Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface: Struggle, Challenge, and History
- 1 Introduction: Reality and Contradiction
- FREDERICK DOUGLASS: THE INDIVIDUALIST AS RACE MAN
- ALEXANDER CRUMMELL: THE ANGLOPHILE AS AFROCENTRIST
- BOOKER TALIAFERO WASHINGTON: THE IDEALIST AS MATERIALIST
- 8 Booker T. Washington and the Meanings of Progress
- 9 Protestant Ethic versus Conspicuous Consumption
- W. E. B. DU BOIS: THE DEMOCRAT AS AUTHORITARIAN
- MARCUS MOZIAH GARVEY: THE REALIST AS ROMANTIC
- CONCLUSION: RESCUING HEROES FROM THEIR ADMIRERS
- Index
9 - Protestant Ethic versus Conspicuous Consumption
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Preface: Struggle, Challenge, and History
- 1 Introduction: Reality and Contradiction
- FREDERICK DOUGLASS: THE INDIVIDUALIST AS RACE MAN
- ALEXANDER CRUMMELL: THE ANGLOPHILE AS AFROCENTRIST
- BOOKER TALIAFERO WASHINGTON: THE IDEALIST AS MATERIALIST
- 8 Booker T. Washington and the Meanings of Progress
- 9 Protestant Ethic versus Conspicuous Consumption
- W. E. B. DU BOIS: THE DEMOCRAT AS AUTHORITARIAN
- MARCUS MOZIAH GARVEY: THE REALIST AS ROMANTIC
- CONCLUSION: RESCUING HEROES FROM THEIR ADMIRERS
- Index
Summary
FRANKLIN, WEBER, VEBLEN, AND BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery has been appropriately compared to the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. His Black Belt Diamonds (1898), a compilation of speeches, addresses, and advice to students, may be compared to Franklin's The Way to Wealth. Max Weber drew on Franklin's collection of maxims as the basis for his theory in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). Washington might have served him just as well, or perhaps even better. Weber propounded a descriptive theory in which religion was a counterintuitive, indirect, and almost subliminal stimulus to habits of capital accumulation. Washington anticipated Weber in drawing a connection between wealth and Christian stoicism, but he was closer to Franklin in that he “instrumentalized” his version of the Protestant ethic – a conscious and pragmatic plan of action.
Tuskegee Chapel sermons offered a program for economic reform. With this in mind, Washington's ridicule of the enthusiastic religion of the Black Belt becomes something more than a set of “darky stories.” He opposed the religion of the masses because it was not useful to his program of supply-side economics, not because of its Africanness. Tuskegee sent forth cold-water puritans to obliterate the “ring shout” and other retentions of “slave culture” among the black masses and replace them with the gospel of industrial capitalism. While he practiced “the speech and thought of triumphant commercialism,” he inserted caustic observations on the improvident consumerism of the black peasantry.
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- Creative Conflict in African American Thought , pp. 166 - 182Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004