W.E.B. Du Bois:
Glory and Shame
During the course of his long career, W.E.B. Du Bois produced superb work in many genres. He was the first African American in the twentieth century to gain national recognition as intellectual, tribune, and agitator. Prickly, gifted, endlessly articulate, Du Bois was both sufficiently self-aware to see how his unavoidable embattlement had forced him, into a "twisted life" and sufficiently principled to keep right on the track to sucess. His studies of the black family and community, especially The Philadelphia Negro, remain valuable. His countless essays and reviews, not only in the Crisis but in other academic journals and popular magazines and newspapers, are impressive in their scope and virtuosity. and his numerous articles on education, labor, and the Pan-African movement further testify to his national and international vision of the development of colored people. He also wrote novels, stories, and poetry, and invented mixed genres of his own, as the sociological acute and lyrical writings, notably Dust to Dawn and his posthumous Autobiography, are also rewarding texts that situate the life of the writer within the complex trends of the late-ninteenth and twentieth centuries.
As a premier man of letters, Du Bois has few rivals in this century. Yet with the exception of The soul of Black Folk, his writings are infrequently taught and rarely acorded in literary history the credit they deserve. In part this results from the fertile ways in which Du Bois's Writings cross and exceed generic and disciplinary categories. Who should teach him? Where should he be taught? Du Bois's astonishing range has possibly worked to his disadvantage, particularly in the academy, leaving the majority of his books unstudied because it is unclear to whose departmental terrain they belong. "His contribution," concludes Arnold Rampersad, "has sunk th the statue of a footnote in the long history of race relations in the United States."
Another, more commanding resason for Du Bois's uneven and trobled reputation is that he wrote politically. He always percieved his writing, in whatever form or forum, as having plitical point and purpose. As he noted in a diary entry on his twenty-fifth birthday, "I ... take the world 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'. Du Bois assembled knoledge, fired off poleemics, issued moral appeals, and preached international bortherhood and peace in the hopeof effecting differences in the lives of the lowly and opressed. He stood for equality and justice, for bringing all men and women into 'the kingdom of culture' as co-workers. So much was this Du Bois's intention that he was willing to use the explosive word propaganda to accent it. Viewing himself as, in everything, a writer and an artist, he affirmed that "all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the p[urists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writng has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy' ("Criteria for Negro Art").
Du Bois's blunt development of art as "propaganda" makes plain the reason that he has proved an awkward figure for literary historians, yet it still remains curious that he is undertaught and undervalued. William James, Nathaniel Shaler, Albert Bushnell Hart, George Santayana, and others praised Du Bois during his student days at Harvard. Hart later said that he counted him" always among the ablest and keenest of our teache-scholars, an American who viewed his country broadly". Some of America's most gifted novelist, poets, and playwrights admired him.
Du Bois's concern for "work," for visible achievement that raatifies the worth and rightness of life, possibly accounts for the reticence about personal felling in his Autobiography. Deeds matter more than feelings, in Du Bois" calculation. The self knows how it feels by looking back upon and confidently reckoning what it has done. Though commendable in most ways, such a program has its dangers and as Du Bois describes it, it is unduly abstract and theoretical. Indeed, one wonders whether Du Bois's extreme emphasis on resolutely organized work, Systematic investigation, highly controlled scientific inquiry, and centralized authority and administration indicates to us why the Soviet state struck him so positively. Accenting everywhever its admirable central planning and scientific efficiency, he does not comprehend, let alone grapple with, the pain and devastation among the masses of men and women that Stalin's work of economic overhaul entailed.