The Black Nationalist Movement

Garvey's adherence to the ideals of service and success, on the one hand, and to the practical boosterism of the self-made man, on the other, created a peculiar tension in his later relationships with both W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington. The antagonism between DuBois and Garvey was more cultural than political. It stemmed from the struggle between the nineteenth-century New England patrician ideal, translated by DuBois into his concept of "the Talented Tenth," and the competing ideal of the self-made man that provided Garvey with his rationale. "Many American Negroes," DuBois asserted, viewed Garvey's meteoric rise as the "enthroning of a demagogue, who with monkey shines was deluding the people and taking their hard-earned dollars." Garvey, for his part, accused DuBois of setting himself up as "the highest social dignitary." Garvey saw in himself the idealized self-made man who triumphed over continual disadvantage in a heroic struggle for success and survival. On this basis he drew a harsh distinction between DuBois and himself:

Marcus Garvey was born in 1887; DuBois was born in 1868; that shows that DuBois is old enough to be Marcus Garvey's father. But what has happened? Within the fifty-five years of DuBois' life we find him still living on the patronage of good white people, and with the thirty-six years of Marcus Garvey's (who was born poor and whose father, according to DuBois, died in a poor house) he is able to at least pass over the charity of white people and develop an independent program originally financed by himself to the extent of thousands of dollars, now taken up by the Negro people themselves. Now which of the two is poorer in character and manhood?

Then, in a bold assertion of his self worth against "DuBois [who] personally had made a success of nothing," Garvey declared:

Suppose for the proof of the better education and ability Garvey and DuBois were to dismantle and put aside all they possess and were placed in the same environment to start life over afresh for the test of the better man? What would you say about this, doctor? Marcus Garvey is willing now because he is conceited enough to believe that in the space of two years he would make you look like a tramp in the competitive rivalry for a higher place in the social, economic world.

This ethic of "competitive rivalry" that aroused such hubris in Garvey was strongly abhorrent to DuBois on philosophical and cultural grounds. Beyond the special African-American quality of DuBois's experience, his social outlook had been profoundly shaped by the New England morality of patrician service and sacrifice. DuBois could not have viewed with equanimity the brash and headstrong claims to "competitive rivalry" of his self-made Jamaican antagonist.

Conversely, Garvey shared with Booker T. Washington a deep commitment to the success ethic and its application to the goal of racial improvement. Washington rooted his racial uplift program in the gospel of the self-made man, and he "wished to be seen by the world, as the American success hero in black." Indeed, Garvey perceived similarities between his own confrontations with DuBois and the earlier Washington--DuBois controversy. "When Booker T. Washington, by his own effort and energy, attempted to climb the ladder of success among his people," Garvey claimed, "we had the sage of Atlanta, Berlin, and Harvard, who attacked him most viciously from every quarter."

DuBois, in his famous critique of Washington in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), attributed Washington's possession of the "mark of the successful man" to what he said was "his singleness of vision and thorough oneness with his age." This was an expansion upon DuBois's earlier Dial magazine critique (16 July 1901) of Washington's autobiography, Up from Slavery, in which DuBois asserted that Washington had "by singular insight . . . intuitively grasped the spirit of the age that was dominating the North," mastering "the speech and thought of triumphant commercialism and the ideals of material prosperity." This capacity explained "Mr. Washington's success, North and South, with his gospel of Work and Money."

Such attributes were, of course, entirely synonymous with the reigning gospel of success, but in DuBois's view, they "raised opposition to him [Washington] from widely divergent sources." This was, indeed, the crucial factor that gave the split between Washington and DuBois the character of "two warring ideals," to borrow the phrase made famous by DuBois in another context. The two men represented opposing American ideals of civilization, within and through which each sought to legitimize his separate vision of the "strivings" of African Americans.

Booker T. Washington was in fact responsible for producing his own impressive body of conduct-of-life literature, on which the character-ethic stage of the success cult rested to a significant degree. These are, in addition to his major autobiographical writings, The Story of My Life (1900) and Up from Slavery (1901), Black Belt Diamonds (1898), Sowing and Reaping (1900), Character Building (1902), and Putting the Most into Life (1906). This nineteenth-century philosophy of the character ethic also deeply pervaded Garvey's outlook, which he translated into essays with such titles as "The Character of Races" (Philosophy and Opinions 2: 134), "The Negro and Character" (BM 1 [May--June 1934]), and "Character! Character! Character! A Vital Necessity" (BM 2 [September--October 1935]:

But significant differences in viewpoint between Washington and Garvey reflected the impact of societal change. In holding up "the self-made black capitalist as a hero of his race," C. Vann Woodward notes that "Washington went back to a bygone day for his economic philosophy," which he describes as consisting "of the mousetrap-maker-and-beaten-path maxims of thrift, virtue, enterprise, and free competition." Woodward also notes that "it was the faith by which the white middle-class preceptors of his youth had explained success, combined with a belief that, as he expressed it, 'there is little race prejudice in the American dollar.' In short, Washington's philosophy of uplift reflected the nineteenth-century character ethic, with worldly success rewarding such homely virtues as diligence, industry, and frugality. Its emphasis, as noted by Richard Weiss, "was on the balanced, ordered, harmonious nature of the social organism." In effect, Woodward suggests, Washington's philosophy "dealt with the present in terms of the past," and, in economic terms, was "more congenial to the pre-machine age than to the twentieth century," when massive industrial expansion in America progressively reduced the options for success to the petty entrepreneurial trades.

Conversely, Garvey was the archetypal black spokesman of the success cult's most optimistic phase, at the end of World War I, when the vision of success became subsumed by the rush to financial speculation. Nontraditional opportunities became available to the small entrepreneur with the dramatic rise of finance capital to a position of dominance in the American political economy. The process was already well under way by the war's beginning, and postwar America emerged as the new banking capital of the world, bringing with it large-scale financing and control of industrial development. Garvey's philosophy of success would come to incorporate the chief mental attributes imparted by the period of industrialization and by the new era of American economic growth. These were the aggressive virtues of self-mastery, mind power, determination, energy, ambition, force of will---all the virtues of personal dominance, which, according to Garvey, assured "that [one would] win the battle over others."

Garvey first articulated this new strategy in August 1921 at the second convention of the UNIA. He then cabled a lengthy resolution to the League of Nations, the ostensible purpose of which was to inform the league of the UNIA's "repudiation" of DuBois's forthcoming Second Pan-African Congress, scheduled for later that month in London, Brussels, and Paris. The cable stated "that the said W. E. B. DuBois and his associates who call the Congress are making an issue of social equality with the white race for their own selfish purposes, and not for the advancement of the Negro Race, and that the idea of their holding a Congress in European Cities is more for the purpose of aggravating the question of social equality to their own personal satisfaction, than to benefit the Negro Race." This statement's strong echo of Booker T. Washington's famous indictment of "social equality," delivered at the Atlanta Exposition in 1895 was not accidental. The UNIA's resolution went on to make explicit the fears that "social equality" evoked among whites:

We further repudiate the [Pan-African] Congress because we sincerely feel that the white race like the Black and Yellow Races should maintain the purity of self, and that the Congress is nothing more than an effort to encourage Race suicide, by the admixture of two opposite Races . . . and [the Negro] therefore denounces any attempt on the part of dissatisfied individuals who by accident are members of the said Negro Race, in their attempts to foster a campaign of miscegenation to the destruction of the Race's purity.

In a statement published shortly afterward by the New York World, on 9 September 1921, Garvey upbraided "the Dr. DuBois group" and called attention to the fact that "the Universal Negro Improvement Association believes that both races have separate and distinct destinies, that each and every race should develop on its own social lines, and that any attempt to bring about the amalgamation of any two opposite races is a crime against nature." The following month Garvey praised President Harding's Birmingham, Alabama, speech, which had emphasized that "race amalgamation there can never be." Harding justified his position on the ground that the maintenance of "natural segregations" between the races was the result of "widely unequal capacities and capabilities." In springing to the support of Harding amid the controversy that his remarks created, Garvey called upon blacks everywhere to "follow President Harding's great lead," and he urged them to "stand uncompromisingly against the idea of social equality." Garvey further asserted that Harding's speech made him "one of the greatest statesmen of the present day."

The other side of Garvey's attack against "social equality" took the form of an assertion that "America is [a] White Man's Country." "Why should I waste time in a place where I am outnumbered and where if I make a physical fight I will lose out and ultimately die," Garvey asked. Garvey also managed to shift the blame for white America's racial exclusivity from white prejudice to black failings. In another broadside against DuBois, Garvey argued that "[Negroes] have done nothing praiseworthy on their own initiative in the last five hundred years to recommend them to the serious consideration of progressive races . . . . [T]hey have made no political, educational, industrial, independent contribution to civilization for which they can be respected by other races, thus making themselves unfit subjects for free companionship and association with races which achieved greatness on their own initiative."

Garvey was, in fact, attempting to present himself before the white American establishment as the potential architect of a new racial "compromise." This was, indeed, a far cry from the sentiment that Garvey voiced when, at the close of the August 1920 convention, he was reported in the Negro World of 11 September as having "hurled defiance at the 'crackers' of the South." During this period of political retreat, Garvey embarked on his various flirtations with Senator T. S. McCallum of Mississippi and with the infamous Ku Klux Klan, setting the precedent for his subsequent alliances with John Powell, leader of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, with Earnest Sevier Cox, leader of the White America Society, and still later in the 1930s with Sen. Theodore G. Bilbo, the scourge of Mississippi black people.

When Garvey spoke at Carnegie Hall on "The Future of the Black and White Races," on 23 February 1923, the audience was assured that "the Universal Negro Improvement Association believes in the purity of all races and respects the rights of all peoples." It was no mere accident, moreover, that the second volume of Garvey's Philosophy and Opinions should have begun with the statement written in October 1923 entitled, "An Appeal to the Soul of White America" (pp. 1--6).

Garvey's espousal of the doctrine of racial purity, beginning in the summer of 1921, however, did not originate with his alleged West Indian misreading of the supposedly different system of racial segmentation in America. "Not only did Garvey advocate race purity," E. D. Cronon comments in Black Moses, "but as a Jamaican black he attempted to transfer the West Indian three-way color caste system to the United States by attacking mulatto leaders" (p. 191). This view echoed DuBois's earlier statement in his essay "Back to Africa," in which he claimed that Garvey brought to America "the new West Indian conception of the color line" (p.541). "Imagine, then, the surprise and disgust of these Americans when Garvey launched his Jamaican color scheme," DuBois recounted (p. 542). The same view, with only minor modification, was taken by the black sociologist Charles S. Johnson in his essay in Opportunity, August 1923, wherein he adjudged that Garvey "hated intensely things white and more intensely things near white" (p. 232). Yet in proposing the creation of a "United States of Africa" in June 1922, Garvey made it plain that his whole outlook was based upon "the White Man's civilization [as] a splendid example to Negroes."

But not everyone shared this concept of Garvey. Detractors labeled him a madman or the greatest confidence man of the age. "We may seriously ask, is not Marcus Garvey a paranoiac?" enquired the NAACP's Robert Bagnall in his 1923 article "The Madness of Marcus Garvey." An earlier psychological assessment by W. E. B. DuBois diagnosed Garvey as suffering from "very serious defects of temperament and training," and described him as "dictatorial, domineering, inordinately vain and very suspicious." In the view of the organ of South Africa's African Political Organization, "the newly-created position of Provisional President of Africa [was] an empty honour which no man in the history of the world has ever held, and no sane man is likely to aspire after."

It was mainly as an embarrassment to his race, however, that Garvey was dismissed. '"The Garvey Movement," reported Kelly Miller in 1927, "seemed to be absurd, grotesque, and bizarre." "If Gilbert and Sullivan were still collaborating," commented one African editorial writer, "what a splendid theme for a musical comic opera Garvey's pipe-dream would be." W. E. B. DuBois echoed this opinion when he described UNIA pageantry as like a "dress-rehearsal of a new comic opera." A West Indian resident in Panama, writing in the April 1920 issue of the Crusader, offered an ironic commentary on what he took to have been Garvey's assumption of the grand title of African potentate: "Pardon me," the gentleman interposed, "but this sounds like the story of "The Count of Monte Cristo' or the 'dream of Labaudy,' or worse still, 'Carnival,' as obtains in the city of Panama, where annually they elect 'Her Gracious Majesty, Queen of the Carnival,' and other high officials." White commentators were not excluded from this game of describing Garvey's conduct through the metaphor of entertainment. Borrowing from Eugene O'Neill's surrealistic play about the dramatic downfall of a self-styled black leader, Robert Morse Lovett referred to Garvey as "an Emperor Jones of Finance" to convey Garvey's financial ineptitude to highbrow readers of the New Republic.

www.ritesofpassage.org/garvey_dubois.htm

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