Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Fall 2004
What Gave the Study Impact
The unique combination of Myrdal and Keppel made the project bolder and
better able to affect public policy than it otherwise would have been.
Keppel was an unusual foundation president: personally involved, operating
on intuition, he employed only a small staff and received many grant applicants
himself (Jackson, p. 14). Keppel sent Myrdal off on a two-month tour of
the South as soon as he arrived in the U.S., before he could do library
research and be influenced by “the experts.” While Keppel
had little knowledge of the social sciences, his instinct continued to
be to lay the groundwork for as fresh a view as possible. As Walter Jackson
points out, it was, paradoxically, because Carnegie Corporation had largely
ignored black issues that there would be few institutional checks and
obstacles to Myrdal’s intellectual freedom:
“The Swedish visitor would be able to chart a more liberal course on race relations because the Carnegie Corporation had no southern trustees, no elaborate educational programs that depended on the good will of southern white elites, and no staff specialists on Negro education whose watchword was caution” (Jackson, p. 35).
Myrdal felt no constraints about personally shaping the
study’s scope, nor did he feel that he had to pay great attention
to the original mission of providing the underpinning for foundation programs.
Once he returned from his first tour of the South he commented that he
found the situation more shocking than he expected and was overwhelmed
by how little he knew. But he wrote in his report that he would need to
redefine the scope of the study since “The American Negro as a social
problem is included in, and includes all other American social, economic
and political problems” (Lagemann, p. 138). While Keppel must have
worried that the mission was expanding, in the tradition of Andrew Carnegie,
he had invested in a “great man” and was willing to give him
the latitude he thought he deserved (Jackson, p. 13). Keppel later said
that he staked his reputation on the book.
In addition, after going to great lengths to find an “objective”
foreigner to do the work, Keppel inadvertently chose a social scientist
who did not believe in objective social science and who was deeply committed
to social engineering. Myrdal, as an outsider, was not beholden to the
American social science establishment with its commitment to value-free
social science. He did not need to submit to peer review. And it was Myrdal’s
very departure from an orthodoxy that made social scientists hesitant
to develop policy recommendations about race relations that would allow
the study to have impact beyond narrow academic circles.
Although Myrdal was given great freedom to go about his work as he saw
fit (and Keppel encouraged him to remain the sole author, even when he
had doubts about his abilities to accomplish the task) and he wrote the
text alone, he relied on the input of a broad range of collaborators—as
respondents to his original framework for the study and then as authors
of research memoranda.
Myrdal went to great lengths to include scholars from several disciplines,
both black and white. Using the lure of the Carnegie Corporation name
and the possibility of future funding from the foundation, he attracted
the best minds in the field. His collaborators were from all of the main
centers of research on race relations in America: the University of Chicago,
the University of North Carolina, Atlanta University, Yale’s Institute
of Human Behavior, Howard, Fisk and Columbia universities (Jackson, p.
109).