Book Review - The Senator & the Socialite

Lawrence Otis Graham tries to tell the story of Blanche Kelso Bruce and his wife Josephine Willson Bruce in The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America's First Black Dynasty. Starting the story before the Civil War, Graham follows the “First Black Dynasty" through three generations and their ultimate fall from grace. Blanche and Josephine are only the first half of the book followed by his son and grandchildren.

Blanche Kelso Bruce was born to a slave mother and her owner in 1841. Favored because of his bloodline connection to the master, Blanche was taught to read and was well prepared for freedom when he moved to Kansas at the age of twenty-two. He studied at Oberlin College and made his way to Mississippi, where he rose quickly in politics and purchased a plantation in 1874. It was through the purchase of this plantation farmed by sharecroppers that Bruce amassed a real-estate fortune. He became the first black man to serve a full term in the United States Senate, although he would only serve one term. In 1878 Bruce married the light-skinned Josephine Willson, who was the daughter of a wealthy black Philadelphia doctor and consequently came from the North's tiny black upper class. Together they broke down racial barriers in Washington, D.C. by befriending the right people, from President Ulysses S. Grant to Frederick Douglass to John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Booker T. Washington. After serving as a United States Senator Bruce gained appointments under Presidents James A. Garfield, Chester A. Arthur, William H. Harrison, and William McKinley. The impressive rise of the couple leads to enormous wealth and status, with Bruce even having his name printed on U.S. currency through his appointment to the top Treasury Department post.

As white supremacists inflicted violence, destruction and chaos across the South with increasing boldness after Reconstruction and as southern Blacks were losing their life and liberty, the Bruces son, Roscoe Conkling Bruce, who was named for a racially liberal New York senator who was a close friend of Blanche’s, headed off to Philips Exeter Academy, a private boarding school, followed by Harvard College. While attending Harvard Roscoe spied for Booker T. Washington on Boston's 'anti-Bookerite' black radicals.

While Blanche Bruces reputation would open some doors for his son, even with a degree from Harvard nobody would hire a black man. Consequently, Roscoe was hired by and became a protégé of the powerful Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee University and eventually became the superintendent of Washington, D.C.'s segregated Black schools, a job that Tuskegee had maneuvered out of the expectant hands of W. E. B. Du Bois. Du Bois's attacks on Washington’s accommodation of white supremacy, which he published in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), were becoming increasingly popular among Washington, D.C.'s Black educated middle class. That Roscoe Bruce was hired on at Tuskegee is not happenstance, for the Bruce family shared its founder, Booker T. Washington's, philosophy of accommodation and dependence on connections with rich white people. A scandal erupted in 1919 wh8ich ended Roscoe's political career and forced his family out of Washington, D.C.

Roscoe's wife, Clara, a smart, former Radcliffe student, tried to save her family by earning a law degree at Boston University. The first Black editor of a law review in U.S. history, and the first woman, Clara's Bruce’s law career was curtailed by the lack of opportunity for Black lawyers (and women in general) in early twentieth-century America. Roscoe and Clara moved to New York in the 1920s and formed an alliance with John D. Rockefeller Jr. while becoming a force in Harlem society.

Factual errors spoil the work in many places. Graham confuses the famous Washington, D.C. minister Francis Grimke with Archibald Grimke, a Harvard-educated lawyer who lived in Boston, and refers to Paul Laurence Dunbar as a "Harlem Renaissance poet." Dunbar, who died in 1906, did most of his writing in Ohio and Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. is not now and has never been the Deep South and upper-class white and black people did mix to a surprising extent. Many Blacks found real economic and social opportunity in the city, and northern Democratic and Republican congressmen were generally considered friendly to Black Washingtonians. Graham's bibliography is extensive but does not compensate for the lack of citations and omits Constance McLaughlin Green's Pulitzer Prize-winning scholarship Washington (1963) and The Secret City: A History of Race Relations in the Nation's Capital (1967).