my life." It would be hard to prove that An American Dilemma had any comparable effect on its primary audience, the policy-making establishment. The policymakers swung into action only at the last minute, when the civil rights movement left them with no other choice. The support of Southern liberals like Hirsch, on the other hand, contributed to the movement's success—in part, because they took quite literally and personally (since Hirsch was presumably not alone in his heartfelt response to Myrdal) an appeal to "America's guilty conscience" that Myrdal himself seems to have intended merely as a figure of speech.

Six years after the appearance of An American Dilemma, Theodor W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt Sanford brought out their monumental volume, The Authoritarian Personality (1950). One of five books in a series of sociological studies of prejudice sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, this collaborative, philanthropically funded investigation resembled Myrdal's both in its form and in the concerns that prompted it: the enormously destructive power of racial, ethnic, and religious hatreds, as evidenced not only by the race problem in America but even more terrifyingly in Hitler's war of extermination against the Jews; the persistence of these atavistic hatreds in the most advanced, enlightened civilization known to history; and the urgent need to control them in order to prevent the destruction of what remained of that civilization. In their general introduction to the series, Max Horkheimer and Samuel B. Flowerman formulated the question of the hour, in words that could easily have been written by Myrdal: "How could it be ... that in a culture of law, order and reason, there should have survived the irrational remnants of ancient racial and religious hatreds?" The question carried a heavy load of implications. To ask what explained the "survival" of anachronistic racial attitudes ruled out in advance the possibility that racism, as distinguished from tribal parochial

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