Introduction: Duty Now For The Future

The confidential report begins with a scene of heat and hope-laden tranquility: “Don’t stop around here, but let us go down to Firestone where all is fine.” So sing the Gio hammock men in response to the “big rubber farm” that had recently been established in Liberia. At least according to George Schwab, who had been commissioned by the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company in 1928 to investigate the culture of Liberia and the prospects of turning it toward the advantage of its newest subsidiary, the Firestone Plantations Company. The hammock men and their relaxed singing style, surmises Schwab, give blessing to the latest scheme of civilized transformation of their world: “The hammock men were but singing the general feeling of the interior people about this great undertaking.”¹ Although the hammock men were singing specifically of Firestone, such undertakings had been going on for over a century when this plot of West African land first became the focus of the American Colonization Society.

The Firestone’s agribusiness in Harbel, Liberia (the town named after Harvey S. Firestone and his wife, Idabelle), was a continuation of the missionary edge of earlier colonizations. When Firestone contracted Harvard University to initiate an ethnographic expedition, Professor Earnest Hooton tapped Schwab to lead it given his previous experience in producing a 1:1,000.000 map of Africa that was used by the Colonel House Committee in the Paris Peace negotiations. Schwab quickly took an eightmonth leave of absence from his position at the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions in order to travel to Liberia.²

The systematicity of the nineteenth-century missionary enterprise had intensified by the time Schwab felt whatever pressures to see what he saw, smell what he smelt, and to write what he wrote. In his report, the desired movement to be tracked is alive—wider, faster, and deeper than mere territory and the stationary folks upon it. It is an approach to reform by an organization that is, at once, rooted in nineteenth-century modes of governmentality and early-twentieth-century managerial-speak. But it also anticipates a second-order systems phenomenon—a coordination and integration of systems—of race, of reason and resources, of space and time, of behavior and belief down to the molecular details of diet.

When Schwab arrives in Liberia in 1928 it is fitting that he travels along routes that connect Missionary outposts: from the Methodist Episcopal Mission Station (6) to the Protestant Episcopal Mission (10) to the Baptist Mission station (12) to the Pentecostal Mission (14) to the Presbyterian Mission (17) up to the boundary that separates the coastlands from the interior. Schwab notes the regrettable lack of missions in the interior just as he himself crosses into the narrative space of ethnographic detail. “Before moving across the threshold we spent a few days measuring men,” writes Schwab (9), suggesting that the greatness of “this great undertaking” (1) is a product of the population’s potential labor value, or more precisely, the report’s single-minded focus on this potential and desire to lay out a reasonable path toward its maximum capitalization (41).

Schwab’s report is simultaneously a biopolitical blueprint, corporate strategy session, self-help mirror, and strange confession, all the while turning workers into so many objects—resources to be managed, placated, tortured, deployed—separating the life of men—their faults and potentialities—from the means of production. The future is ever at stake, the goal being to secure “a more permanent and contented working force” (68). “As to which tribe would be most suited for any particular branch of plantation work, it takes some years of experimenting with workmen to really find out” (41).

Racial categories come to the fore in Schwab’s calculation of the labor potential of different tribes. In their accumulation, they achieve the appearance of totality, of accounting for life itself, in Liberia: their sensitivity to pain, “olefactory and taste system[s],” their mobility of character (24), their egoism and affections (25), their bonds of friendship and family (26), their moral faculties (27), their “self-interest, caprice [and] gross mysticism” as...