A "Fine Liberal" in Black Radical History: W. E. B. Du Bois's Strategic Citation of Carl Schurz

Abstract

A "Fine Liberal" in Black Radical History:W. E. B. Du Bois's Strategic Citation of Carl Schurz Sarah Papazoglakis (bio) "There is probably no man living who has a more intimate knowledge of the Negro Question than Mr. Schurz," wrote S. S. McClure in the editor's introduction to Carl Schurz's 1903 McClure's Magazine article, "Can the South Solve the Negro Problem?"1 No one living, except, of course, the entire black community who intimately knew what it was to experience what W. E. B. Du Bois theorized as "double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others."2 In fact, months before Schurz's essay appeared in McClure's Magazine, Du Bois had published The Souls of Black Folk, his profound work on race and double consciousness that explained the "problem of the color-line" as a problem of "the disfranchisement of the Negro."3 Yet, without a hint of irony, McClure made this hyperbolic claim, naming Schurz, a German American white elder statesman, the ultimate authority on racial conditions in the United States. He did so in the face of a significant body of black activism, writing, and scholarship. Du Bois confronted this fallacy by leveraging Schurz's acclaim among the political and social white elite to turn him into an unlikely ally, citing Schurz throughout much of his scholarship on Reconstruction as he wrote against the grain of the "standard—anti-negro" revisionist histories proliferating at the turn of the century and beyond.4 By strategically citing Schurz, Du Bois could more easily defend against racialized charges of bias and more effectively appropriate and exploit white discourses on race widely considered to be neutral. Du Bois positioned himself alongside and against Schurz as a widely respected liberal figure. Despite the praise of the prestigious, middle-brow, muckraking magazine, Schurz's record in the struggle for civil rights was controversial at best, [End Page 97] given that he, like many other Radical Republicans, "abandoned the negro" as the political tide turned against Reconstruction policies in 1872.5 Schurz's liberalism included the belief that racial inequality was a troubling exception to equal rights and opportunity. However, at the turn of the century, he was portrayed as radical by the conservative Dunning School historians who gave scholarly credibility to blatantly racist accounts of Reconstruction, casting it as a failure because of black incompetence. Du Bois shows that the Dunning School's framing of the liberal Schurz as a radical was part of a larger effort by Southern apologists to rewrite the Reconstruction Era as one of "unrelieved sordidness in political and social life."6 In Du Bois's works, Schurz emerges as an exemplary liberal figure whose writings could only be seen as radical if placed in contrast to extremist antiblack propaganda. To advance a black radical interpretation of the era that would situate a material history of racial exclusion and oppression at the center of—rather than incidental to—American democracy, Du Bois needed to dramatically shift the discourse on Reconstruction. In Du Bois's hands, Schurz became the perfect foil for white supremacist views of Reconstruction, legitimated in large part by Dunning School scholars. By moving the narrative of Schurz to the right and exposing exclusionary tenets of liberalism, Du Bois insisted on black radical resistance at a time when much of the popular commonsense discourse on racial inequality focused on accommodation, compromise, and reform. For Du Bois, Schurz came to represent the racialization of gatekeeping in a number of contexts. In many ways, Schurz's prominence symbolized the currents of white supremacy that undergird white liberalism, which does not appear openly racist or hostile but relies on more polite forms of racial violence. That "fine liberal," as Du Bois called him, could silence the black community by promoting a white perspective as more objective and more knowledgeable than even the most credentialed black scholar. While Schurz's moderate views—later characterized by Du Bois as "fair to indifferent to the Negro"—displaced black voices in magazine outlets, Schurz also embodied the progressive outer limit of elite power circles and demarcated the racial and social boundaries that...