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Gunnar Myrdal died in 1987, less than 70 years ago.
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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Foreword, by Frederick P. Keppel
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influential in their inception. This is true in the present case. The wide
sweep of Andrew Carnegie’s interests included the Negro, he gave
generously to Negro institutions, and was closely identified with both Hampton
and Tuskegee Institutes. The Corporation which he created maintained
that interest, and during the years between its organization in 1911 and the
inauguration of the present study, it made grants of more than two and
one-half million dollars in direct response thereto.
In 1931, the late Newton D. Baker joined the Corporation Board. He
was the son of a Confederate officer, attended the Episcopal Academy in
Virginia and the Law School of Washington and Lee University, and spent
the greater part of his early years in the Border states of West Virginia
and Maryland. His services first as City Solicitor and later as Mayor of
Cleveland gave him direct experience with the growing Negro populations
in Northern cities, and as Secretary of War he had faced the special
problems which the presence of the Negro element in our population inevitably
creates in time of national crisis.
Mr. Baker knew so much more than the rest of us on the Board about
these questions, and his mind had been so deeply concerned with them,
that we readily agreed when he told us that more knowledge and better
organized and interrelated knowledge were essential before the
Corporation could intelligently distribute its own funds. We agreed with him
further in believing that the gathering and digestion of the material might
well have a usefulness far beyond our own needs.
The direction of such a comprehensive study of the Negro in America,
as the Board thereupon authorized, was a serious question. There was no
lack of competent scholars in the United States who were deeply interested
in the problem and had already devoted themselves to its study, but the
whole question had been for nearly a hundred years so charged with
emotion that it appeared wise to seek as the responsible head of the
undertaking someone who could approach his task with a fresh mind,
uninfluenced by traditional attitudes or by earlier conclusions, and it was therefore
decided to “import” a general director—somewhat as the late Charles P.
Howland was called across the Atlantic to supervise the repatriation of
the Greeks in Asia Minor after the close of the first World War. And since
the emotional factor affects the Negroes no less than the whites, the search
was limited to countries of high intellectual and scholarly standards but
with no background or traditions of imperialism which might lessen the
confidence of the Negroes in the United States as to the complete
impartiality of the study and the validity of its findings. Under these limitations,
the obvious places to look were Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries,
and the search ended in the selection of Dr. Gunnar Myrdal, a scholar who
despite his youth had already achieved an international reputation as a
social economist, a professor in the University of Stockholm, economic
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