Abstract
Paul Lawrie’s Forging a Laboring Race explores images and discourses portraying African American workers in the United States during the Progressive Era. Lawrie asks how these images and discourses were produced, how they were circulated, and how they affected Black workers’ entry into labor markets. He argues that when they are properly contextualized, one sees how these images of race are constructed for the sake of political ends: “Reimagining race and racial difference as needs born of specific historical contexts rather than facts divests them of their seemingly natural, inevitable, and ahistorical character” (p. 172). In the case of the Progressive Era, one sees that the forces of war, capitalism, and White supremacy produced contrary images and discourses portraying Black workers in the pursuit of political ends.
Lawrie begins at the turn of the 20th century (1896–1915) when early Black migrants left the rural South to seek work in urban centers of industry. This was an anxious time for much of the White population, for rapidly urbanizing cities, the growth of U.S. imperialism abroad, and the dawn of consumerism were all putting White people in contact and competition with people of color unlike before. These anxieties engendered the image of the “vanishing Negro” (p. 14), the belief that the Black population was destined for extinction because it was biologically unfit for the modern industrial world to which it tried to adapt. Lawrie finds this image in the work of Frederick Hoffman, a German-born insurance actuary who measured Black mortality rates through a combination of statistics on crime, venereal disease, miscegenation, and “vital capacity.” In Race Traits of the American Negro, Hoffman concludes that Black mortality rates increased as Black people migrate to urban industrial centers, and he contrasts the negative effects of city life to the supposed beneficial effects of slavery, under which the Black population received paternalistic care and protection. Upon publication, Race Traits received immediate praise and inspired a “veritable cottage industry in black race suicide literature” (p. 35). This literature justified the exclusion of Black workers from the labor economy, from labor unions, from access to affordable insurance, and from urban centers of industry. The White population saw Black extinction as not only tragic and unavoidable but also a sign of their own racial superiority.
The second chapter covers the span of World War I (1914–1918), and it concerns how Black workers’ entry into industrial labor was shaped by a war-time state and a war-time economy. As White workers were drafted to fight overseas, they left behind vacancies in the workforce and tensions between capital and labor. To solve this problem, the war-time state looked to the increasing numbers of Black migrants leaving the South seeking work. The state created the Department of Negro Economics (DNE) to facilitate Black workers’ entry in the industrial, war-time labor economy. The DNE was staffed mainly by Black sociologists. Its goal was to develop expertise on Black labor, prepare Black workers for industrial occupations, and establish good relationships with White capitalists. The DNE had to fight many uphill battles, including battles against racially ordered labor markets, against chronic underfunding, and against segregationist Southern Whites. Still, they made advances in fitting Black workers into the labor market. In addition, the DNE published The Negro at Work, a study of Black workers’ employment, including where they worked, how they performed, and what their employers thought. In this study, Black workers were imagined as plastic: any deficiency in the Black worker resulted from environmental influences, not innate racial characteristics, so it could be overcome with the application of social scientific expertise. Based on this study, the DNE recommended policies for further integrating Black workers into the workforce, but the Department of Labor never acted on them. Furthermore, much of the DNE’s progress was undone by the return of soldiers from overseas who expected to return to their jobs and the privileges of whiteness.
The third chapter concerns the war-time draft (1917–1919) which provided federal agencies with data on bodies from all across the racial spectrum. The draft required potential recruits to undergo extensive physical measurements and evaluations, and the Committee on Anthropology (COA) was formed to put this data to good use. The COA hoped to use this data to build a taxonomy of racial body types, and because they insisted that different racial types were fit for different kinds of labor, they could use this taxonomy to improve the efficiency of industry and war. This committee was staffed by the “race experts” of the day, all of them White, including advocates of eugenics, avowed White supremacists, and the aforementioned Frederick Hoffman. Unfortunately for the COA, the draft did not furnish all of the data necessary to construct their taxonomy, so they formed subcommittees to continue research after the war. Their efforts culminated in Army Anthropology. To their surprise, this study suggested that Black bodies were actually superior to White bodies in some ways (though not all). These findings elicited a number of responses from the researchers: some blamed the study’s methods and data; others asserted that the advantages of the Black physique were compromised by the inferiority of the Black intellect; and still others placed their faith in future studies to clear up these ambiguities and establish a decisive racial taxonomy. Despite these reactions, this research did destabilize racial categories, and that taxonomy remained elusive.
The fourth chapter concerns the post-war state (1917–1924) and its efforts at racial labor management through a veterans’ rehabilitation program. After the war, the state was obliged to compensate its wounded and disabled veterans for their sacrifices. Compensation involved physically remaking former soldiers into working citizens, and for this task, officials created the Federal Board for Vocational Education (FBVE). However, the rehabilitation treatment varied according to the veteran’s race. White veterans’ received pathways to economic opportunity, security, and mobility. They were remade and retrained, so they could return to their patriarchal roles of family providers. Black veterans, however, received much less, if anything: they were denied claims to disability; they were denied claims to monetary compensation (especially, if it promised financial independence); they were often denied access to job training, and even when they could access it, it was limited to training for agricultural vocations; and when they needed hospitalization, they were less rehabilitated than they were institutionalized. To justify this differential treatment, officials referred to images of the Black body as inherently defective; as unproductive, diseased, and disabled; and as incapable of reaching the perfection that White male bodies could reach. Just as before, one’s race was linked to one’s alleged capacity to labor. This differential treatment secured White male dominance in labor markets, a dominance that had been threatened by the war’s destruction of White bodies, by Black migrants’ continued search for industrial work, by Black veterans’ demands for rights and equality, and by the Black men and women who had entered the workforce during the war. In short, “[t]he drive to remake broken black bodies was driven by a segregationist impulse to put the Negro in his proper occupational and social space” (p. 111).
The final chapter covers the National Research Committee (NRC) and its mission to develop and apply racial labor knowledge (1919–1929). The war affected U.S. domestic life in ways that made the White population anxious. On one hand, the White progressives were concerned about the war’s toll on the young, fit men of the White population. On the other hand, Black laborers had established themselves as part of urban industrial life, and they were seen as part of a process happening in metropolises around the world, a “global rising tide of color” that threatened to inundate “white civilization” (p. 136). Against this background, the NRC undertook numerous studies on the post-war Black population for the sake of preserving national health and productivity. NRC committees examined how the post-war Black population had metamorphosed through the experiences of migration and urbanization, each of which researchers linked with racial pathologies: migration with shiftless and moral failure; urbanization with the proliferation of degeneracy. NRC committees also examined the effects of race mixing. The committee concluded that mulattoes were an inferior race as well as a living testament to the dangers of miscegenation. All together, these NRC studies created the “new Negro type” who was the product of pathological processes and who should be contained for the health and productivity of the nation. The NRC effectively shored up racial boundaries, in part by devaluing and marginalizing Black labor.
Forging a Laboring Race includes important topics woven throughout multiple chapters which deserve at least a passing mention. One of these topics is theories of race. Intellectuals considered whether racial traits were determined by heredity or environment, debated how to establish and negotiate racial boundaries, and observed various “near-White” European ethnicities eventually congealing into a homogeneous Whiteness. Second, each chapter includes the Black intellectual community, usually featuring Du Bois. This community mobilized their talents to resist the racist agendas of White supremacists and eugenicists. The community’s responses show us what kind of anti-racist thought was possible within the intellectual milieu of the Progressive Era; often, they endorsed their own forms of nationalism, eugenics, or anti-miscegenation in attempts to undermine racist agendas. Third, gender mattered. The book documents how masculine ideals framed the meaning of work and the project of rehabilitation, how Black women were briefly integrated into the war-time economy, and how women of all races were depicted as inferior to White males. Finally, there is the history of the social sciences. Lawrie shows us how this particular social context shaped the emergence of sociology, anthropology, and various subdisciplines, including the ways in which researchers used (and abused) data and methods to advance research agendas.
Lawrie’s work makes a valuable contribution to a body of literature depicting race and racial difference throughout Western history. Lawrie’s work is distinct and commendable for capturing the interplay between material conditions and the discourses to which they give rise. By thoroughly historicizing the processes of racial knowledge production, Lawrie shows us how these contrary discourses surrounding the Black worker – the vanishing Negro, the plastic worker, the virile soldier, the pathological urbanite – are the products of particular needs for particular groups at particular times. Conversely, Lawrie reveals how these discourses altered the lives of Black workers in very material ways, fixing their places in labor and military hierarchies, or barring their access to health insurance or labor unions, for instance.
In sum, Lawrie demonstrates how the powerful were able to maintain racial hierarchies through a historical period as turbulent as the Progressive Era. the period between the end of Reconstruction and the consolidation of Jim Crow. They were able to secure these hierarchies in part by linking one’s race to one’s capacity to labor, and images of Black workers were central to this process. Lawrie’s work is suggestive for considering how much has changed in thinking about race and how much has not.