Matthew Pratt Guterl. The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940.

Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. 234 pp. $39.95.

How did scientists and scholars, and politicians and artists, academic writers and popular readers go from thinking the world was populated by hundreds of races in the late nineteenth century to a mere five by the middle of the twentieth century? This is the intriguing question that Matthew Pratt Guterl sets out to explore in his compelling new book The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940. Juxtaposing white supremacist Madison Grant, Irish nationalist Daniel Cohalan, Pan Africanist and anti-racist activist W. E. B. Du Bois, and Cane author Jean Toomer, Guterl argues that in the first four decades of the twentieth century a biracial ideology emerged that equated race with color and fixated almost exclusively on whiteness and blackness. Comparing the junctures and disjunctures in the ways two "white" and two "black" men he studies came to understand and articulate race helps Guterl explain how fluid racial categories became fixed racial binaries.

As intellectual history, Guterl's book excels, providing a fascinating view into how immigration and migration, Progessive Era politics, world war, and empire building shaped the ways elite blacks and whites envisioned themselves in relation to one another. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book considers how eugenicist Madison Grant, author of the 1916 Passing of the Races, sought to shore up an "endangered" American Republic by appealing to Nordic solidarity, a transcendent "whiteness" imagined to encircle the globe. In the career of New York Supreme Court Justice and Irish Nationalist Daniel Cohalan, the dominance of biracial ideology and the incorporation of Irish-Americans into the U.S. nation meant a shift from viewing Irish-Americans as Celts, a race culturally, linguistically, and biologically distinct from British Anglo-Saxons, to seeing them as members of the white race and the (white) U.S. nation. In his discussion of Du Bois, Guterl explores how the writer of "The Conservation of Races" and The Souls of Black Folk became the author of Darkwater and Dark Princess. Discussing Du Bois's now-familiar battles with Booker T. Washington and Marcus Garvey, he identifies important milestones in Du Bois's journey from "race man" to global, anticolonial thinker and activist.

As cultural history, however, the book does not succeed nearly so well as, for example, Matthew Frye Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color, which mines some of the same territory. This is evident in the somewhat weaker chapter on Jean Toomer, who wrote one of the most celebrated books of the New Negro Renaissance but rejected the categorization of himself as a Negro writer. Toomer is important for Guterl because he sought to create an identity at odds with both absolute blackness and whiteness. Crafting a physically perfect body became a way for Toomer to embody a hybridized race of ideal future Americans. What is missing in this chapter is the dynamic sense of a man developing and adapting his own race thinking in response to local and global happenings. Unlike those of Grant, Cohalan, and Du Bois, Toomer's trajectory does not convincingly parallel the complex cultural and political workings of a global Manhattan. Toomer was much less a public figure than the other men, and his autobiographical efforts at constructing the self with their shifting tones and multiple revisions need a more careful analysis than they receive here. Moreover, Toomer, as the grandson of P. S. Pinchback, the one-time Governor of Louisiana, left a series of musings on race that must also be read through the lens of class and privilege rather than simply through that of biracial ideology. His reflections on the multiracial world of his childhood illustrate how blackness was lived along, within, and between a variety of registers with significant cultural and material capital, and the attendant intraracial conflict that is papered over by Toomer's obsessive ruminations on the strictures of race.

Nonetheless, The Color of Race makes important interventions. First, Guterl challenges the belief that racial categories stabilized after the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision, showing that multiple factors: WorldWar I, the Great Migration of African Americans, a shift in immigration from Europe to Africa and the Caribbean, and various internationalisms helped calcify a black-white racial binary during the Progressive Era. Secondly, Guterl locates Manhattan as a globalized city wherein these various factors produced a coherent, biracial ideology that transformed the nation's racial commonsense. In short, the cultural, intellectual, and political happenings in Manhattan served as a proxy for the U.S. nation-state, though Guterl does admit that "making race in Manhattan ... was not precisely making race in America." Finally, Guterl is deeply attuned to the ways that new conceptions of race were articulated to new conceptions of gender, demonstrating that Grant's, Cohalan's, and Toomer's new racial selves relied upon a hyper-masculinist, patriarchal ideal rife with homoerotic overtones.

These interventions entail certain risks. If Guterl persuasively demonstrates that the "one-drop" rule alone did not consolidate whiteness in the U.S., he is less convincing on the matter of whether it fused a national sense of blackness. This lopsided racializing effect would not be unexpected, as racial codes and racialized violence have always policed the "black" side of the line more swiftly and completely than the obverse. What Guterl reads as a shift in Du Bois from Romantic race consciousness to a black-white anticolonial vision may suggest an internationalizing of black American racial paradigms rather than the emergence of a radically new biracial ideology. Instead, the turn of the twentieth century may have produced a black-white binary that took hold unevenly, differentially, producing a split between biracial analyses of the U.S. and racially plural understandings of the world. Also, a nuanced reading of class distinctions among African Americans might further complicate Guterl's argument, perhaps suggesting that an interracial dialogue privileging absolute blackness and whiteness might have simultaneously existed alongside of intraracial dialogues in which blackness was differentially experienced, understood, and expressed.

Centering his discussion on Manhattan also presents certain problems. Guterl's is a careful balancing act. While he persuasively demonstrates the part that international events, immigration, and migration play in reshaping Manhattan's racial sense, he only gestures toward the impact that regional specificities may have had on the consolidation of U.S. racial discourse. Black migration is the most obvious process through which to discern the Southernization of Northern racial paradigms, as Guterl is keenly aware, but the possibility that Western and Midwestern racial ideologies might have also helped to solidify--even if only by contrast--a national discourse on race goes entirely unexplored.

As international immigration flows reconfigure in the wake of the so-called "War on Terror," this book will undoubtedly intervene in contemporary debates about U.S. citizenship, social justice, and the mythic "American character." Guterl persuasively demonstrates just how powerful racial ideologies and their attendant taxonomies are, how insidiously and thoroughly they inform material, cultural, political, and economic life. In the 1957 essay "Princes and Powers," James Baldwin ruminated on the difference between black Americans and colonized people: "[We] had been made and mangled by, another machinery altogether. It had been necessary to make the machinery work for our benefit and the possibility of its doing so had been, so to speak, built in." The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940, forces us to think about how the machinery of racial ideology mangled, redefined, and realigned all Americans in the early twentieth century.

Cynthia Young

University of Southern California