A young (45), blue-eyed Swede named Gunnar Myrdal landed in the U.S. in 1938 to make a fresh, thorough and impartial study of American Negroes. After five years of research, assisted by a staff of some 75 Carnegie Corporation-financed helpers, Sweden's Myrdal found that his whole ambitious project hinged on one simple question: "What goes on in the minds of white Americans?" Last week he published his complex, 1,483-page answer, called it An American Dilemma: the Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (Harper; 2 vols.; $7.50).
Economist-Senator Myrdal was chosen by Carnegie's trustees to make this major American study because he was 1) an able scholar, 2) not an American, and thus could look at Negroes with an "entirely fresh mind." Perhaps not since de Tocqueville and Bryce has the U.S. had such an analytical probing by a sharp-eyed foreigner. Sifting a mountain of documentation through a trained academic mind, Dr. Myrdal drew conclusions that will make U.S. citizens either nod or squirm.
The Negro Problem, he concludes, is grim but not hopeless. It "represents nothing more and nothing less than a century-long lag of public morals. In principle, the Negro problem was settled long ago; in practice, the solution is not effectuated. The Negro in America has not yet been given the elemental civil and political rights of formal democracy. . . . This anachronism constitutes the contemporary 'problem.' . . ."
The White Mind. "America is continuously struggling for its soul. . . . The American . . . is strongly and sincerely 'against sin,' even, and not least, his own sins. He investigates his faults, puts them on record, and shouts them from the housetops, adding the most severe recriminations against himself. . . . Americans accuse themselves, and are accused by others, of being materialists. But they are equally extreme in the other direction. . . . This young nation is the least cynical of all nations."
But the U.S. errs, Dr. Myrdal thinks, in dashing off a brand-new law every time it has a twinge of conscience. The nation's laws are too hastily written, and then their effect is lost or diluted by sloppy or inadequate administration. As a result, a highly moral country paradoxically looks on all law & order with suspicion and mild contempt.
The U.S. Future. The U.S. has now abandoned isolationism and has "joined the world . . . America feels itself to be humanity in miniature. When in this crucial time the international leadership passes to America, the great reason for hope is that this country has a national experience of uniting racial and cultural diversities—and a national theory, if not a consistent practice, of freedom and equality for all. . . . In this sense, the Negro problem is not only America's greatest failure but also America's incomparably great opportunity for the future. . . ."