Senior Thesis | 2025
A Dilemma in Words: An Analysis of An American Dilemma Reviews from 1944 through 1964
Isabella Marland-Hall
Introduction.
In 1944, the Swedish economist and sociologist Gunnar Myrdal published An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy a landmark study of American race relations. Commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation, Myrdal’s work broke the mold of the American social science tradition.1 After five years, two trips to the American South, and the expenditure of roughly three hundred thousand dollars, Myrdal’s conclusions attracted much attention. Articulating what became known as the “moral dilemma thesis,” Myrdal distilled the analysis of the data that his contributors and colleagues had gathered into a compelling and controversial argument. “At the bottom of our problem,” the book asserted, “is the moral dilemma of the American–the conflict between his moral valuations on various levels of consciousness and generality.”
2 The tension between the actual inequality and prejudice prevalent in race relations and the “moral force,” or
1 W. E. B. DuBois and E. B. Reuter, “The American Dilemma,” Phylon 5, No. 2 (1944): 121.
2 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, Volume 1 (McGraw-Hill, 1964), Lxxi.
“American creed” of citizens caused profound discomfort.3 Unlike previous studies of race in the United States, but in line with the rhetoric of many in the black community, Myrdal focused on white attitudes and behavior.4 The “Negro problem,” he insisted, was mainly a white problem because white people constituted the majority. Myrdal’s study had to be “realistic about the actual power relations in American society.”5
Not surprisingly, An American Dilemma provoked widespread, sustained, and hotly debated reactions. In the twenty years after its publication, Myrdal’s study prompted reviews from just about every corner of American political and intellectual life. Unsurprisingly, yet meaningfully many of the assessments aligned closely with the political agendas of their authors. For example, the notorious white supremacist Senator Theodore Bilbo (D-MS) claimed that Myrdal did not understand the concepts of freedom, equality, and democracy in America.6 According to Bilbo, Myrdal “treats the Southerner’s fear of intermarriage as if it were emotional, silly, and unfounded.”7 Many of the reviews, however, revealed more complex reactions. Influenced by the historical moment the remnants of the Great Depression, the closing of
3 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, Volume 1, xxiii.
4 Walter A. Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience: Social Engineering and Racial Liberalism, 1938-1987 (The University of North Carolina Press 1990), 245.
5 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, Volume 1, Lxxv-Lxxvi.
6 Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 252.
7 Theodore G Bilbo, Take your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization (Poplarville, Miss.: Dream House Publishing Company, 1947), pp. 170-72. Quoted in Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 252.
WWII, and civil rights the primarily positive receptions of the study came in two forms: those who saw it breaking the social science tradition and those who praised the moral dilemma thesis that turned blame onto white thought. At the same time, An American Dilemma prompted skeptical, negative reception from both the Left and the Right, and from Black and white reviewers.
To map the discourse this study has raised in the decades since published, this paper utilizes examples from Black intellectuals, white segregationists, white Southern liberals, Black sociologists, and leftists. The study did not only attract attention when released but has retained it for the eighty years since; this paper will also cover 21st-century developments around the Myrdal study and how it is vital to continually reevaluate past conclusions. Both those who critiqued the study for its methodological flaws and those who agreed with its conclusions help to illuminate key societal trends. Today, Gunnar Myrdal’s work in An American Dilemma is eclipsed by the importance of discourse it influenced and what that reveals about the contemporary academic and political values of the reviewer. The study represented a turn in the tide of the American Social Science tradition, but with its optimism, white audience, and lack of attention to the actual Black population and simultaneous efforts for racial equality, it may have been on the path to reinforcing existing power structures without the circulation of reviews discussed later in this paper. Gunnar Myrdal’s work in An American Dilemma will last in its influencing progressive change, not merely through the content of the book but in the conversations and opinions it influenced.
One of the most affirming statements of approval for academic work is widespread citation; within a year of its publication, other scholars and news sources not only reviewed it but cited it extensively. For example, the New York News used An American Dilemma in an article that reported on the cruel discrimination that Black people faced in the North and South: concluding that something had to change in white Americans in order to address the wrong.8 Perhaps the most controversial citation of An American Dilemma came in footnote 11 of the US Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education that ruled school desegregation unconstitutional. While the Court used Myrdal’s work to provide context for its decision, it was by no means pivotal for the decision according to Chief Justice Warren and his colleagues. Many involved in the landmark case were surprised at the specific and negative attention that Myrdal’s footnote received. Jon G. Crawford and Linda J. O'Neill argue in “A Mere Footnote?” that the study’s reception was “vilified as socialist propaganda and caricatured as an overreaching legal argument in disguise, An American Dilemma is a marker for a national work in progress.”9
In this way, the reception of Myrdal’s study presented in this paper showcases the political and social values of their moment.
8 Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 242.
9 Jon G. Crawford and Linda J. O’Neill, “A Mere Footnote? ‘An American Dilemma’ and Supreme Court School Desegregation Jurisprudence,” Peabody Journal of Education 86, no. 5 (2011), http://www.jstor.org/stable/23120511 (524).
Black Academics and Writers.
In his Postscript of the twentieth-anniversary edition of An American Dilemma reflecting on the accuracy of the 1944 study, white northern liberal Arnold Marshall Rose wrote that positive “changes have occurred at a considerably more rapid rate than was generally anticipated at the time.”10 Rose lists the factors of the steep progress he has seen between 1944 and 1962, one of which is the “organization and political education of minority groups.”11 In this sentence, Arnold Rose acknowledges the role that magazines like Phylon and The Crisis played in circulating ideas about civil rights and the discussion of integrationist ideas that many of these reviews contributed to. Some of the following reviews were a part of this social and political conversation.
Seeing it as a possible catalyst or facilitator of progress, many reviewers emphasized the timeliness of the extensive study. The novelist J. Saunders Redding anticipated the volume could capitalize on the “time of momentous redefinition and change” that he diagnosed.12 In his 1944 review of An American Dilemma in the New Republic, Redding saw a growing standoff between the North and the South on the issue of civil rights for Black Americans. Similarly, Life magazine released an editorial in 1944 that identified conflict over race relations as the primary societal
10 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, Volume 1, xxvii.
11 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, Volume 1, xxviii.
12 J. Saunders Redding, “The Negro: America’s Dilemma.” New Republic, March 20, 1944. Quoted in Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 244.
problem of the time.13 During this time, education and coverage of the issue capitalized on the liberal consensus; even the division over equal rights for all citizens did not upset the seat of liberal power in the government and the general acceptance of many liberal policies like the New Deal.
In his 1944 review for Phylon in 1944, W. E. B. DuBois applauded many of those same achievements, but focused on the study’s innovative method: “He does not attempt to be “scientific”[...] the sociology of Myrdal emancipates itself from physical and biological and psychological analogies, and openly and frankly takes into account emotions, thoughts, opinions and ideals.”14 This assessment was significant because of the widespread belief in a scientific explanation for race that defined and codified a hierarchy with Anglo-Saxon at its top. DuBois emphasizes the damaging impact of racist biological ideas in social science methodology; he stressed how detrimental it had been in manipulating the rationalization of enslavement and justifying the “congenital inferiority” of black people through the nineteenth and early twentieth century.15
Many positive reviewers of An American Dilemma specifically praised Myrdal’s attention to the psychology and negative effects of discrimination on African Americans. Author and playwright Richard Wright commended this specifically; he even called for a work that would investigate the “inner personality, the subjective
13 Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 244.
14 DuBois and Reuter, “The American Dilemma,” 122.
15 DuBois and Reuter, “The American Dilemma,” 114-124.
landscape of the Negro” like Myrdal’s social study analyzed external society.16 In his book Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, Walter A. Jackson suggests that it was Wright’s autobiography Black Boy that effectually filled this void a year later in 1945: it quickly made it to number one on the bestseller list, and many white readers were shocked to see what white Americans had done to Black people.17 Wright was communist for a time, anti-colonial, and a proponent of Black activism, but pertinent to this discussion, he was critical of the poverty and alienation that became synonymous with the Black urban experience in his eyes. Wright was influenced by American sociologist Horace R. Cayton Jr. who devoted his career to the study of the metropolitan working-class Black experience.1819 Wright commended Myrdal’s work in the introduction he wrote to Cayton’s Black Metropolis which demonstrates how the two were of one mind on the matter of the importance of the study for furthering their reimagination of urban societies.20 Like Wright and Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, who will be discussed further in the paper, Cayton praised Myrdal’s assessment that the economic standing of African Americans in the late thirties and early forties
16 Micheal Fabre, The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (New York: William Morrow, 1973), p. 586. Quoted in Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, in Jackson 247.
17 Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 247.
18 Maria Quintana, “Richard Wright (1908-1960),” Black Past, June 9, 2020, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/wright-richard-1908-1960/.
19 Ed Diaz, “Horace Roscoe Cayton, Jr. (1903-1970) ,” Black Past, July 29, 2024, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/cayton-jr-horaceroscoe-1903-1970/.
20 Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 247.
was “pathological.”21 Each of these reviewers valued the study’s coverage of the economic issue for they believed that its uncovering would be necessary to finally enact the change they desired.
Historian and professor Lawrence D. Reddick posed a few critiques of the book even though he commended Myrdal’s work; these comments are the summation of three reviews for three different journals, all published in 1944. The first of these critiques that stands out was that he thought it was pessimistic of Myrdal to doubt the possibility of working-class Black and white workers coming together in a united movement for better conditions.22 The second might be understood in the context that Reddick was the first biographer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.23 King in his later years spent time focusing on integrated working-class unions like that of sanitation workers in Tennessee; this work preceded both Reddick’s review and An American Dilemma, but the correlation is there, that perhaps people with a better understanding of these relations had the hope and foresight to believe in integrated, lowerclass organization. The second was his reproaching of the way the study treated African American history and culture. This critique would be advanced by many reviewers in subsequent years, as touched upon in the ‘Black Sociologists’ section to come. Myrdal
21 Horace Cayton, “Fear and Hunger in Black America,” Chicago Sun, March 14, 1945. Quoted in Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 247 22 Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 248. 23 Eric Pace, “Lawrence Reddick, 85, Historian and Writer,” The New York Times, August 16, 1995, https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/16/obituaries/lawrence-reddick-85-historianand-writer.html.
glosses over and generalizes about the Black American population, part of what contributes to the alienation Ralph Ellison identified of Myrdal’s Black readership.
In his 1964 book Shadow and Act, Ralph Ellison published a review of Gunnar Myrdal’s book that he had written twenty years prior, at the time of its release. Ellison advances a couple of very powerful critiques of institution-funded social science studies, Myrdal’s stylistic method, and how it alienates African American readership. First, however, he offers two commendations one of the book’s dismissal of the “vicious non-scientific nonsense that has cluttered our sociological literature,” and of “its demonstration of how the mechanism of prejudice operated to disguise the moral conflict in the minds of whites produced by the clash on the social level between the American Creed and anti-Negro practices.” The second comment focuses on the moral dilemma thesis that many of the positive reviews touched upon, yet the first is similar to DuBois’ loudest praise that the study disrupted the trend in American Social Science. This being said Ellison highlights a way in which this study did in no way break from those that came before it: the study is “the profit motive of the Right–clothed it is true in a guilt-dress of philanthropy,” whether it has “proven more resourceful, imaginative and aware of its own best interests than the overcautious socialism of the Left.”24 This discussion of Ellison will be continued in the ‘Leftists’ section.
24 Ralph Ellison, “An American Dilemma: A Review,” in Shadow and Act (Vintage, 1964), 304-312.
Segregationists.
Returning to the citation of Myrdal’s An American Dilemma in the Brown case was not only a celebrated mention but a critiqued one as well. An attempt to subvert the desegregation-favoring outcome appears as an anonymous letter to the Evening Star newspaper published in their October 28, 1955 issue wherein the author attacks the un-American book on multiple fronts. This letter levels different arguments against Myrdal, his colleagues, and effectively, the Brown decision as well. It alienates Myrdal from America by prominently displaying his Swedish nationality and has no reason to be in the country without the Carnegie Foundation bringing him. It concludes, “I do not feel that I am the proper person to criticize the court decision on segregation, but I would like to ask any eligible voter why he or she should not be told the character of the authorities upon which it was based.”25 While not a review of the study in its own right, this opinion leverages information about the study in an unfavorable light to achieve doubt in the Supreme Court’s decision to desegregate. One primary use of the letter, however, is its showcasing of Georgia Democrat Senator James Eastland’s portrayal of the work in a speech; he quotes parts of the book that critique the U.S. Constitution and ties sixteen of Myrdal’s contributors to communism in some way or another. Eastland was a plantation owner, exploiter of Black labor, a segregationist, and a signer of the 1956 Southern Manifesto which promised opposition to school desegregation in the wake of the
25 Anonymous, “Frank Statement,” Evening Star, October 28, 1955.
Brown decision in 1954.26 In the context of the Cold War and the McCarthy-led witch hunt for communists and sympathizers, Eastland attempted to add fat to the fire and seed serious doubt in the credibility of the study and its reliability to be cited by the Supreme Court because it was just another angle for him to undermine desegregation.
A brief 1959 report from the same paper, Washington D.C.’s Evening Star, tells how a segregationist group has placed the Myrdal study on a list of “undesirable” reads along with “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “Ole Man Adam.”27 They tried to limit access to the book in order to further their social and political agenda. Though much less veiled, this example of a segregationist interaction with the text shows how some people will try to attach negative connotations to something because they think it will interview with their wishes; this is not very different from the previous example where the study’s authors were vilified for being communist-adjacent.
A couple of reviewers from 1944 found fault with Myrdal’s moral dilemma thesis on the basis of maintaining the practice of segregation in the South: William Terry Couch and Maurice Davie. Davie argued that Myrdal had “overstress[ed] rationalism and moralism” in the study to the point that the conclusions were not
26 “James Eastland: A Featured Biography,” U.S. Senate: James Eastland: A Featured Biography, August 9, 2023, https://www.senate.gov/senators/FeaturedBios/Featured_Bio_EastlandJames.ht m.
27 “Segregationist Group Attacks ‘Anne Frank’.” Evening Star, May 26, 1959.
sound.28 Walter A. Jackson credits this claim to Davie’s unignorable racial prejudice. Earlier in his career, he had advocated for the all-out exclusion of immigration from Africa and the West Indies for the sole purpose of not introducing more Black people into the American population. He did not believe in integration because he thought assimilation was not plausible, and he said the nation would be better off if it were the white man’s.29 Similarly, Couch turned to attack Myrdal’s understanding of the American creed by, like Senator Bilbo, undermining Myrdal’s understanding of the values championed in the founding of America: Myrdal had committed a “gross misapprehension of what such ideas as equality, freedom, democracy, human rights have meant, and of what they can be made to mean.”30 Both men were in this case opposing Myrdal’s conclusions to bring about and protect their ideals of separate societies and power structures on the basis of race, but Couch can also be identified as one of the most disapproving Southern Liberal reviewers of Myrdal’s book.
White Southern Liberals of the 1940s.
Another demographic that chose to critique An American Dilemma were white southern liberals who made steps to ameliorate the unjust race relations in the Southern U.S. but could not politically put desegregation at the forefront of their public political agenda.
28 Maurice Davie, review of An American Dilemma in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 233 (May 1944): 253-254. Quoted in Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 256.
29 Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 255.
30 Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 114.
This demographic differs from the segregationists and white supremacists covered above as they sought to achieve civil and economic rights for Black people in gradual steps. John Temple Graves II gives an example of a review that imparts a unique stance on the Southern race relations issue. Son of southern newspaper man and lynch mom supporter John Temple Graves Sr., Graves agreed with some of the moral claims that Myrdal put forward, but he was a staunch segregationist.31 In a review for his column in the Birmingham Age-Herald, he maintained that equality between white and Black people could be achieved, so long as there was little to no integration saying that “economic opportunity and equality before the law” only “if it were settled that the things having to do with segregation were not to be altered.”
32 In the time shortly after the publication of the study, many Southerners chose to ignore the book altogether, with very few publishing reviews in regional newspapers.
President of the American Sociological Association, Southern Liberal, and one of the most prominent social scientists of the South, Howard W. Odum published his skeptical opinion of the study in the October 1944 issue of Social Forces. Once pared down, his review agrees with Myrdal’s claim that problematic race relations are a moral problem, but he thought this argument was far too narrow and misrepresented the historical contexts of the
31 Andy Ambrose, “John Temple Graves and the Southern Race Problem ,” Atlanta History Center, July 13, 2023, https://www.atlantahistorycenter.com/blog/john-temple-graves-and-thesouthern-race-problem/.
32 Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 250.
problem. Odum diagnosed the first problem as “moral isolationism” on Myrdal's part; in Odum’s eyes An American Dilemma did not properly explore how racial inequality in America interacted with additional economic and social problems.33 Odum did not care for the way the study washed over the prior works of the Southern liberals, not including any of his own works of his colleagues in the study’s materials. He particularly did not like how Myrdal was skeptical of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, an organization of liberal thinkers in the South who were working on the integration of the South, as the Sweed’s portrayal of them was not nearly as progressive as they were in reality.
34
Further, the first of many on the same basis, Odum critiqued Myrdal’s grasp on the cultural and political contributions of both Blacks and whites: specifically before the war and during Reconstruction. He was one of the first to publish a review that called out Myrdal’s shallow understanding of Black culture and the social and economic context of the American South. In addition to excluding himself and many other southern liberal intellectuals from the study, Odum saw a disregard for the work done in the South by Blacks and whites prior to WWII.35 He wrote, “Nowhere does he sense the contribution of our great historians, and nowhere
33 Howard W. Odum, “Problem and Method in An American Dilemma,” Social Forces 23 (October 1944): 94-98. Quoted in Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 250.
34 Morton Sosna, In Search of the Silent South: Southern Liberals and the Race Issue (University Press, 1977), 113.
35 Sosna, In Search of the Silent South), 113-114.
is there hardly a mention of the cultural, organic, and evolutionary tragedy of reconstruction.”36 Odum did not believe Myrdal’s path to equality to be viable in the South because of the delicate balance of society and economy he had seen his whole life; as a forties Southern liberal he and his colleagues sought to bring about a southern society of equal opportunity for whites and Blacks, but it would take time and could not be solved by Myrdal who did not have the grasp on southern history that informed the liberals in the South to approach the race relations problem tactfully.37 The North, South divide in liberal reviews of An American Dilemma is an interesting one, and the difference cannot be so simply attributed to southern racism but rather a context that was not shared north of the Mississippi where the book was an instant classic.38 Black Sociologists.
Many commentators championed the unprecedented study that had dramatically stepped away from the framework that they saw as inhibiting the progress of social science during the twentieth century as DuBois had. Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier wrote two reviews in 1944 and 1945, each for a different platform and the audiences that accompanied them. In the American Journal of Sociology, Frazier particularly praised the way that Myrdal challenged the trend toward fatalism in the field of race relations, using this platform to comment on how Myrdal challenged
36 Odum Papers, January 28, 1944 as quoted in Sosna, In Search of the Silent South, 113.
37 Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 250.
38 Sosna, In Search of the Silent South, 115.
American Social Sciences as they were. Then in the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, he wrote primarily to praise Myrdal's analysis of the harms of racial oppression on the lives and psychologies of African Americans in the South; he thought it important to commend this aspect of the book because it was a new angle to hear from a white author in a major study. He gave special attention to Myrdal’s objectivity which kept his work, according to Frazier, far from the patronizing or disdainful air in other white authorship on race relations.39
Myrdal may have brought attention to the detrimental psychological effects of degrading race relations, but he did not do so most accurately or attentively. There was a strong sentiment of being unimpressed with Myrdal’s incorrect characterization that African Americans can be generalized with sameness assumed, this understandably continued in the subsequent decades. In 1953 initially for The Crisis, then the St. Paul Recorder, Sociologist Wilson Record critiqued Myrdal’s tendency to group people into the term “Negro Intellectual” only to make generalizations that would turn out to be contradictory. The instance that Record points to is Myrdal’s deploring the “deep cynicism and the chronic defeatism he observed among Negro intellectuals,” and at the same time he applauded how members of the group became the “founders and leaders of numerous movements whose aims were a redressing of the racial balance in this country.” Record concluded that Myrdal “[failed] to operate with any precise conception of the Negro intellectual,” which rendered his statements on the subject
39 Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 246.
in An American Dilemma inconsequential.40 This inadequacy of Myrdal’s study to recognize and accurately represent the obvious diversity of the Black American population that Record identifies here was reflected in several reviews, Ralph Ellison wrote that this contributed to the alienation of the Black An American Dilemma audience. Leftists.
Oliver C. Cox’s 1945 review An American Dilemma: A Mystical Approach to the Study of Race Relations for The Journal of Negor Education was, according to author Maribel Morey, ahead of its time by “acknowledging An American Dilemma’s complicity in white domination.”41 According to Jackson, the Marxist sociologist was the only strongly critical review by a Black author early on.42 Cox saw in the study evidence of his beliefs but argued that Myrdal would turn to “mystical” conclusions based on feelings and poor word choice. Myrdal chose to use the word ‘Caste’ over ‘Race,’ in describing the race relations conflict; he likened the antebellum slave society to the Hindu caste social system, which
40 Wilson Record, “Negro Intellectual Has Played Important Part In Fight For Rights (In The Crisis Magazine for June-July),” St. Paul Recorder, August 28, 1953.
41 Latif A. Tarik, “Book Reviews, Maribel Morey, White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s ‘An American Dilemma’ and the Making of a White World Order.,” The Journal of African American History 108, no. 4 (September 1, 2023): 730–32, https://doi.org/10.1086/726561.
42 Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, 248.
Cox found grossly inappropriate.43 Cox believed that racial prejudice was not the learned feeling that Myrdal believed could be untaught, but instead “an attitude designedly built up among the masses by an exploiting class, using acceptable rationalizations derogatory to the Negro race, so that the exploitation of the latter's labor power might be justified.”44 For Cox, the conclusions of the Mydal study were ‘mystical’ in the way that the conclusions put forward did not align with the evidence used; the prior quote from Cox’s review was taken in the context of a historical passage which supports his views, only to be improperly presented by Myrdal. So soon after the release of the study, this was not a readily supported view, but it would grow and evolve over time.45
Returning to Ralph Ellison’s Shadow and Act, the novelist was another early reviewer to question the long-term utilization of a comprehensive study like An American Dilemma. Myrdal saw the commission by the Carnegie Foundation as a “new demonstration of the moral concern” of society, but Ellison predicted there were less than progressive motivations behind and applications of Myrdal’s work.46
43 Oliver C. Cox, “An American Dilemma: A Mystical Approach to the Study of Race Relations,” The Journal of Negro Education 14, no. 2 (1945): 132–48, https://doi.org/10.2307/2292464, 134.
44 Cox, “An American Dilemma: A Mystical Approach to the Study of Race Relations,” 144.
45 Tarik, “Book Reviews, Maribel Morey, White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s ‘An American Dilemma’ and the Making of a White World Order.”
46 Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma, Volume 1, xxiv-xxv.
An American Dilemma is the blueprint for a more effective exploitation of the South’s natural, industrial and human resources. We use ‘exploitation’ in both the positive and negative sense. In the positive sense, it is the key to a more democratic and fruitful usage of the South’s natural and human resources; and in the negative, it is the plan for a more efficient and subtle manipulation of the black and white relations especially in the South.47
Ellison attributes this possible outcome to the stylistic choices Myrdal made in the book. He builds to the point that Myrdal is not acknowledging class struggle at all in his interrogation of the causes of discrimination; he writes “All of this, of course, avoids the question of power and the question of who manipulates that power.” This stylistic choice aids the ‘manipulation of the Black and white relations’ that Ellison suspects the study to be applied to; especially in the demonization of the political South and the vindication of the North.48
In 2021, Maribel Morey wrote the book White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation's An American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order, rethinking the motivations behind the corporation-funded study. Latif A. Tarik wrote a review of the book for the Journal of African American History, which offers a synopsis of the main claim that the study was intended by the Carnegie Corporation to aid white supremacy at home and abroad.
47 Ralph Ellison, “An American Dilemma: A Review,” 304.
48 Ralph Ellison, “An American Dilemma: A Review,” 303-317.
It is difficult to discern the motivations of company president Frederick Paul Keppel and the other Carnegie decision-makers when they commissioned Mrydal’s study, yet the research and conclusions that were included in An American Dilemma could certainly be utilized by those for equality and those against it. Twenty years later Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote The Negro Family: The Case for National Action as acting Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon B. Johnson.49 This sociological study made a cultural argument about impoverished urban Black families and was written for an audience of politicians.50 For a time it was cited in many policies that turned out to destabilize impoverished Black families in the end. An example of this is the welfare policy where only one parent could live in the household to receive the check. Retrospective analyses like these are informed by the information learned since the time of publishing; post colonial studies have gained a lot of ground in recent decades and provide useful lenses to consider race relations in America. It follows that Morey’s review, as reported by Tarik, is highly critical but in a new direction that is unique to its being published in 2021 when compared to other reviews discussed in this paper. It brings attention from the content of the work to context, and this displays how as time passes, these sociological studies ought to remain in focus and reassessed.
49 Daniel Geary, “The Moynihan Report: An Annotated Edition,” The Atlantic, September 14, 2014.
50 “Explaining the ‘Moynihan Report,’” PBS American masters, March 29, 2024, https://www.pbs.org/video/explaining-the-moynihan-report-43oqki/.
Importantly Morey’s reevaluation of the study for the twenty-first century opens this discussion to further context behind the conception of the study. Beginning in the early to mid-1900s, elite and educated circles in America were taking an interest in racial tensions.51 These thinkers embraced racial liberalism, the belief that the government, courts, and other large bodies should play a part in bringing about equality.52 The businesses and corporations of millionaires have been acting philanthropically throughout the 20th century but have not always dealt directly with social issues. The Carnegie Corporation and others like it contributed to Black colleges and universities, giving grants towards Black history and art, and to civil rights groups beginning in the 1920s, but An American Dilemma became a departure from the norm.53 In the forward Keppel wrote for the study, he gave grounds for the “ involvement of a foundation with contemporary social issues,” when writing that as long as impartiality is upheld by letting “the facts available and then let them speak for themselves,” then “the foundation limits itself to its proper function,” and the study is useful.54
51 Bruce J. Schulman, Making the American Century: Essays on the Political Culture of Twentieth Century America (New York, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 228.
52 Schulman, Making the American Century, 229.
53 Waldemar A. Nielsen, The Big Foundations (New York, New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 351-352.
54 Nielsen, The Big Foundations, 39-40.
Conclusions.
Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma was an astounding effort that would forever alter the sociology discipline and deeply challenge popular thought held by America’s white population on the problematic race relations of the era. It is a complex book; it would be erroneous and far too simplistic to claim that every dissenter did so because of their prejudiced ideals, or that every person who agreed with the study found it to be flawless. The reviews explored in this paper are multifaceted and raise a variety of interesting points, when placed together they depict the need for the practices of historiography and reevaluation of sociological works. As shown in the Maribel Morey review, discussion over this social science study and others continue to be relevant today, especially in the context of newly developed scholarship on race relations.
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