SOURCE: "W. E. B. Du Bois's Autobiography and the Politics of Literature," in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 24, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 299-313.

[Cain is an educator. In the essay below, he focuses on Du Bois's decision to join the Communist Party and leave the United States for Ghana.]

During the course of his long career, W. E. B. Du Bois produced superb work in many genres. His Harvard dissertation The Suppression of the African Slave Trade (1896) was a pioneering, minutely detailed analysis of the growth and eventual elimination of the slave trade to the Unites States; his absorbing rendering of African culture and African-American history The Negro (1915) served as "the Bible of Pan-Africanism"; and his later historical book Black Reconstruction (1935) bitingly challenged the traditional view of the post-Civil-War period as a time of white suffering and Negro abuses and abominations. His studies of the black family and community, especially The Philadelphia Negro (1899), 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 sociologically acute and lyrical The Souls of Black Folk (1903) demonstrates. Du Bois's many autobiographical writings, notably Dusk of Dawn (1940) and his posthumous Autobiography (1968), are also rewarding texts that situate the life of the writer within the complex trends of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

As a premier man of letters, Du Bois has few rivals in this century. Yet with the exception of The Souls of Black Folk, his writings are infrequently taught and rarely accorded 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 to the status of a footnote in the long history of race relations in the United States."

Another, more commanding reason for Du Bois's uneven and troubled reputation is that he wrote politically: He always perceived his writing, in whatever form or forum, as having political 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'" (Autobiography). Du Bois assembled knowledge, fired off polemics, issued moral appeals, and preached international brotherhood and peace in the hope of effecting differences in the lives of the lowly and oppressed. He stood for equality and justice, for bringing all men and women into "the kingdom of culture" as co-workers (Souls). 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 purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing 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 deployment 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 teacher-scholars, an American who viewed his country broadly'" (cited in Autobiography). Some of America's most gifted novelists, poets, and playwrights admired him. Eugene O'Neill once referred to Du Bois as "ranking among the foremost writers of true importance in the country." Van Wyck Brooks commended him as "an intellectual who was also an artist and a prophet," a man "with a mind at once passionate, critical, humorous, and detached" and "a mental horizon as wide as the world." Even earlier, no less an eminence than Henry James termed him "that most accomplished of members of the Negro race." It was William James who sent his brother a copy of The Souls of Black Folk, referring to it as "a decidedly moving book."

The Souls of Black Folk is indeed a landmark in African-American culture. James Weldon Johnson, in his autobiography, stated that the book "had a greater effect upon and within the Negro race in America than any other single book published in this country since Uncle Tom's Cabin." Rampersad has summarized its significance even more dramatically: "If all of the nation's literature may stem from one book, as Hemingway implied about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, then it can as accurately be said that all of Afro-American literature of a creative nature has proceeded from Du Bois's comprehensive statement on the nature of the people in The Souls of Black Folk."

But while The Souls of Black Folk has loomed large within the African-American intellectual community and, to an extent, within the white one as well, it has not generated a more extensive interest in Du Bois's autobiographies and writings in other genres. In part, Du Bois has received relatively little scrutiny because his race has worked against him in the dominant culture: His black skin bars him from reaching the stature that he had, by rights, attained through his publications and activities. But Du Bois remains an outcast as much, if not more, for ideological reasons. His standing has suffered—and he suffered literally in his life—because of his leftist/socialist sympathies and eventual membership, in 1961, in the Communist Party. As not only a black man but, by February 1963, a Communist citizen of Nkrumah's Ghana, Du Bois has been excluded from the main literary and historical register of scholarship and canon formation.

The Autobiography, the last of Du Bois's works, is crucial not only for its review of the formidable span of his career, but also for the ideological positions that it conveys, positions that help account for Du Bois's problematical reputation inside and outside the academy. The Autobiography begins with an intense account of Du Bois's extremely favorable impressions of the Soviet Union and China, and it concludes with ample sections on his "work for peace," indictment and trial for allegedly subversive behavior (he was eventually acquitted), and zealous support for Pan-Africanism and Communism. To be sure, we must attend carefully to the Autobiography as an interestingly structured work of autobiographical art. But at this juncture, we need particularly to engage and reexamine the ideologically charged parts of Du Bois's book, acknowledging his errors and misjudgments where these exist but also perceiving how his Communist views, as he understood them, stemmed from his lifelong commitment to brotherhood and peace. His decision near the end of his life to become a Communist seemed treasonous during the Cold War, and it strikes many as luridly aberrant today, as the Communist countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union undergo sweeping transformations. But this decision was one that Du Bois weighed carefully. It is important to grasp its origins and not allow it to blind us to his achievement, integrity, and intellectual conscience. The basic case for Du Bois as an exemplary intellectual and one of America's major writers has yet to be satisfactorily made, and the place to begin, artistically and politically, is with the Autobiography.

Not all readers, it should be noted, have felt comfortable about the status of the Autobiography as a text. The editor of the book, Herbert Aptheker, tells us that Du Bois wrote the first draft in 1958–59 (when he was 90 years old), and then revised it somewhat in 1960. According to Aptheker, Du Bois took the draft with him to Ghana in late 1961, and it was first published, in an abbreviated form, in China, the USSR, and the German Democratic Republic in 1964–65. Shirley Graham Du Bois, the author's widow, fortunately managed to rescue the manuscript after the military coup that occurred in Ghana in late 1966; and Aptheker reports that he prepared it for publication in its entirety, making only a few minor corrections such as fixing a date or providing a complete name. But when the Autobiography appeared in 1968, some scholars testily wagered that Aptheker had probably played a more active role. Truman Nelson, for example, queried the inclusion of the long opening section on Du Bois's travels in, and enthusiastic support for, the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. Maintaining that this section did not appear in a carbon copy of the manuscript in his own possession, Nelson implied that it might have been stitched into the manuscript by Aptheker. Rayford Logan and others have similarly questioned Aptheker's involvement, noting many resemblances between passages in the Autobiography and much earlier writings by Du Bois (Logan and Winston 196). Aptheker has steadfastly denied that he significantly modified or adjusted the manuscript. In his 1973 Annotated Bibliography of Du Bois's writings, he repeated that he had merely made "technical" changes.

For the literary and historical record, it is obviously imperative to know as best we can the condition of the manuscript that Du Bois himself wrote. One needs also to tally the affinities between parts of the Autobiography and material previously published in The Souls of Black Folk, Dusk of Dawn, In Battle for Peace, and other texts. Yet, in another sense, the controversy about the text of the Autobiography simply dramatizes issues of authorship and authority familiar to us from many African-American autobiographies. Who is the real author of the text? Was it actually produced, in part or whole, by a black or white author, co-author, or editor? What is the relation between the manuscript and the published book? These questions, often raised about slave narratives in the nineteenth century, have also figured in discussion of autobiographical writings by Booker. T. Washington, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Malcolm X. Such questions, and the difficulty of answering them cleanly, constitute a vexed central feature of the tradition of African-American autobiography.

Often such questions arise because some readers frankly doubt or object to what the text itself says. They do not readily believe in a text that advances a self-representation that is at odds with their own understanding of the author's self and with the historical and political truths that they have embraced. In the case of Du Bois's Autobiography, many readers have doubtless discounted this text as much on political as on scholarly and bibliographical grounds. They would prefer, it sometimes seems, to regard the ardently pro-Communist thrust of the book, and its hugely uncritical attitude toward Soviet state power, to be somehow not "really" present in Du Bois's text—as though these sentiments were more a faithful reflection of Aptheker (a Communist Party member himself) than of Du Bois, who, a tired old man of 90, could not have deeply meant his own words even if he did indeed write them.

The Autobiography is a flawed and disappointing book in certain respects, but we can only make sense of it (and of the life and career to which it attests) if we confront how its words—however much we might disapprove of them—tellingly accord with crucial facts about Du Bois. By the mid-1940s, he was adamantly hostile to the conduct of American foreign policy, and, in the midst of Cold War repression in the United States, he sought to establish connections to and alliances with the Soviet Union. In 1958–59, when he drafted the Autobiography, he traveled extensively in the Soviet Union and China; and, in 1961, his manuscript now finished, Du Bois joined the Communist Party of the United States.

As the Autobiography reveals, the foundations for Du Bois's decisive act of 1961 were laid even earlier than the 1940s. He first became absorbed in Marxism at the time of the Russian Revolution, journeyed to the Soviet Union in 1926, and, after his resignation from the NAACP and return to Atlanta University in 1934, began to teach a graduate course there on Marxism. In Dusk of Dawn, published in 1940, Du Bois speaks skeptically about Communism, rebuking the misguided forays of the Party in America and declaring, "I was not and am not a communist." Yet he also boldly praises Marx, touts the extraordinary importance of the Russian Revolution, and aligns himself with the struggle for socialism in his statement of the "Basic American Negro Creed." Though he claims that he spurns the revolutionary pitch of Communism, he also says openly that "Western Europe did not and does not want democracy, never believed in it, never practiced it and never without fundamental and basic revolution will accept it." Du Bois's belief in Communism did not descend upon him suddenly, nor did it result from world weariness. He knew where he stood—he was not "mindless"—and clearly gauged what he was doing when he at last became a Party member.

The Autobiography not only contains explicit statements of Du Bois's homage to Communism, but also furnishes prophetic signs of the emergence and development of the views he came devoutly to hold in his last years. When he first visited the Soviet Union in the 1920s, what impressed him about the Russian people was their vital, energizing "hope." All of life, he states, "was being renewed and filled with vigor and ideal." Everywhere he looked, he approvingly noticed a dedicated striving to modernize education, abolish poverty, and end the reign of destructive myth and superstition. Nowhere did he detect evidence of race hatred. Returning to the Soviet Union in 1958–59, he saw that the hopes of the Russian people (and his own as well) had taken inspiring form: "The Soviet Union which I see in 1959 is power and faith and not simply hope." Once again, too, he did not sight in the Soviet Union the harrowing fact of bigotry that informed his excruciating vision of America and Europe: "The Soviet Union seems to me the only European country where people are not more or less taught and encouraged to despise and look down on some class, group or race. I know countries where race and color prejudice show only slight manifestations, but no white country where race and color prejudice seems so absolutely absent." Free from the scarring presence of race hatred, the Soviet Union seeks always, Du Bois insists, to lend its support to liberation movements and the worldwide fight against racism, imperialism, and colonialism.

Du Bois's celebration of the Soviet Union is difficult to appraise because it complicatedly blends the country (and ideology in action) that Du Bois actually glimpsed with the country he longed to locate, one that would be constructed according to reason and scientific principle and that would foreground a better, and manifestly attainable, alternative to the oppressive situation in America. The Autobiography can hardly be said to supply readers with a rounded, dispassionate account of the Soviet system. For Du Bois, intolerance and injustice, brutality, imprisonment, and murder do not exist under Communism. To allege that these do exist, or to fasten upon the apparent immorality and human price for converting Communist theory into rigorous, coherent practice, signals political blindness and bad faith, Du Bois believes. Such a critique of the Soviet Union misleadingly and unfairly stresses the "ethics" of the "methods" employed to secure Marxist socialism rather than sympathetically observing the workings of the thing itself.

Du Bois's perspective on the Soviet Union is skewed, but it does reflect an honorable, if exasperating, consistency. It derives from his own bitter disappointment in, and alienation from, the American scene, which seemed to him in the 1950s still to be ravaged by racism despite his own and others' decades of struggle. From one angle, his strangely distanced remarks about the Soviet purge trials of the 1930s, his affirmation of the rightness of the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and similarly meager, muted statements about the limits of Communism likely strike us as absurd. Yet it may be missing the point somewhat to label Du Bois in his Autobiography—as does Irving Howe—a dismal apologist for Stalinism "whose final commitment was soiled both morally and intellectually." In large measure, Du Bois's grand endorsement of Communism represents his own implacable verdict upon America; and his refusal or inability to articulate the evils of Communism bears unremitting witness to his desire to preserve a leftist point of view untainted by the U.S.'s Cold War rhetoric. Like Howe, we are inescapably drawn to indict Stalinism, as are now the Soviet people themselves, encouraged by Mikhail Gorbachev's new spirit of openness and reexamination of the past. But Du Bois, in the 1940s and 1950s, regarded attacks on Stalinist Russia as always deflecting the gaze away from America's own history and crimes in the present and, furthermore, as weakening the already marginalized American left. Du Bois judged, I think, that when people on the left assailed Communism under Stalin, they recklessly played into the hands of the McCarthyite right; by so self-righteously criticizing an apparently pro-Stalinist left, they threatened to discredit the left in general.

The Autobiography therefore places exacting political pressure on its readers, who face a potent array of pro-Soviet claims. But the book does provide rewards not tied to the ideological strife of the Cold War, including precise accounts of Du Bois's boyhood in Great Barrington, Massachusetts; his education at Fisk, Harvard, and the University of Berlin; his work as a teacher and scholar at Wilberforce, the University of Pennsylvania, and Atlanta University; and his opposition to Washington's program for Negro uplift, his leadership of the Niagara movement, and his leading role in the organization of the NAACP. The Autobiography is, however, regrettably silent or restrained on many key aspects of Du Bois's life. He says nothing at all about his five novels and very little about his other written works, especially such historical studies as the epic volume Black Reconstruction. While he mentions his estimable labor for The Crisis, the NAACP magazine he edited from 1910 to 1934, he offers few details. He omits altogether his relation to the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, and refers in a sketchy manner to his ferocious feud with Marcus Garvey. With so much of the beginning of the book taken up with an account of Du Bois's travels to the Soviet Union and China, and with so much space toward the end occupied by Du Bois's work for peace and his indictment and trial in the 1950s, there are inevitably missed opportunities, and much personal, professional, and sociopolitical material is left unexamined.

Du Bois is also guarded about his inner life. He refers to his "habit of repression," hints at the "self-protective coloration, with perhaps an inferiority complex," that marked his life at Harvard, and alludes to his reserve and inhibitions. But these statements are few and fleeting, and do not serve as occasions for deeper probing and meditation. Even the chapter titled "My Character," though surprisingly candid about Du Bois's own sexual disappointment during his first marriage, is rather formal and stiff. Du Bois does not seem at ease with sustained self-scrutiny, finding a chapter on his "character" to be necessary to certify the autobiographical "picture" as a "complete" one but not meeting the assignment with real curiosity or earnest intent.

The cost of Du Bois's relative inattention to his inner life bears upon the politics of his book. It is not just that many readers have heatedly disputed Du Bois's Communism, but that they also cannot clearly perceive its intellectual, emotional, and psychological appeal for him. He exhibits the external conditions in the Communist state that gratify him, yet fails to clarify the human needs that such a state functions to fulfill. When one reads Richard Wright's American Hunger or his essay in The God That Failed, one can apprehend why Communism so attracted Wright and crucially assisted him in forging his identity as a writer. Even as he recants his affiliation with the Party, his prose still testifies compellingly to his gratitude to it for its constructive lessons. In their different ways, the autobiographies of the African-American Communists Hosea Hudson and Harry Haywood also achieve something that Du Bois's book does not. Filled with detail about arduous educational and organizational work, these texts enable readers to appreciate the concrete meaning of Communism for many black Americans, particularly during the 1930s, as they dramatize the powerful feelings of solidarity along race and class lines that both men experienced.

Du Bois's own proud, prickly temperament partially explains the absence of personal inquiry in his Autobiography; he did not view this potential of the genre as one that kindled his writerly interest. In this respect, his term for his autobiographical act in this book—he calls it a "soliloquy"—is admittedly absorbing on a theoretical level but is an inappropriate guide to the nature of what he has actually achieved. Soliloquy implies a 'speaking to oneself,' a disclosing of one's innermost thoughts and feelings unmindful of an audience. It connotes, too, a theatricalized or dramatic posture and pose, a vividly prosecuted, intellectually dense and complex form of speech that highlights self-reflection and risks unanticipated kinds of self-exposure. Du Bois's Autobiography does not really take such a cast or tone. It is less a soliloquy than an elaborate lecture or, better still, the prolonged testimony of an unyielding conscience that accosts America with truths that this nation, in Du Bois's appraisal, was too imprisoned in Cold War defensiveness and guilt to discern itself: "I sit and see the Truth. I look it full in the face, and I will not lie about it, neither to myself nor to the world…. I see this land not merely by statistics or reading lies agreed upon by historians. I judge by what I have seen, heard, and lived through for near a century."

Du Bois suggests that he has earned the right to pronounce this stern sentence through long years of demanding, systematic, progressive "work." Work is, in fact, the key word of the Autobiography. Du Bois uses it many times, nearly always in the context of the building or shaping of a whole "life" in terms of a carefully chosen, determinedly pursued form of work. Preparing to begin his studies at Harvard, Du Bois stresses that he "above all believed in work, systematic and tireless." Later, having finished his advanced training at the University of Berlin, he returned to America to earn his living as a scholar and teacher: "I just got down on my knees and begged for work, anything and anywhere. I began a systematic mail campaign" to find work. Seizing upon an opportunity for an appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, he avidly professes that he was "ready and eager to begin a lifework, leading to the emancipation of the American Negro."

These passages and others similar to them show that Du Bois conceives of his life, as represented in his Autobiography, as highly dedicated "work." He undertakes work with a mission, and according to a specific plan: "The Negro problem was in my mind a matter of systematic investigation and intelligent understanding. The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation." The word work is aligned with a group of related words—system, knowledge, fact, basis, truth, plan, organization—and the Autobiography as a whole contains a number of proposals and schemes for mammoth research projects on the condition of the Negro. Writing in his ninetieth year, Du Bois realizes the limitations of his vision of work, especially as he formulated it in his early years as a scholar and educator. Everything he did, he now understands, presumed the willingness of Americans to ponder the conclusions that his work unequivocally disclosed and to do what the true facts mandated. Du Bois concedes that he was naïve about the ability of accumulated knowledge to speak for itself and impel certain reforms. But this by no means lessens his staunch conviction that one's life only matters when "work" defines it.

Du Bois's concern for "work," for visible achievement that ratifies the worth and rightness of life, possibly accounts for the reticence about personal feeling in his Autobiography. Deeds matter more than feelings, in Du Bois's 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 everywhere 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.

Du Bois admits that his Autobiography is not an altogether reliable record of his life. It is, he observes, "a theory of my life, with much forgotten and misconceived, with valuable testimony but often less than absolutely true, despite my intention to be frank and fair." If the Autobiography fails or disappoints us, it may do so because of the intriguing inadequacy of the very "theory" of Du Bois's life and career that it propounds. Du Bois says clearly that he "believe[s] in socialism" and seeks "a world where the ideals of communism will triumph—to each according to his need, from each according to his ability. For this I will work as long as I live. And I still live." Even as he states his loyalty to the Communist ideal, however, and unflinchingly affirms the model for nationhood that he perceives in both the Soviet Union and China, he adheres to a myth of American exceptionalism and does not recognize the tension and conflict that he thereby introduces into his book—and into his theoretical conception of his life.

"I know the United States," Du Bois concludes. "It is my country and the land of my fathers. It is still a land of magnificent possibilities. It is still the home of noble souls and generous people. But it is selling its birthright. It is betraying its mighty destiny." Du Bois swears that he still loves America, yet how can his profession of faith in this nation stand along-side his passionate fidelity to Communism and the Soviet experiment? To put the question even more pointedly: What does Du Bois mean by his invocation of American destiny? This seems to be a puzzling term for him to employ at this stage of his book (and his career), since he had powerfully sought in his painstaking historical research to demonstrate how American's destiny, and its power and wealth, has been terribly entwined with slavery and racism. It is not as though Du Bois has forgotten these hard facts in his Autobiography, for he refers in his final pages to the tragic legacy of slavery in America. But he appears momentarily to need to lose sight of these facts in order to retain his sense of America as essentially a land of freedom and opportunity that has strayed from its destined path.

Some have said that Du Bois idealizes the Soviet Union, but he may idealize America just as much. In his final paragraph, he states that "this is a wonderful America, which the founding fathers dreamed until their sons drowned it in the blood of slavery and devoured it in greed." Yet Du Bois himself had noted, several pages earlier, that George Washington "bought, owned, and sold slaves"; he knows that the founding fathers compromised their "dream" from the very beginning, and that they, not their sons alone, carry the burden and guilt of slavery.

In his first book, The Suppression of the African Slave Trade, Du Bois spoke words that reverberate against the position to which he clings in these final pages of his last one. "We must face the fact," he stated in 1896,

that this problem [of slavery] arose principally from the cupidity and carelessness of our ancestors. It was the plain duty of the colonies to crush the trade and the system in its infancy: they preferred to enrich themselves on its profits. It was the plain duty of a Revolution based upon "Liberty" to take steps toward the abolition of slavery: it preferred promises to straightforward action. It was the plain duty of the Constitutional Convention, in founding a new nation, to compromise with a threatening social evil only in case its settlement would thereby be postponed to a more favorable time: this was not the case in the slavery and slave-trade compromises; there never was a time in this history of America when the system had a slighter economic, political, and moral justification than in 1787; and yet with this real, existent, growing evil before their eyes, a bargain largely of dollars and cents was allowed to open the highway that led straight to the Civil War.

Though the Autobiography announces its acceptance of Marxist-Leninist ideology, it is The Suppression of the African Slave Trade that arguably shows greater insight into the relationship between politics and economics, and that more resourcefully demystifies pure notions of American destiny. Audaciously pro-Soviet and highly critical of American policies at home and abroad, the Autobiography nevertheless gives evidence of Du Bois's deep attachment to America and his inclination to idealize his native land even as he sagely and sometimes savagely criticizes it.

At one point, for example, Du Bois commends the "democratic" theory and practice of Soviet society, citing the frequent debates, consultations, and discussions of common events current there, and he adds that life under Communism thereby resonates with the same democratic rhythms as small-town America. The Soviet people, he says, "sit and sit and talk and talk, and vote and vote; if this is all a mirage, it is a perfect one. They believe it as I used to believe in the Spring Town Meeting in my village."

There is more detail about these town meetings in Du Bois's chapter on his boyhood in Great Barrington, where he tells of his respect for them. There was one old man who regularly attended these meetings, using them as an opportunity to rail against funds for the local high school.

I remember distinctly how furious I used to get at the stolid town folk, who sat and listened to him. He was nothing and nobody. Yet the town heard him gravely because he was a citizen and property-holder on a small scale and when he was through, they calmly voted the usual funds for the high school. Gradually as I grew up, I began to see that this was the essence of democracy: listening to the other man's opinion and then voting your own, honestly and intelligently.

On the next page, Du Bois concedes that the democracy he admired was not truly democratic: "of course our democracy was not full and free. Certain well-known and well-to-do citizens were always elected to office—not the richest or most noted but just as surely not the poorest or the Irish Catholic." Du Bois shrewdly exposes the limits of the ideal he reveres, and he incorporates other de-idealizing devices elsewhere in his book, as when he observes that the "golden" river of his birth was golden "because of the waste which the paper and woolen mills poured into it and because more and more the river became a public sewer into which town and slum poured their filth." Yet he safeguards his exaltation of America's "dream" from irony, despite his own mustering of evidence that would seem to make the irony inescapable for him. In a word, Du Bois exempts America from the indictment that his own reading of our history would appear to demand. This pro-Soviet, anti-American text is, then, confusedly, movingly, and eloquently patriotic—a jeremiad that simultaneously blasts America for its contemptible sins and hymns its magnificent, if not yet achieved, destiny.

Near the center of his Autobiography, Du Bois reflects that his "thought" has long been characterized by a "dichotomy": "How far can love for my oppressed race accord with love for the oppressing country? And when these loyalties diverge, where shall my soul find refuge?" One could conceivably maintain that by the close of his life, as he sums it up in his book, Du Bois had chosen his race and rejected his country, becoming a believer in Communism and a supporter of the Soviet Union because America had come, for him, to stand for sheer intolerance, repression, and militaristic sponsorship of colonialism. But Du Bois never lost his fervent affection for his country. Even at the end, he declared his belief in a distinctive American message and mission, curiously suspending the ironic demystifications of the American dream that he had defiantly undertaken for many decades and that he had reiterated in the Autobiography itself. To say that Du Bois was a Stalinist apologist and, eventually, a Communist Party member registers truths about the life that he led and wrote about. But these explicitly recorded truths perhaps count for less than the queer beauty of Du Bois's lingering love for the America he told himself he had momentously abandoned.