These dual attitudes—praise and scorn—were constants throughout his life, and although, in the latter stages of his career, the scorn seemed excessive, he bore it with that stoic determination that so marked his character. Writing of one trying experience—indictment and trial as a subversive—in 1951, during the infamous McCarthy era, he revealed his attitude toward the numerous crises of his long life: "It was a bitter experience and I bowed before the storm. But I did not break."
If there is something in Du Bois that Americans have come to identify as New England temperament, the stubborn Yankee, spiritual descendant of Henry David Thoreau and Washington Irving, it may well be because Du Bois's character was formed in the same New England clime. Certainly his description of his hometown, written in an essay, "The Pageant Of Seven Decades," rivals some of Thoreau's descriptions in Walden: "The town and its surroundings were a boy's paradise . . . there were mountains to climb and rivers to wade and swim, lakes to freeze and hills for coasting. There were orchards and caves and wide green fields; and all of it was the free property apparently of the children of town." Such poetic visions of their hometowns were uncommon to most blacks in America in the 1800s, but Du Bois's family, though not middle-class, was unlike that of most blacks.
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