The U.S. South and Europe: Transatlantic Relations in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

11. Gunnar Myrdal and Arthur Raper in the Jim Crow South

205 11 Gunnar Myrdal and Arthur Raper in the Jim Crow South Louis Mazzari A unique relationship between two social scientists, collaborating at the start of World War II, provides a view of a particular intersection between Europe and the American South during a time of great crisis and change in both—a relationship that developed substantial and lasting benefits for both, pushing a wedge into southern race relations at a time of ferment and offering lessons about the resiliency of American democracy to a gravely imperiled Europe and an uncertain postwar world. In the mid-1930s, race in America was so highly charged an issue that, when the Carnegie Corporation decided to fund an exhaustive analysis, it sought the most detached perspective it could find. Instead of going to New York or Chapel Hill or Tuskegee for its scholarship, Carnegie president Frederick Keppel sought the proverbial man from Mars, a social scientist from a nation with “no background or traditions of imperialism which might lessen the confidence of the Negroes in the United States as to the complete impartiality of the study and the validity of its findings.” The most knowledgeable American researchers would be enlisted, but the corporation looked for a director of research from a nation “of high intellectual and scholarly standards,” wrote Keppel—but a nation with no legacy of race conflict. “Under these limitations, the obvious places to look were Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries, and the search ended in the selection of Dr. Gunnar Myrdal, a scholar who had already achieved an international reputation as a social scientist and economist, a professor in the University of Stockholm, an economic adviser to the Swedish Government , and a member of the Swedish Senate.”1 206 Louis Mazzari Myrdal was one of the architects of the Swedish welfare state, proposing new policies concerning economic planning, women’s rights, birth control , child care, public housing, and agricultural modernization. He would go on to work on economic problems in the postwar reconstruction of Europe, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1974. In Myrdal, Carnegie had chosen someone known for his theoretical work in social planning and the application of research and the development of public policy. In the summer of 1937, when the corporation extended Myrdal its invitation to head the most comprehensive study of race ever conducted in America, it told him his research should be “undertaken in a wholly objective and dispassionate way as a social phenomenon.” Carnegie claimed the aim of objectivity, but it had hired a liberal progressive and a prominent and vocal critic of race-biology science in Sweden to study the racial caste system in the most tradition-bound region of the United States. And Myrdal took the South back to Sweden as proof of the durability of what he called the “American creed.” In Kontakt med Amerika, he intended to convince his own people of the resilience that accrued to the American “national conscience,” at a time when Sweden’s finely wrought democracy was being threatened by Nazism.2 “The secret,” he wrote, is that America, ahead of every other country in the whole Western world, large or small, has a living system of expressed ideals for human cooperation which is unified, stable, and clearly formulated . The political belief system is not simply as among us, latent, unpracticed principles which—in degrees of compromise—find expression in the nation’s laws and political order. Furthermore, the principles have been made conscious and articulate in all social levels. Every American has had them stamped in his consciousness. In America we referred to “the American Creed” . . . in our conversations with both the learned and unlearned. . . . A poor farmer in Minnesota, an ordinary immigrant in Chicago, a Negro school teacher in the South can all give a full, satisfactory account of the Constitutional civil rights and freedoms of the citizen. Each of these people knows what the Constitution is and he knows which parts of it are important to him personally.3 Published in 1941, with the Nazis looming, Kontakt med Amerika became a Swedish bestseller. Norwegians read it as a “resistance book,” writes Myrdal’s Gunnar Myrdal and Arthur Raper in the Jim Crow South 207 biographer, Walter A. Jackson, “prophesying the end of Nazi supremacy.” Myrdal became the country’s foremost authority on American society and politics. Europeans might see Americans as naïve, he wrote...