This book is intended by the senior author as a further contribution to his studies in basic personality structure in general and to the basic personalities of the United States, specifically. His claim to originality in studying the effect of societies and institutional phenomena through the study of the individual is correct, however, neither for anthropology nor sociology. Indeed, even in the field of the sociology of the Negro, Dollard, in Caste and Class published in the early 1930s, took the individual as his starting point and used the method of the psychoanalytic interview.

The first chapters deal with the sociology of the white and of the Negro in America. The data are drawn from secondary sources. While those for the white are largely correct, they are thin and their