What Booker T. Learned on Vacation
Christopher J. Wolfe on Booker T. Washington and Josef Pieper
So here’s a nice little comparative piece by my PostModernConservative friend and colleague CJ Wolfe, posing two fine thinkers and books against one another.
The subtitle is: Is work or leisure the basis of culture? And the main title is “Booker T. Washington Versus Josef Pieper.” It’s published by The American Mind.1
The Pieper book is Leisure, the Basis of Culture,
and the Washington one is Up from Slavery.
Pieper is the advocate of leisure and classical liberal education, and Washington the advocate of vocational education and wealth-building work. RTWT, but Wolfe ultimately sides more with Pieper, and one reason why is this bit he found in Washington:
Washington recounted how his wife and some Bostonian civil rights activists finally persuade him to go on a European vacation. Here we finally get a glimpse of his appreciation for rest and contemplation. “From the time I could remember, I had always been at work, and I did not see how I could spend three or four months doing nothing. The fact is, I did not know how to take a vacation.” As the boat pulled out of New York Harbor, Washington was filled with a feeling of “awe mingled with delight.” He recounts sleeping “at a rate of fifteen hours a day during the remainder of the ten days’ passage. Then it was that I began to understand how tired I really was.” Washington got a wonderful vacation and learned to appreciate other cultures such as the staid British, whom he wonders “if, in the long run, they do not accomplish as much or more than rushing, nervous Americans do.”
The same Booker T. Washington who railed against studying great books and only read newspapers was of a mind on the return trip to visit the ship’s library and pull down a copy of the Life of Frederick Douglass to read. Surely, he realized in those moments that work is a beautiful part of God’s design for the good life—and so is true leisure.
Well put, CJ.
And while you’re reading his essay, a fine one for the waning days of summer, play these:
Update: Wolfe has added, in a second post, some reasons for why W.E.B. Dubois’s famous critique of Washington on the “vocational v. liberal education” question, and the connection of that to questions of the right political response to the segregation, is overrated. And I’ve replied in the comments with agreement, but also, with an explanation of how the deepest critique of Washington’s stance is found in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.
Note: I dislike promoting any American Mind content, given its continued scandalous serving of the Suppression this substack denounces, and thus, its continued training of “conservative” leaders and aspirants to leadership in a pattern of dishonesty, and of contempt for the core American value of Open Journalism. But I make an exception for Wolfe.