replacing the father: w. e. b. du bois's reflections on george washington's birthday

Replacing the Father: W. E. B. Du Bois's Reflections on George Washington's BirthdayAuthor(s): Roumiana VelikovaSource: Callaloo, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Spring, 2006), pp. 658-679Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3805637 .

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REPLACING THE FATHER

W. E. B. Du Bois's Reflections on George Washington's Birthday

by Roumiana Velikova

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 Polk (1903), his book that employ s 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 build?

ing 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 his?

tory. 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

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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 in- vokes. 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 was celebrated yearly on February 22 until 1971 when, based on a 1968 law, the birthday began to be commemorated on the third Monday in

February, regardless of whether it fell on February 22, and eventually was joined with Lincoln's birthday in the celebration of Presidents' Day. Because in the nineteenth century and in much of the twentieth, the celebration of Washington's birthday was a separate holiday like Independence Day, its use as a point of reference should not be surprising in the writing of someone who lived through many an ordinary birthday celebration and

through the bicentennial in 1932, which ambitiously set out to extend the observance of

Washington's birthday beyond the single day in February. Years in the making, the commemorative activities aimed to cover the entire Depression year. The government-sponsored anniversary was meant to lift the spirits of the entire nation by reminding citizens of their glorious past, but it discriminated against African Americans to such an extent as to elicit critical response from major black intellectuals and to provoke Du Bois's second sustained piece dedicated to Washington. The pageant "George Washington and Black

Folk," which appeared in The Crisis in April 1932, differs greatly from the bicentennial fare in that it belongs not within the mainstream patriotic tradition, but rather in the African American tradition of protest at the time of patriotic celebration.

African American polemicists had immediately caught on to the egalitarian rhetoric of the American Revolution and engaged that rhetoric in protests against racial inequal- ity. Frederick Douglass's Independence Day address in Rochester, New York, on July 5, 1852, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July," was one of the most widely known of these protests. He posed in a nutshell the essential impossibility of sharing in the glee of patriotic holidays in the context of oppression: Douglass's strategy of displacement and substitution shifted the focus from the celebration of American independence to the abolition of slavery. In his novella The Heroic Slave, Douglass used the same strategy to

project Madison Washington, the leader of the successful slave revolt on the brig Creole, as a revolutionary hero equal in rank to the Founding Fathers. In his use of displacement and substitution, Douglass was not alone; other nineteenth-century protest writers?both black and white and usually writing in an abolitionist context?routinely substituted the cause of colonial independence with the cause of black freedom and equality. This was so widespread that it became a standard procedure to compare leaders of slave revolts to

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Washington and even to elevate revolutionists like the Haitian leader Toussaint L'Overture above Washington. Abolitionists as different as William Wells Brown, Henry Highland Garnet, T. Morris Chester, and Wendell Phillips all wrote or spoke of Toussaint as equal or superior to Washington.2

This well-established abolitionist strategy of engaging the American Revolution for

antislavery purposes reappears in the work of Du Bois and fellow black historian Carter G. Woodson in a new context: the post-Reconstruction backlash against not only black civil rights but also black history. It is this context that makes it imperative for Du Bois to

publish a pageant for the Washington bicentennial that, instead of celebrating Washing? ton, celebrates a pantheon of black revolutionary heroes and does so by relying on facts collected and rhetoric used during the crusade against plantation slavery.

Washington and Du Bois's Birthday: A Symbology of Dates

Du Bois wrote several autobiographies during his long life, and as his most recent bi-

ographer has noted, he frequently reinterpreted his experiences from one autobiography to the next (Lewis, Biography 79). Yet some strategies of presentation remained the same

despite the almost seventy-year difference between Du Bois's early and late memoirs. One of these constant strategies is Du Bois's representation of his birthday through historical events happening in the month and year of his birth. In his indirectness, Du Bois differs from his biographers, who give his birth date straightforwardly as February 23, 1868.3 Du Bois, on the other hand, establishes through his birth date a personal connection to historical events and involves the reader in these highlights of history. The combinations of events with which he chooses to associate his birth vary in the memoirs, and these variations chart the progression of Du Bois's thinking about himself as an American of African descent and about the priorities of American national history. The most peculiar feature of this strategy of representation, however, is Du Bois's recurrent use of George Washington's birthday as a marker for his own. Considering his otherwise relatively low interest in the subject of Washington, it is worth asking why Du Bois chooses to associate his birth with Washington's birthday rather than with those of Lincoln or Douglass, both of whose birthdays are also celebrated in February and were originally selected as the markers for Negro History Week by Carter G. Woodson.4

One of Du Bois's earliest autobiographical writings is an introductory essay he wrote on October 3, 1890, for Barrett Wendell's English 12 class, which Du Bois took in his

graduate year at Harvard. It begins, "For the usual purposes of identification I have been labeled in this life: William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, born in Great Barrington, Mas?

sachusetts, on the day after Washington's birthday, in 1868" (Aptheker, Against Racism

16). While the place of birth and the year are spelled out precisely, establishing Du Bois's exact date of birth is contingent upon one's knowing the month and date of Washington's birthday.5 In his discussion of The Souls of Black Folk, Robert Stepto draws attention to Du Bois's "symbolic geography," the "structural topography" of his ritualized journey from the Berkshires in the North to the Southern Black Belt (70-71). Just as the soil is "full of

history," so is apparently the future historian's calendar, since Du Bois imbues his birth

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date with historical significance as well, thus locating himself as a subject of history fully grounded in space and time. But why choose Washington the slaveholder? Why not Lin? coln the Great Emancipator? After all, Du Bois's writings show a preference for Lincoln, the Civil War, and Reconstruction over Washington and the American Revolution. The obvious answer is that Washington's birthday is closer to Du Bois's. Yet why did Du Bois, the future Pan-Africanist, who in The Souls of Black Folk posited Alexander Crummel as his symbolic forefather, choose an American political figure at all?

This early piece was written for the Harvard audience of Barrett Wendell, a Boston

patrician, and his white students. It was composed during a period of patriotic revivals when Washington's birthday was commemorated by all and could therefore be seen as a point of consensus. In his essay, therefore, Du Bois introduces himself as Wendell's fel? low American, reared in the U.S. patriotic tradition, aware of American national holidays. Yet in the way he words this passage, Du Bois maintains that he is only formally linked to Washington "for the usual purposes of identification." The essay goes on to reveal a different self-perception:

As to who I really am, I am much in doubt. [... ] I believe that there was nothing unusual about my birth. I "point with pride" to no long line of distinguished ancestors?indeed I have often been in a quandary as to how those revered ones have spent their time. From this circumstance I naturally prefer men, other things being equal, who have no grandfathers. (Aptheker, Against Racism 16-17)

Here is a young Du Bois still in search of himself, but already poised against the colonial

revival, which especially in Massachusetts made ancestors so important that there was a mad rush to draw one's roots from the May flower (Marling 94). Having linked his own

birthday to Washington's in a recognition of the spirit of patriotic revivalism, Du Bois

actually takes a step back, disclaims any interest in notable paternity, and questions its

mythologizing tendencies. The essay reveals a public self, eager to establish consensus, and a private self, aware of his own exclusion from the genealogical frenzy of his times and therefore able to satirize them.

The essay may be dismissed as the juvenilia of a young man who had taken Wendell's class in order to learn to write in such a way so as to succeed in a white man's world. As he recalls in his final autobiography, Du Bois had received a failing grade on his first un?

dergraduate English composition because his impassioned prose had lacked the stylistic polish and restraint that his mentors at Harvard desired. They were all concerned about the students' poor English, which included not only poor grammar but also "Western

slang and Southern drawls," i.e., anything but New England's English. Writing his first

essay for an English course, Du Bois was more concerned about "the Negro problem" than the way in which he worded it:

I knew grammar fairly well, and I had a pretty wide vocabulary; but I was bitter, angry and intemperate in my first thesis. Naturally my English instructors had no idea of nor interest in the way in which Southern attacks on the Negro were scratching me on the raw flesh.

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Ben Tillman was raging in the Senate like a beast and the literary clubs, especially rich and well-dressed women, engaged his services eagerly and listened avidly. Senator Morgan of Alabama had just published a scathing attack on "niggers" in a leading magazine, when my first Harvard thesis was due. I let go at him with no holds barred. My long andblazing effort came back marked 'E'?not passed! [... ] I was aghast, but I was not a fool. I did not doubt but what my instructors were fair in judging my English technically even if they did not understand the Negro problem.[ . . . ] I realized that while style is subordinate to content, and that no real literature can be

composed simply of meticulous and fastidious phrases, nevertheless that solid content with literary style carries a message further than poor grammar and muddled syntax. (Autobiography 144)

Having set out to learn how to compromise style and content, or, in other words, how to make his writing acceptable to his Harvard professors, according to Rampersad, Du Bois graduated Harvard taking into the twentieth century a polished Victorian?and even

Augustan?writing style (37). Its judicious indirection is apparent in the introductory essay to Wendell's class, which does not advance an open denouncement. The race question in it can only be guessed. Du Bois makes a gesture of consensus in the beginning, followed

by a modest admission of the lack of illustrious ancestors and only then by a dismissal of genealogy. This strategy obviously works because, as Du Bois can boast later, Wendell chose the last sentence of his introductory essay to read to the rest of the class. It reads

significantly: "I believe, foolishly perhaps, but sincerely, that I have something to say to the world, and I have taken English 12 in order to say it well" (Autobiography 145). The

sentence, like the essay as a whole, balances modesty with audacity and is stylistically poised between these extremes.

If Du Bois's graduate essay is a lesson in style formation, and the mention of George Washington's birthday in it is a means of consensus building, then what would explain Du Bois's decision to follow the same strategy of representing his own birthday through Washington's in his final autobiography, still assuming a basic familiarity with the patri? otic holiday? Written in the period 1958-1960, the Autobiography traveled with Du Bois to Ghana in 1961 and was first published in 1964 and 1965 in Communist China, the Soviet

Union, and the German Democratic Republic. Du Bois had been prosecuted by the anti- Communist American government and had left the United States for good. It is ironic that the autobiography that takes for granted its audience's knowledge of American patriotic history would be first published outside the United States.

Writing before his actual self-exile, Du Bois closes his autobiography with a tenuous

patriotic acknowledgement of his birthplace: "I know the United States. It is my country and the land of my fathers. It is still a land of magnificent possibilities. It is still the home of noble souls and generous people. But it is selling its birthright. It is betraying its mighty destiny. I was born on its soil and educated in its schools. I have served my country to the best of my ability" (419). This bittersweet recognition of the patria, the land of his fathers,

brings up again the question of the inclusiveness of the paternal category for Du Bois. While in The Soul of Black Folks, Du Bois distinguishes his black fathers from the white

Founding Fathers, the final autobiography ties Du Bois's birthday with the celebration of

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Washington's anniversary, identifying him as an American citizen at birth. The arrange- ment of historical parallels in the paragraphs announcing his birth, however, privileges a conception of the United States as a land of democratic struggle for equal rights and

opportunities for African Americans. Du Bois derives that conception from the history of Civil War and Reconstruction, eclipsing Washington, the American Revolution, and

presidentialism. The final autobiography is a collage of passages from earlier autobiographical essays.

In the two patch-quilt paragraphs describing Du Bois's birth, the symbology of dates takes shape through the ordering of borrowed material from documents written at dif? ferent times and for different purposes. The contexts of these original documents shed

light on the final collection of historical events that surround the historian's date of birth. The opening paragraph begins with a sentence from Darkwater, Du Bois's 1920 collection of essays, borrowed via Dusk ofDawn, his 1940 autobiography: "I was born by a golden river and in the shadow of two great hills, hVe years after the Emancipation Proclamation, which began the freeing of American Negro slaves" (Autobiography 61; Dusk ofDawn 8; Darkwater 3). The precise year is withheld, and since this is the first sentence that presents the reader with personal information, it requires knowledge of Civil War history in order to derive the year 1868. The sentence lays out a symbolic geography as well as a symbolic chronology. Because the sentence first appeared in Darkwater, which is an Afrocentric book

(Sundquist, To Wake 544-45), Washington, whose name is quintessentially connected with Americanism and with individual greatness, is absent. A document, Lincoln's Emancipa? tion Proclamation, has taken Washington's place, locating Du Bois within the history of collective black progress and redemption.

The rest of this paragraph deals with the geography of Great Barrington, but in the next Du Bois returns to the symbology of dates. This time he gives out the year, but withholds his birth date: "In 1868 on the day after the birth of George Washington was celebrated, I was born on Church Street" (Autobiography 61). The first part of this sentence bears dis? tant resemblance to Du Bois's student essay except that in this case Du Bois relates his

birthday not directly to Washington's, but rather to its celebration, acknowledging less a connection to the man himself than knowledge of the patriotic ritual devoted to him. The rest of the paragraph comes from Dusk ofDawn, within which it appears in a chapter called "A New England Boy and Reconstruction" (8). This explains the preponderance of facts related to the Reconstruction:

The year of my birth was the year that the f reedmen of the South were enfranchised, and for the first time as a mass took part in government. Conventions with black delegates voted new constitutions all over the South, and two groups of laborers?freed slaves and poor whites?dominated the former slave states. It was an extraordinary experiment in democracy. (Autobiography 61, Dusk 8)

All the facts associated with the year 1868 refer to African American history, which is

brought to the forefront and not submerged as in the student essay to Wendell. This is a list of important dates in the black Reconstruction of the South, a period of special significance to Du Bois. Although he was a child while it lasted, as a historian he understood

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the importance of vindicating the Reconstruction from slander because it held the only extensive black participation in electoral politics and government and was therefore a crucial evidence in the battle against disenfranchisement. In 1940, rather than singling out individual leaders, Du Bois relates his birth to popular achievements en masse.

The paragraph ends with Andrew Johnson's impeachment, also borrowed from Dusk

ofDawn, and because Dusk ofDawn, like Darkwater, does not mention Washington's birth?

day, the borrowed passage ends with the statement of the precise date of Du Bois's birth: "Thaddeus Stevens, the clearest-headed leader of this attempt at industrial democracy, made his last speech, impeaching Andrew Johnson on February 16, and on February 231 was born" (Autobiography 61, Dusk 8).6 If in the beginning of the paragraph the birth date is connected via Washington to the U.S. patriotic reverence for aristocratic presidentialism, at the end of the paragraph there is a different alignment with popular democracy and

against a failing presidency since Du Bois chooses the date of Johnson's impeachment on

February 16 rather than Lincoln's birthday on February 12, which would have promoted a positive rather than a negative connection to the presidency.

The autobiography ends the list of significant historical events here and moves to family history. Du Bois has cut out the international symbology of the paragraph he borrowed from Dusk ofDawn, in which he moved from U.S. history to important dates in Japanese, Chinese, Prussian, and African history. That the international dimension of his birthday recorded in Dusk of Dawn is not included in the final autobiography remains peculiar in

light of its otherwise defiant communist internationalism: the Autobiography is prefaced by an account of Du Bois's trip to Eastern Europe, the USSR, and China, and was originally published in Asia and Europe from a manuscript Du Bois left in Africa. With only American

history to bolster it, Du Bois's final version of his birthday sets it up as the birthday of an American?an African American?rather than a cosmopolitan or a Pan-Africanist. In his final selection and ordering of events from American history, the Emancipation Proclamation takes precedence over the celebration of Washington's birthday as the defining moment of Du Bois's birth. The African American progress towards freedom and enfranchisement

during the Reconstruction, though curtailed in later history, is nevertheless held as an ideal in the struggle for democracy against Du Bois's representation of a failing presidentialism. Washington may be evoked as a generic mark of American citizenship, but the specific content of Du Bois's civic commitment derives from a set of historical events that does not directly include the first president.

On February 23,1944, Coleman Leroy Hacker, the chaplain of a black battalion in Iran, wrote to Du Bois:

[T]oday is your birthday and I want you to know that even in far away Persia there are many who are grateful for the day upon which you were born.

Tonight I had a program arranged for the soldiers here (Military Se? curity f orbids my telling you how many were present but the number was large). We spoke of Washington, Lincoln, Booker T. Washington, Douglass and of course of you. (Aptheker, Correspondence 2: 384).

With brief courtesy, Du Bois acknowledged this letter, which had added black leaders to a list of white ones, all (with the exception of Booker T. Washington) born in February. The

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celebration of these birthdays by black soldiers serving in the U.S. army weaves a tight web of American patriotism and black cultural nationalism?the second expanding and

changing the meaning of the first. That soldiers celebrated Du Bois is fitting because as a historian and propagandist he had done much to ensure that black service in the U.S.

military over three centuries?the willingness to fight and die for one's country being the most basic definition of patriotism?would not be ignored. Du Bois used the George Washington bicentennial in 1932 as an occasion to commemorate the contribution of black soldiers to the American War of Independence and to build a pantheon of black heroes that people excluded from full participation in the official celebrations could be proud to honor.

Du Bois's Bicentennial Pageant: Celebration of Black History

"George Washington and Black Folk," printed in the April 1932 issue of The Crisis, is a four-page compilation in dramatic form of excerpts from historical studies and other sources about African Americans in the late eighteenth century.7 Although the title places Washington first, there are scenes in the pageant where Washington does not even appear, or if he does he is not important for his own sake, but only as a vehicle for representing black folk?both slave and free. This strategic demotion of Washington from center stage sets off a complex set of interventions in several problematic areas. The pageant first and foremost protests the exclusion of blacks from the bicentennial celebrations. It fills the need for black role models and for a rehabilitation of black history from the deliberate distortions and omissions in written histories and textbooks. It also provides a necessary new treatment of blacks in the dramatic arts?necessary because existing representations in film and on stage were dealing in flagrantly racist stereotypes.

Civic pageantry had been popular during the Progressive Era as a means of involv-

ing the masses in communal, local, and national history. A Renaissance genre, revived first in England in 1905 and borrowed in the United States to serve the divergent goals of genteel elites, progressive educators, and artists looking to innovate American drama, it cast a nostalgic look at history by either using the past to teach moral lessons to the

present and the future, or stressing the rupture between an idyllic premodern past and the industrial present. Pageantry had its heyday before World War I and was in decline

by the 1920s. The government sought to revive the form, along with a number of other civic rituals, in 1932, with its sponsored George Washington bicentennial; it did so with

hopes that in celebrating Washington's life and times, the nation would be diverted from the Great Depression.8

Pageants during the Progressive Era had rarely included African Americans; in rare

cases, they were cast in stereotypical roles as slaves or buffoons. In reaction to this negative treatment, Du Bois had staged his pageant The Star ofEthiopia in 1913 as part of the celebration of Emancipation Day in New York City, and then again in Washington, D.C., in 1915, and Los Angeles in 1925. Written to vindicate African American history and civic

pride, this Afrocentric pageant celebrated the gifts of black folk to the world. It engaged the tradition of civic pageantry, even as it also trod a parallel path. According to what

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Du Bois writes in "The Drama among Black Folk," The Star ofEthiopia demonstrated that

"pageantry among colored people is not only possible, but in many ways of unsurpassed beauty and can be made a means of uplift and education and the beginning of a folk drama" (123).

By 1932, the pageant writers' attitude toward black people had not changed significantly despite Du Bois's attempts to invigorate African American drama and the brief vogue of the Harlem Renaissance, which substituted the blackface minstrel tradition with the cult of the exotic primitive (McKay 152). The pageants published by the George Washington Bicentennial Commission show that, in their recreation of the late eighteenth century pageant authors could only cast blacks in the roles of ignorant happy slaves, speaking a

pronounced dialect to the whites' Standard English. The conventions were those of blackf ace

minstrelsy and the plantation tradition; the attitude of the pageant writers on the issue of

slavery was completely unreconstructed. A typical pageant, Olive M. Price's From Picture Book Towne, purports to be set in 1932 when children can hear about Washington on the

radio; yet its setting is an "old house near Mount Vernon," and its two main characters are a young white girl and the family's servant, "an old black Mammy," whose great-great- grandfather told her that George Washington had slept in the house (History 2: 646). The chain of servitude connecting the current servant and her slave ancestor is unbroken.

Despite the technological advance on which the pageant turns, the relationship it depicts between whites and blacks in the present is inherited from the pre-Civil War South. This

predilection for the plantation tradition would make Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind a bestseller four years later.

While pageant authors reveled in the hierarchies of the antebellum South, the head of the Bicentennial Commission, Congressman Sol Bloom, in his address "George Washing? ton and His Relationship to the South" on June 5,1931, catered to the Southerners' pride in their compatriot. He studiously avoided the issue of slavery by calling Washington a farmer among "fellow farmers" (History 2:108) and never mentioning just what kind of a farm a plantation actually was. Thus, slavery was both taken for granted and avoided in the commemoration of Washington's life. In any case, it was tacitly re-inscribed into

present-day race relations. African American intellectuals were disturbed by the official line that Bloom's federal

Bicentennial Commission set for the commemorative celebrations. As early as December

1931, Carter G. Woodson began writing scathing articles in his weekly column Comments on Negro Education in the New York Age, some of which he later reprinted as editorials in the Journal of Negro History. On December 12, he protested the segregated committees; the invitation to blacks in Washington, D.C., to play the part of slaves, as well as the incli- nation of some to comply; and sarcastically called the proposed participation of African Americans "The Side-Show of the George Washington Bicentennial" (9). In a later article, he objected to the selection of just one event?the battle of Rhode Island on August 29?as the only black contribution to the American Revolution. This he considered tantamount to the elimination of African Americans from the bicentennial ("Eliminating" 9). In Janu- ary 1932, Opportunity, the organ of the Urban League, also wondered why "the Negro is apparently neither represented on the [Bicentennial] Commission, nor in any of the events of those stirring days which are being re-enacted during the period of the celebration?save as slaves" (7).

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The Bicentennial Commission did not accept Woodson's offer to work as a consultant on the issue of African American participation in the American Revolution (Woodson, "Communications" 106). The situation necessitated a corrective intervention to make clear that there were free blacks in the eighteenth century, that even enslaved Africans showed considerable talent, and that both enslaved and free African Americans had contributed

significantly to the American Revolution. On the pages of the New York Age and the Journal of Negro History, Woodson presented the evidence in polemic essay form, while Du Bois recast the historical data in a dramatic pageant and published it as George Washington and Black Folk in the April 1932 issue of The Crisis.

The table of contents to the issue features the title of the pageant with the following two

questions: "How shall Negroes celebrate the Bicentenary? Were the Negroes of his day only slaves?" The first question does not put into doubt the fact that African Americans should celebrate the occasion. The second question is a direct challenge to the casting of blacks exclusively as slaves in bicentennial celebrations. In answer to these two questions Du Bois's pageant marshals in historical evidence for the celebration of African Americans in the Revolutionary era. To do that, Du Bois reinterprets the historical record. He places African Americans at the center of the American Revolution, superseding Washington as America's martial and civil heroes. Even slaves are shown to be worthy of celebration because among them are revolutionary martyrs like Crispus Attucks and poets like Phil- lis Wheatley.

George Washington and Black Folk consists of a prologue and five scenes. Significantly, it begins with the Boston Massacre of 1770, in which Crispus Attucks, a runaway slave from Framingham, Massachusetts, was the first one to die in a confrontation with British soldiers. Only in scene two does Washington take command of the Continental Army and

slowly warm up to enlisting black soldiers after the British begin to do so. In this scene

Washington meets Phillis Wheatley, and a portion of her poem "To His Excellency General

Washington" is read, beginning with line twenty-five, "Thee, first in peace." Scene three is titled "First in War," yet shows Washington at Valley Forge dreaming uneasily of all the defeats and victories of his army in which black troops have fought by his side. A read?

ing of Paul Lawrence Dunbar's poem "Black Samson of Brandywine" is included here. Scene four, "First in Peace," opens with Washington counting his slaves, then considering Lafayette's emancipation scheme, and attending in conspicuous silence the debates of the Constitutional Convention. In the remaining part of this scene, Du Bois shifts the focus

away from Washington to add information he got from a chapter detailing the independent black "thought and action" at the end of the eighteenth century in The Negro in Our History (Woodson 141-160): Benjamin Banneker shows his almanac to Jefferson, and a procession of leaders of the main black churches crosses the stage.

Because the previous two scenes use the first two phrases of the encomium "First in

war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen," the absence of the third is im?

mediately noticeable. Scene five is instead titled "Emancipation." In it, Du Bois mentions the Quakers' proposal for the emancipation of slaves, which Washington finds ill timed; he also includes news of the outbreak of the Haitian Revolution followed by the proposi? tion that that revolution had made possible the westward expansion of the United States

through the Louisiana Purchase. Instead of singing praise to Washington, Du Bois quotes the end of Wendell Phillips's speech "Toussaint L'Overture," in which Phillips proclaims

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Toussaint a greater hero than Washington. The scene ends with the reading of Washington's stipulation in his will that his slaves be set free upon his wife's death. The final declaration "Free?Henceforward and forever Free" does not follow from Washington's will but nevertheless ends the pageant on a high note, as is the convention of this genre. It also accentuates the difference of this pageant from the official line of celebration: while there is plenty of black achievement to celebrate in the eighteenth century, there is not much that commends Washington to African Americans.

In the effort to involve European immigrants in the celebration, the Bicentennial Com- mission allowed "that celebrations in honor of George Washington might well be combined with the usual anniversaries of each group." Foreign-born Americans celebrated their countries' contribution of heroes to the American Revolution, such as the French Laf ayette and Rochambeau, the Polish Pulaski and Kosciuszko, and the German Von Steuben. Italians combined the bicentennial celebration with the fiftieth anniversary of Garibaldi's death

(Report 5:177). The commission expected ethnics to contribute their national folk costumes,

songs, and dances; thus, in a pageant rendition of the winter at Valley Forge, Lafayette is asked to break into "one of his gay national songs," while Von Steuben speaks in a heavy German accent (History 2:717). But no where in the five volumes issued by the commission is the African American participation in the bicentennial mentioned at all.9 Therefore, while Du Bois's pageant shares some features with other examples of the genre and with the ethnic groups' celebration of their own heritage as part of the official bicentennial line, it is not a joint celebration of Washington and African American revolutionary heroes, but rather a polemical dramatic piece that replaces Washington with other heroes. While this

may be a response to Washington's record as a slaveholder, it is also in a sense a reaction to the unfairness of the bicentennial.

Because pageants were so often included in open-air public celebrations, they stressed the visual elements of parade over the audio elements of theater because the latter do not project well in large open spaces. Thus pageants often combine tableaux, floats, and

processions with regular dramatic action, and employ a central speaker whose ampli- fied voice guides the audience through the action and the tableaux. The Star ofEthiopia's spectacular performance in 1915 in Washington, D.C., with its thousands on stage and six thousand in the audience, matched in its grandeur the elevated prose in which Du Bois couched the contributions of Africans to world history, announced in the "stentorian voice of a herald" (Lewis, Biography 460). There is no known staging of George Washington and Black Folk, but its print version shows that Du Bois took a different approach in 1932. He

literally dramatized the conflicts of history by developing the scenes from quotations of historical sources, which are rendered as cues spoken by historical personages on stage and by a frame character, who performs a similar role to that of the herald.10 Developed through dialogue, which largely originates from the correspondence of historical figures such as Washington, Jefferson, and Lafayette, the pageant is more conventionally theatrical than The Star ofEthiopia. But its language is the language of history, quoted verbatim from Du Bois's sources. Because its language is to such a large extent derivative, the pageant's originality stems from Du Bois's selection and organization of historical material, as well as from his several original additions to and reinterpretations of that material.

The frame character is one such original addition. The pageant is lead by the Witch of

Endor, the biblical medium whom Saul questions before the battle with the Philistines.

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Du Bois's choice of the central speaker parallels the pageant convention of "classroom discourse" (Smith 44) because the Witch of Endor performs a role similar to that of abstract frame characters such as the "Spirit of History" who function as teachers of history in other pageants of the time. Smith points out that, especially for black children, considering the dearth of textbooks on black history, pageants certainly performed an instructional function.

In her biblical provenance, the Witch of Endor functions doubly as an occult hgure, giving the pageant a Halloween-like quality, and an evocation of the episode in 1 Samuel.

According to Smith, "The passage is especially appropriate to black children's search for

examples of leadership in a racist society, since Saul looks to the fortune teller for help hghting the losing battle against the Philistines" (54). There may be a different set of motivations behind this allusion, however. Indeed, Saul loses both the battle and his life as punishment for seeking the Witch's counsel. In the inspirational genre of pageantry, such cannot be the parallel Du Bois intends to draw. Du Bois's "black Witch of Endor" bears distant similarity to the biblical medium by her power to resurrect the dead and

bring them in front of an inquisitive audience, including, as Smith points out, children as well as adults, in order to teach them cibout African American history. The outlook for the

inquisitive audience is much more optimistic than Saul's since the pageant ends on the

grand note: "Free?Henceforward and forever Free!" (Du Bois, "George" 124). Du Bois was likely employing the Witch of Endor for something beyond her channel-

ing powers and the jocular use of her name. While there is no strict parallel between the biblical story and Du Bois's pageant, George Washington and Black Folk drives home the

unappreciated, yet continuous, participation of African Americans in U.S. military history. Du Bois references the biblical moment in which David, the future King of Israel, is exiled

by Saul and in the service of the Philistines. The Philistines, however, turn down David's offer to fight for them. Unwanted and unappreciated, David's army is nevertheless the only one victorious in battle on the following day (1 Sam: 30). Just as David's rejected troops score the only victory in war and David will replace Saul as the King of Israel, so Du Bois

continuously displaces Washington throughout the pageant with the unacknowledged black soldiers of the American Revolution.

Although it is certain that by the early twentieth century, few sympathetic pages had been written on the subject of black history, sources did exist, written by both blacks and whites. The main problem was not the dearth of material, but the exclusion of such material from schools and its suppression from official histories and public policies. In these

documents, the status of African Americans in the U.S. army was grossly distorted; it was as if black participation in earlier wars was nonexistent. Some of Du Bois's sources were written half a century earlier; this f act suggests the recurrent bouts of amnesia in American culture and the continuous relevance of abolitionist discourse.

One source for the pageant, as well as for other studies on the subject of blacks in the

eighteenth century, is George Livermore's Opinions ofthe Founders ofthe Republic on Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens, and as Soldiers. Livermore delivered this monograph at the Massa? chusetts Historical Society in 1862, at the beginning of the Civil War. Although Livermore claims objectivity, his main goal is to prove the rightness of the Unionist cause and, by showing that blacks served in the Continental Army, to disqualify the argument that the use of black troops in the Civil War would be disagreeable to the spirit of the Republic

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(90). From Livermore, Du Bois borrows the account of the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770, a confrontation between civilians and British soldiers, in which Crispus Attucks and several others were killed. The incident was dismissed by John Adams, defense lawyer of the British soldiers, as the work of a "motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes and mulattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish Jack tarrs" (Livermore 91). Nevertheless, it was adopted as the first act of defiance in revolutionary Boston and in Massachusetts was celebrated as a holiday until replaced by Independence Day. Following the tropes of revolutionary oratory, Livermore calls Attucks "a hero and a martyr" (90); yet Attucks's place in his?

tory as the first hero and first casualty of the Revolutionary War has been contested. In

1851, a petition to the Massachusetts legislature asking an appropriation for a monument to Attucks was turned down on the grounds that someone else?a boy by the name of

Christopher Snyder?was killed before Attucks (Nell 14). The prominent black Bostonian William Nell, who represented the petitioners along with Wendell Phillips, later wrote in The Color ed Patriots ofthe American Revolution (1855) that "The rejection of the petition was to be expected, if we accept the axiom that a colored man never gets justice done him in the United States, except by mistake" (18). In one of his bicentennial articles, "The George Washington Bicentennial Eliminates March 5th, Crispus Attucks Day," Carter G. Woodson

similarly interpreted the continuing dismissal of Attucks as an "idler" or a "roustabout" as well as the claim that he was "a white man of Indian blood" as malevolent racist proposi- tions: "In other words, if this unusual character must be kept in history Caucasianize him in some way or make him a hero of some other race, for it will never do to let it be said that he was a man of Negro blood" (9).11

When he first borrowed the account of the Boston Massacre from Livermore in The Gift of Black Folk (1924), Du Bois weighed the evidence from an objective distance:

Much has been said about the importance and lack of importance of this so-called "Boston Massacre." Whatever the verdict of history may be, there is no doubt that the incident loomed large in the eyes of the colonists. Distinguished men were orators on the 5th of March for years after, until that date was succeeded by the 4th of July. Daniel Webster in his great Bunker Hill oration said: "From this moment we may date the severance of the British Empire."

Possibly these men exaggerated the actual importance of a street brawl between citizens and soldiers, led by a runaway slave; but there is no doubt that the colonists, who fought for independence from England, thought this occasion of tremendous importance and were nerved to great effort because of it. (86-87)

While in 1924 Du Bois allowed the local pride of Bostonians to speak for Attucks's place in history, in the bicentennial pageant, he leaves out any semblance of scholarly reserva- tion: Attucks "dies a martyr to make a country for George Washington to father" (Du Bois,

"George" 121).12 What may have been a sectional competition between Massachusetts and Virginia for the place of origin of the revolutionary spirit becomes racialized. Attucks

supersedes Washington in time and in the sacrifice he makes. One can hear the black intel- lectual's angry protest against the unjustified exclusivity of the bicentennial and of white

patriotism in the Witch's announcement upon Washington's inauguration: "The Fourth of July displaces the Fifth of March. Washington succeeds Crispus Attucks" (123).

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If Crispus Attucks precedes Washington at the beginning of the pageant, at its end Toussaint L'Overture, who led the revolution that made Haiti the first black republic in the 1790s, eclipses Washington in importance. The judgment belongs to none other than Boston's Brahmin abolitionist Wendell Phillips, about whom Du Bois had given an oration

upon graduating from high school:

You think me a fanatic tonight, for you read history not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when truth gets a hearing, the muse of history will [... ] choose Washington as the bright consummate flower of our earlier civilization [... ] then

dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name ofthe soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L'Overture. (Phillips 184; Du Bois 124)

Toussaint L'Overture and Crispus Attucks were coincidentally Phillips's favorite black

heroes, and in the late 1850s he began giving his speeches about them with increasing frequency, "accompanying them with predictions of insurrection and taunts at his white audiences for their 'thin blooded' failure to match the courage of these black heroes."

Phillips's most recent biographer further claims that this was part of his rhetorical "flirtation with violence" in response to increased pro-slavery pressure (Steward 199). Clearly, at the end of his speech Phillips is taunting his audience, accusing it of prejudice and anticipating its hostility. It would be surprising to see Du Bois copy a taunt directed at a hostile white audience if his pageant were intended for use exclusively in the black community. Du Bois's repetition of the taunt?"You think me a fanatic tonight, for you read history not with your eyes, but with your prejudices"?shows that the pageant was directed at least in part as protest against the discriminatory bicentennial celebration. It also suggests that not much had changed since the speech was initially delivered almost a century earlier.

Du Bois replaces Washington with individual black heroes at the beginning and end of the pageant; the middle?especially scene three?is a paean to black soldiers in general. In this scene Du Bois chooses to recreate the harsh winter at Valley Forge, but instead of

desperately attempting to clothe and feed his soldiers or famously praying in the snow, Du Bois's Washington sleeps and only occasionally stirs as from a bad dream. While

Washington is in this passive state, various figures announce the victories and losses of the Continental Army, while the Witch invariably comments that black soldiers were present in all these battles, and on stage "Negro soldiers rush in and out in every direction" (122). Laf ayette assures Washington that France will come to his rescue; when it does in Du Bois's rendition of the battle of Savanna, it is not Frenchmen, but rather "the black and mulatto freedmen from Haiti" who save the retreating American army. Although scene three is

significantly titled "First in War," its heroic referent does not seem to be Washington. If

Washington is first in war, he gets the distinction only with the help of black soldiers who serve loyally in his army despite the fact that at the end of the scene Washington still believes that "the policy of arming slaves is a moot point, unless the enemy sets the

example" (122), revealing that only the military man's opportunism can prevail over the slaveholder's fear of armed slave rebellion.13

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Washington was a slaveholder who came to favor gradual legislated emancipation, but did not even come close to being in the first ranks of abolitionists. The title of scene

four, "First in Peace," is ironic because Du Bois attaches it to a depiction of Washing? ton the slave owner rather than the first president. His source for this scene is Walter

Mazyck's George Washington and the Negro. Mazyck's book had appeared early in 1932 and was favorably reviewed by Carter G. Woodson, who recommended it as an antidote to the Bicentennial Commission's treatment of blacks: "Negroes now at sea as to how

they should participate in this celebration will hnd in this volume every fact and every situation worth dramatization" ("George Washington as He Was" 9). Du Bois dramatizes a number of Mazyck's facts?the counting of slaves, the selling of insubordinate slaves, the driving of slaves to work harder; yet his pageant does not exactly develop the "very human story" of "the evolution of [Washington's] regard for human rights as unfolded

by his changing attitude toward the Negro" (Mazyck vi). Because its true interest is not

really the American War of Independence or Washington's psychological evolution but the achievement of black folk, the pageant celebrates black freedom and independence in some what anachronistic terms.

Mazyck stresses the importance of remembering the progression in Washington's at? titude from that of an unreflective member of the Southern slavocracy to a guilt-ridden slaveholder who wishes for the gradual abolition of slavery by legislative means. This human story ends with Washington's death, which, according to Mazyck, saves him from the poverty towards which his reluctance to sell slaves or separate families was pushing him (134). Washington died owning more than a hundred slaves, and his will made provi- sions for their emancipation only after his wife's death. The will freed only his manservant

immediately; consequently, the closing call of Du Bois's pageant "Free?Henceforward and forever Free!" does not follow directly from Washington's will. These words come from Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. In order for the pageant about African Americans during Washington's life and times to end optimistically, Du Bois feels the need to graft onto it a document from an entirely different epoch. By itself, Washington's evolution, as human as it may be, does not satisfy because it leaves unresolved the problem that matters the most to Du Bois.

The evolutionary pattern that Mazyck sees in Washington's attitude towards slavery is very similar to the one Du Bois uses to establish Lincoln's human greatness in "Again, Lincoln." In the essay, Du Bois strategically commends the "unfortunate speech at Charles-

ton, Illinois, in 1858," in which Lincoln declares himself in favor of white supremacy and

against "the social and political equality of the white and black races." Du Bois excuses the earlier Lincoln from the vantage point of the later developments in his thought: "This was Lincoln's word in 1858. Five years later he declared that black slaves 'are hencefor? ward and forever shall be free.' And in 1864 he was writing to Hahn in Louisiana in favor of Negro suffrage" ("Again" 200). What makes Lincoln's evolution so appealing is that it occurred precisely at the time when widespread emancipation and enfranchisement became possible. Du Bois is aware that the Emancipation Proclamation was a wartime

measure, freeing the slaves only in rebellious states, so that even its proclamation of free? dom was not absolute; it gains legitimacy as the first step in a larger historical process of

emancipation, which in hindsight is irreversible. This is probably also why in his autobi?

ography Du Bois ties his birth year to the Emancipation Proclamation.14 By aligning the

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delayed and limited emancipation of slaves in Washington's will with the wider claims of the Emancipation Proclamation, Du Bois places the will within the chronology of black

independence. The end of the pageant celebrates Washington only insofar as it celebrates Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation.15

Considering the probable irony of the titles "First in War" and "First in Peace," it seems that Du Bois does not share in the enthusiastic exaggeration of the encomium from which he borrowed these two phrases. Yet in scene two of the pageant, Du Bois attributes the au-

thorship of the phrase "first in peace" to Phillis Wheatley, and so indirectly casts his vote in favor of yet another contested black contribution to U.S. patriotic culture. The scene stages Washington's meeting with Phillis Wheatley through the reading of his written invitation to her to visit him at Cambridge in 1776 and through parts of Wheatley's poem "To His

Excellency General Washington." The historical significance of the poem is theatrically enhanced in the directions that while Wheatley "courtseys modestly" and pretends to read the poem, "the great voice of The Witch is heard instead" (122). The segments included in the pageant begin with line twenty-five, one word in which has acquired two variant

spellings. Although in the original 1776 printings in the Pennsylvania Magazine and the

Virginia Gazette the beginning of the line reads "Thee, first in place and honours," by the

beginning of the twentieth century, a variant version of the line had entered into circula?

tion, reading "Thee, first in peace and honours." The second variant was particularly im?

portant to African American intellectuals like Arthur Schomburg because it suggested the

possibility that Wheatley may have been the first to coin the phrase "first in peace" in the

triptych encomium. Schomburg in fact laid an emphatic claim to the origin of this phrase on Wheatley's behalf in an "Appreciation" of her that prefaced Charles Fred Heartman's edition of Wheatley's poems and letters in 1915. James Weldon Johnson later repeated the claim in the 1922 preface to his Book of American Negro Poetry. A January 1932 Opportunity editorial that bemoaned the exclusion of African Americans from the bicentennial "save as slaves" took the claim a step further by reminding the Bicentennial Commission that

Wheatley was the first to call Washington "First in War, first in Peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen" (7). The February issue retracted the larger claim, but still attributed to

Wheatley the phrase "first in peace" based on Schomburg and Johnson's authority (7). Also in 1932, Walter Mazyck in his George Washington and the Negro devoted an entire

chapter to Wheatley's poem and her meeting with Washington. Mazyck printed the poem as he found it in the Pennsylvania Magazine and in a footnote pointed out the erroneous selection of the word "peace" in Heartman's edition, as well as the therefore erroneous,

according to him, claim that Wheatley should be credited as the originator of the phrase "first in peace" (50 n.l). In April 1932, Schomburg sent a letter to Opportunity that expressed his dissatisfaction with Mazyck's failure to give him credit for attributing the phrase to

Wheatley and with his conclusion as to the correct version of line twenty-five. "We should not feel depressed for the adverse judgment formulated by Mazyck,

" writes Schomburg, and as a consolation he offers Wheatley's poem "Liberty and Peace," in which the word

"peace" does not have a variant (123).16 It is not clear from what source Du Bois borrowed the poem, but the portion included

in the pageant begins precisely with the questionable variant of line twenty-five "Thee, first in Peace and Honour, we demand." It favors Schomburg's preference for the word

"peace," but also capitalizes the nouns, changes the number of "honours" from plural to

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singular, and replaces the dash after "honours" with a comma. This may be a sign that Du Bois is quoting from memory, especially since he also skips several lines later on in the poem. The issue at hand has less to do with the accuracy of minor detail. It is significant that Du Bois chooses to begin with the contested line twenty-five and that even after

reading Mazyck's book, chooses the word "peace" instead of "place." Without openly claiming that the phrase "first in peace" originated with Wheatley, Du Bois nevertheless

foregrounds it by moving it from the middle of the poem to the beginning of the excerpt he includes in the pageant.

The African American scholars' desire to attribute to Wheatley the middle part of the

patriotic cliche "First in war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen" is curious

especially because, as Du Bois's pageant shows, they are not so eager to accept the absolute

precedence and therefore privilege it gives to Washington. The cliche is based on the fact that he was the chief commanding officer of the Continental Army (therefore, first in war), first president (therefore, first in peace), and the chosen affective replacement of the British

King in the shift from monarchy to presidential republicanism (therefore, first in the hearts of his countrymen). In the rhetorical turn of phrase, however, the precise historical meaning is obfuscated for the sake of syntactical parallelism, ritualized repetition, and rhythm. The cliche endures not because of verisimilitude but because of its poetic force of emphasis. The desire to credit Wheatley with part of this poetic force would place her before the

myth embodied in the cliche. Washington, the first in peace, would then be her invention and as a creator she would have precedence and control over him. White privilege based on Washington's historical precedence would thus be somewhat neutralized. This, then, is yet another move to displace Washington: just as Crispus Attucks precedes Washington in time as the first in war, so Wheatley supplants the rhetorical Washington as creator to her creation. She becomes indispensable to the claim and cannot be easily cast aside.

To prove the indispensability of black folk in American history is to protest their

cynical exclusion from it. Robert Stepto has identified an instance of such cynicism that

may have affected directly Du Bois's sense of authorship. A reference to Washington appeared in one of the captions to photographs accompanying Du Bois's essay "The Negro as He Really Is" in the journal World's Work (1901). The essay underwent major revision before it was included as two chapters in The Souls of Black Folk, and Stepto argues that the extensive revision was due to Du Bois's desire to purge the text of the offensive pho- tographic material with which it was paired in its original publication context and regain authorial control over it. The offense in question is given by photographs taken by an A.

Radclyffe Dugmore, as well as by their ridiculous captions of unidentified authorship, whose racist condescension clashes with Du Bois's text. The photograph of an old black man is captioned:

A Friend of George Washington He believes that he was with Washington when the cherry tree was cut down and allowed his photograph to be taken only on condition that a copy would be sent to his old friend. (Stepto 60-61)

This fantastic proposition adds up three impossibilities?that no one is old enough to have lived during Washington's time; that the cherry-tree story is a hoax; that Washington is not

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alive to receive the photograph?to drive home a fourth: that no black man can seriously be considered Washington's friend. Ultimately it does not only ridicule the subject of the

photograph for his alleged ignorance, credulity or self-importance (and by analogy with the title of Du Bois's essay claim these attributes to be the real qualities of black people) as it exaggeratedly denies the possibility of any serious connection between Washington (with his claim to precedence, privilege, inherent Americanness, true republicanism) and African Americans. Thirty years later the Washington bicentennial gave similar offense

by not taking seriously the historical agency that urged so many blacks to volunteer their services to both the Continental and the British army in exchange for manumission. It is this need to be taken seriously and to have some control over history, rather than the need to be intimately connected to Washington, that matters most in Du Bois's and other black intellectuals' responses to patriotic celebrations. That is probably why Washington is so often displaced, replaced, and substituted with black heroes. The point is simply that American history cannot be properly understood, or even celebrated, without a serious consideration of the African American entitlement to that history.

Yet, seventy years later, African American control over American history is still hotly disputed. When the name of the ninety-percent black George Washington Elementary School in New Orleans was changed to Charles Drew in 1997, the black civil rights group that had pushed through the change was accused of pettiness and dogmatism for "reject- ing a genuine American hero like George Washington." In defense of Washington's slave-

holding record, which was the main reason for the name change, his supporters cited the

importance of understanding historical "context and ambiguities" (Berry A15). Washington remained the focus of the debate; the historical context that demanded understanding was that of white American history; the people who did not understand said history were African American. No one considered the extensive evidence of African Americans' stra-

tegic relationship to Washington and the American Revolution, or the displacement and substitution that have characterized this uneven relationship in abolitionist protest and in the writing of early-twentieth-century black historians. In the New Orleans case, there was a move from military to civilian hero worship, but the substitution of Washington's name with that of a black surgeon in 1997 was in line with the substitutions taking place in Du Bois's bicentennial pageant.

To ignore the tension in African Americans' relationship with George Washington, or to attribute it to ignorance of historical context and complexity, is ultimately ironic when one examines African American historians' ambivalent response to Washington in the context of white patriotic celebrations. Du Bois and Woodson never question the right and

willingness of black folk to participate in the celebration of Washington; what they protest against is the denial of their right to equal participation in the bicentennial commemorative activities and in American history. Even if the racial inequalities of Washington's times were specifically bound to the peculiar institution of plantation slavery, they persist in the continuing racial problems of the United States, and it is this combination of a racially charged present seeking to celebrate its racially charged past that brings about what appears to be an exaggeratedly negative response among African American intellectuals like Du Bois. Washington is a traditional symbol not simply of citizenship, but of white

citizenship. One's belonging in the United States may be signified through the symbol of Washington. One's belonging to a minority culture involved in the struggle for racial

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equality that does not coincide completely with the goals of a conservationist patriotic culture, bent on preserving the racial status quo, seems to require the rejection of Wash?

ington. This is why Du Bois may alternatively accept the U.S. foundational documents

(like the Declaration of Independence) and reject the Founding Fathers, or acknowledge Washington's birthday and place it at the beginning of his own personal history, and then substitute it, replace it, and eclipse it with an alternative line of foundational texts and historical predecessors. Acknowledging Washington reassures the guardians of patriotic tradition that change canbe kept under control; doing away with Washington, then, sends the emphatic message that change is inevitably going on.

NOTES

Brief references to Washington are scattered throughout Du Bois's writings. In an 1892 travelogue meant for students at a Congregational Sunday School, Du Bois places Washington's presidency at the beginning of Americans' understanding of history and uses it to convey the much greater age of the German castle of Wartburg: "when Washington was President it [the castle] was old" (Aptheker, Correspondence 20). In 1904 he writes Washington in as a symbol of shared revolutionary patrimony: "the years from 1700 to 1800, when our grandfathers' grandfathers lived?that era of revolution and heart searching that gave the world George Washington and the French Revolution" (Du Bois, "Development" 207). In a 1907 address at the third annual meeting of the Niagara Movement, Du Bois calls for "repentance, reparation, and reconsecration to the ideals of Washington, Jefferson and our own Hamilton" ("Over-Look" 27). The 1922 editorial "Again, Lincoln" employs Mason Locke Weems's myth of the truth-loving Washington of the cherry tree story to off set Du Bois's own pref? erence for the imperfect Lincoln: "I care more for Lincoln's great toe than for the whole body of the perfect George Washington, of spotless ancestry, who 'never told a lie' and never did anything else interesting" ("Again, Lincoln" 200). In 1935 Du Bois couples the Americans' desire to "forget that George Washington was a slave owner" with other distortions of history, such as the historians' Birth ofa Nation version of black Reconstruction (Black Reconstruction 722). Even this brief overview shows a progressive change in Du Bois's Washington from a positive to a negative American symbol. See Newman, Rael, and Lapsansky's anthology Pamphlets ofProtest. William Wells Brown in "The History of the Haitian Revolution" compares Toussaint with Washington and Napoleon (253); Garnet compares Denmark Vesey to Toussaint, Lafayette, and Washington (163); T. Morris Chester urges blacks to take off their walls the portraits of white generals like Washington, Jackson, and McLellan, and replace them with the portraits of black military heroes like Toussaint (308). See also Wendell Phillips's speech "Toussaint L'Overture" (Phillips 184), from which Du Bois borrows for the Bicen? tennial pageant. In an article on "Africa and the French Revolution," Du Bois also lists philosopher Auguste Comte among those who compared Toussaint to Washington (Sundquist, Oxford 301). Rampersad writes simply, "William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was born in Great Barrington in western Massachusetts on February 23,1868" (2). David Levering Lewis follows the 1968 Autobiog? raphy in identifying Du Bois's birthday with the celebration of Washington's birthday: "Willie Du Bois, as his family and the townspeople knew him, was born on Church Street in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on February 23, 1868, a Sunday. On Saturday, the town had celebrated George Washington's birthday" (11). Apparently, Lewis also thinks the connection noteworthy without pondering its constructed nature. In 1926, Woodson inaugurated Negro History Week. The chosen week included February 12 (Abraham Lincoln's birthday) and February 14 (the day on which Frederick Douglass chose to celebrate his birthday). In cases where only one of these days fell within the week, Frederick Douglass's birthday had priority. In the 1960s the name was changed to Black History Week and in 1976 the celebrations were extended to include the entire month of February. According to the Julian calendar used in 1732, Washington was actually born on February 11, but according to the one in use since the mid-eighteenth century, his birth date falls on February 22. Thaddeus Stevens was a Radical Republican who helped establish the Freedmen's Bureau and secured the passage of the Fourteenth Constitutional Amendment. He was a vehement critic of President Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction policy and eventually became a leader in the effort to impeach him.

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7. "George Washington and Black Folk" is mentioned in a footnote in Kammen'sMystic Chords of Memory (756 n. 95). In her essay on The Star ofEthiopia, Freda L. Scott comments briefly on its "imaginative" construction (267). Catherine Capshaw Smith gives it a more detailed treatment but incorrectly attributes to Du Bois language and ideas that he borrows from historical sources. Although all three commentators place the pageant within the Bicentennial celebrations, none of them has addressed its reaction to the marginalization of African Americans in the official celebrations.

8. This overview is gleaned from Glassberg's American Historical Pageantry. 9. With the exception of certain European ethnic groups, no other ethnic or racial minorities are men?

tioned in the literature of the Bicentennial. Like blacks, Native Americans are represented solely as stock characters; they are the proverbial savages of the wilderness.

10. Du Bois lists four sources in the beginning of the pageant: Mazyck's George Washington and the Negro (1932); Livermore's Opinions ofthe Founders on Negroes (1862); J. T. Wilson's The Black Phalanx (1890), the author of which was a black Civil War veteran; Carter G. Woodson's The Negro in Our History (1922). In a footnote Du Bois further acknowledges DeWitt Talmadge's 1906 assertion in the Christian Herald?which he had already borrowed in The Gift of Black Folk (154)?that the Haitian Revolution made possible the Louisiana Purchase and thus the westward expansion ofthe United States (Du Bois, "George" 123). The source for the presence of Haitian volunteers in the battle of Savanna, although not cited in the pageant, was T. G. Steward in the Publications of the American Negro Academy, also first borrowed by Du Bois in The Gift of Black Folk (93). In fact, this 1924 book, written by Du Bois as part of the liberal campaign against immigration restriction and Anglo-Saxon supremacism, is essentially one of his main sources for the pageant. Du Bois also borrows the closing paragraph of Wendell Phillips's speech "Toussaint UOverture" without mentioning Phillips in the pageant. The passage is attributed to Phillips in a 1961 article, "Africa and the French Revolution," which ends by repeating De Witt Talmadge's proposition (Sundquist, Oxford 301). All in all, the pageant is a compilation of quotations that Du Bois favored in more than one of his works.

11. In "The George Washington Bicentennial Eliminates March 5th, Crispus Attucks Day," Woodson points out that Crispus Attucks is also at risk of being "eliminated" if African Americans come to believe that sacrificing one's life for a country that oppresses one's people is foolish or insane (9). Both Du Bois and Woodson urged blacks to fulfill their patriotic duty by making the ultimate sacrifice. In his notorious editorial "Close Ranks" (July 1918), which asked his readers to "forget [their] special grievances" and join the U.S. military in its entry into World War I (111), and in the clarihcation that followed in August 1918, "A Philosophy in Time of War," Du Bois made the classic war-hawk patriotic argument: "If this is OUR country, then this is OUR war" (164). Citizenship, in this argument, can only be earned by proving one's "manliness." While patriotism is not the only reason for which ordinary people join the military, especially in the ease of forced conscription, the war propaganda of the leadership is responsible for trends in public opinion, which may explain the record number of black volunteers in the first week after the United States entered World War I (O'Leary 210). Du Bois, however, may have had other reasons besides patriotism; as Rampersad points out he was "probably more pro-European than super-American," and he was otherwise a pacifist (160-61). After the war, in Darkwater Du Bois would offer a devastating analysis of it as an imperialist affair and in "An Essay Toward a History of the Black Man in the Great War" would set out to compile a record of the segregation and racial discrimination in the U.S. military during World War I, alongside examples of black soldiers' loyalty and heroism (Huggins 879-922).

12. Already in 1920, Du Bois had run pronles of black heroes like Crispus Attucks "America's First Martyr" and Toussaint UOverture in his children's magazine, The Brownies'Book (Lewis, Fight 33).

13. During the Congressional debates over universal conscription in World War I, Mississippi Senator Vardaman's warning that arming "millions of Negroes" was the greatest "menace to the South" (O'Leary 211) showed that Southern fears of racial war were still running high.

14. Despite the limited reach of the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans celebrated Eman- cipation Day and even requested that it be recognized as a national holiday. Their request was not honored by the federal government (O'Leary 200-01).

15. Du Bois was not the only one who anachronistically connected Lincoln and Washington. Such twin- nings of "the Father of His Country with its Saviour" were wide spread after the Civil War (Kammen 129). The twin mythology may have served to prove that the Civil War completed the American Revolution, or that Lincoln the Great Emancipator redeemed Washington the slave owner as much as Washington the aristocrat elevated Lincoln the commoner; it may also have been part of the attempts at reconciliation between North and South.

16. "To His Excellency General Washington" is comprised of a letter and a poem sent by Phillis Wheatley to George Washington in October 1775. In his 1989 edition of The Poems of Phillis Wheatley, Julian D. Mason argues that the poem should be read more as a challenge and encouragement to Washington

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to prove his greatness than as an actual praise because it was composed before any major victory of the Colonial Army while Wheatley was exiled from Boston to Rhode Island. It was published only in March and April 1776, after the patriots had some of their victories in Boston (Mason 164-66 n. 38).

Both variants of the contested word in line twenty-flve of Wheatley's poem are still in cireula- tion.

Mason's 1966 edition of The Poems ofPhillis Wheatley prints "peace" without disclosing its source (89), while his 1989 revised edition prints "place" in a reprint from the Pennsylvania Magazine (165-67). William H. Robinson's Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley reprints the poem from The Virginia Gazette and in a footnote points out the existence of the variant spelling "peace" without authorizing one over another (34-35). The variant "peace" appears in The Heath Anthology (1109), whereas The Norton Anthology prints the word as "place" (820). Neither of the anthologies comments on the existence of another variant.

WORKS CITED

Aptheker, Herbert, ed. Against Racism: Unpublished Essays, Papers, Addresses, 1887-1961, by W. E. B. Du Bois. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1985.

-, ed. The Correspondence ofW. E. B. Du Bois. Vol. 2: Selections 1934-1944. Amherst: U of Massachu? setts P, 1976.

Berry, Mary Frances. "Ashamed of George Washington?" New York Times 29 Nov. 1997: A15. Du Bois, W. E. B. "Again, Lincoln." The Crisis Sept. 1922:199-201. -. The Autobiography ofW. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade oflts First

Century. International Publishers, 1968. -. Black Reconstruction in America. New York: Russell and Russell, 1935. -. "Close Ranks." The Crisis July 1918:111. -. Darkwater: Voicesfrom within the Veil. 1920. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999.

"The Development of a People." Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Periodicals Edited by Others. Vol. 1: 1891-1909. Ed. Herbert Aptheker. Milwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1982.

-. "The Drama among Black Folk." The Crisis Aug. 1916:169-73. -. Dusk ofDawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography ofa Race Concept. 1940. New York: Schocken Books,

1968. -. "George Washington and Black Folk: A Pageant for the Bicentenary, 1732-1932." The Crisis Apr.

1932: 121-24. -. The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America. 1924. New York: AMS P, 1971. -. "The Over-Look." Writings in Periodicals Edited by W. E. B. Du Bois: Selections from the Horizon. Ed.

Herbert Aptheker. Milwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson, 1985. -. "A Philosophy in Time of War." The Crisis Aug. 1918: 164-65. -. The Souls of Black Folk. Three Negro Classics. New York: Avon Books, 1965. 207-389. "George Washington Again." Opportunity Feb. 1932: 39. "The George Washington Bicentennial Celebration." Opportunity Jan. 1932: 7. Glassberg, David. American Historical Pageantry: The Uses of Tradition in the Early Twentieth Century. Chapel

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Knopf, 1991. Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography ofa Race 1868-1919. New York: Holt, 1993. -. W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fightfor Eauality and the American Century 1919-1963. New York: Holt, 2000. Livermore, George. Opinions ofthe Founders ofthe Republic on Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens, and as Soldiers.

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Victor A. Kramer and Robert A. Russ. Rev. and expanded ed. Troy, NY: Whitston Publishing Company, 1997.

Nell, William C. The Colored Patriots ofthe American Revolution. 1855. New York: Arno P, 1968. Newman, Richard, Patrick Rael, and Philip Laplansky, ed. Pamphlets ofProtest: An Anthology of Early African-

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York: Hill and Wang, 1965.163-84. Rampersad, Arnold. The Art and Imagination ofW. E. B. Du Bois. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. Report of the U. S. George Washington Bicentennial Commission. Washington, DC: U.S. George Washington

Bicentennial Commission, 1932. Schomburg, Arthur A. "Appreciation." Philhs Wheatley (Phillis Peters). Poems and Letters. Ed. Charles Fred

Heartman. First collected ed. 1915. Miami, FL: Mnemosyne Publishing Co., 1969. -. "Letter." Opportunity Apr. 1932:123. Scott, Freda L. "The Star of Ethiopia: A Contribution Toward the Development of Black Drama and Theater

in the Harlem Renaissance." The Harlem Renaissance: Revaluations. Ed. Amritjit Singh, William S. Shiver, and Stanley Brodwin. New York and London: Garland

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P of Harvard UP, 1993. Wheatley, Phillis. "His Excellency General Washington." Critical Essays on Phillis Wheatley. Ed. William H.

Robinson. Boston: G. K. Hall and Co., 1982. -. "To His Excellency General Washington." The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul

Lauter. 3rd ed. Vol. 1. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1998. -. "To His Excellency General Washington." The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina

Baym. 6th ed. Vol. A. New York: Norton, 2003. -. "To His Excellency General Washington." The Poems of Phillis Wheatley. Ed. Julian D. Mason, Jr.

Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1966. -. "To His Excellency General Washington." The Poems of Phillis Wheatley. Ed. Julian D. Mason, Jr. Rev.

and enlarged ed. Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 1989. Woodson, Carter G. "Communications." Journal of Negro History 17.1 (Jan. 1932): 103-06. -. "Eliminating the Negro from the George Washington Bicentennial." The New York Age 26 Dec.

1931: 9. -and Charles H. Wesley. The Negro in Our History. 1922. 10th ed. Washington, DC: Associated Pub?

lishers, 1962. -. "George Washington as He Was." The New York Age 16 Jan. 1932: 9. -. "The George Washington Bicentennial Eliminates March 5th, Crispus Attucks Day." The New York

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replacing the father: w. e. b. du bois's reflections on george washington's birthday

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