Teddy and Booker T., page 4
To train selected Negro youth who should go out and teach and lead their people first by example, by getting land and homes; to give them not a dollar that they could earn for themselves; to teach respect for labor, to replace stupid drudgery with skilled hands, and in this way to build up an industrial system for the sake not only of self-support and intelligent labor, but also for the sake of character.[9]
Both women and men wanted to learn, even in the face of stubborn resistance from former slaveholders. The White administrators at Hampton ran the place like a military school, with students rising and retiring to the tolling of the school bells. They marched to classes, with a fixed schedule established for prayer and dining. Everybody worked, too, with men in the fields or as waiters, carpenters, or painters, the women as seamstresses or in the kitchens or laundries. When Booker Washington arrived, he became a janitor, for which he was paid two dollars a week against the cost of ten dollars per month for his board.
In the classroom, Hampton’s students learned English language skills, mathematics, history, and biology, but their hunger to improve themselves went beyond the classroom. Washington, for one, found “life at Hampton was a constant revelation,” even down to daily living habits. “The matter of . . . eating on a tablecloth, using a napkin, the use of the bath-tub and of the tooth-brush, as well as the use of sheets upon the bed, were all new to me.”[10] On the other hand, the study of Latin, Greek, and ancient history, central to Roosevelt’s Harvard education, had no place at Hampton, where the virtues of manual and industrial training were treasured above the liberal arts. Upon earning their degrees, Hampton graduates would seek jobs in primary schools in order to share their gains by instructing African American children.
Miss Mackie was “lady principal,” but Brigadier General Samuel Chapman Armstrong was the founder of Hampton Normal. The son of a Presbyterian minister, he brought both the missionary zeal of his upbringing in Hawaii and the experience of commanding Black regiments in the Union army during the Civil War. He saw that gaining their freedom was only the first step for enslaved people, who had been brutalized and degraded by generations in bondage, to take control of their lives. His ideas were both advanced for his times and of them; he once wrote, “Especially in the weak tropical races, idleness, like ignorance, breeds vice.” But he believed that a “deficiency of character” could be corrected by establishing “a routine of industrious habits, which is to character the foundation is to the pyramid.”[11] His life’s work became the education and training program he developed at Hampton, a demanding twelve-hour-a-day regimen that would give students at his school the chance to demonstrate that the Black man was “so skilled in hand, so strong in head, so honest in heart, that the Southern white man cannot do without him.”[*]
General Armstrong made a profound impression on Booker Washington, who described him as “a great man—the noblest, rarest human being” that he had ever met. When Booker arrived at Hampton, Armstrong was just thirty-three, handsome and athletic; the first time Booker came into his presence, he was nearly bowled over. “He made the impression upon me of being the perfect man; I was made to feel that there was something about him that was superhuman.”[12] Armstrong was someone to be like, a model of commitment and vision. Booker thought of Armstrong as his mentor, himself the disciple, but over time, Washington would elevate himself from the status of follower to leader in his own right.
Samuel Chapman Armstrong: Civil War general, founder of Hampton Normal, and the man who more than anyone else inspired Booker Washington’s educational aspirations.
Armstrong, General and Mrs. Ruffner, and Miss Mackie all had been struck by the determination and respectful manner of the likable young Booker; each became an ally and even a friend. But one teacher at Hampton would help him develop a particular talent that would be invaluable to his rise to the role of public man and spokesman for his people.
BOOKER’S GIFT
Booker Washington was working for pay: His teacher, Nathalie Lord, gave him a few dollars he badly needed for his Hampton expenses, and in return, he took care of her little rowboat and was her boatman on days suitable for pleasure rides. But she also became a woman he trusted, in whom he could confide.
“[During] these quiet rows on Hampton Creek,” Nathalie Lord would recall, “I learned something of Booker Washington’s hopes and aspirations.”[13]
Lord recognized that the seventeen-year-old Booker stood out from his fellow students. “His quiet, unassuming manner, his earnestness of purpose and faithfulness greatly impressed me.” She recognized he was bent upon “improving himself in every possible way,” concluding that someday he would truly be someone, someone important.
When Miss Lord had arrived, Booker was a “middler,” a second-year student in the school’s three-year course. She was twenty-five, a slim and pretty young New Englander whose spectacles added to a look of seriousness. She brought solid credentials to her job teaching rhetoric, the art of persuasive writing and speaking. She was the daughter of a Christian magazine editor and had studied at Vassar College.
She began investing extra time and energy in this special student. He came to Hampton to learn the rules of grammar and how to spell, but she encouraged him to read the Bible daily. He would make such study a ritual, spending fifteen minutes a day with the Good Book for the rest of his life. Miss Lord was also among the teachers who exposed him to the writings of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass.
Even before he could read, Booker had heard Douglass’s name; his mother and others had spoken of the great abolitionist. “I had heard so much about Douglass when I was a boy that one of the reasons why I wanted to go to school and learn to read was that I might read for myself what he had written and said.”[14] Douglass’s historical perspective differed from the standard version of history that saw Western civilization in terms of Anglo-Saxon progress and that held African people and cultures in low regard. For the enslaved, Douglass’s notion of equality was a revelation; to a young thinker like Booker, Douglass’s ideas became building blocks for his own racial views.
Booker was a hard worker—“I think I may safely say he was never idle”—and during their quiet hours out on the water, Booker unburdened himself. “To help his people,” Miss Lord learned, “was foremost in his mind.” But she also saw a particular skill in the quiet, self-effacing young man, a particular talent that she could help him develop.
“He had an unusual gift for public speaking even then, and his soul was fired with a longing to use this gift in behalf of his people.” As she coached him, he gained a new facility for talking in public. She helped him learn to control his breathing, to shape his articulation, to recognize when to modulate his voice from “powerful and earnest” to “gentle and tender.” She encouraged him to participate in the school’s debating society.
Miss Lord continued the work Mrs. Ruffner had begun. His exposure to the New England ladies in his life enabled Booker to speak educated English and to shape and convey his thoughts with new clarity. In a world where most White people regarded the Black man as ill-educated, he learned to speak as they did and to persuade and to move an audience.
Much later, as the famous Booker T. Washington, he would choose to be generous in crediting those who aided in his self-making. “Whatever ability I may have as public speaker,” he wrote two decades later, “I owe in a measure to Miss Lord.”[15]
BOOKER WASHINGTON, TEACHER
Washington the student flourished at Hampton Normal. He earned his teaching certificate in the allotted three years, and General Armstrong tapped him to be a graduation speaker.
His time at the school had been transformative:
I was surrounded by an atmosphere of business, and a spirit of self-help that seemed to awaken every faculty in me and cause me for the first time to realize what it means to be a man instead of a piece of property.[16]
Still, he had more lessons to learn.
He left Hampton owing $23.05 in school fees. A summer job working as a waiter at a Connecticut resort would earn him money to pay what he owed, but he was mortified at his own incompetence and ignorance—he had never eaten in a formal restaurant—when a table of hotel patrons “scolded me in such a severe manner that I became frightened and left their table, leaving them sitting there without food.” But the persistent Washington, after being demoted to bus boy, eventually regained his former position waiting tables. The time was not wasted, since during this first visit to the North he observed the manners and attitudes of the sort of “wealthy and aristocratic people” whose respect and support he would later come to rely on.[17]
That autumn he put his teaching skills to work. A job awaited the new graduate teaching Black children in Kanawha Salines. Washington had charge of ninety day students, mostly children, and a similar number of adults attending evening classes. He taught Sunday school, too.
One subject he taught was self-care, which had also been an emphasis at Hampton. To many students raised in dirt-floor shacks with no running water, the rituals of bathing, hair combing, and washing were a challenge. Booker, both as a teacher and later as a public speaker, preached cleanliness. He targeted toothbrushing in particular: “I am convinced,” he said, “that there are few single agencies of civilization that are more far-reaching.”[18]
He himself became a role model, a man who had risen from the lowest caste; he would inspire a number of his students to follow his path and further their studies at Hampton. But he also had family obligations, among them helping to care for his younger sister, Amanda, then fifteen, and a younger adopted brother, James. Their mother, who had been in ill health for years, had died the previous summer; to Booker, her death had been “the saddest and blankest moment of my life.” He regretted not having been with her at the end, but he would honor her memory by helping James attend Hampton.
Simply standing before a class meant that Booker had achieved a great goal. Yet one of his students would remember that their young teacher, just twenty his first year, “always appeared to be looking for something in the distant future.”[19] Getting an education for himself had been his first aspiration; having achieved it, he shared the gift of learning with other children who had been born with as little as he had. But he was beginning to realize he possessed even larger ambitions.
He confided in Miss Lord that he felt more Black lawyers were needed and began reading law under the guidance of an attorney in nearby Charleston. Growing bored with his legal studies, he took the chance to polish his oratorical skills during a statewide debate in 1877 about relocating West Virginia’s capital. He stumped for Charleston, hoping to attract Black voters to the cause. He spent that summer speaking around the state. Just as important, he also made the case to his Black listeners for the quiet power the ballot gave them in a society where their voices were rarely heard. Little did he know that in years that followed the precious right to vote would be challenged across the South, and, in many states, lost to Black citizens.
In the fall of 1878, he moved on, leaving the Kanawha River Valley to enroll at Wayland Baptist Theological Seminary, in Washington, D.C. His time there would be limited. The sheer size and energy of the large city left him wondering whether the many freedmen and -women who had come to the nation’s capital wouldn’t be better off working the soil back home. He also felt a little lost in Washington: He had no strong religious vocation to anchor him in his studies at the seminary, and he was shocked at what seemed to him the very indulgent lifestyle in the city’s large Black community, where it seemed to him that less money was saved than was wasted on carriage rides and stylish clothes.
Booker found his bearings after receiving a letter from General Armstrong in early 1879. Armstrong asked Washington to deliver the “post-graduate address” at commencement. This time he could afford to ride the rails in comfort the full distance, and he thought about how he had transformed his prospects in the nearly seven years since he slept under a boardwalk on his first journey to Hampton. Reunited with Miss Lord, he asked for her help, and she coached him as he rehearsed his speech—“The Force That Wins”—in the school chapel. In it Washington would lay out goals for the new graduates:
My humble experience as a teacher in the South for the last four years teaches me that there is a force with which we can labor and succeed and there is a force with which we can labor and fail. It requires not education merely, but also wisdom and common sense, a heart set on the right and a trust in God. . . .
Will we be a success is the question that each one must answer for himself. It must be answered not in planning but in doing, not in talking noble deeds, but doing noble deeds. It must be answered by a life spent in the cause of truth and virtue, by the number of men made better for our having lived in the world.[20]
Washington impressed his audience. Armstrong, then adding Black teachers to his faculty for the first time, invited his former student to join the staff at Hampton. In return for payment of twenty-five dollars per month, Washington would demonstrate over the next two years that he was more than a teacher. He ran Hampton’s night school. He took charge of a dormitory for Native American students, newly arrived from reservations in the West. General Armstrong recognized in his protégé a capacity that perhaps equaled his own, making Washington the inevitable choice when Armstrong was asked to recommend a candidate to run a new independent educational experiment. Booker Washington, faced with the chance of a lifetime, had prepared himself to take on a challenge that all too few White Southerners thought any Black man could possibly meet.
Meanwhile, another young man, a soon-to-be Harvard graduate, was about to make his own life-changing decisions.
chapter four
THEODORE, HUSBAND AND WRITER
I grew into manhood thoroughly imbued with the feeling that a man must be respected for what he made of himself.
Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography, 1913
He mourned his father that spring and summer, but Theodore’s return to college, in September 1878, was just the distraction he needed. He had been bookish from childhood: One Harvard classmate remembered the first-year Roosevelt, seated in a noisy room, surrounded by rough-housing friends, his nose in a book, “oblivious to all that was going on around him.”[1] Now, as an upperclassman, he was ready to expand his horizons.
The sheltered young man found the right clubs. He was surrounded by people of his own kind, almost entirely members of the Northeast’s Protestant and patrician upper class. In October, he wrote to his mother, “Funnily enough, I have enjoyed quite a burst of popularity.”[2]
A classmate named Richard Saltonstall had become a particular friend. “Old Dick,” as Theodore called him, would also play the role of matchmaker when Teddy met Alice on a weekend visit to his friend’s family home, a rambling Victorian house six miles from Cambridge.
Alice Hathaway Lee was Dick’s cousin—their mothers were sisters—and the Lee and Saltonstall households had all but melded into one, separated as they were by a short, much-used footpath in rural Chestnut Hill. Between them, the two families had eleven children, and the scenes of intimate family life Roosevelt witnessed felt instantly familiar. The setting was tailor-made for him to fall in love with seventeen-year-old Alice. They met on October 18, 1878, and by Thanksgiving, he made a secret promise to himself that they would marry. Like father, like son: He recognized the woman with whom he wanted to spend his life almost at first sight.
Winning her hand, however, and the approval of her father, would take time. Trips to New York were required. Alice and her parents visited Mittie at 7 West Fifty-Seventh Street. Theodore’s sisters traveled to Chestnut Hill. At dances, tennis parties, luncheons, woodland walks, and carriage rides, Alice grew fond of the insistent young man from New York; for him, as he explained to a friend, his was an “eager, restless, passionate pursuit of one all-absorbing object.”[3] Then, in January 1880, Theodore noted in his dairy, “after much pleading, my own sweet, pretty darling consented to be my wife.”[4] He went to New York to tell his family in early February and buy her a ring. A date for the marriage was set after the couple agreed to live in a third-floor apartment in the Roosevelts’ Fifty-Seventh Street mansion, where the young bride could learn about managing a rich man’s house under Mitty’s guidance. As Theodore told his younger sister, “I don’t think Mr. Lee would have consented to our marriage so soon on other terms.”[5]
On Wednesday, October 27, 1880, Theodore, by then a Harvard graduate, and his betrothed exchanged vows, at the Unitarian First Parish Church in Brookline, Massachusetts. He felt immensely lucky to have her. She stood a slender and athletic five-foot-eight, an inch shorter than he. With honey-colored hair and gray-blue eyes, Alice was a very pretty girl and, by nature, cheerful and affectionate (her childhood nickname had been “Sunshine”).[6] She was nineteen and, on their wedding day, he turned twenty-two.
New responsibilities rested on Theodore’s shoulders. As a husband, a child of privilege, and now a man of the world, he took on the obligation he felt to become the man his father would have wanted him to be.
ROOSEVELT THE WRITER
After his father’s death, Roosevelt abandoned his boyhood dream of devoting himself to natural science. Drawn to the life Theodore Sr. lived as a man of good works, the son had recognized that “pretty much the whole duty of man lay in . . . making the best of himself.”[7] Happily married and ready to join “the big world,” he decided, like Booker Washington, to study law, thinking it might be “preparatory to going into public life.”[8] He enrolled that fall at the Columbia Law School in what would be his first step toward a career in politics.
