“A race may be interesting, gentle and hospitable; but if it is not a useful race in the common acceptation of that term, it is only a question of time when a downward course must take place.”
—Frederick L. Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, 1896
In November 1884, Frederick Ludwig Hoffman, a nineteen-year-old journeyman laborer from Oldenburg in northwestern Germany, arrived in New York City with little more than the proverbial dollar in his pocket. Despite lacking an extensive formal education, the young émigré was a proud autodidact determined to make a name for himself in America. Following a string of unsuccessful jobs—including a brief stint collecting insurance premiums door-to-door in Boston—Hoffman decided to try his luck south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Hoffman found Dixie to be a “veritable paradise perfumed with the sweet smells of magnolia and oleander” and accompanied by leisurely “paddles down Edenic rivers.”1 This southern reprieve was soon shattered during a trip down the Mississippi aboard the City of New Orleans, where he witnessed “the truly horrible brutality practiced on the Negro deck hands” by their white shipmates. Despite his initial sympathy for the “much maligned Negroes,” Hoffman was transfixed by the spectacle of laboring black bodies: “Though they were grossly ignorant, they would carry for long hours heavy sacks of corn, up and down the gangplank, leading at a steep angle to the shore.”2 Hoffman’s fascination with the deck hands’ “incredible performance of labor” and their “savage vitality” echoed prevailing notions of blacks as little more than atavistic beasts of burden—pitiable reminders of a rapidly vanishing preindustrial culture.3
Hoffman’s experience aboard the City of New Orleans proved fortuitous. His introduction to the brutal complexities of American race relations led to a lifelong interest in African Americans, provided the subtext for his future actuarial investigations of racial health, and gave him access to the era’s institutional and ideological networks of vocational education. Hoffman chose to remain in the South and soon found work at the Life Insurance Company of Virginia in Norfolk. In 1890, while traveling aboard a train bound for Hampton, Hoffman was overheard discussing the incident aboard the City of New Orleans by Frances Morgan Armstrong, the spouse of General Samuel Armstrong, founder of Hampton Institute. Born and raised in Hawaii by missionary parents, Samuel Armstrong claimed “a deep familiarity with the tropical colored races” and had founded Hampton in 1868 to inculcate the freed-people with much needed “habits of industry and health.”4 Yet as the nineteenth century drew to a close, even self-professed “friends of the Negro” such as Armstrong had begun to doubt the efficacy of vocational education, given blacks’ “congenital aversion towards labor.” Like the Indian before him, the Negro seemed destined for racial death as a prerequisite for the nation’s continued progress.5
This chapter examines the efforts of Frederick L. Hoffman—a statistician and actuary with Prudential Life Insurance—to chart the initial stages of African American proletarianization through actuarial narratives of race suicide. Actuarial science, a key tool of racial labor division in turn-of-the-century American political economy, reveals the ways in which the era’s managerial elites came to understand shifts in the national labor market in explicitly corporeal terms—to try and map shifts in the labor economy onto working bodies. In works such as “Vital Statistics of the Negro” (1892), the seminal Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896), and various other studies undertaken on behalf of Prudential, Hoffman used the metrics of crime, miscegenation, and the broadly defined “vital capacity” (a measure of respiratory health) to quantify the respective social, physical and economic effects of African Americans’ transition from bonded to contract labor.6 Actuarial assessments of African Americans as insurable “risks” were both economic and cultural evaluations of their past, present, and future labor fitness. Indeed, as Brian Glenn notes, “Actuaries rate risks in many different ways, depending on the stories they tell about which characteristics are important, and which are not.” These “stories” invariably adhere to prevailing gender, class, and racial hierarchies that “may be irrelevant to predicting actual losses.” For Glenn, “almost every aspect of the insurance industry is predicated on stories first, then numbers.”7 The story of Negro progress—or lack thereof—was one of a people in decline. Freed from the supposed protection of slavery, the congenitally criminal, mongrel, and tubercular Negro seemed destined to expire amid the mechanized rhythms of modern industrial civilization according to this view. The imperatives of rapid industrialization, imperialism, mass consumerism, and white supremacy necessitated the creation of the “vanishing Negro”: a debased inferior “other” against which the progress of white civilization could be measured and monetized.
The cultural and intellectual landscape of turn of the twentieth century America was littered with an array of self-described “race experts” working to solve the “Negro question.” An eclectic mix of anthropologists, sociologists, scientists, physicians, writers, and actuaries vied to define, delineate, and quantify the vast socioeconomic and cultural changes brought on by the transition of blacks from slavery to freedom. Frederick Hoffman’s status as a young actuary with an interest in racial reform gave him a unique prospective on the character and constitution of the color line. Following their chance encounter on the rails, Hoffman and the Armstrongs became close friends—and, under the latter’s tutelage, Hoffman gained an appreciation of the domestic “Negro problem” as part of a larger global race problem that stretched from the pineapple plantations of Hawaii to the cotton fields of Dixie.8 The question of what to do with the Negro was tied to the broader demands of contemporary political economy: delineating which peoples could do which kinds of work via the logic of industrial evolution whereby the working body was reconstituted as an index of civilizational fitness or lack thereof.9
Applied sciences such as anthropology, actuarial science, and anthropometry (the statistical measurement of the human body) emerged in response to cultural anxieties regarding the social, economic, and physical costs of industrial civilization. Economists and social scientists such as Richard Ely and Thorstein Veblen developed new evolutionary models of political economy that sought to reconcile racial form to economic function. Attendant theories of race suicide represented the most extreme versions of these new forms of thinking—a zero sum logic in which one race would have to perish for another to thrive. For Hoffman, “statistics was the science of numbers applied to the life history of communities, nations, or races.”10 Emerging ideas of the nation-state as an organic entity led many to conclude that black extinction, while necessary and perhaps even desirable, was nevertheless fraught with social, economic, and health risks for blacks and whites alike.
Progressive Era America experienced a shift in understandings of political economy as the social relationships between production and consumption, to one dominated by economic theories seeking to reframe these relations on a more axiomatic and mathematical basis. Scholars have described this as a shift from proprietary to corporate capitalism, citing the turn of the century transatlantic world as a period awash in “an avalanche of numbers.” Quantification was privileged as a superior form of producing knowledge about the social and natural worlds.11 Theodore Porter notes how statistics combined a utopian urge for order with the modern drive for efficiency. Much like banking and accounting, Porter posits insurance as the “classic information industry.”12 However, as Joan Scott reminds us, the very practice of quantification is rooted in the imperatives of power, surveillance and discipline.13 Statistics—or “state numbers”—consolidated the development of the modern industrial state through indices of population, trade, manufacture, and mortality that aided in the shaping of public policy.
Yet from their inception statistics were deeply informed by racial considerations. In the late 1860s, Francis Galton—a cousin of Charles Darwin—used the normal, or Gaussian, method of distribution to transform statistics from a science devoted to the accumulation of socially useful data to one characterized by systematic mathematical theory. He was especially interested in the distribution of deviations, or regressions, from the mean as they related to human populations and the regulation of the gene pool. Galton named this applied science, eugenics, a mixture of Greek terms literally defined as “well born” or the practice of “better breeding.” From its inception, eugenics linked state- and nation-building to biology, which by the early twentieth century had taken on a far more explicit racial tone.14 Galton’s protégé Karl Pearson, the founder of modern mathematical statistics embraced a fully positivist ethos whereby the world consisted not of material objects but of perceptions. The role of science—or statistics more specifically- was to provide shape to the natural and social world material: method not material would prove to be the unifying logic of modern scientific inquiry. This subjective taxonomic impulse to order the world not as it was but as it should be was imbricated in the late nineteenth-century processes of race and state making.15
In the waning years of the nineteenth century, managerial elites developed intricate taxonomies of racial types to order the era’s shifting labor demographics. These new “bodies of knowledge” married form to function, linking the right peoples to the right kinds of work. And though the manner and degree of inquiry may have differed, antebellum and industrial era black bodies were united through their common commodification. Valuation was implicit in the analyses and quantification of working bodies from the slave block to the factory floor.16 Unlike whites, black laborers claimed the dubious distinction of having been literal commodities only a generation prior. Post emancipation blacks had found themselves condemned to the debt peonage of sharecropping shut out of most industrial service jobs and consigned to the margins of the nation’s labor economies. Hoffman’s actuarial narratives of black race suicide—through their transposing of flesh and blood bodies into abstract statistical values—were key examples of the contentious nature of race and nation making in turn-of-the-century America. For example, under the direction of Francis Amasa Walker, the late nineteenth-century census became a key mechanism of racial categorization in the newly reconstituted American republic. At a time of increasing black occupational mobility, actuarial models of black extinction were a means to preserve the race’s social containment.17
Across the nation the rise of mass consumer culture and its attendant technologies—such as the railroads—had eroded many of the traditional markers of racial identity. Within the South, a growing demand for unskilled and semiskilled labor in urban centers had allowed blacks to make small but persistent gains in real estate and small business capital. To the dismay of many whites, the New Negro was wealthier, more mobile, and more assertive than his predecessor of only a few decades ago.18 The figure of “the vanishing Negro” became both an explanatory model of contemporary political economy and a utopian vision of a nation free from the scourge of blackness. “Fantasies of auto genocide or racial suicide” writes Patrick Brantlinger, “are extreme versions of blaming the victim, which throughout the last three centuries have helped to rationalize the genocidal aspects of European conquest and colonization.” Theories of black race suicide worked to alleviate lingering fears over societal and industrial degeneration “by replacing the imperiled white race as victim, with the self-extinguishing savage as sacrifice” to the greater social good.19 By the late nineteenth century, valuation of the greater social good was almost entirely measured within the cash nexus of a new corporatist national economy—one in which the very experiences of life and death were transposed into marketable insurable commodities on the open market.
The American insurance industry originated in the working classes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, American workers banded together in their respective occupations to mutualize the various risks endemic to wage labor. Heretofore, working people lived in constant fear of an unexpected illness, accident, or job loss. In response, they formed mutual benefit societies to provide members with funds for services such as burial insurance. Dan Rodgers notes that though these societies were notoriously unstable and actuarially unsound—often functioning as little more than a lottery—no form of organization set down deeper roots in the working classes.20 Mutual aid societies were widespread among the coal miners of Appalachia, the industrial immigrant workers of Chicago, and African American workers nationwide. Regardless of their ethnic affiliations, these societies were defined by their informal and often corruptible nature. In The Philadelphia Negro (1899), the black sociologist W. E. B. DuBois noted that while some of the city’s black societies were “honest efforts, most were swindling imitations of the pernicious white petty insurance societies.”21 Industrial insurance extracted the single most important aspect of the mutual aid society, burial costs, for use in a business contract with only one condition: payment. As the availability of insurance was reduced to a matter of revenue divorced from social standing, this produced a leveling effect in the “corporeal commodification” of working peoples and working bodies.22 Jackson Lears argues that just as the movement for “sound money sought to tie ephemeral paper to the intrinsic value of gold. . . . modern forms of racism provided similar solidity to personal identity” in a secularizing uncertain market society. Actuarial science and the demands of a white supremacist political economy produced what Lears defines as a “biological personhood” along strictly racial lines.23
Following the Civil War, the major insurance companies insured African Americans on an equal basis with whites. This arrangement lasted until 1881 when Prudential became the first company to reduce life benefits to blacks by one-third while requiring that they still pay premiums in their original amount. Prudential was supported in its efforts by the Insurance Commissioner of Massachusetts, who concluded that this practice “was not a distinction on account of color, but on account of the differences in longevity between the two races apparently supported by mortality statistics.”24 The report dismissed any notion of racial prejudice, stating that, “to compel a company to insure for the same rates, different classes of people, with different prospects of longevity, would be to establish a grossly unjust discrimination against the longer-lived class in favor of the shorter lived class.”25 The editors of the trade journal Spectator concurred arguing, “the color line is not drawn simply because the applicants are negroes—the world is too progressive for that—but a distinction is made on account of the fact that companies cannot afford to grant policies at the same rates to colored as to white applicants and any legislation which is intended to force them to do so is particularly tyrannous.”26 In the end, industry officials saw the free market as an organic expression of evolutionary theory, delineating the “fit” from the “unfit” along monetary lines.
Blacks vigorously contested Prudential’s exclusionary practices in the courts. They achieved a measure of success at the local level, by citing the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws.” In 1884, the Massachusetts legislature passed a law forbidding the custom of providing fewer benefits to blacks who were paying the same premiums as whites. Similar laws were passed in Connecticut in 1887, and Ohio in 1889, due in part by pressure from middle class blacks, and an overall push to regulate the industry at the federal level. When New York State introduced an anti-discriminatory bill in 1891, Leslie Ward, the vice president of Prudential, published a letter in an industry trade journal threatening to end sales to African Americans altogether should the legislation pass. Ward’s pleas were ignored and New York passed the measure in 1891, followed by Michigan in 1893.27 Actuarial expertise was key to making the case for the insurance industry’s refusal to insure blacks on an equal basis as whites. The work of one young actuary in particular, Frederick Hoffman, proved instrumental to proponents of anti-black insurance policies in New Jersey. Hoffman’s “Vital Statistics of the Negro” (1892)—published in the Arena—cited extensive evidence of blacks declining health, “reversion to savagery,” and inevitable extinction, all of which made them unprofitable insurance risks.28 In 1893, Hoffman became a regular contributor to the trade journal Spectator, writing primarily on issues related to health and race. The following year, he took a job in Prudential’s new statistical department at its Newark headquarters, where he began work on what would be his second work, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. Hoffman would remain with Prudential for nearly forty years writing on a variety of issues such as race, cancer, suicide, alcoholism, and national health insurance.29
In the wake of Reconstruction, rapid industrialization, mass immigration to the north and legalized racial segregation in the New South, a national debate arose over whether the assumedly primitive Negro could survive the brave new world of American industrial modernity. This shift from social to biological interpretations of black inferiority was echoed by leading intellectuals such as Nathaniel Shaler, Dean of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard who noted, “Despite the strong spring of life within the race the inherited qualities of Negroes to a great degree unfit them to carry the burden of our own modern civilization.”30 The famed Progressive Era economist Charles Beard echoed prevailing sociocultural interpretations of labor economies when he declared that “modern civilization is industrial,” thereby reconstituting industry as an index of civilizational (read: racial) development—or lack thereof.31 Like many of his peers, Beard believed the fittest races to be laboring races: industrial labor being distinct and superior to the primitivism of handicraft labor, given its associations with both the pre modern and the feminine. Indeed the gendered, patriarchal, and racial nature of this discourse posited any and all working types as resolutely white and male.32
Progressives believed that like the American Indian before him, the Negro was marked for extinction. Yet in contrast to the noble Indian brave who had admirably resisted his fate with manly vigor, blacks were seemingly destined to simply expire through sloth and indifference. From the minstrel stage to the brutal spectacle of lynching, the degraded black body was seen as both cause and consequence of racial depravity.33 In the waning years of the nineteenth century, biological theories of black degeneration were increasingly linked to the failures of Reconstruction and blacks’ ill-fated participation in the political sphere. Popular opinion maintained that slavery had insulated blacks from the enfeebling effects of the free market and direct competition with the superior white wage laborer. Dr. Edwin Bushee, a Boston physician, argued that high black mortality and infectious disease rates were due in part “to the many subtle influences which uniformly cause an inferior race to quickly disappear when in direct contact with a higher civilization,” thereby confirming the evolutionary basis of social and or civilizational development.34
Elites viewed the enfeebled bodies of the first generation of freed people as cautionary tales, testaments to Reconstruction’s failure, and the hubris of reformers and philanthropists who had foolishly worked to uplift the Negro in defiance of the laws of biology. Moreover, many believed that slavery had compelled the seemingly indolent Negro to labor and that in its absence blacks would revert to their inherent slothfulness. Dr. Eugene R. Corson of Savannah noted that “many of these Negroes now passing away, are survivors of the old regime, where they were well cared for, and had reached at emancipation a safe age which kept them out of the struggle for life . . . the younger generations have been deprived from birth from such protection.”35 Historian James Bryce concurred: “The census just taken [in 1890] relieves . . . a source of anxiety. It is now clear that the Negro, long regarded as a factor in the community, is becoming physically weaker; nor is the prospect likely to be arrested.”36
Frederick Hoffman’s first publication, “Vital Statistics of the Negro” (1892) dealt directly with the issue of black extinction. Hoffman drew on secondary data gleaned from census—along with sociological, medical, and military sources—to make the argument that black health had precipitously declined following emancipation. Like many of his peers, he pointed to blacks declining share of the nation’s total population—from 18.1% (in 1830) to 11.9% (in 1890).37 Selective readings of the incomplete eleventh and twelfth censuses (1890, 1900) led many observers to predict that African Americans would become extinct inside of three to four generations. However, Hoffman conceded that the decrease in African American’s share of the population, if not their actual decline in numbers, was due in large part to the massive influx of immigrants to the urban north, in contrast to the relatively immigrant poor South, home to 90% of the nation’s black population. Subsequently, he confined his analysis to “native populations” (defined as those individuals who lived in their state of birth) of only five southern states: Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. But in all five states the rate of natural increase—the excess of birth over deaths—occurred exclusively in the white as opposed to the black population. Hoffman concluded that, “something must be radically wrong in a constitution thus subject to decay. Even if he (blacks) be placed on equal grounds (to the white) he still will exhibit ‘his race proclivity to disease and death’” seemingly confirming the Negro as impervious to even the most salutary environmental conditions.38
Actuaries defined mortality as the primary arbiter of individual and racial health. For Hoffman, mortality was nothing less than “the life story of a people.”39Actuaries tracked mortality rates using “life tables,” which indicated the probability of a person—for each year of their life—dying before their next birthday.40 An analysis of life tables in Hoffman’s early work, along with tables published in the journal of the American Statistical Association from 1892 to 1900, revealed a disproportionate rate of Negro and mulatto mortality with each successive year of their respective life spans. Further examination of white and black life tables in four northern, and four southern, cities from 1880 through 1890 revealed that the rate of black mortality was in greatest excess of whites under the age of fifteen—approximately 300%—and between the ages of fifteen and forty-five—approximately 220%. African American mortality also broke along gendered lines: under the age of twenty-five, mortality rates were much higher for males than females, a trend which continued without exception through all periods of life.41 For Hoffman, black decline was rooted entirely in biology: “It is not in the conditions of life, but in the race traits and tendencies that we find the causes of excessive mortality.”42
Hoffman’s initial claims of black mortality—in both “Vital Stats” and later in Race Traits—were colored by the socioeconomic and cultural dynamics of Jim Crow. To gain an accurate sense of blacks natural increase—or lack thereof, birth rates had to be measured against corresponding death rates. Yet isolated rural blacks often failed to report births or deaths to the local white registrar, who in turn generally neglected to collect accurate data on resident black families. Statisticians tried to compensate by inferring the number of live births through a comparison of the consecutive decennial census. The distinction of “live births” is essential in that it did not account for the massive infant mortality rate among blacks.43 Nevertheless, Hoffman asserted that it was “probably true” that the African American birth rate was more than whites, based on comparable data from the British West Indies and the northern states of Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, which, despite their small black populations, revealed a white birth rate nearly double that of blacks. African Americans’ “gross immorality, early and excessive intercourse of the sexes” caused both unsanitary living conditions and high rates of venereal disease and tuberculosis among the race nationwide.44 Hoffman’s work on “Vital Statistics” shattered his belief in the transformative benefits of vocational education and led him to echo the most dire forecasts of black health: “The Negro, no matter how well educated, is not the mental or physical equal of the European, and the free “low-down” Negro will pass into a sure and deserved oblivion,” thereby ensuing social progress.45
Across the social and natural sciences, the black body became a repository for a shifting constellation of various social ills—crime, sexual deviance, miscegenation and poverty—from which the wider white public had to be protected. Emergent ideologies of social biology—whereby social processes were both a cause and effect of biological imperatives—transformed blackness from an identity to a contagion that threatened the very fabric of American civilization. Beginning with “Vital Stats,” Hoffman cast urban blacks as the prime purveyors of black degeneration. African Americans’ idea that “freedom was free-er” in the towns and cities of the South stimulated a mass intra-regional migration which became particularly pronounced by the 1890s. From 1865 to 1895, the percentage of the black population of the sixteen largest southern cities had risen just over 242%, compared to an increase of 94% for whites.46 This migration was seasonal in nature, characterized by the rhythms of the cotton harvests and the restraints of regional black codes. Hoffman defined black migration to the towns and cities of the New South as “one of the most distinct and deadly phenomena of the past thirty years.” Even in centers such as Atlanta—showcase of the New South and home to a vibrant African American community, the blacks’ death rate exceeded that of whites by 69%: 19.5 deaths per 1,000 for blacks, as opposed to 11.6 for whites. For Hoffman, “The loss of the farmer or planter will be the gain of the undertaker, for the drift of the Negro into the cities is usually a drift into an early grave.”47
At the turn of the century, amid rapid industrialization, urbanization and migration, blackness was primarily remade through crime statistics.48 Accordingly, in Hoffman’s second work, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro published over two issues of the Journal of American Economic Association in 1896, crime and race took center stage. For Hoffman, the “intemperate habits” of black urbanites had turned large sections of the nation’s cities into breeding grounds of disease, vice, and crime. Hoffman disregarded the myriad de jure and de facto segregationist policies such as anti-black real estate codes, municipal zoning ordinances, and curfews—which forced black migrants into the poorest and most decrepit areas of the nation’s cities and towns. Instead, he sought to place the blame for urban blacks depravity in their genes. Hoffman argued that, in centers such as Philadelphia, Chicago, Boston, and Atlanta, the “large majority of the colored population is found to be living in the worst sections of the city, a section in which vice and crime are the only formative influences.”49 Hoffman concluded that “the colored race shows of all races, the most decided tendency towards crime in the large cities.”50 Despite sharing similar “conditions of life” with Italian, Russian, and Irish immigrants, black crime rates remained disproportionately in excess of their population. Hoffman’s characterizations of black criminality as congenital or pathological in nature were informed by the work of the renowned late nineteenth-century Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. Yet whereas Lombroso cited sloping foreheads, narrowed eyes, or recessed chins as proof of criminality, Hoffman posited a black phenotype itself as a stigma of a diseased criminal nature. Blacks’ depravity was rooted in the especially violent nature of their crimes: “As regards the most serious of all crimes, that of crimes against the person, the number of Negro criminals is out of all proportion to the numerical importance of the race.”51 Black prisoners were also disproportionately represented in national convictions for homicides (36.1%), and rape (40.88%). According to the census of 1890, there were approximately 82,239 prisoners in the United States, 24,000 of whom were black. Though blacks made up only 11.9% of the U.S. population, they comprised 29.18% of the national prison population. Nationwide, black men made up 38.21% of those charged with assault crimes. Hoffman believed that, if left to their own devices, blacks would become “more lazy, thriftless, and unreliable, until they will soon attain a condition of total depravity and utter worthlessness,” as burdens on their local and the larger national community.52
Hoffman’s analysis of black criminality revealed the contradictory logic of racial hereditarianism. Invariably, arguments for slavery’s salutary effects ran counter to characterizations of former slaves and their progeny as innately and irrevocably degraded. Hoffman conceded that viable statistics for black crime during slavery were non-existent or fragmentary at best. Nevertheless, he maintained that following emancipation, blacks had chosen to reject “honest labor” for gambling, prostitution, and narcotics. For Hoffman, the “city negro’s desire for finery” evinced his atavistic nature with often deadly consequences. The “roustabout” black male in his “pitiless search for employment honest or otherwise” often fell victim to “accidental death, frequent exposure to the inclemency of the weather, and not least his pronounced criminal tendencies.” Young black men were far more likely to die a violent death, suffer injuries from gunshot wounds, knife fights, or “various other offrays” than their white counterparts nationwide: 19.5 deaths per 1,000 population for blacks, as opposed to 11.6 for whites.53
Hoffman’s located his second metric of black extinction in the rising rates of venereal disease—specifically syphilis—and race mixing (miscegenation) within the nation’s burgeoning urban black communities. Progressives held deeply contradictory views of African American sexuality, characterizing it as both violent threat and enfeebling trait. On the one hand, the rapid rise in lynching exposed southern anxieties about increasing black socioeconomic mobility and unregulated sexuality. During the 1890s, lynchings claimed some 139 lives each year, 75% of which were black. Litwack estimates that from 1890 to 1917, two to three black southerners were “burned, hanged or quietly murdered” each week.54 Likewise, rising rates of venereal disease among urban blacks rarely failed to escape the attention of any observer of American race relations. Whereas in the country the vices of gambling, drinking and prostitution were tempered by social sanction and limited resources, the anonymity and opportunities of the city allowed such practices to flourish. From 1880 to 1890, black men living in cities such as New Orleans and Richmond were afflicted with syphilis at a rate almost triple that of their rural peers. In Atlanta, between 1890 and 1894, deaths from venereal diseases were 4.5 per 100,000 for whites, compared to 31 per 100,000 for blacks. During this same period, residents of Washington and Baltimore experienced almost identical racial disparities in venereal mortality rates.55
Race Traits cast the sexually promiscuous urban Negro as the author of his own destruction. Hoffman argued that “immense immorality was a race trait of which scrofula, consumption and syphilis are the inevitable consequences.”56 Syphilis in particular took a terrible toll on black bodies, resulting in skin lesions, respiratory problems, malformed limbs, and insanity. The disheveled and mentally ill syphilitic—an increasingly common sight in the black sections of many southern towns and cities—seemingly embodied the deleterious effects of city life on blacks. Nor were whites alone in condemning the sexual deviance of urban blacks. A black minister from Montgomery, Alabama echoed such anxieties about the depravity engendered by urban life: “In the lynchings I have known about, the victims were always men in the community no one could say a good word for. They came out of the slums at night, like the diseased raccoon and stole back again.”57 For observers across the color line, blacks’ seeming inability to tame their sexual urges destroyed their bodies, threatened respectable society, and revealed their inability to internalize the work ethic of modern industrial life.
Black female sexuality also came under intense scrutiny by Hoffman. Historians have noted how popular understandings of evolutionary theory and sex selection assigned women a clearly defined role in racial uplift, which could “make or break a race.”58 Hoffman claimed that the high rates of venereal diseases among blacks were due to an “immense amount of immorality, which is a race trait and of which scrofula and syphilis are the consequences.” He cited much of this immorality in the “enormous waste of child life engendered by the unchaste women of the race whose bastard progeny” continued the cycle of sexual and social depravity.59 Though Janus faced characterizations of black female sexuality—the asexual Mammy and ravenous Jezebel—had long infused American society, Progressive Era definitions of this dichotomy were deeply eugenic in nature. Reformer Eleanor Taylor, writing in Outlook Magazine, cited black women’s “moral decadence” as detrimental to racial health, arguing that “it [is] her hand that rocks the cradle in which the little pickaninny sleeps.”60 Throughout Race Traits, Hoffman sought to give statistical coherence—via birth, infant mortality, and venereal disease rates—to the perceived social threats posed by the unrestrained sexual practices of the emerging black proletariat.
Race Traits painted a picture of a rapidly urbanizing Negro beset by the twin demons of venereal disease and race mixing. Hoffman believed racial health was synonymous with racial purity. Only the inferior degenerate races failed to protect their racial integrity: “It may be said, only with emphasis, that the crossbreed of white men and colored women is, as a rule, a product inferior to both parents, physically and morally.”61 Hoffman, like many of his peers across the social and natural sciences, subscribed to the “law of similarity”—the idea that like produced like, and that “affection between groups and individuals was based in large part on sympathy.”62 These various forms of sympathy developed out of similar interests, ideas, and habits that bound social groups together. Conversely, a lack of sympathy seemingly made affections, and thus reproduction, socially and biologically impossible. Yet some thinkers believed that race mixing would help blacks ward off extinction through a much-needed infusion of white blood.63 In 1892, Joseph LeConte, the South’s most prominent natural scientist, proposed an intriguing alternative to the seemingly inevitable fate of the Negro’s extinction: “At present for the lower races everywhere there is eventually but one of two alternatives: either extermination or mixture.” LeConte believed that while the mixing of extreme types such as the “Teuton and the Negro would produce only the worst results,” amalgamation between “marginal varieties of the primary races” could perhaps serve to stave off extinction for the lower races. Nevertheless, observers across the color line generally concurred that race mixing had a deleterious effect on both individuals and the republican body politic.64
Despite the presumed social and biological imperatives of the “law of similarity,” individuals inevitably strayed across the color line with great regularity. For Hoffman, black urbanization had led to a direct increase in the general population of “mulattos,” or peoples of mixed race. Census data showed an increase of mulattos in the black population, from 12.0% (584,000) in 1870 to 15.2% (1,132,000) in 1890.65 Confronted with the seemingly contradictory evidence of increased race mixing, Hoffman maintained that hereditarian imperatives punished the practice by reducing the ability of hybrid offspring to reproduce. He argued that mixed race unions produced an average of only one child, compared to 2.8 children born to intra-racial couples.66 Hoffman cited the editors of Spectator who claimed that “the mortality of the Negro may well be considered the most important phase of the so-called race problem; for it is a fact which can and will be demonstrated by indisputable evidence, that of all races for which statistics are obtainable . . . the negro and in particular his hybrid character, shows the least power of resistance in the struggle for life.”67 Through the metric of mortality, prevailing notions of infertile mulattos were reconfigured along monetary lines: race mixing led to a drop in the race’s natural increase, which in turn devalued black lives as insurable commodities.
The figure of the mulatto was a harbinger of racial decline in the progressive imagination. With the rise of hereditarian thought, popular understandings of “tragic mulattos” torn between two cultures slowly gave way to notions of race mixing as both a social and biological perversion. Theories of black inferiority were predicated on notions of the black body and mind as instinctively primal. Professor J. F. Miller of Columbia University credited an increase in the number of blacks in southern lunatic asylums to “the modern influences and agencies on his less developed nervous organization.”68 Mental illness in African Americans was seen as the result of a primitive physiology taxed beyond both its physical and mental limits by the demands of modern life. The degeneracy of the mulatto, “imprisoned by two warring constitutions,” stemmed from a near fatal imbalance in which a civilized white mind was enfeebled by a savage black body. Blacks’ high rates of venereal diseases, coupled with a small but significant infecund portion of their hybrid population, meant that the “negro race was lagging, and sure to expire” in the zero-sum race of evolution. Late nineteenth-century debates over “race mixing” and interracial marriage also divided the black community between those who came to view it as the surest path to social, economic, and biological equality—such as Frederick Douglass—and those who believed that despite the need for its decriminalization, rampant intermixture would lead to racial extinction—such as W. Calvin Chase, the editor of the influential Washington Bee, who argued that race pride and racial health were contingent on the maintenance of social, cultural, and biological racial integrity.69
Hoffman’s third and final metric of black extinction was based in the race’s apparent “diminished vital capacity.” Hoffman argued that blacks’ innate criminality, sexual depravity, and high rates of racial admixture “made them unequal to whites in their power to resist disease.”70 Turn-of-the-century actuaries used the category of “vital capacity” to denote an individual’s respiratory health: lung capacity, circulation, and resistance to pulmonary diseases such as tuberculosis. But “vital capacity” also had far reaching socioeconomic and cultural connotations via which social scientists “constructed a model of work and the working body as pure performance, as an economy of energy,” according to historian Anson Rabinbach.71 The metaphor of the human motor—informed by the emerging theory of thermodynamics—framed the working body as a self-contained dynamo locked in a constant struggle to transcend the human element expressed through the indices of “fatigue.”72 Physicians and social scientists measured the health and monetary value of working bodies by determining the rate at which they could efficiently labor before succumbing to fatigue. Racial fitness was predicated on stamina and the endurance to labor: the fit races were those whose physiologies were less susceptible to debilitating diseases such as tuberculosis, whereas the unfit were defined by their high rates of respiratory diseases and congenital incapacity for the rigors of modern industrial work.
Respiratory health was based on a number of factors: lung capacity, chest circumference, and height-to-weight ratio. Spirometry—the primary medium for measuring respiratory health in the nineteenth century—was employed for the first time on a major scale by the Union army during the Civil War.73 In his research for Race Traits, Hoffman drew heavily on the wartime studies of Col. Benjamin Gould for analysis of disparities in racial respiratory health. Though Gould found minimal differences in chest circumference—35.1 inches for black and 35.8 inches for white recruits, the disparity in lung capacity was especially striking. Army medics measured the lung capacity for whites at 184.7 cubic inches, 163.5 for blacks, and only 158.9 for mulattos.74 Gould also found that whites possessed higher rates of respiration than their black or mulatto counterparts. Hoffman argued that during the antebellum era, blacks’ “innate lack of exertion” led them to squander opportunities in the mechanical arts afforded to them by their kindly masters. And while Hoffman found that blacks did possess “latent mechanical aptitude,” an inferior vital capacity and lack of “civilized stamina” ultimately hindered their industrial progress.75
Hoffman remained convinced that the source of blacks’ inferior respiratory health as well as their disproportionately high rates of tuberculosis lay in their low height-to-weight ratio. Although low body weight was not seen as a direct causal agent of respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis, it was an indicator of possible infection. Yet Hoffman shied away from drawing a direct correlation between low body weight and tuberculosis, stating, “The uniform result of statistical investigations of life insurance companies has proven that persons under average weight have a decided tendency toward pulmonary diseases.”76 An 1895 study by Prudential seemingly confirmed that a low body weight-to-height ratio was a determining factor in consumption. To Hoffman’s surprise, blacks possessed a higher weight-to-height ratio than whites. Nevertheless, he remained adamant—even in the face of blacks’ superior rate of respiration, approximate chest measurement, and average body weight—that the “lung capacity of the colored race is in itself proof of an inferior physical organism” on both an individual and group level.77
Tuberculosis had a complex etiology rife with race and class connotations. Robert Koch’s 1883 isolation of the tuberculosis bacillus reshaped the ancient affliction of consumption in the etiological terms of germ theory. Subsequently, tuberculosis was understood as a product of environmental factors that created and or exacerbated an individual’s predisposition to the disease. Koch’s discovery occurred during a time of rapid industrialization in which cities became inundated with masses of the working poor. In sociocultural terms, tuberculosis was characterized as a contagion resulting from the congestion, poverty, and filth that accompanied the rapid rise of modern civilization. Katherine Ott notes how, by the late nineteenth century, consumption was redefined as a disease of “over-civilization” afflicting the enervated and neurasthenic middle and upper classes. While the ravages of consumption spared no section of society, it was the working classes who suffered most from the dreaded white plague.78 Yet, informed by the imperatives and mores of contemporary political economy, the analysis of the tubercular poor cited their genes—rather than their environment—as the primary culprit of their condition.
The high rates of tuberculosis among blacks did not fail to escape the notice of the era’s army of self-professed “race experts.” Hoffman drew on a smattering of urban health records and decades-old Civil War medical evaluations of Union recruits to advance his thesis of a race ravaged by tuberculosis. Civil War records revealed that while whites had been rejected for consumption at a rate of 11.4 per 1,000, black rejection rates were substantially lower at 4.2 per 1,000. Hoffman maintained that while mortality rates from consumption had been relatively equal between the races during the antebellum era, the years since emancipation had witnessed a dramatic rise in black mortality rates. He buttressed this theory with data from the 1890 Census and an examination of tuberculosis rates per 100,000 of the fourteen cities nationwide with the largest black populations. Without exception, urban mortality rates for blacks far exceeded those of whites. Even in northern centers such as Boston and New York, which had relatively small black populations, the racial disparities in tubercular mortality rates were staggering: in New York, black mortality rates were almost three times the rates of whites.79
Blacks’ apparent diminished respiratory health was seen as both a cause and effect of their downward evolutionary trajectory. Though Hoffman was willing to see slavery as an ameliorative social force, he was unable or unwilling to conceive of the negative environmental effects of urban life on the black working poor. For Hoffman, blacks’ innately degraded habits—not their environment—spawned the squalor that allowed the tuberculosis bacillus to thrive. Blacks’ seemingly undisciplined and diseased nature therefore necessitated their expulsion from the nation’s labor economy. The arrival of rural blacks in southern cities placed added strain on a job market already weathering a deep nationwide depression. Within this socioeconomic context, tuberculosis functioned as both an etiological condition and an imperative of a white supremacist political economy. The ever prescient DuBois noted this shift in tuberculosis, from an immigrant disease to a black disease at the century’s end: “Negroes are not the first people who have been claimed as its particular victims; the Irish were once thought to be doomed by that disease—but that was when Irishmen were unpopular.”80 The increasingly malleable boundaries of whiteness allowed groups such as the Irish—and to a lesser extent the Jews—to shed their identities as consumptive races and gradually attain the healthful character of republican manhood.81 In contrast, observers such as Dr. F. Billings of the U.S. Army maintained that “the Negro’s extreme liability to consumption alone would suffice to seal his fate as a race.” As one southern public health official bluntly stated, “Disease is today almost a synonym for the word ‘Negro.’”82 For the era’s managerial elites, the drive to deny blacks full citizenship and relegate them to the margins of the labor market was driven by both social and biological imperatives.
Depictions of African Americans as a consumptive race lacking in vital capacity were driven by the socioeconomic, cultural, and spatial dynamics of the Progressive Era political economy. In 1880, approximately 80% of blacks lived in the states of the former confederacy. Black labor and capital, even in their marginalized forms, was key to the economy of the New South. Indebted black sharecroppers were crucial fixtures in the rural economy and unskilled black labor formed the backbone of the regional iron and textile industries.83 Hoffman’s actuarial assessments of black bodies as defective commodities reinforced their subordinate position within the southern labor economy. These actuarial narratives of black inferiority also helped rationalize organized labor’s nationwide hostility to the black worker as “a cheap liver who demands less wages” due to his “natural proclivity for filth and debasement.”84 Hoffman believed that evolution had engineered specific bodies for specific environments. With the ascendance of Mendelian biology—which privileged racial traits over acquired characteristics, removing a race from its natural habitat led to a marked decrease in vital capacity and possible death. He 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.
Racially informed climatology reimagined the respiratory tract into a key site of racial labor division. The rubric of vital capacity became a key technology of both domestic and imperial political economy. Hoffman attributed blacks’ lack of respiratory health and their small lung size to their “tropical heritage” in sub-Saharan Africa. While the “arctic lung” of northern European whites required a large oxygen capacity to maintain animal heat in cold regions, “it would be in accordance with the economy of nature to suppose that the oxygen capacity of a tropical lung would be smaller than that of the arctic in the same ratio to maintain animal heat in the sultry climate of the Equator.”85 Hoffman cited the work of Ira Russell, a member of the Civil War–era U.S. Sanitary Commission who had studied racial lung weights. Based on an indeterminate sample Russell had found, the average weight of the “negro lung” was approximately four ounces less than the lung of whites. Russell’s work on racial respiratory health remained the definitive model for decades across both the natural and social sciences.86
America’s turn-of-the-century imperial interventions throughout the Pacific and the Caribbean introduced its social and natural scientists to a transnational discourse of “climatology” that posited climate as the determining factor in racial evolution. Much like their European predecessors, American colonial officials worried over the ability of white bodies to adapt and thrive in tropical climates. Sir George William Des Voeux, a British colonial administrator echoed the concerns of many Americans when he expressed his “grave doubts [about] whether any tropical country can became a prosperous white man’s colony . . . where white men are laborers as well as employers, able to rear a healthy progeny, inclined to and physically able of work with the hands.”87 American officials such as Col. George Gorgas and Col. Leonard Wood conducted extensive studies of American troops in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, measuring their susceptibility to diseases such as malaria and yellow fever.88
Medical and military personal were also deeply troubled by a pervasive yet indefinable “lassitude” that seemingly took hold of white men who spent extensive time in the tropics. Warwick Anderson notes that fears over the tropics as a “white man’s graveyard” led to a revaluation of the interconnections between manhood, race, and labor in the nation’s rapidly expanding political economy.89 Whether black men leaving the rural south or white men pursuing the “white man’s burden” abroad, both seemed to suffer the enfeebling physiological effects—such as a decline in respiratory health—of leaving an industrial civilization run amok. Models of the tropical and arctic lung sought to reconcile racial form with function and affected racial labor division along distinct spatial lines.90
Ultimately, actuarial narratives of racial fitness were used by social scientists to rationalize production in both the public and private spheres at home and abroad. Martha Banta describes this utopian impulse as the broader societal pursuit of a “managed life.” Banta argues that modern cultures of management efficiency, on and off the shop floor, reified existing gender and racial hierarchies while producing new models of articulating these respective forms of social difference. The logic of turn-of-the-century management theory maintained that subaltern bodies such as women and non-whites represented the “wasteful intractability of the savage element . . . introducing ‘wild facts’ into a situation where managers feared unmanaged, unpredictable irrationality above all else.”91 The racial demands of Progressive Era management theory ensured that the rhetoric of social efficiency was a language of whiteness. The category of vital capacity constructed by industrialists, scientists, physicians, social scientists, and actuaries allowed for the quantification of bodies which otherwise defied quantification.
Race Traits achieved immediate notoriety following its publication in spring 1896. Hoffman’s work spread in popularity far beyond the narrow confines of actuarial science and became one of the era’s definitive texts on race. White intellectuals greeted it with near unanimous praise for its seemingly objective analysis of the “ever vexing Negro problem.”92 Professor W. F. Blackman of Yale University claimed that, “In dealing with the Negro question we have had enough of assumption, prejudice, sentiment and timidity; what we need is exact research in accordance with the methods of anthropology and statistics provided by Mr. Hoffman.”93 The biologist F. Lamson Scribner commended Hoffman for the way in which his conclusions were “intelligently and impartially combined and secured in a clear and attractive manner.” Reviewers argued that unlike previous “amateurish” and “rank scientific” racial analysis, Hoffman had produced a work of ineluctable scientific fact.94 Professor W. B. Smith of Tulane University chillingly noted Hoffman’s work as a reminder that evolutionary and national progress depended on the death of the Negro: “The vision of a race vanishing before its superior is not at all dispiriting, but inspiring.”95
The lavish praise accorded to Race Traits was invariably linked in part to the foreignness of its author. Indeed, the editors of Dial magazine hailed it as, “a thoughtful work by an unbiased foreigner” and an essential read for all serious students of the race problem.96 As an immigrant, Hoffman posed as the consummate outsider, a dispassionate observer of race relations, unburdened by native-born Americans racial bias and prejudices. Moreover, as a German immigrant, Hoffman constantly played upon the American intelligentsia’s reverence for Germanic philosophy and models of higher education. Bismarckian Germany was at the center of progressive transatlantic networks of social theory and a beacon of reform for educated Americans across the color line. Hoffman was merely one of the first in a long line—culminating almost a half-century later in Gunnar Myrdal’s American Dilemma—of seemingly objective white European observers of modern American race relations whose foreignness and ability to dispassionately reduce the Negro to an object of social scientific inquiry, confirmed on them the status of experts.97
The reception of Race Traits among the black intelligentsia was decidedly mixed. Reactions to Race Traits came from two primary sources: black intellectuals and the fledgling black insurance industry. W. E. B. DuBois, an ambivalent exponent of evolutionary theory, praised Hoffman for his exhaustive research while nevertheless taking him to task for “shoddy methodology” and improper “application of the statistical method.” DuBois argued that Hoffman had failed “to see that such a method is after all nothing but the application of logic to counting, and that no amount of counting will justify a departure from the severe rules of correct reasoning.”98 DuBois, a devout Germanophile, contended that Hoffman’s refined continental methodology and rules of reasoning had been compromised by his co-option of American racial biases and preconceptions.99 For DuBois, rational inquiry and scientific empiricism were immune to the coarse subjectivities of racism. Yet even such an adept social critic such as DuBois did not dispute Hoffman’s privilege or intent in counting, only the manner in which he had done so. A few years later, DuBois would adopt similar statistical methodologies in his seminal sociological analysis, The Philadelphia Negro (1899). However, he would take great care to distinguish his analysis of black criminality and health from popular interpretations such as Hoffman’s, which linked these tendencies to biological characteristics.100
African American critiques of actuarial narratives of race suicide were hampered by the predominance of empirical inquiry in Progressive Era discourse. The dominance of the scientific method in both the social and natural sciences—a focus on processes rather than content—divested black intellectuals of the epistemological tools needed to challenge Hoffman’s theory of race suicide. DuBois and his peers were forced to focus on how Hoffman had constructed his evidence, rather than the ideological and conceptual frameworks that had informed his research. Kelly Miller, a leading black sociologist and mathematician, was initially effusive in his praise of Race Traits, declaring it the most “important utterance on the subject of race since the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”101 However, Miller soon began to vigorously dispute Hoffman’s assertion that black health had flourished under slavery, only to decline following emancipation. Miller noted that in the previous eight decades, the black population had quintupled with little aid from external migration: “How a people who had shown such physical vitality for so long a period, has all at once, in the past decade become relatively infecund and threatened with extinction?” The answer did not lie in any innate racial traits or tendencies but in blacks’ “various conditions of life.”102 Convinced that “a sound and objective application” of statistical analysis of black life would yield an accurate picture of the race’s fitness, Miller offered the following advice to blacks: “To the Negro I would say, let him not be discouraged at the ugly facts which confront him . . . the Negro should accept the facts with becoming humility and strive to live in closer conformity with the requirements of human and divine law. He does not labor under a destiny of death from which there is no escape.”103 Couched in the rhetoric of racial uplift and respectability, Miller fashioned a cogent critique of biological theories of black degeneracy within the bounds of rational inquiry.
The African American business community responded to actuarial narratives of the race’s decline with entrepreneurial zeal. Shortly after the publication of Race Traits in spring 1896—and the subsequent segregation of the insurance industry, a small group of black businessmen moved to reorganize local fraternal aid societies along a corporate model. The first black insurance company formed on this basis was the National Benefit Insurance Company, founded in 1898 by S. W. Rutherford in Washington, D.C. That same year, C. C. Spaulding and a consortium of black businessmen organized the North Carolina Mutual Benefit Insurance Company. One black businessman thanked Hoffman for discouraging white firms from insuring blacks: “Without Mr. Hoffman’s pernicious propaganda, there would have been no North Carolina Mutual.”104 In 1908, Herman Perry of Atlanta, Georgia began organizing Standard Life, which would soon become the largest black life insurance company in the world and a beacon of racial uplift. Even so, Standard Life was not fully incorporated until 1913 after Perry waged a protracted battle to raise the sufficient funds set by the state authorities to start up the business.105
Notwithstanding the petit bourgeois ethic of black insurance companies, their very existence radically challenged the constraints of a segregated political economy. Black-owned insurance companies were some of the first institutions in the New South—and the nation as a whole—to allow the race to acquire both financial and social capital. DuBois cited the subversive character of black entrepreneurism, noting that while white southerners “feared Negro crime, they feared Negro success and ambition more . . . the south can conceive neither machinery nor place for the educated, self-reliant, self-assertive black man.”106 Such assertiveness was evinced in industry literature, which advised black agents: “We cannot write any white insurance business and the white agent is controlling the insurance situation in our homes. This will never do! Break it up! Get the Business! Be enthusiastic, alive to the task; hard driving, never satisfied until you get the business.”107 Kevin Gaines describes the era’s black middle class as a “group bound by a shared ideological preoccupation with bourgeois status, rather than one sharing in the material benefits commensurate with the white middle class.” 108 Black uplift ideology formed the basis for a racial elite identity, which equated class stratification with racial progress.
Frederick Hoffman’s early work in “Vital Statistics of the Negro” and Race Traits was essential in maintaining African Americans’ exclusion from the mainstream insurance industry—from the late nineteenth century until the eve of the Second World War. In 1940, the vast majority of white underwriters still refused to insure blacks and of the fifty-five firms that did, only five did so at standard rates. Hoffman was quite vocal about his role in persuading the nation’s major insurers to exclude blacks, “in light of my prior work in charting blacks’ excessive mortality and debased character traits, Prudential has long since stopped soliciting risk policies from the colored population.”109 However, in the face of the emergent civil rights movement—born in part by the struggle against fascism abroad—white resistance to insuring blacks began to fade in the postwar era. By 1957, over one hundred white companies competed for black policyholders at standard rates. By the early 1960s, Congress admitted black insurance companies such as North Carolina Mutual into the select pool of companies underwriting group life coverage for federal employees and military personal. Finally, in 1962, the American Life Convention and the Life Insurance Association of America, the lily-white paragons of the life insurance trade associations, made the Mutual their first black member.110
Race Traits spawned a veritable cottage industry in black race suicide literature. The early twentieth century saw a surge in works predicting blacks’ imminent demise—from Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast; or in the Image of God? (1900), W. P. Calhoun’s The Caucasian and the Negro in the United States (1902), W. B. Smith’s The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn (1905), and Robert Shufeldt’s subtle The Negro, A Menace to American Civilization (1907).111 In 1907, historian Edward Eggleston published his chilling screed, The Ultimate Solution of the American Negro Problem, in which he contrasted the robust body of “the darkey under slavery” with the “diseased carriage of today’s negro vagrant” as proof of blacks resurgent atavistic character.112 Eggleston cited Hoffman’s “unerring statistical proof” as evidence that the “natural flow of evolution would soon dispense with the negro.”113 Dr. Paul Barringer, Chairman of the Faculty at the University of Virginia, and author of The American Negro: His Past and Future (1900), referenced Hoffman at length in arguing for “the Negro’s generic tendency to enfeebling savagery.”114 Barringer believed that, for whites, “the Negro Problem rises above a question of altruism and becomes a question of self-preservation.”115 Hoffman hoped his work would serve as a clear “condemnation of modern philanthropic attempts of superior races to lift inferior races to their own elevated position,” a process so futile that “it would seem criminal indifference on the part of civilized people to ignore it.”116 Spectral images of degenerate Negroes also took on literary forms in contemporary popular culture. Thomas Dixon Jr.’s Reconstruction trilogy—The Leopard’s Spots (1902), The Clansmen (1905) and The Traitor (1907)—was key in popularizing notions of blacks as “crazed and monstrous beasts” utterly unsuited to the demands of work and citizenship in a modern industrial republic.117
Following the publication of Race Traits, Hoffman lobbied his superiors at Prudential to fund a transnational investigation of racial health and mortality. Through the metrics of criminality, venereal disease, miscegenation, and vital capacity, he sought to connect the domestic “Negro problem” to the global race problem—and gain a clearer understanding of the “vicissitudes of racial health on a global scale,” which had previously been “tainted by race prejudice causing even the most fair minded observer to err in judgment.”118 Hoffman’s studies of “the constitution of the color line” took him through the American southwest, Caribbean, Latin America, and South Pacific—all territories acquired by the U.S. in the previous quarter-century and subsequently integrated into America’s rapidly growing imperial political economy.
In 1915, Hoffman arrived in Hawaii—which had been annexed by the U.S. in 1898—to survey the feasibility of insuring the islands’ polyglot population. As late as 1901, the editors of the Honolulu Commercial Advertiser, citing excessive criminality, race mixing, opium abuse, and the spread of “loathsome diseases” such as tuberculosis, had predicted the demise of the island native inhabitants. The editors claimed, “There are probably now living men of voting age who will see the last full blooded Hawaiian native—there is something tragic in the utter annihilation of a race, especially one so amiable in many respects as are the Hawaiians and it is to be hoped that something may be done to check the tendencies that are causing the decay.”119 Upon arrival in the islands, Hoffman was immediately struck and disturbed by the prevalence of race mixing among the natives, which had produced “an envenerated race beset by poverty, drug use, and an ‘impotent lassitude.’” All of the vices of the uncivilized were present: “The neglect of infants by native mothers, the gradual diminution of the fish supply, and the spread of loathsome disease [tuberculosis] have been reinforced by the newly-acquired vice of opium smoking.” Moreover, the mixed Hawaiians “lacked the racial vitality and self-control of the Asiatic consumers and the results of this vice are therefore the more disastrous.”120 Hoffman’s travels in the Pacific and the West Indies seemed to support the prevailing belief of Progressive Era social scientists in the primacy of race and racial admixture “in determining an individual’s life span and resistance to disease.”121 Hoffman’s sense of racial noblesse oblige led him to conclude that although “the colored man was not nor would ever be the equal of the white man,” a “just sense of international race relations depended upon the precise recognition of inherent and permanent inequality in physical, mental and moral traits”—the delineation of racial difference being seen as key to long-term racial equality whether on the islands or stateside.122
Following extensive actuarial surveys, Hoffman informed Prudential’s president John S. Dryden that contrary to prevailing wisdom, the Hawaiian race was not doomed to excitation. Hoffman acknowledged native Hawaiians’ “predilection for degeneracy, before citing how a benign climate, racial intermixture and (healthful) plantation economy made Hawaii “perhaps the most conspicuous modern illustration of successful tropical adaption and race progress.”123 He juxtaposed Hawaii’s “racial progress” with racial conditions stateside: “The Negro death rate remains considerably in excess of the white death rate, regardless of far reaching sanitary improvements of more or less similar effect upon both populations.”124 Hoffman’s efforts to reconcile these disparate actuarial narratives of racial health were firmly situated in the transition from bonded to contract labor on the part of the nation’s oldest and newest sets of colored laborers. Whereas black degeneration was the result of their migration out of the plantation economies of slavery and sharecropping, Hawaiians’ salvation lay in their ever-increasing immersion into the fruit and sugar plantations of corporations such as Dole and United Fruit, which, in both cases, the plantation became a key site of race management.125
The racial dynamics of health—and race relations in general—remained a fascination of Hoffman throughout his long career as an actuary and public intellectual. Though Hoffman never wavered in his belief of Negro inferiority, by the mid-1920s he had revised his earlier theories regarding blacks’ extinction, arguing that blacks would more likely assume a “stagnant position much like the American Indian and the Gypsies of Europe.”126 Hoffman retained a strong sense of racial paternalism—forever regarding himself as a “friend to the Negro”—claiming that although “the colored man was not nor would ever be the equal of the white man, a just sense of international race relations depended upon the precise recognition of inherent and permanent inequality in physical, mental and moral traits.”127 Like many of his peers, Hoffman saw no contradiction in his vision of an American pluralism built on white supremacist racial hierarchies. His fidelity to empiricism and the seemingly ineluctable facts of statistical science blinded him to the racialist imperatives in his research methodologies. Nancy Stepans reminds us that “the scientists who gave scientific racism its credibility and respectability were often first rate scientists struggling to understand what appeared to them to be deeply puzzling problems of biology and human society” and would have dismissed any form of overt prejudice or “race hatred” as quite beside the point.128 A set of circumstances that clearly reveals the extent to which racialist thought was inextricably linked to the era’s empirical methodologies: the delineation of difference was merely an objective process—therefore immune to coarse racial prejudices.
Extinction discourse remained a powerful explanatory model of African American proletarianization well into the interwar years. Actuarial narratives of African American race suicide provide key insights into the persistent influence of non-economic factors such as race on Progressive Era political economy. Statistics and actuarial science allowed progressives to chart the precise rate and value of blacks’ transition to industrial modernity. White elites believed that mastery of this racial knowledge was crucial to the development of a rational and efficient social order. Susan Schweik, in her analysis of early twentieth-century anti-vagrancy laws that criminalized the physically disabled in public spaces, details how race has long played a role in the “symbolic economy of disease.”129 Throughout the nation, “ugly laws,” while primarily aimed at the physically disabled, were also used as a key form of racial labor division. Schweik notes that the “concept of disease has long been tied to racial hierarchies, and the barrage of statistics brought forth in the name of socio-medical racism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hammered home the point that blacks posed a major health and social menace.”130 Black leaders were not immune to this mindset, and constantly evoked the race’s social and biological value. As a guest at the First National Conference on Race Betterment, Booker T. Washington inveighed against this rising eugenic tide: “The American Negro is worth saving, and making a strong, helpful part of the American body politic.”131 Washington was well aware that any calls for inclusion in the body politic would have to conform to the racialist logic of the day and foreground the corporeal dimensions.
The demands of rapid industrialization, imperialism, and mass consumerism required the creation of a “vanishing Negro.” Actuarial science provided the conceptual and practical means to identify, evaluate, and monetize key demographic shifts in the nation’s political economy. Historians have described statistics as a “technology of distance” well suited to conveying concise, accurate, and easily understood information about ambiguous subjects such as racial identities.132 Hoffman’s narratives of black health were ideological constructions—exercises in race making—that allowed those who had never met an African American to gain a working knowledge of one. Megan Wolff notes that “the claims Hoffman made about his own methodology and the access it provided to complete knowledge—the promise that he could examine a series of numbers and know, infallibly, the truth—invoked the ‘myth of the actuary’ as well as its underlying myth of progress.”133 As a professional actuary, writes Wolff, “Hoffman stood at the intersection of two related discourses: progress and profit,” which represented a meeting of the social Darwinism of the marketplace with the social Darwinism of racial ideology.134 Actuarial narratives of race suicide linked ostensibly premodern traditions and peoples, such as blacks, to qualitative and quantitative forms of modern labor economy, such as statistics, to reveal the societal and physical perils of race, work, and the very limits of progress amid the shifting landscape of modern industrial America. Yet with the coming of war in Europe and its reverberations stateside, the figure of the Negro, which heretofore had served as a regional—generally southern—metaphor for the racial perils of progress, now became in both theory and practice a national industrial agent: the “Negro problem” was now an American problem.