Du Bois’s “A World Search for Democracy”: The Democratic Roots of Socialism

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Notes

1. W.E.B. Du Bois (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. A World Search for Democracy, ca. 1937. W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries. The most complete version of the manuscript, apparently meant for the publisher, has handwritten numbers I will use in identifying quotations. Fragmentary sections of the manuscript—most likely earlier drafts—found elsewhere among Du Bois’s papers will be identified by their box number for easier reference.

2. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (NY: Henry Holt, 2000), 389.

3. Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W.E.B. Du Bois, Volume II, Selections, 1934-1944 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1976), 137.

4. Including Black Folk Then and Now (NY: Kraus Thomson, 1939) and the Autobiography (NY: International Publishers, 1968).

5. W.E.B. Du Bois (William Edward Burghardt), 1868-1963. Letter from W.E.B. Du Bois to Eva Knox Evans, March 10, 1937. W.E.B. Du Bois Papers (MS 312). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.

6. Nahum Dimitri Chandler, “Introduction” to Du Bois, The Problem of the Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: The Essential Early Essays (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015). Indeed, Chandler notes here that the greater part of Du Bois’s agenda is already present in essays published before the appearance of The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. See also Bill V. Mullen, Un-American: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Century of World Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2015). Mullen’s account of Du Bois’s political and intellectual trajectory is particularly well-constructed.

7. In addition to the texts noted above, dispatches from Du Bois’s time abroad were published in a series of columns in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1936; insights and questions from this trip appear as well in The World and Africa (1947) and the unpublished Russia and America: An Interpretation (1950), on which see Bill V. Mullen, Un-American, 85-95.

8. Manning Marable, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat (New York: Routledge, 2004).

9. Nick Bromell, A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2018); see also Charles Mills, “W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Liberal”, ibid, 19.

10. Census data shows at homeownership is at a 30-year low, down from a high near 50% in 2004. [http://www.nareb.com/african-american-homeownership-falls-50-year-low/] (accessed 13 August 2018.)

11. Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

12. See Kate Baldwin, Beyond the Iron Curtain and the Color Line: Reading Encounters between Black and Red, 1922-1963 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 149 and passim. See also Bill V. Mullen’s W.E.B. Du Bois: Revolutionary Across the Color Line (London: Pluto Press, 2016). Mullen writes that Du Bois had returned from his earlier trip to the Soviet Union, in 1928, with “new ideas about alternatives to capitalism”, 73.

13. Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Collective Courage: A History of African American Cooperative Economic Thought and Practice (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 76-77 and passim.

14. Grant for travel awarded in June 1935; Lewis, The Fight for Equality, 388.

15. MS 15.

16. MS 6.

17. MS 7.

18. Marable, W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, 51.

19. MS 17.

20. MS 16.

21. MS 16-17.

22. As mentioned below, Du Bois’s 1936 trip to Russia was abridged due to Radek’s falling out of favor with the authorities of the USSR, and Du Bois’s resultant failure to apply in advance for a visa. Lewis, The Fight for Equality, 405-406.

23. Lewis, The Fight for Equality, 390-91.

24. MS 3.

25. W.E.B. Du Bois, Autobiography of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers: 1968), 160.

26. Levering Lewis, The Fight for Equality, 199-200.

27. MS fragment (box 226).

28. MS fragment (box 225).

29. MS 19.

30. In a fragment not included in the final manuscript, Jane Kent wants Jones to “give Hitler a kiss; I hear he hates kisses!”

31. That Hitler and his accomplices were guided by elements of U.S. eugenics programs and segregation laws has long been known; more recent scholarly works explore the extent to which the Third Reich’s “Final Solution” was inspired by the U.S. history of genocide and white supremacy. See Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Ira Katznelson, “What America Taught the Nazis”, Atlantic Monthly Vol. 320, No. 4 (Nov 2017) 42-44, discussing the recent book by James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 2017. See also Bradley W. Hart, Hitler’s American Friends (NY: Thomas Dunn/St. Martin’s, 2018).

32. MS fragment (box 225).

33. In this paper I am using “socialism” to encompass any socio-political system in which, as Du Bois suggests, government is fully participatory and includes decisions about production and distribution of goods and services. Both socialism and communism have their technical definitions; “Communism” is also used generally to refer to regimes in the USSR and China, as well as different parts of Southeast Asia, from midcentury to the present; because of its broad usage, “C/communism” is too vague to be useful here, although in the manuscript at hand Du Bois uses it primarily as a form of government to be contrasted with Fascism.

34. At the time Du Bois wrote “A World Search for Democracy,” Radek had been an author of the 1936 Constitution, but was soon denounced as a traitor and confessed during a show trial. He was apparently in a labor camp until his death in 1939, most likely carried out by an agent of the NKVD. Warren Lerner, Karl Radek: The Last Internationalist (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1970). Radek was cleared of treason charges and rehabilitated by the Soviet Supreme Court, along with Kamenev and Zinoviev, in 1988. Moreover, they were declared to have been “honest revolutionaries.” [https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.guilford.edu/docview/292862899] (accessed 27 August 2018). Online.

35. MS fragment (box 225).

36. MS 17.

37. See, e.g., Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996).

38. See Carol Anderson, Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

39. Of course, a 1937 manuscript cannot be much faulted for failing to contain a nuanced discussion of Stalin. For a discussion of Du Bois’s relationship to Stalinism, see Bill V. Mullen, Un-American, 9-12.

40. MS 69.

41. MS 70.

42. Du Bois offers a similar but updated discussion of these issues in Chapter 4 of Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (1945).

43. On Trump voters, see, e.g., Bowman, K. “Who Were Trump’s Voters? Now We Know” [https://www.forbes.com/sites/bowmanmarsico/2017/06/23/who-were-donald-trumps-voters-now-we-know/#4ff2b0643894 (accessed August 28, 2018)], online; Carnes and Lupu, “It’s Time to Bust the Myth: Trump Voters Were Not Working Class”, [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/?utm_term=.b873141f7aa3 (accessed August 28, 2018)], online. On Clinton voter fraud, see, e.g., “Clinton Could Have Received 800,000 Votes from Non-Citizens” [https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jan/26/hillary-clinton-received-800000-votes-from-noncitizens/ accessed August 28, 2018)], Online; Parks, “Fact Check: Trump Repeats Voter Fraud Claim about California,” [https://www.npr.org/2018/04/05/599868312/fact-check-trump-repeats-voter-fraud-claim-about-california (accessed August 28, 2018)], online.

44. MS 56.

45. The New Centennial Review, Vol. 12, No. 1.

46. Du Bois was evidently not the only one. See Gerald Horne, Facing the Rising Sun: African Americans, Japan, and the Rise of Afro-Asian Solidarity (New York: New York University Press, 2018).

47. Du Bois discussed the concept of propaganda more than once, including in “Science or Propaganda,” Phylon, Vol. 5, No. 1 (1944); here, he notes that attempts by subordinated groups to bring to light empirical data in support of those groups is likely to be called “propaganda,” but that such claims are not applied when members of dominant groups study those same dominant groups. My thanks to Phillip Luke Sinitiere for making this connection.

48. MS 91. This is, of course, a fair question, but several writers have noted that Du Bois was himself overly credulous about Japan’s claims regarding motivation. See, e.g., Yuichiro Onishi, Transpacific Antiracism: Afro-Asian Solidarity in 20th-Century Black America, Japan, and Okinawa (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 79. “Du Bois’s … articulation of the unity of darker nations and people, repeated throughout his sojourn across the Japanese empire, could not dislodge itself from imperialist Japan’s racial propaganda. Ultimately, Du Bois was unable to emphasize the impossibility of guaranteeing a just social order through such a theoretical abstraction.”

49. Emmanuel Eze and Charles Mills have made clear Kant’s own racism. See Eze, Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1997); Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999).

50. Lewis, The Fight for Equality, 4; Du Bois, “Opinion”, The Crisis (June 1919), “The Class Struggle”, The Crisis (June 1921).

51. MS 125.

52. MS 122.

53. In a letter to his editor, Du Bois asks forgiveness for the large number of changes to the proof pages for Black Reconstruction. “My method of writing is a method of ‘after-thoughts.’ I mean that after all the details of commas, periods, spelling and commas, there comes the final to me the most important work of polishing and resetting and even re-stating. This is the crowning achievement of my creative process.” Herbert Aptheker, The Literary Legacy of W.E.B. Du Bois (White Plains: Kraus International Publishers, 1989), 224; see also David Levering Lewis, The Fight for Equality, 364.

54. MS 25.