Myron Magnet's book review is a major and important essay in itself. One quote:
Socialist W. E. B. Du Bois—Harvard’s first black Ph.D., a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and editor of its magazine, Crisis—wanted no part of American industrial capitalism. Redistribution, not production, was his focus. Let white America wallow in the world of grubby accumulation; “We black folks is got the spirit,” says a character in one of his novels. So while he valued education, like Washington, its goal was political power, not economic advancement, and he urged blacks not to let their education dilute their sense of a separate, special group culture.
That proved fatal advice, especially given Dattel’s interesting account of Du Bois’s cultural premonitions. However much he disdained bourgeois economics, Du Bois sensed the necessity of conventional morality for a people’s rise. He worried that, by his estimate, a quarter of black births in 1900 were out of wedlock, and only half of blacks observed “monogamic sex mores,” as opposed to whites’ 2 percent and 90 percent, respectively. He also worried that black preachers were too interested in making money to “adopt a new attitude toward rational amusement and sound moral habits.” He saw, in other words, that black cultural mores had a self-destructive streak, and that the one indigenous black institution that could preach a moral message was shirking its principal duty...
