Forging a Laboring Race: The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination by Paul R. D. Lawrie (review)

Through lynchings, mobs, labor strikes, and more subtle expressions of white supremacy, white Southerners obstructed black Americans' transformation from bonded to paid laborers after the Civil War. Anxious too about greater equality with blacks during the Reconstruction era, Southern whites started to build the architecture for a Jim Crow South. Historians have long explained that many black Americans responded to the terrors and humiliations of an apartheid regime by moving to the Northern United States in search of the inter-connected promises of greater work opportunities and a more meaningful sense of freedom. There, in the industrial plants of northern cities, African Americans became modern industrial workers.

Historian Paul R. D. Lawrie acknowledges this narrative of the Great Migration in his new book on black industrial labor, Forging a Laboring Race: The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination. Indeed, he writes that a significant number of black Americans migrated to the North in the early years of the twentieth century (45). However, he cautions his readers from equating this Northern migration with black Americans' transformation into industrial laborers in the United States. Disrupting contemporary literature on the African American experience and industrial modernity, Lawrie posits that the state apparatus during the First World War, "and military service in particular—provided" Northern and Southern black Americans alike "their defining exposure to the systems of industrial modernity" (6). By investigating the federal government's role in shaping the contours of black industrial labor during the Progressive Era, the author eschews historians' long-standing regional focus in their histories of African Americans' evolution into industrial workers.

Even more, Lawrie distinguishes himself from many labor historians by writing an intellectual rather than a social history. In this vein, the author explains that Forging a Laboring Race presents the story of an idea:

[I]t is both the story of the black worker in the Progressive imagination, and the story of how a collection of thinkers across the natural and social sciences considered the role of the black worker in the nation's industrial past, present, and future, and how these bodies of thought proved crucial in the making of the U.S. industrial state in peace and war (4).

Focusing on the turn of the twentieth century, the author provides five chapters largely proceeding in chronological order from 1896 to 1929, with the First World War playing a central role in the narrative. As Lawrie explains, the war "turned the African American worker into a national industrial factor" and "produced a wealth of social scientific racial knowledge" (8, 10).

The author begins his book by describing the late-nineteenth-century work of Prudential Life Insurance statistician and actuary, Frederick L. Hoffman, who predicted that black Americans would adapt poorly to industrialization and thus would grow extinct as a people in a modernizing United States. This white German immigrant "insisted that blacks had experienced irrevocable long-term physiological damage by way of their removal from Africa and subsequent manumission from a benevolent and nurturing slavery. From both a spatial and evolutionary perspective, working black bodies were out of space and out of time" (30). Far from being an outlier, Lawrie explains that Hoffman became a key thinker on race in the United States. In practice, this statistician's work contributed to the exclusion of blacks from the mainstream insurance industry and also inspired "a veritable cottage industry in black race suicide literature" (35).

In the second and third chapters, the author marches ahead in his chronology and expands his scope of analysis beyond individual scholars to discuss how leading social scientific thought on race impacted the wartime black worker and draft. Looking to the postwar world, the fourth and fifth chapters investigate the relationship between postwar knowledge production on black racial inferiority and black veterans' rehabilitation, along with the continued problematization of the black laborer. Lawrie concludes the book by...