W. E. B. Du Bois, empirical social research and the challenge to race, 1868--1910

Traditional historiography on W. E. B. Du Bois has focused on his role as a political activist and literary scholar, but has consistently overlooked how science informed his social and political outlook. This dissertation focuses on Du Bois as a scientist: he was a pioneering American sociologist who, in breaking away from the dominant evolutionary theory of his day, built a new empirical framework for discussion of the race problem. Using empirical techniques common among nineteenth-century German social scientists as his conceptual and methodological guideposts, Du Bois conceived of a way of analyzing race as a social, not biological, phenomenon. In this sense, he was the product of a broader cultural and intellectual movement within the social sciences happening at the time in Germany—a time when historical economists began to understand that the poor living conditions of the working class could be explained, not by innate characteristics (laziness, inferior intelligence, etc.), but by economics. In discussing race, Du Bois applied the same logic to his sociological studies on the African American experience. As he argued in The Philadelphia Negro and the Atlanta University Publications, the American race question, too, was not a question of innate traits. This was a radical departure from the work of most American sociologists who grounded their work on an evolutionary hierarchical model of progressive racial capacity. Du Bois ultimately concluded that economic disparity was the prime catalyst for “a plexus of social problems” that plagued African American life. It was from this springboard that Du Bois launched the political ideas for which he is most noted.; This dissertation focuses on the earliest years of Du Bois's intellectual life (1868–1910). It is organized around three themes. The first locates the young Du Bois, a child preoccupied with the “race concept” who grew up to believe that the scientific method could be a means through which to understand the world. The second analyzes Du Bois's collegiate years, with a particular focus on his voyage to the University of Berlin, where he acquired empirical social research, a conceptual model. In the third phase, I analyze how he adapted this model to the American race question and thereby built a new empirical framework within which to study the Negro Problem.