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THE DU BOIS DOCTRINE  
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Zachariah Mampilly
September 6, 2022
Foreign Affairs
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_ Du Bois is rightly venerated for his work on civil rights. But by
discarding him, the American foreign policy establishment robbed
itself of one of the twentieth century’s most perceptive and
prescient critics of capitalism and imperialism. _

Mapping Courage: Honoring W.E.B. Du Bois & Engine #11 (detail), by
dannybirchall (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

 

October 1961 was a momentous month for W. E. B. Du Bois. Since the
early years of the twentieth century, Du Bois had been a towering
figure among Black American intellectuals. A sociologist by training,
he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. During the Jim Crow era, he became
known for an uncompromising stance, demanding equal rights for Black
Americans through his journalism and advocacy work while also making
seminal contributions to various academic debates. In the years
between the two world wars, his attention turned increasingly to
international affairs, and his politics veered sharply left; by 1961,
Du Bois had applied for membership in the Communist Party. Now, at the
age of 93, an ailing Du Bois was embarking on what would be his final
journey. At the behest of Ghana’s pan-Africanist president, Kwame
Nkrumah, Du Bois moved to Ghana with the intention of beginning work
on an “Encyclopedia Africana,” which would combat the prevailing
perception of Africans and people of African heritage as devoid of
civilization. What had once been a dream project for Du Bois, however,
had become more of a last resort. Hounded by the U.S. government and
marginalized by the academic and policy establishments that once
welcomed him, Du Bois was fleeing his homeland. It was a figurative
exile that turned literal when the U.S. State Department refused to
renew his passport, rendering him functionally stateless. He spent the
next two years in Ghana, where local and international activists and
thinkers embraced him warmly, but he made little progress. He died in
1963, one day before Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famous
“I Have a Dream” address at the March on Washington.

Today, Du Bois’s home in Accra is notionally a museum that, although
scheduled for renovation next year, lies in a state of disrepair.
Books, including many apparently owned by Du Bois, sit slowly
decomposing in the heat. Photos of disparate Black and African
leaders, including Du Bois’s intellectual rival Booker T. Washington
and the Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi, hang haphazardly alongside
illustrations of ancient Egyptian queens. Tourists, mostly interested
in a crafts market behind the house, wander in and out, posing for
selfies.

It’s hard to argue that Du Bois, perhaps the most celebrated Black
intellectual of all time, is underrecognized. His work remains a
standard on syllabi across disciplines; prizes from academic
associations bear his name. Despite the acclaim, however, Du Bois
remains underappreciated—especially when it comes to his thinking on
international politics. For a time, Du Bois was a regular contributor
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Affairs_, publishing five essays during the interwar period on topics
ranging from European colonialism in Africa to the United States’
role in the League of Nations. But Du Bois was an exception in this
regard: during his lifetime, this magazine published very few Black
voices—and its founding involved acquiring an existing journal that
had occasionally trafficked in the racist pseudoscience that shaped
the early years of international relations theory. Then, during World
War II and amid the hysterical anticommunism of the early Cold
War, _Foreign Affairs_ joined the rest of the white American
establishment in casting out Du Bois; partly as a result, his
contributions to the field have received little attention from
scholars in recent decades.

Du Bois is rightly still venerated for his work on civil rights. But
the erasure of his contributions to debates on U.S. foreign policy
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international order represents an enormous loss. By discarding him,
the American foreign policy establishment robbed itself of one of the
twentieth century’s most perceptive and prescient critics of
capitalism and imperialism. His now forgotten texts on world politics
prefigured many of the ideas that later shaped international relations
theory. They brim with insights on the importance of race, the effect
of domestic politics on foreign policy, the limits of liberal
institutions, and the relationship between political economy and world
order. Revisiting them today reveals how racism marred the dawn of the
so-called American century and the liberal internationalism that drove
it—and the role of establishment institutions (including this
magazine) in that history. And because many of the ills that Du Bois
diagnosed in the imperial and Cold War orders persist in today’s
putatively liberal international order, rediscovering his work serves
more than a purely historical purpose. A better order demands a more
complete reckoning, and restoring Du Bois’s rightful place in the
international relations canon would be a step toward that goal.

STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING?

Du Bois was born in 1868 in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, and his
lifespan overlaps almost exactly with the Jim Crow era, a period
during which Black Americans faced severe restrictions on their
ability to participate in political, economic, and social life. Du
Bois’s youth also coincided with a period of domestic expansion
after the Civil War, as the U.S. government, newly triumphant over the
single greatest threat to its sovereignty, sent its armies west to put
down various indigenous insurgencies.

The enlargement of the U.S. military that accompanied the pacification
of rebellious southern whites and the defeat of Native American
resistance did not recede once those projects were complete. Instead,
the colonial projects that European
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pursuing in Asia and Africa galvanized an envious United States to
carve out its own colonies. In 1898, a year before Du Bois published
his first major sociological study, _The Philadelphia Negro_, the
United States’ imperial ambitions produced the annexation of Hawaii
and the acquisition of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines as
spoils of the Spanish-American War.

At around that time, as the United States
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emerge as a leading global power, modern international relations
theory started to take shape. As the political scientist Robert
Vitalis has written, “The central challenge defining the new field
of ‘imperial relations’ was the efficient political administration
and race development of subject peoples.” Most early theorists, such
as John Hobson, Alleyne Ireland, and Paul Reinsch, saw as major
concerns two interlinked subjects: first, the question of whether the
United States should secure a global empire in the manner of its
European rivals, and second, the role of race in U.S. foreign policy.
Writing in _Political Science Quarterly_, Hobson, for example, argued
that the clear biological advantages enjoyed by the Anglo-Saxon race
not merely justified colonial occupation but demanded it: “It is
desirable that the earth should be peopled, governed and developed as
far as possible by the races which can do their work best, that is, by
the races of highest ‘social efficiency’; these races must assert
their right by conquering, ousting, subjugating or extinguishing races
of lower social efficiency.”

Du Bois remains underappreciated—especially when it comes to his
thinking on international politics.

Today, many scholars dismiss the imperialist, racist logics propounded
by the founders of modern international relations theory as merely
reflecting the prejudices of an unenlightened era: sins not egregious
enough to diminish the value of the sinners’ good works. Vitalis,
however, maintains that the origins of modern international relations
theory cannot be cleaved from the junk race science and dubious
anthropology that were, at the very least, present at its creation.

The same could be said about this magazine. In 1922
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Foreign Relations launched _Foreign Affairs_ after acquiring the
future publication rights for an existing quarterly called
the _Journal of International Relations_—which, until just a few
years earlier, had been known as the _Journal of Race Development_.
Established to be what its editor, George Blakeslee, described as a
“forum for the discussion of the problems which relate to the
progress of races and states generally considered backward,”
the _Journal of Race Development_ published plenty of quackery: for
example, articles that considered whether white people could adapt to
the tropics and that explored the evolutionary origins of blond hair.
But it was hardly a bastion of white supremacism. Indeed, one of its
most prominent contributors was Du Bois; in one contribution in 1917,
he argued that World War I had its origins in colonial exploitation.
And when the publication changed its title, dropping “race
development” in favor of “international relations,” Du Bois was
skeptical: “I am much more interested in the old name than in the
new name of your journal,” he wrote to Blakeslee. And despite
Blakeslee’s interest in publishing him, Du Bois did not contribute
to the short-lived _Journal of International Relations_.

But a few years later, after _Foreign Affairs_ had launched, Du Bois
submitted an article titled “Worlds of Color
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which revisited his concept of a global “color line” in light of
the events of World War I. In a letter to Du Bois accepting the piece,
the magazine’s managing editor, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, praised
“the admirable restraint with which you have expressed yourself.”
The essay was published in 1925, a quarter century after Du Bois had
initially developed the concept, and it garnered a good deal of
attention. In that piece and four others that he published
in _Foreign Affairs_ over the following two decades, Du Bois offered
a real-time assessment of the emerging world order, decrying the
yawning gap between its proponents’ putatively liberal values and
the order’s actual consequences for the colonized world.

“BLACK AND POOR IN A RICH, WHITE WORLD”

One of the central questions that motivated Du Bois was why the white
working class in the United States refused to align with formerly
enslaved Black Americans to challenge their common oppression. His
solution to this puzzle rested on his views about the nature of race
and the tensions between democracy and capitalism. Unlike most of his
white contemporaries, Du Bois did not see race as an immutable
characteristic but as a social construct. “Humanity is mixed to its
bones,” he wrote in a 1935 article for _Foreign Affairs_. Race was
not a product of primordial competition among different groups of
humans but a useful fiction of sorts, employed by economic elites to
justify hierarchies that served their interests. “The medieval world
had no real race problems,” he noted in the same article. “Its
human problems were those of nationality and culture and religion, and
it was mainly as the new economy of an expanding population demanded a
laboring class that this class tended . . . to be composed of members
of alien races.” And later, writing on European colonialism, he
argued, “The belief that racial and color differences made
exploitation of colonies necessary and justifiable was too tempting to
withstand. As a matter of fact, the opposite was the truth; namely,
that the profit from exploitation was the main reason for the belief
in race difference.”

Du Bois saw this dynamic clearly at work in the United States, where
white elites avoided economic redistribution and retained political
power by offering white workers “a public and psychological wage”
in the form of control over police forces, access to politicians, and
flattering media portrayals. But white American elites did not rely
solely on such tactics to secure the allegiance of the white working
class: beginning after the collapse of Reconstruction in the late
1870s, global capitalism and imperialism improved the living
conditions of poorer white Americans by providing resources for their
segregated schools, parks, and neighborhoods, all without meaningfully
transferring power to them. In this way, Du Bois argued in his seminal
1935 work, _Black Reconstruction_, white elites in the United States
had created a double proletariat divided by a racial line. On one side
were poor and working-class whites, afforded some material gains but
no genuine social mobility or political power. On the other were Black
Americans, bereft of any hope for either economic or political gain.
Through imperial war and capitalism, the United States—in concert
with the European powers—had created a global system for upholding
white supremacy.

In the interwar period, Du Bois initially placed his faith in the
emergence of international institutions to redress these inequities.
In 1921, he presented a petition to the newly created League of
Nations on behalf of the Pan-African Congress, concluding that the
league might spark a “revolution for the Negro race.” But over the
next decade, his views soured as the league failed to live up to its
liberal ideals and became a tool of the superpowers.

In a 1933 _Foreign Affairs_ essay
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Liberia, he detailed an unholy alliance between the Firestone
corporation, the league, and the U.S. government. Despite a
league-commissioned investigation that found that Firestone, in
connivance with Liberian elites, had used forced labor, the United
States sided with the company against the league’s plan for reform.
The result was Liberia’s indebtedness and loss of sovereignty. As
Washington debated whether to increase its military involvement to
resolve the consequent crisis in Liberia, Du Bois asked, scathingly:
“Are we starting the United States Army toward Liberia to guarantee
the Firestone Company’s profits in a falling rubber market?” Long
before such charges became a staple of left-wing criticisms of
American hegemony, Du Bois foresaw the troubling effects of
commingling U.S. military power with private interests and the ease
with which major powers could employ international organizations to
hide their imperialist agendas under a veneer of legitimacy. The
exploitation that Du Bois detailed in his report on Liberia was
something of a blueprint for how, long after the end of direct
colonialism, global superpowers would use debt to guarantee the
subservience of countries in Africa and elsewhere in the developing
world.

By the time he published his _Foreign Affairs_ piece on Liberia, Du
Bois had come to see the promise of Western liberal internationalism
as hollow. “Liberia is not faultless,” he wrote. “She lacks
training, experience and thrift. But her chief crime is to be black
and poor in a rich, white world; and in precisely that portion of the
world where color is ruthlessly exploited as a foundation for American
and European wealth. The success of Liberia as a Negro republic would
be a blow to the whole colonial slave labor system.”

In his final essay
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Affairs,_ in 1943, Du Bois rejected the idea that World War II was a
fight between liberal and illiberal powers, arguing that it was
competition for colonies that produced the fighting instead. “Is it
a white man’s war?” he asked, rhetorically, on behalf of Africans
and Asians. And by the time of the San Francisco Conference that
birthed the United Nations in 1945, which he attended on behalf of the
NAACP, Du Bois’s skepticism of the emerging liberal order had
calcified. Afterward, he wrote a letter to Armstrong, who had become
the editor of _Foreign Affairs_ in 1928 (and would stay in the
position until 1972), pitching a critique of the nascent organization.
In his estimation, the conference “took steps to prevent further
wars” but “did not go nearly far enough in facing realistically
the greatest potential cause of war, the colonial system.” The
magazine rejected the pitch, and Du Bois would never again publish
in _Foreign Affairs_.

AGAINST EMPIRE, FOR DEMOCRACY

In exploring the relationship between race relations inside the United
States and the country’s quest for power in the international
system, Du Bois anticipated the ways in which, in the mid-twentieth
century, scholars of international relations would increasingly focus
on domestic politics to explain countries’ foreign policies. And he
applied this lens to cases besides the United States. In trying to
understand the costs of European competition for control over Africa,
for example, Du Bois argued that domestic factors would undermine the
clear military advantage European countries had over their colonial
subjects. As a keen observer of emergent anticolonial struggles in
India and elsewhere, Du Bois deduced how the occupation of foreign
lands would engender resistance among the colonized. But Du Bois also
saw another dilemma that imperialism created for European countries:
colonial domination abroad often required the sacrifice of democracy
at home. Imperialism inevitably led to increased racial and economic
inequality at home: military adventures and opportunities for
extracting natural resources empowered the capitalist class (and its
favored segments of the underclass) and stoked racial prejudice that
justified further interventions in foreign lands. As Du Bois put it in
“Worlds of Color” in 1925: “One looks on present France and her
African shadow, then, as standing at the parting of tremendous ways;
one way leads toward democracy for black as well as white—a thorny
way made more difficult by the organized greed of the imperial
profit-takers within and without the nation; the other road is the way
of the white world, and of its contradictions and dangers English
colonies may tell.”

Du Bois’s increasing engagement with international politics also
shaped his evolving views of the United States and its racial and
class hierarchies. Early in his career, Du Bois developed the concept
of “the talented tenth,” the idea that marginalized groups require
their own internal elite to pull the rest of the group out of poverty.
But his study of European colonialism in Africa forced him to reassess
his faith in minority elites as a vehicle for racial uplift. In
Liberia, Du Bois had initially supported Firestone’s investment as a
way to buttress the legitimacy of the ruling Americo-Liberian
community. But by the 1940s, he had grown disenchanted with the idea
of the talented tenth, warning that it would empower “a group of
selfish, self-indulgent, well-to-do men.” This change in his
thinking dovetailed with the fact that, in his personal life, he was
becoming increasingly estranged from Black elites in the United
States, who he felt had not supported him during his investigation by
the United States government.

Du Bois argued that Washington’s quest for a liberal order could
never be reconciled with a Jim Crow system at home.

Eventually, Du Bois embraced the strategy of “assigning
transformative responsibilities to the international proletariat,”
as the political scientist Adolph Reed has put it. His change in
thinking was reinforced by his interpretation of how international
capitalism was developing: instead of a tool to uplift the darker
races, it was the cause of their exploitation. As a result, long
before he fully embraced communism, he had moved toward a form of
democratic socialism.

Yet even as he developed a theory of working-class agency, Du Bois
could never fully shake his faith in the idea of a chosen few leading
the way toward emancipation or in the potential for global
cooperation. But it would not be Western elites, with their attachment
to racial and economic hierarchies, who would lead the way. Rather, he
believed, it was the rising powers of Asia, as well as the Soviet
Union, that would upend the global system of white supremacy and
liberate Black Americans. This view is palpably present in one of his
most personal works, the novel _Dark Princess_, which Du Bois wrote
in 1928.

Inspired by his participation in the First Universal Races Congress in
1911 and in other forums, such as the League Against Imperialism in
1927, _Dark Princess_ tells the story of Matthew Townes, an African
American medical student in self-imposed exile in Germany, where Du
Bois had conducted some of his graduate studies. An obvious surrogate
for Du Bois, Townes encounters elites from multiple African and Asian
countries who seek to overthrow colonial rule but whose own prejudices
prevent them from recognizing the potential of the Black working class
in the United States. One of these characters is the Indian princess
of the novel’s title, who overcomes her prejudices and commits a
form of class suicide, giving birth to a child fathered by Townes. Du
Bois positions the child as a messiah figure who will someday rescue
the oppressed darker races of the world. Because of their historic
prejudices, Europe and the United States—as well as rich elites
elsewhere—were denying not only themselves but all of humanity of
the potential benefits of lifting up marginalized groups.

WHAT DU BOIS SAW

That Du Bois died a member of the Communist Party is no secret. But
his journey to the left took decades. Du Bois first encountered
socialism as a student in Germany in the 1890s, but it was not until
the 1930s that he began to seriously engage with leftist politics.
Given Du Bois’s stature as the predominant Black intellectual of his
time, his leftward drift was a source of suspicion for the U.S.
government. The FBI began investigating Du Bois in 1942, following his
visit to imperial Japan, where he delivered a speech praising the
country as a potential friend to Black Americans. Despite concluding
that there was “no evidence of subversive activity,” the FBI
continued to investigate Du Bois for the rest of his life, derailing
his career and strengthening his anti-Americanism. During the McCarthy
era in the early 1950s, U.S. authorities arrested Du Bois and charged
him with being a secret Soviet agent after he circulated a petition
calling for a ban on nuclear weapons. At his trial, a federal judge
summarily acquitted Du Bois as soon as the prosecution rested its
case, citing a lack of evidence. But the controversy rendered Du Bois
persona non grata—and penniless.

The State Department refused to issue him a passport in 1952, a harsh
blow for a man who had spent his entire adult life visiting and
studying foreign countries. In 1957, Du Bois sought to regain his
passport to attend Nkrumah’s inauguration. Du Bois sent a personal
appeal to Vice President Richard Nixon, who was scheduled to attend on
behalf of the United States. But the State Department denied the
request. The following year, the Supreme Court declared the policy of
denying passports to suspected communists unconstitutional. Du Bois
secured a new passport—although, in Ghana just a few years later, he
would be unable to renew it—and immediately embarked on a ten-week
trip to China, where he met with both Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.
Having last visited the country in 1936, Du Bois was amazed by
China’s progress, praising its rising industrial prowess and calling
the changes nothing short of a “miracle.”

The success of American democracy required that political and economic
equality be extended to all people around the world.

Du Bois’s admiration for authoritarians such as Nkrumah and Mao, and
his fulsome praise for the Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin were
inconsistent with his lifelong support for democracy. But his
unfortunate embrace of such figures arguably represents a
misapplication of his well-founded belief that democracy was
incompatible with racial and economic inequality. His decades-long
persecution at the hands of the United States also fed his misgivings
about Western liberalism’s ability to foster racial and economic
equality.

In his writings on international politics, Du Bois argued that the
domestic could never be divorced from the global, and that
Washington’s quest for a liberal order could never be reconciled
with a Jim Crow system at home. Although American society has changed
since Du Bois’s time, that fundamental tension has never been
resolved: from the Cold War to the “war on terror” and beyond, the
United States has cast itself as a champion of freedom and equality,
despite never meeting its own standards in its treatment of American
citizens and despite routinely enabling and empowering authoritarians
and other enemies of liberal values when doing so has served U.S.
economic or national security interests, as defined by establishment
elites. Realists often excuse or even demand such inconsistency and
hypocrisy, suggesting that liberals are naive to believe that domestic
values should guide foreign policy. Meanwhile, hawks of all
stripes—from neoconservatives to liberal interventionists—refuse
to acknowledge the inconsistency and hypocrisy at all, claim they are
transient aberrations, or insist that they don’t really matter.

By linking his devastating insights into the realities of American
apartheid with his analysis of Western imperialism, Du Bois charted a
unique course through this perennial debate. His work upends the
liberal fantasy of the United States’ inevitable progress toward a
“more perfect union” that would inspire a just global order and
gives the lie to the realist fantasy that how the country behaves
internationally can be separated from domestic politics. For Du Bois,
the success of democracy in the United States required that political
and economic equality be extended not only to U.S. citizens but to all
people around the world. It is an uncompromising and inspiring vision;
embracing it cost Du Bois dearly. But it may be just what the country
needs as it faces the waning of American imperium.

_ZACHARIAH MAMPILLY is the Marxe Endowed Chair of International
Affairs at the Marxe School of Public and International Affairs at
Baruch College and is an affiliate faculty member at the Graduate
Center, CUNY. He is a co-author of Africa Uprising: Popular Protest
and Political Change
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* W.E.B. Du Bois
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* foreign policy
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* U.S. foreign policy
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* imperialism
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* Africa
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* Pan-Africanism
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