W. E. B. Du Bois and the problems of the twentieth century: Race, history, and literature in Du Bois's political thought, 1903-1940

This dissertation explores Du Bois's intellectual and ideological engagement with the changing problems facing the African American people during the first decades of the twentieth century. From Du Bois's famous early twentieth century conflict with Booker T. Washington to the age of Cold War and McCarthyism, Du Bois's political stands, I argue, were shaped by his life-long determination to devise a practical program that could "liberate" the African American people; this enduring and overarching goal shaped his response to all national and international events. Further, Du Bois interpreted political events, and sought to shape them, according to his own distinctive, and enduring, core ideology, which embraced a messianic concept of the unique redemptive "mission" of the black "race.".;Examined in detail are Du Bois's attempts to devise strategic responses to World War I, the Harlem Renaissance, racism, the Depression, the New Deal, Marxism, and the American working-class, as well as his role in the NAACP and the civil rights tradition. One entire chapter analyzes Du Bois's major work of history, Black Reconstruction in America (1935), showing how it reflected his contemporary political concerns (such as a critique of Marxism and of working-class racism), as well as his pathbreaking historical interpretation of emancipation and the Civil War era. The reasons that Du Bois rejected communism as a political path for blacks during the 1930s, only to embrace the communist movement after World War II, are explained.;W. E. B. Du Bois, who lived through a number of radically different historical periods, continually endeavored to forge a black leadership program that addressed contemporary and future problems facing "the race." Hence, his program changed as he addressed new historical circumstances in the society he sought to transform. While changes in his political positions have caused some to say Du Bois was fundamentally politically inconsistent, it is more accurate to say that Du Bois's core goals were remarkably constant, even as his means of pursuing these goals--the "liberation" of black folk, in America and around the world--changed over time.