Historical Setting for Booker T. Washington and the Rhetoric of Compromise, 1895

Abstract

By the mid 1890's, hollowness and despair gripped the nation. Economic collapse cut deeply into all classes. Wealthy and middle class businessmen as well as immigrant farmers and destitute black and white sharecroppers searched for a way out of 1893. The entire nation was torn by everything short of anarchism-riots, strikes, bloodshed, property damage, and bitter race conflicts. Lynchings soared to all time highs thoughout the South. At the bottom of the economic heap blacks suffered most. Their incomes were almost nil when farm prices dropped. They nearly starved for they grew hardly any food crops; they were dependent mostly on cotton and tobacco (Calista, 1964: 242). Their politics reflected the economic situation. They attempted to agitate through alliances with poor whites. These alliances grew into the Populist movement. This movement, however, failed for it identified too much with the politically unpopular move to substitute silver for gold as the national money standard; it identified with the radical Democratic Party; and most importantly, it identified too much with black people. Their (blacks') hopes for equality, justice, and political leadership that they had with Populism were replaced by despair and fear. Direct political agitation had proved to be painful and costly to blacks in the mid-i 890s (Calista, 1964: 245). They doubtless began to wonder if a new doctrine, a new movement, or a new leader might be able to avoid disheartening political panaceas such as the one they were presently facing, and lead them out of the depressed economic state.