Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1910, and: The Booker T. Washington Papers. Volume I, The Autobiographical Writings, and: The Booker T. Washington Papers. Volume II, 1860-89 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1856-1910. By Louis R. Harlan. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972. Pp. xii, 379. $10.95. ) The Booker T. Washington Papers. Volume I, The Autobiographical Writings. Louis R. Harlan, Editor. John W. Blassingame, Assistant Editor. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Pp. xl, 469. $15.00.) The Booker T. Washington Papers. Volume II, 1860-89. Louis R. Harlan , Editor. Peter Daniel, Stuart B. Kaufman, and Raymond W. Smock, Assistant Editors. William M. Welty, Fellow in Historical Editing. (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1972. Pp. xl, 557. $15.00.) We have begun to take a fresh and intensified look at the black community 's experiences in late-nineteenth-century America and at the Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction years that helped to shape major portions of those experiences. Alfreda M. Duster's edited work, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells ( Chicago, 1970), Emma Lou Thornbrough's T. Thomas Fortune: Militant Journalist (Chicago, 1972), Okon Edet 353 354CIVIL WAR HISTORY Uya's From Slavery to Public Service: Robert Smalls, 1839-1915 (New York, 1971), Edwin S. Redkey's Black Exodus dealing with Bishop Henry M. Turner (New Haven, 1969), David M. Katzman's Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana, 1973), and the opening portions of Stephen R. Fox's The Guardian of Boston: William Monroe Trotter (New York, 1970) have helped this reassessment. Of similar quality are Herbert G. Gutman's studies of the black family in Reconstruction and Richard B. Sherman's recently published The Republican Party and Black America, from McKinley to Hoover. Nothing, however, is likely to surpass the importance and impact of the Booker T. Washington project by Louis R. Harlan and his associates . In the fall of 1972 the opening two books of the multi-volume Washington Papers appeared, and Harlan simultaneously published the first volume of his Washington biography (awarded the Bancroft Prize the following spring). Each of the three represents historical research , editing, and writing at their best. In Booker T. Washington we confront a man whose values, visions, and activities were shaped by his sense of the black community's needs and by the larger regional and national forces impinging on those needs from the 1860's to the tum of the century. Although the functional and constitutional implications of Reconstruction might be traced philosophically to Madison's Federalist Paper No. 10, white America's racial requirements sprang from the search for stability, predictability, and sectional reconciliation in the years after 1875. Booker T. Washington was a black response to that search. Washington's Atlanta Compromise address of 1895 anticipated Plessy v. Ferguson by a full year and assured white America, North and South, that the black folk for whom he allegedly spoke would accommodate themselves to the imperatives of a new South. After all, Washington had become the personification of the American Dream and his public acquiescence to the pervasive entreprenurial and racial sentiments of the day. Everything that he had learned from his white mentors —Viola Ruffner in his youth, General Samuel Chapman Armstrong during Hampton days as student and teacher, and the northern philanthropists to whom he turned for aid and guidance—fell neatly into place in heading Tuskegee Institute and the network of political and economic interests comprising the Tuskegee "machine" nationally. Speaking, for example, of Washington's 1892 farmers' conference, Harlan remarks that "Its conservative, optimistic, non-censuring tone was undoubtedly due to careful shepherding of the resolutions by Washington and his faculty." (Biography, p. 199). In measuring Washington's working relationships with conservative southerners, Harlan notes that "Washington not only seemed to agree with whites who were racially moderate and economically conservative, he actually did agree with them, and they sensed his response." ( Biography, p. 166 ) . Certainly Washington's socialization appeared complete (perhaps irreversible) by 1901 when BOOK REVIEWS355 he criticized the Reconstruction era in Up from Slavery because the heavy emphasis on political action had distracted black people from a necessary concentration on "industry and property accumulation." (Biography, p. 50). The man was, furthermore, an elitist who felt strongly that respectable persons, black and white, should vote and guide...