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

Paul Lawrie writes a densely-argued account of the ways American progressives used the World War I state to define and refine the labour potential of African-American bodies and the Black race as a whole. He builds on scholarship of the past thirty years that has convincingly uncovered the centrality of racial thought to Progressivism, and adds to this his research on a staggering array of committees, departments, experts, councils, boards, and other agents of the state concerned with measuring, defining, and directing the Black worker and soldier during the war years.

As Lawrie states, this is primarily a study of ideology, grounded in a study of institutions and the men who led them. (The number of agencies, with their acronyms and dense institutional histories, can grow rather numbing at times.) Experts from the fields of social science, Taylorist efficiency studies, actuarial science, eugenics, and now-unknown fields such as climatology (the study of the effects of climate on racial development) mobilized for governmental bodies to study various aspects of Black workers and the so-called "Negro problem." Black leaders, notably sociologist and activist W.E.B. DuBois, participated in this process, adopting the language of racial characteristics even as they worked against the narrative of Black inferiority.

Lawrie begins with an account of the actuarial narrative of Black life. Statisticians working for the insurance industry used indices of crime, health, and physical measurements to argue that the Black race was deteriorating. The quantification of Black life expectancy was used both to deny Blacks life insurance for their inherently diseased bodies, and to support arguments that the transition from rural slavery to urban freedom had been a form of race suicide for Blacks.

The Department of Negro Economics (dne), "the first federal agency devoted exclusively to black labor since Reconstruction" (41), along with the National Urban League, employed Black sociologists and other experts to provide an alternate narrative: African-Americans were a "plastic" race (44), which could adapt to urban conditions and industrial discipline, and thus prove their economic value. The dne was dismantled by 1919, a victim of the "southernization" of federal policy after the war and a refusal to accept Black expertise.

Lawrie's chapter on anthropometry—the measurement of the human form with an eye to racial development—is one of his most fascinating. The Committee on Anthropology and the National Research Council measured and evaluated thousands of American bodies to draw conclusions about racial types and their fitness for war and labour. Unsurprisingly, when eugenics was the intellectual currency of American social science and government policy, these measurements found Black bodies fundamentally inferior—a conclusion that matched American imperialist policies toward non-white people around the globe. Men were inspected in minute detail, in the nude, to be declared fit or unfit. Black men were frequently denied service deferments, while judged physically unfit for combat and relegated to service labour. The well-known flawed iq testing of the WWI era further supported eugenic conclusions: Black recruits' failure to answer questions such as "Where is Cornell University?" (106) proved to researchers that Blacks were hereditarily inferior, physically as well as mentally.

Racialized policy shaped soldiers' experiences after the war, when injured Black veterans returned to segregated hospital facilities with all-white staff focused on warehousing veterans, rather than rehabilitating them, operating on the assumption that Black disabilities were pre-existing and congenital.

By war's end, white experts perceived it as a dysgenic event, detrimental to the future of the white race. They sought to harness the power of the wartime state and the data gathered to set new racial policy for the US. This "eugenic statism" (136) informed the creation of the National Research Council. Social scientists, secure in the belief that race was a knowable problem solved by state power, evolved a theory of the New Negro...