Compulsively dissociated from the American tradition, the Negro on the upper level has had to maintain the pretense of possessing what he is in fact denied. He has had no choice but this. He has not been free to realize his ideals or to strive to be what the American tradition has made him wish to be. Paul Lawrence Dunbar, probably the most popular American poet at the turn of the century, did not wish to write “jingles in a broken tongue,” but he was Negro and as a Negro he had to write dialect or else have no hearing as a poet. James Weldon Johnson did not wish to compose those “darky” lyrics and “coon songs” for Williams and Walker’s and his own brother Rosamond’s shows—nor did Williams and Walker and Rosamond Johnson wish to sing them and caper to them. But how else were they to find outlets for their creative urges, when all of the more congenial and less particularized were dammed up against them? DuBois had ideas for a career other than the one he was compelled to follow. “Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me,” he wrote in _Dusk of Dawn_, “I should have probably been an unquestioning worshiper at the shrine of the social order and economic development into which I was born.... What was wrong was that I and people like me and thousands of others who might have my ability and aspiration, were refused permission to be a part of this world. It was as though moving on a rushing express, my main thought was as to the relations I had to other passengers on the express, and not to its rate of speed and its destination.... My attention from the first was focused ... upon the problem of the admission of my people into the freedom of democracy.”[12] The dissociation of the Negro from the American tradition and the lack of knowledge of the Negro on the historical level are certainly in part the fault of social commentators and historians and social scholars. The historians particularly have been guilty of almost complete silence, like William A. Dunning; or of faulty investigation, like James Ford Rhodes; or of misinterpretation of the facts, like Ulrich Philips and W. E. Woodward; or of propaganda, like William E. Dodd and Jesse Carpenter; or of frank and determined anti-Negro bias, like dozens, major and minor, including Claude Bowers, James Truslow Adams, and John W. Burgess—the last of whom, by his prestige as a faculty member at Columbia University, gave scholarly sanction to prejudice. He wrote as follows: