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Scot A. French, Kenneth M. Hamilton. Booker T. Washington in American Memory., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 5, December 2018, Pages 1697–1698, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhy255
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From the “myth-and-symbol” school of American studies in the 1950s–1970s to the “collective memory” subgenre of cultural studies in the 1990s–2010s, historians have surveyed both elite and popular representations of Great Men and Women for insights into the movements, cultures, and times that produced them. Typically, these scholarly studies track the posthumous careers of famous historical figures across time and place through their depiction in literary and artistic works, monuments, textbooks, and various other (to quote Pierre Nora) “sites of memory.” At their best, American memory studies shed light on group identity formation within a national frame of reference and bring shifting, often sharply divergent cultural perspectives into ideological focus.
In Booker T. Washington in American Memory, historian Kenneth M. Hamilton takes as his subject a once towering yet, since the 1960s, somewhat diminished and oft-disparaged historical figure: the African American educator and Gilded Age/Progressive Era “race leader” who merged his own inspirational life story with the Tuskegee-based movement he led and immortalized in his world-famous memoir, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography. Hamilton draws heavily on Washington’s life story, particularly his education by northern white female mentors at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, in advancing the thesis-driven image that dominates this study: Washington as “culture warrior” (38), the leading African American “evangelist” (2) for a “movement” (2) to replace an aristocratic “southern ethic” (38, 158) of “hereditary predetermination” (49) with a meritocratic “Yankee Protestant ethic” (2, 38) of “boundless opportunity” (41) for all who embraced the secularized creed. In memory as in life, Washington personified and championed the “values and behaviors” (16) deemed essential to success within this Yankee Protestant ethic or paradigm: “optimism, confidence, thrift, charity, self-denial, and hard work” (68).
