Booker T. Washington and the Art of Self-Representation (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 298 regiments led by colonels without military training often had subordinate officers with military know-how. The specific nature of that experience varied a great deal: more attended private military academies other than West Point; state militia and Mexican War veterans outnumbered those with regular army experience; and a number of colonels had been naval officers who transferred to the army. Allardice also found colonels who had attended West Point and not graduated, which nonetheless gave them a degree of familiarity with military tactics and manners. The biographical entries are pithy yet informative, replete with the usual birth and death dates as well as important events in the lives of the colonels before, during, and after the war. For example, the postwar accomplishments of William C. Oates, commander of the Fifteenth Alabama and later a congressman and governor, are noted in his biography . Fascinating details emerge on the life of John F. Marshall, before the war chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, who may have used his friendship with Jefferson Davis to secure his appointment as colonel of the Fourth Texas regiment. The hardscrabble men of the Fourth resented the appointment and tried to force Marshall out. Perhaps in an effort to win their loyalty and affection, Marshall led from the front and was killed leading a charge at Gaines’ Mill, Virginia. The entries lack source citations, which would have been immensely helpful to scholars, but space restrictions most likely prevented Allardice from including that material. Bruce Allardice has written a reference work that is useful, informative, and challenges at least one misconception regarding southern officers in the war. DAN MONROE Millikin University Booker T. Washington and the Art of Self-Representation. By Michael Bieze. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. viii, 285 pp. $32.95. ISBN 978-1-4331-0010-9. In his day, Booker T. Washington earned the distinguishing soubriquet “Wizard” for his deft management of the peculiar crucible of race in the United States. In an era where blacks were the last hired and first fired, Washington secured money for his dream of an industrial conservatory for blacks from northern businessmen who ironically were driven by callous notions of social and cultural Darwinism. In an era where Jim Crow rendered African Americans second-class citizens, he gained a certain respect, an odd indifferent deference, from southern whites who simul- O C T O B E R 2 0 0 9 299 taneously admired and disapproved of his labors in the Deep South. A former Alabama slave, Sarah Fitzpatrick, put the matter more succinctly when she reflected in her WPA interview that Booker T. Washington “wuz a wise man. . . he al’ays let de white man shine, so he could live an’ work he’er” (Slave Testimony, Baton Rouge, 1977). In Booker T. Washington and the Art of Self-Representation, Michael Bieze explores how the sage of Tuskegee used photography as a way to promote both himself and his vision of an inclusive smokestack America. Building on the work of August Meier, Louis R. Harlan, and others , Bieze uses photographs to probe the secret life of the Wizard. “Photography was,” he demonstrates artfully, Washington’s “chief accomplice in enacting his many guises as he operated in the briar patch of Jim Crow America” (p. 110). Shortly after rising to power in 1895, the Wizard began employing black and white photographers toward different ends in crafting enigmatic public personas. “Like his contemporaries Sarah Bernhardt and Mark Twain, Washington’s widely distributed images were a part of a burgeoning modern form of self-representation using mass-produced photographs” (p. 2). For black elites, his use of photography represented a form of art that challenged racist stereotypes . “Lazy workers and distorted figures were replaced by workers who looked as though they had stepped out of a Millet painting” (p. 93). Even Washington himself is “photographed as if he is a Millet peasant, although a well dressed one” (p. 100). By Bieze’s account, the Wizard’s work with such black photographers as Arthur P. Bedou, not to mention his efforts promoting...