'To Make the Negro Anew': The African American Worker in the Progressive Imagination, 1896--1928

This dissertation examines how progressive era social scientists thought about African American workers and their place in the nation‘s industrial past, present, and future. Turn of the century racial thought held that certain peoples were naturally equipped to perform certain forms of labor. African Americans were confined to, or excluded from, certain industrial spaces on the pretext that they were congenitally unfit for the rigors of modern industrial life. Elites argued that freed from the protective embrace of slavery African Americans were doomed to degeneration. However, the imperatives of industrialization, migration, and world war soon required new forms of racial labor evaluation and hierarchies.;Despite their differences, observers across the color line drew on a common discourse of industrial evolution that linked racial development with labor fitness. Evolutionary science merged with scientific management to create new taxonomies of racial labor fitness. I chart this process from turn of the century actuarial science which defined African Americans as a dying race, to wartime mental and physical testing that acknowledged the Negro as a vital -albeit inferior- part of the nation‘s industrial workforce. During this period, African Americans struggled to prove their worth on the shop-floor, the battlefield, and the academy. New socioeconomic realities produced new forms of racial knowledge. Progressive era social scientists maintained that mastery of this knowledge was needed to navigate and rationalize America‘s rapidly shifting industrial landscape. Many progressives sought to understand these complex and overarching social shifts in stark biological terms.;My analysis of the progressive era Negro problem links African American, Labor, and Disability History to examine how notions of the fit and unfit body colored the progressive era labor economy. Adopting a corporeal perspective allows me to foreground World War One as both a catalyst and an agent of African American proletarianization. The war mobilized African Americans for the work of war and organized social scientists to develop new methods of measuring racial labor fitness. Initiatives such as the draft and vocational rehabilitation endeavored to transform rural southern black migrants into efficient modern workers/soldiers. Throughout these processes tensions between biological and social models of racial fitness persisted. This thesis contends that the modern Negro type- African Americans as objects of social scientific inquiry- which came of age in the post-World War Two era, was born in the draft boards, factories, trenches, hospitals, and university classrooms of the Progressive Era.