The influx of European immigrants was highly destabilizing to this community. The immigrant labor pool was not only used to depress wages of ordinary workers, it was very often exploited to the exclusion of blacks. The black community would feel the effect of every successive wave of European immigration. Prejudiced white employers would drop their black workers in favor of white immigrants or simply would not hire blacks. So a great many blacks who possessed skills and work experience were left unemployed or underemployed, sometimes dramatically so. A case in point was a college-educated engineer who worked as a waiter. And there were many other cases, such as a woman trained as a secretary but then denied employment. Even those who were in favor of educating or training blacks, it seemed, did not want to hire them.
Blacks appeared to find their “niche” in the occupations that were most consistent with their previous condition of servitude. Hence the servant jobs in the homes of the wealthy served as a relatively secure situation for many. DuBois roundly criticized this situation for many of the reasons mentioned, but also for the way it supported white prejudices toward blacks. But even this niche became endangered by white, generally Irish, immigration.12
This general situation contributed to a profound demoralization of the black community, a fact that expressed itself in the social life of the black community. With poverty of spirit as well as poverty of purse, the black community became increasingly disorganized. Family life suffered. To make ends meet, many families would take on single male boarders, who were often new arrivals from the South, and these men would serve as a destabilizing influence on the family and the household. Alcohol abuse, gambling, crime, and violence were persistent problems for the community. As these problems became worse, they presented whites with an ever greater rationale for their prejudices; a vicious cycle had been created.
After uncovering the way economic factors conspired with racism to keep the Philadelphia Negro down, DuBois looked for the role of the “benevolent despot,” who would presumably exert a positive influence. Instead, he found that the so-called benevolent despot, who so often appears to be a disinterested referee, often plays a very active role, looking out for his own interests and tolerating much of the prejudice toward blacks:
If now a benevolent despot had seen the development, he would immediately have sought to remedy the real weakness of the Negro's position, i.e., his lack of training; and he would have swept away any discrimination that compelled men to support as criminals those who might support themselves as workmen.
He would have made special effort to train Negro boys for industrial life and given them a chance to compete on equal terms with the best white workmen; arguing that in the long run this would be best for all concerned, since by raising the skill and standard of living of the Negroes he would make them effective workmen and competitors who would maintain a decent level of wages. He would have sternly suppressed organized or covert opposition to Negro workmen.
There was, however, no benevolent despot, no philanthropist, no far-seeing captain of industry to prevent the Negro from losing even the skill he had learned or to inspire him by opportunities to learn more.13
The truly benevolent despot was nowhere to be found.
Instead, DuBois encountered the self-interested capitalist and noted certain contradictions in his racial behavior. Such people would contribute to charities for the blacks but would not hire them in their businesses. It appeared that perhaps the white workers themselves had a significant hand in keeping black men out of the workplace. As indicated above, their threats to quit were often taken very seriously, so even if the capitalist wanted to do right by the black man, he was constrained by the thought of losing his workers. This might account for some of the ambivalence observed by DuBois. And to be sure, this was not the only scenario DuBois presented. In certain industries capitalists actively pitted black workers against the Europeans who were threatening to strike for higher wages by hiring the blacks as strikebreakers.14 In this regard, given their low living standard, black workers served as a direct threat to the living standards of white workers. This resulted in tremendous tension and greatly exacerbated race relations. One can only wonder how such antagonisms diffused through Philadelphia at the time, having an impact far beyond the initial contested work setting.15
At the same time, it is provocative to consider what part DuBois's own identity played in the contradictory perspectives he presents—that of the elite Victorian young gentleman committed to the ideas of meritocracy and universalism and that of a son of a people struggling to live in freedom after two hundred years of a bondage justified on racial grounds. DuBois's struggle to reconcile these two orientations is one of the fascinating aspects of The Philadelphia Negro. One gets the sense that it was very difficult for him to accept the idea that blacks were second-class citizens because at the time he wrote the book he still considered himself to be a full citizen of the United States, even a member of the elite. This tension may account for the ultimately ambivalent assessment of the Philadelphia Negro's situation with which DuBois leaves the reader.16
In general, capitalists flagrantly violated the attitude of noblesse oblige DuBois originally imputed to them, and the discovery of this truth disillusioned him. Anticipating Herbert Blumer17 and others, he came to feel that, although exacerbated by economic competition, the existence of racism and race prejudice in American society was very deep, particularly when the racial advantage of whites allowed them to prevail in the workplace. Moreover, such racial and ethnic feelings encouraged group identification for the purpose of furthering group economic interests. The capitalists, by exploiting these socioeconomic forces, were profiting from the low position of the blacks. When he uncovered this behavior as a young man, DuBois harbored the hope that the inherently noble, if opportunistic, American capitalist could eventually be persuaded to change his ways. Toward the end of his life, however, DuBois became profoundly disillusioned with America. Renouncing his American citizenship, he embraced pan-Africanism and moved to Ghana, where he died in 1963 just as a new and more militant generation of blacks was marching on Washington to demand redress of the injustices he was the first to chronicle.
The Philadelphia Negro is also a seminal work in the field of race relations.18 DuBois's discovery that race has caste-like implications for blacks in Philadelphia also anticipates the work of others many years later. The major themes of The Philadelphia Negro are replayed in such important works as Frazier's The Negro Family in the United States and Black Bourgeoisie;19 Drake and Cayton's Black Metropolis;20 and William Wilson's The Declining Significance of Race and The Truly Disadvantaged.21
In his comments on the twoness of American society, on the separateness and inequality of its white and black worlds,22 DuBois anticipated the work of Gunnar Myrdal,23 Daniel Patrick Moynihan,24 and the Kerner Commission Report.25 He saw the black community as being in danger of permanently separating from the mainstream white society, a state of affairs that both Myrdal and Kerner—and most recently Andrew Hacker26—saw as coming to pass over half a century later.
At the end of the book, DuBois discusses the responsibilities he attributed to white people and black people in the situation he presented. But, strikingly, he does not strongly revisit his economic arguments. Curiously, he seems to let these dogs lie. Could this have been due to the influence of the CSA and his desire and hope of positively influencing the capitalists? From whites he asked for greater understanding and tolerance. They should work to try to include the blacks, to reach out to them, train them, give them a leg up so they could recover from the experience of slavery. But at the same time, he considered the blacks to be at fault as well. They had not done all they should have been doing in terms of