W.E.B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts (where AIER is now headquartered), in 1868. Today, this towering figure of the early civil rights movement is remembered as a groundbreaking sociologist, Pan-African socialist, and near-mythical hero to the intellectual left.
“He’s a reformist,” philosopher Cornel West told a classroom of Dartmouth students in a 2017 lecture on Du Bois’ long path to becoming a revolutionary. “But he’s a radical reformist, no doubt.”
But there was once a W.E.B. Du Bois who was radical mainly in the scientific sense. Before drifting into the study of history and sociology, he was an economics student at Harvard. The marginal revolution had just remade the dismal science into a more mathematical and literally “edgy” subject. And Du Bois made original contributions that leveraged insights from the free-market Austrian school and anticipated later developments in neoclassical economic thought, as Daniel Kuehn explains in a recent paper published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Similarly, the young Du Bois’ recommendations for black racial uplift bore surprising similarities to the modern-day conservative economist Thomas Sowell. What caused his later radicalization? It was arguably a tragedy of racism.
Du Bois’ maternal great-great-grandfather was born in Africa and enslaved in America. But in the late 1700s he gained his freedom, possibly by fighting in the American Revolution. By the time Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, the town had a small but largely integrated black population. Du Bois’ mother (his father had abandoned the family when Du Bois was a toddler) owned land, and he learned and played at the public school alongside white kids. In 1888, having already studied at historically black Fisk University, he became only the sixth African American student to matriculate at Harvard.
Studying under Frank Taussig, Du Bois wrote a 158-page essay titled A Constructive Critique of Wage Theory. It included a thorough review of Carl Menger, one of the drivers of the marginal revolution, and his insight that the market value of goods and services does not depend on the value of inputs, but rather the value that consumers place on the most recent, or marginal, unit of output.
In his essay, Du Bois built on such work and rigorously demonstrated what Kuehn terms “a statement of wages as equal to the marginal revenue product… Du Bois identifies this need to think in terms of what would ultimately be called the marginal revenue product of labor.”
Kuehn goes on to note that Du Bois provides “one of the earliest acknowledgements that a labor-leisure trade-off determines individual labor supply in the marginalist framework.”
A year later, Du Bois left Harvard for two years of study at what is today the Humboldt University of Berlin. There he was exposed to a more historical approach to economics under scholars such as Adolph Wagner. Du Bois’ interests evolved, and when he returned to Harvard to finish a PhD (the first PhD Harvard would award to an African American), it was in history.
In his autobiography published in 1968, Du Bois would look back and characterize the economics he studied under Taussig as “reactionary” and “dying.” But as a newly minted PhD, Du Bois still had a long way to go to reach that point. His early works such as The Study of the Negro Problems (1898), The Philadelphia Negro (1899), and The Negro in Business (1899, which he edited), mention family cohesion, productive skills acquisition, and entrepreneurship as keys to black uplift. The required precursor, he believed, was ending racial discrimination.
But having taken a position at Atlanta University in Georgia, Du Bois was immersed in the South’s era of Jim Crow segregation. It was a time when a black man accused of a heinous crime against whites could find himself facing, rather than a court of law, mob action determined to surpass in barbarity the alleged underlying crime. Sam Hose was such a man, alleged to have murdered his white employer in 1899. A mob kidnapped him from a jail in Newnan, Georgia, dismembered him and burned him alive. Another black man was shot to death for “talking too much” about the attack on Hose.
Du Bois later reported in his autobiography that on his way to meet an Atlanta newspaper editor to discuss the lynching, he learned the burnt knuckles of Hose’s hand were on display in a nearby store window. He said the experience “broke in upon my work and eventually disrupted it…one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched.”
Was this the final disappearance of the W.E.B. Du Bois who had once made those economic breakthroughs at Harvard? Subsequent years saw him drift to the left. In 1910, Du Bois joined the Socialist Party of America. In 1926, he visited the new Soviet Union, which he saw as a beacon of hope for racial equality. In 1961, he joined the Communist Party USA. By this time, he seemed to believe that, rather than having potential for black uplift, capitalism was an obstacle to it.
The suffering of The Great Depression likely played a role in his views, as it did for some others. But one wonders how much Du Bois’ embrace of socialism had to do with the simple fact that, for all their proven faults, such regimes tend not to be concerned with skin color. They oppress all races the same.
We live in a time when many young people have a similarly friendly view of socialism. They see the historic wealth produced by free markets not as a path to their dreams but an obstacle to them. And like the evolution of Du Bois’ economic thought, it’s a tragedy.
