editorial autonomy for the Crisis, Du Bois's advocacy of the nationalistic pro-
gram became more and more insistent.30 Finally, he challenged the NAACP
board to acknowledge the utility of segregation as a support for positive black
institutions. 31 In the fervor to make his point, he even stooped to endorse black
fraternities and sororities as exemplars of the racially useful side of segregation.32
Although his nationalistic program was the specific issue that precipitated
Du Bois's departure from the organization, his course had not meshed well for
some time with the thrust defined by the white liberals in the NAACP's leader-
ship. Francis L. Broderick points out that the latter supported none of his post-
World War I initiatives, noting that one Republican director even resigned over
Du Bois's support of Robert Marion La Follette in the 1924 presidential elec-
tion. 33 It is not unlikely that this experience with the apparent incongruence of
black and white agendas for black uplift strengthened Du Bois's resolve for ar-
guing the primacy of intraracial initiative as the appropriate strategy for realiza-
tion of the ultimate objective of an integrated society.34
Du Bois's fundamental commitment to an interracial world civilization was
ideological, and his teleology was one quite common among liberal (and radi-
cal) intellectuals of his cohort. He stated his view of this aspect of the trajectory
of history emphatically in his critical assessment of Marcus Garvey's movement.
Garvey, Du Bois noted, had failed in part because he did not realize that
"[h]ere is a world that for a thousand years, from the First Crusade to the Great
War, had been breaking down the barriers between nations and races in order
to build a world-wide economic unity and cultural solidarity. The process has
involved slavery, peonage, rape, theft, and extermination, but it is slowly uniting
humanity. It is now proposed to turn back and cut out of this world its black
eighth or its colored two thirds. Not only is this virtually impossible, but its
attempt to-day would certainly involve the white and colored worlds in a death-
 Three Confusions about Du Bois 77
struggle whose issue none can surely foretell. The power of the yellow, black,
and brown worlds to-day is the economic dependence of the white world on
them, and the power of the white world is its economic technic and organiza-
tion. The super-diplomacy of race politics tomorrow is to transmute this interde-
pendence into cultural sympathy, spiritual tolerance, and human freedom. Not
in segregation, but in closer, larger unity lies interracial peace.

The "nationalism" which Du Bois embraced, therefore, assumed a broader

context of genuinely international world unity, at least as an ideal and goal. To
some extent his advocacy of organizing behind racial lines was tactical; as I have
shown, he saw cultivation of all-black institutions as a necessary concession to
the reality of segregation and a necessary element in the struggle against it.
Du Bois saw other merits in black-controlled institutions. They could provide
prophylaxis against racial humiliation; he observed that "if social contact can be
had only at the cost of ... racial degradation . . ., then the Negro race is
almost forced to ask for its own teachers and to support its own colleges and
universities —or to demand State aid for Jim Crow higher training."36 And, al-
though he steadfastly maintained his universalist teleology, he remained pessi-
mistic regarding possibilities for honest interracial interaction in the present, as
is indicated in his biting eulogy for Carter G. Woodson. After recounting and
praising Woodson's accomplishments, Du Bois noted: "No white university ever
recognized his work; no white scientific society ever honored him. Perhaps this
was his greatest reward."
Yet black-controlled racial institutions were attractive to Du Bois for purely
positive reasons as well. He argued that "separation" had fostered for the Negro
the rise of "cultured individuals in his own group who were not only able to
impart the elements of civilization to others but were able to do it in much
more pleasant and more effective ways than most white people." 38 In this con-
text blacks developed an active preference for being ministered to by their own
professionals. Moreover, this dynamic merely brought Afro-Americans into step
with the march of world history:
Separation, for the most part, not only ceased to hinder the race from making
any cultural advance, but even helped it forward. But forward toward what?
Exactly the same thing was happening in Negro America that happened in
Germany when she discovered resources within her own soul that made her
independent of French culture; the same thing that happened in Ireland when
she decided that to be Irish was even more desirable than to be English.39

He broke off the analogy dramatically short of a call for an independent

Afro-American nation, and—given that this article appeared only a year after his
universalistic "Back to Africa" essay—it is unlikely that he would have wanted
to endorse such a stance. Instead, Du Bois's notion of racial particularism was
more pluralistic than separatist. In fact, his universalist teleology shared features
with the views of Horace Kallen, perhaps the most important early-twentieth-
century advocate of cultural pluralism in the United States.40 As appears most
clearly in his proposals for a postcolonial Pan-African unity (see below), Du Bois
78 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
envisioned movement toward a world rationally and homogeneously adminis-
tered but constituted of cultural units that would retain their distinctiveness. He
differed from Kallen, though, in the extent to which he saw pluralism as subordi-
nate to a transcendent ideal of "civilization."
David Levering Lewis notes, in an examination of black and Jewish elite
responses to Americanization ideology in the early twentieth century, that Du
Bois believed that "[e] tonic pride . . . could be sublimated in the dogma of
unexceptionable public conformity to the best ideals and behavior of white
Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) America—the better to guarantee private space
for retention of what was most precious in minority culture."41 That stance is
quite like Kallen's call for the United States to be reconstituted as a "federal
republic," in which the "common language of the commonwealth, the language
of its great tradition, would be English, but each nationality would have for its
emotional and involuntary life its own peculiar dialect or speech, its own indi-
vidual and inevitable esthetic and intellectual forms."42 Du Bois, however, be-
cause of his teleological evolutionism, stressed the role of universal principles of
progress, and, correspondingly, was more inclined than Kallen to sacrifice ethnic
particularities on the altar of the cosmopolitan telos.43
Du Bois saw the dynamics of race and culture as at the same time pluralistic
and evolutionist; although the two perspectives need not conflict, in his case
they underwrote an embrace of ideals and rhetoric that were simultaneously
relativistic and hierarchical. The common root of these coexisting commitments
was his persisting affinity for reform-Darwinist premises in his theory of history.44
After World War II, when he was seventy-seven years old, he judged the Nazi
Holocaust to have been particularly horrendous because of the "cultural accom-
plishments of [the Jews], the gifts they have made to the civilization of the
world."45 Contribution to that world civilization was for Du Bois the standard
for assessing the worth and significance of various social groups—classes, races,
nations. Unlike ideologues of Western supremacy, however, he called for recog-
nizing the value and contributions of "primitive" cultures. However, his own
notion of the barometer of civilization was, despite his insistence on construing
it as universal and transcendent, very much defined by Western modernity. Not
only was his acknowledgment of the virtues of the "primitive" usually betrayed
by a rhetoric of condescension; he also never cut himself loose from seeing the
world as consisting of "backward" and "advanced" peoples. He allowed that "vast
numbers of backward peoples have made notable cultural advance under the
colonial regime"46 even as he advocated a vigorous antiimperialism.
An unreflective acceptance of the self-referential, universalistic claims of
European cultural ideology was not unique to Du Bois; as Wilson J. Moses
observes, that disposition was ironically common among early black national-
ists.47 In general, that ironic tendency reflects the hegemonic power of the ideol-
ogies that have shaped the framework of conventions underlying cultural and
political discourse in the West. For Du Bois specifically, the outcome was a
perspective which — despite his own relativistic protests—saw the West as bearer
of the principle of cultural evolution and thus as a model for the backward
 Three Confusions about Du Bois 79
peoples. Although he believed that non-Western, Dionysian or primitive peoples
could enrich—through their own racial-cultural "messages"—the main lines of
progress in world civilization, he never questioned that the trajectory of civiliza-
tion, as it evolved toward perfection, was leading toward a unitary world domi-
nated by principles of planning and rational administration.48 His cultural plu-
ralism, therefore, was ultimately subordinate to the universalizing requirements
of progress, and the ideal world which he envisaged was harmoniously inte-
grated. The notions of progress and civilization which grounded his teleology—
and which were to hold the unified world together—were virtually pure projec-
tions of a rhetorical and ideological orientation current among Western intellec-
tuals.49 Du Bois's failure to recognize that orientation's historical partiality and
specificity led him to ontologize its categories into a universalistic philosophy of
history. To that extent, he succumbed to a precisely Lukacsian false conscious-
ness which gave his cultural relativism an ultimately hollow, defensive ring.

Pan-Africanism

The motif of stepping back into intragroup organization as a step toward re-
alizing universalist objectives also helps to bring into focus the place of Pan-
Africanism in Du Bois's thought.
Pan-Africanism appears in his writing first in relation to his proposals for
decolonization in Africa. However, his commitment to Pan-African unity and
self-determination was tempered from the outset by his distinction of the blacks
who had appropriated the characteristics of "civilization" from those who had
not. The former, in his view, should be responsible for the administration and
guidance of the latter. In his program for dispensation of former German colo-
nies after World War I, Du Bois acknowledged that the "principle of self-
determination . . . cannot be wholly applied to semi-civilized peoples." There-
fore, he argued, those colonies should have been placed "under the guidance
of organized civilization," with special consideration given to the administrative
opinions of the "chiefs and intelligent Negroes among the twelve and one-half
million natives of German Africa [and the] twelve million civilized Negroes of
the United States." Direct governance of the colonies, he proposed, should be
assumed by an "International Commission [representing] not simply govern-
ments, but modern culture —science, commerce, social reform and religious
philanthropy." 50
This construction of the Pan-African mission reveals in yet another domain
Du Bois's confidence in the capacity of the race's elite elements to define and
realize the interests of the black world. Over at least the period of the first four
Pan-African Congresses after World War I, he maintained detailed proposals for
disposition of the colonial territories. The general program was directed in es-
sence toward "preparing" African colonial territories for self-determination
through gradual, supervised extension of autonomy. This gradual preparation
was to include participation in colonial administration by indigenous peoples, as
80 W. E. B. Du Boz's and American Political Thought
well as West Indian and North American "civilized" and "educated" blacks.
Education of the indigenous population was to be extended and with it the
franchise, which Du Bois considered the basis of political participation.
The key in the early program goes back to Du Bois's persisting distinction
between the "civilized" and the "uncivilized." The resolutions of the first Pan-
African Congress stated in part:
The natives of Africa must have the right to participate in the Government
as far as their development permits in conformity with the principle that the
Government exists for the natives, and not the natives for the government.
They should be allowed to participate in local and tribal government according
to ancient usage, and this participation shall gradually extend, as education and
experience proceeds, to the higher offices of State, to the end that, in time
Africa be ruled by consent of Africans. . . . Whenever it is proven that any
African natives are not receiving just treatment at the hands of any state or that
any state deliberately excludes its civilized citizens or subjects of Negro descent
from its body politic and culture, it shall be the duty of the League of Nations
to bring the matter to the civilized world. 51

The relevant social actors for Du Bois in this period were blacks from North
America and the West Indies, and the indigenous elites generated by the colo-
nial system. Those groups represented within the African world the bearers of
civilization and were to function as the carriers of the Enlightenment to Africa.
Du Bois soon modified his position to explore what he perceived to be a
chauvinistic impulse toward Africa on the part of blacks in the Western hemi-
sphere and his own manifestations of that impulse. 52 He felt constrained to point
out that, while reiterating that Africa should be administered by blacks, that
position did not mean "that Africa should be administered by West Indians or
American Negroes." He declared that the latter groups "have no more right to
administer Africa for the native Africans than native Africans have to administer
America." 53 Moreover, he contended that qualified opportunity did exist in Af-
rica for Western blacks "with capital, education and some technical or agricul-
tural skills, who have the courage of pioneers, good health, and are willing to
rough it," but that the continent "has no place for empty-headed laborers . . .
sick people or old people or orators or agitators." 55
The mediation of leadership by Western blacks was made clearly unneces-
sary for decolonization in Africa; as Du Bois reflected in 1961:
Africans began to demand more voice in colonial government and the Second
World War had made their cooperation so necessary to Europe that at the end
actual and unexpected freedom for African colonies was in sight.
Moreover, there miraculously appeared Africans able to take charge of
these governments. American Negroes of former generations had always calcu-
lated that when Africa was ready for freedom, American Negroes would be
ready to lead them. But the event was quite opposite. The African leaders
proved to be Africans. . . . American Negroes for the most part showed neither
the education nor the aptitude for the magnificent opportunity which was sud-
denly offered. Indeed, it now seems that Africans may have to show American
Negroes the way to freedom.' 6
 Three Confusions about Du Bois 81
Still, the civilizing mission remained, and in this respect the significance of
Du Bois's Pan-Africanism as it faced Africa lay in the way that he saw it as an
element of a modernization strategy. From that perspective, the most efficient
governmental or social unit among a common group is that which is able to
administer to and plan for the entire group, thereby minimizing duplication of
effort, contradiction in policy, and other forms of social waste. As part of devel-
opment into the "modern world," to the extent that Africa could be seen as a
basically common cultural unit, the requirements of rational social administra-
tion would suggest combination and unification.
This rational-utilitarian view was enhanced by Du Bois's embedded teleol-
ogy and theory of history, which emphasized harmonious social organization
and progress through advances of civilization. Precolonial Africa appeared in
his reconstruction as a series of societies moving in lockstep toward collective
teleological goals. Similarly, he paid little attention to likely internal conflicts
within his contemporary African unity,5' and took for granted both the existence
and progressive function of a coordinating apparatus, a continental state. Indeed
he maintained:

If Africa unites, it will be because each part, each nation, each tribe gives up a
part of its heritage for the good of the whole. That is what union means; that
is what Pan-Africa means. . . . When the tribe becomes a union of tribes, the
individual tribe surrenders some part of its freedom to the paramount
tribe. . . .
When the nation arises, the constituent tribes, clans and groups must each
yield power and some freedom to the demands of the nation or the nation dies
before it is born. Your local tribal, much-loved languages must yield to the few
world tongues which serve the largest number of people and promote under-
standing and world literature. 58

This statement reflects the predatory and solipsistic optimism that arises
from the rational-administrative outlook. The flippancy with which Du Bois dis-
patched intra-African particularity not only indicates the naivete typically shown
by the relatively more homogeneous Afro-Americans and West Indians concern-
ing such matters, but also demonstrates the centrality of the universalist and
homogenizing assumptions of social engineering in his thinking. The necessity
of sacrificing provincial languages to the "world tongues" indicates the commit-
ment of Du Bois's Pan-Africanism to an ultimately universalist goal. Where can
history as increasing administrative rationality lead, other than to a united and
coordinated world? Provincialisms that retard such development must be jetti-
soned in favor of progress.
The universalist grounding of his Pan-Africanism is hardly only an inference
from Du Bois's text; for, in his own words, "ftjhe broader the basis of a culture,
the wider and freer its conception, the better chance it has for the survival of its
best elements. This is the basic hope of world democracy. . . . Peace and toler-
ance is the only path to eternal progress. Europe can never survive without Asia
and Africa as free and interrelated civili/ations in one world."' 9 Another aspect
of his Pan-Africanism is of interest here. Pair-Africanism for Du Bois, in addition
82 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
to being part of a strategy for decolonization and modernization in Africa, also
represented a mechanism for constitution of an international black elite and
its consciousness: "Pan-Africa means intellectual understanding and cooperation
among all groups of Negro descent in order to bring about at the earliest possi-
ble time the industrial and spiritual emancipation of the Negro peoples."60 One
of the planks in his program for Africa in the early 1920s, in addition to promot-
ing education among the natives and "industry, commerce and credit among
black groups," entailed bringing together "for periodic conference and acquain-
tanceship the leading Negroes to the world and their friends." 61
In this respect, his Pan-Africanism is directed more toward the United States
than toward Africa. From the beginning of his involvement with and agitation
for Africa, Du Bois, unlike others in the Pan-African pantheon, granted the
fundamental Americanness of Afro-Americans. He clarified his position early:
"Once for all let us realize that we are Americans. . . . there is nothing so
indigenous, so completely 'made in America' as we. Yet he saw Africa as
offering "a chance for the colored American to emigrate and to go as a pioneer
to a country which must, sentimentally at least, possess for him the same fascina-
tion as England does for Indian-born Englishmen,"63 and Pan-Africanism as a
mechanism for development of a consciousness among the Afro-American elite
appropriate to the historical tasks required of it:

I tried to say to the American Negro . . . there are certain things you must do
for your own survival and self-preservation. You must work together and in
unison; you must evolve and support your own social institutions; you must
transform your attack from the foray of self-assertive individuals to the massed
might of an organized body. You must put behind your demands, not simply
American Negroes, but West Indians and Africans, and all the colored races of
the world.64

Pan-Africanism, then, was for Du Bois largely a means. Although he built

his Pan-Africanist vision on a foundation that stressed the spiritual ties binding
people of African descent, Pan-Africanism constituted for him at most a basis for
wide-scale racial organization within the context of a global pluralism. In this
sense, his Pan-Africanism differed from the emigrationist-redemptionist orienta-
tion of Garveyism and the millenarian-tinged revolutionism of the post—Black
Power American Pan-Africanism.65 Unlike those other tendencies, Du Bois saw
Pan-Africanism as an expression among blacks of the developmental logic of
modern society. Although, for example, he suggested that the institutional foun-
dation for a self-determining Africa would be a "socialism founded on old Afri-
can communal life," he pointed out at the same instant that "Pan-African social-
ism seeks the welfare state in Black Africa."66 Perhaps as a reflection of the
cavalier or superficial attitudes about ethnic culture that abound in Afro-
American thought, or perhaps as another expression of his "two-ness," at the
same time that Du Bois called for "sacrifice" of inlra-African particularity on the
altar of progress, he insisted that "Pan-Africa will seek to preserve its own past
history."67 Pan-Africa ultimately was to Du Bois the African form of pluralist
 Three Confusions about Du Bois 83
participation in a global socialist order that he saw as the highest expression of
rational social organization. Du Bois assured that "[gradually, every state is com-
ing to this concept of its aim."68 It is at this point that Du Bois's Pan-Africanism
converged with his conception of socialism.

Socialism

The place of socialism in Du Bois's thinking is another area about which con-
ventional wisdom is not as conventional as it appears; everyone agrees that Du
Bois died a socialist, but few agree on when he became one or on what kind of
socialist he was. Broderick, for example, sees Du Bois as having made "advances
to socialism in 1907, although in early 1908 he affirmed his attachment to the
principles of the Republican party."69 Elliott M. Rudwick's view is less ambiva-
lent: He contends that by the earlier year Du Bois was under socialist influence;
and to support his claim, Rudwick adduces Du Bois's advocacy of "cooperation
in capital and labor, wider distribution of capital."70 Alan Sigmund Cywar, how-
ever, maintains that in the early part of this century Du Bois advocated a sort of
leftwing Social Darwinism,71 and that his "decisive swing to the left would begin
to become evident in the pages of the Crisis only after World War I."7Z Eugene
C. Holmes asserts that as "a materialist, it was only natural that ethically and
economically Dr. Du Bois's sympathies were always along socialist lines of think-
ing."73 Bernard Fonlon74 and Julius Lester75 agree that Du Bois opted for social-
ism in 1907, whereas W. Alphaeus Hunton 76 and Truman Nelson 77 emphasize
Du Bois's commitment to socialism in general. Gerald Home claims that Du
Bois was a socialist "all of his adult life."78
A problem common to all these interpretations is the failure to account for
the mercurial content that the term socialism had in the United States in the
early twentieth century. Indeed, among students who address the issue of Du
Bois's early socialism, only Manning Marable and Wilson J. Moses take into
account the ambiguity of the label during the years before 1917 in the United
States. Marable maintains, correctly, that when Du Bois joined the Socialist
party in 1911, the "decision did not mark any significant turn to radicalism,"
and he suggests that the socialism with which Du Bois identified was the conser-
vative variety endorsed by Charles Edward Russell, Mary White Ovington, Jane
Addams, and other members of the NAACP board rather than the radical ten-
dency of Eugene Debs and Bill Haywood. Moses, also noting the preferences
of other NAACP socialists, sees Du Bois as having "toyed with the idea of non-
revolutionary white-collar socialism of the domestic variety,"80 and he links Du
Bois's socialism and his technocratic-elitist commitments.81
Socialism was identified variously with support of trusts, public ownership
of utilities, corporate regulation, municipal reform, trade unionism, industrial
unionism, or any of a myriad of other social and economic policies.82 Determi-
nation of whether Du Bois, or any other agent active at that time, should be
considered a socialist, therefore, depends on which of the variety of socialist
84 W. E. B. Du Boz's and American Political Thought
tendencies the critic takes as authentically socialist. Either that or the identifica-
tion is so vague as to tell us very little.
This impasse of defining socialist authenticity, an intellectually feckless ac-
tivity, can be circumvented. James Gilbert's focus on collectivism as an over-
arching rubric which has encompassed a number of industrial-era American
ideologies (see chapter 2) is helpful in this regard.83 This vantage point illumi-
nates and subsumes theoretical continuities that unite the various social pro-
grams advocated by twentieth-century reform-oriented intellectuals, whether
they embraced Marxism, other sorts of socialism, or progressivism.
Although he observes that socialist and progressivist visions are in retrospect
often difficult to distinguish theoretically, Gilbert contends that socialism consti-
tutes a central theme around which other collectivist ideologies have oscil-
lated.84 Therein lies the strength of his formulation for the present purpose;
notwithstanding Gilbert's attempt to differentiate Marxism qualitatively from
other collectivist ideologies, collectivism suggests a way around the basically
scholastic and probably futile debate over when and whether Du Bois became
a Marxist or any other kind of socialist.86
Argument concerning whether "Marxist" influences on Du Bois's thought
were dominant, or whether Pan-Africanism or non-Marxist socialism constituted
the central orienting principle of his ideas, is beside the point. The ensemble of
the Marxist, non-Marxist socialist, and Pan-African perspectives converged on a
distinctive response to elements of the development of industrial capitalism as a
national and global system in the twentieth century. The future of Du Bois's
Pan-Africa was broadly socialist; his consumer-cooperative organization likewise
was a step toward realization of an integral collectivist society, and official Marx-
ism represents perhaps the apotheosis of collectivism.87 In this sense, the collec-
tivist perspective offers the advantage of dissolving superficial antagonisms
among the strategies toward which Du Bois was drawn by locating common
properties that highlight their status as ideological and programmatic elabora-
tions of a coherent if not systematically articulated political outlook.
In considering these programmatic themes in relation to the problem of
political agency, Du Bois's texts express an assumption of the rational movement
of historical forces along a continuum of progress, the terminus of which is
already knowable, at least in general terms. Thus socialism, defined as "the
assertion by the community of its right to control business and industry; the
denial of the old assumption that public business can ever be a private enter-
prise," 88 stands as the unequivocal long-term goal of social development. That
Du Bois saw his socialist ideal as a point on the continuum along which Western
society is advancing ideologically is hinted at both by his insistence that the
path to socialism must not be led by proletarians, who are untutored and with-
out the capacity for making judgments about the thrust of civilization, and by
his view that transformation must be sought by evolutionary rather than disrup-
tive means.90
He observed shortly after World War I that the great question facing the
world concerned distribution of the wealth created by modern technique, that
 Three Confusions about Du Bois 85
is, the issue of rationalizing the distributive system of large-scale capitalism.91
Socialism, in this 1920 perspective, constituted the challenge to private owner-
ship in "property and tools" and the call for elevation of need over the perqui-
sites of power in distribution of the social product.92 Moreover, he condemned
monopoly primarily because of its irrationality, for under monopoly "it is not
the Inventor, the Manager, and the Thinker who today are reaping the great
rewards of industry, but rather the Gambler and the Highwayman."9' His pro-
posal for rectification was an interesting amalgam of work ethic and social ratio-
nalization—perhaps indicative of the behavioral preferences of intellectuals or
other petit bourgeois. Du Bois wrote, "Present Big Business—that Science of
Human wants — must be perfected by eliminating the price paid for waste,
which is Interest, and for Chance, which is Profit, and making all income a
personal wage for service rendered by the recipient."94 The fact that monopoly
hegemony refuses to acknowledge technical interests sufficiently should not be
taken lightly:

Today the scientific and ethical boundaries of our industrial activities are not
in the hands of scientists, teachers, and thinkers; nor is the intervening opportu-
nity for decision left in the control of the public whose welfare such decisions
guide. On the contrary, the control of industry is largely in the hands of a
powerful few, who decide for their own good and regardless of the good of
others.95

The problem of twentieth-century capitalism was, therefore, that its laudable

technical capacities had developed beyond the rational limits of its institutional
steering apparatus.96 The task before the world, then, was to move to correct
the disjunction. However, that charge implies two questions, who and how. Du
Bois, the careful analyst, strained with only limited success to answer those ques-
tions.
Du Bois early discarded the proletariat as the lever of social transformation.
He was left without an effective agency even as he proclaimed class struggle to
be a reality.97 Although his writings toward the latter years of the interwar period
are dotted increasingly with references to the need for democracy to "fan out
from politics to industrial life,"98 he persisted in distinguishing—apparently with
such self-assurance as to feel no need to argue the matter—a "logical social
hierarchy" from one that can be penetrated only by wealth, with the strong
implication that only the latter is unacceptable. Moreover, it is suggestive in
this regard that the Soviet Union was his enthusiastically held model for the
vision of economic democracy. Perception of Russia as being in the lead "for
realizing industrial democracy in the world" 100 was not uncommon among in-
tellectuals in the United States, especially before the Stalin trials.101 Du Bois
retained his enthusiasm, however; he noted, as World War II drew to a close,
that "Russia . . . still is to my mind, the most hopeful land in the modern
world." 102
Certain indications of how he would resolve the agency problem arc sprin-
kled throughout Du Bois's interwar texts. Notwithstanding his charge that the
86 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
"workers of the world must have voice not only on conditions of work but also
as to what kinds of goods shall be produced and what methods of production
used,"103 he maintained that "distribution of wealth and services by plan, em-
phasizing ability and deserts, and especially the public weal; and guarding man-
kind from ignorance and disease must be a primary object of civilization."104
A tension exists between his two stated concerns, a tension that does not
surface for direct consideration in his writing. Even though Du Bois by no
means lacked sophistication in his critical attention to socialism,105 he never
seemed aware (or at least was not sufficiently troubled to engage the issue for-
mally) of the intrinsic tension between centralized planning—as the expression
of macrological, technical interests—and democratic decision making.
His focus on the Soviet model, it turns out, was not fortuitous. Du Bois's
agency revealed its identity through comparison with its Bolshevik confreres. In
discussing steps necessary to build a cooperative economy in the Afro-American
community, he broke the spell of invisibility. The "Talented Tenth," the natural
leadership of the black population, he tells us, must "subject" black labor to
its guidance in the same way that survival of the Soviet Union "involves vast
regimentation, unquestioning obedience until the cumbersome superhuman
economic machine can run in rhythmic order."106 The invisibility of the
agency, then, appears to be more a matter of class unconsciousness than of
simple confusion on Du Bois's part. Moreover, it indicates an essential continu-
ity in his view of socialism even through his period of association with Bolshe-
vism.
Writing after he finally had joined the Communist Party (USA) (CPUSA)
and left the United States permanently, he responded to the question, What is
socialism?: "It is a disciplined economy and political organization in which the
first duty of a citizen is to serve the state; and the state is not a selected aristoc-
racy, or a group of self-seeking oligarchs who have seized wealth and power. No!
The mass of workers with hand and brain are the ones whose collective destiny
is the chief object of all effort." 107
For his part, Du Bois's dictatorship of the proletariat seems not to have been
too dissimilar from industrial democracy:

Thus it is clear today that the salvation of American Negroes lies in socialism.
They should support all measures and men who favor the welfare state; they
should vote for government ownership of capital in industry; they should favor
strict regulation of corporations or their public ownership; they should vote to
prevent monopoly from controlling the press and the publishing of opinions.
They should favor public ownership and control of water, electric, and atomic
power; they should stand for a clean ballot, the encouragement of third parties,
independent candidates, and the elimination of graft and gambling on televi-
sion and even in churches.
The question of the method by which the socialist state can be achieved
must be worked out by experiment and reason and not by dogma. Whether or
not methods which were right and clear in Russia or China fit our circum-
stances is for our intelligence to decide. 108
 Three Confusions about Du Bois 87
Consonant with Gilbert's general critique of collectivism, Du Bois's social-
ism and his gravitation toward the CPUSA orbit indicate not so much the as-
sumption of revolutionary consciousness at eighty years of age as the conver-
gence of Soviet and New Deal ideological stances in the postwar period.
American Communism reached its nadir during those years and was forced in-
creasingly to tail behind ordinary civil rights and other popular front-type pro-
grams, only by then without much "boring from within." 109 Du Bois's affinity
for the Communist agenda was one of the movement's few bright spots after
1948; for Du Bois, who had been ostracized from mainstream black institutions,
the CP was a port in an endless storm.110
From the collectivist perspective, Du Bois did not really have to move much
at all from the positions he had held for five decades to accommodate his Com-
munist turn. As his continuing enthusiasm in the pages of the Crisis over the
Russian Revolution indicated, he had always felt a certain fascination with Bol-
shevism's Jacobinist element. 111 Furthermore, given the exigencies of the new
atomic age and the consuming weakness of the Communists in the United
States, Du Bois was not required even to revise his long-standing commitments
to nonviolence and reason as the means of social transformation. He maintained
in 1946: "We cannot escape the clear fact that what is going to win in this world
is reason if this ever becomes a reasonable world. The careful reasoning of the
human mind backed by the facts of science is the one salvation of man. The
world, if it resumes its march toward civilization, cannot ignore reason."112
Again in 1957 he described his outlook thus:
I should call myself a Socialist, although that isn't a very definite term. But I
mean I believe in the welfare state. I believe that business should be carried
on not for private profit but tor public welfare. I believe in many of the steps
which are usually associated with socialism. . . . The Communist state will
come about by the increase of socialism, by the change in our attitude toward
each other, by making an individual American think of the progress of America
and the welfare of America rather than thinking of his own advantage over his
fellows, by ceasing to make the butt of our jokes the person who has suffered
injury . . . by the extension of sacrifice and of love and of sympathy for our
fellow beings. . . . I think it will come about democratically, not by violence
. . . the violence that accompanies revolution is not the revolution. The revo-
lution is the reform, is the change of thought, is the change of attitude on the
people who are affected by it.""3

Du Bois's Communist theoretical turn can be seen in part as an attempt to

resolve the perennial problem of agency in the American Left by revising his
expectations of the black elite as bearers of black collective subjectivity and
assigning transformative responsibilities to the international proletariat. His revi-
sion of the role assigned to the black middle class reflects disappointment at the
latter's Cold War opportunism, especially as his "Talented Tenth" failed to sup-
port him during his persecution. Similarly, the rise in prominence of the prole-
tariat in Du Bois's view docs not appear to indicate a qualitative shift in his
outlook. His faith did not rest with empirical proletarians inside lived history.
88 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
He noted that American workers, for example, were not up to their task.114 The
proletariat in which Du Bois had faith was a collective subject whose empirical
and historical embodiment was constituted in the Party. As a core principle of
Bolshevism, the Party stands above the proletariat, represents its collective will,
and thus constitutes a true universal subject. The Party, therefore, is in effect a
central planning directorate for the proletariat. When consideration is given that
the ruling circles within the Party are both centralized and composed over-
whelmingly of intellectuals and intelligentsia, it seems that in turning to the
proletariat as his last hope for realization of reason in the social world, Du Bois
in principle only rationalized and streamlined the commitment to the hege-
mony of the "new class" elite with which he had been identified over the previ-
ous half century.
In fact, the "radical" socialism which he articulated at the end of his life
differed little from the distributivist, technocratic variant he had embraced be-
fore the Great Depression. In 1945 he declared:
The social sciences have been remiss in not pointing out a natural realm of
dictatorship to which all government must bow; that is, the physical laws gov-
erning the constitution of materials, the application of natural force, and the
availability of certain techniques in using matter and force, which are all sub-
ject to law and cannot be changed by popular vote. Thus the production of
goods and to some degree their distribution is not a matter of argument, deci-
sion, or majority opinion, but an inexorable system which men must follow
under the trained guidance of managers and technicians if they would get the
necessary results.
On the other hand, questions as to the kind of goods to be produced and
their distribution among nations, classes, and individuals for consumption, and
most questions of personal service, as to both recipient and servant, are ques-
tions where democratic argument and democratic decision are absolutely nec-
essary to the widest human happiness.115

He was just as likely as in 1920 or even 1900 to link popular participation

to a meritocratic standard of competence, noting that "democracy has pro-
ceeded slowly because the mass of people do not have the intelligence, the
knowledge, or the experience to enable them to bear the responsibility of
rule." 116 Five years before his death he endorsed the conviction—ideologically
construed—that
government must increasingly be controlled by the governed; that the mass of
people, increasing in intelligence, with incomes sufficient to live a good and
healthy life, should control all government, and that they would be able to do
this by the spread of science and scientific technique, access to truth, the use of
reason, and freedom of thought and of creative impulse in art and literature. 117

His essentially Fabian view remained intact even as he was on the threshold
of joining the Communist Part}'. "As knowledge and efficiency increased," he
interpreted Marxism to promise, "democracy would spread among the masses
and they would become capable of conducting a modern welfare state." 118 And
 Three Confusions about Du Bois 89
he still used the term "socialism" to refer interchangeably to regimes and politi-
cal economies as disparate as Mao's China, India, Scandinavia, the U.S.S.R.,
and the welfare state.119

Conclusions

Du Bois's racial pluralism, his Pan-Africanism, and his socialism came together
around a distinct view of the world. Socialism was desirable for Du Bois ulti-
mately because it promised to realize the principles of administrative rationality
and meritocratic equality. Pan-Africanism similarly was a mechanism for ration-
alizing Africa's participation in an integral world order. His racial pluralism re-
flects a focus on elite-driven mass organization and group competition,120 and
this pluralism was for Du Bois an instrument for enhancing black membership
in an integral society. The coherence of Du Bois's political thought is disclosed
in its components' convergence around the unifying principles of the collectivist
outlook characteristic among reform-oriented industrial-era intellectuals.
Those principles, and the outlook that they indicate, seldom are discussed
directly in Du Bois's work, because they were generally shared through the dis-
cursive arena within which he operated. Because they were not controversial,
and were in fact part of the least common denominator of conventional attitudes
that made reform dialogue possible, there was little reason for those principles
ever to be discussed elaborately. Therefore, they are accessible to us, the inhabit-
ants of a different discursive situation, mainly through a reading that is sensitive
to his texts' location in relation to their audiences and the shared understandings
that cement that relation. Still, those organizing principles are not totally invisi-
ble in Du Bois's writing, as I have shown; they often have been obscured or
simply ignored by analysts more concerned to project their theoretical or ideo-
logical programs onto Du Bois at the expense of his own.
It is more than likely, moreover, that similar principles have undergirded
Afro-American political discourse throughout the industrial era. This certainly
seems to be the case in the famed Washington-Du Bois controversy, in which
both sides demonstrate commitment to a project of "Americanizing" the rank-
and-file black population by subordinating it to the imperatives of industrializa-
tion. 121 In any event, the search for structuring assumptions at the base of black
social thought could disclose important meanings characteristically obscured in
narrowly textualist or superficially biographical analyses of writers' views on such
theoretically pregnant issues as intraracial stratification, the nature of leadership
or spokesmanship, and definition of community. Perhaps a useful heuristic is
the simple question, seldom asked of black political figures, What sort of society
would they create if they could restructure the world according to their own
designs?
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 7

Du Bois's "Double Consciousness"

Race ana Gender in Progressive-Era

American Thought

After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton
and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil,
and gifted with second-sight in this American world, —a world which
yields him no true self-consciousness, hut only lets him see himself
through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation,
this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self
through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a
world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels
his two-ness, —an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two
unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose
dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
-W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

T HE EPIGRAPH to this chapter is probably—excepting perhaps his statement

designating the "color line" as the twentieth century's distinctive problem —
the most widely known and most frequently cited statement of any in Du Bois's
entire corpus.1 Indeed, it is quite likely one of the most familiar in all of Afro-
American letters. The passage's enduring resonance derives from its verisimili-
tude in expressing a core lament of the Afro-American condition. It has been a
distinctly attractive template for the articulation of both interpretive and substan-
tive, academic and hortatory arguments concerning the race's status. For that
reason, Du Bois's double-consciousness construct and the ways it has figured
into subsequent intellectual work warrant special attention. In this chapter I
shall consider the significance of the two-ness theme by examining the main
approaches that scholars and other commentators have taken to it and by pro-
posing a different, more richly contextualized perspective that situates Du Bois
within the matrix of Progressive-era intellectual life.
Specifically, I argue that Du Bois's double consciousness was embedded
most significantly in the neo-I .amarckian thinking about race, evolution, and
social hierarchy that prevailed in a strain of reform-oriented, fin-de-siecle Ameri-
can social science. To that extent, 1 demonstrate that, in appropriating the no-

91
92 W. E. B. Du Boz's and American Political Thought
tion, sundry intellectuals misread Du Bois ahistorically and instead project their
own thinking onto him. In the process I comment on certain key conceptual
and methodological issues bearing on interpretation in the study of Afro-
American thought.
The "double-consciousness" or "two-ness" image has been a remarkably, but
variously, evocative characterization of the black American condition for several
generations of observers identified with widely different intellectual and political
projects. These appropriations have clustered, roughly chronologically, around
three ideological programs: an integrationist-therapeutic motiv from the 1920s
to the mid-1960s, a nationalist-therapeutic one from the mid-1960s to the early
1980s, and an academic race-celebratory one since.
August Meier, for example, has maintained that in the double-
consciousness image Du Bois more explicitly than anyone else "revealed the
impact of oppression and of the American creed in creating ambivalent loyalties
toward race and nation in the minds of American Negroes."2 Harold R. Isaacs
similarly credited Du Bois with having crystallized recognition that "Negro iden-
tity has remained blurred, obscured behind the veil of alienation, ambivalence,
confusion, and duality."3 In an article first published in 1923, Robert Ezra Park
cited it as an expression of "the enigma of the Negro's existence . . . how to be
at once a Negro and a citizen."4 For Park's Chicago colleague Everett V.
Stonequist, it captured "with eloquence and poignancy . . . [t]he psychological
dilemma" of the northern mulatto, whose "identification with the white race has
been more complete, with the consequence that failure of full acceptance has
been more disturbing" than for the southern mulatto.5 St. Glair Drake focused
on Du Bois's imagery of the veil as having disclosed a generically black "sense
of isolation from 'the mainstream' . . . [which] not only generates distorted per-
ceptions of the total society and occasionally bizarre definitions of situations,
but . . . also results in cognitive crippling." 6 Perhaps most significantly in this
"mark of oppression" mode, Gunnar Myrdal (see my discussion of Myrdal in
chapter 1) ended his revealing "Negro Popular Theories" chapter by quoting
Du Bois to underscore the tragedy of the "dual pull [which] is the correspon-
dence in the Negro world to what we for the white world have called the Ameri-
can Dilemma," that is, the tension between the reality of race relations and the
"American Creed."7
With development of the Black Power stance and militant ethnic pluralism
in the late 1960s, views of the normative significance of Du Bois's two-ness
image began to shift, though it retained its force as a metaphor for a putatively
collective Afro-American condition. Robert Blauner enlisted Du Bois on behalf
of an argument for radical status group pluralism by first defining "existential
'two-ness' " as a dilemma posed by coexisting imperatives of integration and
nationalism and then generalizing the phenomenon to all "third world people
in the United States."8 Charles Valentine, less flamboyantly, extrapolated from
Du Bois's image to a more elaborate social scientific notion of how Afro-
American ethnicity operates in the American cultural system.9 Similarly, Carol
B. Stack cited the image as a definitive expression of the "conflicting and war-
ring identities between being a Black and an American in a white world"; after
 Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" 93
observing that subsequent black artists and social scientists had drawn frequently
on this "theme of a black identity and the conflict between racism and the
ideology of the American Dream," she construed it as an undergirding premise
of contemporary scholarship —including Valentine's —attacking claims that
there is a debilitating "culture of poverty." Stack sought primarily and insistently
to authenticate a notion of autonomous black culture and to rescue it from the
rhetoric of pathology; at the same time, she attempted to draw moral force and
empathy from a Myrdalian focus on the demoralizing effects of the conflict
between aspirations and opportunities.10 Robert Staples, however, pushed nor-
mative revision of the image further by elevating it to an epistemic principle;
he adduced Du Bois's formulation also in amending Valentine's "biculturation"
concept explicitly to stress positive valorization and foregrounding of the black
pole.11 Similarly, Harold M. Baron accepted the two-ness image as an accurate
representation of black life and defined "black pride" and "black consciousness"
rhetoric as assertions of the "validity of Du Bois' darker self" against those who
"see the damage wrought by oppression without being able to recognize the
strength born amidst suffering." 12
Nathan I. Huggins indicated a still sharper turn toward celebratory race
consciousness in his use of two-ness. He noted that Du Bois's "remarkable and
profound statement fails only to make explicit an important corollary: this 'dou-
ble consciousness' opens to the Negro—through his own quest and passion—a
unique insight into the vulnerable and unfulfilled soul of that other world; a
possibility which, once grasped, liberates one forever from the snarls of that
other world's measuring tape." 13 For George E. Kent proper celebration and
liberation of black authenticity derived not so much from transcendent insight
as from a more emphatic "dissociation of sensibility from constraining defini-
tions enforced by white middle-class culture"; Kent viewed that project, which
he grounded in the Harlem Renaissance, as an entailment of Du Bois's recogni-
tion of a "black selfhood . . . under threat from the black's double conscious-
ness: the consciousness enforcing white definitions upon him; and the part that
desired a full embrace of the universe."14 Others, such as Larry Neal, John
O'Neal, and Hoyt W. Fuller, after affirming Du Bois's characterization, took the
next logical step and called for rejection of American identity altogether.15 By
1972, Houston A. Baker Jr. even had decided that "the sense of 'two-ness' that
Du Bois handles so skillfully in The Souls of Black Folk is fast disappearing as
cultural nationalism grows stronger"; Baker reported happily that the "doubts,
speculations, and reflections are falling into a clear and ordered pattern, and we
realize that America is something apart. . . . The numbing electric shocks are
at an end, and we are feeling completely well."16
Another shift in the mode of appropriating Du Bois's passage as a universal-
istic claim about empirical Afro-American life occurred mainly over the 1980s.
This modification seems linked to the institutionalization of Afro-American
Studies as an academic specialty and the decline of points of reference for an
aggressive nationalist politics outside the university—to the limited extent, that
is, that the nationalism of the 1960s and 1970s ever had generated an indepen-
dent base for intellectual activity in the first place. While continuing to cele-
94 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
brate a distinctive blackness, these recent appropriations are more elaborately
learned than the earlier nationalist views. Even though the interpretive stances
to which Du Bois is annexed remain shaped by a language that treats racial or
cultural identity and politics more or less interchangeably, occasionally hinting
of Kulturkampf, calls for elimination of alien elements have all but disappeared.
Resolution of the duality appears —if at all —as synthesis and distant objective
rather than as immediate, cathartic imperative. Indeed, the double conscious-
ness tends to be seen naturalistically, as an essential fact of Afro-American exis-
tence in the here and now.
Sterling Stuckey's career spans the two periods, and he was identified with
the earlier nationalist scholarship. Although he credits Du Bois with the "im-
portant advance" of recognizing black Americans' two-ness as a "crisis [that]
should be identified and treated," Stuckey's interest lies more in "distinguishing
between that which is African and that which is American in the black ethos"
than in wholesale purging of influences of the "larger society."17 Manning Mara-
ble, showing his peculiar inventiveness, treats Du Bois's formulation as a creative
tension: "the basis of the struggle to attack institutional racism, racial segregation
and all forms of inequality, as well as of that internal collective effort to engen-
der cultural and social structures specific to the Afro-American experience."18
Bettye J. Gardner and Waldo E. Martin also simply accept the reality of the
condition and note its salubrious entailments. For Gardner, blacks' two-ness
"gave rise to the study and teaching of Afro-American history."19 Martin charac-
terizes it in pluralist terms, as a "historic tension between their racial and na-
tional identities [which] . . . most blacks have sought to reconcile . . . through
humanism and assimilationism."20 Even Maulana Karenga, the old nationalist
warhorse, has padded the bromides onto which he grafts Du Bois with a rhetoric
drawn from ego psychology and references to Marx, Hegel, and Gramsci, con-
ceding that resolution of the alleged problem of "defective . . . derivative and
split consciousness" lies in a millennial future. 21
This revised focus on Du Bois's dictum reflects in two closely related ways
the recent process of incorporation of Afro-Americanist interests into mainstream
academic life. First, despite their tendency to employ an evocatively politicized
terminology of "emancipation," "liberation," or "struggle," the contemporary ap-
propriators usually advance arguments that are more purely contemplative than
those of their predecessors. They do not intend to inform national social-policy
debates or to influence public opinion about race relations, as did the propo-
nents of double consciousness prior to the civil rights—Black Power era. Nor are
their arguments strategically oriented toward enhancing more radically opposi-
tional or otherwise counterhegemonic agendas outside the university, as was the
norm in the 1960s and '70s. Second, the double-consciousness notion is typi-
cally called upon to help articulate relatively complex interpretations with pre-
tenses to high theoreticism, in what amounts to a blackening of global social
theory and/or a legitimation of Afro-American intellectual activity in its terms.
That is, the insurgent objectives to which Du Bois is affixed —notwithstanding
genuflections toward more secular concerns —center on assertion of black pres-
 Du Boz's's "Double Consciousness" 95
ence within hermetically constituted communities of academic discourse. Luc-
ius Outlaw credits Du Bois with identifying a "continuing confusion with re-
spect to our identity" and goes on from that point to present a critical
explication of "various complexes of thought and praxis . . . which have guided
African American struggles through the years."22 However, that critique is actu-
ally only an instrument of another objective: to understand "particular African-
American intellectual legacies as philosophy and to grasp them as such in their
racial/ethnic particularity." This in turn will pose "major challenges to the hege-
monic disciplinary/discursive practices that have dominated European and Euro-
American philosophy . . . [make] a lie of the denials and disregard of the exis-
tence of African-American philosophy and [force] a redefinition of 'philosophy'
through an extension of its denotative range."2' Robert C. Williams also har-
nesses Du Bois to an effort to define a "black philosophy"; Williams declares
that recognizing Afro-Americans' double consciousness "is indispensable for ar-
ticulating the totality of the American—and the black—experience" and is
therefore "relevant and necessary to any viable program in American philoso-
phy."2 Thomas F. Slaughter Jr. takes double consciousness, which he accepts
as an empirically accurate description of a collective racial state ("Blackness
begins in double-consciousness"), as an entry point to demonstrating that phe-
nomenology as a "species of philosophical description tends primarily to disclose
for us what is already before us in a new and sometimes deeper light." From
that vantage point:

double-consciousness is precisely the expression of the contradiction posed by

this immovable immediacy of my lived-body on the one hand, and the society's
apparently irresistible compulsion, on the other, to fashion my physiognomic
degradation. My duality of consciousness is the psycho-spatial dynamic span-
ning the socio-physical gap between my own sense of me and the culturally
contrived ignominy surrounding my body.25

Slaughter, who does not tie his exercise to intellectual ambitions concerning the
status of a black philosophy, expresses in this essay no particular nonacademic
objective at all. His apparently exclusive intention is to reinterpret a familiar
construction of Afro-American psychological orientation in the language of phe-
nomenology of the body.
Like Slaughter, Cornel West enlists Du Bois in an effort to recast common-
place ideas about the black American condition within the rhetorical structures
of Continental high social theory; he also seeks to authenticate or found (West's
claims repeatedly confound the two objectives) an "Afro-American philosophy."
Du Bois's formulation is a cornerstone of the latter enterprise. West maintains
that Du Bois "eloquently described . . . the dialectic of black self-recognition
[that] oscillated between being in America but not of it, from being black natives
to black aliens." He trumps the double-consciousness image, however, by as-
serting its location within a "broader dialectic of being American yet feeling
European, of being provincial but yearning for British cosmopolitanism, of be-
ing at once incompletely civilized and materially prosperous, a genteel Brahmin
96 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
amid uncouth conditions." In the breeze of West's elevated perspective, there-
fore, two-ness is only part of the story. Black Americans have experienced a
"triple crisis of self-recognition . . . comprised of African appearance and un-
conscious cultural mores, involuntary displacement to America without status,
and American alienation from the European ethos complicated through domi-
nation by incompletely European Americans."26 This phenomenon is linked
historically to a "process of cultural syncretism which combined indigenous Afri-
can and provincial American life." 27 Thus:

Afro-American philosophy expresses the particular American variation of Euro-

pean modernity that Afro-Americans helped shape in this country and must
contend with in the future. While it might be possible to articulate a competing
Afro-American philosophy based principally on African norms and notions, it is
likely that the result would be theoretically thin. Philosophy is cultural expres-
sion generated from and existentially grounded in the moods and sensibilities
of a writer entrenched in the life-worlds of a people. The life-worlds of Africans
in the United States are conceptually and existentially neither solely African,
European, nor American, but more the latter than any of the former.28

For West, two-ness—or, as he amends it, three-ness—constitutes the immutable

core of black American existence. His intellectual program, therefore, is not
directed toward overcoming that condition, and its secular ramifications are re-
mote and inchoate. Instead, despite a copious sprinkling of political cliches, his
Afro-American philosophy's substantive agenda consists in quite conventionally
academic calls for "a genre of writing, a textuality, a mode of discourse"29 and
"genealogical inquiry into . . . cultural and linguistic roots . . . theoretical re-
construction and evaluation . . . [and] dialogical encounter."30
The practice of appropriating Du Bois's construct for a purely academic
program reaches its apotheosis in the work of Henry Louis Gates Jr. Gates folds
Du Bois into his theorization of a black literary-tradition linked by texts which
are "double-voiced in the sense that their literary antecedents are both white
and black novels."31 Gates takes up double consciousness—which as a "trope of
dualism figured initially in black discourse" in Du Bois's usage 32 —as an in-
stance of "tropological revision," that is, "the manner in which a specific trope
is repeated, with differences, between two or more texts."33 He is emphatically
clear that his intellectual project is hermetically academic; 34 he distances him-
self explicitly from those who would assert social activist criteria onto critical
scholarly endeavor and endorses the "attempt to take the 'mau-mauing' out of
the black literary criticism that defined the 'Black Aesthetic Movement' of the
sixties and transform it into a valid field of intellectual inquiry once again."
Though he understands Du Bois's two-ness as a "metaphor for the Afro-
American's peculiar psychology of citizenship,"36 Gates is concerned with it
only as a literary device. In fact, he annexes the entirety of The Souls of Black
Folk to his literary-theoretical project by contending that the volume is a " 'clas-
sic' not because of the phase of Du Bois's ideological development that it ex-
presses but because of the manner in which he expressed his ideology."
 Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" 97
The shifting patterns of appropriating Du Bois that I have outlined are
meaningful in several respects for the study of his thought, and, by extension,
for the study of Afro-American thought writ large. First, and most generally, the
fact and nature of the changes are evidence that the ways we relate to ideas in
the past are shaped by our own historicity. As E. H. Carr observed in the early
1960s, "[W]e can view the past, and achieve our understanding of the past, only
through the eyes of the present."38 We can see in each mode of appropriation
the stamp of debates and intellectual orientations that were vital or prevalent
among the appropriators' contemporaries. In each case Du Bois's formulation is
instrumentalized to support some current strategic argument about blacks and/
or race relations.
A second point of significance is a corollary of the first. That the types of
interpretation cluster in periods suggests their embeddedness in communities of
discourse, that is, in groups of scholars and others who share concern with an
overlapping set of problems or questions and thus constitute a universe of intel-
lectual exchange and debate.39 These discursive communities help to shape
scholarly and commonsensical interpretations of the past no less than of the
present. Their purposive orientation around a specific set of questions leads in-
vestigation of the past to push certain agents, ideas, and events into relief and
shades historical reconstruction with tones of present interests. From this van-
tage point, I have described modes of appropriating Du Bois's double conscious-
ness that are characteristic to three distinct discursive communities: (1) that orga-
nized around a broad pmblematique of racial adjustment or race relations
management with a vision of eventual assimilation of blacks into a putative
mainstream of American life; (2) that which came together in the late 1960s, in
tandem with the "Black Power" articulation of civil rights activism, around a
project of asserting the authenticity and legitimacy of Afro-American identity;
and (3) that constituted by post-segregation-era academics concerned primarily
with the status of blacks as personnel and subject matter within academic insti-
tutions and disciplines.
A third point has to do with a continuity among the modes of appropriation
and is therefore rather different from the first two. Each way of employing Du
Bois accepts as a settled fact what should be seen as at most a hypothesis and
then uses it as cornerstone and legitimation for a strategic program of one or
another sort. Annexation of Du Bois's exalted reputation gives an aura of non-
contingent truth to a proposition that might be controversial—that black Ameri-
cans universally (or even typically) experience bifurcated identity. Noting that
Du Bois declaimed on double consciousness at the turn of the century, further-
more, enhances the claim's apparent strength by positing its enduring reality.
Thus the references function to circumvent the need for argument and evi-
dence.
Finally, all the appropriations are naive about or inattentive with respect to
matters of history and context in rehearsing the two-ness formulation. They pre-
sume an unchanging black essence and do not consider the possibility that Du
Bois's construction bears the marks of historically specific discursive patterns,
98 W. E. B. Du Bofs and American Political Thought
debates, and objectives. That blindness, moreover, underlies the tendency to
treat Du Bois's text as clear fact and conceals from its appropriators their own
historical and discursive contingency.
Of course, partisans seeking to advance specific agendas predictably attempt
to validate them by asserting links to an estimable past. We cannot reasonably
expect such rhetorical strategies to accommodate that colonized past's integrity.
Their polemical thrust derives from prior certainty of direction and has only
instrumental objectives; to that extent their interest lies in grafting on images
from the past as legitimizing symbols of continuity, not in examining it as a
potential source of clarification of the present. The problem in this case, how-
ever, is that respectable scholarship is not less likely than self-conscious polemics
to approach history instrumentally, with dubiously anachronistic, uninterrogated
presumptions. This tendency toward naive anachronism handicaps the study of
Afro-American thought because, in denying the need for historical contextual-
ization, it removes an important source of interpretive discipline from discussion
of black thinking and debate.
Present interests do inescapably shape reconstruction of the past, and we
probably never can recover earlier mental states or authorial intentions with
definitive accuracy. Yet we can recognize that different interpretations are more
or less anachronistic, more or less careful and rich, more or less plausible as
representations of the content and structure of past ideas or controversies. Ac-
knowledgment that interpretation is contingent upon contemporary purposes
does not eliminate the need to confront past thinking as much as possible on its
own terms, and that need entails situating it within historical context. On that
score the appropriations of double consciousness have failed badly.
Certainly, not all who have drawn attention to Du Bois's image have taken
it as a simple reflection of empirical reality. Some, like Francis L. Broderick and
Jack B. Moore, have seen it as an expression of biographically or psychologically
idiosyncratic aspects of Du Bois's life and upbringing, even as they link the
image to larger structures of meaning.40 Others have taken the formulation as
illustrative of lines of thinking prominent within his black intellectual world.
Lawrence W. Levine connects it to a spreading fear among Du Bois's articulate
black contemporaries of the dangers of "an excessive degree of assimilation."41
For Wilson J. Moses, the double-consciousness idea helps to position Du Bois
in relation to the strain of civilizationist nationalism common among black intel-
lectuals at the end of the nineteenth century.42
Still others have emphasized locating the notion's relation to an American,
or more broadly Western, theoretical or philosophical canon. Robert Gooding-
Williams examines the two-ness passage as an expression of what he argues is
Du Bois's unconfessed Hegelianism. 43 Arnold Rampersad mines that passage for
possible traces of the thinking of James McCosh, William James, and Oswald
Kulpe; Rampersad goes on to note resonances of Johann Gottfried von Herder,
Ralph Waldo Emerson and other likely influences in The Souls of Black Folk.44
Werner Sollors connects Du Bois to Josiah Royce (and through Roycc to Ran-
dolph Bourne and Horace Kallcn) and more directly to Emerson, as well as to
 Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" 99
a broader set of American "ethnic writers."45 As part of an effort to situate him
within a larger "genealogy" of American pragmatism, Cornel West not only links
Du Bois to Emerson but also claims that he "attempts to turn the Emersonian
theodicy inside out" in The Souls of Black Folk.46
In principle, such attempts to locate Du Bois biographically or canonically
are legitimate, though the specific exemplars I have cited represent a sample of
uneven quality. (In addition, 1 should point out that my categorizations in some
cases do not do justice to complex scholarship that overlaps the boundaries
artificially imposed by my categories. Rampersad considers Du Bois's relation to
the ideas of Alexander Crummell and other of his black contemporaries, and
Moses is quite clear in tying his black subjects to the theories of Herder and
others.) Each can contribute in important ways to understanding Du Bois. The
standard determining the propriety of one or another approach—bracketing the
issue of relative success in formulation and execution— should be purposive.
That is, the different ways of focusing interpretation help to shed light on differ-
ent sorts of relationships, and the usefulness of any given approach is a function
of the connection between what it puts into relief and what we want to know at
a given point. Biographical or psychologistic interpretations, for example, cannot
help to locate Du Bois within a larger intellectual matrix, but such interpreta-
tions usually do not seek that objective.
The canonical interpretations, on the other hand, are more problematic.
While they do strive to place Du Bois in a broader context of ideas and certainly
can claim the legitimacy of well-established scholarly practice, they depend on
a notion of linear tradition that approaches discrete subjects principally as arti-
facts of the lineage. This approach biases interpretation in two directions: (1)
toward idealism, because it reifies and animates ideas, and (2) toward ahistor-
icism, because it is blind to the importance of changing social context in the
constitution of ideas and their meanings. These biases combine to divorce indi-
viduals' thought from their roles as social actors and to obscure the crucial point
that the same language can be used in quite different ways and to mean quite
different things. Specifically with respect to Du Bois, this canonical orienta-
tion—notwithstanding its possible merits for literary studies—produces a pro-
crustean form of account that is both so narrow as to court misrepresentation
and too thin to illuminate either the depth and complexity or the ideological
entailments of his links to larger patterns of American intellectual life and politi-
cal debate. This problem appears most clearly on interrogation of the assertion
that a trajectory of influences from Emerson and James lies behind Du Bois's
double-consciousness idea.

Emerson/James/Du Bois

Du Bois certainly was familial with Emerson, and his long-standing relationship
with and sense of intellectual indebtedness to James are well known. On exami-
nation, however, his specific usage of double consciousness seems to share little
100 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
with theirs besides the label. Emerson deployed the double-consciousness image
to affirm the existence of a higher spiritual, religious realm within the human
soul. He characterized the state as a "distinction of the inner and the outer self,"
assuring us that "within this erring passionate mortal self, sits a calm immortal
mind, whose powers I do not know, but it is stronger than I am. I seek counsel
of it in my doubts; I repair to it in my dangers; I pray to it in my undertakings.
It is the door of my access to the Father. It seems to me the face which the
Creator uncovers to his child."47 To Emerson the dilemma of double conscious-
ness was that "the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we
lead, really show very little relation to each other; never meet and measure each
other."48 Eventually, he found a solution to the dilemma, one that became grist
for Mary Baker Eddy, Norman Vincent Peale, and other "positive thinkers." He
proposed that one "must ride alternately on the horses of his private and public
nature." Thus, when afflicted with misery or discomfort, one should "rally on
his relation to the Universe, which his ruin benefits."49 Where Du Bois's notion
pointed to a specific product of black American experience, Emerson's indicated
a generic human condition, prior to and outside history. Where Du Bois's "two
thoughts, two souls, two unreconciled strivings" existed in the same domain,
Emerson's "two states of thought" represented different spheres of existence —
one superficial, the other profound. Where Du Bois's double consciousness
blocked its victim from attaining "true self-consciousness, but only lets him see
himself through the revelation of the other world," for Emerson "propounding"
it was the source of real self-knowledge and inner harmony.
James's connection to theories of double or multiple consciousness is more
complicated, but his ruminations on that theme scarcely more than Emerson's
resemble Du Bois's construction. Consciousness figured prominently for James
in three discrete concerns, though his views often seemed less than precise and
possibly inconsistent.'0 In his psychological work he grappled first of all with
the status of consciousness as a substantial entity. James reacted against idealist
psychology's claims that "mental states are composite in structure, made up of
smaller states conjoined"; he noted that those claims require the presence of
some empirically questionable "mind-stuff" or "mind-dust."'1 Instead, he was
more inclined to view consciousness as simply the product of selective attention
within a stream of experience. 52 It was in this context that he found the fields-
of-consciousness idea appealing.
The expression "field of consciousness" has but recently come into vogue in
the psychology books. Until quite lately the unit of mental life which figured
most was the single "idea," supposed to be a definitely outlined thing. But at
present psychologists are tending, first, to admit that the actual unit is more
probably the total mental state, the entire wave of consciousness or field of
objects present to the thought at any time; and, second, to see that it is impossi-
ble to outline this wave, this field, with any definiteness.
As our mental fields succeed one another, each has its centre of interest,
around which the objects of which we are less and less attentively conscious
 Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" 101
fade to a margin so faint that its limits are unassignable. Some fields are narrow
fields and some are wide fields. Usually when we have a wide field we rejoice,
for then we see masses of truth together, and often get glimpses of relations
which we divine rather than see, for they shoot beyond the field into still re-
moter regions of objectivity, regions which we seem rather to be about to per-
ceive than to perceive actually. At other times, of drowsiness, illness, or fatigue,
our fields may narrow almost to a point, and we find ourselves correspondingly
oppressed and contracted. 53

A second way in which consciousness was a focal point of James's psycho-

logical theory seems at least superficially more pertinent to Du Bois's two-ness
formulation. James was a serious student of research on paranormal and patho-
logical psychology, particularly the condition that "organized systems of
[association-1 paths can be thrown out of gear with others, so that the processes
in one system give rise to one consciousness, and those of another system to
another simultaneously existing consciousness."54 His interest was largely clini-
cal and physiological, reflective of a concern with brain functions and their
connections with mental activity. He concluded his consideration of cases of
various "perversions of personality":

I think we ought not to talk of the doubling of the self as if it consisted in the
failure to combine on the part of certain systems of ideas which usually do so.
It is better to talk of objects usually combined, and which are now divided
between the two "selves," in the hysteric and automatic cases in question. Each
of the selves is due to a system of cerebral paths acting by itself. If the brain
acted normally, and the dissociated systems came together again, we should get
a new affection of consciousness in the form of a third "self" different from the
other two, but knowing their objects together, as the result. 55

This focus on multiple personality, especially as demonstrated in psychic

phenomena, linked James's scientific and mystical interests. As Gerald E. Myers
notes, "discovery of the subconscious by abnormal psychology, psychical re-
search and mind-healing excited James for its potential applications; it promised
to revise traditional theories of mind and consciousness and possibly to explain
the phenomenon that James often hailed, the sudden upsurge of energy or re-
newed vitality which seems sometimes to invade us from out of nowhere."56 He
was open to the possibility that even the existence of ghosts was only a radical
extension of "the truth that the invisible segments of our minds are susceptible,
under rarely realized conditions, of acting and being acted upon by the invisible
segments of other conscious lives."57 He believed that "we all have potentially a
'subliminal' self, which may make at any time irruption into our ordinary lives."
While this subliminal self is minimally "only the depository of our forgotten
memoriesf,] at its highest we do not know what it is at all."58 In fact, he em-
braced the proposition that the subliminal consciousness could be a mechanism
for connecting with a larger extrapersonal or cosmic consciousness. He judged
views that locate the origins of consciousness in the brain to be inadequate
102 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
inasmuch as they require some principle like spontaneous generation. Instead,
James inclined to the belief that consciousness "does not have to be generated
cle novo in a vast number of places. It exists already, behind the scenes, coeval
with the world."59 Our capacities for transmitting that wider consciousness vary,
and the variation can be explained at least in part—following Gustav Fechner—
physiologically. The threshold of receptivity to transmission is lowered by "sense-
action," which makes the receiving brain more "pervious." The more lucid or
alert we are —the wider our field of consciousness—the lower the threshold for
penetration by the larger consciousness.
Throughout, James insistently sought to establish mystical speculation on
an empirical and physiological foundation. Even as he rhapsodized about "the
continuity of our consciousness with a mother sea" whose "exceptional waves
occasionally [pour| over the dam," he admitted, toughmindedly, that "the causes
of these odd lowerings of the brain's threshold still remain a mystery on any
terms." Nevertheless, he accepted the premise that a deeper, spiritual world
lay beyond ordinary human experience. He both attempted to demonstrate that
world's reality by scientific method and characterized those who denied its exis-
tence as narrow-minded dogmatists. His skepticism ultimately was subordinate
to— even an instrument of—his belief. That subordination is clearest in the
third context in which he engaged the issue of consciousness, his considerations
on religion. That is, moreover, the context in which he makes statements that
appear most similar to Du Bois's.
The notion of a divided self was central to James's religious ideas. He identi-
fied as "the general basis of all religious experience, the fact that man has a
dual nature, and is connected with two spheres of thought, a shallower and a
profounder sphere, in either of which he may learn to live habitually." 61 Having
recognized the "two lives, the natural and the spiritual," he declared flatly that
"we must lose the one before we can participate in the other.62 Despite the all-
or-nothing ring of that statement, James contended that the "normal evolution
of character" is a process of "straightening out and unifying . . . the comparative
chaos within us ... by forming a stable system of functions in right subordina-
tion." 63
Although he believed that we all necessarily establish some such system,
James maintained that some personalities seem naturally and effortlessly to dem-
onstrate harmonious equilibrium, the state which he called "healthy-
mindedness." He indicated a need to "distinguish between a more involuntary
and a more voluntary or systematic way of being healthy-minded. In its involun-
tary variety, healthy-mindedness is a way of feeling happy about things immedi-
ately. In its systematical variety, it is an abstract way of conceiving things as
good."64 Where involuntary or natural healthy-mindedness—the " 'once-born'
type of consciousness" — lives the condition in a way that appears "straight and
natural, with no element of morbid compunction or crisis," that which is
voluntary chooses to construe "good as the essential and universal aspect of
being [and] deliberately excludes evil from its field of vision."66 The healthy-
minded character tends toward a religion:
 Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" 103
in which good, even the good of this world's life, is regarded as the essential
thing for a rational being to attend to. This religion directs him to settle his
scores with the more evil aspects of the universe by systematically declining to
lay them to the heart or make much of them, by ignoring them in his reflective
calculations, or even, on occasion, by denying outright that they exist. Evil is a
disease, and worry over disease is itself an additional form of disease, which
only adds to the original complaint. Even repentance and remorse, affections
which come in the character of ministers of good, may be but sickly and re-
laxing impulses. The best repentance is to up and act for righteousness, and
forget that you ever had relations with sin.67

In contrast to those who naturally exhibit or cultivate the healthy-minded

outlook, James noted, another character type—the "morbid-minded" or "sick
soul" —"cannot so easily throw off the burden of the consciousness of evil, but
[is] congenitally fated to suffer from its presence."68 The sick soul must be
"twice-born" — that is, must be reawakened spiritually "out of suffering and des-
peration." The sick soul, once reborn, embraces a religious consciousness
deeper, if less cherubic, than that of the healthy-minded.
One has tasted of the fruit of the tree, and the happiness of Eden never comes
again. The happiness that comes, when any does come —and often enough it
fails to return in an acute form . . . — is not the simple ignorance of ill, but
something vastly more complex, including natural evil as one of its elements,
but finding natural evil no such stumbling-block and terror because it now sees
it swallowed up in supernatural good. The process is one of redemption, not of
mere reversion to natural health, and the sufferer, when saved, is saved by what
seems to him a second birth, a deeper kind of conscious being than he could
enjoy before.70
The twice-born character, James believed, derived psychologically from "a
certain discordancy or heterogeneity in the native temperament of the subject,
an incompletely unified moral and intellectual constitution."71 Drawing on cur-
rent scholarship in psychology, he argued that the different character types ex-
press inborn differences of "inner constitution" and suggested the possibility
(without endorsing it) that the "heterogeneous personality" might even be inher-
ited—"the traits of character of incompatible and antagonistic ancestors are sup-
posed to be preserved along side of each other."72 He also proffered a behaviorist
description and explanation which rested on the premise that one's "ideas, aims,
and objects form diverse internal groups and systems, relatively independent of
one another."
Each 'aim' . . . awakens a certain specific kind of interested excitement, and
gathers a certain group of ideas together in subordination to it as its associates;
and if the aims and excitements are distinct in kind, their groups of ideas may
have little in common. When one group is present and engrosses the interest,
all the ideas connected with other groups may be excluded from the mental
field . . .
Our ordinary alterations of character, as we pass from one of our aims to
another, are not commonly called transformations, because each of them is so
104 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
rapidly succeeded by another in the reverse direction; but whenever one aim
grows so stable as to expel definitively its previous rivals from the individual's
life, we tend to speak of . . . a "transformation."
These alterations are the completest of the ways in which a self may be
divided. A less complete way is the simultaneous coexistence of two or more
different groups of aims of which one practically holds the right of way and
instigates activity, while the others are only pious wishes, and never practically
come to anything. 73

This heterogeneous personality can, in the sick souls, produce "divided will,
when the higher wishes lack just that acuteness, that touch of explosive intensity,
of dynamogenic quality . . . that enables them to burst their shell, and make
irruption efficaciously into life and quell the lower tendencies forever."74 For
such an individual the process of unification of the personality requires the dra-
matic experience of being twice-born. The regenerative experience can be either
sudden or gradual. In either case, its trajectory begins with the "fact that the
conscious person is continuous with a wider self through which saving experiences
come,"/5 a variation on James's notion of the individual's continuity with a
"mother sea" of consciousness. Not surprisingly, the subconscious or subliminal
self is the "mediating term," the conduit for penetration and permeation by the
unifying consciousness, or God.76 James insisted that the unifying experience
did not have to be—and in some cases could not be — religious; he also at-
tempted to present his case more broad-mindedly than to equate the spiritual
exclusively with religion or the latter exclusively with Christianity. Nevertheless,
his concern with the twice-born is itself steeped in religious belief, and his inter-
pretation speaks clearly of his own acknowledged preoccupation with faith, sal-
vation, and contact with the divine.
The individual, so far as he suffers from his wrongness and criticizes it, is to
that extent consciously beyond it, and in at least possible touch with something
higher, if anything higher exists. Along with the wrong part there is thus a
better part of him, even though it may be but a most helpless germ. With
which part he should identify his real being is by no means obvious at this
stage; but when stage 2 (the stage of solution or salvation) arrives, the man
identifies his real being with the germinal higher part of himself, and does so
in the following way. He becomes conscious that this higher part is conterminous
and continuous with a MORE of the same quality, which is operative in the
universe outside of him. and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a
fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to
pieces in the work. 77

Links and similarities between James and Emerson are clearly visible. James
referred frequently to Emerson, taking him, for instance, as an exemplary advo-
cate of healthy-mindedness. James's mother sea of consciousness is quite similar
to Emerson's Over-Soul, "within which every man's particular being is con-
tained and made one with all other."78 James's divided self, torn by natural and
spiritual forces, seems in one sense to be a restatement of Emerson's double
consciousness in a gloomier key.
 Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" 105
No such evidence joins James to Du Bois. James saw the divided self as
alternately a psycho-physiological and a spiritual or mystical phenomenon; for
Du Bois the idea was sociological and historical. To James, therefore, the condi-
tion and the path to transcending it were individual, even random, but to Du
Bois both problem and remedy were bound up with the ascriptive lot of a racial
collectivity. Although it in no way resembles James's "fields of consciousness" or
his specific discussions of pathological and spiritual splitting of consciousness,
one might argue that Du Bois's formulation may have been influenced by
James's suggestion that heterogeneous personality could result from inheritance
of "traits . . . of incompatible and antagonistic ancestors." Du Bois, however,
makes no hint at biology at all in his two-ness claim. In addition, his essay
proclaiming blacks' double consciousness appeared originally in the Atlantic
Monthly in 1897, five years before James's publication of The Varieties of Reli-
gious Experience. Of course, James and Du Bois did communicate after the
latter left Harvard, and it is possible that some of their interaction could have
ranged to James's reflections on the divided self. Myers, though, notes that
"James was skeptical about any automatic transfer of parental traits to children"
and had begun to express his doubts no later than 1898.'9 In any event, attempts
to establish direct links between James and Du Bois would require very elabo-
rate arguments and layers of supposition and presumption. Nor would they—
even if arguably successful in establishing some plausible, though remote tie —
shed much light either on Du Bois's thinking or his relation to his contemporary
world.
I have undertaken this examination of Emerson and James with two pur-
poses in mind. The narrower, admittedly rather scholastic, one is to argue
against assertions and intimations (usually made in a passing way) of a specific
lineage encompassing Du Bois's and their ideas about consciousness. My
broader purpose is to highlight pitfalls and limitations of what John Dunn has
referred to as the interpretive tendency to focus on "what propositions in what
great books remind the author of what propositions in what other great books." 80

Limits of Canonical Focus

1 have already criticized that tendency as it appears among Afro-Americanists as

a species of a more general orientation toward racial vindicationism and for its
embrace of a problematic notion of greatness as a category of intellectual history
(see chapter 1). That kind of approach is defective in other important ways as
well. First of all, those who trace patterns of influence typically fail to demon-
strate them adequately. Such claims too often reduce to noting the presence of
similar terms in texts by different authors and on that basis asserting the likely
influence of the earlier author upon the later one, particularly if the two can be
said in advance to be members of a common tradition. However, as Quentin
Skinner has indicated, much more is required convincingly to demonstrate
claims of influence. An effective case requires: "(i) that there should be a genu-
106 W. E. B. Du Boz's and American Political Thought
ine similarity [i.e., deeper resemblance than use of similar language] between
the doctrines of A and B; (ii) that B could not have found the relevant doctrine
in any writer other than A; (iii) that the probability of the similarity being ran-
dom should be very low (i.e., even if there is a similarity, and it is shown that it
could have been by A that B was influenced, it must still be shown that B did
not as a matter of fact articulate the relevant doctrine independently." 81 Skin-
ner's standard may be too restrictively taxing or overly precise; there may very
well be cases, for instance, in which it makes little difference whether A influ-
enced B directly or indirectly through C or by some more circuitous route.
Nevertheless, he does make clear, minimally, that claims of direct intellectual
links must rest on more than superficial evidence. As examination of the puta-
tive Emerson/James/Du Bois connection illustrates, resemblance of concepts
cannot be deduced from resemblance of terminology.
Making a credible argument for patterns of influence is a difficult enterprise
that can require tedious exegetic, biographical, and bibliographical work that
may or may not yield appropriate chains of evidence and reasonable inference.
Proper attention to Skinner's first condition, moreover, shows that even then,
the task is much more complicated and difficult than it might otherwise appear.
And the difficulties associated with the need to satisfy that condition suggest that
the focus on identifying influences may be — except in relation to certain strictly
biographical objectives — a dubious way to approach the interpretive project.
The main reason that satisfying Skinner's first condition is so difficult is that
different authors can use identical language in apparently similar ways to refer
to very different concepts. The Emerson/James/Du Bois case is not anomalous.
Daniel T. Rodgers has underscored, in his study of keywords in American politi-
cal thought, how the substantive meanings of terms can change dramatically
with changes in the purposive context in which they are used, even without
overt revision of their denotative meanings.82 In addition, as we have seen, the
enlistment of Du Bois's two-ness passage to support quite different strategic pro-
grams in different periods points to a related problem.
Political ideas function pragmatically, as instruments of real-world objectives
tied to historically specific debates and struggles. People adduce connection with
past ideas rhetorically, to support stances and claims in and for their present.
Because it centers on asserting fundamental continuities of meaning, the canon-
ical focus on tracing influences abstracts away from that pragmatic dimension
and inevitably diminishes the lived experience of the putatively influenced. It
snatches historical subjects out of their contexts of action, disconnects them
from their specific purposes and agendas, and severs them from the arenas of
debate toward which their stances are tailored. Put more dramatically, the ca-
nonical orientation imposes an alien ideological force —either a transhistorical
exchange among exemplary thinkers or, worse, the movement of disembodied
ideas themselves—between interpreter and subject and between the latter and
his or her own world.
This interpretive distortion artificially separates intellectual history from so-
cial and political history, rendering opaque the ways in which scdimented beliefs
 Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" 107
affect and are altered by current political debates and practices. From the ele-
vated vantage point that gives transhistorical sweep, we overlook the complex
dialectic through which ideas are formed and deployed—and gain constituen-
cies—in relation to the practical concerns and "collective mentalities" that de-
fine discursive communities.8' In losing sight of intellectual activity's roots in
concrete historical situations, the canonical approach actually obscures rather
than clarifies our understanding of the reproduction of political tradition.
In the study of Afro-American thought the impetus to trace out canonical
lineages, when seen in this critical light, becomes ironically self-defeating. Shoe-
horning blacks into a chronology of exemplary thinkers is a subspecies of the
vindicationist desire to establish the racial presence vis-a-vis a larger intellectual
tradition. Yet that approach misses the deepest and most significant way that
blacks figure into American intellectual life —through their participation in the
historically specific networks of shared presuppositions and concerns that shape
the environing political discourse at any given moment. Again, the Emerson/
James/Du Bois nexus is instructive.
The issue of direct textual influences fades toward triviality when we see Du
Bois's double-consciousness reference as a racially framed version of a sentiment
common among his contemporaries. Of course, Du Bois certainly could have
taken his precise language from Emerson or James; he shared with them also,
for example, the metaphor of living behind or within a veil.84 He could just as
easily have taken the double-consciousness phrase, however, from Edward Bel-
lamy, who was immensely popular in the late nineteenth century and whom
Du Bois later recalled having "revered" in his youth.85 In any event, the more
interesting issue is that the sense of double consciousness, two-ness, or "alien-
age" was prominent among fin-de-siecle American intellectuals. Even if we were
to presume that all who expressed those sentiments drew on Emerson, what led
so many of them to find the specific image of fragmented consciousness a com-
pelling metaphor for their own circumstances? Answering that question requires
a synchronic focus rather than the diachronic telescopy of the canonical orienta-
tion. It also requires searching for the premises that Du Bois shared with his own
peers rather than apparent doctrinal similarities with earlier (or later) luminaries.

Two-ness in the Progressive-Era Intellectual Milieu

Du Bois was part of a cohort of university-trained, reform-oriented, typically

eastern intellectuals who mainly came to maturity during the last years of the
nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth and who shared a loosely
defined outlook and intellectual and political pmblematique. In the terms which
I have been using here, they constituted a reasonably distinct community of
discourse. I have argued at various points in this volume that Du Bois's think-
ing—particularly in its structuring presuppositions—was embedded in discursive
and ideological patterns characteristic to that cohort. Taking that link into ac-
108 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
count suggests an entirely different angle onto his lament concerning black
Americans' purported double consciousness.
Expressions of liminality very similar to Du Bois's two-ness passage were
common among his white intellectual contemporaries. Christopher Lasch, T. J.
Jackson Lears, and Peter Conn are among those who have noted the prevalence
of such expressions among American intellectuals around the turn of the cen-
tury. Their interpretations focus on a largely generational response to what ap-
peared to be rapid and radical cultural change.86 Lasch related the common
sense of liminality to the "growing isolation of the intellectuals as a class from
the main currents of American life" as they formed for the first time a distinct
social stratum. 8 ' He stresses their alienation from the "cultural style" of the old
middle class "characterized by that combination of partiarchal authority and the
sentimental veneration of women which is the essence of the genteel tradi-
tion." 88 The result was a generalized "sense of being in some way disabled or
deformed" and of experiencing life at a remove.89 For Lears liminality derived
from disaffection with the process of social rationalization associated with a con-
solidating mass-industrial society. Many educated late Victorians "began half-
consciously to perceive [modern culture's] limitations and contradictions, its fail-
ure to live up to its claim of perpetual progress and perfect autonomy." This
spreading doubt precipitated a "crisis of cultural authority" 90 which individuals
typically experienced as feelings of inauthenticity. In Conn's view intellectual
life of the period was marked by "a profound internal dialectic, a conflict be-
tween tradition and innovation, between control and independence, between
order and liberation."91 Rather than appraising them a watershed or even neces-
sarily a unique instance, though, he sees the two decades before World War 1 as
a particularly luminous moment of an enduring "pattern of contrariety" 92 driven
by a generational motor, the "simultaneity of future and past."93 This "divided
consciousness," Conn contends, was visible within individuals as well as the
society at large.
Those interpretations, while clearly different, are not mutually exclusive.
They very likely represent different angles onto the same phenomenon: that
which lies at the nexus of the new middle class's "search for order" and the new
intellectuals' search for meaning. These overlapping concerns grew within the
entailments of the corporate industrialization of American society as described
here in chapter 2. Focus on that phenomenon, however, does not go to the
foundations of the intellectual temper under examination. The liminality that
Lasch, Lears, and Conn identify was connected to shared presumptions about
natural hierarchy, evolutionism, laws of knowledge and social organization, and
the antinomies of human nature. They are traceable within and define the char-
acter of the essentially ideological response provoked by uncertainty and alien-
ation—including perception of cultural or existential crisis.
The laments of his white contemporaries at times bore a striking resem-
blance to Du Bois's claim about racial two-ness. Inez Haynes Cillmorc, writer
and feminist, proclaimed in 1912: "For several years now I have felt niyscll alien
to this world, and alien not because of race or color, but alien because of cluing-
 Du Boz's's "Double Consciousness" 109
ing economic conditions. It seems to me that sociologically, so to speak, I hang
in a void between two spheres — the man's sphere and the woman's sphere."94
Charlotte Perkins Gilman in her early twenties defended her plans for spinster-
hood by defining that course (which she did not actually take) as "the end of
the long and tiresome effort to satisfy the demands of two opposing natures in
myself."95
The experience of divided or fragmented consciousness was by no means
restricted to representatives oi marginalized and subordinate groups like blacks
or women. The unadulterated patrician Henry Adams remarked:
[T]he Bostonian could not but develop a double nature. Life was a double
thing. . . . Winter and summer . . . were two hostile lives, bred two separate
natures. Winter was always the effort to live; summer was tropical license. . . .
The bearing of the two seasons on the education of Henry Adams was no fancy;
it was the most decisive force he ever knew; it ran through life, and made
division between its perplexing, warring, irreconcilable problems, irreducible
opposites, with growing emphasis to the last year of study. From earliest child-
hood the boy was accustomed to feel that, for him, life was double. . . . The
boy inherited his double nature.

Lears, in fact, argues that while more than most "Adams was attuned to the
pervasiveness of late-Victorian ambivalence as well as to the growing fascination
with unconscious mind and multiple personality,"9' the sense of fragmentation
was widespread among the educated elite. Indeed, the therapeutic orientation
Lears studies often aimed quite explicitly at helping to transcend "double-
mindedness."98
That sense of fragmented consciousness also was expressed in the frequent
complaint that one's experience of life was blocked, incomplete, or inauthentic.
Lears quotes Vida Scudder's confession that from childhood she "had encoun-
tered too much at second hand," had lived an "imitative life." He relates that
she was haunted by a "puzzling, distressing sense of unreality" and all her adult
life prayed that God would "make me a real person."99 Similarly, Mabel Dodge
Luhan, writer and salon-keeper for the bohemian set, recalled coming to terms
with her decision to immerse herself in a putatively natural world in New
Mexico:
Was one to be forever reminded of something else and never to experience
anything in itself at first-hand? . . . It had begun to appear to me that there
had always been a barrier between oneself and direct experience; the barrier of
other people's awareness and perceptions translated into words or paint or mu-
sic ... never leaving one free to know anything for oneself, or to discover the
true essence in anything. 100

Jane Addams as well spoke of her secondhand experience of life. Recalling

the years between her completion of college and the opening of Hull House,
she concluded: "During most of that time I was absolutely at sea so far as any
moral purpose was concerned, clinging only to the desire to live in a really
living world and refusing to be content with a shadowy intellectual or aesthetic
110 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
reflection of it."101 She contrasted the condition of women of the previous gen-
eration favorably with her own:

I gradually reached a conviction that the first generation of college women had
taken their learning too quickly, had departed too suddenly from the active,
emotional life led by their grandmothers and great grandmothers, that the con-
temporary education of young women had developed too exclusively the power
of acquiring knowledge and of merely receiving impressions; that somewhere
in the process of "being educated" they had lost that simple and almost auto-
matic response to the human appeal, that old healthful reaction resulting in
activity from the mere presence of suffering or of helplessness; that they are so
sheltered and pampered they have no chance even to make "the great re-
fusal." 102

Her decision to found Hull House developed in part from a desire to provide
therapy for victims of such alienation: "I gradually became convinced that it
would be a good thing to rent a house in a part of the city where many primitive
and actual needs are found, in which young women who had been given over
too exclusively to study might restore a balance of activity along traditional lines
and learn of life from life itself." un
The yearning for intense, authentic experience was common, and its link
to therapeutic ideology often was direct. Lears sees the yearning as a source of
the appeal that various manifestations of "anti-modern vitalism" held for many
educated Americans. He takes James's fascination with mysticism as illustrative
of a broader tendency to seek the key to profound experience that could tran-
scend alienation. 104 Occultism and self-help religion of many sorts flourished in
that milieu; Peale—later a pope of positive thinking—considered himself a disci-
ple of James and Emerson. 105 James was in fact an early enthusiast of mind
cure and asserted its roots in Emersonian transcendentalism. 1 Donald Meyer,
moreover, examines mind cure advocates' appropriation of both Emerson's
double-consciousness notion and James's related idea of fields of conscious-
ness.107
Of course, Du Bois expressed no interest in mind cure or other therapeutic
ideologies, and he certainly would not have wanted to be associated with them.
Yet the therapeutic disposition rested on and was articulated in relation to
deeper, more generally shared constructions of essential hierarchies of social
groups, values and meaning. Those essentialist constructions are visible beneath
the variety of expressions of the fragmentation metaphor, and explicating them
and their sources brings Du Bois's own normative moorings more sharply into
view.
Mind cure was only one of a panoply of responses to a common perception
in the milieux of the educated bourgeoisie and petite bourgeoisie that American
life exhibited the effects of overcivilization. The sense of being "suffocated by
the stale gentility of modern culture" 108 propelled ostensibly disparate enthusi-
asms, from mind cure, mysticism, and Anglo-Catholicism to arts and crafts and
militarism. Even Addams, as we have seen, justified social reform activity in
 Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" 111
part as a remedy for overcivili/.ed young women, and she complained of "being
cultivated" as a barrier to the real experience of life. Similarly, Gillmore,
reflecting on her college years, recalled that her female cohort—unlike men,
she imagined —never realized that "we were studying a second-hand world, that
we were getting our life in translation, that we never really had a face-to-face
encounter with it."110 That syndrome, she felt, had not been simply an artifact
of her youth; even at thirty-five she had "never seen life in the raw." 111
The specific conditions against which Addams and Gillmore reacted de-
rived from the forms of structural, institutional, and ideological subordination to
which women of their station were subjected. Gillmore was explicit about that
point, linking her sense of "alienage" to the prevailing gender-based double stan-
dard of experience. In Addams's complaint the heavy hand of gender oppression
is visible indirectly, within what she treated as settled conventions regulating the
proper upbringing and comportment of genteel women. Nevertheless, in her
case no less than Gillmore's the feeling of being blocked from real participation
in life was bound up with the particular situation —including the contradiction
between intellectual aspiration and socially acceptable conduct—of upper status
women in their era.
Their perception of their own lives as unreal, though, was predicated not
only on the constraints of gender; it also presumed a sentimentalized view of
lower-status "others" considered less complex or cultivated. Gillmore, for exam-
ple, compared the downwardly mobile circumstances of her childhood unfavor-
ably to the lives of the genuinely impoverished, which she simultaneously aes-
theticized and imagined to be more vital than her own. "We were poor enough
to be dull," she noted, "but not poor enough to be picturesque . . . not poor
enough to enjoy the hearty, vulgar social promiscuity of the frankly poverty-
stricken." 113 Addams acknowledged a preference in her work for recent immi-
grants over second- or third-generation ethnics because the former were "more
natural and cast in a simpler mold." 114 She also maintained a nostalgic image
of women's lot in peasant villages, asserting and lauding its organic simplicity
and mourning the loss of the "freedom and beauty of that life" in the immigrant
experience.'
In a similar vein, Randolph Bourne feared that the new immigrants would
lose their "native culture" and have their "distinctive qualities . . . washed out
into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity." J16 He assessed more harshly than
Addams the stereotypically half-assimilated second and third generations. He
recoiled from their "insipidity—masses of people who are cultural half-breeds
. . . who retain their foreign names but have lost the foreign savor."117 Bourne's
sharp distaste for those "hyphenates" no doubt was connected with the fact that
he viewed the immigrants principally as sources for revitalization of an indige-
nous bourgeois culture that he judged stagnant. 118
Luhan saw a similar, but more dramatic and esoteric path to countering the
sterility of bourgeois overcivilization. She found an effective antidote among
the Native Americans and Mexican-Americans in the Southwest. In a paean of
unabashed objectification, she romanticized their poverty and imagined them
112 W. E. B. Du Bo/'s and American Political Thought
possessed of a superior, stoical essence that melded them into the local ecol-
ogy."9 She convinced herself that the Native Americans were animated by a
collective tribal "over-soul," which she saw as analogous to the "group spirit in
the flock, in the herd, and in the swarm."120 In that environment, dominated
by overarching spirituality, she believed it was possible to shatter the wall of
intellection that blocked pure, immediate experience. "I had a sudden intuition
right then that here in this country life could come to one more concretely than
in other places, and that meanings that were shut up in words and phrases out
in the world could incorporate themselves in living forms and move before one.
Ideas here might clothe themselves in form and flesh, and word-symbols change
into pictured living realities."1-1 Luhan's rhapsodies bore the marks of conver-
sion, certainly, and she employed that experience's language of rebirth. Not only
did she believe that the organic simplicity of her Mexicans and Indians would
satisfy her deep cravings for embeddedness and personal fulfillment; she also
found in it a proper alternative to the "decadent unhappy world, where the
bright, hot, rainbow flashes of corruption were the only light high spots." l22
Luhan and Bourne were by no means unique in the belief that the putative
traits of peoples generally held to be inferior or simpler could be mined to
remedy the effects of overcivilization. Fin-de-siecle middle-class Americans
commonly believed that "Oriental people, the inhabitants of the tropics, and
the colored peoples generally" knew how to relax; emulating them could help
combat excesses of "moral and intellectual strenuosity."' 23 Henry Adams, for
instance, found Samoans invigoratingly "spontaneous, healthy, free from our
idiotic cant about work" and enthused that he had "never lived in so unselfcon-
scious a place."124 James followed Theodore Parker in taking the "heathen"
consciousness as exemplary of the healthy-minded state. 12
Prevailing adherence to theories of cultural evolution underwrote a notion
of the "primitive" that included both contemporary inferiors and romantic con-
structions of earlier societies. The appeal of the primitive as an ideal, however,
did not depend on the allegedly pacific qualities of simpler folk, either past or
present. The less-evolved others were exalted also as more visceral. Gillmore's
desire to see life "in the raw" was not idiosyncratic. Lears recounts the common
view of medieval figures as "big children" who represented instinctual vitality
both physical and emotional.126 Frank Norris looked back to the Middle Ages
to extol a savage authenticity drenched in Anglo-Saxon racism and pornographic
violence.127 James —on detailing the merciless inexorability of Homeric brutal-
ity—concluded that the "integrity of the instinctive reactions, this freedom from
all moral sophistry and strain, gives a pathetic dignity to ancient pagan feel-
ing."128 More was at stake in this assessment, however, than nostalgic recon-
struction of a classical past without ambivalence. "Our ancestors," James felt,
"have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of
peace won't breed it out of us."129 Therefore, he feared that a "pacific cosmopol-
itan industrialism" was inadequate as an object of properly enthusiastic patrio-
tism. He called instead for fortifying pacifist principles with redefined martial
virtues to produce the requisite basis for proper "civic passion." "Martial virtues,"
 Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" 113
he maintained, "must be the enduring cement; intrepidity, contempt of softness,
surrender of private interest, obedience to command, must still remain the rock
upon which states are built."1''0
This turn to martial imagery discloses another layer of meaning in the con-
cern with overcivilization. It was enmeshed in a profoundly gendered logic. We
have seen how for women like Addams and Gillmore the pangs of overciviliza-
tion stemmed directly from oppressive conventions circumscribing genteel wom-
en's activities. More deeply, though, lay a tendency to cast the social and natural
worlds —even knowledge itself—in explicitly gendered categories. James, for ex-
ample, distinguished between the "scientific-academic mind and the feminine-
mystical mind" 131 as parallel forms of knowing. His romanticized image of our
pugnacious ancestors, typical to such warrior myths, incorporated women simply
as property, the spoils of pillage.132 As with the larger martial image, his scheme
for contemporary revitalization only beveled off the crude edges of that objecti-
fication. Revitalization was to occur through making "new energies and hardi-
hoods continue the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully
clings."133 The young men who were thus to "get the childishness knocked out
of them" would count among their rewards that "the women would value them
more highly."134 When devotees of martial virtue saw women as more than
prizes for male heroism, they typically associated the female character with so-
cial decay and decadence. Norris, for example, viewed feminization as a major
source of "moral and physical weakness" and counseled resistance by "rekin-
dling male potency."155
This gendered dualism, of course, was not restricted to martial ideology; its
premises were widespread among educated—particularly male—Americans. In
self-criticism George Herbert Mead described himself as weak and "rather of a
feminine cast of mind." Van Wyck Brooks defined the basic tension in Ameri-
can life as that between "'masculine' business and 'feminine' culture." 13/ Un-
like Norris, he sought to blend the two principles—tough-minded calculation
and emotional sensibility—to form a healthy mean. Similarly, G. Stanley Hall,
who actively opposed education for women in general, warned especially of the
dangers of coeducation, arguing that it would harm boys by "feminizing them
when they need to be working off their brute animal element."138 However, like
Lester F. Ward and others, Hall was attracted to Johann Jakob Bachofen's theory
of matriarchal origins and exalted an idealized female essence as the nurturant
basis of social order. He argued, therefore, that exposure of adolescent males —
temporarily and in the protective brute animality of the same-sex environment,
of course—to a curriculum emphasizing the feminine principle ("repose, lei-
sure, art, legends, romance, idealizations, in a word, humanisms") would put a
calming and vitalizing polish on their preparation for adulthood. 139
The idea of an essentialist: dichotomy articulated in gendered terms was not
an exclusively male or antifeminist premise. 140 Feminists and antifeminists dif-
fered mainly with respect to the centrality and character of biologistic or evolu-
tionist elements in formulations of the dichotomy. In Beyond Separate Spheres
Rosalind Rosenberg details the efforts of academic women to refute the ortho-
114 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
doxy that presupposed innate, sex-based differences in temperament and mental
ability. Many feminists, however, accepted the premise that such differences ex-
isted and disputed only claims that their sources were biological or that they
necessarily implied female inferiority. Indeed, activists frequently traded on es-
sentialist stereotypes to support arguments for enlarging female participation in
public life.. 141 Addams, among others, invoked the common belief in specific
female province in arguing for the "Utilization of Women in City Government":
From the beginning of tribal life women have been held responsible for the
health of the community, a function which is now represented by the health
department; from the days of the cave dwellers, so far as the home was clean
and wholesome, it was due to their efforts, which are now represented by the
bureau of tenement-house inspection; from the period of the primitive village,
the only public sweeping performed was what they undertook in their own door
yards, that which is now represented by the bureau of street cleaning. Most of
the departments in a modern city can be traced to woman's traditional activity,
but . . . so soon as these old affairs were turned over to the care of the city,
they slipped from woman's hands. 142

With respect specifically to voting, Addams observed that women were con-
stitutionally suited to form a particularly responsible electorate because civic
duty is only an extension of domestic virtue, a view expressed in the phrase of
the day "municipal housekeeping."'143 She indicated no hesitation in assuming
the gendered dualism of temperament:
To turn the administration of our civic affairs wholly over to men may mean
that the American city will continue to push forward in its commercial and
industrial development, and continue to lag behind in those things which make
a city healthful and beautiful. After all, woman's traditional function has been
to make her dwelling-place both clean and fair. Is that dreariness in city life,
that lack of domesticity which the humblest farm dwelling presents, due to a
withdrawal of one of the naturally cooperating forces? If women have in any
sense been responsible for the gentler side of life which softens and blurs some
of its harsher conditions, may they not have a duty to perform in our American
cities?144

Advocates of suffrage and other agendas we would now call feminist com-
monly argued that women's domestic duties would not suffer and even could
be enhanced by an enlarged role in civic affairs. As a rule, that is, they did not
challenge the premise that domestic and humanistic virtues (and obligations)
were intrinsically female. 145
Even Gilman—who insisted that women's inferiority was the product of
historical subjugation, not biology, and who sought, via the professionalization
of housework, to redefine the distinction between public and domestic realms —
operated within the essentialist logic. Despite the mainly economistic and func-
tionalist character of her account of "scxuo-cconomic" evolution, she held a
view of the dichotomous temperaments that verged on mysticism.
 Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" 115
Maternal energy is the force through which have come into the world both
love and industry. It is through the tireless activity of this desire, the mother's
wish to serve the young, that she began the first of the arts and crafts whereby
we live. While the male savage was still a mere hunter and fighter, expressing
masculine energy, the katabolic force, along its essential line, expanding, scat-
tering, the female savage worked out in equally natural ways the conserving
force of female energy. She gathered together and saved nutrition for the child,
as the germ-cell gathers and saves nutrition in the unconscious silences of na-
ture. She wrapped it in garments and built a shelter for its head as naturally as
the same maternal function had loved, clothed, and sheltered the unborn. 146

Gilman embraced a modified form of Ward's "gynaecocentric" theory, which

posited original matriarchy, and in her Utopian "Herland," the female principle
shaped the social order.147
The color line seems to have made little difference on this score. Anna
Julia Cooper, in arguing for higher education for women averred that

there is a feminine as well as a masculine side to truth; that these are related
not as inferior and superior, not as better and worse, not as weaker and stronger,
but as complements —complements in one necessary and symmetric whole.
That as the man is more noble in reason, so the woman is more quick in
sympathy. That as he is indefatigable in pursuit of abstract truth, so is she in
caring for the interests by the way—striving tenderly and lovingly that not one
of the least of these "little ones" should perish.148

Education of women and their expanded participation in public life would en-
rich civilization by establishing harmony between the masculine and feminine
principles throughout the social fabric. Like Adclarns and others, Cooper felt
that contemporary social problems resulted from (or at least reflected) imbal-
ance between the two; she promised that "you will not find the law of love
shut out from the affairs of men after the feminine half of the world's truth is
completed."149 Also like Addams, she accepted female domestic responsibility
in stride, reassuring that while "the untrammeled development of woman . . .
gives her to the world and to civilization, [it] does not necessarily remove her
from the home and fireside."150 On the contrary, in Cooper's frame of reference
the goal of broadened participation for women amounted to generalization of
the province of domesticity, as she charged her gender with being guardians and
tutors of society's "manners and morals." 151
Certainly, this gendered logic's popularity as conventional wisdom derived
largely from its congeniality to the prevailing ideology of male supremacy.
Women operated within a community of intellectual discourse whose legitimat-
ing boundaries were set by sedimented presumptions of male preeminence, and
notions of gender essentialism enshrined that preeminence by representing it as
noncontingent. Historians from Marx to Daniel T. Rodgers have shown how
insurgents develop within a constraining, hegemonic frame of reference and
attempt, at least initially, to bend its premises to ends subversive of the institu-
116 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
tional arrangements and social relations they had theretofore legitimated. That
advocates of feminist agendas embraced essentialist views, therefore, should be
neither dismissed as evidence of false consciousness (indeed, Cooper considered
women who did not see themselves in essentialist terms to be victims of self-
deception) : 52 nor defensively glossed as clever strategy. Instead, women and
men, defenders and enemies of feminist aspirations equally were inclined to
proceed from essentialist assumptions about gender because essentialist beliefs
and conventions suffused and joined the discursive universe in which they all
participated and which shaped their ideas. Essentialist constructions of various
sorts appealed to both common religious notions of divine or natural law and
the nomological pretensions of the period's scientistic enthusiasms. Even the
most careful scholarly discourse blurred the lines separating biology and sociol-
ogy, heredity and environment, ontogeny and phylogeny.
The many different expressions of "alienage," fragmented consciousness,
and anxieties about overcivilization were articulated within an outlook that hy-
postatized dichotomous, essentialist categories as fundamental determinants of
human existence. Typically, the categories represented a dynamic tension be-
tween nature and culture. The former was broadly understood to be the domain
of the feminine and the primitive; the latter, defined by rational calculation and
instrumental action, was the masculine (and prototypically Western) province.
The masculine principle was the source of progress and social evolution —
as can be seen clearly in the social theorizing of Ward, the pioneer sociologist
and mentor to Gilman. Ward maintained that "shrewdness, diplomacy, strategy
and the like are preeminently male characteristics; they are the active, positive,
and progressive elements of society." The "male trunk" of mental development
"may be conceived as devoted to the active increase, development, and advance-
ment, and the female to the passive stability, permanence, and persistence of
type."153 He defined "inventiveness" as a male characteristic and juxtaposed it
to a "female intuition," which he tied to women's characteristic conservatism.154
Although he insisted that the two principles were of equal importance to society
and that male "courage" needed to be balanced by female "prudence," 155 Ward
nonetheless assessed male inventiveness as the "real civilizing agent." "Civiliza-
tion," he asserted, "consists in the utilization of the materials and forces of na-
ture, and the exclusive means by which this is accomplished is human inven-
tion."156
Ward's theory of original matriarchy, in fact, underpinned a common
view—at least suggestive of Lamarckianism — of male aggressiveness as the
source of variation and racial and cultural evolution. G. Stanley Hall noted that
the "male is the agent of variation and progress, and transmits variations best, so
that perhaps the male cell and sex itself originated in order to produce varia-
tion." Hall also observed that in all types of society women are more primitive
than men and that "woman is far nearer childhood than man." William I.
Thomas similarly categorized the female as "the animal norm from which the
male departs by further morphological and physiological variations." He also
found women to be "intermediate in development between the child and the
 Du Boz's's "Double Consciousness" 117
man" and endorsed the claims that "woman is always a growing child and that
her brain departs from the infantile type no more than the other portions of her
body."159
The identification of women as relatively primitive and infantile reveals the
hierarchical presumption underlying the dichotomized masculine and feminine
principles. Thomas, moreover, shows that the dichotomy supported a far broader
perception of hierarchy. The ways in which women were primitive or underde-
veloped were not only childlike; they were also generic markers of inferiority.
He noted that "the lower human races, the lower classes of society, women and
children show something of the same quality in their superior tolerance of surgi-
cal disease." 16° Female anatomy, he assured, "resembles the child and the lower
races, i.e. the less developed forms." 161 The male principle of variation was
an integral feature of this hierarchical order as both cause and classificatory
evidence.
Morphological differences are less in low than in high races, and the less civi-
lized the race the less is the physical difference of the sexes. In woman the
reproductive function fixes the form with relative definitcness at an early pe-
riod; but the further variation and fixation of physical traits in man is condi-
tioned by a multifarious activity, and it results that in the higher races men are
both more unlike one another than in the lower races, and at the same time
more unlike than the women of their own race; and the less civilized the race
the less is the physical difference of the sexes. A similar relation holds between
the higher and lower classes of the same society.162

At bottom, the distinction was between those groups held to be active, ag-
gressive, self-consciously purposive, and goal-directed versus those considered to
be passive, reactive, impulsive, and present-oriented. Thomas went so far as to
seek the foundation of this distinction in essential metabolic differences. He
suggested that
males are more katabolic than females, and that maleness is a product of influ-
ences tending to produce a katabolic habit of body. If this assumption is correct,
maleness and femaleness are merely a repetition of the contrast existing be-
tween the animal and the plant. The katabolic animal form, through its rapid
destruction of energy, has been carried developmentally away from the anabolic
plant form; and of the two sexes the male has been carried farther than the
female from the plant process . . . woman stands nearer to the plant process
than man, representing the constructive as opposed to the disruptive metabolic
tendency.163

Edward A. Ross's version of the active/passive dichotomy was not so ruth-

lessly biologistic, but his sociohistorical theory was no less essentialist than the
others. Although race was his pivotal unit, he argued that definitive racial quali-
ties are formed, not given. The crucial distinction among racial groups, he be-
lieved, concerned their energy levels. Aggressive races arc the product of migra-
tions and the breeding of adventurous individuals with the resolve and ingenuity
required to survive in unfamiliar or adverse conditions. 164 The more energetic
118 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
races are future-oriented in Ross's view. They value foresight and the ability to
defer gratification. By contrast, to "live from hand to mouth taking no thought
of the morrow, is the trait of primitive man generally, and especially of the races
in the tropical lands where nature is bounteous, and the strenuous races have
not yet made their competition felt."165 Instrumental rationality and "stability of
character" also were critical attributes of advanced, "winning" races. "Primitive
peoples," on the other hand, Ross noted, "are usually over-emotional and poised
unstably between smiles and tears. They act quickly if at all, and according to
the impulse of the moment."166 Such a "race of impulsivists absorbed in sensa-
tions, and recollections or anticipations of sensations" is destined to give way
before races driven by "lively imagination of remote experiences to come . . .
self-control that can deny present cravings, or resist temptation in favor of the
thrifty course recommended by reason." Thus Ross proposed another form of
the dichotomy of experience: "the sensori-motor moved by sense-impressions
and by sensory images, and the ideo-motor moved by ideas."157
What Ross propounded as the basis of racial stratification, Hall described as
the biologically grounded substance of sex differentiation. Hall maintained that
the female, in line with her anabolic nature, "works by intuition and feeling;
fear, anger, pity, love, and most of the emotions have a wider range and greater
intensity. If she abandons her natural naivete and takes up the burden of guiding
and accounting for her life by consciousness, she is likely to lose more than she
gains, according to the old saw that she who deliberates is lost."168 He alleged
also:

Her thought is more concrete and individual and she is more prone to associa-
tions in space, and man in time. Men are more prone to bring things under
general rules and with regard to symmetry. Her logical thought is slower, but
her associations quicker than those of man, she is less troubled by inconsisten-
cies, and has less patience with the analysis involved in science and inven-
tion. 169

Park brought together racial and gendered versions of the dichotomy in his
1918 characterization of Negro temperament, which he declared "consists in a
few elementary but distinctive characteristics, determined by physical organiza-
tions and transmitted biologically."

These characteristics manifest themselves in a genial, sunny, and social disposi-

tion, in an interest and attachment to external, physical things rather than to
subjective states and objects of introspection; in a disposition for expression
rather than enterprise and action. . . . Everywhere and always [the Negro's
racial temperament] has been interested rather in expression than in action;
interested in life itself rather than in its reconstruction or reformation. The
Negro is, by natural disposition neither an intellectual nor an idealist, like the
Jew; nor a brooding introspective, like the East African; nor a pioneer and
frontiersman, like the Anglo-Saxon. He is primarily an artist, loving life for its
own sake. His metier is expression rather than action. He is, so to speak, the
lady among the races. 1 '"
 Du Boz's's "Double Consciousness" 119
Beneath the several constructions of hierarchies of temperament lay a dis-
tinction between acting upon nature and living within it. The "male" principle
stood for the former, the "female" for the latter. The view that systematic action
upon nature—that is, culture—was the source of human progress was not
unique to the fin de siecle context; nor was the corollary practice of stratifying
modes of human existence according to their supposed capacities for or levels
of cultural complexity. As L. J. Jordanova notes, for example, prevailing notions
of progress during the Enlightenment already centered the narrative of human
history on "the growth of culture through the domination of nature [character-
ized by] the increasing assertion of masculine ways over irrational, backward-
looking women."171 Progressive-era discourse, though, did give the nature/cul-
ture dichotomy a particular, historically specific grounding as a trope encoding
legitimated stratification. The frame of biological and cultural evolution imbued
extant hierarchy with the impersonality of positivist law and inscribed it among
the core tenets of an organicist teleology.172
Several aspects of evolutionist thought—especially in its Lamarckian ten-
dencies— came together to give the fin de siecle version of the nature/culture
dichotomy its specific character and a respectable intellectual foundation. The
notion that evolution was propelled by a logic of increasing differentiation and
complexity provided an apparently objective, scientific basis for assigning popu-
lations to one or the other category. Recapitulationism—the theory that ancestral
adult stages are repeated in embryonic or juvenile stages of descendants—ac-
commodated the belief that characteristics of less advanced forms existed subsid-
iarily in the more advanced. This view obviously grew from and reinforced the
practice of assigning groups to places on a scale of relative distance from a
"natural" or animal state, and it gave intellectual authority to claims that
equated women, primitives and (white) children. It also gave standing within
educated and enlightened circles to the notion that individuals could experience
atavistic impulses or yearnings. (As an indication of the extent of recapitula-
tionism's legitimacy, Stephen }ay Gould notes that it was the conceptual founda-
tion of Freud's entire psychoanalytic enterprise—a foundation, moreover, on
which he stood until his death.) 173 The prevalent concern with overcivilization
was fed by a judgment that the contemporary bourgeois world had been too
successful in suppressing those impulses and could be reinvigorated by giving
vent to them, albeit in contained or indirect ways.
The Lamarckian belief in inheritance of acquired characteristics also but-
tressed hierarchical essentialism; by underwriting what George W. Stocking Jr.
has characterized as a "vague sociobiological indeterminism," it hopelessly ob-
scured the lines between biological and social theory.174 Ironically, neo-
Lamarckians may have tended more than others to argue that backward groups
could advance in the proper environment. Nevertheless, in propounding a "be-
havioral theory of biological evolution," the Lamarckian tendency actually
made it possible to treat highly dubious behavioral stereotypes as if they had the
force of biological law. Finally, a corollary of the Lamarckian view of inheri-
tance— the belief that common environments produce collective, heritable tem-
120 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
peraments — ensconced essentialism deeply within evolutionist discourse, as we
have seen in Ross's and Park's ideas about racial temperament. It also opened
the path to situating the double-consciousness phenomenon in biological terri-
tory. Gilman argued in a revealing way that gender stratification weakened the
race by stunting half of its pool of hereditary qualities.
The largest and most radical effect of restoring women to economic indepen-
dence will be its result in clarifying and harmonizing the human soul. With a
homogeneous nature bred of two parents in the same degree of social develop-
ment, we shall be able to feel simply, to see clearly, to agree with ourselves
. . . instead of wrestling in such hopeless perplexity with what we have called
"man's dual nature." Marry a civilized man to a primitive savage, and their
child will naturally have a dual nature. Marry an Anglo-Saxon to an African or
oriental, and their child has a dual nature. Marry any man of a highly devel-
oped nation, full of the specialized activities of his race and their accompanying
moral qualities, to the . . . rudimentary female creature he has so religiously
maintained by his side, and you have as a result . . . the human soul in its
pitiful, well-meaning efforts, its cross-eyed, purblind errors, its baby fits of pas-
sion, and its beautiful and ceaseless upward impulse through all this wa-
vering. 176

Du Bois's famous lament takes on heretofore unexplored meaning when

cast within this evolutionist frame, and both textual and biographical evidence
strongly support such an interpretation. Du Bois certainly was conversant with
prominent intellectual constructs of nascent social science and operated quite
naturally within them. And Stocking has indicated that environmentalist evolu-
tionism of a Larnarckian sort was the norm among American social scientists at
the turn of the century. 177 Du Bois even expressed discomfiture— as did many
others—at the potentially reactionary implications of August Weismann's attack
on the principle of inheritance of acquired characteristics; he feared that a
strictly biological theory of heredity would promote "a lessening of faith in what
human training may accomplish, and a general tendency to sit back and watch
the lower classes and the lower races waver and wander on, unhelped and with
little sympathy from above." 1 ' 8
Du Bois's basic views on race at the time of his initial "two-ness" statement
proceeded explicitly from the conventions of neo-Lamarckian social science. He
rejected strictly physical or anatomical classifications because "the wonderful
developments of human history teach that the grosser physical differences of
color, hair and bone go but a short way toward explaining the different roles
which groups of men have played in Human Progress."179 In that judgment
Du Bois reflected contemporary social scientists' disposition to minimize the
significance of gross anatomical features in explaining racial differentiation.
Thomas, for example, argued against the usefulness of such approaches and
invoked considerable scientific authority as support.180 Even Ross — hardly the
avatar of universal brotherhood — saw physical differences as largely the products
of social conditions and subordinated them to moral or temperamental traits in
his classificatorv rubric. 181
 Du Boss's "Double Consciousness" 121
Du Bois, of course, did not deny the existence of essential racial differences;
he simply grounded the "subtle, delicate and elusive" forces of differentiation
within the dynamics of sociohistorical evolution:
While these subtle forces have generally followed the natural cleavage of com-
mon blood, descent and physical peculiarities, they have at other times swept
across and ignored these. At all times, however, they have divided human be-
ings into races, which, while they perhaps transcend scientific definition, never-
theless, are clearly defined to the eye of the Historian and Sociologist.
What, then, is a race? It is a vast family of human beings, generally of
common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and im-
pulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the ac-
complishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life. 182
This construction has led Anthony Appiah properly to identify Du Bois's
view of race as sociohistorical; Appiah is also correct in judging that view unsci-
entific in relation to presentist biological standards.183 Implicit application of
similar standards provoked Moses to charge Du Bois with being "dreadfully in-
consistent" and operating with "reckless abandon" conceptually. "The basis of
Du Bois's raciological theory," he concluded, "was not rational, but mystical; it
was not grounded in reason, but in something akin to faith." 184 When seen in
relation to what his contemporaries understood to be scientific knowledge and
reason, however, Du Bois's construction does not seem to warrant Moses's assess-
ment. Nor does it support Appiah's claim that Du Bois "explicitly sets [his socio-
historical view] over against the scientific conception."185 On the contrary, Du
Bois was unambiguously in step with the conceptual orthodoxy defined by the
Lamarckian social science of his day.
Thomas, a founder of American sociology, had articulated a view quite simi-
lar to Du Bois's in 1896. He argued that, although physical differences among
races were not especially revealing:
the formation of artificial or historic races, through the influence of milieu and
the diffusion of a common fund of beliefs, sentiments, ideas, and interests
among a heterogeneous population brought by hap and chance into the same
geographical zone, is taking place before our eyes at the present moment, and
is a matter of history; and we are safe in assuming that in this the process of
the formation of true races is repeating itself.186

Du Bois read the development of existing races in terms almost identical to

Thomas's.
The age of nomadic tribes of closely related individuals represents the maxi-
mum of physical differences. They were practically vast families, and there were
as many groups as families. As the families came together to form cities the
physical differences lessened, purity of blood was replaced by the requirement
of the domicile . . . i.e., there was a slight and slow breaking down of physical
barriers. This, however, was accompanied by an inerease of the spiritual and
social differences between cities. This city became husbandmen, this mer-
chants, another warriors, and so on. The ideals of life for which the different
122 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
cities struggled were different. When at last cities began to coalesce into nations
there was another breaking down of barriers which separated groups of men.
The larger and broader differences of color, hair and physical proportions were
not by any means ignored, but myriads of minor differences disappeared, and
the sociological and historical races of men began to approximate the present
division of races as indicated by physical researches. At the same time the spiri-
tual and physical differences of race groups which constituted the nations be-
came deep and decisive.187

What Thomas called "true" and "artificial" races, Du Bois treated as settled and
emergent moments of a process. For both Thomas and Du Bois the process was
driven principally by sociohistorical forces which drew upon, produced, real-
ized, and refined themselves through physical characteristics. Like Thomas, Du
Bois believed that "the same natural laws" governed the development of all
races.188 In his 1901 Annals essay, he allowed that "there are many delicate
differences in race psychology, numberless changes that our crude social mea-
surements are not yet able to follow minutely, which explain much of history
and social development."189
Du Bois did not attempt to detail the biochemical mechanisms through
which alleged racial characteristics were generalized and solidified within popu-
lations, as Thomas and others did. Taking account of the controlling intellectual
orientation toward "sociobiological indeterminism," however, renders that dis-
tinction less significant than it might appear to a more presentist reading. More
important is recognition that Du Bois's embeddedness within the prevailing dis-
cursive conventions extended to his acceptance of their evolutionist model of
racial/cultural hierarchy.
As I have shown elsewhere in this volume, Du Bois defined blacks as com-
paratively primitive and undeveloped as a race. He referred only pages after the
two-ness reference to their "credulous race-childhood," 19° and there is no need
to belabor his attachment to the principle of "civilization" (see chapters 4 and
5). He listed blacks among the "world's undeveloped peoples" in need of civiliz-
ing tutelage.191 Beneath his defense of the race's capacity for civilization, more-
over, lay an acceptance of the familiar notion that human social life was stra-
tified on a vertical continuum rising from existence within nature. "Like all
primitive folk," he averred in describing the distinctive qualities of the sorrow
songs, "the slave stood near to Nature's heart."192 In characterizing blacks' state
as "race-childhood" he reproduced the common equation of ostensible primi-
tives and children. His description of black essentiality was steeped in what
contemporary observers uniformly would have recognized as the feminine prin-
ciple. At the defining core of black life Du Bois found a "deep emotional nature
which turns instinctively toward the supernatural . . . a rich tropical imagina-
tion and a keen, delicate appreciation of Nature."193 Even as he articulated the
"two-ness" phenomenon in terms of concrete social relations he pointed to the
race's "innate love of harmony and beauty." At least five years after he began
accommodating to the critique of Lamarckian views of racial heredity, he could
still declare matter-of-factly that "the Negro is essentially an artistic being, whose
 Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" 123
rich emotional nature can be made to contribute much to the world's enjoy-
ment and appreciation of beauty."195
Of course Du Bois's perception of black Americans' double consciousness
rested on an analysis of specific social conditions. He saw it arising broadly from
blacks' contradictory and marginal position in American society, just as Gillmore
rightly understood her sense of hanging between two spheres as a direct conse-
quence of the contradictory status of women of her class. He bemoaned the
plight of the black artisan, professional, and scholar forced to negotiate between
a relatively lofty set of aspirations appropriate to the advanced, white world on
the one hand and his race's thoroughly mundane, backward agenda on the
other. The latter, in addition, threatened constantly to corrupt and debase by
virtue of its taints of ignorance and poverty.196 He portrayed the condition as a
result of the blocked striving "to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture," the
bitter fruit of racial subordination. 197 But he also associated it with blacks' low
level of cultural development, their being "swept on by the currents of the nine-
teenth while yet struggling in the eddies of the fifteenth century."198 In commu-
nicating the angst of the black artist, he implied that a moral or spiritual equiva-
lence pertains between competing black and white race ideals.

The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls of his people
a-dancing and a-singing raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black
artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul beauty of a race which his
larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another
people. This waste of double aims, this seeking to satisfy two unreconciled
ideals, has wrought sad havoc with the courage and faith and deeds of ten
thousand people, —has sent them often wooing false gods and invoking false
means of salvation, and at times has even seemed about to make them ashamed
of themselves.199

In the end, however, despite yoking it to an appeal for securing civil rights, Du
Bois's version of normative equivalence only rehearsed the dichotomy that un-
derlay the fears of overcivilization; he embraced

the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in
opposition or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the
ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two
world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack . . .
all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a
dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her
brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but determined Negro humility?
or her coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music
vviith the soul of the Sorrow Songs? 200

From the contextual vantage point I have proposed, Du Bois's double-

consciousness formulation seems less a deliberate metaphor than an earnest at-
tempt to characterize —within the limits of hegemonic social theory—the actual
situation of blacks in American society. Knowing what we do about Du Bois's
faith in science and the nature of social scientific discourse about race during
124 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
the era in question, it should not be too surprising to see that he operated within
the parameters of mainstream academic conventions. The fact that, for all its
prominence in The Souls of Black Folk, the double-consciousness notion by and
large disappeared from Du Bois's writing after 1903 — he does not even mention
it in subsequent reflections on Sou/s —supports this contextualist interpretation.
By 1904 he had begun revising his thinking about race in ways that were in-
compatible with the neo-Lamarckian resonances surrounding the double-
consciousness idea.201
Du Bois's reconstruction in Dusk of Dawn of the development of his think-
ing about race is revealing in this regard. Although he recalled himself to have
been rather more skeptical about them than his writings from the period indi-
cate, he described the states of learned thinking about race that prevailed within
his fin de siecle intellectual milieu:

At Harvard . . . I began to face scientific race dogma: first of all, evolution and
the "Survival of the Fittest." It was continually stressed in the community and
in the classes that there was a vast difference in the development of the whites
and the "lower" races; that this could be seen in the physical development of
the Negro . . . Eventually in my classes stress was quietly transferred to brain
weight and brain capacity, and at last to the "cephalic index."
In the graduate school at Harvard and again in Germany, the emphasis
again was altered, and race became a matter of culture and cultural history. 202

Given those options, it is not surprising that Du Bois would gravitate toward
the latter, which—as he noted in his 1904 address to Washington, D.C., school-
teachers—at least held out the possibility of improvement. "I could accept evo-
lution and the survival of the fittest," he recalled, "provided the interval between
advanced and backward races was not made too impossible. I balked at the
usual 'thousand years'." 203
He noted further that he had been "born in the century when the walls of
race were clear and straight; when the world consisted of mutually exclusive
races; and even though the exact edges might be blurred, there was no question
of exact definition and understanding of the meaning of the word."204 He then
specifically situated the construction of race from which he had proceeded in
the Conservation of Races essay within that historical context, and he judged
that construction inadequate. 205 He argued instead that the foundations of race
are socioeconomic and ideological. He capped this argument with the powerful
apothegm; "the black man is a person who must ride 'Jim Crow' in Georgia."206
This vantage point on Du Bois seriously undercuts two main claims made
by contemprary scholars concerning the double-consciousness notion: (1) that it
was a definitive element, a key organizing principle of his thought, and (2) that
it is a moment in the articulation of a distinctively black social-theoretical dis-
course or tradition. It also weakens the foundation for the view that the notion
describes an existential condition generic among Afro-Americans. Of course,
that claim is an empirical one and can be resolved ultimately only in such
terms. Nevertheless, evidence that Du Bois's formulation was both historically
 Du Bois's "Double Consciousness" 125
contingent and not unique to a black sensibility destabilizes the claim's concep-
tual basis, especially since invocation of Du Bois typically substitutes for empiri-
cal evidence of the racial "two-ness."
The double-consciousness idea's apparent resonance is, nevertheless, a re-
vealing facet of contemporary black intellectual discourse. As a proposition alleg-
ing a generic racial condition —that millions of individuals experience a peculiar
form of bifurcated identity, simply by virtue of common racial status —the no-
tion seems preposterous on its face. Yet, the image has become especially popu-
lar and evocative among post-segregation-era black intellectuals; moreover, its
appeal, as recent estimations indicate, reflects a striking, new reading of the
significance of The Souls of Black Folk and particularly troubling premises con-
cerning the substance and objectives of Afro-American intellectual history and
historiography. In chapters 8 and 9 I shall examine these developments and
consider their implications for both the state of contemporary black politics
and the study of the history of Afro-American political thought.
This page intentionally left blank
 8

"Tradition" ana Ideology in

Black Intellectual Lire

D U Bois DROPPED the double-consciousness idea early in his career. Why has
it suddenly become fashionable among students of Afro-American
thought? The answer lies in the notion's appeal to contemporary ideological
sensibilities.
In 1989 and 1990 at least three new editions of The Souls of Black Folk
were published in the United States, and it was excerpted in at least one collec-
tion of "African-American Classics." An earlier wave of reissues had occurred,
not surprisingly, during the 1960s, and the introductory essays accompanying
editions in the different periods present a revealing contrast. No reference to the
double-consciousness passage appears in either Saunders Redding's introduction
to the 1961 Fawcett edition 1 or Nathan Hare's and Alvin Poussaint's introdu
tions to the 1968 Signet edition.2 Nor does John Hope Franklin mention it i
his introductory essay to the 1965 Three Negro Classics31 collection which in-
cludes Souls. In a 1989 Penguin edition, however, Donald B. Gibson construes
the double-consciousness tension as a central element of Du Bois's volume.4
John Edgar Wideman, introducing a 1990 edition, considers it to be one of the
"[mjaster metaphors and tropes" that unify the book.5 In the 1989 Bantam edi-
tion, Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s introduction pivots on the two-ness passage, which
lie judges "Du Bois's most important gift to the black literary tradition . . .
without question." 6 Anthony Appiah begins his introductory essay in the 1990

127
128 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
Bantam Early African-American Classics anthology by quoting the passage; "Of
Our Spiritual Strivings," the essay in which it appears, is Appiah's only selection
from Souls for this collection. 7
Attention to the Washington-Du Bois controversy marks the second major
distinction between earlier and subsequent discussions of the volume. Redding
centers the Washington essay in his assessment of the book's power and signifi-
cance, as do Franklin and Hare. Among the introductions to the more recent
editions, though, only Gibson—who in fact presents it as central — emphasizes
the critique of Washington. Gates makes only a passing reference (not even
mentioning the basis of the disagreement), and neither Wideman nor Appiah
even alludes to it. In part this difference may reflect the professional influence
of literary studies. Gates, for example, focuses his consideration on Du Bois's
"rhetorical mastery, his superb command of the English language" 8 and prizes
those of the book's reviewers who had "been able to see 'past' or 'through' the
political or sociological content of a black author's work to proclaim its primarily
aesthetic merits as literary art, as a sublime use of language."9 Yet Redding was,
and Gibson is, also a scholar of literature. Moreover, Gates and Appiah, at least,
do not simply overlook the Washington essay's importance; they go out of the
way to avoid it.
Gates cites Souls reviewers and others among Du Bois's contemporaries to
support his view of the book's principally literary significance. He draws on Ap-
theker's10 survey of reviews selectively, however, not mentioning the extent to
which they—as Aptheker notes—revolved around Du Bois's challenge to Wash-
ington. Gates also adduces William Ferris's, Langston Hughes's, and James Wei-
don Johnson's reflections on the book's importance for themselves and for black
Americans generally in the early twentieth century. 11 He observes that Ferris
judged Souls to be blacks' "political bible," but he glosses over the fact that
Ferris linked the book's significance explicitly to its role in consolidating anti-
Washington sentiments. Similarly, though he quotes Hughes's recollection that
"my earliest memories of written words are those of Du Bois and the Bible," the
sentences immediately following those which Gates quotes hardly convey an
image of aesthetic contemplation: "My maternal grandmother in Kansas, the
last surviving widow of John Brown's Raid, read to me as a child from both the
Bible and The Crisis. And one of the first books I read on my own was The
Souls of Black Foft."13 Johnson not only praised Souls for its unique "effect
upon and within the Negro race in America," as Gates indicates; that effect,
Johnson makes clear at another point in the same text, had to do precisely with
its serving as a clarion for the forces of opposition to Washington.14
Gates, moreover, quotes Redding's observations, from the 1961 introduc-
tion, that Souls "is more history-making than historical" and that the volume
succeeds in "expressing the soul of one people in a time of great stress, and
showing its kinship with the timeless soul of all mankind." Gates asks: "How
can a work be 'more history-making than historical'? It becomes so when it
crosses that barrier between mainly conveying information, and primarily signi-
fying an act of language itself, an object to be experienced, analyzed and en-
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 129
joyed aesthetically."15 Perhaps, but Redding's view was rather more concrete and
political. For Redding, Souls was "history making" ultimately because it

may be seen as fixing that moment in history when the American Negro began
to reject the idea of the world's belonging to white people only, and to think
of himself, in concert, as a potential force in the organization of society. With
its publication, Negroes of training and intelligence, who had hitherto pre-
tended to regard the race problem as of strictly personal concern and who
sought individual salvation in a creed of detachment and silence, found a bond
in their common grievances and a language through which to express them.16

Appiah's treatment of Washington and Du Bois is even more revealing. He

discusses both men's biographies without hinting at their celebrated conflict,
and his silence definitely seems calculated. He maintains it even when enlisting
Du Bois to buttress a description of Washington's prominence as an historical
figure. Appiah quotes Du Bois's observation that "[e]asily the most striking thing
in the history of the Negro since 1876 is the ascendancy of Mr. Booker T.
Washington," and he indicates that the statement appears "at the start of the
third essay of The Souls of Black Folk."17 But Appiah does not acknowledge
either that that "third essay" is "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others" or
that the statement he quotes is prefatory to Du Bois's attack.
Appiah, Gates, and Wideman certainly need not be constrained by earlier
interpretations in locating meanings in Du Bois's text. In discounting the attack
on Washington and emphasizing the double-consciousness formulation, though,
they not only depart from the previous generation of introductory essays. They
also break with a much older conventional understanding of Souls's significance
in Afro-American intellectual and cultural history—one that identifies the attack
on Washington as the book's key moment and scarcely notices the double con-
sciousness construct. 18 W. T. Fontaine was rare among earlier practitioners of
Afro-American intellectual history in stressing the double-consciousness idea in
Souls; yet he defined it as an artifact of the defeat of black aspirations for full
citizenship after Reconstruction and tied it to Du Bois's criticism of Washing-
ton's capitulationist agenda.19 Nellie Y. McKay credits Arnold Rampersad with
initiating an expansion of the scope of commentary on Souls beyond the Wash-
ington-Du Bois debate,20 but Rampersad nonetheless maintains that " 'Of Mr.
Booker T. Washington and Others' is the key to the book's political intent" and
examines the essay at considerable length.21
The radically new assessment presented in the recent introductions tells us
more about contemporary black intellectual life than about Du Bois. The shift
reflects an outlook that—in its focus on delineating a distinctive and coherent
tradition in Afro-American thought—smoothes out important elements in the
constitution of black intellectual and cultural history. It abstracts away from con-
crete debates, historically specific, enveloping patterns of discourse in the society
as a whole, and the pragmatic concerns that inevitably shape perception. In its
purview, differentiation, tension, and conflict among black Americans recede
into a dim background. This outlook, I shall argue in chapter 9, arises from
130 W. E. B. Du Boz's and American Political Thought
and reinforces an ideological current within the post-segregation-era black petite
bourgeoisie that is troubling because of its fundamentally conservative and depo-
liticizing effects on black American intellectual life.
This orientation to the history of Afro-American thought is linked most im-
mediately to the prominence of literary studies in contemporary Afro-
Americanist scholarship. The disciplinary practice of contemporary literary stud-
ies centers on construction and examination of text-based notions of tradition,
or canons. To that extent it underwrites an approach to intellectual history that
is idealist and ahistorical. This approach produces typically "thin" accounts that
emphasize purportedly transhistorical relations of writers and texts. In Afro-
Ainericanist scholarship, moreover, this tendency has unhelpfully blurred the
distinction between cultural history and the history of social and political
thought, such that the former has tended to substitute for the latter. A result has
been to trivialize the idea of the political by deploying it as a generic allusion —
an all-purpose rhetorical symbol of legitimacy (or illegitimacy) and urgency—
and by obfuscating the character of politics as an autonomous domain of social
activity. As reinventions of The Souls of Black Folk without the Washington
controversy indicate, this diffuse conception of politics can accommodate—and
may even give rise to (after all, if politics can be anything, it need not be any-
thing in particular) — accounts of Afro-American thought that are, from the
standpoint of more conventional and bounded conceptions of the political, strik-
ingly depoliticized.
Yet this interpretive tendency is intrinsically ideological. Its simultaneous
inflation of political language (for example in casual propagation of such con-
structs as "cultural politics," "politics of interpretation," and the like) and depo-
liticization of the narrative of black intellectual history—again, as shown in the
recent assessments of Souls — devalues discourse and action directed toward in-
tervening either specifically in the exercise of public authority or more generally
on the reproduction of given patterns of social relations. This intellectual histori-
ography—as, for example, in Gates's dismissal of Souk's political agenda in
assaying the volume's importance —reduces to ephemera strategic arguments
concerning mobilization for willful, collective action in public life. It also, relat-
edly, gives short shrift to critical reflection and debate bearing on social struc-
ture, political economy, and the staples of political theorizing, such as legiti-
macy, justice, obligation, the meaning of equality, or the nature of the polity.
The narratives that result are ironically compatible in this regard with the
broader rhetorical tendency in the Reagan-Bush-Clinton era to diminish the
significance of politics as a consequential endeavor in American society. The
compatibility, moreover, may not be purely serendipitous. The substantive inter-
pretations proffered in those narratives have embedded within them politically
conservative strains that occasionally erupt into explicitness in commentary that
addresses issues in contemporary black life. These are rather provocative
charges, and I shall specif}' them through a critique focused on the writings of
the main representatives of this approach to Afro-American intellectual histori-
ography— Houston A. Baker Jr. and Henry Louis Gates Jr.
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 131

Houston A. Baker Jr.: Cultural Politics and the Rehabilitation

of Booker T. Washington

From his affiliation with the "Black Aesthetic" ideology of the late 1960s and
early 1970s to the present, Baker has attempted to posit racial or cultural tradi-
tions in order to formulate notions of black authenticity. His more recent ex-
cursions into commentary on Afro-American intellectual history simultaneously
proceed from and seek to defend — albeit with shifting conceptual categories and
idiosyncratic yet unexplicated appropriations of conventional usages—versions
of authentic black tradition.
Baker's constructions of black authenticity rely first on subsumption of all
of Afro-American intellectual history into literary history. He routinely invokes
the former as if it were homologous with the latter.23 Thus he is able to derive
a vision of black intellectual tradition from claims about forms of artistic expres-
sion or modes of cultural performance. This move has two important conse-
quences. First, it justifies an approach that is ahistorical, acontextual, and ideal-
ist in that it characterizes tradition as the elemental persistence of definitive
forms—the constitutive idea of blackness—through all concrete environments.
Baker indeed expressly rejects contextualist and historicist interpretations be-
cause they deny "the very possibility that sophisticated verbal art is an always
already present feature of the Afro-American landscape." 24 Second, in ab-
stracting away from historically specific discursive contexts, Baker's formalist con-
struction overlooks real tensions and differences and trivializes the substance of
real debates among black Americans; to that extent it grounds Afro-American
intellectual history on a false unity. Presumption of that fundamental unity of
experience leads Baker to assert a racial principle of masking—intentional, Ae-
sopian misrepresention —as a way of accommodating apparently conflicting ten-
dencies within his black tradition. 25
In addition to its troubling substantive aspect—Baker advances this idea
initially on behalf of his attempt: to rehabilitate Booker T. Washington as a race-
nationalist hero—the masking principle creates a major interpretive problem for
his project. If "x" and "not-x" equally can be taken as expressions of the black
tradition, then how can we tell what does not qualify as representative? If we
must assume that every artifact—-even those that appear antagonistic to one an-
other, produced by an Afro-American necessarily somehow reflects the tradition,
then the argument is premised on a circularity that cannot bear skeptical scru-
tiny: we can demonstrate the tradition only because we already assume its exis-
tence. If expression of the tradition cannot be deduced automatically from group
membership, identification of proper representations must depend on either eso-
teric knowledge or intersubjective standards of evidence. The latter are not im-
mediately apparent, and Baker does not elaborate any. In explicating his under-
lying notion of black authenticity, however, he reveals how he can avoid the
dilemma of circularity. In Baker's view the authentic black tradition is rooted in
vernacular expression, which lie maintains is organized around a sensibility
132 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
formed in slavery and observable in the blues: "The metaphoric dimensions that
arise in Afro-American discourse from sagging cabins, felt blues, and fastidious
style must be apprehended in their vertical (or synchronic) completeness if one
wishes to elaborate exacting accounts of Afro-American history and Afro-
American literary history." 26
He employs other constructions as well; for example, he advances a notion
that modern black culture exhibits distinctive traits he labels "mastery of form"
and "deformation of mastery,"Z7 and he posits the force of an overarching cate-
gory of "spirit work."28 Nevertheless, the vernacular blues sensibility remains his
fundamental classificatory unit. Yet Baker never provides a clear description of
this sensibility. Furthermore, his account begs the question as to why—granting
for the moment that a blues sensibility actually exists—the meter of black Amer-
ican authenticity begins running with the slave experience rather than at some
other point. What makes the blues-informed vernacular the definitive black tra-
dition? Baker anticipates this question, and his clarification inclines toward hu-
bris: it is authentic because he has decided that it is.

Afro-American expressive culture appears in its complex continuity and genuine

cultural authenticity when it is analyzed according to the model that I have
proposed in my foregoing discussions. "Authenticity" is a sign that can connote
powers of certification and invoke a world of rarefied connoisseurship — and a
desire, as well, for only the genuine and the original. What I intend by the
term, however, is not a raffine ARTWORLD projected by institutional theories
of expression, but rather an everyday world occupied by our grand, great-grand,
and immediate parents — our traceable ancestry that judged certain select
sounds appealing and considered them efficacious in the office of a liberating
advancement of THE RACE.29

However, this explanation is transparently arbitrary and circular, and it poses

still another critical question. As it might be phrased in his hallowed vernacular,
Who died and left Houston Baker in charge of designating black authenticity?
Any construction of cultural or racial authenticity would founder on that
same problem, in part because the idea of the authentic is always hortatory
rather than descriptive. It is an attempt to impose a boundary on the intrinsically
fluid, syncretic, pragmatic processes that are the substance of human social exis-
tence. Notions of cultural authenticity reify culture by construing it as a set of
properties whose ownership is established by proof of origination (though "cul-
tural borrowing" may, in some tellings, confer rights of usufruct). Beneath this
view typically lie presumptions of definitive group essences, evocations of the
old belief in racial natures or temperaments, as in identification of groups — all
too frequent in contemporary discourse—by their alleged possession of traits
such as family structure, orientations toward work, spirituality, thrift, and so
on.30
Raker is in 110 way coy about his esscutialist commitments. He declaims
unabashedly on the existence of an "Afro-American racial genius."" He assures
us that "Afro-Americans—from Jamestown's first disembarkation of "twenty ne-
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 133
gres" to the era of Run-DMC—have been deconstructionists par excellence.
They have continuously shaken (or solicited) Western discourse with spirit
work"}2 He lauds Vincent Harding, Stephen Henderson, and Hoyt W. Fuller
for their "explicit and unshakable trust in the value of their own explicitly racial
instincts and experiences," and he contends that "race carries distinctive expres-
sive cultural incumbencies." 33
Baker himself links his principle of authenticity to a notion of racial essence
in exhorting us to "assume that there is a field of 'particular' or vernacular
imagery unique to the Afro-American imagination."34 Even the apparent speci-
ficity of the Afro-American experience dissolves into a larger, generically racial
essentialism: "Somehow, I cannot persuade myself that a black person in
America, or South Africa, or the Caribbean, or anywhere else in today's world
is anything other than a black person —a person preeminently and indisputably
governed, in his life choices and expectations, by a long-standing and pervasive
discourse called race." 35 Allowance for gender difference among blacks, more-
over, does not at all mitigate his racial essentialism. He simply tacks a subsidiary
"Afro-American women's expressivit)'" onto an otherwise unaltered collective ra-
cial essence.36
Baker's essentialist view of black Americans and his corollary, artistically
inflected notion of authenticity connect with the perverse ways in which he
thematizes politics in his characterizations of black intellectual life. I have al-
ready noted that the presumption of a unitary black experience imposes a false
homogeneity on Afro-American intellectual history. It also supports reduction of
politics to the expression of group identity. Baker contends, for instance, that
the telos of black racial advocacy has always been "the establishment of a mode
of sounding reality that is identifiably and self-consciously black and empow-
ering."37 This view allows him to allege a common political project advanced
by (among others) Countee Cullen's and Langston Hughes's poetry, Frederick
Douglass's abolitionism, the civil rights movement, late-sixties black cultural na-
tionalism, the folkloric figure of the trickster, Alain Locke's New Negro rhetoric,
urban uprisings, minstrelsy, Morris Day's pop music, Charles Chesnutt's and
Paul Laurance Dunbar's fiction, and the music of the rap group Run-DMC.38
Such a chronologically and substantively disparate array of individuals, activities,
and artifacts can be united only by the most banal abstractions.
No doubt some of the problem with Baker's construction of politics is a
function of his penchant for denominating categories and fashioning eccentric
uses of conventional terminology—most often without any attempt to defend
them or even to assign them clear meanings. He waxes on through at least three
books about an "economics of slavery," by which he apparently intends to posit
an evolving ideological narrative articulated through all specific contexts of
black subordination from 1619 to the present; this narrative is produced by a
consciousness formed in a three-century interaction with the phenomenon of
"commercial deportation," or slavery and its consequences. These formulations
appear first in association with the similarly amorphous notion, "blues sensibil-
ity," in Baker's Blues, ideology and Afro-American Literature.39 Then, in Modern-
134 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
ism and the Harlem Renaissance, he adds to them a chiasmic dyad: the "mastery
of form" which seems to refer to the appropriation of restrictive, demeaning
stereotypes for racially ennobling ends, and the "deformation of mastery," which
Baker presents as a more direct, racially assertive, and emphatic — but no less
cultivated —rhetorical strategy that in some unarticulated way "implies an al-
tered definition of economics."40 Blending of those two strategies produced,
Baker avers, yet another vaporous category, "Afro-American modernism," which
he claims was born in Washington's infamous September 18, 1895, speech at
the Atlanta Cotton States and International Exposition.41 Subsequent construc-
tions add categories labeled "spirit work" 42 and "metalevels of cultural negotia-
tion,"43 again with no explication or suggestion as to how the new grafts connect
with the earlier ones.
Baker's constantly shifting categorical fog completely obscures the ground
of historical and social fact; as a result, he has neither means nor warrant to
constrain the flight of his narrative imagination. Absence of constraint can yield
expression of grandiloquent ignorance, as it does most clearly in Baker's remark-
able treatment of Washington, which also makes strikingly clear the disturbing
implications his views about tradition and authenticity hold for interpretation of
the history of Afro-American political thought.
Baker's apologia combines a claim about Washington's intentions with one
about the exculpatory significance of his larger agenda. Baker defends Washing-
ton's public acquiescence to blacks' disenfranchisement and relegation to
second-class-citizen status by arguing that the stance was not genuine but was a
cleverly adapted instrument of a higher purpose. In this view Washington's pos-
ture exemplified the "mastery of form"; it was a ruse through which he only
appeared to endorse the rhetoric of racial subordination in order to "earn a
national reputation and its corollary benefits for the Afro-American masses" via
his program for institution building at Tuskegee.44
Baker's defense is in three major ways faulty. First, the "mastery of form"
argument depends entirely on his own will to believe and thus demonstrates the
circularity intrinsic to his notion of masking. He offers no evidence to support
his contention that we should distinguish between Washington and "Washing-
ton's narrator." This distinction, which Baker simply posits in a formalistic dis-
cussion of rhetorical structure in Up from Slavery, is all that lies beneath his call
to see Washington as striving "to reconcile whatever he thinks of as an 'authen-
tic' self with demands of a larger world from which he must secure venture
capital." 4 ' But why should we make such a distinction except to salvage an
image of Washington as a legitimate race man? From an intellectual-historical
standpoint, moreover, how far should we go in distancing a public figure from
his or her acts by interposing a differently motivated, supposedly more "authen-
tic," private self? Why would such a self be more authentic than the public,
official one? Would the existence of a contrary, private self sanitize an agent's
public acts, override their possibly objectionable public force? Baker addresses
none of these issues, and his avoidance of them is symptomatic of a second
problem with his defense.
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 135
Baker fails to consider the social and political consequences of Washington's
strategy, the ways his public acts were received by his contemporaries and the
agendas they furthered. He apparently accepts on Washington's word that the
Tuskegee enterprise was a "skills center," leading the way to racial uplift, 46 and
in doing so he illustrates both the paucity of his own historical understanding
and the inadequacies of trying to read out the history of political thought from
literary analysis of texts. James D. Anderson's rich scholarship has demolished
the myth of Washington as trickster-nationalist. The Tuskegee model —only a
blackface version of the Hampton model pioneered by General Samuel Chap-
man Armstrong, Washington's mentor—was never about real vocational training;
like Hampton, Tuskegee actually functioned as a normal school designed
to impart the barest rudiments of basic education and ideological training. As
Anderson shows, "Hampton and Tuskegee were not trade schools, nor aca-
demic schools worthy of the name, but schools that attempted to train a corps
of teachers with a particular social philosophy relevant to the political and
economic reconstruction of the South."47 That social philosophy "requested
black southerners to eschew politics and concentrate on economic develop-
ment" and focused on developing "black teachers and leaders who would pre-
pare the black masses for efficient service in racially prescribed occupational
niches."48
In his defense of Washington, Baker seems oblivious to the reality of the
"black Eden at Tuskegee," about which he rhapsodizes as a "modernist" image.
Later, however, he disparages "the turn-of-the-century training of blacks for voca-
tional/technical jobs that they could not possibly hope to occupy in a segregated
economy."49 Although he makes no specific reference, the object of this criti-
cism is the Tuskegee model of industrial education. In fact, as Anderson argues
convincingly, industrial schools characteristically were barred by their public
and philanthropic sponsors from undertaking any course that would bring blacks
into direct competition for "white" jobs. 50 Still, the criticism discloses a reveal-
ing contradiction. How can Baker justify Washington's conciliationism by appeal
to a greater goal which he then deems misguided?
He sidesteps this difficulty by separating praise for Washington as a spokes-
man from the substance of his spokesmanship; moreover, he eludes the discrep-
ancy in his utterances by not acknowledging the links between them. (Not only
does he get lost in his categorical fog, it also provides him hiding places.) Thus
his reduction of Afro-American thought to artistic expressiveness gives vent to
an indiscriminate exercise in racial celebration and allows Baker—never once
blushing in his posture of stylized radicalism—to embrace the most central
black henchman of the white supremacist juggernaut since Emancipation. Be-
cause Baker dismisses historicist and contextualist perspectives, he is able to en-
thuse over even the nefarious "Atlanta Compromise" address. What he lauds as
a "Promethean cultural appropriation" and brilliant maneuver on behalf of
black empowerment, 51 however, is historically and politically significant for giv-
ing an appearance of black approval to the New South regime explicitly predi-
cated on black social and economic subordination and expulsion from civic
136 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
life.''2 On the one hand Baker, ironically, understates Washington's agency in
American politics. The Tuskegee Principal did not merely respond to a fait ac-
compli; his active support helped to implement the new regime and to define a
new orthodoxy in race relations. On the other hand Baker exalts Washington as
the embodiment of collective black will, thereby vesting him with strategic
agency for the entire race; in doing so Baker discloses the third fundamental
inadequacy in his account.
Baker proceeds from a naive, extraordinarily simplistic notion of the relation
between Washington and the larger black population whose interests he pur-
ported to represent. In Baker's purview there are only white elites to be cajoled
and manipulated, Washington, and the inert, programmatically mute black
"masses." White power is reified and naturalized as an unchallengeable environ-
mental force, and Washington's leadership "emerges from a mass of southern
black folk who sought ways beyond factionalism, uncertainty, oppression and
minstrel nonsense that marked their lives during thirty uneasy years from eman-
cipation to the dawn of a new century." 53 Having presumed a confused or be-
nighted passivity as the popular black political condition and Washington as the
sole source of strategic coherence, Baker is predisposed to perceive the interests
of leader and led as identical. Benefit to Washington is ipso facto benefit to the
Afro-American masses. So, he observes, Washington's "mind is undoubtedly al-
ways fixed on some intended gain, on a mastery of stories and their telling that
leads to Afro-American advancement."54
Baker can maintain that view only because he does not inquire into black
responses to Washington's program. Instead, he relies on the affinities of his
father, uncle, and in-laws as proof of Washington's popular legitimacy.55 If he
had cast his net more widely, however, he should have found a more complex
situation. Anderson shows that considerable black opposition to the Hampton-
Tuskegee Idea always existed, and he documents a pattern of local protest
against efforts to impose that model from the mid-1870s into the post-World
War I era —well after Washington's death. 56 Moreover, Baker misrepresents
black reaction to the Atlanta Compromise, asserting that the speech had been
an "overwhelming success with black and white alike."57 Louis Harlan, Wash-
ington's biographer, catalogs a "black response to the speech, from the begin-
ning [that] was more varied and ambivalent than that of whites."58 Anderson
also describes elements of the great controversy that Washington's speech gener-
ated among blacks, and Rydell records that there had been substantial black
opposition—both in Atlanta and elsewhere —to participation in the Atlanta Ex-
position at all because of its endorsement of Jim Crow both ideologically and
organizationally.59
The synecdoche through which Baker evinces his family to stand for black
America is instructive. He slides without hesitation from an excursus on certain
of his own kin to a generic-ally racial construction of "our family's sounding
strategies" and a call to undertake the "hard and ofttiincs painful journey back
to ancestral wisdom in order to achieve a traditional (family) goal."60 He can so
easily assume his family to be a cellular representation of the race because he
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 137
holds an image of the Afro-American population as an organic entity. The racial
family imagery evokes a sort of Volksgemeinschaft in which individual and col-
lective interests are identical and status relations are naturalized. His racial es-
sentialism underwrites a slightly different organicist tendency that also appears
in his synecdochic formulation. If black Americans possess distinctive qualities
and interests that are purely racial, then those can be assumed to be reflected
in any one authentically black individual. Any such individual, therefore, can
be taken as accurately representative of collectively racial perspectives and aspi-
rations. To that extent, racial leadership plausibly can be seen as rising naturally
and unproblematically from the collectivity.
The essentialist and organicist strains in Baker's view of black Americans
allow him to expatiate on politics and leadership without giving any consider-
ation to issues bearing on accountability, legitimacy, or popular participation.
His premise of the organic collectivity speaking with one voice is, when all is
said and done, viscerally antidemocratic. His argument for the strategic impor-
tance of the Atlanta Compromise speech suggests the depth of his distaste for
democratic participatory activity; he prefers order of any sort—even under the
aegis of segregationist whites (though he tries to escape this extent of his prefer-
ence through the passive voice)—to the messiness of popular mobilization.

I designate Washington's speech as the point at which an agreed upon (by those
whites in power, or by these empowered by whites in power) direction was set
[!] for a mass of black citizens who had struggled through the thirty years since
emancipation buffeted on all sides by strategies, plans, hopes, and movements,
organized by any number of popular, or local, black spokespersons, without
before 1895 having found an overriding pattern of national leadership or ap-
proved plan of action that could guarantee at least the industrial education of
a considerable sector of the black populace. 61

Baker's fetishizing of order and uniformity may be in part a vestige of his

cultural nationalist commitments; it may reflect a more general trait of a politics
merged with aesthetics. 62 It also lays bare a view of really existing black Ameri-
cans that is—beneath all the ahistorical, aestheticized idealizations —empirically
false and demeaning. In validating Washington's desire to "train the Afro-
American masses in a way that would ensure their inestimable value to a white
world," Baker also affirms Washington's depiction of an incompetent black pop-
ulation in need of elite tutelage to "enable them to survive."63 Nor does Baker
see popular black defectiveness only in the past. When he pronounces on the
plight of the black poor in contemporary inner cities, he adopts automatically
the prevailing frame of punitive moralism that defines problems in terms of the
putative behavior of poor people themselves. He draws on the standard litany of
"underclass" pundits, invoking the "spiraling rates of teenaged pregnancies in
today's black inner cities," female-headed households, and "collapse of the black
family." He even cites the authority of the scurrilously victim-blaming Bill Moy-
crs television special, "The Crisis of the Black Family."64 This retrograde frame
is both wrongheadecl and wrong. Black rates of teenaged childbearing declined
138 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
steadily through at least the 1970s and 1980s. Collapse of the family is a mean-
ingless, purely ideological category devoid of any content except patriarchal nos-
talgia which similarly operates in defining the female head of household as a
problem. 65
Baker's objectionable pronouncements on contemporary black social life
need not flow directly from a decontextualized, organicist approach to interpre-
ting Afro-American intellectual history. All too many others rehearse bromides
comparable to the former—which are, after all, conventions of Reagan-Bush-
Clinton-era discourse on racial inequality—without the hermeneutic scaffolding
of the latter. As his account of Washington shows, though, Baker's orientation
certainly disposes him toward an authoritarian, antipopular view of the history
of political thought among black Americans. Insofar as it pivots on an inevitably
essentialist notion of racial or cultural authenticity, that view is fundamentally
antidiscursive. That is, the premise of a unitary racial perspective does not pro-
vide space for a politics, or therefore a trajectory of political thought, driven by
open-ended debate and legitimate controversy. Thus Baker apprehends the pe-
riod between Emancipation and the rise of Washington as a time of dysfunc-
tional uncertainty; he sees in one of the two moments of the greatest popular
democratic mobilization in Afro-American history only disorderliness, a pointless
inefficiency that Washington's installation supposedly overcame. To that extent,
Baker's account is actually the opposite of an interpretation of the history of
political thought; it is a brief against the very idea of political discourse among
black Americans. As his treatment of Washington also illustrates, only the decon-
textualized idealism warranted by his elision of the distinction between the con-
cerns of literary history and those of the history of political thought obscures this
troubling feature of his approach.

Henry Louis Gates Jr.: From the Signifying Monkey

to the Vital Center

Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s efforts to authenticate an Afro-American intellectual tra-

dition and canon are considerably more complex than Baker's, in part because
Gates wants to avoid racial or cultural essentialism. He is also more explicitly
concerned than Baker to establish the black tradition on an academic plane of
high intellectuality. Despite his greater care and concern, though, he does not
escape the essentialist and ahistorical pitfalls implicit in his quest. Like Baker,
Gates also relies on elision of distinctions between intellectual and cultural his-
tory and—his explicit claims to the contrary notwithstanding—between politics
and politically ambivalent cultural expression, as well as between aesthetic and
anthropological notions of culture. Even more than Baker, as Gates moves to
comment on contemporary affairs he betrays an often strikingly conservative
political perspective.
Gates seeks the distinctivcness of "the black tradition" in the formal charac-
teristics of rhetorical practice. He construes this tradition as one "not defined by
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 139

a pseudoscience of racial biology, or a mystically shared essence called black-

ness, but by the repetition and revision of shared themes, topoi, and tropes, a
process that binds the signal texts of the black tradition into a canon just as
surely as separate links bind together into a chain."66
This "black tradition of figuration" is preeminently literary; its engine and
embodiment is a two-centuries-long "concern to depict the quest of the black
speaking subject to find his or her voice."68 This tradition's literariness presumes
the need for and existence of a specific canon of texts. In Gates's view, more-
over, this canonical foundation grounds the tradition in sociohistorically con-
crete, artistic practice and to that extent rescues it from racial or cultural essen-
tialism. He argues that

the existence of a black canon is a historically contingent phenomenon; it is

not inherent in the nature of "blackness," not vouchsafed by the metaphysics
of some racial essence. The black tradition exists only insofar as black artists
enact it. Only because black writers have read and responded to other black
writers with a sense of recognition and acknowledgment can we speak of a
black literary inheritance, with all the burdens and ironies that has entailed.
Race is a text (an array of discursive practices), not an essence.69

To this point, one might wonder how Gates's construction of Afro-American

literary tradition bears at all on the concerns of the history of political thought.
It does in two significant respects. First, beneath his formal, rhetorical character-
ization of black tradition lies a notion of cultural authenticity rooted in vernacu-
lar expression. This in turn implies an ontological claim about a definitive
blackness. Second, Gates's interpretive project from the outset overtly swallows
politics into literary artistry and criticism, a move that has its own political impli-
cations for both historical interpretation and contemporary ideological program.
Gates contends that black "canonical texts have complex double formal
antecedents, the Western and the black." /0 He notes that black literature is more
like than unlike the "Western textual tradition" but maintains that "black formal
repetition always repeats with a difference, a black difference that manifests itself
in specific language use."71 The source of this difference is visible in vernacular
expression. "By supplanting the received term's associated concept," Gates ar-
gues, "the black vernacular tradition created a homonymic pun of the profoun-
dest sort, thereby marking its sense of difference from the rest of the English
community of speakers."72 Thus "the literary discourse that is most consistently
'black' . . . is the most figurative." 73 Vernacular expression, therefore, is the
touchstone of black particularity; it occupies "the singular role as the black per-
son's ultimate sign of difference, a blackness of the tongue."74
Gates is like Baker in seeking black distinctiveness in vernacular discourse,
but the ends to which they employ the notion differ significantly. For Baker that
vernacular operates mainly to confer a folkish authenticity; it is a theoretical
elaboration of a populist nationalism animating the Black Arts ideology that he
had long embraced. For Gates also the vernacular functions as an authentica-
tion, but a more overtly scholastic one; he emphasizes the vernacular as the
140 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
source of a culture and a "tradition," and, therefore, of a canon. The Signifying
Monkey is in this respect the equivalent of Beowulf. However, Gates's idea of
the vernacular does more than that.
Rooting his notion of black authenticity on popular discursive practices
allows Gates to assert that he has established it on a nonessentialist basis. He
can make that assertion because he construes essentialism narrowly, as inhering
only in claims for the existence of definitive group characteristics that are biolog-
ical or otherwise obviously suprasocietal. From that perspective, representing
definitive black difference as the product of historically specific and contingent
practices avoids essentializing racial characterizations. 75 But this is only a tauto-
logical sleight-of-hand.
As I showed in chapter 7 with respect to Victorian ideology, racial essen-
tialism does not necessarily depend on biological arguments. After World War
II discovery of the Nazi death camps made biologically based justifications of
racial hierarchy unfashionable in liberal American intellectual life. Therefore,
"culture" gradually replaced biology as the metaphor characterizing the source
of essential traits that supposedly define and separate human populations. 76
Gates's contention that " 'race' is not an essence but a trope for ethnicity or
culture" 7 ' is entirely consistent with this strain of nonbiologistic racial essen-
tialism. As it has become hegemonic, moreover, this strain has made clear the
extent to which prevailing notions of race, ethnicity, and culture function inter-
changeably as templates for essentializing claims about social groups.78
The inadequacy of Gates's narrowly stipulated category of essentialism
points to the deeply problematic character of his own formulation of a contin-
gent, yet elemental, quality of blackness. Credulity is overtaxed to imagine a
collective attribute that could be simultaneously contingent and elemental. And
his attempts to demonstrate such a trait's existence only underscore his position's
impossibility.
At first glance Gates does seem to evince a notion of black particularity that
is historically specific. He maintains that the black vernacular's definitive role
has arisen "since slavery,"79 a view that is affirmed by his repeated evocation
of a two-centuries long project of collective expression. More directly still he
argues,

Free of the white person's gaze, black people created their own unique vernacu-
lar structures and relished in the double play that these forms bore to white
forms. . . . That the myths of black slaves and ex-slaves embody theories of
their own status within a tradition is only one of the more striking instances of
what Ralph Ellison calls "the complexity" of the Negro's existence in Western
culture. 80

Nevertheless, Gates fails to avoid the essentialist pitfall, not least because his
efforts to escape it are more apparent than real. Although he refers extensively to
sociolinguistic scholarship on black Americans, 81 his notion of the black vernac-
ular actually centers on formalized cultural production — both folkloric and liter-
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 141
ary, with the occasional allusion to music. He presents objects of folklore (toasts,
mythological narratives) and literary texts as stand-ins for the vernacular dis-
course that carries such a heavy existential burden in his argument for a black
particularity grounded in popular practice. This move elides a distinction be-
tween aesthetic and anthropological notions of culture— a distinction, that is,
between culture as a compendium of fixed and specialized artifacts and the
formal principles governing them and culture as the pragmatic processes of so-
cial life.
While quotidian culture—ways of living and the meanings constructed
around them —certainly has an aesthetic dimension, it is also fluid, various, and
always syncretic. Those characteristics, which reflect the messy autonomy and
open-endedness of social existence, are the more pertinent for claims such as
those Gates wants to make about popular practices. Yet they have no place in
the fundamentally Arnoldian view that Gates exposes.82 Culture for Gates is
ultimately, as it was for Arnold and generations of his epigones, rarefied and
aestheticist. Art promises a summary elegance that trumps all else as source and
statement of group meaning.
Like Baker, Gates reifies artistic production as an unproblematic expression
of definitively black characteristics. This reification in turn supports the premise
of a collective racial subject. Thus he can ensconce the artist as "point of con-
sciousness, or superconsciousness of his or her people"83 and treat the fiction of
Zora Neale Hurston, Ishmael Reed, and Alice Walker as direct representations
of a collectively black expressive culture. This reified vision allows him as well
to propose neatly circumscribed formulations like the "classic confrontation be-
tween Afro-American culture and American culture" or a dichotomy like "the
Western and the black," which treat "cultures" as bundles of identifiable proper-
ties inhering in and marking clearly bounded populations —a variant, that is, of
Victorian notions of racial ideals.
Gates's emphasis on historical contingency in his construction of black dis-
tinctiveness also collapses in short order. He presents the definitive black vernac-
ular simultaneously as a product of the slave experience in the New World
and as indigenously African, predating and outside the social system of Western
Hemispheric slavery and its ideological entailments. To that extent, his vernacu-
lar black authenticity is transcontextual and even transhistorical. He posits an
"unbroken arc of metaphysical presuppositions and patterns of figuration shared
through space and time among black cultures in West Africa, South America,
the Caribbean and the United States." At the same time that he acknowledges
the existence of discrete black "cultures" and "traditions" in the New World, he
treats them as instances of a singular, "extraordinarily self-reflexive tradition"
originating in Africa. This perspective sets the Afro-Americanist intellectual proj-
ect. "Because of the experience of diaspora" he maintains, "the fragments that
contain the traces of a coherent system of order must by reassembled."85
Gates recognizes that such constructs are freighted with the implication of
a racial essence, which he tries to shed. On the one hand, he declares that
142 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
Repetition and revision are fundamental to black artistic forms, from painting
and sculpture to music and language use. I decided to analyze the nature and
function of Signifyin(g) precisely because it is repetition and revision, or repeti-
tion with a signal difference. Whatever is black about black American literature
is to be found in this identifiable black Signifyin(g) difference.86
On the other hand, he attempts in the same breath to back away from that
claim's obviously essentialist foundation. "Lest that theory of criticism, however,
be thought of as only black," he hastens to reassure us, "let me admit that the
implicit premise of this study is that all texts Signify upon other texts, in moti-
vated and unmotivated ways."8' Yet how can both statements be true? Either
"Signifyin(g)" is authentically and distinctively black, or it is not. If he seeks to
argue for a distinctively black form of Signifying that marks the boundaries of
group particularity, he has only refined the idea of a black essentiality, not tran-
scended or overcome it.
Gates's transhistorical claims are ironic and revealing, as well as badly
flawed on their own terms. He advances his thesis crucially by assertion, synec-
doche, and calls to suspend disbelief. In seeking to establish what seem to be
quite tenuous links between the Esu figure in Yoruba mythology and the Signi-
fying Monkey in Afro-American folklore, he attempts to slide past his lack of
evidence by admitting it in passing, yet proceeding, unhesitatingly, with his con-
tentions. Apparently, in Gates's view, noting that assertions are unwarranted
somehow makes them less so or preempts objection to them.88 He glosses over
the evidentiary void with a veneer of lyrical analogy; he suggests that "the Signi-
fying Monkey emerges from his mysteriously beclouded Afro-American origins
as Esu's first cousin, if not his American heir. It is as if Esu's friend, the Monkey,
left his side at Havana and swam to New Orleans. The Signifying Monkey re-
mains as the trace of Esu, the sole survivor of a disrupted partnership." 89
This construction makes sense only if we presume the connection between
Esu and the Monkey that Gates wants to demonstrate. When all is said and
done, he exhorts us to make a leap of faith based only on his own will to believe.
His argument reduces to purely arbitrary justification: "Whereas the rich paral-
lels between Esu and the Monkey cannot be demonstrated historically, these
are the rhetorical figures and the critic's enterprise that I am positing a relation
between, a functional and rhetorical equivalency and complementarity."90
Equally problematic is Gates's synecdochic treatment of Africa in his zeal
to locate black distinctiveness and cultural tradition. He extrapolates Yoruba rit-
ual and mythology to all of Africa and, through a similar elision, takes the "my-
thologies of Yoruba cultures found in ... Brazil, Cuba and Haiti, among oth-
ers" as representative of a genetically diasporic black sensibility. The logical
condensation of his gambit is thus: Esu is a tricksterlike figure in Yoruba mythol-
ogy; Yoruba mythology reflects the "splendid . . . ancient . . . classic culture of
traditional West Africa" and a more general "African system of meaning and
belief"; 92 these survive in the New World, as can be seen in Brazilian and
Caribbean retentions of Yoruba myths; the Esu figure in Cuba sometimes ap-
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 143
pears with a monkey; therefore, the Signifying Monkey trickster of Afro-
American folklore derives from Esu.
In the absence of "archeological and historical evidence" Gates relies heav-
ily on etymological claims to shore up this logically shaky chain of argument.
The burden of his etymological analysis is twofold. He wants to uncover patterns
of overt and sedirnented meanings that link the West African, Caribbean, and
Afro-American trickster figures by ascribed behavior and characteristics. He also
wants to identify all the tricksters with functions related more or less obliquely
to rhetorical strategies. He wants, that is, to show not only that the tricksters are
related but also that they equally "function as focal points for black theories
about formal language use."93
In pursuing this objective Gates centers on two words, apparent African
retentions, that appear in Afro-Cuban trickster lore. He traces nuances of mean-
ing associated with supposedly related words in several West, Central and East
African languages. His execution of this effort, however, is driven by a fallacious
presumption that similar combinations of letters in words indicate common deri-
vation. In an offhand comment he succumbs to this fallacy with regard to words
in a single language in suggesting "a possible French connection between signs
('sign') and singe ('monkey')."94 The problem is magnified when extended
across discrete languages. In attempting to trace Kikongo words into Kiswahili,
Gates mistakenly identifies verb and noun roots and does not recognize that he
must allow for both different noun prefixes and for historical sound shifts in
roots. His specific error lies in assuming the Kikongo noun nganga ("one expert
in medicine or magic") is linked to the Kiswahili verbs ng'ang'ama ("to clutch
hold of, as of a swinging branch or tree") and ng'ang'ama ("to beg earnestly,
beseech, until one attains a desired end") ostensibly on the strength of the
shared ngang lettering. The link thus postulated is the main support for Gates's
claim for a connection between Esu and monkey. This in turn is crucial to his
argument for a diasporic black cultural tradition and sensibility. The Kikongo
and Kiswahili words, however, are not evidently related. Gates does not acknowl-
edge that related roots in different Bantu languages may not have exactly the
same sound shape (Kikongo and Kiswahili are both Bantu languages). In this
case, the related root in Kiswahili is the verb -ganga (from which the Swahili
noun mganga is formed). -Ngagama and -ngangania are two other, independent
Kiswahili verb stems, unrelated either to -ganga (in Kiswahili) or nganga (in
Kikongo). Therefore the association he proposes is specious.9' (This is not to
consider whether such common etymological derivatives would meaningfully
support his theories even if they could be shown convincingly to exist.)
Gates's trickster-based argument for a diasporic black particularity suffers
from yet another potentially fatal flaw, one in part bound up with the absence
of other persuasive evidence. Without the putative Esu-Signifying Monkey rela-
tion we have no compelling reason to assume that the Afro-American trickster
is even a "pure" African retention at all. The trickster figure is common all over
the world, and the Signifying Monkey could be an autonomously Afro-American
144 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
entity. In addition, Native American trickster figures have been shown to be
strikingly close in some instances to their Afro-American counterparts.96 More-
over, Gates's interpretation begs questions — especially given the weakness of his
diasporic claims and absence of direct examination of a certainly more varied
Afro-American vernacular discourse — as to why the Signifying Monkey figure or,
for that matter, the trickster trope writ large becomes definitive or constitutive of
group sensibility.
I mentioned at the beginning of this critique of Gates that his arguments
for a transhistorical black particularity are ironic and revealing as well as prob-
lematic on their merits. His position is ironic insofar as it amounts to a variant
of the project of the Black Arts nationalism from which he has consistently
sought to distance his own approach to Afro-Americanist scholarly inquiry. This
vantage point also throws into relief a little-remarked but central aspect of
Gates's intellectual enterprise, a concern to cleanse Afro-Americanist scholarship
of its association with nonacademic political agendas and ideological programs.
Gates's commonality with Black Arts nationalism comes into focus through
his insistence on rooting black distinctiveness in Africa. He pursues this task
even though doing so, as I have shown, not only requires him to strain against
a manifest lack of evidence but also fatally undermines his equally insistent
claim to an historically contingent—and therefore putatively nonessentialist—
formulation of black particularity. This is by no means to suggest that dropping
the African link would automatically rescue his formulation, which is in princi-
ple oxymoronic. Historical contingency means flux, variation, and change; ele-
mental group distinctiveness implies uniformity and persistence over time. Nev-
ertheless, an argument, such as Gates seems at points inclined to make, for a
common sensibility conferred by the material realities of the slave experience
is, on its face at least, more plausible than one for a group particularity that is
somehow both historically contingent and radically transhistorical. Indeed, other
scholars have advanced accounts that treat slavery as the cauldron for creation
of a distinctive black culture in the New World. Lawrence W. Levine, Eugene
D. Genovese, and more recently Sterling Stuckey have published studies in this
vein that are widely known and generally regarded as reasonable, whether or
not they are ultimately persuasive.97 Why is Gates not satisfied with this kind of
interpretation, admittedly more modest but nonetheless grand in scope, and why
does he persist instead with one that is both impossible to sustain on its own
terms and incompatible with his other intellectual commitments?
The key to answering that question, I submit, lies in Gates's project of au-
thenticating an autonomously black intellectual tradition and literary canon. His
vigorous attempts to establish his claim on an African foundation, even without
clear basis and on pain of mortal contradiction, may stem immediately from a
more or less willful desire to have it both ways. Nevertheless, it is important for
him to have it both ways —at least by holding onto the African foundation narra-
tive—in part because of the value he attaches to notions of tradition and canon.
These notions proceed from and loom so large because of premises that amount
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 145
to a blend of Arnoldian and Black Arts nationalist perspectives, a blend that
illuminates their overlapping features.
Throughout his career Gates has recurred to the significance of the ability
to produce literature as an issue in eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century de-
bates about black people's status as full members of the human community and
their actual, or even potential, equality with Europeans.98 He laments the spe-
cial, and unjust, burden that this artifact of the Enlightenment's exaltation of
reason placed on black people. He also sees this "onerous burden of literacy" "
as having distorted black writing, arguing that it has embedded as a "subtext of
the history of black letters [the] urge to refute the claim that because blacks had
no written traditions, they were bearers of an 'inferior' culture." 100 Gates traces
this organizing subtext from eighteenth-century slave narratives through the con-
temporary tendency he describes as "race and superstructure" criticism, main-
taining that its effect on literary studies in particular has been to circumscribe
too tightly and inappropriately the compass of scholarly inquiry and criticism.101
"Because of this curious valorization of the social and polemical functions of
black literature," he observes, "the structure of the black text has been repressed
and treated as if it were transparent."10Z
Gates's critique resonates with others that have in varying ways drawn atten-
tion to a chronic problem in Afro-American intellectual life, typically formulated
as a self-defeating racial defensiveness or a strait-jacketing, narrowly single-
minded focus on race. Fontaine and L. D. Reddick in the 1930s and 1940s, for
example, pointed to the limitations of a simplistic concentration on race that
ironically blunts the development of knowledge about the black American situa-
tion. Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin in the 1950s and 1960s bemoaned the
dominant presumption that black art should be evaluated primarily in relation
to its status as an aid to social protest. Those arguments converge around a
reaction against the stance I have characterized as racial vindicationism. 103
Gates is incisive and eloquent in his objection to the consequences of the vindi-
cationist orientation in the study and practice of black literature.

Not only the theory but also the practice of black literature has, for two hun-
dred years, grown stunted within these dubious ideological shadows. The con-
tent of a black work of art has, with few but notable exceptions, assumed pri-
macy in normative analysis, at the expense of the judgment of form. What's
more, many black writers themselves seem to have conceived their task to be
the creation of an art that reports and directly reflects brute, irreducible, and
ineffable "black reality," a reality that in fact was often merely the formulaic
fictions spawned by social scientists whose work intended to reveal a black
America dehumanized by slavery, segregation, and racial discrimination, in a
one-to-one relationship of art to life. Black literacy, then, became far more
preoccupied with the literal representation of social content then with literary
form, with ethics and thematics rather that poetics and aesthetics. Art therefore
was argued implicitly and explicitly to be essentially referential. This theory
assumed . . . that there existed a common phenomenal world, which could be
146 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
reliably described by the methods of empirical historiography or else by those
of empirical social science . . . [and] that the function of the black writer was
to testify to the private world of black pain and degradation, determined by a
pervasive white and unblinking racism. Not only would creative writing at last
make visible the face of the victimized and invisible black person, but it would
also serve notice to the white world that individual black people had the requi-
site imagination to create great art and therefore to be "equal," an impetus,
again, that we have traced to the eighteenth century.104

Unlike others who have made similar critiques, however, Gates wants to hold
on to a notion of authentic blackness. This is one sense in which he wants to have
it both ways, as we can see in his objection to the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic dis-
course in Afro-American studies—the contemporary manifestation of the race and
superstructure tendency against which he defines his project. His concern has
been "to take the 'mau-mauing' out of the black literary criticism that defined the
'Black Aesthetic Movement' of the sixties and transform it into a valid field of intel-
lectual inquiry once again."105 But Gates's problem with that discourse ultimately
is just that it is theoretically low-tech and unsophisticated. He propounds a "new
black aesthetic movement" whose interpretive orientation draws on poststructural-
ism and deconstructionist theorizing extrapolated from the black vernacular. He
presents this as a corrective to a Black Arts/Black Aesthetic scholarship in which
"art for art's sake was seen to be a concept alien to a pan-African sensibility."106 He
wonders, in responding to a nationalist critic:
Who can disagree that there is more energy being manifested and good work
being brought to bear on black texts by black critics today than at any other
time in our history, and that a large part of the explanation for this wonderful
phenomenon is the growing critical sophistication of black readers of literature?
Or that this sophistication is not directly related to the fact that we are taking
our work—the close reading, interpretation, and preservation of the texts and
authors of our tradition—with the utmost seriousness?107

For his part Gates proclaims a desire "to lift the discourse of Signifyin(g)
from the vernacular to the discourse of literary criticism." 108 And elsewhere he
elaborates on his hyperprofessionalistic view of the task of Afro-American literary
studies.
We write, it seems to me, primarily for other critics of literature. Through
shared theoretical presuppositions, the arduous process of "cultural translation,"
if not resolved, is not hindered. To maintain yet go beyond this split text milieu
is our curse and, of course, our challenge, as is the fact that we must often
resurrect the texts in our tradition before we can begin to explicate them. To
render major contributions to contemporary theory's quest to "save the text," in
Hartman's phrase is our splendid opportunity. Unlike critics in almost every
other literary tradition, almost all that we have to say about our literature is
new.109

What Gates offers is a version of the Black Arts perspective that has been
refined by an infusion of high intellectuality and purified of its explicitly politi-
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 147
cal intent. He sees a tabula rasa available to Afro-Americanists because in his
view no previous criticism has approached the technical sophistication and tran-
scendence of mundane politics —and the two are joined for him—to which
current critics have access. In this circumstance he sees both intellectual matu-
ration and a radically new interpretive context for an academic field.
Nevertheless, the claim to continuity with an African sensibility does the
same work for him—albeit at the price of contradicting other central tenets —
that it does for Black Arts nationalists. It provides a purely black foundation for
a cultural tradition. Gates emphasizes that Afro-American expressive culture is
the product of white as well as black influences, asserting that "every black
canonical text is ... 'two-toned' or 'double-voiced' ";'.110 that point figures prom-
inently in his criticism of the Black Arts school. Against its parochialism he
argues:

Black writers, like critics of black literature, learn to write by reading literature,
especially canonical texts of the Western tradition. Consequently, black texts
resemble other, Western texts. These black texts employ many of the conven-
tions of literary form that comprise the Western tradition. Black literature shares
much with, far more than it differs from, the Western tradition, primarily as
registered in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French. 111

However, he sees the product of this influence not really as a hybrid or even as
a smooth syncretism. For Gates, the outcome remains a conjunction of two
distinct cultures, thus the doubled voice. He maintains that "the inscription of
the black voice in Western literature has preserved those very cultural differ-
ences to be imitated and revised in a separate Western literary tradition, a tradi-
tion of black difference." 112 Indeed, a key question driving his approach to the
study of Afro-American literature reflects a concern quite like that which in-
spires Black Arts inquiry. He asks, "If every black canonical text is ... 'two-
toned' or 'double-voiced,' how do we explicate the signifyin(g) black difference
that makes black literature 'black'?" 113
Tradition and its formal embodiment in a canon are pivotal for Gates—
notwithstanding the weight he attaches to the black vernacular—because he
ultimately assents to the view that takes the capacity to produce literature as a
marker of racial accomplishment. This view rests on two premises: (1) that there
are discrete characters, styles, or sensibilities that inhere to racial, ethnic, or
national groups; and (2) that there are identifiable benchmarks indicating the
extent of a group's cultivation. Having a sophisticated literary tradition that bears
the distinctive marks of the group, then, supports a claim to black equality and
worth. This imperative underlies the need to define a canon. Gates puts the
issue clearly: "|I]f a peripheral ethnicity is to come into its own through the
production of literature, the mechanisms of recognition—the 'selection of clas-
sics'—remains integral to the attainment." 114
Gates's preoccupation with defining a black tradition has been present from
the first in his scholarly writing. It has existed in a not uninteresting tension
with his more cosmopolitan arguments against Black Arts ideology's conceptual
148 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
narrowness that fails to account for nonblack influences on black texts. Over
time, though, he has tended to resolve this tension increasingly in favor of the
position of racial autonomy. In the process he reveals a similarity between the
rarefied notions of high culture propounded by Arnold and modernist critics,
on the one hand, and the meanings assigned to culture by Black Aestheticians
on the other. Gates is indeed steeped in the former, as his emphasis on the
problem of canonicity and his various defenses of ars gratia artis (for example,
in his assessment of the significance of The Souls of Black Folk, noted above)
reveal. He lobbies only for a separate but equal high culture. Kenneth W. War-
ren points out astutely that "[b]y conceding, as Gates does in The Signifying
Monkey, a vision of white cultural ownership, of a Western tradition that has
been 'created and borne in the main, by white men,' one purchases like owner-
ship of a black tradition."115
Gates proposes what might be described as a neoliberal revision of the
Black Aesthetic. He calls on Afro-Americanist critics to get up to technical
speed, but in a language that bridges the imagery of sacred vocation deployed
by modernist and other conventional aestheticisms and the strikingly similar
rhetoric of the Black Arts movement:

We have the special privilege of explicating the black tradition in ever closer
detail. We shall not meet this challenge by remaining afraid of, or naive about,
literary theory; we will only inflict upon our literary tradition the violation of
the uninformed reading. We are the keepers of the black literary tradition. No
matter what theories we seem to embrace, we have more in common with each
other than we do with any other critic of any other literature. We write for each
other and for our own contemporary writers. This relation is one of trust, if I
may. How can any aid to close reading of the texts of the black tradition be
inimical to our modes of criticism? 116

In responding to Joyce Joyce's fatuous, Black Arts-inflected challenge to the

racial legitimacy of his approach to the study of black literature, Gates reasserts
almost verbatim this combination of neoliberal fetishism of technique and
Arnoldian-modernist-nationalist pieties regarding the hallowed mission of the
critic. In that context he specifies that by "we" he means "critics in the 1980s"
and the "trust" becomes a "sacred" one.117
Gates even approximates the self-consciousness that (Maulana) Ron Kar-
enga and (Imamu) Amiri Baraka displayed a generation earlier in calling for
invention of a black tradition, but, again, from a more professionalistic orienta-
tion. In discussing his work on a Norton Anthology of African-American Litera-
ture, he enthuses, "We have at our disposal the means to edit an anthology that
will define a canon of African-American literature for instructors and students at
any institution which desires to teach a course in African-American literature.
. . . A well-marked anthology functions in the academy to create a tradition, as
well as to define and preserve it" 1 1 8 In defending his claim to a separate black
tradition parallel to the "larger American tradition," he asserts that "nationalism
has always been the dwarf in the critical, canonical chess machine. For anyone
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 149

to deny us the right to engage in attempts to constitute ourselves as discursive

subjects is for them to engage in the double privileging of categories that hap-
pen to be preconstituted."n9 Elsewhere he elaborates on this connection be-
tween nationalism and canon formation after proposing that the "selection of
classics" is integral to the construction of nationality through literature: "Inevita-
bly, the process of constructing a group identity, at the margins as at the very
center, involves active expulsion and repudiation; self-identity requires the ho-
mogeneity of the self-identical. Ironically, then, the cultural mechanism of mi-
nority self-construction must replicate the mechanism responsible for rendering
it marginal in the first place."120
Finally, he extols the "wonderful opportunity offered to our generation of
critics as heirs to the Black Arts movement" and embraces Greg Tate's challenge
to produce a "black critical theory as great as this greatest black art."121 His
trenchant call to "redefine 'theory' itself from within our own black cultures"
brings to mind a Baraka, Karenga, or Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti) with a
more finely honed academic professionalism.
As deconstruction and other post-structuralisms, or even an aracial Marxism
and other "articles of faith in Euro-Judaic thought," exhaust themselves in a
self-willed racial never-never land in which we see no true reflections of our
black faces and hear no echoes of our black voices, let us—at long last—master
the canon of critical traditions and languages of Africa and Afro-America. . . .
We must, in the truest sense, turn inward even as we turn outward to redefine
every institution in the profession—the English Institute, the MLA, the School
of Criticism —in our own image . . .
. . . [Ujntil we free ourselves of the notion that we are "just Americans,"
as Ellison might put it, and that what is good and proper for Americanists is
good and proper for Afro-Americanists, we shall remain indentured servants to
white masters, female and male, and to the Western tradition, yielding the most
fundamental right that any tradition possesses, and that is the right to define
itself, its own terms for order, its own presuppositions. . . . When we mind-
lessly borrow another tradition's theory, we undermine [the] passage from the
seen to the told — from what we see to how we tell it—this basis for our own
black public discourse, this relation between cognition and utterance. 122

Gates's association of literature and canon with nationalist imperatives, as

well as his solemn rhetoric about critics as keepers of the cultural flame and
artists as "points of consciousness" for their people, not only echoes the ponder-
ous style and program of Black Arts nationalism. It also contains anachronistic
resonances that suggest a perspective on his repeated discussion of two-centuries-
old debates about blacks' capacities for literary production. This disposition
might seem to be the product of either a peculiar obsession or extensive recycl-
ing of the same essays. However, taking account of his blend of Black Arts and
formalist aestheticism discloses a layer of meaning in Gates's reconstruction of
those early debates that imbues them with pivotal strategic importance for his
intellectual agenda. They become the basis for a view that absorbs politics into
literary analysis by merger.
150 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
To this point I have described Gates's interpretive stance as revolving in part
around a call to transcend politics in or to purge political considerations from
black textual interpretations. However, though he does complain fulsomely
about the practice of subordinating formal analysis to immediate ideological or
sociological concerns, he actually makes a more radical move. He wants instead
to redefine political significance to give priority to literary expression and criti-
cism as strategic action. This tack he pursues in two ways. First, he eliminates
distinction between literary and political texts, subsuming the latter within the
former. Second, correspondingly, he assigns to the production and formalist
analysis of literature the most elemental and consequential role in advancing
racial interests. He sees the black literary tradition as "broadly defined, including
as it does both the imaginative and the political text."123 Having incorporated
both types of content into a general category of black writing, he then defines
writing itself as the primordial political undertaking.
The very act of writing has been a "political" act for the black author. Even
our most solipsistic texts, at least since the Enlightenment in Europe, have
been treated as political evidence of one sort or another, both implicitly and
explicitly. And, because our life in the West has been one political struggle
after another, our literature has been defined from without, and rather often
from within, as primarily just one more polemic in those struggles. The black
literary tradition now demands, for sustenance and growth, the sort of reading
which it is the especial province of the literary critic to render; and these sorts
of reading all share a fundamental concern with the nature and function of
figurative language as manifested in specific texts.124

Anticipating objections, he actively defends the dissolution of politics into

form by depicting figurative expression as both the quintessence of blackness
and the most fundamental imperative of blacks' existence—-thus, by implication
their most basic politics—in the West.
Given the obvious political intent of so much of our literary traditions, is it not
somewhat wistful to be concerned with the intricacies of the figure? The Afro-
American tradition has been figurative from its beginnings. How could it have
survived otherwise? . . . Black people have always been masters of the figura-
tive: saying one thing to mean something quite other has been basic to black
survival in oppressive Western cultures. Misreading signs could be, and indeed
often was, fatal. 'Reading,' in this sense, was not play; it was an essential aspect
of the 'literacy' training of a child. This sort of metaphorical literacy, the learn-
ing to decipher complex codes, is just about the blackest aspect of the black
tradition. 125

This combination of claims amounts to something of a coup for the depolit-

icization of Afro-Americanist intellectual activity. Gates is able to construe liter-
ary studies as a self-contained, ahistorical enterprise impelled by formalist aes-
thcticism. Yet he can simultaneously appropriate for that endeavor the cachet
and sense of moral urgency that have legitimized Afro-Americanist scholarly
pursuits purporting to bear more directly on secular politics and social affairs.
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 151
Invoking arguments by Hume, Jefferson, and others that hinged the question of
blacks' status in the human community on the production of literature is rhetor-
ically instrumental for this objective. Doing so—particularly because Gates re-
duces the totality of a controversy that ranged across many fronts (for example,
biology and physiology, theology and species descent, capacity for scientific and
mathematical reasoning, relative moral sense, capacity for self-government and
complex social organization) to this one dimension —supports equating pro-
duction and criticism of literature with political action. By representing that
debate as venerable and historically fundamental, and projecting it forward in
time, he asserts the political primacy of the dynamics of expressive culture. This
perspective helps to make sense of Gates's ahistorical and Procrustean reading
that makes The Souls of Black Folk's artistic qualities paramount for the book's
significance and reputation. His commitment to having literary studies swallow
politics and his aestheticism of the Arnoldian-modernist sort converge to overde-
termine such a reading.
Gates exemplifies this move clearly in his response to Joyce Joyce's puerile
attack. On the one hand, he announces: "I do not think that my task as a critic
is to lead black people to 'freedom.' My task is to explicate black texts. That's
why I became a critic. In 1984, I voted for Jesse Jackson for President: if he
stays out of literary criticism, I shall let him continue to speak for me in the
political realm."127 Immediately thereafter, on the other hand, he offers this
assessment:

And who is to say that Baker's work or mine is not implicitly political because
it is "poststructuralist"? How can the demonstration that our texts sustain ever
closer and sophisticated readings not be political, at a time in the academy
when all sorts of so-called canonical critics mediate their racism through calls
for "purity" of "the tradition," demands as implicitly racist as anything the
Southern Agrarians said? How can the deconstruction, as it were, of the forms
of racism itself . . . not be political? 128

Gates discusses a "classic confrontation between Afro-American culture and

American culture" that "is both political and metaphysical," a struggle "defined
by the politics of semantics." He specifies it as a "(political, semantic) confronta-
tion between two parallel discursive universes: the Black American linguistic
circle and the white . . . a protracted argument over the nature of the sign
itself, with the black vernacular discourse proffering its critique of the sign as
the difference that blackness makes within the larger political culture and its
historical unconscious."129
In assessing the Joyce-Gates-Baker exchange, Theodore O. Mason Jr. sug-
gests that "Gates is actually making an argument not against politics and ideol-
ogy as general concerns, but rather is mounting an attack on a specific political
ideology, the liberationist movement of the sixties."130 That point is central. As
Mason also notes, Gates in fact shares Joyce's concern with "the need for a
protective solidarity to defend black culture and the black critical tradition from
the depredations of the surrounding racist environment" and joins her—and, I
152 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
would add, Black Arts nationalists generally—in "assuming the mantle of libera-
tor and custodian."131 Like the Black Arts theorists, Gates romanticizes an artist's
(and by extension a critic's) role in mythopoeically "forging value, . . . solidify-
ing meaning," translating "experience into meaning and meaning into belief
. . . incorporating experience into [the] people's pantheon of value." 132 He di-
verges from them precisely in that he rejects their political focus because of its
mundaneness.
Because of the nature of black poetic expression . . . the black poet is far more
than a mere point of consciousness of the community. He or she is a point of
consciousness of the entire language. In the former role — especially in black
America— one is often bogged down by far too many political considerations.
The latter role, however, though based in part on political reality, allows the
poet to transcend his or her political reality and arrive at the core of the com-
munity's values and way of life. It is debilitating for a people's art to be tied
merely to its immediate political reality. That which individuates a way of life
is not only the set of principal goals a people hold but, more important, their
central beliefs about happiness and suffering (above all, about death) which
play their part in determining choice and motivating action —indeed, in de-
termining value.15'
From this perspective, Gates clearly fails to escape the essentializing ideological
tendency that he laments in race and superstructure criticism, the presumption
of a mimetic function for black artistic production. He simply shifts the locus of
the warranted mimesis from content to form. He also presumes that black art
transparently reveals an essential black social reality; his claim is that the black
experience authentically reflected is a definitive mode of expression rather than
features of demography, social psychology, political economy, or public opinion.
He even shares the reflex that impels nationalists' fetishism of African origins.
In this regard, the narrative of a putative Esu-Signifying Monkey connection,
as well as the undergirding desire to reconstitute poststructuralist literary theory
as an African retention, is Gates's version of Afrocentrists' Egyptology.134
The shift from content to form, including the related subsumption of poli-
tics into literature, has serious implications for inquiry into Afro-American intel-
lectual history and historiography. This shift is nested ideologically with a politi-
cal quietism that affects conceptualization of the history of ideas and illuminates
the homology between Gates's interpretive program and neoliberal political ide-
ology. The parallels stem from his desire to dehistoricize and depoliticize black
intellectual history. They become especially obvious on considering his perspec-
tive on The Souls of Black Folk as a positive expression of the sensibility re-
flected in his brief against Black Arts criticism.
Where Gates objects to "race and superstructure" critics' isolation of social
or political content as the basis for critical appraisal, he proposes that the real
significance of Du Bois's text appears when we "see 'past' or 'through' the politi-
cal or sociological content" to its "primarily aesthetic merits as literary art."1'5
The focus on literary form turns attention away from both the practical issues
and the substantive arguments that animate the text. "Long after the social issues
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 153
with which Du Bois wrestled so intently and so passionately have become chap-
ters in the chronicle of African-American history," he enthuses, "students and
their professors continue to turn to The Souls to experience the power of its
lyricism, the 'poetry' of its prose."''136
In the same vein, he lauds Souls as "an urtext of the African-American
experience," in part because it "succeeds, somehow, in 'narrating' the nation of
Negro Americans at the turn of the century, articulating . . . the cultural partic-
ularity of African-Americans."m This assessment of the text is consistent with
Black Aestheticians' interpretive predisposition; both pivot on reflection of a ge-
nerically authentic blackness as a criterion for membership in the racial canon.
Gates dissents only with respect to identification of the racially definitive sub-
stance, and in the process sidesteps a conundrum that characteristically has be-
set black nationalist intellectual historiography—the problem of accommodating
real conflict and incompatibility among representatives of the tradition. If ca-
nonical authors represent a unitary blackness, how can historiography handle
their disagreements with one another? In relocating the site of black authenticity
to the formal aspects of expression, and in explicitly rejecting explicit politics as
a criterion, Gates abstracts away from this problem. So, for instance, he can
gloss over the Washington-Du Bois controversy with polite demurral; politics is
ephemeral in relation to aesthetics in defining the black intellectual tradition.
The combination of depoliticizing transcendence and aestheticist tech-
nicism that shapes Gates's interpretive program also yields a suggestive similarity
to the "scriptures of modernism," which, David A. Hollinger notes, functioned
to create

a base free from the obligation to specify and to take a stand upon the political,
moral, and metaphysical. . . . The modern canon was thus a vital tool in the
reconsideration of liberalism that figured prominently in the intellectual history
of the 1940s and 1950s. . . . Now, literature was to be about society but not
subject to it: of the world, but not in it. This suspended quality in the "modern-
ism" embodied in the canon was often expressed through the notion of "aes-
thetic." The texts were presumed to be capable of filling cultural space once
occupied by philosophy, theology, and political theory without losing their dis-
tinctive aesthetic quality, and becoming, in themselves, subject to the rules of
argument appropriate for philosophy, theology, and political theory.'38

Hollinger is rather circumspect about the intrinsically conservative, politically

quietistic entailments of the stance advocated by this formalism, but Paul Lauter
remarks on "how fully formalist criticism and McCarthyite politics had buried
ideas about the social functions of writing."139
Despite its official professions of Black Power rhetoric, Black Arts/Black Aes-
thetic ideology proceeds from a view that is in its fundamental features similarly
quietistic. In idealizing transcendent roles for artists as a caste of priestly culture-
keepers and art as the suprahistorical domain for definition of the group and its
essential values, the Black Aesthetic reproduced in a different rhythm and key
modernist ideologues' radical separation of art from concrete social life. This
154 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
effect indeed runs throughout black cultural nationalism, even when it purports
to political activism, because it is moved by a formalistic, ultimately aesthet-
icized view of black people, and therefore of black interests and the means to
realize them.140 As a program for political action, Black Arts ideology's "populist
modernism" reduces to efforts to cultivate authentically black aesthetic sensibil-
ity for a popular audience: the talking drums play an Africanized, inner-city
version of the theme to Masterpiece 'Theater.
Gates recognizes that the Black Aesthetic rests on this concatenation of
markedly different features—a pious aestheticism that amounts to a claim for a
distinctively black high-cultural critique and the romantically populist rhetoric
characteristic to Black Power politics. He notes that "conservative black aca-
demic critics and professors" such as Charles T. Davis often looked favorably on
the formalist-critical possibilities of the Black Aesthetic while rejecting its osten-
sibly radical politics.141 Gates himself has effected the complete separation,
showing that the two moments are not necessarily interdependent. In doing so
he reflects in his interpretive theory the utter collapse of the extra-academic
black political mobilization that had warranted the hybrid of populist modern-
ism in the first place. He simultaneously suggests a link between the aestheti-
cism that he advocates and his own explicitly conservative political centrism.
Gates has expatiated in the public realm much more frequently and ful-
somely than Baker on politics and politically charged matters. Especially in the
1990s has he commented often on topical, political issues in the New York
Times, Newsweek, Forbes, the New Yorker, the New Republic, and elsewhere. His
having pursued this course poses a peculiar irony. Gates, after all, acquired his
academic renown principally on the basis of militant argument for depoliticized
inquiry into black life. He has then used the visibility thus attained as a platform
from which to pontificate about politics. At the very least, by the force of his
own theoretical narrative, the expertise that made him a public figure by itself
cannot qualify him to function in the sort of "public intellectual" role he in-
creasingly occupies.
Gates's activity as a public intellectual is suggestive and problematic; it
raises concern not because he is a scholar of literary studies who deigns to speak
for the record on public affairs. He is hardly unique in that position. Edmund
Wilson, Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Irving Howe, and Lionel Trilling are
only the first few names that come immediately to mind. More broadly, Noam
Chomsky, E. P. Thompson, Stephen Jay Gould, and the late Linus Pauling are
among the most accomplished examples outside literary studies who have used
their prominence in unrelated specialty areas to comment visibly on political
and social issues. Gates differs, though, insomuch as the thrust of his scholarship
has been to reinforce the boundary between academic and civic pursuits. Others
may operate in separate spheres with no overlap — chemistry and antimilitarism,
linguistics and anti-imperialism, Shakespeare and socialist activism. Gates stands
out because his public intellectual and academic stances are not simply uncon-
nected; they appear to contradict each other. His intellectual program seems not
just apolitical but dnft'political through and through.
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 155
This may be a real contradiction of which Gates is not aware or by which
he is untroubled. It may also express nothing deeper or more complicated than
the "that was there, this is here; that was then, this is now" quality so common
in his writing. (He has published at many, quite different ideological compass
points, giving each readership doses of its own comforting truths.) But Gates
himself provides a clue to an alternative view of his apparent contradictoriness,
one that implies compatibility if not coherence. "The political authority that
came to Du Bois after 1903," he observes, "was generated in large part by the
rhetorical authority that he revealed in The Souls of Black Fo/&."142 This assess-
ment suggests a perspective that in either (or both) of two ways comports with
his elevation of the aesthetic in Afro-American intellectual history. The more
benign reading follows from Gates's elevation of the aesthetic to a transcendent
status that makes it the site of the profoundest politics. If aesthetics is a metapol-
itics that subsumes politics of the more conventional sort, then his perception of
the trajectory of Du Bois's stature seems reasonable. Demonstration of rhetorical
prowess is the paramount legitimation; recognition as a political voice is an
entailment of the more meaningful admission to the "republic of letters." A less
benign reading raises the spectre of careerism and self-promotion. Gates is can-
did about this aspect of his new role: "At one time I wanted to grow up and
be Jacques Derrida. Now I want to grow up and be Edmund Wilson. I al-
ways wanted to write for The New Yorker, and now I do. If I publish an essay
in Time magazine, or the New York Times, I get dozens of letters. . . . Every
afternoon I answer my mail, and it's generally
o
people responding to something
that I've written. That's wonderful." 143 Gates might have decided to follow a
course similar to that which he reads into Du Bois—or might have read it into
Du Bois after having chosen it for himself. To that extent he could quite appro-
priately shift gears abruptly from the one role to the other. This view may help
to make sense of Gates's otherwise curious switch in tone. Where he had be-
come increasingly assertive and trenchant in a race-nationalist way in the late
1980s, suddenly thereafter—as he began to publish "social commentary" in
mainstream organs of opinion—he adopted a more temperate, Archimedean
voice.144
Of greater concern than the relation between Gates's academic and political
roles, however, is the substance of the latter. The piece of political ground he
has staked out for himself emits several familiar and quietistic themes and reso-
nances. Above all else, he wants clearly to establish his political centrism. Evok-
ing the Cold War liberalism of Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Gates endorses the
ideal of seeking the "vital center,"145 announces his desire to "search for a mid-
dle way,"146 and bemoans "the sharp ideological oppositions through which we
parse political discourse."147 He shilled for President-Elect Clinton just after the
1992 election, retailing the conservative Democratic Leadership Council's line
on the requirements of American politics and praising Clinton's centrism,
which, according to Gates, "is not the centrism of caution: it reflects, rather, a
heartfelt negotiation between creeds that are bitterly in conflict but do not have
to be so." 148
156 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
This centrist commitment is not idle. Gates has articulated it directly and
indirectly through critical essays on other topics. Not surprisingly, the New Re-
public has been a receptive forum. (His coinage of "muscular humanism" to
describe his perspective consciously evokes that magazine's "muscular liberal-
ism.") In 1992 he constructed a reminiscence of Baldwin to svipport his ideal of
political moderation. Baldwin, on Gates's idiosyncratic reading, lost his discern-
ing critical eye, and thus his power as a public moral force, when he became
overtly politicized and accepted the role of spokesman for the movement in the
late 1960s.149 This is, first of all, a dubious perspective on Baldwin, who —
despite his protestations —had functioned as a race spokesman in his writing
and public appearances throughout the civil rights era. Gates even discusses his
early repudiation of Malcolm X, which was by definition an act of engagement
in black political debate. Baldwin was no more — or less—an "official" spokes-
man for the movement in 1970 than he had been a decade earlier. Though
Gates is certainly right in arguing that Baldwin lost his acute purchase on Amer-
ican society and race relations after the mid-1960s, he has to overlook or deny
key features of the earlier period to provide an account that blames the siren of
activism for deterioration of Baldwin's critical vision. More likely, Baldwin only
demonstrated earlier and more visibly than others how inadequate received ways
of seeing were for making sense of the changing character of racial politics and
the challenges facing black Americans in the postsegregation era.
The real point of Gates's essay, however, is not so much to situate Baldwin
as it is to counsel quietism dressed up as judicious moderation. He places his
hopes in "a new generation of readers that has come to value just those qualities
of ambivalence and equivocality, just that sense of the contingency of identity,
that made [Baldwin] useless to the ideologues of liberation and anathema to so
many black nationalists." Gates attacks caricatures of irrational radicalism, a
"populist left," then and now. He presents first Eldridge Cleaver's and Baraka's
homophobic attacks on Baldwin and then "urban activists who would rather
picket Korean grocery stores than crack houses" as the substance of radi-
calism.
In a 1993 New Republic cover article that trades on the currently popular
canard of juxtaposing the warrants of the First and Fourteenth Amendments,
Gates makes a yet more spirited and direct statement of his ideological position.
He is properly troubled by the flawed psychologism that undergirds a strain of
critical race theorists' support for regulating hate speech, although he advances
his case against them in part in a less than principled way. He links them by
association with Catherine MacKinnon and then takes MacKinnon's argument
for prohibition of pornography as a proxy for the others —even though the ques-
tion of harm in the hate speech issue is burdened with contextual complexities
that do not similarly complicate the pornography debate. To that extent, he
creates a straw opponent through sleight-of-hand.152 (This is a common rhetori-
cal move for Gates. His response to Joyce's attack revolves around his imputing
an "implied presence of the word integrity" to her essay. 153 And he more than
once blithely invokes the existence of a "silent second text" —a construction that
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 157
can take absence as proof of presence—to justify claims of influence in the face
of a lack of evidence.)
In this essay as elsewhere in his new public intellectual guise, Gates resorts
to a substantively legitimate criticism that is nonetheless a familiar device of
those who counsel quietism. He chides the critical race theorists for not paying
attention to political economy, poverty, and class differentiation among black
Americans. 154 On the merits this is a fair and reasonable criticism. Yet it can
also be a smokescreen, a handy way to change a disagreeable topic by pointing
to—but not engaging systematically—a different, supposedly more urgent area
for concern. Gates certainly provokes skepticism with his high-minded charge,
steeped in implication of hypocrisy or irresponsibility, that those who pursue
agendas he criticizes do not focus on "such 'real social problems' as the disinte-
gration of American cities and the failure of the public schools."155 Gates him-
self has never addressed such issues in his scholarly or public intellectual pur-
suits; he only invokes them to reject other programs by impugning their
proponents' sincerity or clearheadedness. He is thereby able to evade confront-
ing the views he opposes on their own terms.
Gates's criticism seems disingenuous both because of the disjunction of his
preachment and practice and because the tendencies he thus rejects share a
common element: they all position themselves as oppositional alternatives to
some academic or political orthodoxy. He has leveled this attack, which is actu-
ally an appropriation of the 1960s' "mau mau" style, at Afrocentrism and post-
structuralism as well as critical race theory. Although each of these tendencies
has very disturbing if not damning features and eminently sensible grounds exist
for rejecting each, what Gates objects to ultimately is their aspirations to radical-
ism. And this principle stands out most of all when he does remark on what he
flippantly calls "the politics of politics."156
In this regard Gates's celebrated attacks on "black anti-Semitism" take on a
less than salutary cast.157 While anti-Semitism is no less reprehensible among
blacks than others, it is by no means clear that there is a particularly virulent,
distinctively black form that warrants special designation and denunciation.
Gates indeed might have taken up that issue in some of his public breast-
beating. There is a potentially dangerous political subtext to the invention of
the black-anti-Semitism category, one that aims to undermine demands for so-
cial justice by imputing to them a tarnished moral foundation and to deflect
discussion of black politics away from the problem of inequality. For Gates to
join the chorus of denunciation on the op-ed pages without addressing that
problem is less an act of courage than a militant endorsement of neoconserva-
tive ideologues' conventional wisdom.
In "Let Them Talk," Gates embraces Isaiah Berlin's thinly ahistorical and
narrowly individualist formulation of negative liberty as the essence of liberalism
and posits it as a standard against which to judge attempts to compel behavior
through state power. Predictably, that standard predisposes him against "sweep-
ingly Utopian rhetoric (that invites] a regime so heavily policed as to be incom-
patible with democracy." 158 As with much of Gates's social commentary, he
158 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
defines himself against a straw alternative. Who would speak for a sweepingly
Utopian, heavily policed regime? He does not specify the conditions that would
qualify for that characterization. But in presenting it as the polar and sole alter-
native to Berlin's negative liberty, Gates both leaves the impression that whatever
deviates from Berlin's thin, fundamentally conservative notion of liberalism is
suspect and gives himself room to deny intending to leave that impression.
The posture of courageous tough-mindedness in defending centrist convic-
tions is a key trope in Gates's commentary. In a single essay he, incredibly
without hint of self-criticism, castigates "massively totalizing theories that mar-
ginalize practical political action as a jejune indulgence"; and objects to "the
historiographical tradition that depicts America univocally as a force of reaction
in a world of daisy-fresh revolutionary ferment." 159 After issuing a disclaimer
that he does not wish to trumpet a new Pax Americana, he asks: "Should the
global circulation of American culture always be identified as imperialism, even
if imperialism by other means? In an era of transnational capital, transnational
labor, and transnational culture, how well is the center-periphery model holding
up?" 16° He draws on Arjun Appadurai's contention that a "new global cultural
economy" has rendered center-periphery theories, and thus theories positing an
overarching American imperialism, obsolete. Gates thereby illustrates the depo-
liticizing tendency within postmodernist cultural studies' inattentiveness to, or
dismissal of, political economy and the state system as domains crucially struc-
turing power relations. In an essay published as the Bush administration—fresh
from invading Panama—was unleashing its military might on Iraq, Gates main-
tains that "the spatial dichotomies through which our oppositional criticism has
defined itself prove increasingly inadequate to a cultural complex of traveling
culture." As the International Monetary Fund's structural-adjustment policies
impose dislocations that send people moving around the globe like sharecrop-
pers, hoping in vain that Lagos or Delhi will be better than the countryside and
that New York or London will be better than Lagos and Delhi, postmodernists
exult in what they see myopically only as "a complex, overlapping, disjunctive
order." 161
Yet it is in his ruminations on Afro-American politics and social life that the
conservative thrust of Gates's commentary is clearest. At times he verges on the
flatly reactionary. In his love note to Clinton he defends the president-elect's
support for workfare and capital punishment, justifying those positions by noting
support for them in "black public opinion."162 He asserts that poverty "can take
on a life of its own, to the point that removing the conditions that caused it can
do little to alleviate it."16? Appropriately, his rightist inclination is most transpar-
ent in an essay in Forbes. Writing in a special seventy-fifth-anniversary issue on
the theme "Why We Feel So Bad When Things Are Going So Good," Gates
lays out his take on intraracial stratification. He notes that "it's time for the black
middle class to stop feeling guilty about its own success while fellow blacks
languish in the inner city of despair. Black prosperity does not derive from black
poverty: Those who succeed are those whose community, whose families, pre-
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 159

pared them to be successful." He pulls out a black neoconservative chestnut in

announcing that "[t]he time has come for honesty within the black community."
And what does honesty decree but admission —in Forbes no less—that "[t]he
causes of poverty within the black community are both structural and behavioral
. . . [and] it's time to concede that, yes, there is a culture of poverty. How could
there not be? How could you think that culture matters and deny its relation to
economic success?"
He rehearses a Rush Limbaughesque stereotype of black poverty: "In gen-
eral a household made up of a 16-year-old mother, a 32-year-old grandmother
and a 48-year-old great-grandmother is not a site for hope and optimism." He
polishes this argument off in fine, Victorian form, raising the spectre of the lazy,
sturdy beggar: "It's also true that not everyone in any society wants to work, that
not all people are equally motivated. There! Was that hard to say?" Well, no,
it is not at all hard to say in Forbes. In another version of this essay Gates deletes
that provocative expletive and rhetorical question, replacing them with a less
bombastic but perhaps more revealing sentence: "The commitment to redress a
legacy of economic violence does not require a fantasy of economic egalitari-
anism."165
Even the set of specific programs he lauds come from the conservative rep-
ertoire—"tax breaks to generate new investment in inner cities, youth appren-
ticeships with corporations, expanded tax credits for earned income and tenant
ownership of inner-city property." And his accusatory conclusion could have
come from Thomas Sowell or Glenn Loury:

To continue to repeat the same old stale formulas—to blame, in exactly the
same ways "the man" for oppressing us all, to scapegoat Koreans, Jews or even
Haitians for seizing local entrepreneurial opportunities that have, for whatever
reason, eluded us —is to fail to accept moral leadership. Not to demand that
each member of the black community accept individual responsibility for their
behavior—whether . . . gang violence, unprotected sexual activity, you name
it—is another way of selling out a beleaguered community.166

Gates in fact depicts a situation in which, in effect, racial discrimination is

the principal source of difficulty and inequality only for upper-status blacks; the
"underclass" suffers most conspicuously as the consequence of its own deficien-
cies, whether bad behavior or lack of human capital.167 And that picture high-
lights the class character of Gates's vision. It also connects the approach to Afro-
American intellectual history that he and Baker represent and the current popu-
larity of the "double-consciousness" formulation to larger ideological currents
within the post-segregation-era black petite bourgeoisie. Gates repeatedly calls
up a nostalgic image of organic solidarity in black communities under Jim
Crow. He cannot decide exactly how solidaristic segregated black life was. In
one moment he scolds that blacks "have never been members of a single social
or economic class."168 In another he contends that "the effect of the Civil Rights
Era . . . was to create two classes in the black community."169 Nevertheless, he
160 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
is convinced that the "'black' community, as we knew it before 1965, simply
does not exist any longer." 17°
This community's supposed passing is a source of consternation. Dissipation
of the enforced proximity of segregation has allowed the growth of both opportu-
nity and anxiety within the black petite bourgeoisie, which finds itself in a "no-
man's land of alienation and fragmentation [among] white colleagues at school,
in our mostly white neighborhoods and in the workplace."171 This sense of
"alienation and fragmentation" fuels nostalgia for a supposedly more connected
setting in which it was possible "to be a part of a community, of something
'larger' than ourselves."172 But this nostalgia is a class dream; it bears a striking
resemblance to white baby boomer counterparts' romantic wistfulness for the
Victorian and Edwardian petit bourgeois worlds. The yearning is for a simpler,
organic community in which the petite bourgeoisie's status was secure and its
cultural authority was hegemonic and deferred to automatically. Gates's nostal-
gic vision centers Du Bois's "Talented Tenth," of which — as his first-person-
plural pronoun discloses—he reads himself as a product.

1'his was a colored world then. . . . It was a world that in some sense has
shaped and nurtured many of us, a world in which both our purpose and our
enemies were clear. We were to get just as much education as we possibly
could, to stay the enemies of racism, segregation, discrimination. . . . It was a
world in which comporting ourselves with dignity and grace, striving to "know
and test the cabalistic letters" (as Du Bois put it) of the white elite and acknowl-
edging and honoring those of us who had achieved were central to being a
colored person in America. . . . We, too, were a people of the Book.173

In considering "the meaning of blackness for my generation of African-

American scholars," he makes a definitively revealing announcement: "I want
my own children to grow up in the home of intellectuals, but with black middle-
class values as common to them as the air they breathe."174
Gates's memoir is particularly instructive in this regard. He confesses his
own sense of double consciousness ("Bach and James Brown. Sushi and fried
catfish") in a preface written to his daughters "because a world into which I was
born, a world that nurtured and sustained me, has mysteriously disappeared."175
The memoir—which from its rhetorical structure could have been titled Up
from Slavery on Lake Wobegon, or Booker T. Washington Meets Garrison Keil-
lor -—is a reminiscence on "a village, a family, and its friends. And of a sort of
segregated peace." His narrative is a lovesong to the ancien regime. He bemoans
what he perceived as "late sixties and early seventies" radicalism's presumption
that "enlightened politics" required loss of "our sense of humor." 176 By his own
account, his experience of the Jim Crow world was sheltered and protected, in
part by his youth but mainly by his class position. Moreover, much of his fond
remembrance is predicated upon his family's relatively prestigious standing in
the black social hierarchy. And not unrelatedly, the crucial loss is not the Ge-
meinschaft of the "village" but the dissolution of the segregated institutional
apparatus within which that status system was embedded.
 "Tradition" and Ideology in Black Intellectual Life 161
Only later did I come to realize that for many of the colored people in Pied-
mont—and a lot of the older Colemans [his mother's prominent family] in
particular —integration was experienced as a loss. The warmth and nurturance
of the womblike colored world was slowly and inevitably disappearing, in a
process that really began on the day they closed the door for the last time at
Howard school, back in 1956. 1/7

We might only wonder how those less fortunately placed experienced the
passing of the old order. The book resolves to a reflection on the last segregated
annual family picnic that the town's principal employer, a paper mill, sponsored
for its black workers. Gates, despite disclaimers along the way, proffers a tale of
desegregation experienced primarily as unintended, unpleasant consequences
for blacks, effected by a reluctant, paternalistic employer trying to avoid the
punitive action of a distant and impersonal state: "Nemo's corn never tasted
saltier, his coffee never smelled fresher, than when these hundreds of Negroes
gathered to say good-bye to themselves, their heritage, and their sole link to
each other, wiped out of existence by the newly enforced anti-Jim Crow laws.
The mill didn't want a lawsuit."178
If Gates's reflections on the demise of Jim Crow bring to mind Washington's
sentimentalized account of freeclpeople's reluctance about Emancipation, it is
for good reason. Nor is it simply because both figured out that mainstream
recognition as a black voice (or public intellectual) requires dramatic and re-
peated endorsement of centrist or conservative orthodoxy. Gates has proposed a
version of bootstrap, self-help social policy consonant with a Washingtonian vi-
sion. He asserts that black impoverishment will persist " ujntil we own things."
That's one of the things I like about the Nation of Islam. Elijah Muhammad
was very clear about the fact that you have to own a chunk of it, you have to
own things, you have to be self-sufficient. You're always going to be interdepen-
dent economically in this society, but you have to control your local institu-
tions. Black people are ... thirty-three million, and if we consider the fact
that there are twenty-six million Canadians, we're a nation. We are a nation.
Instead of mau-mauing each other with disagreements about cultural authentic-
ity, asking, "Mirror mirror on the wall, who's the ideologically blackest one of
all?" —rather [if we] start to pool our ideological and economic resources, I
think we'd have a lot more power. Paradoxically, America presently has the
largest black middle class in history and the largest black underclass in history.
The middle class wants to do something about the underclass. That kind of
pooling and group economic thinking is certainly a much more positive way to
go than manifestations of guilt about our success. . . . We need to use group
political and economic power in this country if we really want to do something
about the other half of the black community.179

So we come full circle. This is the outcome of Gates's depoliticized essen-

tialism, what Warren insightfully describes as his "wish to end up with a more
or less unproblematic 'we' [arid] his belief that 'professionalism' — rather than
functioning within, or, as an ideology—can provide a refuge from it."180 In his
role as public intellectual he endorses precisely the position that he built his
162 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
academic career attempting to purge from Afro-American intellectual historiog-
raphy in the name of a new-Black Aesthetic: simplistic Black Power ideology. In
the process he displays the ahistoricism and conservatism of both stances, as
well as that of the post-Jim Crow petit bourgeois consciousness from which they
spring.
 9

From Historiography to
Class Ideology

T HE HISTORIOGRAPHICAL TENDENCY that Baker and Gates exemplify has at-

tained prominence partly for institutional reasons. Its popularity reflects the
broader appeal of literary studies—and lines of inquiry rooted in the concerns
of literary studies —in the academy of the 1980s and 1990s. This appeal has
been notable in Afro-Americanist scholarship, which has become sharply in-
flected toward the study of literature and associated interpretive rubrics. As in
other academic pursuits, this development is most immediately the product of a
familiar professional dialectic. The interpretive orientation that emerged in liter-
ary studies in the 1980s, typically under the flags of deconstruction and post-
structuralism, has several features that support its proliferation. It is a self-
contained discourse that, not unlike Straussianism in the history of political
thought, has its own relatively esoteric lexicon and an elaborate canon of critical
texts —characteristics that impose entry costs high enough to confer a technicis-
tic legitimacy. Yet militant antipositivism and skepticism regarding linear argu-
ment or grand narrative undermine both internal and external consistency as
criteria for evaluation. Successful interpretation, therefore, is not simply a func-
tion of straightforward application of method, and adjudication of interpretive
claims necessarily is idiosyncratic.
The result is accommodation of a relatively high level of controversy among
practitioners on any issue. Thus the technical requirements for entry into the

163
164 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
discourse do not operate as a filtering mechanism that screens participation on
grounds of methodological proficiency. Pretty much anyone willing to put in
the time required to appropriate the lexicon can play the game. Moreover, the
sociological milieu that has developed around this discourse is aggressively ex-
pansionist, tending to redefine other scholarly disciplines' topical domains in
line with the practices of literary theory—which, often cast, revealingly without
modification, as "theory," in effect displaces all other forms and areas of theoreti-
cal or interpretive endeavor. The combination of an elaborate, esoteric intellec-
tual apparatus, weak guild controls on entry into the discursive community, and
disciplinary expansionism overdetermines academic popularity, particularly once
beachheads have been established in prestigious departments and universities.
(Rational-choice theory, which is similarily esoteric, formalist, and expansionist,
makes an illustrative contrast. Because its formalism derives from the more
closed methodological system of mathematical modeling, and because of its
scientistic ideological commitments, the rational choice community screens
membership on the basis of proficiency in mathematical analysis. Nevertheless,
although insistence on technical rigor limits access to the universe of function-
ally certified practitioners, it does not—as Donald Green and Ian Shapiro have
demonstrated 1 —produce interpretive outcomes with any greater empirical force
or purchase on the social world.)
In addition, the new discourse's claims to subvert, even invert, received ca-
nonical and interpretive hierarchies vest it with a politicized aura likely to find a
congenial audience among proponents of feminist, minority, and other insurgent
academic interests. As both subject matter and personnel, those interests re-
mained marginalized in the academy into the 1980s. The poststructuralist and
cleconstructionist orientation became, as rhetorical posture and substantive pro-
gram, a weapon in the institutional war of position. Moreover, that politicized
rhetoric, in part as an expression of disciplinary expansionism, typically elides
distinctions between the "politics of interpretation" or the status of marginalized
interests in the academy on the one hand, and extramural politics on the other.
As I have argued in chapter 8, this elision has attractive ideological entailments
for adherents. Chief among these is access to a language of moral urgency not
typically applicable in debates surrounding status and legitimacy within aca-
demic regimes.
In the Afro-Americanist field this elision's benefits also extend to the con-
ceptual realm, as my examination of Baker and Gates has shown. Substituting
literary history for the history of political thought glosses over the fundamentally
problematic character of the claim to a smooth, coherent black intellectual tra-
dition. This claim's appeal stems in part from its relation to attempts to legiti-
mize Afro-American studies theoretically and institutionally. But institutional im-
peratives alone seldom fully account for the vagaries of academic fashion.
Academic discourses are not pristine in relation to currents of thought that strike
responsive chords in other spheres of social life. Professors, after all, are embed-
ded in social structures broader than the university. They live, consume, vote,
desire, fear, and pay taxes like everyone else, and they do so, by and large, in
 From Historiography to Class Ideology 165
ways that reflect middle- to upper-middle-class habits of mind and perspectives.
Specifically, the idea of a coherent black tradition that is both essentialist and
depoliticized has become popular in Afro-Americanist scholarly circles also be-
cause it expresses the sensibility of at least a fraction of the post-segregation-era
black petite bourgeoisie.
The idea of a reified black tradition and the imagery of double-
consciousness connect particularly with the middle-class stratum that operates in
largely integrated career environments, especially those professional milieux—
including elite colleges and universities—-in which work and social networks
overlap. The mindset that grows from this stratum's social position is predisposed
to find the double-consciousness trope resonant and familiar. As was true in its
original Victorian formulation, the trope's power presumes a model of identity
constructed from monads such as femaleness, blackness, whiteness, gayness, and
the like. The presumption that group identities are monadic entities—es-
sences—persists broadly as an organizing feature in American discourse. The
boundaries may be construed as more or less permeable, but the crucial point
is that Americans generally continue to apprehend salient group affiliations such
as race/ethnicity, class, gender, and, more recently, sexual orientation as unitary
properties that are in effect primordial and that confer corresponding states of
feeling and perceiving. Double consciousness attains its affective force as an
expression of the sensibility of those who embrace this monadic discourse and
experience their situation as not adequately accounted for by any one of its
reified categories of identity.2
Trey Ellis's manifesto for a "New Black Aesthetic" explictly theorizes this
sensibility as a class phenomenon. In fact, Ellis luxuriates in class status in a
way that brings to mind the hyperbolic self-congratulation for which E. Franklin
Frazier berated an earlier black bourgeoisie and its publicists. Ellis presents him-
self as an avatar of the new sensibility.

I grew up in predominantly white, middle and working-class suburbs around

Ann Arbor, Michigan, and New Haven, Connecticut, while my mother and
father worked their way through the University of Michigan and Yale. At public
elementary school in Hamden, Connecticut, my sister and I were the only
blacks not bused in from New Haven. It wasn't unusual to be called "oreo"
and "nigger" on the same day. After going to private junior high and high
school in New Haven, I transferred to Phillips Academy, Andover, in the elev-
enth grade. . . . I won't pretend to be other than a bourgie black boy . . .
who hadn't lived around a lot of other black people except my own family until
I moved into Ujamaa, Stanford's black dorm. 3

He defines himself as a "cultural mulatto," a member of a black status group

"educated by a multi-racial mix of cultures [who] can navigate easily in the
white world. And it is by and large this rapidly growing group of cultural mulat-
toes that fuels the NBA [New Black Aesthetic]."4 But his formulation conflates
class and a racialized notion of culture. He praises Lisa and Kellie Jones for
having chosen to identify as black despite having been "raised primarily by their
166 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
Jewish mother" and having attained elite academic pedigrees. "Never before,"
he announces, "have individual, educated blacks had the ability to assimilate so
painlessly, yet both Jones sisters didn't."5 Being raised in largely white environ-
ments and the markers of privileged education converge, reinforcing each other
as signs of hybridity.
Class celebration ultimately drives Ellis's exultation in the cultural mulatto
status he proclaims. His "New Black Aesthetic" is—as was the "New Negro"
projected nearly two-thirds of a century earlier, and with almost identical rheto-
ric—at bottom a manifesto for a new petit bourgeois stratum.
For the first time in our history we are producing a critical mass of college
graduates who are children of college graduates themselves. Like most artistic
booms, the NBA is a post-bourgeois movement driven by a second generation
of middle class. Having scraped their way to relative wealth and, too often, crass
materialism, our parents have freed (or compelled) us to bite those hands that
fed us and sent us to college. We now feel secure enough to attend art school
instead of medical school.6

Ellis praises the Black Filmmaker Foundation as "one of the first black-arts
organizations that couples the creativity of the new black artists themselves with
the insider's knowledge of high finance from the current flood of young black
investment bankers and lawyers." He lauds the filmmaking Hudlin brothers as
"some of the most traditionally middle class of the NBA. Artful black yuppies
('buppies'), they don't dress like either hiphop B-boys or punkish hepcats. And
they aren't ashamed that many of their friends are lawyers and bankers." At the
same time he effuses that the films of Reginald Hudlin (a Harvard man, as Ellis
apparently feels it important to point out) "realistically, relentlessly, and hilari-
ously portray contemporary black working-class life" and approvingly quotes
Hudlin's observation that black films should attempt to be "culturally authen-
tic." ' But how, one might ask, does the exaltation of "cultural mulatto" status
comport with a notion of cultural authenticity?
Ellis only begs this question and seems oblivious to the contradiction his
stances suggest. This contradiction runs throughout his argument. He proclaims
that "[nationalist pride continues to be one of the strongest forces in the black
community and the New Black Aesthetic stems straight from that tradition."8 In
responding to critics he proffers his cohort's "leftist, neo-Nationalist politics."9
Yet nowhere does he suggest how this supposed nationalism, with its implica-
tions of an essentialist construction of black authenticity, even coexists with —
much less derives from—the condition of hybridity that also defines his New
Black Aesthetic sensibility.
Similarly, Ellis claims that this sensibility "is not an apolitical, art-for-art's-
sake fantasy," and follows with an allusion to contemporary black suffering. Yet
in the next breath he praises as sophistication a posture that seems at least as
likely to reflect a smug individualism that is politically quietistic.
For us, racism is a hard and little-changing constant that neither surprises nor
enrages. Robert Townscnd, 31, puts it this way, "You can't sit around and corn-
 From Historiography to Class Ideology 167
plain about the white man until you're blue in the face. . . ." So he took the
dominant culture's credit cards and clobbered it with a film. Terry McMillan
"thinks life's a bitch no matter what color you are. You can't blame the world."
We're not saying racism doesn't exist; we're just saying it's not an excuse.10

How these views diverge from those of "black conservatives such as Thomas
Sowell . . . or Stanley Crouch"—from whom Ellis seeks to differentiate his
New Black Aesthetic just one paragraph earlier—is not immediately clear. As
with Baker and Gates, when Ellis reaches toward specificity in his comments on
the political exigencies of the moment, his reflex is not to indict inequality and
social injustice; instead he invokes a cheap, empty gesture and the need for
behavioral purification. "We realize that a poem, no matter how fiery, isn't going
to feed a homeless black child or make a black junkie clean his syringe."11 Ellis
is like Gates in embracing black conservatives' stock-in-trade political orthodoxy
as intrinsically virtuous. He boasts of his group's "postliberated aesthetic," their
willingness to deviate from the "official, positivist black party line," and he gen-
erally commends them for having the self-confidence to present unflattering or
racially satirical portrayals of black life.12
Of course merely employing imagery popularized by conservative ideo-
logues does not necessarily indicate similar commitments. However, Ellis offers
no substantive evidence that would gainsay a suspicion that he shares more of
their perspective than he would like to be recognized as sharing. His reflexive
view of social responsibility as largely centering on rectifying objectionable black
behavior fuels such suspicion, as does his unabashed class celebration.
Considering the composition of the New Black Aesthetic's audience in rela-
tion to the self-justifying goal of disturbing black conventions accentuates the
tension between Ellis's "leftist, neo-Nationalist" posturing and his overlap with a
black conservative perspective. Ellis glosses over this ticklish matter by naturaliz-
ing the white audience. He praises the NBA particularly for not being "afraid to
flout publicly" the conventions of nationalist politics through parody. But he is
able to construe the nose-thumbing stance toward black conventions of depic-
tion as either avantgardist or requiring special courage only because he treats
that "public" as an exogenous abstraction. The fact is that the NBA's popularity
and critical acclaim —on which Ellis dilates fulsomely—means that their audi-
ence is largely white, and that fact undermines any contention that making fun
of black conventions is an especially risky endeavor in this context. Ellis circum-
vents this problem for his praisesong by characterizing the audience only in the
abstract, as "the world"—a world which, revealingly, "is not only now accus-
tomed to black faces in the arts, but also hungers for us."' 3 Yet it is not the
"world" that awards the Pulitzers, MacArthurs, Nobels, and other prizes that
Ellis takes as transparent ratifications of virtuosity; those are conferred by the
same white cultural establishment whose precepts historically have legitimized
exclusion and disparagement of black cultural production and whose standards
he, reasonably enough, otherwise feigns to reject or at least distrust. Moreover,
what Ellis and the NBA project as a courageous break with black conventions
168 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
fits very comfortably with the bourgeois cultural establishment's opposition to
politicized populist sentimentalism. This opposition rests as much on the prem-
ise that thematizing the political is in principle artistically illegitimate as it does
on the formalist shortcomings from which such work typically suffers.
Ellis presents nationalism as the marker of black political authenticity, a
position he claims to endorse. However, reducing the scope of activist politics
to this iconic nationalism (itself a troubling move) and then belittling the na-
tionalist style parodically repeats a depoliticizing trope that ran through 1970s
blaxploitation films. Comically inept or out-of-touch black militants were a com-
mon feature of those films, and their existence bespoke the futile inappropri-
ateness of seeing politics as an arena for defining and pressing black Americans'
desires to improve social conditions. Thus dissent from conventions in the ra-
cially politicized black domain amounts to acceptance of conventions in the
white upper-middle to highbrow domain, and the latter is that which confers
recognition, acclaim, and the material benefits accruing thereto.
The cast of mind that careers between rejection and affirmation, militant
posture and quite ordinary aspiration leads to an extraordinary muddle of self-
contradiction and sophistry. Ellis maintains that

the new unflinching way NBA artists are looking at black culture is largely
responsible for their popularity. No longer are too many black characters either
completely cool and fearless . . . or completely loving and selfless. . . . Says
Spike Lee, "The number one problem with the old reactionary school was they
cared too much about what white people think." And it is precisely because
Mr. Lee isn't afraid of what anyone else thinks that he dares to show his world
warts and all.14

One hardly needs to endorse the vapid, intellectually oppressive insistence that
only "positive images" of blacks be depicted to see something problematic in
this stance. Treating unattractive depictions of blacks as somehow threatening to
white opinion is absurd in a way that borders on dishonesty of precisely the sort
that propels black conservatives' rhetoric. In the great cauldron of black petit
bourgeois ideology, this strange view is even compatible with the concern to
present positive racial images. John Singleton's films, for instance, manage to
combine all the seemingly contradictory strains of racial uplift—nationalist senti-
mentalism, victim-blaming, glorification of the upwardly mobile as positive role
models, and self-righteous claims to uncompromisingly race-conscious, person-
ally risky dissent from orthodoxy—to synthesize a racialized version of a perspec-
tive that is "left in form, right in essence."
Ellis is an unabashed propagandist, but he echoes less trendy social-
scientific chroniclers in describing this new black class fraction. In the early
1980s Martin Kilson discussed the emergence of a black middle class that was
"acquiring social, professional, and political attitudes that are more class-linked
than race-linked, resembling what may be found among upper status whites."1''
Kilson linked this development to expansion of middle-class employment oppor-
tunities beyond the confines of the segregated job market. Because of the effects
 From Historiography to Class Ideology 169
of "residual racist practices," however, the new upper-status group's integration
into mainstream networks is incomplete, and that circumstance has limited the
extent of its "status deracialization." 16 As a result, Kilson contended, the stra-
tum's members occupy a liminal "insider/outsider" social position that makes
for a collective identity marked by ideological ambivalence and ambiguity akin
to a "split personality." Specifically, this tendency appears in the group's simulta-
neously liberal and conservative political dispositions. In Kilson's view, however,
the concatenation of liberal and conservative inclinations is not random or arbi-
trary. He sees a fundamental coherence inasmuch as "the interplay between
conservative and liberal feelings among the black bourgeoisie revolves around
whether social and political issues are viewed as class-linked or race-linked. If
viewed as class-linked, upper-strata blacks are likely to respond as conservatives.
If seen as race-linked, they respond as liberals."17
Kilson's overall view of the new elite's significance is filtered through a
teleological assumption that the black middle class is evolving toward absorption
into the "mainstream," away from the ethnic parochialism of its predecessors.
From that perspective he sees the new class fraction's liminality as transitional,
an artifact of its movement toward full incorporation. However, one need not
accept Kilson's evolutionist view, a reflection of his perception of American race
relations through the lens of modernization theory, to appreciate his account of
the stratum's peculiar social and ideological position. Indeed, seeing the new
petite bourgeoisie as a discrete historical and sociological phenomenon, rather
than as an incompletely formed point in a process, gives access to the central
role of the sense of cultural ambivalence in this cohort's experience of mutual
recognition. Ambivalence is a key metaphor around which the stratum congeals
as a distinct identity; it is a condensation symbol that mediates the movement
from abstract statistical aggregate to self-conscious reference group.
Ellis's articulation of a "cultural mulatto" voice seeks overtly to constitute
the new middle class as a stratum-for-itself by theorizing and positively valorizing
its liminal status. As a way of enunciating a distinct black middle class experi-
ence, though, the trope of ambivalence is much more widely resonant, and its
expressive power and verisimilitude do not depend on explicit ideological affili-
ation or political program. In addition to those who actively laud the condition
as the font of a superior, uniquely sophisticated consciousness, others represent
it as a red-black-and-green badge of courage, the special burden of a particular
combination of racial and economic status. Almost universally the trope is
bound up with assertions regarding the black middle class's racial authenticity,
and those assertions typically proceed —even when formulated in a language of
interracialism —from essentialist constructions of group identity. In some ver-
sions the metaphor is a lament accompanying a willfully nasty intraracial class
politics, a call for the elite to take priority as the genuinely representative black
identity and fulcrum of political propriety.
The impulse is clearest when conservatives like Shelby Steclc or Deroy
Murdock complain that poor, uncultivated, and disreputable blacks have mo-
nopolized the public image of racial authenticity. 18 Others embrace a somewhat
170 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
softer, and ostensibly more sympathetic, variant of conservatives' frustration that
the wrong populations define authentic blackness. Much of the basis for con-
struing the absence of proper "role models" as a problem in inner cities derives
from a belief that black youth in particular are mired in self-defeating notions
that treat aspirations for conventional upward mobility as denials of racial iden-
tity. Like the black conservatives, proponents of this view seek less to challenge
the premise of monadic racial authenticity (though conservatives tend to give lip
service to this objective) than to project the respectable petite bourgeoisie as the
normative representation of black Americans. In fact, it is the pandemic appeal
of the rhetoric of authenticity—as is exemplified in the persisting conventional
usage in scholarly, journalistic, and colloquial parlance of a "black community"
construct that functions as the subject of singular verbs —that accounts for the
ambivalence imagery's resonance. The image refers to a sense of straddling two
uniform and bounded entities, into neither of which one fits neatly.
Instructively, even those who actively attempt to problematize the catego-
ries, to deconstruct the reified entities, find doing so very difficult. Lorene Gary's
memoir Black Ice is a singularly intelligent and sensitive reflection on her expe-
riences as an early integrator of an exclusive New England prep school. Gary
interrogates the subtle, complex processes of personal transformation that en-
sued from the liminal social position she entered. Her narrative is grounded in
the realm of concrete social relations, and the people and interactions that carry
it along retain human depth and multidimensionality. Thus Gary not only grap-
ples usefully with the multifarious, crosscutting ways that race and class—and
gender—swirl together to form experience and self-perception; she also exposes
the inadequacy of the essentializing shorthand so prevalent in the rhetoric of
group identity. Gary considers how the notions of blackness that provided exis-
tential and solidaristic comfort for her cohort were fashioned largely out of rei-
fied images drawn from artistic representation and popular culture. And in re-
calling an episode of deepest adolescent angst she captures the way that the
experience of liminality itself rests on presumptions that identity is built from
fixed, monadic conceptions of groupness: "Over and over and over I had said to
Jimmy, and to other friends, that I did not want to be trapped in one world. I
wanted to be black, to be part of our group, to draw nourishment from it and
give back, and yet I wanted to be free to come and go."
Although Gary problematizes and struggles against this kind of monadic
construction, she nonetheless resolves her narrative into a dyadic configuration
in which a basically folkish principle of blackness collides with (ultimately to be
expanded and enriched by) a "white American education." 21 In finally adopting
that construction she inadvertently indicates how deeply the rhetoric of black
liminality is embedded on reified, essentialist premises. Her resort to a juxtaposi-
tion of folkishness and cultivation evokes older versions of the nature/culture
dichotomy; it also reflects a common ambivalence surrounding the race/class
nexus that in less nuanced and humanely progressive hands supports the puni-
tively elitist impulse in black politics.
 From Historiography to Class Ideology 171
The tension that concludes Gary's memoir pervades the new black middle
class's self-reflection and underwrites the recent popularity of Du Bois's double-
consciousness passage. Discussing black social scientists, Jacquelyn Mitchell
writes:
In pursuit of our goals, it was easy to overlook how extended interactions with
white colleagues and exposure to different ways of thinking could alter our
world view and change the way we think. Some of us became the prodigal sons
and daughters in our communities, returning to our grassroots only to discover
painfully that we have changed and are now strangers—marginal members
within our ethnic group and communities. "What usually happens is that blacks
become detached from their own . . . ethnic world, and alienated from the
black masses." (Noble, 1978, p. 149)
What ensues is a state of double marginality. . . . It is of little conse-
quence that we may be recognized and respected for our contributions and
scholarship; our ever-present visibility never allows us to experience complete
membership in white academia. At the same time, these marginal feelings be-
gin to affect our ethnicity as well. We thus experience double marginality, be-
longing to and feeling a part of two worlds, yet never at home in either.22

Ellis glories in this experience as a form of protean transcendence, and

Gary puzzles with it as a practical fact of life that has both useful and frustrating
features. Mitchell, though, is arguably nearer the norm in apprehending it as
simultaneously a marker of elevated status and an artifact of the racial burden
borne uniquely by elite nonwhites. To that extent she reveals the double-
consciousness trope's particular attraction: it expresses in the same instant cele-
bration and complaint.
This combination permeates the ruminations by contributors to Gerald Ear-
ly's anthology of reactions to the double-consciousness image. Several of the
essays proceed from the view that, as Stephen L. Carter puts it, to "be a black
professional is to lead a dual existence."23 Carter makes sure we recognize his
own solidly petit bourgeois circumstances, noting that he lives in a white elite
world and comports himself appropriately ("I shop mostly at Brooks Brothers").
And he illustrates how whites' petty racial discrimination can be blind to class
markers. On the other hand, he assures us that "[rjacial solidarity, in the sense
of self-love, is the key to our survival in a frustratingly segregated integrated
professional world, just as it is the key to our survival in a frustratingly oppressive
nation."24 His summary thesis is clear. "To succeed in a profession, one adopts
the profession's ethos, its aesthetic, its culture. One remakes significant aspects
of oneself. It should be possible to adapt to this professional aesthetic and yet
retain one's cultural identity."25
The structure of this narrative recurs in many of the contributions. Several
in addition muse nostalgically about an organic black universe that has been
superseded by the disenchanted world into which their (and the race's) success
has thrust them. They fret about how their own purchase on blackness will differ
from that of their still more solidly petit bourgeois and mainstream children. 26
172 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
Nor is this fixation on the nexus of ambivalence and authenticity, success and
suffering only the province of academic intellectuals.
Isabel Wilkerson of the New York Times laments with Ellis Cose "the in-
credible burden of living this dual life," and Cose reports that "the fear of being
forced to shed one's identity in order to prosper is not at all uncommon.' The
trope has made its way into popular media. A Time feature on the new black
middle class quotes Du Bois and takes the frame "Between Two Worlds."28 A
Chicago Tribune puff piece invokes Du Bois's formulation to express John Edgar
Wicleman's situation as a successful writer with working-class black origins.
Perhaps most revealing, Newsweek enlists Du Bois to characterize O. J. Simp-
son's supposed "twoness —the higher he reached for the trappings of the white
world, the more he distanced himself from his beginnings."30 For Newsweek the
trope's overlap with the nature/culture dichotomy is no longer implicit, tenta-
tive, or nuanced. Instead, the lament about the tensions connected with being
black and middle class is reduced to its hoary foundation: "black" = visceral,
uncultivated, savage; "middle class" = white. This reduction actualizes middle-
class fears that folkish or populist notions of black authenticity support racist
stereotypes and demonization.
The legitimate basis for this fear appears in more mundane ways as well.
Many of Cose's informants report—and this is routine in anecdotal black
professional-managerial-class experience—white colleagues' observations that
they are not "really" black because they do not conform to some "ghetto" stereo-
type.31 Thus an objectively grounded concern with racial denigration merges
with the logic of class consolidation to support a discrete, petit bourgeois ideo-
logical program. This convergence is a factor impelling the production of a
genre of scholarly and popular literature that charts and celebrates the black
middle class's place in Afro-American history. Along with the generically Ameri-
can penchant for uplifting stories of individual (or group) triumph against adver-
sity as well as the black form of the contemporary sensibility that enthralls
professional-stratum whites with images of Victorian and Edwardian bourgeois
life, the concern to establish the black middle class's racial authenticity (if not
primacy) fuels proliferation of biographies of distinguished, race-conscious an-
cestors, historical memoirs of upper-status families, and histories stressing the
race-serving roles of elite organizations. Perhaps because the area of interest has
gathered momentum in this ideological environment, the effort to construct an
autonomous black women's history, ironically, seems particularly congenial to
the genre.32
Nowhere are the tensions, anxieties, and political contradictions that under-
gird the double-consciousness image's popularity more sharply laid out than in
Leanita McClain's posthumously collected essays, A Foot in Each World.33
McClain was a wunderkind at the Chicago Tribune and a success story of rapid
upward mobility. She had grown up in a black working-class family in the Ida
B. Wells housing project and attended the inner-city Chicago State University,
tier star began its rapid ascent with graduate study at Northwestern University's
 From Historiography to Class Ideology 173
journalism school, from which she went immediately to the Tribune, where she
remained until her suicide in 1984 at age thirty-two.
Significantly, McClain's career began its steepest incline in 1980 when she
published an opinion piece in Newsweek titled "The Middle-Class Black's Bur-
den." This essay was something of a cri de coeur on behalf of what her former
husband and posthumous editor, Clarence Page, describes as the "emerging
class of black professional baby boomers" of her sort.34 She begins by establish-
ing the stratum's ambivalent social position and protesting its frustrations: "I am
a member of the black middle-class who has had it with being patted on the
head by white hands and slapped in the face by black hands for my success."35
After pointing out that middle-class blacks have the same material aspirations as
their white peers and complaining about their being berated as "Oreos" by
"those we left behind," she writes:
It is impossible for me to forget where I came from as long as I am prey to the
jive hustler who does not hesitate to exploit my childhood friendship. I am
reminded, too, when I go back to the old neighborhood in fear—and have my
purse snatched —and when I sit down to a business lunch and have an old
classmate wait on my table. . . . My life abounds in incongruities. . . . But I
am not ashamed.36

She most closely approximates Du Bois's language at the most revealing points
of her narrative, such as: "I run a gauntlet between two worlds, and I am cursed
and blessed by both. . . . I have a foot in each world, but I cannot fool myself
about either. . . . I know how tenuous my grip on one way of life is, and how
strangling the grip of the other way of life can be."37
McClain's anxiety about the fragility of her upward mobility is clear; she
also focuses that anxiety toward blacks, whom she sees challenging her right to
be petit bourgeois: "As for the envy of my own people, am I to give up my
career, my standard of living, to pacify them and set my conscience at ease? No
I have worked for these amenities and deserve them, though I can never enjoy
them without feeling guilty."38
McClain also embodies Kilson's hypothesis about her stratum's combination
of liberal and conservative politics. Repeatedly in her essays she declaims pas-
sionately in support of a liberal political disposition and agenda with respect to
strictly racial issues. Her approach to intraracial stratification, though, is satu-
rated in paternalism and class prejudice.
The greatest commitment now in the civil rights struggle must come from the
black middle class, which at the same time must guard its own sliver of the
economic pie. . . . And it will be triply hard without the very dollars-and-cents
programs that helped them, programs that have been stripped bare by the
Reagan administration. They could not have achieved what they did alone, and
they cannot now do for others without that assistance.
It will be black self-help that will have to save the underclass, to educate
and call for an end to rampant teenage pregnancy, to offer reforms in welfare
174 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
6

that will allow fathers to stay home, to decrease criminal recidivism, to demand
better schools and community services.39

McClain's visits to her old South Side neighborhood stir within her a
victim-blaming scorn that prompts an intensely punitive illiberalism. As is com-
mon in such interpretations, a nostalgic tale of decline from an organic golden
age shores up the self-righteousness required to make harsh judgments of people
in circumstances objectively so similar to those of her own past. On returning
to her old high school, Lucy Flower Vocational, she observes:
While I found the building much the same, the students were not. There is no
dress code. Far worse, there is little of a moral code, and the true "young ladies"
are by far outnumbered by girls who are proud of their pregnancies and so
uninterested in an education that they skip class and boldly just sit outside the
school door playing cards. Trouble-making young men, drawn to Flower like
bees to honey loiter outside in souped-up jalopies.40

Her paternalistic concern with moral rectification leads her to a reactionary

approach to social policy worthy of Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, or Phil
Gramm. Of the inner-city schools she attended, she complains that they "took
on too much that was black oriented but also tried to do too much of everything.
. . . Out went dress codes and corporal punishment; in came permissiveness
and students' rights. Out went the standards, the great American cookie cutter
everyone was supposed to pass through." 41
She singles out the "free-meals program" as especially corrosive because it
reinforces poor people's expectations that things should just be "given to them."
She pauses to reflect that she would have qualified for the free lunch program
if it had been offered when she was in school, but nostalgic elevation of the
moral fiber of the community of her youth establishes —indeed forces—the dis-
tance needed to preempt the taint of hypocrisy. "Yet I must remind myself that
to be poor and to live in the projects is not the same any more, just as the
schools are not the same. I can see the despair, the lost sense of self-sufficiency,
when I go back to the old neighborhood." 42 (No doubt the apples also were
sweeter, the music better, and the rooms bigger! It is worth noting, moreover,
that McClain's tale of precipitous decline from the community of her youth
appeared when she was less than thirty years old.)
McClain's punitive paternalism reaches its extremes in her vehement attack
on civil libertarian impulses in inner-city schools. She castigates judicial and
legislative interventions securing students' and parents' rights as having "gone to
the extreme to undermine teacher authority, and at the very time that other
traditional authority figures in a student's life also are declining." Predictably,
she evokes a Reaganite image of the simple virtue and benign tonic of a teach-
er's backhanded slap across (someone else's) face.43
McClain, apparently, was in a variety of ways a deeply troubled person, and
I would not suggest that her suicide be seen as a case of terminal class/race
ambivalence. Nevertheless, the palpable experience of tension, ambiguity, and
 From Historiography to Class Ideology 175
ambivalence in her social and ideological position condensed a malaise whose
sources no doubt were more complicated into a single, distinctly resonant meta-
phor. Like others who express the sense of being trapped between two worlds or
identities, she both struggled to reject yet could not transcend the limitations of
the essentialist conceptions of blackness (and other identities) on which such
formulations inevitably depend.
To some extent the difficulty in breaking with the essentialist mystifications
that underlie the double-consciousness sensibility reflects the force of intellec-
tual habit. Essentialist premises are solidly ensconced in the conventions shap-
ing discourse about black Americans—without regard to level of intellectual
sophistication or point on the ideological spectrum. Habits of mind, however,
are sustained and reinforced by the social realities that they interpret and thus
partially constitute. This effect is likely to be especially durable if the interpre-
tive orientation firmly supports pragmatic interests. That is the case with the
black petit bourgeois commitment to essentialist constructions of black identity.
At a minimum, the persistence of racial discrimination works in two ways to
validate essentialist notions of blackness as common sense. On the one hand,
the reality of discrimination buttresses impressions of shared suffering; on the
other hand, the programmatic remedies for discrimination proceed from an as-
sumption that common racial classification implies common social condition.
At the same time, particularly for the black professional cohort that Kilson char-
acterizes as relatively "cosmopolitan," the demand for racial justice is partly a
demand for equal capacity to realize class privilege. This fuels the apparent
dissonance that Kilson observes between this class fraction's race-inflected liber-
alism and class-inflected conservatism, which runs the gamut from the ideologi-
cal underpinnings of Gates's and Baker's intellectual historiography through
McClain's pathetic lament. To the extent that derogatory, class-tinged racial ste-
reotypes are experienced as undermining petit bourgeois aspirations through
guilt by association, the effect is further to strengthen a nasty, victim-blaming
intraracial class politics, whose distasteful features are typically shrouded in a
rhetoric of noblesse oblige.
Certainly other, less immediately material factors help to reproduce the
essentialist perspective that underlies the double-consciousness conundrum. For
instance, it comports with the nostalgic yearning for a mythical past of organic
racial community that both mediates petit bourgeois status anxiety and eases
accommodation to a rightward shift in the ideological context within which
incremental political agendas and prevailing models of respectable middle-class
opinion are constructed. This nostalgic current becomes all the more salient as
the postwar baby boom—the first age cohort to grow into the new professional-
managerial stratum—settles evermore into middle age. The yearning for restora-
tion of supposedly lost organicism and wholeness in fact appears in multiple
forms. In addition to wistful reinvention of community in the Jim Crow South
(a vision against which Charles Burner's film To Sleep with Anger emphatically
exhorts), this yearning is articulated in middle-class adoption of invented tradi-
176 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
tions like Kwanzaa, embrace of Afrocentricity, Egyptology and other sorts of
mysticism, propagation of religiosity as the wellspring of black authenticity, and
assertion of the racialized ideology of patriarchal restoration that Inrks within
the rhetoric of special crisis of supposedly "endangered" black males.
When seen in this light, the black middle-class appropriation of the double-
consciousness trope gives off a familiar glow. As a metaphor that voices and
grounds class consciousness and identity, it has much in common with the simi-
lar mindset that pervaded the white upper middle class at the end of the nine-
teenth century. Both rest on essentializing rhetoric rooted in the nature/culture
dichotomy. Both tend to mediate status anxiety through idealization of myths of
past or present organicism. As a malaise, the ambivalence bemoaned by contem-
porary black petit bourgeois sufferers is conceptually quite similar to the old
fretting about the threat of overcivilization—an ailment that simultaneously cer-
tifies elevated class standing and elicits sympathy for suffering. Double con-
sciousness, therefore, is the neurasthenia of the black professional-managerial
class at the end of the twentieth century.
 ConcI
oncmsion

A Generativist Approach to the

History of Political Thought

T HAT RECENT INTEREST in Du Bois is so bound up with the double-

consciousness formulation is deeply ironic. The sensibilities to which the
formulation appeals hardly could differ more from the central premises and
driving concerns of Du Bois's career. As I showed in chapters 8 and 9, the
double-consciousness metaphor figures into contemporary popular and scholarly
discourse about black Americans as part of a strain that dcpoliticizes and dehist-
oricizes accounts of the Afro-American experience. This appropriation has, per-
haps fittingly, a doubly dissonant relation to Du Bois.
First, Du Bois was one of the very most consistently and resolutely political
of all twentieth-century black American intellectuals. This assessment rests not
just on his movements back and forth between employment in academic and
activist domains, though it is easy to lose sight of the fact that he held full-time
academic appointments for only about a third of his postdoctoral lifetime and
that he was an employee of the NAACP for more years than he was a professor.
It is also the case that nearly all his writing—scholarly and otherwise — was
shaped by his engagement with the controversies of the day. Du Bois's funda-
mental orientation to scholarly activity, his basic epistcmic reflex, as I argued in
chapter 4, linked inquiry to strategic political action. The links were more or
less direct, more or less nuanccd. In some venues, for example art, his disposi-

177
178 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
tion was crudely instrumental; in historical and social-scientific inquiry he was
more sophisticated. Nevertheless, it would be barely an exaggeration to contend
that all Du Bois's writing pivots on a concern to influence contemporaneous,
explicitly political debates. His idea of politics, moreover, always centered unam-
biguously on the realm of government activity and public policy. His antiimperi-
alism, his reinterpretation of Reconstruction, his vision of social transformation
in the United States and elsewhere all proceed from recognition of the centrality
of state power, both in the shaping of social life in general and as the crucial
focal point for effective progressive theorizing and practice. Du Bois's insistence
on the primacy of a state-centered politics in making sense of the black Ameri-
can situation was, most dramatically, the foundation of his critique of Booker T.
Washington, the source of its eloquent sharpness.
The Washington controversy is also emblematic of the second way that the
actual Du Bois is at odds with the sensibility that now appropriates him as an
icon. That sensibility not only devalues politics as constitutive of the black expe-
rience; its own ideological inclinations are much nearer Washington's conserva-
tive moralism and privatistic bootstrap rhetoric than to Du Bois's perspective at
any point in his mature life. Du Bois certainly was like those who now invoke
him—and, for that matter, Washington —in perceiving the black population in
a way that at least implies the primacy of the group's elite strata. However, even
though his pro-elite bias prompted Du Bois to assign the "natural aristocracy" a
tutelary function vis-a-vis the rest of the race, it never led him (at least not after
1900) to embrace the kind of politically quietistic and victim-blaming interpreta-
tion of that role that Washington advocated and current petit bourgeois nostalgia
exalts. Even the racial celebration articulated in The Negro, The Gift of Black
Folk, Black Folk: Then and Now, and The World and Africa —while romantically
articulating the equivalent of the postsegregation era's "positive images" rheto-
ric—did not in Du Bois's view substitute in any way for aggressive, direct chal-
lenge to the political-economic and racial status quo. Here he differs markedly
from today's nationalists and proponents of notions of a black "cultural politics,"
who rationalize the essentially quietistic retreat to celebration as therapy, a mo-
rale booster preliminary to or even as a novel form of political action. Similarly,
for at least his last sixty years Du Bois did not elevate the task of correcting
putative deficiencies within the black population to an equal status with the
externally directed struggle for racial equality and broader social reorganization.
In noting Du Bois's inappropriateness as an avatar of the discursive ten-
dency onto which he has lately been grafted, I do not wish to present him as a
benchmark of propriety or authenticity against which those who now invoke
him are to be judged and thus found wanting. Nor do I intend to imply where
Du Bois might stand in relation to current political controversies among black
Americans. Some possibilities, given what we know about his basic commit-
ments and clarity, arguably would be more likely than others; it seems most
unlikely, for instance, that he would have succumbed to the Reaganite ideologi-
cal blite and become an apostle of inward-looking quiescence or a free-
marketeer. Nevertheless, we can never speculate confidently about how an indi-
 Conclusion 179
vidual formed through one historical context would respond to the imperatives,
cleavages, and options that comprise another. Nor would it matter if we could.
They lived their history; we must live ours.
Remarking on what Du Bois would think, say, or do if he were alive can be
superficially effective rhetorically, but doing so is unsound on its own terms and
reflects a distinctly unhelpful, if not counterproductive, way of thinking about
the relation between past and present. The "if-x-were-alive-now" laments have a
prelapsarian quality that posits a golden age of heroic antecedents purer, clearer,
and smarter than ourselves. The cast of mind from which such statements arise
is to that extent fundamentally ahistorical; it presumes the past to have been an
order of existence intrinsically, and radically, different from our own, a world
free from the partiality, contingency, and mundane, imperfect, and purblind
choices that are our lot. This perspective converges with a naive reading of the
old saw about learning from history to reify the past as a singular, empyrean
realm that we can mine for allegorical lessons and the timeless wisdom of the
ancients. Though it is by no means the only academic precinct so afflicted,
Afro-Americanist scholarship is plagued by this mindset, whose appeal has been
reinforced in the 1980s and 1990s by pro forma gestures of ancestor reverence
as expressions of racial/cultural authentication.
As the recent appropriations of Du Bois demonstrate, the result undermines
historical understanding. Beneath the sentimental reduction of history to a reser-
voir of inspirational anecdotes, heroic figures, and debaters' points lies a heavy
presentist bias that obfuscates the past in the process of drawing on it. This
points to a problem intrinsic to the rhetorical allusion to historical antecedents
in service to presentist objectives. A common defense of the anachronism exhib-
ited in such moves is that they proceed from purely pragmatic agendas that do
not involve claims to historical interpretation at all. At first blush, this defense,
and the corollary call for separate criteria for judgment, seem reasonable
enough. In quoting, for instance, from Frederick Douglass's "West India Eman-
cipation" address to counsel against the Democratic Leadership Council's capit-
ulationist politics or John Locke in support of private property against a regula-
tory, social-democratic state, one is not intending a situated interpretation of
Douglass or Locke. Besides, it would be both priggish and silly to insist that
hortatory political activity be bound by the strictures of scholarly rigor. Political
rhetoric operates in an entirely different field of discourse and on the basis of
quite different pragmatic principles, and reinventing notable antecedents
through presentist appropriation has been a staple ideological practice — itself an
important object of intellectual historical inquiry—in the West at least since the
Renaissance.
The relation between scholarly and hortatory projects, however, is more
complicated in actual practice. Scholarly inquiry also springs from questions
shaped by concerns and discourses anchored in the present. Therefore, it can
never completely escape the influences of contemporary partisanship and inven-
tion. As proponents of what is often labeled the "linguistic turn" tirelessly an-
nounce, the real alternative to radical presentism is not a pure historicism that
180 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
faithfully reconstructs the past entirely on its "own" terms, that recovers it as it
"really" was. It is at the same time true, though less commonly noted, that even
radical presentism makes at least implicit claims that are both historicist and
strive for interpretive authenticity. One does not invoke Douglass or Locke, to
return to my earlier example, at random from the rolls of the literate dead.
Rather, adducing them functions rhetorically to annex their presumed cultural
authority as prominent figures associated with one or another estimable tradi-
tion, to elicit from their reputations endorsements for the positions on behalf of
which they are cited. One in effect says, "If Douglass were alive now, he also
would dissent from the DLC's capitulationist agenda." One is claiming, that is,
minimally: (1) that Douglass is a significant figure whose views should have
weight with us; (2) that we know clearly what those views are and can extrapo-
late them accurately to the context of our own controversies; and (3) that opposi-
tion to the DLC is at least consistent with, perhaps a direct outgrowth of, a
venerable tradition that Douglass exemplifies. Each of these claims presumes a
historical interpretation, and each is subject to critical evaluation as such.
Once again, my point is not to indict the hortatory appropriation of promi-
nent antecedents. I freely acknowledge finding it a quite useful gambit myself
in polemical political writing and speeches, including drawing on Douglass in
precisely the manner described here. I believe, though, that it is important to
be self-conscious in one's rhetoric and to avoid savaging historical integrity, for
example, by claiming associations that fly in the face of informed understand-
ings of the views held by the figures appropriated. This concern no doubt partly
expresses the guild mentality of a professional historian of political thought, just
as artists have more exacting standards for constructing political posters and
leaflets or carpenters and architects for remodeling party offices. Yet it also re-
flects a premise that—particularly at this historical moment and in discourse
bearing on the character of Afro-American politics—the hortatory project ought
to be leavened with pursuit of civic education. The latter objective entails, to
whatever extent feasible in the given circumstance, clarifying, demystifying, or
simply providing better alternatives to cracker-barrel or bowdlerized versions of
political tradition. This conviction is linked to an argument that I shall make
presently for a particular perspective on and approach to the study of the history
of political thought, a perspective and approach that I believe are especially
crucial with respect to Afro-Americanist intellectual interests. It is not likely that
political activists will be much inclined to cultivate a sophisticated understand-
ing of the history of Afro-American debate, and such an understanding is not an
essential ingredient for creation of a vital, critical black politics. Nevertheless,
clarity about the links between past and present discourses is one thing that
engaged intellectuals can contribute to the larger political project.
In recent years we have seen instead, in the name of engaged scholarly
intervention, proliferation of a problematic tendency to blend or confound the
two objectives and the strategic imperatives that ensue from them. Afro-
Americanist inquiry has from its origins been oriented simultaneously toward
advancing scholarly understanding of black Americans and improving or pro-
 Conclusion 181
tecting the race's position in the social order. These purposes occasionally have
conflicted, which is not surprising, because one presumes an audience sympa-
thetic to and already relatively knowledgeable about black Americans and the
other presumes an audience that is either neutral or skeptical and generally
uninformed. That condition has prompted scholars like Earl E. Thorpe, Wil-
liam T. Fontaine, L. D. Reddick, Joseph A. Bailey, and others to complain of a
myopic focus on racial vindication, as I characterized it in chapter 1, that under-
mines rigorous investigation of the black experience through its dogmatic adher-
ence to a restrictive metanarrative stressing propagation of only favorable ac-
counts of the race. This metanarrative is the academic expression of the protest
discourse that became hegemonic in black politics after the discrediting of
Washington's accommodationism and that remained the animating perspective
of black political activity for the duration of the struggle against Jim Crow segre-
gation.
The institutional dynamics surrounding Afro-Americanist scholarship's entry
into mainstream academic venues in the postsegregation era reproduced that
metanarrative, buttressing it with the affective force of a rhetoric drawn from
insurgent black activism outside the academy. The result has been to reinforce,
if not intensify, the confounding of the scholarly and hortatory projects. This
tendency has been further exacerbated by legitimation of a sensibility—associ-
ated with the related discourses of "cultural politics" and various strains of anti-
foundationalist social theory, chiefly postmodernism and poststructuralism—that
devalues the concern to distinguish the two projects. This concatenation of ten-
dencies has produced the class of ahistorical, sometimes perverse interpretations
I have criticized in this book.
As I have indicated, it is not possible to isolate in practice either a pure
historicism or a pure presentism, a scholarly inquiry unaffected by presentist
concerns or a hortatory appropriation that avoids historical interpretation and,
thus, judgment. To that extent the antifoundationalist sensibility's rejection of
absolute distinctions is correct. Unfortunately, the antifoundationalist tendency
goes further: it takes recognition of the impossibility of absolute criteria for inter-
pretation as an invalidation of attempts to impose any objective or intersubjec-
tive criteria at all for evaluating claims about the past. This amounts to seeing
the twenty-five-cent bet on the table in a poker game and raising it a thousand
dollars. As we have seen, this approach makes for bad history and worse politics.
What is required is adoption of criteria for historical interpretation that take into
account the contingency, incompleteness, and inescapably presentist connec-
tions of any statement about the past. I have attempted in this book to exemplify
an approach that rests on such criteria with respect to reconstruction of Du
Bois's political thought. I shall now specify it in conceptual and historiographical
terms and argue for its virtues for making sense of the history of political thought
in general and the Afro-Americanist project in particular.
I propose what is perhaps best described as an evolutionist or a generative
perspective on the history of political thought. By this I mean a vantage point
that approaches examination of antecedent individuals and debates and the clis-
182 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
courses within which they were embedded from an orienting concern to locate
within them clues to sources of salient political problems and discursive tenden-
cies in our present. The metaphor of open-ended evolution —minus the leftover
Victorian teleology that implies hierarchical movement from less to more ad-
vanced—most effectively captures this perspective. The view I put forward rests
on two premises regarding the nature of political discourses and ideologies: (1)
that they arise pragmatically, from a dialectic of concrete events, issues, actions,
disagreements, patterns of social relations (including existing alliances and cleav-
ages), and received ways of conceptualizing the social and political world; and
(2) that they evolve along with—shaping and being shaped by—those social
contexts. Because political discourses, and the individuals and debates that in-
stantiate them, are thus tied fundamentally to discrete historical situations, mak-
ing sense of them requires interpreting them in terms of their formative, tempo-
rally autonomous complexes of meaning. These include the prevailing political
vocabulary and semantics. It follows that, as I have asserted at various points in
this study, this sort of inquiry into the history of political thought must proceed
from immersion in the history in which the thought emerges, about which that
thinking most immediately is. Political tendencies and principles become mean-
ingfully visible through reconstruction of the premises, formulations, questions,
and positions around which pragmatic discourses cohere in specific contexts.
Explication and assessment of the thought of individuals similarly requires, as I
hope to have accomplished here in the case of Du Bois, reading them through
their situatedness in their discursive environments.
The generativist premise underscores the need for careful historical ground-
ing. Assumptions that are made explicitly and arguments that are contested in
one historical moment subsequently can become ensconced as the given back-
ground assumptions that limit the thinkable—tacitly channeling political debate
and influencing its character. Construction of an evolutionary narrative requires
examination of the ideological fossil record, excavation of discursive moments
as fluid points in an open-ended dialectic in which the present emerges organi-
cally from the past and is the constraining raw material of the future. Close
attention to each moment's constitutive context, moreover, is necessary to pro-
tect an evolutionist account from the everpresent temptation of teleology, the
inclination to represent the history of political thought as an anachronistic
chronicle of anticipations and shortfalls in an ineluctable unfolding toward cur-
rent conventions. Ideological narratives evolve instead through the victory of
some discrete tendencies and interpetations over others by means of varying
combinations of persuasiveness and coercion. Those that win — often enough
not in forms their proponents would choose—become naturalized as the com-
mon sense of the next historical moment and so on. The outcomes of this
dialectic, in addition, are knowable only after the fact; political truth is made
through contestation, not discovered.
A generative view of the history of ideologies overcomes the prcscntism/
historicisin conundrum pragmatically, by anchoring inquiry overtly to contem-
porary concerns while requiring thick historical grounding. On the one hand,
 Conclusion 183
this perspective avoids the historicist dilemma by not claiming to represent the
past purely on its own terms. On the other hand, its commitment to historical
contextualization imposes an interpretive coherence and the intellectual disci-
pline of purposiveness that presentist accounts typically lack. This outlook,
therefore, apprehends the social world on the basis of a contingent foundation-
alism, which I believe provides the most reasonable substantive view of how the
social world works, as does this perspective's insistence that the roots and logic
of political thought lie in its pragmatic relation to practical political debates and
choices inside lived history.
This mindset has potentially useful entailments for the study of Afro-
American political thought in particular. For the same reasons that it avoids the
presentism/historicism problem this approach also resolves the tension between
the scholarly and hortatory imperatives in Afro-Americanist intellectual life. Its
objectives are probing and tough-minded academically and, simultaneously, di-
rectly linked to civic concerns. Seeing the history of Afro-American thought as
the trajectory of a generative activity is especially important at this historical
juncture, a period in which the dominant conceptual categories and narratives
in black political discourse presume the superficially less complicated diagnostic
and strategic vision that characterized the era of struggle against Jim Crow. In
this context communitarian nostalgia for the organic simplicity that supposedly
structured black life under segregation —a trope becoming hegemonic within
the black petite bourgeoisie, even in the face of a rightist political counteroffen-
sive that threatens to restore a modified form of Jim Crow—bespeaks a wish to
amend the world to fit the interpretive categories available for comprehending
it.
The inherited interpretive frames, which ultimately derive from the dis-
course of racial protest, were always incomplete and problematic in their inabil-
ity effectively to conceptualize differentiation and dynamism among black
Americans. This inadequacy remained generally invisible throughout the segre-
gation era, when presumption of a monadic racial community of interest seemed
plausible relative to the main political challenges toward which the discourse
was articulated. However, the criticisms of its corrosive effect on scholarly in-
quiry into black life mounted by Thorpe, Fontaine, Reddick, and the others
threw this problem into relief in ways that at least passingly commented on
its political inadequacies as well. The latter critique came more forcefully, if
mechanistically, from Marxists like the young Ralph Bunche and Oliver Cox.
Nevertheless, buoyed by the postwar political successes embodied in the Brown
decision and shifting public and elite sentiment toward opposition to Jim Crow,
the protest discourse —despite its limitations—became the generic American
frame for discussing black American politics. Its persistence can be seen in the
dominant Afro-Americanist scholarly reflex that formulates the dictates of politi-
cal engagement exclusively in line with the imperatives of racial vindication.
This stance translates into not only a restrictive bias toward racial image man-
J O

agement but also continuing legitimation-through-use of simplistically monadic,

organicist constructions of black politics and institutional life. These formula-
184 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
tions —which give us, for example, accounts of Afro-American politics that con-
tain no autonomous politics among black people —are objectionably thin and
increasingly unhelpful. They and the communitarian mystifications on which
they rest spin further and further away from credible reflection of the social
forces and world of mundane experience in which the black American popula-
tion is enmeshed.
No intellectual approach is a panacea; any ideological or epistemic stance
can be harmonized with virtually any specific interpretation or political position.
The most general methodological commandment, as I suggested in chapter 1,
cannot be more elaborate than the injunction not to be stupid or simplistic and
to avoid anachronism. This neither provides a roadmap for nor carries guaran-
tees regarding substantive interpretations. Nonetheless, a generative perspective
opens conceptual possibilities for examination of Afro-American politics and po-
litical thought under current circumstances. A contextualist disposition in prin-
ciple emphasizes the dynamism and tensions internal to black political dis-
course, which means that it also stresses ideological and programmatic
differentiation. Its pragmatic view that connects political thought to concrete,
historically specific political issues and action also opens space for consideration
of differentiation by material political interests and structural position in the
social order as a normal, consequential feature of black politics. And these possi-
bilities have political as well as scholarly ramifications.
In reifying the past as an empyrean region hovering above, but connecting
only allegorically with our own, the prevailing ways of thinking and writing
about black political thought, in both popular and scholarly venues, profoundly
depoliticize the history of Afro-American debate. To that extent they fail at the
task of civic education, which thus reduces to platitudes about the wisdom of
our predecessors, a larger-than-life cohort of Great Men and the occasional
Great Woman. This tendency underwrites political passivity through supporting
a defeatist rhetoric that bemoans the absence of such heroes in our time. By
contrast, a generative or evolutionist perspective suggests folding the Greats back
into history, situating them within discursive communities formed through grap-
pling with concrete, historically specific problems. It establishes, that is, connec-
tions between them and ourselves—both by considering them and us as distinct
yet related moments in a process and by bringing them down to earth as people
just like us, the best of whom struggled in concert and debate with their peers
to craft progressive visions and programs under adverse and uncertain condi-
tions, with imperfect knowledge and constrained by the histories and mentalites
through which they could construct meanings. The stress on the discursive con-
stitution of political thought, moreover, can reinforce the importance of strategi-
cally organized, collective action for creating and sustaining political move-
ments, a lesson that has receded from public consciousness, partly as an ironic
consequence of the dominance of potted, bowdlerized versions of black political
history that purport to just the opposite intent.
Although there is no methodological magic pill that guarantees construc-
tion of historical accounts that are true in the sense that they capture the past
 Conclusion 185
exactly "as it was," that does not mean that any sort of account is necessarily as
good as any other. Interpretations differ qualitatively with respect to the extent
to which they are reasonable and meaningful in historical terms. And, from the
perspective I lay out here, the two criteria overlap. That past social actors re-
sponded to issues and concerns they and their peers found pressing provides one
solid basis for evaluation: the extent to which an interpretation sensibly fits the
contingent linguistic and empirical facts around which the arguments and posi-
tions under investigation cohered. Representation of Washington as a nationalist
militant, based on a cleverly inventive, decontextualized reading of his Atlanta
Compromise speech, is challengeable on grounds of historical fact, including
the facts of the substantive ideological premises and beliefs structuring the dis-
cursive frames within which he operated.
The purposive orientation of inquiry also yields a corresponding basis for
evaluation. Because past ideological discourses were constituted as responses to
events and issues at least partly external to themselves, making historical sense
of them requires examining them in relation to the ways they distort, misrepre-
sent, or otherwise characterize an out-there reality whose pertinent features are
at least contingently accessible. What determines pertinence in this regard is the
configuration of the historian's perception—blessed by hindsight—of the aspects
of the moment under investigation that were most consequential both at the
time and for subsequent events and the presentist concerns that organize her
inquiry. This vantage point not only supports judgment of contemporary ac-
counts of past actors and ideologies by asking how well and how meaningfully
an interpretation connects with the external reality as we understand it to have
been important. It also makes possible evaluation of the political and normative
character and entailments of positions and discourses articulated in the past by
connecting them to political agendas and their consequences — examining the
substance and effects of what they emphasized and overlooked, how they con-
structed and evaluated significant dimensions of their social reality. That is in-
deed a crucial way that generative, thick historical interpretation is particularly
well suited practically to illuminate features of the present, its contribution to
realization of the goal of engaged inquiry.
By contrast, the hyperrelativism propounded by radical antifoundationalism
appears fatally contradictory, if not hypocritical. The claim that no single inter-
pretation of the past can be intrinsically better than any other fails on at least
two scores. First, insofar as this view rests on repudiation of the idea of interpret-
er's authority, it begs the question as to why we should acknowledge the implicit
presumption of expertise on which that repudiation in turn rests. If scholarly
specialization does not at least in principle justify a claim to interpretive exper-
tise, then what basis exists for antifoundationalist professors' claims on jobs that
by most standards in the American political economy are fairly comfortable and
secure? The warrant ensuing from rejection of the idea that scholarly expertise
confers contingent interpretive authority is that faculty positions bearing on such
endeavors should be filled without regard to usual academic protocols, perhaps
randomly. While no doubt some radical antifoundationahsts would embrace this
186 W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought
view officially, there is no evidence yet of a wave of faculty resignations in accor-
dance with it. As the gospel lyric puts it, everybody wants to go to heaven, but
nobody wants to die. Second, although the hyperrelativist view typically is associ-
ated with a rhetorical emphasis on the political aspect of interpretation, its own
premises and practices actually depoliticize interpretation by severing it from
the strictures of purposive evaluation. If everything is everything, nothing is any-
thing. We are as a result left rudderless, without any pragmatic foundation for
our undertakings. This is the opposite of engaged inquiry.
Finally, it may be especially fitting that this argument for a generative or
evolutionary approach to inquiry into the history of political thought grows out
of a study of Du Bois. Although his substantive interpretations of the world
owed very little, if anything, to philosophical pragmatism, his practice spoke
eloquently of the substantively pragmatic relation between knowledge and ac-
tion. His career, moreover, embodied several of the main precepts of the per-
spective I propose. His simultaneous insistence on the purposive foundations of
scholarly work and the need to inform action through rigorous, tough-minded
inquiry is one instance. This enabled him to combine the scholarly and horta-
tory projects productively and self-consciously, at his best avoiding confounding
them and using the imperatives of each to discipline the other. This in turn fed
his deep commitment to civic education as an elemental part of both projects.
Du Bois is an apt background figure for this discussion in other ways as
well. Mundanely, the fact of his longevity provides a ready point of emphasis of
the dialectic of change and continuity in response to changing contexts that
propels the evolutionist trajectory. As a principal proponent of the protest stance
in the struggle against Washington who then became a foe of that stance's inter-
pretive and programmatic strictures as it was articulated as an orthodoxy in the
NAACP, Du Bois illustrates the way that the history we make is never final or
completely under our control. And on the front of practical politics, making
sense of Du Bois's political thought is especially important now, as a corrective
to the rehabilitation of Washington's gospel of political quiescence and accom-
modation to racial inequality which proceeds around us.
Toward that end, with regard to the relation between the interpretation of
the world and acting in it, perhaps the key point of connection with Du Bois is
his militant and unyielding understanding that truth is made — under constraints
and not as its agents choose, but made nonetheless. And the actual boundaries
of possibility are knowable only through challenging them. This basically prag-
matic notion of truth is consistent with the contingent foundationalism for
which I have argued here. Each is an antidote to naive realism and the apoca-
lyptic, equally naive antifoundationalism associated with the linguistic turn.
Whether or not he would have embraced it theoretically, Du Bois's career real-
ized as few others have the deepest epistemological significance of Marx's Elev-
enth Thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world,
in various ways; the point is to change it."
 Notes

Chapter 1
1. Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination ofW. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge,
Mass., 1976); Joseph P. DeMarco, The Social Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois (Lanham,
Md., 1983). David Levering Lewis's W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919
(New York, 1993) also engages usefully and most intelligently with the foundations of
Du Bois's thinking. Lewis's study is the definitive biography of Du Bois's first fifty years,
but its principal focus is not examination of his political thought.
2. DeMarco claims erroneously, for example, that the "role of the Talented Tenth
was dropped, by and large, from [Du Bois's] writing" shortly after 1907 (Social Thought,
p. 54), and his reading of Social Darwinism (pp. 31, 69) is rather simplistic.
3. Adolph Reed Jr., review of Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary
Christianity, by Cornel West, Telos (summer 1984): 211-18. St. Glair Drake, "Anthropol-
ogy and the Black Experience," Black Scholar 11 (September-October 1980): 2-31, also
discusses the long-standing concern of black intellectual activity with a project of "racial
vindication."
4. For discussion of these general problems, see J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language
and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York, 1971); David A. Hollinger,
"Historians and the Discourse of Intellectuals," in John Higham and Paul K. Conkin,
eels., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore, 1979); Ian Shapiro,
"Realism in the Study of the History of Ideas," History of Political Thought 3 (1982):
535—78; two essays by Quentin Skinner: "Meaning and Understanding in the History of

187
188 Notes to Pages 5-6
Ideas," History and Theory 8 (first quarter 1969): 3-53, and "The Limits of Historical
Explanations," Philosophy 41 (July 1966): 199-215; John G. Gunnell, "Interpretation
and the History of Political Theory: Apology and Epistemology," American Political Sci-
ence Review 76 (June 1982): 317-27; and John Dunn, "The Identity of the History of
Ideas," in Peter Laslett, W. G. Runciman, and Quentin Skinner, eds., Philosophy, Politics
and Society (New York, 1972).
5. Manning Marable, "The Black Faith of W. E. B. Du Bois: Structural and Politi-
cal Dimensions of Black Religion," Southern Quarterly 23 (spring 1985): 15—33, and
Marable, W. E. fl. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (Boston, 1986). Compare Du Bois's
statement concerning religion: "I cannot believe that any chosen body of people or spe-
cial organization of mankind has received a direct revelation of ultimate truth which is
denied to earnest scientific effort. . . . It may well be that God has revealed ultimate
knowledge to babes and sucklings, but that is no reason why I, one who does not believe
this miracle, should surrender to infants the guidance of my mind and effort. No light of
faith, no matter how kindly and beneficent, can in a world of reason guide human beliefs
to truth unless it is continually tested by pragmatic fact." He referred to religious belief
as accepting "urgent desire, or myth and fairy tale, as valid truth" (Du Bois, Color and
Democracy: Colonies and Peace [New York, 1945], p. 137. Lewis also is emphatic about
Du Bois's aversion to religiosity; see Biography of a Race, pp. 65-66.
6. Marable, Black Radical Democrat, p. 47.
7. Francis L. Broderick, W. E, B. Du Bois: Negro Leader in a Time of Crisis (Palo
Alto, Calif., 1959); Elliott M. Rudwick, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Study in Minority Group
Leadership (Philadelphia, 1960). A revised version of Rudwick's study was published un-
der the title W. E. B. Du Bois: Propagandist of the Negro Protest (New York, 1968).
Unless otherwise indicated, references here are to the earlier edition.
8. R. Charles Key, "Society and Sociology: The Dynamics of Black Sociological
Negation," Phylon 39 (March 1978): 35-48; see also two articles by Elliott M. Rudwick:
"Notes on a Forgotten Black Sociologist: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sociological Profes-
sion," The American Sociologist 4 (November 1969): 303-6, and "W. E. B. Du Bois as
Sociologist," in James E. Blackwell and Morris Janowitz, eds., Black Sociologists: Histori-
cal and Contemporary Perspectives (Chicago, 1974), pp. 25-55.
9. Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver, "W. E. B. Du Bois: A Case in the Sociology
of Sociological Negation," Phylon 37 (December 1976): 308-33.
10. Arthur L. Johnson, "The Social Theories of W. E. B. Du Bois," master's thesis,
Atlanta University, Atlanta, Ga., 1949.
11. Charles H. Wesley, "W. E. B. Du Bois: The Historian," in John Henrik Clarke
et al, eds., Black Titan: W. E. B. Du Bois (Boston, 1970), pp. 82-97; Jessie P. Guzman,
"W. E. B. Du Bois-The Historian," Journal of Negro Education 30 (fall 1961): 377-85.
12. Eugene C. Holmes, "W. E. B. Du Bois: Philosopher," in Clarke et al., eds.,
Black Titan, pp. 76-81.
13. William T. Fontaine, " 'Social Determination' in the Writings of Negro Schol-
ars," American Journal of Sociology 49 (January 1944): 302-13; see also Fontaine's: "An
Interpretation of Contemporary Negro Thought from the Standpoint of the Sociology of
Knowledge," Journal of Negro History 25 (January 1940): 6—13, and his "The Mind and
Thought of the Negro of the United States as Revealed in Imaginative Literature, 1876-
1940," Southern University Bulletin (March 1942): 5-50.
14. Many revisionist Americanists, especially social and cultural historians, have be-
gun to overcome —often quite impressively, as in the work of James McPherson and Eric
Foner—the ghettoi/ation in the study of American life. By and large, however, revisionist
intellectual history, perpetuates the presumption thai "American" means "white." Other-
 Notes to Pages 6-7 189
wise impressive recent scholarship—such as David Green, Shaping Political Conscious-
ness: The Language of Politics in America from McKinley to Reagan (Ithaca, N.Y. 1987),
and James T. Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in
European and American Thought, 1870-1920 (New York, and London, 1986)—manages
to reconstruct twentieth-century American political debate in ways which give no clue
that either race or anyone other than whites (with the exception of Green's brief discus-
sion of Martin Luther King Jr. as a national moral symbol) has figured into the picture
at all.
Some signs of improvement do exist, however. Daniel T. Rodgers (Contested Truths:
Keywords in American Politics since Independence [New York, 1987]) notes the power of
racism as an enduring ideological current in American life. And Rogers M. Smith ("The
'American Creed' and American Identity: The Limits of Liberal Citizenship in the
United States," Western Political Quarterly 41 [June 1988]: 225-51, and "Beyond Tocque-
ville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple Traditions in America," American Political Science
Review 87 [September 1993]: 549-66) argues that a racialist ideological orientation,
which he calls "ethnocultural Americanism," or "ascriptive inegalitarianism," has been
one of three fundamental currents —along with liberalism and republicanism —of Ameri-
can political discourse since the revolutionary era. Other scholars have focused on the
importance of race and ideologies about race in American history. (See, for example,
George M. Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind [Middletown, Conn.,
1971]; Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom [New York, 1975], and
Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny [Cambridge, Mass., 1981]). Rodgers and
especially Smith, though, stand out for their efforts to integrate that perspective into
accounts of the main trajectories of American intellectual life. See also James Oakes,
Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York, 1990), and Mark
Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920 (Madison, Wis.,
1993).
15. For detailed discussion of this phenomenon and its implications see John
Higham, History: Professional Scholarship in America (Baltimore and London, 1983), pp.
212-32, and Higham, Introduction to Higham and Conkin, eds., New Directions in
American Intellectual History, pp. xi-xix.
16. Among the classic examples of this approach are Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradi-
tion in America (New York, 1955), and Daniel Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics
(Chicago, 1953). Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. managed during this period to publish a book
on Jacksonian politics which does not refer at all to Native Americans—despite Jackson's
pivotal role as shaper and enforcer of the genocidal consensus then prevailing among
whites. See Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1945). This orienta-
tion has had remarkable staying power, even in the face of a more than twenty-year
counteroffensive undertaken by revisionist schools that seek to recover a more expansive
view of American history and intellectual life. For an example of its persistence into the
present, see especially the title essay in Michael Walzer, What It Means to Be an Ameri-
can: Essays on the American Experience (New York, 1992).
17. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern De-
mocracy, 2 vols. (1944; reprint, New York, 1962).
18. Gerald D. Jaynes, "Urban Policy and Economic Reform," Review of Black Politi-
cal Economy 13 (summer-fall 1984): 103-15; Report of the National Advisory Commis-
sion on Civil Disorders (New York, 1968), pp. 236-82.
19. See, for example, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center (Boston, 1949),
esp. pp. 228-30. Mary Louise Dudziak carefully examines the Cold War's shaping of
elite concern about domestic race relations in "Cold War Civil Rights: The Relationship
190 Notes to Pages 7-8
between Civil Rights and Foreign Affairs in the Truman Administration," Ph.D. disserta-
tion, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., 1992.
20. Ralph Ellison, "An American Dilemma: A Review," in Ellison, Shadow and Act
(New York, 1972), p. 315.
21. See, for example, Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Retreat from Racial
Justice in American Thought and Policy (Boston, 1995). In addition to the study of Afro-
American thought, the pluralist turn in the social sciences —particularly political sci-
ence—would be an especially interesting focal point for such research, as would the
variants of the "culture of poverty" thesis in sociology and social psychology.
22. See, for example: August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880-1915: Racial
Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1963); Howard Brotz,
ed., Negro Social and Political Thought, 1850-1920 (New York, 1966), pp. 1-33; August
Meier, Elliott M. Rudwick, and Francis L. Broderick, eds., Black Protest Thought in the
Twentieth Century (Indianapolis, 1971), pp. xix-lvi; Theodore Draper, The Rediscovery of
Black Nationalism (New York, 1970).
23. Judith Stein, " 'Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others': The Political Econ-
omy of Racism in the United States," Science and Society 38 (winter 1974-75): esp. 423-
63; Mack H. Jones and Alex Willingham, "The White Custodians of the Black Experi-
ence: A Reply to Rudwick and Meier," Social Science Quarterly 51 (June 1970): 31-36;
Alex Willingham, "Black Political Thought in the United States: A Characterization,"
Ph.D. dissertation, University of N.C., Chapel Hill, N.C. 1974; and Eric Foner, "Recon-
struction Revisited," Reviews in American History 10 (December 1982): esp. 87-90. See
also Alex Willingham, "Ideology and Politics: Their Status in Afro-American Social The-
ory," in Adolph L. Reed Jr. ed., Race, Politics and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radical-
ism of the 1960s (Westport, Conn., 1986), esp. pp. 17-18.
24. Examples of valuable, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempts are Harold
Cruse, The Crisis of the Neqro Intellectual (New York, 1967), and S. P. Fullinwider, The
Mind and Mood of Black America (Homewood, 111., 1969). Cruse's and Fullinwider's
accounts are limited by their own reliance on transhistorical dualisms, and Cruse's suffers
as well from an excess of one of its strengths —i.e., a passion for the subject undermines
intellectual discipline. Moses and Toll have gone still farther in the direction of providing
historically contexmalized interpretations that explore the theoretical dimensions of black
debates. See Wilson J. Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (New
York, 1988), and William S. Toll, The Resurgence of Race: Black Social Theory from
Reconstruction to the Pan-African Conferences (Philadelphia, 1979). It may be that a
cohort of younger scholars finally will establish the history of Afro-American thought
firmly on a foundation that apprehends both the internal dynamism of black debate and
its rootedness in broader historical and discursive streams. See, for example, Jonathan
Scott Holloway, "Confonting the Veil: New Deal African-American Intellectuals and the
Evolution of a Radical Voice," Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.,
1995; Dean E. Robinson, "To Forge a Nation, to Forge an Identity: Black Nationalism
in the United States, 1957—1974," Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, New Haven,
Conn., 1995 and Michele Mitchell, "Adjusting the Race: Gender, Sexuality and the
Question of African-American Destiny, 1877-1930," Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern
University, Evanston, 111., 1977.
25. Myrdal, American Dilemma, vol. 2, p. 786.
26. Ibid., p. 784.
27. L. D. Reddick, "A New Interpretation for Negro History," Journal of Negro His-
tory 22 (January 1937): 27-28.
 Notes to Pages 8-12 191
28. E. Franklin Frazier, "The Failure of the Negro Intellectual," in Frazier, On
Race Relations (Chicago, 1968), p. 273.
29. Earl E. Thorpe, The Mind of the Negro: An Intellectual History of Afro-
Americans (1961; reprint, Westport, Conn., 1970), p. xii.
30. Ibid., pp. 444-45.
31. Ibid., p. xi.
32. Earl E. Thorpe, The Central Theme of Black History (Durham, N.C., 1969),
esp. pp. 18-32.
33. Myrdal, American Dilemma, pp. 783-84. More than twenty years after those
words were written, Martin Luther King Jr. was attacked widely for being so audacious
as to express a nonconformist opinion on the Vietnam War, which, he was reminded,
was not a proper issue for black concern. See David Garrow, Bearing the Cross (New
York, 1986), pp. 553-58.
34. Myrdal, American Dilemma, p. 784.
35. Cox similarly identifies the "American Creed" notion as a pivotal weakness in
Myrdal's study, though from the standpoint of a somewhat mechanistic Marxism; see
Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class and Race (1948; reprint, New York, 1959), pp. 510-14. See
also Smith, "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz."
36. Myrdal, American Dilemma, pp. 783-85.
37. I do not wish to argue that Myrdal is responsible for the constitution of the
study of Afro-American thought as a field around an atheoretical approach to its subject
matter. However, the conceptual foundation on which his study rested meshed readily
with both the consensualism that overtook the study of American thought during the
postwar years and the instrumentalism that organized the growing concern with race
relations. To that extent An American Dilemma expresses, analytically at least, the conver-
gence of those two intellectual tendencies. That circumstance no doubt helped Myrdal's
view to become so influential. For thorough consideration of the study's impact see David
W. Southern, Gunnar Myrdal and Black-White Relations: The Use and Abuse of An
American Dilemma, J949-1969 (Baton Rouge, La., and London, 1987), and Walter A.
Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liber-
alism, 1938-1987 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990).
38. Hollinger, "Historians and the Discourse of Intellectuals," p. 43. For other elab-
orations of this point, see e.g.: William E. Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse
(Princeton, N.J., 1983); J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time (New York, 1971),
and Rodgers, Contested Truths.
39. George W. Stocking Jr., "On the Limits of 'Presentism' and 'Historicism' in the
Historiography of the Behavioral Sciences," in Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution:
Essays in the History of Anthropology (Chicago, 1982), pp. 1-12.
40. Ibid., p. 4.
41. Recent examples of these tendencies are, respectively: Vincent Harding, There
Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York, 1981); and Sterling
Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New
York and London, 1987).
42. Foner, "Reconstruction Revisited," pp. 90-91.
43. Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christian-
ity (Philadelphia, 1982); Marable, Black Radical Democrat. Both studies seek to erect
among Afro-American intellectuals coherent traditions comparable to those held to exist
among whites. Marable, for instance, argues at length that Crummell's "influences" arc
more prominent in the early texts of Du Bois than are those of certain other, white
192 Notes to Pages 12-16
theorists, and West's volume is essentially a polemic on behalf of a claim that there is an
autonomously grounded "Afro-American critical philosophy."
44. See Robert Gooding-Williams, "Philosophy of History and Social Critique in
The Souls of Black Folk," Social Science Information 26 (1987): 99-114. Gooding-
Williams argues somewhat convincingly that Du Bois held some views about history
similar to those held by Hegel. On that basis, unfortunately, he characterizes Du Bois —
without the latter's explicit complicity—as a Hegelian and contends that in sections of
Souls Du Bois argues against his own unacknowledged Hegelianism. This approach does
justice to neither Du Bois nor Afro-American thought, nor to Hegel. Lewis also points to
apparently Hegelian traces in Du Bois's early writing, but he makes less of them than
Gooding-Williams; see Biography of a Race, pp. 139-40, 165.
45. Hollinger, "Historians and the Discourse of Intellectuals," pp. 44-45.
46. Ibid., p. 43.
47. For discussion of some of these problems see Skinner, "Meaning and Under-
standing."
48. Pocock, Politics, Language, and Time, pp. 3-41. I do not wish to endorse the
more elaborate arguments of Skinner or Pocock with respect to linguistic conventions
and recovering authorial intentions in the study of the history of ideas. In the first place
those arguments are struck at a level of procedural detail more specific than I care to
engage in this or quite possibly any other context. In addition that linguistic approach
has been criticized capably, and in ways that I do endorse, by Shapiro ("Realism in the
Study of the History of Ideas") and Gunnell ("Interpretation and the History of Political
Theory"). I share their view that the sharp linguistic turn proposed by Skinner, Pocock,
and others leads into an interpretive blind alley and can result in an unproductive hyper-
methodism. My own methodological prescriptions are no more detailed than Gunnell's
charge that "what is required is sensitive textual analysis coupled with historical awareness
and conducted with philosophical and political self-consciousness" (p. 327) and Shapiro's
general defense of an "anthropological" approach which requires the historian of ideas
also to be a "competent social, economic and political historian" (p. 578).

Chapter 2
1. Alfred D. Chandler Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in Ameri-
can Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), pp. 331-34, and Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of
Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916 (New York, 1963), pp.
18-19; see also Martin J. Sklar, The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism,
1890-1916: The Market, The Law and Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1988).
2. Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher
Learning in America (Baton Rouge, La., 1975), p. 12.
3. David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corpo-
rate Capitalism (New York, 1977).
4. Gruber, Mars and Minerva, p. 12.
5. Richard Hofstadter, in his Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston,
1955), details the impact of the American appropriation of Darwinian theory as social
science and ideology. See also Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary
Thought, 1870-1920 (Madison, Wis., 1993).
6. Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., "A Critical Period in American Religion, 1875—1900,"
in John M. Mulder and John F. Wilson eels., Religion in American History: Interpretive
Essays (Englcwood Cliffs, N.J., 1978), p. 303.
 Notes to Pages 16-17 193
7. Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism: 1885-1914 (Chicago, 1957), p.
72. However, the new reform spirit did not strictly preclude religiosity. President Folwell
of Minnesota, himself a reformer and new-breed academic, mobilized his powers of ratio-
nal thought not only to effect his conversion, but also to lead him to a conviction that
anyone with any sense must see the Protestant Episcopal course as God's exclusive Truth.
See Burton J. Bleclstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Devel-
opment of Higher Education in America (New York, 1976), p. 199.
8. Gruber, Mars and Minerva, p. 12. See also Joel H. Spring, Education and the
Rise of the Corporate State (Boston, 1972).
9. Gruber, Mars and Minerva, p. 14.
10. On the history of psychology in the United States, see L. Postman, Psychology
in the Making (New York, 1962); E. G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology
(New York, 1950); and R. S. Crutchfield and D. Krech, A Source Book in the History of
Psychology (Cambridge, Mass., 1965). Gruber notes that the first professorship in this
country in psychology alone was established at the University of Pennsylvania in 1891
(Mars and Minerva, p. 188). On the articulation of history of a discrete discipline, see
Julian Herbst, The German Historical School in American Scholarship: A Study in the
Transfer of Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1965); John Higham, History: Professional Scholarship
in America (Baltimore and London, 1983); Merle Curti, ed., American Scholarship in the
Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1953); and Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The
"Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge and New York,
1988). On the social sciences, sec Thomas L. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional
Social Science (Urbana, 111., 1977) and Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social
Science (Cambridge and New York, 1991).
11. Gruber, Mars and Minerva, p. 14. For a view that emphasizes the diversity
among academic responses to the changing environment sec Laurence R. Veysey, The
Emergence of the American University (Chicago, 1965).
12. See, for example, Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency
(Cambridge, Mass., 1959). A statement of this ideology by one who —though writing
somewhat later, after World War I —elaborates its radical implications is Thorstein Veb-
len, The Engineers and the Price System (New York, 1963). See also Pittenger, American
Socialists.
13. Noble, America by Design, pp. 257-324; Harry F. Braverman, Labor and Mo-
nopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974),
pp. 155-83; C. Wright Mills, White Collar (New York, 1951), pp. 77-111.
14. Kolko, Triumph, pp. 1-10. Also see David W. Eakins, "The Origins of Corpo-
rate Liberal Policy Research, 1916-1922: The Political-Economic Expert and the De-
cline of Public Debate," in Jerry Israel, ed., Building the Organizational Society (New
York, 1972), pp. 163-79, and Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The
Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (Cambridge and New York,
1982).
15. Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New
York, 1977), pp. 3-22; Alvin W. Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the
New Class (New York, 1979), pp. 14-15; Pat Walker, ed., Between Labor and Capital
(Boston, 1979). Lasch, in his earlier study The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963:
The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York, 1965), refers to this new "status group"
generically as "intellectuals" (p. x); Gouldner uses the term "new class" to refer to a
stratum of academic or humanistic intellectuals and technical intelligentsia. I employ
the terms interchangeably without acceding to the extent of the theoretical claims that
194 Notes to Pages 17-21
Gouldner makes concerning the significance of the constitution of this stratum as a class.
16. Gouldner, Future of Intellectuals, pp. 5-6.
17. Ibid., p. 19.
18. Alvin W. Gouldner, The Dialectic of Ideology and Technology: The Origins,
Grammar, and Future of Ideology (New York, 1976), pp. 253-57.
19. Cf. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western
Political Thought (Boston, 1960), pp. 352-434. Simon H. Patten, a prominent spokesman
among turn-of-the-century intellectual ideologues, wrote: "The final victory of man's ma-
chinery over nature's control of human society was the transition from anarchic and puny
individualism to the group acting as a powerful, intelligent organism" (The New Basis of
Civilization [1907; reprint, Cambridge, Mass., 1968], p. 43. See also Jarnes Gilbert, De-
signing the Industrial State: The Intellectual Pursuit of Collectivism in America, 1880-
1940 (Chicago, 1972), pp. 8-9.
20. Gouldner, Future of Intellectuals, 11-15; Jurgen Habermas, "Technology and
Science as 'Ideology,' " in Habermas, Toward a Rational Society: Student Protest, Science
and Politics (Boston, 1970), pp. 81-122. Habermas details a critical view of the funda-
mental interest-groundedness of all knowledge and the ideological tendencies of both
traditional philosophy and modern science to obscure their foundations in interestedness;
see his Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston, 1979), pp. 301-17.
21. Gilbert, Industrial State, p. 6.
22. Ibid. p. 7. Pittenger stresses the significance of evolutionism in this loose con-
sensus (American Socialists).
23. Gilbert, Industrial State, p. 31.
24. Ibid., pp. 7-8.
25. Ibid., pp. 34-35.
26. Gilbert, Industrial State, p. 36.
27. Ibid., p. 18. Nowhere is the disappearance of socialism into progressivism much
more pronounced than in the career of Charles Steinmetz, whom Gilbert discusses in
detail. Ira Kipnis cites an article by Victor Berger, the Wisconsin Socialist party leader,
titled "Socialism, the Logical Outcome of Progressivism" (Kipnis, The American Socialist
Movement: 1897-1912 [New York, 1952], p. 226).
28. Gilbert, Industrial State, p. 64.
29. Ibid., p. 66; see also Pittenger, American Socialists, and James T. Kloppenberg,
Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in European and American
Thought, 1870-1920 (New York and London, 1986).
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid. See also, for example, Richard T. Ely, The Strength and Weakness of So-
cialism (New York, 1894).
32. See Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York,
1974), esp. pp. 443-50.
33. Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy (New York, 1970).
34. Albrecht Wellmer, Critical Theory of Society (New York, 1971), pp. 67-119.
35. Alvin W. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the
Development of Theory (New York, 1980).
36. See, for example, Rainer Traub, "Lenin and Taylor: The Fate of 'Scientific
Management' in the (Early) Soviet Union," Telos (fall 1978): 82-92; Fran£ois George,
"Forgetting Lenin," Telos (winter 1973-74): 53-88; Russell Jacoby, "What Is Conformist
Marxism?" Telos (fall 1980): 19-44; and Frederic ]. Fleron, ed., Technology and Commu-
nist Culture (New York, 1977).
 Notes to Pages 21-24 195
37. V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement (New
York, 1943).
38. George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power:
A Sociological Study of the Role of the Intelligentsia in Socialism (New York, 1979),
p. 141.
39. Ibid., p. 142.
40. V. 1. Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, in Lenin, Selected Works, 3
vols. (New York, 1967), vol. 1, p. 412. See Rosa Luxemburg's critique of Lenin and the
Bolsheviks on this view in "Organizational Question of Social Democracy," in Luxem-
burg, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, ed. Mary-Alice Waters (New York, 1970), pp. 112-30.
Konrad and Szelenyi point out that Lenin's organizational model disqualified workers
from participating as party members and reduced them to recipients of consciousness
from professionals (Intellectuals, pp. 140—41).
41. This legacy of the Enlightenment is traced critically by Max Horkheimer and
Theodor W. Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, 1972), and William
Leiss, The Domination of Nature (Boston, 1973).
42. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodemism and the Transformation
of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York, 1981), pp. 4-58.
43. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the
Gilded Age (New York, 1982), p. 59.
44. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York, 1967), p. xiii.
45. Ibid., pp. 19-20.
46. Ibid., p. 111. Wiebe notes that "in order to demarcate this national upper class
new modes of identification such as a common educational experience in an exclusive
boarding school and then in one of a select set of Eastern colleges assumed far greater
importance. Aristocrats, in other words, made peace with an impersonal world by ex-
tending their familiar pattern of life" (ibid). Kenneth W. Warren examines elite concerns
with establishing and maintaining social boundaries to provide insulation from presumed
inferiors during this period, focusing on expression of such anxieties in realist literature;
see his Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago and
London, 1993).
47. Wiebe, p. 112.
48. Ibid., p. 129.
49. Ibid., p. 113.
50. Ibid., p. 129.
51. Ibid., p. 52.
52. R. Jeffrey Lustig, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Politi-
cal Theory, 1890-1920 (Berkeley, Calif., 1982), p. 45. See also John L. Thomas, Alterna-
tive America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd and the Adversary
Tradition (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).
53. Gronlund's The Cooperative Commonwealth in Its Outlines was published in
1884, Bellamy's Looking Backward in 1888 and Lloyd's Wealth against Commonwealth
in 1894. Lustig contends that the cooperative commonwealth idea "until the First World
War expressed the indigenous American radicals' vision of a democratic future" (Corpo-
rate Liberalism, p. 72). See also Pittenger, American Socialists, esp. pp. 25-88.
54. Gilbert, Industrial State, p. 23. A far more ambitious attempt to link Bellamy
with antidemocratic collectivism is Arthur Lipow's study Authoritarian Socialism in
America: Edward Bellamy and the Nationalist Movement (Berkeley, Calif., 1982); Pit-
tenger (American Socialism, pp. 65—71) also discusses this feature of Bellamy's vision,
196 Notes to Pages 24-28
noting that his Utopian "vocabulary of desire holds no terms to express what human
beings might yet become" (p. 67).
55. Lipow, Authoritarian Socialism, pp. 54-72; Pittenger, American Socialism, pp.
43-65.
56. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 7.
57. Ibid., p. xiii.
58. Ibid., pp. 218-19. I shall detail this mindset and its relation to Du Bois's thought
in chapter 7.

Chapter 3
1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899; reprint, New
York, 1967). Gunnar Myrdal, in An American Dilemma (2 vols. [1944; reprint, New York,
1962]) lauded Du Bois's volume as a pioneering sociological work, and E. Digby Baltzell
seconded that judgment in his introduction to the 1967 edition of Du Bois's study. Arthur
J. Vidich and Stanford M. Lyman identify Du Bois's Philadelphia research as "the first
American urban community study," the initial expression of American sociologists' efforts
to link "the methods of urban research being developed in England and the ethno-
graphic study of the urban community" (American Sociology: Worldly Rejections of Reli-
gion and Their Directions [New Haven, Conn., and London, 1985], pp. 75 and 127); see
also Martin Bulmer, "W. E. B. Du Bois as a Social Investigator: The Philadelphia Negro,
1899," in Bulmer et al., eds., The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880-1940
(Cambridge, 1991).
2. W. E. B. Du Bois, Autobiography: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last
Decade of Its First Century (New York, 1968), p. 194. A pillar of the progressivist view
on political reform was the claim that government could be run more "efficiently" were
it not for the influence of the non-Anglo-Saxon immigrant groups who propped up the
machines. In Philadelphia, which had one of the largest black populations among Ameri-
can cities at the turn of the century, considerable sentiment assigned blacks great respon-
sibility for the maintenance of corruption. On the position of immigrants in progressivist
political ideology, see Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (New York, 1955), esp. pp.
178-81, Edward C. Banfield and James Q. Wilson, City Politics (New York, 1968), pp.
139-50, and Samuel P. Hays, "The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the
Progressive Era," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 55 (October 1964): 157-69.
3. Du Bois, Autobiography, p. 197. Allison Davis claims that the university's interest
stemmed from the fact that the black population "was beginning to encroach upon" the
campus; see his Leadership, Love and Aggression (New York, 1983), p. 127. See David
Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois; Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York, 1993),
pp. 179-210, for the most thorough discussion of the Philadelphia study's genesis and
conduct.
4. Du Bois, Autobiography, p. 206.
5. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Conservation of Races (Washington, D.C., 1897), p. 15.
This tract shows Du Bois's affinity for reform Darwinism or Lamarckian social theory.
See also Alfred O. Moss Jr., The American Negro Academy (Baton Rouge, La., 1980);
Lewis, Biography of a Race, pp. 168-74.
6. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, pp. 6-8.
7. Klliott M. Rndwick, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Study in Minority Group Leadership
(Philadelphia, 1960), pp. 29-30, and Baltzell, Introduction, to Du Bois, Philadelphia
Negro, p. xvi. Baltzell and Rudwick, however, only mention Wharton's role in passing
 Notes to Pages 29-31 197
and draw no implications from her association. Lewis notes that Wharton and Lindsay—
reflecting the bent of the College Settlement Association with which they were affili-
ated—"represented more of the right wing's paternalism than the left wing's mobilizing
fervor" (Biography of a Race, p. 188).
8. Vidich and Lyman discuss the origins of this strain in the Social Gospel move-
ment and trace its development in the field. See American Sociology; see also Robert M.
Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in American Civilization,
1889-1920 (Urbana, III, 1984).
9. The Americanization movement and its impact on the family structure of immi-
grant populations are discussed in Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises: The Shaping of
American Working Class Consciousness (New York, 1973), pp. 158-66; Stuart and Eliza-
beth Ewen, "Americanization and Consumption," Telos (fall 1978): 42-51. Each of these
authors establishes the further link between the impetus to Americanization and the
production and consumption requirements of the newly ascendant corporate capitalism.
See also John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925
(New York, 1981), pp. 234-63.
10. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, p. 15.
11. Ibid., p. 55.
12. Ibid., p. 67.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., p. 97.
15. Ibid., pp. 192-93.
16. Ibid., p. 193.
17. Ibid., p. 193.
18. Ibid., p. 195.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., pp. 195-96.
21. Ibid., p. 196. Du Bois elsewhere and not too happily identified the church
congregations as "the real units of race life" (Some Efforts of American Negroes for Their
Own Social Betterment [Atlanta, 1898], p. 4).
22. It is worthy of note here that Du Bois, no doubt because of the room available
for their cultural improvement, saw Negroes by and large as "a people comparatively low
in the scale of civilization" (Philadelphia Negro, p. 66).
23. Ibid., p. 195.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., p. 390.
26. Cf. Christopher Lasch's discussions of Addams, Bourne, and others in his The
New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York,
1965). Some feminists, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, were prepared during the prewar
years to displace family functions altogether in deference to progress in the form of Tay-
lorist rationalization. See, for example, Gilman's article "The Waste of Private
Housekeeping," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 48 (July
1913): 91-96. See also Simon H. Patten's enthusiasm over the prospects of extension of
corporate rationalization to the nuclear family in the same issue of the Annals ("The
Standardization of Family Life," pp. 81-90).
27. Du Bois pointed out early on that "the little shop, the small trader, the house
industry have given way to the department store, the organized company and the factory"
(Philadelphia Negro, p. 45). And again: "Today . . . the application of large capital to
the retail business, the gathering of workmen into factories, the wonderful success of
198 Notes to Pages 31-33
trained talent in catering to the whims and taste of customers almost precludes the effec-
tive competition of the small store" (ibid., p. 123).
28. In spite of his awareness of the passage of the entrepreneurial phase from the
society in general, he still maintained the value of entrepreneurship among blacks, who
had not—because of the slave experience—assimilated the bourgeois virtues. "For a Ne-
gro, then, to go into business means a great deal. It is, indeed, a step in social progress
worth measuring" (W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro in Business [Atlanta, 1899], p. 5).
29. W. R. B. Du Bois, The Quest of the Silver Fleece: A Novel (Chicago, 1911).
This tension has persisted in various guises among black intellectuals and appears at
times to have had a reasonably clear material basis. I shall discuss this recurring tension
in chapter 5 in relation to the Harlem Renaissance and the early attempts at consolida-
tion of an elite within the black community.
30. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, p. 174.
31. Ibid., p. 161. Improper dressing, lack of understanding of the need to change
wet clothes (not enough sense to come in out of the rain?!), superstitious fear of hospi-
tals—these "bad habits" contributed to poor health, especially among southern migrants
(ibid., p. 162).
32. Ibid., p. 161.
33. Ibid., pp. 283-84. The importance of "house and home and ward" here under-
scores Du Bois's concerns about building the nuclear family and stimulating neighbor-
hood community.
34. Ibid., p. 221.
35. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Politi-
cal Thought (Boston, 1960), pp. 352-434. Samuel P. Hays maintains that an "organiza-
tional revolution" took off after the mid-1890s (The Response to Industrialism, 1885—1914
[Chicago, 1957], pp. 48-50).
36. Du Bois, Some Efforts of American Negroes, p. 4. This statement recalls the
tendency of collectivist intellectuals to assume the mantle of the society as a whole.
37. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, p. 284.
38. Ibid., p. 285.
39. Ibid., p. 315. These views imply both a specific model of how the Afro-
American population should be structured and a special tutelary role for an organiza-
tional vanguard. In the last analysis, therefore, these are categories whose profoundly
political character is concealed within the organizationalist terminology.
40. Ibid., p. 235.
41. Ibid.
42. George Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (New
York, 1978), esp. pp. 77-93, discusses at length those theories he characterizes as efforts
to wed science and racism in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries —for
example, phrenology and physiognomy. See also Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of
Man (New York, 1981). The political and cultural climate associated with Reaganism
has allowed reputable scholars once again to attempt to link criminality and biology. See
James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature (New York, 1985),
and Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class
Structure in American Life (New York, 1994); see also Adolph Reed Jr. "Looking Back-
ward," Nation, November 28, 1994, pp. 654-62.
43. Indications of the persistence of this problem can be seen over the next two
generations in William T. Fontaine, " 'Social Determination' in the Writings of Negro
Scholars," American journal of Sociology 49 (January 1944): 302-15, and Orlando Pat-
 Notes to Pages 33-36 199
terson, "The Moral Crisis of the Black American," Public Interest (summer 1973): 43-
69. See also my discussion of this problem in chapter 1.
44. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, pp. 254-56. Du Bois noted that more and more
black convicts knew how to read.
45. Ibid., pp. 389-90.
46. Ibid., p. 373. He notes, however, that this debasement of electoral responsibility
was not exclusive to blacks, though it may have been relatively more common among
them.
47. Ibid., pp. 374-75 and 380-81.
48. Ibid., p. 382. He went on to point out that while this laudable conservatism
may in part have been a functioir of "the inertia of ignorance," the point remained that
the black voter usually was allied with the "better" and never with the "worst" political
elements (ibid).
49. Ibid., pp. 136-39.
50. Ibid., p. 395.
51. Ibid., p. 129.
52. Ibid., pp. 129-3In and 331-32.
53. For a general discussion of Taylor and his experiments see Sudhir Kakar, Freder-
ick Taylor: A Study in Personality in Innovation (Cambridge, Mass., 1971). More critical
views are proffered by David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology and the
Rise of Corporate Capitalism. (New York, 1977) esp. pp. 264-78, and Harry F. Braverman,
Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New
York, 1974), esp. pp. 85-138. Taylor's ideas are best presented in his rather self-serving
volume The Principles of Scientific Management (New York, 1967). Lewis also notes the
Midvale-Taylor connection (Biography of a Race, p. 191).
54. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, pp. 126-27.
55. Ibid., pp. 138-39. Like Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Simon H. Patten (cited
above, note 26), Du Bois advocated the "professionalization" of domestic work. Unlike
the others, however, he mixed a healthy dose of paternalism in with his prescription by
proclaiming servants to be "constituent members of the family and as such [to] have
rights and privileges as well as duties." Among the reforms he proposed was an effort to
reverse the trend toward having servants live off the premises. This regrettable situation
left servants "free at night to wander at will, to hire lodgings in suspicious houses, to
consort with paramours, and thus to bring moral and physical disease to their place of
work." Moreover, the reform that was "imperatively needed" in this area would, he noted,
"benefit white and black alike —the employer as well as the employed" (ibid., p. 141).
With this kind of outlook predominant in the progressive social sciences, there is small
wonder that Henry Ford was to find use for a Sociology Department!
56. Ibid.
57. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Training of Negroes for Social Power," Outlook 75
(October 17, 1903): 409-14. Quotations here are from a typescript copy of the essay in
the Countee Cullen-Harold Jackman Collection, Atlanta University, Collection No. 3,
"Du Bois."
58. Ibid., p. 4.
59. Ibid., pp. 5-6. "An industrial school, however, does not merely teach technique.
It is also a school —of moral influence and of mental discipline" (ibid., p. 6).
60. Ibid., p. 7.
61. Ibid., pp. 7-8.
62. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, p. 7. This view of the upper class as bearer of a
200 Notes to Pages 36-39
group's "realized ideal" also reflects Du Bois's embrace of a variant of racialist social
theory prevalent among his educated, late Victorian contemporaries.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., p. 309.
65. Ibid., p. 310.
66. Ibid., pp. 310-11.
67. Ibid., p. 62n. He also deplored the practice among realtors of dumping "undesir-
able elements . . . from the slums" among black settlements (ibid., p. 194). The bluntness
of his class prejudice should give pause to those who currently adduce The Philadelphia
Negro as evidence for the persistence of a so-called black urban underclass —for example,
Orlando Patterson, "Toward a Study of Black America," Dissent (fall 1989): 483.
68. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, p. 55n.
69. E. Franklin Frazier, "Durham: Capital of the Black Middle Class," in Alain
Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925; reprint, New York, 1968), pp. 333-
40. In this essay Frazier anointed the new black elite for the sacred mission of uplift and
advancement of the race as a whole. Unfortunately Spaulding, Pearson, Moore, and the
other guiding lights of the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company—not to
mention the larger elite stratum and aspirants to it—did not heed the clarion but went
about their chosen agenda of personal aggrandizement and conspicuous consumption.
70. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, p. 155.
71. Ibid., p. 177.
72. Ibid., p. 316.
73. Ibid., p. 318.
74. Ibid., p. 317.
75. Ibid., p. 177.
76. Ibid., p. 318.
77. Ibid., p. 177.
78. Lester F. Ward, Pure Sociology: A Treatise on the Origin and Spontaneous Devel-
opment of Society (New York, 1907), p. 205.
79. Du Bois, Conservation of Races, p. 7.
80. Ibid.
81. See, for example, Howard Brotz, ed., Negro Social and Political Thought, 1850-
1920 (New York, 1966).
82. Du Bois, Conservation of Races, p. 8. Lewis notes the echoes of German roman-
tic race theory in Du Bois's writing in this period (Biography of a Race, pp. 165-66).
83. Du Bois, Conservation of Races, p. 9. Appiah and Fergerson note that Du Bois's
writings—as was common among his contemporaries — were ambiguous during those
early years with respect to whether race is defined ultimately by biology or history. In
part this ambiguity sterns from the prevailing naivete (i.e., prior to the "rediscovery" of
Mendelian theory) about genetics and thus about heredity. Indeed, race and class typi-
cally were discussed in a language that was at the same time categorically vague and at
least evocative of biological determinism. See Anthony Appiah, "The Uncompleted Argu-
ment: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race," Critical Inquiry 12 (autumn 1985): 21—37;
Gerard Fergerson, "Race, Science, and Medicine in the Late Nineteenth Century: W. E. B.
Du Bois and the Health and Physique of the Negro American," master's thesis, Yale
University, New Haven, Conn., 1987; George W. Stocking Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolu-
tion (Chicago, 1982), esp. pp. 42-68 and 161-94; Greta Jones, Social Darwinism and
English Thought: The Interaction between Biological and Social Theory (Atlantic High-
 Notes to Pages 40-44 201
lands, N.J., 1980), pp. 140-59; Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and Evolutionary
Thought, 1870-1920 (Madison, Wis., 1993). I shall return to this issue in chapter 7.
84. Du Bois, Conservation of Races, p. 10. The "advance guard" of the race in Du
Bois's view were the Afro-Americans. Perhaps West Indians and Africans would have seen
things differently.
85. Ibid., p. 12. This specific proposal of course reflects an attempt to promote the
newly formed group that published Du Bois's monograph. See note 5 above.
86. Ibid., p. 13.
87. Ibid. "The Academy," Du Bois proposed, "should seek to gather about it the
talented, unselfish men, the pure and noble-minded women, to fight an army of devils
that disgraces our manhood and womanhood" (ibid., p. 14).
88. Du Bois, "The Problem of Amusement," Southern Workman 27 (September
1897): 184.
89. Du Bois, "The Study of the Negro Problems," Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science 11 (January 1898): 21.

Chapter 4
1. See, for example, the following works by Du Bois: The Philadelphia Negro (1899;
reprint, New York, 1967); The Negro (1915; reprint, New York, 1970 Black Folk: Then
and Now (New York, 1939); The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa
Has Played in World History (1947; reprint, New York, 1965). See also Francis L. Broder-
ick, W. E. B. Du Bois: Negro Leader in a Time of Crisis (Palo Alto, Calif., 1959), pp. 48-
49, and Joseph P. DeMareo, The Social Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois (Lanham, Md.,
1983), pp. xi-xiii; David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-
1919 (New York, 1993).
2. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race
Concept (1940; reprint, New York, 1968), p. 63.
3. Elliott M. Rudwick points out in this regard that Du Bois "hoped to use the
Negro university . . . to train a brain trust" (W. E. B. Du Bois: A Study in Minority
Group Leadership [Philadelphia, 1960], p. 37).
4. The studies were published by Atlanta University as proceedings of the annual
conferences on the "Negro problem" that Du Bois organized. He continued his role with
the conferences and the studies for five years after his departure from the university. The
series included, among others, the following volumes: Social and Physical Condition of
Negroes in Cities (1897), Some Efforts of American Negroes for Their Own Social Better-
ment (1898), The Negro in Business (1899), The College-Bred Negro (1900), The Negro
Common School (1901), The Negro Artisan (1902), Some Notes on Negro Crime, Particu-
larly in Georgia (1904), The Health and Physique of the Negro American (1906), Eco-
nomic Cooperation among Negro Americans (1907), The Negro American Family (1908),
Efforts for Social Betterment among Negro Americans (1910), The Common School and
the Negro American (1912), The Negro American Artisan (1913), Morals and Manners
among Negro Americans (1915).
5. Du Bois began to collect and annotate his papers at the age of fifteen. Broderick,
Negro Leader, p. 4.
6. After indicating that their ultimate purpose was to determine "how much of natu-
ral law there is in human conduct," Du Bois argued that the Atlanta University studies
of the Afro-American community offered to sociology insights to questions such as: "What
202 Notes to Pages 44-45
is human progress and how is it emphasized? How do nations rise and fall? What is the
meaning and value of certain human actions? Is there rhythm and law in the mass of
the deeds of men —and if so how can it best be measured and stated?" (Du Bois, "The
Atlanta Conferences," Voice of the Negro I [March 1904]: 85).
7. Du Bois, "The Study of the Negro Problems," Annals of the American Academy
of Political and Social Science 11 (January 1898): 1-23.
8. Henry Lee Moon perceptively notes the connection between Du Bois's faith in
scientific expertise and his assertion of the duty of the intellectual elite (Moon, Introduc-
tion to W. E. B. Du Bois, The Emerging Thought ofW. E. B. Du Bois, Henry Lee Moon,
ed. [New York, 1972]).
9. Du Bois's affinity for positivist science as a model for understanding social life
has been noted by several analysts. See for example Eugene C. Holmes, "W. E. B. Du
Bois: Philosopher," in John Henrik Clarke et al., eds., Black Titan: W. E. B. Du Bois
(Boston, 1970); Julius Lester, Introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois, The Seventh Son: The
Thought and Writings ofW. E. B. Du Bois, Julius Lester, ed. (New York, 1971), esp. pp.
54, 58; William Allison Davis, Du Bois and the Problems of the Black Masses (Atlanta,
1974); Bernard R. Boxill, "Du Bois and Fanon on Culture," Philosophical Forum 9 (win-
ter-spring, 1979): 326-38; and Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver, Introduction to Du
Bois, W.E.B. Du Bois on Sociology and the Black Community, Green and Driver, eds.
(Chicago, 1978). Some of the zest with which these authors attempt to identify Du Bois
with science may derive from a desire to legitimize or exalt his reputation among Ameri-
can intellectuals. The high value generally attached to science in this culture is such
that "scientific" knowledge typically is held to be its highest expression, and each of the
authors cited here writes in part from an intention to elevate Du Bois's role within the
history of American ideas.
As an indication of his receptiveness to the scientism then coming into its own at the
more prestigious universities, among his early Cambridge notes is the following syllogism:
"Science is Mathematics. Mathematics is Identity. Science is Identity." Quoted in Francis
L. Broderick, "The Academic Training of W. E. B. Du Bois," Journal of Negro Education
27 (winter 1958): 13; Lewis, Biography of a Race, pp. 95-96 also discusses Du Bois's
early, exuberant scientism.
10. W. E. B. Du Bois, Some Notes on Negroes in New York City (Atlanta, 1905),
p. 1.
11. Du Bois, "Atlanta Conferences," p. 85.
12. Ibid.
13. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, p. 50.
14. Ibid., p. 51. At the time of his early encounter with Spencer's work, however,
Du Bois does not appear to have been quite so skeptical as this passage might suggest.
Cf. Du Bois, The Conservation of Races (Washington, D.C., 1897).
15. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, p. 51.
16. Arthur L. Johnson, "The Social Theories of W. E. B. Du Bois," M.A. thesis,
Atlanta University, Atlanta, Ga., 1949. Du Bois himself informs us that the Atlanta series
received accolades for its scientificity from William James and other prominent scholars
and reformers (Autobiography: Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its
First Century (New York, 1968), pp. 218-19.
17. Mark Pittenger, James Gilbert, R. Jeffrey Lustig, and Arthur Lipow all discuss
the static and mechanistic biases operating in scientific reform activity during this period
in, respectively, American Socialists and Evolutionary Thought, J870-1920 (Madison,
 Notes to Pages 45-46 203
Wis., 1993), Designing the Industrial State (Chicago, 1972), Corporate Liberalism (Berke-
ley, Calif., 1982), Authoritarian Socialism in America (Berkeley, Calif., 1982). See also
Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge and New York, 1991).
18. Elliott M. Rudwick, "W. E. B. Du Bois as Sociologist," in James E. Blackwell
and Morris Janowitz, eds., Black Sociologists: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives
(Chicago 1974), p. 26.
19. I have borrowed the phrase "background assumption" from Alvin W. Gouldner,
The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (New York, 1970), pp. 29-31. Gouldner defines
background assumptions as the "unpostulated and unlabeled" assumptions out of which
a theory in part emerges. These assumptions, furthermore, "are embedded in a theory's
postulations . . . [and] . . . provide some of the bases of choice and the invisible ce-
ment" for linking postulations together.
20. Arthur J. Vidich and Stanford M. Lyman, American Sociology: Worldly Rejec-
tions of Religion and Their Directions (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1985), p. 307.
21. J. David Lewis and Richard L. Smith, American Sociology and Pragmatism:
Mead, Chicago Sociology, and Symbolic Interaction (Chicago, 1980), p. 5.
22. Lustig, Corporate Liberalism, p. 168. Lustig suggests that pragmatism might
even be seen as an attempt to extend positivism to new terrain: "An approach that is
usually celebrated for admitting that social matter was informed by mind turns out to
have actually provided a rationale for applying to mind a set of techniques proven useful
in dealing with matter" (p. 169).
23. Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge,
Mass., 1976), p. 27. A notable and, I believe mistaken, alternative assessment is De-
Marco's claim that social Darwinism "never occupied a strong role in [Du Bois's]
thought" (Social Thought ofW. E. B. Du Bois, p. 69). The basis for this faulty interpreta-
tion may be DeMarco's curious assertion that the principle of "advance through race
loyalty," which he rightly attributes to Du Bois, conflicted with Social Darwinist pre-
cepts. However, Lester F. Ward, Thomas Nixon Carver, Edward Cummings and other
early evolutionary sociologists found little difficulty in incorporating notions like race
loyalty into their theoretical constructs. See Vidich and Lyman, American Sociology, pp.
28, 71-78. On Du Bois's persisting rationalism, see Lewis, Biography of a Race, pp.
438-41.
24. Of Bismarck, Du Bois stated: "The Fate of Europe is Germany and Germany
is Bismarck. The Man of Iron, one of the strangest personalities the world has ever seen;
brilliant, stubborn;—reckless, careful, a patriot, a despot: the Man of One Idea" ("Bis-
marck," Fisk University, June 1888, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers at the University of Massa-
chusetts, Amherst, Mass., Reel 80 #7).
25. DeMatco, Social Thought ofW. E. B. Du Bois, pp. 45-47. See also Du Bois,
Autobiography, pp. 154-82; Francis L. Broderick, "German Influence on the Scholarship
of W. E. B. Du Bois," Phylon 19 (December 1958): 367-71. Manning Marable empha-
sizes Alexander CrummeH's racial theories in discussing the intellectual foundations of
The Conservation of Races (Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat [Boston,
1986], pp. 31-35). Wilson J. Moses, though, notes that Crummell and Du Bois operated
equally within a broader Germanically inflected discourse of racial romanticism (The
Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 [New York, 1988], p. 81). Lewis elaborates
the latter view (Biography of a Race, pp. 163-69).
26. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Proposal for a Sociological Society," Atlanta University,
1897, Du Bois Papers, Reel 80 #84-94. In this draft Du Bois emphasized regularities as
204 Notes to Pages 46-49
the object of sociological study and argued that social scientific facts and expertise should
have priority in reform efforts, racial and otherwise.
27. Dan S. Green and Edwin D. Driver, "W. E. B. Du Bois: A Case in the Sociol-
ogy of Sociological Negation," Phylon 37 (December 1976): 313-17. Lewis's account is
a solid corrective; see Biography of a Race, esp. chapter 9.
28. Du Bois, Negroes in New "York City, p. 3.
29. Ibid., p. 2.
30. Ibid., pp. 2-3.
31. A flavor of this perspective is found in the following: Gilbert, Industrial State;
ed., Jerry Israel, Building the Organizational Society: Essays on Associational Activities in
Modern America, (New York, 1972); Robert H. Wiebe, Search for Order 1877-1920 (New
York, 1967); Lipow, Authoritarian Socialism; Pittenger, American Socialists.
32. Sec, for example, Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912
(New York, 1952); Lipow, Authoritarian Socialism; Aileen S. Kraditor, The Radical Per-
suasion, 1890-1917: Aspects of the Intellectual History and the Historiography of Three
American Radical Organizations (Baton Rouge, La., 1981); James Weinstein, The Corpo-
rate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900-1918 (Boston, 1968); Lustig, Corporate Liberalism.
33. Gilbert, Industrial State, p. 31. The situation with legal theory, however, is
somewhat more complex than Gilbert suggests. While proponents of sociological juris-
prudence and legal realism certainly advocated reliance on the fruits and techniques of
social science, they were not inclined to justify their project in terms of neutrality or
impartiality. Indeed, they understood themselves to be reacting against the alleged impar-
tiality associated with formalist doctrines. I am grateful to Rogers M. Smith for bringing
this clarification to my attention. For discussion bearing on this issue, see his Liberalism
and American Constitutional Law (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 75-78 and 154-57,
and his "Constitutional Interpretation and Political Theory: American Legal Realism's
Continuing Search for Standards," Polity 15 (summer 1983): esp. 492-97.
34. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Speech by Dr. William E. B. Du Bois, A.L.P. Candidate for
U.S. Senator at A.L.P. Rally, Golden Gate Ballroom," in Du Bois, Seventh Son, vol. 2, p.
604.
35. W. E. B. Du Bois, "My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom," in Rayford W.
Logan, ed., What the Negro Wants (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944), p. 56.
36. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920; reprint, New
York, 1969), p. 21.
37. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, p. 67. He also learned, so he tells us, that there was
little demand for the research that he had been doing (ibid).
38. Du Bois, "My Evolving Program," p. 57.
39. Du Bois, "My Evolving Program." Despite this statement, Rampersad asserts
emphatically that Royce had no influence on Du Bois (Art and Imagination, p. 29).
40. Broderick, Negro Leader, pp. 30-31. Cornel West similarly sees a pragmatist
strain in Du Bois; see West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragma-
tism (Madison, Wis., 1989), pp. 142-43.
41. Alan Sigmund Cywar, "An Inquiry into American Thought and the Determi-
nate Influence of Political Economic and Social Factors in the Early Twentieth Century:
Bourne, Dewey, Du Bois, Nearing, Veblen, and Weyl," Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Rochester, Rochester, N.Y., 1972, p. 315. Cywar also discusses apparent reform Darwinist
influence in Dn Bois's writing in this early period, pp. 330—31.
42. Rampersad, Art and Imagination, p. 65. See also Bruce Kuklik, The Rise of
American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (New Haven, Conn., 1977),
 Notes to Pages 49-53 205
esp. chaps 9, 14—17; Lewis and Smith, American Sociology, pp. 59—86; C. Wright Mills,
Sociology and Pragmatism (New York, 1964), pp. 215-76; and William James, Pragma-
tism (Cleveland and New York, 1955). Despite these shared concerns, David Levering
Lewis concluded, I believe correctly, that the extent of James's philosophical "imprint on
Du Bois is somewhat less distinct than some recent students of ideas have believed,"
noting that there is no clear evidence that Du Bois embraced pragmatism's theoretical
underpinnings either formally or substantively (Biography of a Race, p. 96).
43. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Education and Work," Journal of Negro Education 1 (April
1932): 64-65. Du Bois made clear in this essay that he was not unmindful either of the
underlying sense in which this view of the purpose of education dovetails with the utili-
tarian objectives of vocational training. The differences were, first, that such vocational
training as had been advocated was obsolescent and generally useless, and, second, that
the vocational training advocates paid insufficient attention to the utilitarian character of
the sensibility that can accompany college education.
44. Du Bois, World and Africa, p. xii
45. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America
(1924; reprint, New York, 1970).
46. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935; reprint,
New York, 1969) and Black Folk: Then and Now (New York, 1939).
47. Cf. Daniel Lerner and Harold Lasswell, The Policy Sciences (Stanford, Calif.,
1965). See David W. Eakins, "The Origins of Corporate Liberal Policy Research, 1916-
1922: The Political-Economic Expert and the Decline of Public Debate," in Israel, ed.,
Building the Organizational Society, pp. 163-179; David M. Ricci, The Tragedy of Politi-
cal Science: Politics, Scholarship and Democracy (New Haven, Conn., and London,
1984); Raymond Seidelman, with the assistance of Edward J. Harpham, Disenchanted
Realists: Political Science and the American Crisis, 1884-1984 (Albany, 1985).
48. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Prospect of a World without Race Conflict," American Jour-
nal of Sociology 49 (March 1944): 456.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid., p. 456.
51. Ibid.
52. Du Bois, Negro in Business, p. 1.
53. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Training of Negroes for Social Power," Outlook 75
(October 17, 1903): 409-14. The quotation here is from a typescript copy of the essay in
the Countee Cullen—Harold Jackman Collection, Atlanta University, Collection No. 3,
"Du Bois," p. 10.

Chapter 5
1. Joseph P. DeMarco, The Social Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois (Lanham, Md.,
1983), p. 54.
2. Gerald Home, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response
to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (Albany, 1986), p. 7. It is possible for Home to make this
contention only because he does not consult Du Bois's major prewar writings and relies
on Du Bois's own retrospective assessments of his earlier positions. Manning Marable
goes so far as to reinterpret the "Talented Tenth" formulation as not really elitist after all,
contending that: it should be seen as "a strategy to win democracy for all black Ameri-
cans" (W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat [Boston, 1986], p. 47). That Marable
seems untroubled by this interpretation's manifestly Orwellian character may reflect the
206 Notes to Pages 54-56
hegemony of an antiparticipatory model of political action current in black civic dis-
course. This problem intensified over the 1980s with proliferation of an idea of leader-
ship vested in individuals who represent group interests organically, without mediation or
mechanisms of accountability. I have discussed this phenomenon at greater length in
The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon: The Crisis of Purpose in Afro-American Politics (New
Haven, Conn., and London, 1986) and in the forthcoming volume, Stirrings in the Jug:
Black American Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis, 1998).
3. W. E. B. Du Bois, Some Efforts of American Negroes for Their Own Social Better-
ment (Atlanta, 1898), p. 43.
4. Ibid., p. 43.
5. Ibid., p. 36, cf. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Conservation of Races (Washington, D.C.,
1897), pp. 12-14. I discuss Du Bois's earlier advocacy of an "intellectual clearinghouse"
role for the American Negro Academy in chapter 3. On the history of the Academy see
Alfred O. Moss Jr., The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth (Baton
Rouge, La., 1980).
6. Du Bois, Some Efforts, p. 37, quoting Alexander Crummell, Character: The Great
Thing, Tracts for the Negro Race, no. 2 (Washington, D.C., American Negro Academy, n.d.).
7. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro in Business (Atlanta, 1899).
8. W. E. B. Du Bois, The College-Bred Negro (Atlanta, 1900).
9. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Study of the Negro Problems," Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 11 (January 1898): 1-23. See also Du Bois,
"Program for a Sociological Society" Atlanta University, 1897, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers
at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Mass., Reel 80 #84-94.
10. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Possibilities of the Negro: The Advance Guard of the Race,"
Booklovers Magazine 2 (July 1903): 3.
11. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth," in The Negro Problem (multiauthor
collection) (1903; reprint, New York, 1969 p. 33. Despite Du Bois's atypically resolute
support for women's rights, he almost certainly in such formulations meant to refer liter-
ally to men.
12. Ibid., p. 34.
13. Ibid., p. 54.
14. Ibid., p. 35.
15. Ibid., p 45. Arnold Rampersad also notes Du Bois's "trickle down" view of cul-
ture (The Art and Imagination ofW. E. B. Du Bois [Cambridge, Mass., 1976], p. 87).
Several years later, in the thick of the Washington controversy, Du Bois would assert that
all youth in principle should receive "a training designed . . . to make them men of
power, of thought, of trained and cultivated taste —men who know whither civilization is
tending and what it means." However, he noted, the costs involved prohibited the univer-
sal dissemination of liberal education and decreed that only a few could benefit; to make
the best of this unfortunate situation required that such opportunities as were available
be reserved for the most talented. Du Bois, "The Hampton Idea," Voice of the Negro 3
(September 1906): 632-36. The quotation here is from a typescript copy in the Countee
Cullen-Harold Jackman Collection, Atlanta University, Collection No. 3, "Du Bois." Du
Bois's consistent emphasis on talent as a legitimizing principle of the elite conforms not
only with the meritocratic ideological posture of reform liberalism but also with the
circumstances of his own biography. He had grown up in poverty in the Berkshires only
to be rescued by opportunities opened to him through the initiative of those who ob-
served his intellectual ability.
16. Quoted by Du Bois in "The Talented Tenth," p. 41. '['his reference occurs in
 Notes to Pages 56-58 207
the midst of a recounting of antislavery and prorace activism by early prominent blacks.
Du Bois contented in his essay that pride in ethnicity by no means necessarily implies
interracial populism or even exaltation of folkishness. His deprecation of what he saw as
the backwardness of Afro-American social organization coexists with his high admiration
of the racial pride exhibited by Benjamin Banneker and others (ibid., pp. 35-36.
17. Ibid., p. 42.
18. Ibid., pp. 45.
19. Francis L. Broderick contends that Du Bois was consistent from his 1896 talk
to the American Negro Academy through Niagara and the NAACP in the conviction
that blacks should challenge their physical and intellectual powers for self-organization
(W. E. B. Du Bois: Negro Leader in a Time of Crisis [Stanford, Calif., 1959], p. 101).
See also David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New-
York, 1993), pp. 398-99.
20. William Allison Davis, Du Bois and the Problems of the Black Masses (Atlanta,
1974), p. 16.
21. For example, in Crisis 2 (November 1911), the first advertisement for "Crisis-
Maid" face powder appeared, with a photograph of a Crisis-Maid in Crisis 5 (December
1912), and shortly after an issue in which he had hailed the Bolshevik Revolution, Du
Bois noted with "exceeding interest" the pleasure and beaut}' he had seen displayed at
recent black elite balls (Crisis 18 [October 1919]: 285).
22. W. E. B. Du Bois, Crisis 7 (December 1913); 83. Several months later he took
issue with the practice of designating talented blacks as " 'black Westers,' 'black Sousas'
. . . black this and black that. Who ever heard of a 'white Fred Douglass,' a 'white
Coleridge-Taylor' or even a 'white Jack Johnson'?" (Crisis 1 [April 1914]: 288).
23. W. E. B. Du Bois, Crisis 5 (January 1913): 130.
24. W. E. B. Du Bois, Crisis 9 (February 1915); 184.
25. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Negro (1915; reprint, New York, 1970), p. 138.
26. Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925; reprint, New York,
1968).
27. Charles S. Johnson, "The New Frontage on American Life," in Locke, ed., New
Negro, pp. 278-98.
28. Kelly Miller, "Howard: The National Negro University," in Locke, ed., New
Negro, pp. 312-322.
29. Robert R. Moton, "Hampton-Tuskegee: Missioners of the Mass," in Locke, ed.,
New Negro, pp. 323-32.
30. Johnson, "New Frontage," p. 297.
31. E. Franklin Frazier, "Durham: Capital of the Black Middle Class," in Locke,
ed., New Negro, pp. 333-40.
32. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America
(1924; reprint, New York, 1970), p. 178.
33. Ibid., p. 158.
34. W. E. B. Du Bois, Crisis 24 (May 1922): 8-9.
35. W. E. B. Du Bois, Crisis 24 (October 1922), 247-48.
36. Frantz Eanon describes this dynamic eloquently in Black Skin, White Masks
(New York, 1967).
37. I shall discuss this issue in detail in chapter 7 as a feature of Dvi Bois's early accep-
tance of the Lamarekian race theory prominent at the end of the nineteenth century.
38. See the lengthy discussion of this relation in Harold Crnse, The Crisis of the
Negro Intellectual: From Us Origins to the Present (New York 1967), pp. 11-63.
208 Notes to Pages 59-62
39. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South: 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, La.,
1951), pp. 356-60. See also Louis R. Harlan's biography Booker T. Washington, 2 vols.
(New York, 1972-83) as well as Lewis, Biography of a Race, esp. chapters 9-15.
40. Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth," pp. 74-75.
41. J. Saunders Redding maintains that the volume "may be seen as fixing that
moment in history when the American Negro began to reject the idea of the world's
belonging to white people only, and to think of himself in concert, as a potential force
in the organization of society" (Redding, "The Souls of Black Folk: Du Bois' Masterpiece
Lives On," in John Henrik Clarke et al., eds., Black Titan: W. E. B. Du Bois [Boston,
1970], p. 49). See also William S. Toll, The Resurgence of Race: Black Social Theory
from Reconstruction to the Pan-African Conferences (Philadelphia, 1979), p. 120. In this
sense Souls was a manifesto of a rising black elite.
42. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New York, 1907), pp.
29-30. This passage may be to some degree an escape into style that got carried away
with itself. However, he also reflected that the freedman "had emerged from slavery,—
not the worst slavery in the world, not a slavery that made all life unbearable, rather a
slavery that had here and there something of kindliness, fidelity, and happiness, — but
withal slavery, which so far as human aspiration and desert were concerned, classed the
black man and the ox together" (p. 28). Such studied evenhandedness surely indicates
that Du Bois's desired audience was in large part white.
43. Ibid., p. 56.
44. Ibid., p. 86.
45. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race
Concept (1940; reprint, New York, 1968), p. 75. David Levering Lewis has provided a defin-
itive account of the intricacies and specifics of the Washington-Du Bois conflict, including
the lineaments of the patterns of political alliance within which it was embedded and which
it shaped (see note 39 above). There is no need to rehearse that account here.
46. Mary Law Chaffee, "William E. B. Du Bois' Concept of the Racial Problem in
the United States," Journal of Negro History 41 (July 1956): 242.
47. Robert L. Factor, "Booker T. Washington and the Transformation of the Black
Belt Negro: Disorganization and Change," in Jerry Israel, ed., Building the Organiza-
tional Society: Essays on Associational Activities in Modem America (New York, 1972), p.
112. See also Harlan, Washington, as well as Lewis, Biography of a Race, and James D.
Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988),
pp. 33-110.
48. Toll, Resurgence of Race, p. 17; Judith Stein, " 'Of Mr. Booker T. Washington
and Others': The Political Economy of Racism in the United States," Science and Society
38 (winter 1974-75): 422-63.
49. Toll, Resurgence of Race, p. 21.
50. Ibid., p. 58.
51. Ibid., p. 109. In this context Toll observes, insightfully, that the structural divi-
sion between Du Boisians and Washingtonians spun more likely around an urban/rural
axis than a northern/southern one.
52. Du Bois, Crisis 1 (December 1913): 84. Americanization, of course, during that
period meant industrial socialization and acculturation.
53. As is true of the society as a whole, the story of the women involved in the
genesis of this discourse of "race adjustment" remains largely untold. Much fruitful re-
search can be done on the ideas of such figures as Mary Church Terrell, Ida Wclls-
Barnett, and others. Recent though theoretically uneven contributions arc Paula Gid-
 Notes to Pages 63-64 209
dings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America
(New York, 1984); Thomas C. Holt, "The Lonely Warrior: Ida Wells-Barnett and the
Struggle for Black Leadership," in John Hope Franklin and August Meier Black Leaders
of the Twentieth Century (Urbana, 111., Chicago, and London, 1982); and Hazel Carby,
" 'On the Threshold of Woman's Era': Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Femi-
nist Theory," Critical Inquiry 12 (autumn 1985): 262-77. Carby's account is the most
directly intellectual-historical.
54. While Du Bois's inclinations in this regard have been discussed, the following
passage from Washington should establish the extent to which he assimilated the domi-
nant values of the order, even the logic of the incipient consumer culture: "| W]hat is
needed is not only to have the individual educated in industry but to have his hand so
trained that he will become ambitious. We should get the man to the point where he
will want a house, where his wife will want carpet for the floor, pictures for the walls,
books, a newspaper and a substantial kind of furniture. We should get the family to the
point where it will want money to educate its children, to support the minister and the
church. Later, we should get this family to the point where it will want to put money in
the bank and perhaps have the experience of placing a mortgage on some property.
When this stage of development has been reached, there is no difficulty in getting indi-
viduals to work six days during a week." Booker T. Washington, "The Economic Devel-
opment of the Negro Race since Its Emancipation," in W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T.
Washington, The Negro in the South: His Economic Progress in Relation to His Moral
and Religious Development (1907; reprint, Northbrook, 111., 1972), pp. 56-57. August
Meier also discusses the extent to which adjustment to industrialization was a central
theme of black political discourse in the decades preceding World War I. See his account
in Negro Thought in America I880-I9I5: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Wash-
ington (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1963). Washington and Du Bois equally advocated for much
of the Afro-American population something very much akin to the Americanization ini-
tiatives to which European immigrants were subjected by northern progressives.
55. August Meier, Introduction to Negro Problem, pp. viii-ix. Julius Lester's claim
that the disagreement between Du Bois and Washington struck so deep as "their concepts
of the nature of Man and his function" seems extreme by contrast (Lester, Introduction
to W. E. B. Du Bois, The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings ofW. E. B. Du Bois,
Julius Lester, ed. [New York, 1969], p. 43). In fact, in the same year that The Souls of
Black Folk appeared, Du Bois rendered a qualified but still laudatory assessment of Wash-
ington's work. Du Bois, "Possibilities of the Negro," p. 7.
56. Elliott M. Rudwick, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Study in Minority Group Leadership
(Philadelphia, 1960), p. 59.
57. Ibid., p. 81.
58. Ibid., p. 63-64.
59. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Twelfth Census and the Negro Problems," Southern
Workman 29 (May 1900): 308. This recalls Du Bois's earlier call for organization of an
"intellectual clearinghouse through the American Negro Academy," in his Conservation
of Races, pp. 12-14.
60. Du Bois, Autobiography, p. 224. David Levering Lewis indicates that Schiffs
lack of support resulted at least in part from Washington's veto (Biography of a Race, p.
325) and also discusses another, more humiliating rejection Du Bois suffered from the
Carnegie Institution in 1906 (ibid., pp. 366—67).
61. Rudwick, W. E. B. Du Bois, p. 118.
62. Ibid., p. 298.
210 Notes to Pages 64-66
63. Robert L. Factor, pointing out the importance of the educational apparatus as a
source of the elite's income and status, describes the tight control that the religious and
other philanthropic organizations maintained over black education in the South (Factor,
"Booker T. Washington," pp. 111-12. Kenneth Manning's Black Apollo of Science (New
York, 1983) portrays brilliantly and poignantly the tragic experience of the black biologist
E. E. Just in attempting to secure philanthropic support for his research; in the process
Manning richly illuminates the defensive paternalism with which white philanthropists
approached even nonpolitical black initiatives. On this relation see also James D. Ander-
son, "Philanthropic Control over Private Black Higher Education," in Robert F. Amove,
ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism (Bloomington, Ind., 1980), and Anderson,
The Education of Blacks in the South; and John H. Stanfield, Philanthropy and Jim Crow
in American Social Science (Westport, Conn., 1985).
64. Cited in Virginia Hamilton, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Biography (New York, 1972),
p. 102. Reflecting on the philanthropic connection years later, Du Bois observed a source
of the paradox. Most of the prominent philanthropists, while often relatives or friends of
Abolitionists, were also capitalists and employers of labor who saw in blacks a way to
restrain the demands of white labor (Autobiography, pp. 239-40).
65. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, p. 113. Atlanta, interestingly, was his model for
this encroaching philistinism. Plus ga change, plus c'est la meme chose! Wilson J. Moses
claims that Du Bois attacked Washington from the standpoint of a backward-looking anti-
capitalism which recoiled from the "values of an upstart burgher class" The Golden Age
of Black Nationalism, J850-J925, [New York, 1988] p. 137). However, Du Bois's critique
was struck explicitly in the name of a rising stratum of young, cosmopolitan professionals.
See also Lewis, Biography of a Race, pp. 297-342.
66. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Social Evolution of the Black South (Washington, D.C.,
1911), p. 9.
67. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, p. 183.
68. Ibid., pp. 185-86.
69. Ibid., p. 189.
70. Ibid., p. 217.
71. Ibid., p. 219.
72. Rampersad, Art and Imagination, p. 209. The novel's hero, Matthew Towns,
embraces as his revolutionary vision a society guided by an oligarchy of excellence.
Rampersad rightly identifies the theme as Tbwns's "search for an aristocracy of merit" (p.
217) and notes — on the basis of a plot in which Afro-American struggle hinges on leader-
ship by an assemblage of Third World revolutionaries — "Where Du Bois had seen the
civilizing of Afro-Americans as a moral responsibility of the white world, he was now
transferring the burden to darker but still foreign backs" (p. 210).
73. W. E. B. Du Bois, "What Is Wrong with the NAACP?" conference address,
May 18, 1932, Du Bois Papers, Reel 80 #492-93.
74. Ibid.
75. The limitations of this kind of self-criticism were disclosed in their extremes to
a later generation, which witnessed in the 1970s first Louis Althusser's intellectual contor-
tions and then those of the American Maoists who squabbled over the carcass of the New
Left. The latter, with each new ideological turn made and each new part}' proclaimed,
engaged in a ritual of "summing up," in which no earlier positions were examined and
transcended, only declared no longer appropriate for the "new stage." Russell Jacoby
discusses these developments in "The Politics of Objectivity: Notes on the U.S. Left,"
Telos (winter 1977-78): 74-88.
 Notes to Pages 67-71 211
76. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, 3 vols., Herbert
Aptheker, ed., (Amherst, Mass., 1973-78), vol. 2, p. 92.
77. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Talented Tenth: The Re-Examination of a Concept,"
address to the Sigma Pi Phi Grand Boule, Wilberforce, Ohio, August 12, 1948, Du Bois
Papers, Reel 80 #1092.
78. Ibid., #1110-11.
79. Ibid., #1093. He also criticized them for repudiating the idea of a Negro culture,
and raised the spectre of a large Negro "nation" in the United States in objecting to their
course of "complete effacement and utter nirvana in another and foreign entity." As with
most proponents of the idea of a politically significant racial culture in this century, that
notion was intrinsically connected in Du Bois's thought with the special responsibili-
ties—and special status—of the black elite. I have taken up the problem of this pivotal
though often overlooked aspect of Afro-American nationalism in "The Black Revolution
and the Reconstitution of Domination," in Reed, ed., Race, Politics and Culture: Critical
Essays on the Radicalism of the Sixties (Westport, Conn., 1986).
80. Du Bois Papers, #1109—10. His construction tells more than his statement; the
"mass" remains inert and amorphous, devoid of subjectivity and fit only to be adminis-
tered.
81. Ibid., #1120.
82. Ibid., #1117.
83. Ibid., #1121. He also called for greater emphasis on art and culture in home
life (#1120).
84. Ibid., #1111.
85. Ibid., #1112-13.
86. Ibid., #1119-20. If this were not sufficiently repressive, he reached back further
into his progressivist roots to condemn gambling.
87. Ibid., #1121. It is very difficult to comprehend how Gerald Home could refer
to this text as an indication of Du Bois's disavowal of elitism Home, Black and Red, p. 7).
88. W. E. B. Du Bois,"How United Are Negroes?" in Du Bois, Seventh Son, vol. 2
p. 630, National Guardian.
89. W. E. B. Du Bois, In Battle for Peace: The Story of My 83rd Birthday (New
York, 1952), pp. 76-77.
90. Du Bois, "How United Are Negroes?" p. 632.
91. Ibid.
92. Du Bois, In Battle for Peace, p. 77.
93. Ibid.
94. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Speech by Dr. William E. B. Du Bois, A.L.P. Candidate for
U.S. Senator at A.L.P. Rally, Golden Gate Ballroom," in Du Bois, Seventh Son, p. 604.
95. Du Bois, "How United Are Negroes?" p. 631. He continued to exhort the black
intelligentsia to fulfill the mission he had set for it more than a half century earlier. See
W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Negro and Socialism," in Helen Alfred, ed., Toward a Socialist
America: A Symposium of Essays by Fifteen Contemporary American Socialists (New York,
1958), esp. p. 188.

Chapter 6
1. Exemplary, although unevenly successful, efforts to confront this general prob-
lem— in addition to the work o) Arnold Rarnpersad and Wilson J. Moses — arc Hancs
Walton, "Black Political Thought: The Problem of Characteri/ation," Journal of Black
212 Notes to Pages 72-74
Studies I (December 1970); 213-18; S. P. Fullinwider, The Mind and Mood of Black
America (Homewood, 111., 1969); Herbert Storing, Introduction to Storing, ed., What
Country Have I?: Political Writing of Black Americans (New York, 1970); Alex Will-
ingham, "Ideology and Politics: Their Status in Afro-American Social Theory," in Adolph
L. Reed Jr., ed. Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s
(Westport, Conn., 1986); William S. Toll, The Resurgence of Race: Black Social Theory
from Reconstruction to the Pan-African Conferences (Philadelphia, 1979); and Harold
Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: From Its Origins to the Present (New York,
1967).
2. This is not to say that interracialism was generally accepted among Du Bois's
contemporaries; rather, in the system of relevance that structured the earlier political
debates, the proper forms of interracial contact seldom surfaced as an issue for explicit
discussion. Even though different writers might be shown to have held different implicit
positions on the matter, it was not sufficiently meaningful in the context of their com-
monly conceived project of discourse to warrant contention.
3. Howard Brotz, in Brotz, ed., Negro Social and Political Thought: Representative
Texts (New York, 1966). Wilson J. Moses also sees Du Bois as a nationalist, even a "racial
chauvinist" (Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 [New York, 1988],
pp. 144-45). Manning Marable, never to be outdone at piling up labels, sees Du Bois's
outlook as a "synthesis of racial democracy, cultural pluralism, pan-Africanism and social-
ism" (W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat [Boston, 1986], p. 91).
4. Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual.
5. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture; Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black
America (New York and London, 1987), p. 291.
6. Vincent Harding, "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Messianic Vision," in John
Henrik Clarke et al., eds., Black Titan: W. E. B. Du Bois (Boston, 1970).
7. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America
(1924; reprint, New York, 1970). Also see William T. Fontaine, "The Mind and Thought
of the Negro of the United States as Revealed in Imaginative Literature, 1876-1940,"
Southern University Bulletin 28 (March 1942): 20-22.
8. Ibid., p. 158.
9. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New York, 1907), pp.
85-86.
10. Ibid., p. 172.
11. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (1899; reprint, New York, 1967), p. 317. Mo-
ses notes that an authoritarian component typically accompanied racial collectivist ideol-
ogy among black American intellectuals during the early modern period (Golden Age of
Black Nationalism, pp. 21-22).
12. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, p. 318.
13. See, for example, his two studies: W. E. B. Du Bois, Some Efforts of American
Negroes for Their Own Social Betterment (Atlanta, 1898), and Du Bois, Economic Cooper-
ation among Negro Americans (Atlanta, 1907).
14. W. E. B. Du Bois, "A Pageant in Seven Decades" (1938), in Du Bois, W. E. B.
Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1920-1963, Philip S. Foner, ed., 2 vols. (New
York, 1970), vol. 2 p. 66.
15. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race
Concept (1940; reprint, New York, 1968), p. 295.
16. Ibid., p. 296.
 Notes to Pages 74-77 213
17. Ibid., pp. 171-172.
18. W. E. B. Du Bois, "My Evolving Program for Negro Freedom," in Rayford W.
Logan, ed. What the Negro Wants (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1944), p. 70.
19. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Tragedy of 'Jim Crow,' " The Crisis 26 (August 1923):
170. On Cheyney State, see ibid., p. 172. See also Du Bois, "The Dilemma of the
Negro," American Mercury 3 (October 1924): 179-85.
20. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Position of the Negro in the American Social Order:
Where Do We Go from Here?" Journal of Negro Education 8 (July 1939): 565-66.
21. Ibid.
22. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Prospect of a World without Race Conflict," American Jour-
nal of Sociology 49 (March 1944): 456.
23. Du Bois, "Position of the Negro," p. 565. Du Bois advanced this view also as a
criticism of individualistic black entrepreneurial activity; see Mark David Higbee, "W. E.
B. Du Bois, F. B. Ransom, the Madam Walker Company, and Black Business Leadership
in the 1930s," Indiana Magazine of History 89 (June 1993): 101-24.
24. Du Bois, "Position of the Negro," p. 569.
25. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, p. 296.
26. Ibid., p. 305. Moses, in identifying a strain of nationalistic thinking among
prominent black "race men," demonstrates that Du Bois's charge was at best an exaggera-
tion; see his Golden Age of Black Nationalism. Du Bois's objective here, however, is
hortatory rather than analytical. It is understandable, therefore, that his narrative rests on
the hyperbolic claims of a jeremiad rather than the cautious empiricism of a scholarly
description. Judith Stein, in The World of Marcus Garvey: Race and Class in Modem
Society (Baton Rouge, La., 1986), has argued persuasively that even the Garvey move-
ment's social base was concentrated in the aspiring petite bourgeoisie.
27. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, pp. 309-10.
28. Ibid., p. 310.
29. See, for example, W. E. B. Du Bois, "On Being Ashamed of Oneself: An Essay
on Race Pride," Crisis 40 (September 1933): 199-200, and Du Bois, "Prospect of a
World."
30. See Du Bois's editorials in the Crisis 41.
31. W. E. B. Du Bois, Crisis 41 (May 1934): 149.
32. W. E. B. Du Bois, Crisis 41 (June 1934): 184.
33. Francis L. Broderick, W. E. B. Du Bois: Negro Leader in a Time of Crisis (Palo
Alto, Calif, 1959), pp. 172-73.
34. It is significant here to note that Du Bois defined his conflict within the NAACP
as "not an absolute difference of principle, but it was a grave difference as to further
procedure" (Dusk of Dawn, p. 313).
35. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Back to Africa," Century 105 (February 1923): 546-47.
36. Du Bois, "Dilemma of the Negro," p. 184.
37. W. E. B. Du Bois, "As the Crow Flies," Chicago Globe, April 12, 1950.
38. Du Bois, "Dilemma of the Negro," p. 180.
39. Ibid.
40. See, for example, Horace M. Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United
States (New York, 1924), and Kallen, Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea (Phila-
delphia, 1956). For a perspective on the conceptual and practical limitations of cultural
pluralism for black Americans, see Oliver C. Cox, "The Question of Pluralism," Race 12
(fourth quarter 1971): 385-400; John Higham, Send These to Me: lews and Other Immi-
214 Notes to Pages 78-79
grants in Urban America (New York, 1975), pp. 203-8; and Werner Sollors, "A Critique
of Pure Pluralism," in Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., Reconstructing American Literary History
(Cambridge, Mass., 1986).
41. David Levering Lewis, "Parallels and Divergences: Assimilationist Strategies of
Afro-American and Jewish Elites from 1910 to the Early 1930s," journal of American
History 71 (December 1984): 545.
42. Kallen, Culture and Democracy, p. 124. David A. Hollinger maintains that Kal-
leri "was not so much for cross-fertilization as for the harmonious cooperation and mutual
enrichment of clearly defined, contrasting, durable ethnic units" (In the American Prov-
ince: Studies in the History and Historiography of Ideas [Bloomington, Ind., 1985], p. 65).
43. For comparisons of Kallen and Du Bois in this respect, see Werner Sollors,
Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Literature (New York, 1986), pp.
181-88, and Higham, Send These to Me, pp. 209-12. William T. Fontaine also empha-
sizes Du Bois's subordination of racial particularity to a "broader human perspective"
(Reflections on Segregation, Desegregation, Power and Morals (Springfield, 111., 1967), pp.
12—13. From this vantage point Du Bois arguably had more in common with his statist
Harvard classmate, Herbert Croly, than with Kallen. See Croly's The Promise of American
Life (1909; reprint, Indianapolis, 1965); David Levy, Herbert Croly of the New Republic
(Princeton, N.J., 1985); Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lipp-
man, and the Progressive Era, 1900-1925 (New York, 1961), pp. 3-51; and R. Jeffrey
Lustig, Corporate Liberalism: The Origins of Modern American Political 'Theory, 1890-
1920 (Berkeley, Calif, 1982), pp. 211-16.
44. Recent Du Bois scholarship has stressed his links to Alexander Crummell in
seeking the sources of his racial views. (See, for example, Marable, Moses, and Stuckey.)
Crummell most likely did influence Du Bois's early formulations of the specifically black
variant of racial idealism. There are, however, at least three reasons for emphasizing
instead the wider reform Darwinist and Lamarckian evolutionist tendencies' significance.
First, CrummeU's racial organicism was itself an instance of the broader orientation to-
ward teleological evolutionism (see Moses, Golden Age of Black Nationalism, pp. 59-61).
Second, Du Bois had absorbed a disposition toward that orientation through his Harvard
and Berlin experiences prior to his close association with Crummell. Finally, although
Du Bois's link to Crummell is no doubt salient biographically, that focus can obscure
the extent to which both Crummell and Du Bois operated within a more general context
of intellectual conventions. Not surprisingly, the scholars who have emphasized Crum-
meU's influence on Du Bois have been concerned to establish the contours of autono-
mous Afro-American intellectual traditions. It is instructive that only Moses and David
Levering Lewis, who are least inclined among them to argue for a wholly independent
black philosophical orientation, seek to situate both subjects within contemporaneous
intellectual currents. The most careful and reasonable efforts to situate Du Bois and
Crummell, in addition to Moses's Golden Age of Black Nationalism, are Wilson J. Moses,
"W. E. B. Du Bois's 'The Conservation of Races' and Its Context: Idealism, Conservatism
and Hero Worship" Massachusetts Review (summer 1993): 275-94, and David Levering
Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New York, 1993), pp. 161- 70.
45. W. E. B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York, 1945),
p. 70.
46. Ibid., p. 10.
47. Moses, Golden Age of Black Nationalism, p. 133.
48. Lewis describes Du Bois's effusions of rationalist optimism surrounding the 1911
Universal Races Congress in Biography of a Race, pp. 439-41.
 Notes to Pages 79-82 215
49. Moses, Golden Age of Black Nationalism, p. 133.
50. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Future of Africa-A Platform" (1919), in Du Bois, Du
Bois Speaks, vol. 1 p. 273.
51. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Pan-African Movement" (1945), in Du Bois, Du Bois
Speaks, vol. 2 p. 166. Moreover, the second Pan-African Congress declared in part that,
"The Negro race, through their thinking intelligentsia, demand . . . recognition of civi-
lized men as civilized, despite their race or color" (ibid., p. 170). Stuckey nevertheless
observes that Du Bois in his early years "underestimated the power of contemporary
African cultures" but reassures us that the notion that Western blacks should lead Africa
out of darkness was a "position from which [Du Bois] later backed away" (Slave Culture,
p. 259). ^
52. "There are . . . in the United States today several commendable groups of
young people who are proposing to take hold of Liberia and emancipate her from her
difficulties, quite forgetting the fact that Liberia belongs to Liberia," W. E. B. Du Bois,
"Pan-Africa and the New Racial Philosophy," Crisis 49 (November 1933): 247. Du Bois
articulated this position in the context of accusations that the Americo-Liberian aristoc-
racy was practicing slavery.
53. W. E. B. Du Bois, Crisis 23 (February 1922): 155. This criticism was directed
specifically at Garveyism in general and Garvey's dispute with the Liberian elite in partic-
ular; Du Bois not unreasonably chose the Americo-Liberians over Garvey.
54. Ibid., p. 154.
55. Ibid.
56. W. E. B. Du Bois, "American Negroes and Africa's Rise to Freedom" (1961), in
Du Bois, The Seventh Son: The Thought and the Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Julius
Lester, ed., 2 vols. (New York, 1971), vol. 2, pp. 693-94.
57. That "tribalism" and its variants are mainly European colonial imports to Africa
(see W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Saga of Nkrumah," National Guardian, July 30, 1956) and
that "Pan-African socialism seeks the welfare state in Africa" (Du Bois, "A Future for
Pan-Africa: Freedom, Peace, Socialism," in Du Bois, Seventh Son, vol. 2, p. 649) obviated
any such attention.
58. Du Bois "Future of Africa," pp. 660—61. This passage suggests that the spirit of
Du Bois's admiration of Bismarck never completely disappeared.
59. W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa
Has Played in World History (1947; reprint, New York, 1965). Even here, however, he
genuflects toward cultural pluralism in according Asia and Africa the status of civiliza-
tions along with Europe.
60. Du Bois, "Pan-Africa and the New Racial Philosophy," p. 247.
61. Du Bois, Crisis 23 (April 1922): 251-52.
62. Du Bois, Crisis 17 (February 1919): 166.
63. Ibid.
64. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, p. 304.
65. For critical interpretations of Garveyite Pan-Africanism, see Stein, World of Mar-
cus Garvey, and Adolph L. Reed Jr., "The Political Philosophy of Pan-Africanism: A
Study of the Writings of Du Bois, Garvey, Nkrumah and Padmore and Their Legacy,"
M.A. thesis, Atlanta University, 1975. Post-Black Power Pan-Africanism is analyzed sys-
tematically in Charles Hopkins, "Pan-Africanism: A Theoretical Examination of Contem-
porary Afro-American Involvement," M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina, Chapel
Hill, N.C., 1974. See also Adolph L. Reed Jr.: "Pan-Africanism: Ideology for Liberation?"
The Black Scholar (September 1971), and Reed, "Pan-Africanism as Black Liberalism:
216 Notes to Pages 82-84
Du Bois and Garvey," in Ofuatey-Kodjoe, ed., Pan-Africanism: New Directions in Strategy
(Lanham, Md., 1986).
66. Du Bois, "Future for Pan-Africa," p. 649.
67. Ibid. Preservation in this context evokes the appropriate image —that of the fos-
silized museum piece.
68. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Future of Africa" (Address to the All-African People's
Conference, Accra, Ghana, December 22, 1958), in Du Bois, Seventh Son, vol. 2, pp.
658-59.
69. Broderick, Negro Leader, p. 123.
70. Elliott M. Rudwick, W. E. B. Du Bois: A Study in Minority Group Leadership
(Philadelphia, 1960), p. 51.
71. Alan Sigmund Cywar, "An Inquiry into American Thought and Determinate
Influence of Political Economic and Social Factors in the Early Twentieth Century:
Bourne, Dewey, Dn Bois, Nearing, Veblen, and Weyl," Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Rochester, Rochester, N.Y., 1972, pp. 330-31.
72. Ibid., p. 340.
73. Eugene C. Holmes, "Du Bois: Philosopher," in Clarke et al., eds., Black Titan,
p. 80.
74. Bernard Fonlon, "The Passing of a Great African," in Clarke et al., eds. Black
Titan, p. 220.
75. Lester, Introduction, to Du Bois, Seventh Son, vol. 1, p. 137.
76. W. Alphaeus Hunton, "W. E. B. Du Bois: The Meaning of His Life," in Clarke
et al., eds., Black Titan, p. 176.
77. Truman Nelson, "W. E. B. Du Bois as a Prophet," in Clarke et al., eds., Black
Titan, p. 145.
78. Gerald Home, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Re-
sponse to the Cold War, 1944-1963 (Albany, 1986), p. 5.
79. Marable, Black Radical Democrat, p. 83.
80. Moses, Golden Age of Black Nationalism, p. 139.
81. Ibid., p. 140; see also Lewis, Biography of a Race, pp. 143, 543.
82. See Ira Kipnis, The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912 (New York, 1952);
James Weinstein, The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912-1925 (New York, 1969).
83. James Gilbert, Designing the Industrial State: The Intellectual Pursuit of Collec-
tivism in America, 1880-1940 (Chicago, 1972); Mark Pittenger, American Socialists and
Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920 (Madison, Wis., 1993).
84. Gilbert, Industrial State, p. 64.
85. Ibid. Pittenger also stresses the concern of a reform tendency to construct a
socialist vision shorn of Marxism's radical implications and propagation of a rhetoric of
necessary social conflict (American Socialists).
86. Marable, for example, contends that Du Bois was always essentially a "radical
democrat" (Black Radical Democrat, p. 195). Moses sees him as having been a "radical
liberal" (Golden Age of Black Nationalism, p. 144) and maintains, furthermore, that his
attraction to Communism rested on "black nationalistic rather than on Marxist grounds"
(ibid., p. 140). By contrast, the burden of Home's entire interpretation of Du Bois is
validation of the premise that he was always a Marxist—even before recognizing it (Black
and Red, e.g. pp. 289-90). Lewis's account locates —correctly, in my view—Du Bois's
early socialist affinities as outcroppings of his rationalist and scientistic commitments
(Biography of a Race, pp. 144, 338).
 Notes to Pages 84-86 217
87. Du Bois affirmed his belief that "the end of economic reform is socialism, or as
some would call it 'collectivism'; but I also just as firmly believe that the next step toward
this is consumers' co-operation and that for the American Negro it is the only step" (Du
Bois, Pittsburgh Courier, March 28, 1936). For theoretical discussion of the convergence
of Marxism and liberal collectivism see Russell Jacoby, "What Is Conformist Marxism?"
Telos (fall 1980): 19-44; Alvin W. Gouldner, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and
Anomalies in the Development of Theory (New York, 1980); and Michael Urban, The
Ideology of Administration: American and Soviet Cases (Albany, 1982).
88. W. E. B. Du Bois, Crisis 22 (September 1921): 199-200.
89. W. E. B. Du Bois, Crisis 22 (October 1921); 245.
90. Ibid., p. 246.
91. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920; reprint, New
York, 1969), p. 98.
92. Ibid., p. 100.
93. Ibid., p. 101.
94. Ibid., p. 103.
95. Ibid, p. 157.
96. Du Bois observed that the "essential difficulty with liberalism in the twentieth
century was not to realize the fundamental change brought about by the worldwide
organization of work and trade and commerce" ("Pageant in Seven Decades," p. 64).
97. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Marxism and the Negro Problem," Crisis 40 (May 1933), p.
103.
98. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, p. 289. Also, after citing inequitable taxation, imperial-
ism, fluctuation in gold prices, and myriad indicators of the "fundamental unsoundness"
of industrial capitalism, he observed, "Beyond all this lies the great fact that income is a
social product and not simply the result of individual effort. Income is and must be
divided by human judgment. That judgment must eventually be determined by social
ethics and controlled by wider and more intelligent democracy in all industry" (Crisis 37
[December 1930|: 426).
99. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, pp. 189-90.
100. W. E. B. Du Bois, Crisis 32 (June 1926): 64.
101. See, for example, John P. Diggins's two volumes: Up from Communism: Con-
servative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (New York, 1975) and The American
Left in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1973); Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New
York, 1961).
102. Du Bois, "My Evolving Program," p. 60. As Broderick (Negro Leader, p. 193)
observes, that Du Bois in the interwar period tended to support Trotsky and Radek over
Stalin has little bearing here. At issue is the outlook that the three Soviet antagonists
shared, commitment to a model of a command society of mass mobilization.
103. Du Bois, World and Africa, p. 256.
104. Ibid.
105. Du Bois detected early, along with and presumably independently of his Ger-
man contemporaries associated with the Frankfurt Institute, the fundamental homology
uniting Fascism, Bolshevism, and the New Deal (Dusk of Dawn, p. 288); he expressed a
need to adjust the orthodox critique of capitalism to account for the rise of a "new class
of technical engineers and managers" and other internal systemic changes in the twenti-
eth century ("Marxism and the Negro Problem," p. 104), and he demonstrated a sense
of the significance of the mass-culture apparatus, planned obsolescence and intensified
218 Notes to Pages 86-89
marketing in the contemporary social management synthesis (World and Africa, pp. 254—
56). See also his discussion of the growth of a permanent white-collar class in "The
American Negro and the Labor Movement," Reel 80 #894, Du Bois Papers.
106. W. E. B. Du Bois, Pittsburgh Courier, June 5, 1937. He expressed a need for
the black "mass" to "be induced to submit itself to the dictatorship which is best and
quickest for bringing . . . an economic development which is primarily for the benefit
of [that] laboring mass" (ibid). William E. Cain notes the persistence of Du Bois's at-
traction to "comprehensive organization, centralized authority, rational planning on a
massive basis, exhaustive gathering and sifting of facts, and highly disciplined, tightly
controlled attitudes toward work," from his youthful fascination with Bismarck to his
support for Stalinism; see Cain, "From Liberalism to Communism: The Political
Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois," in Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds., Cultures of
United States Imperialism (Durham, N.C., 1993), p. 466. Cain attempts to determine
when Du Bois became a Marxist, with no greater success than others who have under-
taken to chart that transition.
107. Du Bois, "Future of Africa," pp. 658-59.
108. W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Negro and Socialism" in Helen L. Alfred, ed., Toward
a Socialist America: A Symposium of Essays (New York, 1958), pp. 190-91.
109. For detailed examination of the atrophy of the CPUSA in this period, see
Joseph R. Starobin, American Communism in Crisis, 1943-1957 (Berkeley, Calif., 1972).
On the decline of a Left opposition in the postwar West more generally, see C. Wright
Mills, Power Politics and People: The Collected Essays of C. Wright Mills, Irving Louis
Horowitz, ed. (New York, 1963); Peter Clecak, Radical Paradoxes: Dilemmas of the Amer-
ican Left, 1945-1970 (New York, 1973); and E. J. Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (New York,
1973).
110. Although Home argues that Du Bois enjoyed considerable support from black
elites during his persecution in the postwar years, he almost certainly overstates his case.
One of his own sources, for example, while noting that Du Bois's black supporters were
ardent, pointed out also that they "were very few" (Black and Red, p. 257).
111. Du Bois had declared during the Depression that "Russia would welcome an
autonomous Negro state within her boundaries. Are there no Negroes young or old who
have the guts to leave America?" (Pittsburgh Courier, February 29, 1936.
112. W. E. B. Du Bois, "Behold the Land," in Du Bois, Seventh Son, vol. 2, p. 583.
113. "Interview with Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois," in Du Bois, Seventh Son, vol. 2, pp.
701-3.
114. "The American worker himself does not always realize [his mission]. He has
high wages and many comforts. Rather than lose these, he keeps in office by his votes
the servants of industrial exploitation so long as they maintain his wage. His labor leaders
represent exploitation and not the fight against the exploitation of labor by private capi-
tal" (W. E. B. Du Bois, "Hail Humankind!" in Du Bois, Du Bois Speaks, p. 318.
115. Du Bois, Color and Democracy, pp. 83-84.
116. Ibid., p. 73. He went on to indicate that the lack of intelligence and experience
derived from poverty (p. 74).
117. Du Bois, "Negro and Socialism," p. 180.
118. Ibid., p. 183.
119. Ibid., p. 179.
120. Gilbert, Industrial Slate, pp. 7-8, and Louis Lindsay, "The Pluralist Persuasion
in American Democratic Thought," Social and Economic Studies 22 (December 1973):
479—513; see also Lnstig, Corporate Liberalism, pp. 120—49.
 Notes to Pages 89-93 219
121. See, for example, Toll's discussion of the structuring principles of black dis-
course in this period in The Resurgence of Race. The theme of adjustment to industrial-
ization is also visible in August Meier's account in Negro Thought in America, 1880-
1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1963);
and, in a more limited compass, Kevin Gaines, "Black Americans' Racial Uplift Ideology
as 'Civilizing Mission': Pauline E. Hopkins on Race and Imperialism," in Kaplan and
Pease, eds., Cultures of United States Imperialism.

Chapter 7
1. The text of the epigraph appears on p. 3 of The Souls of Black Folk (1903;
reprint, Chicago, 1907).
2. August Meier, Negro Thought in America 1880-1915: Racial Ideologies in the
Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1963), p. 190.
3. Harold R. Isaacs, The New World of Negro Americans (New York, 1963), p. 97.
Isaacs repeated this appropriation of Du Bois over a decade later, asserting the persistence
of a collective black struggle "to shake the blur into some single or coherent image"
(Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe [New York, 1975], p. 198).
4. Robert Ezra Park, Race and Culture: Essays in the Sociology of Contemporary
Man (New York, 1950), p. 291.
5. Everett V. Stonequist, "Race Mixture and the Mulatto," in Edgar T. Thompson,
ed., Race Relations and the Race Problem: A Definition and an Analysis (Durham, N.C.,
1939), p. 266.
6. St. Clair Drake, "The Social and Economic Status of the Negro in the United
States," in Talcott Parsons and Kenneth B. Clark, eds., The Negro American (Boston,
1967), p. 34. Versions of most of the essays in this volume, including Drake's, had ap-
peared in the fall 1965 and winter 1966 issues of Daedalus.
7. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modem Democ-
racy, 2 vols. (1944; reprint, New York, 1962), vol. 2, p. 809. Before quoting Du Bois,
Myrdal also quotes Bertram Schrieke on black Americans' "double consciousness."
Schrieke was a Dutch colonial official and anthropologist who, rather like Myrdal him-
self, had been hired in the early 1930s by the Julius Rosenwald Fund "to make a study
of Negro life and education, especially in the Southern states, on the basis of [his] exten-
sive but quite different experience with race relations in the Orient" (Bertram F. O.
Schrieke, Alien Americans: A Study of Race Relations [New York, 1936], p. vii). Although
Schrieke does not cite Du Bois for the double-consciousness reference, The Souls of
Black Folk does appear in his bibliography.
8. Robert Blauner, Racial Oppression in America (New York, 1972), pp. 69-70.
Thomas L. Blair also, though without the rhetorical flourish of the colonial analogy,
attached Du Bois's "two-ness" to the integration/nationalism dichotomy; see his Retreat
to the Ghetto (London, 1977), pp. 25-26.
9. Charles A. Valentine, "Deficit, Difference and Bicultural Models of Afro-
American Behavior," Harvard Educational Review 41 (May 1971): 143-44.
10. Carol B. Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Suivival in a Black Community (New
York, 1974), pp. 26-27.
11. Robert Staples, Introduction to Black Sociology (New York, 1976), pp. 67-68.
12. Harold M. Baron, "The Web of Urban Racism," in Louis L. Knowles and Ken-
neth Prewitt, eds., Institutional Racism in America (New York, 1969), pp. 173—74.
13. Nathan I. Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York, 1971), pp. 244-45.
220 Notes to Pages 93-96
14. George E. Kent, "Patterns of the Harlem Renaissance," in Arna Bontemps, ed.,
The Harlem Renaissance Remembered (New York, 1972), p. 50.
15. Larry Neal, "And Shine Swam On," in LeRoi Jones and Larry Neal, eds., Black
Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (New York, 1968), pp. 640-41; John O'Neal,
"Black Arts: Notebook," in Addison Gayle Jr., ed., The Black Aesthetic (Garden City,
N.Y., 1971), pp. 48-50; Hoyt W. Fuller, "The New Black Literature: Protest or Affirma-
tion," in Gayle, ed., The Black Aesthetic, pp. 348-50.
16. Houston A. Baker Jr., Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature
and Culture (Charlottesville, Va., 1972), p. 17.
17. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of
Black America (New York, 1987), pp. 274-75. Stuckey's construction of black authenticity
does, however, endorse a principle of selective repudiation of alien influences.
18. Manning Marable, Black American Politics: From the Washington Marches to
Jesse Jackson (London, 1985), p. 56. Elsewhere, Marable asserts that the "essential dual-
ity" Du Bois identified is the source of the "most fundamental characteristics of modern
Black political life" (Marable, "The Contradictory Contours of Black Political Culture,"
in Mike Davis et al., eds., The Year Left 2: Toward a Rainbow Socialism: Essays on Race,
Ethnicity, Class and Gender [London, 1987], p. 1).
19. Bettye J. Gardner, "The Teaching of Afro-American History in Schools and Col-
leges," in Darlene Clark Hine, ed., The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present and
Future (Baton Rouge, La., 1986), p. 172.
20. Waldo E. Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1984),
p. 106.
21. Maulana Karenga, "Society, Culture, and the Problem of Self-Consciousness: A
Kawaida Analysis," in Leonard Harris, ed., Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of Afro-
American Philosophy from 1917 (Dubuque, Iowa, 1983), pp. 214-15.
22. Lucius Outlaw, "African-American Philosophy: Social and Political Case Stud-
ies," Social Science Information 26 (first quarter 1987): 80-83.
23. Ibid., 77-78.
24. Robert C. Williams, "W. E. B. Du Bois: Afro-American Philosopher of Social
Reality," in Harris, ed., Philosophy Bom of Struggle, p. 17.
25. Thomas F. Slaughter Jr., "Epidermalizing the World: A Basic Mode of Being
Black," in Harris, ed., Philosophy Bom of Struggle, pp. 283-84.
26. Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christian-
ity (Philadelphia, 1982), pp. 30-31.
27. Ibid., p. 31. Paul Gilroy expands on West's already broad view of the phenome-
non by extrapolating it to the entire Atlantic region, contending that double conscious-
ness is the "resolution of a familiar problem which points towards the core dynamic of
racial oppression as well as the fundamental antinomy of diaspora blacks" (The Black
Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [Cambridge, Mass., 1993], p. 30).
28. West, Prophesy Deliverance!, p. 24.
29. Ibid., p. 15. Because West consistently refers without clarification to Afro-
American "philosophy," "critical philosophy," "critical thought," and "religious philoso-
phy" when discussing his program, my use of "secular" here may seem ambiguous. I use
the term to denote activity and phenomena situated outside self-contained, specialized
discursive communities associated with academic disciplines and subdisciplines.
30. Ibid., p. 23.
3 1 . Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Liter-
ary Criticism (New York and Oxford, 1988), p. xxiii.
 Notes to Pages 96-98 221
32. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the "Racial" Self
(New York and Oxford, 1987), p. 276. Other scholars of Afro-American literature recently
have made use of Du Bois's formulation in arguments concerning the status and charac-
ter of black literary tradition. Michael Awkward sees double consciousness as "the merg-
ing of the binary opposites 'spirit' and 'matter' for which the Afro-American strives" and
as a precursor of Toni Morrison's "dual voices of narrator and protagonist" in The Bluest
Eye; see Awkward, Inspiriting Influences: Tradition, Revision and Afro-American Women's
Novels (New York, 1989), p. 12. Barbara Johnson endorses the premise of a distinctive
racial two-ness; she then criticizes Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson for having as-
sumed the black voice's maleness, noting that women also have been forced to be two-
voiced; see her "Metaphor, Metonymy and Voice in Their Eyes Were Watching God," in
Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., Black Literature and Literary Theory (New York and London,
1984), pp. 214-15.
33. Gates, Signifying Monkey, p. xxv. Tropological revision is one of four types of
"double-voiced textual relations" that Gates identifies in the black tradition.
34. Gates, Figures in Black, pp. 56-57.
35. Ibid., p. 44.
36. Gates, Signifying Monkey, p. 207.
37. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black
Folk (1903; reprint, New York, 1989), p. xiv.
38. Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History? (New York, 1961), p. 28.
39. See my discussion of this notion in chapter 1. It is noteworthy that, despite the
extensive appropriations of Du Bois's passage in support of arguments about black peo-
ple's empirical condition in the United States, the formulation until very recently had
gone virtually unnoticed among Afro-Americanist intellectual historians. I discuss this
issue at length in chapter 8.
40. Francis L. Broderick, W. E. B. Du Bois: Negro Leader in a Time of Crisis (Palo
Alto, Calif., 1959), pp. 102-3; Jack B. Moore, W. E. B. Du Bois (Boston, 1981), pp. 68-
69. Peter Conn both asserts the source of the two-ness reference in Du Bois's personality
and credits him with having discovered a generic racial condition; see Conn, The Divided
Mind: Ideology and Imagination in America, 1898-1917 (Cambridge and New York,
1983), pp. 148-49.
41. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American
Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York, 1977), p. 151.
42. Wilson J. Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925 (New York,
1988), pp. 136-37. Though he does not focus on the two-ness notion, William S. Toll
also provides a very useful account which situates The Souls of Black Folk in an envel-
oping black discursive community; see his The Resurgence of Race: Black Social Theory
from Reconstruction to the Pan-African Conferences (Philadelphia, 1979), pp. 118-19; see
also David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (New
York, 1993), esp. pp. 265-96.
43. Robert Gooding-Williams, "Philosophy of History and Social Critique in The
Souls of Black Folk," Social Science Information 26 (first quarter 1987): 106-8. Gilroy
also claims to find Hegelian roots for the double-consciousness passage (Black Atlantic,
p. 134). Lewis notes Du Bois's general fondness for Hegel but resists claiming unique
lines of influence; see Biography of a Race, pp. 134, 139-140, 165.
44. Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge,
Mass., 1976), p. 74; see also his "Biography and Afro-American Culture," in Houston A.
Baker Jr. and Patricia Redmond, eds., Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990s (Chi-
222 Notes to Pages 99-101
cago, 1989), p. 200. Eric Sundquist similarly asserts James's influence; see To Wake the
Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), pp. 487,
571; also see Dickson D. Bruce Jr., "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Con-
sciousness," American Literature 64 (June 1992): 299-309.
45. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture
(New York and Oxford, 1986), pp. 186-88 and 249. Kimberly Benston also indicates an
Emersonian connection via William James in his "I Yam What I Am: The Topos of
(Un)naming in Afro-American Literature," in Gates, ed., Black Literature, p. 170n.
46. Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism
(Madison, Wis., 1989), pp. 142-43.
47. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Religion and Society," in Emerson, 'Young Emerson
Speaks, Arthur Cushman McGiffert, ed. (Boston, 1938), p. 200.
48. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Transcendentalist," in The Portable Emerson, Carl
Bode, ed. (New York, 1981), p. 106.
49. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Fate," in Portable Emerson, pp. 372—73. He observed
that "by the cunning co-presence of two elements, which is throughout nature, whatever
lames or paralyzes you draws in with it the divinity, in some form, to repay."
50. For a discussion of the ambiguities in James's considerations of consciousness
and related issues, see Gerald E. Myers, William James: His Life and Thought (New
Haven, Conn., and London, 1986), esp. pp. 54-80 and 344-86.
51. William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890; reprint, Cambridge, Mass.,
1983), pp. 148-49.
52. See, e.g., William James, "Does Consciousness Exist?" in The Writings of Wil-
liam fames, John J. McDermott, ed. (Chicago, 1977), pp. 169-83; Bruce Kuklick, The
Rise of American Philosophy: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1860-1930 (New Haven, Conn.,
and London, 1977), pp. 169-70, and Myers, William ]ames, pp. 72-80.
53. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902; reprint, New York,
1961), p. 190.
54. James, Principles of Psychology, p. 377.
55. Ibid., pp. 377-78. In exploring the extent to which the "splitting up of the mind
into separate consciousness may exist in each one of us"—that is, in critically examining
Pierre-Marie-Felix Janet's claim that it appears only in mental disorder—James took an
experimental, empiricist route. He argued, albeit tentatively, that normal subjects demon-
strate a similar, though less extreme, process: "namely, an active counting out and posi-
tive exclusion of certain objects" (ibid., p. 209). His argument was rigorously empirical
and physiological: "The mother who is asleep to every sound but the stirrings of her
babe, evidently has the babe-portion of her auditory sensibility systematically awake. Rela-
tively to that, the rest of her mind is in a state of systematized anesthesia. That depart-
ment, split off and disconnected from the sleeping part, can none the less wake the latter
up in case of need. . . . As glands cease to secrete and muscles to contract, so the brain
should sometimes cease to carry currents, and with this minimum of its activity might
well coexist a minimum of consciousness. On the other hand, we see how deceptive are
appearances, and are forced to admit that part of consciousness may sever its connections
with other parts and yet continue to be" (p. 210).
56. Myers, William James, p. 376. See also James, Essays in Radical Empiricism
and A Pluralistic Universe (New York, 1971), pp. 262-64.
57. William James, The Will to Believe (1897; reprint, New York, 1956), pp. 320-21.
58. Ibid., p. 321.
 Notes to Pages 102-5 223
59. William James, Human Immortality (1898; reprint, New York, 1956), pp. 22-23.
60. Ibid., pp. 24 and 27. See also Myers, William James, pp. 383-86.
61. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 92.
62. Ibid, p. 143.
63. Ibid., p. 146. James acknowledged that religion is not the only way to establish
that unity. He noted that "the new birth may be away from religion into incredulity; or
it may be from moral scrupulosity into freedom and license; or it may be produced by
the irruption into the individual's life of some new stimulus or passion, such as love,
ambition, cupidity, revenge, or patriotic devotion" (ibid, p. 150).
64. Ibid, p. 85.
65. Ibid, p. 81.
66. Ibid, p. 85.
67. Ibid, p. 114. James recognized mind cure as an instance of this sort of religion
(ibid, p. 90).
68. Ibid, pp. 118-19.
69. Myers, William James, p. 468.
70. fames, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 135.
71. Ibid, p. 144.
72. Ibid, pp. 144-45.
73. Ibid, pp. 163-64.
74. Ibid, p. 148
75. Ibid, p. 398.
76. Ibid, p. 396.
77. Ibid, pp. 393-94.
78. Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Over-Soul," in Portable Emerson, pp. 210.
79. William James, p. 19. Of course it is possible that James changed his mind after
influencing Du Bois or that Du Bois may have accepted the idea over James's skepticism,
or perhaps that Du Bois found the notion useful or attractive as a trope that stimulated
him to formulate his own nonbiological idea of race. Each of those possibilities, however,
requires assumption warranted only by acceptance of the proposition which is to be
demonstrated. If accepted, moreover, each possibility posits conditions which beg ques-
tions as to whether "influence" reasonably describes the relation between the two ideas
or the extent to which they reasonably can be viewed as similar.
80. John Dunn, "The Identity of the History of Ideas," in Peter Laslett, W. G. Run-
ciman, and Quentin Skinner, eds, Philosophy, Politics and Society (New York, 1972), p.
160. Lewis makes a similar complaint specifically regarding the double-consciousness
issue, criticizing those who have asserted James's influence on Du Bois for "their readi-
ness to infer connections between ideas largely because of similarity, possibility of con-
tact, or plausible nexus, in the absence of sufficient documentary evidence available from
the subject's life" (Biography of a Race, p. 603). Sundquist (To Wake the Nations, pp.
570-71) and Bruce ("Du Bois and Double Consciousness," p. 304) base their claims
entirely on similarity of a few terms and the facts of personal connection to draw infer-
ences for which they have no subtantive textual basis. Both rest their claims on the
circular assertion that Du Bois must have been familiar with current psychological re-
search; in effect suggesting his use of the double-consciousness term as evidence. This
position, though, presumes what is to be demonstrated. It also requires reading into Du
Bois's essay a psychological argument that, as I have shown here, is in no way visible in
the text. Bruce is in such thrall to this putative chain of influence that he maintains that
224 Notes to Pages 106-9
Du Bois must have intended a medical-psychological foundation, basing this claim on a
reference to James's usage and the latter's role as Du Bois's "mentor."
81. Quentin Skinner, "Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas," History
and Theory 8 (first quarter 1969): 26. This essay has been reprinted—along with others
by Skinner, several criticisms and his reply—in James Tully, ed., Meaning and Context:
Quentin Skinner and His Critics (Princeton, N.J., 1988). Skinner's argument concerning
imputations of influence has not provoked the sort of critical debate or dissent among
historians of ideas as have other of his methodological views.
82. Daniel T. Rodgers, Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics since Inde-
pendence (New York, 1987). In a critique of Raymond Williams's Keywords, which pro-
vided some of the inspiration behind Rodgers's exemplary study, Skinner stresses the
distinction between different forms of politically significant contestation over proper use
of terms (over whether agreed-upon meanings are being applied to the proper practices,
whether the normative appraisal of an agreed-upon meaning should change, etc.) and
their differing implications for the conceptual and ideological content of the contesta-
tion. Unfortunately, Skinner overstates the need for and usefulness of speech-act theory
as a technique for making such interpretive distinctions. See "Language and Social
Change," in Tully, ed., Meaning and Context, pp. 119-32. Among others, Ian Shapiro
has criticized effectively the intellectual inadequacies and conservative (i.e., depoliticiz-
ing) bias in Skinner's approach in his "Realism in the Study of the History of Ideas,"
History of Political Thought 3 (November 1982): 535-78; see also Shapiro's review of
Meaning and Context in Canadian Philosophical Reviews, vol. 10 (1990), p. 291.
83. Laurence R. Veysey, "Intellectual History and the New Social History," in John
Higham and Paul K. Conkin, eds. New Directions in American Intellectual History (Balti-
more, 1979), pp. 11-19.
84. In this case as well, Emerson's and James's references have more in common
with each other than either's does with Du Bois's. See Emerson, "Over-Soul," p. 221;
James, Human Immorality, p. 26 and Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, p. 3. For Emerson
and James the veil surrounds transcendental inner experience; for Du Bois it is the wall
of racial exclusion.
85. Du Bois, The Autobiography ofW. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My
Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York, 1968), p. 168. Julian West, the
protagonist of Bellamy's much-read magnum opus, observes: "The idea that I was two
persons, that my identity was double, began to fascinate me with its simple solution of
my experience" (Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward [1888; reprint, New York, 1982], p.
78).
86. Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellec-
tual as a Social Type (New York, 1965); T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimod-
ernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (New York, 1981); Conn,
Divided Mind.
87. Lasch, New Radicalism in America, p. 101.
88. Ibid., p. xiii.
89. Ibid., pp. 100-101.
90. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 26.
91. Conn, Divided Mind, p. 1.
92. Ibid., p. 4.
93. Ibid., p. 13.
94. Inez Haynes Gillmore, "Confessions of an Alien," Harper's Bazaar 46 (April
1912): 170.
 Notes to Pages 109-12 225
95. Cited in Mary A. Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Making of a Radical
Feminist, 1860-1896 (Philadelphia, 1980), p. 74.
96. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston, 1918), p. 9. Lears quotes
Adams's complaint to his father about his "double personality" (No Place of Grace, p.
264).
97. Ibid., p. 290.
98. Ibid., p. 75.
99. Ibid., P. 210-11.
100. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge ofTaos Desert (New York, 1937), pp. 301-2. This
memoir was published when Luhan was in her fifty-eighth year.
101. Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910; reprint, New York, 1981), p.
59.
102. Ibid., p. 64.
103. Ibid., p. 72.
104. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 174-76. James pointed out that he was prohibited
by his "constitution" from experiencing mystical states directly and could "speak of them
only at second hand." See also James, Varieties of Religious Experience.
105. Donald Meyer, The Positive Thinkers: Religion as Pop Psychology from Mary
Baker Eddy to Oral Roberts (New York, 1980), p. 75.
106. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 89-91; also see Meyer, Positive
Thinkers, pp. 83-88.
107. Meyer, Positive Thinkers, pp. 79-92.
108. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 170.
109. Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, pp. 64-65.
110. Gillmore, "Confessions of an Alien," p. 171.
111. Ibid., p. 210.
112. Jessie Howard Taft in fact argued directly that the experience of alienation
among women was structurally and institutionally based; see Taft, The Woman Movement
from the Point of View of Social Consciousness (Chicago, 1915), pp. 53-54. In her De-
mocracy and Social Ethics (New York, 1902), Jane Addams had been equally explicit; see
esp. pp. 71-101. See also Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual
Roots of Modem Feminism (New Haven, Conn., 1982), pp. 142-44.
113. Gillmore, "Confessions of an Alien," p. 170. She repeated the description
more than a decade later in the Nation, noting that she had missed the "thrill of haphaz-
ard picturesque slum existence"; see Gillmore, "The Making of a Militant," in Elaine
Showalter, ed., These Modern Women: Autobiographical Essays from the Twenties (New
York, 1989), p. 35.
114. Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House, p. 169.
115. Ibid., p. 176.
116. Randolph Bourne, "Trans-National America," in Bourne The Radical Will:
Randolph Bourne, Selected Writings, 1911-1918, Olaf Hansen, ed. (New York, 1977), pp.
253-54; see also Sollors's discussion of Bourne in Beyond Ethnicity, pp. 184-86.
117. Ibid., p. 254.
118. Ibid., pp. 250 and 259.
119. Luhan, Edge ofTaos Desert, p. 34.
120. Ibid., p. 62. Her usage here illustrates the appropriation of Emerson and James
by popular psychology and mysticism.
121. Ibid., p. 60. She succeeded, this passage shows, in eliminating the tension
between phenomenon and concept — but exactly opposite from the way she thought she
226 Notes to Pages 112-14
had. Rather than transcending intellection, she so completely objectified her surround
that it existed only as a set of banal abstractions.
122. Ibid., pp. 221-22.
123. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 52. They also commonly believed that prolonged
exposure to tropical climates produced moral degeneracy. Even open-minded racial liber-
als like Josiah Royce, who was skeptical of racial essentialism, accepted that premise
matter-of-factly. See Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism and Other American Problems
(1908; reprint, Freeport, N.Y., 1967), pp. 18-19.
124. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 274.
125. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 80. James also understood Leo Tol-
stoy's conversion experience as a transcendence of overcivilization; he cautioned, though,
that "not many of us can imitate Tolstoy, not having enough, perhaps, of the aboriginal
human marrow in our bones" (pp. 157-58).
126. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 159.
127. Ibid., pp. 129-31.
128. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 84-5.
129. William James, "The Moral Equivalent of War," in Writings of William James,
p. 661.
130. Ibid., pp. 667-68.
131. James, Will to Believe, p. 301. See also James, Varieties of Religious Experience,
p. 79.
132. James, "Moral Equivalent of War," p. 661.
133. Ibid., p. 668.
134. Ibid., p. 669.
135. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 136.
136. Robert M. Crunden, Ministers of Reform: The Progressives' Achievement in
American Civilization, 1889-1920 (Urbana, 111, 1984), p. 32.
137. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 255. George Santayana made a similar claim; see
his 1911 essay, "The American Philosophy," in Santayana, The Genteel Tradition: Nine
Essays by George Santayana, Douglas L. Wilson, ed. (Cambridge, Mass, 1967), esp. p.
40.
138. Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, p. 42. Hall believed that the progress of
civilization rested on ever-widening sex differentiation; therefore, coeducation or any
practice which threatened to "virify women and feminize men . . . would be regressive"
(G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence [New York, 1904], vol. 2, p. 569.
139. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. 249.
140. I recognize that, as Nancy F. Cott (The Grounding of Modem Feminism jNew
Haven, Conn, and London, 1987], pp. 3—10) notes, use of the term "feminism" to de-
scribe the strains of women's activism prominent much before the First World War is
anachronistic and glosses significant shifts in foci and objectives. I use the term here not
to refer to support for or opposition to concrete movements, but more generically as a
shorthand reference to stances reinforcing or opposing women's subordinate status in
society.
141. Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement, 1890-1920
(New York, 1971), esp. pp. 82-104. The tendency to appeal to such constructions of
women's "nature" also appears commonly in contemporary feminist arguments by both
scholars and activists. Micaela di Leonardo discusses this phenomenon critically in her
"Morals, Mothers, and Militarism: Antimilitarism and Feminist Theory," Feminist Studies
11 (fall 1985): 599-617, and her "Habits of the Cumbered Heart: Ethnic Community
 Notes to Pages 114-17 227
and Women's Culture as American Invented Traditions," in Jay O'Brien and William
Roseberry, eds., Golden Ages, Dark Ages: Imagining the Past in Anthropology and History
(Berkeley, Calif., 1991); see also Katha Pollitt, Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women
and Feminism (New York, 1994), pp. 42-62.
142. Jane Addams, "Utilization of Women in City Government" (1907), in Jane
Addams: A Centennial Reader Emily Cooper Johnson, ed. (New York, 1960), p. 115.
143. Jane Addams, "The Larger Aspeets of the Woman's Movement," Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Science 56 (November 1914): 1-8.
144. Jane Addams, "Why Women Should Vote" in A Centennial Reader (New York,
1960). . . . She argued the negative consequenees of disfranchisement in similar terms,
noting that "many women today are failing to discharge their duties to their own households
properly simply because they do not perceive that as society grows more complicated it is
necessary that woman shall extend her sense of responsibility to many things outside of her
own home if she would continue to preserve the home in its entirety" (p. 21).
145. See Louise Michele Newman, ed., Men's Ideal/Women's Realities: Popular Sci-
ence 1870-1915 (New York, 1985), especially essays by Alice Tweedy, Olivia R. Fernow,
and Frances Gordon Smith. See also May Wright Sewall, ed., The World's Congress of
Representative Women, 1893 (Chicago and New York, 1894). One might argue that those
who adopted that stance did so tactically, which is no doubt to a greater or lesser extent
true for given individuals. The distinction between tactical and principled adoption of a
position, however, is not a very neat one, even in the mind of the agent in question. In
addition, willingness to concede a point tactically can imply that the agent had no strong
opposition to the point in the first place. Finally, even if activists adopted the rhetoric of
essential gender dichotomy in a purely tactical way, they did so because they believed
that the presumptions of that rhetoric were hegemonic as "respectable" opinion among
the constituencies they wanted to influence or enlist.
146. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: The Economic Factor be-
tween Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (1898; reprint, New York, 1966),
p. 126.
147. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobi-
ography (New York, 1935), p. 187; Gilman, Herland (1915; reprint, New York, 1979);
Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres, pp. 36-40; Hill, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, p. 230.
148. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892; reprint, New York and
Oxford, 1988), p. 60.
149. Ibid., p. 58. Cooper made a similar claim concerning the importance of "an
elevated and trained womanhood" in the effort to "elevate the Negro" (p. 29).
150. Ibid., p. 73.
151. Ibid., p. 84.
152. Ibid., pp. 54-5.
153. Lester F. Ward, The Psychic Factors of Civilization (Boston, 1892), p. 179.
154. Ibid., pp. 193-94.
155. Ibid., p. 180.
156. Ibid., p. 189.
157. Hall, Adolescence, pp. 566-67. He contended, though, that differentiation is
greatest among "highly civilized races," p. 569.
158. William I. Thomas, "On a Difference in the Metabolism of the Sexes," Ameri-
can Journal of Sociology 3 (July 1897): 37.
159. Ibid., p. 40. He already had pointed to women's "infantile somatic characters,"
p. 34.
228 Notes to Pages 117-20
160. Ibid., p. 50.
161. Ibid., p. 41.
162. Ibid., PP. 41-42.
163. Ibid., pp. 31-32. By 1907, interestingly, Thomas had forsaken biologism alto-
gether and argued that apparent race and gender differences were artifacts of social injus-
tice and bigoted observation; see Thomas, "The Mind of Women and the Lower Races,"
American Journal of Sociology 12 (January 1907): 435-69.
164. Edward A. Ross, "The Causes of Race Superiority," Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science 18 (July 1901): 72-74.
165. Ibid, p. 75.
166. Ibid., p. 83.
167. Ibid, p. 76. Ross's argument was a combination primer, jeremiad, and forecast
of likelihood for success on behalf of Anglo-Saxon world supremacy under prevailing
conditions of capitalist imperialism. Not surprisingly, therefore, he found the apotheosis
of contemporary civilization in practices and institutions of predatory capitalism; see also
Ward, Psychic Factors of Civilization, pp. 183-84. Ward saw the putative qualities of the
businessman as the most highly evolved existing form of an "intuitive reason" originating
in the natural world. Unlike Ross, though, his vision of a melioristic society led him to
define that tendency as the highest articulation of prehuman forms which would be
surpassed in the new order.
168. Hall, Adolescence, p. 561.
169. Ibid, p. 564. Just as Ross's description of primitives brings to mind Edward
Banfield's characterizations of "lower class" and "backward" societies (The Moral Basis of
a Backward Society [New York, 1958] and The Unheavenlv City [New York, 1970]), Hall's
characterization here seems uncannily like Carol Gilligan's argument concerning gender-
based reasoning (In a Different Voice [Cambridge, Mass, 1982]).
170. Robert Ezra Park, "Education in Its Relation to the Conflict and Fusion of
Cultures," in Park, Race and Culture, p. 280.
171. L. J. Jordanova, "Natural Facts: A Historical Perspective on Science and Sexu-
ality," in Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, eds. Nature, Culture and Gender
(Cambridge, 1980), p. 61; see also William Leiss, The Domination of Nature (Boston,
1973).
172. See, for example, Stephen Jay Gould, Ontogeny and Phytogeny (Cambridge,
Mass, 1977), esp. pp. 126-35. George W. Stocking Jr., "Lamarckianism in American
Social Science," in Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of An-
thropology (Chicago, 1968), pp. 234-69. Mark Pittenger charts the centrality and ramifi-
cations of evolutionist thought in fin-de-siecle reform discourse; see his American Social-
ists and Evolutionary Thought, 1870-1920 (Madison, Wis, 1993).
173. Gould, Ontogeny and Phylogeny, pp. 155-64. Gould also discusses the cen-
trality of Jung's and Ferenczi's recapitulationist beliefs in their respective psychoanalytic
theories.
174. Stocking, "Lamarckianism," in Stocking, Race, Culture, and Evolution, p. 265.
175. Ibid, p. 238.
176. Gilman, Women and Economics, pp. 331—32. For discussion of Gilman's par-
ticular mode of evolutionism see Maureen L. Egan, "Evolutionary Theory in the Social
Philosophy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman," Hypatia 4 (spring 1989): 102-19.
177. Stocking, "Lamarckianism," p. 255; also see Dorothy Ross, The Origins of
American Social Science (Cambridge and New York, 1991).
178. W. E. B. Du Bois, Heredity and the Public Schools (Washington, D.C, 1904),
 Notes to Pages 120-24 229
p. 7. By the time of this address, however, he at least formally acknowledged the sound-
ness of Weismann's critique.
179. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Conservation of Races (Washington, D.C., 1897), p. 6.
180. William I. Thomas, "The Scope and Method of Folk Psychology," American
Journal of Sociology 1 (January 1896):438-39.
181. Ross, "Causes of Race Superiority," pp. 67-68. Du Bois's "The Relation of the
Negroes to the Whites in the South," which appeared in the same Annals issue as Ross's
article, was reprinted as the ninth chapter, "Of the Sons of Masters and Man," of The
Souls of Black Folk.
182. Du Bois, Conservation of Races, pp. 6-7.
183. Anthony Appiah, "The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of
Race," Critical Inquiry 12 (autumn 1985): 23-25.
184. Moses, Golden Age of Black Nationalism, p. 135.
185. Appiah, "Uncompleted Argument," p. 25. Appiah takes Du Bois's statement
that racial differences "perhaps transcend scientific definition" as evidence that he contra-
posed scientific and sociohistorical conceptions. That interpretation overlooks the extent
to which Du Bois understood himself to be engaged in a scientific project as a sociologist
(see chapter 4); it imputes to Du Bois Appiah's equation of science and biology in this
context. Du Bois's statement is more likely an expression of the cautious attitude of the
practitioner who feels his technical arsenal —his "crude social measurements," as he put
it in another context—to be inadequately developed for his task.
186. Thomas, "Folk Psychology," p. 439. Stocking, "Lamarckianism," pp. 244-47.
187. Du Bois, Conservation of Races, p. 9.
188. Ibid., p. 10; Thomas, "Folk Psychology," p. 440.
189. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, p. 164.
190. Ibid., pp. 11 and 179.
191. Ibid., pp. 163 and 179.
192. Ibid., p. 257.
193. Ibid., p. 198.
194. Ibid., p. 5.
195. W. E. B. Du Bois, Efforts for Social Betterment among Negro Americans (At-
lanta, 1909), p. 133. Rampersad, Art and Imagination, pp. 62-63.
196. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, pp. 4-5.
197. Ibid., p. 4.
198. Ibid., p. 202.
199. Ibid., p. 5.
200. Ibid., pp. 11-12.
201. This challenges Thomas C. Holt's contention that the "two-ness" problem,
which he characterizes as the effort to achieve "mature self-consciousness and an integ-
rity or wholeness of self in an alienating environment . . . would become the dominant
focus —political and cultural — of Du Bois's life and work" ("The Political Uses of Alien-
ation: W. E. B. Du Bois on Politics, Race, and Culture, 1903-1940," American Quarterly
42 [June 1990]: 304). Jacqueline Stevens ("Beyond Tocqueville, Please!," American Polit-
ical Science Review 89 [December 1995]: 987-90) rejects the argument that Du Bois's
early views about race were embedded in the premises and categories of neo-Lamarckian
discourse, adducing the authority of Paul Gilroy, David Levering Lewis, and Joel Wil-
liamson to support her assertion that Du Bois's ideas derived instead from Hegelian roots.
In the first place, however, the sources she cites do not effectively do the work for which
she enlists them. Neither Gilroy (Black Atlantic, p. 134) nor Williamson (The Crucible
230 Notes to Page 124
of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation [New York and
Oxford, 1984], pp. 402-13) provides more than suggestive, inferential support for the
claim that Du Bois's double-consciousness formulation is distinctively Hegelian. Both
rely crucially on extrapolating from the fact of Du Bois's academic engagement with
Hegel to conclude that superficial textual similarities must reflect the latter's influence.
Gilroy—whose acknowledged objective of establishing a black diasporic consciousness
leads him to stress connections to ""European ways of linking race, nation, culture, and
history" as an antidote to an "American intellectual ethnoccntrism" (Black Atlantic, pp.
134 and 137)—rests his argument for Du Bois's definitive Hegelianism ultimately on
Williamson (Black Atlantic, p. 134). Yet Williamson himself does not establish the claim
on especially solid ground: "In what ways was Du Bois's solution Hegelian? It was not,
in fact, purely Hegelian . . . Du Bois was eclectic. Habitually, he surveyed the field of
contemporary knowledge, used what he wanted, and left the remainder to drift . . . It
would be fruitless to search for a one-to-one appropriation of Hegelianism in Du Bois's
essay" (Crucible of Race, pp. 402-3). Williamson decides that Du Bois's text is nonethe-
less "fundamentally Hegelian" —principally because he believes it "heavily laden with
such favored Hegelian words as ideal, consciousness, strife, and self; spirit, soul, and
genius; conflict and contradiction; Freedom . . . and, of course, folk" (Crucible of Race,
p. 403). Williamson combines this observation with facts of Du Bois's biography to
launch an interpretation that requires —like those proffered by Gilroy and Gooding-Wil-
liams ("Philosophy of History")—abstracting from the specific content of Du Bois's essay
to construct conceptual parallels with Hegel at the level of metatheory; these are often
quite general and remote, requiring for their force prior commitment to belief in specifi-
cally Hegelian influences.
Lewis is not much more helpful to Stevens's claim. While Lewis contends that
Du Bois "borrowed more or less intact notions of distinct, hierarchical racial attributes"
(Biography of a Race, p. 139) from Hegel, he also notes that the "vocabulary of Du
Bois's generation resounded with the racialisms of Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau, Edouard
Drumont, Francis Galton, Thomas Carlyle, and Bishop William Stubbs, with evolution-
ist buzzwords ranking 'superior' and 'inferior' races according to pseudo-anthropological
findings." (p. 148). The key point, which I have argued in this chapter, is that Du Bois's
formulation resonates with a particular discourse of racial hierarchy—rooted in the na-
ture/culture dichotomy and the evolutionism prominent in the social sciences—that was
hegemonic among his contemporaries. Whether or not Du Bois's participation in that
discourse was mediated through frames drawn specifically from Hegel's texts is —apropos
of my discussion above of Skinner's arguments regarding the problem of asserting lines
of influence—both much more easily alleged than demonstrated and ultimately beside
the point. At issue is not whether Du Bois derived his formulations via Hegel, Lamarck
(a claim I do not make in any case), or elsewhere, but whether his formulations bear the
stamp of the discursive field within which he generally operated and how taking account
of his relation to that discursive context illuminates his thoguht.
What is troublesome and ironic about Stevens's objection is that, for all her inten-
tions to break with establishmentarian conventions, in insisting on reducing the discus-
sion of Du Bois's racial views to a matter of determining ahistorical lineages of influence,
she reproduces perhaps the most barren and formalistic tendency in the study of the
history of political thought.
202. W. R. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a
Race Concept (1940; reprint, New York, 1968), p. 98.
203. Ibid., p. 99. Here Du Bois himself undermines Stevens's contention.
 Notes to Pages 124-29 231
204. Ibid., p. 116. Compare this observation to Moses's and Appiah's frustration at
Du Bois's apparent inconsistency.
205. Ibid.
206. Ibid., p. 153. Du Bois's movement toward a social constructionist view of race
by no means happened all at once; as late as the mid-1920s, he was still capable of
strikingly essentialist formulations of race temperament; see my discussion of The Gift of
Black Folk in chapter 6. His discussion of the nature and meaning of race in The Negro
(1915; reprint, New York, 1970), pp. 6-10, illustrates both his movement toward a social
constructionist view and the persistence of his acceptance of the notion of race formation
that characterized neo-Lamarckian social science.

Chapter 8
1. J. Saunders Redding, Introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
(1903; reprint, New York, 1961), pp. vii-xi.
2. Nathan Hare, "W. E. Burghardt Du Bois: An Appreciation," in W. E. B. Du Bois,
The Souls of Black Folk (1903; reprint, New York, 1969), pp. xiii-xxvii; Alvin Poussaint,
"The Souls of Black Folk: A Critique," in Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (1969 reprint),
pp. xxviii-xlii
3. John Hope Franklin, Introduction to Franklin, ed., Three Negro Classics: Up from
Slavery, The Souls of Black Folk, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (New York,
1965), pp. vii-xii.
4. Donald B. Gibson, Introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
(1903; reprint, New York, 1989), pp. xv-xvi.
5. John Edgar Wedeman, Introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black
Folk (1903; reprint, New York, 1990), pp. xii-xiv.
6. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black
Folk (1903; reprint, 1989), p. xviii f.
7. Anthony Appiah, Introduction to Appiah, ed., Early African-American Classics
(New York, 1990), p. vii. The anthology includes the entire Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and selections of over a hundred pages each from
Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself, Booker T.
Washington's Up from Slavery, and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an
Ex-Colored Man, with the lone Du Bois essay as a "Prologue."
8. Gates, Introduction to Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (1989 reprint), p. xvi.
9. Ibid., p. xiii.
10. Herbert Aptheker, Introduction to W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
(1903; reprint, Millwood, N.Y., 1973), pp. 14-15. For the record, Aptheker does not refer
to the double-consciousness idea in his essay.
11. Gates, Introduction to Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (1989 reprint), p. xiv.
12. William H. Ferris, The African Abroad, 2 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1913), vol.
1, p. 276.
13. Langston Hughes, "Tribute" in John Henrik Clarke et al., eds. Black Titan:
W. E. B. Du Bois (Boston, 1970), p. 8.
14. Gates, Introduction to Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (1989 reprint), pp. xiv;
James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (New York, 1933), pp. 203, 313.
15. Gates, Introduction to Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (1989 reprint), pp. xvi—xvii.
16. Redding, Introduction to Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (1961 reprint), p. ix.
Redding went from this statement directly to the discussion of the Washington essay.
232 Notes to Pages 129-32
17. Appiah, Introduction to Appiah, ed., Early African-American Classics, p. xix.
Appiah seems also not to notice Du Bois's heavy irony in invoking 1876 — the symbol of
the defeat of Reconstruction —in relation to Washington's ascent.
18. See, for example, Benjamin Brawley, The Negro Genius: A New Appraisal of the
Achievement of the American Negro in Literature and the Fine Arts (New York, 1937), pp.
191-92; Roi Ottley and William J. Weatherby, eds. The Negro in New York: An Informal
Social History, 1626-1940 (1940; reprint, New York, 1967), p. 171; John Hope Franklin,
From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (New York, 1966), pp. 393-95;
Margaret Just Butcher, The Negro in American Culture (1956; reprint New York, 1971),
p. 162; Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro: From Rutherford B. Hayes to
Woodrow Wilson (New York, 1965), pp. 330, 341-42 (originally published in 1954 under
the title The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877-1901).
19. William T. Fontaine, "The Mind and Thought of the Negro of the United
States as Revealed in Imaginative Literature, 1876-1940," Southern University Bulletin
28 (March 1942): 16-32; also see Fontaine, Reflections on Segregation, Desegregation,
Power and Morals (Springfield, 111., 1967), pp. 9-13.
20. Nellie Y. McKay, "The Souls of Black Women Folk in the Writings of W. E. B.
Du Bois," in Henry Louis Gates Jr., ed., Reading Black/Reading Feminist: A Critical
Anthology (New York, 1990), p. 230.
21. Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (Cambridge,
Mass., 1976), p. 81.
22. The essays in Baker's Long Black Song: Essays in Black American Literature and
Culture (Charlottesville, Va., 1972) exemplify his intellectual ties to the Black Aesthetic
during the early 1970s, as do several of the essays reprinted in his Afro-American Poetics:
Revisions of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (Madison, Wis., 1988)
23. See, for example, Houston A. Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Liter-
ature: A Vernacular Theoiy (Chicago, 1984), pp. 17-22, 60-62, Baker, Afro-American
Poetics, pp. 162-63; and Baker, "There Is No More Beautiful Way: Theory and the
Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing," in Baker and Patricia Redmond, eds., Afro-
American Literary Study in the 1990s (Chicago, 1989), p. 125.
24. Baker, Blues, Ideology, p. 121
25. Houston A. Baker Jr. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago and
London, 1987), pp. 17-18, 85-86.
26. Baker, Blues, Ideology, p. 62; Baker, Afro-American Poetics, pp. 7-8.
27. Baker, Modernism, pp. 31-32, 49-51.
28. Baker, Afro-American Poetics, pp. 88-89, 97; Baker, Workings of the Spirit: The
Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writings (Chicago and London, 1991), pp. 75-77.
29. Baker, Modernism, p. 100. As he does repeatedly in this book, Baker then in-
vokes images of his father's biography to buttress his claim. He even proffers his late
father as a "metonym" for black history and dismisses criticism of the Harlem Renais-
sance as a failure on the grounds that "my father had not been a failure" (pp. xiv—xv).
This sophistry is obviously ridiculous; it is also a cheap ploy, as it irrelevantly proposes
that disagreement with Baker besmirches the legacy of his recently deceased father. His
ploy stands in sharp contrast to the maudlin self-criticism and apology offered in the
following year for his articles as a Black Aesthetic "mau mauer" in the early 1970s. The
"you-can't-talk-about-my-daddy" canard certainly projects "bullet words rather than finer
resonances of an Afro-American spirit" (Afro-American Poetics, p. 173). After all, that he
had Houston Baker Sr.'s endorsement in doing so hardly justifies Booker T. Washington's
role as rationalizer of disfranchisemciit and racial subordination.
 Notes to Pages 132-35 233
30. See my discussion of this phenomenon in chapter 7. For recent statements of
this view, see Joel Kotkin, Tribes: How Race, Religion and Identity Determine Success in
the New Global Economy (New York, 1993), and Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of
Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs 72 (summer 1993): 22-49. This cast of mind organizes a
stream of literature on ethnicity that dates from Edward Banfield, The Moral Basis of a
Backward Society (New York, 1958), and Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer,
Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians and Irish of New York
City (Cambridge, Mass., 1963). I have suggested this literature's conceptual overlap with
nineteenth-century race theory in "The New Victorians," Progressive (February 1994):
20-22.
31. Baker, Afro-American Poetics, p. 6.
32. Ibid., pp. 7-8.
33. Ibid., pp. 89, 101. In this volume he also posits the existence of "black cultural
compulsives" (p. 147).
34. Baker, "No More Beautiful Way," p. 150.
35. Baker, Afro-American Poetics, p. 109.
36. Baker, "No More Beautiful Way," pp. 149, 151; Also see his Workings of the
Spirit, p. 12, and his Blues, Ideology, p. 56. See Blues, Ideology, pp. 48-49, for Baker's
treatment of Frederick Douglass's ability to marry and form a patriarchal household as
an unproblematically generic assertion of racial autonomy, one that: "signifies . . . that
the black man has repossessed himself in a manner that enables him to enter the kind of
relationship disrupted, or foreclosed, by the economics of slavery."
37. Baker, Modernism, p. 71.
38. Baker, Afro-American Poetics, pp. 48, 7-8, 115; Baker, Blues, Ideology, pp. 39-
55, 114-38, 196; and Baker, Modernism, pp. 41-47, 50, 17-24, 72-81.
39. Baker, Blues, Ideology, pp. 23-31, 60.
40. Baker, Modernism, pp. 21-22, 49-51, 67, 103-4.
41. Ibid., p. 8.
42. Baker, Afro-American Poetics, pp. 5-6; Baker, Workings of the Spirit, pp. 75-76.
43. Baker, "No More Beautiful Way," pp. 135-39; Baker, Workings of the Spirit, pp.
38-45.
44. Baker, Modernism, p. 33
45. Ibid., pp. 29-33, 62.
46. Ibid, p. 62.
47. James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935 (Chapel
Hill, N.C, 1988), pp. 75-77. Anderson cites numerous laments by students who had
gone to Hampton or Tuskegee with hopes of learning trades, only to be confronted with
a regime of simple physical labor and rudimentary instruction in the three r's —and with
virtually no time even for studying those.
48. Ibid., pp. 42, 44. Eric Foner similarly notes Washington's pernicious role in
black education, arguing that the "divorce of schooling from ideals of equal citizenship
would come only after the end of Reconstruction when, under the auspices of Arm-
strong's pupil Booker T. Washington and the South's white 'Redeemers', the Hampton
philosophy gained ascendancy in Southern black education. Before then, most teachers
favored equality before the law and black suffrage, and many promoted black political
organization" (Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 [New
York, 1988], p. 147).
49. Baker, Workings of the Spirit, p. 16.
50. Anderson, Education oj Blacks, pp. 216-17.
234 Notes to Pages 135-40
51. Baker, Modernism, pp. 32-33.
52. Anderson, Education of Blacks, p. 73; Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair
(Chicago, 1984), pp. 74-75; Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington 2 vols. (New York
and London, 1972-83), vol. 1, pp. 227-28. For a flavor of the New South racial ideology
see Henry Grady, The New South: Writings and Speeches of Henry Grady, (Savannah,
Ga, 1971).
53. Baker, Modernism, p. 36.
54. Ibid., pp. 31-32
55. Ibid., pp. 100-101.
56. Anderson, Education of Blacks, pp. 63-67, 102-9, 261-62.
57. Baker, Modernism, p. 32.
58. Harlan, Booker T. Washington, vol. 1, p. 224-27. Even Washington noted black
criticism of the speech; see Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery (1901; reprint New
York, 1986), pp. 229-30.
59. Anderson, Education of Blacks, pp. 103-4; Rydell, All the World's a F'air, pp.
84-85.
60. Baker, Modernism, pp. 104-6.
61. Ibid., p. 15. There is unintended irony in Baker's reference to "mass of black
citizens." Both Washington's agenda and Baker's defense deny black Americans an auto-
matic claim to autonomous participation as individuals in civic life.
62. See, for instance, Henning Eichberg, "The Nazi Thingspiel," New German Cri-
tique (spring 1977): 133-50; Rainer Stollmann, "Fascist Politics as a Total Work of Art,"
New German Critique (spring 1978): 41-60.
63. Baker, Modernism, p. 38.
64. Baker, Blues, Ideology, p. 28; Baker, Afro-American Poetics, pp. 96, 186-87.
65. See Adolph L. Reed Jr., "The 'Underclass' as Myth and Symbol: The Poverty of
Discourse about Poverty," Radical America 24 (winter 1992): 21-40; Stephanie Coontz,
The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (New York, 1992).
66. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York,
1992), p. 39.
67. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Criticism in the Jungle," in Gates, ed., Black Literature
and Literary Theory (New York, 1984), p. 6
68. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey (New York, 1988), p. 239.
69. Gates, Loose Canons, p. 79. See also Gates, eel., Black Literature: "It is clear
that black writers read and critique other black texts as an act of rhetorical self-definition.
Our literary tradition exists because of these precisely chartable formal literary relation-
ships, relationships of signifying" (p. 290).
70. Gates, Signifying Monkey, p. xxiv.
71. Ibid., pp. xxii-xxiii. See also Gates, Loose Canons, pp. 65-66.
72. Gates, Signifying Monkey, pp. 46-47.
73. Ibid., p. xxvii.
74. Ibid., p. xix
75. Diana Fuss, at least, shares Gates's view on this issue; see her discussion of
his supposed "re-historicization" of race in Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and
Difference (New York and London, 1989), pp. 81-86. Fuss, interestingly, begins her chap-
ter on race with a totally depoliticized, decontextualized discussion of Booker T. Wash-
ington (p. 73) and embraces double consciousness as a description of the fundamental
condition of "the Afro-American subject" (p. 95).
76. For discussion of this shift see Reed, "New Victorians."
 Notes to Pages 140-42 235
77. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "What's Love Got to Do with It?: Critical Theory, Integ-
rity and the Black Idiom," New Literary History 18 (winter 1987): 356. In an essay origi-
nally published two years earlier, Gates notes the broader significance of race as a cate-
gory: "Race has become a trope of ultimate, irreducible difference between cultures,
linguistic groups, or practicioners of specific belief systems, who more often than not
have fundamentally opposed economic interests" ("Writing, 'Race,' and the Difference It
Makes," Critical Inquiry 12 [autumn 1985]: 5).
78. Recent expressions of this tendency in the respectable public forum are Kotkin,
Tribes, and the indefatigable Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View (New
York, 1994). It is a sign of this mode of thought's ascendance that the former is not
broadly recognized as simply the sophistry of a malevolent dolt or the latter as that of an
increasingly bilious, ultraright crank.
79. Gates, Signifying Monkey, p. xix.
80. Ibid., pp. xxiv—xxv.
81. Ibid., pp. 53-104.
82. Sometimes Gates reveals striking parallels to Matthew Arnold in his formula-
tions. Compare Arnold's famous definition of culture as the "pursuit of our total perfec-
tion by means of getting to know . . . the best which has been thought and said in the
world" (Culture and Anarchy [1869; reprint, Cambridge, 1978], p. 6) with Gates on
constructing an Afro-American literary canon: "Our task will be to bring together the
'essential' texts of the canon, the 'crucially central' authors, those whom we feel to be
indispensible to an understanding of the shape, and shaping, of the tradition" ("Canon-
Formation, Literary History, and the Afro-American Tradition: From the Seen to the
Told," in Baker and Redmond, eds., Afro-American Literary Study [Chicago, 1989], p.
38). Where Arnold unabashedly, in Victorian self-assurance, speaks of "perfection" and
"best," Gates opts for this era's more value-neutral-sounding terminology—"essential,"
"crucially central"—which he further distances himself from with quotation marks. To
be sure, he wishes to base his Afro-Americanist version of "the best which has been
thought and said" on criteria ostensibly inflected toward more popular vernacular and
folk expression. But as Barbara E',. Johnson notes, though she is curiously untroubled by
his move, Gates tries "to have it both ways, to have his Western theory and his vernacular
theory too" (Johnson, "Response," in Baker and Redmond, eds., Afro-American Literary
Study, p. 40). Kenneth W. Warren, less sanguine than Johnson about the issue, makes a
similar observation in a review of Gates's Signifying Monkey in Modern Philology (No-
vember 1990): 224-26. Warren notes also that Gates's interpretation oscillates "between
structural and/or cultural determination on the one hand and assertions of authorial
autonomy on the other," and that Gates actually only genuflects toward vernacular dis-
course, focusing substantively on literary tradition instead.
83. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self
(New York and Oxford, 1987), pp. 176-78; Gates, "Dis and Dat: Dialect and the De-
scent," in Dexter Fisher and Robert Stepto, eds., Afro-American Literature: The Recon-
struction of Instruction (New York, 1979), p. 98.
84. Gates, ed., Black Literature, p. 286; Gates. Signifying Monkey, p. 6.
85. Gates, Signifying Monkey, p. xxiv.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid.
88. For instance: "For reasons extremely difficult to reconstruct, the monkey be-
came, through a displacement in African myths in the New World, a central character
in this crucial scene of instruction" (ibid, p. 15), or, "While we lack archeological and
236 Notes to Pages 142-45
historical evidence to explain the valorized presence of the Monkey in Cuban mythology,
in the textual evidence, on the other hand, we commonly encounter Esu with his com-
panion, as depicted even in visual representations of Esu" (ihid, p. 20).
89. Ibid., p. 20.
90. Ibid., p. 42. This move is similar to Baker's pontifical announcement of the
criteria of black authenticity.
91. Ibid., p. xxi
92. Ibid., pp. 4-5.
93. Ibid., p. 21.
94. Ibid., p. 105. This is perhaps an especially illustrative instance of his fallacy.
Although the words contain the same letters, the latter combine to quite different effect,
as should be obvious to anyone with elementary familiarity with spoken French. The
initial vowel sounds—\e\ in singe, \T\ in signs — differ markedly. The order of juxtaposition
of the n and g also has substantial consequences. The gn functions as a single consonant
[ft]; the ng is more a diphthong, producing a sound nearer a soft ;' (or \zh\). The words,
moreover, stem from completely different Latin roots—signe from signum, singe from
simius.
95. I am indebted to Corinne A. Kratz, in personal correspondance, for clarifying
these problems with Gates's excursion into Kikongo and Kiswahili etymology.
96. Samuel M. Wilson, "Trickster Treats," Natural History (October 1991): 4. See
also Paul Radin, The Trickster (London, 1956).
97. Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American
Folk Thought from Slaver)' to Freedon (New York, 1977); Eugene D. Genovese, Roll,
Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1976); Sterling Stuckey, Slave Cul-
ture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York and London,
1987).
98. See, for example, Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Preface to Blackness: Text and Pre-
text," in Eisher and Stepto, eds., Afro-American Literature, pp. 44-52; also his Figures in
Black, pp. 3-28, 61-79; Signifying Monkey, pp. 66, 94, 113, 129, 167; "Canon-
Formation," pp. 16-17; Loose Canons, pp. 54-78; "What's Love Got to Do with It?," pp.
347- 58; and "Writing 'Race' and the Difference It Makes," pp. 7-13.
99. Gates, "Preface to Blackness," p. 45.
100. Gates, "What's Love Got to Do with It?," p. 347.
101. Gates, "Preface to Blackness," pp. 54-68.
102. Gates, "Criticism in the Jungle," pp. 5—6.
103. Sec chapter 1 for my discussion of the vindicationist tendency and its critics.
Criticism of this tendency has sometimes overlapped a standard black conservative com-
plaint about the intellectually suffocating and infantilizing effects of a politicized race
consciousness. Ellison in particular has been a target for appropriation by black conserva-
tives, though it is hardly clear that his critique rests comfortably or unambigiously in that
camp. The conservative articulation of the critique is represented more clearly by those
like Hurston and George Schuyler, who tie it to disparagement of racial agitation in the
political realm. See for example Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks in the Road (Urbana,
III, 1984), and "The 'Pet Negro' System," American Mercury 56 (May 1943): 593-600;
George Schuyler, Black and Conservative (New Rochelle, N.Y., 1966). Schuyler's satirical
novel Black No More (1931; reprint Amherst, Mass., 1989) also advances a version of
this strain of criticism. (Wallace Thurman's satire of the Harlem Renaissance, Infants of
the Spring, is another—but not conspicuously conservative — fictionalized attack on (he
limits of race consciousness in black intellectual life.) Gates, interestingly, has written
 Notes to Pages 146-51 237
about both Hurston and Schuyler sympathetically, attempting to take full measure of
their complexity and, arguably, sanitizing their political conservatism. See Gates, "A Frag-
mented Man: George Schuyler and the Claims of Race," New York Times Book Review,
September 20, 1992; Gates, "A Negro Way of Saying," New York Times Book Review,
April 21, 1985.
104. Gates, Figures in Black, p. 45.
105. Ibid., p. 44. See also Gates, "Preface to Blackness," pp. 58-68; Gates, Loose
Canons, pp. 101-2.
106. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "African American Criticism," in Stephen Greenblat
and Giles Gunn, eds., Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and
American Literary Studies (New York, 1992), p. 309.
107. Gates, "What's Love Got to Do with It?," pp. 346-47
108. Gates, Signifying Monkey, p. xi.
109. Gates, Figures in Black, pp. 56-57.
110. Gates, eel., "The Blackness of Blackness," in Black Literaturey, p. 3.
111. Gates, Signifying Monkey, p. xxii.
112. Gates, Loose Canons, pp. 65-66; Gates, ed., "Criticism in the Jungle," in Black
Literature, p. 6; Gates, Signifying Monkey, pp. xxiv-xxv.
113. Gates, ed., Black Literature, p. 3.
114. Gates, "African American Criticism," p. 313.
115. Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary
Realism (Chicago and London, 1993), p. 142. Warren also discusses the way that Gates
relies on the image of professionalistic pluralism in interpretation "to establish some non-
political notion of black unity" and points out the impossibility of that essentialist ideal.
See his "Delimiting America: The Legacy of Du Bois," American Literary History 1
(spring 1989): 172-89.
116. Gates, Figures in Black, p. xxii.
117. Gates, "What's Love Got to Do with It?," pp. 352-53.
118. Gates, Loose Canons, p. 31; Gates, "Canon-Formation," pp. 37—38; His claim
for the Norton anthology's legitimation as a black canon recalls Baraka's old notion of
"unity without uniformity." He wants to "bring together a diverse array of ideological,
methodological, and theoretical perspectives, so that we together might produce an an-
thology which most fully represents the various definitions of what it means to speak of
the Afro-American literary tradition, and what it means to teach that tradition" (ibid., p.
38). Cf. Warren, "Delimiting America."
119. Gates, Loose Canons, p. 39.
120. Gates, "African American Criticism," p. 312.
121. Gates, "Canon-Formation," pp. 27-28.
122. Ibid., pp. 29-30. Gates mentions—with no sense of possible contradiction in
the context of his argument here—that he takes the "passage from the seen to the told"
formulation from Wlad Godzich's introduction to Paul de Man's The Resistance to
Theory.
123. Gates, ed., "Criticism in the Jungle," in Black Literature, p. 4.
124. Ibid., p. 5. This passage is yet another instance of Gates's contention that this
generation of Afro-Americanists has access to uniquely new intellectual vistas made avail-
able by their unprecedented technical sophistication.
125. Ibid., p. 6.
126. See, for example, Winlhrop Jordan, White over Black (New York, 1968).
127. Gates, "What's Love Got to Do with It?," p. 357. Given Gates's subsequent
238 Notes to Pages 151-57
visibility as a "public intellectual" who pontificates on social affairs, are we to assume
that Jackson has taken up theorizing about tropes in Ulysses and Their Eyes Were Watch-
ing Cod?
128. Ibid., p. 358.
129. Gates, Signifying Monkey, p. 45.
130. Theodore O. Mason Jr., "Between the Populist and the Scientist: Ideology and
Power in Recent Afro-American Literary Criticism; Or, 'The Dozens' as Scholarship,"
Callaloo 11 (summer 1988): 612.
131. Ibid., p. 609.
132. Gates, Figures in Black, pp. 176-77.
133. Ibid, p. 178.
134. I am indebted to Joe Wood for the Egyptology comparison.
135. Gates, Introduction to Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (1989 reprint), p. xiii.
136. Ibid, p. xvi.
137. Ibid, p. xvii.
138. David A. Hollinger, In the American Province: Studies in the History and Histo-
riography of Ideas (Bloomington, Ind, 1985), p. 85.
139. Paul Lautcr, Canons and Contexts (New York and Oxford, 1991), p. 148.
140. See, for instance, Jennifer Jordan, "Cultural Nationalism in the Sixties: Politics
and Poetry," in Adolph L. Reed Jr., ed. Race, Politics and Culture: Critical Essays on the
Radicalism of the 1960s (Westport, Conn, 1986), pp. 29-60.
141. Gates, Figures in Black, p. xxvii.
142. Gates, Introduction to Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk (1989 reprint), p. xiii.
143. Sam Haselby, "Muscular Humanism: Interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,"
Hungry Mind Review (fall 1994): 23.
144. Compare, for example, the differences in both argument and tone between
Gates's "Canon-Formation" and his "Good-Bye, Columbus? Notes on the Culture of
Criticism," American Literary History 3 (winter 1991): 711-32, published slightly more
than a year later.
145. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "A Pretty Good Society," Time, November 16, 1992, p.
86.
146. Gates, Loose Canons, p. xix.
147. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Introduction to Katharine Whittmore and Gerald Mar-
zorati, eds. Voices in Black and White (New York, 1993), p. xiv.
148. Gates, "Pretty Good Society," p. 84.
149. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "The Fire Last Time: What James Baldwin Can and
Can't Teach America," New Republic, June 1, 1992, pp. 37-43.
150. Ibid, pp. 41-42.
151. Ibid, p. 40-42.
152. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Let Them Talk: Why Civil Liberties Pose No Threat
to Civil Rights," New Republic (September 20 and 29, 1993, pp. 37-49.
153. Gates, "What's Love Got to Do with It?," p. 350.
154. Gates, "Let Them Talk," p. 48.
155. Karen J. Winkler, "Literary Scholars Mount a Counteroffensive against Bad
Press, Conservative Critics," Chronicle of Higher Education January 15, 1992, p. A15.
See also Fox Butterfield, "Afro-American Studies Get New Life at Harvard," New York
Times, June 3, 1992; Gates, "Good-Bye Columbus?" p. 717-19.
156. Gates, "Good-Bye, Columbus?" p. 717.
157. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars," New York
 Notes to Pages 157-66 239
Times, July 20, 1992; Gates, "Black Intellectuals, Jewish Tensions," New York Times, April
14, 1993. I have critized the notion of a distinctly virulent black anti-Semitism more
extensively in "What Color is Anti-Semitism?" Village Voice, December 26, 1995, p. 26
and "Behind the Farrakhan Show," The Progressive (April 1994): 16-17.
158. Gates. "Let Them Talk," p. 48. He also draws on "the great political philoso-
pher Sir Isaiah Berlin" in his paean to Bill Clinton, "Pretty Good Society," p. 86.
159. Gates. "Good-Bye, Columbus?" pp. 723-25.
160. Ibid., p. 727.
161. Ibid., p. 724.
162. Gates, "Pretty Good Society," p. 85. See also Gates's "The Black Leadership
Myth," New Yorker, October 24, 1994, p. 7.
163. Gates, "Let Them Talk."
164. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Two Nations . . . Both Black," Forbes, September 14,
1992, p. 138.
165. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Two Nations . . . Both Black" (revised), in Robert
Gooding-Williams, ed., Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprisings (New York,
1993), p. 253.
166. Gates, "Two Nations," p. 138.
167. Ibid., p. 135; Haselby, "Muscular Humanism," p. 64.
168. Gates, "Two Nations," p. 138.
169. Haselby, "Muscular Humanism," p. 64.
170. Gates, "Two Nations," p. 135.
171. Ibid.
172. Gates, Loose Canons, p. 149.
173. Gates, "Two Nations," p. 134.
174. Gates, Loose Canons, p. 149.
175. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Colored People: A Memoir (New York, 1994), pp. xi-xv.
176. Ibid., p. xvi.
177. Ibid., p. 184.
178. Ibid., p. 216. I have examined this current nostalgia at greater length in "Ro-
manticing Jim Crow: Black Nostalgia for a Segregated Past," Village Voice, April 16,
1996, p. 24-29
179. Haselby, "Muscular Humanism," p. 32.
180. Warren, "Delimiting America," pp. 184-86.

Chapter 9
1. Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory (New
Haven, Conn., London, 1994).
2. For a thoroughgoing critique of the essentializing formulations of the discourse
of identity politics and its implications, see Micaela di Leonardo, "White Ethnicities,
Identity Politics, and Baby Bear's Chair," Social Text (winter 1994): 165-91.
3. Trey Ellis, "The New Black Aesthetic," Callaloo 12 (winter 1989): 235.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 236.
6. Ibid., p. 237. Ellis pats himself on the back for having hitchhiked across central
Africa, which, he beleives, is "something only a second-generation middle-class person
would ever volunteer to do" (pp. 241-42).
7. Ibid., p. 239.
240 Notes to Pages 166-72
8. Ibid.
9. Trey Ellis, "Response to NBA Critiques," Callaloo 12 (winter 1989): 250.
10. Ellis, "New Black Aesthetic," pp. 239-40.
11. Ellis, "Response," p. 250. The humility expressed in that statement rests uneasily
against the previous paragraph, in which Ellis offers this assessment of his group's signifi-
cance: "[T]his new movement is also fueled by naive exuberance and a for now unshak-
able belief that our youthful black power can perfect society and perfect the soul. A
certain amount of disillusionment and cynicism will eventually set in as it always does
when we discover that changing the world will take more than a couple of summers, but
ingenuous arrogance has been the spark for all important movements, artistic and politi-
cal, from Cubism to Sandinismo to the Beats."
12. Ellis, "New Black Aesthetic," p. 237.
13. Ibid., p. 237. Gates is more self-conscious in his praise of supposedly new black
"mainstream" success. See Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Black Creativity: On the Cutting
Edge," Time, October 10, 1994, pp. 74-75.
14. Ellis, "New Black Aesthetic," p. 237.
15. Martin Kilson, "The Black Bourgeoisie, Revisited" Dissent (winter 1984): 87.
16. Ibid, p. 89.
17. Ibid., pp. 90-91.
18. See, for instance, Shelby Steele, The Content of Our Character (New York,
1990); David L. Kirp, "No Angels, No Dreams," San Francisco Examiner Image, (Octo-
ber 7, 1990; and Deroy Murdock, " 'Oh, My God! It's a Black Man! " Chicago Tribune,
March 11, 1993.
19. See, for example, Signithia Fordham and John U. Ogbu, "Black Students'
School Success: Coping with the Burden of 'Acting White.' " Urban Review 18 (1986):
176-206; Elijah Anderson, Streetwise: Race, Class and Change in an Urban Community
(Chicago, 1992).
20. Lorene Gary, Black Ice (New York, 1991), p. 150.
21. Ibid., pp. 233-37.
22. Jacquelyn Mitchell, "Reflections of a Black Social Scientist: Some Struggles,
Some Doubts, Some Hopes," Harvard Educational Review 52 (February 1982): 38-39.
Mitchell refers to Du Bois directly as well.
23. Stephen L. Carter, "The Black Table, the Empty Seat, and the Tie," in Gerald
Early, ed., Lure and Loathing: Essays on Race, Identity, and the Ambivalence of Assimila-
tion (New York, 1993), p. 65.
24. Ibid., pp. 59, 64-65.
25. Ibid., p. 73.
26. Gerald Early, Introduction to Early, ed., Lure and Loathing, and the following
other essays from that volume: Glenn C. Loury, "Free at Last?: A Personal Perspective
on Race and Identity in America"; James McPherson, "Junior and John Doe"; Kristin
Hunter Lattany, "Off-Timing: Stepping to the Different Drummer."
27. Ellis Cose, The Rage of a Privileged Class (New York, 1993), pp. 41, 65-66.
28. Richard Lacayo, "Between Two Worlds," Time, March 13, 1989, p. 58-59.
29. George E. Curry, "A Writer's Tortuous Flight from Home," Chicago Tribune,
July 9, 1992.
30. Evan Thomas, "The Double Life of O. J. Simpson," Newsweek, August 29,
1994, p. 48.
31. Case, Rage of a Privileged Class, pp. 61-62.
32. See, for example, James Comer, Maggie's American Dream: The Life and Times
 Notes to Pages 172-74 241
of a Black Family (New York, 1988); Sara Lawrence Lightfoot, Balm in Gilead (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1984); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black
Women on Race and Sex in America (New York, 1984); Mamie Garvin Fields with Karen
Fields, Lemon Swamp and Other Places (New York, 1983); Cynthia Neverdon-Morton,
Afro-American Women of the South and the Advancement of the Race, 1895-1925 (Knox-
ville, Term., 1989); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's
Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); and Wil-
lard B. Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color: The Black Elite, 1880-1920 (Bloomington, Ind.,
1990).
33. Leanita McClain, A Foot in Each World (Evanston, 111., 1986).
34. Ibid., p. 7.
35. Ibid., p 12.
36. Ibid, p. 13.
37. Ibid., p. 14.
38. Ibid., pp. 14-15.
39. Ibid., p. 42.
40. Ibid., p. 159. She quotes a retired teacher's view that there "hasn't been a good
class at Flower since 1969" —just after McClain graduated, coincidentally (p. 162).
41. Ibid., p. 162.
42. Ibid., pp. 162-63.
43. Ibid., p. 176.
This page intentionally left blank
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 Index

Adams, Henry, 109, 112, 224n.96 middle-class sensibilities and appeal, 159, 175
Addams, Jane, 83, 109-15 Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 133-34
American Communism, 87 on politics, 154, 167
Anderson, James, 135-36, 209n.63, 233n.47 rehabilitation of Booker T. Washington, 131-38
Antimodernism, 25 interpretation of the Atlanta Compromise,
Appadurai, Arjun, 158 134-37
Appiah, Anthony, 121, 127-29, 200n.83, on Up From Slavery, 134
229n.l85 Baldwin, James, 145, 156
Aptheker, Herbert, 128 Banfield, Edward C, 228n.l69
Armstrong, General Samuel Chapman, 135 Baraka, (Imamu) Amiri, 148-49, 155
Arnold, Matthew 141, 148, 151 Baron, Harold M., 93
Aronowitz, Stanley, 197n.9 Bellamy, Edward, 24, 107
Berlin, Isaiah, 157
Baker, Houston A. Jr., 93, 130, 131-38, 139, 141, Black Aesthetic Movement, 96, 131, 144-48, 153,
154, 159, 163, 167, 175, 232-34nn.29, 36, 162
235n.82 Black Power, 92, 94, 97, 153
"Black Aesthetic" ideology, 131, 137 Blauner, Robert, 92, 219n.8
Blues, Ideology and Afro-American Literature, Bolshevism, 21-22, 86
133 Boule, 67-68
on black vernacular expression, 132-33, 139, Bourne, Randolph, 98, 111-12
141 Boxill, Bernard R., 202n.9
Cullen, Countee, 133 Braverman, Harry F., 199n.53
Chestnutt, Charles, 133 Broderick, Francis L., 5, 48, 76, 98, 207n.l9
Day, Morris, 133 Brotz, Howard, 212n.3
Dunbar, Paul Laurance, 133 Brown v. Board of Education, 182
Hughes, Langston, 133 Bukharin, Nikolai, 20
Run-DMC, 133 Burnet, Charles, 175
canonical interpretations' deemphasis of politics,
130-31, 133, 141 Canonical interpretations, 99-107, 128-34, 141,
double consciousness, 93 147-55, 161-64
csscntialism, 130-34, 136-39, 141 See also Baker, Houston A. Jr.; Double
literary studies, 163 consciousness; Gates, Henry Louis Jr.;

276
 Index 277
Problems of interpretation in Afro- Meier, August, 92, 190n.22
American thought Myrdal, Gunnar, 92-93, 189n.l4, 191n.37
Carr, Edward H., 96 Neal, Larry, 93
Carter, Stephen, 171 new black middle elass. See New black middle
Carver, Thomas Nixon, 203n.23 class
Cary, Lorene, 170-71 Progressive Era whites, 107-24
Chaffee, Mary Law, 60 Adams, Henry, 109, 112
Chestnut, Charles, 133 Addams, Jane, 109-11, 113-15
Cheyney Sate College, 74 Bourne, Randolph, 98, 111-12
Chicago Tribune, 172 Gillmore, Inez Haynes, 108, 111, 113
Chomsky, Noam, 154 Oilman, Charlotte Perkins, 109, 114-16
Civil War, 17 Hall, G. Stanley, 113, 116
Clarke, John Henrik, 202n.9 James, William, 100-107, 110, 112
Cleaver, Eklridge, 156 Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 109, 112
Comer, James, 240n. 32 Norris, Frank, 112
Conkin, Paul K., 187 Park, Robert Ezra, 92, 118, 120
Conn, Peter, 221n.69 Parker, Theodore, 112
Cooper, Anna Julia, 115 Ross, Edward A., 117-18
Cose, Ellis, 172 Scudder, Vida, 109,
Crouch, Stanley, 167 Thomas, William I., 116-17, 121-22 (essen-
Crummell, Alexander, 54, 99 (West), 214n.44 tialism)
Cruse, Harold, 68, 190n.24, 207n.38 Ward, Lester F., 113, 115-16
Cullen, Countee, 133 Rampersad, Arnold, 98
"Cultural mulatto." See New black middle Sollors, Werner, 98 (Royce, Bourne,
class Kallen)
Cultural politics, 181 Stack, Carol, 92-93
Cummings, Edward, 203n.23 Staples, Robert, 93
Stonequist, Everett V., 92
Davis, Charles T., 154 Stuckey, Sterling, 94
Davis, William Allison, 56, 202n.9 Valentine, Charles, 92-93
Day, Morris, 133 West, Cornel, 95-96, 99 (Emerson)
Debs, Eugene, 83 (socialism) Williams, Robert C., 95
DeMarco, Joseph, 4, 12, 46, 53, 203nn.23, 25 Douglass, Frederick, 61, 133, 179, 180
Derrida, Jacques, 155 Drake, St. Clair, 92, 187n.219
di Leonardo, Micaela, 226n.l41 Driver, Edwin D., 5, 202-3nn.9, 27
Double consciousness, 91-127, 160, 165-76 Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt
Baker, Houston A. Jr. See Baker, Houston A. Jr. Atlanta University, 15, 43-48, 50, 54, 64
Baron, Harold M., 93 Black Folk: Then and Now, 178
Blauner, Robert, 92 collectivist thought, 15, 22, 25, 31-34, 60-64,
Cooper, Anna Julia, 115 67-68, 73-75, 80-89
Drake, St. Clair, 92 "cooperative commonwealth," 24—25
Dn Bois, William Edward Burghardi. See Du Communist party, 86-87
Bois, William Edward Burghardt Conservation of Races, 46, 124
Ellis, Trey. See New black middle class The Crisis, 56, 66, 76, 87
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 99-100, 104-7, 110 Crummell's influence, 98-99, 191n.43
essentialist underpinnings, 97—98 (presentism), Dark Princess, 65-66
113-22 double conciousness, 91-127, 222n.45,
Fuller, Hoyt W., 93 225n.l20
Gardner, Bettye ]., 94 Atlantic Monthly, 105
Gates, Henry Louis Jr. See Gates, Henry Louis Dusk of Dawn, 62, 124
Jr. elitism
Huggins, Nathan I., 93 Boule, 67-68
Isaacs, Harold R., 92 distinction between "intelligentsia" and bour-
Karenga, Ron (Maulana), 94 geoisie, 68-73, 85, 87-88
Kent, George, 92 "guiding hundredth," 68
Martin, Waldo K., 94 Negro Academy, 40, 54
278 Index
Du Bois, W.E.B (continued) Home, Gerald, 53, 83
proletariat's role, 85, 88-89 Johnson, Arthur L., 5, 45
slavery's impact on black leadership, 55-56 Lester, Julius, 83
talented tenth's role, 4, 5, 34-40, 44, 53-65, Lewis, David L., 78
67-70, 206nn.ll-12 Marable, Manning, 5, 12, 83, 94
Emerson's influence, 99-100, 104-7, 110 Moses, Wilson J. 12, 78, 83, 98-99, 121
essentialism, 97, 121—25 Nelson, Truman, 83
Fisk University, 15,44,46,60 Rampersad, Arnold, 4, 12, 46, 65, 98-99,
German influence, 46, 79, 124nn.203, 215 129
essay on Otto Von Bismark, 46 Rudwick, Elliot M., 5, 45, 63, 83
Schmoller, Gnstav von, 46 Wesley, Charles H., 5
Treitshke, Heinrich von, 46 West, Cornel, 12, 95-96, 99
The Gift of Black Folk, 49, 58 The Souls of Black Folk, 31, 56, 91, 93, 98-99,
Harvard, 46, 105, 124 124-25, 127-30, 150-54
Hegelianism, 11-12, 24, 94, 98, 192n.44, "Special Committee for the Study of the Negro
221n.43, 229-30n.201 Problems," 63
The Horizon, 56 Washington, Booker T., conflict with, 3, 4, 15,
James's influence, 100-107, 110, 112 33, 56, 59-64, 89, 134-37, 161, 178, 185-
Marxism, 18-22, 67, 84, 186, 217-18nn.98, 86, 209n.54
102, 105-6, 110-11 National Negro Business League, 56
National Association for the Advancement of The World and Africa, 178
Colored People (NAACP), 38, 43, 56, 63- Dudziak, Mary Louise, 189n.l9
64, 66, 68, 72, 74-77 Dunbar, Paul Laurance, 133
split with, 186 Dunn, John, 105, 188n.4, 223n.80
neo-Lamarckianism and ideas about race, 120—
24, 214n.44, 228nn. 172, 174 Early, Gerald, 171
Niagara Movement, 56, 63 Eddy, Mary Baker, 100
Philadelphia Negro, 15, 27-31, 34-36, 54-56, Ellis, Trey. See New black middle class
62, 64, 67, 73 Ellison, Ralph, 7, 9, 145, 190n.20
family disorganization, 28-31 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 98-100 (West), 104-7,
Midvale Steel Works, 34 110, 222n.49, 225n.l25
vice and criminality among poor blacks, 31— Essentialism, 97, 113, 121-25, 130-34, 136-47,
33 152-54, 160-61, 165-71, 173
pluralism, 39, 77-78, 84, 89 Baker, I louston A. Jr. See also Baker, Houston
political thought, 43-51, 171-78 A. Jr.; Double consciousness; Du Bois,
consumer cooperatives, 74-75 William Edward Burghardt; Gates,
interracialism, 72-79, 89 Henry Louis Gates Jr.; New black middle
pan-Africanism, 72, 79-84, 89, 215nn.51-52, class
65 Esu, 142, 152
socialism, 67, 72-79, 82-89
positivism, 43-51 Factor, Robert, 60, 209n.63
pragmatism, 43-51, 54, 185 Fanon, Frantx, 207n. 36
progressive reform, 15-17, 23-26, 27-31, 34, Fechner, Gustsav, 102
39-40, 43-51, 78, 84, 89, 199n.55 Fields, Karen, 240n. 32
purpose of science, 45—51 Fields, Mamie Garvin, 240n.32
research at Atlanta University, 54-55 Foner, Eric, 11, 188n.l4
scholarship on Fonlon, Bernard, 83n.216
Broderick, Francis L., 5, 48, 76, 98 Fontaine, William T., 5, 8-10, 12, 129, 145, 181-
Brotz, Howard, 72 82, 188n.l3, 214n.43
Cruse, Harold, 72 Fourteenth Amendment, 15
Cywar, Alan Sigmund, 83 Franklin, John Hope, 127-28, 208-9n,53
DeMarco, Joseph, 4, 12, 46, 53 Frazier, E. Franklin, 8-10, 12, 200n.69, 207n.31
Fonlon, Bernard, 83 Frederickson, George M., 188-89n.l4
On/man, Jessie P., 5 Freud, Sigrmmd, 119
Harding, Vincent, 72 Fuller, Hoyt W., 133
Holmes, Eugene C., 5, 83 Fuss, Diana, 234n.75
 Index 279
Gardner, Bettye )., 94 Hall, G. Stanley, 113, 116
Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 96, 127-30, 138-62, 164- Harding, Vincent, 72, 133
65, 220-21n.32, 234-37nn.69, 82, 88, 94, Hare, Nathan, 127-28
122 Harlan, Louis, 136, 208n.39, 234n.58
on "black anti-Semitism," 157 Harlem Renaissance, 3, 58, 93
on the black middle class, 158-60 Hartz, Louis, 188n.H
on black vernacular expression, 138-39, 141, Haskell, Thomas L., 193n.lO
151 Hegelmnism, 21, 94, 98. See also Du Bois, Wil-
canonical interpretations' deemphasis of politics, liam Edward Burghardt
128-30, 147-55, 161-62, 164-65, 234- Henderson, Stephen, 133
35nn.69, 82, 88 Herder, Joliann Gottfried Von, 98-99
Colored People, 160-61 Hernnstein, Richard, 198n.42
commonality with Black Arts nationalism, 144— Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, 240
54 Higham, John, 189n.l6, 193n,10, 213-14nn.40,
double consciousness, 127, 160, 220-21n.32 43
essentialism of, 138-47, 152-54, 160-61, 164- Hofstadter, Richard, 192, 196
65, 236-37n.94, 122 Hollinger, David A., 153, 191n.38, 214n.42
on the Nation of Islam, 161 Holloway, Jonathan Scott, 190n.24
nostalgia for Jim Crow, 160 Holmes, Eugene C., 5, 83, 202n.9
political centrism, 154—62, 167 Holt, Thomas C., 208n.53, 229n.201
as public intellectual, 154-62 Hopkins, Charles, 215n.65
Forbes, 154, 158-59 Home, Gerald, 53, 83, 205n.2, 211n.87, 216n.86
New Republic, 156 218n.llO
Newsweek, 154 Howe, Irving, 154
New York Times, 154-5 5 Hughes, Langston, 128, 133
New Yorker, 154-55 Hull House, 110
Time, 155 Hume, David, 151
racial vindicationism, 145 Huntington, Samuel P., 232n.30
The Signifying Monkey, 140-44, 146-48, 152 Hurston, Zora Neale, 141, 236n.l03
Esu, 142, 152
Yoruba, 142 Isaacs, Harold R., 92, 219n.3
on The Souls of Black Folk, 128, 130, 148, 151-
53, 155 Jackson, Jesse, 151
Washington-Du Bois controversy, 128 James, William, 48, 98, 100-107, 110, 112,
Genovese, Eugene D., 144 222n.45, 225n.l20
Gibson, Donald B., 127 Jaynes, Gerald D., 189n.l8
Gidclings, Paula, 240n.32 Jefferson, Thomas, 151
Gilbert, James, 18-24, 47, 84, 87, 194-95n.54, Jim Crow. See Segregation
202n.l7, 204n.33 (collectivism) Johnson, Barbara E., 235n.82
Gillmore, Inez Haynes, 108, 110, 112-13, 122-23, Johnson, Charles S., 56
225n.ll3 Johnson, James Weldon, 128
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 109, 114-16, 120, Jones, Kellie, 165-66
197n.26, 199n.55 Jones, Lisa, 165-66
Gilroy, Paul, 220n.27, 229n.201 Jones, Mack H., 190n.23
Gooding-Williams, Robert, 98, 192n.44, Jordan, Jennifer, 238n.l40
221n.43 Jordanova, L. J., 119
Gould, Stephen Jay, 119, 154, 198n.22S
Gouldner, Alvin W., 18, 21, 193-94n.I5, 203n. 19 Kakar, Sudhir, 199n,53
Gramm, Phil, 173 Kallen, Horace, 77, 78, 98, 213n.40
Gramsci, Antonio, 94 Karenga, (Manlana) Ron, 148-49
Great Depression, 74, 88 Kautskyan Social Democracy, 20
Green, Dan S., 5, 188n.9, 203n.27 Kelley, Edmund, 20
Green, Donald, 164, 239n. 1 Kikongo, 143
Cronlund, Laurence, 24 Kilson, Martin, 168-69, 173
Grubcr, Carol S., 16, 193n.lO King, Martin L. Jr., 68
Gunnel], John G., 192.ii.48 Kirp, David L., 240n. 18
280 Index
Kiswahili, 143 Miller, Kelly, 56
Konrad, George, 21 Mills, C.Wright, 193n.l3
Korsch, Karl, 20, 21 Mitchell, Jacquelyn, 171, 240n.22
Kotkin, Joel, 232n.30 Mitchell, Michele, 190n.24
Kraditor, Aileen S., 226n. 141 Moon, Henry Lee, 202n.8
Kratz, Corinne A., 236n.95 Morgan, Edmund, 189n. 14
Kulpe, Oswald, 98 Moses, Wilson J., 78, 203n.25, 210-14nn.65, 1, 3,
Kwanzaa, 176 26, 44, 221n.42, See also Du Bois, William
Edward Burghardt
LaFolIette, Robert Marion, 76 Mosse, George, 198n.42
Lasch, Christopher, 108, 193n.l5, 197n.26 Moton, Robert R., 56
Lasswell, Harold, 205n.47 Moyer, Bill, 137
Lauter, Paul, 153 Murdock, Deroy, 169
League of Nations, 80 Murray, Charles, 173, 198n.42
Lears, T. J. Jackson, 23, 25, 108, 110, 112, Myrdal, Gunnar, 7-10, 92-93, 191n.37, 196n.l,
195n.54, 225n.l05 219n.7
Lee, Don L. (Haki Madhubuti), 149
Lee, Spike, 168 National Negro Business League, 56
Lenin, Vladmir L, 20-22,195n.40 Nazi Holocaust, 78, 141
Lerner, Daniel, 205n.47 Neal, Larry, 93
Lester, Julius, 83, 209n.55 Nelson, Truman, 83
Levine, Lawrence W., 144 neo-Lamarckianism, 91, 116, 119-21, 214n.44,
Levy, David, 214 228n.l72 See also Du Bois, William Ed-
Lewis, David Levering, 78, 187n.l, 196-97nn.3,7, ward Burghardt
200n.82, 203n.21, 209n.60, 213n.41, "New Black Aesthetic." See New black middle
216n.86, 221n.42, 223n.83, 229-30n.201 class
Lightfoot, Sarah Lawrence, 240n.32 New black middle class, 165-76
Lindsay, Samuel McCunc, 28 Carter, Stephen, 171
Lipow, Arthur, 202 Gary, Lorene, 170-71
Lloyd, Henry Demarest, 24 Cose, Ellis, 172
Locke, Alain, 57, 133. See also New Negro critique of, (chpts. 8—9}
Locke, John, 179-80 Crouch, Stanley, 167
Logan, Rayford W., 232n.l8 Kilson, Martin 168-69, 173
Luhan, Mabel Dodge, 109, 111-12 double consciousness, 165—76
Lukacs, Georg, 79 Ellis, Trey, 165-68, 171, 239n.3
Lustig, R. Jeffrey, 46, 195n.52 celebration of class status, 165-66, 171
Luxemburg, Rosa, 195n.40 "cultural mulatto," 165, 169
Lyman, Stanford M., 196n. 1 essentialism, 165—68
"New Black Aesthetic," 165-68
MacKinnon, Catherine, 156 essentialism, 165-71, 175
Malcolm X, 156 Jones, Kellie, 165-66
Marable, Manning, 5, 12, 83, 94, 188n.5, Jones, Lisa, 165—66
191n.43, 203n.25, 205n.2, 212n.3, Lee, Spike, 168
214n.44, 216n.86 McClain, Leanita, 172-73
Martin, Waldo E., 94 Mitchell, Jacquelyn, 171
Marxism, 18-22, 67, 84, 186. See also Du Bois, Murdock, Deroy, 169
William Edward Burghardt Simpson, O. J., 172
Mason, Theodore O. Jr., 151 Steele, Shelby, 169
McClain, Leanita, 172-73 Wilkerson, Isabel, 172
McCosh, James, 98 See also Baker, Houston A. Jr.; Gates, Henry
McKay, Nellie Y., 129 Louis Jr.
McPherson, James, 188n.l4 New Deal, 87
Mead, George Herbert, 113 Newman, Louise Michele, 227n.l45
Meier, August, 63, 92 New Negro, 57-58, 166
Meyer, Donald, 110 New South, 60-61, 135
Midvale Slcel Works, 34 Newsweek, 172
 Index 281
New York Times, 172 Rational Choice Theory, 164
Morris, Frank, 112 Redding, J. Saunders, 127-29, 208n.41
Redeemers/Redemption, 61
Oakes, James, 189 Redmond, Patricia, 235n.82
Outlaw, Lucius, 220 Reed, Ishmael, 141
Ovington, Mary White, 83 (socialism) Robinson, Dean E., 190n.20
Rodgers, Daniel T, 106, 115, 189n.l4
Page, Clarence, 173 Rosenberg, Rosalind, 113
Park, Robert Ezra, 92, 118, 120 Ross, Dorothy, 193
Parker, Theodore, 112 Ross, Edward A., 117-18, 120, 228n.l67
Peale, Norman Vincent, 100, 110 Royce, Josiah, 48, 98, 226n.l23
Pittenger, Mark, 200n.83, 202n.l7, 216nn.83, 85 Rudwick, Elliott M., 5, 45, 63, 83
Plekhanov, George V., 21 Run DMC, 133
Pollitt, Katha, 226n.l41 Runciman, W. G., 187n.4
Postmodernism, 181 Russian Revolution, 87
Poussaint, Alvin, 127
Problems of interpretation in Afro-American Said, Edward, 154
thought, 4-13, 91-99, 105, 145, 165-76, Schiff, Jacob, 63
177-85 Schlesinger, Arthur M. Jr., 165, 189n.l9
canonical interpretation, 99-107, 128-31, 133- Schmoller, Gustav, 48
34, 141, 147-55, 161-64 Scuddcr, Vida, 109
institutionalization of Afro-American studies, 93 Segregation, 61, 74, 77, 124, 133, 145
internal critique Shapiro, Ian, 164, 224n.82, 239n.l
Bailey, Joseph A., 181 Simpson, O. J., 172
Ellison, Ralph, 7, 9, 145 Singleton, John, 168
Fontaine, William T., 5, 8-10, 12, 129, 145, Skinner, Quentin, 105-6, 223n.80, 229n.201
181-82 Slavery, 59, 61, 132, 144, 145
Frazier, E. Franklin, 8-10, 12 Smith, Rogers M., 188n.l4
Reddick, L. D., 8-10, 12, 145, 182 Social Darwinism, 16, 45-46, 78
Thorpe, Earl E., 8-10, 12, 181-82 Socialism, 19, 21-22, 67, 72-79, 82-89
the Negro problem, 5-6 Sollors, Werner, 98
presentism and racial vindicationism, 4-13, 91- Soviet Union/Russia, 85-86
99, 105, 145, 177-85 Sowell, Thomas, 159, 167, 174, 235n.78
Broderick, Francis L., 5 Spencer, Herbert, 39, 44, 46-47
DeMarco, Joseph, 12 Stack, Carol B., 92-93
Driver, Edwin D., 5 Stalin, Joseph, 20, 85
Foner, Eric, 11 Staples, Robert, 93
Green, Dan S., 5 Steele, Shelby, 169
Johnson, Arthur L., 5 Stein, Judith, 190n.?3, 213n.26, 215n.65
Key, R. Charles, 5 Steinberg, Stephen, 190n.21
Marable, Manning, 5, 94 Steinmetz, Charles, 20
Rudwick, Elliott M., 5 Stevens, Jacqueline, 229n,201
West, Cornel, 95-96, 99 Stocking, George W. Jr., 119, 200n.83, 228n.l72
Wesley, Charles H., 5 Stonequist, Everett V., 92
See also Baker, Houston A. Jr.; Double con- Straussianism, 163
sciousness; Du Bois, William Edward Bur- Streator, George, 67
ghardt; Gates, Henry Louis Jr. Stuckey, Sterling, 94, 144
Skinner, Quentin, 105-6 Szelenyi, Ivan, 21
traditionalism, 163—65
class underpinnings, 165—76 Taft, Jessie Howard, 225n.ll2
Professionalization, 16—18 Taylor, Frederick Winslovv, 34
Progressivism, 18-19, 84, 91-125 Thomas, Evan, 240
Protestantism, 25 Thomas, William I., 116-17, 120-22
Thompson, fv P., 154
Rampersad, Arnold, 4, 12, 46, 65, 98-99, 129, Tz'me, 172
203n.23, 206n. 15 Toll, William S., 61, 19()n.24, 218n. 121
282 Index
Trilling, Lionel, 154 Wellmer, Albrecht, 211
Trotsky, Leon, 20 West, Cornel, 12, 95-96, 99, 191-92n. 43
Wharton, Susan P., 28
"underclass" ideology, 137, 159 Wideman, John Edgar, 127-29, 172
University of Pennsylvania, 28, 44 Wiebe, Robert, 24
Up from Slavery, 134, 161 Wilkerson, Isabel, 172
Williams, Raymond, 15 4
Valentine, Charles, 92-93 Williams, Robert C., 95
Vernacular Blues. See Baker, Houston A. Jr. Williamson, Joel, 229- 30
Victorianism, 58, 140, 141, 159, 160, 165, 172, Willingham, Alex, 190n.23
182 Wilson, Edmund, 154-55
Wilson, James Q., 196
Ward, Lester F., 39, 113, 116 Wolin, Sheldon, 32, 194n.l9
Warren, Kenneth W,, 148, 161, 195n.235, Woodson, Carter G., 77
237n.ll5 Woodward, C. Vann, 207
Washington, Booker T., 3-4, 13, 33, 56, 59-64, World War I, 17, 48, 74, 79, 83-84, 108
89, 134-37, 161, 178, 185-86. See also World War II (Du Bois post-WWII), 68, 76, 78,
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt 85, 140
Weber, Max, 25, 48
Weismann, August, 120 Yoruba, 142