In Virginia in 1743, Lawrence Washington, the charming son of a middle-rank planter, married Anne Fairfax of the colony’s richest, most powerful family, and went on to make history after he died. He was exceedingly fond of his half-brother George, badly schooled and unhappy at home with his shrew of a mother. He took the boy with him into his new family, as if he were his own son.
It was at Belvoir, the Fairfax estate, that George learned to mix with the rich and the worldly, absorbed what they said about playwrights and power and copied their manners and speech. The Fairfaxes hired him to do his first job, which gave him the money to start buying property. This helped him to his high rank in the local militia, where he started the Seven Years’ War almost by accident, and emerged from it a soldier of note.
Because he was a property owner and a celebrity, George was a suitable match for a pretty young widow who had lost her first husband, and it was the fortune she brought him that lifted him to the very top rank of Virginia society: A well-rounded military, mercantile and political leader who was ready to answer when destiny called.
A century later, Booker T. Washington, born into slavery and the chaos it fostered, got his first taste of order when still a pre-teen. He took a job as a houseboy with Viola Ruffner, a former school mistress, in her native Vermont. She “gave him attention, structure, encouragement,” taught him to keep house and keep up with his reading, and urged him to apply to the Hampton Academy in eastern Virginia, established after the war by a Civil War veteran for the education of teenaged black boys. Tuskegee followed, and a distinguished career as a civil rights leader. The teacher had done her job well.
At the age of 13, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina had been in some trouble, failing in school and afraid of the future, with an overworked mother and no father at home. In a Chick-fil-A near the theater where he worked after school he caught the eye of the owner, John Moniz, who, seeing him try to make meals out of French fries and water, gave him a sandwich and what turned into several years worth of instruction in how to do well in business and life. It was an education he could not have found elsewhere, and it would be critical. As Scott wrote years later, “In the course of three or four years, John transformed my way of thinking, which changed my life.”
What do the Fairfaxes, Mrs. Ruffner and John Moniz all share? All functioned as mentors — strangers who came to the aid of disadvantaged young people by providing the advice, training and socialization they needed to flourish. Mentors taught George Washington how to be an aristocrat, Booker T. Washington how to live like a gentleman and Tim Scott how to talk, think and act like a businessman — which is what he became after college.
What mentors do is give youngsters the tools that they need to change social classes. They are critical factors in social mobility. Scott, one member of the United States Senate who comes from a truly humble background, is justly concerned with helping young people avoid a bad outcome. If so, finding a way to make mentors available to more and more children might be a good way to start.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
