The Difficult Doctor Du Bois

David Levering Lewis. W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963. New York: Henry Holt, 2000. xiv + 715 pp. Notes and index. $35.00

Writing the biography of W. E. B. Du Bois for the years from 1919 to his death in 1963 requires the skills of a twentieth-century historian as well as a detective able to separate facts from the myth and fancy surrounding the life. Black urbanization, the rebirth of mass politics, and the fertilization of the black experience with modern ideologies during World War I, the earthquake of the Great Depression, the upheavals of hot and cold wars, and finally the onset of a new civil rights movement transformed the politics and culture that anchored the first fifty years of Du Bois's life. Inevitably, the biographer must make intellectual judgments on some of the most contentious issues in American history. David Levering Lewis's sleuthing abilities are superb and his breezy style and fine-tuned sensibility capture the social world of the Talented Tenth, but these qualities do not equip him to probe in depth the politics that displaced its most talented member, the unstated theme of the biography. W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, so rich in creating Du Bois's social world, alternatively soft-pedals or ignores, but in the end does not analyze the politics that occupied so much of his life.

Like the first volume, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919 (1993), this successor clears much brush surrounding Du Bois's life. We learn that Du Bois's masterpiece Black Reconstruction was widely and surprisingly well-reviewed when it was published in 1935 and that Shirley Graham, his second wife, pursued him as an ambitious woman in love, not as an agent of the Communist party. Lewis is at his best dissecting the complexities of Du Bois's character. As Lewis revealed in Biography of a Race, Du Bois's universalism and racialism, feminism and womanizing, socialism and elitism, and later his critique of consumerism and attachment to creature comforts and display often collided. The young and mature Du Bois display identical personality traits: He was driven, principled, and learned, but also arrogant, dogmatic, and stubborn. Du Bois, Lewis writes, "comported himself like the colossus his public self had become. The result was stiff formality even with colleagues and an off-putting froideur to most strangers, coupled with spring-loaded vigilance against the slightest hint of racial put-down" (p. 231). His first wife, Nina, and their daughter, Yolande, continued to suffer silently and mostly apart from the great man.

Lewis's talent for social portraiture extends to Du Bois's circle. He fittingly dubs Benjamin Davis, Jr. an Ivy League Bolshevik. Lewis captures the cultural movement as well as the person with this characterization of Mary Austin's speech at a Du Bois tribute in 1924: "[M]istaking the occasion for a tribute to Sitting Bull, [she] prattled on about the influence of Indian art and music" (p.124). Lewis razors political, as well as intellectual, tourism. W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois "moved about Beijing in their ceremonial cocoon" and eyed "a fable of disciplined bees working in revolutionary unison" (p. 563). Lewis's pairing of daughter Yolande's marriage to poet Countee Cullen and Du Bois's novel Dark Princess, which included a politically pregnant marriage, is inspired.

At times, however, Lewis's phrase-making distracts and obscures. He refers to Benjamin Davis's defense of Angelo Herndon as the lawyer's "first fifteen minutes of fame"(p. 464). (No one acquired celebrity by defending a black, working-class Communist in 1930s Georgia.) Also, Lewis banishes monosyllables in favor of usable polysyllables. Sometimes sentences simply run away, as the number of words overwhelms the number of ideas. He tells us that "[f]ew knew better from long experience the...