Europe and the Crisis of Reason Podcast – Karolina Stenlund: Swedish answers to an American Dilemma?

Listen to Karolina Stenlund's speech titled "Swedish answers to an American Dilemma? The influence of Gunnar Myrdal’s thinking in the American Civil rights Movement."

Listen to Postdoctoral Researcher Karolina Stenlund’s talk from the workshop Europe and the Crisis of Reason: “Swedish Answers to an American Dilemma? The Influence of Gunnar Myrdal’s Thinking in the American Civil Rights Movement.”

Listen on Spotify:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3b10Fdgr1iWRpMrFOfYS3V?si=eJItPTHDQnm7N3iNCqeJSA

 

So, my name is Karolina Stenlund. It's great to be here, and I prepared some videos for you in this afternoon, so that we can, yeah, take a nap together to something. Started with this brilliant idea of a talk called Swedish Answers to an American Dilemma, the beauty, however, of... Nothing is working. Start over again. Here we go. Yeah, the beauty of being an academic instead of a legal practitioner, I'm a legal scholar, is that you can change your subject the way you want to. So, hence, we have the complexity of history and the crisis of reason, which I think is much more suitable with the overarching theme of this conference. However, we will have some Swedish answers to an American dilemma as well, so please bear with me. So, what I'm going to talk about today is the theme of the conference, but from an angle of legal history. I'm a legal historian doing a postdoc here at EuroStorie. So, this is the blessing and the curse of doing interdisciplinary research that, of course, I approach this theme from another perspective, another angle, but what I'm interested in is like uses of history, uses of the past and the abuses of history. And what I'm going to present to you today is the beginning of an article that I'm writing, and it deals with the legacy of the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal. And I'm at the very beginning of writing this article. However, I know that the Nobel Prize archive will open this fall, because it's 50 years since he won the Nobel Prize in, not the real Nobel Prize, but in memory of Alfred Nobel. So, I've been in contact with the archive, they're going to open the archive, so I can find, hopefully, some juicy materials there. So, hence, I'm doing the preparatory work of laying out the bigger story of his work and how it's relevant to what I'm doing generally. But it does touch upon the theme of crisis. So, for those of you who do not know who this white dead male is, his name was Gunnar Myrdal. He lived between 1898 and 1987. He was a world-famous economist, and he had done studies in sociology and law as well. So, he actually started by studying law at my home university, Uppsala University. Did it super quickly, and then finished and hated it, apparently. He was a social democratic minister of foreign trade between 1945 and 1947, so just right after the war. He was also married to a quite famous female called Alva Myrdal, who also won the Nobel Prize, though in peace, for her works on the disarmament movement a lot later. And he won the, in memory of the Nobel, Alfred Nobel Prize from Sveriges Riksbank in 1974, together with Hayek. And they were like brutal enemies. There are stories of them not even looking each other in the eye during the [ceremony? 00:03:34] and stuff like that. So, I'm very much looking forward to reading the archive, as you can understand. From a legal perspective and legal historical perspective, however, he's a very interesting figure, because he's, from what I know at least, the only Swede who has been ever referenced by the Supreme Court of the US. And it's not just like an ordinary case, it's the case Brown v. Board of Education, which is a landmark case where the racist laws of Southern US were, and the so-called separate but equal doctrine was, sorry, I'm losing words, but where basically, the heyday of the civil rights movement. That's how I can say it, sorry, but you see what I mean. And it happens here, Gunnar Mydal, An American Dilemma. And so, let me tell you the story about this background. 

 

Speaker 1 [00:04:39]: So, the Carnegie Cooperation in the 30s, they were looking for someone to investigate the Negro problem in the US. And they tried to find someone to do this, and they figured out that they wanted a neutral person, which was then Gunnar Myrdal. And he was called to the US. He moved there with his family, three kids and his wife, settled in New York, and started to conduct this huge research on how Americans, why Americans are treating the black minority, basically. And it's 1,500 pages of statistics, anecdotes, details. It's like a mix of, you know, everything from, like, I'm encountering this taxi driver to true statistics of, you know, what can you do in the different states, what are you allowed to, not allowed to do, and the legal limits, the economic limits, like the right to vote, all sorts of different information. And it's written together with Ralph Bunche, who was also the first black American who won the Nobel Prize, a lot of Nobel Prizes here, but he was working under him. And you could say from one perspective that there is nothing new here. This is everyday reality of black people in the US in the 30s. However, what is new is, of course, the collection, that he's putting all of this information together in a comprehensive way and presenting it. Of course, when I came back, just say one thing, it came out 1944, and then the reason for why it was so delayed was the paper shortage during World War II. But it was actually finished, finalised, I think, 1942. Yeah, or 1941, something like that. And when it came out, it became an immediate success. It sold out directly. However, it was heavily criticised. So, this is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Florida from this time. Because what happened was, when this book became more and more published, more and more well-known, used, it became used in the civil rights movement as proof for the fact that discrimination is occurring now, and we have hard facts on it, and ended up in the Brown v. Board of Education case, and a lot of criticism came out. First of all, why are you looking at the Swede who claimed to know anything about how the US Constitution should be interpreted? He knows nothing about our legal system, and you should not use his work, basically. It was also, of course, very criticised from other angles at the same time. So, there's a Marxist critique that was very prominent, basically the fact that Myrdal is an economist, looking at national economy, not correctly framing the question as a question of control of production. That was one of the big strands. And there was also a critique of his scientific method, which is, you know, he was, and this is maybe like a sidestep, but he, Gunnar Myrdal, was a child, so to speak, of the intellectual tradition of the Scandinavian legal realist school. And you can see, as a legal scholar as I am, when you read his work, you can see old positivist professors, that there are traces of them all over. Also, the fact that there's mixed method anecdotes, and the statistics in the book has been criticised. 

 

Speaker 1 [00:08:55]: But also, later criticism and a present criticism, because people are engaging with this work still, is the fact that many people tend to claim that he is racist actually, and/or a classist. And one of the reasons for this are quotes like this that you can find from the book, that as more Negroes become educated and urbanised, it may be expected that they will lose their distinctive cultural traits and take over the dominant American patterns as the trend proceeds. You know, he also believes, really, in progression. And the emergence of class of Negroes, which is recognised by the whites to have the same cultural traits as themselves, the Negro will become less peculiar than he is now. Recognition, yeah, you can read for yourself. You know, there is an idea of assimilation here, that once, if we just improve the situation of this discriminated group, they will also assimilate into the cultural hegemony of white America. That's basically what he argues. And also, following this critique, there has been research claiming that this neutrality or classical critical argument that no one is neutral, that, first of all, the way they define Sweden as neutral is just made up, I mean, Swedes were not a homogeneous people at all, I mean, there were Saami, Roma, Jewish people living in Sweden at the time when he came, so why talk about Sweden even as a homogenous society? Secondly, he was very biased for many reasons. And if you go back to his earlier writings, you can see that he, of course, has a legacy. And here, we enter the crisis of reason and the complexity of history. So, one of the people who has made these arguments about the racism lurking behind the whole Carnegie project is a researcher called Maribel Morey. And she claims that, she's American, and she has gone to the Swedish Gunnar Myrdal archives and read what he wrote earlier. And before An American Dilemma, together with his wife, he wrote a very, very famous book called Crisis in the Question of Peoples is to translate it. So, there are a lot of crises here, depending on how you see it. But the context of this book is, in the 20s and 30s, there was a widespread sense of democratic crisis in contemporary Sweden. And there was a continuous decline of birth rates. And it was all time low at 33. And according to Myrdals, who were like chief engineers, like intellectual engineers of the Social Democratic Party, there were the social conditions who within Sweden were responsible for the decline of the birth rates. So, this is a political book, right? They have clear aims; they want to reshape society. But it's social democracy in the 30s, so it's very family oriented. It's all about helping families, providing them with money, providing them with housing. There are these ideas how an ideal family should look, how many kids you should have, how you should live, and how we should boost economy and make this happen. But there's also questions of sterilisation. And here is where things get, you know, complicated. Yeah, because they do advocate sterilisation of unwanted people. Very, very, like stark. 

 

Speaker 1 [00:13:17]: And the argument goes like, yeah, we cannot have problematic people here because we have no possibility to provide community aid for all. And this ended up in a law, the sterilisation law, that was enacted in 1935. And between 1935 and 1975, it was more than 60,000 people who were sterilised in Sweden. There's a gender aspect here. More than 90% were women. It's like 1% of the fertile population were actually sterilised. However, there was no, and that should be clear, there was not a racial argument behind this. They do talk about it. They do talk about, you know, can we talk about different races here? Should we do sterilisation because of that? And then, they go very rational, like, no, there are no proofs of that in science, and it's wrong, and they're very, like, hard, criticising Germany harshly. But so, this is, you know, it shouldn't be, I argue, by no means, it's awful, but the argument is not racially, it's not based on racial, an idea of race and rationality and hierarchy between races. It's other economic, very economic arguments behind it. Yeah, and this goes hand in hand with the idea of means of production is not the basic target of social democracy here, it's more about family and aid. So, this is, according to current researchers, one must read An American Dilemma in the light of crisis, [?? 00:15:25] and crisis in the population question. Because what you can see, what they argue there, it comes out when they investigate the American society. So, hence, we should not hail this book as what we do, still do as a pivotal work that has changed the way we look at American society. We should reject it. It's about racism, after all. 

 

Speaker 1 [00:15:56]: So, you see where I'm going, right? When we start looking at history, suddenly things get complicated. Because, of course, this is a leftist critique, and now I'm taking this as an example. But meanwhile, at the same time, we have a right-wing movement, which is very strong in Europe generally, and we all touched upon it during our presentations, I think. So, there is this Swedish Democratic Party, who is further right, there is a think tank that is attached to that called Current Times. And like two, three, four years ago, they published a film that argued that, okay, you blame us for having neo-Nazi history, which is true, but you know, no one is perfect. Look at social democracy. And this is the film. It is on YouTube, and it's not working. Here we go. It did work during the pause. I was supposed to show you like a short clip here, but we can take it afterwards if we have time, I'm sorry. But the main argument goes that they take up Gunnar Myrdal, they take the sterilisation question, and they say, "Look, if social democracy has this legacy, you should not blame us for our legacy." You see where we're going? If you start questioning the history, anything goes basically. You're relativising what happened, and suddenly, also you change the discourse and focus on questions of interpretation of history, instead of future aims, right? Also, there is, which I thought was kind of interesting when just listening to Marianna's presentation, that there is a theme of how to deal the enlightenment that lags behind, because the very last, very, very last word of An America Dilemma is enlightenment. And that's what he thought. We see progress, the vicious circle that we have, we can change that if we just change, we help, we remove the laws that are discriminating, we give better healthcare, the vicious circle will be broken, and we can have a progression. Of course, it did not really go that way, but I thought that these could be some of the themes that we could discuss now, and I'm really happy to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you.