This treatment of the Midwest as a cultureless nether zone was supported and given scholarly veneer by the leading intellectuals of the New Negro movement. In his essay “The New Frontage on American Life,” published in The New Negro alongside Matheus’ story, the prominent sociologist and editor Charles Johnson presents a thesis of industrial determinism to explain the nature of individual cities and their inhabitants. The locally predominant kind of labor, Johnson suggests, will “determine not only [cities’] respective characters, but the type of person they attract and hold.” Detroit was archetypal of this proposition because work in an automobile plant was of such technical intricacy that, “like the army intelligence tests,” the nature of the work itself “sift[ed] out the heavy-handed worked” better suited to “unskilled” labor in a steel mill in Pittsburgh. This pre-sifting of working-class migrants accounted for the variations between Black populations across different cities: “the furious striving after commercial glory in Chicago, and the chasing of the will-o’-the-wisp of culture in New York; the objective of an unshakable berth in a skilled job at $10 a day in Detroit, and a near future of benign comfort in Philadelphia.” Only in Harlem was a “diversity of employment” available to Black migrants. This befitted the “restlessness” of the Harlem migrant, for whom the “dull arduous routine” of a Black worker’s job in another city simply would not do. Harlem was the only place that could stimulate such active minds.
James Weldon Johnson (no relation to Charles) condemned the Midwest and its Black population even more thoroughly than his namesake, sharpening the contrast with Harlem. J. W. Johnson was Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and therefore an extremely influential voice in the national civil rights conversation, when his social history of Harlem entitled Black Manhattan was released in 1930. In the book, industrial workers in Midwestern factories are presented not only as naïve, submissive gang laborers, but ignorant too. The author’s reasoning here resembles Charles Johnson’s deterministic thesis, except that a migrant’s destination is preordained by their place of origin and cultural preferences rather than their industrial skillset.