Forging a Laboring Race: The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination

by Paul R.D. Lawrie

Overview

Foregrounds the working black body as both a category of analysis and lived experience

“How does it feel to be a problem?” asked W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk. For many thinkers across the color line, the “Negro problem” was inextricably linked to the concurrent “labor problem,” occasioning debates regarding blacks’ role in the nation’s industrial past, present and future. With blacks freed from the seemingly protective embrace of slavery, many felt that the ostensibly primitive Negro was doomed to expire in the face of unbridled industrial progress. Yet efforts to address the so-called “Negro problem” invariably led to questions regarding the relationship between race, industry and labor writ large. In consequence, a collection of thinkers across the natural and social sciences developed a new culture of racial management, linking race and labor to color and the body. Evolutionary theory and industrial management combined to identify certain peoples with certain forms of work and reconfigured the story of races into one of development and decline, efficiency and inefficiency, and the thin line between civilization and savagery.

Forging a Laboring Race charts the history of an idea—race management—building on recent work in African American, labor, and disability history to analyze how ideas of race, work, and the “fit” or “unfit” body informed the political economy of early twentieth-century industrial America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781479827558
Publisher:	New York University Press
Publication date:	11/21/2023
Series:	Culture, Labor, History , #11
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	243
File size:	702 KB

About the Author

Paul R.D. Lawrie is Associate Professor of History and Senior Fellow, Institute of Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Imagining Negro Laboring Types in Fin de Siècle America 1

1 Mortality as the Life Story of a People: Frederick L. Hoffman and Actuarial Narratives of African American Extinction, 1896-1915 13

2 The Negro Is Plastic: The Department of Negro Economics, Sociology, and the Wartime Black Worker 39

3 Measuring Men for the Work of War: Anthropometry, Race, and the Wartime Draft, 1917-1919 71

4 Salvaging the Negro: Vocational Rehabilitation and African American Veterans, 1917-1924 109

5 A New Negro Type: The National Research Council and the Production of Racial Expertise in Postwar America, 1919-1929 135

Epilogue: Invisible Men: The Afterlives of the Negro Problem in American Racial Thought 169

Notes 173

Bibliography 209

Index 225

About the Author 231

Editorial Reviews

"A stimulating account of the uses of sciences and the state in defining blackness in the services of war and capitalism, and important reading for any scholar of race, the progressive era, or modernity."

Canadian Journal of History

"The book is a reminder of the need to examine the production, dissemination, and broad acceptance of scientific knowledge in historical context, and does so itself in a compact analysis that will interest scholars of race and ethnicity, progressivism, state formation, and the history of science."

Choice

"A painstakingly thorough examination of the black worker as a commodity and a concept within the Progressive imagination. . . . Lawrie boldly demonstrates how a race-based form of industrial capitalism was central to the making of the modern U.S. state during the Progressive Era."

Davarian L. Baldwin

"Forging A Laboring Race is an important and imaginative contribution to the history of race and labor in the Progressive Era. It is also a brisk, powerful, and re-orienting critique of the very notion of 'the black worker' as a discrete category of experience. This notion was produced by myriad think tanks, self-professed social scientists, and busy-bodied state agencies, and it had real consequences for the men and women who arrived in the urban North in the first Great Migration. It persists to this day."

Brown University Matthew Pratt Guterl

"Lawrie demonstrates that difference, and most specifically blackness, has been conceived as problematic by Americans. Unfortunately, Americans continue to struggle with the question of whether a diverse group of people can form and maintain a cohesive and strong nation. In our contemporary period, those who say it cannot be done continue to rely on false data; in this matter, Lawries work can help us greet the future as well as the past."

Canada and the United States

"Forging A Laboring Race is an important and imaginative contribution to the history of race and labor in the Progressive Era. It is also a brisk, powerful, and re-orienting critique of the very notion of 'the black worker' as a discrete category of experience. This notion was produced by myriad think tanks, self-professed social scientists, and busy-bodied state agencies, and it had real consequences for the men and women who arrived in the urban North in the first Great Migration. It persists to this day."

Matthew Pratt Guterl

"The book is a reminder of the need to examine the production, dissemination, and broad acceptance of scientific knowledge in historical context, and does so itself in a compact analysis that will interest scholars of race and ethnicity, progressivism, state formation, and the history of science."- Choice

“A painstakingly thorough examination of the black worker as a commodity and a concept within the Progressive imagination. . . . Lawrie boldly demonstrates how a race-based form of industrial capitalism was central to the making of the modern U.S. state during the Progressive Era."-Davarian L. Baldwin,Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies, Trinity College

"A stimulating account of the uses of sciences and the state in defining blackness in the services of war and capitalism, and important reading for any scholar of race, the progressive era, or modernity."- Canadian Journal of History

" Forging A Laboring Race is an important and imaginative contribution to the history of race and labor in the Progressive Era. It is also a brisk, powerful, and re-orienting critique of the very notion of 'the black worker' as a discrete category of experience. This notion was produced by myriad think tanks, self-professed social scientists, and busy-bodied state agencies, and it had real consequences for the men and women who arrived in the urban North in the first Great Migration. It persists to this day."-Matthew Pratt Guterl,Brown University

“Lawrie demonstrates that difference, and most specifically blackness, has been conceived as problematic by Americans. Unfortunately, Americans continue to struggle with the question of whether a diverse group of people can form and maintain a cohesive and strong nation. In our contemporary period, those who say it cannot be done continue to rely on false data; in this matter, Lawrie’s work can help us greet the future as well as the past.”- Canada and the United States

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