Replacing the Father: W. E. B. Du Bois' Reflections on George Washington's Birthday

Washington is not among the representative white men in Du Bois's canon. Du Bois neither uses him as a satiric stand-in for Anglo-Saxon civilization, as he does Jefferson Davis, nor does he consider Washington an imperfect great man of stature as Abraham Lincoln. And since Washington is not a living president, there are no "open letters" to him of the kind The Crisis editor sent to Presidents Wilson and Harding, urging them to reconsider the U.S. government's policies toward its black citizens. Mostly Washington's name appears in one-sentence references that assume a shared, if rudimentary, familiarity with the life and the myth of the first president.¹ These occasional evocations of Washington point to Du Bois's willingness to participate in a dialogue with a patriotic culture that assigned its first president ready-made uses and meanings. Their brief superficiality also reveals the historian's lack of genuine interest in this or any of the other eighteenth-century politicians known as the Founding Fathers. Du Bois never lost his idealistic belief in the possibility of democracy, and in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), his book that employs most thoroughly a Romantic nationalist Enlightenment rhetoric, he appropriates "the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence" (Souls 220) for black folk. Yet when it comes to building a pantheon of illustrious predecessors, he does not draw his line of descent from the Founding Fathers. In Souls he chooses to celebrate Alexander Crummel; it is only because Crummel was at one time helped by an abolitionist descendant of John Jay, "that daring father's daring son" (Souls 358), that a white Founding Father is obliquely mentioned in the entire 1903 collection of essays.

Against Du Bois's general unwillingness to give more than a passing mention to the American revolutionary pantheon, two sustained treatments of Washington, or rather of Washington's birthday, stand out. Neither of them is sustained in the sense of depth or extent of coverage of Washington himself. Both rather quickly shift the focus away from Washington to an alternative list of significant events and heroes in African American history. The first is a private connection that Du Bois establishes between his own birthday on February 23 and Washington's, celebrated on February 22. This connection is sustained in time—from an early student essay, written in 1890, to Du Bois's final autobiography, composed in 1958–1959 but not published in the United States until 1968. In the seventy years intervening between the student essay and the final autobiography, Du Bois brings other events in American and world history to bear on his birth date, and the changing selection of events reveals his evolving perception of historical processes.

The initial choice of Washington may have reflected Du Bois's situation as a student in a traditional curriculum. He is known to have subscribed to Carlyle's understanding of history as the work of great men, but, if his graduation speeches are taken as an indicator, within the span of two years Du Bois had already begun to move away from Carlyle's model. While his 1888 Fisk graduation speech celebrates German Chancellor Otto von Bismark, the 1890 Harvard commencement address satirizes its subject, Jefferson Davis. Similarly, in the earliest autobiographical text, an essay written in a Harvard graduate class, where Washington's birthday is the only clue to the birth of the future historian, there is a sense of a satiric distance between Du Bois and the patriotic figurehead he invokes. As a historian, Du Bois came to favor an understanding of history as a collective material production and to endorse a representation of American history that stressed the achievements of African Americans. Thus, as a shortcut to his American identity, Washington's birthday is progressively displaced by a series of historical events that shift the emphasis from the first president to the struggle for democracy in the United States, leaving Washington, as well as the patriotic rituals surrounding his memory, somewhat outside this struggle.

George Washington's birthday...