Bob’s induction to the military undoubtedly provides protections that would have been unavailable to a black man in his position only a few years earlier. The architecture of causality undergirding Himes’ account of military conscription, however, suggests a dissident intervention in conventional integrationist narratives of war as the pathway to black citizenship. War, in Himes’ rendering, appears not as a means of salvation but instead as the culmination of an entire process of sanctioned racial violence. “Looks like this man had has a war,” exclaims a fellow inductee observing Bob’s wounds and bruises in the novel’s final paragraph. Himes thus uses the political rhetoric of analogy to draw racial subjection into symbolic proximity to war itself. As I argue in what follows, however, Himes’ use of this analogy exceeds its conventional deployment amongst WWII-era black activists who sought to link military service and the struggle for citizenship rights. Indeed, the collapse of metaphoric into literal war in the novel’s closing pages raises the question of war’s historical temporality: what is the “war” that Bob has “had” and how has it led him, perhaps even prepared him to take part in a literal war? If war is both what Bob has “had” and that upon which he is about to embark, what is the future war augurs? We can begin by adapting Carl von Clausewitz’ famous formulation of war as “the continuation of politics by other means” and note that, in the process outlined above, war operates as the continuation of racialization by other means. Conversely, we might suggest that racialization represents a conduit for the internalization of war as a regulative principle of social life within the borders of the U.S. As Michel Foucault argues in a provocative inversion of Clausewitz’ maxim, “the role of political power is perpetually to use a sort of silent war to reinscribe that relationship of force, and to reinscribe it in
the precondition of the latter. Keynes himself foresaw as much in a 1940 article for The New Republic: “It seems politically impossible,” he wrote, “for a capitalistic democracy to organize expenditure on the scale necessary to make the grand experiment which would prove my case—except in war conditions.” Hofstadter accordingly argues that “only the war itself could consummate the fiscal revolution that the New Deal began.” It was, however, not only the Keynesian fiscal revolution that the war enabled, but also the Keynesian labor revolution: it was in the context of the war that the U.S. state came closest to a “state based on labor.” Thus in his famous 1940 radio address on the “arsenal of democracy” President Franklin Delano Roosevelt assigns a noble role to the working class in an emergent war of production: “The worker possesses the same human dignity and is entitled to the same security of position as the engineer or the manager or the owner. For the workers provide the human power that turns out the destroyers, the airplanes and the tanks.” FDR thus defines the dignity of the worker in terms of a value beyond the wage, a value measured in weaponry. Capital accumulation becomes the accumulation of the means of destruction. In exchange for their unqualified submission to these operational imperatives, FDR promises “to maintain stability of prices and with that the stability of the cost of living.” The manipulation of aggregate demand, the quest for full employment, the equilibrium of labor, industry, and state: it is all here. FDR even demands a cessation of strikes and walkouts, as though federal intervention itself could supplant the labor struggle to set the price of labor power. National emergency thus becomes the occasion to pursue the political miracle of a pacified working class. It is telling that in this 1940 address FDR makes no mention of “the negro problem.” One might expect the ongoing disenfranchisement and racial terror of southern
the highest admiration for her.” The arbiters of wartime justice thus transform the false rape accusation into an opportunity to reproduce a racialized and gendered script of black disloyalty and white female patriotism. Madge becomes a national hero for “withdrawing” charges of rape: the layers of mendacity, jingoism, and misogyny become difficult to delaminate. White womanhood here enters a deeply ambivalent nexus of legal impunity, patriarchal overprotection, and sexual availability on behalf of the war effort. Meanwhile, Bob is tacitly positioned as a rapist not only of a white woman, but of the nation. Of course, the whole premise of a “withdrawal of charges” is a ruse designed in accordance with the needs of the racial military Keynsian equilibrium. This charade elevates Madge’s racist interpellation of Bob into an official “public script” while simultaneously unburdening the state of the need to determine the truth in a court of law. The dejuridicalization of the accused black subject keeps him simultaneously outside the law and inside the labor pool. Thus, in his final appearance before the disciplinary apparatus of the war corporation, Bob embodies the contradictions of the warfare state itself. The shipyard president proclaims sanctimoniously: You were given every opportunity to advance. You were the first Negro to be employed in a position of responsibility by our corporation and you were in a position to represent your race, to win for them advantages heretofore denied….To do a thing like this, at a time when Negroes are making such rapid progress, when Negro soldiers are earning the respect of the nation, and when Negro workers are being employed in all braches of industry is more than a disgrace to yourself, it is a betrayal of your people. This speech calls to mind Negri’s assertion that Keynesianism “conceal[s] the violence that [is] required to maintain this precarious controlled equilibrium.” The president, in claiming that Bob has betrayed the liberalizing norms of the warfare state, in fact carries out a crucial task of the racial military Keynesian order: the mystifying reduction of racial