Alva and Gunnar Myrdal

In 1944—the same year that segregated American troops landed on the beaches of Normandy and Americans back home mobilized to distinguish American democracy from the Third Reich—Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy was first published. In two-volumes, Myrdal explained how a modern democracy like the United States could socially engineer a solution to a perceived racial problem, and in the process, distinguish itself from the Third Reich’s treatment of its so-called “Jewish problem.” Myrdal stated that black Americans were not to blame for the “Negro Problem” and that its solution was not the expulsion or segregation of this group from mainstream society. He shifted his readers’ attention away from ongoing national conversations on black Americans’ “pathology” and moved their awareness towards a newer transatlantic conversation on the pathology of the aggressor. He explained that the “Negro problem” was in the minds of white Americans, and that it was largely a moral dilemma. Myrdal wrote that whites in the United States needed to analyze how their discriminatory behavior towards blacks fell short of the American creed of “liberty, equality, justice, and fair opportunity for everybody” and to correct this behavior. The ever-hopeful social engineer, he urged his readers not only to change their individual actions, but to mobilize the federal government to dismantle institutional segregation and discrimination that subordinated black Americans to white Americans. Only then, Myrdal explained, would white Americans find a solution to their moral crisis—or rather, their “Negro problem.” Two years later, U.S. President Harry S. Truman established a Committee on Civil Rights; and the following December, the Committee published its report, To Secure These Rights, which noted the many restrictions on black Americans, and urged that all Americans should have equal opportunities for education, decent housing, and jobs. Scholars have noted that this 1947 report “adopted the analytical framework and endorsed the conclusions set forth in Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, published just three years earlier,”1

In the late 1930s, the Carnegie Corporation commissioned Gunnar Myrdal to direct a comprehensive survey of white-black relations in the United States, with the expectation that he would approach the topic “with an entirely fresh mind.” In selecting him, the foundation’s president had supposed that a social scientist from Sweden—a country he presumed to be ethnically homogeneous—would bring few assumptions to an investigation of American race relations. And it is true that Myrdal had little experience with the topic. However, his prior work as an economic theorist, population expert, and politician in Sweden informed his analysis in An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). In particular, it helped him define both his target audience and the extent of the policy program that he recommended.

The Introduction begins with a personal anecdote. Unaware of the complicated politics of racial impersonation, Gaines blackened a fellow student for her high school’s revival of the 1947 Broadway musical, Finian’s Rainbow. In the musical’s complicated plotline, magically becoming black for a day was the only corrective remedy to the racism of a white, Southern legislator terrorizing his constituents. Moving from the personal to a close reading of Finian’s Rainbow, the introduction establishes the postwar temporality and theoretical scaffolding for the rest of the book. The introduction establishes the link between these racial experiments in temporary blackness and the politics of American liberalism by considering Gunnar Myrdal’s influential sociological tome, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. In it, Myrdal concluded that the solution to the “Negro problem” “rested in the heart and mind of the [white] American.” This false conclusion enabled the genealogy of “empathetic racial impersonation” detailed in the rest of the book. It argues these racial experiments come into vogue when the United States, as an emerging, postwar superpower, attempts to understand its racial past, present, and future. It then unpacks how and why empathetic racial impersonation resurges during moments of racial and sociopolitical crisis.

The economic progress of black Americans has captured the attention of economists and sociologists since Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma appeared in the early 1940s. More than half a century later, social scientists are still intrigued with the determinants of black economic status and how that status has changed over time. In 1989, the National Research Council published a major study entitled A Common Destiny: The Status of Black Americans, which served as a clear signal that interest in the economic progress of blacks was deeply entrenched in economic and sociological research. Even though there is considerable research on the economic progress of African Americans, there is no consensus regarding what factors best explain changes over time in the economic conditions of African Americans.1

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<i>Stephen Schryer</i> Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction<i>Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction</i>. Stephen Schryer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. Pp. 278.

Purpose Theoretical reconstruction for the sake of practical political relevance is inherently resistant to the theorisation of a rigorous sociological discipline. Yet, the need for such theoretical reconstruction recurs in history, particularly in times of social and economic crisis when social reconstruction of damaged, fractured and conflict-ridden societies was seen as urgent by both applied sociologists and publics at large. Methodology/approach This paper directs itself to questions regarding the intellectual and political origins of the Swedish, egalitarian, democratic welfare state ideology in the 1930s, and how it came to be theoretically defined in opposition to the overarching binary frameworks of ‘conservative’ capitalism and ‘progressive’ Marxist socialism. Findings Using McLennan’s notion of a ‘vehicular’ concept, I will attempt to show that the ‘third’ or ‘middle way’ compromise between opposing interests has, since its inception in the earlier parts of the twentieth century, changed over time, and will continue to change, within shifting political contexts and changing practical, political demands to ‘move things on’. Practical implications This paper also examines the concept of social planning – social engineering – as a ‘third way’ practical strategy and how it came to be used as a political and theoretical stick by which attack ‘third way’ democracy by both neo-liberal and Marxist theorists. Originality/value The paper builds on the author’s previous research on the intellectual and political visions of the Swedish social scientists and reformers, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, and argues for the continuing importance of theoretical reconstruction and innovation in the preservation of justice and democracy.

More than half a century has passed since the publication of &lt;i&gt;An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy&lt;/i&gt;, Gunnar Myrdal's agonizing portrait of the pervasiveness of racially prejudiced attitudes and discriminatory practices in American life. Central to Myrdal's work was the paradox posed by the coexistence of race-based social, economic, and political inequality on the one hand, and the cherished American cultural values of freedom and equality on the other. In the five decades since the publication of this work, there has been a dramatic decline in white Americans' overt expressions of anti-black and anti-integrationist sentiments and in many of the inequalities Myrdal highlighted in his monumental work. Yet the persistence of racial antipathy is evidence of the continuing dilemma of race in American society. This collection of original essays by leading race relations experts focuses on the recent history and current state of racial attitudes in the United States. It addresses key issues and debates in the literature, and it includes chapters on the racial attitudes of African-Americans as well as whites. The volume will be of great importance to students and scholars concerned with the sociology and politics of contemporary American race relations.

Reports from abroad on the American condition have a special place in the canon of social commentary. There is Lord Bryce's American Commonwealth (1888), Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906) and, of course—the standard setter—Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America in 1835. What makes these works touchstones is not just the quality of the analysis or the fame of their authors but the privileged status they have come to enjoy as works of external reflection and criticism. For a people prone to ignore the rest of the world or see abroad only a mirror image of themselves, Americans have always had a surprisingly soft spot for the foreign observer willing to discourse on what makes their nation unique.

This paper directs itself to the impact of American social science on the writings of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal on the role of education and social science in “modern” industrial democracy. After a brief sketch of the Myrdals' role in the development of Swedish welfare reforms and of their intellectual contacts in the United States during the 1930's, the paper outlines four theoretical “dilemmas” of “modernity” to the solution of which education and social research was seen to contribute: the relationships between facts and values, the individual and the collective, child rearing and social change, and theory and practice. The paper concludes by tracing the articulation of these themes in the Social Democratic Party school reform proposals of 1948.

It’s July in the year two thousand twelve (2012), just a few days away from the nation’s celebration of “Independence Day,” commemorating the signing of the historic Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. Written by Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s third President, the document signifies the formal and public assertion of power by the thirteen colonies against British rule. Charging the King of Great Britain with illicit abuses and usurpations—that all seemed an attempt to establish an absolute tyranny—leaders of the original colonies declared their independence by severing ties with the British throne and promising to set new guardians of their future destiny. It is from this founding document, The Declaration of Independence, that these infamous words are drawn: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” In the late 1930s, Gunnar Myrdal, the renowned Swedish economist and Nobel Prize winner, led a team of researchers to conduct a Carnegie Corporation–funded study on race relations in America. In the report of findings, a massive 1,500-page book titled An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Myrdal (1944) argues that much of American life is powerfully shaped by a widespread belief in an American Creed—the same “unalienable Rights” or ideals of liberty, equality, and justice referenced in The Declaration of Independence. The American Creed, he argued, seemed to serve as a common cause or ethos for a nation that otherwise was remarkably diverse and disparate. And despite this keen observation, Myrdal’s encyclopedic treatise points out the troubling and paradoxical coexistence of American liberal ideals and the deplorable sociopolitical situation of Blacks in America—what he called “the Negro Problem.” He noted “that White prejudice and discrimination keep the Negro low in standards of living, health, education, manners, and

This short article considers four questions about the lives led by Gunnar Myrdal and Alva Myrdal, world-famous Swedish social scientists. What were the social conditions for the development of their ideas? What implications (if any) did their developing social science theories have for their personal lives? Is consistency a necessary requirement in matching words and deeds? Is there any necessary relationship between the public and private lives of eminent scholars and public figures? All three of their children, Jan, Sissela, and Kaj, have written autobiographical accounts which, directly or indirectly, suggest that the Myrdal family was dysfunctional. The implications of this are explored.

Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944) influenced the attitudes of a generation of Americans on the race issue and established Myrdal as a major critic of American politics and culture. Walter Jackson explores how the Swedish Social Democratic scholar, policymaker, and activist came to shape a consensus on one of America's most explosive public issues.

Expressivism, Pluralism, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “A Suggestion on the Negro Problem”

Myrdal, Gunnar (1898–1987)