A few days ago I chose passages from the Autobiography of W E B Du Bois for Berkshire Publishing’s Juneteenth newsletters.
I picked passages about his experiences as a boy (including the story of how we came to have a castle in Great Barrington) and as a young man at Harvard and then struggling to find a job. But my favorite chapter is the one titled “My Character.” He opens with this:
When I was a young man, we talked much of character. At Fisk University character was discussed and emphasized more than scholarship. I knew what was meant and agreed that the sort of person a man was would in the long run prove more important for the world than what he knew or how logically he could think. It is typical of our time that insistence on character today in the country has almost ceased. Freud and others have stressed the unconscious factors of our personality so that today we do not advise youth about their development of character; we watch and count their actions with almost helpless disassociation from thought of advice.
Nevertheless, from that older generation which formed my youth, I still retain an interest in what men are rather than what they do; and at the age of 50, I began to take stock of myself and ask what I really was as a person. Of course I knew that self-examination is not a true unbiased picture; but on the other hand without it no picture is quite complete.
Apart from the chapters about his childhood, “My Character” is the most personal. It’s startling in its frankness. He writes about his sexual experience, including being raped as a young man by an unhappy landlady. He explains that sexual relations with his wife of 53 years were not satisfying. But Du Bois framed the stories in this chapter as evidence of his character: sometimes good, and sometimes not.
One difficulty of married life we faced as many others must have. My wife’s life-long training as a virgin, made it almost impossible for her ever to regard sexual intercourse as not fundamentally indecent. It took careful restraint on my part not to make her unhappy at this most beautiful of human experiences. This was no easy task for a normal and lusty young man.
Another passage:
Thus I did not seek white acquaintances, I let them make the advances, and they therefore thought me arrogant. In a sense I was, but after all I was in fact rather desperately hanging on to my self-respect. I was not fighting to dominate others; I was fighting against my own degradation. I wanted to meet my fellows as an equal; they offered or seemed to offer only a status of inferiority and submission.
I did not for the most part meet my great contemporaries. Doubtless this was largely my own fault. I did not seek them. I deliberately refused invitations to spend weekends with Henry James and H. G. Wells. I did not follow up an offer of the wife of Havelock Ellis to meet him and Bernard Shaw. Later, when I tried to call on Shaw he was coy. Several times I could have met presidents of the United States and did not. Great statesmen, writers and artists of America, I might have met, and in some cases, might have known intimately. I did not try to accomplish this. This was partly because of my fear that color caste would interfere with our meeting and understanding; if not with the persons themselves, certainly with their friends. But even beyond this, I was not what Americans called a “good fellow.”
How often do we consider our own characters, as he did? Or the characters of those around us, and especially of those in positions of power? Biographers ought to consider character, but when I went to some of the biographies on my shelf, I was startled by how little they tried to sum up the person in moral or ethical terms. In the biographies included in Women and Leadership, I found accounts of famous women’s activities. The summaries of their lives were laudatory (a rare exception is the biography of Madame Mao, Jiang Qing1), with little that one could call an analysis of character. Admittedly, one generally includes someone in a publication about leadership because they were successful. But that doesn’t make them virtuous, or consistently admirable. What about their private behavior, their motivations and ambitions?2
An accidental biographer had character in mind as he wrote about his hero, the poet T S Eliot:
On the surface that he showed to the world he was charming, modest, likable; at a deeper level he was arrogant, contemptuous, sometimes cruel; at a deeper level still, a sinner and a would-be saint. And so on, down or in. When you start peeling the onion, where do you end? The conflicting testimony of his "friends," especially of those who "knew him better than anybody," may be at least partly explained by the illusion that we (some of us, at least) can get to the bottom of a human being, and without shutting our eyes or holding our noses. The fact is, we usually know better than to try. As Eliot himself said, "No one can be understood: but between a great artist of the past and a contemporary whom one has known as a friend there is the difference between a mystery which baffles one and a mystery which is accepted." [from Great Tom by T S Matthews]
The US Naturalization Act of 1790, which still governs the process of becoming an American citizen, includes “Good Moral Character” as a requirement.
Character was something people used to think and write about. In Anthony Trollope’s novel The Claverings, for example:
Captain Archibald Clavering had not yet reached the profitable stage in the career of a betting man, though perhaps he was beginning to qualify himself for it. He was not bad-looking, though his face was unprepossessing to a judge of character. He was slight and well made about five feet nine in height, with light brown hair, which had already left the top of his head bald, with slight whiskers, and a well-formed moustache. But the peculiarity of his face was in his eyes. His eyebrows were light-colored and very slight, and this was made more apparent by the skin above the eyes, which was loose and hung down over the outside corners of them, giving him a look of cunning which was disagreeable. He seemed always to be speculating, counting up the odds, and calculating whether anything could be done with the events then present before him.
And he was always ready to make a bet, being ever provided with a book for that purpose. He would take the odds that the sun did not rise on the morrow, and would either win the bet or wrangle in the losing of it. He would wrangle, but would do so noiselessly, never on such occasions damaging his cause by a loud voice. He was now about thirty-three years of age, and was two years younger than the baronet. Sir Hugh was not a gambler like his brother, but I do not know that he was therefore a more estimable man. He was greedy and anxious to increase his store, never willing to lose that which he possessed, fond of pleasure, but very careful of himself in the enjoyment of it, handsome, every inch an English gentleman in appearance, and therefore popular with men and women of his own class who were not near enough to him to know him well, given to but few words, proud of his name, and rank, and place, well versed in the business of the world, a match for most men in money matters, not ignorant, though he rarely opened a book, selfish, and utterly regardless of the feelings of all those with whom he came in contact. Such were Sir Hugh Clavering and his brother the captain.
It’s hard, perhaps impossible, to be honest about ourselves. I first read Du Bois’s moving account of the death of his only son:
The world loved him; the women kissed his curls, the men looked gravely into his wonderful eyes, and the children hovered and fluttered about him. I can see him now, changing like the sky from sparkling laughter to darkening frowns, and then to wondering thoughtfulness as he watched the world. He knew no color-line, poor dear—and the veil, though it shadowed him, had not yet darkened half his sun. He loved the white matron, he loved his black nurse; and in his little world walked souls alone, uncolored and unclothed. I—yea, all men—are larger and purer by the infinite breadth of that one little life. She who in simple clearness of vision sees beyond the stars said when he had flown—"He will be happy There; he ever loved beautiful things.” And I, far more ignorant, and blind by the web of my own weaving, sit alone winding words and muttering, “If still he be, and he be There, and there be a There, let him be happy, O Fate!”
When I turned to David Levering Lewis’s Pulitzer Prize winning biography of Du Bois, I read that “the supreme focus of the tragedy is Du Bois.... Burghardt’s death is presented as Du Bois’s calamity and, by extension, the race’s, with Nina playing merely a supporting role…. As his wife, she understood why Will’s work had brought them to a city practically devoid of doctors of their own race - a city where white physicians refused to treat even desperately sick black children. But as a mother, Nina would never forgive him.” The baby’s 10-day illness, which led to his death, coincided with Du Bois’s final arrangements for the first of the Atlanta conferences.
One has to wonder how Nina Du Bois would have summed up her husband’s character.
What we do matters, but who we are matters, too. If you were to write a chapter called “My Character,” what would it include? And how about those you admire, or follow, or take as a model?
"To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win, not battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately. All other things, ruling, hoarding, building, are only little appendages and props, at most." —Montaigne
The title of Ross Terrill’s biography, Madame Mao: The White-Boned Demon, will give you an idea of how Jiang Qing was regarded. We had other authors for the Jiang Qing biographies in Berkshire publications, but I’m glad to say that Terrill wrote our major piece on Mao Zedong himself. His biography of Mao was one of the earliest accounts and is much acclaimed. I came across this issue of Social Research, an academic journal, about WOMEN AND MORALITY. It is decades' old but poses some questions about rights and responsibilities that are relevant to today's conversation about leadership
Leaders are not necessarily good, as we can easily see by looking an news headlines. But leadership scholars were shocked by our analysis, presented at an international leadership conference in 2004, that showed they had themselves referred to Hitler far more frequently than Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr, Winston Churchill, or Jesus: “Jesus or Hitler? Data analysis from the Encyclopedia of Leadership.” I now think it’s naive to focus leadership studies on leaders we like and admire, and that’s why I commissioned a chapter on “The Strongman Problem” for Women and Leadership. Of course we may soon be writing about the “strongwoman problem.”