W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 by David Levering Lewis Henry Holt & Company, 2000, 715 pp.
W.E.B. Du Bois is conventionally perceived as the quintessential crusader for black freedom, heroically contending with an America by turns hostile and indifferent to his cause. This is the Du Bois of the Niagara Movement and the NAACP, editor of The Crisis, theoretician of Pan-Africanism, engaged a ceaseless and passionate struggle for racial justice. The perception is not baseless, but it reflects a colossal shallowness. W.E.B. Du Bois was a much deeper and disturbing individual, one who expended considerable effort defending history's most murderous regimes.
David Levering Lewis's W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 completes the story he began in W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919. Superbly researched and written, this final volume presents a thorough portrait of its subject. That W.E.B. Du Bois was a totalitarian apologist is not omitted by this biography. Lewis writes of Du Bois's affection for Soviet Russia and Maoist China; his "On Stalin," described as "an apostrophe to the dead dictator"; how "Khrushchev's Twentieth Party Congress revelations in February 1956 of Stalin's crimes left him publicly unmoved"; his 1959 receipt of the Lenin Peace Prize; and his 1961 application for membership in the Communist Party.
To exacerbate this record, Du Bois emerges as a moral moron in his travels. When he visits the Soviet regime in 1926, "Du Bois could have been at best only dimly aware of the momentous political tragedy unfolding in the Kremlin." (How about the human tragedies that had been perpetrated for nearly a decade? The Red Terror wasn't unknown prior to The Black Book of Communism. Du Bois asserted willful blindness: "I know nothing of political prisoners, secret police and underground propaganda.") Du Bois's 1959 trip to China in the wake of the Great Leap Forward is similarly described: "As they moved about Beijing in their ceremonial cocoon, Du Bois and [Shirley] Graham Du Bois knew absolutely nothing of the catastrophe inflicted upon the Chinese people by their omnipotent ruler." Du Bois would write rhapsodically of "so vast and glorious a miracle as China" and return in 1962.
Notwithstanding this repugnance, Lewis looks favorably upon Du Bois. (His subtitle indicates as much.) "An extraordinary mind of color in a racialized century," he writes, "Du Bois was possessed of a principled impatience with what he saw as the egregious failings of American democracy that drove him, decade by decade, to the paradox of defending totalitarianism in the service of a global ideal of economic and social justice." This ideal further impelled Du Bois to seek allies, and "because he believed that the enemies of his enemies were his friends in Africa and Asia, neither communism's doctrinal rigidities nor the Soviet Union's 1956 rampages in Eastern Europe would shake Du Bois's commitment to world socialism." As for Du Bois's prescriptions, Lewis comments: "No doubt he was precipitous in totally writing off the market economy. Even so, it may be suggested that Du Bois was right to insist that to leave the solution of systemic social problems exclusively to the market is an agenda guaranteeing obscene economic inequality in the short run and irresoluble political calamity in the long run."
This apologetic spin is unpersuasive. Lewis's deterministic portrayal of Du Bois's totalitarian embrace ("the egregious failings of American democracy that drove him…") makes for ornate illogic, as if oppression in America entailed exalting the apogees of oppression abroad. Lewis here and elsewhere manifests an exculpatory as well as explanatory objective. The tenor amounts to the following: Yes, Du Bois behaved shamefully, but these were the deeds of an errant idealist, not an ideologue.
Might these mitigative attempts derive from Lewis's own ideology? He dryly refers to "communism's doctrinal rigidities" but excoriates the "obscene economic inequality" and "irresoluble political calamity" resulting from a market-based approach to "systemic social problems." The disparity of intensity elucidates Lewis's perspective on his subject's communist cuddling. Whereas encomiums for Stalin and Mao should be contextualized in American racial injustice, an economic order grounded in market principles is ipso facto abhorrent.
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919-1963 brims with scholarship and elegance. It is this descriptive amplitude that contrasts so starkly with its author's critical dearth.
February 19, 2001
Myles Kantor lives in Boynton Beach, Florida.
