Louis Mazzari
I teach courses in both literature and history, and my research concerns both the U.S. and Europe, primarily in the 20th century. Currently, I'm writing a biography of American modernist author, journalist, and cultural critic Philip Wylie.
less
InterestsView All (9)
Uploads
Books by Louis Mazzari
In the late 1930s, the Carnegie Corporation decided to fund an exhaustive study of the emotionally charged issue of southern and American race relations. Given the sensitivities involved, Carnegie sought the most detached perspective possible. Instead of going to New York or Tuskegee for its scholarship, Carnegie sought the proverbial man from Mars, a social scientist from a nation 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.” The most knowledgeable American sociologists would also be enlisted, but Carnegie sought a director of research from a nation, in the words of president Frederick Keppel, “of high intellectual and scholarly standards,” but with no legacy of race conflict. “Under these limitations, the obvious places to look were Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries,” Keppel wrote, “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 adviser to the Swedish Government, and a member of the Swedish Senate.” When Carnegie extended its invitation extended to Myrdal in the summer of 1937, it specified that the most comprehensive study of race ever conducted in America, “be undertaken in a wholly objective and dispassionate way as a social phenomenon.”
Myrdal immediately saw that the “Negro problem” in southern race relations existed because of a complex of forces in American society at large. “The relationship between American society and the Negro problem is not one-sided,” wrote Myrdal. “The entire structure of American society is itself greatly conditioned by the presence of the thirteen million Negro citizens. . . New impulses from the Negro people are constantly affecting the American way of life, bending in some degree all American institutions and bringing changes in every aspect of the American’s complex world view.” Myrdal’s research in the U.S., and his subsequent report, offers fascinating insights into the relationship between Europe and the U.S. just as Europe’s democratic institutions were about to engage in a struggle against totalitarianism.
He recognized, for example, that technology and industrialization were creating the huge changes in southern race relations by serving as the engine of urbanization, industrialization eroded traditional social structures. And he placed the South’s agricultural policies in the context of the world war that was doing so much to change America’s perspective on race relations. He looked to a post-war world in which agricultural economies and agrarian societies might be considered from local, national, and also international perspectives, a merger of European social concern and American ideals of democracy.
This paper, based on research conducted at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, examines Myrdal’s close working relationship with several of his southern colleagues, particular Chapel Hill sociologist Arthur Raper. (LSU Press published my biography of Raper, Southern Modernist, under its “Making the Modern South” series in 2006.) These relationships reveal that Myrdal’s work in the American South informed his views on European democracy during its fight against fascism. In Myrdal, we see an interplay between European and southern ideas of democracy during a crisis in Western history.
Papers by Louis Mazzari
Talks by Louis Mazzari
In the late 1930s, the Carnegie Corporation decided to fund an exhaustive study of the emotionally charged issue of southern and American race relations. Given the sensitivities involved, Carnegie sought the most detached perspective possible. Instead of going to New York or Tuskegee for its scholarship, Carnegie sought the proverbial man from Mars, a social scientist from a nation 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.” The most knowledgeable American sociologists would also be enlisted, but Carnegie sought a director of research from a nation, in the words of president Frederick Keppel, “of high intellectual and scholarly standards,” but with no legacy of race conflict. “Under these limitations, the obvious places to look were Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries,” Keppel wrote, “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 adviser to the Swedish Government, and a member of the Swedish Senate.” When Carnegie extended its invitation extended to Myrdal in the summer of 1937, it specified that the most comprehensive study of race ever conducted in America, “be undertaken in a wholly objective and dispassionate way as a social phenomenon.”
Myrdal immediately saw that the “Negro problem” in southern race relations existed because of a complex of forces in American society at large. “The relationship between American society and the Negro problem is not one-sided,” wrote Myrdal. “The entire structure of American society is itself greatly conditioned by the presence of the thirteen million Negro citizens. . . New impulses from the Negro people are constantly affecting the American way of life, bending in some degree all American institutions and bringing changes in every aspect of the American’s complex world view.” Myrdal’s research in the U.S., and his subsequent report, offers fascinating insights into the relationship between Europe and the U.S. just as Europe’s democratic institutions were about to engage in a struggle against totalitarianism.
He recognized, for example, that technology and industrialization were creating the huge changes in southern race relations by serving as the engine of urbanization, industrialization eroded traditional social structures. And he placed the South’s agricultural policies in the context of the world war that was doing so much to change America’s perspective on race relations. He looked to a post-war world in which agricultural economies and agrarian societies might be considered from local, national, and also international perspectives, a merger of European social concern and American ideals of democracy.
This paper, based on research conducted at the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, examines Myrdal’s close working relationship with several of his southern colleagues, particular Chapel Hill sociologist Arthur Raper. (LSU Press published my biography of Raper, Southern Modernist, under its “Making the Modern South” series in 2006.) These relationships reveal that Myrdal’s work in the American South informed his views on European democracy during its fight against fascism. In Myrdal, we see an interplay between European and southern ideas of democracy during a crisis in Western history.