Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

The Need to Remember \\ 239
The extension of the Armstrong perspective evolved in tandem with the dramatic
growth and alteration of the nation's economy. Between the Civil War and
1900, America's corporate culture changed profoundly. A new class of professional
managers took over the day-to-day operations of many companies, beginning
with railroads. Concomitantly, business sectors standardized operations and pricing.
Spurred by an extraordinary savings rate that increased from a significant
10-12 percent in the 1850s to a staggering 18—20 percent between 1865 and
1914, capital was available to inventors, entrepreneurs, and corporations. This
investment capital provided the revenues needed to fuel an industrial revolution.
As important, America's corporate leaders embarked on a campaign of consolidation.
This practice drove out competition and generated huge profits and personal
fortunes for those who survived. Some would call the new capitalists "Robber
Barons"; others called them friends and donors. 28
Booker T. Washington, Hampton graduate and perhaps the most important
African American leader to emerge after the Civil War, preferred the later label.
Washington took the Hampton model of disciplined industrial training to
Tuskegee, Alabama, where he created an educational institution and political
fiefdom of unequaled endowment. At Tuskegee Institute Washington also developed
a style of cultivating new capitalists into benefactors. He did so by exploiting
the politics of racial belief.
Washington biographer Louis Harlan called him an astute politician. Like
many politicians, Washington cultivated relationships, sometimes compromising
principle for results. Thus he appeared quite at ease with William H. Baldwin's
pronouncement that Blacks were the real alternative to the threat of unionized
labor. Baldwin, a railroad executive and soon to be philanthropist, joined the
Tuskegee board of trustees in 1894. A lifelong opponent of classical higher education
for Blacks, the northern-born and educated Baldwin argued that industrial
education trained Blacks for their roles as the backbone of the southern economy.
In an 1899 address he maintained, "properly directed he...will willingly fill
the more menial positions, and do the heavy work, at less wages, than the
American white man or any foreign race which has yet come to our shores." So
sure was Baldwin of Washington and industrial education that he enlisted scores
of others in funding industrial education for Blacks. 29
The sure-footedness of Washington and his advisors meant much to southern
Blacks, even as the limits of their visions soon prompted a lively debate over the
hazards of a singular approach to the education of the Black masses. This debate
did not stop Robert G. Ogden, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, George
Foster Peabody, and others from raising and donating millions for the education
of Black southerners. Rockefeller, for example, gave $53 million to the General
Education Board between 1902 and 1909, primarily for training Black teachers. 30
Hundreds of miles to the north a new wave of European Jews, who fled the
pogroms in Eastern Europe, began to establish themselves. They came by the millions
and they stayed. The majority settled in New York, New Jersey,