Robert Greene II on Maribel Morey’s *White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s An American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order*

Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma has fascinated activists, intellectuals, and the historians who study both groups since its release in 1944. A book examining the issue of racism in American life, and how the nation had to move to dismantle it to live up to Myrdal’s ideal of the “American Creed,” the book continues to stoke the imaginations of those who hope for an American future free of the problem of anti-Black racism. At the same time, the book has had plenty of critics in its nearly 80 years of publication. However, no work of intellectual history has offered more to think about when reconsidering An American Dilemma than Maribel Morey’s White Philanthropy: Carnegie Corporation’s An American Dilemma and the Making of a White World Order. Morey’s masterful use of archival sources allows her to make the argument that An American Dilemma was not just part of the World War II-era rethinking of concepts of race going on across the Western world; it was part of a larger mission of philanthropic organizations to make sure white Americans—and their Anglo counterparts—could use these findings to continue their hegemonic control of both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

For Morey, her discoveries in the archive of the origins of An American Dilemma’s true purposes “confirms with historical evidence” that the book “was an exercise in white Anglo-American domination, an effort to help solidify rather than to challenge white rule within and beyond the United States” (6). What Morey refers to here is the long intellectual history of a variety of writers, journalists, activists, and intellectuals—ranging from Ralph Ellison and Oliver Cox to Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton—who all saw An American Dilemma not as a tome that offered a way forward on race relations in the United States, but as an effort to codify white domination within the nation. Morey’s argument is an extraordinary one, especially considering the already voluminous work on An American Dilemma. But her use of numerous archival sources on both sides of the Atlantic lends considerable credence to her argument.

Indeed, Morey begins her story not with Gunnar Myrdal but starts with the creation of the Carnegie Corporation, and the rise of Frederick P. Keppel to president of that organization in 1923. Andrew Carnegie’s concerns with the status of the white race in both the United States and the United Kingdom influenced both his philanthropy and the creation of the Carnegie Corporation. Morey makes clear that we should not divorce Carnegie’s aims from the time period in which he lived. Morey writes, the noted Scottish philanthropist “was not unique among contemporaries in his ideas for an international English-speaking community or in assuming that such leadership would be white or that its further unification was essential for international order” (31). The search for a world order amenable to white interests in the U.S. and the U.K. was at the heart of the Carnegie Corporation.

One of the strengths of White Philanthropy is how Morey analyzes how major leaders in the group grappled with the way to best rule peoples of African descent—whether in the United States or in Africa itself. Carnegie’s own fears of revolution by colonized peoples around the world, for example, animated his 1907 lecture titled “Negro in America.” Like many other leaders in the early twentieth century who displayed a paternalistic attitude toward Black Americans, Carnegie used this speech to push the idea of industrial education being the best form of higher education for Black people. Morey links this to contemporary debates among intellectuals and politicians about the “Negro Problem” of the era, reminding readers of Booker T. Washington’s rise to fame by also publicly arguing for industrial education as well. Still, Morey’s telling of this story in chapter two of White Philanthropy does what the work of Andrew Zimmerman in Alabama in Africa, or Natalie Ring in The Problem South, for example, also does: taking the story of American debates about racial formation and economics, and reminding us all that they were always international in scope.

Throughout White Philanthropy, Maribel Morey takes great pains to link various academic studies of white and Black life in Africa and America to the ideology of the Carnegie Corporation: keeping white rule on both sides of the Atlantic secure and robust for generations to come. An African Survey, crafted by Malcolm Hailey and released in 1938, was a forerunner to An American Dilemma in how it tried to imagine the proper place for Black people within a white-ruled world—in this case, colonized Africa of the early to mid-twentieth century. This book, Morey argues, was both a response to former South African Prime Minster Jan Smuts’ call for a general survey of life in Africa, and the result of Phillip Kerr—secretary of the Rhodes Trust at the time—having interest in the growing debate over the fate of African peoples within an Anglo-American dominated world. Morey deftly ties this work to the Carnegie Corporation’s goals, while also showcasing how Black leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois constantly provided pushback to these efforts.

In a sense, the central conflict in White Philanthropy is two-fold. One is the debate among white leaders of the Carnegie Corporation and other organizations over how best to handle the issue of Black rights within the Anglo-American world. The other conflict, however, is between those groups and Black leaders across the U.S. and the British Empire. Such leaders, including Du Bois, not only observed these arguments with concern, but made their own scholarly and political interventions when possible. It explains, therefore, the criticism of An American Dilemma that emerged after that book’s release in 1944. They were not a surprise, but instead continued a critique of white philanthropic and intellectual domination of the Black world.

In short, White Philanthropy is both an engaging work of institutional history of the Carnegie Corporation, and a trenchant analysis of the intellectual history of race in the twentieth century. Suffice to say, it makes a valuable contribution to how we think about the question of white rule in the twentieth century, as we grapple with its legacy in the twenty-first.