modernization. He recognized that "America is continuously struggling for its soul," but he tended to think of the struggle as one between enlightenment and popular ignorance, cosmopolitanism and provincialism. His conceptualizaiton of the issue as a "dilemma" seemed to imply that Americans experienced a conflict between theory and practice as individuals, but closer examination reveals that he used phrases like "America's uneasy conscience" as metaphorical abstractions, not as literal descriptions of the divided soul of particular American individuals. The struggle for this abstract American "soul" turned out to be a struggle between white liberals, who believed in racial justice, and Southerners, poor white Southerners especially, who did not. The forces of light and darkness, as Myrdal saw them, instead of coexisting in the same individuals were conveniently arranged on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon line.

"The Negro problem has nowhere in the North the importance it has in the South," Myrdal declared. Race riots had occasionally broken out in Northern cities, to be sure, but, on the whole, it did not seem likely that there would be "further riots, of any significant degree of violence, in the North." ^* The North was industrial, prosperous, and cosmopolitan; the South backward, its agriculture "primitive," its labor system "antiquated" and "paternalistic." Its judicial and penal system, "overripe for fundamental reforms," represented a "tremendous cultural lag in progressive twentieth-century America." Modern reform movements— "woman suffrage and economic equality, collective bargaining, labor legislation, progressive education, child welfare, civil service reform, police and court reform, prison reform"—had left the South untouched. ^†

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*

Myrdal attributed the 1942 riot in Detroit to the large number of white Southern migrants in the city; but "Detroit is almost unique among Northern cities," he noted, "for its large Southern-born population." To give him his due, he added that future riots might take the form of "sporadic and unorganized outbreaks on the part of the Negroes with little opposition from whites," instead of the "two-way conflicts which we are calling riots."

†

Myrdal's list of reform movements recalls the one drawn up by Theodore Parker a hundred years earlier. As always, the absence of the spirit of "improvement" provided liberals with conclusive evidence of the South's backwardness—evidence even more

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