First as Tragedy,Then as Farce: WEB Du Bois,Left-Wing Radicalism,and the Problem of Interracial Labor Unionism

Introduction

“It would be idle to argue that all, or most, white Americans are friendly toward the Negro, for such argument would be diametrically opposed to the facts. But it would be just as idle to argue that all white people are enemies of the Negro, since, from the time of John Brown, Wendell Philips, Garrison, etc., to the present-day, the facts in the case would overwhelmingly controvert such an argument. . .Already the most radical white labor organizations have thrown themselves open to the Negro. . .”

—Cyril V Briggs in “The Acid Test of White Friendship,” July 1921

What are we to make of the myriad of contradictions in Du Bois’s voluminous corpus? What are we to make of Du Bois’s acerbic (and damning) assessment of Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and his subsequent embrace of Black nationalism; his championing of the liberal integrationism, and the ensuing endorsement of what his biographer has called “Du Boisian segregation”; his lifelong denunciation of colonialism, and his all too enthusiastic advocacy of Japanese imperialism in China? ¹ David Levering Lewis suggests one possible solution: while a principled social scientist, politically, Du Bois was “essentially. . .[a] militant petit bourgeois opportunis[t]” (Lewis, 2000: 4). ² Du Bois’s analysis and appraisal of, say, imperialism and the First World War in “The Souls of White Folk” and “The African Roots of the War” may have been grounded in a principled opposition to economic exploitation and colonial violence, but, ultimately, the short-term interests of African Americans would not have been served by opposing US entry into the conflict. Indeed, Du Bois argued, “closing rank”—by fighting and dying loyally and valiantly in the Great War—was an instrumental good: “we have gained rights and gained them rapidly and effectively by our loyalty in time of trouble” (“Our Special Grievances,” Sep. 1918; Du Bois, 1983: 163). If the Black population proved their loyalty in a “time of trouble” again, they were sure to gain more rights. In terms of practical activism and politics, Du Bois favored anything that he perceived to be in the short-term interests of the Black population, no matter how unprincipled or opportunist they may have been. Du Bois’s overriding concern was the political and social equality of African Americans; any positive step in that direction was politically justifiable, even if that meant participating in colonial conquest, embracing segregation, or turning a blind eye to the ravages of Japanese imperialism.

While this solution—analytically separating Du Bois the social scientist from Du Bois the “militant petit bourgeois opportunist”—explains some of the apparent contradictions in Du Bois’s work, it cannot and does not explain them all. Indeed, Adolf Reed, Jr. has argued that the seeming contradictions in Du Bois’s work are derived largely by decontextualizing the political strategies he proposed from the concrete situations they were perceived to solve (Reed, 1985: 432). The contradictions only seem to exist to us, the latter-day interpreter, because we divorce Du Bois’s proposed strategies from their historical context. Rather, Reed argues, Du Bois’s thought “cohere[s] around certain core assumptions and values that he maintained over the course of his lengthy intellectual career” (Reed, 1985: 432). From this perspective, then, some, if not most, of the apparent contradictions in Du Bois’s thought are not contradictions at all, but a failure on the interpreter’s part to ground their interpretation in Du Bois’s “core assumptions and values.”

It is through this latter analytical lens that I propose to examine an oft-mentioned, but little seriously studied apparent contradiction in Du Bois’s sociological thought, political activism, and personal life: his rhetorical, seemingly principled, advocacy of interracial worker cooperation/unionization and left-wing radicalism, and his concrete disavowal and denunciation of every such organizational attempt to organize workers interracially or further left-wing goals in the USA (at least until the Second World War). By this I mean—in contradistinction to an interpretation that attempts to explain Du Bois’s condemnation of concrete efforts to organize workers interracially and further left-wing goals in the USA by resorting to Du Bois’s supposed opportunism (an explanation that he, on occasion, embraced)—that this concurrent advocacy and condemnation was grounded in a “core assumption” of Du Bois’s thought: interracial cooperation among workers is extremely unlikely, if not totally impossible. This assumption undergirds and informs Du Bois’s mature scholarship (including his masterpiece, Black Reconstruction in America), it serves as the theoretical grounding for his condemnation of the large-scale attempts to organize workers interracially on the basis of class, and it explains his uneven personal relationship with the Communist Party USA.

Tragically, as a number of his contemporary critics pointed out—namely George Streator, E Franklin Fraizer, Hubert H Harrison, and the above-quoted Cyril V Briggs ³ —Du Bois refused to alter this “core assumption,” even in the face of successful mass mobilization of white and Black workers on a class basis. Especially confounding was the fact that his most sophisticated elaboration of this “core assumption” occurred during the heyday of interracial industrial unionism under the auspices of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), the pro-interracial impetus of which was due largely to the efforts of the Communist Party USA (CP)—a group he ruthlessly criticized throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and then, ironically, joined in 1961. ⁴ As Streator, a Black organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, pointed out in another oft-cited ⁵ but little analyzed exchange with Du Bois, Du Bois’s suspicion of and refusal to engage with the CIO and the CP was grounded largely if not totally in his inability to accept as true any challenge to his “core assumption” that white workers would never organize on a class basis with Black workers. Indeed, Streator claimed, Du Bois was willfully ignorant of the union upsurge:

Your [Du Bois’s] information on the present-day labor problem, its possible trends, your information on Southern white labor are on the whole poor. And there is no place for you to learn these things except from the ‘youngsters’ you are tending to bawl out, these days. (Streator to Du Bois, 18 April 1935; Du Bois, 1976, Vol 2: 89)

Du Bois responded predictability:

I am convinced from wide contact with the [white] working people of the United States. . .that the last thing that they would want to do would be united in any movement whose object was the uplift of the mass of Negroes. . .” (Du Bois to Streator, 24 April 1935; Du Bois, 1976, Vol 2: 91)

Just such a movement was then brewing.

In what follows, I illustrate how Du Bois’s “core assumption” of the improbability or impossibility of interracial working class solidarity undergirded his scholarship and political activism, especially during the 1930s. It is this assumption, I argue, that led Du Bois to (incorrectly) ascribe a transhistoric logic to his argument—made most forcefully and completely in Black Reconstruction, but present throughout much his previous work—that white workers pursue their material interests as whites in competition with Blacks, and, in so doing, become the primary promulgators of white supremacy and racial inequality. While this logic is certainly true at some historical junctures, it is a historically contingent response, not a transhistoric inevitability. Given sufficiently ideologically inclined leadership, ⁶ white workers have historically been willing to organize with Black workers in the pursuit of class-based interests, while rejecting the potentiality of achieving short-term advantage over Blacks by organizing against them. I give a general overview of this latter phenomenon during the 1930s (i.e. the period Du Bois wrote, published, and defended the claims made in Black Reconstruction), focusing especially on the activity of the CP and the CIO. Then, I more closely analyze three instances of interracial class-based organization that Du Bois specifically denounced: the attempt by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) to organize striking hotel and restaurant workers in 1912 New York, the attempt by the CP to organize Black and white coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky in the early 1930s, and, finally, the CP’s role in the labor movement in metropolitan St Louis throughout the 1930s and 1940s. I conclude by pointing out the danger and the methodological insufficiency—influential since David Roediger’s seminal Wages of Whiteness, but growing to dominate the literature on the white working class since the 2016 presidential election—of ascribing such a transhistoric logic to the behavior of white workers. Not only does it problematically minimize the role of capitalists and the state in the perpetuation of racial inequality, but it also ignores the extraordinary instances when white workers actively fight against the white supremacist status quo.

Racialized Competition and the Perpetuation of Racial Inequality

In his 1935 classic, Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois characterized the American labor movement as consisting of two contradictory currents: one which strives to establish the economic, social, and political equality of Blacks, and another that strives to better the wages and conditions of white workers by monopolizing the labor pool (i.e. limiting competition) (Du Bois, [1935] 1998: 20–21, 354–355). In this zero-sum conceptualization, a victory by one current means a loss for the other: if Black workers are able to enter a previously all-white industry or occupational group, white workers are faced with increased competition, potential job loss, and potential wage reduction. This, what Du Bois called in an earlier work, “modern economic paradox”—made possible by the anarchic structure of capitalism—results in an obfuscation of the class struggle: the primary antagonism of the American class structure is not between workers and their employers, but between Black workers and white workers (see Du Bois, [1920] (1999): 52; Du Bois, [1935] (1998): 103, 216, 239, & 573). Workers confront each other in the labor market neither as atomized individuals, nor as an undifferentiated proletariat with identical propensities to collectively challenge the boss’s rule: workers confront each other in the labor market as racialized entities, whose individual material interests are furthered along with their socially constructed race. Hence the “exceptionalism” of the American labor movement: One segment of the working class concentrates most of its activism on excluding the other segment from higher-paying jobs to protect against potential job displacement and wage decline, and the other segment concentrates most of its activism on eliminating the mechanisms and undermining the organizations through which the first segment excludes them. In sum, white workers, to protect their own livelihoods, embrace and perpetuate white supremacy, and Blacks workers, to improve their economic position, struggle against the means through which white workers attempt to achieve labor market monopoly—specifically labor unions. As Du Bois put it poignantly: “Negroes must act as scabs” and “strikes cannot be effective because the white striker can be threatened with the colored ‘scab’” (Du Bois, [1935] (1998): 354 & 704, emphasis added). Both white and Black workers are compelled to act as they do by economic necessity.

Contrary to what I would characterize as the dominant interpretation of Black Reconstruction, which emphasizes the “public and psychological wage” that whites receive as a result of the operation of white supremacy (thus incentivizing their complicity in its perpetuation), ⁷ Du Bois clearly grounds racial antagonism in economic necessity, even if the so-called “wages of whiteness” contribute, in a secondary and buttressing way, to white working class behavior. Whites and Blacks, according to Du Bois, are literally engaged in a life or death struggle: workers need jobs to survive, and being displaced from one’s job because of “underbidding” or “scabbing” is akin to, or is at least perceived to be akin to, having one’s livelihood stolen; just as being relegated to the lowest paying jobs and being prohibited from competing in the larger labor market is akin to having one’s livelihood stolen. The antagonism between whites and Blacks is driven, ultimately, by the imperative under capitalism to earn one’s living by competing with other workers in a limited job market: the specificity of American capitalism is that this competition occurs not between workers as workers, but between workers as whites, and workers as Blacks.

Du Bois ascribes to this antagonism a transhistoric logic: ⁸ under slavery, white workers fear competition with slaves, after abolition, white workers fear competition with freedmen, and up to the present, interracial working class solidarity is thwarted by interracial competition. ⁹ Undergirding this ascription is the aforementioned “core assumption” of Du Bois: overcoming this antagonism—engaging in class struggle on an interracial basis—is extremely improbable, if not totally impossible. The incentives to pursue one’s material interests in terms of race rather than class are simply too strong to overcome. Assertions to this effect are repeated throughout Black Reconstruction, and echo much of his journalistic accounts of labor union activity (and his personal correspondence) from the early 1900s to at least the end of the Second World War. While often professing an almost superficial advocacy of organized labor (e.g. “The Crisis [i.e., Du Bois] believes in organized labor,” July 1912; “I am among the few colored men who have tried conscientiously to bring about understanding co-operation between American Negroes and the Labor Unions,” March 1918), Du Bois invariably noted the improbability of interracial cooperation under the aegis of labor unionism, and emphasized his contention that white supremacy is given “its greatest impulse” by white workers in pursuit of relative economic advantage. ¹⁰ In sum, as Du Bois wrote to George Streator in 1935: “Your plan, as it seems to me, involves co-operation with organized labor. I have no faith in this. . .I see no salvation in that direction” (17 April 1935; Du Bois, 1976, Vol 2: 88).

The Problem of Interracial Unionism

Of course, just one year before Du Bois voiced his lack of faith to Streator, “labor’s giant step” crescendoed into one of the largest mass strike waves in American history. Three city-wide strikes in Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Toledo, Ohio fired the first major volley in the insurgence of industrial unionism in the USA (Preis, [1964] (2000): 42–59). Especially relevant in this context is the West Coast waterfront strike—a CP-led walkout of longshoremen in every West Coast port—which culminated in a bloody general strike in San Francisco, and, finally, union recognition. Prior to the strike, Black workers were only employed on the docks as strikebreakers; only an extremely small percentage of these Black strikebreakers worked on the waterfront permanently (1.4% of the longshoremen in California were Black in 1930) (Nelson, 1998: 157). Both to avoid a broken strike, and to further the CP imperative to eliminate Black oppression in the USA, ¹¹ the CP “played a vital role in pushing the unions they led toward a break with white supremacist ideology and practice” (Nelson, 1990: 259). Specifically, CP leaders “spoke at black churches and ‘implored blacks to join [them] on the picket line”; as longshore organizer Harry Bridges put it, “I went directly to them. I said: ‘Our union means a new deal for Negroes. Stick with us and we’ll stand for your inclusion in [the] industry. . .Almost without exception, they stuck with us. . .The employers were frustrated in their attempt to use them for scabs” (Nelson, 1998: 158). The CP kept its word: the left-led International Longshore and Warehouse Union became a “haven of racial equality” due to the “substantial presence of the Communist Party” (Cherny, 2002; Nelson, 1998: 158). ¹²

This pattern—the CP (often under the auspices of the CIO) unionizing industries that only hired Blacks as actual or potential strikebreakers by ensuring racial inclusion in the benefits of unionization, working to eliminate the special oppressions of Blacks, and disabusing white workers of the efficacy of exclusionary responses—was repeated throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Steel, an industry whose workers perceived their previous unionization attempts to have been frustrated by Black strikebreaking (specifically during the Great Steel Strike of 1919), ¹³ was organized largely by CPers, a significant number of whom were Black members of the left-led National Negro Congress (Gellman, 2012: 19–62). Goldfield argues that without this radical, interracial impetus from the left, the steel campaign would not have been successful (Goldfield, 1993: 10). Goldfield also points out that some newly organized Black and white steelworkers started their own “civil rights revolution” by “desegregating everything in sight, from restaurants and department stores to movie theaters and swimming pools” (Goldfield, 1993: 10). In meatpacking, the story is remarkably similar: Black workers were first hired in the industry from 1916 to 1921 as strikebreakers (especially during the national strike of 1920–1921), and unionization occurred, starting in the early 1930s, largely under the direction of the CP and their interracial commitments (Horowitz, 1997: 65–68). As Horowitz argues, “as one of the few inter-racial organizations in Chicago, the Communist Party helped bridge the divisions among packinghouse workers and also initiated the process of unionization” (Horowitz, 1997: 68). The same pattern was also evident in auto, especially during the campaign to organize the Ford Motor Company (Keeran, 1980), electrical, especially in the South (Feurer, 2006; Filippelli and McColloch, 1995), tobacco (Korstad, 2003), cannery (Romney, 2016), and agriculture (Kelly, 2015; Vargas, 2005). ¹⁴

While Du Bois’s skepticism of the prospect of interracial cooperation within the labor movement may have been warranted—given the hegemony of white supremacy within the labor movement during the early 20th century—his especially virulent attacks against the CP, ¹⁵ given their many and significant successes discussed above, is particularly confounding. ¹⁶ Although Du Bois, from his 1926 visit to the Soviet Union until his death, was a staunch defender of the USSR, as well as a self-professed Marxist and “Bolshevik,” during the 1930s he constantly and relentlessly ridiculed and caricaturized the American CP (“Russia, 1926” Crisis Nov. 1926; Du Bois, 1983: 451–452; Lewis, 2000: 203).

“I am, therefore, absolutely and bitterly opposed to the American brand of communism which simply aims to stir up trouble and to make Negroes shock troops in a fight whose triumph may easily involve the utter annihilation of the American Negro,” Du Bois wrote to Streator on 24 April 1935, “I, therefore, attack and shall continue to attack American communism in its present form, while at the same time, I regard Russia [the USSR] as the most promising modern country” (Du Bois, 1976, Vol 2: 92).

In 1931, Du Bois wrote what he considered—until the end of the Second World War, at least ¹⁷ —to be his definitive assessment of the CP: a long Crisis editorial entitled “The Negro and Communism.” Besides ad hominin attacks—“American Communists are neither wise nor intelligent”—Du Bois’s substantive critique was limited mostly to the Party’s handling of the Scottsboro trial, accusing the CP of exploiting “the boys” to further the Party’s alien cause (Du Bois, 1983: 634–635). No mention is made of the fact that his NAACP initially refused the case because Walter White assumed that the defendants were actually guilty (Lewis, 2000: 257, 333). Du Bois reiterates his “core assumption” that white and Black workers could not possibly organize together on a class basis, and concludes by claiming that “radical reformers,” like the CP, only “share their gains with Negroes when they ha[ve] to” (Du Bois, 1983: 640). Such a position is not only belied by what has been presented above, but, even more so, by the case studies presented below. ¹⁸ I conclude this piece with three case studies on Du Bois’s response to specific attempts at interracial unionization. The first, on the 1912 NYC Waiters Strike, illustrates that Du Bois’s disapproval of interracial unionization was not limited to CP-led attempts. The second, on the CP’s attempt to organize coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, belies Du Bois’s claim that the CP only organized Black workers to benefit themselves; indeed, they did so even if it meant harming their cause. And, finally, the case of the labor movement in metropolitan St Louis demonstrates just how contingent white working class behavior is.

The 1912 NYC Waiters’ Strike

From May to June 1912, roughly 18,000 waiters, cooks, and assorted hotel staff participated in a walkout and militant picket of New York City’s luxury hotels (Dubofsky, 1968: 122; Josephson, 1956: 96–97). Restaurant service at the Plaza, the St Regis, the Waldorf-Astoria, and at least 17 other hotels was totally incapacitated: “many upper-class New Yorkers had unexpected difficulty locating dining tables set with silver service and featuring continental cuisine” (Dubofsky, 1968: 122; New York Times, 1 June 1912). Instead of the servile service staff they were used to, “upper-class New Yorkers” brazen enough to cross the picket line found themselves “immersed in riotous crowds of workers who, attacked by guards and detectives, shouted: ‘Hotel workers unite!—Don’t be slaves!’” (Josephson, 1956: 96). Compelled by starvation wages, long hours, despotic management, and condescending patrons, the walkout was initially a leaderless, “spontaneous” uprising with diffuse demands and no centralized strategy. Into this vacuum entered the IWW, fresh off the heels of their monumental victory leading a massive strike of immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts (Dubofsky, 1968: 122). IWW leadership christened a new organizational aegis, the Hotel Workers’ International Union, and set out to organize the rest of the city’s hotel workers. The new Wobbly affiliate was led not only by “IWW firebrands” like Big Bill Haywood, Arturo Giovanitti, and “Smiling Joe” Ettor, but by experienced hotel worker organizers who had defected from the rival Hotel and Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union—a “tight-aristocratic craft organization,” composed mostly of neighborhood bartenders, which “used high initiation fees to exclude the hordes of depressed workers toiling in the expanding luxury establishments” (Dubofsky, 1968: 121; Josephson, 1956: 97).

Almost immediately, hotel management began hiring strikebreakers, a substantial proportion of which were either Blacks “imported” from the South, or college students from Columbia University. ¹⁹ The IWW did not respond to the influx of Black strikebreakers as the employers had hoped: instead of allowing the class struggle to descend into anti-Black violence, the union “promptly. . .opened a special bureau for the enrollment of negro [sic] waiters and cooks” (New York Times 1 June 1912). The IWW also sought, and achieved, an alliance with the Colored Waiters’ Association, who assured the union that “the aims of the two organizations are entirely sympathetic, and that if an army of negroes [sic] should be drafted to meet the occasion, they would be converted to union men in no time and drawn out into the growing ranks of strikers” (New York Times 1 June 1912). The majority-white picket did not act as Du Bois’s transhistoric logic would have predicted: these white workers refused to pursue the material interests in race-based terms by excluding the Black strikebreakers; rather, they organized with them on the basis of class solidarity.

Despite the IWW’s infamous ideological and substantive commitment to interracialism ²⁰ —in 1919 Du Bois wrote that he “respect[s] [the IWW] as one of the social and political movements in modern times that draws no color line” ²¹ —during the strike, Du Bois encouraged Blacks to act as strikebreakers (“I.W.W.” Crisis June 1919; “Organized Labor” Crisis July 1912; Du Bois, 1983: 38). Apparently completely unaware of the actual unionization attempt, and uninformed as to the actors involved, Du Bois asked his readership: “What then must be the attitude of the black man in the event of a strike like that of the white waiters of New York?” He answered for them: “The mass of them must most naturally regard the union white man as their enemy. . .when they [Black workers] take back the jobs out of which the white waiters have driven them, they do the natural and sensible thing” (“Organized Labor”). The strikers “deserve themselves the starvation which they plan for their darker and poorer fellows” (“Organized Labor”). Again, because Du Bois assumed that white workers could not possibly organize with Black workers on a class basis, his response was determined a priori: unions are always exclusionary, so when unions strike, Black workers must always act as strikebreakers. ²² The 1912 NYC Waiters’ Strike was eventually broken: not by Black strikebreaking, but by the struck hotels accepting all of the strikers’ demands, except union recognition (Dubofsky, 1968: 122–123).

Bloody Harlan

From 1931 to 1932, facing widespread unemployment, even wider underemployment, and declining wages, miners in the isolated coal communities of rural Kentucky initiated a desperate, doomed, and bloody walkout of the coal fields. Turning first to the mainstream United Mine Workers of America (UMWA)—a union that had lacked significant presence in Kentucky since 1921—the miners sought leadership, organizational structure, and monetary support. After initially rebuffing the miners’ request, the UMWA sent its vice president (and future president of the United Steelworkers and the CIO), Philip Murray, to encourage the strikers to join the union (Draper, 1972: 381). Shortly thereafter, the 10,000-strong picket was engaged in a veritable war—known later as the Battle of Evarts—culminating in the deaths of three sheriff deputies and one miner, and murder charges for 34 of the strikers (Bubka, 1970: 45–48). Fearing imminent defeat and wishing to distance itself from the violence in Harlan County, the UMWA abandoned the strike (Hevener, 1978: 55). The Communist-led National Miners Union (NMU)—along with a number of other groups—stepped in to fill the leadership void (Hevener, 1978: 56).

Founded in 1928, the NMU was a response both to the purge of the leftwing from the UMWA, and the CP’s shift to the sectarian left during the so-called “third period.” Prior to participating in the Harlan County strike, the NMU led a number of strikes in the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania, resulting in the coal companies signing backdoor, sweetheart contracts with the more conservative UMWA, which companies regarded as the “lesser evil” (Draper, 1972: 379). Upon learning of the Battle of Evarts, the CP’s legal-defense arm, the International Labor Defense, offered the defendants legal assistance, while the CP itself established seven soup kitchens to relieve the starving strikers, and began recruiting them to the NMU (Hevener, 1978: 57). The soup kitchens were to “pose a special problem for the Communists”; however: the CPers insisted that all workers, regardless of race, ate “under the same roof and at the same table” (Hevener, 1978: 60). Not only did the CP seek to organize workers interracially, they sought to eliminate every manifestation of Jim Crow: ²³ as anti-Communist historian, Theodore Draper put it, “it is fair to say that only the Communists in that period, in the heat of battle, would have taken such a firm stand on this issue” (1972: 387).

This “special problem”—insisting on interracial equality among a less-than tolerant, overwhelmingly white, unemployed starving mass of Southern coal miners—would come to a head on 11 February 1932, the same day Harry Simms, a Young Communist League leader tasked with organizing for the NMU, was murdered by mine guards (Hevener, 1978: 79). A group of local miners had just returned from a series of training sessions conducted by the CP on the East Coast. Outraged that the CP endorsed the permissibility of interracial marriage, the local miners returned hell-bent on purging the CP from Harlan Country (Hevener, 1978: 80). As Homer Morris put it, the denunciation by the returning miners was “far more effective in smashing the union than the National Guard ever could have been” (Hevener, 1978: 80). Harlan County would not be unionized until 1939, and then only by the far more conservative UMWA (Bubka, 1970: 57).

Du Bois himself visited Harlan County in February 1932, right in the midst of Communists being murdered and denounced for their promotion of interracialism (Lewis, 2000: 296). His published work on his visit—a March 1932 Crisis editorial entitled “Miners” (Du Bois, 1983: 659)—while acknowledging the fact that the strike involved Black and white miners, is conspicuously silent on the presence of the CP. While it mentions the CP soup kitchen that was dynamited by the mine owners (without acknowledging the fact that the kitchen was run by the NMU, see Hevener, 1978: 60), it says nothing about the efforts of the CP to racially integrate that very same soup kitchen. Ignorance is not a possible excuse: the primary, if not the only, reports of the ongoings in Harlan County were made by a group of CP members and fellow travelers led by authors John Dos Passos and Theodore Dreiser (Hevener, 1978: 63). It is extremely likely that Du Bois met with this group while in Harlan (Lewis, 2000: 296). Contrary to Du Bois’s above discussed description of the CP as a group of “radical reformers” who only “share their gains with Negroes when they ha[ve] to,” the CP was so dedicated to the pursuit of racial equality that they were willing to pursue this goal even if it meant organizational failure—as it did in Bloody Harlan.

Historical Contingency in Metropolitan St Louis

Du Bois’s 1920 account of the East St Louis Race Riot of 1917, “Of Wealth and Work,” is the epitome of Du Boisian analysis: driven by a compelling, almost ethereal narrative, it is a sociological account of a true tragedy—a tragedy not simply because of its devastating and murderous outcome, but, in true Sophoclean fashion, because each actor was compelled to act as they did for seemingly justifiable reasons. As a result of the tightening labor market in industrial East St Louis during the First World War, white workers were relatively successful in organizing themselves in trade unions. In order to ease this tightening labor market and decrease wages, employers recruited thousands of Black workers from the South to undercut the prevailing industrial wage (Du Bois, [1920] 1999: 51). White workers, for the most part, excluded these Black workers from their unions and organized specifically to gain a white monopoly of the labor pool (Du Bois, [1920] 1999: 53). When white workers failed at achieving this latter goal through unionization, they turned to violence, killing dozens, if not hundreds, of Black workers—male and female—and their children, while burning or otherwise destroying their homes (Du Bois, [1920] 1999: 54). In what I consider the most succinct statement of Du Bois’s account of racialized competition under American capitalism, Du Bois describes the riot as follows:

If the white workingmen of East St. Louis felt sure that Negro workers would not and could not take the bread and cake from their mouths, their race hatred would never have been translated into murder. If the black workingmen of the South could earn a decent living under decent circumstances at home, they would not be compelled to underbid their white fellows. (Du Bois, [1920] 1999: 57)

Racial antagonism, again, is driven by economic necessity—not immorality or ignorance, but by the “shadow of hunger” that “drives us to war and murder and hate” (Du Bois, [1920] 1999: 57).

White working class behavior during the 1917 race riot conforms to Du Bois’s “core assumption” that white and Black workers are extremely unlikely to organize together on a class basis; however, a little more than a decade after the riot, St Louis would be the site of one of the most successful attempts by the CP to organize workers interracially in the South. The largest left-led union of the CIO (with a peak national membership of roughly 600,000), the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), organized St Louis’s expansive electrical industry in the mid-1930s. Led primarily by CPer William Sentner—who had previously organized St Louis’s majority Black female nut-processing industry—the UE not only insisted on organizing Black and white workers on a class basis, but it also realized many of the specific demands of the Black workforce, even though the industry itself was overwhelmingly white (Blacks made up roughly 10% of the workforce) (Feurer, 1992, 2006: 146). First, Sentner established a “Negro Committee” within the union designed to increase Black hiring in the industry. The union also hired a number of Black organizers and appointed Black members to leadership positions (Feurer, 2006: 148). The UE integrated all of the factories’ cafeterias, their contracts included plant-wide seniority clauses that prohibited racial discrimination, it led an intense education campaign among its white members to disabuse them of racism, the union insisted on the termination of white workers who refused to work with Black workers, and it organized integrated social events to instill interracial solidarity in the membership (Feurer, 2006: 146–151). The St. Louis American, the city’s Black newspaper, characterized the UE as the “forefront of organizations pledged to the fight to end discrimination against blacks” (Feurer, 2006: 151).

The history of the St Louis labor movement illustrates the historically contingent nature of white working class behavior. The white working class, while often perceiving and pursuing its interests in race-based, exclusionary terms, has historically organized with Black workers on a class-based basis both when it was feasible, and when there was sufficiently ideologically inclined leadership. Indeed, the very same white working class who in 1917 perceived Black workers as malevolent job displacers, in the 1930s and 1940s considered Black workers as “fellow workers” in a class-based struggle against their joint exploiters. ²⁴

Conclusion

Due to its slavish adherence to the Soviet “line,” the CP would eventually abandon its commitment to militant interracial, class-based unity, and Black liberation generally. In 1939, the USSR would sign a neutrality pact with Nazi Germany (the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact), leading the American Communists to advocate for US isolationism and temper its criticism of German fascism. If this did not lend itself to total delegitimization, the CP’s abrupt shift to supporting US involvement in the war in 1941—when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union—largely would. In an attempt to ensure the survival of the USSR, the CP and their unions became the most ardent propagators and adherents of the labor movement’s “no-strike pledge” during the war—to maximize the production of military goods—which disproportionately negatively affected Black and female workers. Shunning a golden opportunity to increase the working conditions and wages through strikes, the CP instead chose to abandon Black workers, while thwarting and lambasting their industrial actions throughout the war. The CP would later self-liquidate its role in the labor movement and the Black liberation movement in the late-1940s into the 1950s (for a fuller discussion, see Stepan-Norris and Zeitlin, 2002: 266–327).

It is precisely during this period that Du Bois would temper his “core assumption” of the unlikelihood of interracial class-based cooperation. His appraisal of the CIO and, especially the CP, would become much more positive throughout the late 1940s and into 1950s until he finally joined the party, at age 93, in 1961 (see, especially, Du Bois, 1948). When asked why he had not joined the party earlier, he replied: “I suppose one of the chief reasons that I didn’t become a Communist as a young man was that nobody asked me to” (Horne, 1986: 289). It is hard to know what to make of this response: was Du Bois answering tongue in cheek? Surely, he had not forgotten being one of the CP’s most prominent critics during the Party’s 1930s heyday; surely, he had not forgotten being actively recruited since the early 1930s by some of the Party’s most famous Black members, such as actor, baritone, and professional football player, Paul Robeson. This is the farce corresponding to the earlier tragedy: Du Bois the CPer when the CP was impotent, and Du Bois the anti-CPer when the CP was, in the words of Gilmore, “alone” in “argu[ing] for complete equality of the races” (Gilmore, 2008: 4).

More important than this personal and intellectual history, however, is the resurgent insistence on a transhistoric logic of white working class behavior. ²⁵ Besides simply being methodologically incomplete, as I believe I have shown, it is a dangerous, if not simply defeatist, political position grounded in short-term and selective memory (see James, 1999: 58). Du Bois’s most important contribution to the study of the perpetuation of racial inequality, the claim that white workers pursue their material interests as whites in competition with Blacks, and, in so doing, become the primary promulgators of white supremacy, accurately explains much of American race relations. However, it does not and cannot explain why, at certain historical junctures, white workers reject the potentiality of short-term relative advantage over Blacks and decide to organize on a class-based basis with their fellow workers. Such an explanation also totally ignores the agentic and purposely divisive response of the state and employers to working class militancy, as other scholars have emphasized (see e.g., Woodward, [1955] 2002; Arnesen, 1998; Roediger & Esch, 2014; Esch, 2018; Melcher, 2018). An alternative paradigm that accounts for these phenomena, while building off of the theoretical achievements of Du Bois, is necessary.