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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 - V. Politics - 21. Southern Conservatism and Liberalism - 2. Southern Conservatism
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456 An American Dilemma
All modern reform movements which have penetrated the rest of the
country and gradually changed American society—woman suffrage and
economic equality, collective bargaining, labor legislation, progressive
education, child welfare, civil service reform, police and court reform,
prison reform—have, until recently, hardly touched the greater part of the
South except in so far as the federal government has imposed them from
the outside. In particular, there has been no active participation of the
masses. Recently they have become the interest of the japper class liberals
around the universities and other cultural centers. Southern liberalism
which will be discussed in turther detail below—^is beautitul and digmhed.
It preserves mvich of the philosophical grace of the mythical old aristo-
cratic South. But until the New Deal came, it had no source of power.
Even yet it does not have contact with, or support by, the masses. Social
reform is now coming rapidly to the South, but it is coming mainly from
Washington. For a hundred years this region, which played such an
important and distinguished role in the American Revolution and in the
early history of the Republic, has not contributed to the nation anything
approaching its fair share of fresh political thinking and forward-looking
political initiative in national issues. It has, on the whole, served as a
reactionary drag against the forces of change and progress.
This political conservatism is directly tied up with the Negro problem
in several ways. The devices inaugurated to disfranchise Negroes, the one-
party system, the low political participation on the part of the white
masses, and other peculiarities of Southern politics, all tend to give a
disproportionate power to classes, groups and individuals who feel their
interests tied up with conservatism in social issues. But there is also a more
direct connection between Southern conservatism and the Negro problem.
For constitutional and other reasons, social reform measures will have to
include Negroes, and this is resented. The conservative opponents of
reform proposals can usually discredit them by pointing out that they will
improve the status of the Negroes, and that they prepare for ^^social equal-
ity.” This argument has been raised in the South against labor unions,
child labor legislation and practically every other proposal for reform.
It has been argued to the white workers that the Wages and Hours Law
was an attempt to legislate equality between the races by raising the wage
level of Negro workers to that of the whites. The South has never been
seriously interested in instituting tenancy legislation to protect the tenants’
rights and at the same time to improve agriculture, and the argument has
again been that the Negro sharecropper should not be helped agiinst the
white man.® I have met this same argument everywhere in the South when
discussing economic and social reforms: ^^We don’t want our Negroes
“See Chapter 10, Section 4.
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