Putting the south on the psychological map: the impact of region and race on the human sciences during the 1930s.

IN EARLY 1939 HARRY STACK SULLIVAN, THE NEW YORK PSYCHIATRIST, spent several weeks in Greenville, Mississippi, studying the effects of race on personality development. Walker Percy later sketched Sullivan's habit of conducting research in his uncle Will Percy's pantry. Every afternoon Sullivan "made himself a pitcher of vodka martinis," a drink unfamiliar to the locals, and "listened and talked to any and all comers," both "white folks" who found their way through the dining room and "the cook and her friends and friends of the cook's friends" entering from the kitchen. Percy admired Sullivan's irreverent method. Although commissioned "by a foundation," Sullivan realized "no one can make sense of any kind of human relations in three weeks," and he "none too seriously made the best of it." (1)

Percy's account makes for a quaint tale of an interloper derailed by the South's impenetrability and then assimilated to its friendly ways. The truth was more ragged, yet introduces another story: how North-South encounters helped transform the human sciences during the 1930s and particularly the concept of personality. Contrary to Walker's memory, Sullivan was not a houseguest throughout his stay. Across town at the Hotel Greenville, Sullivan wrote "in despair" to Charles S. Johnson, a leading black sociologist at Fisk University, about "the abysmal lack of any opportunity" for black youth and their inability to trust, leading to conclusions that "(b) the problem of the Deep South could best be solved by a holocaust; and (c) I am a damned fool to expect to understand anything much about human personality." (2) Rather than decide brief fieldwork was useless, Sullivan was intellectually shaken.

The Percys' hospitality obscured their own worries. After Will Percy kindly opened doors in Mississippi in 1932 for Sullivan's acquaintance Hortense Powdermaker, an anthropologist, she sent him a copy of her finished book. He was grateful, he replied, but she never heard from him again, surmising that "he could not depart from his code of charming politeness to tell me how he really felt" about her views of race. Private issues, in contrast, must have preoccupied Walker Percy as he now entertained Sullivan. A medical student at Columbia University, home on break, he was in the midst of three years of psychoanalysis in New York with Sullivan's protegee, Janet Rioch, at Sullivan's suggestion. (3) Recognizing these crisscrossed lines of vision should not divert attention from the main point, however: Sullivan came south to learn about human beings.

Social theory in America was changing dramatically between the wars, and Sullivan's visit grew out of new ideas. For at least half a century, both the social sciences, such as anthropology and sociology, and the mental sciences, including psychiatry and psychology, had relied on a blend of biological and evolutionary assumptions. Race, a concept so popular as to seem pervasive, combined the two: science writers arranged groups defined by somatic traits on a progressive scale. Despite the variety of races, a unitary standard measured their value. The idea of culture, in contrast, gaining ground in the 1920s and near dominance by World War II, pictured human life as shaped by social forces, not nature. This deepened the appreciation of agency and diversity, so much that Edward Sapir, the Yale anthropologist, wrote in 1932 that "[t]he true locus of culture is in the interactions of specific individuals" and "in the world of meanings which each one of these individuals may unconsciously abstract for himself from his participation in these interactions." (4) The notion of society as the sum of interpretative acts welcomed, in turn, the psychiatrist. After Sapir met Sullivan in 1926, they made common cause to ally the social and mental sciences for the sake of elucidating culture. Hardly alone, they were part of a broad, cross-disciplinary movement to recast society as a uniquely human product. Personality--conceived as the subjective outcome of social experience and a force in society in turn--situated the individual in culture. The project of studying the mind, now differentiated by context as much as it once seemed fixed by descent, sent researchers into the field. (5)

The South drew these northern white scholars by their belief in its backwardness. Casting the region as the enterprising Yankee's dark sister, they reacted to its social taboos, racial secrets, miscegenation, and poverty with a mix of shock and fascination. John Dollard of Yale, psychoanalytically trained, politely contrasted "the aristocratic, agrarian tradition in the South" with "the egalitarian ideology of the North which has become the master pattern of the American mores." (6) The national exception, the South also appealed to Dollard as the American primitive, as he probed its interracial dependencies and repressions in the "Southerntown" of his fieldwork. Race, indeed, deepened the South's allure. Because the idea of racial character had been a cornerstone of biological thinking, the South offered cultural theorists a laboratory for revisionism. Anticipating a plurality of cultural patterns instead of one evolutionary line, they welcomed biracialism that promised contrasting experiences on the same soil. When they came south, they entered a symbolic locus where civilization seemed thinly to veil raw social forces. They expected to see culture at work. (7)

They, did, but the intellectual results were surprising. Setting out with a research approach that was engaged and eclectic, northern scholars and their sponsors were disconcerted by the South, so much so that they moved toward the safety of formalism. Personally, white field-workers first felt the South's opacity and then its intricate racial mores and the emotional tangles of the color line. Discovery had been their intent, but they often left disturbed. Collectively, they fell to squabbling over how to analyze personalities in culture and why. It was one thing to imagine a meta-discipline for human study and quite another to settle whether it should mimic the exactitude of hard science or the concrete immediacy of field reporting. Nor was there a clear research goal. All expected to improve human life. But some envisioned top-down social engineering, while others hoped for moral awakening and grassroots change. This became to an extent a racial issue, as white visitors teamed up on projects with southern black scholars. Although interracial cooperation was a brave experiment, black intellectuals in the partnership were less willing to stop at diagnosis.

By the 1940s, southern work produced a deeply mixed legacy: the idea of personality flourished at the same time that the South receded from view as a place. Cultural theorists in effect distilled racial problems from regional ones. Now investigators measured traits in laboratories, not communities, and their writing approached racial interaction as one in a string of American disorders. Scientism redoubled faith in reform, and the controlled studies helped advance legal desegregation. But success was built on willful forgetfulness about how the South had altered scientific preconceptions. Personality as an idea, embraced as the perfect synthesizing tool, worked a bit too well when it brought the depth of racial problems into focus. (8)

The story I tell includes three parts: how early somatic views of the mind affected concepts of race, what cultural revisionists found in the South, and how controversy at home propelled retreat from the field. These events represent a piece in a larger puzzle, albeit an influential one. Not everyone identified with the "culture and personality" school had southern interests. Yale University, the University of Chicago, and Fisk University sent researchers into this field; but Columbia University, another center of this approach, did not. Although adoption of an abstracted academic style was widespread, southern work was not a catalyst for everyone. Nor did this circle of thinkers launch the only challenge to biological racialism; developmental psychology, for example, preaching the influence of nurture, reached the public through school reform. Nor, again, was the timetable for intellectual transition everywhere the same. For theorists interested in the South, but perhaps not others, the 1930s were crucial because the Great Depression directed national attention to enduring southern poverty and because international turmoil threatened fieldwork abroad. (9) All said, this account presents the experience of prominent white and black scholars connected with research institutions favored by foundation support. Although a select group, their voices were surely heard.

Scientific curiosity about the South had roots in the earlier era of biological thinking. As belief in racially determined natures sparked comparative racial studies, eyes turned to the region where more than three-quarters of the nation's black families still lived in 1930. Black character, to whites, was synonymous with weakness, and the connection contributed to a stream of publications around 1900 about the race's mental disorders. Because this literature presented deficiencies and illnesses as evidence of racial traits, it epitomized the somatic view of human beings that advocates of culture hoped to displace. This was a white conversation, although at rare times blacks who were determined enough to have acquired specialized training and brave enough to use it spoke up as well. (10)

The statistic universally cited was the rising number of people of color committed to state institutions following emancipation. Turn-of-the-century studies had a simple explanation: freedom unleashed racial character. Because blacks were "naturally timid, suspicious and emotional," explained a psychiatrist at Washington's Government Hospital for the Insane in 1891, the "exciting requirements incident to their emancipation, life of freedom, and advancing civilization" favored mental illness. (11) A woman doctor at the same institution used stronger language in 1914. Removal of "the rigorous supervision of the master as to morals, habits, etc." heightened the disease risk of descendants of "naked dwellers on the west coast of Africa" living in "savagery." Mania was common, she continued, while depression was rare, because "the colored race is of a highly emotional nature, with little capacity for self-control." (12) Such efforts to link specific disorders with races underscored the influence of physiology. Skull and brain measurement similarly emphasized natural endowment. Data offered in 1906 by a researcher from Johns Hopkins University placed the size of Negro brains between "man and the ourang-outang." (13) In all these studies, society was a catalyst of natural weakness rather than the cause of human development.

This naturalistic premise meant that the utility of institutionalized blacks to white science was the light they cast on Negro character overall. Indeed, among blacks the insane and sane seemed unusually close. In one psychiatrist's words, "in comparing the normal with the pathological mental processes in the colored race the line of demarcation is very indistinct...." (14) Followers of Sigmund Freud in America extended this logic: blacks offered easy access to the human unconscious. In "his [Freud's] country there is no such race as we have here whose psychological processes are simple in character," wrote a contributor to the Psychoanalytic Review in 1914. The availability of black subjects privileged American analysts to validate Freud's theories. This writer, practicing, like a number of other commentators on racial temperament, at the Government Hospital, connected his article with Freud's Interpretation of Dreams (1900) by the title, "The Dream as a Simple Wish-Fulfilment in the Negro." (15) Two years later, a colleague identified "phylogenetic elements" surfacing in black psychoses. Each person has a "wonderful amount of memories which have been stored in his unconscious through the slow evolution of his race." "[B]ecause the colored race is so much nearer its stage of barbarism," the wild thoughts of this doctor's patients let him approach the human origins that intrigued Freud in Totem and Taboo (1913). (16) These applications of Freudian theory were faithful to the master's emphases: that all minds conform to some unitary patterns with a degree of somatic basis and evolve predictably over generations. Freud's American disciples counted on the black insane to reveal the core of human nature.

Every feature of these discussions obscured their significance for the American South, although the region remained home to most blacks and the source of much data. On a theoretical level, belief in racial determinism made geography secondary; in professional terms, the wish to be scientific favored conclusions stated in universal language. Both attitudes contributed to the odd use of the word comparative in a way that detached psychiatry from society. Two 1914 articles, "Psychoses Among Negroes--A Comparative Study" and "Psychoses in the Colored Race: A Study in Comparative Psychiatry," by Georgia and Washington doctors respectively, dealt with whites only in passing despite the subtitles' promise of two-sided analysis. (17) The notion of comparison did its work simply by lending the authors' clinical observations the prestige of race science, a label making their black patients, from whatever area, representatives of the race. Howard Odum at Columbia similarly privileged race over region in his doctoral dissertation, published as Social and Mental Traits of the Negro (1910). His preface said he would analyze "the essential qualities of the race" first and then the "Negro Problem"; less than a dozen pages later, his introduction called the Negro "the central figure in Southern problems." (18) As his focus moved from racial traits to broader racial and then regional issues, Odum let readers glimpse private tensions between his Georgia roots and sociological training, on the one hand, pulling him toward particularism, and Yankee schooling and scientism, on the other, pushing him to slight place. The order of his stated goals shows how naturalistic assumptions curtailed regional analysis. (19)

White writing on race nonetheless had practical goals, and inattention to social circumstances in fact advanced them. The fixity of nature, for example, supported Odum's paternalism. The "Negro should know himself"--"comprehend the essential weaknesses of the race"--in order to induce whites to behave toward compliant blacks with "tolerance, broadmindedness and patience." (20) A neuroanatomist did not have to spell out the social lessons in his findings that Caucasian brains showed "will power, self-control, self-government," in contrast to Negroes who were "affectionate, immensely emotional, then sensual and under stimulation passionate." (21) Indeed, the practical irrelevance of race-based psychiatry to southern blacks underscores its primarily ideological function. Research curiosity about black psychoses did not lead to medical treatment. Grady Hospital in Atlanta operated free, segregated clinics for indigent patients in the 1930s staffed by a variety of specialists. Although whites could see a neurologist and neurosurgeon, blacks at Gray Clinic, also called "Colored Grady," found only a neurologist. Diagnosis was possible, this suggests, but not surgery. Any care outside custodial institutions for the black mentally ill, or, for that matter, for whites, was a rarity in the South. This said, Grady's unequal policy shows how little research on black subjects helped black patients. In practice, the idea of Negroes as primitives worked to limit the medical attention they received. (22)

It is not surprising that southern black medical circles rejected race-based theories by neglect and counterargument. Here was an early pocket of resistance to naturalism. Black doctors and social workers borrowed selectively from the mental sciences; what use to them was evidence of Negro inferiority? After the Neighborhood Union in Atlanta opened its first clinic in 1916, at the time "the only Health Center for Colored people" in the city, physicians saw patients diagnosed as "feeble minded" or experiencing "senile changes." (23) Mention of racial traits was absent, as if insulting as well as irrelevant. Nor did awareness of racial character stand out in early records of the Atlanta School of Social Work, opened in 1925. Black social work aspired to grand aims ranging "from breaking the chains to mending lives," in the words of the script of a student pageant, and a 1932 curriculum plan included study of "mental hygiene relating to the child and the adult" as one component of professional knowledge. (24) There was no indication that black minds required special scrutiny because they differed from white ones.

Open quarreling with racial psychiatry by black professionals broke this silence at rare times. Prudence was not the only reason for their restraint. Racism, North and South, so limited medical training that only 3 percent of black doctors were certified specialists by the late 1940s. (25) The majority of general practitioners were probably not comfortable arguing theory, if they had time. This made Charles V. Roman (1864-1934) of Meharry Medical College in Nashville an exception in 1925 when he published a paper titled "The Negro's Psychology and His Health." He began with a few bows to racial character, criticizing sloppy uses of the concept and then noting black traits of piety and loyalty. Social theory, however, and angry at that, anchored his thinking: "The Negro often manifests that inferiority complex of oppressed peoples which forbids self-criticism." Blunt language pointed the finger at social disadvantage: blacks find their "upward way deliberately barred"; health workers experience "systematic exclusion" from medical institutions; high rates of disease and death "are due to situation and not to any defect in the Negro's constitution or his psychology." Roman's pained awareness of this social cage did not fully subvert a biological view, as he praised "the patient, persistent, kind-hearted, good-nature of the American Negro." (26) He nonetheless brought social forces to the forefront of explanation.

Roman was a prominent man speaking at a critical moment. A graduate of Meharry in 1890 and then a professor there, he was the first editor of the Journal of the National Medical Association, the publication of black doctors forced by segregation to organize separately. The revival of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s must have accented Roman' s sense of black vulnerability when he delivered his thoughts in 1924 to a conference of Canadian social workers. In 1925, the year the speech appeared in print, students went on strike at Fisk University, across the street from Meharry, to protest their white president's restrictive policies. The Scopes trial on the teaching of evolution was focusing the world's eyes on Tennessee. Much as Roman may have been stirred by events, however, he was primarily an intellectual. Among scholars, cultural thinking, rejecting racialism and evolution in favor of diverse social patterns, gained momentum during the 1920s. Roman apparently wanted to be heard in these circles, because he published his piece in Hospital Social Service, issued in New York. In so doing, he joined a collective effort to rethink human society that turned with renewed interest to the American South. (27)

The basic premise of cultural theory transformed research for scholars who focused on the mind. If, as long held, nature shapes character, then an asylum is an ideal place to see personality without ordinary masks. But if society determines behavior, investigators have to get out and mingle. During the 1930s, social scientists took up residence in boarding houses, conducted interviews, and attended community gatherings across the South. On a map, their projects would have resembled a patchwork of investigations. (28) White and black, northern and southern, many had a connection with one of three institutions: Yale, Chicago, or Fisk. Then as now, universities were complex places with discordant views. There was quiet pressure all along to harvest an "inventory" of culture for its "scientific fruits" from the separate studies, in the words of a Rockefeller Foundation report about Yale around 1930. Looking back, it seems fated that the southern work, touching raw nerves in the American psyche, would clash with this goal of elucidating clean principles. (29) But the irony did not slow the initial rush to the field. The northern schools hosted star European anthropologists in the thirties; A. R. Radcliffe-Brown spent six years in Chicago, and Bronislaw Malinowski repeatedly visited New Haven. Picturing societies as living systems of interactive customs, their viewpoints made fieldwork the basis of scholarship. They built on a native foundation of cultural thinking, however, with a distinctly American flavor. The Americans mixed the social and mental sciences to explore the effects of social organization on the mind. How much old-fashioned moralism about character affected this new interest in personality is hard to say. Scholars took this theoretical slant with them, in any case, to southern sites.

Although some of the first steps toward a convergence of psychiatry and social science in the 1920s were unsophisticated, mainstream thinkers clearly wished to experiment. William Alanson White (1870-1937), head psychiatrist at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington (formerly the Government Hospital for the Insane), enjoyed national prestige when he gave a lecture in 1929 called "The Social Significance of Mental Disease." Both the latest cultural jargon and crude somaticism appeared in his remarks. He seemed prescient when he said that "the illumination of the social aspects of psychiatry" was "distinctly American." "Culture," meaning "customs, traditions and beliefs," was "as much a precipitate of man's experience as is his bodily structure." Yet true to psychiatry's medical roots, White did not concede that we are simply the sum of social variables. Matching physiognomy and temperament in a way popular at the turn of the century, he correlated the graceful "Asthenic" build and stocky "Pyknic" type with specific mental diseases. (30) By 1936, White was intrigued by how cultural ideas might spur reform to reduce mental illness. If "social maladjustments" are part of dysfunction, he told listeners at the New York Academy of Medicine, then treatment, broadly defined, would include "the slow alteration of cultural standards in conformity with our increasing knowledge of the psychology of mental disorder." (31) Yet again, White stopped short of full-blown social organicism. The main improvement he had in mind was better training in psychiatry for doctors and teachers. Drawn to environmental explanations, White remained primarily a clinician.

The potential for collaboration between psychiatry and cultural thinking blossomed in the working friendship of Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949), White's protege, and the German-born ethnologist Edward Sapir (1884-1939). By 1937, their companion pieces in the American Journal of Sociology championed interdisciplinary effort: Sullivan wrote "A Note on the Implications of Psychiatry, the Study of Interpersonal Relations, for Investigation in the Social Sciences," while Sapir included a piece titled "The Contribution of Psychiatry to an Understanding of Behavior in Society." (32) The men's common cause rested on an intensely personal base. After an all-day meeting in 1926 in Sullivan's Chicago hotel room, where Sapir sought out the psychiatrist to talk through his grief at the death of his wife, they kept in close touch, as Sullivan left clinical for private practice in 1930 and Sapir moved from the University of Chicago to Yale the next year. Recasting individual psychology as the outcome of interpersonal contacts, as Sullivan did, was a psychiatric innovation indebted to social science. Sapir was the more lucid writer, however, and a brilliant synthesizer. (33)

Sapir was not a conventional social scientist, and his difference from his colleagues may have led him toward other intellectual company. At a time when much cultural theory pictured society as a functioning whole, he valued the unique and ostensibly useless. A specialist in American Indian languages, he acknowledged not only the "socializing and uniformizing force" of speech, but also its role in "personality expression." Language is "the most potent single known factor," he concluded in 1933, "for the growth of individuality." (34) Idiosyncrasy tugged at conformity, in Sapir's view, and resisted the too-neat "abstracted configurations of idea and action patterns" typically "constructed by the anthropologist." We imagine the "'givenness' of culture," he chided, and forget its distorting transmission through the child. (35) It was psychiatry that rescued the individual from service as "a long-suffering carrier of cultural items," Sapir wrote in his 1937 dialogue with Sullivan, and restored "the actual human being." It was psychoanalysis that lent Sapir's individuals, and culture through them, complexity. (36) Influenced by Freud, though, like Sullivan, not an orthodox Freudian, Sapir had insisted in 1927 on behavior's "unconscious patterning." (37) During the 1930s, he worked to inject the individual mind--assertive, unpredictable, potentially dark--into the social sciences.

The concept of personality anchored this socio-psychological view. Sapir registered the word's currency when he explained five of its meanings in an article titled "Personality" in the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1934): philosophical, physiological, psychophysical, sociological, and psychiatric. (38) The intellectual development of Charles S. Johnson (1893-1956) of Fisk shows the idea's power more concretely. A student of the sociologist Robert Park at Chicago around 1920 and later southern host and collaborator for Sapir's Yale colleagues, Johnson gained depth and edge by considering subjectivity. His survey of Nashville churches, conducted soon after he arrived in the city in 1928, consisted simply of observers' notes on services. (39) In contrast, his 1934 article "Negro Personality Changes in a Southern Community" paid full homage to personality as "an individual's habits and behavior patterns in the process of adjustment to the culture in which he is set." This aligned Johnson with cultural theory; yet only gradually did he get beyond "folkways" to describe black children's feelings of "nothingness." (40) At the White House Conference on Children in a Democracy (1939-1940), Johnson said black youth face the "fact that the larger society of which they are a part blocks as a matter of [special?] policy the release of a wide range of normal impulses." A psychiatrist on his panel recommended warmth as the answer, "the emotional structure (personality) of the parents, teachers, social workers, etc., who touch the child." But Johnson countered that "therapeutic rearrangements of the culture setting" were also needed. (41) Over the decade, Johnson's focus had shifted from group behavior to black children's rooted sense of discouragement. The idea of personality was instrumental in this change.

The very air in academic circles contained intellectual energy born of this newfound synergy between mental and social science. For fieldworkers in the South, personal experience of two kinds reinforced the excitement: psychoanalysis and reform goals. Although the South was among the best cultural "laboratories," in one anthropologist's words, scholars did not enter it with a neutral outlook. (42) Both Hortense Powdermaker (1903-1970) and John Dollard (1900-1980), for example, who studied Indianola, Mississippi, in the mid-1930s at different times, underwent psychoanalysis. The Rockefeller Foundation arranged a postdoctoral fellowship in 1931 for Dollard, then a sociologist, at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, where Freud's intimate Hanns Sachs was his analyst. The dates of her "two long analyses," recalled by Powdermaker in her 1966 autobiography, are less clear. But she said more bluntly than Dollard that psychotherapy, sought for "personal reasons," furthered her "understanding of others." (43) Both grasped the much-talked-of concept of personality from the inside.

Reform impulses also added a subtext to academic objectives. Agendas were inchoate; practical goals and scholarship mixed uncertainly in individuals, and no two researchers had the same views. But wishes for social betterment were commonplace among these students of the South. Powdermaker had recruited young immigrant women for a union in the 1920s when "it was unusual," she said later, "for a middle class college girl to be a labor organizer." After finishing her southern work, she taught night classes around 1940 at the left-leaning New School for Social Research in New York. (44) In another key, Dollard lent his prestige to the utopianism of pop psychology. At a time when one newspaper called children "a blank check," Dollard told New Jersey "mothers of the privileged class" in 1937 to take childrearing back from their maids. He gave a talk titled "Fulfillment and Frustration in Family Life" in Cleveland and advised listeners at New York's Cooper Union on the "average American male." (45) Differently again, Charles S. Johnson, called a "sidelines activist" by his biographer, let his anger peep through his professionalism. The tension in his writing between calm references to the "biracial system" and hideous data (a three-year-old black boy castrated and thrown in a lake to drown) is palpable. (46) For Johnson, social science was a legitimizing rhetoric, and for all these scholars, social hopes accompanied academic work.

By train, Atlanta was twenty-five hours from New York and Jackson was twenty hours from Chicago when John Dollard planned his trip from New Haven to Mississippi in 1934. On the Chicago line, Jim Crow cars had to begin at Cairo, Illinois, although to avoid disruption there was often separate seating from Chicago. (47) Coming from Irish-Catholic roots in Wisconsin, Dollard faced an unfamiliar world. Why the South?

The South promised both abnormality and authenticity to scholars looking for a place to test the development of personality in culture. Choosing to study the region began as a northern issue. Private northern foundations--among them the Rockefeller Foundation, General Education Board, Rosenwald Fund, Social Science Research Council, and American Council on Education--funded research on projects of academic interest that held out benefits such as better education and health. In their writings, the South seemed the heartland of the nation's maladjustment. When Hortense Powdermaker compared her work on blacks in New Haven and Mississippi in 1934, she said down south "one is able to see the situation more 'in the raw.'" (48) Race relations there were "most highly charged and typical," John Dollard agreed. Fieldwork would help him "avoid making many mistakes which the unskilled white investigator is likely to make" in northern ghettos, particularly because his anticipated collaboration with E. Franklin Frazier, the sociologist, then teaching at Fisk, afforded a chance to "study the race relation situation as it affects oneself and one's Negro colleague." (49) White southerners were quick to see the insult in Yankee eagerness to probe their homes. Southerntown, the fictitious name of Dollard's site, is "abnormal and queer," wrote the Agrarian Donald Davidson in a review of the finished study; "otherwise he would not be investigating it." Davidson deployed sarcasm against scientism: although Dollard's sociological credentials made him seem "not queer," he was really "Gulliver with hay fever," a hulking intruder claiming that his allergies kept him from passing judgment on the proverbial bad smell of blacks. (50) The clash between those excited about the South as a research object and others resentful of becoming subjects underlines the cutting-edge nature, academic and cultural, of southern projects. Powdermaker called herself the first anthropologist to study an American community, and a newspaper praised Dollard for his pioneering application of psychoanalytic techniques to interviews with blacks. (51) As cultural theory moved interest in personality from the asylum to the field, the gain was a burst of creativity about the South, while the cost was pathologizing it.

Southern black scholars found themselves in the middle. Even if they felt colonized, they willingly anchored incoming research. In 1938, Charles S. Johnson recruited Harry Stack Sullivan to work on "personality development of southern rural Negro youth" by saying that their mutual friend Powdermaker thought the psychiatrist would be interested. As their correspondence grew, Sullivan addressed Johnson "dear friend," but Johnson wrote carefully to "Dr. Sullivan." (52) Well schooled in deference, Johnson did not let familiarity unsettle collaboration. Black Nashville in fact became a scholarly hub. At Fisk, Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier counseled Powdermaker, for example, on her way to Mississippi in 1932. The men insisted she should not "reveal my Jewish background to Negroes or whites in a Bible Belt community" because "Jews were still 'Christ killers.'" (53) Nearby at Meharry Medical College, Michael Bent, a professor, had Rockefeller Foundation funding, like Powdermaker, to improve rural blacks' understanding of health. Meharry had also educated Walter A. Adams, the only black psychiatrist ever to receive a Rosenwald Fund fellowship to aid black education. Not surprisingly, Adams soon showed up in Chicago as coauthor of Color and Human Nature: Negro Personality Development in a Northern City (1941) with sociologist W. Lloyd Warner of the University of Chicago, where Johnson and Dollard had studied and Sapir once taught. (54) It was a small world for cultural theorists interested in the South, and black scholars occupied a crucial niche.

As heroes, go-betweens, and pariahs at once, however, the black colleagues felt the social complexity of the research. Northern sponsors praised the integrated teams as models of harmony. Allison Davis (1902-1983) and John Dollard, collaborators in 1940 on a book about black youth in Deep South cities, "differ in race, professional training, and place of residence," said the American Youth Commission's preface. This happily meant "the product was tempered by far more intellectual criticism and tested by more varied criteria than could have been possible had the work been done by either scholar working alone." (55) More practically, all assumed blacks could better penetrate the masks habitually worn by a subject people. In Mississippi, Harry Stack Sullivan had listened to one man's story for eight hours before realizing the tale was a fiction. Recognizing communication as a problem, Powdermaker hired "a Negro assistant" in New Haven "who is reaching the men of the lowest social class, a group very difficult for a white person to reach here." (56) This became one southern strategy: to work with a black scholar who in turn recruited field-workers, often his students, to collect life histories. The arrangement defied southern custom. In 1975, Dollard recalled his first, nearly clandestine meeting with Davis in Natchez. His white hosts "thought I couldn't go to the house where Allison Davis, a negro person lived," so they arranged a rendezvous outside the city "under the Dueling Oaks." (57) To Dollard, the open-air introduction was a necessary subterfuge. What Davis, as a man educated at Williams, Harvard, the London School of Economics, and Chicago, felt about Jim Crow's insult was not recorded.

Yet there were risks for northern white scholars as well. Social ostracism, physical danger, and "going native" were all hazards. Initially, they devised explanations to deflect suspicion. On the advice of her Rockefeller Foundation sponsors, Powdermaker told Indianola whites in 1931 that her focus was "the Negro family, an innocuous subject, I thought." After a cotton-gin manager in the same town mistook Dollard for a labor organizer, Dollard spread word that "I was studying socialization among negro children." (58) Segregated space made it difficult for white investigators to find a place to interview blacks. Dollard rented an office for intensive conversations with black, as well as white, subjects using a modified psychoanalytic technique. Neighbors of both races would have been shocked to know how often the topic was sexuality. But his misstep came when he revealed to fellow boarders that he planned to eat dinner at the home of a black woman teacher. "After that I was ostracized from the town and that was a heavy dreadful experience." (59) Caution and color, however, kept him from greater harm. Clippings about lynchings in his scrapbook support his recollection that he went south fearful for his safety; but he soon saw that he had the "protection of the effective political people" who kept "their representatives of the law under control." (60) Managing external threats did not prevent field-workers from falling in love with their subjects and forfeiting scholarly distance. Powdermaker, less stiff than Dollard, more freely let herself go. "Every night, as the moon became fuller, I danced" with the village women, she wrote of her work in Melanesia in the 1920s. Now in Mississippi she sneaked off on Sundays with black acquaintances for church and dinner, breaking the white "taboo on eating with Negroes--eating together being a symbol of course, of social equality." (61) Even then, she did not come as close to compromising her identity as did Newbell Niles Puckett, who "posed as a real conjure-doctor and prescribed as well as received charms" while doing his doctoral research in New Orleans a decade earlier. (62) Yankee scholars liked to call the South a "laboratory." Detachment from a place and its people was not possible if the subject was personality, however, and cultural study could not be called scientific in a simple sense.

At the same time, the northerners had little contact with southern white scholars. The reason was less the two sides' open hostility than their dissimilar thinking about culture. Southerners were developing their own methods. Although Frank Luton (1898-1979) in Tennessee worked vigorously to improve mental health, he did not use the rhetoric of personality and instead saw the problem as medical. After studying psychiatry with Adolf Meyer at Johns Hopkins in the late 1920s, he was "anxious to get back home," he told an acquaintance at Vanderbilt, where he taught as the state's first licensed psychiatrist. (63) Like Meyer, Luton believed in taking patients' life histories for diagnosis, as well as preventing illness through "mental hygiene," that is, raising public awareness and providing early clinical intervention. His focus on institutional care did not preclude interest in fieldwork of a kind. In 1934, the Rockefeller Foundation funded his "mental health demonstration" in rural Tennessee; the research would show how to bring mental hygiene to the countryside. (64) Whether in the clinic or field, however, biology remained influential in Luton's thinking. The category race included Irish, Italians, and Jews in his lecture to Vanderbilt medical students around 1930, and a retarded "colored boy" became a truant, Luton told a group of nurses, when he "got beyond his depth in school." (65) In his circle there was excitement about the human sciences, but also a sense that the South should be different. Regionalism could foster defensiveness. When a Kentucky psychiatric clinic wished to hire a "young male, Gentile doctor" in 1935, Luton replied that he had few names that were "'young male' and 'Gentile,'" but did say that "this Wall boy is a Southerner." (66) Vanderbilt and Fisk are just a few miles apart in Nashville, but Luton did not meet the northern visitors hosted by Charles Johnson. Academically and socially, their differences were too great. (67)

One last challenge to Yankee scholars had nothing to do with the field: it was the Rip Van Winkle effect. Conditions at home did not stand still while they were away, most crucially, the expectations of sponsors. Yale's Institute of Human Relations, employing Dollard and Powdermaker as well as Sapir as their mentor, reveals commonplace pressures in bold terms because of huge financial stakes. Within months of the researchers' return from Mississippi in 1934, Mark May, the institute's director, received a complaint from an officer of the Rockefeller Foundation who wrote that "I have not had a single thrill in going over" the Yale group's five-year report. Rockefeller's gift of nearly six million dollars beginning in 1929 was to fund "effective collaboration of the biological and social sciences in research on human behavior." (68) Excitement about culture and personality was explicit, and in 1931 the grant brought Sapir to Yale. Yet the foundation soon voiced "frustrated ambitions." Dollard's private communication to a Rockefeller officer about "almost anarchic, individualism" in New Haven reinforced the foundation's fears: the institute had not achieved the teamwork and intellectual clarity of natural science. (69) The sponsors' hope lay in May, who told a Rockefeller Foundation visitor in 1935 that "it is in medicine and industry that real improvements have come to [the] human race." Their affinity did not deflect a warning that if Yale could not deliver "concentrated and intensived [sic] research," then it should decline further funding. (70) The situation increased pressure on Yale-based field-workers, if possible, even more. Dependent on travel stipends, they were less likely to offer simple answers after living in the South.

Like most theories, the concept of personality had an engaging simplicity. As social and mental science moved in the 1920s and 1930s from biological to cultural models, it made sense to place the mind in society. There was promising research potential as well, as psychiatry gained a sociological dimension and social science took note of the individual. But would it work? The South became a site for experimentation because its inequalities and taboos promised access to dark truths. Living up to expectations, the region inspired brilliant work. But it also behaved as the American terra incognita, unpredictable and disruptive, testing the heady alliance among disciplines by forcing difficult questions about the human sciences' methods and uses.

A taste of this troubling legacy appears in the recollections of John Dollard. In 1975, Dollard told an interviewer that he never returned to Mississippi after his fieldwork: "I had the feeling that that was a closed chapter for me." (71) This was at best a half-truth. Southern reception of his Caste and Class in a Southern Town had thrown him into emotional turmoil. Hurt and angered by the comments of W. E. B. Du Bois, whom Dollard considered a friend, in the North Georgia Review, Dollard vowed in his private reply that "a carbon copy of this letter will keep company with your review in my scrapbook." But he pasted in the original instead, amended by a handwritten note, "you can't catch a lie anyway. Never sent!" (72) So much optimism had infused southern research at the outset, and much was gained: the notion of personality underscored that blacks, like whites, were human and that segregation took a psychic toll on both. But fear and flight also gripped northern white scholars. In the South, reception of their work, by blacks and whites, ran from cool to hostile. At home, research was moving from site to lab, case study to general theory, social criticism to plans for adjustment by experts. Field-workers were tempted to jump on board. Refusing to be disturbed by the South, they helped their disciplines disengage from sectionalism, racism, and grassroots activism for the safety of scientific detachment and abstracted social laws. As Yankee social science generalized about society as racial theory had once done about human nature, it neglected the South as a place. (73)

These difficulties should not obscure the moral and intellectual impact of personality studies. Four companion books on black youth, commissioned by the left-leaning American Council on Education and issued in 1940 and 1941, showed the promise of a psycho-social method. One study of growing up black in Deep South cities "explores processes in personality development from a combined psychological and cultural point of view," the council's spokesman explained, as did additional volumes on the rural Cotton Belt, the urban upper South, and the North. (74) Even more forward-looking, four of the six principal authors were black. Charles S. Johnson and E. Franklin Frazier (1894-1962), leading sociologists, wrote alone, while Walter A. Adams and Allison Davis, less prominent black scholars, collaborated with W. Lloyd Warner of the University of Chicago and John Dollard of Yale, both first-class names. Only the connection of the black researchers with traditionally black institutions (Fisk, Howard, and Dillard Universities, and Provident Hospital in Chicago) was a visible reminder of racial inequity. (75)

Children of Bondage (1940) sketched eight black adolescents in Natchez and New Orleans, and telling stories about individuals was a common feature of the series. In contrast to the racial determinism behind earlier asylum studies, personality theory predisposed fieldworkers to appreciate the uniqueness of each black child in a social environment. In the same spirit, social science refused to accept black life as static, inclining instead to conceptualize it as problems amenable to solution. With obvious feeling, Charles S. Johnson wrote in Growing Up in the Black Belt (1941) that grossly unequal country schools produce "misshapen personalities." (76) All the books contained similar chronicles of shame and anger, but there were a few hopeful notes. Dollard, with psychoanalytic training, and Adams, a psychiatrist, looked to therapy. The behavior of one New Orleans girl greatly improved after she developed "easy and mutually satisfactory relations with the upper-class interviewer" of Dollard and Davis's project. Psychiatric outpatients in Chicago might spend years in treatment and emerge "better adjusted," Adams reported. (77) If today empathy seems a paltry response to injustice, it is well to recall its rarity then: no outpatient talk therapy was available to southern blacks during the 1930s. (78) Frazier seemed most political of the authors because he included a chapter on what Washington youth knew about "social movements and ideologies." (79) Indeed, one strength of the series was the variety of emphases permitted by the eclectic term personality. The other was its down-to-earth involvement with black children.

Margaret Mead' s mildly appreciative review of Johnson' s volume in the American Journal of Sociology correctly placed it "against the background of the studies of biracial culture of the South, which have been appearing in the last five years." (80) Her calm tone did not register the rising conflict over southern research, however, some of the contention private and so out of her range but other comments publicly voiced. Perhaps this reigning expert on coming-of-age did not see that it was riskier to document racism's damage to American personalities than to report primitive life cycles. By the time she wrote in 1942, controversy was well under way.

In emotional events surrounding the publication of Dollard's Caste and Class in a Southern Town in 1937 and Powdermaker's After Freedom in 1939, the issue was fundamental: how to analyze culture and why. Both had studied Indianola, Mississippi, and Du Bois, in the review so galling to Dollard, all but charged Dollard with opportunism because he seemed to rush his psychoanalytic interpretation into print without Powdermaker's sociological data, after she invited him along as a "co-worker." (81) In truth, both authors were victims of academic conflict that mirrored deeper shifts in American culture. In January 1936, Powdermaker naively approached Mark May, director of Yale's Institute of Human Relations where she worked with Dollard, about having Yale University Press publish her manuscript. She hoped it would appear by "late spring." Edward Sapir had already told May that it was "a first rate book": "I rate it higher than I do 'Middletown.'" But May returned with bad news: the early readers' reports were severe, and Powdermaker would have to hire an editor to repair her "atrociously written" text. (82) As the author of Life in Lesu, published by Norton in 1933, she must have been surprised and, one imagines, insulted. Her good manners carried her through the next two years while she worked with May and an editor, until, no longer employed by Yale, she gave up and placed the manuscript with Viking. (83) Even then, May insisted on reviewing her acknowledgments ("in science publications strict accuracy is required") and instructed her that she could not claim ever to have been a research associate at the institute, just "a member of the research staff," despite the fact that he had assured Sapir in 1936 that she was an "Associate in Anthropology with the rank of assistant professor." (84) In the meantime, Yale University Press issued Dollard's book, and James R. Angell, Yale's president, wrote to the author praising his "distinguished achievement" on "a complicated and critical problem." (85) Angell made it clear that Dollard helped the institute bring honor to Yale, while Powdermaker, May's hurried retreat implied, threatened shame.

Today, differences between the books seem more perceived than real. Both are considered classic field studies of a community, and the authors similarly used interviews and participant-observation to assess variables such as race and class. Each writer was openly experimental, and each talked about his or her reactions as an exercise in scientific self-awareness. Dollard focused more on race relations, highlighting dependency and anger, while Powdermaker looked in depth at the black community, quietly questioning the relevance of psychoanalysis. (86) Despite attention to emotion in her sections on religion and family, both limited themes in Dollard's book, she stayed more within sociological bounds; Dollard had a keener sense that desire, repression, and displacement exert social power. Still, the works' basic similarity makes their varying receptions at Yale a log of culture-theory flashpoints.

Two tiny blue pages among Institute of Human Relations papers, unsigned and undated, begin "Powdermaker": "style informal," "a newspaper reporter type of thing," "[d]oes not show grounding in the literature." (87) Because the notes reiterated the readers' reports, perhaps Mark May used the scraps of paper to communicate with the author. In this view, Powdermaker was insufficiently theoretical and too personally involved. Leonard Doob, an institute psychologist, doubted the reliability of "her colored ladies," who fed her "old wives' tales" and indecorously took her along to a "revival meeting." Her "timidity in making deeper generalizations" so convinced him that the manuscript had no value that he repeated himself: it was "a badly told story of a small town in the South," "a guide-book to a sleepy town of about 3,000 people." (88) George P. Murdock, an anthropologist, also in-house, agreed. "Too anecdotal," the manuscript did not allude to "the existing literature" or go far enough "in abstracting cultural generalizations." He, too, seemed irritated by the text, because he devoted half of his report to cataloging grammatical errors. (89) Sapir's quick rebuttal made it clear that there was a question about the field's standards. To require a literature review would be a mere "ceremonious performance," he told May; "the sober presentation of the facts as concretely recorded in particular cases is the most valuable part of the book." (90) Despite Sapir's scholarly distinction, his words seemed wasted on his colleagues. Very likely, personal issues reinforced professional ones. Doob's cutting innuendos about Powdermaker' s female informants and intellectual daintiness implied that her sex was a problem. Just so, not only were Sapir and Powdermaker Jews, but Sapir had pushed to employ refugee scholars at the institute following the rise of Hitler, to the point that he confided in Harry Stack Sullivan that he felt the anti-Semitism he encountered at Yale was accelerating his failing health. (91) May, Doob, and Murdock no doubt sincerely favored theoretically informed, personally detached social science; but emotions evoked by their prejudices may also have come into play.

These tense exchanges were not the conflicts of rival schools of thought but fissures in the dispersed group intrigued by the eclectic possibilities of personality. As recently as 1933, Sapir asked May to speak to his seminar titled "The Impact of Culture on Personality." (92) Genuine confusion about Dollard's field after the publication of Caste and Class underlined the openness of the cultural approach. Different reviewers called him a psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, and social scientist. (93) Yet he had become, among other things, Yale's darling, and criticisms of his book confirm the growing rift between hoe-and-spade and armchair human science.

Predictably, Dollard was the villain of the Agrarians and hero of the Freudians; but another line of response identified him as ethically flat. Said neutrally, he was a "student" not a "crusader," in the words of Social Work Today. (94) Leftist and black reviewers, sometimes overlapping categories, were less polite. The New Masses called him "'impartial' to the point of moral suicide." (95) But no one exceeded the passion of E. Franklin Frazier, like Du Bois, a one-time friend. "To be sure the scientist qua scientist should strive to understand human behavior," Frazier wrote in Christendom, "but moral beings who are members of society should not be satisfied merely to contemplate cruelty and violence simply because it is an expression of human nature." When one race subordinates members of another and "destroys their personal dignity, civilized men will judge such a system." (96) Here was the counterpoint to Yale's high-toned academic style. Social and mental science must not forget that people are their subjects or sever analysis from action. Southern black scholars gravitated toward this stance. Writing in the American Journal of Sociology in 1942, Lewis C. Copeland of Fisk described Deep South, by a cluster of University of Chicago authors, as "not concerned with 'the race problem,'" but "primarily concerned with the scientific problems of culture." Equivocating about whether their "detachment" was good, as if he was withholding a crucial subtext, Copeland quietly raised the question of science's social involvement. (97)

Yet it was difficult for black scholars to sustain dissent because they, too, felt pushed toward formalism by centers of academic power. Black and white hopes for Davis and Dollard's book, Children of Bondage, for example, were dramatically different: instrument of awakening versus teachers' guide. Allison Davis, coauthor with Dollard, was distressed in 1939 that the General Education Board, one sponsor, wanted "a scholarly format." His goal was "to make our book a vivid and intimate presentation of the humanity of Negro children, and to write in a non-technical, popular style" in order "to reach the great body of general white readers," the "audience one must reach in any effort to change controls with regard to the Negro." (98) Internal discussions at the philanthropy's offices decided against collapsing the series's four case studies into two streamlined volumes. But the expectations for distribution of the staff of the General Education Board were modest--southern black school personnel as well as "women's colleges and church organizations"--and a press release stressed moderation, saying the book "does not pretend to 'solve' the problems it describes," only to foster "a deeper comprehension." (99) Davis had written with an ambitious social purpose, but the publication process sent a blunt message about his limited power. The realities of funding were one reason why black-white disagreements about the intent of personality studies remained muted.

The argument that race in the South, challenging the human sciences in the 1930s through personality ideas plus fieldwork, drove a wedge between formalists and activists may be, as stated, too simple. In scholarly circles with southern interests, some who recoiled at intimate reporting had encountered the South only on paper, although they had apparently seen enough to want to frame injustice safely in theory. Nor did this group wish to be mere theoreticians; they hoped to use scientifically precise cultural principles to guide policy. (100) These caveats are important; but the fact remains that the southern work provoked hard questions and stirred strong feelings. At times, the experiential core to the transformation of northern white scholarship can be plainly seen.

John Dollard, near the center of discussion, seemed overwhelmed by the South, at the same time that his interest shifted toward experimentation and psychological laws. He felt betrayed by southern criticisms of his book. When he heard from a Mississippi friend that Indianola whites were "outraged" and "yelling loudly," he offered "to pay your expenses to Indianola and back (seriously!) if you could get me any information" about whether these enemies sought "to revenge themselves on me" by "tak[ing] it out on my friends." (101) When he similarly charged Du Bois, as a reviewer, with having "exposed some of my Negro friends to harm," Dollard underscored his naivete. This was the South, and race was more than a scholarly theme. (102) Nearly forty years later, telling an interviewer that southern "courtesy is a sort of act," he revealed again that he felt he was made a fool, never quite grasping the region until after he left. He recalled that it was "a great experience" to spend a summer in New Orleans around 1940 writing Children of Bondage; but by then his research was moving in a new direction. His acclaimed "frustration-aggression hypothesis" seemed, in his memory, a matter of progress, coming "out of that book," meaning Caste and Class. (103) True enough, he had documented restrictions and hostilities along Indianola's color line. But Frustration and Aggression (1939) otherwise little resembled his southern study. Blacks were now one of many repressed groups, including Jews, immigrants, criminals, and minorities in totalitarian states. Evidence often consisted of lab experiments, fabricating frustration, not real-world observation. Although policy makers might widely apply the law that restriction produces anger, the method took a bird's-eye view of society, protecting the researcher and limiting his obligation. Not surprisingly, Dollard's four coauthors were colleagues at the Institute of Human Relations. The book seemed the kind of work Powdermaker's critics expected, and the research must have been a relief to Dollard, who would not have to pay a personal price or think about how mores resist social engineering. (104)

In his instinct to back off from the South, Dollard was not alone. No longer was the region densely populated by scholar-reformers, as northerners increasingly preferred either to romanticize it or fold its problems into national concerns. (105) The waning of academic experimentalism seemed part of a wish for closure. By 1940, southern letters, exploding on the national market during the preceding decade, were appreciated as much as curiosities as testimonies. Faulkner's wrenching fatalism had made him a literary star, John Gould Fletcher's poetry won the region's first Pulitzer prize in the field, and a string of meditations on southernness appeared, among them Clarence Cason's 90 Degrees in the Shade (1935), W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South (1941), and Will Percy's Lanterns on the Levee (1941). (106) Tense blendings of regional love and self-criticism, these were serious books; yet responses to Lanterns were often frivolous. Calling Percy a "Mississippi squirearch," critics north and south agreed he "makes a good case" for the "South's aristocratic ideal." Alfred Knopf, Percy's publisher, capitalized on the nostalgia by running a large ad in the New York Times titled "Is the Old South Really Gone with the Wind?" (107) True to the letter of Percy's text, the commentators mistook its tone, reducing mourning to melancholy. Asking "a learned gentleman from Yale," clearly Dollard, why blacks behave violently and heating in reply that it is--"tentatively you understand"--"the frustrated hatred of the Negro for the white man," Percy offered his own diagnosis for patriarchy's decline: the inability of blacks to trust anyone, even their peers. (108) With its odd mix of sarcasm, parody, regret, and reflection, Lanterns is as easy to like as it is hard to comprehend. After six months on the market, it still ranked tenth on the bestseller list compiled by Publisher's Weekly. (109) Judging by the publicity, however, readers embraced Percy as a male Margaret Mitchell and hoped to find a southern myth.

More to the point, northern white social science similarly withdrew from the maelstrom of southern emotions. There was continuity in the issues treated, principally race, and the concepts used, namely personality. The difference was in the mood. New books on racism conformed to the streamlined scientism of Frustration and Aggression. The blockbuster study, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944), amassed mountains of evidence about black disadvantage compiled by researchers of both races, only to conclude that the life of the underclass was not really the point. "The Negro problem is primarily a white man's problem," averred Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish economist hired by the sponsoring Carnegie Corporation as the study's chief author: racial inequality was a blot on opportunity, progress, and optimism, key articles of the "American Creed." Shifting the focus from black life to white "moral uneasiness" redesigned racism as a policy issue. It had to be easier for whites to face cleansing the nation's conscience than reversing centuries of injustice. (110) Gordon Allport of Harvard University similarly disengaged bigotry from its social foundations in The Nature of Prejudice (1954). His book Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (1937) had established him as an expert on character, and now he traced bias to childrearing in "a home that is suppressive, harsh, or critical--where the parents' word is law." Psychologizing prejudice allowed him to universalize it: blacks and Jews feel hostile to whites and gentiles, as much as the other way around. (111) He did not register that inequalities of power made the consequences of their anger vastly different. Both arguments contained elements of truth: all Americans were troubled by hatred. Their shortcoming was the simplicity growing from their detachment from particulars, including place.

The irony was that they spoke persuasively to policy makers in an era attentive to testimony in a scientific style. In the years before 1954, social science' s analyses of race affected the legal steps toward Brown v. Board of Education. (112) The national assault on segregation put the South on everyone's map; but how fully Yankees apprehended southern society may be questioned in light of the short, controversial life there of cultural fieldwork. The original group drawn from the social and mental sciences was now dispersed. Sapir's death at fifty-five in 1939 severed Sullivan's cross-disciplinary tie, although he psychoanalyzed a boy for Frazier's Negro Youth before his own health began to decline. Powdermaker, in part thumbing her nose at her tormenters, dedicated After Freedom to Sapir. Then, she recalled, she lost her way. Turning from the South's disturbing realism to the movie industry's production of fantasy, she was later most "critical of the Hollywood fieldwork." "Feelings were muted. I saw myself as an objective scientist." (113) Success cut short Charles S. Johnson's scholarly career. In 1946, he became the first black president of Fisk, by necessity focusing on administrative tasks until his death ten years later. By then, the cluster of black collaborators had largely left the South: Walter Adams and Allison Davis held positions in Chicago, and Du Bois, increasingly at odds with America, died in self-imposed exile in Ghana in 1963. Obstacles in the South to educated, principled men of color were discouraging. Malinowski, Sapir's friend and Powdermaker's teacher, died in New Haven on a visit to Yale in 1942, far from his Polish homeland. (114) How this impassioned field-worker and culture theorist mixed with the Institute of Human Relations crowd is hard to picture.

The passing of a generation was not the end of the story. The retreat of northern intellectual interest from the South in a way unmasked and nourished the region's indigenous human-science tradition. The fiery Lillian Smith, the innovative Atlanta Psychiatric Clinic, and dedicated Lloyd C. Elam, psychiatrist-president of Meharry Medical College at the height of the civil rights movement, variously explored the question of southern personalities in the postwar era. (115) They did not begin with a blank slate, however, and part of the legacy was the southern experience of scholars of culture. Although theory never fits its material altogether comfortably, the idea of personality as articulated in the 1930s especially invited challenge. Its interdisciplinary openness, fieldwork emphasis, and individualized focus induced white northern researchers to learn more about America than they planned. Probing the subjective history of racism, they saw bitterness, defensiveness, and fear close-up in members of both races. Perhaps because they were intellectuals, their instinct to back off from personal responsibility was predetermined. Wealthy sponsors did nothing to encourage engagement; in fact, quite the opposite. The white northern withdrawal from southern subjects and, indeed, southern black colleagues, was disorderly, as the scholars anxiously sought safer ground. Through all, the personality concept not only survived but also extended its range, though with diminished concreteness and, arguably, less courage. The human sciences had entered a very old American conversation between regions about race and did not escape untransformed.

(1) "Uncle Will's House," in Walker Percy, Signposts in a Strange Land, ed. Patrick Samway (New York, 1991), 65. I am grateful for support for research travel provided by the American Philosophical Society, the Rockefeller Archive Center, and Penn State University's Department of History and Institute for the Arts and Humanities. I thank the archives cited in the notes for permission to publish quotations from manuscripts in their possession, and I wish especially to acknowledge Mrs. Joan Dollard for allowing me to cite the papers of John Dollard. Assistance with this essay has been generously offered by Jane Adams, Lila Corwin Berman, Philip Jenkins, Lewis Perry, Johanna Shields, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, and the anonymous readers for the Journal of Southern History. Dolores Dungee and Scott Lenhart influenced me to undertake this project. My loving children, Ellie and Jon, helped me to complete it.

(2) Sullivan to Johnson, February 1, [1939], Folder 14, Box 17, Charles S. Johnson Papers (Special Collections, Fisk University Franklin Library, Fisk University, Nashville, Tenn.).

(3) Hortense Powdermaker recorded her impression in her autobiography, Stranger and Friend: The Way of an Anthropologist (New York, 1966), 194-95. On Sullivan's involvement with the Percys, see Jay Tolson, Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy (New York, 1992), 138-39, 290, and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, The House of Percy: Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family (New York, 1994), 295-97. Sullivan perhaps met them when Walker's father, Le Roy Pratt Percy, was treated for depression at the Phipps Psychiatric Clinic of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore; Sullivan, then a young psychiatrist, worked nearby at Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital and was friendly with the central figure at Phipps, Adolf Meyer. When the drowning death of Walker's mother in 1932 quickly followed his father's suicide in 1929, Sullivan traveled to Mississippi as both doctor and family friend to speak with the three now-orphaned sons. See Tolson, Pilgrim in the Ruins, 138; Wyatt-Brown, House of Percy, 253-55, 274, 296; and Helen Swick Perry, Psychiatrist of America: The Life of Harry Stack Sullivan (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), chaps. 23, 27. Tolson establishes the serious depth of Walker's analysis with Rioch, as well as his simultaneous study of Freud. See Tolson, Pilgrim in the Ruins, 138-42, 151.

(4) Sapir, "Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry" (1932), in David G. Mandelbaum, ed., Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality (Berkeley, 1949), 515.

(5) On the relationship of Sapir and Sullivan, see Perry, Psychiatrist of America, chap. 28, as well as their pair of articles, Harry Stack Sullivan, "A Note on the Implications of Psychiatry, the Study of Interpersonal Relations, for Investigations in the Social Sciences," and Edward Sapir, "The Contribution of Psychiatry to an Understanding of Behavior in Society," American Journal of Sociology, 42 (May 1937), 848-61, 862-70. On the transition from racial to cultural thinking, see esp. George W. Stocking Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology (New York, 1968); Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York, 1991); John S. Gilkeson Jr., "The Domestication of 'Culture' in Interwar America, 1919-1941," in Jo Anne Brown and David K. van Keuren, eds., The Estate of Social Knowledge (Baltimore, 1991), 153-74; and Elazar Barkan, The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States between the World Wars (Cambridge, Eng., 1992).

(6) Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937; 2nd ed., New York, 1949), 54.

(7) Key works on the South as symbol, both in the northern imagination and southern self perception, include William R. Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York, 1961); Anne Rowe, The Enchanted Country: Northern Writers in the South, 1865-1910 (Baton Rouge, 1978); Fred Hobson, Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain (Baton Rouge, 1983); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982); J. William Harris, Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation (Baltimore, 2001); and Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Hearts of Darkness: Wellsprings of a Southern Literary Tradition (Baton Rouge, 2003).

(8) Studies exploring the intellectual and psychological groundwork of civil rights in ways complementary to this analysis include Carol Polsgrove, Divided Minds: Intellectuals and the Civil Rights Movement (New York, 2001), and Richard H. King, Civil Rights and the Idea of Freedom (New York, 1992). Polsgrove emphasizes the moral equivocation of a later generation of intellectuals; King underscores the psychological consequences of black activism in a way relevant to southern black scholars of the 1930s.

(9) For a sense of the academic geography of cultural theory, with attention to Columbia, the absent partner in southern work, see Abram Kardiner and Edward Preble, They Studied Man (Cleveland, 1961), esp. 134-59, 205-13. It is also informative to see how Erik Erikson, the German emigre scholar, interacted in the late 1930s with both the New Haven and New York circles; see Lawrence J. Friedman, Identity's Architect: A Biography of Erik H. Erikson (New York, 1999), 124-39. For the challenge of a developmental view of childhood to racial theory, see Anne C. Rose, "The Discovery of Southern Childhoods: Psychology and the Transformation of Schooling in the Jim Crow South" (unpublished paper in the author's possession); on the rise of an environmentally oriented psychology along with Progressivism, see John Chynoweth Burnham, "Psychiatry, Psychology and the Progressive Movement," American Quarterly, 12 (Winter 1960), 457-65. The growing hazard of international work of all kinds appears dramatically in the arrangements made for Yale's yearlong seminar, "The Impact of Culture on Personality" (19321933). Sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, the project deliberately funded only one-way travel for Japanese, Chinese, Indian, and German scholars from their own countries to the United States and arranged for some families to accompany participants. This foreshadowed later Rockefeller Foundation efforts to rescue scholars from war-torn nations. See Lawrence K. Frank to Edmund Ezra Day, February 6, 1932, Tracy B. Kittredge to Day, April 5, 1932, Folder 4829, Box 408, and Frank to Mark May, February 27, 1933, Folder 4830, Box 408, all in Series 200s, RG 1.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives; hereinafter cited as RF Archives (Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y.; hereinafter cited as RAC). All further citations from the RF Archives are from this record group. At the same time, Yale scholars who once did international fieldwork now began projects close to home, perhaps in part for safety's sake. Hortense Powdermaker was one of the first female anthropologists to do solo fieldwork in the South Pacific in the 1920s. But in 1933 she began a study of New Haven's black community. See her "Plan for Continuation of the Negro Research for the Next Academic Year," p. 1, typescript, February 5, 1934, Folder 114, Box 12, Series II, Institute of Human Relations Papers, RU 483; hereinafter cited as IHR Papers (Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library, Yale University, New Haven, Conn.; hereinafter cited as Yale Archives). All citations from this collection are in Series II unless otherwise noted.

(10) On black specialists, see Paul B. Cornely, "The Economics of Medical Practice and the Negro Physician," Journal of the National Medical Association, 43 (March 1951), 85. Charles S. Johnson reported that 78 percent of U.S. black families lived in the South in 1930, in Growing Up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South (1941; reprint, New York, 1967), xxii.

(11) A. H. Witmer, "Insanity in the Colored Race in the United States," Alienist and Neurologist, 12 (1891), 24. Post-1930 writers, in contrast, resisted prevailing racialism by citing social variables affecting hospitalization; see, for example, Solomon P. Rosenthal, "Racial Differences in the Incidence of Mental Disease," Journal of Negro Education, 3 (July 1934), 484-93, and E. Y. Williams, "The Incidence of Mental Disease in the Negro," Journal of Negro Education, 6 (July 1937), 377-92.

(12) Mary O'Malley, "Psychoses in the Colored Race: A Study in Comparative Psychiatry," American Journal of Insanity, 71 (October 1914), 317 (first quotation), 310 (second and third quotations), 323 (fourth quotation).

(13) Robert Bennett Bean, "Some Racial Peculiarities of the Negro Brain," American Journal of Anatomy, 5 (September 1906), 380. For skull measurements, see Witmer, "Insanity in the Colored Race," 28. Not surprisingly, the conviction that race determined mental character had been articulated during slavery; see Todd L. Savitt, "Slave Health and Southern Distinctiveness," in Todd L. Savitt and James Harvey Young, eds., Disease and Distinctiveness in the American South (Knoxville, 1988), 120-53. Antebellum mental institutions cared for slaves as well as whites; see Samuel B. Thielman, "Southern Madness: The Shape of Mental Health Care in the Old South," in Ronald L. Numbers and Todd L. Savitt, eds., Science and Medicine in the Old South (Baton Rouge, 1989), 256-75.

(14) O'Malley, "Psychoses in the Colored Race," 317.

(15) John E. Lind, "The Dream as a Simple Wish-Fulfilment in the Negro," Psychoanalytic Review, 1 (July 1914), 300.

(16) Arrah B. Evarts, "The Ontogenetic Against the Phylogenetic Elements in the Psychoses of the Colored Race," Psychoanalytic Review, 3 (July 1916), 272, 274. On Freud's views of dreams and human origins, see Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time (New York, 1988), 104-17, 326-35. Well into the twentieth century, Freudian training led scholars to admire what they saw as a lack of repression in blacks. Erwin Wexberg, a European-born psychiatrist practicing in New Orleans around 1940, wrote that "the simpler living conditions of the Southern negro do not cause the development of emotional dissatisfaction and repression to the same degree as among white subjects." See Wexberg, "The Comparative Racial Incidence (White and Negro) of Neuropsychiatric Conditions in a General Hospital," Tri-State Medical Journal, 13 (February 1941), 2696.

(17) E. M. Green, "Psychoses Among Negroes--A Comparative Study," Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 41 (1914), 697-708; O'Malley, "Psychoses in the Colored Race."

(18) Howard W. Odum, Social and Mental Traits of the Negro: Research into the Conditions of the Negro Race in Southern Towns; A Study in Race Traits, Tendencies and Prospects (1910; reprint, New York, 1968), 5, 13.

(19) By the 1930s, however, Odum became a major exponent of regional study, though he never gave up belief in black inferiority or segregation. See Michael O'Brien, The Idea of the American South, 1920-1941 (Baltimore, 1979), chaps. 24.

(20) Odum, Social and Mental Traits of the Negro, 19 (first quotation), 20 (second quotation), 295 (third quotation).

(21) Bean, "Some Racial Peculiarities of the Negro Brain," 379.

(22) On the Grady clinics, see "Directory: Free Clinic and Hospital Service in Fulton & De Kalb Counties, Georgia, Revised March 1934," p. 4, and "Free Clinic and Hospital Services in Fulton & De Kalb Counties, Georgia, Open to Colored, January 1934," p. 2, typescripts, Folder 26, Box 5, Neighborhood Union Collection (Archives and Special Collections, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, Atlanta, Ga.; hereinafter AUC). With a similar view of blacks' role in medicine, W. S. Leathers, dean of the Medical School of Vanderbilt University, argued in a request for funding from the General Education Board that hospital beds should be added for blacks (including five of the thirty for psychiatric cases) because "these patients afford the very best type of material for teaching purposes." See "Memoranda Concerning Expansion of the Vanderbilt Medical School and Hospital," p. 2, typescript, April l, 1931, Folder 1415, Box 153, Series 1.1, General Education Board Archives; hereinafter cited as GEB Archives (RAC). The most notorious instance of interest in black patients as research objects is the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, documented by James H. Jones, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment (New York, 1981). The norm for mental health care in the South for all but the wealthy remained segregated public asylums; see, for example, Frank H. Luton and Paul L. Boynton, "A Study of Mental Health Needs in Tennessee: A Report to George H. Cato, Commissioner of Institutions and Public Welfare," typescript, December 1938, Folder 2, Box 7, Frank H. Luton Papers (Eskind Biomedical Library Historical Collection, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.).

(23) The claim to be the only black health center appears in an untitled typescript, circa June 23, 1916, Folder 12, Box 5, Neighborhood Union Collection; the diagnoses were part of an untitled typescript about the Wesley Avenue Public School Clinic, circa 1924, Folder 17, Box 5, ibid.; and "senile asthenia" was a diagnosis at another location, "Summerhill Clinic," typescript, May 14-18, 1917, Folder 13, Box 5, ibid. The Neighborhood Union operated clinics in locations such as schools and churches.

(24) "Social Work Among Negroes" pageant script, typescript, [mid-1930s], Folder 23, Box 4, Frankie V. Adams Collection (AUC); Walter W. Pettit, Wilbur I. Neustetter, and Dora M. Rinert, "Report of the Committee on the Content of Group Work Courses," typescript, December 1932, Folder 13, Box 4, Adams Collection. In contrast, John J. Mullowney, white president of black Meharry Medical College from 1921 to 1938, referred to "Negro Psychology" in a letter to M. J. Holmes, Board of Education, Methodist Episcopal Church, March 26, 1934, Folder "General Correspondence, Grandy to Rosenwald," Box 1, John J. Mullowney Papers (Meharry Medical College Archives, Meharry Medical College, Nashville, Tenn.; hereinafter cited as Meharry Medical College Archives). Not surprisingly, Franklin C. McLean of the University of Chicago, visiting Meharry for the General Education Board, concluded that Mullowney "regards the Negroes as an inferior race, to be dealt with paternalistically." See "Report on Meharry Medical College," p. 7, typescript, March 27, 1934, Folder 1250, Box 135, Series 1.1, GEB Archives.

(25) Paul Comely made this estimate on the basis of a 1945 survey. See Comely, "Economics of Medical Practice," 85. Conditions affecting black doctors who might wish to specialize were crippling. Because southern white medical schools would not admit blacks, they had to rely on funding from northern foundations to go north for advanced study. See John J. Mullowney to Robert A. Lambert, Rockefeller Foundation, January 21, [19]30, Folder 1257, Box 136, Series 1.1, GEB Archives. See also Herbert M. Morals, The History of the Negro in Medicine (New York, 1967), esp. chap. 6.

(26) C. V. Roman, "The Negro's Psychology and His Health," Hospital Social Service, 11 (1925), 92, 94, 94, 93, 94, 92.

(27) On Roman's life, see James Summerville, Educating Black Doctors: A History of Meharry Medical College (University, Ala., 1983), 33-34, 42. He was a specialist, though not in a theoretical field but in the area of eye, ear, nose, and throat. The Globe, Nashville's black newspaper, proudly reported on September 4, 1908, that his expertise was "a hopeful sign for the race." See "Dr. C. V. Roman, Specialist," clipping, Folder "Dr. C. V. Roman, Specialist" (Meharry Medical College Archives).

(28) For example, field studies in the Nashville area during the 1930s, with sponsoring agencies noted in parentheses, include rural health education project, Meharry Medical College (Julius Rosenwald Fund); mental health demonstration, School of Medicine, Vanderbilt University (Rockefeller Foundation); Fisk Social Center, Fisk University (Community Chest, WPA); and study of black youth for Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt, Fisk University (American Youth Commission). See, respectively, Michael J. Bent and Ellen F. Greene, Rural Negro Health: A Report on a Five-Year Experiment in Health Education in Tennessee (Nashville, 1937); Charles S. Johnson, "A Social Program for Negroes in the Bertha Fensterwald Settlement," May 1937, typescript, Folder 6, Box 1, Series 1-28, and "The Children's Institute of the Fisk University Social Center," typescript, [1938?], Folder 9, Box 8, Series 1-28, Johnson Papers (Social Center); [Frank H. Luton], "Proposed Mental Health Demonstration," typescript, [1934?], and Luton to Chester L. Reynolds, February 26, 1935, Folder 63, Box 2, Luton Papers; and Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt, xx.

(29) LKF [Lawrence K. Frank], "Study of Comparative Culture," typescript, circa 1929-1931, Folder 48-28, Box 408, Series 200s, RF Archives. The wording pertained to a yearlong seminar at Yale, drawing international scholars, held in 1932-1933; for an account of the project, see Edmund Ezra Day to John V. Van Sickle, "Subject: Appointment of Fellows in Connection with the Project for the Study of the Impact of Culture on Personality," December 9, 1930, ibid.

(30) William A. White, "The Social Significance of Mental Disease," Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry, 22 (November 1929), 873 (first and second quotations), 898 (third, fourth, and fifth quotations), 896-97 (sixth and seventh quotations). This was the Kober Lecture at Georgetown University, March 25, 1929. On White, see Perry, Psychiatrist of America, 121-22, 183-87.

(31) William A. White, Twentieth Century Psychiatry: Its Contribution to Man's Knowledge of Himself(New York, 1936), 93 (first quotation), 128-29 (second quotation). The book represents his Thomas W. Salmon Lectures.

(32) For the complete citations, see note 5.

(33) Perry, Psychiatrist of America, 243, 302-3.

(34) Sapir, "Language" (1933), in Mandelbaum, ed., Selected Writings of Sapir, 17-18.

(35) Sapir, "Emergence of the Concept of Personality in a Study of Cultures" (1934), ibid., 593 (first and second quotations), 596 (third quotation).

(36) Sapir, "Contribution of Psychiatry to an Understanding of Behavior in Society," 863.

(37) Sapir, "The Unconscious Patterning of Behavior in Society" (1927), in Mandelbaum, ed., Selected Writings of Sapir, 556. Sapir also offered a characteristic criticism of functionalism as oversimplified, in light of both individuality and the unconscious, in this essay (p. 556).

(38) Sapir, "Personality," ibid., 560.

(39) "Manuscript Description of Church Services, Nashville, Tennessee, by Fisk University, Department of Social Sciences," issued by the Social Science Institute, Fisk University, bound typescript, 1929, Folder 9, Box 228, Johnson Papers. On Johnson, see Richard Robbins, Sidelines Activist: Charles S. Johnson and the Struggle for Civil Rights (Jackson, Miss., 1996).

(40) "Negro Personality Changes in a Southern Community," in E. B. Reuter, ed., Race and Culture Contacts (New York, 1934), 208 (first quotation), 211 (second quotation). The word nothingness, attributed by Johnson to Gertrude Stein, appears in a later typescript "Discussion" (p. 4) of a paper by James S. Plant, "Community Planning for the Emotional Needs of the Child," delivered at one session of "The White House Conference on Children in a Democracy, January 18-20, 1940." Both typescripts are in Folder 10, Box 129, Johnson Papers. Johnson later identified Sullivan as a key figure in resisting racialist ideas and, implicitly, as an important influence on him. See "The Contribution of Harry Stack Sullivan to Sociology," typescript, lecture delivered at Hunter College, October 14, 1951, Folder 20, Box 159, Johnson Papers.

(41) Plant, "Community Planning for the Emotional Needs of the Child," 3 (second quotation); Johnson, "Discussion," pp. 11-12 (first and third quotations); both documents in Folder 10, Box 129, Johnson Papers.

(42) Powdermaker, "Plan for Continuation of the Negro Research for the Next Academic Year," 1.

(43) Powdermaker, Stranger and Friend, 39. On Dollard's psychoanalysis, see Neal E. Miller, "John Dollard (1900-1980)," American Psychology, 37 (May 1982), 587; and Ian Lubek, "Fifty Years of Frustration and Aggression: Some Notes on the Long-Lived Hypothesis," in Knud S. Larson, ed., Dialectics and Ideology in Psychology (Norwood, N.J., 1986), 37-38, copies of both in Folder l, Box l, John Dollard Papers (Yale Archives). When Dollard compiled separate lists of names of colleagues and friends to receive copies of his Caste and Class in a Southern Town (1937), Sachs's name appeared on the "personal copies" list. See Folder 52, Box 21, Series III, IHR Papers. See also Sachs's memoir, Freud: Master and Friend (Cambridge, Mass., 1945).

(44) The quotation about her union work appears in Powdermaker, Stranger and Friend, 25; she told a correspondent about her affiliation with the New School, in Powdermaker to Mark A. May, March 26, 1938, Folder 114, Box 12, IHR Papers.

(45) "If John Doe Beats His Family Put Blame on Grouchy Boss," Cleveland News, May 5, 1937 (first quotation); "Raise Your Children," Newark Evening News, April 16, 1937 (second quotation); "Wife Cranky? Listen in on Family Clinic," Cleveland News, May 6, 1937 (third quotation); "Professor Finds Average American Male Believes Newspapers and Expects to Get Rich," New York World-Telegram, November 29, 1937 (fourth quotation); all four clippings in unpaginated scrapbook, Box 2, Dollard Papers. The scrapbook is the only item in Box 2, and all future references to items pasted in this volume will be simply to Box 2.

(46) Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt, 53 (quotation), 5-6; Robbins, Sidelines Activist.

(47) J. H. Reaney, District Passenger Agent, Pennsylvania Railroad, to John Dollard, April 17, 1934, Folder 2, Box 1, Dollard Papers; Dollard, Caste and Class, 92.

(48) Powdermaker, "Report on Negro Study," pp. 1-2, typescript, November 6, 1934, Folder 114, Box 12, IHR Papers. Northern foundations had been involved in southern education and health care since the turn of the century; but it was mainly after World War I and particularly during the Great Depression that they funded research on the South by northern scholars. See esp. Raymond B. Fosdick, Adventure in Giving: The Story of the General Education Board, A Foundation Established by John D. Rockefeller (New York, 1962), and William A. Link, A Hard Country and a Lonely Place: Schooling, Society, and Reform in Rural Virginia, 1870-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1986), esp. chap. 7.

(49) "Proposal for Summer Research in Negro-White Relations," unpaginated typescript, [1934], Folder 2, Box 1, Dollard Papers.

(50) Davidson, "Gulliver with Hay Fever," American Review, 9 (Summer 1937), 153, in Box 2, Dollard Papers.

(51) Powdermaker, Stranger and Friend, 133; "Yale Sociologist in New Book Bares Rivalry of Races in the South," New Haven Register, March 21, 1937, in Box 2, Dollard Papers.

(52) Johnson to "My dear Dr. Sullivan," October 31, 1939, Johnson to "Dear Dr. Sullivan," March 1, 1940; Sullivan to "Dear Friend," February 12, 1940, Folder 14, Box 17, Johnson Papers. The initial letter in the correspondence was Johnson to Sullivan, September 20, 1938, ibid. For all of Sullivan's easy intimacy, Johnson had to push him to complete his portion of the research and requested repeatedly, without result, that Sullivan train one of Johnson's students in psychoanalysis. On the latter issue, see Johnson to Sullivan, October 31, 1939, March 1, 1940, April 29, 1940, and May 21, 1940, ibid. Although there was a flavor of dismissiveness in Sullivan's disengagement, he did have a reputation for irresponsibility; see Perry, Psychiatrist of America, esp. chaps. 32, 35.

(53) Powdermaker, Stranger and Friend, 145.

(54) W. Lloyd Warner, Buford H. Junker, and Walter A. Adams, Color and Human Nature: Negro Personality Development in a Northern City (Washington, 1941). On Adams's Rosenwald award, see Edwin R. Embree and Julia Waxman, Investment in People: The Story of the Julius Rosenwald Fund (New York, 1949), 155, 238. Bent, like Adams a Meharry graduate, had received a General Education Board fellowship in 1921 to study at Columbia University; see Summerville, Educating Black Doctors, 70. His field study, coauthored with Ellen Greene, was Rural Negro Health.

(55) Robert L. Sutherland, Associate Director for Studies of Negro Youth, American Youth Commission, preface to Allison Davis and John Dollard, Children of Bondage: The Personality Development of Negro Youth in the Urban South (1940; reprint, New York, 1964), ix.

(56) Powdermaker, "Report on Negro Study," 8. Sullivan told this story in his appendix, "Memorandum on a Psychiatric Reconaissance," to Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt, 332.

(57) "William Ferris Interview with John Dollard, March 14, 1975, New Haven, CT," p. 6, Folder 4, Box 1, Dollard Papers. In the same interview, Dollard recalled that Davis's students from traditionally black Dillard University in New Orleans conducted the interviews. See ibid., p. 7. Giving educated blacks respectable work and authority, even on the modest level of data gathering, could provoke white hostility. J. William Harris tells how sociologist Arthur Raper barely averted violence when he employed black investigators for fieldwork in Georgia in 1934. Harris, Deep Souths, 306-8.

(58) Powdermaker, Stranger and Friend, 139 (first quotation); "Ferris Interview with John Dollard," p. 2, Folder 4, Box 1, Dollard Papers (second quotation).

(59) "Ferris Interview with John Dollard," p. 4, Folder 4, Box 1, Dollard Papers. On his office and extended attention to sexuality in the interviews, see, respectively, Dollard, Caste and Class, 23-26 and chap. 7, "The Sexual Gain."

(60) "Ferris Interview with John Dollard," p. 6, Folder 4, Box 1; "Throng in Florida Awaits a Lynching," New York Times, October 27, 1934, in Box 2; "Eye Witness of Lynching Reveals Fiendish Torture," New York Daily Worker, November 27, 1934, in Box 2, Dollard Papers. The articles reported a lynching, connected with an interracial romance, in which the man was sexually mutilated. The racial taboo and sexual aspect to the story might have had special appeal to someone with Freudian training, and intellectual interest was most likely also a reason that Dollard saved the articles.

(61) Powdermaker, Stranger and Friend, 111 (first quotation), 181 (second quotation).

(62) Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro (Chapel Hill, 1926), 190.

(63) Luton to Evelyn Ridley, February 14, 1930, Folder 2, Box 1, Luton Papers. Meyer was instrumental in introducing behavioral explanations into psychiatry; although he did not subscribe to the anthropologically informed idea of culture, he helped move psychiatry away from a strictly medical model. See Barbara Sicherman, "The New Psychiatry: Medical and Behavioral Science, 1895-1921," in Jacques M. Quen and Eric T. Carlson, eds., American Psychoanalysis: Origins and Development (New York, 1978), 20-37. So much writing about the history of psychiatry focuses on the Northeast that it is worth noting Lawrence J. Friedman's history of the Menninger Clinic in Topeka as an excellent model for regional study; see Menninger: The Family and the Clinic (New York, 1990).

(64) [Luton], "Proposed Mental Health Demonstration." The mental hygiene movement could be connected with advocacy of eugenic sterilization of "mental defectives." See Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore, 1995), 44 (quotation) and passim; on the national movement, see Helen Leland Witmer, Psychiatric Clinics for Children, with Special Reference to State Programs (New York, 1940). Documents about sterilization are among Luton's papers (Folder 46, Box 6), although there is no definitive evidence that he agreed with this initiative.

(65) "2nd Lecture," course on psychopathology, undated manuscript, Folder 93, Box 3; "Lecture to City Hospital Nurses: Child Psychology," p. 6, manuscript, November 5, 1931, Folder 94, Box 3, Luton Papers.

(66) Spafford Ackerly to Luton, August 16, 1935; Luton to Ackerly, August 21, 1935, Folder 4, Box 1, Luton Papers. The muffled worry here about Jews in psychiatry resonated broadly through the history of the field. Freud had worded that psychoanalysis would be perceived as a Jewish science, in part because most in his early circle were Jews. See Dennis B. Klein, Jewish Origins of the Psychoanalytic Movement (New York, 1981). There were emigre European Jewish psychiatrists in the South. For example, the Viennese origins and first names in the family of P. J. Sparer, a Memphis psychiatrist who came to the United States in 1909, suggest his Jewish background. See "Dr. P. J. Sparer Noted Psychiatrist," Memphis Press-Scimitar, October 10, 1977, and "Psychiatrist Has One-Man Library--No Fines Either," Memphis Press-Scimitar, December 10, 1957, in P. J. Sparer Folder, Clippings File (Memphis-Shelby County Room, Memphis Public Library, Memphis, Tenn.; hereinafter cited as Memphis Public Library). Erwin Wexberg, who taught social psychiatry at Xavier University, New Orleans, from 1936 to 1940, is identified as a Holocaust refugee in Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb, From Swastika to Jim Crow: Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges (Malabar, Fla., 1993), 133. As vice-chairman of the section on neurology and psychiatry of the Southern Medical Association (SMA), Luton had distant professional contact with Wexberg, whose name appeared on a SMA list along with other possibly Jewish names including Oppenheimer and Zincker. Helen Cox to Luton, May 29, 1937, Folder 6, Box 1, Luton Papers. My sense, however, is that Jewish psychiatrists kept a low profile in the South.

(67) In more technical areas, there was contact between white and black southern scholars, and part of the intellectual distance between Luton and the psycho-sociology of the Fisk-Yankee group was a matter of field. White psychiatrists often taught part-time in black professional programs that lacked resident professors of psychiatry. Luton taught a clinical course for Meharry, for example, in the mid-1950s. D. T. Rolfe to Luton, October 15, 1955, and Luton to Otto Billig, December 13, 1956, Folder 11, Box 2, Luton Papers. Earlier, an Emory professor of psychiatry, William Walker Young, taught psychopathology at the Atlanta School of Social Work in 1930-1931. See the 1930-1931 issue of the Atlanta School of Social Work Bulletin, 6 (copy in AUC).

(68) Edmund Ezra Day to Raymond Fosdick, "Memorandum to Mr. Fosdick-Subject: Yale Institute of Human Relations," July 28, 1936, p. 2, Folder 809, Box 67, Series 200, RF Archives (second quotation); Edmund Ezra Day to Mark A. May, February 13, 1935, Folder 808, Box 67, Series 200, RF Archives (first quotation).

(69) John Dollard to Edmund Ezra Day, February 13, 1935, Folder 808, Box 67, Series 200, RF Archives (second quotation); untitled notes concerning a final grant to the IHR, April 6, 1938, Folder 804, Box 67, Series 200, RF Archives (first quotation). On the Rockefeller Foundation's support of work on culture and personality, see, for example, Donald Slesinger to Edmund Ezra Day, March 18, 1930, and Edmund Ezra Day to John V. Van Sickle, "Subject: Appointment of Fellows in Connection with the Project for the Study of the Impact of Culture on Personality," December 9, 1930, Folder 4828, Box 408, Series 200s, RF Archives.

(70) "Notes on Interviews, October 7-11, 1935, AG [Alan Gregg], with Personnel at Institute of Human Behavior [sic], Yale University, New Haven," Folder 808, Box 67, Series 200, RF Archives. May expressed his views in "AG Interview, February 27, 1936," March 2, 1936, Folder 809, Box 67, Series 200, RF Archives.

(71) "Ferris Interview with John Dollard," p. 8, Folder 4, Box 1, Dollard Papers.

(72) Dollard to Du Bois, April 19, 1938 (unsent), Box 2, Dollard Papers. Although not close to Du Bois, Dollard felt betrayed in light of Du Bois's "hospitable gestures" during Dollard's visit to Atlanta. Du Bois titled his review "Southern Trauma," North Georgia Review (Winter 1937-1938), 9-10, in Box 2, Dollard Papers. It is worth noting that the white liberal Lillian Smith published the journal.

(73) Dorothy Ross explains that "scientism," a belief in the invariable truth of science, reached one peak in the 1920s. Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (Cambridge, Eng., 1991), esp. chap. 10. Not only does the open-ended experimentalism found in the 1930s seem exceptional, but it also clearly contended with scientism in such programs as the Rockefeller Foundation-sponsored Institute of Human Relations at Yale. Ellen Herman explains the extensive connections between social science and politically moderate social engineering, beginning with World War II, in The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (Berkeley, 1995).

(74) Sutherland, preface, Davis and Dollard, Children of Bondage, ix. Floyd W. Reeves, director of the American Youth Commission, explained the origin and scope of the series, ibid., v-vii. The other principal books were Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt; Warner, Junker, and Adams, Color and Human Nature; and E. Franklin Frazier, Negro Youth at the Crossways: Their Personality Development in the Middle States (1940; reprint, New York, 1967).

(75) At the time each wrote, Johnson was head of the Department of Social Sciences at Fisk; Frazier was head of the Department of Sociology at Howard; Davis was head of the Division of Social Studies at Dillard; and Adams was chief of the Psychiatric Division at Provident Hospital. Adding to the interracial character of the project, Harry Stack Sullivan contributed a section to the volumes by Johnson and Frazier. There were private reminders of racism. During a meeting of the contributors in New York, E. Franklin Frazier was denied a room at the Commodore Hotel; see Robert J. Havighurst to Robert L. Sutherland, April 12, 1939, Folder 5965, Box 558, Series 1.3, GEB Archives.

(76) Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt, 134.

(77) Davis and Dollard, Children of Bondage, 160; Warner, Junker, and Adams, Color and Human Nature, 279.

(78) See note 22 on the norms for psychological care of both races. Private sanatoriums patronized by affluent whites sometimes offered talk therapy by the 1930s. The initial emphasis of sanatoriums, however, was physiological treatment. Gartly-Ramsay Hospital in Memphis, for example, which specialized in psychiatry by the 1950s, advertised in the 1910 Memphis City Directory that it offered "hydrotherapy, electricity, massage, manual Swedish movements, physical culture, and carefully regulated dietary" (microform, Memphis Public Library). See also R. G. Ramsay Jr. and Mary Alice Crockett, "Gartly-Ramsay Hospital, Inc.," in Marcus J. Stewart and William T. Black Jr., eds., History of Medicine in Memphis (Jackson, Tenn., 1971), 134-35. I have found only one instance of a sanatorium operated by a black doctor for, presumably, black clients: the "Pythian Hotel, Bath House and Sanitarium" in Hot Springs, Arkansas, managed by Dr. H. H. Phipps, the father of Mamie Phipps Clark, who became an eminent psychologist as well as wife of psychologist Kenneth B. Clark. The advertising on the sanatorium's letterhead suggests that, like white establishments, this was a combination of hospital and resort; see Mamie Kathryn Phipps to Kenneth B. Clark, July 6, 1936, Folder 8, Box 3, Kenneth B. Clark Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.).

(79) Frazier, Negro Youth at the Crossways, chap. 7.

(80) Mead, review of Johnson, Growing Up in the Black Belt, in American Journal of Sociology, 48 (November 1942), 433.

(81) Du Bois, "Southern Trauma," 9, in Box 2, Dollard Papers. Powdermaker took up residence twice in Indianola, September 1932-May 1933 and summer 1934. Powdermaker, Stranger and Friend, 129. Although Dollard recalled varying dates in later life for his fieldwork, ranging from 1934 to 1936, IHR correspondence about funding indicates that he first traveled to Indianola in the summer of 1934 (Maurice Davie to Mark A. May, May 11, 1934, Folder 2, Box 1, Dollard Papers). For bibliographic information about Caste and Class, see note 6; Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom: A Cultural Study in the Deep South (1939; reprint, New York, 1966).

(82) Powdermaker to May, February 11, 1936 (first quotation); Sapir to May, February 6, 1936 (second and third quotations); George P. Murdock to May, January 27, 1936 (fourth quotation), Folder 114, Box 12, IHR Papers. All correspondence cited below concerning After Freedom is in Folder 114 unless otherwise noted. It was Murdock, also of the institute, who had disparaged the manuscript's writing in his reader's report of January 27. After Powdermaker initially contacted May about the book on January 6, 1936, he apparently solicited two in-house readers' reports, from Murdock and Leonard Doob (see Doob to May, January 16, [19]36) and then three external reviews, a process taking more than a year. May explained the review procedure and reported all the opinions to Powdermaker on June 23, 1937. The external reports are not among these papers. In the meantime, May had explained to Powdermaker on April 27, 1937, that he could no longer fund her position. Sapir was comparing Powdermaker's manuscript to Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Contemporary American Culture (New York, 1929).

(83) Of the two editors whom May suggested, the wives of Professors Melville Herskovits and George Herzog, Powdermaker chose Mrs. Herzog (May to Powdermaker, June 23, 1937; Powdermaker to May, March 26, 1938). She indicated her resubmission of the manuscript in a letter to May, dated May 9, 1938; there is no evidence of its critical reception this time. She announced Viking's acceptance of the book to May, September 26, 1938; he sent congratulations on September 29. Initially teaching at the New School for Social Research in the evening as well as Queens College (Powdermaker to May, March 26, 1938), she divided her time between Queens and Yale during the war, teaching two days a week in the Army Specialized Training Program for the southwest Pacific at Yale (Powdermaker, Stranger and Friend, 209-10). She seemed unable to give up her wish to be affiliated with Yale despite unfair treatment.

(84) May to Powdermaker, November 22, 1938, Folder 114, Box 12; May to Sapir, April 8, 1936, Folder 135, Box 14, IHR Papers. In a similar reversal of position, the IHR now rejected a book it had funded on the basis of research proposals by Powdermaker that it had approved, including "Plan for Continuation of the Negro Research for the Next Academic Year," February 5, 1934, and "Report on Negro Study," November 6, 1934, Folder 114, Box 12, IHR Papers.

(85) Angell to Dollard, June 28, 1937, Folder 2, Box 1, Dollard Papers.

(86) Powdermaker's criticism of psychoanalysis, except by neglect, was quiet; she did say explicitly that white guilt about enforcing black subordination was "not identical with the guilt that plays so large a part in psychoanalytic theory." Powdermaker, After Freedom, 362.

(87) Folder 114, Box 12, IHR Papers.

(88) Doob to Mark May, January 16, [19]36. Doob's disparaging comments on Indianola were based on his visit there; he wrote an appendix for Dollard's Caste and Class about poor whites.

(89) Murdock to Mark May, January 27, 1936.

(90) Sapir to Mark May, February 13, 1936.

(91) Rescue efforts often involved informal networks; Sapir, German-born and now well placed, was perfectly situated to help. Among IHR correspondence, Sapir asked Mark May to provide a position for Ernst Harms (May 1, 1936), which May declined to do (May 4, 1936), Folder 135, Box 14, IHR Papers. Harms (1895-1974) had published a book on Hegel in Heidelberg in 1933, suggesting Harms's place of origin. Marcel Mauss, writing from Paris, asked Sapir to find employment for a Swiss scholar "comme apres de la Rockefeller." Mauss to Sapir, May 20, 1935, Folder 135, Box 14, IHR Papers. Because the Rockefeller Foundation was a principal agency in the placement of scholars, the letter signals Sapir's role as a conduit for European intellectuals at risk, although there is no conclusive evidence that either of these men was Jewish. One Jewish refugee whose association with the IHR was nearly as difficult as Sapir's was Erik Erikson; see Friedman, Identity's Architect, 124-33. Sapir's voice in the refugee crisis followed scandal over the refusal of Yale's Graduate Club to offer him membership in 1932 because of his Jewishness; see Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (New Haven, 1985), 131-34.

(92) Sapir to May, April 17, 1933, Folder 135, Box 14, IHR Papers. It was an indication of their different orientations that May replied that he would be happy to speak about "personality tests," a more formalistic approach than Sapir's. May to Sapir, April 21, 1933, ibid.

(93) These professional descriptions appeared, respectively, in Clyde Robinson, "Caste and Class in the South," Washington Post, June 20, 1937; G. Gorer, "Time and Tide," no source; "Yale Sociologist in New Book Bares Rivalry of Races in the South," New Haven Register, March 21, 1937; and Thomas C. McCormick, "Castes in the South," Madison Wisconsin State Journal, July 4, 1937, clippings in Box 2, Dollard Papers.

(94) Mary Palevsky, "In the Deep South," Social Work Today, 5 (October 1937), no page, clipping in Box 2, Dollard Papers. Donald Davidson wrote the Agrarian review, "Gulliver with Hay Fever"; the psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner praised Dollard in "The Anatomy of Jim Crow," New Republic, September 1, 1937, clippings in Box 2, Dollard Papers.

(95) Elizabeth Lawson, "Southerntown," New Masses, September 7, 1937, clipping in Box 2, Dollard Papers.

(96) Frazier, "Racial Culture and Conflict," Christendom, no date, pp. 506-7, clipping in Box 2, Dollard Papers.

(97) Copeland, review of Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (1941), in American Journal of Sociology, 48 (November 1942), 432. After World War II, there was a quiet countervailing trend in the South in opposition to neutral social science among white scholars. A new cluster of white sociologists, often newcomers to the South, used their disciplines to resist segregation. Both Ernst Borinski (1901-1983), Holocaust refugee and sociologist at Tougaloo College, and Joseph H. Fichter, S.J. (1908-1994), New Jersey-born sociologist at Loyola University New Orleans, boldly hosted interracial discussions beginning in the late 1940s and centering on guest social scientists as speakers. See Folder "Social Science Forums," Box "Social Science Forums, Announcements, Fliers," Ernst Borinski Papers (L. Zenobia Coleman Library Archives, Tougaloo College, Tougaloo, Miss.), and Christian Impact leaflets, Folder 3, Box 47, Joseph H. Fichter Papers, Collection 12 (Department of Special Collections and Archives, J. Edgar and Louise S. Monroe Library, Loyola University New Orleans, New Orleans, La.). See also Edgcomb, From Swastika to Jim Crow, chap. 8, and Joseph H. Fichter, One-Man Research: Reminiscences of a Catholic Sociologist (New York, 1973), esp. chap. 1.

(98) Allison Davis to Robert J. Havighurst, September 20, 1939, Folder 5965, Box 558, Series 1.3, GEB Archives.

(99) The General Education Board received this "review or digest" scheduled for release August 4, 1940, from the American Youth Commission on August 26, 1940 (Folder 5966, Box 558, Series 1.3, GEB Archives). Ideas for distribution were those of the GEB's Fred McCuistion. See McCuistion to Winthrop M. Southworth Jr., November 10, 1941, Folder 5965, Box 558, ibid. The idea that the books might be combined in a brief and more scientific format appears in "ARM [Albert R. Mann] Interviews," October 27, 1939, Folder 5965, Box 558, ibid.

(100) See note 9 for the role of southern fieldwork in the broader social and mental sciences. For the larger picture also see Ross, Origins of American Social Science, and Herman, Romance of American Psychology. It is difficult to be both precise and inclusive in sketching the social foundations of intellectual movements; in this case, an array of scholars and foundation administrators participated in this complex transformation. One key figure, keen about the scientific possibilities of social science, who may serve as a helpful case study is Lawrence K. Frank; see Margaret Mead, "Lawrence Kelso Frank, 1890-1968," American Sociologist, 4 (February 1969), 57-58.

(101) Anne May Bennett told him about the furor, June 11, 1937, and he replied, Dollard to Bennett, July 9, 1937 (quotations), Folder 2, Box 1, Dollard Papers.

(102) Dollard to Du Bois, April 19, 1938 (unsent), Box 2, Dollard Papers. This was not a completely irrational--and paranoid--reaction on Dollard's part, because Du Bois had revealed the identity of "Southerntown" in the review, outraging Dollard at Du Bois's disregard of sociological convention. For an acute sense of the risks run by critics of the racial status quo, especially those living in the South, see Polsgrove, Divided Minds.

(103) "Ferris Interview with John Dollard," pp. 9, 7, 7, Folder 4, Box 1, Dollard Papers.

(104) John Dollard, Leonard W. Doob, Neal E. Miller, O. H. Mowrer, and Robert R. Sears, Frustration and Aggression (New Haven, 1939).

(105) The remaining research funding in the South tended to support clinical, versus field, investigations. For example, Vanderbilt Medical School received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation during the war to study the effect of anxiety on surgical patients. See Smiley Blanton to Alan Gregg, November 8, 1943, and Gregg to Dr. [W. S.] Leathers, November 23, 1943, Folder 11, Box 1, Luton Papers. The trend toward narrower questions seems a function of academic conservatism, concern for wartime applications, and perhaps declining resources. The General Education Board, for example, realized by the early 1950s that its capital was running out and made its last major grant in 1960; see Fosdick, Adventure in Giving, vii.

(106) Clarence Cason, 90 Degrees in the Shade (1935; reprint, Westport, Conn., 1970); W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York, 1941); William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (New York, 1941). On Faulkner's rising popularity, see Joel Williamson, William Faulkner and Southern History (New York, 1993), chap. 7; on Fletcher's Pulitzer prize, see Ben F. Johnson III, Fierce Solitude: A Life of John Gould Fletcher (Fayetteville, Ark., 1994), 232.

(107) "World of a Mississippi Squirearch," unidentified (first quotation); "Southern Aristocracy Treated with Sympathy," Cleveland Press, March 22, 1941 (second quotation); "Mississippian Ably Reveals South's Aristocratic Ideal," Charlotte Observer, March 16, 1941 (third quotation), and "Is the Old South Really Gone with the Wind?" New York Times Book Review, May 18, 1941 (fourth quotation), clippings in Percy Family Papers (Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson, Miss.), microfilm, reel 6.

(108) Percy, Lanterns on the Levee, 300 (quotations), 306.

(109) Clipping from Publisher's Weekly, September 13, 1941, Percy Papers, reel 6. The book had been ninth on the list on June 14.

(110) Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944; reprint, New York, 1962), 669 (first quotation), lxx-lxxi (second quotation), lxix (third quotation). Much like the relationship between Dollard's Caste and Class and his Frustration and Aggression, Myrdal's An American Dilemma built on the fieldwork of the previous decade, but changed its tone. Almost every scholar who studied the South during the 1930s contributed written material, advice, or both to Myrdal. The list includes Allison Davis, John Dollard, E. Franklin Frazier, Charles S. Johnson, and Hortense Powdermaker. Myrdal, American Dilemma, lii. Like the earlier biracial research teams, too, Myrdal traveled the South with black political scientist Ralph Bunche; see Harris, Deep Souths, 325-28.

(111) Allport, Nature of Prejudice, 298 (quotation), 351; Allport, Personality: A Psychological Interpretation (New York, 1937).

(112) The black psychologist Kenneth B. Clark and other social scientists contributed an influential appendix to the appellant' s briefs in Brown v. Board of Education about personality damage to children of both races done by segregation; see "The Effects of Segregation and the Consequences of Desegregation: A Social Science Statement," in Clark, Prejudice and Your Child, (2nd ed.; Boston, 1963), 166-84. Clark's integrity and courage are unquestionable, but he adhered to the lab-based, formalistic style of his northern peers, a choice that is not surprising in light of his nearly lifelong residence in New York.

(113) Powdermaker, Stranger and Friend, 211.

(114) Commenting on Johnson, Louise Young of Scarritt College for Christian Workers, Nashville, told General Education Board officials in New York, March 29, 1946, that "Charles Johnson was too valuable as a scholar" to become Fisk's president: "No one could do what he is doing and, if he were president, he would have to give up most of these activities" (interview typescript, Folder 1436, Box 155, Series 1.1, GEB Archives). This seems precisely what happened. On Du Bois's alienation, see David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963 (New York, 2000), chaps. 14-15.

(115) On Smith's ideas, see Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (New York, 1949); on the Atlanta Psychiatric Clinic, see esp. Carl A. Whitaker and Thomas P. Malone, The Roots of Psychotherapy (New York, 1953); Carl A. Whitaker, Midnight Musings of a Family Therapist, ed. Margaret O. Ryan (New York, 1989), section 1; and Richard E. Felder and Avrum Geurin Weiss, Experiential Psychotherapy: A Symphony of Selves (Lanham, Md., 1991); and on Lloyd C. Elam, see biographical sketch, Modern Medicine, January 15, 1975, offprint, uncatalogued, Lloyd Charles Elam Papers (Meharry Medical College Archives), as well as undated typescripts such as "The Effect of the City on Personality Development" and "Anti-Poverty Programs and the Psychiatrist," Folder "File (Oct. and Nov.)," Elam Papers.

MS. ROSE is a professor of history, religious studies, and Jewish studies at Penn State University.