The Wizard.(Booker T. Washington)(Essay)

Booker T. Washington was already a celebrity--a self-made man, and the spokesman for black America--when he arrived at the White House on October 16, 1901, for a dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt. They had plenty to talk about: Washington was a great orator and conversationalist, and he had become one of the President's most valued advisers. But, almost before the plates were cleared, the form of this meeting had overshadowed its content. Washington had earned his reputation as a racial moderate by assuring white people that he wouldn't press for social equality, but this dinner looked an awful lot like a strike against segregation; the reported presence of the President's glamorous seventeen-year-old daughter, Alice, intensified the scandal. Southern newspapers raised the alarm; the Memphis Scimitar announced, with impressive certainty, that the dinner was "the most damnable outrage which has ever been perpetrated by any citizen of the United States."

Both men survived the evening, but it was not soon forgotten. In his third autobiography, "My Larger Education," Washington tells of a railway trip he took through Florida sometime later. At a stop near Gainesville, a white farmer shook his hand, exclaiming, "You are the greatest man in this country!" Washington demurred and suggested that Roosevelt was the greatest American, but the farmer was having none of it. With "considerable emphasis," he said, "I used to think that Roosevelt was a great man until he ate dinner with you. That settled him for me."

Washington loved this story--he sent a newspaper account of it to Roosevelt, who is said to have "laughed uproariously"--perhaps because it reminded him that he lived, and thrived, in a world that didn't quite make sense. He was born in slavery, in Virginia, in 1856, which meant that he was old enough to remember the morning his family was freed, nine years later. At sixteen, he enrolled in Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, one of the Negro schools that were springing up in the postwar South; his remarks at his graduation ceremony, three years later, were singled out for praise in the New York Times. In 1881, at the age of twenty-five, he became the first principal of a newly established Negro school in Tuskegee, Alabama, and, like many college presidents before and since, he discovered that the job required constant fund-raising. He spent most of the rest of his life giving speeches, building up his own reputation (quickly) and the Tuskegee Institute's endowment (slowly). Washington's message--that economic progress was the true engine of uplift for black America, and that black political agitation was "the extremest folly"--was engineered to meet the demands of his time, not the demands of history. (It was also meant to persuade rich people to write checks; Washington's critics never let him forget that his temple to self-help was built on handouts.) He spent his life in search of consensus, not controversy, and historians have been fighting over him ever since.

In 1972, Louis R. Harlan published the first half of his meticulous twovolume biography, "Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1901." It began with a sneer. "Booker T. Washington has been the schoolbook black hero for more than half a century," Harlan wrote, and his book aimed to change that, although there was nothing polemical about it. Harlan, a historian at the University of Maryland, brought an exacting skepticism to his task, subjecting myths and anecdotes to forensic examination. (Although Washington remembered taking sacks of corn to the mill as a boy, Harlan concluded that the task "probably actually" fell to his older brother John. And, after quoting a starstruck reporter who described him as "tall, bony, straight as a Sioux chief," Harlan hastened to add that Washington was "not actually tall, bony, nor very straight.") Harlan, who edited fourteen volumes of Washington's papers, used private correspondence to complicate--and sometimes undermine--his subject's public image. He clearly admired the skill and strategy behind Washington's rise: the way he got his white neighbors to view his booming black school as a source of regional pride; the way he flattered Northern liberals and soothed Southern segregationists with the same folksy speeches. But, in Harlan's view, the great race man was also an "artful dodger," and a not entirely honest broker, forever spying on his critics, punishing his enemies, rewarding his friends, and bribing the Negro press. He got so good at telling people (especially white people) what they wanted to hear that he often forgot what he wanted to say.

The fact that Booker T. Washington's tactics were finely tuned to the temper of his times helps explain why they were so discordant with the times that followed. Washington's reasonableness came to be viewed as his mortal sin--he was often portrayed as the enemy of black activism. But these days, when the "schoolbook black hero" is Martin Luther King, Jr., Washington is less threatening, and more likable, than he once was: a slave turned mogul whose life story is easier to admire now that his political philosophy has been eclipsed. And, in the age of Obama, Washington seems more than ever like a precursor: a beloved barrier-smasher, sensitive to the rigorous demands of being America's favorite black person. In short, Washington seems due for reappraisal, and in "Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington" the historian Robert J. Norrell aims to push him back up onto his pedestal--or, at any rate, to pick him up off the floor.

No one can deny that Washington had an extraordinary knack for cultivating white people. A few years after the end of the Civil War, he worked as a houseboy for a transplanted Vermonter named Viola Knapp Ruffner, who was reputedly a demanding mistress. The thoroughness of his housework won her over, and she became one of his first boosters, although it's not clear whether she gave him her blessing to quit her household and set out for Hampton. Washington never knew his father, who was almost certainly white, but he found a surrogate at Hampton: Samuel Armstrong, the school's founder, who had commanded black troops as a Union officer in the Civil War. Washington adopted Armstrong's credo--work hard, don't complain--as his own, and when the Alabama state commissioners in charge of Tuskegee wrote Armstrong in search of someone to lead their new school, he replied with a terse but nonetheless extravagant letter recommending Washington as "a very competent capable mulatto, clear headed, modest, sensible, polite and a thorough teacher and superior man. The best man we ever had here." It turned out that this new school in Tuskegee was essentially a vacant lot with a two-thousand-dollar budget. (A local tinsmith had promised to swing the black vote to the Democrats in exchange for a new state-sponsored Negro institute.) So Washington went to work rounding up students, who had to double as construction workers. This was to be a hybrid school, teaching academic subjects (many of the graduates became teachers) alongside agriculture and industry; students not only built the campus but also, after a series of disastrous kiln experiments, learned to make their own bricks, with some left over to sell to the locals.

With an emphasis on discipline (another legacy of General Armstrong's) and practical knowledge, Tuskegee was meant to be an oasis of stability in a shifting world. The prolonged death throes of slavery had been followed by the accelerated rise and fall of Reconstruction: black men, some formerly enslaved, were swept into political office and then swept out almost as fast, as if history had suddenly been speeded up and then thrown into reverse. In his speeches and on campus, Washington stressed the importance of tangible things that changed slowly or not at all: how to plant vegetables, how to make a mattress, how to use a toothbrush (he was obsessed with toothbrushes). He could sound less like a man desperate to change the world than like a man determined to outlast it. Although he was married three times, by all accounts happily, and widowed twice, his voluminous archive contains, in Harlan's words, "not a single love letter, nor a cry of joy." Yet most people who met him praised his warmth, which was sometimes indistinguishable from obsequiousness. In "Up from Slavery," his best and most popular book, he told a joke about a "coloured man in Alabama" who mysteriously (and conveniently) found his true calling on a sweltering day, and cried out, "O Lawd, de cotton am so grassy, de work am so hard, and the sun am so hot dat I b'lieve dis darky am called to preach!" He saw nothing wrong with summoning up an old stereotype--the shiftless "darky"--even while asking his people to leave it behind.