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The Divided Family in Civil War America (review)

King as an abstraction that all Americans are presumed to worship; before the letter ‘X’ was transformed from the mysteriousness of that which is long gone into just another bit of merchandise; before culture and lifestyle and politics became synonymous, each and all commodities neatly organized and readily available for convenient browsing; before all that, a similarly conceived artifact from the dawn of mass-market selling enjoyed its own extended vogue” (1). Even though this is a book that might better have been conceptualized and developed in a shorter journal article, it nevertheless is one that advanced readers and scholars who want fresh and challenging theories of race relations, African American history, and the roots of the contemporary civil rights movement will want to review. The author’s philosophical construct of Washington’s developmental period, including copious references to Washington’s birth in Franklin County, Virginia, and multifaceted early formal and informal education in Malden and the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia, challenges readers to reconceptualize Washington’s inner-clockwork and his infatuation with the idea of race relations. In conjunction with the latest edited work discussing the nature of Washington and his legacy, Rebecca Carroll’s edited Uncle Tom or New Negro?: African Americans Reflect on Booker T. Washington and “Up From Slavery” 100 Years Later (2006), West’s study will provide both reworked and new insight into the historical figure under review. In the end, although sometimes in a belabored fashion, Michael Rudolph West reminds contemporary America just how complex and intriguing are the psyches and souls of race leaders like Booker T. Washington and, by implication, how redundant and sanitized much of the literature has been in regard to analyzing such leaders’ psychosocial development in and contributions to the American “democratic” drama.