Swedish roots to Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma (1944)

Scholars have long assumed that Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal had no prior knowledge of black Americans when he went to the USA to collect data for the two-volume study An American Dilemma. This chapter argues, however, that Myrdal was hardly a blank slate when he arrived, nor was his conclusion – that Americans’ racial differences were caused by environmental factors such as discrimination, and that if white Americans changed their behaviour to live up to their egalitarian ideals, black Americans would take on the values, culture and traits of the dominant race – solely the result of the data he and his team of researchers collected between 1938 and 1942. Instead, the analysis of population quality in mid 1930s Sweden that he had developed with his wife Alva informed his approach, as did the concept of the American Creed, which was the centrepiece of the propagandistic book that the couple wrote in early 1940s Sweden.