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Putting the South on the Psychological Map: The Impact of Region and Race on the Human Sciences During the 1930s

Posted on: Saturday, 28 May 2005, 03:00 CDT

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 NorthSouth 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." 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 protge, 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 illness\es 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 thin\king, 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 oldfashioned 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 protg, 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 Bollard (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 o\f 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 IrishCatholic 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 Bollard'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 ins\titutional 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 empl\oyed 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 modestsouthern 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 frustra\tion, 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, Bollard'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 hearing 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 inter

Source: Journal of Southern History, The

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