322 Making It New: 1900–1945Blacks should learn to “cast it down in agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in
domestic service, and in the professions.” Whites should learn to cast it down “among
those people who have, without strikes and labor wars, tilled your fields, cleared
your forests, builded your railroads and cities, and brought treasures from the
bowels of the earth.” There should be mutual trust and aid.
Mutual but separate: Washington insisted that “in all things that are purely social”
blacks and whites could be “separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things
essential to mutual progress.” He saw “the agitations of questions of social equality”
as “the extremest folly.” Progress would come for African-Americans as and when it
was earned by hard work, diligence, and thrift: as it had for him, he pointed out,
because he had been “determined to succeed.” The core text here for explaining
Washington’s gospel of progress and his own career as exemplary, a demonstration
of that gospel, was Up From Slavery. It is a slave narrative of a kind, at the beginning.
But it more clearly resembles the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, as it describes
the rise of its hero from humble beginnings to fame and fortune – and prescribes the
same resolution and route for other men and women like him. Washington even
recalls Franklin in specific episodes. His account of his arrival in Richmond, Virginia
to enrol in Hampton Normal Agricultural Institute, penniless, anonymous, and
painfully hungry, echoes Franklin’s description of his own first entry into
Philadelphia. And he models the narrative on the archetypal American success story
that Franklin initiated: our representative man rises to prominence thanks to hard
work, thrift, and diligence and then, relentlessly optimistic, divulges the secret, the
agenda he followed that enabled him to rise and will now enable his reader to rise as
well. It is hardly surprising that Up From Slavery was an enormous success, becoming
the most famous book by an African-American for half a century after its publication.
For it formulates a myth of black effort and achievement that slotted neatly into the
prevailing white myths of the time. It was a book that white readers could find
appealing because it was unthreatening, even eager to please: “I believe it is the duty
of the Negro ... to deport himself modestly in regard to political claims,” Washington
concluded on the crucial issue of enfranchisement, “depending upon the slow but
sure influences that proceed from property, intelligence, and high character for the
full recognition of his political rights.” It was also one that many black readers could
find attractive because it offered a measure of hope, however limited.
Not all black readers, however: in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois
offered a comprehensive criticism of Washington’s modest stance on black
disenfranchisement as well as his emphasis on “formation of character,” vocational
instruction at the expense of liberal education. Du Bois began his critique by damn-
ing Washington with faint praise. “Today,” he declared, “Mr. Washington is certainly
the most distinguished Southerner since Jefferson Davis,” the leader of the
Confederacy during the Civil War, “and the one with the largest personal following.”
That sly linking of a self-proclaimed leader of the black community with the leader
of the white slave community at war led into the recognition that “Mr. Washington
represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment and submission.” His
program, Du Bois pointed out, “practically accepts the alleged inferiority of theGGray_c04.indd 322ray_c 04 .indd 322 8 8/1/2011 7:53:46 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 46 AM