Carnegie Corporation’s Frederick Keppel never wrote a manifesto on international order along the color line. Rather, the research at the heart of this book illustrating his perspective on the need for a white Anglo-American world order is based on years reading through his papers at Carnegie Corporation, the archives of the corporation more broadly, and the personal papers of advisers and social scientists in Keppel’s network at the time. In Carnegie Corporation’s and Keppel’s papers, it furthermore required moving beyond files on the organization’s grantmaking practices in the United States and to its grantmaking practices abroad.
As a first step, for example, and reading simply through Carnegie Corporation material on the organization’s work in the United States, it could easily seem that Keppel, if not fellow Carnegie Corporation trustee Newton Baker, might have been a relatively closeted advocate of Black Americans’ absolute equality in the United States. To this point, Carnegie Corporation material illustrates that Keppel chose a Swedish economist to direct the U.S. study of Black Americans, and Gunnar Myrdal indeed wrote a manuscript emphasizing the importance for white Americans to correct anti-Black discrimination to match their national egalitarian ideals. And far from criticizing this argument, Keppel celebrated this part of the book in correspondence with colleagues at the organization.
And even when Keppel agonized over the project’s dismissal of white southerners as a critical group of white Americans for shaping a national policy program on Black Americans, his anxieties—if placed only in a U.S. context—would seem to suggest that the foundation president was simply being a “realistic” advocate of Black Americans’ equality who remained aware of power dynamics in the United States and, thus, eager to recruit support from white southerners. To this point and anxious about Myrdal’s portrayal of these white Americans, Keppel had admitted to a colleague: “I feel that the blow is coming to them, in fact it is long overdue, but I feel also that we must be particularly careful as to the manner in which the blow is delivered.”1 And so, simply reading Keppel’s commentary on the white South along with his support of Gunnar Myrdal’s general thesis in An American Dilemma, one reasonably could assume that Keppel simply had been, as the Swedish director concluded years later, “a liberal of that period.”2
Maintaining a focus on Keppel’s work in the United States, there are other archival examples suggesting Keppel’s potential empathy for Black Americans’ subjection under white rule in the country. For example, secretary of war Newton Baker’s special adviser on Black affairs Emmett Jay Scott recounted that his colleague, third assistant secretary of war Keppel, had been “especially charged with the duty of looking after many complaints and matters of vital concern to colored Americans generally, and not only did he manifest a keen interest in their welfare but, in many cases, was successful in translating that interest into remedial action.”3 Then as Carnegie Corporation president, Keppel too had asked Myrdal to include distinguished Black scholars W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke as collaborators in the study. And when Myrdal failed to find tasks for the two men, Keppel had suggested that Myrdal “write them each a nice letter, telling them that I was now in a preliminary stage of fact collection and that I have selected a staff to do the fact collection job, but that I should later have to turn to them for advice when the study was in the critical stage of fixing the broad view points.”4 Keppel thus seemingly respected the renowned Black historian and philosopher sufficiently to suggest to Myrdal that he send them each a “nice letter.”5
However, once Keppel’s actions are analyzed within a broader transnational lens—within Carnegie Corporation’s funding practices in the British Empire during his tenure, as this book has done—his reasons for financing An American Dilemma become that much clearer and yet also that much more complicated.
Some six years before giving thought to the study of Black Americans, for example, Keppel had written to his principal adviser in South Africa, Charles Loram, and related impressions of former South African prime minister Jan Smuts’s recent visit to the United States. Keppel wrote: “Smuts has been here and made, as you can imagine, a most favorable impression, though he stirred up feeling among the Negroes by referring to the patience of the ass.”6 Visiting New York City within weeks of delivering the Rhodes Lectures at Oxford, Smuts had spoken with an audience of white and Black Americans. If Jan Smuts said anything in New York City close to what he had shared during his Rhodes Lectures (lectures that had inspired J. H. Oldham to criticize Smuts’s complete assumption of the inferiority of Black people), one could imagine that Keppel (assuming he had great empathy for Black people), would have found the former South African prime minister to have been off-putting. But Keppel did not seem as impassioned as Oldham. And to be clear, as this book has shown, Oldham was barely a supporter of Black people’s freedom from white oppression.
Most strikingly, communications between Keppel and his contacts in British Africa in the 1920s and 1930s illustrate how this network of white men discussed anxieties about white Anglo-American rule from a transnational perspective. Not only did they conflate white Americans, Britons, and Afrikaners as potential white allies in the making of a white Anglo-American world (and relatedly conflated Black Americans and Africans as comparable subject groups in the Anglo-American world), but as archival material on Carnegie Corporation’s work outside of the United States exposes, Keppel developed a vision for international order along the color line during the span of his tenure at the corporation.
President Keppel’s transatlantic perspective on white Anglo-American rule makes it possible to piece together both his vision for white rule and Black subordination on both sides of the Atlantic and thus too his specific intentions for An American Dilemma. To this point, as this book clarifies, Keppel had found convincing J. H. Oldham’s 1925 memorandum stressing the threat of Black consciousness in Africa and the need for scientific research to aid white policymakers in stabilizing control on the continent.7 He was not taken aback by Oldham’s suggestion that white people should work toward stamping out Black people’s attempts toward a shared consciousness as Black people. On the contrary, Keppel had interpreted the memorandum to be sufficiently important to circulate among fellow trustees at Carnegie Corporation and to use it as a basis for developing a grantmaking program in Africa that, in line with the corporation’s priorities, would privilege the interests of white Anglo-Americans there. Even more, Keppel maintained Oldham as a key contact in years to come, suggesting sympathy in their views on the importance of white Anglo-American rule across the Atlantic and the need to address rising Black consciousness as a serious threat to it.
That said, Keppel and Oldham were not unique in their views. Rather, Keppel’s and Oldham’s efforts to promote and finance cooperative studies in the social sciences as means of helping white policymakers fortify white rule were in harmony with a network of advisers and colleagues who championed the need for stable white governance in colonial Africa and the United States, and the critical role that the social sciences could play towards this end. Keppel and Oldham, like many others in this transatlantic network, furthermore assumed that white Anglo-Americans would govern Black people and that Black people would remain in a subordinate position to white Anglo-Americans and their white allies for the foreseeable future.
And yet, their vision of white domination was relatively nuanced. This is because, at times, it incorporated some public declaration (even if half-hearted, patronizing, and insincere) for ameliorating the condition of Black people, though without threatening the validity of continued white domination. This was a viewpoint that Andrew Carnegie and James Bertram had embraced; that the British Colonial Office increasingly held in the 1920s; and that Carnegie Corporation’s advisers at Chatham House in the 1930s, including Oldham, shared in their search for a director of the African survey. Keppel was never quite as adamant on this point; though if his decision to make routine trips to London throughout the 1930s is any indication, he seemed more at ease with this set of advisers who privileged this vision of white rule than he had been with his South African network, who more publicly demonized Black people. Granted, Keppel remained in contact with South African advisers such as Charles Loram, Ernst Malherbe, and Jan Smuts, but he returned most often to his Chatham House contacts—and especially Oldham—and even reached out to them for advice when he started making plans for a study of Black Americans.
This book takes readers through this global context to Carnegie Corporation’s grantmaking practices and networks of advisers and grantees in the 1920s and 1930s in order to present Keppel’s reasons for commissioning, funding, and overseeing a national study of Black Americans in the mid-1930s, and what he saw favorable and thus worthy of celebration in Gunnar Myrdal’s final report. As this book explains, Keppel was part of a network of white Anglo-Americans and their white allies in South Africa who increasingly believed that the social sciences could be an important tool in helping white policymakers placate Black people’s challenges to white rule in British Africa and the United States and, in the process, avoid a global conflict along the color line. And they were rather up-front about what they meant by international order: white Anglo-American domination.
For this network of white men, it was possible to admire individual Black intellectuals such as Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, D. D. T. Jabavu, and Ralph Bunche, for example, and yet still fear Black consciousness and, thus, Black people as a group. For this network of white Anglo-American men, it also was possible to be critical of particularly egregious forms of white supremacy and Black subordination—from repressive labor laws in Kenya to the public demonization of Africans in South Africa and Jim Crow laws in the southern United States—without throwing out the very value of white supremacy and Black subordination. This is because, again, their ideal form of national and international order required white governance and Black subordination, though, for them, it also preferably included a form of white rule whose public face showed some effort (whether sincere, insincere, or simply patronizing) to improve the status of Black people. In line with this vision of white governance, reflected most closely in An African Survey and An American Dilemma, white people would retain control over the content and speed of ameliorative changes in Black people’s subordinate status across the Atlantic.
This was the global intellectual and political context that bore An American Dilemma, a text that for too long has been wrongly understood by too many Americans to be an exclusively U.S. project advocating foremost Black Americans’ equality. As some critics of An American Dilemma well knew, even though they did not have the archival records to prove it, Myrdal’s text was part of a complicated and global history peopled with cross-Atlantic networks of white philanthropic managers, advisers, social researchers, and policymakers. And though Myrdal himself was not part of this transatlantic network, he wrote a book in dialogue with and complementing the transatlantic intentions of these white Anglo-American men.
Now, in the twenty-first century, when we all can see An American Dilemma through this global and imperial lens, it seems time for all Americans to find inspiration in An American Dilemma’s critics—from W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Oliver Cox to Harold Cruse, Stokely Carmichael, Charles V. Hamilton, Samuel DuBois Cook, John Oliver Killens, and Martin Luther King Jr.—and embrace definitions and means toward racial equality that are free of white domination and, thus, will actually move us toward a truly free and peaceful United States and world.
Acknowledgments
It was in college when I first realized that “scholars” existed and that perhaps I could become one. From my undergraduate days, I thus thank Eileen Hunt Botting for, quite honestly, showing me how intellectual brilliance and absolute joy could coexist. I will never forget reading through books at Hesburgh Library and running over to your office to share what I had just learned, and your own generosity in meeting my own enthusiasm as an undergraduate. For that, I absolutely thank you. In a similar spirit, I thank Christina Wolbrecht, Alvin B. Tillery, and Catherine Perry, who also served as academic role models during those undergraduate years at Notre Dame.
At New York University Law School, I am indebted to the faithful mentorship of William E. Nelson and Carol Gilligan. I also thank Derrick Bell, posthumously, for his generous and thoughtful correspondence. At Princeton, I am indebted to Hendrik Hartog, Stanley N. Katz, and Anson Rabinbach, who modeled scholarly rigor and encouraged me to produce work of great significance. I also thank Melissa Harris-Perry for being a beacon of brilliance, kindness, and truth in the quite intimidating space of Princeton University. From my trips to Sweden during the past decade, I also thank Rob Hannah, Niclas Fogelström, Vanessa Barker, and Lars Trägårdh, who became family away from home. More recently, I thank Michael McEachrane, Jason Diakité, and Madubuko Diakité for their friendship and long-standing work to make Sweden and the global community more comprehensible and breathable for the Global Majority.
Beyond universities and to the archives, I owe great thanks to the Rockefeller Archive Center’s Tom Rosenbaum and Michele Hiltzik Beckerman; the Swedish Labour Movement Archives and Library’s Stellan Andersson; and Carnegie Corporation curators and archivists Jane Gorjevsky and Jennifer S. Comins at Columbia University. Thank you for your engaged interest in this project and, even more, for being highlights of my trips to the archives. And Tom, I thank you posthumously: You were sunshine at the Rockefeller Archive Center.
I also thank the librarians at Columbia University’s Butler Library—both past and present—who have created the vast collection from which I deeply benefited in the process of researching and writing this book. Because of this robust library collection, I was able to access various and difficult-to-find published sources so critical for the research in this book.
For financial support, I thank especially Carnegie Corporation’s Andrew Carnegie Fellowship Program, which facilitated research travel and a two-year research sabbatical from teaching at Clemson University between 2016 and 2018. During this time, the irony of writing a book that critically engages with the history of Carnegie Corporation and that in many ways has been financed by Carnegie Corporation was not lost on me. In fact, this two-year fellowship led me to self-reflect on the role that I want to play in the academe and, subsequently, to the founding of the Miami Institute for the Social Sciences. A year-long sabbatical at Ersta Sköndal Bräcke Högskola’s Center on Civil Society Research in Stockholm, Sweden, during the 2019–2020 academic year also facilitated the writing of this book, even as the COVID-19 pandemic led us to Miami earlier than expected.
I thank Elizabeth Mahan, Athena Tan, and the team at Westchester Publishing Services, especially production editor Kirsten Elmer, for their proofreading, indexing, and copyediting work on this manuscript. I thank, too, the University of North Carolina Press—particularly editorial, design, and production editor Iris Levesque and acquisitions editor Lucas Church—and the two reviewers who believed in this project and helped me to see ways to improve it. Reviewer Two changed my life by leading me to write this book, and more broadly through the readings she suggested to propel me further into an analysis of the role I want to play in the academe. Thank you deeply, Tiffany Willoughby-Herard. Without you, we both know that this book would still remain unpublished. And thank you too, Inderjeet Parmar and Claude A. Clegg III, for playing critical roles in bringing this book to publication at the University of North Carolina Press. Even more, Tiffany and Inderjeet, thank you for bringing me into your rich communities of scholars. I will be forever grateful for your warmth, generosity, and purpose as human beings and scholars.
I also thank Megan Ming Francis who has witnessed the long journey this project has taken. Thank you for your moral support throughout these years, Megan. Karida Brown, thank you too for your wise counsel to reach out to the University of North Carolina Press when this project was meeting dead ends towards publication. And thank you, Takiyah Harper-Shipman, for guiding me toward your trusted proofreader. For their general encouragement, many thanks as well to Alondra Nelson, Khalil Muhammad, Patricia Rosenfield, Mary Dudziak, Daniel Sharfstein, Rob Reich, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Sven Eliaeson, Alden Young, Fadzilah Yahaya, Kenneth Mack, Sam Moyn, Nils Gilman, Noliwe Rooks, and, posthumously, Vartan Gregorian, Tony Judt and Walter Jackson. You all have played critical roles in encouraging the work in this book.
Of course, all errors and omissions are my own.
Closer to home, I thank my family and especially my parents, Daysi and Jorge Morey, who have modeled courage in life and long have encouraged me to take my own path, even if it has meant eternally burying myself in books and traveling to archives. And thank you, Jason and Frankie, for being my center wherever we are in the world. Los quiero mucho. Frankie, I will always love you “more than one million.”