MAKING BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON AND THE POLITICS OF THE DISENFRANCHISED A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Desmond Jagmohan January 2015 © 2015 Desmond Jagmohan MAKING BRICKS WITHOUT STRAW: BOOKER T. WASHINGTON AND THE POLITICS OF THE DISENFRANCHISED Desmond Jagmohan, Ph. D. Cornell University 2015 This dissertation reconstructs the political thought of Booker T. Washington (1856– 1915). I argue that Washington envisioned a form of black politics—in the teeth of formidable Jim Crow brutalities and injustice—that would endure because it would be solidly anchored in autonomous institutions and practices. I show how his intellectual interventions and activism informed the everyday political strategies that Afro- Southerners employed in their struggle against white supremacy. Through archival evidence, historical documents, and primary texts I situate Washington’s thought in a rich intellectual context. I recover his complex discursive dialogues with his contemporaries, especially W. E. B. Du Bois, and I elucidate Frederick Douglass’s lasting intellectual influence on Washington’s thought and politics. I then distill Washington’s political vision from three predominant themes in his writings and activism. First, I ground Washington’s politics in his realism and pragmatism. I show that Washington began with the disenfranchised and the concrete constraints on their political voice and agency. Second, I recover Washington’s structural analysis of white supremacy, his argument that the economic, political, and social institutions and practices of white supremacy reinforce and strengthen one another, resulting in a system against which a frontal attack would prove fruitless. Third, I reinterpret Washington’s uplift politics as the most feasible strategy for challenging Jim Crow and cultivating social and political agency under oppression. Washington’s thought directly confronted the material and social foundations of white supremacy while enabling individual and communal empowerment and transformation. This revisionist approach to Washington aims to rehabilitate his thinking as a powerful resource for political theory, especially for those interested in the question of intellectual, social, and political agency under oppression. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Desmond Jagmohan researches the history of political thought. He is particularly interested in American and Afro-American political thought, the politics of race and ethnicity in the United States, slavery and modern political theory, and theories of domination and liberty. Having received his doctorate from Cornell University, he is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Princeton University and will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton University, Summer 2016. Before Cornell, Desmond pursued his undergraduate studies at Northeastern Illinois University, where he majored in philosophy and history. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not be possible without my mother’s love and support. To my mom, Barbara Rachael Bacchus, I owe my abiding interest in the politics of the disempowered. I would like to also thank my family for encouragement and generous support throughout my studies: Albert Bacchus, Patrick Bacchus, Samantha Bacchus, and especially Theresa Roman-Bacchus and Owen Roman. I would also like to thank Caleb Avaraham and Lukasz Dobrzynski, who continue to inspire me. My teachers have made me the thinker and writer I am. Anna Marie Smith, Jason Frank, Isaac Kramnick, and Richard Bensel have been more than dissertation committee members; they have been wonderful intellectual models, mentors, and friends. I would also like to thank Alexander Livingston for serving as the outside reader of the dissertation. My fellow graduate students at Cornell made the experience worthwhile: Philip Ayoub, Julia Ajinkya, Benjamin Brake, Berk Esen, Simon Gilhooley, Sinja Graf, Ulas Ince, Pinar Kemerli, Igor Lovinenko, Alison McQueen, Sree Muppirisetty, Michelle Smith, Pablo Yanguas, and, most of all, Simon Cotton, Deondra Rose, and Christopher Zepeda. Finally, I would like to thank Amy Rowland who continues to inspire and sustain me. She has endured too many conversations about nineteenth-century American political thought and about Booker T. Washington. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch iii Acknowledgements iv Introduction The Political Thought of Booker T. Washington 1 Chapter 1 The Early Life of Booker T. Washington 53 Chapter 2 From Matthew to Marx: 100 Booker T. Washington in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois Chapter 3 The Lion and the Lamb? 158 Booker T. Washington’s Intellectual Debt to Frederick Douglass Chapter 4 From the Lash to the Lien: 244 Booker T. Washington on the Foundations of White Supremacy Chapter 5 Uplifting the Race 315 Conclusion The Legacy of Booker T. Washington 380 Bibliography 391 v INTRODUCTION Ye shall no more give the people straw to make brick, as heretofore; let them go and gather straw for themselves. —Exodus 5:7 I had always sympathized with the “Children of Israel” in their task of “making bricks without straws,” but ours was making bricks with no money and no experience. —Booker T. Washington1 1. The Political Thought of Booker T. Washington The eminent historian John Hope Franklin wrote that Booker T. Washington “was unquestionably the central figure—the dominant personality—in the history of the Negro down to his death in 1915. The vast majority of Negroes acclaimed him as their leader and few whites ventured into the matter of race relations without his counsel.”2 “Washington’s influence,” Franklin added, “was so great that there is considerable justification in calling the period ‘The Age of Booker T. Washington.’”3 Even W. E. B. Du Bois, one of Washington’s most famous and firmest critics, did not deny Washington’s political preeminence. “After Frederick Douglass, Washington was the 1 Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery, in The Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis R. Harlan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 1:295. 2 John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes, 2nd and revised edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956), 390. 3 Ibid. 1 next great exemplification and revelation of problems of race and labor in America, so significant as to go to the very core of our democracy,” wrote Du Bois.4 Booker T. Washington was born a slave on a plantation near Hale’s Ford, Virginia, in 1856, and he remained in bondage until the conclusion of the Civil War. After the war, Washington and his family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where he would spend the next seven years of his life working in salt furnaces and coal mines and intermittently attending school. In 1872 he scraped up enough money and set off for Hampton Institute, a Normal School, or teachers’ college, located in Virginia. After graduating from Hampton in 1875, Washington returned to Malden and worked as a teacher but soon grew restless. In 1877 he tried his hand at party politics, working as a stump speaker for a campaign to transfer the West Virginia capital to Charleston. Washington then turned to the study of law, but with the collapse of Reconstruction it was clear that neither politics nor the law offered much professional possibility for an African American in the South, so in 1878 he entered Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C. He soon found out that he was no preacher and left within the year. In 1881 Washington returned to Hampton to serve as a postgraduate instructor and tutor. He was then hired as the principal for a soon-to-be-founded Normal school in Tuskegee, Alabama. He remained a professor and administrator for the rest of his life. Over the next decade, Washington transformed what had begun in an old henhouse into one of the largest and most successful black universities in the country. But when he gave his famous speech in 1895 at the Atlanta Cotton Exposition, he was 4 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Social Significance of Booker T. Washington,” Reel 82, frames 1376–1396, Du Bois Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 2 still a relatively unknown principal of an African American university in rural Alabama. On that afternoon, Washington delivered twenty-seven words that propelled him into national prominence, the leadership of his race: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”5 Over the next two decades, Washington was the foremost leader of his race and a world-famous public intellectual. Douglass had died a few months earlier and into this breech stepped Washington. When Washington died in 1915, he was still the central voice in Afro-American politics and one of the country’s leading statesmen. How, then, did it come to pass that Washington is now so often dismissed as little more than a charlatan and a compromiser? This is a thesis on the political thought of Booker T. Washington (1856–1915). It takes as its starting point the following questions: how should we approach the study of Washington’s political thought? Did Washington’s childhood in slavery and his coming of age during Reconstruction shape his political and social vision, and if so, how? What was his intellectual formation? Who did he admire, intellectually and politically? How did he understand his own political thought in regard to the work of Frederick Douglass and later that of W. E. B. Du Bois? How did he conceive of white supremacy? Was his conception distinct and different from how his contemporaries thought of Jim Crow or how we, today, view the history of white supremacy? How did his analysis of the nature of white supremacy shape his more substantive political conclusions? 5 Washington, Up from Slavery, 1:75. 3 To answer these and other questions, I place at the forefront Washington’s emphasis on the political lives of the disenfranchised, the fact that he primarily spoke for impoverished rural black Southerners who were highly vulnerable to the most violent forms of racial oppression.