South Atlantic Quarterly
Moon-Ho Jung
Black Reconstruction and Empire
​I had a very strong reaction to Black Reconstruc-
tion the first time I read it. W. E. B. Du Bois’s
monumental text resonated with me like no other
book in US history. In my estimation, Black Reconstruction is the greatest book that the US historical profession has ever produced. That the book
shifted the focus to black workers themselves—
on how their struggles fundamentally shaped
the course of US history—is undeniable. To limit
Black Reconstruction to the study of African Americans or Reconstruction in the United States, however, would be to miss a whole lot. Black Reconstruction was and remains a major synthesis of
US and indeed world history, framing history on a
scale that most of us trained in US history are not
accustomed to. Through his apparent (and lyrical)
asides and penetrating analysis, Du Bois was able
to highlight the centrality of race and empire in
the making of the modern world and, in the process, to deliver a searing critique of the US empire,
a critique that constitutes Black Reconstruction’s
most revolutionary and enduring insight.
Global Framings
Although almost the entire book focuses on blacks
and whites in the United States, Du Bois was
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careful to stress the global roots of race and labor, to tie both firmly to colonialism the world over. Du Bois’s global vision of US history, of course, preceded his writing of Black Reconstruction. In the most often quoted line from
The Souls of Black Folk (1903), for example, Du Bois had proclaimed, “The
problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line,—the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America
and the islands of the sea” (Du Bois 1986: 372). (The critical clause after the
“color-line” often gets ignored.) It is therefore not very surprising that in the
first chapter of Black Reconstruction, titled “The Black Worker,” Du Bois
demanded that his readers recognize the enormity of the meanings of black
labor, which he argued was “the foundation stone not only of the Southern
social structure, but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English
factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a worldwide scale; new cities were built on the results of black labor, and a new labor
problem, involving all white labor, arose both in Europe and America” (Du
Bois 1992: 5).
In “The Black Worker,” Du Bois wasted no time in stating the expansiveness of his project, of his ultimate aim to get at the roots of what he called
“the real modern labor problem.” It was not an American problem, although
America was surely implicated. It was a world problem that tied together, as
he put it, “that dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the
South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central America and in the
United States—that great majority of mankind,” whose labor had produced
“the basis of world power and universal dominion and armed arrogance in
London and Paris, Berlin and Rome, New York and Rio de Janeiro.” In my
favorite sentence of the book, the very last lines of the first chapter, Du Bois
made it clear that emancipation was not something of the past but something to struggle for, in the present and into the future: “The emancipation
of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the
freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and black”
(Du Bois, 1992: 15–16).
Du Bois’s framework was expansive, not really comparative. There is a
rich tradition of comparative study of slavery and race relations—Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen is perhaps the most prominent (Tannenbaum
1992)—but Du Bois was proposing a much more radical project. He was not
interested in studying how different institutions of slavery or postslavery
societies compared against one another. Rather, Du Bois sought to expose
their intricate connections, to propose a new history of the modern world
within which the United States was deeply and intimately embedded.
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Heightening Contradictions
Du Bois covered many different topics in Black Reconstruction, but he had a
relatively straightforward interpretation of why Reconstruction proved to be,
as he called it, “a splendid failure” (Du Bois 1992: 708). His interpretation
was almost formulaic, though not simplistic in any sense. For Du Bois, black
suffrage was the result of an alliance of convenience between what he called
“abolition-democracy” and “industry for private profit directed by an autocracy,” with the latter driven by a fear of Southern white intransigence (Du
Bois 1992: 182). “Thus a movement, which began primarily and sincerely to
abolish slavery and insure the Negroes’ rights,” Du Bois argued, “became
coupled with a struggle of capitalism to retain control of the government as
against Northern labor and Southern and Western agriculture” (Du Bois
1992: 214).
That alliance would not last, and Reconstruction was over before
it really began, once “the Southern exploiter of labor” reached an agreement with “the Northern exploiter” that workers must produce private profit,
cementing the power of Northern industry to rule “at last free and untrammeled” (Du Bois 1992: 240, 187). Du Bois held nothing back as he wrote of
Northern industry’s march. “It began in 1876 an exploitation which was built
on much the same sort of slavery which it helped to overthrow in 1863,” he
stated. “It murdered democracy in the United States so completely that the
world does not recognize its corpse. It established as dominant in industry a
monarchical system which killed the idea of democracy” (Du Bois 1992: 187).
The “splendid” character of Reconstruction resided in black workers
themselves and their efforts to forge a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a true
labor movement on behalf of all workers in the South. To proclaim Southern
state governments as a “dictatorship of the proletariat”—or even as representing significant steps toward it—was at best an overstatement, but it was,
I believe, an interpretive and narrative device that enabled Du Bois to
heighten the contradiction between capitalism and democracy. And it was
that particular point that he came back to, over and over again, throughout
Black Reconstruction.
That is, Reconstruction was many things to Du Bois, but it was that
epic struggle between the dictatorship of capital (plutocracy) and the dictatorship of labor (democracy) that held worldwide significance. In prose that
I cannot do justice to without quoting at length, Du Bois argued:
Thus by singular coincidence and for a moment, for the few years of an eternal second in a cycle of a thousand years, the orbits of two widely and utterly
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dissimilar economic systems coincided and the result was a revolution so
vast and portentous that few minds ever fully conceived it; for the systems
were these: first, that of a democracy which should by universal suffrage
establish a dictatorship of the proletariat ending in industrial democracy;
and the other, a system by which a little knot of masterful men would so
organize capitalism as to bring under their control the natural resources,
wealth and industry of a vast and rich country and through that, of the
world. (Du Bois 1992: 346)
Plutocracy prevailed.
For Du Bois, that marked the lasting tragedy of Reconstruction, the
inability of Americans to grasp its national and worldwide implications.
Eighteen seventy-six marked the beginning of a new era of labor exploitation, race hatred, and empire, tying America to Europe in the project to
subjugate the darker peoples of the world. “Within the very echo of that
philanthropy which had abolished the slave trade,” Du Bois argued, “was
beginning a new industrial slavery of black and brown and yellow workers
in Africa and Asia.” And with that shift, he observed, emerged new racial
attitudes toward these workers, who were no longer deemed worthy of
sympathy. “These inferiors were to be raised out of sloth and laziness by
being compelled to work,” Du Bois remarked. “The whole attitude of
Europe was reflected in America and it found in America support for its
own attitude” (Du Bois 1992: 632).
If enslaved black labor had laid the foundation of US and European
empires, its re-enslavement through an agreement between big business
and the white South heralded the age of what Du Bois called “international
and commercial imperialism” (Du Bois 1992: 632), which would lead
directly to the Great War (World War I) and the Great Depression.
Against American Exceptionalism
Du Bois’s critique of the new age of empire was deep, deeper than what
William Appleman Williams and others would suggest in the ensuing
decades. Williams and others writing critically of the US empire stressed
US diplomatic efforts to expand capitalist markets, an interpretive framework that ironically reified and reinforced US exceptionalism. The United
States was definitely an empire, but seemingly an exceptional empire, supposedly in search of markets, not territorial conquest.1 Du Bois’s critique of
the US empire was different.
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Reconstruction in the United States, for Du Bois, was an exceptional
moment of possibilities in world history, but it was exceptional in the sense
that it reflected, encompassed, and portended global trends. There was
nothing inherently exceptional about the United States. Indeed, even as
Du Bois understood fully the power of the black vote in the South—the
“attempt to make black men American citizens,” as he put it at the very end
of the book (Du Bois 1992: 708)—he steadfastly refused to define and contain black struggles as a search for citizenship rights.
Du Bois, for example, discussed at length how black men had fought
in the Civil War and, in doing so, determined its outcome. But he simultaneously and insistently noted the tragedy of claiming and performing martial
manhood. “Men go wild and fight for freedom with bestial ferocity when
they must—where there is no other way,” Du Bois wrote, “but human nature
does not deliberately choose blood—at least not black human nature” (Du
Bois 1992: 66). And he elaborated later that killing human beings was the
only way African Americans could garner the respect of whites. “Nothing
else made emancipation possible in the United States,” he noted ruefully.
“Nothing else made Negro citizenship conceivable, but the record of the
Negro soldier as a fighter” (Du Bois 1992: 104). If violence translated into citizenship rights, violence quickly took them away, as Du Bois discussed poignantly in his penultimate chapter, “Back toward Slavery.”
Pulsing throughout Black Reconstruction was Du Bois’s rebuke of not
only state power in the hands of industry but also its orchestration of state
violence, most notably in World War I. In many ways, Du Bois was echoing
what he had written in “The Souls of White Folk,” one of his most piercing
and enraged essays on race, war, and empire, written in the wake of World
War I. In that essay, he had condemned war and its vicious logic. “The
cause of war is preparation for war,” he argued, “and of all that Europe has
done in a century there is nothing that has equaled in energy, thought, and
time [more than] her preparation for wholesale murder.” And Du Bois
placed America firmly alongside Europe in its appetite for wholesale murder and the subjugation of the “darker nations.” “She stands today shoulder to shoulder with Europe in Europe’s worst sin against civilization,” he
stated (Du Bois 2004: 33, 36).
At the same time, Du Bois found hope in the world, within and
beyond America. “A belief in humanity is a belief in colored men,” he
wrote in “The Souls of White Folk.” And he warned famously in that essay,
“The Dark World is going to submit to its present treatment just as long as
it must and not one moment longer” (Du Bois 2004: 35). Du Bois’s tone in
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Black Reconstruction was perhaps a bit less confrontational, but it was no
less direct and to the point. In resurrecting black humanity to his readers,
he saw hope, a hope for democracy, “the consciousness of a great and just
cause; fighting the battle of all the oppressed and despised humanity of
every race and color, against the massed hirelings of Religion, Science,
Education, Law, and brute force” (Du Bois 1992: 708).
Those words marked the end of Black Reconstruction—except for the
last chapter on “The Propaganda of History”—and they underscored Du
Bois’s vision of a wider humanity, a larger struggle in which blacks played a
pivotal role during and through Reconstruction. Reflecting on the broader
state of affairs as he was writing Black Reconstruction, Du Bois saw plenty of
despair in the ruins of Reconstruction. All around the world, he observed
“grotesque Profits and Poverty, Plenty and Starvation, Empire and Democracy, staring at each other across World Depression.” But within that depressing world, the black reconstruction of democracy in America (Du Bois’s
original title for the book)—and emphatically not America, which, to Du
Bois, stood for empire, not democracy—offered hope. “And the rebuilding,
whether it comes now or a century later,” he concluded, “will and must go
back to the basic principles of Reconstruction in the United States during
1867–76—Land, Light and Leading for slaves, black, brown, yellow and
white, under a dictatorship of the proletariat” (Du Bois 1992: 635).
In laying bare the ultimate stakes of Reconstruction in US and world
history, Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction has no peer. I found it indispensable as I wrote my first book on race, labor, and emancipation in Louisiana.
I continue to find it indispensable as I work on a new book on race, war,
and empire across the Pacific. It was and is a big book that continues to
address the biggest issues of Reconstruction, of Du Bois’s lifetime, and of
our own time.
Note
1
For a recent historiographical review, see McCoy, Scarano, and Johnson 2009.
References
Du Bois, W. E. B. 1986. Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, The Souls of
Black Folk, Dusk of Dawn, Essays and Articles. New York: Library of America.
Du Bois, W. E. B. [1935] 1992. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Atheneum.
Du Bois, W. E. B. [1920] 2004. Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil. New York: Washington
Square Press.
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McCoy, Alfred W., Francisco A. Scarano, and Courtney Johnson. 2009. “On the Tropic of Cancer: Transitions and Transformations in the U.S. Imperial State.” In Colonial Crucible:
Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, edited by Alfred W. McCoy and
Francisco A. Scarano, 3–33. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
Tannenbaum, Frank. [1946] 1992. Slave and Citizen. Boston: Beacon Press.
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