Roger Horne, a Mohawk Ironworker in the Raising Gang, ca. 1970 via the Smithsonian

Indians

The two stories below, The King of the Gypsies and The Mohawks in High Steel, contain long anthropological discourses, so I thought it would be helpful to relate what Thomas Kunkel, Mitchell's biographer, had to say about Mitchell's interest in anthropology:

About this same time (1937), Mitchell received a telephone call that caught him entirely unawares yet thoroughly delighted him. On the other end of the line was Mitchell’s undereducated shipmate on the City of Fairbury, Jack Sargent Harris. It seems he had indeed gone on to make something of himself, just as Mitchell had urged him to do on their transatlantic sail six years earlier. When Harris finally gave up as a merchant seaman, he was accepted into Northwestern University, where he studied anthropology. Now, in an even more remarkable turn, he was working on his PhD at Columbia University and was a graduate assistant for Franz Boas. Even a layman like Mitchell recognized Boas as the most influential anthropologist in the world. Seventy-eight years old and recently retired, Boas had trained a veritable army of anthropologists who were radically redefining race and civilization and reshaping how the West understood cultures once considered simply “primitive.” It was Boas’s earlier work that had largely disproved notions of “superior race”—which now, in a terrible irony, had reemerged so virulently in the scientist’s native Germany. Indeed, Boas lived long enough to see Nazis burning his books in a square outside his alma mater, the University of Kiel, which over the years had bestowed on him its highest honors for his contributions to understanding the family of man. 

Harris arranged for Mitchell to meet his mentor, who in turn agreed to be interviewed for a series in the World-Telegram. Mitchell’s conversations with Boas and many of his protégés resulted in six long pieces that ran in early November 1937. These included an overview of the state and importance of anthropological studies; a profile of Boas himself; and stories specifically focused on the Ojibwa and Pawnee tribes, the Dobu natives of New Guinea, and the collection and recording of aboriginal music. The stories make for good reading, if rather highbrow for World-Telegram readers. But for Mitchell, the experience represented something much more profound; it was a kind of graduate-level seminar in anthropology that caused him to rethink, as a reporter, why people are who they are and do what they do. It would be a career-altering revelation. 

Mitchell went into the interviews with Boas with the typical mindset of a reporter approaching an expert, which is to say he hoped he could find a way to put across his subject’s work to a non-scientific audience in an interesting, coherent fashion. Yet it was Boas himself who upended the usual journalistic transaction, Mitchell would recall years later. As the two men settled into conversation, the reporter began to realize that Boas was paying more attention to him than to his questions, essentially an anthropologist observing a curious specimen—the New York newspaperman. Boas was becoming increasingly engaged—“not in me,” Mitchell explained, “but in my ignorance.” As Boas tried to explain his research principles, he suddenly told Mitchell, “Read this,” and handed him a copy of his book Anthropology and Modern Life, which Mitchell would in fact read, and he “began telling me how to look at the world. He said, ‘Don’t take anything for granted, don’t take yourself for granted, or your father.’ ” Mitchell was exhilarated by it all. He would remember coming away from the experience “feeling born again.” 

The insights from preparing the anthropology series caused Mitchell to reflect on his own life’s work to date, a review that left him feeling somewhat unsettled. “I began to see that I had written a lot of things that were highly dubious,” he recalled, in particular the stereotypical drinking stories so popular at that time (such as “Bar and Grill” from the previous year’s New Yorker), which tended to wink at heavy imbibing as relatively innocent or even amusing behavior, when in fact Mitchell was beginning to think the truer question was, “What’s so great about all this goddamned sloshing?” He also realized that such stories were, in a sense, too easy to execute; he was better than that. This self-awareness was one of the main reasons that, in time, Mitchell’s subject matter would move in far more substantive directions. In relating the stories of Mohawk steelworkers, gypsies, sideshow acts, and fishermen, Mitchell brought to them a new depth and context—a clear anthropological approach to understanding his subjects as members of distinct communities, with their own values, histories, and prejudices. For instance, when years later he would profile the venerable George Hunter, Mitchell took pains to set the story against the decline of Hunter’s Sandy Ground hometown, lending the tale considerably more richness and meaning. Like a good novelist, Mitchell was moving ever closer to discovering his characters’ fundamental motivation.

Kunkel, Thomas. Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker (pp. 92-94). (Function). Kindle Edition.