Sunday, May 31, 2009

Booker T. Washington: First Black Republican


Excepts from David Beito and Jonathan Bean's article in National Review (March 2009).


"In 1899, as Americans looked forward to a new century of progress, Booker T. Washington published 'The Future of the American Negro'. A reporter asked him whether that future would include a black man as president. 'I should hope so' Washington responded. He did not expect to see it in his lifetime: Black [Americans] could not vote in the South, Jim Crow laws enforced rigid segregation, and lynching was rampant. Even so, Washington envisioned a day when black Americans would achieve political equality - and he believed he had a role to play in making it come about. 'One generation lays the foundation for succeeding generations' he wrote. By laying that foundation, Booker T. Washington helped make the election of Barak Obama possible.


That is not to say he would have entirely approved. Washington was a rock-ribbed Republican, and arguably America's first black conservative. Obama's brand of politics would have disappointed him deeply. On Election Night last November [2008] it was John McCain - not Obama - who invoked Washington's name. Liberals, it turns out, don't have much use for Washington. Yet he has much to teach, especially as we enter the Age of Obama.


Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) possesses one of the best-known names in the history of black America. He was president of the renowned Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, an influential advocate for civil rights, and the most admired black man of his generation. For most of the 20th century, however, certain black leaders and academic liberals rejected his vision of racial advancement. Its emphasis on self-help, faith in entrepreneurship, and abject refusal to embrance victimhood seemed to demand as much from blacks as from whites. For these later figures, Washington was simply too conservative [...].


For years [...] the standard view was that white racism was the primary reason for black misfortune. That is an increasingly difficult case to make now, when the main afflictions of black America [and any poor community regardless of race] are the breakdown of 2 parent families, crime, drugs, lousy public schools, and unprecedented dependency on [government]. The time may have come to revive Booker T. Washington as an inspirational figure.


He was born a slave in Virginia [...]. Shortly after the Civil War, he went to work as a child laborer in a salt works. His sharp mind greatly impressed the wife of his employer, who taught him to read and opened the door to what would become his first great opportunity. Washington's hunger for learning led him on a 500 mile trek to the Hampton Institute, a school that allowed black [Americans] to to work for their education. There, he came under the influence of the school's founder, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, a former Union officer who had commanded black troops at Petersburg during the Civil War. Armstrong tried to instill the habits of hard work and good character in his students and admonished them to "live down prejudice". Under his mentorship, Washington excelled in school. In 1881 when Armstrong received an inquiry from a white man founding a school for black [Americans] in Alabama, he recommended his star pupil.


Washington became the first president of Tuskegee Normal & Industrial Institute, orginally founded as a teachers' college. Under Washington, the school trained students in the liberal arts and industrial labor. They learned to respect knowledge and hard work as requirements for becoming good teachers, craftsmen, and civic leaders. [...] [the] school was grounded in a philosophy of self improvement. [...] By the turn of the century, Tuskegee was enrolling 1,000 students, all of them black. Tuskegee has more students than the two leading white institutions in the state - the Univ. of Alabama and Auburn - combined.


When Frederick Douglas died in 1895, Washington immediately succeeded him as black America's most prominent figure - a role in which he would continue until his own death two decades later. [...] Tuskegee's requirement that students learn highly paid industrial skills fostered [...] goals of self-help and capitalist uplift.
Booker T. Washington authored 'Up From Slavery' in 1901, a book that inspired generations of black Americans with his personal account of success. [...]

One of the most important contributions of [Robert J. Norrell, Univ. of Tennessee]'s book is to show how the leading racists of the day, such as Rep. J. Thomas Heflin (Democrat, Alabama) and Sen. Benjamin 'Pitchfork' Tillman (Democrat, South Carolina) feared and denounced Washington's strategy to educate blacks and equip them with economic skills. In 1901 [...] democrats raged when Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington, the leading black republican, to dinner at the White House. [...]

In a hostile environment [of the early 1900's] Washington repeatedly spoke out against lynching, disfranchisement, and segregation. [...] Economic hisorians have documented the progress of black farmers, workers, and business owners - progress made possible because conservative courts (republican appointees) upheld the right to work against the lily white unionism of the time. In his 1977 book Competition and Coercion, Robert Higgs showed that the % of black farmers in the South who were landowners increased from virtually zero in 1865 to 25% by 1910. [...] Nationwide, the number of black businesses skyrocketed from 4,000 to 50,000. Washington played a key role in nurturing these enterprises by creating the National Negro Business League in 1900. [...]

As Norrell describes, gains in education provide perhaps the clearest vindication of Washington's efforts. He had no small role in the spectacular increase in the literacy rate for blacks in the South from 5% in 1865 to 70% in 1910. Although white politicians [...] shunted blacks into inferior schools, Washington was instrumental in providing them with alternatives in the private sector. It was largely because of his influence, for example, that Julius Rosenwald financed the building of 5,500 black schools throughout the South (known as the Rosenwald schools.)
[...]

Obama's worldview is profoundly different from that of Washington. Washington repeatedly emphasized that thrift was the basis of advancement. [...] The secret of success was to shun excessive debt, delay gratification, and 'learn the saving habit, until we learn to save every nickel.' Washington rejected the philosophy that people could spend their way to success. While Obama believes that government can create jobs simply through spending, Washington put his trust in the resourcefulness of individuals to accomplish this goal. He had, he said, 'little patience with any man, white or black, with education, who goes through the country whining and crying because nobody will give him a job of work. A man with education should be able to create a job for himself, but in doing so he may have to begin at the very bottom.' Progress ultimately rested on a solid foundation of hard work, thrift, and production. Excessive debt, especially without the means to repay it, only created a trap leading to more debt and regress. It is doubtful that Washington could have imagined the endless bailouts of our own day. They certainly would have appalled him.

Friday, May 29, 2009

Why we must reduce illegal and legal immigration

The laws of economics cannot be violated:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6633620258136248169

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Abraham Lincoln and Republican Ideology




President Obama has likened himself to Lincoln, but apparently Mr. Obama cannot read...


Monday, May 25, 2009

Poly tennis strings do break







Although "poly" tennis strings are very durable, you can still break them by "shear" force applied when you hit an off-center shot along the edge of the frame. The edge of the frame at the grommett is very rigid, so the potential shear force is high if you hit the string hard right near that point.






If you are a "string breaker" you have to use either a hybrid stringjob with poly on the mains and something softer on the crosses, or even consider Kevlar for the mains, or poly on the whole stringbed. But a poly can still break via this shear mechanism so do not be surprised if you break a poly string after 1 match when you thought the string would last several months.