Even the broken reed on which we had rested high hopes of eternal peace,--the guild of the laborers--the front of that very important movement for human justice on which we had builded most, even this flew like a straw before the breath of king and kaiser.
Du Bois reflects on the disillusionment with labor movements in the face of imperialist ambitions.
Share
More from W.E.B. Du Bois
To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.
The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.
All this segregation by color is largely independent of that natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.
The first decade was merely a prolongation of the vain search for freedom, the boon that seemed ever barely to elude their grasp,—like a tantalizing will-o’-the-wisp, maddening and misleading the headless host.