The Making of a Radical: W.E.B. Du Bois's Turn to the Left by J.D. Vivian A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida May 1997 The Making of a Radical: W.E.B. Du Bois's Turn to the Left by J.D. Vivian This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Dr. Lewis, Department of English, and has been approved by the members of his supervisory committee. It was submitted to the faculty of the Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. Supervisory Committee: /(Y/S~ r4J,5 Chairman, Department of English ~,.~~, n Schmidt College of Arts and Humanities Studies ii Abstract Author: J.D. Vivian Title: The Making of a Radical: W.E.B. Du Bois's Turn to the Left Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis advisor: Dr. K. Lewis Degree: Master of Arts Year: 1997 During his lifetime, W.E.B. Du Bois grew increasingly leftist. His early writings showed his optimism; his later works showed no such upbeat tone. Several developments fueled this metamorphosis: his controversies with Booker T. Washington; his two acrimonious departures from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; his arrest and trial as an unregistered foreign agent. In his early writings, Du Bois frequently mentions being "above the veil." In later works, the metaphorical garment--when mentioned at all--has become a prison. His early belief that the advancement of Negroes would depend on science and rational discourse was eventually replaced with a conviction that only economic reconstruction would allow his people to rend the veil keeping them in check and permit the working class--black and white--to cast off its chains. iii Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: Toward a More Perfect Union 9 Chapter Two: The Demise of Optimism 24 Chapter Three: Workers of the World, Unite 40 Conclusion 53 Notes 56 Works Cited 59 iv Introduction While attending Fisk University in the 1880s, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was fired with optimism for his own future and that of his fellow Negroes. He wrote, "Through the leadership of men like myself and my fellows we were going to have these enslaved Israelites out of the still enduring bondage in short order" (qtd. in Lewis A Reader 3). He knew the road to equality would prove tortuous; nevertheless, he believed that he and other well-educated blacks could, with hard work, elevate the lesser-educated. In 1893, Du Bois ended his essay "Cele­ brating His Twenty-fifth Birthday" with these hopeful words: "These are my plans: to make a name in science, to make a name in literature and thus to raise my race .... and if I perish--! PERISH" (Against Racism 29). Education would create a sense of self-consciousness in Negroes that Du Bois believed would help them advance. But such was not to happen--at least not to the extent the scholar had envisioned and hoped. Unfortunately for Du Bois, and despite his capable leadership, the "enslaved Israelites" were still largely in bondage, even at his death in 1963, ninety-eight years after the end of the War Between the States. 1 Du Bois's optimism suffered many setbacks, and eventually disappeared. His public disagreements with the powerful Booker T. Washington had been raging for about three years when in 1903 he penned The Souls of Black Folk. But Du Bois had not then given up hope that all races would live in peace, even symbiosis. His opening essay to Souls, "Of Our Spiritual Strivings,'' asks African Americans to work toward the ideal of human brotherhood ... the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to •.. other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater 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. (Souls 11) Du Bois, even in this early essay, hints at what later would become a mantra: The road to true freedom for blacks--and whites--lay in mutual understanding and aid. The scholar believed in the early 1900s that blacks, to gain equality, would need the help of whites. But he did not see this as a one-way street; instead, the two groups would face the future together, creating a formidable united front. ~ooking back in 1940 at this early point in his life, he wrote in Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept that he had not opposed the white world but merely wanted to become part of it: "What the white world was doing, its goals and ideals, I had not doubted were quite right. What was wrong was that 2 I and people like me ... were refused permission to be a part of this world" (27). As Du Bois's life progressed and he saw more setbacks in civil rights and endured more injustices--such as his two oustings from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an organization he helped establish--his writings reflected less and less hopeful­ ness. In 1940, the decades of segregation and of blacks being denied the right to participate fully in the opportunities afforded whites had exacted their toll. Du Bois no longer considered the veil a metaphorical garment above which the members of his race could, through self­ sacrifice and hard work, rise. In his early writings, he frequently mentions escaping the veil: "I lived above it in a region of blue sky ... That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot-race" (Souls 4). Du Bois could transcend the veil by studying and working hard, then outperforming his white classmates. By the 1940s, however, the veil, no longer a poetic metaphor, had become a stifling--and "horribly tangible"--prison. In Dusk of Dawn, he compares segregation to being sealed away, prisoners in "a dark cave" attempting to speak to the world outside. Such an attempt is in vain, and Du Bois issues a tocsin to whites: 3 It gradually penetrates the minds of the prisoners that the people passing do not hear; that some thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass is between them and the world .... They get excited ... (and] may become hysterical. (130-31) During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Du Bois became what many Americans considered "radical": He grew leftist; ultimately, avowedly communist. He wrote his controversial "Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent in the United States of America," then tried repeatedly to have it presented at the United Nations's General Assembly. Furthermore, he "denounced the Marshall Plan and (North Atlantic Treaty Organization] as capitalist aggression, and distributed an explosively detailed memorandum for restructuring NAACP headquarters" (Lewis, A Reader 9). Largely because of these actions, the NAACP fired Du Bois as director of special research in 1948, an event that precipitated his final--and hard--turn to the left. His early, optimistic belief that the advancement of Negroes would depend on science and rational discourse had been slowly but steadily replaced with a conviction, held until his death, that only extreme measures--e.g., economic revolution and political force--would allow his people to rend the hated veil. Events in Du Bois's life brought about this change: his controversies with Booker T. Washington; his acrimon- 4 ious departure in 1934 from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; his firing from the NAACP in September 1948; and his February 1951 arrest and trial, with four others, by the u.s. government as unregistered "foreign agents" (Lewis, "Dilemma of Race" 39-42). This thesis will explore these and other important developments and their effect on his writings as Du Bois metamorphosed from an optimist to extreme pessimist. Du Bois scholars such as David Levering Lewis and Manning Marable have misinterpreted or exaggerated how various developments in his life affected him. Lewis argues that the second turning point in Du Bois's life (he delineates four) 1 occurred "with DuBois's two explosive exits in 1934 and 1948 from the NAACP; the third concerns his quixotic quest for foundation money during the late 1930s in order to launch the Encyclopedia of the Negro" (Lewis, A Reader 3-4). These assumptions appear incorrect on several fronts. To begin, as this thesis will show, the Du Bois of 1948 was a vastly different man from the Du Bois of 1934; nor does a fourteen-year span constitute a single turning point. In addition, Du Bois's failure to find Encyclopedia funding in the late 1930s does not appear to have affected him to any significant degree. Marable interprets too literally the definition of words. Du Bois "did not perceive the necessity to engage overtly in politics in order to fulfill his cultural and 5 social program" (37) (emphasis added). Marable forgets--or conveniently ignores--that all social movements are political. Why bother to protest if not to effect change in the direction you perceive it is needed? Certainly, Du Bois did engage in politics, throughout his life. Further­ more, Marable himself quotes Du Bois criticizing Booker T. Washington because he "does not rightly value the privilege and duty of voting" (qtd.