What's the first known use of 'Crabs in a Barrel'

I'm looking for the first known use of the phrase to describe human behavior, i.e. Pulling successful people back down to crowd level.

Solution 1:

'Crabs in a bucket'

A Google Books search turns up three relevent instances of "crabs in a bucket" from the years 1911–1916, and none earlier. The first is (as cited by StoneyB in a comment above) from Walter Lionel George, A Bed of Roses (1911), where it appears three times:

"Altered? Oh, yes," he [Farwell] stammered [to Victoria], "that's if the race lasts long enough. Sometimes I think, as I see men struggling to get on top of one another, like crabs in a bucket . . . Like crabs in a bucket," he repeated dreamily, visualising the simile.

...

[Victoria speaking:] "What's it all mean after all. I'm only being used. Sucked dry like an orange. By and by they'll throw the peel away. Talk of brotherhood! ... It's war, war ... It's climbing and fighting to get on top ... like crabs in a bucket, like crabs ..."

"Vic," screamed Betty.

...

"Mr. Farwell," she [Victoria] said deliberately, "I've come to the conclusion that you are right. We are crabs in a bucket and those at the bottom are no nobler than those on the top, for they would gladly be on the top. I'm going on the top."

"Sophist," said Farwell, smiling.

The second instance is from another novel by Walter Lionel George, The Second Blooming (1914):

"There's nothing so fine [as a battle]. Contest, that's life; peace, that's death; so long as we want to dominate we know we are strong. We must grow like trees even if blood must feed our roots. If we cease to grow we begin to decay; we must fight for life and for love because nobody's going to give us life or love for nothing. There's not enough to go round, you see. It's taking we've got to do and the taking justifies us because none save the strong have the right to live. Poverty, weakness, self-sacrifice, these are the crimes, these are the soft spots of the strong, the things that overcome them in the end. We're like crabs in a bucket, all anxious to get to the top and the noblest are not those who lie at the bottom, for they'd gladly be at the top." He [Enoch] drew in a heavy breath. " My God, I'll go gladly singing into battle."

And the third instance is from W.L. George, "Woman after the War," in The English Review (December 1916), reprinted in Feminism and the Periodical Press, 1900–1918, Volume 3 (2006):

The woman who before the war earned her living grew self-reliant enough. She was merely a little more sweated than she has recently been. It will be suggested that the greater number of self-reliant women is bound to affect modern conditions, but the fact remains that before the war there were already millions of self-reliant women, and yet, with all their advertised qualities, they seemed to do very little but undercut each other and meekly tolerate the reduction of piece-rates. The self-reliance of women contains little fellowship, it is only reliance on self. If, therefore, the quality of self-reliance indeed becomes more prominent among women, it is likely to prove their undoing; it will produce millions of additional egotists, millions of women with a strongly developed sense of their individual worth, their individual desires; they will compete and struggle with each other and with men like crabs in a bucket, doing each other much harm.

W.L. George, it seems, is that same Walter Lionel George whose characters compared human beings to competing crabs in 1911 and 1914—only now he is speaking in his own voice about the similarity of human beings to competing crabs. One can imagine what George's reaction to the outbreak and progress of the Great War would have been, if only he had had a Twitter account: "Appreciate the congrats for being right on humanity's similarity to crabs in a bucket."

George is quoted in Goodwin's Weekly (May 29, 1915), a Salt Lake City, Utah, periodical, but otherwise I could not find any U.S. instances of the expression "[like] crabs in a bucket" through 1930. But whether George directly inspired subsequent instances of the phrase or merely anticipated them, he was clearly obsessed with the image.

'Crabs in a barrel'

An answer posted by Josh61 but later deleted cites a very similar instance by Marcus Garvey involving the term "crabs in a barrel." From Marcus Garvey, "The Negro's Greatest Enemy," in Current History (September 1923) [combined snippets]:

Most of the trouble I have had in advancing the cause of the race has come from negroes. Booker Washington aptly described the race in on of his lectures by stating that we were like crabs in a barrel, that none would allow the other to climb over, but on any such attempt all would continue to pull back into the barrel the one crab that would make the effort to climb out.

I haven't yet been able to identify the year when Booker T. Washington gave the lecture that included the "barrel of crabs" remark. Henry Louis Gates & Hollis Robbins, the editors of The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin (2007) include this footnoted comment about Washington's phrase:

Booker T. Washington, in his 1901 autobiography, Up From Slavery, offered the metaphor of crabs in a barrel to lament how all too often members of the race would not let others climb up and over, but would pull back into the pot anyone who made an effort to escape.

Unfortunately, Gates & Robbins do not cite a page number in Up From Slavery where this metaphor appears, and a search of the 1901 edition of Up From Slavery turns up no relevant matches for the word barrel and none at all for the words crab and crabs. Multiple books published over the past two decades attribute the crabs-in-a-barrel metaphor to Up From Slavery—starting no later than an article in The International Review of African American Art (1998), but none of them quote the exact wording Washington used and none of them cite the chapter and page of Washington's autobiography in which it appears.

Kenneth Alley & Leewin Williams, Encyclopedia of Wit, Humor, and Wisdom: The Big Book of Little Anecdotes (2000) offer what they present as the story Washington told in his lecture:

The crab nature.—Booker T, Washington, in lecturing to his people, used to tell this story: Once upon a time there was an old colored man who was having great success catching crabs. He had a tremendous box more than half full when a passerby warned him that the biggest and best crabs were crawling out and would escape. The old man replied: "Thankee, sir, much obleeged, but I ain't goin' to lose no rabs. I'se a crabologist, I is, and I knows all about de crab nature. I don't need to watch 'em a'tall. When de big crab fights up to de top an' when he is gittin' out, de little crab catches him by de laig and pulls him back. He can't get out nohow."

"My friends, I have been informed that there is something of the crab nature in human nature, but it must be altogether among the white folks and not in our race."

I don't, however, find any earlier account in Google Books search results that uses the same wording. At this point the safest conclusion to draw is that the story attributed to Washington may very well not appear in recognizable form in Up From Slavery, but that (as Garvey notes in 1923) Washington almost certainly did use the metaphor in a lecture at some indeterminate date.