The prescience of Myrdal - Swedish economist and public servant Gunnar Myrdal

Public Interest, Summer, 1997 by Abigail Thernstrom, Stephan Thernstrom

An American Dilemma Gunnar Myrdal called the problem of race in his classic 1944 book, recently re-issued with a new introduction by Myrdal's daughter, Sissela Bok. "Dilemma" was, in fact, never quite the right word. Myrdal saw not a difficult choice between two unappealing alternatives but, rather, virtue derailed - a good people doing bad things, a country with a heart of gold in the grip of much evil.

Myrdal, a distinguished Swedish economist and public servant, had been invited by the Carnegie Corporation to study "The American Negro Problem." Traveling through the South and appalled by the racism he found, he nevertheless fell in love with the deeply racist country that he explored. He wasn't an apologist for American apartheid. He was, to the contrary, "shocked and scared to the bones by all the evils" he saw. But he believed that while racism was pervasive, America was not racist at its core.

Myrdal had arrived in the United States to begin work on the project (aided by a staff of American collaborators) in September, 1938. An American Dilemma was written in Princeton, New Jersey in 1941 and 1942, after a ten-month trip back to Sweden, whose response to nazism had been neutrality. Myrdal's dismay in discovering that his countrymen lacked the moral fiber of ordinary Americans - that democratic values were comparatively shallow and civil liberties compromised in his homeland - was the backdrop against which An American Dilemma was composed. As Walter A. Jackson's splendid biography of Myrdal makes clear, the war was the context in which his central argument took shape. Indeed, Myrdal viewed the book as his "war work": a celebration of the American commitment to individual dignity, equality, and inalienable rights.

In his first visit to America, in the years 1929 to 1930, Myrdal had been impressed with the degree to which schools and other institutions in "the most individualistic nation in the world" absorbed immigrants through a process of ideological indoctrination. Ten years later, he viewed that schooling in conformity to an American Creed as both an enviable bulwark against fascism and the foundation upon which a more racially just society would be built. How could Americans live with their high values and their (racist) selves without excruciating pain? he asked. "The moral pulse beats much more strongly in the American civilization" than in most of Europe, he had concluded in a small book that he co-authored with his wife while briefly at home in 1940 and 1941. The consequence was a country "continuously struggling for its soul," he wrote in An American Dilemma. "The American Negro problem" was thus a problem of the "heart."

Myrdal did Americans the honor of taking seriously their professed political values. The Negro problem was a moral issue over which even ordinary Americans brooded "in their thoughtful moments":

Even a poor and uneducated white person in some isolated and backward rural region in the Deep South, who is violently prejudiced against the Negro and intent upon depriving him of civic rights and human independence, has also a whole compartment in his valuation sphere housing the entire American Creed of liberty, equality, justice, and fair opportunity for everybody. He is actually also a good Christian and honestly devoted to the ideals of human brotherhood and the Golden Rule.

It was an extraordinarily rosy picture of white America in the early 1940s, and it was far from accurate. Myrdal depicted a painful conflict between American ideals and American racial practices, but more than 10 years before Brown v. Board of Education, most whites were not in much pain. Indeed, when asked in a 1944 survey whether "Negroes should have as good a chance as white people to get any kind of job," the majority of whites said that "white people should have the first chance at any kind of job." Blacks belonged at the back of the employment bus, most whites were convinced. Two years earlier, half of all northern whites had said they believed blacks to be less intelligent than whites, that they could not "learn things just as well if they [were] given the same education and training."

Myrdal's soothing rhetoric

Nevertheless, Myrdal could not have chosen a more politically astute way of framing the problem of racial subjugation in a country ostensibly committed to egalitarian ideals. He had the reassuring touch of a therapist, healing psychic wounds. And that therapeutic stance allowed him to expose what life was like for blacks - to recount the horrors - without condemning whites as born to be bad. He went out of his way, in fact, to call American racism simply an "imperfection," on the basis of which no person or culture should be solely judged. "Large groups of the American population probably live a more 'righteous' life, measured by whatever standard one chooses, than any large group of people anywhere else in the Western world," he concluded. Do not base "wider conclusions concerning the United States and its civilization" on the findings pertaining to "the American Negro problem," he warned.