CHAPTER 9
Focusing on the writing stage of Carnegie Corporation’s study on Black Americans, this chapter illustrates how President Keppel read and commented on drafts of Myrdal’s final report. The chapter argues that An American Dilemma reflected Myrdal’s intellectual influences and observations in 1930s and 1940s Sweden and the United States and, equally so, largely met—and in some ways, exceeded—Keppel’s expectations for a national policy program that would help stabilize white domination in the United States. This is because, in An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal provided a means for white Anglo-Americans to fortify their supremacy within the United States, as Keppel expected, and also beyond the United States, a point which Keppel long had valued.
In fact, the biggest difference of opinion between Keppel and Myrdal during the writing stage of the study rested on their varying perspectives on the significance of white southerners for achieving Myrdal’s national policy plan on Black Americans. While Keppel thought that white southerners were critical for such a national effort, Myrdal discounted their importance by pointing to the political and economic power of white northerners and the New Deal federal government, as well as to intellectual divides among white southerners.
In this way, Myrdal felt confident in including peppered criticisms of the white South in An American Dilemma, while Keppel viewed these scattered phrases as liabilities that could potentially limit the project’s national policy goals. This difference of perspectives between Myrdal and Keppel helps explain why Keppel decided to play his part to court white southern readers in his preface to An American Dilemma. In this introductory section of An American Dilemma, Keppel not only highlighted former Carnegie Corporation trustee Newton Baker’s southern roots but also emphasized that Myrdal was a foreigner whose use of the English language was imperfect.
Describing the evolution of Carnegie Corporation’s cooperative study on Black Americans while Myrdal drafted its final report and how it largely met and, in some ways, exceeded Keppel’s expectations, the chapter begins by describing Myrdal’s conversations about An African Survey with Keppel and Keppel’s assistant, Charles Dollard. After all, An African Survey inspired the research structure and public policy purpose of the corporation’s U.S. study.
1. Gunnar Myrdal and An African Survey
After spending a year in Sweden during the Second World War, Myrdal returned to the United. States in 1941 to read over his U.S. researchers’ memoranda and to write his final report. To this end, Myrdal, his wife, Alva Reimer Myrdal (who followed her husband a few months later through an equally harrowing voyage across the Atlantic), and two research associates, Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose, secluded themselves in Princeton, New Jersey.
An experienced Swedish social statistician, Sterner had worked with Myrdal on the study since its start in 1938. By contrast, Rose was a “young sociology graduate student from the University of Chicago whom Stouffer had brought on board while Myrdal had been in Sweden”; Rose joined the two men during this final writing stage of the study.1 While relatively new to the team, Myrdal stressed to Carnegie Corporation that Rose was playing an active role in this final phase of the project.2 In fact, Rose ultimately drafted several chapters of the final manuscript.3 Eager to acknowledge the central roles played by Rose and Sterner on the project, Myrdal tweaked the corporation’s initial intentions by arguing to Keppel and Dollard that he should list the two men as assistants in the book’s title page.
Beyond these two white men whose inclusion on the book’s title page Gunnar Myrdal justified to Carnegie Corporation by stressing the centrality of their roles on the project, neither he nor his funders ever considered the possibility of expanding such public recognition to Alva Myrdal or close staff members such as Ralph J. Bunche, Guy B. Johnson, Paul H. Norgren, Dorothy S. Thomas, and Doxey A. Wilkerson, let alone the numerous other social scientists commissioned to conduct fieldwork and produce memoranda for the study.4
Rather, as Keppel intended from the start, a single director would be front and center. In this spirit, the title page of An American Dilemma (1944) announces that it was written “by Gunnar Myrdal with the assistance of Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose.”5
Located some fifty miles from each other, Gunnar Myrdal’s writing team in Princeton and Carnegie Corporation leaders in New York City not only discussed names on the final report’s title page, but exchanged correspondence and chapter drafts throughout 1941 and 1942. It was during this time that Keppel, his new assistant, Charles Dollard, and Myrdal made increasing mention of the U.S. study’s antecedents and particularly its London-based predecessor.
In the summer of 1941, for example, Dollard promised to send Myrdal The Poor White Problem in South Africa.6 And the following summer, while completing the manuscript, Myrdal noted to Dollard that he had structured the book along the lines of An African Survey (1938). Resisting Dollard’s calls to shorten the manuscript, Myrdal argued that no one “will read it who is not something of a ‘scholar’ himself and who has special interests in the problems treated.” In this way, Myrdal urged, neither Dollard nor any other reader should “think of it as a book which should be read from cover to cover, just as little as you assume that Hailey’s book on Africa is ever used in that way. I have no reason why I shouldn’t write general chapters as interestingly as possible and all have encouraged me in this.”7
Compared to Keppel, Dollard had little firsthand knowledge with Carnegie Corporation’s advisers at Chatham House and their evolving plans for an African survey during the 1930s.8 With little awareness that the Chatham House project initially also had been envisioned as a shorter report, Dollard responded to Myrdal by acknowledging that Myrdal’s “analogy to Lord Hailey’s survey is fair enough, but I have always cherished the hope that your book would have something of a popular audience which Hailey’s, of course, did not. Moreover, Hailey’s work is essentially an encyclopedia from which other researchers can draw material rather than a real analysis of the African picture.”9 Downplaying the impact of An African Survey among imperial and colonial administrators in the British Empire, Dollard preferred to underscore its length and urged Myrdal to write a shorter manuscript, which, as Dollard imagined, would enjoy greater readership in the United States. Myrdal ultimately completed a two-volume study compared to An African Survey’s single volume, though, at 1,483 pages, An American Dilemma nearly reached the length of the 1,837-page African Survey.
Further noting the extent to which Myrdal inherited his funder’s perspective of An African Survey as model for the U.S. study, Myrdal more publicly engaged with Hailey’s study within the pages of An American Dilemma. Thus, for example, in his chapter on “Negro Popular Theories” and specifically a section titled “Back to Africa,” Myrdal considered the possibility that white Americans’ resentment of Black Americans could increase if the United States entered another period of unemployment. And in that case, Myrdal argued in An American Dilemma that it was “not beyond possibility that a large proportion of Southern whites might under certain circumstances come to demand the sending away of Negroes from America.”10 Looking to Africa as a geographic space where Black Americans presumably would settle in response to heightened hostility from white Americans and particularly from white southerners, Myrdal added, “Lord Hailey, an Englishman, has already done some of the necessary spade work of scientific inquiry for such practical work” that would be needed for imperial powers to develop the region to the point that it ultimately could become an independent “Black Continent.”11
And yet, Myrdal did not simply produce a manuscript to Carnegie Corporation president Keppel’s liking simply by reading and citing An African Survey. Rather, and more deeply, Myrdal reached such a complementary goal by being the national policymaker from Sweden Keppel had found so very attractive to lead the U.S. analogue to An African Survey.12 Of course, and contrary to Keppel’s initial hopes for the U.S. director, Myrdal was not a white Briton with colonial administrative experience. But Keppel was accustomed to adapting his expectations depending on changing geographies and combinations of white advisers in the Anglo-American world. In this vein, Keppel had once relied on white Afrikaner researchers in a South African environment more hospitable to Afrikaner rather than British researchers, and in a similar spirit, he adapted this ideal for a U.S. context seemingly more comfortable with a Scandinavian, rather than a British colonial administrator, director for the U.S. study.
That said, Myrdal could have been a different person in a U.S. context than Keppel had expected when he first had offered him the directorship, or Myrdal simply could have changed his perspective on the value of a national policy program on Black Americans during the span of the project. So the question is just how Myrdal—positioned from the start, as Keppel hoped, to provide white policymakers across governments in the United States with a national policy program on Black people—produced a study complementary to his funder’s expectations.
Analyzing just how and why Myrdal ultimately wrote a final report largely to Keppel’s liking, the following sections explore key elements of Myrdal’s thesis in An American Dilemma and place them in the context of his lived experiences and observations both in the United States and Sweden during the 1930s and 1940s, because it was during those years that Myrdal evolved and reinforced his views on the “nation,” the “folk,” and the urgency for white Anglo-American domination across the Atlantic.
2. Myrdal Flatters and Focuses on White Americans
Reading drafts of Gunnar Myrdal’s first chapters in the fall of 1941, Keppel praised the author for “hanging the whole study on the peg which [he] describe[d] as the American dilemma, i.e., the conflict between the average American’s faith in the democratic creed and his tacit acceptance of social and legal measures designed to repress a large segment of the population.”13
For Keppel, Myrdal’s positive portrayal of Americans—and particularly white Americans who Myrdal suggested experienced moral anxiety in their discriminatory treatment of Black Americans—could only help inspire other white Americans throughout the country to come together and coordinate their policies on Black Americans. Considering the preferred model of white rule embraced by Keppel, his board at Carnegie Corporation, and their Chatham House advisers, it expectedly pleased him that Myrdal imagined proposing a national policy program on Black Americans to be led by white Americans and designed to counteract Black Americans’ absolute repression. Because this preferred model of white rule not only centered the needs and interests of white Anglo-Americans, but expressed a concern to help Black people under white rule, efforts which these white men imagined should not challenge, but rather reinforce, the legitimacy of white Anglo-American domination.
While Myrdal drafted his final manuscript, Keppel retired from Carnegie Corporation and, yet, Keppel retained an office at the organization and would continue overseeing the project. In this spirit, Keppel received numerous and evolving drafts of Myrdal’s manuscript between 1941 and 1942, and continued to celebrate the project. In a confidential memorandum to his successor at Carnegie Corporation, Walter Jessup, Keppel called Myrdal’s thesis “an original and challenging one, namely that the essence of the Negro problem lies in the heart of the white man.”14 Indeed, throughout An American Dilemma, Myrdal argued that white Americans harbored national ideals of equality and liberty, “the American Creed,” which necessarily made them feel morally culpable for discriminating against fellow Black Americans, and this argument met with Keppel’s approval. After all, and again, it was an image of white Americans as a particularly moral people, which would only help white Anglo-Americans justify their dominant roles in the United States and, as Myrdal noted in the book too, at the international level.
This aspect of Gunnar Myrdal’s central thesis in An American Dilemma, which Keppel found so compelling, had roots in Myrdal’s year-long sabbatical away from the U.S. project, when he and his family had returned to Sweden expecting to play critical wartime roles in their home country. This European context during the Second World War helps explain how Myrdal came to privilege and develop this central concept in An American Dilemma, a positive portrayal of white Americans’ psychology which countered research memoranda on white psychology that Myrdal’s team had produced for him.15 This wartime context also helps explain how and why Myrdal became particularly invested in white Anglo-American leadership, not only within the United States, but also at a global level.
Particularly after he had returned to Sweden in 1940, for example, Gunnar Myrdal had begun to view the U.S. project as wartime service on behalf of the Allied Powers and especially the United States. With past leading roles in Sweden’s Social Democratic Party and Parliament, he and Alva Myrdal had imagined that they would have had important government roles to play in resisting a potential invasion from Nazi Germany. Contrary to these expectations, however, historian Yvonne Hirdman notes that upon arriving in Stockholm in 1940 the Myrdals “were not offered the heroic tasks they had hoped for.”16 This predictably bruised their egos, but the couple quickly created wartime work for themselves by drafting a three-hundred-page defense and glowing description of the United States. Written in Swedish for a Swedish audience, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal in Kontakt med Amerika (Contact with America, 1941) developed their ideas about white Americans’ allegiance to an “American Creed” and, relatedly, the value of global U.S. leadership.17
As the Myrdals explained in Kontakt, the main inspiration for writing the book came after they perceived their fellow countrymen were folding to the pressures of the Third Reich. Alva had written to a U.S. friend that she even saw some colleagues and friends turn into outright Nazis. In correspondence with a Swedish friend, she had wondered how their country had transformed from a modern, democratic, and forward-thinking Sweden to one that was conservative, traditional, and tolerant of the Third Reich.18
In writing Kontakt, the Myrdals thus aimed to mobilize fellow countrymen against the Third Reich and, in the process, garner Swedish citizens’ support for the United States. By then, the United States was informally engaged in the Second World War and, from the Myrdals’ perspectives in 1940, soon would likely become a formally belligerent country.19 In this critical moment of global allegiances, the couple wanted to make clear to Swedes that there was an inherent difference between modern-day Germans and Americans, that the United States was worthy of Swedes’ allegiance during the war, and thus that there was purpose in defending Sweden against a Third Reich invasion.
In the 1941 book, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal disproved two stereotypes about the United States that fellow Swedish citizens seemed to hold. In particular, they explained that the United States was not simply a heterogeneous group of people who treated racial minorities and particularly Black Americans as badly as Germans treated Jews. Rather, the Myrdals stressed that the United States was a common “folk”—a community of like-minded people united by their shared egalitarian ideals. That said, the authors acknowledged that “America is more heterogeneous” than other countries and that it “takes a long time and through lively studies before one discovers that which is shared and stable in America.”20 They noted that the “secret is that America, more than any other land in the Western world, large or small, has the most homogeneous, firmly and clearly formulated, vividly living system of expressed ideals for human social life, which is vividly living in the people’s mind.… Each American has had them stamped in his mind.” This, the Myrdals explained, was the “American creed” that brought the U.S. folk together.21 The couple thus previewed for the first time the concept that was to frame the thesis in An American Dilemma: the American Creed.
All Americans, Gunnar and Alva reasoned in Kontakt, shared the belief that “all individuals have the same rights in relation to each other and before the state, independent of race, religion, and standing. Around each individual, in whatever condition he lives, stands therefore an aura of clear rights which even the state must respect.”22 These were shared egalitarian ideals, the Myrdals noted, which Swedes could relate to and which were lacking among the German people.
The Myrdals admitted that Americans, like Germans, treated racial minorities abominably. However, they noted that Americans, unlike Germans, wanted to correct their discriminatory behavior to meet their egalitarian ideals. To this point, they explained that “no people on earth are (or ever were) so passionately interested in finding and crying out their own deficiencies as Americans.”23 As an example, Gunnar mentioned that he had been asked to research Black Americans in the United States and that he very much doubted that Germany would ever have invited a foreign researcher to analyze “the country’s most difficult race problem—the Jewish question.”24
Gunnar Myrdal underscored that white Americans distinguished themselves from their counterparts in Germany, not only by commissioning and thus welcoming a critical analysis of their treatment of Black Americans, but also by expressing remorse in their discrimination and violence towards this group of Americans. Gunnar Myrdal wrote: “I often would ask [Americans] how they could criticize so much the treatment of Jews in Germany, while their own Negroes and so often many of their poor whites did not have it much better. The answer was: ‘But we do not say that what happens is right! That is the difference between America and Germany, that here that goes against our ideals.’ ”25 The Myrdals reasoned that, unlike Germans, white Americans held egalitarian ideals and acknowledged that their violent and discriminatory treatment of Black Americans contradicted their ideals.
Furthermore, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal noted that this gap between white Americans’ actions and ideals caused Americans emotional distress: “The Negro problem, like all the other difficult social problems, is mainly a problem in Americans’ own hearts.”26 In other words, white Americans’ national character was bound together by egalitarian ideals. So when white Americans treated Black Americans unequally, the Myrdals explained, guilt overwhelmed these Americans. In this way, and as the Myrdals urged fellow Swedes to realize during the war, white Americans proved that they indeed aspired to be a more egalitarian people.
In comparing these two countries in Kontakt, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal hoped to convince Swedes that they had more in common with Americans than with Germans. In Gunnar Myrdal’s words: “One of those who writes this has had, for the last two years, the assignment of becoming an expert exactly on America’s social deficiencies and he knows more about those imperfections than maybe anyone else who writes in the Swedish language. He knows quite well how much more evil, injustice and shortcomings that still remain in America compared to Sweden. But he has also learned how much more there is of goodness, justice, and extraordinary power.”27 Despite white Americans’ discriminatory and violent treatment of Black Americans, the Myrdals underscored that the United States was worthy of Sweden’s support.
Just as this book went to press in Sweden in the first weeks of 1941, Gunnar Myrdal returned to the United States in order to complete Carnegie Corporation’s study of Black Americans. As in Kontakt med Amerika, Gunnar Myrdal explained in An American Dilemma that the supposed problem of Black Americans was “a problem in the heart of the American. It is there that the interracial tension has its focus. It is there that the decisive struggle goes on.”28 Stressing the importance of understanding the supposed problem of Black Americans as a moral problem, Myrdal continued in An American Dilemma: “Though our study includes economic, social, and political race relations, at bottom our problem is the moral dilemma of the American—the conflict between his moral valuations on various levels of consciousness and generality.”29
Throughout An American Dilemma, the American Creed is front and center. As Myrdal put it in the first chapter: “From the point of view of the American Creed the status accorded the Negro in America represents nothing more and nothing less than a century-long lag of public morals.”30 In both Kontakt med America and An American Dilemma, that is, Gunnar Myrdal observed that white Americans’ treatment of Black Americans fell short of white Americans’ egalitarian ideals. And in both books, the American Creed would give grounds for a positive image of white Americans. Particularly in An American Dilemma, he mobilized this concept to inspire white Americans toward a solution to their so-called “Negro problem,” the very existence of which, Myrdal argued, jeopardized white Americans’ national and global leadership.
Regarding that “problem,” Myrdal wrote: “The Negro in America has not yet been given the elemental civil and political rights of formal democracy, including a fair opportunity to earn his living, upon which a general accord was already won when the American Creed was first taking form. And this anachronism constitutes the contemporary ‘problem’ both to Negroes and to whites. If those rights were respected … there would not longer be a Negro problem.”31 To U.S. readers, Gunnar Myrdal stressed that white Americans would cease viewing Black people as a societal problem once they lined up their behavior and policies toward Black Americans with their American Creed. In effect, Myrdal viewed white Americans as particularly moral beings willing and capable of treating Black Americans as they themselves would want to be treated, especially when confronted with their moral failings.
The author’s positive portrayal of white Americans did not simply begin and end with his discussion of the American Creed. In An American Dilemma, Myrdal also extended this favorable image in his model of social change, a vision of national public policy reform placing white people—and particularly white northerners and white policymakers in the U.S. federal government—as principal catalysts improving the lived experiences of Black Americans. In a section of An American Dilemma titled “A White Man’s Problem,” he admitted that his analysis of Black Americans was intended “to give primary attention to what goes on in the minds of white Americans” because it was “the white majority group that naturally determines the Negro’s ‘place.’ ”32
In this vein, Myrdal’s model of social change in An American Dilemma—or rather, to use Myrdal’s terminology, his theory of “cumulative causation”—privileged the interests, views, and agency of white Americans.33 Titled “A Methodological Note on the Principle of Cumulation,” this second appendix to An American Dilemma begins by noting that “equilibrium” was a concept that the various branches of the social sciences had adopted from the natural sciences. To this point, Myrdal argued that social scientists long had analyzed the social world in an effort to return to a stable equilibrium: “It is this equilibrium notion which is implicit in the sociological constructions of ‘maladjustment’ and ‘adjustment’ and all their several synonyms or near-synonyms, where equilibrium is thought of as having a virtual reality in determining the direction of change.”34 Myrdal thus clarified in An American Dilemma that social scientists who looked at the social world and categorized people and events either as maladjustments or adjustments had in mind an ideal—or rather, a static—equilibrium from which social reality deviated.
In An American Dilemma, Myrdal argued that social scientists should abandon this definition of equilibrium for a more dynamic one. Rather than hearkening back to an original and static state of balance, for example, Myrdal stressed that a more dynamic equilibrium model would consider the “cumulation of forces” affecting social change and thus seek stability within this ever-changing, forward-moving motion.35 Relating the relevance of this alternative equilibrium model, Myrdal noted in this concluding section of An American Dilemma that he had applied this concept in an earlier work on economic theory, citing the 1939 English-language translation of his 1931 text, Monetary Equilibrium (Om penningteoretisk jämvikt).36
Transplanting in An American Dilemma elements of his “model of cumulative economic causation,” Myrdal characterized the various factors impacting relations between white and Black Americans as “the ‘principle of cumulation,’ also commonly called the ‘vicious circle.’ ”37 Before discussing the vicious circle theory, though, Myrdal first defined the “hypothetically balanced state” between Black and white Americans from which he and his team had worked, writing: “There is—under these static conditions—just enough prejudice on the part of the whites to keep down the Negro plane of living to that level which maintains the specific degree of prejudice, or the other way around.”38 In this “hypothetically balanced state,” Myrdal clarified that white Americans’ prejudice toward Black Americans created a lowered living standard for Black Americans which then reinforced white Americans’ prejudice toward Black Americans. As far as the genesis of white Americans’ prejudice, Myrdal thus explained that Black people’s lower “plane of living” partly explained white Americans’ initial “reason for discrimination.” Here, Myrdal wrote that Black Americans’ “poverty, ignorance, superstition, slum dwellings, health deficiencies, dirty appearance, disorderly conduct, bad odor and criminality stimulate and feed the antipathy of the whites for them.”39
In An American Dilemma, Myrdal furthermore detailed that this balanced state between white and Black Americans actually was never static, because any change “will, by the aggregate weight of the cumulative effects running back and forth between them all, start the whole system moving in one direction or the other.”40 Noting that various factors caused shifts in this equilibrium, Myrdal together termed these various elements “the principle of cumulation,” “the vicious circle,” or rather, “a model of dynamic social causation.”41 The focus of social scientists, Myrdal stressed, should not be on trying to achieve an imagined, prior “stable equilibrium” but, rather, trying to “analyze the causal interrelation within the system itself as it works under the influence of outside pushes and the momentum of on-going processes within.”42
With a focus on white Americans as leading change agents in the country, Myrdal hypothesized that white people in the United States would be decreasing their own prejudice toward Black people in the United States by improving Black people’s status in society. In the process of ameliorating the lives of Black Americans, Myrdal thus argued that white Americans increasingly would regard Black Americans as equals.43 However, realizing that this was likely too complimentary of an image of white Americans, he admitted later in the appendix that a rise in Black Americans’ status would be met by an increase of prejudice among some—though, as he perceived it, not the majority of—white Americans.44
Assuming his targeted white readers were intent on improving Black Americans’ social condition and decreasing their own anti-Black prejudice, Myrdal proposed a means for putting into motion his model of “cumulative causation.” Detailing “the white man’s rank order of discriminations,” or rather, a hierarchy of white Americans’ relative sensitivity to various forms of anti-Black discrimination, Myrdal suggested that white Americans’ public policy actions should begin with those forms of discrimination that were least important to white Americans.45
In An American Dilemma, Myrdal thus advised that white Americans, inspired by the American Creed and following a “white man’s rank order of discriminations,” should begin by addressing discriminations “in securing land, credit, jobs, or other means of earning a living, and discriminations in public relief and other social welfare activities.”46 Then they could focus on tackling “discriminations in law courts, by the police, and by other public services” followed by Black Americans’ “political disfranchisement.”47 Inching closer to forms of discriminatory behaviors and public policies to which white Americans were increasingly committed, Myrdal then suggested confronting “segregation and discrimination in use of public facilities such as schools, churches and means of conveyance” along with “several etiquettes and discriminations, which specifically concern behavior in personal relations,” with the last focus being “the bar against intermarriage and sexual intercourse involving white women.”48
Inspired by the American Creed and following the “white man’s rank order of discriminations,” Myrdal thus expected that his targeted group of white Americans first would attack public policies and behavior discriminatory of Black Americans that were least important to them. And Myrdal encouraged white Americans to make these “pushes” to the current equilibrium in the “Negro problem.” As Myrdal imagined it, these “pushes”—these ameliorative changes to anti-Black public policies and behavior—would lead to improvements in Black Americans’ “plane of living.” To Myrdal, such policy improvements necessarily meant opening up the way for Black Americans to achieve “white levels” in all aspects of life in the United States.49 Furthermore, he reasoned that Black Americans’ achievement of such “white levels” would help decrease white Americans’ prejudice of Black people because white Americans’ prejudice, at least in part, as he suggested, was a reaction to societal problems that many white Americans associated with Black Americans: “In other words, we assume that a movement in any of the Negro variables in the direction toward the corresponding white levels will tend to decrease white prejudice.”50 As its ultimate outcome, Myrdal’s dynamic model of social causation aimed to provide further proof of white Americans’ moral leadership in the United States and, in the process, increase Black Americans’ “plane of living” to “white levels” at a speed and level comfortable to white Americans. Over time, and again at a speed that was suitable for white Americans, Myrdal imagined that this should lead to the full assimilation of Black Americans into white life in the United States, as a people invited to reflect (and ultimately reflecting) white Americans’ values.
In this theory of social change, Myrdal thus proposed that Black Americans not only would attain “white levels” in various aspects of life in the United States and thus increasingly reflect white Americans’ values, but relatedly, white Americans would decrease their anti-Black prejudice and begin to view Black Americans as an assimilable people, worthy of miscegenation with white Americans. Following Myrdal’s logic in An American Dilemma, white Americans thus would ultimately treat Black Americans much like “all the Northern European stocks, but also the people from Eastern and Southern Europe, the Near East and Mexico” whose ultimate fate in the United States was to shed their various ethnic identities, marry white Anglo-Americans and, in the process, assimilate into “a homogenous nation” defined by Anglo American whiteness.51 If given such an opportunity by white Americans to assimilate fully into whiteness, Myrdal reasoned that Black Americans would embrace it. Because while there was a “strong practical reason for the Negro’s preaching ‘race pride’ in his own group,” Myrdal explained that “it is almost certainly not based on any fundamental feeling condemning miscegenation on racial or biological groups.”52 For Myrdal, any contemporary resistance from Black Americans to assimilation into the white “homogenous nation” of the United States was simply a response to white Americans’ long-standing assumption that Black Americans were “unassimilable.”53
Myrdal furthermore argued in An American Dilemma that, by expediting this assimilationist national policy program on Black Americans, white Americans would be justifying their moral leadership, not only within the United States, but also abroad. Focusing on the final chapter of An American Dilemma, which Myrdal titled “America Again at the Crossroads in the Negro Problem,” scholar Nikhil Pal Singh observes that, for Myrdal, solving the “Negro problem” in the United States “would both affirm the underlying theory of American nationhood and also prove that the United States was the world’s greatest democracy, whose ability to harmonize the needs of a heterogeneous population fitted it to be the broker of the world’s security concerns and aspirations for social progress.”54
Alluding to the evolving international significance of the study, Myrdal wrote in these final pages of An American Dilemma that: “What has actually happened within the last few years is not only that the Negro problem has become national in scope after having been mainly a Southern worry. It has also acquired tremendous international implications.”55 Further specifying the international significance of white Americans’ resolve to solve the so-called “Negro problem” by incorporating Black Americans into white life, he also stressed that “America, for its international prestige, power, and future security, needs to demonstrate to the world that American Negroes can be satisfactorily integrated into its democracy.”56
Making it even clearer to his white U.S. readers how he imagined that a national approach to Black Americans would help serve to solidify white Anglo-American rule both within and beyond the United States, Myrdal further predicted that “the coming difficult decades will be America’s turn in the endless sequence of main actors on the world stage.… For perhaps several decades, the whites will still hold the lead, and America will be the most powerful white nation.”57 For such a “white nation” to maintain global domination, Myrdal calculated that it would need to prove its moral superiority, and ideally by treating Black Americans as white Americans would treat each other and, in the process, by assimilating Black Americans into white Anglo-American whiteness. To this point, Myrdal reasoned that “America is free to choose whether the Negro shall remain her liability or become her opportunity.”58 Myrdal called upon white Americans to demonstrate their moral sensibilities to a national and global audience, with a definition of racial equality leaving intact white Anglo-American domination. In the process, he hoped to be offering white Anglo-Americans blueprints for further solidifying, rather than challenging, their leadership within and beyond the continental United States.
Considering his expectations for Myrdal’s study, Keppel predictably celebrated Myrdal for centering white Americans and for arguing in favor of the global significance of the national study on Black Americans. Thus, in his preface to An American Dilemma, Keppel echoed Myrdal’s own explanation of how the study had gained international importance during the span of the previous few years, noting that this was a time “when the eyes of men of all races the world over are turned upon us to see how the people of the most powerful of the United Nations are dealing at home with a major problem of race relations.”59 By addressing this “major problem” within the United States, both Keppel and Myrdal hoped to preserve the central place of the United States and its white allies on the global stage. Again, while Myrdal felt this sense of urgency particularly during the Second World War, Keppel long had harbored this anxiety about the frailty of white Anglo-American domination—and so too, international order along the color line—at least since the First World War.
By contrast to its effort to flatter and center white Americans, Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma remained consistent in its negative portrayal of Black life, even beyond its theory of dynamic social causation and within Myrdal’s definition of racial equality. Because his assimilationist vision of racial equality clearly required Black Americans to strip themselves of Blackness—that is, of anything that distinguished them from the habits, tastes, culture, and linguistic preferences of white Americans. To this point, Myrdal stressed in An American Dilemma that he and his team “assume that it is to the advantage of American Negroes as individuals and as a group to become assimilated into American culture, to acquire the traits held in esteem by the dominant white Americans.”60 By calling Black Americans to divorce themselves from Black identities, Myrdal proposed a national policy program on Black Americans that not only would be spearheaded by white Americans, but also would serve to reinforce the supremacy of whiteness and call for the disappearance of Blackness.
This was, indeed, Myrdal’s long-term goal with his national policy program. Because as he reasoned in An American Dilemma, he was simply helping white Americans achieve, through means that they found morally acceptable, what they actually wanted to accomplish with Black Americans: their full eradication. Myrdal wrote in An American Dilemma: “If the Negroes could be eliminated from America or greatly decreased in numbers, this would meet the whites’ approval—provided that it could be accomplished by means which are also approved.”61 One such approved means, Myrdal explained, was the full assimilation of Black Americans into white U.S. life, to the point that Blackness ceased to exist: “Therefore, the dominant American valuation is that the Negro should be eliminated from the American scene, but slowly.”62
As the following section highlights, this vision of white and Black Americans’ coexistence in a white-dominated United States—and its assumption that racial equality in the United States would require Black Americans’ full assimilation into a white “homogenous nation” and, relatedly, the erasure of Black identities—not only reflected Gunnar Myrdal’s reading of white Americans’ valuations, but also his and Alva Myrdal’s earlier analysis of population quantity, quality, and nation-building in Kris i befolkningsfrågan (Crisis in the Population Question, 1934).63
3. White Domination and Black Subjection in Myrdal’s Definition of Racial Equality
Engaging with debates on population quantity, quality, and nation-building in continental Europe in the 1930s, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal’s Kris i befolkningsfrågan begins with a description of economic theory. And in this section authored by Gunnar Myrdal, the Myrdals made clear that they situated their theory on ideal population sizes against that of the English scholar, Thomas Robert Malthus.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Gunnar Myrdal explained in Kris, Malthus had argued that there were limited resources on the earth, meaning that population growth threatened the existing public’s quality of life. While Malthus had been hesitant to suggest contraception, the Englishman had recommended that people should marry later and try to have fewer children than they were having.64 In a similar vein, Gunnar Myrdal recounted in Kris that a subsequent generation of Malthusian scholars then warned fellow citizens that populations were becoming too numerous for the limited resources that humans could produce. However, unlike Malthus, Myrdal noted that contemporary Malthusians were much more vocal about condoning and promoting the use of contraception in an effort to limit fertility rates. Among these proponents of contraception was, in fact, the famous American, Margaret Sanger, whose work spread across both continents.65
By contrast to Malthusians, who believed that humans needed to decrease fertility rates to maintain their quality of life, Gunnar Myrdal asserted that a balanced population size was more beneficial for these same purposes.66 In Kris, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal argued that crafting a balanced population with sufficient numbers of productive citizens to support the unproductive citizens, such as children and the elderly, was more important than limiting the total population numbers.
In the case of Sweden, the Myrdals explained that Malthusians had been so successful in promoting delayed marriages and contraception that, as a consequence, the country suffered alarmingly low fertility rates. This low reproduction rate, the Myrdals argued, not only threatened the country’s ability to support the future aging population, but also its existence as a cultural entity: as a “folk.” With such low population numbers, the authors explained that other groups could immigrate into Sweden and overwhelm and threaten the dwindling Swedish population’s ethnic identity.67 Such immigrants, the couple wrote, “would signify the race’s degeneration and mean ‘racial suicide.’ If the population size is reduced, the land would be flooded by immigrants of alien groups with high fertility rates. With their stronger reproduction rates, they could take over and transform our precious cultural heritage.”68 Because such migration would threaten the identity of their own population, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal argued that fellow Swedes could not rely on immigration to increase their population size. Instead, they suggested that Swedish citizens should expand the population by increasing their own fertility rates.
The authors were aware that young Swedish couples would not easily respond to this message. During the previous decade, many young Swedes had moved from the countryside to urban centers and did not necessarily want to give up the modern lives that they had established for themselves. Swedish women still wanted to work and when they married; they, like their husbands, were unwilling to make the financial sacrifices that having children represented. Put simply, the Myrdals in Kris noted that many young citizens chose not to have children because they represented significant financial burdens and lifestyle changes, especially in modern urban settings. If Sweden wanted to increase its fertility rates, the Myrdals argued that it would need to keep this kind of young couple in mind and create policies that limited the burdens of childrearing.
In the process of suggesting a national public policy initiative to increase fertility rates in Sweden, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal in Kris directly distinguished themselves from other contemporary population experts in Germany, Italy and France who they thought were merely interested in growing the population size irrespective of how childbearing and childrearing affected couples’ quality of life. In Kris, the Myrdals thus explained that they were not only interested in expanding the quantity of the population, but also its quality. And in contemplating quality, they considered how childrearing affected parents.
To this point, the Myrdals asserted that potential young parents should neither be forced into parenthood nor should they be burdened with new financial responsibilities that decreased their quality of life. In this vein, the couple suggested that the state should promote the free exchange and use of contraception, ensure mothers’ ability to retain their employment outside their homes, and provide services that covered the main costs associated with parenting. Specifically, they concluded that the Swedish state could cover living subsidies for families with children; free public nurseries, baby cribs, and kindergartens; free health services and free school lunch for all children; price reductions for necessary food items for children living at home; all costs for school materials (free school books and free school material, school transportation and school houses were needed); and, education stipends.69
Beyond parents’ quality of life, the Myrdals acknowledged that the quality of the children they brought to the world mattered as well. These state benefits would ensure that Sweden’s future children would be more educated and more physically healthy than previous generations. In other words, the couple argued in Kris that the way to improve the quality and quantity of the future generations of Swedes was to create public policies offering more robust public resources to parents and children alike. The Myrdals’ policy proposals came to be, for many Swedes, the genesis of their modern welfare state.70
In providing their analyses of the best means for increasing the size and quality of the Swedish population, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal moreover were responding to contemporaneous discussions on the relative importance of hereditary characteristics and genetics for improving population quality, which famously defined Nazi Germany’s population program at the time. In response to such conversations in continental Europe, the Myrdals thus argued that the “quality problem can be tackled thus, with studying individual differences in the population and finding to which degree those differences are hereditary or conditioned by the environment.… In the case of differences conditioned by the environment, one can of course change the population’s quality by (in different ways) changing the environmental conditions for certain individuals.”71 Most differences among individuals, the Myrdals noted, were caused by the environment. And because of that, the couple argued in Kris that such distinctions could be remedied by changing the population’s surroundings, such as improving living, health, and education standards.
In this section of Kris focusing on population quality, the Myrdals then paused to discuss the case of the mentally ill and mentally deficient, noting that “race biologists” and “social pedagogues” each had different reasons for sterilizing these individuals.
The Myrdals explained that race biologists asserted that the mentally ill and deficient should be sterilized because these traits could be passed on to their offspring, while social pedagogues argued that these mental characteristics limited these individuals’ ability to parent. In reference to race biologists, the couple noted that “hereditary biologists have already made interesting and practically meaningful contributions and one has reason to expect more in the future.”72 However, the Myrdals were not ready to say that mental illnesses and deficiencies were necessarily passed on from parent to child. Instead, the authors of Kris concluded that individuals with such characteristics should be sterilized for the reasons social pedagogues listed. Gunnar and Alva Myrdal wrote: “More and more we come to meet for example, large broods of children with unmarried imbecile mothers, where the whole troop must be supported by the public and where their frequent associability and criminality in the future come to cause additional worry. That a number of those sorts of individuals are prevented from coming into the world leads to an important social relief, quite apart from the results these restrictions can bring about in the future population’s quality.”73 Because the Myrdals assumed that these individuals’ abilities to parent were limited, they concluded that the state should take the extra measure of sterilizing them. Similarly, other Swedes at the time supported sterilization on “eugenic, social, humanitarian and criminal” grounds, with the social grounds entailing “ ‘first and foremost the situation where persons are psychologically or physically inferior to such a degree that they cannot, or are not suited to care for their children.’ ”74 The Myrdals were thus part and parcel of conversations on eugenics in 1920s and 1930s Europe and, like some of the “social pedagogues” they described in Kris, supported the sterilization of the “mentally ill and deficient” on “social grounds.”75
In fact, the Myrdals’ engagement with discussions on eugenics would showcase itself in An American Dilemma. For example, and again under the assumption that the solution to the problem of Black Americans in the United States ultimately called for the erasure of Blackness, Gunnar Myrdal included a section in An American Dilemma titled, “The Case for Controlling the Negro Birth Rate.”76 Here, Myrdal analogized Black Americans to the “mentally ill and deficient” by arguing that many Black Americans are “so ignorant and so poor that they are not desirable parents and cannot offer their children a reasonably good home.”77 Taking for granted that no social policy “would be able to lift the standards of these people immediately,” Myrdal supported “the argument for sterilization of destitute Negroes.”78 In this way, Myrdal in An American Dilemma—like the couple in Kris—justified eugenics on the grounds that certain people or certain groups of people were incapable of parenting well.
In An American Dilemma, however, Myrdal ultimately would push away from recommending sterilization as part of his proposed national program to solve the “Negro problem,” if only because “such proposals, if they are made at all, are almost repugnant to the average white American in the South and the North as to the Negro.”79 Keeping in mind the values and perspectives of white Americans, while offering a national policy program that would align with white Americans’ interest to decrease the visibility and presence of Blackness in the United States, Myrdal suggested instead greater access to birth control among Black Americans. “Until these reforms [passed by white Americans following their ‘rank order of discriminations’] are carried out,” Myrdal reasoned, “an extreme birth control program is warranted by reasons of individual and social welfare.”80 Myrdal in An American Dilemma thus embraced greater birth control access among Black Americans as one way to decrease population numbers among Black Americans and, thus, to erase the problem of Black Americans for white Americans; the problem being white Americans’ moral dilemma in discriminating against and victimizing a population that they considered to be culturally, if not biologically, inferior.
And yet, An American Dilemma would focus even more heavily on Black Americans’ assimilation into white U.S. life as principal means of erasing Blackness and, relatedly, Black Americans as a moral dilemma for white Americans. This dominant thread in An American Dilemma’s theory of social change also had roots in the Myrdals’ analysis of population quality in Kris.
Later in their discussion of population quality in Kris, for example, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal suggested that the state should go about improving the quality and quantity of the population by ameliorating and equalizing Swedes’ environments. To this point, they made clear that “social group differences” were irrelevant in discussions of population quality. And to illustrate this point, the Myrdals discussed class distinctions in Sweden and how the differences between these groups were caused by social rather than hereditary or genetic factors. In the case of intelligence, for example, the couple referred to a contemporary study of schoolchildren in England and noted that children of academics, doctors, lawyers, and writers scored higher than children of factory workers on intelligence tests. However, they explained these conclusions by noting that children of different social classes generally grew up differently.81 They wrote: “Those children of intellectual workers have, from their very early ages, more intellectual training at home than is often granted the children of heavy work or wholesale traders.”82 This intelligence gap between poorer and more affluent children in England or in Sweden, the Myrdals reasoned, could be bridged if children were offered similar childhood benefits.
In the case of the higher classes’ multi-generational affluence and success, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal noted that “the higher classes’ children receive better upbringing, better education, they are accustomed to significant social security and know how to make use of personal connections.”83 That is, environmental factors such as childrearing, education, and friendships led the more affluent classes to perform better on intelligence exams and to be more successful and prosperous than the less affluent classes. There were no hereditary or genetic characteristics that made the lower socio-economic classes less intelligent, affluent, or successful.
In fact, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal in Kris explained that social group differences like these had no hereditary or genetic roots, explaining that “researchers do not support the hypothesis of the existence of socially significant character differences between social classes that are of hereditary quality.”84 Instead, as the Myrdals stressed, society created these distinctions. To this point, the authors wrote: “A social group is actually not (like an individual) a naturally given biological unit; but rather, created by social and institutional factors established and accumulated by highly different individuals.”85 If policymakers erased the social and institutional factors that maintained poor and lower class Swedes’ inferiority, Kris emphasized, then these Swedes could achieve the same health and intelligence standards as the rest of the population.
In Kris, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal underscored that their claims about the root causes of social group differences reflected the findings of leading scholars across the globe.86 And in this way, they furthermore noted that their examination of social group differences in Sweden applied in other corners of the world. The Myrdals wrote: “If blacks in America or Jews in Poland display certain average racial characteristics in their actions, by that it should be explained, that since childhood they had been branded, treated and had to react just as blacks in America or Jews in Poland.”87 Just as social and institutional environments were to blame for creating differences between more and less affluent Swedes, they reasoned in Kris that environmental factors largely were responsible for creating Black Americans’ and Jews’ own distinctions in their respective national societies. If Black Americans and “Jews in Poland” were not raised and treated as Black Americans or Jews, the Myrdals asserted, they could assimilate and achieve the same standards of their nations’ dominant groups.
In Kris, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal mentioned Black Americans within the context of social group differences among Swedish citizens rather than in their discussion of immigrants. In other words, they viewed Black Americans to be Americans who had a rightful place in the U.S. folk in a way that “immigrants of alien groups,” existing outside the Swedish national body, did not belong within the Swedish folk. And in this vein, they argued that the differences between white and Black Americans, like the differences between richer and poorer Swedes and Jews and non-Jews in Poland, could be erased in order to help these groups become part of the dominant national community.
From Kris to An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal would remain consistent in his urgency that social group differences between Black and white Americans could be erased, and that this would mean ridding Black Americans of Blackness, much as it would mean ridding Jews of Jewishness in Poland and poorer Swedes of traits that the Myrdals associated with poverty in Sweden. Granted, much as in Kris, which discussed the possibility of eugenics among the “mentally ill and deficient,” An American Dilemma would entertain the possibility of eugenics programs targeted at Black Americans, though only as a temporary measure for expediting the ultimate goal of decreasing the presence of Blackness and the societal ills Myrdal associated with Black people. Much like its discussion of Black Americans in Kris, An American Dilemma emphasized more strongly Black Americans’ assimilation into white American life as the dominant key towards solving white Americans’ moral dilemma in treating with violence and discrimination a group of Americans whom they perceived to be less desirable members of the white homogenous national body.
In embodying white Americans’ sensibilities, Gunnar Myrdal furthermore incorporated in An American Dilemma his and Alva Myrdal’s inclination in Kris to tailor their public policy recommendations to the values and interests of the demographic groups that they believed were key to realizing their policy goals. In Kris, he and Alva Myrdal had been sensitive to the preferences and values of young urban Swedish couples because it was this group of Swedes whom they had hoped to motivate to procreate at higher rates and, thus, to solve their country’s declining population numbers. Similarly, in An American Dilemma, for example, Gunnar Myrdal would shy away from suggesting sterilization as an immediate means for addressing the problem of Black Americans’ very existence in the United States, because it was counter to the values of white Americans, relying instead on Black Americans’ gradual assimilation into white U.S. life as the principal solution to the problem.
Throughout An American Dilemma, and as this next section further highlights, Myrdal emphasized that he had taken into consideration the values of white Americans, and particularly those in the northern states and those working in the U.S. federal government, in shaping his analysis in the book. Because it was this group of white Americans who he thought could expedite his national policy program on Black Americans in the United States.
4. The Main White U.S. Audiences for An American Dilemma
Throughout An American Dilemma, Myrdal clarified that he was “motivated by an ambition to be realistic about the actual power relations in American society.”88 So while Myrdal acknowledged that he was writing a book on Black Americans in the United States, he did not write a book for Black Americans. Writing this final report between 1941 and 1942, he stressed that his target audience would be white Americans, and particularly those with the most political and economic power in the country: white northerners and New Dealers in Washington, D.C. Not only were they more sympathetic to Black Americans than other groups of white Americans, as Myrdal had deduced during his years in the United States, and thus more likely to respond to his moralistic means for seducing white people into action in An American Dilemma, but this “dominant white majority” held “practically all the economic, social, and political power” in the country.89
By underscoring the particular relevance of white Anglo-Americans in the northern United States and those working within the U.S. federal government, Myrdal was far from being a disinterested observer of existing power dynamics in the United States. Rather, at a personal level, he looked at these white Americans’ increased national power with some satisfaction. As director of Carnegie Corporation’s study between 1938 and 1942, Myrdal had witnessed how public control in the United States had been moving from local governments to state governments and from states to the federal government. And this centralization of government was a positive thing, Myrdal explained in An American Dilemma, because “a capable and uncorrupted bureaucracy, independent in its work except for the laws and regulations passed by the legislatures and the continuous control by legislators and executives, is as important for the efficient working of a modern democracy as is the voter’s final word on the general direction of this administration.”90 Not only was a central government more efficient, capable, and less corrupt than local and state governments, according to Myrdal, but their employees were thus fairer to Black Americans.91
During this era of economic depression and increasing centralization of state power in the United States, Myrdal also detected that the federal government controlled the South. This was an observable fact during the depression when the South had accepted the federal government’s New Deal legislation and federally-led social reform, including the Farm Security Administration and its local health programs.92 Myrdal noted: “Apart from the fact of party allegiance, the South was actually too poor to scorn systematically the gifts of national charity, even if the price to be paid was the acceptance of social legislation and organized social reform.”93 Myrdal acknowledged that New Deal legislation and reform still discriminated against Black Americans, but he also reasoned that these initiatives undermined to some extent the more hard-line forms of white supremacy and Black subjection supported by white southerners. To this point, he argued that the federal presence in the South already was undermining practices of white domination in the region, by providing services both to white and Black Americans. As examples of such New Deal agents in the southern United States, Myrdal included “the relief administrator, the county farm agent, the Farm Security supervisor, the home demonstration agent, and the doctors and nurses of local health programs.”94
Observing power dynamics between the North and South and between the New Deal government and the South, Myrdal predicted in An American Dilemma that white northerners and the U.S. federal government would be able to push forward more egalitarian national policies on Black Americans than white southerners might want to embrace, and that much as it did during the Depression, the South would have no other choice but to accept the federal government’s policies. For starters, Myrdal noted that the South was poor and in need of federal assistance.95 To this point, Myrdal wrote in An American Dilemma: “If, in the main, the New Deal has to deal tactfully with Southern congressmen, the latter cannot afford to break off entirely from the New Deal either.… In this way Southern political conservatism as a whole, and even on the race point, has to retreat and compromise.”96 As Myrdal saw it, this poor and depressed region of the United States would not risk losing the federal government’s assistance.
During the span of the project, that is, Myrdal retained his focus on white Americans as key change agents in the country. Specifically, he became convinced that a national coordination of public policies on Black Americans would incorporate the active participation of northern whites and the U.S. federal government. Keppel seemed to agree, if not with Myrdal’s emphasis on white northerners, with Myrdal’s insistence that the U.S. federal government had a critical role to play in incorporating a national program on Black Americans. To this point, Keppel had cautioned Myrdal to remain attentive to the 1940 national election before drafting policy recommendations on Black Americans. For both Keppel and Myrdal, a national coordination of public policies on Black Americans would not simply call for white policymakers across governments in the United States to learn from each other and harmonize their respective local, state, and regional policies, but also beckon the participation and guidance of the U.S. federal government.
And yet, during the writing stage of the project, Myrdal and Keppel did maintain one major disagreement: it concerned Myrdal’s insistence in the final report that white southerners were not crucial for realizing a national policy program on Black people.
5. Keppel’s Concerns about Myrdal’s Centering of White Northerners and New Dealers at the Expense of the White South
During the first two years of the study, from 1938 to 1940, Frederick Keppel had remained mindful of GEB associate director Jackson Davis’s criticism that Myrdal had proven to be, throughout his trip to the South in the fall of 1938, rather insensitive to white southerners’ particular commitments to white supremacy and Black subordination.97 As Keppel perceived at the time, no national policy program on Black Americans was then possible without the support of white southerners, who dominated the U.S. Congress. But Davis and Keppel found comfort from the fact that Myrdal himself realized that “he knew nothing about the situation and that he wanted now to read and study and think through his own plans before taking any further steps in the field.” Thus, they agreed that it would “be best to say nothing further about” Myrdal’s lack of understanding of the white South.98
Then in 1939, Myrdal did another tour of the South, this time with Black political scientist and fellow research staff member, Ralph Bunche. And once again, Myrdal would find himself brushing up against white southern sensibilities, with such news reaching Carnegie Corporation’s office in New York City. Keppel’s assistant, Charles Dollard, noted in his records that in 1939 Myrdal and Bunche had “left Georgia rather hurriedly after being advised that an Atlanta woman, with whom he had had a conference, had gotten out a warrant for [Myrdal].”99 Historian Walter Jackson notes that, in Georgia, Myrdal had visited the home of a “fanatical white supremacist, Mrs. Andrews … after listening to a long tirade about the evils of miscegenation and the lust of Negro men, he asked her if she was aware of psychological theories that people with such sexual phobias secretly desired that which they professed to abhor.”100 Once the woman became aware of Myrdal’s suggestion, she ushered him out of her house and subsequently “called the police and had a warrant sworn out against Myrdal for indecent language.”101
When this news reached Keppel, he decided to meet with Myrdal over lunch in New York City, hoping to assess the director’s general grasp of white southerners’ perspectives on Black Americans and “race relations.”102 Keppel recorded in his notes that he had been comforted by Myrdal’s analysis of the situation, with the director showing a “real grasp of the mentality and attitude of the southern white in connection with the Negro.”103
Keppel’s level of deference to and patience with Myrdal’s analysis of white southerners, however, would change during the writing stage of the study. Then both Keppel and Dollard would play more active roles as critical advisers on the project. From Princeton, New Jersey, Myrdal would mail draft chapters to the two men in New York City, and both Keppel and Dollard routinely and continuously would respond with their joint comments.104 At first, Keppel and Dollard eased into their roles as editors by suggesting, rather than commanding, changes in the manuscript. Writing to Myrdal in November of 1941, for example, Dollard was rather circumspect about his and Keppel’s reactions to his latest chapter drafts: “Many of your statements inevitably tend to alienate some of the good people on both sides of the Mason and Dixon line who were helpful to you in the course of the study, it might be well for you to say plainly in your introduction that in a job of this kind complete honesty involved the author in the risk of losing friends. This won’t heal all the wounds, but it may reduce the bleeding.”105 Subsequently, however, Keppel’s anxiety persisted, and by the summer of 1942, his instructions became all the more direct. Rather than using Dollard as messenger, and reflecting the importance he placed on this message, Keppel ultimately decided to write directly to Myrdal.
Thus, in July 1942, Keppel followed up on a letter Dollard had written to Myrdal, stressing to Myrdal: “You and [Dollard] can fight it out as to most of his suggestions without help from me, though I will make one exception, and that is to back Dollard about the inherent dangers of over-emphasizing the Woman-Negro analogy in Chapter 4, and I would also suggest that you give special consideration to his comments and suggestions on Chapter 20.”106 The fourth chapter’s analysis on the “Woman-Negro analogy” was a segment of the book that Gunnar and Alva Myrdal seemed to have written in greater collaboration, with its final citation referring to a chapter of Alva’s then-recently published Nation and Family (1941), the U.S. adaptation of Kris i befolkningsfrågan (1934).107 Complying with Keppel’s concerns, Gunnar Myrdal ejected the “Woman-Negro analogy” from the chapter draft and relegated it to a fifth appendix of the manuscript.
In this “Appendix 5: A Parallel to the Negro Problem,” Myrdal’s An American Dilemma includes negative descriptions of white southerners which clearly did not please Keppel. But if this had been the extent of the problem for Keppel with the “Woman-Negro analogy,” he likely would have suggested for Myrdal simply to rethink his description of the antebellum South as “conservative and increasingly antiquarian,” or his decision to include a quotation from former first lady of the United States Dolley Madison that the “the Southern wife was ‘the chief slave of the harem.”108 But as Keppel realized while reading chapter drafts in 1942, such editorial decisions would do little to save Myrdal’s central take-away from the analogy—that “an especially close relation in the South [existed] between the subordination of women and that of Negroes”—which would directly challenge white southerners’ image of “southern white ladyhood” as particularly “pure,” and thus, antithetical to the status of Black people.109
When faced with his funder’s disapproval, Myrdal moved the analysis of the race-sex analogy to an appendix, rather than simply deleting it. But by placing it well in the depths of the second volume starting on page 1,073, he also acquiesced to Keppel’s demand that it remain outside the body of his central manuscript, and thus, increase the chances that white southern readers might miss these slights in the manuscript.110
Keppel and Dollard also found fault with Myrdal’s draft of chapter twenty. In his letter to Myrdal, Dollard suggested to Myrdal that he “should be careful not to overplay [his] first-hand acquaintance with the South with Southerners—and especially not [to] use [his] own limited experience as the basis for broad generalizations.”111 Without access to this earlier draft of chapter twenty, it remains unclear the extent to which Myrdal responded to his funders’ criticisms. What is clear is that in its final form, Myrdal did not shy away from a critical view of the South. Thus, he began that chapter of An American Dilemma by noting that he would “concentrate on the South, not only because this region contains the great majority of the Negro people, but because the South is the only region where Negro suffrage is a problem.”112 From there, he went on to describe “Southern conservative illegality” in their long-standing and violent efforts to disenfranchise Black southerners and, more generally, their “opportunistic disrespect for law, order and public morals.”113
Years later, Myrdal recalled Keppel’s two main anxieties about his final report as he drafted it between 1941 and 1942, echoing the very tensions they shared in correspondence during the project’s writing stage: “I remember two things where he was eager. One was that he was very disturbed that I called the direction in the South—that it was illegal; that they were illegalists. And he said those were very harsh words … The other point was this, I had a section where I made a parallel to the Negro problem from the woman’s problem. And that made him, I remember he was very sad about that … That section I reworked and now it was an Appendix 5.”114 For those readers of An American Dilemma simply reading the main sections of the book and gleaning from it the book’s main argument, as Keppel likely hoped they would, these sections critical of white southerners might remain unread. These portions of the text were tucked away in the depths of the two-volume manuscript.
6. Keppel Channels His Lingering Anxiety in An American Dilemma’s Foreword
In the summer of 1942, just as Gunnar Myrdal was preparing to return to Sweden, leaving behind his final report, Keppel shared with his successor at Carnegie Corporation, Walter Jessup, his reservations about Myrdal’s portrayal of white southerners and wondered whether the foundation should request that a leading white southerner review the manuscript before publication.
Communicating his own goals and expectations for the study, Keppel reasoned to Jessup: “A phrase here and there could rouse men who might otherwise be of help to such fury that they would become incapable of finding any good whatever in the report, and would work actively to prevent its exerting any influence in the south.”115 If white southerners took offence to the study, Keppel calculated that his expectations that it would arouse a national policy program on Black Americans would be undermined. Underscoring the significance of his comments, Keppel admitted to Jessup that he and Dollard had already “been on alert to catch instances where this has happened, and Myrdal has been very generous in adopting the changes we have suggested. But we are none of us Southerners, and the question arises whether, as a measure of insurance to the Corporation no less than in the interest of the report itself, it might not be wise to have someone of southern birth and background read the ms. with this question of southern susceptibilities constantly in mind.”116 No longer president of the foundation, Keppel only went so far as to advise his successor, concluding his letter with the suggestion that he was “rather incline[d] toward our taking” the decision to commission a white southern reader.117 In the end, though, Jessup thought that the corporation should refrain from taking this extra step, because it would undermine Keppel’s own initial idea of commissioning a “fresh mind” to analyze Black Americans in the United States.118
And yet, as Jessup likely knew, Keppel had been less invested in some opaque concept of a “fresh mind” when selecting the U.S. director than he had been in ensuring that such an individual could provide a viable national policy plan on Black Americans. Remaining anxious about the white South’s perception of the project, Keppel chose to use the foreword that he was drafting for An American Dilemma to appeal to this group of Americans, and thus, to increase the chances that the project would achieve his policy goal.
Completed in December 1942, Keppel began this foreword to An American Dilemma by describing the role of foundations in the United States. Though Americans usually associated these organizations with “gifts for endowment and buildings to universities, colleges and other cultural and scientific institutions, and to a lesser degree with the financial support of fundamental research,” Keppel underscored that they did from time to time finance comprehensive studies.119 The difficulty here was explaining why Carnegie Corporation would sponsor such a project as Myrdal’s without there having been any particular demand for it in the United States. Part of Keppel’s strategy was to generalize. Thus, he pointed out that, sometimes there were “problems which face the American people, and sometimes mankind in general, which call for studies upon a scale too broad for any single institution or association to undertake.”120
He also deflected his own role in the project by focusing on Newton Baker as the originator of the study and, in doing so, emphasized Baker’s southern roots. Baker, he wrote, had been the “son of a Confederate officer, attended the Episcopal Academy in Virginia and the Law School of Washington and Lee University, and spent the greater part of his early years in the Border states of West Virginia and Maryland.”121 In effect, Keppel was trying to portray Baker to white southerners as one of their own and characterize the report as having southern roots. From this, such readers presumably would conclude that they should read the book with an open mind.
In this foreword to An American Dilemma, Keppel also explained why Gunnar Myrdal had been selected to lead the project. Omitting mention of Gunnar and Alva Myrdal’s prior work in “crime and disorder” and national public policy planning in response to the population problem in Sweden—which was in fact what had attracted Keppel and his board—Keppel described Gunnar Myrdal as someone who had “achieved an international reputation as a social economist, a professor in the University of Stockholm, economic adviser to the Swedish Government, and a member of the Swedish Senate.”122 After describing Myrdal’s task as director of the U.S. project, Keppel stopped once again to appeal to white southern readers rather directly.
In view of those sections of An American Dilemma that remained critical of the white South, Keppel underscored the global significance of the project during the Second World War. He also noted that any “freshness” and “piquancy” in the manuscript’s prose was due to the fact that Myrdal did not have full command of the English language. Keppel thus suggested to white southern readers of An American Dilemma that they should focus on Myrdal’s general arguments in the book. And indeed, Myrdal’s general message in An American Dilemma—which pleased Keppel—was that white Americans were a moral and egalitarian people who would come together to craft a national program on Black Americans: a national program promoting Black Americans’ assimilation into white American life following white Americans’ rank order of priorities in white domination and Black subordination. It was a policy program completely in the hands of white Americans, with a seemingly empathetic lens on improving the lived conditions of Black Americans to standards enjoyed by white Americans. As Myrdal stressed in the book, this assimilationist national policy program on Black Americans would only help strengthen, rather than challenge, the United States as a “powerful white nation.”123 Relatedly, and as Myrdal further underscored in the book, this national effort would help fortify and justify white Anglo-American domination on the global stage.124
Since Frederick Keppel passed away just two years after his retirement and before the publication of An American Dilemma (1944), he never had the chance to see whether the project achieved these goals. The next chapter explores the extent to which it did so.