Tea at Trianon: The Wisdom of Booker T. Washington

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, February 3, 2018

The Wisdom of Booker T. Washington

From The Conservative Tribune:

In his 1910 book, “My Larger Education: Being Chapters from My Experience,” civil rights icon and Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington noted that the same class of people you saw sitting on Tuesday were extant during some of the darkest hours in American race relations, as well. And it wasn’t just spite that made them root against the people they claimed to want to help.

“I am afraid that there is a certain class of race-problem solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public,” Washington wrote.

“My experience is that people who call themselves ‘The Intellectuals’ understand theories, but they do not understand things. I have long been convinced that, if these men could have gone into the South and taken up and become interested in some practical work which would have brought them in touch with people and things, the whole world would have looked very different to them.

“Bad as conditions might have seemed at first, when they saw that actual progress was being made, they would have taken a more hopeful view of the situation,” he noted. This is the perfect description of a modern Democrat Party, nourished on feminist and postcolonialist theory, ever ready to make an appearance on MSNBC or give an interview to Vox — but what have they really changed for the marginalized groups in their balkanized America? (Read more.)