Forging a Laboring Race

The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination

Paul R. D. Lawrie

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479827558
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia afroamericana

Forging a Laboring Race foregrounds the working black body as both a category of analysis and lived experience. “How does it feel to be a problem?” asked W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk. For many thinkers across the color line, the “Negro problem” was inextricably linked to the concurrent “labor problem,” occasioning debates regarding blacks’ role in the nation’s industrial past, present and future. With blacks freed from the seemingly protective embrace of slavery, many felt that the ostensibly primitive Negro was doomed to expire in the face of unbridled industrial progress. Yet efforts to address the so-called “Negro problem” invariably led to questions regarding the relationship between race, industry and labor writ large. In consequence, a collection of thinkers across the natural and social sciences developed a new culture of racial management, linking race and labor to color and the body. Evolutionary theory and industrial management combined to identify certain peoples with certain forms of work and reconfigured the story of races into one of development and decline, efficiency and inefficiency, and the thin line between civilization and savagery. Forging a Laboring Race charts the history of an idea—race management—building on recent work in African American, labor, and disability history to analyze how ideas of race, work, and the “fit” or “unfit” body informed the political economy of early twentieth-century industrial America.

1

Mortality as the Life Story of a People

Frederick L. Hoffman and Actuarial Narratives of African American Extinction, 1896–1915

“A race may be interesting, gentle and hospitable; but if it is not a useful race in the common acceptation of that term, it is only a question of time when a downward course must take place.”

—Frederick L. Hoffman, Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro, 1896

In November 1884, Frederick Ludwig Hoffman, a nineteen-year-old journeyman laborer from Oldenburg in northwestern Germany, arrived in New York City with little more than the proverbial dollar in his pocket. Despite lacking an extensive formal education, the young émigré was a proud autodidact determined to make a name for himself in America. Following a string of unsuccessful jobs—including a brief stint collecting insurance premiums door-to-door in Boston—Hoffman decided to try his luck south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Hoffman found Dixie to be a “veritable paradise perfumed with the sweet smells of magnolia and oleander” and accompanied by leisurely “paddles down Edenic rivers.”1 This southern reprieve was soon shattered during a trip down the Mississippi aboard the City of New Orleans, where he witnessed “the truly horrible brutality practiced on the Negro deck hands” by their white shipmates. Despite his initial sympathy for the “much maligned Negroes,” Hoffman was transfixed by the spectacle of laboring black bodies: “Though they were grossly ignorant, they would carry for long hours heavy sacks of corn, up and down the gangplank, leading at a steep angle to the shore.”2 Hoffman’s fascination with the deck hands’ “incredible performance of labor” and their “savage vitality” echoed prevailing notions of blacks as little more than atavistic beasts of burden—pitiable reminders of a rapidly vanishing preindustrial culture.3

Hoffman’s experience aboard the City of New Orleans proved fortuitous. His introduction to the brutal complexities of American race relations led to a lifelong interest in African Americans, provided the subtext for his future actuarial investigations of racial health, and gave him access to the era’s institutional and ideological networks of vocational education. Hoffman chose to remain in the South and soon found work at the Life Insurance Company of Virginia in Norfolk. In 1890, while traveling aboard a train bound for Hampton, Hoffman was overheard discussing the incident aboard the City of New Orleans by Frances Morgan Armstrong, the spouse of General Samuel Armstrong, founder of Hampton Institute. Born and raised in Hawaii by missionary parents, Samuel Armstrong claimed “a deep familiarity with the tropical colored races” and had founded Hampton in 1868 to inculcate the freed-people with much needed “habits of industry and health.”4 Yet as the nineteenth century drew to a close, even self-professed “friends of the Negro” such as Armstrong had begun to doubt the efficacy of vocational education, given blacks’ “congenital aversion towards labor.” Like the Indian before him, the Negro seemed destined for racial death as a prerequisite for the nation’s continued progress.5

This chapter examines the efforts of Frederick L. Hoffman—a statistician and actuary with Prudential Life Insurance—to chart the initial stages of African American proletarianization through actuarial narratives of race suicide. Actuarial science, a key tool of racial labor division in turn-of-the-century American political economy, reveals the ways in which the era’s managerial elites came to understand shifts in the national labor market in explicitly corporeal terms—to try and map shifts in the labor economy onto working bodies. In works such as “Vital Statistics of the Negro” (1892), the seminal Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896), and various other studies undertaken on behalf of Prudential, Hoffman used the metrics of crime, miscegenation, and the broadly defined “vital capacity” (a measure of respiratory health) to quantify the respective social, physical and economic effects of African Americans’ transition from bonded to contract labor.6 Actuarial assessments of African Americans as insurable “risks” were both economic and cultural evaluations of their past, present, and future labor fitness. Indeed, as Brian Glenn notes, “Actuaries rate risks in many different ways, depending on the stories they tell about which characteristics are important, and which are not.” These “stories” invariably adhere to prevailing gender, class, and racial hierarchies that “may be irrelevant to predicting actual losses.” For Glenn, “almost every aspect of the insurance industry is predicated on stories first, then numbers.”7 The story of Negro progress—or lack thereof—was one of a people in decline. Freed from the supposed protection of slavery, the congenitally criminal, mongrel, and tubercular Negro seemed destined to expire amid the mechanized rhythms of modern industrial civilization according to this view. The imperatives of rapid industrialization, imperialism, mass consumerism, and white supremacy necessitated the creation of the “vanishing Negro”: a debased inferior “other” against which the progress of white civilization could be measured and monetized.

The cultural and intellectual landscape of turn of the twentieth century America was littered with an array of self-described “race experts” working to solve the “Negro question.” An eclectic mix of anthropologists, sociologists, scientists, physicians, writers, and actuaries vied to define, delineate, and quantify the vast socioeconomic and cultural changes brought on by the transition of blacks from slavery to freedom. Frederick Hoffman’s status as a young actuary with an interest in racial reform gave him a unique prospective on the character and constitution of the color line. Following their chance encounter on the rails, Hoffman and the Armstrongs became close friends—and, under the latter’s tutelage, Hoffman gained an appreciation of the domestic “Negro problem” as part of a larger global race problem that stretched from the pineapple plantations of Hawaii to the cotton fields of Dixie.8 The question of what to do with the Negro was tied to the broader demands of contemporary political economy: delineating which peoples could do which kinds of work via the logic of industrial evolution whereby the working body was reconstituted as an index of civilizational fitness or lack thereof.9

Applied sciences such as anthropology, actuarial science, and anthropometry (the statistical measurement of the human body) emerged in response to cultural anxieties regarding the social, economic, and physical costs of industrial civilization. Economists and social scientists such as Richard Ely and Thorstein Veblen developed new evolutionary models of political economy that sought to reconcile racial form to economic function. Attendant theories of race suicide represented the most extreme versions of these new forms of thinking—a zero sum logic in which one race would have to perish for another to thrive. For Hoffman, “statistics was the science of numbers applied to the life history of communities, nations, or races.”10 Emerging ideas of the nation-state as an organic entity led many to conclude that black extinction, while necessary and perhaps even desirable, was nevertheless fraught with social, economic, and health risks for blacks and whites alike.

Progressive Era America experienced a shift in understandings of political economy as the social relationships between production and consumption, to one dominated by economic theories seeking to reframe these relations on a more axiomatic and mathematical basis. Scholars have described this as a shift from proprietary to corporate capitalism, citing the turn of the century transatlantic world as a period awash in “an avalanche of numbers.” Quantification was privileged as a superior form of producing knowledge about the social and natural worlds.11 Theodore Porter notes how statistics combined a utopian urge for order with the modern drive for efficiency. Much like banking and accounting, Porter posits insurance as the “classic information industry.”12 However, as Joan Scott reminds us, the very practice of quantification is rooted in the imperatives of power, surveillance and discipline.13 Statistics—or “state numbers”—consolidated the development of the modern industrial state through indices of population, trade, manufacture, and mortality that aided in the shaping of public policy.

Yet from their inception statistics were deeply informed by racial considerations. In the late 1860s, Francis Galton—a cousin of Charles Darwin—used the normal, or Gaussian, method of distribution to transform statistics from a science devoted to the accumulation of socially useful data to one characterized by systematic mathematical theory. He was especially interested in the distribution of deviations, or regressions, from the mean as they related to human populations and the regulation of the gene pool. Galton named this applied science, eugenics, a mixture of Greek terms literally defined as “well born” or the practice of “better breeding.” From its inception, eugenics linked state- and nation-building to biology, which by the early twentieth century had taken on a far more explicit racial tone.14 Galton’s protégé Karl Pearson, the founder of modern mathematical statistics embraced a fully positivist ethos whereby the world consisted not of material objects but of perceptions. The role of science—or statistics more specifically- was to provide shape to the natural and social world material: method not material would prove to be the unifying logic of modern scientific inquiry. This subjective taxonomic impulse to order the world not as it was but as it should be was imbricated in the late nineteenth-century processes of race and state making.15

In the waning years of the nineteenth century, managerial elites developed intricate taxonomies of racial types to order the era’s shifting labor demographics. These new “bodies of knowledge” married form to function, linking the right peoples to the right kinds of work. And though the manner and degree of inquiry may have differed, antebellum and industrial era black bodies were united through their common commodification. Valuation was implicit in the analyses and quantification of working bodies from the slave block to the factory floor.16 Unlike whites, black laborers claimed the dubious distinction of having been literal commodities only a generation prior. Post emancipation blacks had found themselves condemned to the debt peonage of sharecropping shut out of most industrial service jobs and consigned to the margins of the nation’s labor economies. Hoffman’s actuarial narratives of black race suicide—through their transposing of flesh and blood bodies into abstract statistical values—were key examples of the contentious nature of race and nation making in turn-of-the-century America. For example, under the direction of Francis Amasa Walker, the late nineteenth-century census became a key mechanism of racial categorization in the newly reconstituted American republic. At a time of increasing black occupational mobility, actuarial models of black extinction were a means to preserve the race’s social containment.17

Across the nation the rise of mass consumer culture and its attendant technologies—such as the railroads—had eroded many of the traditional markers of racial identity. Within the South, a growing demand for unskilled and semiskilled labor in urban centers had allowed blacks to make small but persistent gains in real estate and small business capital. To the dismay of many whites, the New Negro was wealthier, more mobile, and more assertive than his predecessor of only a few decades ago.18 The figure of “the vanishing Negro” became both an explanatory model of contemporary political economy and a utopian vision of a nation free from the scourge of blackness. “Fantasies of auto genocide or racial suicide” writes Patrick Brantlinger, “are extreme versions of blaming the victim, which throughout the last three centuries have helped to rationalize the genocidal aspects of European conquest and colonization.” Theories of black race suicide worked to alleviate lingering fears over societal and industrial degeneration “by replacing the imperiled white race as victim, with the self-extinguishing savage as sacrifice” to the greater social good.19 By the late nineteenth century, valuation of the greater social good was almost entirely measured within the cash nexus of a new corporatist national economy—one in which the very experiences of life and death were transposed into marketable insurable commodities on the open market.

The American insurance industry originated in the working classes. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, American workers banded together in their respective occupations to mutualize the various risks endemic to wage labor. Heretofore, working people lived in constant fear of an unexpected illness, accident, or job loss. In response, they formed mutual benefit societies to provide members with funds for services such as burial insurance. Dan Rodgers notes that though these societies were notoriously unstable and actuarially unsound—often functioning as little more than a lottery—no form of organization set down deeper roots in the working classes.20 Mutual aid societies were widespread among the coal miners of Appalachia, the industrial immigrant workers of Chicago, and African American workers nationwide. Regardless of their ethnic affiliations, these societies were defined by their informal and often corruptible nature. In The Philadelphia Negro (1899), the black sociologist W. E. B. DuBois noted that while some of the city’s black societies were “honest efforts, most were swindling imitations of the pernicious white petty insurance societies.”21 Industrial insurance extracted the single most important aspect of the mutual aid society, burial costs, for use in a business contract with only one condition: payment. As the availability of insurance was reduced to a matter of revenue divorced from social standing, this produced a leveling effect in the “corporeal commodification” of working peoples and working bodies.22 Jackson Lears argues that just as the movement for “sound money sought to tie ephemeral paper to the intrinsic value of gold. . . . modern forms of racism provided similar solidity to personal identity” in a secularizing uncertain market society. Actuarial science and the demands of a white supremacist political economy produced what Lears defines as a “biological personhood” along strictly racial lines.23

Following the Civil War, the major insurance companies insured African Americans on an equal basis with whites. This arrangement lasted until 1881 when Prudential became the first company to reduce life benefits to blacks by one-third while requiring that they still pay premiums in their original amount. Prudential was supported in its efforts by the Insurance Commissioner of Massachusetts, who concluded that this practice “was not a distinction on account of color, but on account of the differences in longevity between the two races apparently supported by mortality statistics.”24 The report dismissed any notion of racial prejudice, stating that, “to compel a company to insure for the same rates, different classes of people, with different prospects of longevity, would be to establish a grossly unjust discrimination against the longer-lived class in favor of the shorter lived class.”25 The editors of the trade journal Spectator concurred arguing, “the color line is not drawn simpl...