Abstract
In his celebrated study of An American Dilemma in 1944, Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal chastised the American political community for failing to live up to its ideals. Taking the situation of blacks as the paradigmatic case, Myrdal exposed the moral contradiction between the nation’s “American Creed,” with its commitment to democracy, egalitarianism, and tolerance, and its racist policies and practices. While recognizing the emotional and moral intensity of this contradiction, Myrdal was nonetheless certain that a favorable resolution would be achieved. Whereas racist and segregationist values and practices were grounded in only particularistic and local interests, jealousies, wants, and impulses, the liberal contents of the American Creed were transcendent, universal, and more fundamental.
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Notes
Gunnar Myrdal, with the assistance of Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944), p. 3. Also see the discussion of Myrdal’s work in Chapter IV of Stanford M. Lyman, The Black American in Sociological Thought: A Failure of Perspective (New York: Capricorn Books, 1972).
Alan Simpson, Puritanism in Old and New England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), p. 24.
J. Franklin Jameson (ed.), Johnson’s Wonder Working Providence, 1628–1651 (New York: Original Narratives of Early American History, 1910), pp. 28–32. Reprinted in Robert T. Handy (ed.), Religion in the American Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), pp. 3–6.
John Winthrop, “A Declaration in Defense of an Order of Court Made in May, 1637.” Reprinted in Edmund S. Morgan (ed.), Puritan Political Ideas, 1558–1794 (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), pp. 144–149.
Herbert W. Schneider, The Puritan Mind (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1958), pp. 67–73.
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1969), p. 398.
David Riesman, et al, The Lonely Crowd (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1950).
The comment is by Josiah Strong, Our Country. Edited by Jurgen Herbst (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 109.
Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965).
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© 1992 Human Sciences Press
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Hughey, M.W. (1992). Americanism and Its Discontents: Protestantism, Nativism, and Political Heresy in America. In: Hughey, M.W. (eds) New Tribalisms. Main Trends of the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26403-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26403-2_6
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