| Preface | xi |
| Introduction: The Race Issue in the 1930s | 1 |
1 | Finding a Tocqueville | 10 |
| Frederick Keppel and the Carnegie Corporation | 11 |
| Newton Baker's Proposal | 16 |
| Foundations and Black Americans | 22 |
| "Exceptional Men," Colonial Administrators, and Scandinavians | 26 |
2 | Social Engineering and Prophylactic Reform | 36 |
| The Making of an Intellectual Aristocrat | 40 |
| Marriage to Alva and Apprenticeship to Cassel | 50 |
| First Visit to America, 1929-1930 | 59 |
| Social Democratic Reform | 68 |
| Sweden's "Population Crisis" | 75 |
3 | Encountering the "Negro Problem" | 88 |
| Initial Impressions | 89 |
| An Absence of Consensus | 94 |
| A Royal Commission for the "Negro Problem" | 106 |
| On the Road | 117 |
| Myrdal and Bunche | 121 |
4 | My War Work | 135 |
| "The World's Problem in Miniature" | 137 |
| Contact with America | 147 |
| Conflicts of Conscience | 159 |
| "The Limits of Optimism" | 164 |
| Democratic Internationalism or American Imperialism? | 173 |
| Myrdal and the July 20, 1944, Plot to Kill Hitler | 181 |
5 | An American Dilemma: The Text | 186 |
| The American Creed and Institutional Change | 188 |
| Race, Population, and Migration | 198 |
| Economics | 204 |
| Politics, Justice, and Social Equality | 212 |
| Negro Politics, Culture, and Community | 219 |
| Racial Justice in a Global Context | 228 |
6 | The Study to End All Studies | 231 |
| The Race Issue in 1944 | 232 |
| Acclaim in the National Press | 241 |
| Afro-American and White Southern Reactions | 245 |
| The Reception in Scholarly Journals | 252 |
| The Divided Left | 257 |
| The Emerging Orthodoxy and Neglected Alternatives | 261 |
7 | The Rise and Fall of a Liberal Orthodoxy | 272 |
| The Growing Legitimacy of Civil Rights | 273 |
| Intercultural Education, Prejudice, and Damage | 279 |
| Racial Liberalism from Brown to the Voting Rights Act | 293 |
| Liberalism in Crisis | 302 |
8 | Dreamer, Planner, and Fighter | 312 |
| An American Dilemma in Perspective | 312 |
| The Cold War and McCarthyism | 320 |
| The Challenge of Third World Poverty | 332 |
| America's Critic and Friend | 344 |
| The Dilemma Revisited | 352 |
| The Last Years | 359 |
| Legacy | 368 |
| Notes | 373 |
| Essay on Sources | 429 |
| Index | 435 |