“It is as though Nature must needs make men narrow in order to give them force,” he wrote of Booker T. Washington, but it was not “Nature” that created the enduring image of Washington; it was the fine Machiavellian hand of Du Bois. In order to render his subject a more wieldy symbol, Du Bois found it convenient to exaggerate his narrowness. The doctor's brilliant surgery on Washington's image – so ingenious and so disingenuous – is comparable to the scalpel wielding that Thomas Jefferson performed on George Washington. Scrupulously antiseptic hands such as those of Jefferson and Du Bois are careful to avoid charges of intentional contamination. Each meticulously professed admiration for his respective Washington's intellectual power and insight. Jefferson did not say that the father of his country was mediocre, only that he lacked the genius of an Isaac Newton; he did not say that he lapsed into royalism, only that he might be in the company of others who were perceived as doing so. Du Bois did not say that the Sage of Tuskegee was pedestrian, only that he lacked the imagination of a Socrates or the beatific vision of a St. Francis. Persons like Jefferson and Du Bois are so skillfully incisive that the results of their snipping and suturing are undetectable to the credulous. Usually those who inherit such carefully molded impressions of personalities and events have no inkling of their derivations.