“War is the health of the State.”
—Randolph Bourne, The State (1918)
In the spring of 1918, Henry S. Berry, a promising young medical student, arrived at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama for induction into the U.S. Army. Prior to his arrival, Berry had undergone a battery of mental and physical tests that had found him “fit and worthy to bear arms in defense of the United States.” At Tuskegee, Berry and his fellow recruits underwent intense military training: “Stripped to the waist in the broiling sun, we would go through our exercises necessary to the development of arms, chest, abdomen, and legs.” Despite the protests and groans of many of the men, Berry later wrote, “[I] enjoyed the exercises very much for I knew that such training as this would make a better man physically of me, if not more, and at the same time enable me to stand the strain of active service with greater fortitude.” Soon he and his compatriots “began to assume the shape and appearance of soldiers.” Berry was eventually attached to the segregated Army Medical Corps in France and remained forever grateful to the army for the “hard muscles that now cover my limbs, the cultivated deep breathing that guards me from the white plague and my ability to walk many miles and enjoy the love of clean, pure, fresh air.”1 Through a regime of intensive physical evaluation and training, the army had remade Henry S. Berry into a new man, a new Negro, for the brave new world of American industrial modernity.
Military service was a midwife to quasi-feudal black peoples pregnant with the possibilities of wage labor. Henry Berry’s experience of military service is illustrative of how the shifting and often contradictory categories of race and labor were mediated and rationalized through the body in Progressive Era America. Although the First World War did not create the impetus for state surveillance and discipline of the body, it intensified that surveillance and encouraged the proliferation of various regulatory institutions and practices. Scholars have argued that “the military requirements of modern warfare and industry provided governments with a powerful incentive to intervene in new areas of the economy including the construction of men’s bodies.”2 Heretofore, the soldiering body had been viewed as a source of social contagion and vice. From the earliest days of the republic to the Civil War, the conquest of the frontier and the imperial wars of the late nineteenth-century soldiering bodies and military encampments were seen as repositories of moral and physical decay from which the populace had to be protected.3
Managerial elites armed with the required expertise in hygiene and social reform now sought to reconstitute the soldiering body via the draft, anthropometry (the measurement of the human form), and subsequent forms of rehabilitation. Military service became not only a key mechanism of Americanization, but of moral, social, and physical regeneration. Historian David Roediger reminds us that “the bodily and mental fitness of those being drafted into the army were objects of intense nationalist concern.”4 War linked the health of the citizenry—specifically, conscripts—to the health of the nation writ large, and in doing so, posited the notion of the republican body politic in stark physiological terms. The policies and practices of wartime anthropometry—and later, vocational rehabilitation—lent a corporeal character to radical critic Randolph Bourne’s dictum that war was indeed “the health of the state” on an individual, institutional, and collective level.5
Notwithstanding the case of Henry Berry, however, most managerial elites remained skeptical of blacks’ ability to transcend their seemingly brutish physicality and become efficient soldier/workers. In addition to prevailing notions of blacks’ physiological inferiority, many managerial observers drew on longstanding notions—dating from the early antebellum era—of blacks’ inability to work free of coercion, whether military or otherwise. Black recalcitrance was contrasted with the apparent malleability of the various near-white races of eastern and southern Europe. In the spring of 1918, the writer Irvin Cobb observed the men of the 77th “melting pot” Division from New York City—so named because of the disproportionate number of new immigrants in their ranks—following their arrival in France,
I saw them when they first landed at Camp Upton (NY), furtive, frightened, slow footed, slack-shouldered, underfed, a huddle of unhappy aliens. . . . now three months later . . . the stoop was beginning to come out of their spines, the shamble out of their gait. They had learned to hold their heads up; had learned to look every man in the eye and tell him to go elsewhere, with a capital H.
For reformers and militarists—such as Cobb, Theodore Roosevelt, and General Leonard Wood—who had long agitated for the “invigorating benefits of universal military service,” conscription was a key medium of Americanization, essential for forging a new and vigorous American body politic out of the nation’s disparate peoples.6 Alone among the nation’s races, blacks were seen as prisoners to a depraved physiology that precluded them from attaining the full social, fiscal, and political benefits of republican manhood.
Social scientists from the Committee on Anthropology (COA) and the National Research Council (NRC) used the science of anthropometry to evaluate the health, shape, and fitness of various racial types through the wartime draft. Ales Hrdlicka, head of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution and a founding member of the COA, initially defined anthropometry as “that part of anthropology in which are studied variations in the human body and all its parts, and particularly the differences of such variations in the races, tribes, families, and other well defined groups of humanity.”7 The voluminous prewar Dillingham Commission 1907–1911—charged with studying the various socioeconomic and physiological effects of immigration—had made extensive use of anthropometry as a prospective tool of social policy. In “Changes in Bodily Form of the Descendants of Immigrants,” Franz Boas utilized anthropometric evaluations and taxonomies to argue for the mutability of racial physiologies and the potential benefits of state managed assimilation albeit in limited form.8 Less than a decade later, Hrdlicka and his staff worked to equate military evaluation of bodies with their industrial classification along clearly delineated racial lines. Although the army IQ tests developed by Robert Yerkes are perhaps the best-known wartime accounting of racial fitness, reformers were also extremely interested in “correlating the physical capabilities of various racial types with their cultural character.”9 Eugenicists and COA officials such as Charles Davenport argued that while the “drafted men’s mental qualities and behavior are of importance, of no less obvious importance is his physique.”10 Through institutional mechanisms and practices such as the selective service draft and vocational rehabilitation, the Negro was (re)constituted—in starkly corporeal terms—as a key object of inquiry in early twentieth-century American social sciences and industrial management theory.
Progressive managerial elites conceived of the Negro in deeply pathological terms. In the representational political economy of Western society, only white men were seen to possess the requisite rationality and discipline that marked a respectable citizen worker. Non-white races—and women of all colors—were characterized strictly in bodily terms, beholden to their depraved physicality “the pairing of passion and passivity typical of all the savage, backward races.”11 David Roediger argues that the social and financial benefits of “the wages of whiteness” often worked to offset the downward mobility experienced by all workers during periods of stress, such as rapid migration or war. Wartime anthropometry conferred scientific and legislative authority on the division of white man’s work from colored work and effectively ensured payment of the wages of whiteness in the Progressive Era political economy.12 Throughout this period, black workers emerged as mere objects of law and social policy. They were seen as weak, disordered, or, in the lexicon of industrial evolution, as a people out of time, and out of place. Historians note that, during the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, theories of black inferiority “remained remarkably malleable, as different groups of whites sought to advance their own interests and invent new rationales to justify certain traditional patterns of black labor.” Eileen Boris and Ava Baron concur, arguing that “while racial categories, like gender, have proven historically flexible, they remain ideologically rigid,” thanks in part to race’s deeply embodied nature.13
Linking war to work, COA officials measured racial types through three key sites: the evaluation of the first million army draft recruits; the evaluation of the “multiracial” workforce of the American International Shipbuilding Association at Hog Island in Philadelphia; and the measurement of approximately 100,000 demobilized men in the summer of 1919. These practices were extensively detailed in Physical Examination of the First Million Draft Recruits: Methods and Results (1919), Defects Found in Drafted Men (1919), and Army Anthropology (1921). The COA’s exclusively white membership included many of the leading self professed race “experts” of the day: Dr. Ales Hrdlicka, of the Smithsonian, Dr. Charles Davenport, of the Carnegie Institute and head of the Eugenics Records Office (ERO) at Cold Springs, Dr. Frederick Hoffman, Chief Statistician of the Prudential Life Insurance Company, Dr. E. F. Hooton, a Harvard anthropologist, and the notorious white supremacist Madison Grant, of the American Museum of Natural History—to name but a few.14 Conspicuously absent were leading cultural anthropologists such as Franz Boas and W. E. B. DuBois who would challenge eugenic racial models favored by the likes of Hrdlicka and Davenport. DuBois, perhaps the foremost black practitioner of anthropometry, had for years recognized its role in perpetuating physiological models of black degeneracy. But he was ultimately stymied in his efforts to develop positive black anthropometrical models, due to a lack of institutional capital.15 Operating at the nexus of the public and private spheres, the COA’s cadre of exclusively white anthropometricists exercised a near monopoly on the development, dissemination, and institutionalization of wartime racial typologies.
The COA’s leading member was a retiring biologist named Charles Davenport, the very embodiment of Yankee ingenuity and respectability, and perhaps the era’s leading eugenicist. Born into a prominent Puritan family with roots in the abolitionist movement, Davenport was a shy yet intensely ambitious individual. In 1892, he obtained a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard and subsequently secured a position in the school’s fledging zoology department. As a member of a new “anti-speculative generation of biologists,” he was a pioneer in importing the European science of biometrics—the statistical analysis and quantification of evolution—to America in the early twentieth century. Biometrics formed one of the pillars of early American eugenics. In 1904, Davenport was able to persuade the wealthy Carnegie Institute of Washington—with its ten million dollar endowment—to fund the establishment of a station for the Experimental Study of Evolution in Cold Springs, New York. Six years later, thanks to the largesse of the Harriman railroad fortune, he established the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Springs, cementing his position as America’s premier eugenicist.16 While many questioned Davenport’s scientific acumen—Boas was an ardent critic quick to deride the “amateurish” quality of his work, Davenport was nothing if not an accomplished self-promoter, possessed of the true faith of eugenics. Perhaps his greatest strength was his ability to frame both complex biological phenomena in stark social terms and eugenics as little more than an applied science committed to the long-term betterment of society. Davenport’s characteristic propriety led him to eschew incendiary commentary in favor of what he believed to be the rational commonsensical truth of eugenics. Yet this faith was soon tested by the war, which Davenport saw as an exercise in racial fratricide that imperiled the long-term survival of the white race(s). Only an acute understanding and management of the conflict’s racial dynamics and contours could avert this disaster and pull white civilization back from the abyss.17
The selective service system and the policies and practices of anthropometry reified prevailing social hierarchies, which linked regional and national norms of race, class, and citizenship. Wartime anthropometry determined the physical requirements of military service, along with “the physical adaptation of workman to highly organized industrial functions.” Industrial imperatives were paramount, given that recruits were disproportionately drawn from the industrial working classes—the majority of whom were semiskilled or unskilled laborers. Enoch Crowder, head of the Selective Service, estimated that industrial workers had a participation rate that was as much as five times higher than that of agricultural workers.18 COA officials argued, “We should relate our army establishment to society in training for our daily social and economic life, wherein young men may achieve not solely military training but equipment as well for the industrial life ahead of them.” This equipment included everything from mechanical skill to time-work discipline. In both the military and industrial spheres, physical fitness and efficiency were measured by the body’s resistance to disease and fatigue. In the context of wartime political economy, the value of a laboring body resided in its ability “not to crack” under the withering strain of militarized industry and mechanized warfare.19 Roger Horowitz notes that military service is a special form of work experience, with its attendant issues of cohesion, division, authority, community, and recreation. Yet he warns against “overly ambitious levels of generalization concerning the effects of military service on workers” and stresses the need to develop analytical tools cognizant of the variegated character of military service and its respective historical contexts.20
Anthropometry, much like statistics and sociology, was a tool employed by progressives to develop and maintain racial labor hierarchies amid rapid shifts in the nation’s political economy. Within a global economy characterized by a highly migratory labor force, increasing division of work processes, labor radicalism, and war, managerial efforts to link bodily form to function were proving especially troublesome. With the chaos of war and rapid changes in technology, the explanatory power of race as an agent of historical development and social change was increasingly in doubt. Amid these fractious conditions, managerial elites turned to the hereditarianism of eugenics as a way to chart races’ past, present, and future levels of fitness. Much of the appeal surrounding eugenics stemmed from its ability to historicize and narrate social change—through race and heredity—in the face of modernity’s relentlessly futurist character. Eugenics posited individual and group evolution along a continuum of past, present, and future development and ultimately endowed heredity as an unassailable, inevitable agent of progress. Eugenicists argued that, for too long, medical science and anthropology had erroneously focused on “what man had done, and never what man was.” Heredity, not environment, was the deciding factor in individual and racial development.21 Anthropometry linked the historical imperatives of eugenics to the policies and practices of scientific management in its pursuit of the ideal soldiering body.22 Army anthropometry created a catalogue of racial taxonomies in which martial and labor fitness were linked not only to character but to seemingly immutable traits like skin color and body shape—effectively turning the working body into an index of its laboring abilities.23 World War I, as the first modern war, provided unprecedented opportunities to measure the constitution of the color line running through the republican body politic.
Founded in February 1917, the National Research Council’s (NRC) Committee on Anthropology (COA) sought to reconcile racial form to labor function through the policies and practices of anthropometry. The COA’s anthropometrical policies and practices drew heavily on mid-nineteenth-century forms of racial measurement and labor control. American anthropometry had originated in the Civil War, primarily with Col. Benjamin Gould and his seminal work, Investigations of the Military and Anthropological Statistics of American Soldiers (1869). An astronomer by training, Gould was hired by the U.S. Army Sanitary Commission to measure the terrestrial bodies of Union troops and create tables of “normal” body measurements. Gould dutifully measured recruits’ arms, legs, feet, heads, trunks, heights, and weights—and quantified lifting ability, lung capacity, pulse, and vision. To do this, he used a variety of instruments, such as the spirometer, a bewildering contraption that measured an individual’s lung or respiratory capacity.24 He then categorized his findings by country of origin, age, degree of education, and most importantly, race. Gould concluded that both “pure blacks” and “mulattos” possessed a smaller pulmonary capacity than whites and disproportionately suffered from flat feet. Perhaps, from an evolutionary perspective, blacks’ longer arms—the distance from fingertip to kneecap being shorter than whites—marked the Negro as closer in development to a primitive anthropoid than his white peer.25 These conclusions only fueled speculation among some in the scientific community that blacks were indeed the missing link in the evolutionary puzzle. Gould’s evidence of blacks’ apparent physiological inferiority was echoed by Sanford Hunt in the Anthropological Review in “The Negro as Soldier” (1869).26 These works, and others like them, informed a larger corpus of late nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century scholarship across the natural and social sciences that sought to trace blacks’ apparent degeneration post-emancipation in starkly physiological terms.27
Civil War anthropometry informed subsequent nineteenth-century discourses of race and human development across the transatlantic world. Charles Darwin cited Gould’s work in The Descent of Man (1871) to illustrate the ways in which physical differences both within and between races could be delineated. Hoffman’s aforementioned 1896 treatise on black extinction, Race Traits, also drew heavily on Gould’s work in its quantification and monetization of racial health. Despite the best efforts of sociologists and anthropologists such as DuBois and Boas to develop antiracist forms of anthropometry, they too found themselves beholden to the prevailing belief that racial forms or bodies—however mutable—were ultimately an expression of racial function. In short, races were as races did. From a professional and ideological perspective, black social scientists were strongly dissuaded from pursuing anthropological study, as it “had no practical benefit to the needs of the race.”28 In the wake of Civil War anthropometry, “no longer would attitudes of racial inferiority have to employ those prewar measurements and conclusions tainted by proslavery arguments.”29 Scientific objectivism had seemingly displaced crass sentimentality and prejudice in the debates over black inferiority. In a bitter twist of historical irony, the war that led to the destruction of racial slavery produced a body of anthropological research that sustained anti-black prejudice well into the twentieth century.
Anthropometry experienced a renaissance with America’s imperial forays into Asia and the Caribbean at the turn of the century. The socioeconomic demands of empire foregrounded the soldiering body as a medium of imperial knowledge, reflecting Americans’ shifting place in the world. Yet many “old-stock” white elites worried about the dangers of empire on both individual bodies and the republican body politic as a whole. Watching American regiments leave for Cuba in 1898, Madison Grant could not help but be impressed by “the size and blondness of the men in the ranks as contrasted with the complacent citizen, who from his safe stand on the gutter curb gave his applause to the fighting men and stayed behind to perpetuate his own brunet type.”30 The potential of imperial labor to reinvigorate its agents paradoxically weakened the nation by the enfeebled individuals it left behind. Moreover, the physiological effects of empire abroad were still unclear. During the Spanish American and Filipino American wars, and the subsequent occupation of the Philippine archipelago, U.S. military officials conducted various studies on what effect, if any, these foreign environments had on the health of American troops. After all, it was in these “exotic” environments where it was believed that “the white man lives and works only as a diver lives and works underwater.”31 Troops bound for colonial service abroad underwent anatomical analysis to determine their racial fitness and endurance in allegedly debilitating tropical climates.
Imperial labor was fraught with socioeconomic and physiological contradictions. For many Americans, the desire for empire coexisted with an abiding fear of these new dark and uncharted colonial spaces. The science of climatology, which linked racial evolution to climate, was a response to the anxieties surrounding socioeconomic, racial, and gender status that accompanied the rise of American empire. Americans often turned to corporal metaphors to express this ambivalence, counseling them to “take up the white man’s burden” while warning them about the debilitating effects of these new tropical spaces, ruefully termed “the white man’s graveyard.”32 In the case of the Philippines, U.S. army medical officials estimated that whites required approximately two years to become acclimated to the archipelago’s climate. Officials found that a “moral life, with plenty of hard work” was found “to counteract, in most cases, the so-called demoralizing effects of the Philippine climate.” Imperial labor would redeem both its architects and subjects preserving the superiority of the former and setting the latter on the path to civilization.33 Despite its small size, the prewar army was one of the few national institutions with the resources and material to conduct systematic anthropometric and medical assessments of American bodies linking studies of soldiers’ health in the Caribbean and the Philippines to a broader discourse of race, work, and the nation’s imperial constitution.34
Anthropometry revealed the imperialist urge for order and the need to place the right bodies in the right places both at home and abroad. White elites believed that empire could serve as a balm to the proverbial “Negro problem.” In 1900, Nathaniel Shaler, a geographer and the dean of Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School, proposed that “troops required for Federal Service in tropical lands might well be recruited from the abler Negroes,” whom, “as a result of their tropical constitution, would endure the tropical climates better than whites.”35 In 1901, Alabama senator John Tyler Morgan proposed the formation of black colonies in the Philippines, reasoning that blacks—as fellow tropical peoples—were best equipped to compete with the islands’ indolent natives and could perhaps serve as a vanguard of a broader American colonization of the archipelago. However, Morgan’s plans were effectively scuttled when it was revealed that after extended duty in Southeast Asia, whatever immunity black troops possessed was compromised by their lack of “moral stamina”—evidenced by their tendency to fraternize with native women—and the deleterious effects of various tropical diseases such as malaria.36 Whereas interracial sexual transgressions that occurred in the U.S. punished black men with murderous violence, in the colonial context, sex across or within the color line was generally countenanced when the races in question were deemed inferior. Anthropometric studies of black troops delineated the detrimental effects of socio-sexual diseases manifested in lesions and inflammations that marked the black body as degenerate. Within only a few years, blacks had gone from being regarded as acclimated “children of the tropics” to representatives of the vast native reservoir of disease and degradation.37
By the turn of the twentieth century, the military body was increasingly acclaimed in civilian life throughout the Western world. Military definitions of fitness were widely adopted in public life contrasting the “A1,” or first class, body versus the “C3,” or third class, body. Across industries, the male body became a prominent object of inquiry—a tool used to delineate shifts in the nation’s political economy driven by increased migration and technological change. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, transatlantic reformers in the social and natural sciences had turned to the medium of conscription as a means to chart social change along corporeal lines. The experience of the British during the Boer War exacerbated fears of working-class degeneration when the nation’s elites were stunned to find that few of the nation’s industrial workers were fit for service. The nation “awoke to the fact that its vigor was sapped,” as its working classes showed up for battle as a “hooligan, anemic, neurotic, emaciated and degenerate race.”38 For many, it seemed as if the working classes—especially those in heavy industries such as coal and steel production—had degenerated into a debased subset of a wider white race, or perhaps even a depraved race unto themselves.39
On both sides of the Atlantic, it was widely acknowledged that both the state and employers had to accept some responsibility for rendering the male physique as means to preserve national health. A decade prior to Private Berry’s aforementioned transformation, leading progressives such as the feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman had made the case for industrial conscription as effective race management:
Let each sovereign state carefully organize in every county and township an enlisted body of all negroes below a certain grade of citizenship . . . For the whole body of negroes who do not progress, who are not self-supporting, who are degenerating into an increasing percentage of social burdens or actual criminals should be taken hold of by the state. This proposed organization is not enslavement, but enlistment . . . To be drafted to a field of labor that shall benefit his own race and the whole community, need not be considered a wrong to any negro. It should furnish good physical training and as much education as each individual can take.
Gilman echoed prevailing notions of essentialist racial thought citing Robert Park’s characterization of blacks as the “lady of the races.” In order for her prospective scheme of industrial conscription to work, Gilman noted: “The whole system should involve the fullest understanding of the special characteristics of the negro; should be full of light and color; of rhythm and music; of careful organization and honorable recognition. The new army should have its uniforms, its decorations, its titles, its careful system of grading, its music and banners and impressive ceremonies.”40 Yet like all good progressives, Gilman believed that only the state—through its marshaling of expertise and legislative coercion—was capable of providing the so-called inferior races with the requisite tools needed to work their way to civilization.
The outbreak of war in Europe in the fall of 1914 inextricably tied the health of the worker-soldier to the body politic. The wartime extension of workplace safety legislation and public and military hygiene programs revealed the corporatist drive to view national productivity as an organic whole, in which the health of its constituent parts had to be maintained at all costs. However, Americans were hesitant to draw definitive racial conclusions from European anthropometry. Hoffman noted that while “every authority on anthropology on both sides of the Atlantic conceded the supreme importance of race as an underlying determining condition in the physical proportions or dimensions of workers and recruits,” there was too much ambiguity regarding “race” in European anthropometry to draw direct comparisons with race relations in the U.S.41 Whereas Americans linked race to distinct physical markers such as skin color, hair, and body shape, European military anthropometry tended to privilege “intra-racial” rather than “interracial” difference, to privilege place over blood. Evaluating the 1914 to 1915 rejection statistics of European armies, Hoffman concluded that, “the term race is not one which permits of precise definition, for entirely pure races are certainly no longer met with in European countries.” Europeans believed an individual’s race roughly corresponded with their residency or birthplace: a Prussian was generally accepted as someone who was born in Prussia. Though it should be noted that these spatial “birth place” definitions of race were largely confined to academic and elite anthropometrical debates and did not characterize European racial discourse as a whole. Much like its American variant, European anthropometry understood race as an immutable biological and cultural identity.
Nevertheless, Hoffman found this methodology to be maddeningly imprecise from an American ethnological perspective, arguing for the need to “[correlate] the physical data to the place of birth.”42 Racial physiologies had to be conceived of as a long-term product of both space and time. Hoffman drew on his training as an actuary to note that “the same definite relationship between disease predisposition and inherited ancestral traits has shown to be the case in the inheritance of physical proportions of the body.” Hoffman proposed that the U.S. Army abandon its current European-informed models of racial classification—which only required examiners to list recruits’ color and nationality—in favor of methods more attuned to models of physical anthropology, which more effectively linked race to place.43
The war simultaneously shattered and reaffirmed progressive’s faith in rational inquiry. The “war to end all wars” destroyed progressive notions of perpetual progress while simultaneously reconfiguring new forms of pragmatism. Indeed, the war convinced many progressives that there was perhaps nothing wrong with pragmatism—as both an ideological and instrumentalist social philosophy—that could not be remedied through pragmatic solutions. Progressives sought to remedy these seeming contradictions of pessimistic rationality in their efforts to regulate and potentially remake laboring bodies of color viewed as recalcitrant. One observer described this process as “an increased interest in physical measurements and the means of improving them when they are below par.”44 Anthropometry could also alleviate the war’s potentially dysgenic effects. War “impoverished the breed” the nation’s germ plasma, as the strongest were killed at the front leaving behind the unfit to breed.45 Dr. T. J. Downing, writing in the New York Medical Journal, warned that the danger of postwar racial degeneracy lay in “the possibility that through religion and commerce, the idealism of universal democracy, worldwide socialism and the practical annihilation of distance, the long headed races of Western Europe and America may invite or permit a migration of the mixed or broad head skull types which would be followed by centuries of retrogression.”46 By marking the stigmata of degeneracy in various racial types, anthropometry helped weed out unfit bodies from the body politic. For many progressives, an “accounting of national health” through a process like conscription was vital for addressing questions of “national and racial vitality, physical progress, or deterioration at a time of great unrest.”47 And only the state as the facilitator of racial and labor management expertise could effectively serve as the primary arbiter of national health.
The wartime draft was a massive undertaking unprecedented in U.S. history. Congress formally declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917, and in the following month, conscription was instituted with the passage of the Selective Service Act. The draft soon became a litmus test for progressive principles, and the utility and limits of state coercion as an agent of social change. Over the course of the war, America transformed its small peacetime volunteer army of 126,000 men into a fighting force of approximately 4 million (350,000 of whom were black).48 Officials drew heavily on the experiences of Civil War conscription such as the infamous racially contentious New York Draft Riots of 1863 eager to avoid past mistakes. Conscription was couched in the rhetoric of a voluntary “selective service,” owing to the need to reconcile civil liberty and national efficiency in a modern, multiracial democracy ostensibly committed to a war to make the world safe for democracy. General Enoch Crowder, director of the Selective Service, stated that “conscription in America was not the drafting of the unwilling . . . the citizens themselves had willingly come forward and pledged their service.” President Wilson described the process not as a draft per se, but as a “selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass.” For the philosopher John Dewey, the irony of the state effectively “press-ganging” men into the armed services to “make the world safe for democracy” was a perversion of American ideals of social justice. Despite fears that June 5, 1917, registration day, would be met with violence, or at the very least indifference, the day largely passed without incident. At the end of the day, 9.6 million men—including 700,000 African American men—had been registered for military service.49
Wartime imperatives and long term strategies of race betterment necessitated a clear and full accounting of the nation’s physical health, which only the draft could provide. Like most progressive initiatives, the draft was a curious mix of the pragmatic and the utopian. President Wilson, who framed the “war to end all wars” in idealistic terms, continually stressed the practical character of conscription. After signing the Selective Service Act into law on May 18, 1917, he announced, “This is not the time for any action not calculated to contribute to the immediate success of the war. The business now in hand is undramatic, practical and of scientific definiteness and precision.”50 Ales Hrdlicka demanded that conscription “should yield nothing less than the initiation of a National Anthropometric Survey . . . the existence of nations in the future will depend largely on the conservation of the physical standards and soundness of their people.”51 Reformers and military officials linked the regenerative potential of conscription to notions of sexual purity and manly self-control traits generally seen to be the sole purview of white men. Conversely, those peoples lacking such traits were marked as deficient men, workers, soldiers, and Americans.
Unprecedented levels of federal manpower were needed to process the masses of conscripted men. Out of approximately 9.6 million males—ages 21 to 30 years old—who registered for the initial selective service draft in June 1917, some 2.5 million, were examined at local draft boards. After examination at the local level, qualified men were dispersed to one of the nation’s sixteen mobilization camps, where they underwent a second or possibly third battery of physical tests. These tests were administered by officers of the Medical Department of the Army under the supervision of the division or camp surgeon. The chief medical officer was responsible for selecting the examining staff, which was drawn in part from regimental surgeons and base hospital personal.52 Though local draft boards and camp physicians exercised some latitude in interpreting the examination standards—detailed in the Selective Service Act of June 1917—they generally conformed to a common pattern. Regulations proscribed a minimum height of 61 inches, weight of 118 pounds, and a chest circumference of 31 inches for recruits. Physical defects given as causes for rejection included those found in the skin, head, spine, ears, eyes, mouth, neck, chest, abdomen, anus, genitals, hands, and the lower extremities. Draft officials toyed with the idea of expanding the draft age from 31 to 40 years to expand the number of defects that could disqualify one from military service. However, they were less willing to compromise on height, weight, and chest circumference standards. Despite official efforts to standardize fitness, these norms often proved negotiable for “healthy chaps” able to draw on their respective gendered or racial privileges in pleading their cases to the appropriate military authorities. Case in point was a thirty-one-year-old white recruit from Brooklyn, New York—a post-graduate student at NYU and a former athletic director of playgrounds—who, after being placed in Class 1A, was informed by his local draft board, “that new army regulations forbade [his] induction into service because [he] was only sixty-two and a half inches”—a half inch below the required sixty-three inches. The recruit bemoaned the fact that, “as there are plenty of sickly fellows ready to do clerical duty, why is it necessary to pick upon a healthy chap, fit for the real kind of war work?”53
The African American intelligentsia reacted to the draft with ambivalence. W. E. B. DuBois hoped that military service would confer full citizenship on blacks. He explained his reasoning in a July 1918 editorial in The Crisis entitled “Close Ranks”: “Let us while the war lasts . . . close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.”54 Driven by a mixture of professional and political motivations—not the least of which was a prospective captaincy in the army—DuBois’s call to arms was met with scorn by many blacks. Radicals such as A. Philip Randolph and Hubert Harrison argued that black support for the war represented a “surrender of life, liberty, and manhood.” Randolph declared that he would fight not to make the world safe for democracy but to “make Georgia safe for the Negro.”55 By the end of the war, draft boards had registered 24.2 million men “acceptable for military service,” with blacks comprising roughly 2.3 million, or 9.63%, of the total registration. Across the color line, a significant minority of men resisted conscription by feigning illness, self-mutilation, or simply failing to register. However, it is near impossible to determine whether this resistance was driven by political or religious ideologies or sheer indifference. Roughly one in ten of all American men eligible for registration, and approximately 30% of those selected by the draft boards, refused to present themselves for formal induction into the army. Local racial politics, high levels of illiteracy and—notwithstanding the Great Migration—the overwhelmingly rural character of the mass of black recruits made it difficult for officials to gauge the exact number of blacks selected for the selective service. Although, the available evidence reveals that the majority of black men complied with wartime conscription.56
Black support for the war effort stretched across class lines just as it did in white communities. For members of the black elite, the call to the colors was a duty incumbent upon them as the self appointed leaders of the race. Steeped in traditions of military service from the revolution through the Civil War blacks of all classes saw military service as a path, albeit a historically circuitous one, to full citizenship.57 Of the 750,000 men in the Regular Army and the National Guard at the beginning of the war, approximately 20,000 were black. Nevertheless, longstanding theories of blacks’ lack of military prowess—informed in part by Civil War anthropometry—had denied most African Americans the chance to prove their martial masculinity on the battlefield. The reasons were numerous, and included white southerners’ anxieties about armed blacks, along with a prevailing sense that the Negro was naturally “yellow” and unfit for the demands of modern mechanized warfare. One American war correspondent remarked, “One who sees the Negro stevedores work notes with what rapidity and cheerfulness they work and what a very important cog they are in the war machinery.”58 Characterizations of black laborers as both childlike “happy darkies” of a bygone era versus vital cogs in the machinery of the wartime state revealed the contradictory characterizations of black labor as an atavistic, juvenile yet mechanistic agent of the wartime labor economy. Remaking the black worker as primitive efficiency embodied led to more than 89% of black recruits being consigned to labor and supply battalions to provide logistical support to the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) in France. Black draftees who did see combat duty served in National Guard Units and regular army detachments units. The most famous black combat regiment was the 369th Harlem Hell Fighters, who served as an attachment of the French Fourth Army and became one of the most highly decorated allied units of the war.59
America’s polyglot army provided ample opportunity to develop an intricate schedule of racial typologies. COA officials noted that men of “smaller races” (fewer than 60 inches) were unable to carry the required military equipment whereas men over 78 inches, “drawn primarily from the Nordic type,” were more apt to suffer from circulatory diseases. Body size also related to the standard army food ration. Troops in a camp containing many “small southern Italians and Jews” required less calories than one composed mainly of “hardy Scandinavians.”60 One AEF officer concluded that the fighting ability of American troops was in direct proportion to the percentage of “old-stock Americans” in various units, claiming, “get a draft outfit filled with men swept up from the east side [of New York with its high concentration of recent southern and eastern European immigrants] and it is just about as unsafe as anything in the army.”61 While many progressives viewed military service as a key mechanism of Americanization for the “near white” races of southern and eastern Europe, anthropometry consistently reaffirmed blacks physiological lack of martial fitness continually held hostage to their depraved physiology. Army officials cited draft evaluations to argue that “the poorer class of backward Negro has not the mental or physical stamina or moral sturdiness to put him in the line against opposing German troops of high average education and training.”62 Only 38,000 blacks served in overseas combat units, constituting a mere 3% of the army’s combat forces. The vast majority of black recruits were relegated to segregated service battalions as stevedores, cooks, gravediggers and menial laborers working under conditions not unlike those experienced by many blacks stateside in the convict labor gangs of the Deep South.63
American military officials believed that efficient standardization—whether in war or industry—necessitated racial differentiation. Determining whether the Negro could, or should, fight, was based on defining just what constituted a “Negro” in physiological terms. Indeed, one of the committee’s stated goals was “to assist division surgeons with basic racial problems such as: Is this person to be classified as a white or a Negro?”64 Consequently officials came to understand race in mechanistic terms as a collection of interchangeable parts which taken together produced the sum of a racial type. Army officials sought to apply these mechanistic models of labor to increase military efficiency in new, and often intriguing, ways. In late 1917, COA officials tried to incorporate famed French anthropologist L. Manouvrier of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, work on marching. Manouvrier argued that the arrangement of men in each battalion section according to the length of their leg, as opposed to their height, would facilitate more efficient marching techniques. Consequently, any potential gaps in the line could be filled instantaneously by men of any height without requiring any redistribution or exchange of “men of various racial statures,” thereby preventing the insidious scourge of fatigue so dreaded by industrialists and militarists. However, an initial lack of funding and the abrupt conclusion of the war in November 1918 precluded COA officials from implementing Manouvier’s plan.65
Increasingly gruesome modes of warfare highlighted previously neglected aspects of a soldier’s physiology. Facial proportions were analyzed to fit men for new equipment, like gas masks, and respiratory fitness was measured to gauge specific groups’ susceptibility to gas. As a medic attached to the 92nd Division in western France, Henry Berry recalled one such order whereby “‘Negro soldiers will be used to handle the mustard gas cases because the Negro is less susceptible than the white.’ Why is the Negro less susceptible than the whites? No one can answer!” COA officials argued that a knowledge of “racial characteristics was necessary to decide on the classification when military organizations are being formed on racial lines, such as ‘Negro regiments’ or ‘Slavic legions’” and foregrounding racial labor knowledge as a function of military efficiency amid rapid technological change.66
The impetus to measure the exact dimensions of Negro racial types was colored by the socioeconomic realities of Jim Crow. After the East St. Louis Race Riot of May 1917 and the Houston Riot in August of that year—in which the all-black 24th infantry battalion responded to months of race baiting and violence by local whites by killing over a dozen white civilians—the War Department delayed the general mobilization of blacks until mid October 1917 to ease racial tensions. Once blacks began to be called, southern draft boards habitually refused to grant exemptions for even the most debilitating physical ailments. One of the more egregious examples occurred in Fulton County, Georgia where the local draft board discharged 44% of white registrants on physical grounds while exempting only 3% of black registrants. Nationwide, black draftees received proportionality fewer deferrals than whites. Despite constituting only 10% of the population, blacks made up approximately 13% of those serving.67
Historically barred from the skilled trades, blacks were hard pressed to claim deferments for “industrial necessity” and were instead shuttled into low skilled labor. Moreover, many black men were quite simply too poor to claim the usual exemptions for husbands and fathers. In a cruel twist of irony, black men’s merge army pay and compulsory family allotment—up to fifty dollars a month to an enlisted man’s family—“would actually increase many a black family’s income, wiping out any claimed deferment on grounds of economic dependency.” To preserve the segregated labor economy of Jim Crow, local officials also made a practice of inducting those blacks who owned their own farms and had their own families to support, while exempting young, single men who worked for large planters. This, in turn, effectively reified blacks’ subordinate position in regional and national political economies.68
COA officials argued that race-based anthropometrical investigations of recruits were vital to avoid errors in “the selection of recruits for [war] work involving a wide range of physical aptitude, stress, strain and specific liabilities to disease.” However, the Selective Service failed to provide gradations in assigning rejections simply classifying recruits as fit or unfit for military service.69 By the summer of 1917, COA officials were convinced that army recruiting officials were still totally “indifferent to the racial aspects” of their work. Officials estimated that thousands of black recruits had been rejected for physical traits such as flat feet, which, although “inherent in the Negro, had no bearing on his military efficiency.” Conversely thousands more had been deemed fit for active duty despite suffering from the apparently “hidden wounds of colored diseases,” such as tuberculosis (TB) and venereal disease (VD).70 Military officials saw these pathologies “as endemic to the colored race prior to enlistment” and “readily detectable by the trained medical professional or racial anthropologist.”71 Eager to draw upon a captive black labor force military officials sought to strengthen the selection process through the implementation of professional expertise.
In November 1917, Frederick Hoffman wrote to the Army Surgeon General and the Chief of Staff, urgently recommending the “authorization of the scientific re-measurement of selected groups of men of the new national army . . . for the purpose of securing trustworthy racial data strictly comparable with statistics secured during the Civil War indispensable to all investigations into national physical progress or deterioration.” Hoffman argued that “if the measurements being made are ignorant of these pathological facts, it is self evident that one of the greatest opportunities for securing such information will be lost.”72 In January 1918, Dr. George Hale, Chairman of the NRC, wrote to the Army Surgeon General, William Gorgas, to reiterate the need for anthropologists attuned to racial imperatives: “I regard this matter as of the utmost importance, both from the standpoint of pure anthropology and its part in American history . . . for various reasons, much time has been lost and I cannot here impress upon you too strongly the great desirability of prompt action.” In response, Hale tapped Davenport, now head of the ERO at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York to oversee the work.73
Beginning in December 1917, in an effort to enhance the scientific and medical rigor of the selection process, the Selective Service allowed local boards to appoint additional examining physicians to assist in all future physical evaluations. The COA recommended two separate schedules: one for use in the local draft boards throughout the country, and the other, which contained detailed anthropometric examinations, for use at the cantonments. Schedule A—for use at local draft boards—was a general schedule that included references to the registrants’ town, state, county, and draft number. Examiners were instructed to note an individual’s color, “white, black, yellow and so on,” as opposed to his race. Applicants were required to note their weight, height, and chest circumference and the birthplace of both their parents and grandparents. A second schedule for special examination at the cantonments called for more detailed physiological investigations referencing “the form of the head, its length, and breadth”—measurements deemed to be of “great anthropological importance.” The COA was especially keen to chart other racial traits like “the absence of body hair in certain Negro races, the Chinese, etc.,” and the variation between the races’ respective wing spans. Both schedules provided space for any additional remarks related to “special bodily peculiarities that the individual may show.”74 Secondary measurements echoed those of earlier racial sciences—specifically the notorious practice of skull measurement known as phrenology—in linking variations in body type to skin color and racial identity, a rejoinder to the coming culturist trend advocated by the likes of Boas.75
Anxieties regarding draft officials’ apparent inability to reconcile form and function coalesced around the phenomena of an apparent rise in “malingering” within the ranks. Akin to “soldiering” in industrial labor, malingering, or shirking, was the intentional withholding or slowing down of the labor process and was seen by those in the military and industrial spheres as a major impediment to efficiency and a direct threat to managerial control. Military officials divided malingerers into two groups: those who “do so [malinger] with full knowledge, intent and responsibility; and those whose members are hypochondriacs or constitutionally inferior individuals.”76 While the first group was relatively small, it was the second group, “the constitutionally inferior,” who posed the greatest threat. Reformers feared that the hyper regimented and social nature of military life, along with a basic fear of combat, greatly increased the chance for “systematic malingering, which like its industrial cousin, stemmed not from a man’s natural inclination to loaf but from one’s self interest in relation to that of other men.” One surgeon remarked, “In all of the cases in which defects were simulated or exaggerated, the patients were actually defective either in a lesser degree or in a different affection or both.” Military officials were forced to walk a fine line between facilitating cooperation between disparate types of men and militating against any tendency on their collective part to restrict or withhold their labor at the front or behind the lines.77
The conflation of malingering with soldiering clearly revealed the increasing militarization of labor. Moreover, the logic of industrial evolution persistently characterized malingering in gendered terms through the rhetoric of dependence that was seen as proof of a congenital lack of manliness. Blacks, as members of a so-called “tropical race,” were seen as genetically predisposed to indolence. For whites guilty of such practices, deviant behavior, not genetics, was to blame—though charges of malingering were disproportionately leveled at colored recruits.78 Arthur Little, a white officer in the 15th New York colored regiment, recorded his reactions to the sight of his men bathing naked in a pond, claiming that it “caused a number of us to exclaim: ‘with Henry M. Stanley in Darkest Africa!’” Like most white officers assigned to black units, Little saw blacks as a people governed by unreasoning emotion and brute strength who, if left to their own devices, would surely succumb to state of dissipation.79 Little saw his “colored charges” as only one step removed from the jungle primeval and the black soldiering body as indolence embodied.
Malingering was a socio-medical condition that was also seen as highly performative. Despite suspected malingerers’ various efforts to disguise their condition through “excessively self-assertive” or “overconfident” behavior, military officials felt that advances in physical anthropology and a keen analytical eye for symptoms such as dilated pupils or rapid breathing that were often “indicative of various racial traits” exposed the subterfuge of malingering. Military officials believed that “there was something indefinable yet pathological in the bearing of the malinger which medical experience alone can detect.” Though examining personnel were advised to use some degree of “personal discretion” in evaluating suspected malingerers, they increasingly relied on proscribed medical models of physical anthropology that marked bodies as unambiguously fit or unfit. The “Negro type” and the “malingering type” were increasingly seen as one and the same: deviant bodies that had to be identified and weeded from the ranks to preserve military vigor and national vitality.80
Ultimately, time and its contractual dynamics were at the nexus of debates regarding malingering and how best to manage black military manpower. Yet endowing blacks with a regimented clock consciousness was merely a necessary precursor to imparting a sense of military labor’s contractual obligations and value. But if proletarianization was defined in part by a shift from bonded to contract labor, this transition was complicated by military conscription—for African American serviceman who were only a little more than two generations removed from slavery, the complications were infinite. Building on Peter Way’s formulation of military labor as a “marchland of labor relations . . . straddling the worlds of free and unfree labor” provides insight into the curious contractual condition of black serviceman.81 However, martial wage labor was defined less by its contractual obligations as opposed to those occupations rooted in service and citizenship. This proved problematic for African Americans whose civil rights had been under constant attack by state and federal officials since the dying days of Reconstruction.
Prevailing notions of contract or wage labor in both the public and private spheres were predicated on the autonomy of both the employer and employee: a reciprocity seen to be the sole purview of white manhood.82 However, with conscripted military labor, an individual’s autonomy was ostensibly based on his ability to temporarily cede ownership of both his body and labor to the service of the state. President Wilson’s aforementioned description of conscription “not as a draft per se, but as a selection from a nation, which has volunteered in mass” revealed the complicated contractual nature of this process.83 Conscription relegated partially emancipated blacks to their supposedly “natural” state of bondage by asserting direct ownership over the black soldiering body—albeit only for the length of their military service. Despite receiving a wage, a soldier’s productive capacity was ultimately measured by his ability to take life, and if necessary, give up his own in the service of the state. By doing so, he was entitled to various rewards, such as veterans’ pensions. Indeed, only a citizen could be subjected to the seemingly contradictory process of “voluntary conscription,” because only a citizen was seen to possess inviolable rights that could be temporarily suspended in the service of the state. Black serviceman, seen as congenitally dependent and defective agents, remained beyond the pale of martial citizenship.
In the wake of fears over a supposed spike in cases of malingering, and following the institution of the new medical advisory boards in the winter of 1917, all previously granted exemptions were repealed and subjected to further review. Washington established 1,319 medical advisory boards to allow individuals to appeal the decision of their local draft boards.84 Selective Service regulations regarding physical examinations by local boards henceforth “prescribed standards of unconditional acceptance and rejection.” All cases found upon examination by a Local Board to fall “between these two standards shall be referred to the Medical Advisory Board.” The functions of the Medical Advisory Boards, outlined in Section 44 of the Selective Service Act, were to “examine registrants sent to them by Local Boards or State Adjutants General for examination and advise such Local Boards concerning the physical condition of such registrants.” The power to determine whether an individual was either accepted or rejected for service, however, remained with the local draft boards. Under these new guidelines, all past, present, and future draftees were required to fill out questionnaires concerning their industrial status and exemption eligibility.85
The revised guidelines of the Selected Service sought to establish clearly defined hierarchies of military efficiency. All registrants were reclassified into five classes, “in inverse order of their importance to the economic interests of the Nation.” These categories were implemented at both the local and regional level. Most men fell under Class I, defined as “unmarried and married men whose wife and children are not dependent on their earnings.” Classes II through IV included men who were the sole support for their dependents, as well as clerics and criminals, whereas Class V consisted of those “totally and permanently physically and or mentally unfit for military service.” Those defined as Class I—liable for immediate military service—were dispatched to one of sixteen national mobilization camps to potentially undergo a second battery of tests to determine whether they were fit for military service. The relative impotence of the Medical Advisory Boards deepened with the growing expectation that no individuals “found by the local boards to be qualified for military service will be rejected upon their subsequent examination by any examining surgeons at the camps or cantonments.”86 To the chagrin of many COA officials, military expediency continued to trump long-term considerations of race betterment and national health.87
Anxieties regarding the nation’s seemingly enfeebled manhood were ultimately rooted in competing claims of expertise, a characteristic of many Progressive Era debates. Critics noted that draft boards were made up of three local residents of the respective county or city, only one of whom was a physician—although often with dubious professional accreditations and beholden to the dictates of local politics rather than long-term race betterment. Davenport and COA officials blamed the high rejection rates on local draft boards’ misunderstanding of the “racial antecedents” of recruits and the overarching amateurism of the local draft boards. In the initial stages of the draft, it fell to the physician, “in whom the governor feels that he can repose implicit confidence,” to carry out the physical examinations. With little to no understanding of the admittedly “imperfectly developed branch of knowledge that was physical anthropology,” examining officers of the line were ill equipped to detect the apparent racial significance of all but the most apparent conditions, such as “deformities, skin eruptions, pallor, inebriety, flat feet, etc.”88 COA members noted that for recruits defined as “black,” these defective conditions must be understood as endemic to, and not simply conditions of, an inferior racial constitution. By confusing physical deformities (such as flat feet) and infections with the far more insidious and entrenched forms of racial pathologies, draft board officials, as victims of cronyism and patronage, had failed to see the forest for the trees.
Debates regarding race selection and race betterment in regards to the draft intersected with the prevailing policies and practices of eugenics, the science of “better breeding” that informed much of the era’s racial discourse. In the spring of 1918, in response to the revised procedures’ state of apparent indifference to the “race question,” Davenport received a civilian appointment in the War Department as an army anthropologist. Two months later, he was appointed Major in the Sanitary Corps. Finally, on July 23, 1918, a subsection of anthropology under Davenport’s supervision was authorized within the Office of the Army Surgeon General.89 Initially proposed as the section of “Anthropology and Eugenics,” this subcommittee received federal funding and drew most of its staff from the COA. Hrdlicka predicted that anthropometric surveys of this kind would become “as fixed and important as the census, and the data they gather will serve as an index of progress, stagnation or deterioration of and within the nation, and thus be of vital importance to agencies for eugenics and legislation.”90 Drawing on Civil War anthropometry, COA officials remarked, “It seems as though we should, considering the progress of science, at least equal the achievements of Gould if not exceed them, and so the Committee has this purpose primarily in view.”91 Yet Davenport feared that there were limits to the utility of the Civil War-era data:
In view of the tremendous immigration of the past years, the physical changes of the racial constitution of our stock have been so great as to mask entirely any slight alteration that may have occurred in the physique of the stock of fifty years ago, through either improvement or deterioration of environmental or economic conditions.92
Contradictory statements such as these conflating hereditary and environmental factors—“racial constitutions” and “environmental or economic conditions”—only increased elite anxieties regarding the utility and explanatory force of eugenic terminology.
For much of the early twentieth century, eugenicists had dismissed African Americans as a factor in industrial civilization. Early eugenicists were primarily fixated upon class rather than race, positing degenerates and the poor as the greatest threat to the nation’s biological well being. However, historians have noted that “the war accelerated the process of colored industrial advance” as southern black migrants began to replace whites throughout the industrial north.93 Madison Grant—the patrician racialist and author of the best-selling lament for Nordic supremacy, The Passing of the Great Race (1915)—vigorously campaigned for a stronger eugenic element in the committee’s work to better understand and combat the creeping “Negro factor” in national life. For Grant, an indifference to heredity was an indifference to history. Throughout their extensive correspondence, Davenport informed Grant that the inclusion of the term eugenics was to underscore the effects that the selection might have on the next generation in charting marriage and birth rates, and the “selective nature of the death rate in war and future matters of race and anthropology.” However, Davenport maintained that he would withdraw the term if the Surgeon General should find himself “not educated up to it.”94 Eugenicists’ fears that perhaps heredity was not in fact destiny, and that their goals would be misunderstood by the non-initiated, belied deeper anxieties regarding the mutability of racial physiologies during this highly volatile period of war and socioeconomic change.
From a practical point of view, eugenics—with its broad focus on the very production and ultimate prevention of certain degenerate types—was too unwieldy, too impractical for the purpose of racial labor management. Though keenly aware of the indispensability of “the Negro type” to the contemporary political economy, many observers began to doubt whether such a “type in its purest form” even existed. Prior to the outbreak of war in Europe, Grant warned Davenport about the dangers of airing these anxieties in public, given the current political and cultural climate. Responding to Davenport’s musings on the prospective “whiteness” of mulattos and “Negroes as the first men,” Grant remarked, “The inferior races are struggling so hard to assert their equality with the dominant races, that I think it a pity to give them any statements, which by misquotation could be twisted to their advantage. This is especially true of the Negroes, about whom so much sentimentalism has been wasted.”95 For Grant, race betterment was a zero sum proposition; white supremacy was contingent on blacks’ continued debasement and subjugation. However, eugenic prescriptions for preserving white supremacy—whether state-enforced sterilization of the unfit, colored or otherwise—did not address the problem of the various degenerate types still at large in the present population. In contrast, anthropometry, with its ability to measure and quantify the respective utility of racial types, was seen as a powerful and effective tool for preserving white supremacy in both military and industrial labor hierarchies from the trenches of France to the shop floors of America.96
Establishment of a Subsection of Anthropology within the Army Surgeon General’s Office (the term eugenics having since been dropped) was an attempt to craft a distinctly American form of anthropometry sensitive to the nation’s racial and socioeconomic needs. A new section was authorized “to secure the highest quality of the measurements of recruits to assist the War Department in all questions about racial dimensions and differences.”97 The army hoped to answer these questions, cut down on rejection rates, and better prepare for the racial reconfiguration of the postwar workforce. During the summer of 1918, Davenport and his staff traveled to army camps across the nation to inspect methods and equipment used to carry out physical examinations. After a visit to Camp Grant in Illinois, they drew up revised plans—based on Hoffman’s actuarial models, which traced links between disease and heredity—for use at the physical inspection fingerprinting at mobilization camps. However, due to the cessation of mobilization in September 1918 and the end of the war a mere two months later, these projects were never completed.98
Anthropometric studies of drafted men continued into the immediate postwar period. From the fall of 1918 until his discharge in January 1919, Davenport was relegated to a statistical analysis of the army’s preexisting physical examination records. Davenport and his collaborator, Albert Love—both determined to guide future social policy along biological lines—rushed to publish their findings in Army Anthropology: Physical Examination of the First Million Draft Recruits (1919). Reviewing the data prior to publication, they found the “elucidation of defects to be highly subjective” and “shockingly indifferent to racial factors.”99 The data covered two successive drafts of Class I men from September 1917 to May 1918. Since the Class I men in the study were initially subjected to two different standards of physical examination, the results were predictably uneven. Nevertheless, the authors were able to make a few provisional conclusions regarding overall rejection rates. They found that recruiting standards declined over time; rejection rates fluctuated on a regional basis; and urban men were rejected at a slightly higher rate than those from rural regions. Sensory (eyesight) or physical (underweight) defects accounted for two-fifths (21% and 20%, respectively) of all rejections, followed by circulatory diseases (15.7%) and then tuberculosis and venereal diseases, which accounted for a combined 15%. Much to their chagrin, Davenport and Love conceded that their conclusions were bereft of any “real meaningful racial value” due to the committee’s initial indifference to racial factors that consequently corrupted the final data.100
The failure of the Committee on Anthropology and the Surgeon General’s Subsection on Anthropology led their respective members to explore new avenues well before their respective committees’ official demise. Three initiatives in particular require attention. The genesis of the first began in March 1918, following a conference on eugenics at the Shoreham Hotel in New York at which Davenport suggested to Madison Grant the creation of a society that would analyze the race problem from the specific vantage point of physical anthropology.101 This prospective organization would serve as a counter-weight to the American Anthropological Association, which had increasingly come under the influence of Boasian-trained anthropologists who privileged culturist interpretations of race over the biological models favored by the likes of Davenport and Grant. To reaffirm the society’s commitment to hereditarianism, Grant suggested the name “Galton Society”—to honor eugenics founder Francis Galton—which met with Davenport’s approval. Soon, Henry F. Osborn of the American Museum of National History—with whom Grant had co-founded the Bronx Zoo—was brought on board, and on April 16, 1918, a charter of the Galton Society was signed by its founding members. In conjunction with the Eugenics Record Office and the Museum of Natural History, the Galton Society would form part of a triumvirate of eugenic institutions based in and around New York City.102
Eugenicists’ influence would grow in the 1920s reflected in the development of the Caucasian as a legal and cultural entity. New cultural forms of whiteness evinced in the era’s “Nordic vogue” were disseminated to the nation through literary, cinematic, and intellectual channels emanating from the nation’s cosmopolitan center on the island of Manhattan. For many old-guard native New Yorkers such as Grant, life in New York was akin to living in the belly of the beast, the focal point of the nation’s descent into pluralist degeneracy.103 One of the leading mediums in this new whiteness discourse was the new American Journal of Physical Anthropology, founded in early 1918 in New York and Washington, D.C by anthropologists and headed by Ales Hrdlicka. But Hrdlicka’s COA peers, particularly Madison Grant, felt he was becoming indifferent to the wartime work of the committee. Grant believed that while the journal could be launched at any time, the window of opportunity provided by the draft into racial research was limited. Hrdlicka disagreed, and by the middle of 1918 he and Grant were no longer on speaking terms. Under the sole direction of Hrdlicka, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology blended Lamarckian and Mendelian theories of heredity. Hrdlicka proposed that environment “excited germ plasma” in various peoples, which exacerbated latent traits that individuals would invariably pass on to their offspring. Scholar Lee Baker argues that Hrdlicka and the journal were largely responsible “for making physical anthropology a well defined field within the discipline,” a feat that culminated in the establishment of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in 1929.104
The third and final alternative to COA refugees came through the creation of yet another NRC subcommittee, Race in Relation to Disease Civilian Records (RRDCR), founded in May 1918. The RRDCR was designed as a medium for linking military investigations of racial anthropometry to the public and private spheres. Frederick Hoffman was appointed head of the section and pledged to put Prudential Life Insurance’s vast collection of vital racial statistics at the full disposal of the committee. Much like the COA and the Surgeon General’s anthropological subsection, the RRDCR met with a mixture of bureaucratic indifference and intransigence from both the NRC and the federal government. Though the RRDCR had originally been conceived as single entity (incorporating both military and civilian records), objections from the Surgeon General’s Office regarding civilian access to military records required the creation of two distinct military and civilian subsections with only loosely defined information-sharing rules—effectively eviscerating the committee’s autonomy for much of its short existence.105
The RRDCR subcommittee was a key medium of wartime racial knowledge production, and approximated the focus of its committee predecessors to reconcile form with function. In correspondence with the Chairmen of the NRC’s Division of Medicine, Hoffman outlined three possible investigations: a study of Hawaiian race pathology with special reference “to Orientals”; “Racial Aspects of Autopsy Investigation” at John Hopkins Hospital; and “Race in Relation to Physical Condition and Fitness for Employment at Hog Island, Pa.” The latter was intended to determine the physical variation of various racial groups that officials had so far failed to glean from wartime examinations.106 Hoffman went over the records of Dr. J. J. Reilly, chief surgeon of the American International Shipbuilding Corporation at Hog Island, and found “the outlook for new and practically useful data as distinctly encouraging.” He was especially impressed with Reilly’s use of “photographic identification” in measuring a worker’s stature, weight, and vital capacity. Despite Reilly’s lack of formal anthropological training, Hoffman found him to be a man of “high scientific attainments with extended experience in the anthropometric measurements of men.” Perhaps most importantly, Reilly was amenable to any of the committee’s potential suggestions regarding policies and practices of measurement at Hog Island.107
Located southwest of Philadelphia along the Delaware River, the Hog Island shipyard was the largest in the world. Built in approximately nine months on reclaimed swampland, it was hailed by many as the “eighth wonder of the world.” Foreign visitors to Hog Island described it as “awe-inspiring,” “thrilling,” and were thoroughly impressed with the “wonderful organizing efficiency of what they have seen.” President Wilson stated, “Hog Island is simply wonderful.” Lieutenant C. Wiezbicki of France succinctly expressed the conflation of war as work when, following a tour of the island, he remarked, “Hog Island is one of the two most important places in the world today. The other is the River Marne.” Despite these accolades, the yard proved relatively ineffectual as an arsenal of democracy. The first ship produced at the site, the USS Quistconck was christened on August 5, 1918, but subsequent delays in its final fitting pushed its launch date to weeks beyond the armistice. In just over three years of operation (from August 1917 to January 1921), Hog Island turned out 122 ships equaling almost a million deadweight tons, yet failed to furnish a single ship for the war effort.108
Hog Island’s importance resided in its seemingly limitless supply of human capital. The sheer numbers and diversity of men passing through the plant, comprising “dozens of different nationalities,” made it an ideal source for gathering anthropometric data. Of an estimated 300,000 men, black laborers would make up approximately one-fifth of the island’s workforce by war’s end. COA officials noted that under the direction of the Industrial Relations Manager and the Consulting Sanitary Engineer, workplace hygiene and a general attention to working bodies “constituted one of the most important facets of life at Hog Island.” Dr. Reilly commented, “We have not had an epidemic of any sort. Our record is better than any of the army cantonments and the spirit of the workmen is fine.” The vitality of the workforce began with “the examination of all applicants for employment.” Reilly’s partner, Dr. Darlington remarked, “Efficiency means health. This country needs men too badly to waste them. Therefore, we are doing things here that are not usually done—we have a medical as well as a surgical hospital and vocational school on site.”109 A reporter for the New York Times noted that two large hospitals for employees were already up and running as well as a vast program of social welfare activities on behalf of the labor force—working bodies and the corporeal dimensions of labor efficiency retained pride of place at Hog Island.110
During the summer of 1918, NRC officials tentatively agreed to fund the RRDCR’s proposed anthropometric research at Hog Island. The overriding question informing this work was the practical correlation between the physical variations of different racial types and their “physical efficiency, disease resistance, disease occurrence, physical, and pathological impairment.”111 From a military perspective, this investigation was intended to provide the War Department and the Office of the Surgeon General with “unquestionable evidence of physiological racial variations,” which could help lessen the rejections caused by physical errors—thereby increasing the effectiveness of America’s fighting forces. NRC and military officials hoped that anthropometric analysis undertaken at a key wartime labor site would provide insight into ways to preserve the industrial and racial equilibrium deemed so vital to a nation at war.112
Anthropometric methodology used at Hog Island was informed by a wider transatlantic anthropological discourse regarding the measurement and discipline of laboring bodies. Primary among these were models outlined by Charles Goring in his seminal study The English Convict (1913). Deploying an array of anthropometrical practices, Goring maintained that the criminal was a defective and not an atavistic physical type in the Lombrosian vein. For Goring, defective mental or physical traits were often concurrent, but not necessarily agents of degeneration: though not all defectives were criminals, most criminals exhibited defective traits.113 Drawing on Goring’s work, Hoffman believed that defective traits were generally inherited and could therefore be reliably traced through an analysis of the individual’s “racial antecedents” visible in individual physiognomy. Though Hoffman and his peers were often unclear as to the existence of a priori “Negro type,” they believed that certain measurable physiological traits—flat feet, concave chests, and flattened noses—collectively marked one as a Negro. Delineating racial difference in this manner effectively rendered race as an identity that was greater than the sum of its physiological parts.114
At Hog Island, maintaining workers’ health began with the selection process. In early August 1918, Hoffman forwarded to Davenport the first draft of the subcommittee’s record card for use at Hog Island. Hoffman hoped that “in the course of time, these cards could be found feasible for adoption on the part of many other industrial corporations or allied interests in connection with which employees or applicants for employment are physically examined.” Therefore, “only such measurements and questions have been included that serves the immediate and practical purpose of determining the physical status, strength, aptitude and health of the person examined.”115 Examination cards were divided into four data groups: Personal Record, Birth Place and Race, Physical Examination, and Medical Examination. Aside from measuring an applicant’s weight, height, and chest circumference, examiners were instructed to note any other “racial peculiarities” in lung capacity, feet, and hair color. Unless otherwise noted, recruits were to be measured in the nude. Finally, to increase the degree of accuracy and render any statistical findings compatible with those of European investigators, measurements were to be made in metric terms standardizing military efficiency across the Atlantic.116
Progressives were tied, if by nothing else, by an abiding faith in pragmatism through empirical inquiry as a tool of social reform. This instrumentalist view of ethics privileged systematic modes of theory and practice. Accordingly, Hoffman advised that different individuals be charged with securing different sets of anthropometric data in the interests of “systematic consistency.” Examiners were urged to exercise great care in noting examinees’ respective occupation and race. When filling in the occupational entry in Section A of the Personal Record, examiners were instructed as follows: “No general statements or assertions should be accepted. The mere term ‘laborer’ was deemed wholly inadequate.” Applicants were to state the specific nature of their work—whether they were a laborer involved in sewer work, street-cleaning, or work at a steel plant—and their respective standing in these vocations. In Section B, “extra care was necessary for the ascertainment of an applicant’s race,” in an effort to link industrial aptitude with racial fitness. Sketching out these racial schedules, Hoffman asserted that “the large majority of applicants would be white, in the ordinary sense of the term.”117 This was a revealing designation given recent shifts in political economy such as black migration, cessation of European immigration, increasing labor standardization—all occasioning a shift away from heterogeneous ideologies of whiteness to a more homogenous Caucasian archetype.
Wartime demands privileged intra-racial over interracial models of racial difference. The proposed examination card also provided space for notation for Chinese, Japanese, and Filipinos. Hoffman suggested that it would be advisable to secure a list from the Bureau of Immigration of the “fifty principal races likely to be met with in this country.”118 Establishing a normative Caucasian archetype was ultimately an exercise in negation. Whiteness was defined not by what it was but by what it was not (that is, blackness). The physiological and social boundaries of this perpetually elusive whiteness required constant policing of suspected “deviant” and “abnormal” bodies through various legislative, economic, and social means. Moreover, this process—defined by distinct corporeal characters such as color and bodily shape—now became the primary markers of said deviance. When examining “Negro applicants at Hog Island, examiners would have to be guided entirely by personal appearance.” The three “distinctions of ‘black,’ ‘mulatto,’ and ‘near or almost white,’ should not lead to confusion.” For RRDCR officials, this was a tacit acknowledgment that black identity ultimately rested in its definitive non-whiteness. Anthropometrical investigations revealed that the “Negro type” was “colored” by a progressively declining absence of whiteness.119
The officials of the American International Shipbuilding Corporation were committed to a productivist ethos with little regard for caste or color. Black workers at Hog Island were initially given access to company health care and trained in highly skilled trades, such as welding and riveting. Thanks to the work of the RRDCR, however, opportunities for blacks were soon limited. During their time at Hog Island, Hoffman and Riley were able to evaluate approximately 450 workers through their new record cards. While the exact number of blacks in this sample is unknown, subsequent events reveal that they must have comprised a significant portion of the total. A mere six weeks after the drafting of the initial set of record cards, W. R. Wright, president of the Colored Men’s Protective Association, brandished fifteen signed affidavits, claiming that black workers who had graduated from the Hog Island School as riveters had been assigned to jobs as general laborers due to their supposed “lack of aptitude.”120 International Shipbuilding officials countered that the promotion of skilled black laborers would only serve to antagonize white workers and disrupt the shipyards supposed racial harmony. Management cited Hoffman’s anthropometric evaluations to buttress their claims of blacks’ apparent lack of mechanical aptitude. The physiological imperatives of wartime production—the need to fit the right bodies to the right kinds of work—as opposed to callous prejudice, seemingly necessitated relegating blacks to the bottom of Hog Island’s occupational hierarchy.121
Inadequately funded from the start and continually stonewalled by officials of both the American Shipbuilding Corporation and the NRC, the RRDCR was abruptly eliminated by the winter of 1918. Thus, Hoffman and his allies were unable to publish any of their preliminary findings on the Hog Island workforce. Following the armistice, appeals to the wartime “utility” of anthropometric work became moot. Like other initiatives of the wartime state, the U.S.’s brief wartime experience precluded any significant short-term results. The significance of the RRDCR was its ability to reconfigure socioeconomic ideologies in the long term and provide frameworks for future inquires into race and labor fitness. Through its association—albeit limited—with the American shipbuilding company, the RRDCR provided a template for strengthening links between the public and private sector “to establish a standard of physical efficiency for our soldiers and our adult male working population.”122 Anthropometry at Hog Island contributed to a broadening consensus that racial physiognomies could and should be measured and that a working knowledge of racial anthropology was vital to postwar national efficiency.
Wartime anthropometry was an applied science forged in the crucible of a nascent military-industrial complex. In the immediate postwar era, the COA and its various successor agencies prevailed upon leading labor organizations to note the racial consequences “of physical examinations in fitting applicants for employment.”123 Accordingly, Hoffman established a correspondence with representatives of the Western Pennsylvania Division of the National Safety Council and the National Industrial Conference Board regarding the broader implementation of these racial schedules. Mere weeks before the war’s end, the committee achieved something of a coup, enlisting the support of American Federation of Labor (AFL) president Samuel Gompers who was currently serving as the chairman of the Committee on Labor at the Council of National Defense. Gompers was attuned to the discourse of industrial ethnography—developed by the likes of Ely, Commons, and Ross as a means to increase labor efficiency—and had long advocated ethnographic inspection of workers. Industrial ethnography was especially appealing in that it provided a scientific rationale for the AFL’s advocacy for skilled labor, an aristocracy of labor whose elite status could seemingly be reified through an analysis of working bodies. But Gompers also recognized that a complete ethnographic examination of every prospective laborer, however desirable for medical, public health, or race betterment purposes, was beyond the financial and institutional means of most companies.124
Notwithstanding the lack of financial and institutional resources, many managerial elites opposed industrial anthropometry on principle. Following the Civil War, any large scale public and private investigations into racial physiologies were invariably bedeviled by the fear that a lack of normative racial taxonomies would allow various racial types to pass undetected into positions or occupations for which they were not “racially equipped.” The practice of “passing”—whether in the social or industrial spheres—revealed longstanding anxieties on the part of whites and blacks regarding the mutability of the color line. For Gompers and his allies in labor and industry, the anthropometric record card was seen as a way to efficiently rationalize working bodies in explicitly black and white terms eliminating any potential ambiguities. These practices would do away with time-consuming medical examinations. The record card would far more effectively chart bodily development, nutritional conditions, and occupational aptitudes than the medical literature currently used by industrial agencies—which was generally indifferent to racial dynamics. By the spring of 1919, the COA was inundated by inquires for racial record cards from corporations such as Standard Oil, Sears Roebuck, and their former partners at Hog Island, the American Shipbuilding Corporation—all seeking to reconcile racial form with function.125
Postwar efforts to link certain bodies to certain work coalesced along sartorial lines via the ready-made clothing industry. In the winter of 1918, Harvard anthropologist Dr. E. F. Hooton wrote to Secretary of War Newton Baker citing the “tremendous problem afforded by large numbers of the Negro race in this country.” Hooton warned that “to neglect the investigative opportunity presented by demobilization would hamper the scientific study of race betterment for many years to come.” Hooton’s plans received a boost during the following summer when the Secretary of War directed the Office of the Army’s Surgeon General (OASG) to have “measurements of 100,000 men made for the purposes of uniform patterns.”126 With the final authorization of Col. A. J. Dougherty of the equipment branch of the OASG, a cadre of expert anthropologists under the guidance of Dr. Charles Davenport was enlisted to perform this work throughout the various national camps where demobilization was already under way. Given public demands for a quick return to “normalcy,” anthropologists were cautioned to finish their work quickly “so as not interfere in any way with the process of demobilization” in keeping with wider public demands for a quick return to an imagined prewar stability.127
Sartorial anthropometry is an often-overlooked form of racial labor management of the immediate postwar era. Fitting men for military uniforms or industrial clothing—“accruements vital to their respective industrial productivity”—allowed Davenport and his peers to appropriate the impetus of wartime imperatives for a postwar civilian industrial context and to reconstitute anthropometry as an applied science essential to national efficiency and race betterment. COA anthropologists were tasked with collecting data to be used “in the construction of manikins of various sizes with the aim of affording better fitting uniforms for the army.” However, the COA’s primary intent was to ascertain the diversity of racial types, since “the tariffs of sizes to be supplied to any distribution zone for a draft army depended on the racial constitution of the population living in that zone.”128 These prized measurements were obtained under the pretext of improving military efficiency, so as to not “unduly alarm any uncooperative radicals who might object to being measured for eugenic purposes.”129 Regarding the formation of the two all-black combat divisions (the 92nd and the 93rd), officials claimed that “surely the question of whether a given person had Negro blood must often have arisen and mistakes have been made.” These suspected incidents of “passing” were believed to exert potentially disastrous effects on the biological composition and integrity of a unit. Through its sartorial manufacture of bodily types, the ready-made clothing industry was the ideal medium to expedite the process of linking race and labor efficiency through the body.130
The cadre of postwar anthropologists comprised a large part of those individuals involved in wartime testing. One month after the Army Surgeon General placed its order for uniforms, Davenport tapped Ales Hrdlicka, now the curator of the division of anthropology at the National Museum in Washington, D.C., to train anthropologists for work in the demobilization camps. Under the direction of the camp surgeon, anthropologists were required to measure up to approximately ninety men an hour per eight-hour day. Given the limited allotted assignments for each anthropologist and the basic cost of maintaining men in the service, “haste was essential” to ensure that this unprecedented opportunity was not lost. Examinees were to be measured in the nude using apparatuses such as calipers, measuring tapes, and metal scales. There were twenty primary metric measurements ranging from standards such as “standing and sitting height,” “weight,” and “circumference of chest” to more obscure notations of “height of pubis” and “height of sternal notch.” Final measurements were shipped to the Medical Record Section of the Surgeon General’s Office in Washington, D.C. for transfer to Hollerith punch cards using a prearranged code for bodily measurements.131
Wartime and postwar anthropometry inextricably linked race to color. Visual subjectivities trumped all other forms of sensory analysis in defining who or what a Negro was. Officials were advised to use their “own discretion to judge the fraction of Negro blood by estimate of skin color.” Accordingly a “mulatto” was identified by their “clear brown” or “cafe au lait” complexion. If the skin color was darker than clear brown, one was to mark them as three-quarter black. If the skin color was light brownish, yellow, or lighter (“yet clearly of African Descent,” but presumably marked by other physiological markers such as hair or eye color), the examinee was defined as one-quarter black. Conversely, other veterans of color were given unprecedented opportunities to racially self-identify. In the case of a “probable” or “suspected” individual of Indian, Chinese, or Japanese descent, officials were simply advised to ask: “Of what race?”132 The measurement card also contained blanks for recording the “native language” and “religion” of the veterans’ parents along with the “nationality” of his maternal and paternal grandparents. If this line of questioning proved insufficient, examiners were provided space to note any “other noteworthy racial traits” that could provide clues to the individual’s “precise” racial identity. Whereas other colored peoples were given a chance to self identify, those deemed “Negro” were afforded no such opportunity. For wartime officials, blackness was a fixed identity firmly rooted and identifiable in the body.133
COA anthropologists found that their sample size of 100,000 men—of whom only 6,445, or a mere 0.6% of the total, were deemed “colored”—was too limited to glean any meaningful conclusions about recruits’ labor fitness. Consequently, the demobilization material was combined with prior wartime evaluations of the first one million recruits and published as Army Anthropology (1921) by the Army Medical Department. Authored by Charles Davenport and Albert Love, Army Anthropology detailed the sizes and proportions of the American male population from twenty-one to thirty years of age with “reference to health and development, to geographical distribution and environment, and to race and color.” With a larger sample size, the authors were able to make some definitive conclusions regarding racial physiology. The general comparative picture of white versus black troops revealed the latter as having longer appendages, shorter trunks, broader shoulders, narrower pelvises, and greater girth of neck, thigh, and calf than their white peers. While blacks seemed more powerfully developed from the pelvis down, whites were more powerfully developed in the chest—confirming longstanding beliefs in white’s seemingly superior respiratory health as a key indicator of labor fitness.134
Postwar anthropometry was a mixture of heredity and environmental models of racial development. Davenport and Love mused as to what role, if any, environment or acquired characteristics played in the development of racial types—and could a shift in function potentially alter form? The primary aim of Army Anthropology was to determine the effect of the military experience on racial physiologies.135 The authors concluded that it was “important to know the physical characteristics and proportions of accepted and demobilized men, as physical proportions are intimately related to mental development, diseases, and nutritional requirements.” Therefore, all measured men were required to have a minimum four months of military service to better gauge the role—if any—of military service in regard to recruits’ physiologies. When it came to blacks, these evaluations could aid in charting “the changes which have occurred in the Negro due to various conditions and the persistent qualities which occurred in the distribution of the race during its recent northward migration.” Officials noted, “In three primary southern demobilization zones, respectively 35%, 30%, and 25% of the men measured were to be of African descent.” Measurements were then matched to the available census data to effectively provide officials with a corporeal map of black proletarianization.136
Postwar data confirmed the physiological effects of military service on recruits of all races. From enlistment to demobilization, the mean stature of all enlisted men, both white and black, had increased from 67.49 to 67.72 inches. Blacks stood at 67.70 inches, compared to 67.71 inches for whites, while the average weight of all military personal increased by approximately three pounds, to 144.50 pounds. The reasons for these changes were numerous. Young men of all races had lied about their age at enlistment, and thus underwent slight growth spurts while in the service. And height and weight requirements had been progressively lowered in later drafts to redress manpower shortages. Yet, despite sharing a near identical height with whites, blacks emerged from the war five pounds heavier on average than their white counterparts. Davenport and Love also noted that “in the southern sections, those containing many colored men show relatively less obesity than those containing a small proposition of them.”137 Finally, while the chest girth of black troops was somewhat less than that of whites, the chest circumference of recruits had increased about one inch over the last twenty-four months of military service, from 33.22 to 34.94 inches. The authors concluded that, thanks “to the fine physical conditions of army life,” the average recruit emerged from the war a changed man: a slightly taller, heavier, and fitter version of his former self. For many recruits, especially those from overcrowded urban areas, these fitter physiques were due to little more than increased access to outdoor activity, exercise, and better nutrition.138
Postwar anthropometry yielded key (yet often contradictory) insights into the shifting nature of racial types. The editors of the Journal of the American Medical Association cited Army Anthropology—along with an additional 549,099 men who were rejected by local boards as totally and permanently unfit for military service—to argue that “the uninfected Negro was a constitutionally better physiological machine” than his white counterpart.139 This assessment ran counter to prevailing theories of blacks’ mental inferiority gleaned from the infamous Army IQ tests. The U.S. Army and the American Psychological Association (APA) administered the IQ intelligence tests under the direction of Robert Yerkes. Historians have demonstrated how IQ tests linked a suspect regime of assessment to the national interest and featured “wildly biased questions in terms of race, nationality, and class.” Examples included queries that would have been baffling to the majority of the population, such as, “Why is tennis good exercise?” and “Where is Cornell University?” Testers gave recruits a letter grade and while “new immigrants” such as Italians and Poles consistently registered in the “D” grade range, black Americans represented a negative baseline of “F” against which all others were measured.140 An astronomical 89% of African American recruits, compared to 47% of whites, were classified as “morons,” defined as possessing a mental age of seven to ten years. Officials ignored social disparities between Southern and Northern blacks test scores—with the latter scoring consistently higher—as well as the disparity of educational rates between whites and blacks. While 25% of all draftees were classified as illiterate, the median number of years spent in education ranged from 6.9% for “native” whites, 4.7% for immigrants, to only 2.6% for Southern blacks. Reflecting on these tests in the immediate postwar era, one veteran quipped that many officials “take these soldiers who whipped the Germans to be mental and physical cripples.”141 Notwithstanding their social biases and shaky methodology, the tests further convinced eugenically minded Americans not only that mental deficiency was genetically determined but also that physical and mental function were linked.142
Wartime anthropometry told a different story from a physiological perspective. Physiologically, blacks and white shared a similar mortality rate for the majority of illnesses, though the black solider “possessed more stable nerves, has better balance, and metabolizes better” than his white counterpart. The skin of black soldiers—on the bodily surface, and in enfolds of the mouth and nasal passages—was found to be much more resistant to microorganisms than that of whites. Officials found that white skin actually seemed to “be a relatively degenerate skin in this respect.”143 Blacks suffered from few of the diseases of “over-civilization,” such as neurasthenia and various other psychopathic disorders, due to their allegedly innate primitivism. If “civilization was paid for by nervousness,” as George Beard, author of the seminal text on neurasthenia, American Nervousness asserted, then those deemed the antithesis of civilization, such as blacks, were absented from this transaction. In this vein, blacks seemed to lack the requisite nerves to be frayed, or minds to lose, in the first place.144 Despite high levels of poverty, blacks were also less likely than whites to suffer from nutritional disorders or alcoholism—issues that affected whites at nearly double the rate of blacks. However, blacks were found to be more susceptible to maladies such as venereal diseases, tuberculosis, and smallpox. The apparent physiological superiority of the black soldier was all the more impressive given a selective service that often enlisted unfit black recruits without causing any apparent diminution in the health of the seemingly superior Negro type.145
Persistent attempts of the COA to compile working taxonomies of racial labor types were constantly hindered by a sustained lack of institutional support, bureaucratic incompetence, and committee infighting. Yet those studies yielded some perplexing and unsettling results. Perhaps most troubling for white social scientists, the allegedly primitive and ossified figure of the Negro had displayed a surprising capacity to work his way to a state of civilized fitness. Perhaps the experience of Henry Berry—transformed into a fitter and healthier man through military labor—had proven the rule rather than the exception. White elites found the wartime emergence of the Negro as a “superior physiological machine” troubling on many levels, not only because it refuted notions of black inferiority, but also because it challenged the stability and utility of black and white racial identities. More worrisome than blacks’ transformation into a supposedly superior type was their ability to transform themselves in the first place. In the face of blacks’ apparent physiological superiority, social scientists were forced to rethink their fundamental understandings of immutable racial typologies. Perhaps racial form was changeable. Regarding army anthropometry, Davenport maintained: “We started this draft in ignorance; all our errors were due to the fact that we had a heterogeneous mass of data instead of a homogenous distribution of types.”146 Flawed methodology inevitably produced flawed results. However, he remained optimistic about how the tools of wartime anthropometry could be used to maintain, or reestablish, racial labor hierarchies in the postwar era. In a lecture to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, entitled “The Measurement of Men,” Davenport noted:
Man is more than a physical body. A live person has a dynamic output, and it is one of the signs of progress in the scientific study of men that within the last fifteen years so great an extension of the measurement of human functioning has been undertaken . . . It led to the remarkable intelligence testing and physical measurements in the late war and the attempt to express quantitatively the social and physical qualities amongst army recruits.
But he concluded with a warning: “Although type is a natural refuge of the mind, the danger is that in our enthusiasm for selected types the great mass of people who do not fall into any type are overlooked.”147 In the end, the soldiering body across the color line proved remarkably resistant to taxonomic standardization.
The carnage of war and increased standardization and segmentation of wartime labor processes had violated the productive integrity of the working body. Reconstituting racial typologies as a dynamic output of physical and mental forces allowed social scientists to rationalize the apparent physiological superiority of the Negro by calling into question the very parameters and contours of the Negro type. Laboring bodies—and by extension, labor power—was reduced to little more than the sum of its parts. Though some of these parts were seen as interchangeable—witness the growth of the postwar prosthetics industry—others were thought to be firmly rooted in heredity. The Army IQ tests that labeled blacks as “moronic” justified white presumptions that African Americans’ ostensible physiological superiority was invariably compromised by their inherently feeble intellect. Though the shape of the Negro may change, his essentially debased intellect was fixed. Whereas whites possessed the genetic capital to overcome their particular mental and physiological shortcomings, the Negro was undone by his inability to reconcile his own. The mind-body tension that undermined his “dynamic productivity” left his savage—yet vital—body a hostage to his primitive mind.148
Biologically informed racial typologies persisted as key organizing principles of labor economies notwithstanding the creeping culturist mindset of the postwar era. Anthropometry continued to be described as “the best quantitative expression of the form of the body” through much of the postwar period. For Davenport, “wartime anthropometry was a handmaiden to genetic studies directed toward problems of inheritance of the human form in both the military and industrial sphere.”149 Concurrent with postwar assessments of wartime anthropometry was the practice of rehabilitation and the struggle to determine which individuals or groups required or warranted reconstruction. Both anthropometry, and later, rehabilitation sought to determine the value of laboring bodies, albeit in differing stages of bodily integrity. Theories of black physiological superiority gleaned from anthropometric inquiry did not go uncontested during the various stages of rehabilitation. This continued as officials struggled to determine whether they could or even should mend black bodies that they already assumed to be broken. The tension that informed social scientific efforts to simultaneously define and rehabilitate a supposed “Negro type” within the confines of legalized and de facto segregation marked a turning point in progressive imaginings of the black worker and the very nature of work itself.150