Abstract
One of the lingering pleasures of the scholar’s existence resides, for a while yet, in gliding among the shelves of a large library, and finding by the grace of Mertonian serendipity a volume that should by virtue of its quality and utility be remembered and consulted, but is not—the bookish equivalent to shopping in Filene’s Basement or the local Goodwill store, uncovering a genuine preciosity amidst clutter, awaiting its rightful attention. The rediscovered book’s glory lies in its ability to shed light on matters of continuing concern, to contextualize debates that have not subsided, and perhaps most importantly, to illustrate yet again that social analysis has been carried out with great skill and subtlety long before anyone still alive was involved.
So it was that The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe (“The Struggle of European Toilers”) authored “by Booker T. Washington with the collaboration of Robert E. Park” recently came to hand by happy coincidence in this, its centenary year. It was copyrighted in 1911 by The Outlook Company, then issued in 1912 by Doubleday, Page and Co. in Garden City, New Jersey, and reprinted once, in 1984. Booker Taliaferro Washington remains famous through his autobiographies for being born into slavery in 1856, then miraculously achieving international celebrity as a champion of the oppressed. He vigorously disagreed with W.E.B. Du Bois concerning the most effective political and economic means for liberating the American “Negro,” a debate Du Bois recalled vividly in 1963 shortly before dying (McGill 1965). By 1910 Washington was enduring morbid hypertension (at twice the normal rate), was “forced” by his nervous Tuskegee Institute staff to vacation in Europe, turned 56 when the The Man Farthest Down appeared, and died three years later from exhaustion—nearly 50 years prior to Du Bois’s death (who once said that some people assumed that he, too, had died in 1915).
Robert Ezra Park, eight years Washington’s junior, lived a life not unlike Du Bois’, and so unlike Washington’s, who worked when young as a miner in West Virginia. Park, who was the ASA President in 1925, was educated at Michigan with Dewey, practiced journalism for twelve years in five major cities, won an MA at Harvard with William James, then pursued his doctorate in Germany under Simmel, Windelband, and the like. He spent 1904—05 at Harvard teaching philosophy (at the time his mentor, W. James, met with Max Weber), and eventually became a stalwart of the Chicago School (from 1914 to 1933), finishing up at Fisk prior to his death in 1944.
He left Harvard to work for seven years (1907—14) with Washington at the Tuskegee Institute as his ghostwriter and publicist: “Park would say that he learned more about human nature and society with Booker than in all his academic study” (Norrell 2009, p. 372). “These seven years were for me a sort of prolonged internship during which I gained a clinical and firsthand knowledge of a first class social problem….I gained some adequate notion of how deep-rooted in human history and human nature social institutions were and how difficult, if not impossible it was, to make fundamental changes in them by mere legislation or by legal artifice of any sort” (Odum 1951, p. 132). From this work he created the four-stage race-relations cycle still taught to undergraduates.
This unlikely pair, who became close friends, toured Europe from August 20 through October 9, 1910, “less than seven weeks…but it seemed to me that I had been away for a year” (p. 377). Park had done all the preparatory work for the trip, and had a large hand in writing up their report. Each day after seeking out the most exploited laborers in a given region, while traveling by train to the next stop, Washington would dictate their “findings” to his stenographer, Nathan Hunt, who would type up the results and give them to Park for reworking into publishable form (Mathews 1948, p. 260). Thus, Park’s long experience as a journalist served the project well. Their goal was simple: to ascertain the conditions of laborers throughout Europe and compare what they found with the plight of “Negroes” in the United States. It was widely believed, especially among whites, that blacks could “never” ascend the U.S. achievement ladder, and Washington made it his mission to destroy this prejudice by any means possible. The trip to Europe was but one small part of his lifelong campaign. Park later feared that Washington found abroad what he wished to find, to prove his case rather than perceiving what actually was before them, as they dashed through the least savory segments of European societies (Norrell 2009, p. 274). Nevertheless, and despite Park’s uncertainty, the book reads convincingly and is full of remarkable “data.”
According to a detailed itinerary map (between pp. 8 and 9 of the book, though not available in the Googled version), they landed at Liverpool, visited Andrew Carnegie at Skibo Castle in northernmost Scotland, then to London, Belgium, Bremen and Hamburg, Copenhagen, Berlin, Breslau, Budapest, Prague, northern and southern Italy, Sicily, then back north, departing from Germany. In his typical self-abnegating fashion, Washington insisted that they avoid all tourist traps and focus instead on work sites of the laboring class. They carried out a worker-oriented ethnography far removed from museums, castles, concert performances, libraries, and all the usual sites which attracted intellectuals. Washington had already visited Europe as a tourist, and this time had no patience for sight-seeing.
Instead, he and Park learned a great deal about the “lower orders”: that in London, he found “the human waste of a great city” (p. 22), those 52 people who had starved to death on the city’s streets in the preceding year (p. 29), and worse, those more than 100,000 in the East End, out of 2 million, who “are living on the verge of starvation” (p. 38). After carefully documenting widespread misery, he comes to the crux of his argument: “Not infrequently, when in my public speeches I have made some reference to the condition of the Negro in the South, certain members of my own race in the North have objected because, they said, I did not paint conditions in the South black enough. During my stay in England I had the unusual experience of being criticised in the London newspapers for the same reason, this time by an American white man. . . I have never denied that the Negro in the South frequently meets with wrong and injustice; but he does not starve. I do not think a single case was ever heard of, in the South, where a Negro died from want of food. In fact, unless because of sickness or some other reason he has been unable to work, it is comparatively rare to find a Negro in an almshouse” (p. 31).
If this sounds preposterous to our ears, trained to imagine black life in the South c. 1900 as mercilessly oppressive, there is more: “Another thing in regard to the Negro: although he is frequently poor, he is never without hope and a certain joy in living. No hardship he has yet encountered, either in slavery or in freedom, has robbed the Negro of the desire to live. The race constantly grew and increased in slavery, and it has considerably more than doubled in freedom” (p. 26). At many turns throughout the book, and particularly where the travelers encountered the most desperately poor and oppressed (as in Bohemia or Sicily), Washington and Park consistently remark that the farthest man down in Europe is not only a woman, but that both she and her spouse are far worse off by most measures of physical or mental health than the Negro of the American South: “I believe there are few plantations in our Southern States where, even in the small one-room cabins, one would not find the coloured people living in more real comfort and more cleanliness than was the case here” [in Bohemia] (p. 62). Or “No one who has not seen something of the hardships of the average workingman in a great city like London can understand the privilege that we in the Southern States have in living in the country districts, where there is independence and a living for every man, and where we have the opportunity to fix ourselves forever on the soil” (p. 52). Such repeated observations must have irritated many politically alert blacks of the time, and because the book was published so near Washington’s death, he was not around to defend his ethnographic accounts. And yet when he died, his most famous and respected antagonist, Du Bois, said this: “He was the greatest Negro leader since Frederick Douglass and the most distinguished man, white or black, who has come out of the South since the Civil War. His fame was international and his influence far-reaching. Of the good that he accomplished there can be no doubt (Chicago Post, December 13, 1915; quoted in Mathews 1948, p. 302).
There is a great deal to be learned from this forgotten study, some of it startlingly contemporary. For instance, Washington noted on several occasions that “the man farthest down in Europe is woman” (p. 20), whom he observed doing physically demanding work with small reward, in addition to carrying grueling family responsibilities. But just as vital as those thousands of keen observations about workers and the poor in Europe, one learns that many of our comfortably maintained notions of the past are only half-right when not entirely wrong. Washington had no reason to whitewash conditions in the American South regarding the lives of its former slaves, yet he was an honest observer whose message comes through in The Man Farthest Down with undeniable clarity: the Negro, given education and a chance to work, would surely climb to the top of the social pyramid in a way that the European peasant could not.
Footnotes
About This Issue
Someday a scholar with tremendous energy and perspicacity will decide to write a biography of Irving Louis Horowitz, who died on March 21 at 82. Abundant archival materials for such a work are housed in the Special Collections unit of Penn State’s Paterno Library, and are also digitized for long-distance use. As many obituaries have noted, Horowitz was larger than life, a protean force of nature, and any other cliché one might like to invoke when describing someone whose grasp of life and of intellectual matters so far exceeds the norm that ordinary descriptors will not do. The scope of his scholarly, political, and publishing contributions to the social sciences—as “controversial” as they so often were—will not be matched in the imaginable future, not only due to his intrinsic qualities, but because he came into sociology and political science at “just the right time” given his interests and skills.
When he was not writing social science, he was publishing someone else’s, and would proudly display to visitors the thousands of volumes which Transaction Publishers under his guidance had given printed life. (After reading an original printing of The Man Farthest Down and declaring in my remarks above that it had not been reprinted since 1912, I discovered that in fact Transaction Publishers had reissued the book in 1984, and with a new introduction by St. Clair Drake, no less. As in so many things, Horowitz had already been there.) It is both corny and accurate to observe that he lived “for” scholarship rather than “off” of it, to borrow from both Max Weber and Alvin Gouldner, two thinkers who were never far from Horowitz’s imagination. Perhaps anticipating fate, he sent to CS not long ago his concluding observations about C. Wright Mills, with whom he is so strongly linked, a speech he was to have delivered in Norway in May to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Mills’ death at 45. There is nothing one can say that is adequate in measuring the loss of this scholar and publisher, so we will allow him to speak his last words for himself.
Some time ago it seemed apposite to publish in CS the occasional analysis of a so-called “classic work” from the social sciences which today’s practitioners might not know, or have forgotten. Given the wisdom required for such a work, it made sense to invite Charles Lemert to take it on. That he chose a work composed between 400 and 420 CE (or AD by the original author’s assumed preference) is not too surprising given Lemert’s unique training in theology, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the social sciences. His essay, like its predecessors in this series by Andrew Abbott on Morris Janowitz (November 2009) and Julia Adams on James Coleman (May 2010), illustrates the great virtue of looking back with intelligence and discernment as one considers the most fruitful paths into our collective future. We hope to offer more essays of this quality and detail as they become available.
Lastly, and not at all less important, with this issue CS begins what will become a regular feature, what we are calling “retrospective-critical essays.” As explained in my Remarks for March, the Editorial Board puzzled over how to increase the intellectual and professional legitimacy of writing for this journal, and at the Las Vegas meeting we came upon the idea of asking notable specialists to canvass the most important works in their area published since about 2000. Many such essays have since been commissioned, and several have already reached us, including the two—by Daniel Lee Kleinman and Christine L. Williams—which inaugurate what will surely become an honored and useful resource for scholars, junior to senior, who wish to know which books they might most fruitfully consult when pursuing a new area of research, or while refreshing an old one. Responses from readers concerning the series will be taken seriously, of course.