Gunnar Myrdal and America's conscience: social engineering and racial liberalism, 1938-1987

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Myrdal's thesis with regard to relations in American society is examined conceptually to bring out its underlying normative assumptions concerning nature of social integration and of social change. An alternate interpretation of relations in American society is offered, based upon assumptions that are more structural and less normative in character. PARTICULARLY since 1954, almost all attempts to treat members of minorities according to universalistic standards of citizenship have met with a storm of opposition in southern states. While this opposition was not unexpected or unforeseen, prognosis for relations and for culture change more generally in South depends largely upon meaning ascribed to it. This paper comments on a view, advanced most cogently by Gunnar Myrdal in 19441, that opposition has its source in a value with respect to relations, in American society. Myrdal's thesis has become so well institutionalized among sociologists that its assumptions have never been systematically examined, to my knowledge. Attention rather has been centered on issues of methodology raised chiefly by Myrdal's repudiation of disinterested social science2 or on issues of substance lending themselves to statistical test: notably hypothesis of a differential rank order of discrimination between whites and nonwhites3; and hypothesis of discomfort in practice of racial segregation4. By contrast, this paper attempts a conceptual rather than empirical analysis of Myrdal hypothesis. first part examines assumptions which underlie Myrdal's concept of American culture as a dilemma with respect to relations. second examines assumptions of his dynamic analysis, and suggests an alternate way to interpret dynamics of relations in American society, given assumptions concerning social integration and social process different from those which he employed. AMERICAN CULTURE AS DILEMMA In making a comprehensive study of Negro in America, it was perhaps inevitable that Myrdal should have been struck by existence in American society of two irreconcilable sets of values, in respect to race and race relations. One set emphasized inherent equality of individuals in terms of their origins, and moral desirability of minimizing race as criterion for avoidance-acceptance relations. other set emphasized inherent superiority of one group over another, and moral desirability of maximizing race as criterion for avoidance-acceptance relations. Myrdal conceptualized relationship between these two sets of values in terms of generality-specificity. To first set, he ascribed authority of what he called American Creed, saying that it operated on the general plane ... where American thinks, talks, and acts under influence of high national and Christian pre* writer is indebted to Professor Samuel DuB. Cook, Atlanta University, and to Professor David Riesman, Harvard University, for helpful comments and suggestions. They are in no sense responsible, however, for views expressed here. I Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma (New York: Harper Bros. 1944), 2 vols. 2 See for example, G. Nettler, A Note on Myrdal's 'Notes onFacts and Valuations' ' , American Sociological Review, 9 (1944) pp. 686-8; C. C. Bowman, Polarities and Impairment of Science, American Sociological Review, 15 (1950) p. 482. 3 For example, L. M. Killian and C. M. Grigg, Orders of Discrimination of Negroes and Whites in a Southern City, Social Forces, 39 (March 1961), pp. 235-9; E. E. Edmunds, The Myrdalian Thesis: Rank Order of Discrimination, Phylon, 15 (1954), pp. 297-303. 4 See E. Q. Campbell, Moral Discomfort and Racial Segregation-An Examination of Myrdal Hypothesis, Social Forces 39 (March 1961), pp. 228-

Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938-1987: The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies.

Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938-1987.

Gunnar Myrdal and America's Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938-1987

Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938-1987

Seeking precedents for their struggle for equality, the feminists of the 1960s readily turned to the American civil rights movement. Simone de Beauvoir, the dedicatee of The Dialectic of Sex, had herself taken Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 study of “The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy,” The American Dilemma, as a model for The Second Sex, noting Myrdal’s own “very interesting analogies between Negroes’ and women’s status.”1 And, like their nineteenth century abolitionist predecessors, a number of the founders of Women’s Liberation had been anti-racist activists early in the 1960s, while Black Power offered an even more militant model at their end. As Shulamith Firestone writes: the issue of racism now stimulated the new feminism: the analogy between racism and sexism had to be made eventually. Once people had admitted and confronted their own racism, they could not deny the parallel. And if racism was expungeable, why not sexism?2

This chapter examines Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma as an expression of the shifting parameters and ultimate limitations of racial liberalism in the post-war United States. In framing the so-called ‘Negro problem’ as a pathology of white racial prejudice and behaviour, Myrdal challenged widely held precepts of ‘scientific’ and popular racism while skirting the degree to which racism was structurally and institutionally embedded in American politics and capitalism. An American Dilemma also calibrated its reform vision to the confines of the New Deal welfare state, which Myrdal recognized as itself the product of racial compromise and highly contingent ideas about the rights of social citizenship. Ironically, it was An American Dilemma’s politically appealing yet pragmatically circumscribed racial liberalism, which rested on access to political rights and economic opportunities as sanctioned by the American Creed, that overshadowed Myrdal’s own professed allegiance to a fuller vision of economic rights and planning as vehicles for reform. That broader economic reform project was left up to civil rights, and later, welfare rights activists who would make it a centrepiece of their organizing activities on behalf of racial democracy for decades to come.

ABSTRACTIn US intellectual and academic life, the 1940s and 1950s stand out as a period abounding with attempts to assay the characteristic and distinctive forms of ‘American culture’ and ‘American society,’ from Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma and the oft-noted ‘Tocqueville revival’ to works by Harold Laski, Max Lerner, David Riesman, C. L. R. James, the ‘consensus historians,’ and the early writers in the field of American Studies. Viewed as the culmination of a half-century span (roughly 1900–1950) of cultural nation-building, this rush of ‘American’ definitions at mid-century was shot through with politics – but in complex ways that are not adequately captured by the familiar recourse to Cold War anticommunism as the presumed ideological bedrock of the time. By treating this cultural nationalism as the outcome of an uneven and combined intellectual-historical process, we see how elusive (and illusory) the enterprise of designating ‘American’ traits actually was.

Thirty years after Lyndon Johnson declared a War on Poverty, the United States still lags behind most Western democracies in national welfare systems, lacking such basic programs as national health insurance and child care support. Some critics have explained the failure of social programs by citing our tradition of individual freedom and libertarian values, while others point to weaknesses within the working class. In The Color of Welfare, Jill Quadagno takes exception to these claims, placing race at the centre of the "American Dilemma," as Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal did half a century ago. The "American creed" of liberty, justice, and equality clashed with a history of active racial discrimination, says Quadagno. It is racism that has undermined the War on Poverty, and America must come to terms with this history if there is to be any hope of addressing welfare reform today. From Reconstruction to Lyndon Johnson and beyond, Quadagno reveals how American social policy has continually foundered on issues of race. Drawing on extensive primary research, Quadagno shows, for instance, how Roosevelt, in need of support from southern congressmen, excluded African Americans from the core programs of the Social Security Act. Turning to Lyndon Johnson's "unconditional war on poverty," she contends that though anti-poverty programs for job training, community action, health care, housing, and education have accomplished much, they have not been fully realized because they became inextricably intertwined with the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which triggered a white backlash. Job training programs, for instance, became affirmative action programs, programs to improve housing became programs to integrate housing, programs that began as community action to upgrade the quality of life in the cities were taken over by local civil rights groups. This shift of emphasis eventually alienated white, working-class Americans, who had some of the same needs--for health care, subsidized housing, and job training opportunities--but who got very little from these programs. At the same time, affirmative action clashed openly with organized labor, and equal housing raised protests from the white suburban middle-class, who didn't want their neighborhoods integrated. Quadagno shows that Nixon, who initially supported many of Johnson's programs, eventually caught on that the white middle class was disenchanted. He realized that his grand plan for welfare reform, the Family Assistance Plan, threatened to undermine wages in the South and alienate the Republican party's new constituency--white, southern Democrats--and therefore dropped it. In the 1960s, the United States embarked on a journey to resolve the "American dilemma." Yet instead of finally instituting full democratic rights for all its citizens, the policies enacted in that turbulent decade failed dismally. The Color of Welfare reveals the root cause of this failure--the inability to address racial inequality.

As two of the leading social scientists of the twentieth century, Alva and Gunnar Myrdal tried to establish a harmonious, “organic” Gemeinschaft [community] in order to fight an assumed disintegration of modern society. By means of functionalist architecture and by educating “sensible” citizens, disciplining bodies, and reorganizing social relationships they attempted to intervene in the lives of ordinary men. The paradox of this task was to modernize society in order to defend it against an “ambivalent modernity.” This combination of Weltanschauung [world view], social science, and technical devices became known as social engineering. The Myrdals started in the early 1930s with Sweden, and then chose the world as their working field. In 1938, Gunnar Myrdal was asked to solve the “negro problem” in the United States, and, in the 1970s, Alva Myrdal campaigned for the world's super powers to abolish all of their nuclear weapons. The Myrdals successfully established their own "modern American" marriage as a media image and role model for reform. Far from perfect, their marriage was disrupted by numerous conflicts, mirrored in thousands of private letters. This marital conflict propelled their urge for social reform by exposing the need for the elimination of irrational conflicts from everyday life. A just society, according to the Myrdals, would merge social expertise with everyday life, and ordinary men with the intellectually elite. Thomas Etzemüller's study of these two figures brings to light the roots of modern social engineering, providing insight for today's sociologists, historians, and political scholars.

These two volumes, An American Dilemma' by Dr. Gunnar Myrdal are perhaps the culminating achievement of classical scholarship on the subject of race relations. They bring to finest expression practically all the vacuous theories of race relations which are acceptable among the liberal intelligentsia and which explain race relations away from the social and economic order. The theories do this in spite of the verbal desire of the author to integrate his problem in the on-going social system. In the end the social system is exculpated, and the burden of the dilemma is poetically left inthe hearts of the American people, the esoteric reaches of which, obviously, may be plumbed only by the guardians of morals in our society. This critical examination, to be sure, is not intended to be a review of An American Dilemma. As a source of information and brilliant interpretation of information on race relations in the United States, it is unsurpassed. We are interested here only in the validity of the meanings which Myrdal derives from the broad movements of his data. The data are continually changing and becoming obsolescent; but if we understand their social determinants we can not only predict change but also influence it.

Focusing on one of the most significant studies of race in US history—Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944)—White Philanthropy argues that An American Dilemma should be remembered as a project with great dialogue and intent between its funder, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and its author, Gunnar Myrdal, and a project whose author largely delivered on the funder’s intentions. In the 1920s and 1930s, Carnegie Corporation—both as an institution rooted in Andrew Carnegie’s vision for international peace and under the leadership of President Frederick Keppel—was intent on helping white policymakers solidify a white Anglo-American world order. As White Philanthropy underscores, An American Dilemma was linked to The Poor White Problem in South Africa (1932) and An African Survey (1938) as part of Carnegie Corporation’s plan in the first half of the twentieth century to further solidify white Anglo-American rule and Black subjection across the Atlantic through its funding of comprehensive studies in the social sciences.

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

IN 1937 MINNIE L. STECKEL, SOCIOLOGIST AT THE ALL-WHITE ALABAMA COLLEGE for women in Montevallo, made the following observations: A consideration of how [poll tax] laws affect women indicates that in many circumstances they do result in limiting women, more than men, in meeting voting qualifications.... [E]specially during the depression, $1.50 poll tax paid for the husband to vote and also for the wife often meant just that much less food and clothing for the family. If such a family is mindful of the need for voting, in most cases the poll tax will be paid for the man, but not for the woman. Fourteen years later, Katharine Cater, the dean of women at Auburn, wrote: have women not taken better advantage of the vote for which they worked so diligently? There are a number of possible reasons, but one of the most obvious is the poll tax. The Alabama poll tax very clearly discriminates against women between the ages of 21 and 45. Veterans of World War I and World War II are exempt from paying the tax. This includes many men. But it leaves most women with a tax to pay, one of the worst features of which is the fact that it is cumulative. By 1958 Frederic D. Ogden, a University of Alabama political scientist who spent years studying the poll tax, reached the same conclusions. The poll tax, he wrote, tends to bear more harshly on women than men and analysis of the results of ... reduction of the cumulative feature in Alabama disclosed that more white women had been prevented from voting by the tax than either white men or Negroes. (1) Even though these observations make clear that earlier generations of scholars and women's activists identified forces that suppressed the white female vote in the South after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, the post-1920 disfranchisement of large numbers of southern white women has gone largely unnoticed and unexplained by recent historians and political scientists. (2) Scholarly discussions of the poll tax and the anti-poll tax campaigns have generally been placed within the context of the civil fights movement, where the focus is on race and/or class discrimination, not gender. (3) Why is it that we are aware of the ongoing struggle black women and men waged through the NAACP and other organizations to challenge black disfranchisement but know so little about the continuing fight for woman suffrage waged by the white women who campaigned to abolish the poll tax and reform election laws in order to make the Nineteenth Amendment a reality? The failure of scholars to address white female disfranchisement seems deserving of an explanation in and of itself. This essay examines how a growing understanding of the suppressive effects of the poll tax on southern white women voters inspired the Women's Division of the Democratic National Committee to pursue an anti-poll tax agenda at the national level and moved white women in Alabama to launch a state anti-poll tax campaign. These women's political activism was part of the continuing movement to enfranchise women, and their efforts were opposed by white male Democratic leaders. Yet the women's campaigns were also conducted in the midst of the in-depth studies of black disfranchisement and southern political systems that yielded such classic works as Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy and V. O. Key's Southern Politics in State and Nation. (4) These researchers, however, neglected issues concerning women and politics as they gathered data and feverishly wrote chapter drafts to meet impending deadlines. An examination of their methods illuminates the process that has maintained our ignorance of the history of women's political cultures. (5) What we have then are two stories: the first concerns the reality of white female disfranchisement in the South in the post-suffrage decades and women's relentless efforts to combat it at the state and national level; the second centers on the failure of political scientists to study the problem. …