1 Philadelphia Record, Morning Edition, March 23, 1885. On black boxing in late nineteenth-century Philadelphia, see Roger Lane, The Roots of Violence in Black Philadelphia, 1860–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 118–119.
2 Philadelphia Record, Morning Edition, March 23, 1885; Philadelphia Record, Morning Edition, April 14, 1885.
3 The color line in boxing at this time was informal and inconsistent in its application. Theresa Runstedtler notes that “profit motives and consumer demand foiled attempts to maintain a rigid color line.” In later years, modern technologies such as radio and film would prevent its potential architects from restricting the wider public’s access to the triumphs of black boxers, most notable being those of Jack Johnson, the world heavyweight champion from 1908 to 1915 and the scourge of global white supremacy. Runstedtler, Jack Johnson, Rebel Sojourner, 18.
4 Though August 1883 signaled the formalization of Muybridge’s Motion Studies at Penn, he had spent much of the previous winter and spring in Philadelphia giving a series of lectures on Animal Motion at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Franklin Institute, and the Academy of Music, sites that evinced Muybridge’s artistic understandings of his work while also bringing him to the attention of a diverse and influential group of faculty and administrators at Penn. Gordon, “Prestige, Professionalism, and the Paradox,” 86–87.
5 Eadweard Muybridge, “Muybridge at Penn,” “Animal Locomotion,” Prospectus and Catalog of Plates (1887) UPT 50 M993, Box 62, Folder 2, Eadweard Muybridge Papers, University Archives, University of Pennsylvania; Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body,” 627–628.
6 Muybridge, “Muybridge at Penn,” Draft of “Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements” (1887) UPT 50 M993, Box 62, Folder 2, Muybridge Papers, University Archives, University of Pennsylvania.
7 Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body,” 637.
8 Ibid., 637–638.
9 On the grid as a means of racial knowledge production, Elspeth Brown notes “it is as if the non-white ‘other’ cannot be understood, scientifically, without the anthropometric grid, a technology for mapping racial difference” in stark physiological terms. Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body,” 637–638.
10 Wayne, Imagining Black America, 3–5.
11 During the 1890s, lynching claimed some 139 lives each year, 75% of which were black. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 436–437. For blacks’—specifically black women’s—appropriation of racial violence into narratives of corporeal resistance, see Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me.
12 Although the racial logic of the day, specifically the one-drop rule, classified Bailey as a black man, continual reference to his “mulatto” identity complicates his status as a representative and definable black body and speaks to the era’s often-elastic definition of blackness—an elasticity that Muybridge’s framing of Bailey against the grid would help to undermine and that would presage the hardening of racial boundaries in the scientific and popular imaginary in turn-of-the-century America. Brown, “Racialising the Virile Body,” 637–638.
13 On the socio-cultural construction of neurasthenia in Progressive Era America and its racial and gender dynamics, see Bederman, Manliness and Civilization.
14 On the civilized and savage dichotomy that informed assessments of turn-of-the-century white and black laboring bodies, see Bender, American Abyss, 88–90. For insight on how emergent forms of professional expertise coalesced in the modern university and informed public debates regarding the definition and limits of propriety (specifically nudity) in the public sphere, see Gordon, “Prestige, Professionalism and the Paradox,” 81–82. On “primeval” blackness as atavism, see Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies, 63–64.
15 In Italy, degeneration was embodied in the malformed body of the criminal; in France, the mentally ill were seen as the greatest threat to national health; meanwhile, in England, it was the specter of the working poor that constituted a cancer upon the national body while in America it was the Negro who was seen as the embodiment of degeneration. Nye, “Degeneration, Neurasthenia.”
16 Much of the theoretical and conceptual basis of this work—positing the working body as a site and agent of social and knowledge production—draws on Anson Rabinbach’s work on the human motor, a metaphor of work and energy that provided nineteenth-century European thinkers with a new scientific, cultural framework for making sense of society. For Rabinbach, the metaphor of the human motor “translated revolutionary scientific discoveries about physical nature into a new vision of social modernity.” Building on this formulation I contend that through the metaphor of the Negro working type, progressives sought to maintain blacks’ traditional social marginalization among increased occupational and interregional mobility, to naturalize or embody racial hierarchies—from the factory floor to the trenches of France. Rabinbach, The Human Motor.
17 DuBois, quoted in Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois, 171. For DuBois and many of his peers across the social and natural sciences in thrall to Hegelian notions of cultural determinism, culture preceded biology in the process of racial development, as outlined in DuBois’s “Conservation of Races” (1897).
18 Bender, American Abyss, 21–22; Banta, Taylored Lives, 4.
19 Painter, The History of White People, 1–3.
20 Thompson, Witness Against the Beast, xii, xix; Williams, Marxism and Literature, 55–71.
21 Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science, xvi.
22 Stanley, Bondage to Contract, 95–97.
23 Critics such as E. P. Thompson challenged this determinist model of working class development by positing an active process of class making that owed as much to the dynamic responses of workers as it did to the impact of industrialists and machines noting “the working class did not rise like the sun at the appointed time. It was present at its own making.” Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 9–14. Wheen, Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’; Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital; Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America.
24 The seminal works on black proletarianization remain Trotter, Black Milwaukee, esp. 276–277; Trotter, The Great Migration in Historical Perspective.
25 Examples of migration narratives include Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way; Grossman, Land of Hope; Phillips, Alabama North; Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns. For examples of the focus on black agency engendered in migration and war, see Kelley, Race Rebels.
26 On the progressive imperatives of the New South, see Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name; Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy; Liechtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor; and Ayers, The Promise of the New South. For a post-Progressive Era perspective on the persistence of these models of racial labor control, see Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth.
27 Ray S. Baker, “A Statesmen of the Negro Problem,” World’s Work (Summer 1916). On black soldiers as avatars of modernity, see Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy.
28 Analysis of black working class agency must be tempered by an acknowledgement of the overwhelming power of the state, especially in wartime, in sanctioning categories of race and racial labor fitness. Historians of race and labor need to heed the admonishment of scholars to “bring the state back in” to better determine how racial labor hierarchies are embodied on both the shop floor and the battlefield. Evans, et al., Bringing the State Back In.
29 On racial corporality as social knowledge conduits, see Schilling, The Body and Social Theory, 16–17; Wailoo, Dying in the City of the Blues. On past and present attempts to mediate racial progress through corporally-infused narratives of health, see Downs, Sick from Freedom.
30 Boris and Baron, “The Body as a Useful Category,” 23–26, note that “bodies are both constituted by and constitutive of the workplace they inhabit and the racialized and gendered class relations which work both expresses and creates.” Moreover, “racial bodies are cultural productions, constituted through an interpretive process which often masks the social struggles that went into their making.”
31 I build on Catherine Kudlick’s call for disability as a category of analysis when delineating how social difference has been embodied throughout history. Kudlick’s argument for “why we need another ‘other’” is especially useful for charting the way in which race and labor hierarchies were understood in visceral, aesthetic and everyday terms. Kudlick, “Disability History.” Also see Longmore and Umansky, The New Disability History. For insights on the relationship between citizenship as a function and agent of conscription, see Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
32 Foucault, History of Sexuality, 139–144.
33 On blacks’ uses of lynching and racial violence as corporeal repositories of resistance, see Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me.
34 On quantification—along corporeal lines or otherwise—as both constitutive and an imperative of the modern nation state, see Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 113–138. Bailey’s last recorded bout on March 6, 1890 was a loss by knockout to a Mike Boden in Philadelphia. Over the span of a five-year career from 1885 to 1890, Bailey carved out a decidedly unspectacular record of four wins (two by knockout), five losses (two by knockout), and two draws. “Ben Bailey,” BoxRec.com, http://boxrec.com/list_bouts.php?human_id=565556&cat=boxer. Accessed March 20, 2015.
35 Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, 2–3.
36 Frederick L. Hoffman, “The Practical Use of Vital Statistics,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 143, no. 26 (December 1900), 653; Porter, Trust in Numbers, 11, 45–53; Porter, “Statistical Utopianism,” 210–227.
37 Louis Menard, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), xxi, defines the Progressive Era as one in which “ideas mattered” while remaining committed to the notion that ideas should never ossify into ideologies. Lorenzo Fioramonti’s reading of Max Weber on bureaucracy is especially instructive here. Fioramonti, How Numbers Rule the World, 20, argues that Weber sees the essence of bureaucracy as the power of technology, which leads to the marginalization of all irrational and emotional elements associated with political factors, that is, human factors (i.e. race) that escape the precision of calculation.
38 Degler, In Search of Human Nature, viii–ix, 75–78; Bender, American Abyss, 2–10.
39 Walter Lippman, “Negro Migration,” New Republic, July 1, 1916.
40 Biddle, “Military History, Democracy,” 1143–1145.
41 Banta, Taylored Lives, 4–6. Debates persist over whether the various social, economic and cultural attempts to negotiate what James Livingstone describes as a shift from proprietary to corporate capitalism evinced a retrenchment of the corporatist status quo or produced new ruling structures and values. Livingstone, Pragmatism and the Political Economy, xxiii–xxv.
42 Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 4–8.
43 For analysis of transnational networks of Progressive reform, see Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 279.
44 Gains, Uplifting the Race. DuBois later characterized his unsuccessful pursuit of a military commission as an attempt “to increase the race’s knowledge capital at a time of great crisis.” Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois, 552–560.
45 On the links between military and labor history, see Way, “Class and the Common Soldier,” 455–481; Way, “Rebellion of the Regulars,” 761–792; Stanfield, “The Negro Problem,” 188; Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 5.
46 Findings collected in Davenport and Love, Physical Examination of the First Million Draft Recruits; Defects Found in Drafted Men; and Army Anthropology.
47 Holmes to Hrdlicka, Report of the Committee on Anthropology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (1918). W. E. B. DuBois was the foremost black practitioner of anthropometry or biometric science. For insight into how DuBois engaged with this scholarship, used it to bind his scientific and literary work, and reconfigured it as a means of uplift, see Farland, “W. E. B. DuBois, Anthropometric Science,” 1017–1044.
48 On race and racial division—specifically blackness—as a function of Western/American modernity, see Cornel West, “A Geneology of Modern Racism,” in Prophesy Deliverance: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (New York: Westminster John Knox Press, 1982), 154, 162. On race and labor management as constitutive to the development of modern American labor economies, see Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference.
49 Gerber, Disabled Veterans in History, 4; Gelber, “A ‘Hard-Boiled Order,’” 161–180. For insights into rehabilitation as a mechanism of imperial racial control, see Elizabeth West, “Divine Fragments: Even India has Begun to Salvage its Man Power,” Carry On 1, no. 3 (1918), 22–25; and Frader, “From Muscles to Nerves,” 123–147.
50 Literary Digest, June 14, 1919, 23. Nonetheless, just as mainstream social sciences began to abandon hereditarianism, leading African American nationalists such as Marcus Garvey began to embrace race purity as a source of racial uplift. See Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 215–217.
51 “The Determination of Racial Relationships by Means of Blood,” Journal of the American Medical Association 73 (December 27, 1919), 1941–1942; Lippman, “Negro Migration,” New Republic, July 1, 1916; Adas, Dominance by Design, 281.
52 Visweswaran, “Race and the Culture of Anthropology,” 70, argues that the “attempt to expunge race from social science by assigning it to biology as Boas and his students did, helped to legitimate the scientific study of race, thereby fuelling the machine of scientific racism.”
53 Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Scribner, 1916); Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color.
54 DuBois, Darkwater, 32.
55 The pushback against eugenic thinking has often been characterized as coinciding with the rise of New Deal pluralism, abetted by new models of cultural relativism developed by the anthropologist Franz Boas and his students. For many scholars, eugenic models of race and racial difference were ultimately discredited with the rise of Nazism and the horrors of Auschwitz. Daniel Kelves notes that while the “barbarousness of Nazi policies eventually provoked a powerful anti-eugenic reaction . . . this reaction obscured a deeper historical reality: many thoughtful members of the American public had already recognized that a great deal was wrong with mainline eugenics” and the general urge to mediate social policy in strict biological terms. Baker, From Savage to Negro; Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives; Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, 118–119; Bender, American Abyss, 243–246.
56 DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 213–215.
57 Painter, The History of White People, 1; Banta, Taylored Lives, 29; Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa, 40.
58 For additional examples of works on the “Negro problem,” see Jabez L. Curry, “The Negro Question,” Popular Science Monthly 55 (1899); and LeConte, “The Race Problem in the South.” Theories of degeneration also infused a transnational reform discourse. See Nye, “Degeneration, Neurasthenia,” 51–69; Nye, Crime, Madness and Politics; and Pick, Faces of Degeneration. Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, outlines the counter discourse of regeneration which animated Progressive Era thought.
59 Downs, Sick from Freedom, 168–169.
60 On efforts to link work and empire to the development of American modernity, see Bender and Lipman, Making the Empire Work.
61 Painter, The History of White People, x; James Bryce, “Thoughts on the Negro Problem,” North American Review 153 (December 1891), 659–660.
62 See Stanley, Bondage to Contract, 95–97. Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 247, notes that during this period, the labor management practices of “racial reasoning and regulation shifted from the religious tales of Ham to the bio-cultural social sciences.”
63 Charles Rosenberg, “Framing Disease,” in Rosenberg and Golden, Framing Disease: Studies in Cultural History, xiii–xxvi.
1 Frederick L. Hoffman, “Memoir” (unpublished) Frederick L. Hoffman Papers, Box 9, Butler Library Rare Book and Manuscripts, Columbia University, 72–73; Ella Hoffman, “Biography of Frederick L. Hoffman” (unpublished) Vol. 4, Hoffman Papers, Box 31, Butler Library Rare Book and Manuscripts, Columbia University, 117.
2 Ibid., 117–118.
3 Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies, 63–66.
4 Hampton Institute had been directly modeled on Hawaii’s Hilo Boarding School, founded a generation prior by Samuel’s father, Richard Armstrong to bring “thrift and industry” to the islands natives. “The Negro and the Polynesian have many striking similarities,” observed the younger Armstrong. “Of both it is true that not mere ignorance, but deficiency of character is the chief difficulty, and that to build up character is the true objective point of education.” Gary Okihiro, Island World: A History of Hawai’i and the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 114–115. For more on the Hampton, Hawaiian connections, see Engs, Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited.
5 Okihiro, Island World, 114–116. Alexander Saxton argues that the sentimental domestication of racial “others”—the noble Indian, for example—into popular culture became possible only through the discourse of degeneracy and extinction because it alleviated the racial anxiety of white Americans. Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 342–345. See also Deloria, Playing Indian.
6 Hoffman, Race Traits; Hoffman, “Vital Statistics of the Negro.”
7 Glenn, “Postmodernism,” 6, 131–143.
8 For analysis of the transnational models of racial labor knowledge and black vocational uplift, see Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa, 40.
9 Degler, In Search of Human Nature, viii–ix, 75–78; Bender, American Abyss, 2–10; Banta, Taylored Lives, 4.
10 Bender, American Abyss, 18–19; Hoffman, “The Practical Use of Vital Statistics,” 653.
11 Livingstone, Pragmatism and the Political Economy, xxiii–xxv.
12 Porter, “Statistical Utopianism,” 210–227; “Life Insurance, Medical Testing and the Management of Mortality,” in Lorraine Daston, ed., Biographies of Scientific Objects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 226.
13 Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, 113–138.
14 Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, ix, 13–14. See also Hacking, The Social Construction of What?.
15 Fioramonti, How Numbers Rule the World, 15.
16 On antebellum black bodies as both embodied and imagined capital, see Johnson, Soul by Soul.
17 Painter, The History of White People, 245.
18 Because blacks faced discrimination in housing markets and had little capital for down payments, a relatively high proportion of their wealth was held in personal property—such as clothes and furniture—rather than real estate, which make it somewhat difficult to gauge black wealth at the turn of the century. Moreover, the situation differed for urban and rural blacks: in Atlanta blacks possessed only $37,000 worth of real estate in 1869 an amount which had grown to $855,561 by 1900. In contrast, in 1900 black farm ownership was only 8% in the black belt in compared with 54% of whites. Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 70, 429, 449–450.
19 Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, 2–3.
20 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 209–217.
21 DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro, 225; Weare, Black Business in the New South, 7.
22 Zelizer, Morals and Markets, xii. From its inception, life insurance was opposed by various religious and secular thinkers who objected to the commodification of sacred and personal entities and experiences like bodies, life and, death. In The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, the young Karl Marx deplored the devaluing of human life beyond the all-encompassing cash nexus. Marx cited labor, prostitution, and slavery as prime examples of the degrading, alienating process of capitalist commodification. Marx, “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts,” 131–146.
23 Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, 93.
24 Wolff, “The Myth of the Actuary,” 84–91.
25 Ibid.
26 Hoffman, History of Prudential, 16, 153, 185.
27 Wolff, “The Myth of the Actuary,” 88; Hoffman, History of Prudential, 185.
28 Francis Sypher, “The Rediscovered Prophet: Frederick L. Hoffman (1865–1946),” Cosmos Club (2000), http://cosmos-club.org/web/journals/2000/sypher.html.
29 Ibid.
30 N. S. Shaler, “The Negro Problem,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1884, 703; Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, 2–3.
31 Beard, quoted in Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 247.
32 Bender, American Abyss, 119–121.
33 For analysis of minstrelsy as a key cultural discourse of nineteenth-century white supremacy, see Lott, Love and Theft.
34 Warren, “Northern Chills, Southern Fevers,” 7.
35 Eugene R. Corson, “The Vital Equation of the Colored Race and Its Future in the United States,” in Wilder Quarter-Century Book (Ithaca, 1893), 123.
36 Bryce, “Thoughts on the Negro Problem,” 659–660.
37 Hoffman, Race Traits, 6, 148, 312. Previous to 1860, Chinese and Indians were counted as colored; for 1860 and 1890 they were excluded altogether.
38 Ibid., 142.
39 Ibid., 6.
40 Zelizer, Morals and Markets, xii.
41 Ibid., 113, 48.
42 Hoffman, Race Traits, 28.
43 Of the 431 black babies born in Atlanta for the year 1895, a staggering 194 (or 45%) died before their first birthday; however as deaths were recorded more often then births the real infant mortality rate was likely somewhat less. Litwack, Trouble in Mind.
44 Hoffman, Race Traits, 64–68, 33–37.
45 Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 238.
46 Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 483; Hoffman, Race Traits, 17–18. Also see Brian Kelly, “Industrial Sentinels Confront the ‘Rabid Faction’: Black Elites, Black Workers, and the Labor Question in the Jim Crow South,” in Arnesen, The Black Worker.
47 Galishoff, “Germs Know No Color Line”; Hoffman, “Vital Statistics of the Negro,” 534.
48 Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness, 5.
49 Hoffman, Race Traits, 226, 263–265.
50 Ibid., 263–265.
51 Pick, Faces of Degeneration, 109–138; Horn, The Criminal Body.
52 Hoffman, Race Traits, 218–220.
53 Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 436–437; Hoffman, Race Traits, 218–225.
54 Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 284.
55 Ibid., 92–95.
56 Ibid., 96.
57 Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 158. The analogy of blacks as animals was pervasive in nineteenth-century American culture. With the coming of Darwinian theory, ethnologists continued to stress the animal nature of blacks by positing them as the “missing link” between apes and white men. See Haller, Outcasts from Evolution; Humphreys, Intensely Human.
58 Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 190–191.
59 Hoffman, Race Traits, 95–96.
60 Quoted in Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 190–191.
61 Hoffman, Race Traits, 185–187, 180–182.
62 Ibid., 156.
63 Carter, The United States of the United Races, 77–106.
64 LeConte, quoted in Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind, 246–247.
65 These findings were complicated by the fact that mulattos were not listed in either the 1880 or 1900 Census. Williamson, New People, 112.
66 Hoffman, Race Traits, 186.
67 Spectator, June 1897.
68 Hoffman, Race Traits, 140.
69 Smithers, Science, Sexuality, and Race, 158–161. Also see Mitchell, Righteous Propagation. On the mulatto as a barometer of the racial boundaries of the republican body politic, see Carter, The United States of the United Races.
70 Hoffman, Race Traits, 140.
71 Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 23–25.
72 Ibid.
73 Braun, “Spirometry, Measurement, and Race,” 136–137.
74 Gould, Investigations in the Military.
75 Hoffman, Race Traits, 310–312.
76 Ibid., 183–185.
77 Ibid.
78 Ott, Fevered Lives, 12.
79 Ibid., 84.
80 DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro, 160.
81 For more on how tuberculosis (TB) contributed to a fracturing of working class whiteness along racial and gendered lines for Jewish immigrants, see Bender, Sweated Work, Weak Bodies.
82 Schweik, The Ugly Laws, 193.
83 Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, 400–401.
84 Hoffman, Race Traits, 70–77.
85 Ibid., 70.
86 Ibid., 160.
87 Bender, American Abyss, 43–46.
88 See Anderson, Colonial Pathologies; McCallum, Leonard Wood.
89 Guterl and Skwiot, “Atlantic and Pacific Crossings,” 46; Anderson, Colonial Pathologies.
90 For more on quantification—racial and otherwise—as an imperative of empire, see Ian Hacking, “Why Race Still Matters,” Daedalus 135 (Fall 2006), 113–115.
91 Banta, Taylored Lives, 27.
92 M. Dawson, “Review of Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro,” Publications of the American Statistical Association 5, no. 35 (September–December 1896).
93 Quoted in Hoffman, “Biography of Frederick L. Hoffman” (unpublished) Vol. 4, Hoffman Papers, Box 31, Butler Library Rare Book and Manuscripts, Columbia University, 120.
94 F. Lamson Scribner, “Review of Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro,” Science 5, no. 106 (January 8, 1897), 62–69.
95 W. B. Smith, The Color Line: A Brief in Behalf of the Unborn (New York, 1905), 186–187, 190–191.
96 Dial Magazine, January 1897, 17.
97 Rogers, Atlantic Crossings, 125.
98 DuBois, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (January 1897).
99 On DuBois’s “Germanophilia,” see Lewis, W. E. B. DuBois, 127–130.
100 Reed, W. E. B. DuBois and American Political Thought, 32–35; Katz and Sugrue, W. E. B. DuBois, Race, and the City.
101 In 1810, there were 1,377,808 blacks in the U.S., a number that had swelled to approximately 7,470,040 in 1890. Kelly Miller, “Review of Race Traits,” The American Negro Academy, Occasional Papers, no. 1 (1897).
102 Ibid.
103 Ibid.
104 Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro, 324.
105 Harry Pace, “The Attitudes of Life Insurance Companies Towards Negroes,” Southern Workman 57, no. 5 (January 1928).
106 DuBois, quoted in Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 430.
107 Ibid.
108 Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 14.
109 Frederick Hoffman, “Race Pathology,” Hoffman Papers, Box 11, Folder 12, Butler Library Rare Book and Manuscripts, Columbia University.
110 Weare, Black Business in the New South, 280–281.
111 Charles Carroll, The Negro a Beast: or, in the Image of God? (St. Louis, MO: American Book and Bible House, 1900); W. P. Calhoun, The Caucasian and the Negro in the United States (Arno Press, 1902); Smith, The Color Line; Robert Shufeldt, The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization (Boston: Gorham Press, 1907).
112 Eggleston, The Ultimate Solution.
113 Ibid., 124.
114 Barringer, The American Negro.
115 Dorr, Segregation’s Science, 22–24.
116 Hoffman, Race Traits, 312–313. See Marion Dawson, “The South and the Negro,” North American Review 172 (February 1901).
117 Guterl, The Color of Race, 117.
118 Hoffman to Dryden, November 2, 1914, Hoffman Papers, Box 13, Folder 11, Butler Library Rare Book and Manuscripts, Columbia University.
119 Honolulu Commercial Advertiser, April 1901.
120 Frederick Hoffman, “Travels in Hawaii,” Hoffman Papers, Box 13, Butler Library Rare Book and Manuscripts, Columbia University.
121 Ibid.
122 Hoffman, “Race Pathology.”
123 Frederick Hoffman, The Sanitary Progress and Vital Statistics of Hawaii (Newark: Prudential Life Insurance Company, 1916), 9.
124 Ibid., 9–11.
125 See Gary Okihiro, Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
126 Frederick Hoffman, “Races of Mankind,” Hoffman Papers, Box 14, Folder 3, Butler Library Rare Book and Manuscripts, Columbia University.
127 Ibid.
128 Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science.
129 Schweik, The Ugly Laws, 193.
130 Ibid., 193–194.
131 Booker T. Washington, quoted in Bruinius, Better for All the World.
132 Porter, Trust in Numbers, 124–126.
133 Wolff, “The Myth of the Actuary,” 121. For an examination of the racial epistemologies of statistics, see Tukufu Zuberi, “Deracailyzing Social Statistics: Problems in the Quantification of Race,” Annals (March 2000), 173.
134 Wolff, “The Myth of the Actuary,” 121–122.
1 Survey (July 14, 1917), 331, 333.
2 James Winston, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early-Twentieth Century America (New York: Verso, 1999), 96.
3 Wayne, Imagining Black America, 44–47.
4 Memo to Post, August 1, 1917, Records of the War Production Board, Record Group (RG) 179, National Archives Building, College Park, MD (NAB II).
5 Ibid.
6 For an analysis of how workers exercised white privilege within the nexus of work and culture, see Lott, Love and Theft; Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic; Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; Allen, The Invention of the White Race.
7 Stanfield, “The Negro Problem,” 188.
8 Despite being the first federal agency since Reconstruction exclusively devoted to the black worker, the DNE is largely absent from African American and Progressive historiography. Until quite recently, much of this ambivalence was due to historians’ tendency to interpret the modern African American experience through the narrow lens of Washingtonian accommodation and DuBoisian radicalism. For the former, Haynes’s moderate racial liberalism was a corrective to the perceived excesses of the black power movement of the late sixties and early seventies. For scholars committed to detailing the agency and forms of resistance of the black working class, Haynes’s brand of bourgeois respectability was seen as irrelevant, or even detrimental, to the cause of black equality. However, recent works by historians Toure Reed and Francille Wilson have helped to re-conceptualize Haynes’s commitment to developing black labor expertise and his efforts to instill in migrants an industrial consciousness as complex and nuanced attempts to assert black labor fitness at a high tide of eugenics and Jim Crow. Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity; Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 171.
9 Francis Walker, quoted in Painter, The History of White People, 212.
10 McKee, Sociology and the Race Problem, 29.
11 Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics, 5.
12 Edward A. Ross, “The Causes of Race Superiority,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 18, America’s Race Problems (July 1901), 81.
13 Bender, American Abyss, 124–125.
14 Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 27–30.
15 Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity, 20.
16 Quoted in Lyman, Militarism, Imperialism, and Racial Accommodation, 120–140.
17 Quoted in Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 27.
18 Alfred Stone, “Is Race Friction Between Blacks and Whites in the United States Growing and Inevitable?” American Journal of Sociology 13, no. 5 (1908), 692.
19 Gilman, “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” 78.
20 Quoted in McKee, Sociology and the Race Problem, 29.
21 On the contemporaneous development of pathological models of class or class as pathology, see Mark Pittenger, Class Unknown: Undercover Investigations of American Work and Poverty from the Progressive Era to the Present (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 38–39.
22 O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, 95.
23 Carter, The United States of the United Races, 113.
24 Berlin, The Making of African America, 154–156.
25 Giddings, The Principles of Sociology, 328.
26 Guterl, The Color of Race, 49. See Odom’s theory of the “Black Ulysses” to see how this played out in the shifting labor—specifically lumber—economy of the South and how southern blacks were also seen to be incompatible with modernity. Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses.
27 Jones, The Tribe of Black Ulysses, 328.
28 O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, 17.
29 While still a student at Fisk, Haynes arranged for DuBois to give the 1898 commencement address, which coincided with the tenth anniversary of DuBois’s own graduation. Perlman, “Stirring the White Conscious,” 176.
30 Haynes, The Negro at Work in New York City.
31 Perlman, “Stirring the White Conscious,” 42.
32 Haynes, The Negro at Work in New York City, 44.
33 Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 38–39.
34 Haynes, The Negro at Work in New York City, 44.
35 Ibid., 33.
36 For an extended critique by Haynes of Hoffman’s index of the Negro death rate in southern cities, see Haynes, The Negro at Work during the War, 34–38, 42–44.
37 Ibid., 45–55.
38 Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity, 22.
39 Wayne, Imagining Black America, 45.
40 On the interracial dynamics of political radicalism, see Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Knopf, 2011).
41 Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity, 20.
42 Ibid. Decades before E. Franklin Frazier’s The Negro Family in Chicago, Haynes’s The Negro at Work in New York City was one of the best known works regarding the racial dimensions of urban ecology theory.
43 New York Times, January 28, 1912; Albert O. Wright, “The New Philanthropy,” in Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (Boston, 1896), 4.
44 New York Times, January 28, 1912. In 1900, 80.9% of the black population of Manhattan was contained within twelve of the thirty-five Assembly districts—one-third of which was concentrated in only three districts: the Eleventh (10.4%), the Nineteenth (13.8%), and the Twenty-Seventh (9.2%). Haynes, The Negro at Work in New York City, 48–49.
45 Roediger and Esch, Production of Difference, 173–174.
46 See Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness.
47 Parris and Brooks, Blacks in the City, 191.
48 Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity, 191.
49 Ibid.
50 Emmett J. Scott, Negro Migration during the War (New York, 1923), 54–55.
51 Quoted in Scott, Negro Migration during the War, 54–55.
52 G. E. Haynes, “Cooperation with Colleges in Securing and Training Negro Social Workers for Urban Centers,” Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections (1916).
53 Haynes launched the Urban League Fellows Program in conjunction with the New York School of Philanthropy, which funded graduate training at the Master’s level in sociology, economics, or social work at a number of universities. This provided the NUL with highly skilled employees at no cost and avoided the need to integrate placements. The Fellows Program became a feeder program for NUL branch executives and supplied many future black social scientists such as Abram Harris and Ira Reid. Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 86.
54 The Pittsburgh Survey, 6 vols. (Pittsburgh, PA: Russell Sage Foundation, 1909–1914); William P. Dillingham, U.S. Immigration Commission (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1907–1911); Edward Ross, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (New York: The Century Company, 1914).
55 Emily Greene Balch, “Racial Contacts and Cohesions: As Factors in the Unconstrained Fabric of a World at Peace,” Survey (March 6, 1915), 610.
56 Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 128.
57 Bender, American Abyss, 242–243; Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 128.
58 Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 128–129.
59 Quoted in ibid., 128–129. In 1907, DuBois issued a public statement rejecting erroneous suggestions that he—rather than Jackson—had prepared the Jamestown exhibit, attacking the whole affair as a “shameful and discredited enterprise.”
60 Ibid.
61 George Haynes, “Negroes Move North,” pt. 1, Survey 40 (May 4, 1918); Haynes, “Negroes Move North,” pt. 2, Survey 41 (January 4, 1919).
62 Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity, 21–25.
63 Ibid.
64 On professional expertise—in the social sciences, specifically—as a form and or agent of masculine racial uplift in early twentieth-century America, see Ross, Manning the Race, 145–200.
65 Hall later returned to the Census Bureau, where he was the chief specialist on black population matters for a number of years. Hall had already written a number of census reports on black migration. In 1917, Hall and Jennifer were “loaned” to the DOL to do a report on blacks, which was used to justify the creation of the DNE. Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 131.
66 Guzda, “Social Experiment of the Labor Department,” 20.
67 Ibid.
68 Haynes, The Negro at Work during the War, 130, 137–138. On race and time-work discipline with a particular emphasis on the antebellum sense of the temporal, see Smith, Mastered by the Clock.
69 Haynes, The Negro at Work during the War, 137–138.
70 “Visiting Hog Island,” September 1918, Records of the U.S. Shipping Board, RG 32, File Folder 12, National Archives and Records Administration–Mid-Atlantic Region, Philadelphia, PA.
71 Ibid.
72 Ibid.
73 Bruce Nelson, Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 9.
74 Guzda,“Social Experiment of the Labor Department,” 21.
75 Haynes, The Negro at Work during the War, 137; New York Times, February 17, 1918.
76 New York Times, February 17, 1918.
77 Haynes, The Negro at Work during the War, 62.
78 Ibid.,120–130.
79 A survey of five major stockyards found that 2,990 black women (91% of those black women working in the industry) were employed in cleaning and curing offal. In a survey of sixteen tobacco plants, 5,965 women were employed as steamers (72% of the total number of employed black women). Haynes, The Negro at Work during the War, 125, 130.
80 On the intra-racial gender politics of racial uplift, see Mitchell, Righteous Propagation; Ross, Manning the Race.
81 Haynes, The Negro at Work during the War, 141.
82 Ibid., 130.
83 Ibid., 126–127.
84 Ibid.
85 Guzda, “Social Experiment of the Labor Department,” 21.
86 Department of Negro Economics, Summer Memo 1918, Records of the War Production Board, RG 179, Box 21, Folder, 6, NAB II; Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 131.
87 Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 130–134.
88 Ibid., 132.
89 Ibid., 134.
90 Guterl, The Color of Race, 12.
91 Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 279.
92 Guzda, “Social Experiment of the Labor Department,” 31–32.
93 Ibid.
94 Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 132.
95 War Department Memo, April 22, 1919, Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, RG 165.2, Box 10, Folder 2, NAB II.
96 Ibid.
97 Postwar black unemployment in the North, despite being rooted in a general slowing of the economy (labor surplus), was also linked to blacks’ refusal to work at prewar rates and the demand for agricultural labor in the South. See Memo to Woods, April 19, 1919, RG 165.2, Box 10, Folder 3, NAB II.
98 War Department Memo, April 22, 1919, RG 165.2, Box 10, Folder 2, NAB II.
99 Ibid.
100 Guzda, “Social Experiment of the Labor Department,” 32; Memo to Colonel Woods, Department of Labor, USES, April 19, 1919, RG 179, NAB II.
101 Ibid., 30–34.
102 Ibid., 30–34.
103 Ibid., 33.
104 Ibid., 33.
105 U.S. Congress, House, House Document 1906, 64th Congress, 2nd session; U.S. Department of Labor, Regulations of the Department of Labor (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1915), 119–121.
106 Ovington to Secretary Wilson, Records of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP), Box I:C80, Reel 14, Library of Congress (LOC); Eugene Kinckle Jones, “Department of Negro Economics,” Records of the National Urban League (NUL), Box I:E30, LOC.
107 Guzda, “Social Experiment of the Labor Department,” 35.
108 U.S. Congress, Civil Sundry Bill, Press Clippings, Records of the NAACP, Box C319, LOC.
109 Roediger, Working Toward Whiteness, 7.
110 Jane Schiber and Harry Schiber, “The Wilson Administration,” 449; Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 131.
111 Haynes, The Negro at Work during the War, 7.
112 Ibid., 7–9.
113 Ibid., 7–9.
114 Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 131.
115 Charles Johnson, “Black Workers and the City,” Survey Graphic 6, no. 6 (March 1925); Abram Harris, “The Economic Foundations of American Race Division,” Social Forces 5, no. 3 (March 1927), 468–478; Harris, “The Negro Population in Minneapolis: A Study of Race Relations,” National Urban League (1926); Harris, The Negro as Capitalist (1936).
116 For prior sociological examinations of black proletarianization, see Charles Harris Wesley, Negro Labor in the United States, 1850–1925: A Study in American Economic History (New York: Vanguard Press, 1927).
117 Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference, 161–162.
118 Montgomery, Workers’ Control in America, 122.
119 Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 202–203.
120 Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, viii.
121 Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 11–13.
122 Holt, Children of Fire, 4.
123 For insights into the relation of race to industry, see Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Cornell University Press, 1990); Gilman, Difference and Pathology; Bender, American Abyss, 13–15. For a brilliant cultural/artistic perspective of blacks’ relation to and within American modernity—inhabiting and shaping modernity in sonic terms, see Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine.
124 In arguing that the ideal working man (and manager) “was made” and not born, Taylor seemed to be echoing an environmentalist view of social difference—a view that was potentially sympathetic to groups such as blacks who were generally seen as slaves to their nature. Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, iv. For work on Taylorism and race, see Frader, “From Muscles to Nerves”; Lyman, Militarism, Imperialism and Racial Accommodation, 120–140.
125 Brown, “The Negro Migrant.”
126 Miles, Capitalism and Unfree Labor; DuBois, Darkwater, 34–35.
127 On the structure of the prewar/wartime state, see Hawley, The Great War; Alan Dawley, Struggles for Justice: Social Responsibility and the Liberal State (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991).
1 H. Berry Memoir, A Day in the Army at Tuskegee Institute, Berry Family Letters, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library (NYPL).
2 A process was often referred to as the “inspection effect” of wartime economies. Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 171–179.
3 Bristow, Making Men Moral, 3.
4 Roediger, How Race Survived U.S. History, 160–161.
5 Bourne, “The State,” (1918); The Untimely Papers (1919). Bourne’s critique of the wartime state as a mechanism of corporeal control is further complicated and perhaps informed by his experiences as an American living with a physical disability. Bourne’s face was disfigured at birth by the misuse of forceps and his spine was deformed by a childhood bout of tuberculosis. For Bourne’s reflections on disability as both an identity and category of analysis, see Randolph Bourne, “The Handicapped,” Youth and Life, 1913.
6 Irvin Cobb, quoted in Slotkin, Lost Battalions, 153–154; Gerstle, American Crucible, 84–85.
7 Ales Hrdlicka, quoted in Frederick L. Hoffman, Army Anthropometry and Medical Rejection Statistics (Prudential Press, 1918), 14–16.
8 Franz Boas, “Changes in Bodily Form of the Descendants of Immigrants,” American Anthropologist 14, no. 3 (July–September 1912), 530–562.
9 Hoffman, Army Anthropometry, 16, 54. Davenport and Yerkes had corresponded at the beginning of the war regarding the linkages between heredity and mental and the physiological development. In a letter to Yerkes, Davenport remarked: “I am now rushing a book on the subject of naval officers with reference to their juvenile and family history. It is interesting to note that Admiral T Mahan was the one man who has expressed very clearly the idea that the effectiveness of a man in his occupation depends upon his hereditary traits, together with the opportunities that they have for development and exercise.” Davenport to Yerkes, May 16, 1917, Charles B. Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 97, Folder 5, American Philosophical Society (APS).
10 Ireland, Davenport, and Love, “Part One: Army Anthropology,” 45.
11 Bender, American Abyss, 112.
12 Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; Boris and Baron, “The Body as a Useful Category,” 24, 25. For nineteenth-century antecedents of theories of racial embodiment, see Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies; Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness, 3–5.
13 Baron, “Masculinity, the Embodied Male Worker,” 143–160; Jones, American Work, 336; Boris and Baron, “The Body as a Useful Category,” 34. For further analysis on the malleability and contingent nature of racial ideology—along corporeal lines or otherwise, see Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics; Roediger, Colored White; Gilroy, Against Race, 11–15.
14 Holmes to Hrdlicka, Report of the Committee on Anthropology, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (1918).
15 For insight into how DuBois engaged with this scholarship, used it to bind his scientific and literary work, and reconfigured it as a means of uplift, see Farland, “W. E. B. DuBois, Anthropometric Science.”
16 Bruinius, Better for All the World, 162; Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, 44–46.
17 Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, 46–47.
18 Dawley, Changing the World, 194.
19 Charles Johnson Post, “The Army as a Social Service,” Survey (May 20, 1916), 201.
20 Roger Horowitz, “‘It is the Working Class Who Fight All the Battles’: Military Service, Patriotism and the Study of American Workers,” in Halpern and Morris, American Exceptionalism?, 76–100; Shenk, “Work or Fight!,” 6–7.
21 Minutes of a Meeting of the Committee of Anthropologists at the NRC, Washington, DC, November 15, 1918, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 81, Folder 18, APS (hereafter cited as Minutes, Committee of Anthropologists at the NRC).
22 Though historians have debated the actual extent to which Taylorist models were adopted by business, many still contend that he was “the most influential management theorist of his time.” McCartin, Labor’s Great War, 3, 50.
23 Minutes, Committee of Anthropologists at the NRC.
24 Braun, “Spirometry, Measurement, and Race.”
25 Gould, Investigations in the Military, 477–497. Historian Margaret Humphreys disputes this assertion, claiming that Gould himself did not draw this conclusion but merely documented the measurement. Humphreys, Intensely Human, 152.
26 Sanford Hunt, “The Negro as Soldier,” Anthropological Review 7, no. 24 (January 1869), 40–54.
27 On the era’s corpus of black extinction literature, see Lawrie, “‘Mortality as the Life Story of a People,’” Canadian Review of American Studies (2013) 375.
28 Vernon Williams Jr., “What is Race? Franz Boas Reconsidered,” in Campbell, Race, Nation, and Empire, 40–64. The intersections of race, imperialism, and anthropology revealed themselves in intriguing ways. In 1904, Boas contacted Booker T. Washington on behalf of J. E. Aggrey, a “full blooded Negro” and a student at Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina who wished to study anthropology at Columbia University. While Boas acknowledged that he was hesitant to “advise the young man to take up this work for fear that it would be difficult for him to find a place” following his studies, he was hopeful that Aggrey could find work in the Colonial services of a European African colony. Washington, however, confirmed Boas’s initial doubts, arguing that Aggrey’s proposed course of study would “be of little value to him” given his race. Boas to Washington, November, 30, 1904, Franz Boas Papers, APS, https://diglib.amphilsoc.org/boas-request?key=text:130178; Washington to Boas, December 9, 1904, Boas Papers, APS, https://diglib.amphilsoc.org/boas-request?key=text:130180; DuBois to Boas, October 11, 1905, Boas Papers, APS, http://diglib.amphilsoc.org/islandora/object/text:39375.
29 Haller, Outcasts from Evolution, 34.
30 Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, 74.
31 Benjamin Kidd, quoted in Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 41.
32 On the climatic and environmental dimensions of race and imperial labor, see Bender, American Abyss, 40–68.
33 William Washburn, “The Relation Between Climate and Health with special reference to American Occupation of the Philippine Islands,” American Journal of the Medical Sciences (1905), 515.
34 On the intersections of race and labor in the broader logic of American imperialism, see Bender and Lipman, Making the Empire Work.
35 N. S. Shaler, “The Future of the Negro in the Southern States,” Popular Science Monthly 57 (June 1900), 150.
36 Joseph O. Baylen and John Hammond Moore, “Senator John Tyler Morgan and Negro Colonization in the Philippines, 1901 to 1902,” Phylon 29, no. 1 (1968), 65–75.
37 Bender, American Abyss, 88; Anderson, Colonial Pathologies, 102–103. On blacks’—specifically black troops’—fractious relationship to U.S. imperialism, see Murphy, Shadowing the White Man’s Burden.
38 Bender, American Abyss, 129.
39 Minutes, Committee of Anthropologists at the NRC. For European perceptions of conscription’s dysgenic consequences, see Pick, Faces of Degeneration.
40 Gilman, “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem,” 78–85.
41 Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 175; Hoffman, Army Anthropometry, 41–44.
42 Hoffman, Army Anthropometry, 42–44.
43 Ibid., 49; Bender, American Abyss, 66–67.
44 Scientific America, June 9, 1917.
45 Robert De C. Ward, “Some Aspects of Immigration to the United States in Relation to the Future of the American Race,” Eugenics Review 7 (April 1915–January 1916), 263–282. For further insights into the dysgenic nature of war, see Jordan, War and Waste.
46 T. J. Downing, “A Possible Factor of Degeneracy,” New York Medical Journal 108 (July 20, 1917), 103–105.
47 Hoffman, Army Anthropometry, 16.
48 Kennedy, Over Here, 144–154.
49 Those responsible for raising a new national army, such as Secretary of War Newton Baker and Provost Marshal General Enoch Crowder, head of the Selective Service, were keen students of the Civil War and were well aware of the fact that the draft had yielded only 6% of the Union manpower and resulted in widespread civil unrest such as the bloody 1863 draft riots in New York City. Kennedy, Over Here, 68; Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 331.
50 Hrdlicka to Davenport, February 4, 1918, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 53, Folder 2, APS; Kennedy, Over Here, 149.
51 Hrdlicka to Davenport, February 4, 1918, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 53, Folder 2, APS.
52 Davenport and Love, Physical Examination of the First Million Draft Recruits, 25.
53 Hoffman, Army Anthropometry, 114; Office of the Provost Marshal General, Standards of Physical Examination, Form 75, 4.
54 DuBois, quoted in Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 77.
55 Ibid., 25, 75.
56 Slotkin, Lost Battalions, 239; Shenk, “Work or Fight!,” 4–10.
57 For insight into this tradition and how it conflated with blacks’ understandings of uplift ideology and imperialism, see Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 27; Mitchell, “‘The Black Man’s Burden,’” 77–99.
58 “Stevedores’ Career a Round of Harmony,” June 7, 1918, Stars and Stripes.
59 Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, 455, 462–463; Buckley, American Patriots, 165.
60 Ireland, Davenport, and Love, “Part One: Army Anthropology.”
61 Henry Fairfield Osborne, “The Fighting Ability of Different Races,” Journal of Heredity 10, no. 1 (1919), 29–31.
62 Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 108, 110–112.
63 For the racial dynamics of Progressive Era penal labor, see Liechtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor.
64 Davenport and Love, Army Anthropology, 35. In one instance, the Surgeon General’s Office subsection of anthropology (established in July 1918 under Davenport’s supervision) was called upon to intervene in a case of disputed classification of a recruit who claimed not to have colored blood. Unfortunately, the archival record does not reveal the outcome of this dispute. What is significant is the way in which some officials believed that anthropometric evaluation of said recruit could provide a reliable index of his racial typology. This provides further evidence of anthropometry’s role in linking race and color—not to traits and tendencies, but to the body. Davenport to Grant, January 12, 1918, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 42, Folder 21, APS.
65 Extract from letter of Professor L. Manouvrier, Laboratoire d’Anthropologie, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, December 25, 1917 to Dr. A. Hrdlicka, March, 12, 1918, National Research Council (NRC) Collection, APS.
66 Berry, A Day in the Army at Tuskegee Institute; Davenport and Love, Army Anthropology, 34.
67 James Mennell, “African Americans and the Selective Service Act of 1917,” Journal of Negro History (1982); Painter, Standing at Armageddon, 332.
68 Kennedy, Over Here, 162; Barbeau and Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, 80; Shenk, “Work or Fight!,” 45.
69 Hoffman to Davenport, August 5, 1918, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box, 52, Folder 2, APS.
70 Ibid.
71 Minutes, Committee of Anthropologists at the NRC.
72 Hoffman, Army Anthropometry, 15.
73 Hale to Hoffman, November 22, 1917, Re: U.S. Army Anthropometric Work, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 44, Folder 1, APS.
74 Hoffman, Army Anthropometry, 15; Davenport to Grant, December, 31, 1917, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 42, Folder 5, APS.
75 See Williams Jr., “What is Race? Franz Boas Reconsidered.”
76 Office of the Surgeon General U.S. Army, “Malingering in U.S. Troops, Home Forces 1917,” Military Surgeon 42, no. 3 (March 1918), 21–25.
77 Ibid.; Taylor, The Principles of Scientific Management, 6–7.
78 Office of the Provost Marshal General, Standards of Physical Examination, Form 75.
79 Slotkin, Lost Battalions, 63.
80 Office of the Provost Marshal General, Standards of Physical Examination, Form 75, 7.
81 Peter Way, “‘Black Service . . . White Money’: The Peculiar Institution of Military Labor in the British Army during the Seven Years’ War,” in Leon Fink, ed., Workers Across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
82 On the temporal dynamics of blacks transition from bondage to contract labor, see Stanley, Bondage to Contract.
83 Kennedy, Over Here, 150.
84 Office of the Provost Marshal General, Manual of Instructions for Medical Advisory Boards, Form 64, 2.
85 Ibid.; Office of the Provost Marshal General, Manual of Instructions for Medical Advisory Boards, Form 65, 3; Davenport and Love, Physical Examination of First Million Draft Recruits, 23.
86 Office of the Provost Marshal General, Manual of Instructions for Medical Advisory Boards, Form 65, 3.
87 K. Walter Hickel, “Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Welfare,” in Longmore and Umansky, The New Disability History, 256.
88 Davenport and Love, Physical Examination of the First Million Draft Recruits, 22. F. Hoffman claimed that confusing venereal diseases with physical deficiencies of the body was “as serious an error as to confuse organic defects of the lungs with defects of lung capacity.” Hoffman, Army Anthropometry, 13.
89 Davenport and Love, Army Anthropology, 22.
90 Hrdlicka to Hale, February, 4, 1918; Hrdlicka to Hale, July 1918, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 53, Folder 3, APS.
91 Ibid.
92 Davenport and Love, Army Anthropology, 35.
93 Bender, American Abyss, 240.
94 Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 311; Davenport to Grant, January 12, 1918, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 42, Folder 6, APS. The Surgeon General’s Office could be forgiven for their rectitude given Davenport’s more extreme and baffling statements—such as his stubborn belief that a dominant gene for thalassophilia (love of the sea) predisposed its carriers to careers as naval captains. Witkowski and Inglis, Davenport’s Dream, 7.
95 Grant to Davenport, July 6, 1914, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 42, Folder 3, APS.
96 While eugenics had already started to receive criticism within the scientific community as early as the 1910s—thanks to the work of Boas and his students at Columbia—the public, or popular, incarnation of eugenics flourished during the 1920s and 30s. For analysis of the lag between scientific and popular understandings of eugenics, see Currell and Cogdell, Popular Eugenics.
97 Davenport and Love, Army Anthropology, 50.
98 Ibid., 50.
99 Ibid., 17.
100 Ibid., 17.
101 Grant to William Gregory, American Museum of Natural History, April 18, 1918, Eugenics Records Office Records, APS.
102 Guterl, The Color of Race, 30–31.
103 Guterl, The Color of Race, 30–32; Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 304; Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, 75.
104 Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 314; Baker, From Savage to Negro: 93.
105 “Race in Relation to Disease Civilian Records,” May 1918, Hoffman Papers, Box 13, Item 57, Butler Library Rare Book and Manuscripts, Columbia University.
106 Ibid.
107 Ibid.
108 Minutes of the U.S. Shipping Board, Spring 1918, RG 32, File 25, Folder 2, National Archives and Record Administration–Mid-Atlantic Region, Philadelphia, PA (hereafter cited as Minutes, U.S. Shipping Board); Martin, The Saga of Hog’s Island, 34–35.
109 Quoted in Martin, The Saga of Hog’s Island, 34–35.
110 New York Times, February 17, 1918.
111 Minutes, U.S. Shipping Board, Spring 1918.
112 Ibid.
113 Charles Goring, The English Convict (1913); Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, 70–71; Piers Beirne and James W. Messerschmidt, Criminology, 4th ed. (Los Angeles, CA: Roxbury, 2005), 82.
114 Hoffman to Pearce, July 15, 1918, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 52, Folder 3, APS.
115 Hoffman to Davenport, August 5, 1918, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 52, Folder 3, APS.
116 Ibid.
117 Ibid.
118 Ibid.
119 Minutes, U.S. Shipping Board, Spring 1918.
120 “U.S. to Act to Oust Ship Work Slackers,” New York Tribune, September 22, 1918, 9.
121 Ibid.
122 To Franz Boas, November 20, 1919, National Research Council–Division of Anthropology and Psychology, Boas Papers, APS, https://diglib.amphilsoc.org/boas-request?key=text:91232.
123 Hoffman to Matthew Well, Committee on Labor, Council of National Defense, September, 11, 1918, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 52, Folder 3, APS.
124 Hoffman to Davenport, September 4, 1918, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 52, Folder 3, APS.
125 Hoffman to Woll, Assistant to Gompers, September, 11, 1918; Hoffman to Davenport, April 15, 1919, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 52, Folder 3, APS; Davenport to Boas, May, 2, 1919, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 5, Folder 2, APS.
126 Hooton to Baker, November 22, 1918, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 52, Folder 2, APS.
127 Ibid.; Davenport and Love, Army Anthropology, 56.
128 Spiro, Defending the Master Race, 312.
129 Ibid.
130 Davenport and Love, Army Anthropology, 47, 54.
131 Davenport to Merriam, Re: Memo for the Adjunct General of the Army, June 9, 1919, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 101, Folder 3, APS.
132 Davenport and Love, Army Anthropology, 59–61.
133 Ibid., 59–61.
134 Ibid., 34, 40.
135 This hypothesis drew in part on Boas’s previous prewar work on shifting immigrant physiognomies, Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants (1910). In response to critics, Boas would go on to publish over 500 pages of raw data from this study entitled Materials for the Study of Inheritance in Man (1928). Davenport and Love, Army Anthropology, 59.
136 Davenport to the Surgeon General of the Army, July 31, 1922; June 25, 1919, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box. 12, Folder 2, APS.
137 Davenport and Love, Army Anthropology, 35–39.
138 Ibid.
139 Literary Digest, June 14, 1919, 23.
140 Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference, 182.
141 Gelber, “A ‘Hard-Boiled Order,’” 167–168.
142 Yerkes, Psychological Examining in the U.S. Army; Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 227; Kelves, In the Name of Eugenics, 80–83.
143 Literary Digest, June 14, 1919, 23.
144 Brad Campbell, “The Making of ‘American’: Race and Nation in Neurasthenic Discourse,” History of Psychiatry 18, no. 2 (2007), 162.
145 Ibid., 23.
146 Minutes, Committee of Anthropologists at the NRC.
147 Charles Davenport, “The Measurement of Men,” (lecture, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Philadelphia, PA, January, 14, 1927), Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 27, APS.
148 Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 227; Minutes.
149 Minutes, Committee of Anthropologists at the NRC.
150 Charles Davenport, “Aims and Methods in Anthropometry,” (lecture, Institut International d’Anthropologie, September 23, 1927), Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 24, APS; Stiker, A History of Disability, 124.
1 Hickel, “Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Welfare,” 256–258.
2 Harry Mock, “Reclamation of the Disabled from the Industrial Army,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 80, Rehabilitation of the Wounded (November 1918).
3 Despite the public’s fascination with the amputee, fewer than five thousand men in need of prosthetics returned to the United States. Lansing, “Salvaging the Manpower,” 2. Prior to the war, the U.S. was one of the world’s largest producers of artificial limbs. Linker, War’s Waste, 98–99.
4 See Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color; Stoddard, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man (New York: Scribner, 1922), 120–125.
5 Gerber, Disabled Veterans in History, 4; “Caring for the Soldiers’ Health: Reducing the Loss from Sickness and Wounds, Businesslike Humanity—Burying 140 Men an Hour,” World’s Work 28, no. 6 (October 1914), 119.
6 Gerber, Disabled Veterans in History, 4.
7 Deborah Cohen, “Will to Work: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany after the First World War,” in Gerber, Disabled Veterans in History, 297; Keane, Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America, 6, 163; Federal Board of Vocational Education, “What Every Disabled Soldier and Sailor Should Know”; Gelber, “A ‘Hard-Boiled Order,’” 167.
8 For further insight into anthropological notions of the Negro mind and body divide in modern American racial thought, see Baker, From Savage to Negro; Scott, Contempt and Pity.
9 Gerber, Disabled Veterans in History, 4; Bourke, Dismembering the Male. For insights into rehabilitation as a mechanism of colonial and transnational racial labor control, see West, “Divine Fragments,” 22–25; Frader, “From Muscles to Nerves,” 123–147; Jennifer Keene, “Protest and Disability: A New Look at African American Soldiers During the First World War” in Warfare and Belligerence: Perspectives in First World War Studies, ed. Pierre Purseigle (Boston: Brill, 2005), 216–241.
10 Degler, In Search of Human Nature, viii–ix, 75–78; Banta, Taylored Lives, 4.
11 Beth Linker, “Feet For Fighting: Locating Disability and Social Medicine in First World War America,” Social History of Medicine 20, no. 1 (April 2007), 91–109; Bender, American Abyss, 243–245; Price, “Lives and Limbs,” 5.
12 Elizabeth Upham, “Selective Placement of the Disabled,” Vocational Summary 2, no. 2 (June 1919), 35.
13 Longmore, Why I Burned My Book, 2.
14 Boris and Baron, “The Body as a Useful Category,” 23; Price, “Lives and Limbs,” 5; Keough, “War-Disabled Negroes in Training,” Vocational Summary (Spring 1923), 33.
15 By 1930, half a million blacks had left the region of their birth. At mid-century, 96% of black northerners and 90% of black westerners lived in urban areas. Ira Berlin, The Making of African America, 154.
16 Ibid., 4–10.
17 Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, 455, 462–463; Buckley, American Patriots, 165; Keene, “Protest and Disability,” 218–219.
18 Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 108–112.
19 Kennedy, Over Here, 199; Barbeau and Henri, The Unknown Soldiers, 191; Budreau, Bodies of War, 54–55.
20 Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 204; Slotkin, Lost Battalions; “Returned Negro Soldiers,” Survey (May 3, 1919), 207; James Sanford to Dr. J. R. A. Crossland, “Colored Physicians to Attend Colored Vocational Men,” November 10, 1921, Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, RG 15, Entry 50, Box 2, General Correspondence File Folder, National Archives Building, Washington, DC (NAB); W. E. B. DuBois, “Returning Soldiers,” The Crisis, (May 1919).
21 Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy, 224–225.
22 Kennedy, Over Here, 214–225; “Returned Negro Soldiers,” 207.
23 See Paul R. D. Lawrie, “Salvaging the Negro: Race, Rehabilitation, and the Body Politic in World War One America,” in Burch and Rembis, Disability Histories, 321–344.
24 Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 171–179, refers to this process as the “inspection effect” of wartime economies.
25 One of the first progressives to cite the racially dysgenic effects of war was David Starr Jordan, the founding president of Stanford University. See Jordan, War and Waste; Bender, American Abyss, 233–234; Gerber, Disabled Veterans in History, 8; Hussie, “Forestry and Tree Culture,” 725–726.
26 Croly, quoted in Harry Mock, “Human Conservation and Reclamation,” American Journal of Care for Cripples 6, no. 1, 5. For analysis of the shift from social forms of “manhood” to somatic understandings of “masculinity and its martial character” in progressive America, see Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization.
27 Keough, “War-Disabled Negroes in Training,” 33.
28 Mock, “Reclamation of the Disabled,” 30.
29 Office of the Surgeon General, The Medical Department of the United States Army, 2, 28; Paul Kellogg, “A Canadian City in War Time: The Battle-Ground for Wounded Men,” Survey (April 7, 1917), 1–2; Thomas Gregory, “Restoring Crippled Soldiers to a Useful Life,” World’s Work (1918), 427–432; John Todd, “The Meaning of Rehabilitation,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 80, Rehabilitation of the Wounded (November 1918), 1.
30 Douglas McMutrie, “Your Duty to the War Cripple,” American Journal of Care for Cripples 7, 82; “The High Road to Self-Support,” Carry On 1, no. 1, 4–9; George Price, “Rehabilitation Problems,” Survey (March 29, 1919), 921–922; W. S. Bainbridge, “Social Responsibilities in the Rehabilitation of Disabled Soldiers and Sailors,” American Journal of Care for Cripples 7, no. 2, 126–132.
31 Holt, The Federal Board of Vocational Education, 45.
32 Ibid.
33 Linker, War’s Waste, 33.
34 The FBVE took up the administration of this work until it was subsumed by the Veterans Bureau in 1921. Thurber, Preliminary Checklist, 6.
35 Rupert Hughes, “The Lucky Handicap,” Carry On 1 (September 1918), 11–12; James Munroe, “The War’s Crippled: How They May Be Made Assets Both to Themselves and to Society,” Survey (May 18, 1918), 28; Gelber, “A ‘Hard-Boiled Order,’” 167. Black Civil War veterans were especially vulnerable to charges of “dependency” and were subsequently denied pensions at nearly double the rate of their white peers. For insight into late nineteenth-century discourses of race, health, and citizenship, see Downs, Sick from Freedom, 156–158.
36 McMutrie, “Your Duty to the War Cripple,” 82.
37 Bainbridge, “Social Responsibilities,” 126–132.
38 Quoted in Hughes, “The Lucky Handicap,” 11–12.
39 Gelber, “A ‘Hard-Boiled Order,’” 167.
40 Munroe, “The War’s Crippled,” 28; ibid., 179–183; Vocational Summary 1, no. 3 (July 1918), 1; Mock, “Reclamation of the Disabled,” 8, 28; Grace Harper, “Re-Education from the Point of View of the Disabled Soldier,” American Journal of Care for Cripples 7, no. 2 (1918), 85.
41 Munroe, “The War’s Crippled,” 28.
42 “Conserve Motherhood and Childhood-Make Skilled Workers of Both War and Industrial Cripples,” Labor Laws in Wartime Special Bulletin, The American Association for Labor Legislation, no. 4, May 1918, RG 15, Folder Entry 55, Folder 4, NAB.
43 Francis Patterson, “Industrial Training for the Wounded,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 80, Rehabilitation of the Wounded (November 1918), 41; E. H. Fish, “Human Engineering,” Journal of Applied Psychology (Spring 1922), 161; Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 74–76.
44 Callie Hull, “Reopening Industry’s Doors to the Returning Negro Soldiers,” Vocational Summary 2, no. 5 (September 1919), 88.
45 Linker, War’s Waste, 61.
46 Bourke, Dismembering the Male, 171–179.
47 Mock, “Reclamation of the Disabled.”
48 Ibid.
49 Thurber, Preliminary Checklist, 6–7.
50 Ibid.
51 Hickel, “Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Welfare,” 239.
52 Ibid., 235–245.
53 Bristow, Making Men Moral, 176–177; “Returned Negro Soldiers,” 207; “Negro Soldiers and Labor,” The Crisis (May 1919); Sergeant Greenleaf B. Johnson, “The Negro’s Part in the War in Democracy,” Washington Bee, January 18, 1919.
54 Hickel, “Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Welfare,” 240.
55 Quoted in Ana Carden-Coyne, “Ungrateful Bodies: Rehabilitation, Resistance and Disabled American Veterans of the First World War,” European Review of History 14, no. 4 (December 2007), 548.
56 “From His Neck Up: A Man May Be Worth $100,000 a Year,” Carry On 1, no. 1 (June 1918), 23.
57 Ibid. For early twentieth-century theories of labor power as a metric of social efficiency, see Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 242–244; Luther Gulick, “The Effect of Fatigue on Character,” World’s Work (August 1907); Alice Hamilton, “Fatigue, Efficiency, and Insurance Discussed by the American Public Health Association,” Survey 37, no. 6 (November 1916), 135–138; Mock, “Reclamation of the Disabled,” 30.
58 Sociologist Robert Park famously characterized the Negro as the “lady of the races” due to blacks’ perceived love of finery and profound lack of vitality. Quoted in Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 26–27.
59 Hickel, “Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Warfare,” 257.
60 Ibid.
61 The Crisis (June 1920), 193; “Returned Negro Soldiers”; Sanford to Crossland, “Colored Physicians to Attend Colored Vocational Men”; DuBois, “Returning Soldiers”; Bristow, Making Men Moral, 176–177; “Negro Soldiers and Labor”; Johnson, “The Negro’s Part in the War in Democracy.”
62 Hickel, “Medicine, Bureaucracy, and Social Warfare,” 240–245; Kite, Cotton Fields No More, 98.
63 Keough, “War-Disabled Negroes in Training,” 93.
64 Ibid.
65 Frank Billings, “Reconstruction Has Begun,” Carry On 1, no. 2 (1918), 24.
66 Ibid.
67 The Crisis (June 1920), 193; Keough, “War-Disabled Negroes in Training,” 93.
68 Guterl, The Color of Race, 12–13.
69 From 1918 to 1921, the fourteen districts were: (1) Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island; (2) Connecticut, New York, New Jersey; (3) Pennsylvania, Delaware; (4) D.C., Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia; (5) North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee; (6) Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana; (7) Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky; (8) Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin; (9) Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri; (10) Minnesota, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota; (11) Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah; (12) California, Nevada, Arizona; (13) Idaho, Oregon, Washington; and (14) Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas. In 1921, the district offices combined with Public Health Service Offices, subsumed under the Veterans Bureau.
70 “Biography of Crossland,” RG 15, Entry 50, Box 1, Misc. Correspondence File 1920–1925, NAB.
71 Ibid.
72 Todd, “The Meaning of Rehabilitation,” 8.
73 Ibid.
74 Crossland to Acting Assistant Director, Rehabilitation Division, U.S. Veterans Bureau, April 3, 1923, RG 15, Entry 50, Box 1, NAB.
75 Hull, “Reopening Industry’s Doors,” 88–90.
76 H. O. Sargent, “Vocational Agricultural Education for Negroes in the Southern Region,” Vocational Summary 1, no. 7 (November 1918), 12.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid.
79 Chas. M. Griffith to Director, U.S. Veterans Bureau, April 29, 1922, RG 15, Entry 55, Folder 2, NAB.
80 Quoted in Ernest Luce to I. Fisher, “Disabled Negro Soldiers in Training,” Veterans Administration, October 1920, RG 15, Entry 20, Box 1, Office Files on Supervisor of Advisement and Training, NAB.
81 J. R. Crossland to Smith, U.S. Veterans Bureau–Division of Vocational Rehabilitation, January 3, 1922, RG 15, Entry 50, Box 2, General Correspondence File Folder, NAB.
82 Wiley Hill to J. R. Crossland, January 23, 1922, RG 15, Entry 50, Box 4, NAB.
83 “War-Disabled Negroes in Training,” 33; Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves, 73–74.
84 Linker, War’s Waste, 87–88.
85 Ibid.
86 Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves, 73–74; The Crisis (Spring 1920).
87 Carden-Coyne, “Ungrateful Bodies,” 547, notes that the idea of placing grown men in nurseries indicated how military medical authorities upheld ambiguous attitudes towards disabled soldiers. However, this ambiguity faded somewhat in regards to African American veterans, given prevailing social scientific and anthropological notions of blacks as a backward, childlike race in need of constant supervision.
88 Gamble, Making a Place for Ourselves, 73.
89 Ibid.
90 “War-Disabled Negroes in Training,” 33.
91 Quoted in William J. Schieffelin, “The Most Unforgettable Character I’ve Met: Robert Russa Moton,” Reader’s Digest, November 1950.
92 Schneider, We Return Fighting, 236.
93 For an analysis of the rise of interwar forms of racial nationalism and KKK infiltration of 1920s government, see Gerstle, American Crucible, 120–126.
94 Schneider, We Return Fighting, 235–237; Clifton Dummett and Eugene Dibble, “Historical Notes on the Tuskegee Veterans Hospitals,” Journal of the National Medical Association 54, no. 2 (March 1962), 134–135.
95 Dummett and Dibble, “Historical Notes,” 135; Thomas Ruth, Director War Service, to Directors of War Service, “Service Connection on Tuberculosis and Neuropsychotic Diseases in Relation to Vocational Training,” November 2, 1922, Records of the American Red Cross, 1917–1934, RG 200, Box 600, NAB II; Evelyn Phelps to Helen Ryan, “Monthly Report of the American Red Cross, Tuskegee, Alabama,” June–August 1923, RG 200, NAB II.
96 Office of the Surgeon General, The Medical Department of the United States Army, 95.
97 Evelyn Phelps to Helen Ryan, “Monthly Report of the American Red Cross, Tuskegee, Alabama,” June 1923, RG 200, NAB II; Evelyn Phelps to Helen Ryan, “Monthly Report of the American Red Cross, Tuskegee, Alabama,” August 31, 1923, RG 200, NAB II.
98 E. M. Murray to Helen Ryan, The American Red Cross, U.S. Veterans Hospital No. 91, Tuskegee, Alabama, May 1, 1924, RG 200, Entry 55, Box 21, Folder 6, NAB II.
99 Phelps to Ryan, “Monthly Report of the American Red Cross,” June 1923.
100 Phelps to Ryan, “Monthly Report of the American Red Cross,” June–August 1923.
101 Ibid.
102 On early twentieth-century ideologies of black masculinity and racial uplift, see Summers, Manliness and its Discontents.
103 Phelps to Ryan, June 1924; E. M. Murray to Pauline Radford, The American Red Cross, U.S. Veterans Hospital No. 91, January 1925, RG 200, NAB II.
104 Murray to Ryan, May 1, 1924; Phelps to Ryan, June 1924; Murray to Radford, January 1925.
105 Evelyn Phelps to Helen Ryan, Red Cross Files, January 2, 1924, RG 200, NAB II.
106 For works on black eugenic ideology and the ensuing interracial class tensions, see Dorr, Segregation’s Science.
107 E. M. Murray to Pauline Radford, The American Red Cross, U.S. Veterans Hospital No. 91, Tuskegee, Alabama, December 3, 1924, RG 200, NAB II.
108 Ibid.
109 Linker, War’s Waste, 9.
110 Natalia Molina, “Medicalizing the Mexican: Immigration, Race and Disability in the Early Twentieth Century U.S.,” Radical History Review 94 (Winter 2006), 23, illustrates how cultural mores and legislative imperatives have coalesced around issues such as immigration—or in this case rehabilitation—“to write race on the body so indelibly that they are almost indistinguishable from biological inscription.”
111 Stiker, A History of Disability, 123–125.
112 “War-Disabled Negroes in Training,” 33.
113 Adas, Dominance by Design, 203.
114 Bender, “Perils of Degeneration,” 7.
115 For analysis of race and racial hierarchies as “the changing same” in American political economy, see Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, “The Changing Same: Black Racial Formation and Transformation as a Theory of the African American Experience,” in Koditschek, Cha-Jua, and Neville, Race Struggles, 9–47.
1 Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 321.
2 Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color; Bender, American Abyss, 236, 248–249.
3 Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies; Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 322–323.
4 Committee on the American Negro Proposal, November 30, 1926, Davenport Papers, Box 12, Folder 2, APS.
5 Bender, American Abyss, 92–93.
6 Stoddard’s notion of the “unfit” was not strictly confined to “the fecund colored races”—or the lower classes of whites, it also drew heavily on prewar notions of the white upper classes as “unfit” for abrogating their duty to propagate. Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color, 220–221, 13–16; Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 10–11.
7 Warren S. Thompson, “Race Suicide in the United States,” American Journal of Anthropology 2, no. 1 (January–March 1919), 144–145; Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea, 340.
8 Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 396–397.
9 Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in Holloway and Keppel, Black Scholars on the Line, 218.
10 Adas, Dominance by Design, 203.
11 Johnson, “Black Workers in the City”; A. E. Jenks to Hal Smith, Attn. Ford Motor Company, December 13, 1923, NRC Committee on Anthropology, Davenport Papers, Box 58, Folder 2, APS.
12 A. E. Jenks to Mr. Hal Smith, Attn. Ford Motor Company, December 13, 1923, NRC Committee on Anthropology, Davenport Papers, Box 58, Folder 2, APS.
13 Quoted in Lyman, Militarism, Imperialism, and Racial Accommodation, 16.
14 Adas, Dominance by Design, 281.
15 Johnson, “Black Workers and the City,” 719.
16 John Richards “Some Experiences with Colored Soldiers,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1919, 190. A common refrain among wartime evaluations of black soldiers was their supposed “childlike nature,” and “affinity for the theatrics of drill and parade”. Black soldiers were continually praised for their “imitative skill.”
17 Johnson, “Black Workers and the City,” 719.
18 Adas, Dominance by Design, 281; “The Determination of Racial Relationships by Means of Blood,” Journal of the American Medical Association 73 (December 27, 1919), 1941–1942; DuBois, quoted in Lippman, “Negro Migration,” New Republic, July 1, 1916.
19 Proposals for the Organization of Investigations of the American Negro, April 8, 1927, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 12, Folder 9, APS.
20 Boas to R. J. Terry, Committee on the American Negro, February 15, 1927, Boas Papers, APS; A. E. Jenks to Hal Smith, Attn. Ford Motor Company, December 13, 1923, NRC Committee on Anthropology, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 58, Folder 2, APS.
21 Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics, 5–7.
22 On anthropology as a function of imperial American health policies, see Warwick Anderson, “Pacific Crossings: Imperial Logics in U.S. Public Health Programs,” in McCoy and Scarano, Colonial Crucible.
23 Boas to Terry, Committee on the American Negro, February 15, 1927, Boas Papers, Series 1, Box 71, Folder 6, APS.
24 Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics, 208–209; Lewis, DuBois: Biography of a Race, 351–353.
25 Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics, 25.
26 It was not until the 1930s and 40s that anthropology began to be used by activists, educators and lawyers to provide scientific proof of racial equality and better facilitate efforts towards desegregation. Baker, From Savage to Negro, 125–127.
27 These projects were united around a common concern regarding diversity’s role as an agent of racial evolution (i.e., were “racial hybrids” a cause or effect of racial degeneration?). Report of the Committee on the Study of the American Negro, 1928, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 12, Folder 6, APS.
28 Ibid.
29 The crux of Grant’s argument was the likeness between African Americans—seen as racially incompatible with whites—and immigrant groups tenuously seen as white. From a eugenic perspective, the “one drop rule” by which any degree of black ancestry made one a Negro, also applied to near-white races such as Jews. Slotkin, Lost Battalions, 455.
30 Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 396–397.
31 Gershenhorn, Melville Herskovits, 124.
32 Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 150–151; Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 400.
33 Baker, From Savage to Negro, 93–94.
34 Stoddard, Re-Forging America: The Story of Our Nationhood (New York: Scribner, 1927), 256–257.
35 New York Times, October 27, 1921, 11.
36 Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color, 220–222, 13–16; Bender, American Abyss, 248; Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 10–11.
37 Guterl, The Color of Race, 216; Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes, 10–11; Aptheker, Pamphlets and Leaflets by W. E. B. DuBois, 197.
38 On the riots as an agent of New Negro identity, see Barbara Foley, Specters of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
39 Albert Jenks, “University Training Course in Americanization or Applied Anthropology,” Scientific Monthly (March 1921).
40 Charles Davenport, “Selecting Immigrants,” (lecture, preliminary meeting on Human Migration, May 3, 1920), Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 54, APS.
41 Suggestions for Committee on Scientific Problems of Human Migration (CSPHM), January 25, 1923; Report and Recommendations of the CSPHM, April 2, 1923; Proceedings of the Conference on Human Migration, November 18, 1922, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Foundation (LSRM) Collection, Box 21, Folder 5, Rockefeller Archive Center (RAC).
42 Bender, American Abyss, 40–41.
43 Frederick Hoffman, “Causes of Death in Primitive Races,” Hoffman Papers, Box 29, Butler Library Rare Book and Manuscripts, Columbia University. See also Huntington, Civilization and Climate.
44 Davenport, Lecture on Race Crossing (n.d.), Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 1, Folder 2, APS.
45 Francis A. Walker, “Restriction of Immigration,” Publications of the Immigration Restriction League 33 (n.d.), 11.
46 Bender, American Abyss, 67.
47 Davenport, Lecture on Race Crossing.
48 Report and Recommendations of CSPHM, April 2, 1923; Report of CSPHM, July 1, 1923, LSRM Collection, Series 3, Box 58, Folder 629, RAC.
49 Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 23, 27.
50 Slotkin, Lost Battalions, 455; Stoddard, quoted in Bender, American Abyss, 244.
51 Matthew Jacobson notes that the “idea of a Caucasian race represents whiteness ratcheted up to a new epistemological realm of certainty.” Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 94.
52 W. E. B. DuBois, “Brothers Come North,” The Crisis 19 (January 1920), 105–106.
53 “Some Answers to Our Employment Problems,” NUL Industrial Relations Department, Records of the NUL, Box 1, D7, LOC; “Will Negroes Stay in Industry?,” Survey (December 14, 1918), 348–349.
54 Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, 466–467; Slotkin, Lost Battalions; 405–407.
55 Literary Digest, June 14, 1919, 23.
56 James Weldon Johnson, “The Changing Status of Negro Labor,” National Conference on Social Welfare Proceedings (1918), 383–384; Eugenical News, Fall 1925, 3.
57 Kelly Miller, “Negro Labor for the Steel Mills,” World’s Work (May–October 1923), 243.
58 “The American Negro as Soldier,” Literary Digest, June 27, 1925, 14–15; “NUL: An Idea Made Practical,” January 1920, General Education Board Collection, Series 1, Box 276, Folder 2876, 2–14, RAC.
59 At mid-century, 96% of black northerners and 90% of black westerners lived in urban areas. Berlin, The Making of African Americans, 154.
60 Johnson, “Black Workers and the City,” 641.
61 Lyman, Militarism, Imperialism, and Racial Accommodation, 116–117.
62 Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, 209.
63 Thompson, “Race Suicide in the United States,” 145.
64 Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 23–25.
65 Trotter, The Great Migration in Historical Perspective, 5; “Helping Negroes Help Themselves” Survey 38, no. 12 (June 23, 1917), 278.
66 Gershenhorn, Melville Herskovits, 111. See Franz Boas, The History of the American Race (1912), Report on an Anthropometric Investigation of the Population of the United States (1922), Race, Language, and Culture (1940).
67 Wilson, The Segregated Scholars, 152–153.
68 Johnson, “Black Workers and the City”; Locke, “The New Negro,” 218.
69 “Is Nature Solving the Negro Problem?,” World’s Work 47, (November–April 1923–1924), 131–132; William Pickens, “Migrating to Fuller Life,” Forum 72 (November 1924), 593–607.
70 Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 232–233.
71 Program of the Eighth Annual Negro Health Week, April 2–8, 1922, Records of the NUL, Part 1, Box 1, D5, LOC.
72 Toure Reed, “The Educational Alliance and the Urban League in New York: Ethnic Elites and the Politics of Americanization and Racial Uplift, 1903–1932,” in Reed and Warren, Reviewing Black Intellectual History, 113–114.
73 Bender, American Abyss, 242–243; Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 232–233; Carter Woodson, “The Exodus during the World War,” in Holloway and Keppel, Black Scholars on the Line, 98.
74 Johnson, “Black Workers and the City,” 643.
75 Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 232–233.
76 Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind, 188–189.
77 Guterl, The Color of Race, 132–133.
78 A. E. Jenks to C. Davenport, Suggested Research Projects of the Committee on Race Characters (CRC), October 23, 1923, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 97, Folder 3, APS.
79 On the racial and gendered imperatives of imperial labor, see Bender and Lipman, Making the Empire Work.
80 Proposals for the Organization of Investigations of the American Negro, March 19, 1927, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 12, Folder 9, APS.
81 William McDougall, a British member of the NRC argued that America’s “tardy” entry into the war—“if it was right in 1917 then it was equally right in 1914”—was due to the, “lack of a national mind; chiefly because it comprised many individuals and some large communities that were only very partially assimilated.” William McDougall, “The Problems of Unassimilated Groups,” Proceedings of the Conference on Human Migration, November 18, 1922, LSRM Collection, Box 24, Folder 4, RAC.
82 Committee on the American Negro, March 19, 1927, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 12, Folder 2, APS.
83 Ibid.
84 Garvey to Davis, October, 4, 1923, General Records of the Department of Labor, Files 1907–1942, RG 174, Box 19, Entry 1, NAB; Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 230.
85 Carter, The United States of United Races, 124–125.
86 DuBois produced a striking visual rejoinder to these characterizations through a photographic exhibit of “respectable Negro types” at the 1900 Paris Exposition, later published as Health and Physique of the American Negro (1906). See Smith, Photography on the Color Line; Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 79–81.
87 Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 203; Charles Johnson, “The Vanishing Mulatto,” Opportunity (October 1925), 291.
88 Gershenhorn, Melville Herskovits, 40–45; Committee on the American Negro (Conference on Racial Differences, Washington, DC, February 1928), Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 12, Folder 17, APS.
89 Davenport and Steggerda, Race Crossing in Jamaica, 125.
90 Park, quoted in Davenport and Steggerda, Race Crossing in Jamaica, 126.
91 McNeil, Sex and Race in the Black Atlantic, 3–4; Carter, The United States of United Races, 125.
92 Patterson to Yerkes, May 20, 1924, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 97, Folder 6, APS; Fish, “Human Engineering,” 262.
93 Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 228–229.
94 Committee on the American Negro (Conference on Racial Differences, Washington, DC, February 1928), Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 12, Folder 17, APS.
95 Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, 5–7; E. Fischer, Die Rehobother Bastards und das Bastardierungsproblem beim Menschen (Rehobother Bastards and the Problem of Miscegenation Among Humans) (1913), vii, 327; Louis R. Sullivan, “Anthropometry of the Siouan Tribes,” Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History 23, no. 3 (1920), 81–174; Clark Wissler, “Distribution of Stature in the United States,” Scientific Monthly 18, no. 2 (1924), 129–143; E. Rodenwaldt, Die Mestizen auf Kisar (Mestizos of Kisar) 2 vols. (Batavia, 1927); Leslie Dunn, An Anthropometric Study of Hawaiians of Pure and Mixed Blood, Vol. 11, Papers, Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology (1928); Charles Davenport and Morris Steggerda, Race Crossing in Jamaica (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institute, 1929).
96 Davenport and Steggerda, Race Crossing in Jamaica, 51.
97 Davenport, “The Effects of Race Intermingling,” Proceedings of American Philosophical Society 56, no. 4 (1922), 366. On racial admixture as a function and or impediment to the labor process, see Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference, 108–121.
98 Davenport, “The Effects of Race Intermingling,” 365.
99 Hoffman, “Race Pathology”; Davenport and Steggerda, Race Crossing in Jamaica, 3.
100 Years prior, in Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, Hoffman had argued that “the difference in mortality of the two races is not so pronounced as between the white and colored populations of American cities, but is sufficiently large to establish substantially the same race tendency to premature death among the colored population of the West Indies that we meet with among the colored population of this country.” Hoffman, Race Traits, 69–71.
101 NRC Committee on Anthropology (Conference on Racial Differences, Washington, DC, Fall 1928), NRC Collection, APS; Davenport and Steggerda, Race Crossing in Jamaica, 289–291.
102 Davenport and Steggerda, Race Crossing in Jamaica, 289–291.
103 Ibid., 290–292.
104 Ibid.
105 Ibid.
106 Ibid., 464.
107 Emerson to Davenport, October 1927, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 36, Folder 22, APS.
108 Ibid.
109 Davenport and Steggerda, Race Crossing in Jamaica (draft), November 8, 1928, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 27, Folder 2, APS.
110 Davenport, “Is the Crossing of Races Useful?,” November 1929, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 26, Folder 8, APS.
111 Harris, “The Economic Foundations of American Race Division,” in Holloway and Keppel, Black Scholars on the Line, 276–277.
112 Painter, History of White People, 274, 323.
113 Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference, 186–193; Bender, American Abyss, 242–244.
114 Report and Recommendations of CSPHM, April 2, 1923; Report of CSPHM, July 1, 1923, LSRM Collection, Series 3, Box 58, Folder 629, RAC.
115 Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color, 94.
116 Gershenhorn, Melville Herskovits, 48.
117 U. G. Weatherly, “The West Indies as a Sociological Laboratory,” American Journal of Sociology 29, no. 3 (November 1923), 290–304.
118 Gershenhorn, Melville Herskovits, 48.
119 Terry to Davenport, March 1929; Terry to Boas, March 1929, Preliminary Report of the Committee on the American Negro, 1926, Davenport Papers, Series 1, Box 18, Folder 17, APS.
120 Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color, 120.
121 Otto Klienberg, Negro Intelligence and Selective Migration (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 60–62.
122 W. E. B. DuBois, “The African Roots of War,” Atlantic Monthly 115, no. 5 (May 1915), 707–714.
123 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 9.
124 Abram Harris, “The Economic Foundations of American Race Division,” in Black Scholars on the Line, 288; Ross, The Origins of American Social Science, 472.
125 Locke, “The New Negro,” 215.
126 Baker, From Savage to Negro, 127; Baker, Anthropology and the Racial Politics, 2–15.
1 Rabinbach, The Human Motor, 4–8; Roediger and Esch, The Production of Difference, 3–6.
2 Miles, Capitalism and Unfree Labor, 5–7; Paul Gilroy, “One Nation under a Groove,” in Goldberg, The Anatomy of Racism, 265.
3 Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 177–179. Paul Gilroy charts the beginnings of modern rationality in the slave labor sugar plantations of the Caribbean. For Gilroy, the emergence of “race” in this early modern context is “an important reminder that making politics aesthetic was not a governmental strategy that originated in twentieth century fascism.” Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 2, 47–49; Gilroy, Against Race, 56.
4 Wright, White Man Listen!, 72, 80.
5 Myrdal, quoted in Guterl, The Color of Race, 184. Myrdal observed that black social scientists—unlike their white counterparts—had long advocated social rather than biological models of race and racial difference and were therefore infinitely more modern than their white peers.
6 Cha-Jua, “The Changing Same,” x, 38.
7 David Roediger, “White Without End? The Abolition of Whiteness; or the Rearticulation of Race,” in Koditschek, Cha-Jua, and Neville, Race Struggles, 98; Cornel West and Jorge Klor de Alva, “On Black Brown Relations,” in West, The Cornel West Reader, 499–514.
8 Cha-Jua, “The Changing Same,” x, 38.
9 Singh, Black Is a Country.
10 Koditschek, Cha-Jua, and Neville, Race Struggles, x.
11 Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness (New York: New Press, 2012), 4–8. Alexander also notes that the United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.
12 Roediger, How Race Survived U.S. History, 210–211; Wayne, Imagining Black America, 45–47; Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness, 276–277. On the persistence of conceptions of black bodies as pathological or problematic in modern America, see Omi and Winant, Racial Formation in the United States; Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists.
13 Miller, “Review of Race Traits” (emphasis mine).
14 On capitalism’s classificatory impulse regarding the racial and or colonial subject, see Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 236–237.
15 Charles Blow, “Beyond ‘Black Lives Matter’,” New York Times, February 9, 2015, http://nytimes.com/2015/02/09/opinion/charles-blow-beyond-black-lives-matter.html?.
16 Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness, 177; Bender, American Abyss, 247–256.