CHAPTER 1
“The present war in Europe is one of the great disasters due to race and color prejudice and it but foreshadows greater disasters in the future.”1
DU BOIS FEARED FOR his family’s safety. It was August 1914, and war engulfed Europe. His thirteen-year-old daughter, Yolande, and his wife, Nina, were scheduled to leave for England at the end of the month.2 Yolande had received admission to the prestigious Bedales boarding school in Hampshire, where, as her father intended, she would be “trained to become a healthy woman, of broad outlook and spiritual resources, able to earn a living in some line of work which she likes and is fitted for.”3 Du Bois believed that Nina should dutifully relocate as well and settle in nearby London to provide motherly support whenever necessary.
War complicated their travel plans. The European crisis had been long in the making. The forces of nationalism, militarism, and imperialism swelled in the decades following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, gripping the continent with fear, envy, and mistrust.4 Colonial rivalries and a precarious alliance system exacerbated tensions. The fatal spark occurred in the Balkans. On June 28, 1914, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed the Archduke of Austria and heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand, along with his wife, Sophie, in the capital city of Sarajevo. The assassination presented Germany and Kaiser Wilhelm II with an opportunity to push for the conflict they had long prepared for.
On July 28, Austria-Hungary, with Germany’s backing, declared war on Serbia. The dominoes quickly began to fall. Two days later, Russia came to the defense of its Serbian ally. Germany responded in kind and, between August 1 and August 4, declared war against Russia, France, and Belgium. “Whatever our lot may be,” Imperial Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg avowed before the assembled members of the Reichstag, “the 4th of August, 1914, will remain through all eternity one of Germany’s greatest days.”5 As the sun rose on August 5, Great Britain had entered the mess, creating a Triple Entente with France and Russia against the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. All sides mobilized every young, able-bodied man for military service, with The New York Times estimating that seventeen million men stood at the ready to fight and possibly die in “the Colossal European War.”6 Soldiers of various nations, clad in crisp, clean uniforms of blue, red, khaki, and gray, buoyantly filled trains and prepared to travel to the front by foot and by horse. The war would be over in a matter of weeks, they believed. However, some military leaders and heads of state imagined a more ominous future. On the eve of his nation’s declaration of war, the British foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, solemnly predicted, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”7
Germany, with nearly four million well-trained soldiers, advanced weapons, and seemingly boundless martial spirit, envisioned a swift and decisive victory. The Kaiser’s forces, adhering to the Schlieffen Plan conceived in 1905, invaded neutral Belgium.8 The initial wave of German cavalry and infantry experienced stiffer than expected resistance and took surprisingly heavy losses at the opening Battle of Liège. Nevertheless, Belgium’s plucky defenses proved no match for Germany’s deep reservoir of soldiers, superior firepower, and ruthless tactics, marked by the burning of villages and executions of civilians.9 By August 20, Brussels had fallen, and Germany focused attention on its ultimate goal: crushing France.10
As Du Bois followed early news of the European disaster, he wrote to a longtime friend and London resident, Frances Hoggan. With August 28 ship passage booked for Nina and Yolande, he wanted an up-close opinion about the situation abroad and how it might affect his family. The war had quickly disrupted social and economic life in capital cities and rural countrysides alike,11 and while Germany had not yet decided to unleash its U-boats, the safety of transatlantic travel was uncertain. Hoggan, sharing the optimistic sentiments of most middle-class Londoners in the early days of the war, informed Du Bois in her August 15 letter that though room and board had become more expensive, “life goes on almost normally.” “There is not much risk in coming over,” she assured him and, regarding Du Bois’s loved ones, promised, “I should do my part for them in case of need.” Hoggan acknowledged that “uncertainty is the great feature at present,” but she believed that “as things now stand Germany will be forced by failure of supplies for the army and other armies to make peace within a not very long period.”12
Du Bois was steadfast that his daughter, war or no war, would attend Bedales. Yet he decided to err on the side of caution and delay Yolande and Nina’s Atlantic crossing until after mid-September. “I would not want them in any danger or great deprivation,” he told Hoggan, although the pair, he presumed, “would not mind small inconveniences.” About the war itself, Du Bois, at least for the moment, could not muster the words: “This sudden failure of civilization is simply beyond comment.”13
* * *
BY AUGUST 1914, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois had scaled heights thought unimaginable for a Black person in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. “I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, five years after the Emancipation Proclamation which began the freeing of American Negro slaves,” he wrote in the last of his many autobiographical remembrances.14 The only child of Alfred Du Bois and Mary Silvina Burghardt, Du Bois came of age in the small, quintessentially New England town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Driven to succeed despite challenging familial circumstances, he excelled academically, devoting himself to reading Greek and Latin and browsing the shelves of the local bookstore.15 On June 27, 1884, at the age of sixteen, the light brown–skinned prodigy graduated from high school, the star of his small class of thirteen students.16
Following the sudden death of his mother in March 1885, young Du Bois set out to make a name for himself and his family by obtaining the best education possible. He enrolled and, three years later, graduated with pride from Fisk University in Tennessee, his first experience below the Mason-Dixon line, a world, he recalled, “split into white and black halves.” He loved Fisk, crediting the school with exposing him to this new world of Black folk—full of both suffering and striving. Fisk also set in stone his racial identity. On these formative years, Du Bois reflected, “A new loyalty and allegiance replaced my Americanism: henceforward I was a Negro.”17
But he’d long desired to attend Harvard. Admitted to pursue a second undergraduate degree, he arrived on the Cambridge campus in September 1888. Later recollecting that he was “in Harvard, but not of it,” he nevertheless made the most of his time, learning from some of the nation’s intellectual giants—William James, George Santayana, Albert Bushnell Hart, Nathaniel Shaler, Josiah Royce—and honing a humanistic approach to the study of life and a commitment to democratic reasoning.18 After graduating cum laude in 1890, he continued at Harvard to obtain a doctorate in history, stopping along the way to spend two transformational years—from 1893 to 1894—at the University of Berlin. The lessons he reverently absorbed in classes taught by Gustav von Schmoller, Heinrich von Treitschke, and other German luminaries fortified his approach to history as a science, with the power to shape the way nations and their people understood the past, present, and future. Du Bois’s experience in Germany profoundly shaped his intellect, cultural tastes, and character. He would sport a well-groomed Vandyke beard and handlebar mustache for the rest of his life.19
Yet this product of Victorian New England and European Enlightenment thought was Black, and unashamedly so. Late into the night of his twenty-fifth birthday, in 1893, homesick and contemplative in the solitude of his candlelit Berlin boarding room, Du Bois determined to dedicate his life’s cause to the Black race. “I therefore take the work that the Unknown lay in my hands and work for the rise of the Negro people, taking for granted that their best development means the best development of the world,” he penned in a letter to himself. “These are my plans,” he added, “to make a name in science, to make a name in literature and thus to raise my race.”20 This project of racial uplift, the calling of many like-minded educated African Americans in the late nineteenth century, steeled Du Bois’s sense of purpose.21
He could soon boast of fulfilling his personal charge from that Berlin evening. He received his Harvard Ph.D. in 1895—the first African American to do so—with his doctoral dissertation, “The Suppression of the African Slave Trade,” earning distinction as the inaugural publication of the Harvard Historical Studies series. He briefly taught classics at Wilberforce University in Ohio, an unpleasant experience save for the friendships he made and the charming, dark-eyed student, Nina Gomer, he became enamored with and married on May 12, 1896. The young couple moved to Philadelphia, where Du Bois spent a year at the University of Pennsylvania researching and writing what became The Philadelphia Negro, a pioneering work of sociology. The segregated state of the academy ruled out the possibility of a full-time position at Penn, so in 1897 Will and Nina packed up and moved south to Atlanta University. Here Du Bois truly made his mark, producing a series of studies that cemented his status as the nation’s foremost Black social scientist interrogating what had come to be known interchangeably as the “race question” and the “Negro problem.”22
As the new century approached, the hopes of African Americans for basic equality and recognition of their humanity looked dire. The post–Civil War years had offered the promise of freedom and political inclusion in the nation’s reconstructed democracy, yet the dream ended prematurely with the election of 1876, as the federal government absolved itself of responsibility to protect its Black citizens.23 Southern white supremacists were determined to keep the Negro in his place. In 1883, the Supreme Court ruled that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments did not guarantee individual civil rights and that Congress, as it had affirmed in 1875, lacked the power to outlaw racial discrimination. One by one, Southern states, redeemed from Republican rule, devised ways to strip African Americans of political power and access to the ballot.24 Informal rules of segregation became sanctioned and codified with the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling, broadening a system and culture of Jim Crow that seeped into every aspect of Southern race relations.25 The vast majority of Black Southerners toiled in near-slavery conditions as sharecroppers, trapped in a crushing cycle of debt and servitude.26 Justice was synonymous with terror. A brutal convict leasing system, taking advantage of the Thirteenth Amendment’s allowance of involuntary servitude “as punishment for a crime,” epitomized the racist structure of the law and the systemic criminalization of Blackness.27 Lynching and mob violence became endemic throughout the South and beyond. In the decade between 1890 and 1900 alone, more than twelve hundred Black people lost their lives at the hands of persons unknown.28
Du Bois felt the realities of race personally. Whether being a young schoolboy in Great Barrington, taking his first ride on a Jim Crow car as a Fisk undergraduate, or experiencing loneliness at Harvard and Berlin, he’d reckoned with the emotional weight of being Black.
His days in Atlanta, while remarkably productive, were also traumatic. On the evening of May 24, 1899, his two-year-old son, Burghardt, died, succumbing to a ten-day bout of diphtheria that may have been treatable had he been born on the other side of the color line. Du Bois and grief-stricken Nina, who would never be the same, buried their son in Great Barrington, not wanting his final resting place to be in the red soil of Georgia.29 This tragedy came on the heels of the April 23 lynching of Sam Hose, a Black farmer who, after being accused of murdering his employer, was burned and mutilated before two thousand white men and women, many still adorned in their Sunday church best. An appalled Du Bois set out from his office to register a protest with editors at The Atlanta Constitution, but decided otherwise upon learning that Hose’s charred knuckles sat on display in a downtown store window. “Something died in me that day,” he reflected decades later,30 having realized that “one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.”31
Fueled by this moral commitment, he poured all his brilliance and anguish into writing The Souls of Black Folk. Released in 1903, the collection of new and previously published essays—revised and organized with philosophical clairvoyance, historical audacity, literary imagination, sociological precision, autobiographical introspection, political urgency, musical lyricism, and poetic emotion—together amounted to a text that defied classification. The Souls of Black Folk launched Du Bois as America’s foremost prophet on what he declared was “the problem of the Twentieth Century … the problem of the color line.”32
In spellbinding prose, Du Bois articulated the ways in which race shaped the everyday lives of African Americans and constructed their identity. The color line, he imagined, functioned as a “vast veil,” physically and spiritually dividing the Black and white worlds. The veil obscured the vision of white people, thus rendering the Negro a homogeneous “problem.” As Du Bois guided his readers in the book’s fourteen chapters through life on the other side of the veil, he demonstrated that Black people were not a “problem” to be resolved but a proud, gifted race, full of triumphs and sorrows, tragedies and hopes, pain and faith. Navigating the color line endowed Black people with the “peculiar sensation” of “double-consciousness,” what he described as the “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.” He added, in words that encapsulated for millions the fundamental tension of being Black in America, “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.”33
While Du Bois made clear from the book’s outset that he was “bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh of them that live within the Veil,” The Souls of Black Folk resonated most powerfully among college-educated African Americans who were engaged in the task of racial uplift.34 In the chapter “Of the Training of Black Men,” Du Bois articulated the responsibilities of the “Talented Tenth”—not so much an exclusive group of Black intellectuals, but an aspiration and a calling for anyone striving through work, education, artistry, and professional excellence to represent the race and contribute to its progress. This included lawyers, doctors, teachers, athletes, ministers, businessmen, and soldiers.35 Du Bois’s framing of Black leadership, like much of his thinking about the history and meaning of racial struggle, was deeply gendered and laced with patriarchy. Women, to be sure, had a place in the Talented Tenth and deserved full social and political rights. But they were the mothers of the race and, as Du Bois believed, should play their natural role while Black men stood on the front lines.36
Debates about the type of education African Americans should receive and its use fueled his conflict with Booker T. Washington, the powerful principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. A former slave from Virginia, Washington built Tuskegee from the ground up, advancing a gospel of industrial training that grated against Du Bois’s liberal arts sensibilities. Washington coupled this with a politics of racial conciliation, reassuring Southern white supremacists—as he did in his famous September 18, 1895, speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta—that “in all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” Washington, having offered the ideal solution to the “race problem,” gained the favor of white Gilded Age philanthropists and a choke hold on money flowing into Southern colleges, including to Du Bois’s Atlanta University. Using his vast connections and the muscle of what came to be known as the “Tuskegee Machine,” Washington sought to crush all threats, real or perceived, to his dominance.37
Du Bois, believing that the time had come for open, honest criticism and asserting his manly responsibility to voice it, used the chapter “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others” in The Souls of Black Folk to methodically lay bare his ideological differences with the Tuskegee “Wizard.” The race, Du Bois insisted, needed the ballot, civic equality, and higher education beyond training for life as manual laborers, writing, “We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.”38 He also painted Washington as outside the historical tradition of Black leadership, instead anointed by white capitalists North and South to legitimize the social, political, and economic marginalization of the race.39
The Souls of Black Folk and his confrontation of Washington thrust Du Bois into the role of civil rights leader and spokesman for the anti-Tuskegee wing of the Talented Tenth. In 1905, along with his former Harvard classmate, the Boston firebrand William Monroe Trotter, Du Bois established the Niagara Movement, a collection of race men and women committed to the cause of full political equality and racial justice for African Americans. Against Washington’s considerable resistance, the group struggled for widespread support, but nevertheless laid the groundwork for the 1909 founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).40
Du Bois, relocating to New York City, assumed the position of director of research and publications for the upstart, overwhelmingly white-run organization and editor of its monthly magazine of news and opinion, The Crisis. His pride and joy, The Crisis provided him with a platform to display the full arsenal of his intellectual, political, and artistic gifts. Upon receiving their copy in the mail, readers immediately turned to his editorials for information and inspiration. To those who followed his lead and hung on to his every word, Du Bois appeared larger than life.41
However, beneath his unassailable veneer lay a man with faults, frailties, and vulnerabilities. He possessed an ego that far exceeded his mere five-foot-five-inch stature. Keenly aware of his significance, walking cane always in hand, Du Bois could be notoriously cold and aloof.42 He possessed little patience for people he deemed intellectually and politically inferior. While committed to hard truth-telling, he was not above strategic dishonesty when it best suited him.43 Unable to conceive of, much less admit to, wrongdoing, Du Bois radiated a confidence that both attracted and repulsed. He especially clashed with his white colleagues at the NAACP, who waged a constant battle to coalesce his voice as editor of The Crisis with the agenda of the organization in its masthead. By late 1914, many board members wanted him out.
Joel Spingarn knew and understood Du Bois better than any other person in the NAACP. The wealthy son of Jewish immigrants, headstrong and pugnacious, Spingarn made a name for himself as a brilliant scholar of comparative literature, teaching for twelve years at Columbia University. A dispute with Columbia’s president prompted his departure from the university, opening the door for a new career in civic activism that, in 1911, led him to the NAACP. His younger brother, Arthur, a founding member, headed the nascent organization’s legal committee. As Du Bois’s future wife, Shirley Graham, told the story years later, “Upon visiting the offices of this association,” Joel “met a small, alert brown man who was enthusiastically getting together a magazine which he called The Crisis. Such a literary effort alone would have deeply interested the former English professor, but the man himself with his Harvard accent and continental manners intrigued him.”44
Intrigue blossomed into admiration and ultimately a deep friendship. In Du Bois, Spingarn saw a man of letters, erudition, and the potential of a suffering race. In Spingarn, Du Bois saw an intellectual and temperamental equal who, as part of a fellow persecuted group of people, held a fierce commitment to equal rights. “He was one of those vivid, enthusiastic but clear-thinking idealists which from age to age the Jewish race has given the world,” Du Bois remembered.45 Spingarn was also proudly American, having eschewed his hyphenated identity, and he saw no reason why Black people should not be embraced as full Americans as well. He immersed himself in the work of the NAACP with fervor, spreading the gospel of the “New Abolitionism” and assuming the chairmanship in 1913. “We fought each other continuously in the councils of the Association,” Du Bois recalled of these early days of, at times, painful growth, “but always our admiration and basic faith in each other kept us going hand in hand.”46 Their relationship symbolized, for both men, the promise of American democracy.47
Spingarn also possessed the mettle to honestly criticize his friend when the occasion arose. At the height of a bitter disagreement in October 1914 between Du Bois and the NAACP over the role of The Crisis and the autonomy of its editor, Spingarn wrote to Du Bois, fully aware that “I may wound your feelings deeply.” “You have an extraordinary unwillingness to acknowledge that you have made a mistake, even in trifles,” he brazenly diagnosed, “and if accused of one, your mind will find or even invent reasons and quibbles of any kind to prove that you were never mistaken.” White coworkers and acquaintances, Spingarn believed, felt “a mingled affection and resentment” toward Du Bois. “They have come to feel that you prefer to have your own way rather than accept another way,” and trembled at the possibility of “wounding your own sensitive nerves.”48
Du Bois, respectfully, refused to back down. He thanked Spingarn for his letter and its constructive spirit. “Some of the criticism, I think, is fair. Some I am sure is not,” Du Bois wrote, admitting that “my temperament is a difficult one to endure,” and noting, “In my peculiar education and experience it would be miraculous if I came through normal and unwarped.” But the root cause of the friction within the NAACP, he argued, was not principally due to his touchy personality but to “the inevitable American rift of the color line.” “You do not realize this,” he gently told his enlightened yet still-privileged comrade. “Perhaps I realize it over-much,” Du Bois conceded. “But remember I’ve lived beside it nearly half a century.”49
Indeed, by the fall of 1914, as the world convulsed and the fate of the twentieth century hung in the balance, arguably no other African American could articulate the significance of the color line—and what it meant for Black people in the United States and beyond—with greater insight, vision, and passion than W. E. B. Du Bois.
* * *
AT 12:00 NOON ON September 23, Nina and Yolande departed from New York aboard the steamship St. Paul for Liverpool.50 In spite of the war—and unexpected passport complications Du Bois frantically sought to resolve—they arrived safely after a little more than a week at sea.51 Du Bois was relieved. He took seriously his patriarchal responsibilities to direct the course of Yolande’s education and provide for Nina’s comfort. However, untethered from their presence, he could now devote more undivided attention to his work, which included thinking about the war.
Events on the battlefield unfolded quickly. By early September, after smashing through Belgium and into northern France, the German columns stood a mere thirty miles from Paris, ready to strike a final blow. The war may very well have ended at the Marne. But on September 6, the French general Joseph Joffre rallied his troops, launched a daring counterattack, and, aided by British Allied forces and critical miscalculations by German commanders, forced the Kaiser’s army to retreat to the Aisne River. The weeklong nonstop storm of machine-gun fire and artillery explosion left a horrific toll: more than five hundred thousand soldiers dead, wounded, or missing.52 The results portended things to come. Hoping to outflank each other, the “race to the sea” began, with opposing forces moving northward as rapidly as possible, mangling the countryside with miles of fortified trenches along the way.
While Nina and Yolande tried to get accustomed to their new surroundings in London and Bedales, on October 19, across the English Channel, the warring armies clashed near the Belgian town of Ypres. For more than a month they bloodied the fields of Flanders until, by mid-November, the arrival of winter weather brought the hostilities to an indecisive halt. Both sides suffered staggering casualties, with the British Expeditionary Forces severely crippled and the Belgian army virtually destroyed. The battle resulted in stalemate and entrenchment, as the Allied and German troops, also fighting determined Russian forces in the east, literally and figuratively dug in for an uncertain future.53
The imperial scope of the war immediately became clear as Africa was pulled into the conflict. In early August, France and Great Britain, already imagining the colonial spoils of an Allied victory, had taken control of the German-held territories of Togoland and Cameroon. An invasion of British forces from South Africa, led by Louis Botha, into German South West Africa proved unsuccessful, but fighting continued. By September, German East Africa, the Kaiser’s most prized African colonial possession, also became a battleground, marked by the mobilization of native Black troops. Germany and Great Britain initially hesitated but ultimately assented to using Africans in combat against white soldiers. Yet they remained adamant against employing them on European soil, more attentive to the stability of racial hierarchy than to military necessity. France, on the other hand, decided to throw troops from its North and West African colonies into the killing fields of the Western Front. By 1915, red-capped tirailleurs were charging into the German lines, paying their blood tax for the privilege of being children of the empire.54
The African dimensions of the war sadly confirmed for Du Bois the dangers a German victory would incur to Black folk on the continent and beyond. He knew Germany well. As a young student at the University of Berlin, he had developed a profound reverence for German history, culture, and intellect. The experience also afforded him firsthand knowledge of the Deutsches Kaiserreich’s march toward autocracy, militarism, and empire. He’d taken classes with Heinrich von Treitschke, the acclaimed historian whom Du Bois described as “the very embodiment of united monarchical, armed, Germany.”55 He’d viewed the military parades and observed the Prussian gait of superiority with which the soldiers marched. It reminded him of the strut of the Southern white supremacist. In a curt October 9, 1914, letter to Moritz Schanz, a German diplomat who worked to propagandize his country’s imperial control of East Africa, Du Bois declared, without equivocation, “I regret to say that I believe Germany is responsible for the war.” He reminded Schanz of a recent statement produced by a group of “leading German scientists” who defended their nation’s conduct in fueling the crisis. “Germany will fight to the end as a cultured nation, which has the might of Goethe, Beethoven, and Kant,” they wrote, adding, “Those who associate with Russians and Servians and offer to the world the spectacle of letting loose mongrels and niggers on the white race have the least right to call themselves defenders of European civilization.”56 Although Du Bois held Goethe in the highest esteem, appreciated the beauty of Beethoven’s music, and relished fond memories of reading Kant alongside George Santayana at Harvard, his allegiances lay with the world’s Black folk, whose freedoms and aspirations were threatened by Germany. “I sincerely hope that your country will be thoroughly whipped,” he told Schanz.57
This exchange with Schanz took place just as Du Bois finished writing “World War and the Color Line” for the November 1914 issue of The Crisis, his first extensive published thoughts on the European calamity. “The present war in Europe is one of the great disasters due to race and color prejudice,” he warned readers, “and it but foreshadows greater disasters in the future.” He made clear that the loyalties of people of color must rest with the Allied nations of England, France, and Belgium, in spite of their own terrible colonial records. A victory by the Central Powers, he rationalized, would mean “the triumph of every force calculated to subordinate darker peoples” and elevate Germany, her dream of racial dominance and world conquest realized, to “one of the most contemptible of ‘Nigger’ hating nations.”58 Race and the global color line stood at the heart of the war’s origins. It was “not merely national jealousy” that prefigured the European bloodletting. Instead, Du Bois argued, the real causes of the war lay in “the wild quest for Imperial expansion among colored races between Germany, England and France primarily, and Belgium, Italy, Russia and Austria-Hungary in lesser degree.” Driving this was “a theory of the inferiority of the darker peoples and a contempt for their rights and aspirations” espoused by the United States and embraced the world over, which by 1914 had “become all but universal in the greatest centers of modern culture.”59
Du Bois put an even finer point on this argument for the May 1915 issue of The Atlantic Monthly in the essay “The African Roots of War.” “Yet in a very real sense Africa is a prime cause of this terrible overturning of civilization which we have lived to see,” he asserted. The 1884 Berlin Conference marked a new epoch in the history of Africa and Europe, as the partitioning of the continent—“contemptible and dishonest beyond expression”—and subsequent exploitation relied upon “lying treaties, rivers of rum, murder, assassination, mutilation, rape, and torture,” all in the name of “progress.” This new imperialism underwrote the maturation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century global capitalism. What made this development unique, Du Bois analyzed, was the complicity between the “captains of industry” and the “white workingman” in race prejudice and “exploiting ‘chinks and niggers.’” With other economic spheres of influence already claimed or deemed not as profitable, the “white European mind” fixated on Africa. “The greater the concentration, the more deadly the rivalry,” Du Bois wrote. The result, he argued, was the World War, a tangle of national jealousies and suspicions arising from the “spoils of trade-empire” and the desire for expansion, “not in Europe but in Asia, and particularly in Africa.”60
Du Bois painted a bleak picture. The war served as Europe’s reckoning. Africa and the darker races suffered the collateral damage. What, then, did the future hold? How could those committed to peace, like Du Bois, “remove the real causes of war”?
Democracy was the answer. “We must extend the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples,” he faithfully declared. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century expansion of democracy beyond the realm of the ruling elite, a remarkable development in world history, also coincided with slavery, disfranchisement, empire, and the doctrine of white supremacy. The nations of the West, therefore, faced a decision. “Suppose we have to choose between this unspeakably inhuman outrage on decency and intelligence and religion which we call the World War and the attempt to treat black men as human, sentient, responsible beings?” Du Bois believed that the answer was obvious, and that it could be done. “Democracy is a method of doing the impossible,” he mused. The impossible meant providing African peoples with land, education, and political autonomy. They also needed uplift and leadership. For this, Du Bois looked to the diaspora, “the twenty-five million grandchildren of the European slave trade, spread through the Americas and now writhing desperately for freedom and a place in the world,” and, first and foremost, “the ten million black folk of the United States, now a problem, then a world-salvation.” A future Black world, born out of the war, shaped by democratic ideals, and led by enlightened African Americans—like himself—riveted his imagination.
* * *
DU BOIS CONTINUED TO closely monitor the war as it spilled into 1915. He had the aid of a personal war correspondent in his wife, Nina, whose letters home, mostly expressing her loneliness and need for additional money, contained periodic impressions of events in London. Basic everyday items grew more scarce; German attacks on merchant vessels increased in regularity; shell-shocked convalescing soldiers became a regular sight.61 “Every where one turns are troops,” Nina remarked in a May 15 letter three weeks into the Second Battle of Ypres, the first use by Germany of poison gas on the Western Front. “I passed a hospital where there seemed to be such numbers of wounded soldiers some sitting out some on cots, the losses have been very heavy on both sides of late.”62
The decision by Germany to conduct air raids on London brought the war to terrifyingly close proximity. Around 11:00 p.m. on the night of May 31, a 650-foot German zeppelin appeared over North London and released more than 120 incendiary bombs and grenades on mostly residential neighborhoods. Flames consumed forty-one buildings, and left seven people dead and another thirty-five wounded. The campaign continued into June.63 “I’ve seen several bombs, two from the recent raids on London,” Nina wrote that month. She professed to not being afraid, believing the Germans would opt for more important targets than where she resided; nevertheless, she acknowledged, “they don’t always hit where they aim to.”64
The May 7, 1915, sinking of the RMS Lusitania offered tragic evidence that the Atlantic Ocean would not buffer America from the war’s destructive reach. “Isn’t the sinking of the Lusitania dreadful,” Nina wrote to her husband. After being torpedoed by a German U-boat, the British ocean liner sank in just eighteen minutes, killing 1,198 passengers, including 128 American citizens. President Woodrow Wilson responded to an outraged public calling for the United States to declare war on Germany, arguing, “There is such a thing as a man being too proud to fight. There is such a thing as a nation being so right that it does not need to convince others by force that it is right.”65 Meanwhile, Nina watched as demonstrations erupted in the streets of London. Signs reading DO NOTHING AMERICA in large letters plastered the windows of buses. “I wonder what the Germans will do next,” she pondered.66
Whatever subsequent atrocities followed, Du Bois’s judgment of the war, as he revealed in the June 1915 Crisis editorial “Lusitania,” had now been set in stone. “The last horror of a horrible war is come! It puts a period to what we have already said: European civilization has failed.” He raged at the hypocrisy of those who decried the actions of Germany on the high seas while remaining silent about the rape, mutilation, and exploitation of Black and brown people across the globe: “The Great War is the lie unveiled.” From the moral high ground as the European civil war raged below, Du Bois proclaimed, “It is a great privilege in the midst of this frightful catastrophe to belong to a race that can stand before Heaven with clean hands and say: we have not oppressed, we have been oppressed; we are not thieves, we are victims; we are not murderers, we are lynched!”67
While Du Bois stayed busy in New York, managing The Crisis and writing scorching editorials, Yolande, an ocean away at the Bedales school, missed her papa. “I haven’t had a letter from you for years,” she wrote in June, jokingly but with enough somberness to betray her emotional needs. Even with her mother nearby, being a young Black girl in a foreign country was a disorienting experience. The presence of the war undoubtedly heightened her anxieties. “Do you think America will join in the war, don’t you think she ought to?” she asked her father. “I do.”68
Du Bois did not offer his daughter an answer. He instead reminded Yolande to stay focused on the “interesting worlds” buried within her books.69 However, her question, as well as how African Americans should respond if the United States entered the war, no doubt weighed heavily on his mind. The national Preparedness Movement, led by the former president Theodore Roosevelt and his fellow Spanish-Cuban-American War “Rough Rider” General Leonard Wood, gained momentum after the sinking of the Lusitania. Woodrow Wilson held firm to a policy of American neutrality but grudgingly agreed to increase the size of the military and officer corps with the June 1916 National Defense Act. Du Bois, in heart and principle, sided with such anti-militarists and peace advocates as the NAACP cofounder Jane Addams.70 At the same time, he recognized the importance of reminding African Americans that the war, while perhaps geographically distant, held important implications for the race in both the present and the future.
Du Bois used The Crisis to keep readers fully abreast of the war and its significance for the Black world. He gave special attention to the African dimensions of the conflict, noting the service of colonial troops, particularly those in the French Army. The image of Black West Africans fighting for France and against German autocracy on European soil fascinated him.71 Photos of the tirailleurs sénégalais, accompanied by provocative subheadings—such as “Black soldiers from Senegal fighting to protect the civilization of Europe from itself” and “Negro Senegalese, of the French colonial troops, delivering a harangue to a group of German prisoners”—appeared regularly in The Crisis from late 1914 to early 1917.72
Pictures and stories of the “Buffalo Soldiers” of the United States Regular Army rang more familiar to readers. As Jim Crow, disfranchisement, and mob violence had rendered most African Americans second-class citizens, the presence and meaning of Black troops in the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the Twenty-Fourth and Twenty-Fifth Infantry became especially important. Black men made up ten percent of a standing Regular Army that numbered only twenty-five thousand prior to World War I. Through heroic service in Cuba, the Philippines, and across the American West, they staked claim to the United States and their manhood, albeit in the name of empire and at the expense of the lives of indigenous peoples and other darker races.73 Since 1868, nineteen Black soldiers had received the Medal of Honor.74 Looking past their contradictions and choosing to focus on what they meant for the cause of African American progress, Du Bois extolled the Black Regulars in Crisis articles with photos, updates on their whereabouts, and profiles as “Men of the Month.” As evocative symbols, they represented citizenship, Black masculinity, and leadership, the fighting arm of Du Bois’s Talented Tenth.
The summer of 1916 found some of the Buffalo Soldiers in Mexico. The United States, asserting its hemispheric dominance, had meddled in the Mexican Revolution since its start in 1910. The Wilson administration formally recognized Venustiano Carranza as leader of the country, in the process betraying Carranza’s adversary and former American ally, Francisco “Pancho” Villa. Aggrieved and in need of supplies, Villa and his men conducted a daring raid on Columbus, New Mexico, on March 9, 1916, resulting in the deaths of eighteen American soldiers and civilians. Wilson promptly responded by ordering a “Punitive Expedition” to track down Villa and bring him to justice. On March 15, General John J. Pershing led roughly ten thousand hastily assembled American troops across the border.75
“Black Jack” Pershing’s expeditionary force included his former unit, the Tenth Cavalry, now officered by Major Charles Young. Young towered as the highest-ranking African American in the United States Army. Born in Kentucky in 1864, he had military service in his blood. Young’s father, Gabriel, escaped from slavery and briefly served in the Union Army at the tail end of the Civil War. In 1884, Young enrolled at the venerable and thoroughly racist West Point Military Academy. Enduring insult and isolation, he graduated in 1889, only the third African American to do so. His varied and distinguished career began with the Ninth Cavalry and, in 1894, with an assignment at Wilberforce University to serve as professor of military science and tactics.76
Du Bois arrived at Wilberforce that same year.77 The two men initially bonded over their shared disdain for the school’s Christmastime religious revival services, but soon found they had other things in common.78 They possessed similar tastes in music and literature. Both were fiercely disciplined, determined to defy stereotypes, and committed to shattering barriers when it came to their careers, Du Bois in academics and Young in the military. Indeed, Du Bois, educated at Harvard and the University of Berlin, could appreciate as few others Young’s lonely battle to demonstrate his ability in a white supremacist army. Most important, the two trailblazers held a deep commitment to uplifting the race. Young, “silent, uncomplaining, brave, and efficient,” as Du Bois described him, stood as a fitting model of Black leadership—for African Americans but also for Du Bois personally.79 Young possessed a type of rugged Black masculinity that the highbrow doctor from Great Barrington, long an admirer of martial figures, deeply respected.80 Du Bois, socially awkward and shy by nature, found in Young his first true male friend.81
The bonds between the two men grew over the years. They confided in each other, with Young revealing the pain he experienced during his isolating time at West Point and Du Bois sharing the hurt of being the subject of Black New York gossip circles related to his aloof personality and the stability of his marriage.82 Nina Du Bois and Young’s wife, Ada, also spent time together. In June and July 1915, Ada and her two children, Charles Noel and Marie Aurelia, visited Nina and Yolande in London. Charles wrote to Nina, wishing her well and expressing gratitude that she remained safely beyond the reach of “that beastly war.”83
Along with being a dear friend and a personal hero, Young was a powerful symbol for Du Bois. The editor chronicled every achievement of Young’s illustrious career, which seemed to hold no limit.84 After the Spanish-Cuban-American War disrupted his teaching at Wilberforce, Young returned to the Ninth Cavalry, this time as a captain. The February 1912 issue of The Crisis featured Captain Young on the cover, dignified in his uniform, officer bars proudly displayed. He served in a number of places throughout the country and world in service of America’s empire—in California as superintendent of national parks, in the Philippines to help secure the U.S. occupation, in Haiti and Liberia as a military attaché—and ascended to the rank of major. A handsome full-page photo in the January 1916 Crisis listed his accomplishments.85 To the questions “Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both?” that Du Bois had asked in the 1897 essay “The Conservation of Races” and echoed in The Souls of Black Folk, Charles Young seemingly and without contradiction answered yes.86
Further validation of Young’s importance came on the evening of February 22, 1916, in Boston, when he accepted the NAACP Spingarn Medal. Du Bois played a pivotal role in making sure that Young became the second recipient of the prestigious award, named after Du Bois’s closest white comrade, Joel Spingarn.87 Twenty-five hundred friends, family, well-wishers, and admirers, among them the governor of Massachusetts, filled the Tremont Temple in downtown Boston, across the street from where Crispus Attucks and other heroes of the American Revolution lay buried and memorialized. Young humbly accepted the award, assuring the crowd that if and when the country needed his services, he would be “Jonny on the spot.”88 An untimely train wreck in Connecticut delayed Du Bois, preventing him from attending the ceremony. However, he reunited with his friend the next day in New York City, where, over dinner, they celebrated Du Bois’s forty-eighth birthday and toasted to the next chapter in Young’s military career.89
Du Bois further atoned for missing the Spingarn medal fete with a tribute in the March 1916 Crisis simply and appropriately titled “Young.” At the height of his profession, “strongly built, and physically fit” with a “certain unusually fine quality of spirit,” Young was more than deserving of the NAACP’s highest award. He had endured many challenges and come face-to-face with death, but, as Du Bois wrote, he survived, and, alluding to the possibility of America entering the World War, stood “ready for further sacrifices.”90
* * *
BY THE SUMMER OF 1916, few people could question Du Bois’s stature as Black America’s foremost thinker and leader. On November 15 of the preceding year, Booker T. Washington had died at the age of fifty-nine, his overworked heart finally giving out. The influence of the Tuskegee principal had gradually eroded since the founding of the Niagara Movement and its progeny, the NAACP. Washington’s death, Du Bois accurately deduced, marked an “epoch in the history of America” and the history of the Black freedom struggle. Du Bois opted for magnanimity in noting the passing of his adversary, writing in a Crisis eulogy, “He was the greatest Negro leader since Frederick Douglass, and the most distinguished man, white or black, who has come out of the South since the Civil War.” While acknowledging Washington’s “mistakes and shortcomings,” Du Bois wrote that the times did not call for “recrimination or complaint.” Instead, he encouraged Black people in America and throughout the world to “close ranks and march steadily on” toward their ultimate goal of freedom, equality, and justice.91 With his chief rival gone from the stage, it was Du Bois’s time to lead.
The first real test of his call for unity occurred in August 1916 at Amenia, New York. “There was war in Europe,” he recalled of the moment, “but a war far, far away.” Although he had discussed it, in his words, “from time to time with a calm detachment,” his mind remained focused on the “battle in America, that war of colors which we who are black always sense as the principal thing in life.” Successfully fighting that battle required a unified front. Joel Spingarn had conceived the idea for a gathering at his Troutbeck estate in Amenia, where, Du Bois remembered, “colored and white men of all shades of opinion might sit down and rest and talk and agree on many things if not on all.”92
When it came to conceptualizing and organizing the conference, Du Bois assumed the reins. He developed the agenda and carefully managed an ambitious interracial list of two hundred invitees that included the current and former presidents Wilson, Taft, and Roosevelt, who each declined.93 Ultimately, fifty-five men and women representing a broad geographical and ideological cross-section of the racial uplift spectrum confirmed their attendance.94
The most prominent member of the Tuskegee camp to accept Du Bois’s invitation was Emmett Jay Scott. In 1897, the native Texan, with a background in journalism, had landed the plum job of private secretary to Booker T. Washington. He made himself indispensable and soon became Washington’s most trusted confidant, effectively serving as the brains and cunning behind-the-scenes architect of the Tuskegee Machine. He was also one of Du Bois’s slyest foes, using his connections in the Black press to undermine first the Niagara Movement and then the NAACP. After Washington’s death in 1915, Scott envisioned succeeding the Wizard, but Robert Russa Moton, from sister school Hampton Institute, was selected for the position. While disappointed by the snub, Scott remained loyal to Tuskegee, as his presence at Amenia in Moton’s place reflected.95
Reminiscing in 1925, Du Bois ascribed mystical qualities to Joel Spingarn’s rural Troutbeck manor and its sprawling property. “I had no sooner seen the place than I knew it was mine,” he recollected of his arrival on the cool, misty morning of August 24. The “same slow, rocky uplift of land, the nestle of lake and the sturdy murmur of brooks and brown rivers,” and the “blue and mysterious mountains” in the distance transported him back to his beloved Berkshire Hills. Du Bois and Spingarn breathed a sigh of relief as participants—Emmett Scott, the Morehouse College president John Hope, Mary Church Terrell of the National Association of Colored Women, the New York Age editor Fred Moore, and others—slowly began to filter in and locate their assigned canvas tents spread out across the lawn. The rustic settings made for a congenial atmosphere and helped thaw icy relationships hardened by years of ideological conflict. Soon, Du Bois fondly remembered, they were all having a “rollicking jolly time.” Between games of tennis, swims in the lake, leisurely hikes in the surrounding forest, and great meals—“miraculously steaming and perfectly cooked”—the gathered spokesmen and women of the race attended to business. They talked openly and frankly. By the last day, August 26, they came away with a balanced platform that called for “political freedom,” the right to “all forms of education,” and recognition of “the peculiar difficulties” facing Black people in the South. Achieving these goals would necessitate a “practical working understanding among the leaders of the colored race” and the elimination of “antiquated subjects of controversy, ancient suspicions and factional alignments.” Amenia, they hoped, would only be the first of many similar gatherings in the future.96
Years later, Du Bois reflected, “Probably on account of our meeting the Negro race was more united and more ready to meet the problems of the world than it could possibly have been without these beautiful days of understanding.”97 Brimming with confidence as he returned to New York City, he felt that no challenge, even war, was too large to tackle.98
He was not, however, prepared to confront the possibility of death. A kidney stone ailed him throughout the summer. The pain had become bad enough to briefly incapacitate him during the lead-up to Amenia. By December, his condition was unbearable and required surgery. On the morning of December 15, 1916, doctors at St. Luke’s Hospital prepared Du Bois for an operation on his left kidney. A nervous Joel Spingarn sent his family physician to be present, “in order to make certain,” as he wrote to Du Bois in the days leading up to the procedure, “that every advantage of medical science would be placed at your disposal.”99 Surgeons successfully removed the stone. However, the blockage, undiagnosed for ten years, had left the organ irreparably damaged. After two weeks of consultation, doctors recommended the kidney’s immediate removal. A second, more serious, surgery was scheduled for January 4.100
“They brought him down from the operating table at 1:30,” Joel Spingarn wrote. The surgery, as Du Bois modestly described it, was “rather delicate.”101 Spingarn later visited, finding Du Bois asleep. The nurse offered words of reassurance. “He is unconscious, and we cannot tell yet,” she said, “but he seems to have stood the operation pretty well.” As Spingarn left the hospital, Du Bois’s fate uncertain, he worried for his friend, but also wondered what it would mean “for twelve million people if this champion of theirs were not permitted to live.”102 NAACP colleagues and much of the Talented Tenth across the country held their collective breath, awaiting word of Du Bois’s condition.103
For nearly three weeks, “shrouded by the curtains of pain,” he convalesced. Recalling the ordeal in typically dramatic prose, Du Bois “looked death in the face and found its lineaments not unkind. But it was not my time.”104 Day by day he improved, and by January 20 he was up on his feet and moving about. On January 22 he left St. Luke’s Hospital, “apparently as strong as ever, if not stronger, for the fight ahead.”105
* * *
BY THE END OF January 1917, as Du Bois, having eluded death and fully recovered, eased back into his work at The Crisis, Woodrow Wilson agonized over the increasing likelihood of America going to war. Du Bois initially came to know and respect the Southern-born Wilson, who held a Ph.D. in history and government, as an academic.106 He used Wilson’s popular 1889 textbook The State in his civil government classes at Atlanta University,107 and he shared with Wilson a deep fascination with the history and ultimate potential of American democracy. “Democracy is a principle with us, not a mere form of government,” Wilson wrote in a 1901 Atlantic Monthly article. “It is for this that we love democracy: for the emphasis it puts on character; for its tendency to exalt the purposes of the average man to some high level of endeavor; for its just principle of common assent in matters in which all are concerned; for its ideals of duty and its sense of brotherhood.”108 However, the two scholars, both shaped in radically different ways by the color line, held polar opposite views on race, history, and the full inclusion of Black people in the nation’s democracy.109
In spite of these faults, Du Bois saw reasons for optimism in Woodrow Wilson the elected officeholder, having followed his public career as president of Princeton University and as governor of New Jersey. He came to view the reform-minded Democrat as a “new type of politician.” When Wilson decided to seek the presidency in 1912, promising “justice executed with liberality and cordial good feeling” for his “colored fellow-citizens,” Du Bois, in a leap of faith, resigned his brief one-year membership in the Socialist Party and threw his weight behind Wilson’s candidacy.110 “On the whole, we do not believe that Woodrow Wilson admires Negroes,” Du Bois wrote in his Crisis endorsement. But he still considered him “a cultivated scholar” with “brains” and not fanatically committed to white supremacy like other Southern Democrats.111 After Wilson handily defeated the former president Theodore Roosevelt, who was running as a third-party Progressive, and the incumbent, William Howard Taft, Du Bois penned a firm, yet hopeful open letter to the new commander in chief. “Your inauguration to the Presidency of the United States is to the colored people, to the white South and to the nation a momentous occasion,” he wrote in The Crisis, adding that Wilson held the potential “to become the greatest benefactor of his country since Abraham Lincoln.”112
The folly of Du Bois’s belief in Wilson soon became embarrassingly clear. Consistent with most Southern progressives, Wilson viewed Jim Crow as the most efficient means of addressing the “race question.”113 He thus put up no resistance as his cabinet, dominated by fellow Democrats from the South, diligently began segregating the federal government, starting with the Treasury and the Postal Service. Moreover, with the ghosts of Reconstruction still looming, the desire for a clean, corruption-free civil service by Wilson and his administration came at the expense of Black employees, the majority of them Republicans who had traditionally benefited from a long-standing patronage system. Good government meant a white government. Emboldened Southern congressional Democrats advanced a host of virulently racist measures, including a federal anti-miscegenation law. Although Wilson opposed these rabid expressions of white supremacy, his more genteel version was ultimately no less devastating for African Americans in Washington and beyond, both tangibly and symbolically.114
Adam Patterson became one of the Wilson administration’s most prominent Black victims. Patterson had come a long way from the small town of Walthall, Mississippi, where he was born on December 23, 1876. Ambition carried him to the University of Kansas, where he earned a law degree in 1900. He began practicing in Colorado, before eventually settling in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in 1904. Taking advantage of Muskogee’s vibrant Black community of post-Reconstruction Exodusters, Patterson made a name for himself in both law and real estate. The move also served as an opportunity for reinvention, as he listed himself and his wife, Nellie, as white on the 1910 census. His willingness to bend the rules of race was also reflected in his politics, as he counted himself among the small national population of Black Democrats, calculating that a break from the Republican Party would translate to political and financial reward. He aggressively stumped for Wilson in 1912, winning the favor of local and state white Democratic politicians, including Senator Thomas Gore. As a result of these efforts, he received a nomination for the post of register of the Treasury, a position that, since Reconstruction, had traditionally been given to an African American.115
He immediately found himself in a hornet’s nest. The previous Black register of the Treasury, James Napier, had nobly resigned in protest over the newly elected president’s policy of racial segregation for all federal employees. The Black press looked askance at Patterson when he agreed to accept the humiliation of Jim Crow as a condition of the post, while, at the same time, white supremacists in and outside Congress furiously opposed his nomination. Rumors circulated that he would be assassinated if ever confirmed.116 Overwhelmed, yet still hoping to remain in the good graces of white Democrats, Patterson withdrew his name, wanting, as he wrote to Wilson, not to “embarrass your administration, Mr. President.”117
Patterson’s public withdrawal and unwillingness to fight for the post earned him a savage beating in the Black press. The Topeka Plaindealer accused him of “laying down,” while The Washington Bee described him as “a man with a child’s mind.”118 Du Bois offered his thoughts in a blistering editorial, “Another Open Letter to Woodrow Wilson,” penned for the September 1913 issue of The Crisis. After just six months, Du Bois fumed, “It is no exaggeration to say that every enemy of the Negro race is greatly encouraged” and scolded Wilson that “not a single act and not a single word of yours since election has given anyone reason to infer that you have the slightest interest in the colored people or desire to alleviate their intolerable position.” He decried the removal of “worthy Negro officials” from the federal government while noting that the only Black man put up for office—Adam Patterson—was “a contemptible cur” whose nomination “was an insult to every Negro in the land.”119
The Patterson embarrassment numbered only one of many points Du Bois made in his scathing critique of the president. He specifically targeted Wilson’s actions in segregating the federal government, writing, “The policy adopted, whether with your consent or knowledge or not, is an indefensible attack on a people who have in the past been shamefully humiliated … We have appealed in the past, Mr. Wilson, to you as a man and statesman; to your sense of fairness and broad cosmopolitan outlook on the world. We renew this appeal and to it we venture to add some plain considerations of political expediency.” Du Bois’s plea made little difference, as the unmitigated racial disaster of the Wilson presidency continued to unfold. Despite the best efforts of the NAACP’s Washington branch to fight the onslaught on the city’s Black professional community, the segregation of federal employees continued apace, further aided by a 1914 directive requiring all civil service applicants to provide photo identification.
The 1915 film The Birth of a Nation was like salt to an open wound. Directed by D. W. Griffith and based on the book The Clansman, written by Wilson’s former Johns Hopkins classmate Thomas Dixon, the film offered a simultaneously enthralling and grotesque rendering of the Civil War and Reconstruction era, replete with full glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. The film premiered on February 8, in Los Angeles. Ten days later, on February 18, Wilson did Dixon the favor of hosting a special screening in the East Room of the White House. Wilson professed to be “entirely unaware of the character of the play” and never offered a full public endorsement. However, the fact that he remained silent in the face of national protests—the most vociferous led by William Monroe Trotter—and offered no objections to Griffith’s out-of-context quotes from his 1902 book, A History of the American People, conveyed a White House stamp of approval.120 The Birth of a Nation became the first national blockbuster, with white audiences across the country enraptured and enraged by the visual and musical spectacle. On November 25, inspired by the film, a small group of white Georgians, led by an itinerant preacher, William Joseph Simmons, ascended Stone Mountain on the outskirts of Atlanta, burned a cross, and inaugurated the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan.121
Predictably, lynching and mob violence continued and became even more spectacular. On May 15, 1916, in Waco, Texas, a white mob of more than ten thousand participants reveled in the burning and mutilation of Jesse Washington, a Black farmhand accused of rape and murder. Washington was one of at least fifty Black people lynched in 1916. Wilsonian white supremacy was not confined to American soil. When U.S. Marines had disembarked at Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on July 28, 1915, Du Bois initially hoped to leverage Wilson’s invasion to spread democracy and credible leadership to the hemisphere’s only Black republic. However, the American occupation quickly became marred by racist brutality and economic exploitation.122 As the 1916 presidential election neared, African Americans had no reason whatsoever to support Wilson. On October 16, Du Bois received a tepid letter from the White House secretary Joseph Tumulty, who remarked that his boss could “say with a clear conscience” that he tried to live up to his “original assurances” to African Americans from four years earlier.123 Du Bois would not be duped again. “No intelligent Negro can vote for Woodrow Wilson,” he declared in The Crisis.124
In the months immediately following Wilson’s razor-thin reelection, American neutrality regarding the World War quickly became untenable. Wilson successfully campaigned on his accomplishment in keeping the United States out of the conflict and began to actively push for an American-brokered peace settlement. The February 1, 1917, resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare—a high-risk calculation by Germany that they could inflict enough damage on British vessels to end the war before the United States had time to enter and make a difference—ended those hopes. Wilson broke off diplomatic relations and began to seriously weigh the possibility of the United States joining the carnage.
A top-secret telegram from the German secretary of foreign affairs, Arthur Zimmermann, to the German ambassador to Mexico eliminated any lingering doubt in Wilson’s mind. In the telegram, originally sent on January 16 and intercepted by British intelligence, Zimmermann acknowledged the likelihood of American entry into the war. In that case, Zimmermann proposed that Germany and Mexico form an alliance to “make war together, make peace together,” with the ultimate prize upon victory and settlement the reacquisition of the land encompassing Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona lost in the Mexican-American War and the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. When informed by the U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, Walter Hines Page, of the communication, Wilson was furious. He decided to release it to the public. On March 1, the telegram appeared on newspaper front pages across the country to howls of outrage.125
Wilson’s inauguration speech just four days later reflected the changed reality of America’s involvement in the European maelstrom. “We are provincials no longer,” the president somberly told his fellow Americans, who now had to view themselves as “citizens of the world.” He agonized over the possibility of war, realizing the potentially horrendous consequences. The principle of staying out of European conflicts, sacrosanct since George Washington and the founding of the republic, was outdated. “There can be no turning back,” Wilson said. “Our own fortunes as a nation are involved whether we would have it so or not.”126
On the rainy evening of April 2, Wilson made the mile-long trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to address a special joint session of Congress. He’d requested the opportunity to discuss “grave matters of national policy.” As he approached the podium, anticipation and tension filled the House chamber. Reading carefully from his typewritten speech, point by point, he methodically laid out the case for war, arguing that the burden had been thrust upon the United States. America now had a solemn duty that went beyond its own narrow national interests and self-preservation.
Then he uttered the words that would frame the nation’s purpose and capture the imagination of millions in the United States and beyond: “The world must be made safe for democracy.” Scattered applause gradually rose to a crescendo. “We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.” He acknowledged the danger ahead. “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.” Nevertheless, he asserted, “the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest to our hearts—for democracy … for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.” Upon concluding his speech, Wilson returned to the White House and, with the gravity of his decision bearing down on him, burst into tears.127
Two days later, on April 4, the United States Senate overwhelmingly approved the president’s declaration of war. The House of Representatives followed suit in the early-morning hours of April 6. Later that afternoon, Wilson etched his signature on the succinct and open-ended resolution that granted him the power to “employ the entire naval and military forces of the United States and the resources of the Government to carry on war against the Imperial German Government.”128
“I believe in the Prince of Peace. I believe that War is Murder. I believe that armies and navies are at bottom the tinsel and braggadocio of oppression and wrong; and I believe that the wicked conquest of weaker and darker nations by nations whiter and stronger but foreshadows the death of that strength.”129 These principles lay at the heart of Du Bois’s “Credo,” the poetic articulation of his core values published in 1904. He still believed what he wrote. Now the time had arrived to test his convictions, not just in theory but in the actual crucible of war.130
Du Bois’s opposition to war and military service was not unconditional. He valorized Black soldiers and archetypes like Charles Young as embodying the best manhood of the race. Moreover, Du Bois understood war as an engine of potentially revolutionary social, political, and economic change for the colonized and racially oppressed.131 He needed only to look back to the Civil War, when African Americans, with Black soldiers at the liberatory tip of the Union Army’s spear, gained their freedom. As Du Bois’s hero and model of racial leadership, Frederick Douglass, famously said in an 1863 recruiting speech, “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S.; let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on the earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.”132 Du Bois could imagine this possibility on an even grander scale. The war presented not only the opportunity for African Americans to claim their full civic rights but also the chance to remake democracy and expand it to all peoples of African descent.
Thus, with a mix of resignation, pragmatism, patriotism, and hope, he voiced his support for America’s entry into the war. In the May edition of The Crisis, the first appearing after Woodrow Wilson’s declaration, Du Bois echoed the president’s sorrow about stepping into the global catastrophe. “War! It is an awful thing!” he wrote. “It is Hell. It is the end of civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism.” And, like Wilson, he wished for the end result to be a world “where war shall be no more.” African Americans, even in the face of persecution and degradation, would do their part. Duty, to nation and to the higher righteousness of their cause, necessitated that they “fight shoulder to shoulder with the world.” He offered a comparison, however imperfect, with the English suffragists who, in August 1914, “did not hesitate when war came” and, “although bowed beneath age-long insult and injustice,” offered their patriotic service to the nation. “So will we black men fight against Germany for America,” he declared. “God grant us freedom, too, in the end.”133
War had come. And Du Bois stood ready to lead his people into battle.
Copyright © 2023 by Chad Williams
