As the year ends and begins, conservatives doubting their central convictions should read Stephanie Deutsch’s “You Need a Schoolhouse,” about Booker T. Washington’s alliance with Sears Roebuck mogul Julius Rosenwald, and cheer.

Do conservatives venerate what Tocqueville called “associations” — and Edmund Burke the “little platoons” of civil society — as the bonds that hold people and countries together? Washington and Rosenwald were among these “platoons”: private men who stood up for freed slaves and their children when they were cast adrift without structures to help them, and when the state itself failed to act.