An Inevitable Drift?: Oligarchy, Du Bois, and the Politics of Race between the Wars

At a moment that can only be described as a crisis of faith, Matthew Towns, the hero of W. E. B. Du Bois’s 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, Towns’s 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. Towns’s salvation, though, is short lived, because the two are again separated. And it is during this subsequent separation that Towns finds his democratic faith once again waning.

Although Towns’s confession does not constitute Dark Princess’s final 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 world’s 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 Bois’s fictional 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 Towns’s 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 question—that of the ability, qualifications, 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 refinement 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 defies 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 princess’s charge and returns to...