David Siegel - The Plenitude of Arboreal Beauty

I was struck by the compromises of civil and political rights for economic promise that Booker T. Washington was willing to make on behalf of a struggling race. DuBois describes Washington’s agenda as “a gospel of Work and Money to such extent as to completely overshadow the higher aims of life,” (30) and “the sudden transformation of a fair far-off ideal of Freedom into the hard reality of bread-winning and the consequent deification of Bread” (50). It must have been horrifying for someone with DuBois’s ideals to see these deals brokered out of hunger and ignorance. This willingness to tolerate intolerance for economic empowerment reminds me of the religious differences brushed under the rugs of the London Exchange for similar reasons in Voltaire.

I enjoyed the Borgesian interweaving of historical narrative and poetic language, which made the meticulous historical accounts easy to bear:

These were the saddest sights of that woful day; and no man clasped the hands of these two passing fingers of the present-past; but, hating, they went to their long home, and, hating, their children’s children live today.

Here, then, was the Freedmen’s Bureau; and since, with some hesitation, it was continued by the act of 1868 until 1869… (pp.18-19)