Commencement Speaker

The Commencement Address at Dartmouth's graduation exercises on Sunday morning, June 13, will be given by Gunnar Myrdal, Swedish economist, known as one of Europe's most penetrating analysts of the American scene.

Dr. Myrdal spent the summer of 1941 in Hanover and used the facilities of Baker Library while he was working on his massive study, An AmericanDilemma: The Negro Problem andModern Democracy, which made him widely known outside his native Sweden when it was published in 1944. Twenty-four years later he published another monumental study, Asian Drama: AnInquiry into the Poverty of Nations. Both books were the result of long periods of study, research, and writing-six years for the first, ten years for the second.

Although some of the predictions of An American Dilemma proved false and others were not completely fulfilled. Dr. Myrdal's study remains the most important and dispassionate analysis of the problem of race relations in this country. In his Asian Drama he ended up by changing some of his preconceptions and, although a leading Social Democrat in Sweden, concluded that "capitalist farming" would be the best answer to Asia's food problem.

Dr. Myrdal, 72, is still Professor of International Economy at Stockholm University. In his varied career, he has been adviser to the Swedish government, a member of the Swedish Senate a director of the Swedish Bank, and Minister of Commerce for Sweden 1945-47. For the decade ending in 1957 he served as executive secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. His daughter Sissila is the wife of Dr. Derek Bok, president-designate of Harvard University.