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Our Splendid Failure

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/19405103.55.3.08

1940-5103

Edlie Wong,

Race, History, and American Society

In the final chapter of his landmark revisionist study Black Reconstruction in America 1860–1880 (1935), W. E. B. Du Bois referred to Reconstruction as “a tragedy that beggared the Greek.”1 He explains, “The unending tragedy of Reconstruction is the utter inability of the American mind to grasp its real significance, its national and worldwide implications” (708). In thus naming Reconstruction a tragedy, Du Bois collapses the distinction between literary genre and social experience. This notion of tragedy, or more precisely tragic thinking (given Du Bois’ heterodox use of the term) resembles most closely what anthropologist David Scott means by the concept in his compelling reading of C. L. R. James’ Black Jacobins (1938, revised 1963), a landmark text in the anticolonial historiography of the Haitian Revolution. For Scott, tragic thinking serves a dual role. As an analytic, tragedy functions as a mode of historical criticism, and as a narrative strategy, tragedy yields a form of historical representation attentive to the contingencies of human action and equally well suited to capture ambiguity and paradox.2 Du Bois used historical inquiry to make political arguments about the present, and studying his early experiments with literary genre helps us better understand the politics of historical representation that he later takes up in Black Reconstruction. In the dynamic interplay between his earlier fiction and historiographical writings, Du Bois turned to tragedy and tragic thinking to delineate the complex connection between hope and despair that structured Black American responses to Reconstruction and its legacies. In what follows, I explore some of the political stakes involved in Du Bois reclaiming Reconstruction as tragedy through a brief consideration of the novelistic experimentation that preceded it.In calling Reconstruction a tragedy, Du Bois offers perhaps little surprise to those of us in the twenty-first century. Following Black Reconstruction, modern historians have tended to emphasize Reconstruction's Janus-faced nature: the groundbreaking promise offset by its abysmal failures. However, Annette Gordon-Reed reminds us that the encoding of Reconstruction as “tragedy” held a very different political significance during Du Bois’ era.3 In the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, a veritable school of literature, film, and historiography sprang up to mourn the customs and traditions of the Old South and protest the injustices of federal overreach in granting the formerly enslaved citizenship, enfranchising Black men, and allowing them to govern in Southern states. This “tragic legend of Reconstruction” became a touchstone for a highly influential and dominant interpretation of Reconstruction as a lamentation for the so-called “Lost Cause” of the white South, and it dominated the historical imagination of the era, as Kenneth Stampp has argued.4 Inflected through white supremacy, this tragic notion of Reconstruction lasted well into the 1960s, leading some reactionary public commentators to disparage the Civil Rights Movement as a Second Reconstruction.5 As Thomas Holt reminds us, some Civil Rights reformers and politicians at that time had sought to disassociate their progressive initiatives from Reconstruction, which many still viewed as a bad chapter in U.S. history and to be forgotten as such.6In reclaiming the concept of tragedy, Du Bois sought to refute and challenge this white supremacist counter-revolution in public history. In Black Reconstruction, he marshals tragic thinking as a political gesture in his recovery of the “history of the black man's part in Reconstruction,” as he later described in the autobiographical Dusk of Dawn (1940). “Like Nemesis of Greek tragedy,” writes Du Bois in Black Reconstruction, “the central problem of America after the Civil War, as before, was the black man: those four million souls whom the nation had used and degraded, and on whom the South had built an oligarchy similar to the colonial imperialism of today” (237). Among the vast cast of characters—Union officers, politicians, jurists, capitalists, abolitionists, and slaveholders, Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction centers the Black worker in a revolutionary struggle that went terribly wrong and with far-reaching and unintended consequences. Reconstruction proved to be a failure, but it was, in his words, “a splendid failure” for it demonstrated the power of Black capacity and laid the foundation for future struggle (708). As Du Bois later insisted in Dusk of Dawn, “Reconstruction was ‘tragic,’ ‘terrible,’ a ‘great mistake,’ and ‘a humiliation,’ not because of what actually happened.” He goes on to clarify what he took to be the “thesis” of Black Reconstruction, “No, the ‘tragedy’ of Reconstruction was because here an attempt was initiated to make American democracy and the tenets of the Declaration of Independence apply not only to white men, but to black men.”7Du Bois’ first novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) dramatizes many of the central themes of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) through what numerous scholars have referred to as an ambitious—if flawed, by some counts—stitching together of fable and realism (David Levering Lewis) or romance and (nascent socialist or economic) realism (Arnold Rampersad, Keith Byerman, Maurice Lee).8 In an early scene from Quest, Blessed or Bles Alwyn, who travels from Georgia to attend Miss Sarah Smith's longstanding free school for Blacks in Alabama, learns about Jason and the Argonauts and applies the myth to the racial economy of cotton. Southern planters including the novel's ex-Confederate Cresswells, like Jason, have stolen the “silver fleece” of cotton from “the dull cabins that crouched here and there upon the earth, with the dark twinkling of their black folk.”9 Reiterated in the novel's title, this allusion references a key chapter, “Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece,” from the earlier Souls. There Du Bois numbers “its Reconstruction tragedies” among the many crimes of this “happy-go-lucky nation,” denouncing the new “slavery of debt” peonage, which made a “mockery of freedom” promised by Reconstruction.10 Writing during what Rayford Logan later termed the “Nadir,” as anti-Black racial violence and segregation became entrenched in American daily life, Du Bois portrays Reconstruction as less the forging of a new South than the preservation of the old.Du Bois’ experiments with tragic thinking might be traced back to this first foray into long fiction. Byerman observes that Du Bois’ fiction “consistently seeks to combine conventions of fictional narrative with the realities of black experience in a racist society.”11 As Byerman and other scholars have noted, Quest is firmly rooted in nineteenth-century forms of storytelling, and the uneven interplay between romance and realism might be read as DuBois’ literary effort to delineate the powerful and generative ambivalence of Reconstruction in Black American life. One of the novel's plotlines charts the nefarious machinations of New England capitalists and Southern planters in monopolizing the cotton market and thereby seizing control of the wealth of the post-Reconstruction South and returning Black freedmen to an oppressive servitude that is slavery by another name. In this fashion, the novel offers a fictional rendering of Du Bois’ historiographic concerns and typifies many of Black Reconstruction's historical concepts, such as the “backwards looking” South and the old “Abolition-democracy” and “new industrial oligarchy” of the North in a range of white characters, including the Cresswells, Miss Sarah Smith, and the Taylors.12In Quest, Du Bois’ experiments with realism and romance help us understand the affective and temporal dimensions of the tragic thinking at work in Black Reconstruction. By fusing fatalism and struggle, tragedy offered a way for Du Bois to think through the complex history of Black striving and toil after Reconstruction's abrupt end. Du Bois began working on Quest soon after the publication of Souls in 1903, although there was some overlap between Du Bois’ work on the novel and Black Reconstruction despite the nearly two and half decades that separate the publication of the two books. During the novel's lengthy composition period, Du Bois presented an essay entitled “Reconstruction and Its Benefits” at the 1909 American Historical Association meeting (later published in the American Historical Review). According to David Levering Lewis, this essay was “germinal . . . for what would ultimately become Black Reconstruction” and Du Bois later reiterated this point in Dusk of Dawn.13 While working on the novel, Du Bois also undertook a commission by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to supervise a study of Black tenant farmers in Lowndes County, Alabama.14 The study was completed in 1906, although the Bureau, under new leadership, dismissed and destroyed Du Bois’ final report. Despite this setback, his research would make its way into his first attempt at long fiction, enriching the verisimilitude of the novel's fictional setting of rural Tooms County, Alabama. Significantly, he based the novel's fictional free school on the Calhoun School (a rural version of the urban settlement house), which two white northern women, Mabel Dillingham and Charlotte Thornton, had established in 1892.15 Du Bois directed his land tenancy research from the Calhoun School, and he likely had this material in mind when he penned the author's note attesting to the novel's documentary realism: “In no fact or picture have I consciously set down aught that counterpart of which I have not seen or known.”16 He later referred to Quest as “an economic study of some merit” in Dusk of Dawn.17Quest follows the parallel and intersecting paths of its two Black protagonists, Bles Alwyn and Zora, the wild and wayward “child of the swamp,” as they seek education, reform, and redemption for themselves and their people.18 The novel critiques the relentless materialism of the villainous Cresswells and Taylors as well as the cynicism of urban Black elites like Caroline Wynn, yet it does not depict a world of grim determinism that smothers the humanist potential in Zora's love for Bles and in her vision of an educational and economic commune beyond the exploitation of sharecropping and tenant farming. The oscillation between romance and realism in the novel captures the longings of Bles and Zora to live differently despite the disappointments and setbacks in their struggles to transform their post-Reconstruction agrarian society. As Lee has argued, “The Quest of the Silver Fleece is a narrative of double aims, for Du Bois confronts the political world while also resisting its worldliness.” Neither realism nor romance is alone sufficient to Du Bois’ search for a literary idiom capable of capturing the Black experience of Reconstruction and its aftermath, and the novel, in Lee's words, “displays a powerful twoness” as a consequence.19 Not only does the “twoness” nicely describe a novel organized evenly between the storylines of its male and female protagonists, it also speaks to Reconstruction's many paradoxes: its promise and betrayal of Black America and the subsequent competing versions of its historical tragedy.The dialectical interplay and tension between romance and realism also results in a novel with a highly ambivalent and unsatisfying end. In the concluding pages, Du Bois juxtaposes Zora's marriage proposal to Bles against the “red and awful” bodies of two lynched Black men, murdered by a mob of white laborers led by their newly elected sheriff. Enraged by the sight of “white children in the Negro school and white women . . . looking on,” the sheriff whips up a “Toomsville mob” that goes on a rampage, burning the Black settlement near Miss Smith's free school and finally lynching two Black men who come across their path. This “catastrophe” too spells the end of agrarian populism and political collaboration between Black sharecroppers and white mill-hands to challenge their shared economic and social exploitation.20 However, Du Bois offsets and balances this searing scene of anti-Black violence and political failure with the long-awaited romantic union of Zora and Bles. Cast into a future beyond the novel's end, their prospective marriage stands in contrast to the failed union between New England school teacher Mary Taylor and the dissolute Harry Cresswell and symbolized in their horrifically malformed stillborn child (the result of the venereal disease Cresswell carries).21 Mary's failed—indeed, sterile—matrimonial plot (and her studied refusal to acknowledge the harsh realities of Black southern life) rewrites the popular plantation romance. It also serves as a foil to Zora and Bles’ romantic union and their efforts to navigate the complex economic and political system of Southern racial exploitation and bigotry.22The notion of failure serves a powerful purpose in the novel, and it anticipates the tragic thinking at work in Black Reconstruction. The final moments of Quest draw together the intense feelings of helplessness and despair with the longing for a different society in which Black suffering might be alleviated. As Raymond Williams argues, the hero in modern tragedy “is also the victim, who is destroyed by his society but who is capable of saving it,” and Du Bois’ Zora powerfully embodies these warring qualities in her character arc.23 Zora, who begins the novel as the object of white sexual exploitation, emerges as “a born leader, wedded to a great cause.” She becomes the self-appointed protector of “all black girls” and the founder of the area's first Black cooperative settlement. However, the novel abruptly concludes before Zora's experiment in agrarian communal living becomes a self-sufficient reality. Du Bois thus grants readers access only to the “beginning of a free community,” albeit one forged once again in the blood of racial strife and anti-Black violence. In the penultimate pages of the novel, a telling final conversation takes place between Zora and a now chastened Mary Taylor. After receiving the happy news that Miss Smith's free school has received an unexpected endowment ensuring its futurity and expansion to the adjoining Cresswell land, Mary joyfully announces, “Well, the battle's over, isn't it?” To Mary's utter amazement, Zora replies, “why, the battle is scarcely even begun.”24 Du Bois draws our attention to the misleading desire for closure and clear-cut endings, for it disregards the extended temporality or longue durée of Black freedom struggles. Zora's words offer a fitting conclusion to Du Bois’ literary exploration of how tragedy and tragic thinking might be reclaimed for a Black history of Reconstruction.In Quest, Du Bois also begins to limn another significant proposition that would become a central thematic in Black Reconstruction. As Byerman observes, cotton is the “thread that holds . . . together” the disparate parts of the novel.25 A bale of Zora's “shimmering . . . Alabama cotton” processed and cut into a gown adorns Mary Taylor as she marries unhappily into the Southern plantocracy. Another bale of the processed cotton, tucked into a traveling trunk, serves as a “talisman” of Zora's “stolen dream” as she moves north to New York and Washington D.C. while in the employment of Mrs. Vanderpool.26 In an early chapter entitled simply “Cotton,” Du Bois powerfully delineates the global contours of cotton's racial economy and the international dimensions of Reconstruction in the “Cotton Kingdom”: The cry of the naked was sweeping the world. From the peasant toiling in Russia, the lady lolling in London, the chieftain burning in Africa, and the Esquimaux freezing in Alaska; from long lines of hungry men, from patient sad-eyed women, from old folks and creeping children went up the cry, “Clothes, clothes!” Far away the wide black land that belts the South, where Miss Smith worked and Miss Taylor drudged and Bles and Zora dreamed, the dense black land sensed the cry and heard the bound of answering life within the vast dark breast. All that dark earth heaved in mighty travail with the bursting bolls of cotton while black attendant earth spirits swarmed above, sweating and crooning to its birth pains.27In following the economic journey of Zora's stolen “Silver Fleece,” Du Bois “pans out to the macrocosm—underlining cotton's place in the tightly woven transnational network of capital flows and unprocessed markets—just as it zooms in on the micro, presenting a social and ecological condition wherein everything is reducible to cotton,” according to Benjamin Child.28 Over two and half decades later, Black Reconstruction would likewise emphasize the centrality of racial capitalism in the making of the modern world and offer a searing critique of U.S. internal and overseas Empire in the process: for Du Bois, the “Cotton Kingdom” was the product of “imperial white domination” (7). Du Bois explicitly casts Reconstruction as a world problem of race and labor that tied together, in his words, “that dark and vast sea of human labor in China and India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies and Central America and in the United States—that great majority of mankind, on whose bent and broken backs rest today the founding stones of modern industry” (15). In thus reframing the tragedy of Reconstruction on a global scale, Du Bois positions citizenship rights as one of multiple horizons for Black struggles against white supremacy, labor exploitation, and colonialism the world over.29 Reconstruction for Du Bois was not just an American tragedy, for “the problem of democracy expands and touches all races and nations” in the globalized age of New Imperialism and World Wars (13).In reclaiming Reconstruction as tragedy, Du Bois asks us to the consider the nature and limits of democracy and constructs for us a usable past, reworking history to sustain a critique of the present and contemplate future possibility. Tragedy is often viewed as a conservative and defeatist social discourse, one that in the words of Vijay Phulwani “either opposes efforts at radical political change or calls on us to chasten our ideals and aspirations for the world in which we want to live.”30 Williams too reminds us that the idea of tragedy is often viewed as the antithesis of revolution.31 Reconstruction generally designates a specific period of time: 1863–1877 or 1860–1880, if we follow Black Reconstruction's more expansive timeline (which anticipates contemporary calls for a “long Reconstruction”), yet Du Bois’ use of tragic thinking in Black Reconstruction also allows him to position Reconstruction as an ongoing process—indeed, an “unfinished revolution,” in Eric Foner's memorable phrase.32 This idea of Reconstruction as necessarily unresolved challenges the teleology of progress and the idea that the nation successfully reunited after the Civil War.33 In Black Reconstruction, tragic thinking helped Du Bois name the open-ended temporality in the struggle for progress—indeed, of American democracy writ large, to borrow from Greg Laski's Untimely Democracy: The Politics of Progress after Slavery. Hence the Reconstruction that Du Bois historicizes in Black Reconstruction might be, in Laski's words, “defined by the possibility that it might not—perhaps must not—reach an end.”34 In short, the twinned projects of racial justice and American democracy must remain ongoing, resisting the false endings that some, like Mary Taylor in Quest, would prefer to impose upon them. Writing in the 1930s during a deep and lasting worldwide economic depression that plunged the globe into poverty, hunger, and despair and as Europe and Asia moved toward a second World War, Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction urged his readers to “go back to the basic principles of Reconstruction in the United States” in the rebuilding of a still broken world, “whether it comes now or a century later” (635).In Quest, Du Bois drew upon the familiar and accessible genres of realism and romance in the effort to delineate Black hope and desire after a failed Reconstruction, and his later use of tragic thinking in Black Reconstruction provides a corrective to the hegemonic discourse of Reconstruction as a tragedy of federal overreach in the subjugation of the white South. Like his near-contemporary C. L. R. James, Du Bois took full advantage of “tragedy's dramatic ability to contain and represent moments of historical transformation, moments when possible futures seem less certain than they have been.” In Du Bois’ use of tragedy as a historical analytic, he also engaged in the critical work of “seeking out the historical idioms and historical rhythms in which our own present might yield to us a desirable future.”35 Du Bois’ wide-ranging search for Black Reconstruction's idiom had begun with Quest. However, this is not to say that Du Bois’ Black Reconstruction offers us history in the guise of classical tragedy; rather, Black Reconstruction challenges us to question the uses of tragedy in the public history of Reconstruction. Du Bois enlisted tragedy and tragic thinking not in the service of the white South; rather, tragedy—or, what he meant by the “splendid failure” of Reconstruction—allowed him to imagine a different future for American democracy. Du Bois anticipated that Reconstruction's unfinished revolution would likely not be realized within the conditions of his own historical moment. He wrote Black Reconstruction as forward-looking history, one that urged readers to return to Reconstruction “now or a century later” (635). Like Zora's experimental commune and her happy union with Bles in Quest, Du Bois projected beyond the limits of the printed page the arrival of what some progressive scholars and activists now affirm as a much-needed Third Reconstruction in America.