W.E.B. Du Bois and God

Among African-American civil rights leaders, W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the more complex personalities. His thoughts during the early part of his career were quite different than during his later work.

In his early phases, Du Bois saw free markets and free enterprise as a chance for Blacks to move upward in society. He wanted to remove the artificial restrictions of institutionalized racism and to allow African-Americans to compete.

He believed that Blacks had creativity, ingenuity, and motivation, and that given a chance in the business world, many of them would succeed.

But later in life, Du Bois had become cynical, and doubted whether a truly fair business climate could be established. At the end of his career, he reject the ideas of a “free market” and instead wanted a socialist government to control how people used their money.

Thus Du Bois embraced, at different times, two opposing views.

But Du Bois had a spiritual element in his thought which remained continuous over the years. Although attracted to Marx’s atheism, Du Bois did not declare himself an atheist. He retained some spiritual attitude, however ambiguous. Historian Gary Dorrien writes:

Du Bois, however, had a spiritual wellspring of his own. He was a keen appreciator of Jesus, and his argument with the black church was a lover's quarrel. His writings were strewn with religious images and references, even after he supposedly dropped religion for Marxism. The Souls of Black Folk famously invoked “our spiritual strivings” and lauded the spirituals. He began his book Darkwater with the social gospel “Credo,” conjured a black baby Jesus in his essay “The Second Coming,” conjured an adult black Jesus in the scathing “Jesus Christ in Texas,” and ended with a “Hymn to the Peoples.”

Although vague, Du Bois refused to relegate his spirituality to realm of symbolism or emotion. He certainly did not belong in the mainstream of African-American Christianity.

At times he criticized the Black churches; at other times he sought to encourage them. To be sure, he saw the power of religion to energize. But he did not rule out an objective ontological reality within spirituality. Gary Dorrien notes that even at the end of his career, Du Bois was concerned about the social role of religion:

As late as the 1950s, Du Bois was still writing about saving “the tattered shreds of God.”

While studying at Fisk University in the 1880s, Du Bois drifted from orthodox Christianity. In the 1890s, he did graduate work in Berlin, where he was introduced to many unorthodox forms of Christianity. He was interested in exploring these more nuanced form of spirituality, rather than dogmatic and doctrinaire atheism.

George Washington's Chaplains: the Notion of ‘Church and State’ in Action

In the long and tangled history of religion in the United States, concrete examples from the Revolutionary Era can help to clarify murky and controversial concepts, like the ‘free exercise of religion’ and the ‘separation of church and state,’ about which heated debate still rages today.

Most notably, the separation of church and state was fueled by two motives: first, the desire to separate church from religion, and second, the desire for religion to inform the political process.

To the eyes of a twenty-first century reader, the phrases ‘church and state’ and ‘religion and state’ might seem similar, even synonymous. But in the late eighteenth century, these phrases captured a tension between church and religion.

For the Revolutionaries in North America, ‘church’ was a human institution, which, although perhaps founded with admirable intentions, had been corrupted and was in fact often the tool of the King. Britain’s Anglican Church was fueled, not with freely-given donations, but with taxes.

The Anglican Church, and its American offspring, the Episcopal Church, was, until 1776, the only authorized church in the thirteen colonies. Often, the Church had little to do with genuinely spiritual matters, and emphasized instead legalistic morality and ceremonial propriety.

Casting off the Anglican Church in the Revolution, the Americans saw themselves as become more religious, not less, in the act of dethroning the church. They didn’t want a government to impose institutions, traditions, and rules by acknowledging, funding, and authorizing a church to be the ‘established’ church.

In the terminology of the day, a church was ‘established’ if it was recognized by the government as the only official and authorized church, and if the government subsidized the church with taxpayer money. The American Revolution intended to energize and liberate religion by disestablishing the church. Freed from institutionalism and legalistic tradition, religious thought would energize the political process. This is why the First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

So it was, that when George Washington was organizing chaplains for the spiritual care of his troops, that he was little interested in their denominations - Episcopal, Presbyterian, Baptist, Quaker, Lutheran etc.

They would not be working for the church. They’d be working for Continental Army. Historian Tim Townsend writes:

When George Washington was desperate for a chaplain to minister to his drunken Virginia backcountry troops, he asked the governor to provide him one, writing that the absence of a chaplain reflected “dishonor on the regiment.” Some of Washington’s soldiers told him they’d pay a chaplain’s salary from their own pockets, but Washington said he’d rather have a chaplain appointed as an officer because that would have “a more graceful appearance.” A chaplain, Washington wrote, “ought to be provided, that we may at least have the show if we are said to want the substance of Godliness.” When Washington became commander of the Continental Army on July 2, 1775, he found fifteen chaplains among the army’s twenty-three regiments. He encouraged the chaplains to lead weekly worship services, and he eventually admitted ministers of eight denominations into the chaplaincy and urged his commanders to facilitate the free exercise of religion among their troops.

By discarding ‘establishment,’ the Americans would encourage ‘the free exercise’ of religion. This took forms which, to the twenty-first century eye, seem odd: Thomas Jefferson discouraged Congressmen from attending worship in churches in or near the capital; instead, he organized services in government buildings, reading aloud from the Bible, singing hymns, and praying. Jefferson himself participated regularly.

Jefferson understood himself to be freeing the government from the influence of church, while infusing what he understood to be a purer form of spirituality into the political process.

When offices were created for Chaplain of the United States Senate and Chaplain of the House of Representatives, it was understood that those who filled them were no longer to be in the employ of any church.

As the old saying goes, “he who pays the piper calls the tune.”

On the logic that whoever pays a worker determines what he does, the principle of ‘disestablishment’ required that the government hire and pay the chaplain. The ‘separation of church and state’ meant that no church could have an employee within the government.

Rather, by hiring its own chaplains, the government was getting religion without the church: it was not a staffer of any church, but rather the government’s own employee who explained the Bible, preached, and organized prayers and hymns.

Woodrow Wilson, Haiti, and Democracy

Although one of Woodrow Wilson’s most famous speeches was about “making the world safe for democracy,” it is not entirely clear exactly what he meant by the word ‘democracy.’

Given his willingness to impose his will on postwar Europe, redrawing the map as he dissolved some nations and created others, it is plain that he did not subscribe to the traditional notion of popular sovereignty in which the legitimacy of the government arose from the consent of the governed.

From his dealings with, e.g., Haiti, it is obvious that Wilson did not understand ‘democracy’ to mean the right of a people freely to elect representatives constituting a republic. Superior Court Judge Andrew Napolitano writes:

Haiti was suffering from chronic insurrections by local rebels a hundred years ago. In 1915, when the rebellions came to a head, Wilson wrote to Robert Lansing, his secretary of state, “I fear we have not the legal authority to do what we apparently ought to do.” Yet, Wilson continued, “I suppose there is nothing for it but to take the bull by the horns and restore order.” To this end, Wilson deployed U.S. troops to Haiti, forcing the Haitians to elect an American puppet government.

Wilson freely admits that he lacks “the legal authority to” intervene so decisively into Haiti’s internal affairs, but he does so nonetheless, raising procedural concerns.

There was more at stake than the domestic tranquility of Haiti. As the Wall Street Journal reported on February 15, 1915,

American and French Ministers have protested issue by Haiti of $8,000,000 Treasury notes in violation of contract with National Bank of Haiti.

Wilson, however, continued his rhetoric. Not only did he use the word ‘democracy,’ he also mentioned ‘equality’ - no doubt to the surprise of the Haitians, who were experiencing neither of those two. In a speech on December 7, 1915, Wilson proclaimed about his policies toward the nations of central America and the Caribbean,

This is Pan-Americanism. It has none of the spirit of empire in it. It is the embodiment, the effectual embodiment, of the spirit of law and independence and liberty and mutual service.

Any naive understanding of Wilson’s use of the words ‘democracy’ and ‘equality’ in the context of foreign policy would be dissolved by an examination of his domestic policies. His introduction of segregation among the employees of various federal agencies, his efforts to keep African-American students from enrolling in universities, and his other blatantly racist policies undermined his proclamation, in the same speech, that

All the governments of America stand, so far as we are concerned, upon a footing of genuine equality and unquestioned independence.

The next day, the New York Times reported the skepticism at Wilson’s feigned enthusiasm for equality. (The population of Haiti is approximately 95% Black.) On December 8, 1915, the Times informed its readers that

The welcome the President expressed for the southern republics into a new equality with the United States came as a surprise to some Senators who recalled that the President would ask the Senate at this session to ratify treaties with Nicaragua and Haiti establishing protectorates over those countries.

While Wilson’s speeches were filled with references to ‘democracy’ and ‘equality,’ it is clear from his actions that his use of these words was either idiosyncratic or simply insincere. His actions were, however, emblematic for his progressivist wing within the Democratic Party.

An Amazing Moment in Economics: President Calvin Coolidge

Statistically, the Coolidge presidency is an outlier. Affectionately named ‘Silent Cal’ by the media and by the public, he managed simultaneously to reduce the national debt and to cut taxes.

Naturally, it is an oversimplification to give Coolidge alone the credit for this achievement. Congress was a necessary part of the process.

During the Coolidge years - he took office in August 1923 - the federal government’s budget was kept under control: in some years it grew a little, in other years, it actually shrank a bit. There were years of budget surplus.

Coolidge’s economic policies generated marked growth: wages rose, unemployed vanished. The benefits of this prosperity came to citizens at all income levels, especially those in the lower wage groupings.

Coolidge retained Andrew Mellon as Secretary of the Treasury. Historian Robert Ferrell writes:

The Mellon tax cuts favored “small Americans.” Seventy percent of the lost revenue under one Mellon proposal would have gone to taxpayers with incomes under $10,000 - the latter figure admittedly a handsome income in those days. Under the same proposal, the percentage going to taxpayers with incomes over $100,000 would have been 2.5.

The Coolidge administration can be seen as a continuation of the Harding administration; Andrew Mellon has been appointed by Harding. In 1920, the last year of the Wilson administration, the federal budget was a bloated $6,649,000,000 with a negligible surplus. By 1928, the last full year of Coolidge’s presidency, it was down to $3,900,000,000 with a surplus of $939,000,000.

Coolidge managed an amazing constellation of statistics: he cut the debt, he cut the budget and spending, he cut taxes, and he increased the surplus. Citizens in the lower wage brackets experienced significant increases in their wages and in the standards of living.

During the 1920s, the Coolidge administration reduced the debt, kept the budget flat, and brought in sufficient revenues through markedly reduced tax rates, both personal and corporate.

The prosperity of the 1920s ended when both Hoover and FDR turned a temporary downturn into an enduring depression by creating, for the first time in more than a decade, a deficit instead of a surplus, and then massively increasing spending, deficits, and taxes.

The presidency of Calvin Coolidge remains an economic landmark, both in American History and in World History.

The 1920s - Economic Concerns in Coolidge's Domestic and Foreign Policies

The administrations of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge worked to stabilize the economy of the United States. Woodrow Wilson’s administration had inflicted both increasing taxes and increasing national debt on the country.

Wilson had used the Sixteenth Amendment, and Congress had complied, to increase taxation massively. For the first time in the history of the United States - apart from an experimental income tax during the Civil War - the federal government began confiscating a portion of the wages of working people.

Income tax rates soared up to 77% by 1918 during Wilson’s “progressive” administration. The war was used as an excuse for such taxation.

When President Harding was elected in 1920, the voters were tired of paying excessive taxes, and such taxes threatened to destroy the nation’s economy. Harding began to cut taxes. When Calvin Coolidge became president in 1923, he continued the trend. Historian Robert Ferrell writes:

Of course, the subtleties involved in these reductions often made large differences in the savings of individual taxpayers. In 1921, the highest personal rate was for incomes beginning at $200,000, down from the previous beginning point of $1 million. In 1924, the beginning point was $500,000; in 1926, $100,000. These categories were so far removed from the incomes of most Americans that they meant little. More important was the exemption for married taxpayers, which the act of 1921 raised from $2,000 to $2,500 and the act of 1926 raised to $3,500. The latter raise exempted 40 percent of all individuals who had paid taxes in 1924, leaving only 2.5 million taxpayers. Between 1921 and 1929, the number of taxpayers declined by 1 million. By 1927, 98 percent of the population paid no income tax. Three-tenths of 1 percent paid 94 percent of income taxes. As Mellon explained that year, “The income tax has gradually become so restricted in its application that it is a class tax rather than a national tax.”

Money was central, not only to Coolidge’s domestic policies, but also to his foreign policies. Europe was still recovering from WWI. European nations owed money to American banks; they were having difficulties repaying those loans.

The Treaty of Versailles demanded that Germany pay billions in reparations. Germany likewise had difficulty making such payments.

In the meantime, brutal communists had gained control of Russia, which was now in grips of Soviet socialism. President Coolidge had to decide which stance the United States would take toward the Soviet Union.

The international diplomatic scene of the 1920s was complex. Coolidge appointed Charles Dawes and Frank Kellogg as his key foreign policy experts. Historian David Greenberg writes:

On the international front, Coolidge had to confront several important issues in his first year in office, including the question of whether to establish diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and calls for various treaties and institutions to protect the peace. But the most urgent and knottiest issues were those surrounding foreign debt to the United States. During World War I, American banks had let the European allies more than $10 billion, and after the war these nations, their economies ailing, were struggling to meet their payments. Then crisis struck. In early 1923, Germany, groaning under the reparations imposed by the Versailles Treaty, defaulted on its payments to France. French and Belgian troops moved into the Ruhr Valley, home to the German coal and steel industries, raising the prospect of another war. Germany printed money to pay its debts, resulting in a legendary period of hyperinflation. By October 1923, one dollar bought 4.2 trillion marks.

Vice President Dawes saved Europe from collapse by means of the “Dawes Plan,” which restructured German reparation payments, reducing the burden on the German economy. The global economy had been so close to breaking down that Dawes earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925.

Statism and Narrative

Narrative is a powerful force in human society. People naturally pay closer attention to narratives than to mere recitations of facts. People remember narratives better than they remember disjointed lists of data.

Emotions often engage in a narrative. Curiosity is aroused. Who’s the ‘good guy’? Who’s the ‘bad guy’? What will happen next?

Those who wish to instill ethical principles into their listeners know the power of a story. So do politicians who are promoting an ideology or who are seeking to get elected.

Historians understand the centrality of narrative. History is, essentially and necessarily, narrative. The business of historians is often to sort out and compare competing narratives.

While some have speculated about ‘doing history without narrative,’ most efforts in such a direction have floundered. They seem to strive for something which is practically impossible, if not absolutely so. Jonah Goldberg writes:

The brain was wired to take in information via stories. (It helps if they’re sung and rhyme a lot, but that’s a topic for another day.) Every important lesson of your life comes with a story.

Narrative will be implemented by both sides of serious ideological debates. Those who would assign the bulk of power and authority to the government, and who see the government as providing the solution for most problems, are often called ‘statists.’

To justify the inevitable reductions of individual political liberty, statists employ narratives. The paternalistic government, which benignly taxes and regulates, rescues citizens from a variety of crises and emergencies. Goldberg continues:

Ever since Hegel or maybe Plato, statists have been telling a story about government in which government itself is the hero in an epic struggle.

It became necessary for the government, and for the statist on behalf of the government, to find a continuous supply of problems and disasters so that the government can once again reveal itself to be the deliverer, and so that the government can once again justify regulating the life of the individual and imposing taxes.

The American political vocabulary of twentieth and early twenty-first centuries does not do justice to the problem of statism. Talk of ‘Republicans’ and ‘Democrats’ - talk of ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ - doesn’t capture what’s at stake.

The question about statism is the question about whether we look to the government as a provider and rescuer, or whether we look to society itself, and the individuals and groupings within society, as a source of creativity and inventiveness, as the engine for constructive effort.

For Hegel, the state was the mechanism by which God worked out His will. For Marx, the State was an expression of cold immutable forces.

In historical development, Marxism and the various types of socialism which it spawned moved from seeing the government as the means to seeing the government as the end. Some versions of communism, in the early and mid-nineteenth century, aimed for the eventual dissolution of government, once it had been used to attain communal ownership of nearly everything: a sort of ‘anarcho-communism.’

But a larger segment of socialists eventually moved to a vision of the government as absorbing everything, owning everything, and regulating everything. “For the socialists who followed, control of the state was a kind of” desideratum, “but over time it became the hero itself.”

The narrative of the statist, then, incorporates the government as hero, and therefore must find the government to be an embodiment of ethical principles. Heroes, after all, are the good guys. When the typical statist of the early twenty-first century

talks about the moral arc of the universe bending towards justice, the physical manifestation of that pie-eyed treacle is always government.

Statist narratives, therefore, are stories of how the government has not only rescued its citizens, but done so in a morally noble manner. Statist histories of the past, analyses of the present, and speculations about the future follow this formula.

There is no room, in the statist narrative, for a hero who is not in some way linked to the government. There is no room for private citizens who freely assemble to form a social effort apart from the government to address any problem.

As Jonah Goldberg phrases it, when the statists of the early twenty-first century

talk about the progress we’ve made as a society, the hero is always the state (and the heroic individuals who bent it to their will). It doesn’t matter that the market, non-state institutions, and heroic individuals tend to solve most of the problems in life; the government is always shoehorned in as the indispensable author of beneficence.

What remains, then, it to examine competing narratives.

Take, for example, the statist narrative about women’s rights. The Progressivist movement would have the reader believe that women were rescued from abject servitude by the federal government, which enacted the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. It was the benevolence of the centralized state which launched women into political equality, according to this narrative.

Yet a different narrative can be assembled from the available data. Quite aside from the point that it was the individual state legislatures, not the national government, which ratified the amendment is the point that women were already voting long before the amendment was even proposed. Women began voting in Wyoming in 1869, Colorado in 1893, in Idaho in 1896, in Utah in 1896, and in Montana in 1914. This trend continued until women were voting in 41 out of 48 states before the amendment was ratified. It was evident that the few ‘holdout’ states would soon follow the others.

Another statist narrative alleges that the ordinary citizens were saved from monopolies, trusts, and ‘robber baron’ industrialists when the federal government undertook to disperse these large commercial holdings. The statist narrative further alleges that the large corporations would inflict high prices on consumers who had no choice but to buy from a monopoly.

The competing economic narrative points out, first, that large holdings like Standard Oil achieved large market shares by offering low, not high prices to consumers. Second, Standard Oil never had 100% of the market share and so was never a true monopoly, and in fact faced competition throughout its existence which forced it to keep its prices to consumers low. Third, far from being invincible bastions of power, these industrialist empires, like Vanderbilt’s corner on the railroad market, often lasted only a few years, before competition reshaped the economic landscape: railroad dominance shifted from Vanderbilt to J.P. Morgan. The federal government’s efforts at “trust busting” were ineffectual and largely symbolic: Standard Oil was past its peak, and had been steadily losing market share, by the time the statists intervened to “save” the consumers from purported danger it posed.

A third common statist narrative tells us that FDR’s ‘New Deal’ rescued ordinary Americans from the depths of the Great Depression. Roosevelt’s high rates of taxation, massive national debt, wage-and-price controls, and make-work programs were the necessary steps to save Americans from poverty.

The competing liberty-based narrative tells us that the Great Depression was impervious to FDR’s efforts - it was in fact worse in 1937 than in 1932 - and Roosevelt’s efforts were in some cases shockingly irrational. Thousands of hogs were butchered and the meat thrown away, while families hungered: the New Deal’s attempt to ‘jump start’ consumer demand for agricultural products. The massive efforts of WWII masked, but did not end, the Great Depression. It was after the war that three factors coalesced to finally put the nation’s economy back onto a steady footing: a reduction in government spending, a reduction in taxation, and efforts to pay down the national debt. It was the postwar downsizing of government which ultimately laid the specter of the Great Depression to rest.

We see, then, that for each statist narrative, there is a competing narrative which is based on liberty and on the independence of the individual, instead of on the statist’s desire to see power centralized in a national government. Although abstract principle of ideology may ultimately be more attractive to pure reason, it is narrative which often decides the practical political perceptions of both the people and the historians.

Coolidge's Foreign Policy

The foreign policy of Calvin Coolidge might be described as located between the extremes of isolationism and internationalism. He saw the need for American engagement, and oversaw Frank Kellogg and Charles Dawes as they developed the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the Dawes Plan, respectively.

Yet Coolidge knew that the nation was weary after Woodrow Wilson had dragged it through WWI and the ensuing diplomatic entanglements of Versailles and the League of Nations. Wilson had been elected on a platform of keeping America out of the war, but he’d ultimately been unable to resist the attraction of the extraordinary powers which he would exercise as a wartime leader.

Therefore, Coolidge engaged diplomatically, but did not commit the United States militarily or in any way which, like the League of Nations, would compromise its national sovereignty.

The years of the Coolidge administration included significant foreign policy challenges, from efforts to ameliorate the problematic provisions of the Versailles Treaty, to the disconcerting awareness of Japan’s growing militaristic nationalism; from emergence of the Soviet Union as it replaced the Czarist dynasty to the irruption of civil war in China as the communists sought power.

There were, naturally, critics: some saw Coolidge as too engaged, and there was a vocal isolationist minority who doubted his decisions. But the voters overwhelming affirmed Coolidge and returned him to office, manifesting the will of the majority. Historian David Greenberg writes:

He ultimately declined to recognize the Communist government of the Soviet Union, and his policy toward the internal strife and rising anti-Western sentiment in China was uncertain and reactive. Coolidge, however, was no isolationist. Rather, his cautious temperament disinclined him from making bold ventures. He governed, moreover, at a moment when the public has lost its patience for the swashbuckling of a Roosevelt or the internationalism of a Wilson. Indeed, the president’s critics on foreign affairs were mainly those men who distrusted his internationalist forays altogether, from the Dawes Plan in his first term to his efforts to join the World Court in his second. He was fighting isolationism, not carrying its banner.

The voters seemed to like Coolidge’s foreign policy because, on the one hand, he avoided the extremes of isolationism and Wilsonian adventurism, and other the other hand, he engaged diplomatically while firmly maintaining national sovereignty.