Negro Problem Research Articles

Reintroducing Derrick Bell into contemporary discourse: A review of ‘Racism and Resistance: Essays on Derrick Bell’s Racial Realism’

Edited by Timothy J. Golden, “Racism and Resistance: Essays on Derrick Bell’s Racial Realism” presents a diverse set of perspectives from scholars in philosophy, law, theology, and rhetoric that critically engage with and expand upon Derrick Bell’s theories and scholarly works. This review approaches this work from outside the disciplines of its contributors and evaluates the volume for its accessibility, interdisciplinarity, and application of Bell’s theory of racial realism in contemporary discourses on racism and anti-racism. “Racism and Resistance” is divided into four parts, each containing two chapters. This review focuses on Part 1 – Racial Realism, Religion, and the Negro Problem and Part 4 – Racial Realism and Theology, as they are excellent examples of both the disciplinary range of this book and the authors’ command of Bell’s body of work.

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: A Quest of Identity

This research paper attempts to study the Negro problem ofidentity and existence in the postwar American Negro novelwith special reference to the saga of survival and invisibilityof a nameless young black man in Ralph Ellison‟s InvisibleMan. The core of this study tackles the desperate quest, thisman is living in a blind, nihilistic, and a racist Americanworld, which denies his existence, and reduces him almost toa non-entity making him ever more restless, possessed andexhausted.

The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 by Autumn Womack

Reviewed by: The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 by Autumn Womack Rayvon Fouché (bio) The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 By Autumn Womack. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Pp. 288. As our varying cultures, societies, and communities embrace the changing nature of identity and we become more comfortable with the differences that define human existence, it is still relevant and important to investigate how we have gotten to where we are and examine the underpinning social, political, and cultural structures that have helped to fashion this reality. In a refreshingly interdisciplinary way, Autumn Womack takes up this task in The Matter of Black Living. The text launches this investigation with the provocative subheading "Undisciplining Data" in the introductory chapter, "Data and the Matter of Blackness." This beginning sets the stage for Womack's thoughtful and carefully argued study aimed at disentangling, and more optimistically disrupting, the processes by which Black folks and Black life are represented as data to quantify, systematize, organize, and ultimately solve the problem of Black people in the United States. Womack's point of entry is the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when this American conundrum was simplistically known as the Negro Problem. What is most interesting about this text is that Womack leans away from the expected trajectory about race, Blackness, and data. That space is comprised of contemporary studies that reveal the ways algorithmic [End Page 593] biases shape Black lives, control Black communities, and precipitate a host of actions that continue the tradition of technological violence levied against Black people. Though Womack acknowledges the importance of these works, The Matter of Black Living propels us to a moment a century earlier, when the foundation of contemporary data violence was born. In this regard, Womack demands that we question the power of social scientific investigation that made data the gold standard of understanding and ultimately categorizing Black people and Black living. It is the interrogation into the ways that data have been deployed to circumscribe Black life that is a central concern of the book. It is not only the ways in which data and Blackness are co-constituted but the racialized imperative of social scientific disciplines that made Blackness the problem and the new technological tools of data acquisition and analysis the solution that this study brings into higher relief. Moreover, the text questions the processes by which the data of Black life were acquired, as well as how the desire to have a clean and tidy solution to the Negro Problem drove the need to universalize and flatten Black life. If the construction of the data and data sets that represent Blackness is flawed from the outset, then it is seemingly impossible for that data to become information, knowledge, or wisdom. The text navigates the interlaced claims "that black life and data cohered at the turn of the twentieth century, albeit asymmetrically and insufficiently; that African American cultural producers intervened into these debates along experimental lines; and, finally, that these experiments doubled as rubrics for literary and aesthetic practice" (p. 32). Three chapters that loosely correspond to the prior claims and focus on the technologies of the social survey, photography, and film animate the bulk of the book. In the chapter "The Social Survey: The Survey Spirit," Womack contends that social surveys were not just instruments for or methods of data collection but were modern visual technologies that reconceptualized our understanding for observing life. Thus, the social survey could provide an opportunity to conceptualize Black life beyond that of merely quantified data. The second chapter, "Photography: Looking Out," works through the interrelationships between photography as a technology of creating data and as a technique of capturing, revealing, and expressing the vitality of Black life. The third chapter, "Film: Overexposure," argues that the medium of film, for some Black people, was more than just a collection of moving images but could be an instrument through which Black people could record the rich textures of their own lives and intervene in the statistical rigidity required to answer the Negro Problem. Overall, Autumn Womack has authored a text that...

HF01-13 TRANSFUSION, THE BATTLEFIELD, AND RACIAL POLITICS

You have accessJournal of UrologyCME1 Apr 2023HF01-13 TRANSFUSION, THE BATTLEFIELD, AND RACIAL POLITICS Joseph Kelly-Brown and Michael Moran Joseph Kelly-BrownJoseph Kelly-Brown More articles by this author and Michael MoranMichael Moran More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1097/JU.0000000000003243.13AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail Abstract INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: The transfusion of blood is a fascinating history though tied in many ways to battlefield medicine. Maluf, a urology resident wrote perhaps the most fascinating account in 1954 that typically ignored the herculean contributions of one Charles R. Drew, M.D. METHODS: William Harvey first elucidated the circulation of blood in 1628 but there was obviously some appreciation on the criticality of blood loss after injury. Richard Lower tried to keep dogs alive with transfusion by 1665. However, blood groups and their importance had to await Karl Landsteiner’s discovery in 1900. We reviewed the history of blood transfusions during WWI, WWII, and the Korean War along with the work of Charles R. Drew, M.D. RESULTS: “So much of our energy is spent in overcoming the constricting environment in which we live that little energy is left for creating new ideas or things. Whenever, however, one bread out of this rather high-walled prison of the ‘Negro problem’ by virtue of some worthwhile contribution, not only is he himself allowed more freedom, but part of the wall crumbles.” Drew was born in Washington, D.C. on June 3, 1904. He attended Amherst College and was a brilliant athlete as well as student. He attended and graduated from McGill University’s school of medicine in 1933 and AOA. He went to Howard University on graduation and his doctoral thesis earned his advanced degree from Columbia University on “Banked Blood.” He received a two-year Rockefeller fellowship and began working on improved methods of collection, preservation, and marketing blood donation. He also developed the Blood for Britain Campaign at the outset of WWII. CONCLUSIONS: “The life of the body is the blood.” Genesis 9:4. In 1941 it was Dr. Drew who was appointed the first American Red Cross Blood Bank director in charge of the blood supply for U.S. Army and Navy. In 1942 when the military refused to pool blood and insisted on segregation of African-American from white blood he resigned his official posts. Drew died of a tragic automobile accident on April 1, 1950 in Burlington, N.C. leaving his wife, Lenore and four children as his legacy. Source of Funding: None © 2023 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 209Issue Supplement 4April 2023Page: e260 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2023 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Joseph Kelly-Brown More articles by this author Michael Moran More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

Expressivism, Pluralism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem”

Expressivism, Pluralism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem”

To move forward, we must look back: White supremacy at the base of urban studies

The concretisation of the Chicago School solidified and inscribed in the city their obsession with the ‘Negro Problem’, race, race relations and (im)migration. Their fixation not only framed modern sociology with an emphasis on the ‘Other’ but cemented a taken-for-granted undergirding of Whiteness at its base. As a discipline, until we can name, point out, understand and highlight that form of violence, urban sociology will be deficient in understanding the city, particularly, but not limited to the US. As an alternative, I offer Du Boisian sociology, critical race theory, and global critical race and racism to aid in moving away from an unstated Whiteness. This article shows how Whiteness is at the base of the urban question and its consequences via the trajectory of the first sociologists of colour trained at the Chicago School, the work on the ghetto, underclass and the effects of such work.

Review: A Field Guide to White Supremacy, edited by Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez

Book Review| November 01 2022 Review: A Field Guide to White Supremacy, edited by Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez, eds. A Field Guide to White Supremacy. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. 424 pp. Paperback $24.95. Max Felker-Kantor Max Felker-Kantor MAX FELKER-KANTOR is an assistant professor of history at Ball State University and the author of Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD (2018). Currently, he is finishing a book manuscript on schools, race, policing, and the D.A.R.E. program. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2022) 99 (4): 101–103. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.4.101 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Max Felker-Kantor; Review: A Field Guide to White Supremacy, edited by Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez. California History 1 November 2022; 99 (4): 101–103. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2022.99.4.101 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search In his monumental 1944 study, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, the famed Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal outlined the fundamental contradiction facing Americans at the end of World War II, that of the gulf between what he called the “American Creed,” the supposed commitment to ideals of democracy and equal opportunity, and the reality of racial discrimination and segregation. While many continue to see this gap between ideal and reality as an aberration from America’s democratic promise, the exceptional collection of essays in Kathleen Belew and Ramón A. Gutiérrez’s A Field Guide to White Supremacy demonstrate that the persistent failure to resolve this contradiction is deeply engrained in the country’s history and that the “American dilemma” is, perhaps, all but unresolvable within the structure of the United States as presently constituted. Indeed, as its chapters collectively demonstrate, the United States as both an idea and a... You do not currently have access to this content.

Raceless or Race-inflicted? Insecure and Anxious White Masculinities in Ann Petry’s Country Place

Ann Petry’s second novel, Country Place (1947), is classifi ed as a “white life novel” and serves as a medium to reflect on her interest in going beyond the usual “negro problem” in the African American protest novels of the 1940s to tackle the white peoples’ problems with other whites. This paper underlines the ways Petry challenges assumptions about whiteness as a universal convention and aims at making race visible by representing destabilized white (male) characters. By excavating issues of masculine anxiety and insecurity in a number of white characters, Petry endorses the progressive politics of her works in exposing racial prejudice and widening the defi nitions of racism.

Pandemic Response: A Reflection on Disease and Education

Pandemic Response: A Reflection on Disease and Education

“The World Was Thinking Wrong About Race”: W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro

ABSTRACT In The Philadelphia Negro, published in 1899, W. E. B. Du Bois created a detailed sociological study to communicate that the “Negro problem” was not due to a perceived inferiority of Black people, but instead the result of structural racism in society. While his work did not immediately improve the lives of Black Philadelphians, it contributed both to advancing the field of sociology and to changing the way Americans understood race. Du Bois emphasized the importance of acknowledging Black people as individuals and that the problems within Philadelphia’s Black population were a “symptom” of the society and not the cause of the society’s problems. The spread of Du Bois’s perspective continues today as America again grapples with understanding all of the ways racism is manifested in society.

Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Training School for Women and Girls

Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Training School for Women and Girls

Review: American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship, by Niambi M. Carter

Review: <i>American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship</i>, by Niambi M. Carter

Revealing “The Struggle and the Dream”: Sterling A. Brown’s Role in Producing An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy

This article investigates the role of poet, critic and vanguard Black intellectual Sterling A. Brown in the production of An American Dilemma (Myrdal et al., 1944), a foundational book that would influence national policy in relation to race for at least 50 years after its publication. Commissioned to deliver an analysis of “the Negro in American culture,” Brown set out to create a work of integrity that would convey the richness of African American cultural traditions and contribute to a balanced appraisal of their overarching experiences. The Carnegie Corporation selected outsider Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal to lead the study to ensure an unbiased analysis of the “Negro problem.” This apparent commitment to impartiality obscures the reality of the impact of race on the book’s construction. These dynamics had a particularly forceful impact on Brown, the only member of Myrdal’s team with a deep understanding of the historical development, aesthetics and politics of the African American cultural tradition.

Deferral and the Dream

Deferral and the Dream

The Negro Problem Of Identity And Existence In The Novel “Invisible Man” By Ralph Ellison

This article attempts to study the Negro problem of identity and existence in the postwar American novel. The core of this study tackles the desperate quest, this man is living in a blind and racist American world, which denies his existence, and reduces him almost to a non-entity making him ever more restless, possessed and exhausted.

I Am Not Your Negro Movie Review: Critical Reflection and Discourse to Advance Social Equity

This article reviews I Am Not Your Negro, a documentary film based on Remember this House, an unfinished manuscript written by James Baldwin. I Am Not Your Negro is a critical film for any public service professional who impacts the lives and livelihoods of Black people in the United States. The critical nature of this film rests in the tragedy of lives lost in a quest for justice for Black people in the US. Baldwin’s conceptualization of “the Negro problem” is an ethical concern that undergirds a strong rationale to advance social equity in American society. Using the tenets of critical race theory, we argue public service personnel have an ethical duty to actively oppose racism, reject color-blind ideology, engage in critical reflection and discourse about justice and the denial of the American dream, and pursue social equity as a means of achieving justice for all.

“Out of the business once established could grow various enterprises”: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Ed. L. Simon &amp; Co. Printers

“Out of the business once established could grow various enterprises”: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Ed. L. Simon & Co. Printers Elizabeth McHenry (bio) Sometime in the summer or early fall of 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois quietly purchased a printing business at 163 Beale Street in Memphis, Tennessee.1 He did not live or work in Memphis, nor did he have experience in or knowledge of the business of printing. In theory, there were printing offices in Atlanta that were accessible to Du Bois, and as a professor of Sociology at Atlanta University, he also would have had some access to the university’s Printing Office. Described in the Catalogue of Atlanta University for 1901–1902 as “large and well appointed,” the Printing Office was used as a place of instruction where students learned the printing trade by working on publications for both the school and the larger Atlanta Community. It was where two monthly newspapers were published: The Bulletin of Atlanta University and a student newspaper called THE SCROLL. In addition, it housed Atlanta University Press, which, beginning in 1896, had produced the proceedings of the annual Conference for the Study of Negro Problems as well as related publications.2 And yet Du Bois invested his entire life savings—some $1,600—in the Memphis print business, entering into a partnership with two young recent graduates of Atlanta University who had been his students. Unlike Du Bois, both of these men knew the business of printing: Harry H. Pace had learned the printer’s trade as a youth, and Edward L. Simon worked as an instructor in the Print Department at Le Moyne Institute in Memphis after his graduation from Atlanta University. In this, Du Bois was the outsider of the group. And yet, he was the driving force behind the venture, which promised him something he did not have but felt he sorely needed: ready access to and control over a printing press. This printing office became the home of the Moon Illustrated Weekly, a publication Du Bois envisioned as circulating among African Americans to “tell them of the deeds of themselves + their neighbors, interpret the news of the world to them + inspire them toward definite ideals.”3 In reality, the [End Page 405] Moon was a modest, essentially local newspaper and it, together with the relatively small journal that followed it, the Horizon, have been considered mere footnotes in Du Bois’s long and illustrative career as an educator, an activist, a journalist, and a critical thinker. To the extent that it has been studied, the Moon in particular has become known as Du Bois’s most spectacular failure. This was the determination of historian Paul Parrington, whose investigative study of the Moon Illustrated Weekly was published alongside the three surviving issues of the newspaper in 1986. The Moon “failed before it began,” Parrington concluded, calling the journal “a dream which was not to be realized until 1918 when the circulation of the Crisis reached 100,000.”4 In some respects, this view accurately sums up the life of the paper: Du Bois could not find financial support for the publication, he was inaccurate about the circulation numbers that could be achieved; and the Moon was never, in any practical sense, an “illustrated weekly.”5 But the Moon is only one aspect of the venture that Du Bois entered when he invested in the Memphis printing business. Rather than focusing on the failings of the Moon Illustrated Weekly, this essay takes up the larger subject of Du Bois’s printing office, the Ed. L. Simon & Co. In doing so, I am attempting to divert our focus from the demise of one small newspaper to the more significant story of a small African American printing business. These stories are, of course, entangled, but focusing only on the shortcomings of the Moon detracts from our appreciation of Du Bois’s larger objectives in purchasing a printing business and the importance of the business itself. What he sought to do with that business, I argue, will draw our attention to areas of Black print culture studies that remain unexplored: the business of printing, the history of Black...

Emancipation without Equality: Pan-African Activism and the Global Color Line by Thomas E. Smith

Reviewed by: Emancipation without Equality: Pan-African Activism and the Global Color Line by Thomas E. Smith Andrew J. Rosa (bio) Emancipation without Equality: Pan-African Activism and the Global Color Line. By Thomas E. Smith. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2018. Pp. 194. $90.00 cloth; $27.95 paper) In seven well-written chapters, Thomas E. Smith considers how intellectuals of African descent navigated the global color line between the 1884–1885 Berlin Conference and the 1911 Universal Races Congress. Rather than representing a lull in the history of Pan-Africanism, as is suggested in much of the literature, Emancipation without Equality credits this period for producing a generation of intellectuals that challenged racial oppression in pursuit of equal treatment and rights in the colonies and metropoles of the Atlantic world. If Euro-American powers guided the course of imperialism, then African and African-descended people represented a formidable, anti-imperialist response. Smith begins with a discussion of Pan-African thought as represented by African American intellectuals who, despite their marginalization from the 1893 World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago and the 1895 Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta, formed a counter-public sphere wherein they interrogated the meaning of American citizenship, condemned white vigilante terrorism, and called for greater control over the Christianizing mission in Africa. Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Alexander Crummell, and Booker T. Washington are all discussed as significant in this regard, as are a number of African American women, who, like Frances Harper, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Anna Julia Cooper, pressed for Black inclusion in the 1893 World's Congress of Representative Women. Moving across the Atlantic in chapter two, Smith discusses the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris as a culminating moment in Pan-African protest. In addition to celebrating Euro-American imperial mastery, this venue featured the "American Negro Exhibit," which ceded space to Thomas Calloway and W. E. B. Du Bois to challenge the "Negro problem" school of thought by evidencing African American progress since slavery's abolition. This challenge carried over to the first Pan-African Conference in London, where diaspora intellectuals called [End Page 369] for the expansion of rights and equality across the Atlantic world. The ideas and platforms they put forward discredited the ideological underpinnings of the global color line and reflected the influence of positivist currents shaping anti-racist thought during this period. Smith expands his discussion on the Pan-African critique of Euro-American Christianity in chapter three by focusing on the ideas of religious intellectuals that corresponded with the African American journalist John E. Bruce. While supportive of the civilizationist project in Africa, men like George Washington Williams, Theophilus Scholes, Edward Wilmot Blyden, and Mojola Agbebi were generally critical of white-led Christianity, seeing it as the handmaiden of Euro-American imperialism. They instead insisted on a more forceful embrace of political reform and a commitment to vindicating Africa from "Dark Continent" stereotypes that justified the exploitation of Black bodies globally. Emphasis on the correspondence between Africa and the United States continues in chapter four with Smith's examination of the Spanish American War and the South African (Boer) War. Both events were imbued with masculinist meanings by Pan-African intellectuals and looked upon as opportunities to advance claims for rights that essentially remain unrealized. Smith returns to the World Congress of Representative Women and the Pan-African Conference in chapter five to remind readers that, despite the masculinist nature of Pan-African discourse, women, including several of whom founded the National Association of Colored Women, engaged in advocating for rights for people of African descent. From the trans-Atlantic protests of Ida. B. Wells and Catherine Impey, to the rhetorical responses of Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Pauline Hopkins, women spoke, wrote, theorized, and organized preambles to action against the global color line. Smith concludes his examination with an analysis of the 1911 Universal Race Congress. In addition to Boas, who is credited with shifting the discourse on race from the realm of biology to culture, the Congress is discussed as significant for announcing the arrival of the Sudanese–Egyptian Duse Mohammed Ali. As founder and editor of African [End Page 370] Times and Orient...

Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing by Jeffrey S. Adler

Reviewed by: Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing by Jeffrey S. Adler Gregory L. Richard Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing. By Jeffrey S. Adler. Historical Studies of Urban America. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Pp. viii, 256. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-226-64331-1.) While historians attempt to explain the meteoric rise in incarceration after World War II, Jeffrey S. Adler invites us to consider a wider narrative. Adler’s work Murder in New Orleans: The Creation of Jim Crow Policing investigates the collective actions of the criminal justice system in New Orleans and the interwar racial climate, while exploring many “complex and often counter-intuitive relationships between violence and reactions to violence and between crime and punishment” in the process (pp. 2–3). Adler’s focus on the years 1920–1945 allows the reader to consider numerous watershed moments in American history, such as the Great Migration, Prohibition, the Great Depression, and World War II, and their effect on race, justice, and Jim Crow. New Orleans, while a violent southern city, provides much insight into other similar locales at the time, especially in the area of policing, politics, and economics. The disjuncture between crime rates, actual violence, and white perceptions of violence provides the paradox that is the major theme of the work. These white perceptions of crime fueled the development of a criminal justice system in New Orleans that continues to evolve in often tragic ways. In the 1920s, custom and not law dictated the criminal justice system’s disregard for African American crime. As long as white New Orleanians perceived that black crime was neatly tucked away within racial boundaries, the criminal justice system ignored what it referred to as a “‘negro problem’” (p. 21). In many cases, where ample evidence existed of black guilt in a homicide, prosecutors refused to charge the accused. Releasing these individuals back to the street, along with the endemic inaction of the criminal justice system, left African Americans feeling helpless. Hence, it is no surprise that the rates of African American violence soared as black people increasingly turned to self-help. As time progressed, the cultural and social history of the United States might lead one to believe that violent crime and homicide skyrocketed in New Orleans. Instead, according to records Adler uncovers, it decreased. The economic downfall of the late 1920s and 1930s reduced crime in the Big Easy. Unfortunately, these statistics did not matter to police and prosecutors. National-headline-making crimes, the increase in property crimes, and the rising anxiety of white people in New Orleans that the banditry would continue to grow among African Americans began the transformation of crime control into race control. Increased militarization of police, as well as the evolution of the brutal methods of confession extraction, combined with police officers seeing themselves as protectors of the white racial order. The growing [End Page 506] importance placed on perception, fueled by race and anxiety as opposed to reality, signaled a law enforcement shift that continued well into the twentieth century and beyond. The major strength of Adler’s work rests in the sources. He has succeeded in finding an urban area that had no dearth of crime and homicide statistics and records. Adler has reviewed a total of 2,118 homicide cases during the interwar period, and his primary source materials serve as a valuable foundation for any examination of criminal justice in New Orleans. He also expands his view beyond the courts, analyzing other diverse records such as coroners’ records and newspapers. Utilizing this fantastically cohesive body of primary sources, Adler helps explain the origins of the current incarceration crisis, which most assuredly rest in the interwar period. Gregory L. Richard Winona State University Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy by Katherine Benton-Cohen

Reviewed by: Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy by Katherine Benton-Cohen Jeanne Petit Inventing the Immigration Problem: The Dillingham Commission and its Legacy. By Katherine Benton-Cohen. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2018. Pp. 342. Photographs, notes, index.) Katherine Benton-Cohen seeks to understand the meaning and legacy of the Dillingham Commission, the three-year congressional study of immigration that began in 1907 and issued its report and recommendations in 1911. She faced a significant challenge in writing this book. The main source is a massive, multivolume government report with thousands of pages of statistics and graphs, but there is little documentation of how the report was created because the papers of the Dillingham Commission were not preserved. Benton-Cohen finds a solution to this dilemma by concentrating on an array of men and women—social scientists, reformers, religious leaders, politicians, and others—who sought to shape the report’s findings and recommendations. In the process, she argues, those who participated in the Dillingham Commission competed to create a framework for understanding migration to the United States, ultimately creating a powerful and consequential vision of the “immigration problem.” While many historians recognize the significance of the Dillingham Commission in justifying immigration restriction, Benton-Cohen examines how participants used complex and competing political, economic, and ideological arguments to shape the report. One interesting insight here is how, perhaps not surprisingly, the work of the commission created unexpected political bedfellows. For instance, while many Jewish lobbyists advocated for Judaism to be labeled a religion, Zionists agreed with the restrictionist Senator Henry Cabot Lodge that Jews should be classified as a distinct “Hebrew race.” Moreover, Jewish philanthropist Jacob Schiff advocated for the redistribution of Jewish immigrants to Texas to counter criticism about their concentration in the New York area. This idea was likewise promoted by Mississippi Senator LaRoy Percy, who wanted to address what he called “the Negro problem” by replacing [End Page 483] low-wage African American agricultural workers in Mississippi with Italian immigrants. A central theme throughout the book is that those with different views on immigration shared a belief in the expanded use of federal power to achieve their goals. Many commissioners used their authority to pry into the personal lives of individuals, particularly vulnerable people. Jett Lauke, a “practical economist” (108) who led an expansive investigation of industrial conditions for the commission, coerced workers in steel towns to answer personal questions about employment history, savings, and even grocery bills. He used the report to argue that the federal government should exclude immigrants to protect what he called “the vanishing American wage earner.” Anthropologist Franz Boas made the opposite argument, that immigrants should not be excluded because they assimilated into what he called “the American type.” To make this case, he, too, used federal authority to get schools to allow him to measure the skulls and other physical features of children. The author includes an entire chapter on each of Lauke’s and Boas’s concepts of American types. Another contribution this book makes is to demonstrate how the Dillingham Commission offered opportunities for those on the periphery of power to shape perceptions of migration. These figures include Yamato Ichihashi, a Japanese immigrant who offered sympathetic portraits of Japanese farmers in California. They also include social worker Anna Herkner, who went undercover on shipping vessels to examine the conditions immigrant women faced. She successfully advocated for a federal law limiting immigrants in steerage. At the same time, Benton-Cohen shows that powerful figures like Henry Cabot Lodge had the ability to shape the final recommendations, which portrayed immigration as a problem to be solved through restriction. Through a focus on historical actors, the author demonstrates the multiple ways Progressive-Era Americans created the “immigration problem” and reimagined the ways federal policy could deal with it. As Benton-Cohen points out, the Dillingham Commission’s legacy shapes the way we understand immigration policy to this day. Jeanne Petit Hope College Copyright © 2020 The Texas State Historical Association