Cornelius Johnson, Office-Seeker

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906)
From The American Short Story: The Nineteenth Century

Interesting Links

“The Caged Bird Sings: Paul Laurence Dunbar at the Library of Congress” (Peter Armenti, Library of Congress)

“The Legacy of a Caged Bird: On Gene Andrew Jarrett’s Paul Laurence Dunbar” (Vesper North, Los Angeles Review of Books)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• Three Poems, Paul Laurence Dunbar
• “Sister Josepha,” Alice Dunbar-Nelson
• “The First Successful Trip of an Airship,” A. I. Root
• “John Redding Goes to Sea,” Zora Neale Hurston

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The new bookstacks in the Thomas Jefferson building of the Library of Congress when it was completed in 1897, the year Paul Laurence Dunbar was hired as an assistant librarian. Photographer unknown. (Library of Congress)

Dunbar’s wife, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, later claimed that the shelving supplied him with the metaphor he used in “Sympathy,” his most famous poem: “The iron grating of the book stacks in the Library of Congress suggested to him the bars of the bird’s cage. June and July days are hot. . . . The torrid sun poured its rays down into the courtyard of the library and heated the iron grilling of the book stacks until they were like prison bars in more senses than one. The dry dust of the dry books (ironic incongruity!–a poet shut up with medical works), rasped sharply in his hot throat, and he understood how the bird felt when it beats its wings against its cage.”

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“We are now in the throes of feverish delight over industrial education,” asserted Paul Laurence Dunbar. “It is a good thing, and yet one of which we can easily have too much.” He warned against “the danger we court of going to the other extreme of educating the hand to the exclusion of the needs of the head.” The essay, titled “Our New Madness,” appeared in the August 18, 1898, issue of The Independent, a political weekly based in New York, and Dunbar argued that the overemphasis on skilled training not only proceeded from principles of racial inequality but also reinforced them:

You say: “But we can’t all be doctors and lawyers and preachers.” No, to be sure not, but let some of us be; for we cannot all of us be carpenters, tinners, and bricklayers. There has been here, of late, too great an insistence upon manual training for the negro. . . .

At this late day the negro has no need to prove his manual efficiency. That was settled fifty years ago when he was the plantation blacksmith and carpenter and shoemaker. . . . [But] there has not, in the history of this country, risen a single intellectual black man whose pretensions have not been sneered at, laughed at, and then lamely wondered at. If he was fair of complexion, they said that he derived his powers from his white blood. If he was convincingly black, they felt of his bumps, measured his head, and said it was not negro in conformation.

Dunbar’s essay aimed its ire at Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute; he acknowledged “the efficiency of the work being done there” but he was concerned that Washington’s focus in his public speeches on “industrial education” had been used to support the idea “that we must not have anything else.”

As if to prove Dunbar’s point, the essayist Charles Dudley Warner, president of American Social Science Association, delivered the keynote speech at the group’s annual convention in May 1900. With the title “The Education of the Negro,” the essay argued for the reduction or elimination of financial support of higher education for Black Americans and the reallocation of the funds toward more basic schooling for skilled careers—and Warner cited Washington in support of the idea:

[Slavery] taught the negro to work, it transformed him, by compulsion it is true, into an industrial being, and held him in the habit of industry for several generations. Perhaps only force could do this, for it was a radical transformation. I am glad to see that this result of slavery is recognized by Mr. Booker Washington, the ablest and most clear-sighted leader the negro race has ever had. . . . On almost all the Southern plantations, and in the cities also, negro mechanics were bred, excellent blacksmiths, good carpenters, and house-builders capable of executing plans of high architectural merit. Everywhere were negroes skilled in trades, and competent in various mechanical industries. . . .

Among the witnesses to the failure of the result expected from the establishment of colleges and universities for the negro are heard, from time to time, and more frequently as time goes on, practical men from the North, railway men, manufacturers, who have initiated business enterprises at the South. . . . We have been disappointed in our extravagant expectations of what this education could do for a race undeveloped, and so wanting in certain elements of character, and that the millions of money devoted to it might have been much better applied.

Warner’s premise was that the “development of a race” is “a gigantic task, and generations may elapse before it can in any degree be relaxed”; his evidence, such as it was, consisted of his anecdotal observations about the Black population of New Orleans and the racial breakdown of prison camps.

Deriding the speech as “an essay founded upon observation of the South from a car window,” Dunbar published a response countering Warner’s arguments in The Philadelphia Times. “If the Negro has been crowded out of the many occupations by the more vigorous races, was it because of their vigor, or because of the prejudice which preferred the alien to the citizen? Was it the vigor of the foreign miners in Illinois that drove the negroes from their work, or the prejudice of a narrow people which allowed it?”

Dunbar’s criticisms of Washington and Warner echoed arguments voiced during the same period by W.E.B. Du Bois. For his part, Washington opted not to respond directly to either critic; instead, he made the strategically friendly suggestion to the two younger men that they share the stage one evening in Boston and, after a couple of postponed attempts, Washington, Du Bois, and Dunbar appeared together at Tuskegee’s fundraising event at the Hollis Street Theater in March 1899. Du Bois read one of his stories; Dunbar read several poems, and Washington delivered a version of his usual speech on racial uplift. By all accounts, it was a successful evening—although the two guests apparently upstaged their host, whose hoarse voice and obvious exhaustion undercut the aim of his pitch. Dunbar never abandoned his support for classical education, but the evening was one of a series of olive branches he and Washington extended to each other, leading Dunbar to write several positive articles about Tuskegee, a sonnet dedicated to Washington, and even a song that would eventually be published in celebration of the school’s twentieth anniversary. The differences between Washington and Du Bois, however, would deepen, culminating in the latter’s full-throated denunciation of the Tuskegee founder in The Souls of Black Folk.

When Dunbar published his initial criticism of Booker T. Washington, he was an assistant librarian at the Library of Congress, a job he had to relinquish at the end of 1898 because of various illnesses. While living in Washington, D.C., Dunbar observed and experienced the prejudices and obstacles arrayed against Black activists and leaders who had benefited from the very kind of liberal education Warner would have denied them. When his next story collection, The Strength of Gideon, appeared in 1900, he included alongside his popular dialect stories several tales about politics and race relations, including “A Council of State,” about a convention of African American political leaders; “The Tragedy at Three Forks,” focusing on a white girl who commits a crime for which two Black men are lynched; and our Story of the Week selection, “Cornelius Johnson, Office-Seeker,” a satirical tale targeting both certain politicians who take for granted the loyalty of Black voters and an overconfident Alabama job applicant who misguidedly places his trust in the patronage mill.

Notes: In John Bunyan’s allegorical work The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), Vanity Fair is a bustling marketplace filled with worldly goods and pleasures, temptations and distractions.

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It was a beautiful day in balmy May and the sun shone pleasantly on Mr. Cornelius Johnson’s very spruce Prince Albert suit of grey as he alighted from the train in Washington. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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