Although Du Bois was quietly relieved that the War Department scotched his application for a commission, he was stung by the attacks his editorial provoked from Black moderates and radicals. As part of the collaboration, Du Bois applied for a captaincy in the Army’s Military Intelligence Branch. leader Joel Spingarn, to offer up The Crisis “as a platform of wartime propaganda” to the War Department. At the same time, Du Bois’s editorial was part of a larger effort, proposed by Du Bois’s friend, benefactor and fellow N.A.A.C.P. Du Bois feared that the government would use the Sedition Act to shut down The Crisis if censors deemed it insufficiently patriotic. Williams makes a compelling case that “Close Ranks” was the product of both calculation and opportunism. government and the colonial policies of England, France and the United States, he encouraged Black citizens to “forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.”
The July 1918 issue of The Crisis, the N.A.A.C.P.’s monthly magazine, featured an editorial by Du Bois titled “Close Ranks.” Despite his earlier blistering critiques of the U.S. Initially, Du Bois was the most prominent Black American to support the war effort. “I was convinced and said that American white officers fought more valiantly against Negroes within our ranks than they did against the Germans. “I saw the mud and dirt of the trenches I heard from the mouths of soldiers the kind of treatment that Black men got in the American army,” he said. Du Bois traveled to France after the armistice to interview Black troops. This hope soon gave way to disillusionment.
“I did not believe in war, but I thought that in a fight with America against militarism and for democracy we would be fighting for the emancipation of the Negro race.” “I felt for a moment during the war that I could be without reservation a patriotic American,” Du Bois said. As the historian Chad Williams describes in his illuminating new account, Du Bois told the friends and luminaries who had gathered how he was profoundly influenced and troubled by the First World War. Wearing his Harvard doctoral regalia, he delivered a speech surveying his life and work as a scholar and activist.
Du Bois celebrated his 70th birthday by attending a convocation in his honor at Spelman College in Atlanta. Du Bois and the First World War, by Chad L.
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