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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - I. The Approach - 1. American Ideals and the American Conscience - 13. Value Premises in This Study
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14 An American Dilemma
a formative stage. It is now discovering its ideals in the social and economic
sphere and in the realm of international organization.
While this is going on, there are great disparities in opinions even on
fundamentals in these new fields of valuation—as there were during the
Revolution concerning the ideals which then became crystallized. Some
Americans see in trade unions a denial of the rights to human liberty 5
others see in the unions an expression of the common man’s right to reach
for greater equality and freedom. Some Americans want to tax property
and nationalize public utilities in order to defend equality of opportunity
for the masses of the people and to preserve their liberties j
others see in
such attempts an assault upon American principles of liberty. In the inter-
national field American ideals in recent decades and even today seem
divided and rambling in the wide space of the triangle marked by the
three points; absolute isolationism, an organized world democracy, and
American world imperialism.
These great disparities of opinion would, in any other social problem,
considerably increase the technical difficulties of utilizing the Creed as a
set of specified and definite value premises for research. When in later
chapters we face the task of defining our value premises specifically, we
shall find that this is not the case in the Negro problem. The Creed is
expressive and definite in practically all respects of importance for the
Negro problem. Most of the value premises with which we shall be
concerned have actually been incorporated for a long time in the national
Constitution and in the constitutions and laws of the several states.
The deeper reason for the technical simplicity of the value aspect of the
Negro problem Is this: From the point of view of the American Creed
the status accorded the Negro In America represents nothing more and
nothing less than a century-long lag of public morals. In principle the
Negro problem was settled long ago 5
in practice the solution is not effec-
tuated. The Negro in America has not yet been given the elemental civil
and political rights of formal democracy, including a fair opportunity to
earn his living, upon which a general accord was already won when the
American Creed was first taking form. And this anachronism constitutes
the contemporary ^^problem” both to Negroes and to whites.
If those rights were respected, many other pressing social problems
would, of course, still remain. Many Negroes would, together with many
whites, belong to groups which would invoke the old ideals of equality and
liberty in demanding more effective protection for their social and economic
opportunities. But there would no longer be a Negro problem. This does
not mean that the Negro problem \s an easy problem to solve. It Is a
tremendo\is task lor theoretical research to hnd out why the Negro’s status
is what it is. In its unsolved form it further intertwines with all other social
problems. It is simple only in the technical sense that in America the value
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