Booker T. Washington (1856–1915) was the most prominent black American at the beginning of the twentieth century. He began and ran the Tuskegee Institute, an innovative industrial school for blacks, which is today Tuskegee University. He dined with President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House—the first time a black man had met with a president in the White House since Frederick Douglass met with Abraham Lincoln. He was a champion of education and moral betterment for all blacks (not just an elite). Thousands of boys were named Booker in his honor.
Washington’s fame declined after his death, however. W.E.B. Du Bois, an intellectual with a Harvard PhD, seems to have taken over the mantle of black leadership, after Washington’s death in 1915—if not before. Du Bois was much younger; he died in 1963.
Today Washington is sometimes disparaged as an “Uncle Tom” because he did not politically resist the growing Jim Crow restrictions of the South.
Instead, he concentrated on education and on encouraging moral and social improvement among blacks. If his support of self-development had been more widely accepted, the first half of the 20th century might have been less tragic for black Americans.
Washington has left a substantial cache of works. Beginning in 1899 (when Tuskegee had been in operation for 18 years) he wrote a book a year, often with a collaborator. While some of his books are collections of his generally uplifting speeches, others are highly distinctive. I’m going to share with you an engaging and informative book he published in 1912.
The Man Farthest Down
Thanks to Nicholas Jay Wilson, a Ph.D. student at George Mason University, I learned about The Man Farthest Down, which describes Washington’s seven-week journey through Europe, including England, the Austrian-Hungary Empire, Sicily, Poland, Denmark, and Bohemia.[1]
Washington explains that he had been told to take a leave from Tuskegee “on condition that I would spend that time in some way that would give me recreation and rest.” For him, the only way to rest was to find “some new kind of work or occupation.” So he made a carefully planned visit with his colleague, pioneering sociologist Robert E. Park, to learn about ”the condition of the poorer and working classes in Europe.”[2]
Given his background (he had been born in slavery), Washington wanted to compare the lowest tiers of society in Europe with American blacks, whom he viewed as America’s lowest social tier, even after nearly fifty years of emancipation. Indeed, he makes many comparisons throughout the book, most of them favorable to the United States, even to the South.
The theme is that the man farthest down was not the American black man, but the lowest castes of Europeans. And in many cases, the “man farthest down” in Europe was a woman! In the European countries he visited, he said, women did three-fourths of the work in agriculture and “a considerable part of the heavy work in the cities.”[3]
Poverty and Maltreatment of Ethnic Minorities
Traveling in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Washington was struck by the poverty and maltreatment of ethnic minorities (he calls them races); he estimates there were 17 ethnic groups, including Ruthenians, Romanians, Slovaks, Bohemians, Moravians, and others. Many of these groups were Slavic; usually each had its own language.
In Vienna, Washington noticed with surprise that many women were barefoot. When he asked a Viennese why, the answer was “Oh, well, they are Slovaks.” Sometimes he asked about the state of the Slavs. “In almost every case . . . I received the same answer. I was told they were lazy and would not work; that they had no initiative; that they were immoral and not fitted to govern themselves.” Washington goes on to say that “I have heard people talk more violently, but I do not think I have heard any one say anything worse in regard to the Negro than some of the statements that are made by members of one race [ethnicity] in Austria in regard to members of some other.”[3]
He observed many people at the low tiers of society. In Sicily there were teenagers in the sulphur mines (young men called carusi) whose parents had “loaned” them to miners in return for a fee, but had essentially sold them. Washington called these young people slaves, and their work was so hard and debilitating that they “early gained the appearance of gray old men,” and it was often said that only a few lived till they were 25 years old.[4]
Washington found “hopeless and broken men” in London and learned about an official report indicating that in one year 52 people had died specifically of starvation in London. That led him to say, “I have never denied that the Negro in the South frequently meets with wrong and injustice; but he does not starve.”[5]
Washington’s writing is very open and conversational, quite easy to read. Its clarity may be due in part to his collaborator, but Washington’s upbeat conversational tone is typical of all his writing I have seen.
The book was an ingenious idea—America’s most famous black man visits the poor of Europe to see how their experience compares with turn-of-the-century black Americans. Although he is critical of Europeans caste systems, he sees some progress as the lower castes strive to improve.
Washington is also alert to ironies: ”I have found that the places in which the life of the peasants is most interesting to tourists are usually the places that the peasants are leaving in large numbers.” [6]
There’s a lot to discover in this book.
Map above is from “Distribution of Austro-Hungarian Races,” by William R. Shepherd in 1911. The map is in the public domain via Wikipedia.
Notes (Comments follow the notes.)
[1] Booker T. Washington, with the collaboration of Robert E. Park, The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe (London: FB&c Ltd., 2018 [1912], also available at Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/manfarthestdownr0000unse/mode/1up. Nicholas Wilson also gave me some insights into Washington’s character.
[2] Washington, 3.
[3] Washington, 20.
[3] Washington, 56–57.
[4] Washington, 204.
[5] Washington, 31.
[6] Washington, 325