The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe was published by Doubleday, Page & Company in 1912, co-authored with Robert Ezra Park, a sociologist who would later help found the Chicago School of sociology. Washington and Park traveled through Europe in 1910, visiting the poorest workers and peasants — Sicilian sulfur miners, London slum dwellers, Polish agricultural laborers, Danish dairy farmers, Bohemian factory workers — and comparing their conditions to those of Black Americans.
Washington’s conclusion was characteristically provocative and strategically useful: in many material respects, the Black farmer in Alabama was better off than the European peasant. He had more land, better food, greater economic mobility, and stronger community institutions. The argument served Washington’s domestic agenda — if conditions in the American South were not the worst in the world, the case for radical political change was weakened, and the case for patient economic development was strengthened.
The book is a fascinating document of comparative sociology, whatever one thinks of its political purpose. Washington’s descriptions of European poverty are vivid and specific — the sulfur mines of Sicily, the tenements of East London, the feudal estates of Poland — and his comparative method, while tendentious, produces genuine insights about the relationship between political rights and material conditions.
Collecting The Man Farthest Down
First edition (Doubleday, Page & Co., New York, 1912): Cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, near fine: $200–$500
- Very good: $80–$200
- Good: $30–$80