Gunnar Myrdal’s a lot More Complicated than You Think

Recently, History News Network published an excerpt from a widely- and well-reviewed book The Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation, written by journalists Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff and published by Knopf in 2006 for a general educated readership. Leaving aside the perhaps unconscious link to The Birth of a Nation in the subtitle, I was astonished by the excerpted first chapter, which is devoted solely to the seminal contribution of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (1944). The authors allege that the book that the Myrdals wrote in response to Swedish censorship of anti-Nazi newspapers, Kontakt Med Amerika (Contact With America), not only “crystallized” Myrdal’s “understanding of [American] race relations, but “seed[ed]” what was to become the book that awakened America to the real condition of Negroes. The authors then summarized the contents of the seed: “In Kontact, published in 1941, the Myrdals [Gunnar and Alva] argued that Swedes had much to learn from America about democracy, dialogue, and self-criticism. ‘The secret,’ they 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 Carnegie project, they added, was evidence of America’s willingness to sanction a sweeping examination and discussion of a national problem." (p.4, my emphasis.)

Note that the famous American Creed, as formulated in this opening chapter, is described in the language of a healthy, functioning national organism, and it implicitly endorses the ideal of consensus, not civil liberties, especially including the rights of the dissenting individual and the development of the individual human personality, which some would claim as the major contribution of the eighteenth-century liberalism that was the ostensible source of the “civil rights struggle” celebrated throughout The Race Beat.

There are other ironies: Gunnar Myrdal’s book was heavily dependent on his chief assistant, Ralph Bunche, who was probably the source of the notion of an overarching American Creed, and there is no doubt that Bunche was referring to the libertarian ideals of radical puritans and eighteenth-century deists, ideals that were as yet unrealized, but that were to be finally attained through materialist analysis of institutions and unified class action by cooperating black and white workers in industrial unions. At least that is what he wrote in his 3000 pages of memoranda to Myrdal.

In fact, Myrdal appropriated many of Bunche’s ideas, and where he diverged from Bunche’s implicit evocation of the gradualist Second International or of A. Philip Randolph, he simply attacked Bunche and his “economic determinist” cohort at Howard University where Bunche had been the chair of the Political Science Department. In advancing instead his theory of “cumulative causation” Myrdal was agreeing with upper-class white liberals that interracial understanding and attitude change through propaganda could solve the problem of Negro poverty. Such a strategy, denounced constantly by Bunche in his memoranda, was of course agreeable to the white liberals who controlled the Carnegie Corporation, massive funders of a study that could never have achieved its goals in the time allotted.

However, solving the problem of Negro poverty was not the mission of the Carnegie-Myrdal study, at least not in the materials I have exhaustively examined in the Bunche Papers at UCLA Special Collections. As I demonstrated in a published work “Race, Class, or Caste? The Bunche-Myrdal Dispute Over An American Dilemma,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, Vol. 14, No.3 (Spring 2001): 465-511, the Carnegie Corporation, along with other progressive or “socially responsible” capitalists, was interested in averting race riots and/or revolution. Bunche was frequently urged by both Carnegie officials and by Myrdal to identify those Negro betterment organizations that were Communist fronts or, if not Communist-dominated, then disruptively militant in other ways. Indeed, Myrdal himself made his purpose very clear in AD (pp.519-520). If hidebound Southern conservatives did not follow the example of European conservative reformers, they would face a revolutionary mob. Bunche became the red/black specter who haunts the pages of Myrdal’s book. Readers generally leave this part of AD out, with the exception of one or two leftists who notice such characteristic tics from right-wing social democrats of the Myrdal ilk. As I wrote in my article, “While apparently appealing to the “American Creed,” Myrdal was warning laissez-faire anti-New Dealers that without some statist reform, race riots in America would ensue after demobilization, redundant black unskilled labor would burden the state with demands for welfare, and colored peoples of the world would support anti-American, anti-Western powers as war continued to spread." (p. 485)

There is a great deal at stake in the general distortion of the origins and social purpose of An American Dilemma (and by no means confined to this particular book, The Race Beat). I will mention only two. First, students and scholars generally do not make critical distinctions between left-wing social democrats and right-wing social democrats. The dispute between Bunche and Myrdal over analytic methodology delineates that critical distinction.

Second, underlying their sub rosa quarrel was a sharply differing understanding of fascism and Nazism, not only their structural characteristics, but how the dictators had come to power, for instance in Myrdal’s emphasis on racist propaganda, ignoring structural similarities between Western countries responding to the crisis of the 1930s. By contrast, in Bunche’s speeches promoting American resistance to Hitler, delivered throughout 1941, Bunche emphasized not only the destruction of independent worker organizations, but the statism that forcibly reconciled conflicting interests of capital and labor, to the detriment of both interests.

A word should be said about the sources. The Bunche memoranda have been microfilmed and are widely available, but UCLA Special Collections has materials that are unique and to my knowledge not replicated. Bunche’s memoranda were sent to Myrdal in paperback booklets, and have marginalia that were almost certainly written by Myrdal in pencil. These are indicated in my article and are important. Also, there is a crucial, and to me, a shocking group of letters from Myrdal to Bunche that I have found only in the Brian Urquhart collection of materials related to his Bunche biography, and these are excerpted also in my article, and only there. They may illuminate not only Myrdal’s flailing around during the composition of AD, but his willingness to wield the iron fist beneath the velvet glove of Swedish Social Democracy.

[From my article of 2001: Bunche was now employed at a high level in the Roosevelt administration:] “A few months later, Bunche was hired by a ‘top-secret operation’ working on ‘facts and figures on war-time propaganda & information’ under the aegis of William Donovan and Archibald MacLeish, and set in motion before Pearl Harbor. While composing his final draft for An American Dilemma, Myrdal wrote to his former collaborator with pleas for assistance, compliments, a pregnant query, and the suggestion that Bunche still needed his good-will. In his letter of 11 August 1941, an anxious Myrdal wrote, “You understand that I am very eager not to say desperately in need of your help.” He began his letter of 14 January 1942 with the news that he had started his chapter on Politics:

“…and I have been preparing myself by going over your magnificent opus which is really too big to digest properly. I am planning a maximum of thirty or forty pages, and will be able only to try to skim the cream of the cream of your bulky knowledge.
….Did [George] Streator write up anything for you on communism and radicalism in the Negro group? If so, please send me that . Can you give me any other references?
…I was much amused some weeks ago when I had to answer a personal inquiry about you from the Congressional Library, where, I understand, you have an “uppity” job at present, particularly because I had to reassure them in their beliefs of your being a loyal American.”

[continuing the quotation from my article:] “A subsequent letter, 28 January 1942, expressed the desire to please his collaborator; referring to the Politics chapter, Myrdal stated, “I hope you will be satisfied with it when it is ready.” Another letter to Bunche, 5 May 1942, suggested that the Ideologies memo should be published. ‘I have had good use of your memoranda. Some are bulky and you don’t have time to organize them, but there is a lot of stuff in them….’” [end of excerpt from my article, p.491]

One would never know from these supportive communications that Myrdal was about to stigmatize Bunche’s “economic determinism” throughout his great book, going so far as to claim that the “academic radicalism of Negro intellectuals” played into the hands of “the type of liberal but skeptical laissez-faire do-nothing opinion so prevalent among white sociologists writing on the Negro problem. …Both groups assume that the economic factor is basic” (AD p. 1398, n.13). If Bunche ever resented Myrdal’s genteel backstabbing, he never mentioned it in materials made available to researchers in the Bunche Papers at UCLA (the letters from Bunche to his wife are sealed). What I hope to have made clear in transmitting these primary sources is that there could not have been an epiphany in Sweden that accounts for Myrdal’s contribution to American race relations, and that, in any case, it is inexcusable for Roberts and Klibanoff to have papered over a most serious methodological dispute between Myrdal and his uppity collaborator that Myrdal made no effort to conceal.