Washington's assertion is a product of its time, the American Gilded Age, when the self-made man was the figure most worthy of emulation. Children learned that in the stories of Horatio Alger; adults saw it personified in figures such as Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and the Wright brothers. Is a struggle toward success as valued in American society today? Success, then and now, is gauged by the distance one ascends from one's background. That distance has narrowed. Today's great innovators and corporate titans almost all come from middle- or upper middle-class backgrounds. The most notable exceptions are among racial and ethnic minorities. Even in these groups, however, the ascent commonly begins not from an underclass but from the middle class. The most prominent current analogs to a Booker T. Washington are entertainers and athletes whose talent drives their ascent. Their success could be called anomalous -- genius is not evenly proportioned in the population -- and their 'struggle' takes place among a small coterie of similarly gifted competitors. It would be gratifying to see success-through-struggle appreciated where it really occurs, as the children of disadvantaged or working-class families move up the ladder to form comfortable and stable homes for their children, who in turn climb further rungs of society's ladder. Those stories, however, are too mundane for most of us to notice. The single mother who works two jobs and sends her kids to college doesn't have the same public appeal, and so doesn't get the same public notice, as the bad-boy superstar or the Ivy League-educated corporate titan. We are poorer as a society for not recognizing success as Washington did.
