Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Fall 2004
The book also had something to say about the purpose of social scientific research: it contained a cutting critique of the dominant view of social science of the time. As Leslie Dunbar said in “The Enduring American Dilemma,” an article written in 1983, “He [Myrdal] was against the view that was then weighty and authoritative in social science…that social problems had best be left alone to work themselves out and that intervention by government to direct or speed up the process is futile and productive of much harm. Myrdal argued the case for the possibility of change and for the necessity of conscious action in order to achieve it.”
Origins of the Study
The book that was ultimately published in 1944—over six years after
Carnegie Corporation president Fredrick Keppel invited Swedish economist
Gunnar Myrdal to “lead a comprehensive Study of the Negro in the
United States” —was not the one intended (Lagemann, The
Politics of Knowledge, p. 135). Instead of what the foundation had
planned as a limited study that would help guide Corporation grantmaking
beyond its historic involvement in black education in the South, Keppel
got a treatise that recast the very paradigm within which the Corporation
staff who were responsible for the idea were operating. The problem of
race, for Myrdal, was a moral issue, not just a matter of preventing racial
clashes or modernizing the South.
At the time, although Keppel and his advisors were aware that black-white relations were changing and needed a new kind of attention, they did not aim to end segregation or take on the economic and social conditions of blacks. But they did begin to see that social changes such as the migration to northern cities, the crisis of southern agriculture, the devastating effects of the Great Depression in the cities of the North and the South, and the rising militancy among blacks were making it increasingly necessary to move beyond the dominant philanthropic approach of the time: educating rural southern blacks within the context of segregation.
In 1935, Keppel’s adviser, Newton Baker, who had been mayor of Cleveland 1913-1916, and Secretary of War under Woodrow Wilson, questioned the foundation’s policy of using the funds it devoted to issues of race to support “Negro” schools in the South. He argued that more needed to be understood about race, which was no longer just a southern problem and that the Corporation should concern itself with the condition of blacks in northern cities (Jackson, Gunnar Myrdal and America’s Conscience, p.17). He suggested that a study was needed to help the Corporation decide how to spend its money in such as way to have the most impact on the black minority (Southern, p. 3).
While Baker spoke publicly against discrimination, he referred to blacks as an “infant race” and his views still reflected the fact that he was from a Confederate family in West Virginia. These inconsistencies demonstrate the dilemma Myrdal would write about. Keppel’s views were less overtly inconsistent on the issue of blacks, but he did not have a developed alternative to the reigning paradigm of the day (Lagemann, p. 132).
Black leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois had already questioned
the dominant approach to black education in the philanthropic community,
which was based on the assumption that blacks should be trained for agricultural
and industrial work. He complained that this technical training would
teach blacks “to be thought for, not to think; to be led, but not
to lead themselves” (Lagemann, p. 126). But within philanthropic
circles, the dominant focus remained rural education in the South, although
increasingly higher education was included.