The individual and “the general situation”: The tension barometer and the race problem at the University of Chicago, 1947–1954 |
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| Authors: | Leah N Gordon |
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| Institution: | 1. Assistant Professor, Education and (by courtesy) of History at Stanford University;2. She completed a joint PhD in history and education at the University of Pennsylvania in 2008. Professor Gordon is interested in modern American intellectual and cultural history, the history of social thought, the history of education, and African American history. Her current book project, The Question of Prejudice: Social Science, Education, and the Struggle to Define “the Race Problem” in Mid‐Century America, 1935–1965, shows how a particular framework for progress in race relations—one that depicted individual attitudes as the root cause of racial injustice—competed with alternatives. This project examines debate about the significance of prejudice to the race problem in a variety of sites: the Rockefeller Foundation;3. the University of Chicago's Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations;4. Fisk University's Race Relations Institutes;5. Howard University's Journal of Negro Education;6. and the National Conference of Christians and Jews. The study reveals why some people had more power than others to define critical ethical and political concepts for a national audience. |
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| Abstract: | This article explains how social theories that posited white attitudes as the root of racial injustice gained traction in postwar social thought. Examining the production of a “tension barometer,” an attitude survey that scholars from the University of Chicago's Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations created to predict interracial violence, I chart vigorous debate over the nature and causes of racial oppression in the critical postwar decades. Available—and unavailable—social scientific frameworks, activists” interests, and emerging anticommunism, the Committee's history shows, created an environment where individualistic conceptions of the race problem won out, despite critique. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. |
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