“The race problem is rather a difficult one because we do not know exactly what Negroes are or what the Negro race is.”
—Dr. Joseph Peterson, National Research Council (1928)
Notwithstanding the conflict’s gruesome human toll, the war also shook progressives’ faith in their ability to effect historical change through rational reform. One economist declared, “It would perhaps be an exaggeration to say that the European war has rendered every text in the social sciences out of date . . . but not much of an exaggeration.”1 As latecomers to the conflict and an ocean removed, Americans managed to avoid the war’s most destructive excess yet as active participants in the discourse of transatlantic reform, they were unable to escape the pervading crisis of faith that consumed Western progressives. Progressives’ notion of progress was linear, linking the past, present, and future through the medium of empirical inquiry; to know the past was to shape the present and the future. Progress was consequently imbued with a sense of perpetual motion, an inevitability that could only be undermined through inattention—willful or otherwise—to the laws of industrial evolution which progressives had long conceived of in explicitly racial and corporeal terms. The war had accelerated a process of “racial impoverishment” and unleashed an insidious atavism embodied in “the colored hordes” that now threatened to penetrate the “outer and inner dikes” of the white world—laying siege to the very future of western civilization.2
The successful management of the war effort provided social scientists with the impetus to rationalize humans and human networks through theoretical models analogous to those in the natural sciences—effectively creating an organic model of political economy along racial lines. Surveying the ravaged postwar landscape for clear answers to the era’s seemingly insurmountable socioeconomic, political, and cultural problems, progressives reconfigured social processes as a function of biology or, more specifically, race. The war further convinced progressives that “biological diseases required biological cures.”3 Wartime imperatives produced racial and labor taxonomies through the draft and rehabilitation to combat the human “waste of war” and purge the body politic of its most inefficient (and therefore undesirable) elements. Despite the war’s horrors, the conflict had provided “extraordinary opportunities for the study of different races and their various physical and mental aptitudes.”4 For many postwar observers, taking stock of the war’s dysgenic effects was paramount. Avowed white supremacists such as Lothrop Stoddard saw the conflict as a white civil war that portended the fall of Western society. For many, this decline had begun over a decade prior with Japan’s shocking victory in the 1904 to 1905 Russo-Japanese War, which vaulted the Asian nation into the ranks of global imperial powers.5 In the intervening years, new technologies had increased the flow of global migration and capital, spurring the advance of the colored races from east to west.
Fears of a global rising tide of color inundating white civilization were constitutive with the development of the postwar U.S. state. Drawing on wartime testing, the authority of the postwar state was predicated on its ability to maintain the racial and corporeal integrity of the republican body politic. These new forms of eugenic statism informed a wide variety of public initiatives from federal funding of the National Research Council (NRC) to hyper-restrictive immigration legislation. Policymakers in Washington drew on their respective wartime experiences in concluding that the nation’s productive capacity and democratic health required inviolable borders and bodies. Even prior to the armistice, the biological effects of the “war to end all wars” were already clear: the best of white manhood had been slaughtered in the trenches, leaving the unfit behind to breed.
Perhaps most troubling to white elites were the masses of colored laborers and soldiers who had traveled to the various metropolises of empire—New York, Chicago, Paris, Berlin, and London—to labor at the work of war in the service of their colonial masters, many of whom now intended to stay. For Stoddard, “colored triumphs of arms are less to be dreaded than more enduring conquests like migration which would swamp whole populations and turn countries now white into colored man’s lands irretrievably lost to the white world.” Though “these ominous possibilities existed even before 1914, the war had rendered them much more probable,” due in large part to the white world’s unbridled avarice.6 Professor Warren S. Thompson of Cornell University remarked, “One may look upon the dying out of those who worship the God of Mammon as nature’s kindly provision for ridding the world of the overambitious, egotistic elements who have missed the true goal of living.” In abrogating their duty to propagate the “best of the breed,” whites now faced submersion by the world’s colored majorities. The language of inundation was also invoked by the likes of Col. William J. Simmons who sought to revive the Ku Klux Klan in 1915 for the purposes of maintaining “Anglo-Saxon civilization on the American continent from submergence due to the encroachment and invasion of alien people of whatever clime or color.”7 Stateside, this menace was embodied in the New Negro type that, according to some wartime testing, had emerged from the war reinvigorated and poised to reshape the very boundaries of race in America.
Postwar social scientists with the NRC built on wartime studies to develop, sustain, and institutionalize a working body of knowledge on the Negro and black labor. The expansion and articulation of state power evinced in the production of racial labor knowledge would prove to be one of the conflicts enduring legacies to American social thought. Specifically, the idea that race was a knowable, quantifiable entity, an object of inquiry, and a problem to be solved through state auspicious. Efforts to chart the effects of migration, urbanization, and race mixing on an ostensibly new Negro type, which had emerged from the war, produced new forms of knowledge on race—the Negro as embodied pathology—which would inform the discourse of American race relations for the foreseeable future. Indeed, the institutionalization of race and racialized peoples as “problem” was perhaps the most significant consequence of wartime testing. Formed in December 1916, the NRC was empowered “to stimulate research and apply the knowledge to the public welfare; to plan comprehensive researches and to minimize duplication by cooperation; and to gather up and render available existing scientific and technical knowledge” to inform public policy.8 For the philosopher Alain Locke, the relative “newness” of the New Negro was only “because the Old Negro had long become more of a myth than a man,” a “creature of moral debate and historical controversy.” Gone was the sturdy yeoman Negro farmer of the Bookerite imagination, dutifully “casting his buckets down” in his “natural” southern homeland.9 The exigencies of war, migration, and shifting labor processes had transformed the Negro into a mobile, national, yet increasingly elusive figure, despite the era’s mania for quantification.
Postwar production of new modes of knowledge on race and the laboring body irrevocably linked race making to state making. Michael Adas argues that scientism—a melding of the “pure” and “social” sciences—informed the efforts of postwar social scientists to establish their authority in drafting public policy and to win funding for their endeavors.10 Knowledge forged in this public/private nexus was stamped with the imprimatur of “expertise” a quintessentially modern form of professionalized knowledge. The language of “expertise” required that the social sciences be made “as relevant to modern industry as the chemist, engineer or geologist.” Sociologist A. E. Jenks cited the need for applied racial labor knowledge noting, “of what value were material gains if civilization itself is to fail?”11 Determined to influence public policy, NRC officials sought to create a critical mass of expert knowledge that “could assist the American nation and race toward her goal of developing civilization” while simultaneously enhancing the authority of the state.12
Conflating categories of race and nation reinforced progressives’ belief that delineating the physiological and political contours of the body politic was paramount to national efficiency. NRC officials sought to extend and enhance the states’ role in facilitating taxonomies of race and labor fitness as a key organizing principles of the postwar labor economy especially as it related to issues of immigration and migration. Committees on “Migration,” “Race Characters/Racial Differences,” “The American Negro” and “Anthropology and Psychology” were charged with the collection and dissemination of all the available existing scientific and technical knowledge on race, racial difference and their relation to labor. Before the war, Robert Park had noted that “the simplest problems . . . are world problems, the problems of the contacts and the frictions and the interactions of nations and races.”13 Members of the NRC linked proposals for studies of domestic black migration to a larger global project of racial knowledge production to curry favor and funding from federal officials.14 Forging the color line at home was essential to stemming the rising tide of color abroad.
The war changed perceptions of black labor fitness in three significant ways. First, wartime migration and military service definitively established the Negro as a factor in industrial civilization. Secondly, rapid migration and urbanization were seemingly affecting mental and physical changes on the Negro—reshaping the corporeal and social contours of blackness in the social scientific imagination. Finally, national efficiency was reconstituted as a function of racial integrity—delineating what bodies could and should do which kinds of work. Socioeconomic, political, and legislative efforts to disentangle race from nation, such as the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, led to the prewar near-white “races” of Europe being subsumed into an all-encompassing Caucasian archetype. The postwar emergence of the Caucasian as a racial category reduced the prewar multiplicities of white and near-white races to the singular tones of the Caucasian. Race subsequently became a synonym for an increasingly elusive blackness. For better or for worse, to talk of race was to almost exclusively speak of blacks. But as Charles Johnson observed, such a process was fraught with ambiguity, especially in regards to contemporary labor economy:
The Negro worker can no more become a fixed racial idea than can the white worker. Conceived in terms either of capacity or opportunity, the employment of Negroes gives rise to the most perplexing paradoxes. If it is a question of what a Negro is mentally and physically able to do, there are as many affirmations of competence as denials of it.15
Though anthropometrical testing had found the “uninfected Negro to be a constitutionally better physiological machine than his white counterpart,” skeptics pointed to blacks’ woeful performance on the Army IQ tests as evidence of their infantile inability to reconcile the mind and body divide. Even military officials sympathetic to “the Negro’s plight” cautioned, “Races develop slowly! A few years ago these men were slaves in the fields and a few years before that they were children in the jungles of Africa. They are children still.”16 Wartime testing framed blacks’ innate savagery as a source of their physiological vitality as well as with the mental deficiencies that ultimately undermined said vigor.
Social scientific prewar iterations of the “Negro as problem” persisted into the postwar era. But wartime testing had raised more questions than answers as to just what exactly made a Negro a Negro. Postwar fascination with race mixing and the figure of the mulatto revealed deep anxieties regarding the physiological and social contours of race in America. For Johnson, the “Negro Problem” was “only now in evolution” on a national and global scale.17 According to DuBois, the war “had given the Negro his chance to widen his narrow foothold on life, a slightly better opportunity to make his way in the industrial world of America.”18 NRC officials concurred, noting that “given that the Negro and his descendants represent a large part of the total population and were now an increasing factor in industrial life, investigation of this group is particularly important, both from a theoretical and practical point of view.”19 To mine the full potential of black labor, it was necessary to study “the Negro’s respective strength, endurance, nervous reactions and instinctive responses to stimuli in comparison with those of the white [or Indian] race to discern his capacity for profiting by vocational training.” Anthropologist A. E. Jenks remarked that “just as breeds of animals differ, likewise, do breeds (or so-called races) of people differ.” For Jenks, the survival of American civilization depended on “the races of men who are to work and breed the nation’s future generations.”20 Positing labor economy in stark corporeal terms cast eugenics as an imperative of national health. NRC research on race and its relation to labor transformed prior understandings of blackness as something shaping labor processes and hierarchies—blacks’ innate traits and tendencies pushed them towards certain types of work—to one in which form preceded function whereby Negroes were as Negroes did.
NRC officials developed an intricate form of social anthropology, the “science of race and culture,” to investigate the “Negro problem” in postwar labor economy. Wartime and postwar testing of blacks were attempts to rectify blacks’ previous absence from anthropological discourse.21 For much of the late nineteenth century, anthropology had focused on the study of what Lee Baker refers to as “out of the way peoples,” such as American Indians or indigenous colonial subjects from the American West to the Philippines.22 Prewar anthropologists paid less attention to “in the way peoples,” such as blacks and immigrants—generally ceding their study to the sociological gaze. R. J. Terry, the future chairman of the Committee on the American Negro, claimed, “the Negro Problem is certainly no less complex than the Indian problem and we should have to anticipate the same kind of valuable . . . but fragmentary work being done by the Bureau of American Ethnology.”23 Whereas the Indian was characterized as a hostage to a degraded culture, the Negro was captive to a depraved biology. Franz Boas was one of the few early twentieth century anthropologists to work on the “Negro Problem”—publishing his first article on the subject “The Negro and the Demands of Modern Life: Ethnic and Anatomical Considerations,” in the fall 1905 volume of Charities, a leading reform organ. Black intellectuals immediately recognized Boas as a key ally in the fight against entrenched racial hereditarianism—his culturist methodologies and his immigrant Jewish roots marked him as a fellow outsider in a discipline and academy dominated by white Anglo Saxon Protestants. In early 1906, DuBois wrote to Boas, inviting him to Atlanta University to speak at an annual conference on the Negro in American Life. Boas’s commencement address on the cultural basis of racial behavior and the historic significance of Africa refuted prevailing theories of blacks’ biological deficiencies. Linking culture to race, Boas sought to reorient anthropology toward the study of blacks while producing a systemic critique of its white supremacist epistemologies.24
When anthropologists eventually did turn to the study of the Negro, they favored three methodological approaches. The first was folklore predicated on the search for the continuity of African culture in the Americas. The second approach foregrounded the nexus of class and race to measure the cultural, social, and psychological toll of racism on black Americans as a whole. The final approach involved physical or biological anthropology that had driven much of wartime anthropometry and now informed the work of the respective committees on migration, race characters, and the American Negro. Advocates of the New Negro Movement used anthropology, particularly folklore, to argue for the vitality of black culture in its various forms within American modernity. Zora Neale Hurston—a pupil of Boas—echoed anthropologists’ prevailing view of blacks as “in the way peoples.” She found that “the Negro is not living his lore to the extent of the Indian. He is not on a reservation being kept pure. His negroness is being rubbed off by close contact with white culture.”25 Hurston saw “negroness” as an ever-shifting condition that continually reshaped its social and physiological contours. Conversely, NRC social scientists used physical anthropology to delineate blacks’ fitness for industrial modernity. Baker notes that, throughout the 1920s, anthropology remained a segregated discipline, rendering a “paramount practical service to the nation” by helping to establish legal and de facto Jim Crow throughout the nation.26 Committee members identified five key areas in urgent need of attention: a bibliography of Negro anthropology and psychology; research on development of the Negro child; “investigations of the full blood Negro American and Negro mentality; studies of the Negro in Africa to determine the persistence of racial traits”; and “the collection of families of full bloods and browns for future investigations”—all of which were informed by an eugenic obsession with racial purity.27
Postwar inquiries into the nature and prevalence of hybridity and its long-term effects on the body politic was only the latest reconstitution of America’s ever-shifting black-white racial binary. The figure of the mulatto came to represent a barometer of racial health, or lack thereof. The war and the immediate postwar era saw race and racial fitness increasingly connected to color and the body. Yet postwar anthropology represented a slight detour in this process at a time when strict Mendelian models of biological determinism dominated debates regarding race and racial difference. NRC anthropologists often unwittingly embraced a form of neo-Lamarckism regarding the malleability of racial types through acquired traits. Convinced that “all the nation’s economic, social, and political problems were intimately bound up with the reactions of different peoples in our midst,” anthropologists conceded that said reactions were born of a social context rather than any innate traits.28 These “reactions” and the resulting instances of hybridity pointed to the fact that perhaps race was not a fixed phenomenon. Yet committed nativists and eugenic advocates like Madison Grant were unmoved, warning lawmakers, “It has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English and wearing good clothes and going to school does not transform a Negro into a white man” and no amount of social engineering could obscure this fact. Grant and his ilk remained suspicious of the prewar ‘near-white races’ currently navigating the fractious postwar road to whiteness. Just like the Negro, “Americans will have a similar experience with the Polish Jew, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless self interest are being engrafted upon the stock of the nation.”29 Distinguishing between “colored work” and “white man’s work” was essential for the long-term health of the nation’s labor economy. NRC officials hoped to use the results gleaned from wartime testing to build the case that national efficiency was contingent upon the regulation of shifting cultural and biological racial demographics through legislative means: fixing the right races to the right occupational niches.
The production of knowledge on race and labor was an imperative of the postwar state. The state’s facilitation of racial labor expertise functioned as an agent of state power through both institutional and legislative means. From an institutional perspective, these processes of state making through race making began with the founding of the National Research Council (NRC) in December 1916. Eight months prior, President Wilson had charged the National Academy of Sciences with organizing “the scientific agencies of the United States.” As the likelihood of America’s entry into the war increased, so did the need for a more efficient coordination of the nation’s intellectual expertise. In May 1918, the President issued an executive order requesting the Academy to perpetuate the NRC, defining its duties as follows: “To stimulate research and apply the knowledge to the public welfare; to plan comprehensive researches and to minimize duplication by cooperation; and to gather up and render available existing scientific and technical knowledge.” The biologist John C. Merriam—who Wilson chose to head the NRC—proposed a science “defined by ‘method,’ oriented to ‘control,’ and sustained by organized professional structures to promote research.”30 Methodologies of social control coalesced in the production of a new Negro type that was both a lens of analysis and an object of inquiry through which federally sanctioned “experts” within and outside of the NRC strove to make sense of the shifting demographics of the postwar labor economy.
State-sanctioned social scientific expertise was a public and private enterprise before and after the war. Before the war, the major private philanthropic foundation in the field, Russell Sage, had limited itself to social welfare studies rather than the promotion of the social sciences per se. Jerry Gershenhorn argues that the war reinforced social scientists’ move away from a “moral fervor for reform” to a “reverence for scientific knowledge and technological innovation.”31 Following the war, both the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations contributed vast sums of money to the development of social science expertise in a variety of public and private mediums. The Department of Research and Investigations at the National Urban League (NUL)—responsible for most of the research and publications on black workers in the 1920s—was initiated by an $8,000 three-year grant from the Carnegie Corporation. Likewise, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), a public/private initiative, relied on Rockefeller money for its extensive array of summer conferences, advisory councils, and fellowship monies for the study of the social and racial dynamics of postwar political economies. Dorothy Ross argues that this corporate largesse was motivated in part by a faith in the “emerging scientific idiom of the social sciences,” along with more cynically minded attempts to purge the family name of prior accusations of corruption, malfeasance, and social injustice. In contrast to the “amateurish philanthropy” of the past, this new idiom promised “both distance from political controversy, and knowledge that would allow the real control of social change”—a decidedly conservative model of social change which would come to inform the public sector.32
Conservative models of social change were invariably predicated upon conservative methodologies such as eugenics, which intersected with anthropology through the discipline of physical anthropology. Ales Hrdlicka was largely responsible for making physical anthropology a well-defined field within the discipline through the establishment of the American Journal of Physical Anthropology (in 1918) and the American Association of Physical Anthropologists (in 1929). He was also instrumental in securing positions for Madison Grant and Charles Davenport on the NRC’s Anthropology Committee. These elite connections provided Hrdlicka with vital political influence. In a 1921 speech at American University, he explained the links between anthropology and eugenics and their implications for public policy: “From now on, evolution will no longer be left entirely to nature, but will be assisted . . . and even regulated by man himself . . . This particular line of activity is known today under the name Eugenics. . . . (which) is merely applied anthropological and medical science—applied for the benefit of mankind.” By the early 1920s, social scientists—specifically anthropologists—increasingly turned to migration as a forum in which the laws of biology could be transformed into effective social policy.33
The sudden appearance of masses of nonwhite workers in the wartime/postwar West engendered a renewed social scientific interest in migration. Migratory patterns were increasingly seen in pathological terms as evinced in observers’ over-reliance on terms such as “peril” and “contagion.” Stoddard warned that “colored migration is now a universal peril, menacing every part of the white world. Nowhere can the white man endure colored competition.”34 The failure of races to stay in their proper place(s) raised the specter of degenerate germ plasma that infected the body politic of a wider white Western civilization. Yet fears over foreign immigration and the march of the colored races abroad were tied to anxieties regarding the migration of black Americans domestically. President Warren G. Harding remarked, “Whoever will take the time to read and ponder Mr. Stoddard’s book on The Rising Tide of Color . . . Must realize that our race problem here in the United States is only a phase of the race issue the whole world confronts. Surely we gain nothing by blinking at the facts.”35 Progressives feared that southern black migrants, untethered from traditional social restraints, would fall prey to the menacing specter of “Bolshevism . . . which sought to enlist the colored races in its grand assault on civilization.” For “prophets of pessimism” like Stoddard, Bolshevism’s insidious and rapacious nature was a product of its “Asiatic mind,” which saw the “very existence of superior biological values as a crime.” “Bolshevists,” claimed Stoddard, “are mostly born and not made.” The “great Negro quarters of New York, Chicago, and other northern cities” were seething with ideas and emotions, “which by the power of mass contagion may engender sudden and startling developments.” President Wilson had previously worried that black soldiers would be “our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America.” White elites correlated fears of labor radicalism and racial pollution, conjuring up nightmares of “red scares, yellow perils, brown hordes, and black problems,” which would consume a fragile postwar white supremacy.36
Black radicals readily embraced a eugenically informed anti-imperialism in which the “darker masses would eventually overthrow their degenerate white masters.” Davarian Baldwin argues that pan-Africanists—such as Hubert Harrison, Cyril Briggs, and Marcus Garvey—consistently denounced the interconnections between “colonialism, global capitalism, racial science, and racist social formations in transnational metropolises.” Drafting the manifesto for the 1921 Pan-African Congress, DuBois acknowledged these global processes and his hope for freedom from “the industrial machine and the need to judge men as men and not as material and labor.”37 The era’s rapidly shifting labor demographics drove the private lives of a “dark” proletariat onto the public streets of cities throughout the Western world—exacerbating the “problematization” of colored peoples and labor in the postwar social scientific imagination. Tensions over access to services and infrastructure strained urban race relations across the nation. These tensions culminated in a series of bloody race riots during the “red summer” of 1919. Amid the summer’s brutal paroxysms of anti-black violence from Chicago to Washington, D.C. to Omaha, white elites generally refrained from viewing these riots in socioeconomic terms and instead cited them as further evidence of the Negro’s inherent incapacity for urban industrial modernity.38
The NRC established a Committee on Race Characters (CRC) in the spring of 1921 to investigate the racial dimensions of migration. Though short lived, the CRC conducted some intriguing work delineating “the relation of anthropology to Americanization.” At the University of Minnesota, Dr. Albert Jenks, Professor of Anthropology, developed an “Americanization Training Course,” under CRC auspices, to investigate “the anthropological dimensions of assimilation.” He argued that “it was not until America was rudely awakened by a time of national peril that she realized the magnitude of the task before her of assimilating the various people in her midst.” Jenks believed, in this respect, “Anthropology has an opportunity for paramount practical service to the nation.” Trained to “know peoples, in physiological and psychological terms,” graduates would work with social workers, police, and industry to ease the nation’s disparate populace into their proper occupational niches. Jenks was especially interested in anthropological research on the Negro, “the least authentically and commonly understood race group in America.” As the nation’s oldest racial minority, black Americans were seen as an ideal test case for determining the potential physiological and mental effects of assimilation on present-day foreign immigrant groups and the biological dimensions of citizenship.39
The CRC’s failure to secure proper funding soon led to calls for a new committee. In September 1922, the NRC’s Committee on Anthropology and Psychology recommended the establishment of a committee for the scientific study of human migration under the direction of Robert Yerkes, who had directed the infamous Army IQ tests. Two months later, the Committee on Scientific Problems of Immigration (CSPI) held its first conference in Washington, D.C. Some twenty individuals representing a wide range of disciplines from biology, economics, psychology, and anthropology attended the conference. Funded by the Russell Sage Fund and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, the committee’s goal was to consider, “from the view of natural science, the complex migration situation resulting from the world war and from the virtual elimination of space as a barrier to movements of men and race intermixture.”40 Anthropological evaluations of migrant bodies sought to delineate the racial dimensions of migration as a precursor to the management of these processes.
The CSPI ultimately proved too narrow for the transnational demands of its work. In early 1923, in order to “see the world-situation clearly and without individual, national or racial bias,” members dropped their focus on “immigration” and adopted the broader designation, “Committee on the Scientific Problems of Human Migration” (CSPHM). Throughout the spring and summer of 1923, the committee sought to “speedily bring all the resources of science to bear on the study of migration.” Members noted that considering the “important and imminent modifications of national immigration policy,” knowledge of “human traits and potentialities—individual, occupational and ethnic” was vital. The committee requested a sum of $60,000 from the NRC for studies into the psychological, anthropological, and socioeconomic factors of migration. The latter two connected matters of “racial physical characteristics, normal and pathological” to “immigration’s relation to labor supply and its distribution and relative adequacy among the different industries, trades and arts.” CSPHM members became convinced that “one could not form a judgment on the problem of immigration so far as it concerns the United States without a consideration of the race problem in the broadest sense.” Members were committed to undertaking “a comprehensive biological evaluation of the processes going on in America resulting from the inflow and subsequent assimilation of a wide variety of racial groups”—revealing the ongoing connections between race and nation in U.S. immigration policies.41
Racial “roots” and migratory “routes” were linked through the emerging discipline of climatology, which was broadly defined as the study of the effects of climate on racial development. The pioneer of modern climatology was Yale geographer Ellsworth Huntington. CSPHM officials at the NRC-funded Committee on the Atmosphere and Man drew on Huntington’s work to produce a racial geography of civilization from the tropics to the tundra.42 Prewar studies of race and climate—such as Frederick Hoffman’s analysis of blacks in Canada—deeply informed these new environmental models of racial difference. For instance, Hoffman found that in 1901, the black population of Canada was 17,437 versus 16,877 in 1911. In that time, the aggregate population of Canada had increased “and the environmental conditions were probably never as favorable to Negro progress in the Canadian Dominion than they are at the present time.” Hoffman concluded that “the race is not holding its own; it is not increasing by an excess of births over deaths and in Canada as in the U.S., is distinctly subject to an excessive disease liability and mortality due to its inherited race traits.” Negroes’ experience in Canada proves conclusively that there is no tendency on the part of the Negro to migrate to far northern latitudes nor any inherent power of successful adaption and race survival.” 43 Given the logic of environmental determinism, races out of place were invariably races in decline.
NRC social scientists saw race—born of specific environmental and climatic conditions—as the driving force of migration. The instinct to wander, or nomadism, was one with a hereditary basis. While previous immigrants from northern Europe had made a conscious decision to emigrate, the present day masses of colored laborers were seemingly driven by an almost primal urge to seek new opportunities. While the former represented the hardiest stock of the Nordic race, the latter were the “dregs of humanity.”44 Francis Amasa Walker was adamant that modern migratory patterns were a function of failure: “They are beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.”45 Dan Bender argues that “climate, race, and migration transcended the nation and permitted scholars to rationalize the racial kinship they felt with their European counterparts,” in opposition to the colored hordes. Climatology crossed national boundaries in linking together a common white race.46 Developing a racially informed immigration policy required an intricate catalogue of racial taxonomies for the “wise regulation of mass movements of mankind” and the “safe development of social biology” at home and abroad.47 By 1919, uncertain socioeconomic conditions, labor unrest, and a rising eugenic mindset had led to a broad public and social scientific consensus in favor of immigrant restriction—though the form, degree, and duration of such a policy remained in dispute.
NRC members figured prominently in the deliberations of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, chaired by Congressman Albert Johnson of Washington. Johnson was a former AEF officer, a virulent anti-Communist, and the president of the Eugenics Research Association (ERA). Under Johnson’s leadership, the ERA had vigorously lobbied state and federal authorities for immigration restrictions on “inferior” racial stocks, forcible sterilization of the disabled, and a permanent ban on interracial marriage. Johnson hired Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Records Office—and disciple of NRC member Charles Davenport—to ensure the congressional deliberations maintained a racial focus. As the committee’s expert on race biology, Laughlin testified, “The character of a nation is determined primarily by its racial qualities; that is by the hereditary, physical, mental, and moral temperament of its people.” Throughout his testimony, Laughlin was also in close correspondence with Yerkes’s student, Professor Carl Bingham, who was currently conducting a study into the “internationalizing or universalizing of methods of mental measurements” under the auspices of the CSPHM. Like Yerkes, Bingham took a positivist view of intelligence testing, believing it to be a latent, definable racial trait—a definitive index of racial fitness for American citizenship. Citing the results of wartime intelligence testing, Laughlin argued that the melting pot could not be “allowed to boil without control” in blind pursuit of the national motto that declared all men to be equal.48 Laughlin impressed upon Congress that the health of the republican body politic depended on delineating which peoples could be afforded equality—and the exclusion of those who could not—through strict racial quotas rooted in hereditarian models of racial development.
The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 represented a profound shift in national immigration policy from a period of relatively open European immigration to one of greater restrictions on the former and the reiteration of Asian exclusion. Mae Ngai notes that the Act “articulated a new kind of thinking, in which the cultural nationalism of the late nineteenth century had transformed into a nationalism based on race” with the broadly defined white Caucasian at its apogee. Perhaps the most significant change was in the introduction of a quota system, which although designed to restrict immigration from southern, central, and eastern Europe, “also divided Europe from the non-European world. . . . It defined the world formally in terms of country and nationality but also in terms of race.”49 Davenport remarked that “before the war it was generally regarded as impractical to make a selection of the fit on the other side. The war has now shown the possibility of doing so.” Yet even the bill’s most ardent advocates such as Lothrop Stoddard did not see it as a definitive solution to the immigrant invasion, but as “the beginning of a new epoch of national reconstruction and racial stabilization that would culminate in a reforged America.”50 Managerial elites agreed that, given the apparent unsuitability of nonwhites as long term sources of labor, the nation should concern itself with “making that which we have doubly efficient.” The multitude of near-white races of the prewar era could now be transformed into sturdy and responsible Caucasians to stem the rapid flow of colored labor.51 DuBois, in an effort to forge a cross-racial international proletariat, urged black workers that “we will make America pay for her injustice to us and to the poor foreigner by pouring into the open doors of mine and factory in increasing numbers,” linking African Americans’ rupture of the Mason-Dixon Line via mass migration to the closing of the doors of Ellis Island to so-called immigrant undesirables.52
Wartime testing of blacks was ambiguous regarding their labor and military fitness. The institution of draconian “work or fight” laws, aimed primarily at poor southern blacks, reinforced the notion that the Negro would not work free of coercion. This anxiety grew as southern black migrants moved north into wartime industries that lacked the traditional constraints of Jim Crow. National Urban League officials noted that while many employers conceded the “adequacy of Negro labor,” others cited “the race’s natural inertia,” “unreliability,” and “shiftlessness for high speed production” to rationalize pushing blacks out of their “temporary” positions following the war. Officials at the War Department confidently declared, “clearly the Negro has failed to adjust himself to industrial life and must be returned to his natural occupational environment in the South.” NUL officials conceded, “The readjustment of the Negro to northern conditions is a difficult task, of course, that must be continued and intensified if the position gained during the war is not to be lost.”53 Yet in the face of the postwar consolidation of the white working class, the status of black labor became ever more tenuous.
Notwithstanding the checkered results of wartime testing blacks reintegration into the postwar economy was further imperiled by anecdotal assessments of their lack of martial vigor. Despite official pronouncements by General John Pershing that blacks had “measured up to every expectation of the Commander in Chief,” blacks’ disproportionate consignment to labor battalions demonstrated that expectations had been quite low to begin with. Almost immediately following the armistice, black soldiers were subjected to taunts and ridicule in the mainstream press by many of their former white allies who claimed that “the darkies had merely smiled their way through the war.” Mainstream papers were filled with comic accounts of black troops fleeing from their first encounter with shelling and expressing befuddlement with foreign French ways, all the while shuffling and shucking in a stereotypical “nigger” dialect.54 In 1925, Retired General Robert Lee Bullard, commander of the 92nd Negro Division, caused a stir when he stated that along with being “intractably lazy” and “wholly lacking in initiative,” the men under his command generally had little idea of what was expected of them as soldiers. Bullard concluded that if one “needed combat soldiers, and especially if you needed them in a hurry, don’t put your time upon Negroes.”55 Black veterans were consistently maligned for their seemingly congenital lack of willpower. Much like their counterparts in the industrial sphere, military officials argued that black soldiers required harsh military discipline to compel them to fight. Army officials justified the need for segregated units in part because of blacks’ supposed lack of soldiering qualities and because they feared that the race’s “natural torpor” would infect the ranks if left unchecked. The trope of “Negro lassitude” was cleverly inverted by the editors of the Eugenical News, who claimed, “The worst thing that ever happened to the area of the present United States was the bringing of large numbers of Negroes, the lowest of races, to our shores. America called for cheap labor that its whites might enjoy the luxury of the parasite, which is fed by its host without effort of its own. Now we realize that this host bids fair to destroy the parasite.”56 White Americans’ parasitic reliance upon Negro labor had now seemingly left the former vulnerable to the degradation of the latter.
Conversely blacks—especially those schooled in the Tuskegee/Hampton model of vocational uplift—challenged this thinking by casting black labor as a bulwark against the potential deluge of foreign labor poised to stream out of war-ravaged Europe. While Stoddard cited “the profoundly destructive effects of colored competition upon white standards of labor and living,” Kelly Miller characterized black workers as able-bodied and law-abiding American citizens who required no “Americanization.” Drawing on the prewar rhetoric of Washingtonian uplift, Miller noted that it was unnecessary to look to foreign shores to offset any labor shortage when such a “large and sympathetic group was within reach.”57 When officials at U.S. Steel released a statement deploring labor shortages due to present and pending immigration laws, Tuskegee’s Emmett Scott proposed the use of black workers. In contrast to “defective foreign labor,” the Negro worker was “not an alien, he possessed a strong body and a real attachment to American institutions.” The NUL lamented that employers “were ill prepared to make use of Negro labor,” instead opting for “white labor of all ranks, even the most unskilled and ignorant foreigners who greet our arrival with widespread and unreasoning hostility.”58 Anti-black racism on the part of immigrant laborers revealed the imperatives of whiteness—both as ideology and identity—in the formation of the postwar labor economy. The prospective wages of whiteness outweighed any potential benefits of cross-racial worker solidarity.
Tracing the various migratory routes of peoples in the wartime and postwar era led to a concurrent interest in the effects that urban destinations had on racial and labor identities. The postwar New Negro type was an urban creation. The 1920 Census revealed that, for the first time, more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas. Between America’s entry into the war and the stock market crash of 1929, blacks left the South at an average rate of five hundred per day, or more than fifteen thousand per month. By 1930, more than a million blacks had left the region of their birth.59 The era’s sprawling metropolises were draining the world’s vast open spaces of capital and peoples. Through a “strain of peculiar racial status and the terrific pressure of modern life,” the city created its own types—perhaps the most prominent of which was the “Negro” who, in little over a decade, would come to be a synonym for “urban.”60 Robert Park claimed that black migration out of the “caste-ridden rural South” and into cities of the North and Midwest meant that their situation could no longer be depicted as a “natural history” but would now have to be investigated as “social history.” Whereas the rural environment required an organically informed analysis, an examination of the complexities of urban centers necessitated social scientific methodologies. Postwar urban modernity—through shifting labor processes and a rapid expansion of consumer culture—fundamentally altered the temporal and spatial dynamics of urban dwellers across the color line.61
Longstanding notions of the city as a site of social and racial degeneracy continued to inform urban theory in the postwar era. The dysgenic effects of war had provided elites with the language of eugenics, which linked an earlier rhetoric of urban reform that located degeneracy in social causes to one rooted almost exclusively in heredity. For Madison Grant, the so-called Nordic type was handicapped by a natural aversion to industrialism and urban life: “The cramped factory and crowded city quickly weed him [the Nordic] out, while the little brunet Mediterranean can work a spindle, set type, sell ribbons or push a clerk’s pen far better.” According to Grant, the “somewhat heavy Nordic blond who needs exercise meat and air cannot live under Ghetto conditions.”62 Shortly following the armistice, Warren Thompson of Cornell University noted, “City life seems to be unfavorable to the raising of even moderate sized old stock families among all except the poor.” City life diminished the vitality of the better classes and races while exacerbating the proliferation of the lower peoples and deviant types such as blacks.63
Nor was the black intelligentsia immune to eugenic interpretations of urbanization. Postwar black observers drew heavily on prewar investigations into race and urbanism such as the Atlanta University Studies of the 1890s. Led by R. R. Wright, the Atlanta studies were an early effort by black social scientists to investigate potentially causal relationships between biology, urban poverty, and vice. Though environmentalism eventually carried the day over genetics, researchers at Atlanta failed to achieve complete consensus. Those that rejected environmental causes tended to use class and cultural analyses, citing working class blacks’ failure to measure up to white middle class norms of respectability. Eugene Harris of Fisk University, in “The Physical Condition of the Race: Whether Dependent Upon Social Conditions or Environment,” posited that a genetic disposition rooted in slavery and manifested in class as the reason for blacks’ failure to acclimatize to modern urban life. Even DuBois’s Philadelphia Negro cited urban living as a contributing factor in the proliferation of the degenerate traits and tendencies of “the lower classes of Negroes” in cities, effectively reconfiguring degeneracy as a function of class rather than race.64
Postwar progressives viewed the socioeconomic and racial dislocations of migration and urbanization in deeply historical terms. Yet historian Joe W. Trotter Jr. notes that while scholarship during the Great Migration “placed black migration within a larger historical context,” this often came at the “expense of examining this process in depth over time.” Blacks’ migration north was seen as only the most recent example of the migratory impulse that had characterized the nation’s history, but the particulars of the Great Migration were generally given short shrift. Postwar anthropologists tried to reconcile this disconnect between the past and the present by charting black migration and urbanization in physiological or corporeal terms. The editors of The Survey characterized the migration and urbanization of “tropical colored laborers” out of their natural rural southern habitat as a “physiologically violent act” with irrevocable historical consequences for future race development.65 For many observers, blacks’ encounters with the stimuli of the modern city revealed themselves in explicitly physiological terms. Anthropologists such as Melville Herskovits unsuccessfully attempted to measure a cross section of Harlem’s inhabitants “to assess the short and long term effects of migration on Negro Physiognomy.” Building on Boas’s earlier work on changes in immigrant physiognomy, Herskovits anticipated that environment, not biology, was the determining factor in blacks’ urban development. Herskovits’s methodological impetus revealed a shift among anthropologists, from hereditary to cultural models of racial difference and development in urban contexts.66
During the war, many black social scientists began to reject the links between urbanism and racial degeneracy—characterizing the “increasing urbanization of the colored race as an inevitable process” and proof of racial progress rather than decline. Led by Charles Johnson, the NUL’s Department of Research and Investigations, along with Opportunity magazine, were at the forefront of research on postwar black workers. Founded in January 1923, Opportunity was home to a new generation of black artists, social scientists, and social workers. Along with providing a forum for fledgling literary talent, the magazine represented a break from prewar reformism through its “desire to approach . . . new problems with a new increased scientific technique for dealing with them,” which essentially reified the Negro as object—albeit through the lens of black folks—of social scientific inquiry.67 Efforts to come to terms with blacks’ on-going marginalization from mainstream urban labor economies led many black social scientists to cite both heredetarian and cultural causal factors. Charles Johnson in The Black Worker in the City, argued that blacks, “by tradition, and probably by temperament,” were the antithesis of the modern urban type as their “métier was agriculture.” The laboring black body was literally incompatible with modern work processes, given “the in-complex gestures of unskilled manual labor and even domestic service; the broad, dully sensitive touch of body and hands trained to groom and nurse the soil, develop distinctive physical habits and a musculature appropriate to simple processes.” Moreover, Johnson saw these processes in explicitly spatial terms, claiming, “It is a motley group which is now in ascendancy in the city. The picturesqueness of the South, the memory of pain, the warped unsophistication, are laid upon the surface of the city in a curious pattern.” Conceptions of blacks’ incapacity for urban life were a sharp rejoinder to prewar and wartime models of the Negro as benefitting from the transition to urban life advocated by the likes of George Haynes. Alain Locke posited this cultural model of black migration as “the Negro’s deliberate flight not only from the countryside to city, but from medieval America to modern”—which had seemingly altered the physiological and psychological contours of blackness in the process.68
Postwar migration and rapid urbanization also reopened prior debates regarding black extinction. Black birth rates—a key metric in Hoffman’s thesis of blacks’ imminent extinction—once again became a topic of public discussion. Following the war, however, many believed that popular ideas “about Negro health and extinction had suffered severe shock in the light of improved medical science.” According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of blacks nearly doubled between 1870 and 1920, leading the editors of the World’s Work to confidently declare, “Death now awaits the hope that the Negro will die.”69 Between 1900 and 1910, the decennial increase in black population was around 11%, with ten million black Americans making up roughly 10% of the nation’s population in 1910. Although this rate was commensurate with whites—both native and foreign-born—the black birth rate still remained well below that of whites for the next ten years. Whether due to birth control, poverty, war, clerical error, or the postwar influenza epidemic, the 1920 Census revealed that African Americans entered the third decade of the century at just under 10% of the national total. Notwithstanding blacks avoidance of extinction, the race appeared to have reached a point of stagnation.70
To reinvigorate the health of the race, black reformers embarked upon a number of key initiatives. Foremost of which was the NUL’s “National Negro Health Week,” launched in conjunction with the U.S. Public Health Service. Negro Health Weeks joined agencies such as the National Negro Business League, the American Social Hygiene Association, American Red Cross, and the YMCA to promote health as a basis for occupational and economic advancement. Health was the key to not only “reduce the cost of preventable disease and death, but to also increase vitality, resistance to disease, and the well being, earning capacity, and service of the healthy citizen to home, community, and country.” Held annually during the first week in April—to commemorate the birthday (April 5) of Booker T. Washington, officials from these various agencies held workshops, lectures, and film screenings to educate northern black communities throughout the nation on the importance of hygiene and sanitation at home and in the workplace. Prior moralistic approaches to health were slowly being displaced by ones which saw health in mechanistic terms and “the human being as living machine,” which required the need to place health and hygiene along “modern scientific lines” to promote national efficiency.71 Developing health capital was instrumental in the NUL’s broader strategy of promoting efficiency as the key to eliminating workplace racism. A fitter worker was a successful worker with greater occupational opportunities. NUL officials argued that the limited gains made by black workers during the war demonstrated the ability of market forces to mitigate prejudice—thereby making the systematic distribution of health expertise and vocational training essential to racial uplift.72
Paradoxically, postwar theories of black extinction were most prevalent within black communities. As late as 1924, The Forum contended that black migrants to the North would “gradually die out, for there he seems to lose his fecundity.” Marcus Garvey concurred, claiming that “the Negro is dying out, and he is going to die faster in the next fifty years.” The historian Carter Woodson conceded that on “account of this sudden change of the Negroes from one climate to another and the hardships of more unrelenting toil, many of them have been unable to resist pneumonia, bronchitis and tuberculosis.” However, Woodson was quick to point out that many of the reports on black migrants’ poor health had been greatly exaggerated.73 The mainstream press peppered analysis of the Great Migration with accounts of migrants freezing to death on the cold and unforgiving streets of Northern cities. NUL officials agreed: “It is a strange fact that in the cities of the North, the native born Negro population, as if in biological revolt against its environment, barely perpetuates itself. For whatever reason, there is lacking that lusty vigor of increase which has nearly trebled the Negro population as a whole.” Within the past sixty years, the natural increase of this old Northern stock, apart from migrations, has been negligible.74 Black nationalists characterized this alarming lack of fecundity as a function of economic pressures and a lack of racial purity. The editors of the Universal Negro Improvement Association’s Negro World claimed that the remedy for blacks’ inferior socioeconomic position called for “clean and orderly sexual relations” as a basis for a self-sufficient black capitalism.75
Throughout the immediate postwar era, UNIA members infused the discourse of contemporary political economy with the tenants of a eugenically minded black nationalism—creating a narrative of racial uplift predicated on the inviolability of black bodies. In contrast, UNIA critics such as DuBois and Kelly Miller couched their eugenic impulses in the intra-racial rhetoric of class—inveighing against the dangers of “the masses” out-breeding “the classes.” Mia Bay notes, “Ironically, just as the white scientific establishment was finally beginning to dismantle the racial edifice built by nineteenth-century science, racial essentialism was achieving unprecedented popularity in some corners of the black community,” such as the UNIA and various other nationalist organizations.76 Linking economic uplift with racial integrity, Garvey warned that “if we do not seriously reorganize ourselves as a people . . . our days in civilization are numbered.” Garvey’s sentiments revealed a vision of a martial and masculine “race never conquered” produced and sustained by an undiluted blackness.77
Postwar debates regarding the effects of migration and urbanization on black health presumed a clearly defined Negro “type.” This taxonomic mindset invariably raised questions regarding the physiological contours of blackness and the perils of hybridity. Anthropologists were especially interested in tracing racial types through the various stages of industrial evolution. For A. E. Jenks, the “question of so-called disharmony in crosses demands attention more urgently than almost any other, as no nation can survive except under the conditions nature imposes.”78 Rising racial and labor unrest at home, anti-colonialism and bolshevism abroad, along with a prevailing biological mindset transformed local discourses of “miscegenation,” or race mixing, into a transnational phenomenon. Recent scholarship on American empire has elucidated the links between domestic anti-miscegenation statues, their colonial counterparts, and the respective role of each as a transnational node of racial labor control. At home and abroad, these methods of sexual surveillance were couched in the rhetoric of hygiene and carried out under the auspices of public health programs.79 In the fall of 1926, the NRC began arranging a Committee on the American Negro to focus on the “anthropological and psychological dimensions of the Negro.” The real attention, however, was on “how far race mixture and race contact may affect social hygiene and our civilization.” Though blacks made up approximately one-tenth of the population, a supposed rise in race mixing had led to blacks being “perhaps the least known of any part” of the nation’s peoples.80 NRC officials cautioned that attempts to “forge a nation out of disparate peoples constituted a ceaseless warfare with the stubborn biological forces of nature.” Victory in this conflict would only be achieved through the preservation of racial integrity and purging any and all racial transgressions from the republican body politic.81
The Committee on the American Negro was a “who’s who” of the era’s self-described race experts from Charles Davenport, Ales Hrdlicka, E. A. Hooton, to committee chairman R. J. Terry. Even Franz Boas—the leading purveyor of anti-racist social anthropology and scourge of the eugenics set—actively sought out membership and was present at the committee’s founding meeting in Philadelphia in December of 1926, where he seconded Davenport and Hrdlicka’s recommendation that the committee create a “bibliography of prior and current research on the American Negro.”82 Though the committee retained a commitment to original research on race mixing, many felt proposed historiographical or bibliographical commitments of this nature were beyond their financial and institutional means. Instead, members committed themselves to the consolidation of knowledge on “the biological, psychological, and physiological aptitudes and aspects of the full-blood Negro and of the mixed population,” which had proven resistant to the imperatives of military and industrial systems of racial classification.83
Throughout the Progressive Era, the cultural practices of endogamy—marrying and procreating within one’s specific class, caste and or ethnicity—were rigidly observed and enforced across the color line to preserve the social peace. Negrophobes and black nationalists found common cause in the belief that race crossing was socially and biologically detrimental to a race’s progress. In the fall of 1923, Marcus Garvey wrote to John J. Davis, the Secretary of Labor, on the subject of the “Negro problem.” Noting that “the twentieth-century Negro in America was different from the Negro of the last century,” Garvey queried Davis on the department’s potential commitment to blacks’ repatriation to Africa. Linking race purity to industrial advancement, Garvey asked Davis whether he believed “that the Negro should be encouraged to develop a society of his own for exclusive social intercourse” or to “create positions of his own in industry and commerce in a country of his own.” Though departmental officials did not pursue the matter further, the correspondence reveals the power of eugenic interpretations of labor economy. Historian Michelle Mitchell notes that postwar “uplift ideology adapted quite readily to the period’s characteristic eugenic thinking,” specifically in Garveyite calls for racial purity as a means to a race’s socioeconomic and cultural autonomy.84
Recent historical studies have revealed a concurrent—though decidedly minority—strain of thought which saw race crossing as a positive practice, which could restore national vitality.85 Motivated by both personal and political considerations, DuBois had long railed against characterizations of the enfeebled and infertile mulatto. In an era that equated racial vigor with manliness, however, this proved a difficult discursive task. Legislative efforts to strengthen the black-white binary turned the mulatto into a legal impossibility and a social pariah. Franz Boas, in his anthropological work for the prewar Immigration Commission, had argued that race mixing was the only way to instill a much-needed vitality in “an industrially and socially [not biologically] inferior black population.” Years later, in a piece entitled “The Problem of the American Negro,” Boas reaffirmed his belief that since racism rested on social awareness of differences—exacerbated by economic competition—then the solution was to diminish these differences as much as possible. But even Boas, the famed anti-racist and cultural relativist, saw amalgamation as a one way street which ultimately entailed the disappearance of black Americans into a colorless, and by default white, mass populace. The proposition that race mixing could “blacken” the populace in a positive manner was simply beyond the pale for the majority of social scientists. For Boas and many of his progressive peers, the mulatto was merely a detour on blacks’ inevitable road to social and perhaps even physiological whiteness: race would cease to be a problem with the elimination of blackness in all its forms.86
Foregrounding the mulatto as an object of inquiry revealed prevailing anxieties over the stability of racial categories, revealing key cracks in the leviathan of postwar white supremacy. In 1890, the Census Bureau made its first and only attempt to divide peoples of African ancestry along the lines of “negro,” “mulatto,” “octoroon,” and “quadroon.” Following 1920, the category of “mulatto” disappeared altogether from the federal census. The editors of Opportunity ruefully remarked, “Men who, by and by, ask for the Negro will be told—‘there they go, clad in white man’s skins.’”87 Anthropologists dismissed arguments for the mulatto as a new or distinct race, arguing that mixed race individuals “possessed a low degree of physical variability” and would eventually be subsumed into the larger mass of African Americans. Speaking to the NRC Conference on Racial Differences, Dr. A. Cole of Columbia remarked, “If we do find changes occurring in bodies of individuals who make up our immigrant groups; if our Negro is changing; if blending is going on, it must lead to radical readjustments in our concept of race.”88 Defining the mulatto as Negro—using the one-drop rule of blackness—required shifting the physiological and social boundaries of both blackness and whiteness.
Wartime assessments of decommissioned soldiers only served to muddy the color line. Testing revealed that mulattos possessed a more “well defined musculature and proportionality of appendages” than whites. Moreover, all blacks—both mixed and “pure bred”—had many physical advantages over whites. Blacks, broadly defined, were much less prone than whites to suffer from defects of the spine, obesity, deaf mutism, deafness, and diseases of the eyes, nose, and throat. Mulattos’ disproportionately high scores on the Army IQ tests recalled previous theories of racial hybrids’ mind and body imbalance: the superior white intellect captive to the savage black body. Davenport characterized mulattos as more “restless on the whole than the Negro and less easily satisfied with his lot—possibly due to a disharmony introduced by the cross.”89 A restlessness that was seemingly symptomatic of white’s inborn independence of spirit, which was continually stifled by the crushing “lassitude of the mulattos” Negro blood. Robert Park diagnosed the mulatto as a “marginal man” consigned to an ineffectual existence because of his inability to join the supposedly “superior white group” or create a separate caste from the “pure-blooded Negro.”90 Historian Greg Carter notes this burgeoning school of “mulatto studies” analyzed hybridity to assess the progress of their minority communities—that is, blacks—as opposed to the progress of America as a whole: the mulatto as a barometer of blacks’ racial health.91
Models of the “maladjusted” mulatto sought to delineate racial difference in physiological and psychological terms. NRC officials were especially interested in charting the race’s respective mental “aptitude for modern civilization.”92 In the mid-1920s, Dr. Joseph Patterson of George Peabody College in Nashville, Tennessee, under the auspices of the Committee on Human Migration and Race Characters, conducted studies on local school children to gauge the relation of intelligence to race difference, or what he deemed “racial ingenuity.” Patterson ignored Yerkes’s wartime caveat that “these intelligence tests do not measure occupational fitness nor educational attainment; they measure intellectual ability which has been shown to be important in estimating military value.”93 Notwithstanding mulattos’ high test scores on the Army IQ tests, Patterson believed that intelligence testing engendered “a naturalistic attitude in a community toward behavior and the success or failure of individuals and or groups in particular.” As people came to feel that group accomplishment was based “upon innate characters with some degree of training, rather than the haphazard factors and arbitrary volitions of individuals,” racial hierarchies could be preserved. A committed eugenicist, Patterson felt that interracial and intra-racial testing was key to allowing various races to “regulate the selection of factors for the production of desirable types,” thereby eliminating “maladjusted strains” like the mulatto.94
Postwar characterizations of the mulatto revealed much about the instability of the color line both at home and abroad. Anthropology as “a science of mourning” was fittingly preoccupied with analysis of the mulatto as a legal, social, and biological anachronism. Anthropologists had been among the first to situate the mulatto and hybridity more generally in a transnational context in works such as Eugene Fischer’s Rehobother Bastards and the Problem of Miscegenation Among Humans; L. R. Sullivan’s Half Blood Sioux; and Distribution of Stature in the United States by Columbia’s Clark Wissler. A compatriot of Boas, Wissler believed racial admixture to be rampant throughout the American population, even going so far to put “the negro” of Davenport’s Army Anthropology in mocking quotation marks. Subsequent studies in the field included Mestizos of Kisar by E. Rodewaldt; Leslie Dunn’s An Anthropometric Study of Hawaiians of Pure and Mixed Blood; and Davenport and Morris Steggerda’s Race Crossing in Jamaica.95
Transnational NRC investigations of “race crosses” were informed by a desire to balance blacks’ newfound—albeit limited—mobility with their traditional social strictures both at home and abroad. Davenport argued that despite the body’s “great capacity for self adjustment, it fails to overcome bad hereditary combinations.” Mixed races, or “hybridized people,” were a “badly put together people, a dissatisfied, restless, ineffective people.” The lingering influence of climatology led social scientists to continue to characterize the sluggish pace of labor in the tropics with racial admixture. The deleterious effects of race mixing on a society’s industrial evolution were made evident in “the indolent republics and colonies” of the Caribbean and of Central and South America. Latin America offered a good “field for the study of racial crosses . . . as the social environment is much more uniform, there being in some countries little or no race prejudice and discrimination of the sort that is alleged to prevent the Negro and the Mulatto in the U.S. from ‘coming into their own.’”96 Whereas de facto and de jure racial prejudice in the United States functioned as a form of self-preservation on the part of whites, the absence of these same mechanisms throughout the Caribbean and Latin America had produced a depraved mixed population unable to compete in the struggle of industrial evolution.97
Postwar anthropologists saw the tropics as a laboratory where the natural laws of racial heredity prevailed, unfettered by the artificial social restraints of modern industrial civilization. The prevailing belief among social scientists held that the “primitive races provided good opportunities for strictly scientific studies of mortality problems. Until such races come into contact with civilized man, they generally present a healthy, robust, and vigorous appearance.”98 In March 1926, the Carnegie Institution of Washington accepted a gift from an anonymous donor who requested an investigation into “the problem of race crossing, with special reference to its significance for the future of any country containing a mixed population.” Carnegie’s Department of Genetics, in conjunction with the NRC, appointed an advisory committee of Davenport, E. L. Thorndike, and Robert Yerkes’s former assistant, W. V. Bingham. Morris Steggerda, a promising young zoology student at the University of Illinois “with excellent training in genetics and psychology” was appointed chief field investigator. In the summer of 1926, Steggerda and Davenport traveled to Jamaica to see firsthand the effects of race mixing on the nation’s health.99
Jamaica’s proximity, common language, varied demographics, and co-operative colonial authorities made it an ideal locale to chart the effects of hybridity on a nation’s labor economy. American anthropologists had conducted fieldwork on the island for years. Melville Herskovits had conducted extensive research in Jamaica and was largely responsible for convincing the NRC and the Carnegie Foundation to agree to Davenport and Steggerda’s proposal for research on the island. Following his study of Hawaii’s unique racial dynamics, the ubiquitous Hoffman had visited Jamaica and Cuba in late 1916 to conduct an investigation into tropical mortality. He found that much like blacks stateside, blacks in the islands suffered from poor respiratory health due to supposedly innate physiological deficiencies like diminished lung capacity. Hoffman also noted that rates of tuberculosis and syphilis in Jamaica were indeed comparable to those among American blacks. Yet he was far more willing to ascribe Jamaican blacks’ high rates of tuberculosis to the poor and unhygienic living conditions in which the island’s colored majority lived as opposed to any “innate” racial traits that afflicted American blacks stateside. Nevertheless, at Hoffman’s urging, Prudential Life Insurance subsequently declined premiums to the non-white populace of the West Indies well into the late 1940s.100
The NRC’s plans for Jamaica were ambitious, and included “a study of Negroes and mulattos in comparison with whites living in the same locality, with special reference to their innate qualities, fitting them for carrying on modern civilization.” Along with anthropometric and mental measurements, Steggerda was eager to obtain samples of basal metabolism—a measurement of oxygen consumption, blood pressure, and body temperature believed to be the best index of an individual and presumed racial level of required caloric intake and respiratory capacity. At the outset, Steggerda suspected that the “racial metabolism of Jamaican blacks and browns” would be much lower than that of whites from the temperate zone, confirming the former’s apparent “tropical lassitude.” Given that 85% of the island’s population lived in rural districts working in the production of sugar and other foodstuffs, measurements of agricultural workers were key for producing a representative population sample. Davenport believed that because “the entire population depends—in one manner or another—upon the fruit of the soil for its livelihood, this undoubtedly has an effect upon the physical measurements of the population.” The bulk of initial measurements were to be conducted at the island’s schools and municipal institutions—spaces that “lent themselves most readily to scientific work”—before proceeding to an analysis of the agricultural communities.101
Upon arrival in Kingston, Davenport and Steggerda made contact with the local colonial authorities. Officials at the U.S. State Department put them in contact with the island’s Assistant Colonial Secretary, Superintending Medical Officer, the Director of Education, and officials of the Jamaica Hookworm Commission of the Rockefeller International Health Board. The Americans toured the Kingston Hospital, penitentiary, and lunatic asylum and were assured that staff members and inmates would both be made available for measurements. Davenport and Steggerda found their keenest supporter in H. J. Newman, principal of Mico Training College. Founded in 1834, Mico College was a small training school for male teachers modeled along the lines of Hampton and Tuskegee, although with less emphasis on vocational training. Steggerda and Davenport measured the entire student body of Mico—“fifteen Negros and forty-six mulattos”—and used the school as the primary site of their operations due to its central location and capacity to house the bulky apparatus required for measuring basal metabolism.102 Subsequent anthropometrical work in the surrounding communities was ultimately hindered by a lack of staffing. From September 1926 to October 1927, Steggerda conducted his limited fieldwork with occasional help from Davenport, who frequently shuttled between Jamaica and the States. In December 1926, Steggerda returned to Cold Spring Harbor and presented his initial findings to the NRC and Carnegie Institute fellows in New York. Following these meetings, it was arranged that physical anthropological data should be collected for fifty adults of each sex of three groups—“pure-blooded negro, mulatto, and white, from the same social or occupational level if possible.”103 Steggerda was also to acquire data for a developmental series exclusively on Negroes and mulattos. In January, Steggerda returned to Jamaica, where he spent the next ten months traveling throughout the island measuring all variety of its inhabitants. Steggerda’s final reports totaled approximately eight thousand sheets and scored as they were received. Codes for each trait were tabulated and adapted to Hollerith punch cards similar to those used in wartime anthropometric evaluations of recruits.104
Davenport and Steggerda’s findings were published in Race Crossing in Jamaica, which focused on five factors: evidence of increased variability in race characters; evidence of dominance or recessiveness; appearance of new qualities; appearance of social traits; and evidence of “hybrid vigor.” Summarizing their findings, Steggerda and Davenport found that among the traits in which blacks and whites differed genetically, “Browns” (peoples of mixed race) were quite variable. No evidence of dominance or recessiveness of any particular traits was found, nor did Jamaica’s Negros exhibit any new genetic qualities or mutations. Given the seeming persistence of African traits and tendencies, “the burden of proof is placed on those who deny fundamental differences in mental capacity between Gold Coast Negros and Europeans.” In terms of mental capacity, Browns on average were found to be “intermediate in proportions between whites and blacks . . . though an excessive percent seemingly failed to be able to utilize their native [read: white] endowment.” Assessing racial hybridity, the authors curtly concluded, “no evidence of hybrid vigor is found in Browns,” confirming a priori notions of hybridity as a source of racial degeneration.105
Anthropological fieldwork in Jamaica reaffirmed prevailing characterizations of hybridity as a degenerate social force, but was occasionally challenged by those who saw the practice as potentially invigorating to a depleted racial stock. Heterosis, or “hybrid vigor,” occurred when the union of two races—both of which were unable to express their full developmental potential—produced a compensatory capacity for growth in their offspring. Typically, evidence of heterosis materialized in the first generation of hybrids, a hypothesis seemingly borne out by fieldwork in Jamaica. Though hybrid vigor was readily apparent in nature—especially in varieties of maize and cotton—observers doubted whether the same held true for humans.106 Drawing on his studies in Jamaica, Davenport began a correspondence with the efficiency consultant firm of Harrington Emerson in the late 1920s. During an extensive correspondence, Davenport and Emerson mused on the potential benefits of race crossing. Emerson argued, “As with seedlings, extraordinary diversity, some being far above the parent stocks in excellence often occurs.” Emerson—a white man—offered a rare endorsement of race mixing: “The line of the Dumas in three generations showed what an infusion of Negro blood could do.” Davenport and Emerson agreed that under “proper supervised breeding” in specific environments, hybrids could possibly exhibit “greater adaptive social and industrial powers than their pure-bred ancestors.”107 Employing prewar models of eugenics, Emerson argued that racial traits and tendencies resided in the genes: “The pure Aryan as I know him is essentially coarse minded, his blasphemy is hideous, his obscenity disgusting, his drunkenness brutal. He might be benefited by a blend with a race in which blasphemy is pleasantly familiar, obscenity only piquant, and intoxication delightful.”108 However, this was a minority view among contemporary social scientists and represented a mere, albeit intriguing, detour in Davenport’s generally consistent biological worldview.
Davenport’s efforts to establish a transnational geography of racial hybridity disabused him of the idea that racial hybrids possessed a kind of “beneficial adaptability.” The basal metabolism records—the most accurate index of vital capacity—indicated that “Browns” registered slightly below both blacks and whites. Davenport noted that while mulattos tested between whites and blacks in terms of “physical proportions and mental capacity,” an “excessive number seemed not to be able to utilize their native [read: white] endowment.”109 Jamaica’s racial demographics—the “undiluted Africanisms of its Negroes” and its small yet “pure European” population—meant that its mixed population comprised a clear mix of “warring identities” entirely incompatible with one another in social and or biological terms. Davenport and Steggerda argued that the insidious effects of race mixing transcended national boundaries—framing their research as incontrovertible evidence for the need to maintain and expand social and legislative prohibitions against race mixing stateside. Both men hoped to prevent the U.S. falling victim to the warring identities of hybridity that had seemingly devitalized and subsequently impoverished many of their southern neighbors.110
NRC efforts to construct a body of knowledge on the New Negro type at home and abroad were predicated on the notion that racial homogeneity and bodily integrity were essential to national health—that is, fit peoples informed fit nations. NRC anthropologists retained much of prewar taxonomies in delineating the Negro type but generally eschewed prior hierarchical models of racial stratification. Abram Harris of the NUL noted, “The apologetic school of American race relations considers the social distance between white and black Americans as conforming to a natural order of preordained and inescapable physical, mental, and moral differences.” The Negro type of the postwar imagination was defined as much by difference as by degree. Based on wartime evaluations postwar social scientists anticipated that “homogeneity in occupation is directly related to the physical traits of groups.”111 The disproportionate clustering of certain groups in certain occupations was due to the fact that specific peoples were physiologically fitted for specific kinds of work. Therefore the productions of models of racial difference—as opposed to strict hierarchical models of race—were seen as instrumental to the development of the postwar labor economy.
The impetus to mediate the nation’s labor economy through racial models of “fit” and “unfit” bodies received legislative sanction in 1924 with the passage of the infamous Immigration Restriction Act and Virginia’s Anti-Miscegenation Act, which prohibited inter-racial marriage and provided for the sterilization of the “unfit.”112 Whereas the former was responding to a racial landscape from which the Negro was largely absent, the latter directly addressed postwar fears regarding the emergence of the New Negro. Yet passage of both these acts—though hailed at the time by their supporters as the culmination of a long crusade—actually marked the beginning of the end of eugenically informed social policy: a rearguard action by embattled white nativists. Both statues drew heavily on wartime mental and physical testing in their respective attempts to impose racial quotas on immigration and criminalize interracial sex.113 Both acts were also predicated on the assumption, cultivated in no small part by the congressional testimonies of eugenicists such as Harry Laughlin, that race and racial difference were real and that only through the cultivation and preservation of the “fittest types” could the nation survive.114 To counter the “rising tide” of colored labor, the disparate so-called “near white” races of southern, central, and eastern Europe were fused with native-born whites into a common Caucasian identity—making able bodied whiteness a precondition of national health.115 Melville Herskovits confirmed eugenicists’ worst fears, arguing that “the very term ‘Negro’ is social rather than racial [and, as in the United States,] means ‘not all white’”—bedeviling those who wished to reify the corporeal constitution of the color line.116 Foregrounding working bodies of color as categories of analysis reveals these legislative practices of racial control—not as reactionary aberrations but as constitutive of an American industrial modernity predicated on the discipline and control of “fit” and “unfit” laboring bodies along racial lines.
However, this utopian vision of racial labor control through strict quantification was complicated by NRC anthropologists’ experiences in the West Indies, which forced them to rethink the dimensions of the New Negro type. In Jamaica, race mixture seemingly led to “social and occupational stratification based on a degree of white blood which interferes with racial solidarity” across the racial divide.117 Observers felt that because biological imperatives—the inborn association between like and like—were not driving peoples to self-segregate along racial lines, segregationist legislation was necessary. Anticipating the messy cultural pluralism of the 1930s, Herskovits characterized the faltering hereditarian-engendered biracialism of the postwar era not as white versus black, but as a race to the bottom to determine who was definitively not white and who, therefore, was precluded from the benefits of white privilege.118
Beyond the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act and Virginia’s Anti-Miscegenation Act, the regulatory initiatives of the Progressive Era, and their draconian wartime manifestations, sapped the public desire for greater government control over social policy. In the spring of 1929, just prior to the publication of Race Crossing in Jamaica, the Committee on the American Negro disbanded. In March, Chairman R. J. Terry presented his resignation to Davenport and Boas on the pretext that “someone in the east who is in closer touch with the foundations will assume this function.” In reality, the committee had ceased functioning by the fall of 1928. Like its predecessors, the CRC and CSPHM, the Committee on the American Negro failed to secure adequate funding and maintain any kind of institutional stability. The various studies undertaken by its members, the majority of which remained incomplete, were often conducted under the auspices of their respectively better endowed academic or philanthropic foundations.119 The NRC’s drive to create a clearing-house of racial knowledge and develop a racial science—one that was defined by method and oriented to racial labor control—floundered on the shoals of postwar anti-statism. Despite the NRC’s efforts to link social biology to national efficiency, and racial form to racial function, there was little aptitude on the part of lawmakers and the public to fund or facilitate the necessary studies.
From the black belt of Dixie to the cane fields of Jamaica to the law courts of Virginia, postwar NRC anthropologists saw mixed race peoples as unsettling avatars of modernity. Previous social scientific assessments of racial labor fitness had been exercises in mutual negation—aimed at determining the work races could not, or would not, do in relation to other races. Social scientists hoped that an evaluation of racially “in between peoples” would allow for a more definitive appraisal of the respective laboring fitness of the New Negro and Caucasian. The logic of Jim Crow led anthropologists to posit the mulatto as a literal mix of black and white types, rather than as a new racial type. Stoddard described “racial mongrels” as those “for whom in every cell of their bodies is the battleground of jarring heredities.”120 In the early 1930s, Otto Klineberg, a graduate of McGill and professor of psychology at Columbia, drew on wartime studies to compare southern and northern “pure and mixed” African Americans “with reference to speed and accuracy of mental and physical performance to determine whether or not there was a racial norm independent of cultural envoir.” However, like many NRC studies, Klineberg’s faltered from lack of financial resources.121 For observers across the color line, the “race problem,” or more specifically the “Negro problem,” was a matter of social biology best mediated through the mulatto, but whose ultimate resolution necessitated the elimination of hybridity in all its forms.
The war and wartime testing reshaped narratives and models of black labor fitness in three significant ways: Wartime migration and military service definitively established the Negro as a factor in industrial civilization. Rapid migration and urbanization were leading to mental and physical changes on African American workers. And national efficiency was linked to racial integrity through transnational discourses of race crossing. Postwar social scientists and their legislative allies constantly despaired over the failure of nature to self correct itself to fit their desired racial ends. For many observers, the very persistence of “unnatural” practices like race crossing was a prime example of the need for scientific intervention in “natural” evolutionary processes. NRC social scientists’ persistent and furtive attempts to define and quantify a new Negro type demonstrated that the triumph of whiteness was far from assured by even its most ardent ideological and legislative architects. As early as 1915, DuBois, in “The African Roots of War,” observed that one of the unintended consequences of global capitalism was that white-on-white violence on the world stage exposed the dark side of progress and undermined the racial supremacy of progressive industrial nations.122 The NRC was committed to rebuilding the racial knowledge that had sustained these prewar networks of white supremacy.
The efforts of NRC social scientists to quantify and delineate black labor fitness facilitated the concurrent devaluation of black labor in industry and contributed to blacks’ increasing marginalization from the era’s labor economy. To paraphrase E. P. Thompson, the New Negro was “present at its own making,” a product of processes and relationships—war, migration, and urbanization—which “owed as much to agency as to conditioning.”123 Consequently, new state-sanctioned efforts to link blacks’ lack of labor capacity in clear corporeal terms fractured interracial class solidarity. Abram Harris cited the persistence of this “color-caste feeling” for the failure of a logic which teaches that “the ultimate interests of socially disadvantaged whites and blacks are more coincidental than that of white capitalists and white wage earners” to take hold among American workers. This paradox was neatly summarized by the anthropologist Arthur H. Fauset, who claimed, “the New Negro had been in America for a long time, yet everyone had grown so used to seeing Negros that practically no one discovered that differences were taking place under our very eyes.”124 The black philosopher Alain Locke opined, “In the last decade something beyond the watch and guard of statistics has happened in the life of the American Negro and the three norms who have traditionally presided over the ‘Negro problem’ have a changeling in their laps. The Sociologist, the Philanthropist, the Race Leader are not unaware of the New Negro, but they are at a loss to account for him. He simply cannot be swathed in their formulae.”125 Whereas prewar race theorists had posited culture or race “traits and tendencies” as the basis for biological racial difference, wartime and postwar observers tried to invert this model by substituting biology as an index for racial character or pathology. The futility of this process was on display in postwar studies of race mixing. Wartime testing unwittingly accelerated the decoupling of race from biology—presaging more culturally informed models of racial difference.126 By the interwar years, war, migration, urbanization, and a perceived rise in race mixing had transformed the Negro into a physically present, yet deeply ambiguous, national figure to social scientists across the color line. Notwithstanding debates regarding the contours and dimensions of the New Negro what was clear was that the Negro—whether in biological or social terms—had become an object of mainstream social scientific inquiry, a problem in perpetual need of a solution.