Forging a laboring race : the African American worker in the progressive imagination / Paul R.D. Lawrie.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 209-223) and index.

Introduction: Imagining Negro Laboring Types in Fin de Siècle America -- Mortality as the Life Story of a People: Frederick L. Hoffman and Actuarial Narratives of African American Extinction, 1896--1915 -- The Negro Is Plastic: The Department of Negro Economics, Sociology, and the Wartime Black Worker -- Measuring Men for the Work of War: Anthropometry, Race, and the Wartime Draft, 1917--1919 -- Salvaging the Negro: Vocational Rehabilitation and African American Veterans, 1917--1924 -- A New Negro Type: The National Research Council and the Production of Racial Expertise in Postwar America, 1919--1929 -- Epilogue: Invisible Men: The Afterlives of the Negro Problem in American Racial Thought.

"How does it feel to be a problem?" asked W.E.B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). For Progressive Era 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 what some believed to be the protective embrace of slavery, many felt that the assumedly 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. 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 link certain peoples to 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. Forging a Laboring Race foregrounds the working black body as both a category of analysis and lived experience. It charts a corporeal map of African American proletarianization via the fields, factories, trenches, hospital, and universities of Progressive Era America.