The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America's First Black Dynasty - Hardcover

Graham, Lawrence Otis

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060184124 ISBN 13: 9780060184124

Publisher: Harper, 2006

Synopsis

“A cohesive picture of an extraordinary figure. . . . The issues raised by Bruce’s life and career resonate today, making Graham’s book not just a history but a revealing commentary on race and class, and on their inordinately powerful force in shaping our lives today.”—Chicago Tribune

Spanning more than a century, Lawrence Otis’s illuminating biography is a fascinating look at race and class in America, witnessed through the life of Blanche Kelso Bruce—the head of America’s first black dynasty and the first black U.S. senator. Otis reveals how Bruce rose from slavery to achieve power and prestige in the aftermath of the Civil War. With his wife, the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia physician, he would break social and racial barriers—a legacy continued by their children until scandal destroyed the family’s wealth and stature. Filled with triumph and tragedy, Otis’s riveting book brings into focus an important yet little-known segment of our nation’s past.

About this title

About the Author

The author of fourteen books, including the New York Times bestseller Our Kind of People, and a contributing editor for Reader's Digest, Lawrence Otis Graham's work has also appeared in the New York Times, Essence, and The Best American Essays.

From the Back Cover

This is the true story of America's first black dynasty. The years after the Civil War represented an astonishing moment of opportunity for African-Americans. The rush to build a racially democratic society from the ruins of slavery is never more evident than in the personal history of Blanche Kelso Bruce and his heirs.

Born a slave in 1841, Bruce became a local Mississippi sheriff, developed a growing Republican power base, amassed a real-estate fortune, and became the first black to serve a full Senate term. He married Josephine Willson, the daughter of a wealthy black Philadelphia doctor. Together they broke racial barriers as a socialite couple in 1880s Washington, D.C.

By befriending President Ulysses S. Grant, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and a cadre of liberal black and white Republicans, Bruce spent six years in the U.S. Senate, then gained appointments under four presidents (Garfield, Arthur, Harrison, and McKinley), culminating with a top Treasury post, which placed his name on all U.S. currency.

During Reconstruction, the Bruce family entertained lavishly in their two Washington town houses and acquired an 800-acre plantation, homes in four states, and a fortune that allowed their son and grandchildren to attend Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard University, beginning in 1896.

The Senator's legacy would continue with his son, Roscoe, who became both a protégé of Booker T. Washington and a superintendent of Washington, D.C.'s segregated schools. When the family moved to New York in the 1920s and formed an alliance with John D. Rockefeller Jr., the Bruces became an enviable force in Harlem society. Their public battle to get their grandson admitted into Harvard University's segregated dormitories elicited the support of people like W. E. B. Du Bois and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and broke brave new ground for blacks of their day.

But in the end, the Bruce dynasty's wealth and stature would disappear when the Senator's grandson landed in prison following a sensational trial and his Radcliffe-educated granddaughter married a black Hollywood actor who passed for white.

By drawing on Senate records, historic documents, and the personal letters of Senator Bruce, Josephine, their colleagues, friends, children, and grandchildren, author Lawrence Otis Graham weaves a riveting social history that spans 120 years. From Mississippi to Washington, D.C., to New York, The Senator and the Socialite provides a fascinating look into the history of race and class in America.

Reviews

It is a revealing commentary on the history of American democracy that, of the 1,885 men and women who have served in the U.S. Senate since the founding of the republic, only five have been black. Remarkably, the first two were elected from Mississippi during the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War. Hiram Revels served for a few weeks in 1870 and then returned to relative obscurity. Blanche K. Bruce, who held his seat from 1875 to 1881, amassed a small fortune and founded what Lawrence Otis Graham calls "America's first true black dynasty."

In this flawed but fascinating study, Graham, a black attorney and author of Our Kind of People, a bestseller about the black upper class, tells the story of three generations of the Bruce family. It is a poignant tale of struggle, accomplishment and weakness -- and an illuminating account of American racism.

Graham's cast of characters begins with Bruce and his wife, Josephine, the senator and the socialite of the book's title. Born a slave in Virginia in 1841, the son of his owner, Bruce escaped during the Civil War, studied at Oberlin College and made his way to Mississippi, where he rose quickly in politics and purchased a plantation in 1874. His beautiful, light-skinned wife, whom he married in 1878, came from the North's tiny black upper class. After his Senate term expired, Bruce remained in Washington, D.C., where he held lucrative patronage posts, acquired a large townhouse and summer home, and presided over black high society.

The second generation of Bruces enjoyed privileged lives far removed from those of most Americans, white or black. Their only child, Roscoe, attended Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard, worked for a time as head of academic education at the Tuskegee Institute, then served as superintendent of black schools in Washington and manager of the Dunbar Apartments, a Harlem housing complex built by John D. Rockefeller Jr. His talented wife, Clara, attended Radcliffe and Boston University Law School, where she became the first woman anywhere to edit a law review. The third generation, also named Roscoe and Clara, followed in their parents' footsteps to Harvard and Radcliffe.

Graham does not shy away from describing the costs of these accomplishments, among them the Bruces' complete dissociation from most of black America. On the Bruce plantation in Mississippi, black sharecroppers lived in "flimsy wooden shacks" and labored in the same oppressive conditions as on white-owned estates. Equally telling, Roscoe Bruce Sr. found the exuberant mode of worship practiced by lower-class Tuskegee students "disgusting."

That Roscoe Bruce worked at Tuskegee is not coincidental, for the family shared its founder Booker T. Washington's philosophy of accommodation, as well as his reliance on connections with wealthy white patrons. Blanche Bruce said little in the Senate as white violence stripped his people of their rights. Indeed, Graham writes, the senator had "an almost single-minded obsession for maintaining favor with powerful whites." While attending Harvard, his son spied for Washington on Boston's "anti-Bookerite" black radicals. Even though he had received an elite academic education, Roscoe Bruce tried to introduce Washington's philosophy of industrial training in the District of Columbia's black schools, causing an uproar among black parents proud of their children's educational attainments. When a scandal erupted in 1919 because Bruce allowed a white man to take nude photographs of black high school students, allegedly as part of a study of physical differences between the races, he was forced to resign.

Only when it came to their own family did the Bruces turn militant. In 1923, Harvard President A. Lawrence Lowell barred the college's six black freshmen, including Roscoe Jr., from living in freshman dormitories. Roscoe Sr. organized a national campaign that forced Lowell to rescind his order.

An indefatigable researcher in primary sources, Graham sometimes seems unaware of current scholarship. The opening chapters present a confusing picture of Reconstruction politics because Graham uses the word "liberal" in its modern sense of racial egalitarianism rather than its 19th-century meaning of belief in limited government and laissez-faire economics. Contrary to his account, those who called themselves liberal Republicans opposed Reconstruction.

Nonetheless, The Senator and the Socialite offers a compelling portrait of the Bruce family's rise, dynamics and downfall. In 1936, Roscoe Sr. lost his job when Rockefeller sold the Dunbar Apartments. His children lacked the drive and self-discipline of their forebears. The younger Clara failed to complete her studies at Radcliffe and eloped with a black actor. Roscoe Jr. embezzled money from an apartment complex he managed in New Jersey and then arranged a phony burglary to explain the absence of funds. He served 18 months in prison. The legal costs bankrupted the family.

Problems in the third generation of privileged families are standard grist for gossip columnists. But the black elite faced greater obstacles to recovery and had fewer resources and connections to fall back on than their white counterparts. No New York law firm would hire a black female attorney such as Clara Bruce. In their hour of need, the elite whites the Bruces had cultivated for decades abandoned them, refusing repeated requests for assistance. Roscoe Sr. and his wife were reduced to living for a time on welfare. Many of their relatives, including the younger Clara and her actor husband, avoided racism by passing for white. Today, Graham reports, most descendants of Sen. Bruce live as white persons -- an ironic but in some ways understandable end to a black dynasty to which Jim Crow America never truly offered a secure place.

Reviewed by Eric Foner
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Buried within this account of a black family that includes "a United States senator; a bank president; [and] a Washington socialite" is a rags to riches to welfare tale that ought to intrigue, but merely bores. Slave-born Blanche K. Bruce (1841–1898) was the first African-American to serve a full term in the United State Senate (1874–1880). Having obtained wealth in addition to political clout in Mississippi, he acquired elite class status through his marriage to Josephine Willson, daughter of a wealthy dentist whose freeborn roots extended back to the late 18th century. The first half of this repetitious family biography focuses largely on Bruce's political life, the second on his son Roscoe, who after a stint at Tuskegee returns to Washington as superintendent of "Colored Schools." The family spirals through a decline that finds Roscoe managing an apartment complex in Harlem and his sons jailed for fraud. In tracing the fortunes of the clan, Graham (Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class) allows an absorption with class status to obscure fresher areas, such as Blanche Bruce's involvement in the serious work of the black women's club movement. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

In 1878, the Times ran its first wedding announcement for a black couple: Senator Blanche Kelso Bruce, a former slave who entered the Senate in the fading days of Reconstruction (many newspapers ignored his election, assuming that he would never be seated), and Josephine Willson, a daughter of the light-skinned black élite. The Bruces established what the author calls America's first black dynasty, although its members "lived much of their lives outside of black circles." Graham, whose "Our Kind of People" profiled the black upper class, recovers the history of a family that broke barriers in Washington and at Exeter and Harvard. At the same time, he offers a devastating view of the compromises it made. The Bruces' son was an "intellectual dandy" and snob who described a black revival meeting as "a reversion into barbarism." When the family, "after years of favoring . . . white acquaintances" over "accomplished black men," was engulfed in scandal, it found that it had few allies in either community.
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker - click here to subscribe.

Blanche Kelso Bruce was born a slave, a fact he would later go to pains to avoid disclosing, and rose in 1874 to be the first black man elected to a full term in the U.S. Senate, from Mississippi no less. Bruce, a plantation owner, was also wealthy and married into a well-respected, wealthy black family, securing his position among the elite. Despite his status, Bruce compromised his place as a black leader in the post-Reconstruction era by being obsequious toward powerful racist politicians in hopes of furthering his personal ambitions. Bruce was a friend and rival of Frederick Douglass for preeminence as a black leader and was well connected enough to secure a Treasury post during the Grant administration that culminated with his name on all U.S. currency. Graham details the political machinations of the post-Reconstruction South to keep blacks from rising above servitude, the venality of congressional politics that went along with the injustices, and one man's attempts to build and maintain a dynasty in the midst of great social and political turmoil. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Harper
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0060184124
• ISBN 13: 9780060184124
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 480