In general, poor people are not radical and not even liberal, though to have such political opinions would often be in their interest. Liberalism is not characteristic of Negroes either. ... A liberal outlook is much more likely to emerge among people in a somewhat secure social and economic situation and with a background of education. The problem for political liberalism ... appears to be first to lift the masses to security and education and then to work to make them liberal.

The march "toward social democracy and law observance" had to be led by liberals, and there were "relatively few liberals in the South," white or black. Progress would come as a result of the "general trend toward social amelioration and secularization." "More education, better housing, and increased economic security" would gradually dissipate the remnants of racial superstition and intolerance. Meritocracy would make education "more and more important as a vehicle of social mobility," and a well‐ planned campaign of popular education," the key to effective "social engineering," would enable the blacks to climb out of poverty. The growth of a professional civil service would replace vigilante justice with the rule of law. Even the "common people," Myrdal observed, were beginning to understand that a "capable and uncorrupted bureaucracy" was "as important for the efficient working of a modern democracy as ... the voter's final word on the general direction of this administration."

Myrdal invited his readers to count themselves among the "handful of rational intellectual liberals" who did not object even to racial intermarraige, the great American bugaboo. He did not write with the intention of changing his readers' minds. It was the "mind of the South" that needed to be changed—not by any direct appeal but by the mobilization of economic, educational, and governmental resources that would drag the South into the twentieth century. Yet Myrdal inadvertently changed the mind of at least one of his readers—probably a greater achievement than any of the purposes he intended to accomplish. "As a child of eleven," writes E. D. Hirsch in support of his case for the importance of cultural literacy, "I turned against the conservative views of my family and the Southern community in which I grew up, precisely because I had been given a traditional education and was therefore literate enough to read Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma, an epoch-making book in

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