Books like W.E.B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919

This is a biography that actually merits the “magisterial” among its blurbs, the kind of book that shows biography second only to the novel for difficulty of organization and effect. As epigraph to the first of the five volumes he would devote to the life of Henry James, Leon Edel quoted a line from his subject’s rare foray into biography (William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 1903):To live other people’s lives is nothing unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the change, the varying intensity of the same—since it was by these things they themselves lived.Du Bois began his intellectual life in the 1870s, a prodigious New England preteen saving odd job money to buy Macaulay’s History of England on an installment plan—and died in 1963, a Pan-Africanist Marxist with a villa in Accra, capital of newly-independent Ghana, and a chauffeured limousine provided by the Soviet embassy. So yeah, Lewis had a lot of ground to cover, plenty of change “to live over.” Du Bois requires two +500 page volumes (this is the first) in which Lewis synchronizes his subject’s restless ninety-five years with an account of the turbulent modernity he inhabited and strove so variously to interpret. This book is full of fascinating microhistories. Every page is dense, chewy with a trenchant portrait or ideological summary or sketch of socio-political context; the history of the United States from Andrew Johnson to Lyndon Johnson, from the Civil War in which Du Bois’s father fought to the Vietnam War he predicted and denounced a decade in advance; imperialism, Gilded Age economics, race and class dynamics, assimilation and separatism, Eurocentrism and Afrocentrism, Bismarck and Négritude, German philosophy, Romantic Nationalism, and every stripe of social thought. In some people egoism is a revelation of spirit; Du Bois’ life is a political and intellectual history of the twentieth century. Things I learned, stuff I was prompted to recall, random notes:1. At Harvard Du Bois read The Critique of Pure Reason with Santayana—not under him, with him. Just hangin’ out. 2. At Harvard Du Bois was a star student of William James, who sent The Souls of Black Folk to Henry, who admired it and invited Du Bois to conclude his 1909 bicycle tour of the Lake District with a visit to Rye House. They never did meet. But James-Santayana is the missed friendship of American Letters.3. After former U.S. president Rutherford B. Hayes publicly questioned the relevance of higher education to blacks, the undergraduate Du Bois wrote him a stern letter in which he told Hayes that he “owed an apology to the Negro People.” This was particularly egregious of Hayes, who at the time was trustee of a black college fund, and particularly ballsy of Du Bois, whose application to that same fund—he wanted a doctorate from a German university; Herr doktor, the prestigious credential of the era—was pending. Hayes was impressed and Du Bois got his grant. Du Bois studied political economy at the University of Berlin, wrote a dissertation comparing the black American peasantry with the Eastern European variety; drank in beer gardens, romanced shop girls, hiked throughout Austra-Hungary, thrilled at Prussian military parades, and affected the upturned points of Wilhelmine mustache. 4. Du Bois was labeled a “dangerous man” by another president, Teddy Roosevelt, for his “freewheeling, militant” editorship of the NAACP magazine, The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races (I love that subtitle; Du Bois ran plenty of pride-instilling Nubian images on the cover; my aunt has several sets of Sphinx-head bookends). When the Justice Department formed its Bureau of Investigation in 1908, Du Bois’ was an inaugural dossier, henceforth a rite of passage for African-American leaders. The white establishment was quite dismayed that by 1914 many American blacks had turned away from the earthy, humble, accommodating, vo-tech vice-principal Booker T. Washington, to listen at the feet of this “sociologist turned propagandist,” a colleague of Weber and Durkheim who could provoke like an old school Abolitionist, who had put aside brilliant historical work and foundational contributions to the new sociology to rake American pretentions up and down, in sermonic editorials of a grandly indignant style, a lynchable sass—“When it was not hurling thunderbolts, The Crisis dripped acid, issue after issue. Mordant observations and gratuitous asides filled its pages”—that needled even whites on the NAACP board and made Du Bois a hero to blacks, who named children, learned societies and even a brand of cigars after him. Du Bois died the night before the March on Washington; when Sidney Poitier and James Baldwin, standing around a hotel lobby, got the news that "the Old Man is dead," they didn't need to be told who he was. 5. Booker T. Washington’s power was a function of educational funding. In the absence of a federal Dept. of Education, national funding for higher education was in the hands of robber baron philanthropies. Washington had the philanthropic ear and whispered that blacks were rooted to the peasant soil of the south, uninterested in demanding rights that would upset the southern caste system, or in education beyond that of mechanics and menials, carpenters and cooks. Black liberal-arts colleges, like Du Bois’s alma mater Fisk and periodic hub Atlanta University, were left to wither on the vine; the trustees of the Rockefeller and Carnegie education monies wanted to see such institutions literally perish.6. Washington’s lackeydom extended throughout the black press—he attempted to disrupt the forming of NAACP, then a cutting-edge attempt at interracial civil rights action, by planting lurid news stories about the fraternization of black men and white women in the ranks of the new organization, a specter he thought sure to enrage popular sentiment. Washington could also advance or quash federal civil service appointments of blacks due to his pull with Republican administrations, and was a pretty smooth bureaucratic operator, buying off potential dissenters with plum posts; although to his credit he also secretly funded early legal efforts against the imposition of Jim Crow—secret because his white backers would not have been cool with that.7. At philanthropic conclaves Washington would warm up the crowd with “darkie jokes” and savage lampoons of citified “college negroes.” That ridicule still echoes. I wonder if he used a super-nerdy “white voice” when doing Du Bois.8. Washington is the quintessence of Uncle Tomism, a representative man of southern caste. Uncle Toms don’t like whites, as is commonly thought, but fear and distrust them, and so resort to obsequious accommodation as a way of staying out of the cross-hairs. They fawn and flatter but are extremely angry. Southern mores—backed up by the rope, the pyre, the castrating blade—exacted a degree of Tomism from all blacks, especially men. Washington’s relevance waned when it became clear that the progress of the race was in the north. His assault by a street tough while out whoring, and his incapacitation and slow death from what looked like syphilis, weakened his standing also. 9. Du Bois and Jack Johnson show pride and egoism in heroic, visionary dimensions. They exemplify unintimidated blackness at the post-emancipation high noon of white supremacy. The love of beat-downs and the poses of a frosty hauteur never looked so good. And both were sharp dressers. 10. Newly arrived, cash-strapped Vladimir Nabokov did a lot of peripatetic lecturing in the early 1940s, and was a great favorite at black colleges in the south. He always brought down the house by declaring Pushkin the striking example of what mankind can achieve when the races are allowed to freely mingle. In the fall of 1942 he met Du Bois and recorded his impression in a letter to Edmund Wilson: Celebrated Negro scholar and organizer. 70 years old, but looks 50. Dusky face, grizzled goatee, nice wrinkles, big ears—prodigiously like a White Russian General in mufti played sympathetically by Emil Jannings. Piebald hands. Brilliant talker, with an old-world touch. Très gentilhomme. Smokes special Turkish cigarettes. Charming and distinguished in other, more important, ways. Told me that when he went to England he was listed as “Colonel” on the Channel boat, because his name bore the addition “Col.” on his passport.