W. E. B. Du Bois on Blowing Up the White House’s East Wing

The vision of W. E. B. Du Bois was one of congressional democracy, critical of presidential regimes that concentrate power in the hands of one individual — an individual who can, say, impose his vision of a White House ballroom in the sky upon all of us.

One of the elements of W. E. B. Du Bois’s argument in Black Reconstruction in America that surprised me most the last time that I taught it (or maybe the time before that), was just how much attention he pays to the Radical Republican vision of congressional power and congressional government over and against a Constitution based on presidential power and presidential government.

Du Bois even suggests that had the Radicals won, we might have had a system more like the parliamentary democracies of Europe, or at least of Britain, where the