| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Michael Rudolph West. The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations. New York: Columbia University Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 281. $29.50.
Michael Rudolph West "seeks simultaneously to explain Booker T. Washington—his life and what he meant to the nation and his part in the history of `the Negro problem,' a term that has since the early 1960s fallen out of use" (p. ix). This is the first of several major themes West proposes in a complicated examination of Washington as the initiator of a theory of race relations, the solution to America's contradictory wrestling match between real democracy and the triumph of Jim Crow segregation that defined the age of Washington and much of the twentieth century.	1
According to West, the work "is about a history of an idea," a "theory here called `race relations,' that opened a way for the ideological reconciliation of two opposites: racist proscription and democracy" (pp. ix–x). West additionally wanted "to reveal the personal and political dimensions of Washington's journey up from slavery" to become a man of influence and the next generation of "racial pundits" in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, General Samuel C. Armstrong, and Gunnar Myrdal (p. x). The word "progress" also defined the search for racial peace in the wake of black efforts to formulate freedom during Reconstruction. West argues, "I mean to show progress as offered up by Washington and his advocates to be a false substitute for democracy" (p. 5).	. . .

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