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An Inevitable Drift? Oligarchy, Du Bois, and the

Politics of Race between the Wars

Kenneth W. Warren

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At a moment that can only be described as a crisis of faith, Matthew

Towns, the hero of W. E. B. Du Boiss novel Dark Princess (1929), writes
to his lover and soon-to-be wife, Princess Kautilya, Hitherto I have seen
democracy as the corner stone of my new world. But today and with the
world, I see myself drifting logically and inevitably toward oligarchy. 1 Occurring late in the novel, Townss crisis of faith is particularly acute, because
the princess has only just recently rescued him from the quicksand of political cynicism. Having arrived in Chicago as Towns is about to abandon his
democratic principles to secure a nomination to the United States Congress, the princess manages to pluck him from the clutches of his scheming wife, Sara, and, for a time, she seems to restore his faith in democracy. Townss salvation, though, is short lived, because the two are again
separated. And it is during this subsequent separation that Towns nds his
democratic faith once again waning.
1. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dark Princess (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1995), 283.
Hereafter, subsequent references to this text will be cited parenthetically by page number only.
boundary 2 27:3, 2000. Copyright 2000 by Duke University Press.

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Although Townss confession does not constitute Dark Princesss

nal word on the direction of global politics, his words are nonetheless indicative of a larger problem for Du Bois, one that stems from his efforts to
create a multiracial politics both within the United States and across the
globe. Acutely aware that the worlds darker races were being left out of
discussions about world peace, justice, and democracy, Du Bois attempted
to make sure that the wishes and hopes of darker peoples received appropriate consideration. Both his Pan-Africanism and his editorial work on the
Crisis were but two examples of this effort. This drive for inclusion, however, often led Du Bois to countenance tendencies in black political and
social life that were compromising to the democratic thrust of his politics
and work. In many ways, Dark Princess enables us to see the dynamics of
what Du Boiss ctional hero describes as a logical and inevitable drift into
oligarchy.
The descent into cynicism that Towns confesses in his letter to Kautilya is only one more dramatic dip in the roller-coaster plot of Dark Princess, which reads a lot like a boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl,
boy-gets-girl story freighted with a political thesis. Towns has left the United
States in disgust after being denied an opportunity to take a required course
in obstetrics because, according to the medical school dean, white women
patients are [not] going to have a nigger doctor delivering their babies
(4). While in exile in Berlin, Towns comes to the aid of an attractive Indian
woman who is being accosted by a racist American tourist. As he and the
woman, who turns out to be the Princess Kautilya of Bwodpur, India, are
whisked away in a taxi cab, the princess, upon hearing Townss story, takes
the American with her to a multinational conference representing the darker
peoples of the world. The members of the council, although invested in
the idea of multiracial unity against white domination, nonetheless harbor
deeply aristocratic sentiments that include racist estimations of the ability of
Africans and African Americans to participate in their movement as equals.
The Japanese representative admits that for the larger company we represent, there is a deeper questionthat of the ability, qualications, and real
possibilities of the black race in Africa or elsewhere (21).
Towns, who had begun to feel at home in this nonwhite atmosphere
of renement and ability, responds in a voice ardently democratic, professing a faith in the capacities of the lowly. On the strength of this passion, the
princess dees the rest of the council by sending Towns on a mission to
assess the likelihood that blacks in the United States are ready for an insurrection. Towns eagerly accepts the princesss charge and returns to the

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United States, where he sends her regular reports on what he observes.

She reads his reports, but her skeptical colleagues intercept the letters she
writes to Towns, leaving him to believe he has been abandoned. His despair
is deepened by several circumstances, including his discovery that Perigua,
the leading man in the black revolutionary effort, is something of a crackpot.
But a lynching (for which Towns feels responsible) and an aborted Pullman
Porter strike of a special Ku Klux Klan train cause Towns not only to countenance Periguas plan to dynamite the train, but to place himself on board,
working as a porter, so that when Perigua blows it up, Towns will martyr himself for the cause. It is only the somewhat improbable reappearance of the
princess as a passenger that leads Towns to stop the train, saving her and
also himself, so that the novel may stage their eventual reunion as husband
and wife.
Before this reunion can occur, however, the two are separated twice
more, setting the stage for the princesss timely reappearance as Towns
is about to accept the nomination that will likely make him the rst black
congressional representative since Reconstruction. Engineered by his wife,
Sara, a corrupt Chicago political operative, the nomination has come at a
considerable price, and Towns describes himself as having sold his soul
to the Devil in deciding to accept it (207). And it is nothing less than his
soul that the princess is determined to save when she returns to the story
this time. Appearing before Towns as a representative of the Box-Makers
Union, she declares to him, See, I came to save you! I came to save your
soul from hell (209). This rescue of Towns makes possible a brief reunion
in which the relationship between him and the princess is sexually consummated, even though Towns remains married to Saraa legal and ethical obstacle that the novel keeps in place long enough to gear up the plots separation/reunion dynamic one more time so that Towns can slip again into the
political slough of despond where oligarchy, rather than democracy, seems
to be the future of humanity.
One might expect, then, that, given her penchant for eleventh-hour
rescues and her considerable personal investment in Townss democratic
vision, the princess would respond to his despair and apparent political
apostasy by warning him in no uncertain terms of the dangers of embracing oligarchy. Having staked so much on Townss belief that the masses of
men of all races might be the best of men simply imprisoned by poverty and
ignorance (248), the princess would appear to risk losing all if he recants
his commitment to democracy.
Expectedly, then, the Princess does attempt to rally Townss agging

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faith. What may seem a bit curious, though, is that she does not do so by
denouncing oligarchy outright. In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois describes himself as having been unequivocal about the ills of oligarchy during the period
before Dark Princess was published. He writes that so-called democracy
today was allowing the mass of people to have only limited voice in government . . . that here we did not have democracy; we had oligarchy, and
oligarchy based on monopoly and income: and this oligarchy was as determined to deny democracy in industry as it had once been determined to
deny democracy in legislation and choice of ofcials. 2
Yet the princess, rather than echoing Du Bois, offers Towns a vision
that seeks to combine what she takes to be the virtues of both systems,
exclaiming in a letter to him, And, oh, my Matthew, your oligarchy as you
conceive it is not the antithesis of democracyit is democracy if only the
selection of oligarchs is just and true (285). She then goes on to say that
democracies excel both aristocracies and plutocracies because they are
more effective at producing a leadership class: Birth is the method of blind
fools. Wealth is the gamblers method. Only Talent served from the great
Reservoir of All Men of All Races, of All Classes, of All Ages, of Both Sexes
this is the real Aristocracy, real Democracythe only path to that great
and nal Freedom which you so well call Divine Anarchy (285).
While it might be tempting to see as signicant the apparent divergence between the princesss sentiments on oligarchy and those uttered by
Du Bois in Dusk of Dawn it appears that Du Bois himself may have seen no
such contradiction: He denounces oligarchy in the same chapter in which he
calls Dark Princess his favorite book. 3 These statements, taken together,
reveal how, in this novel, and in his political writings through the early 1940s,
Du Bois sought to manage the tensions arising from his commitment to
democracy and to the principles of administrative rationality and meritocratic equality. These principles, particularly meritocratic equality, which insists that intelligence and talent are just as likely to be encountered at the
bottom as at the top of the social scale, allowed Du Bois to split the difference between a preference for rule by the many and rule by the few by positing the desirability of elite-driven mass organization[s], in which a representative ruling cadre acted on behalf of the whole.4 And while the princess
seems to hold that democratized oligarchy is but a way station on the road
2. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept,
in W. E. B. Du Bois, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1986), 762.
3. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 751.
4. Adolph Reed, W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the
Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 89.

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to Divine Anarchy, it is not clear from many of Du Boiss other writings that
his thinking on this point was thoroughly dialectical.
Certainly, as Adolph Reed points out, Du Boiss rather managerial
understanding of the relationship between rulers and the ruled did not make
him an anomaly within the political and intellectual milieu in which he operated. Collectivism and social management ideology of the type that
Du Bois espoused undergirded a range of different social programs, including socialism, progressivism, managerialism, and social engineering
in general. 5 There was, then, despite the adventurousness that characterized Du Boiss considerable intellectual and political achievements, a strain
in his thought that was shared broadly among many of the major thinkers
black or whiteof the time. Ross Posnock, who argues that Dark Princess
ultimately realizes its inclinations toward Divine Anarchy, nonetheless notes
that in the late 1910s, when Du Bois called for black Americans to close
ranks in support of the Allied war effort, his thought had much in common
with the technocratic version of pragmatism Randolph Bourne called pragmatic realism, the creed that reigned at the New Republic, on whose editorial board Du Bois served.6 Posnock goes on to argue, however, that in
accepting segregated military units for tactical reasons and, more importantly, in writing Dark Princess, Du Bois was pushing beyond the intellectual
connes of the present moment. In Posnocks view, Du Boiss willingness to
scandalize many of his political allies by urging black Americans to close
ranks in support of the war effort reveals Du Boiss capacity to revise his
authority, opening it to an experimental venture in freedom, an experiment
that deed the complacent technocratic rationalism of which he and his
fellow intellectuals had been accused by Bourne.7 On this account, Dark
Princess is noteworthy as a break from the thought of its historical moment.
While it is certainly true that Du Bois hoped his novel would precipitate a change in the prevailing political climate, Posnock perhaps overstates the democratic alternative offered by this curious piece of ction. As
Arnold Rampersad observes, The masses remain a hazy, unknown quantity in Dark Princess. [Du Boiss] defense is really of the old talented tenth, of
whom Matthew himselfeducated, idealistic, brown-skinnedis the prime
example. 8 It is possible, then, that Dark Princess did not enable Du Bois
5. Reed, Du Bois and American Political Thought, 19.
6. Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 154.
7. Posnock, Color and Culture, 157.
8. Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: Schocken
Books, 1990), 206.

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to revise and free himself from technocratic rationalism as much as it provided him with a tool with which to eroticize, spiritualize, and thus revitalize his technocratic rationalism so that it could continue to play a role in
his political and aesthetic interventions over the next decade. So that while
Posnock may be right in saying that by dissolving aristocracy and democracy into each other, Divine Anarchy commemorates Du Boiss long effort
(shared by Alain Locke) to fashion cosmopolitanism into an instrument of
democracy, 9 it is also possible to look at the text from the other way round,
such that Du Boiss work also allows us to see how the long political moment from the end of World War I through the rise of national socialism was
also one in which democracy and cosmopolitanism could be fashioned into
instruments of fascism and totalitarianism. Du Bois was acutely aware of
this threat and sought by various means to combat it. But as one can see in
the messianism that dominates his work, from Darkwater to Dark Princess,
and is present in his thinking as early as The Souls of Black Folk, maintaining a democratic vision that did not realize its highest expression in the
gure of the heroic leader was an ongoing struggle within Du Boiss political thought. Accordingly, I want to place Du Boiss sociology of black politics
within a project that, however unintentionally, threatened to reduce rather
than expand the role that political freedom could play in shaping modern life.
To be sure, Du Bois was an extraordinarily eloquent spokesperson
for human freedom, and throughout his life he remained severely critical of
arguments that sought to deny democracy to certain strata of the human
population. Writing in chapter 6 of Darkwater (1919), he insisted that if
America is ever to become a government built on the broadest justice to
every citizen, then every citizen must be enfranchised. The only exclusions
on the franchise that he was willing to tolerate were temporary oneseveryone must be raised rapidly to a place where they can speak for themselves. Du Bois also contended that the lack of an education (he certainly
had in mind the Souths use of literacy tests to disenfranchise blacks and
poor whites) should not constitute an obstacle to suffrage: Education is not
a prerequisite to political controlpolitical control is the cause of popular
education. 10
Indeed, as he made the case for universal suffrage, Du Bois argued for the pedagogical and civilizing effect that voting would have on
9. Posnock, Color and Culture, 166.
10. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from behind the Veil, in The Oxford W. E. B.
Du Bois Reader, ed. Eric Sundquist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 557, 555,
553. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as Darkwater.

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those newly admitted to the franchise, declaring that in every modern state
there must come to the polls every generation, and indeed every year, men
who are inexperienced in the solutions of the political problems that confront them and who must experiment in methods of ruling men. Thus and
thus only will civilization grow (Darkwater, 553). This process of growth,
however, would be far from smooth and would entail signicant social upheaval. Elaborating this argument in support of the Nineteenth Amendment,
Du Bois wrote:
It is not, for a moment, to be assumed that enfranchising women will
not cost something. It will for many years confuse our politics. It may
even change the present status of family life. It will admit to the ballot thousands of inexperienced persons, unable to vote intelligently.
Above all, it will interfere with some of the present prerogatives of
men and probably for some time to come annoy them considerably.
So, too, Negro enfranchisement meant reconstruction, with its
theft and bribery and incompetency as well as its public schools and
enlightened, social legislation. (Darkwater, 55657)

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What Du Bois intended to be a candid assessment of the costs of

greater democratization begged a further question, a question that from the
nineteenth century onward had been put to those arguing for the enfranchisement of black men, all women, and the poor: Why, given the presumed
difculties that would result from expanding the franchise, would a government want to undertake such a project?
In answer to this question, a variety of social critics produced
cautionary tales in which governments were asked to contemplate the impending social disaster they would face if large portions of its population remained ignorant and impoverished. The note sounded by Booker T. Washington in his infamous address to the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition in
1895 is representative. In making his case for his Tuskegee Program, Washington told the white southerners in his audience, Nearly sixteen millions
of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against
you the load downward. We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third of its intelligence and progress;
we shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of
the South, or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic. 11 Describing the
11. Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (New York: Carol Publishing
Group, 1989), 222.

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Souths black population as an impending but preventable social disease

that, left untreated, would infect the whole of the body politic, Washington
appealed to nothing more than white self-interest and self-preservation to
enlist support for his program of uplift. Indeed, across the board, progressives could often be heard making similar appeals on behalf of the disenfranchised and uneducated. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in Women and Economics (1898), felt compelled to invoke race-preservative processes in
arguing the importance of educating women to be more effective mothers.12
Likewise, Du Bois, in 1897, insisted that the American Negro Academy must
sound a note of warning that would echo in every black cabin in the land.
Unless we conquer our present vices they will conquer us; we are diseased,
we are developing criminal tendencies, and an alarmingly large percentage
of our men and women are sexually impure. 13
Notwithstanding the fact that these arguments were intended to drive
home the indivisibility of modern societies and the impossibility of cordoning off one portion of the population from the rest, the hinge of these claims
allowed the door to swing both ways. If certain groups were diseased, then
quarantine rather than cure might be indicated. As Charles Lofgren has argued, while claims that the black population was diseased and in need of
care were intended to underscore the shared fate of all races in America,
these opinions also helped provide broad grounds for concluding that racial
separation was reasonable in the sense of arguably conducing to the maintenance of public health, welfare, and morals. 14
Du Bois never entirely jettisoned the racial pathology argument from
his arsenal of social beliefs. (Then again, it might be useful to point out
the fact that even at the end of the twentieth century, such arguments continue to be a signicant feature of presumably progressive black political
thought.)15 Yet, by 1919, Du Bois had added some signicant wrinkles to
his appeal for democratizationan appeal that did not rest primarily on
12. Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: The Economic Factor between
Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution, ed. Carl Degler (New York: Harper and
Row, 1966), 194.
13. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Conservation of Races, in W. E. B. Du Bois, Writings, 824.
14. Charles A. Lofgren, The Plessy Case: A Legal-Historical Interpretation (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1987), 11415.
15. See, for example, Eugene F. Rivers III, Beyond the Nationalism of Fools: Toward an
Agenda for Black Intellectuals, Boston Review 20, no.3 (December 1994); and On the
Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Crack, Boston Review 17, no. 5 (September/October 1992). See also Cornel West, Race Matters (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).

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metaphors of disease and health. For example, when he wrote Darkwater,

Du Bois persisted in his claim that a lack of knowledge constituted a problem for democratic societies. As he unfolded his argument, however, he
shifted the condition of ignorance from the populace onto the state: Many
people assume that it was corruption that made such aristocracies fail. By
no means. The best and most effective aristocracy, like the best monarchy,
suffered from lack of knowledge. The rulers did not know or understand the
needs of the people and they could not nd out, for in the last analysis only
the man himself, however humble, knows his own condition (Darkwater,
554). Resting effective governance on the states knowledge of its citizens,
Du Bois proclaimed that the real argument for democracy is, then, that
in the people we have the source of that endless life and unbounded wisdom which the rulers of men must have (Darkwater, 554). By insisting that
good government depended on the wisdom of its citizens, Du Bois dened
democracy as a method of realizing the broadest measure of justice to all
human beings (Darkwater, 555). Accordingly, the nal arbiter in determining whether or not all human beings were experiencing a sufcient measure
of justice would have to be each human being, because in the last analysis
only the sufferer knows his sufferings (Darkwater, 555). A state that justied itself by claiming to provide for the welfare of its subjects was, whether it
admitted the fact or not, necessarily dependent on the conrmation of each
of its citizens that it was fullling its mission.
Individual testimony about suffering, however, was not merely reportage or information. Rather, according to Du Bois, it constituted knowledge
or wisdom. The continued existence of suffering was an indication that a
state had failed to consult the wisdom of its citizens. For example, in reckoning the cost of keeping women disenfranchised, he wrote that no state can
be strong which excludes from its expressed wisdom the knowledge possessed by mothers, wives, and daughters. We have but to view the unsatisfactory relations of the sexes the world over and the problem of children to
realize how desperately we need this excluded wisdom (Darkwater, 555).
That its citizens were not merely testifying or acting as informants but contributing their experience and wisdom for the good of all points to the
nonrepresentational strand in Du Boiss understanding of democracy. Each
individual was at bottom the only arbiter of his or her own experience, which
meant that only the individual could speak for him- or herself, offer his or
her own point of view. In fact, in explaining his decision to write Darkwater,
Du Bois alluded primarily to the fact that he could offer to the world what no
one else could, his own point of view (Darkwater, 483).

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At the same time, however, Du Bois also appeared willing to resolve

individual points of view into group points of view, suggesting a representational quality to the experience of various peoples: If a race, like the Negro
race, is excluded, then so far as that race is a part of the economic and
social organization of the land, the feeling and the experience of that race
are absolutely necessary to the realization of the broadest justice for all citizens (Darkwater, 555). Du Boiss contention was that men, even when they
were sincere in their intent to be just to women, could not represent adequately the needs and experiences of women, just as whites could not be
expected to act as effectively as blacks themselves on behalf of their own
interests. Yet Du Boiss theory of government in Darkwater also presumed
shared experience within social groups so that women could represent the
experiences of other women just as blacks could effectively represent the
experiences and feelings of other blacks. His prediction that government
by temporary coalition of small and diverse groups may easily become the
most efcient method of expressing the will of man and of setting the human
soul free (Darkwater, 560), derived from this simultaneous insistence that
while only each individual could express his or her own wisdom, the effective representation of this wisdom required group endeavor.
Du Boiss almost unavoidable equivocation between individual and
social group as the nal locus of consent provided some of the slippage that
allowed him to identify oligarchy and democracy. While it was clear to him
that the exclusion of white women and black men and women from the franchise meant that governing bodies consisting only of white men could not
be representative, Du Bois did not rest legitimate representation entirely on
the franchise. The value he placed on common experience and feeling also
allowed him to maintain that a group like the Council of Darker Races in
Dark Princess, even though not constituted electorally, could still be representative, provided it included some individuals from each of the oppressed
darker races.
Moreover, Dark Princess also intimated that the virtual representation offered by the Council of Darker Racesafter it had included some
Negro memberswas to be preferred to the realm in which blacks did have
some capacity to participate in the electoral process. As a writer who had,
since the late nineteenth century, insisted that the capacity of the nation to
live up to its ideals depended on its willingness to welcome black Americans into the polity (he had declared in The Souls of Black Folk that there
are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration

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of Independence than the American Negroes),16 Du Bois was obliged to

account for the behavior of and effect of those black Americans who had,
after the nations betrayal of Reconstruction in 1876, gained some access
to both the franchise and electoral ofce. And this was the challenge that
1920s Chicagothe setting of the middle section of Dark Princesspresented to him.
Meeting this challenge was no small matter. There were few precedents for optimistic representation of black political activity available for
Du Bois to consult. Black political participation during Reconstruction had
been engraved on the public mind as a travestyDu Bois had not yet published his revisionist work on that periodleaving little in the available representational archive from which Du Bois could draw.
Accommodationists such as Washington had sneered at former
black congressmen and the large class who depended upon the Government for every conceivable thing. 17 In addition, as Wilson Jeremiah Moses
has observed, black progressives in the postCivil War era, from Frederick Douglass onward, tended to share the distaste that northeastern white
intellectual elites expressed for the rough and tumble of city politics and
consequently found it impossible . . . to view Tammany Hall or the Chicago ward as offering models for black American political organization. 18
Although writing much later, Ralph Ellison appeared to have Du Boiss problem in mind when he complained that the novelists of his generation had
had little opportunity to know at rsthand the personalities who shape the
nations affairs in contrast to writers such as Henry James, who could take
for granted a familiarity with the movers and shakers of the nation, an advantage springing from his upper-class background and the easy availability
of those who exercised political and social power. 19 And while this assessment was for the most part credible, Ellison, in making it, had overlooked
Dark Princess (possibly because the politics that Du Bois depicted were
more local than national), which remains remarkable for its sustained and
rather unsentimental portrayal of black participation in democratic machine
politics. The other problem that Du Bois confronted, though, was created
16. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Du Bois, Writings, 370.
17. Washington, Up from Slavery, 8990.
18. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 130.
19. Ralph Ellison, The Myth of the Flawed White Southerner, in The Collected Essays of
Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 554.

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by the contradictions that Chicago politics presented him. To some extent,

the city stood as a dream of a Black Metropolis and, in 1928, had elected
the rst black to the U.S. Congress since 1901. Yet, as St. Clair Drake
and Horace Cayton have pointed out, for many black Americans, Chicago
had also come to represent a makeshift dream, a substitute for the real
American Dream of complete integration into American life. To some who
watched Negroes inherit the citys slums, crowded together amid squalor
and vice, where schemers, white and black, battened on their blood, the
dream seemed a fraud and a delusion. 20
These schemers troubled Du Boiss vision. Black Chicago politics
was dened by the likes of Jesse Binga, Pullman Porter turned banker,
and Oscar DePriest, who, although indicted in 1917 on conspiracy and bribery charges connected with houses of gambling and prostitution (he was
not convicted), had nonetheless managed, by 1928, to win a U.S. congressional seat. These men combined shrewdness, opportunism, and selfinterest with their constituents desire for a modicum of racial justice and
real economic prosperity in order to cobble together a politics that from
Du Boiss point of view answered rather ominously the question he had
posed in Souls when he wondered what would happen if the nations Mammonism were to be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its halfawakened black millions? 21 The Chicago Politician section of Dark Princess answered this question by predicting that the result would be a world
where the interests of the poor and the working classes were routinely sacriced on the altar of personal ambition. This world is the hell from which
Kautilya rescues Towns in Du Boiss romance.
Although the second section of Dark Princess paints Chicago machine politics in some detail, its crucial features are embodied in the person of Sara Andrews, whom the novel describes as having no particular
scruples or conscience. Lying, stealing, bribery, gambling, prostitution, were
facts that she accepted casually. Personally honest and physically pure almost to prudery, she could put a lie through the typewriter in so adroit a way
that it sounded better than the truth and was legally reproof. She recognized politics as a means of private income (112). A damning portrait, and
yet, as many readers of the novel have noted, the overall depiction of Sara is
not entirely unsympathetic. In fact, some have argued that despite Du Boiss
20. St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a
Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 8182.
21. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 419.

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having reserved some of his most erotically charged language to portray

the princess, Sara is more fully rendered than Kautilya.22 It is as if by removing sexuality, idealism, and even the conventional goals of domesticity
from his representational palette, Du Bois was obliged to render a character who was almost nothing more than political calculation. Although lacking idealism or spiritualism, Sara has a sense of self-interest more imaginative and capacious than that of her Chicago associates. On the strength
of this self-interest, she is able to elevate the ambitions of those around her
beyond small-time political graft. The larger arena represented by the U.S.
Congress is nothing more to her than the greatest market in the land (156).
Du Boiss powerfully effective rendering of Saras manipulation of Republicans, Progressives, Democrats, and Unionists alike through the machinery
of Chicago politics is intended to drive home the fact that while the electoral
process can create the facade of representatives, it does not even approximate the real democracy of which Du Bois wrote in Darkwater.
Du Boiss virtual unsexing of Sara (shes pleasing but a trie disconcerting to look at. Men always turned to gaze at her, but they did not
attempt to irtat least not more than once [109]) underscores the sterility
of Chicago politics. Structurally, then, Kautilyas sexuality and fertility are almost demanded of the novel by way of contrast. Likewise demanded, given
Saras rather soulless instrumentalism, is a resolution that involves some
form of spirituality.
Expectedly then, the salvation of Towns and of the narratives political hopes lies not only in the nal reunion of Kautilya and Towns but in the
birth of their child, Madhu, which proves the fertility of their politics. Emphasizing the transcendent quality of Towns and the global politics they
represent, the pageant that announces their marriage also announces their
son-to-be, the Messenger and Messiah to all the Darker Worlds! (311).
The solemn reverence with which Du Bois treats the wedding of Kautilya
and Towns contrasts markedly with the earlier nuptials of Sara and Towns,
when Sara had punctuated the ceremony with sartorial remonstrances to
the groom: Straighten your tie and Be careful of the veil (14344).
One can obviously make too much of what Du Bois labeled a romance. In fact, the fantastic dimensions of Du Boiss story, which center
around the princess and her improbable reappearances throughout the
22. See for example, Rampersad, Art and Imagination, 211; and Keith E. Byerman, Seizing
the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1994), 131.

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novel, might be seen merely as part of rich and colored gossamer of

dream that Du Bois mentions in the texts Envoy (312). Yet there are reasons not to dismiss entirely the more prescriptive aspects of Dark Princesss
ending. Rampersads reading of the novel, for example, notes that its central problem involves the tension between the spiritual emphasis . . . and the
undeniably secular and political concerns that the novelist also brought to
the work. . . . The author seeks to be both geopolitician of the darker races
and the prophet lifting his eyes to the truths beyond. 23
Rampersad concludes that the novel is a utopian exercise and must
be judged as such. 24 But it is useful to raise again the question, How seriously did Du Bois wish us to take the suggestion that the ecumenical spiritualism invoked at the birth of Madhu constituted a necessary requirement for
achieving his political goals? Certainly Du Bois, in his 1968 Autobiography,
spoke quite unequivocally of the political virtues of keeping the church out of
affairs of the state. Observing that no one actually believes that this world
is ruled and directed by a person of great power who, on humble appeal,
will change the course of events at our request, Du Bois went so far as to
claim that the greatest gift of the Russian Revolution to the modern world
was the fact that the Soviet Union does not allow any church of any kind
to interfere with education and religion is not taught in the public schools. 25
Such sentiments are clearly out of tune with the conclusion of Dark Princess, which is festooned with prayers and invocations directed to a variety
of dieties.
They are also out of tune with certain aspects of the political agenda
that Du Bois outlined in his 1945 text Color and Democracy, in which he
commented on the 1944 Dumbarton Oaks Conference that led to the founding of the United Nations. With the devastation of World War II and the reorganization of Europe and its colonies sitting squarely on the table, Du Bois
reiterated his commitment to democracy as well as his denunciation of oligarchy. The failure of the Western powers to uphold the rights of colonized peoples and to provide for their emancipation meant an extension
of the principle of rule by the few. Lamenting that there will be at least
750,000,000 colored and black folk inhabiting colonies owned by white nations, who will have no rights that the white people of the world are bound to
23. Rampersad, Art and Imagination, 217.
24. Rampersad, Art and Imagination, 217.
25. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My
Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968),
42-43.

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respect, Du Bois pointed out that it cannot be reconciled with any philosophy of democracy that 50,000,000 white folk of the British Empire should be
able to make the destiny of 450,000,000 yellow, brown, and black people a
matter solely of their own internal decision. 26
The most straightforward remedy, of course, would have been to call
for immediate decolonization and self-determination. Such a solution, given
the reluctance of many world powers to provide for eventual emancipation, had no chance of succeeding. Equally pertinent, however, was the fact
that Du Boiss commitment to a vision of uplift inclined him to concede the
argument that the ultimate liberation of colonized and backward peoples
would require some temporary trusteeship under scientic and enlightened
leadership (Color, 123). Du Boiss policy recommendations tended toward
securing representation for colonial peoples in this process. As Penny Von
Eschen emphasizes, Du Bois was well aware that limiting participation in
international assemblies to the representatives of nation-states would effectively exclude most of the worlds darker population. Von Eschen credits
Du Boiss criticism as the beginning of a challenge to the idea that human
beings had rights and agency only as citizens of a nation-state. 27 Yet however signicant Du Boiss challenge was, it left him with the problem of how
to determine representative voices and how to ensure that those voices,
in the absence of democratic mechanisms of accountability, would act with
the best interests of the colonial peoples at heart. On strict democratic
grounds, Du Bois was content to leave matters of numerical and ideological representation to be worked out along the way. He felt most crucially
that some members of the colonized peoples should be there at the beginning to raise their voices against oppression (Color, 140). But his commitment to the idea that the path to full democratization demanded that colonial
peoples be made ready for emancipation as quickly as possible meant that
he could not entirely shunt aside the question of choosing of proper men to
carry on the work (Color, 133). And it was in response to this problem that
Du Bois produced policy recommendations that mimicked the utopian synthesis of prophet and geopolitician that Rampersad ascribed to Dark Princess. Notwithstanding Du Boiss criticism of organized religion in his political writing, he found himself saying in Color and Democracy, It is all too
clear today that if we are to have a sufcient motive for the uplift of backward
26. W. E. B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace (New York: Harcourt,
Brace and Co., 1945), 910. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as Color.
27. Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism,
19371957 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 75.

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peoples, for the redemption and progress of colonials, such a motive can
be found only in the faith and ideals of organized religion; and the great task
that is before us is to join this belief and the consequent action with the scientic knowledge and efcient techniques of economic reform (Color, 136).
The full unfolding of Du Boiss recommendation did not overlook the
role that religion had played in justifying and perpetuating slavery, inequality,
and a host of other historical ills. He insisted that these failings be met headon and that religious dogma would have to yield before scientic inquiry.
But faced with what he believed to be the fact that the majority of the best
and earnest people of this world today organized in religious groups, and
that without the co-operation of the richness of their emotional experience,
and the unselshness of their aims, science stands helpless before crude
fact and selsh endeavor (Color, 137), he put forward recommendations
that would expand the role of organized religion in directing the future of the
worlds peoples of color.
Du Boiss willingness to concede to religion a leading role in the process of democratization and decolonization was born of an attempt to face
pragmatically the problem of how, in the absence of any effective democratic infrastructure, to ensure that those who presumably represented
others would act with the larger good in mind. As he had so often in his
work over the rst four decades of the twentieth century, Du Bois turned
to the importance of idealsideals of selessness that he hoped he could
nd within organized religion. This turn, of course, begged the question of
whether the Negro Churchwhich Edward Franklin Frazier would characterize as authoritarian and which he would hold responsible for the fact
that Negroes have had little education in democratic processeswas in
the short term amenable to the transformation that Du Bois envisioned.28
But having dened the problem of democratic transition as being dependent
on nding good people, it made sense for Du Bois to go where good people
might be found.
In fact, one could say that what Du Bois was seeking, across the
broad front of his writings, was a social science of leadership, a means of
choosing the best men. What underwrote his support of representation
and of greater democratization was his faith that all peoples could produce
such men and that the future health of the world depended on their being
28. Edward Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America / C. Eric Lincoln, The Black
Church since Frazier (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 90. To be clear, Du Bois does
not single out black churches in Color and Democracy.

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identied. Democracy would produce oligarchy if not monarchy. The birth of

a son to Kautilya and Towns at the end of Dark Princess, a child descended
from both royalty and slavery, signaled Du Boiss conviction that the world
could nd what it needed only by seeking leaders from among the downtrodden as well as the exaltedthe best guarantee that he could produce
in his ction that the interests of all would be represented. But as he looked
on the plight of the colonial world at the end of World War II, his gossamer
romance of redemptive leadership had perhaps come to seem all too real.

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