SOURCE: "W. E. B. Du Bois: Glory and Shame," in Celebrations and Attacks: Thirty Years of Literary and Cultural Commentary, pp. 170-79. New York: Horizon Press, 1979.

In the essay below, Howe contends that Du Bois's commitment to Communism and Stalinism at the end of his life "was soiled both morally and intellectually."

If the name "Du Bois" means anything at all to most Americans, it is probably linked in their minds with those campus sects—the Du Bois clubs—that speak for Moscow-style Communism. Richard Nixon, with his special gift for parodying native follies, once suggested that the campus Communists were trying to capitalize on the phenotic kinship between the Du Bois clubs (dew boys) and the Boys Clubs (da boys). Actually, the Communists were quite within their rights, for in the last decade of his remarkable life—he died in 1963 at the age of ninety-five—William Edward...