Walter A. Jackson - Gunnar Myrdal and Americas Conscience

Gunnar Myrdal and Americas Conscience

1990 The University of North Carolina Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jackson, Walter A.
Gunnar Myrdal and Americas conscience : social engineering and
racial liberalism, 19381987 / by Walter A. Jackson.
p. cm.(Fred W Morrison series in Southern studies)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8078-1911-5 (alk. paper)
1. United StatesSocial conditions19331945. 2. United StatesSocial conditions1945 3. Myrdal, Gunnar, 1898 American dilemma. 4. Race discriminationUnited StatesHistory20th century. I. Title. II. Series.
HN57J246 1990
306.0973dc20
9012015
[0904]
CIP

THIS BOOK WAS DIGITALLY MANUFACTURED.

In a life that spanned most of the twentieth century, Gunnar Myrdal contributed ideas to many of the centurys major political, economic, and social debates. As a young economist in the late 1920s, he shocked the older generation of Swedish neoclassicists with a daring critique of political biases in neoclassical economics. In the 1930s Myrdal was one of the architects of the Swedish welfare state, proposing new policies concerning economic planning, birth control, womens rights, child care, public housing, and agricultural modernization. During the Second World War, he was a critic of Nazi ideology, urging Swedes to remain faithful to democratic ideals and to resist Nazi propaganda. As a United Nations official from 1947 to 1957, Myrdal played a prominent role in planning the economic reconstruction of Europe and advocated detente before it was in vogue in Washington or Moscow. From the mid-1950s until his death in 1987, he directed inquiries into poverty in the Third World, studied the problems of Western welfare states, and spoke out against United States policy in Vietnam. Together with his wife, the diplomat and Nobel laureate Alva Myrdal, he championed nuclear disarmament.

Gunnar Myrdal is best known in the United States for his book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, one of the most influential works of social science ever written in America. This fourteen-hundred-page study, published in 1944, established a liberal orthodoxy on black-white relations and remained the most important study of the race issue until the middle of the 1960s. As the civil rights movement gained momentum, many educated white Americans turned to Myrdals book in an effort to understand the effects of white racism on Afro-American life. Activists, educators, ministers, and social workers referred to An American Dilemma in campaigns against segregation and discrimination. A generation of college students read it as a textbook in social science courses. Most significantly, Chief Justice Earl Warren cited An American Dilemma in the Supreme Courts Brown v. Board of Education decision to support the view that segregated schools were inherently unequal.

Myrdal turned the conventional wisdom of white Americans on its head by arguing that the Negro problem was really a white mans problem, a massive social problem of national dimensions caused by white racial discrimination. In analyzing Americas greatest failure, he developed a new interpretation of American race relations that would strongly influence postwar racial liberalism. At a time when the Roosevelt administration avoided the issue of civil rights, Myrdal argued that the federal government had to take action to end racial discrimination and to establish equality of economic opportunity. In an era when most American social scientists sought to practice their craft on the model of the natural sciences, eschewing discussions of morality and viewing social engineering as beyond the scope of their work, Myrdal combined appeals to morality with advocacy of ambitious programs of social engineering. He saw racial discrimination as an irrational aberration from a fundamentally egalitarian tradition of American life and believed that educational efforts would substantially reduce white prejudice. In addition, Myrdal took a strongly assimilationist position on black culture, emphasizing the strategic importance of blacks acquiring the cultural characteristics deemed valuable by white Americans.

While many liberals of the 1930s had concentrated on bettering the economic condition of blacks, Myrdal emphasized the psychological and moral dimensions of the race issue. The central argument of An American Dilemma was that white Americans experienced a profound psychological conflict concerning blacks: on the one hand, whites believed in an American Creed of democracy and equality of opportunity; on the other hand, they held prejudices against blacks.

Although these ideas would become widespread among American intellectuals in the 1950s and 1960s, reviewers of many persuasions saw An American Dilemma as a bold and strikingly original book when it appeared in 1944. The sociologist Robert S. Lynd compared Myrdals work to the classic interpretations of American culture of Alexis de Tocqueville and James Bryce.

American readers were particularly impressed by the fact that when Gunnar Myrdal began his research in the fall of 1938 he knew practically nothing about black Americans. He had come to the United States at the invitation of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, a private philanthropic foundation. In his foreword to An American Dilemma, Carnegie president Frederick Keppel offered an explanation for the foundations selection of a Swedish economist to conduct a broad survey of American race relations. According to Keppel, former secretary of war Newton D. Baker, a Carnegie trustee, had suggested that the corporation sponsor a study of black Americans to gain a better understanding of how to distribute its funds. Because the race issue was so charged with emotion in the United States, Keppel explained, the foundation decided to invite a foreign scholar from a country with no background or traditions of imperialism which might lessen the confidence of Negroes in the United States as to the complete impartiality of its findings. With these criteria in mind, Keppel claimed, the corporation had approached Gunnar Myrdal, a professor of economics at the University of Stockholm, economic advisor to the Swedish government, and member of the upper house of the Swedish parliament. To assist the foreign scholar in his research, the foundation had provided a staff of American social scientists selected by Myrdal.