"Closing Ranks" and "Seeking Honors": W. E. B. Du Bois in World War I

Abstract

In July 1918, at the height of American mobilization during World War I, W. E. B. Du Bois issued Close Ranks, one of the best-known and least-understood prescriptions in the history of civil rights protest. In the Crisis, the monthly journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he called on African Americans to forget [their] special grievances and close ranks with white Americans and the Allies for the duration of the war. Close Ranks is commonly described as the most controversial editorial of Du Bois's long career. Not only was it accommodationist in tone; it was also published when he was seeking a commission as a captain in the Military Intelligence Branch (MIB), an antiradical agency of the United States Army General Staff. He applied to MIB at the suggestion of his friend, the white chairman of the NAACP, Joel E. Spingarn, who was then serving as an intelligence officer. Although Du Bois insisted that the editorial and the commission were unconnected, his motives became a matter of scorching debate among campaigners for equal rights, and they have puzzled historians and biographers ever since. The controversy damaged Du Bois's reputation as an unbending opponent of racial discrimination and deepened the divisions between various factions in the increasingly vigorous black political vanguard. Partly because of Close Ranks, Du Bois was to recall World War I with a mixture of shame and bitterness for the next forty years.1 The importance of the Close Ranks incident in the life of W. E. B. Du Bois is not in question; contemporaries and historians noted the mauling he received in the black press and his struggle to defend himself. But no attempt has been made to investigate fully his critics' most serious charge: that he wrote the editorial to strengthen his application for a commission. Historians have cited Close Ranks in three main ways. Most commonly, it is used to epitomize black patriotic senti-