The individual and "the general situation": the tension barometer and the race problem at the University of Chicago, 1947-1954.

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.