Race And Reason: A Yankee View

By Carleton Putnam

Foreword

This book is a signal contribution to an understanding of the race controversy. No other writer, in my opinion, has yet combined so forceful an analysis of the viewpoints of both North and South with so clear a grasp of the reasons behind each.

Carleton Putnam strikes at the root of the matter. He thoroughly explores the ideology which led to the Supreme Court's decision in the desegregation cases and traces it to its source. In the process he puts race against the background of fundamental American ideals with arresting results. He presents documented facts, and discloses a situation, which I believe should be brought to the immediate attention of the American people. Race and Reason may well become a text for the unorganized majority in their battle against the social concepts of our minority groups.

If there be an argument in favor of integration which is not plainly set out in this volume, and as plainly examined, I have not heard it. The writing is incisive and can be read by the layman at one sitting with pleasure as well as profit. The author has thought through many issues, and has combined his thinking with careful research. He gives his results in telling sentences, crisp and spare. In these pages, any legislator, judge, lawyer, minister or college debater can have at his finger tips, conveniently indexed, a succinct reply to every sophistry advanced by the propagandist. To those who recognize that the salvation of the South lies in the education of public opinion rather than in rear-guard court actions, and that our national leaders must be told the scientific as well as the political facts of race, this book will be indispensable.

My personal enthusiasm has been increased by knowing Putnam himself. He is a dyed-in- the-wool Northerner, a New Englander collaterally descended from both Israel Putnam, George Washington's first major-general, and Rufus Putnam, founder of the Ohio Colony. Putnam is a Yankee in the true sense of the word. He speaks with detachment and from what I may term the native American outlook. Few men are better qualified by inheritance and training to recall us to the principles on which our republic rests.

In his own career Putnam has been singularly successful both as a practical man of affairs and as a scholar. Graduating with a science degree and with honors in history and politics from Princeton, and with a law degree from Columbia, he was for fifteen years president of Chicago and Southern Air Lines and later chairman of the board of Delta Air Lines. He finally retired, in his early fifties, to write biography, and has already distinguished himself in this field. My fellow journalist, Virginius Dabney, aptly described the situation when he said editorially that the first volume of Putnam's Theodore Roosevelt "had the critics turning handsprings.".

Putnam writes from a knowledge of history, science and law. He writes from nation-wide experience in business, and from long residence in North and South. He knows America, its past and its present. I consider his message imperative reading for its own sake, and doubly valuable because of the man who speaks.

I would like finally to comment upon the panel of scientists who have signed the Introduction which follows this Foreword. Their tribute is, I believe, unique. I know of no other case where a social study of this kind has had such combined support from the fields of genetics, psychology, anthropology, zoology and anatomy.

The panel is headed by R. Ruggles Gates, generally acknowledged to be one of the world's leading human geneticists. Born a Canadian, Dr. Gates received his MA. from Mt. Allison, his B.Sc. from McGill, his Ph.D. from Chicago and his D.Sc. from the University of London. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society since 1931.

His active career began as a Lecturer in Biology at St. Thomas's Hospital in London, continued as Associate Professor of Zoology at the University of California, then as Professor of Botany at King's College, University of London, and as Honorary Research Fellow in Biology at Harvard. For the last eight years he has been engaged in world travel for the study of Races and Race Crossings. His publications include The Mutation Factor in Human Evolution (1915), Human Genetics, 2 Vols. (1946), Human Ancestry (1948), and Pedigrees of Negro Families (1949).

From the field of psychology we find Henry E. Garrett, Professor Emeritus, Columbia University. For fifteen years Dr. Garrett headed the Department of Psychology at Columbia. He has been President of the Eastern Psychological Association and the American Psychological Association. In addition he has served as Vice Chairman of the Division of Psychology and Anthropology of the National Research Council. He is general editor of the American Psychological Series, and is the author of Statistics in Psychology and Education; Great Experiments in Psychology; Psychological Tests, Methods and Results; Psychology; General Psychology; and Testing.

Robert Gayre is a Scot. Presently Editor of the Mankind Quarterly, he was formerly Professor of Anthropology and head of the postgraduate Department of Anthropo-Geography, University of Saugor, India. He is the author of Teuton and Slav (1944) and of Ethnology, 3 Vols. (soon to be published). He was Director of Education in the Allied Control Commission for Italy after World War II.

Wesley C. George began his career as Instructor in Zoology at the University of North Carolina, served variously as Professor of Biology at Guilford College, Adjunct Professor of Zoology at the University of Georgia, and Associate Professor of Histology and Embryology at the University of Tennessee Medical School. He has been Professor of Anatomy at the University of North Carolina since 1924 and was for ten years head of the department there. He is the author of numerous articles on the development of man and other vertebrates, comparative hematology and the philosophy of science.

There can be no doubt that the endorsement of these men, taken together with the evidence of other scientists called as witnesses by the author in his text, guarantee the scientific integrity of Race and Reason and confirm the soundness of its premises.

T. R. Waring
Editor, Charleston News and Courier

Introduction

Biological scientists seldom find themselves writing an introduction to what is essentially a study of a social problem. However, the problem in this instance is of such great importance from both the scientific and social standpoints, and the two are so closely interrelated, that we cannot dissociate ourselves from the task.

Our professional interest lies in the scientific foundations on which Mr. Putnam rests his thesis. We are in complete accord with what he has to say concerning these foundations. We agree with his balanced presentation of genetic and environmental factors in the area of both racial and individual biology. We believe they deserve this sharp reappraisal in the light of current problems in the world at large. We can also confirm Putnam's estimate of the extent to which non-scientific, ideological pressures have harassed scientists in the last thirty years, often resulting in the suppression or distortion of truth.

The intrusion of political thought into the social and anthropological sciences which has occurred on a massive scale during this period, has been a very great disservice to scientific investigation and to the guidance which scientific work and its conclusions ought to be able to render to human society. Man must be guided by science, but scientific thought must not be moulded to preconceived political ideas.

We, as signatories to this introduction, although we may differ over some aspects of genetic, biological, anthropological and sociological theory, believe that statesmen and judges today frequently take positions based upon an inadequate knowledge of the facts so far as they relate to the nature of man. Therefore, we have no hesitation in placing on record our disapproval of what has been all too commonly a trend since 1930. We do not believe that there is anything to be drawn from the sciences in which we work which supports the view that all races of men, all types of men, or all ethnic groups are equal and alike, or likely to become equal or alike, in anything approaching the foreseeable future. We believe on the contrary that there are vast areas of difference within mankind not only in physical appearance, but in such matters as adaptability to varying environments, and in deep psychological and emotional qualities, as well as in mental ability and capacity for development. We are of the opinion that in ignoring these depths of difference modern man and his political representatives are likely to find themselves in serious difficulties sooner or later.

Whatever may be said for or against minor or detailed points made by the author of this book, we feel that it deserves the serious attention of both scientists and public men wherever racial problems exist. The facts in it cannot much longer be ignored. It probes to the core of an abscess, yet does so with a healing touch. There is logic and common sense in these pages; there is also inescapable scientific validity.

R. Ruggles Gates, M.A., Ph.D., D.Sc., LL.D., F.R.S. Henry E. Garrett, Ph.D., D.Sc. R. Gayer Of Gayer, M.A., D.Phil., D.Pol.Sc., D.Sc. Wesley C. George, MA., Ph.D.

Contents

Chapter I - A frame of mind

When the Supreme Court reached its desegregation decision in 1954, not all of us stopped to think about its implications. There were many, of course, who were joyful. The Negro population and those white minority organizations which had played so large a part in pressing the case were elated. So were those good people who dream in general terms of pleasing everybody without counting the cost. But the majority of Americans, at least in the North, were preoccupied with other matters. They were surprised, perhaps a little startled, but quite willing to leave such a subject to the courts.

I confess that I was in the latter category. In those days, I was board chairman of a major airline, and such spare time as I had was occupied in beginning a four volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt. On the one hand, I was involved in a life of action; on the other, I was committed to the life of the mind, steeped in the moods of the nineteenth century, far removed from either action or the social trends of the mid-twentieth century. I cannot blame myself for not realizing immediately the meaning of the desegregation cases. Had I been resident in the South, it might have struck me sooner. But I was living in the national capital. I speak of these things because the reaction, when it came, could not be unrelated to the personal equation. I believe that in 1954 I could lay claim to the viewpoint of an average American, a viewpoint in my case essentially Northern but modified by long experience in the South. In my early airline days I had spent seven years in Memphis, Tennessee, and had travelled extensively throughout all the

Southern states, dealing with local governments, business groups and individuals in the most practical of activities. Twenty years before I had begun my airline career along the California coast by starting a service between Los Angeles and San Francisco. At a still earlier period I had gone to school for two years in Arizona, and I had spent many summer vacations in the northern Rockies.

In fact, to the American West I owed a large part of my life's motivation. From pack-trips across the Painted Desert in my college days, to camps in the Bad Lands of North Dakota where I began research on my biography of Roosevelt, I had known and loved the stage on which the pioneer played out the drama of the American Dream. It was not just a question of the sun setting beyond the Pass, nor the sound at night of wind rising in the forests of the Big Horn Mountains. These were important as symbols to the senses, but there were other scenes in the montage of memory— episodes involving people, from old prospectors and cowpunchers to women who had come to Arizona in covered wagons over the Santa Fe Trail —these were symbols of a different sort, figures of pride and self-reliance, and primordially American.

In a spiritual sense, of course, the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail had begun at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock, and had left me what I regarded as a personal heritage. My first American ancestors, on both my father's and my mother's side, had arrived in Massachusetts from England in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century. From Salem, to northern Vermont, to Saratoga and the Mohawk Valley, my father's people migrated to the West of their day and bequeathed me a proprietary interest in a sunset and a frame of mind. Call it individualism, say it was rugged, nonetheless it was American in its time. There were certain traditions that were taken for granted, yet which passed by osmosis from father to son. A man expected the community to do for him only what there was no way of his doing for himself. When he asked the community to do what he ought to have done for himself, this was begging; it was begging because it meant another's effort was making up his lack —and beggars were not popular on the frontier.

Nor was there a notion of equality in any sense except the equal chance. The frontier had its aristocracy of character to which one earned the right to belong. And the man with the bad reputation was not easily or quickly forgiven. I realize that today the frontier is history and that social conditions have changed. I do not see that the principles have changed.

Of my two grandfathers, one was a justice of the New York Supreme Court, another was a New York publisher who had the doubtful distinction of rejecting Mark Twain's first book. My father, who died young, was more adventurous. Having been cited for gallantry in action during the Philippine Insurrection, he remained in Manila to start the first American newspaper published in the Islands. There was something vitally American, in a turn-of-the- century sense, about my father —a certain gallantry, a gay initiative, a confidence in the strength of being right, and a willingness to take risks in its service. Once or twice he spoke with a twinkle of the close call I had had in getting into the world. Two years before I was born, he had come back to camp one evening from a skirmish at Tabuan and had found his undershirt cut across by a bullet.

Father was less fortunate in 1918. He died in the Argonne, and I went on to Princeton in 1920. I took a science degree, but majored in history and politics, because I wanted an education that would give me a perspective on the river of time, and I hoped a combination of science and history would provide it. So I began with astronomy, the story of the universe; went on to geology, the story of the earth; and finally to history, the story of man, elaborating the details through physics, chemistry and biology and flavoring the whole with some philosophy and considerable English literature. Perhaps it was a jack-of-all-trades education, but I cannot say I have regretted it. If I was vague about some of the trees, I believe I saw the outline of the woods.

Then came three arduous years which ended in a law degree at Columbia. From the law I acquired a wholesome regard for precedent. It is a lesson that can be learned from history, or from science, or, over a long life, from personal observation. But the law, I think, teaches it best. For a thousand years our Anglo-American common law has been based upon the evolution of man's experience in particular cases. Experience has produced the theory, rather than theory coloring the experience. In leafing through a book I wrote some twelve years later, I find the following record of my reaction to Columbia:

“The American ardor for the new is one of the great hopes of the human race, but a respect for the experience of the past can, I think, contribute more to its fulfillment than the average American appreciates. For me, three years of saturation in the law did something to offset a very inadequate education in the classics, for it made real to me the substance of the soil out of which the present and the future grow.".”.

Another fifteen years have passed since I wrote the preceding sentences, but I would now only re-emphasize, in an age obsessed with novelty and change, the importance of our Anglo- American heritage, particularly in the field of moral values and basic principle. There are very few social experiments that have not been tried before, and there are absolutely no principles that have not been thoroughly tested. "Winds of change" do not alter these.

If I were asked to be specific, I would say that as time has gone on, I have been impressed with two fallacies that have crept into the thinking of Americans: the fallacy that men by weight of numbers can defy the moral law and lean increasingly upon other men under the guise of the State, and the fallacy that this dependence is justified by the supposed right of all men to share equally in everything. I shall have more to say on this subject later. My purpose here is to suggest the roots from which my views have grown.

It may seem strange, in the light of such views, that in June of 1954, when the Supreme Court's desegregation decision burst upon the country, I did not react at once. Surely, here was a sharp departure from the past—a confusion of equality of opportunity and equality before the law, with social and cultural equality—as well as a clear challenge to other American principles. My only answer, as I have said, must be that I was absorbed in other matters, an answer I believe I shared with many "average" Northerners. It took four years, in my case, before a chance incident brought the whole situation home.

I was thumbing through Life magazine for September 22,1958, when I came upon an article by Virginius Dabney, editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The article appeared to be a part of a debate which Life had arranged between Northern and Southern writers on the school integration controversy. It stated the Southern viewpoint most ably, I thought, but what really aroused me was something else in the same magazine. It was an editorial purporting to answer Dabney—an editorial wholly lacking in perception and full of inept analogies and abandoned principles.

I was not by habit addicted to writing letters to the press, but in this case I could think of no better way to relieve my feelings. So I composed a letter of protest to Life and sent a copy to the newspaper editor I knew best. In my airline years I had shared some press flights with Frank Ahlgren, manager of the Memphis Commercial Appeal, and he might be sympathetic. A few days later, Life answered with a polite acknowledgment, Ahlgren with an envelope enclosing a page of his latest edition. On it my letter appeared in full. It was a contrast that would grow sharper.

Then other things began to happen. Notes started to come in from old Memphis friends and from strangers. It was a comfort, they said, that at least one Northerner understood. Next, Dabney himself telephoned from Richmond. He had seen my letter in the Commercial Appeal and he asked if he might reprint it in his Times-Dispatch.

I hesitated for a moment because by that time I had had a chance to think further about the subject. There were several additional points I wanted to make. Moreover, there was one man who could do more to correct the situation than any other, if he would, and that man was the President of the United States. Perhaps, in the maelstrom of other problems and activities, he had overlooked the real significance of the desegregation cases. Perhaps, if others as well as I wrote him, he might be led to see the reasonableness behind the Southern position. Then from the pulpit of the Presidency he might enlighten the nation. I began to wonder whether the best contribution I could make might not be to try to reach him with a new letter, more complete than the one to Life. Meanwhile, as far as Dabney was concerned, it might be wiser for him to wait and see whether he preferred to publish the letter to the President. Dabney agreed and I set to work, helped by an opinion of Justice Frankfurter in a case growing out of the Little Rock episode.

Frankfurter's views, printed in the Washington Post, had spoiled my breakfast a morning or two before, but now they gave me a starting point. On October 13, 1958 — 1 remember the occasion well because it was the climax of weeks of deliberation—I wrote as follows to President Eisenhower:

A few days ago I was reading over Justice Frankfurter's opinion in the recent Little Rock case. Three sentences in it tempt me to write you this letter. I am a Northerner, but I have spent a large part of my life as a business executive in the South. I have a law degree, but I am now engaged in historical writing. From this observation post I risk the presumption of a comment.

The sentences I wish to examine are these:

“Local customs, however hardened by time, are not decreed in heaven. Habits and feelings they engender may be counteracted and moderated. Experience attests that such local habits and feelings will yield, gradually though this be, to law and education.”.

It is my personal conviction that the local customs in this case were "hardened by time" for a very good reason, and that while they may not, as Frankfurter says, have been decreed in heaven, they come closer to it than the current view of the Supreme Court. I was particularly puzzled by Frankfurter's remark that "the Constitution is not the formulation of the merely personal views of the members of this court." Five minutes before the court's desegregation decision, the Constitution meant one thing; five minutes later, it meant something else. Only one thing intervened, namely, an expression of the personal views of the members of the court.

It is not my purpose to dispute the point with which the greater part of Frankfurter's opinion is concerned. The law must be obeyed. But I think the original desegregation decision was wrong, that it ought to be reversed, and that meanwhile every legal means should be found, not to disobey it, but to avoid it. Failing this, the situation should be corrected by constitutional amendment.

I cannot agree that this is a matter involving "a few states" as Frankfurter suggests. The picture in reality is of a court, by one sudden edict, forcing upon the entire South a view, and a way of life, with which the great majority of the population are in complete disagreement. Although not from the legal, in fact from the practical, standpoint the North, which does not have the problem, is presuming to tell the South, which does have the problem, what to do. To me there is a frightening arrogance in this performance. Neither the North, nor the court, has any holy mandate inherent in the trend of the times or the progress of liberalism to reform society in the South.

In the matter of schools, rights to equal education are inseparably bound up with rights to freedom of association and, in the South at least, may require that both be considered simultaneously. (In using the word "association" here, I mean the right to associate with whom you please, and the right not to associate with whom you please.) Moreover, am I not correct in my recollection that it was the social stigma of segregation and its effect upon the Negro's "mind and heart" to which the court objected as much as to any other, and thus that the court, in forcing the black man's right to equal education was actually determined to violate the white man's right to freedom of association?

In any case the crux of this issue would seem obvious: social status has to be earned. Or, to put it another way, equality of association has to be mutually agreed to and mutually desired. It cannot be achieved by legal fiat. Personally, I feel only affection for the Negro. But there are facts that have to be faced. Any man with two eyes in his head can observe a Negro settlement in the Congo, can study the pure-blooded African in his native habitat as he exists when left on his own resources, can compare this settlement with London or Paris, and can draw his own conclusions regarding relative levels of character and intelligence — or that combination of character and intelligence which is civilization.

Finally, he can inquire as to the number of pure-blooded blacks who have made contributions to great literature or engineering or medicine or philosophy or abstract science. (I do not include singing or athletics as these are not primarily matters of character and intelligence.) Nor is there any validity to the argument that the Negro "hasn't been given a chance." We were all in caves or trees originally. The progress which the pure-blooded black has made when left to himself, with a minimum of white help or hindrance, genetically or otherwise, can be measured today in the Congo.

Lord Bryce, a distinguished and impartial foreign observer, presented the situation accurately in his American Commonwealth when he wrote in 1880:

“History is a record of the progress towards civilization of races originally barbarous. But that progress has in all cases been slow and gradual ... Utterly dissimilar is the case of the African Negro, caught up in and whirled along with the swift movement of the American democracy. In it we have a singular juxtaposition of the most primitive and the most recent, the most rudimentary and the most highly developed types of culture ... A body of savages is violently carried across the ocean and set to work as slaves on the plantations of masters who are three or four thousand years in advance of them in mental capacity and moral force ... Suddenly, even more suddenly than they were torn from Africa, they find themselves, not only freed, but made full citizens and active members of the most popular government the world has seen, treated as fit to bear an equal part in ruling, not only themselves, but also their recent masters.”.

One does not telescope three or four thousand years into the 70 years since Bryce wrote. One may change the terms of the problem by mixed breeding, but if ever there was a matter that ought to be left to local option it would seem to be the decision as to when the mixture has produced an acceptable amalgam in the schools. And I see no reason for penalizing a locality that does not choose to mix.

I would emphatically support improvement of education in Negro schools, if and where it is inferior. Equality of opportunity and equality before the law, when not strained to cover other situations, are acceptable ideals because they provide the chance to earn and to progress — and consequently should be enforced by legal fiat as far as is humanly possible. But equality of association, which desegregation in Southern schools involves, pre-supposes a status which in the South the average Negro has not earned. To force it upon the Southern white will, I think, meet with as much opposition as the prohibition amendment encountered in the wet states.

Throughout this controversy there has been frequent mention of the equality of man as a broad social objective. No proposition in recent years has been clouded by more loose thinking. Not many of us would care to enter a poetry contest with Keats, nor play chess with the national champion, nor set our character beside Albert Schweitzer's. When we see the doctrine of equality contradicted everywhere around us in fact, it remains a mystery why so many of us continue to give it lip service in theory, and why we tolerate the vicious notion that status in any field need not be earned.

Pin down the man who uses the word "equality," and at once the evasions and qualifications begin. As I recall, you, yourself, in a recent statement used some phrase to the effect that men were "equal in the sight of God." I would be interested to know where in the Bible you get your authority for this conception. There is doubtless authority in Scripture for the concept of potential equality in the sight of God —after earning that status, and with various further qualifications —but where is the authority for the sort of ipso facto equality suggested by your context? The whole idea contradicts the basic tenet of the Christian and Jewish religions that status is earned through righteousness and is not an automatic matter. What is true of religion and righteousness is just as true of achievement in other fields. And what is true among individuals is just as true of averages among races.

The confusion here is not unlike the confusion created by some left-wing writers between the doctrine of equality and the doctrine of Christian love. The command to love your neighbor is not a command either to consider your neighbor your equal, or yourself his equal; perhaps the purest example of great love without equality is the love between parent and child. In fact the equality doctrine as a whole, except when surrounded by a plethora of qualifications, is so untenable that it falls to pieces at the slightest thoughtful examination.

Frankfurter closes his opinion with a quotation from Abraham Lincoln, to whom the Negro owes more than to any other man. I, too, would like to quote from Lincoln. At Charleston, Illinois, in September 1858 in a debate with Douglas, Lincoln said:

“I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor qualifying them to hold office ... I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”.

The extent to which Lincoln would have modified these views today, or may have modified them before his death, is a moot question, but it is clear on its face that he would not have been in sympathy with the Supreme Court's position on desegregation. Many historians have felt that when Lincoln died the South lost the best friend it had. This also may be moot, but again it seems clear that for 94 years — from the horrors of Reconstruction through the Supreme Court's desegregation decision—the North has been trying to force the black man down the white Southerner's throat, and it is a miracle that relations between the races in the South have progressed as well as they have.

Perhaps the most discouraging spectacle is the spectacle of Northern newspapers dwelling with pleasure upon the predicament of the Southern parent who is forced to choose between desegregation and no school at all for his child. It does not seem to occur to these papers that this is the cruelest sort of blackmail; that the North is virtually putting a pistol at the head of the Southern parent in a gesture which every Northerner must contemplate with shame. Indeed, there now seems little doubt that the court's recent decision has set back the cause of the Negro in the South by a generation. He may force his way into white schools, but he will not force his way into white hearts nor earn the respect he seeks. What evolution was slowly and wisely achieving, revolution has now arrested, and the trail of bitterness will lead far.

After dispatching this letter to the White House, I sent a copy to Dabney. Dabney allowed three days to pass out of courtesy to the President. Then he printed it on the editorial page of the Richmond Times-Dispatch and devoted his leading editorial to it. On the same page he included a cartoon showing the North being awakened from sleep by an alarm clock tagged "The Putnam Letter." Like the cartoon, the editorial was unduly complimentary. It referred to my effort as "one of the most incisive and convincing discussions we have seen." It dwelt on my training in history and law as well as my years of residence in the South and my New England origins. Finally it concluded:

“The fact that Mr. Putnam has written this letter ... is eloquent testimony to the fact that the South's case is getting across, at last, to intelligent Northerners. We still have a long way to go but we are making progress.”.

I took the personal references in this editorial with a grain of salt. I knew well enough that it was not Putnam but the predicament of the South that produced what appeal my letter may have had, together with the fact that I was a Northerner. But the response from Memphis, and now Dabney's remarks, made me wonder about something else. Here, in effect, was a call to the North for help, over the heads of the court, over the head of the President. Here was a great section of the country, more indigenously American than many of the areas most loudly denouncing the South, asking for understanding and aid. What sort of responsibility did this place upon me, and upon all impartial Northerners?

Day by day my concern increased. The effect of Dabney's publication was a new flood of letters, even of telegrams. If Memphis had produced a rain, Richmond produced a torrent. Dabney, too, was inundated. On November 4 he wrote me: "The response from individuals has been truly colossal. Nothing of the sort we have published in years has caused such a sensation." Neighboring newspapers started to copy, and mail began arriving from Norfolk and other Virginia towns. "The open letter to the President," said the Norfolk Ledger-Star on October 18, "has occasioned so much comment and brought so many requests for copies that the regular supply of back issues for that day has been exhausted. However, a supply of reprints of the page containing the letter is now available and copies may be had by writing or calling in person."

Referring to this announcement, a letter from Virginia Beach remarked, "During the ten years that I have been a resident of Tidewater Virginia this is the first time such an offering has ever appeared in either Norfolk newspaper. I thought nothing of a forty mile trip to and from Norfolk in order to purchase twelve copies.... Like yourself, I am a Northerner, a Chicagoan, educated at Williams College..." Actually, many of the letters were from native Northerners moved South, and I hope I will not be accused of egotism if I say that most seemed to come from sane and earnest men and women. Few were from the group the Attorney General had said he thought was the source of all Southern opposition—"Crackpots running printing presses in cellars."

Several of my correspondents overwhelmed me with their courtesy and the courtly expression of their gratitude, although I knew that the praise was for a viewpoint, not for a man. As the letter began to be published more widely throughout the South, the cross-section of comments from all parts of the area had a common intensity.

These letters did not arrive by tens or hundreds; they arrived by thousands. College students wrote me they had framed the letter and hung it on the walls of their rooms. Schools assigned it for class discussion. Editors of law journals asked to print it. Judges wrote me from chambers. Senators and Congressmen simultaneously requested permission to insert it in the Congressional Record, and I was embarrassed as to the proper protocol in reply. The Birmingham Post-Herald alone supplied 22,000 demands for reprints. Whether or not I had the point of view of an average American on things in general, it looked as if many Southerners felt I had presented their viewpoint on integration.

Again I realized that my own efforts had had little to do with the matter. It was clear this time that the pent-up frustrations of the South had snatched at this straw because of its almost universal publication by the Southern press with favorable editorial comment. There were a few, but only a few, islands of silence where papers were in the control of so-called "moderates." For the most part, comment ran in the vein of Dabney's editorial.

Among columnists, the most active was John Temple Graves of Birmingham. Day after day he urged my letter upon his readers, upon the President, upon the North. In one of his syndicated articles he remarked:

“What Carleton Putnam has written the President is newer than the New Deal, fairer than the Fair Deal, and as old as the Constitution of the United States. Fet Southern young people be told. Fet some of our Southern religious leaders be told, too.”.

Finally one morning my telephone rang and I found Graves on the wire from Birmingham. Fie wanted to know what reception my letter had received in Northern newspapers. I was compelled to answer that although Dabney had sent reprints to every editor in the United States only one Northern paper—a small one in Plattsburg—had printed it and with unfavorable comment. The sectional cleavage had been extraordinary.

Graves appeared shocked by this, and then an antidote occurred to him. He would call in his column for the starting of a fund to print the letter in the North by advertisement. He asked me if I would sanction such a move, and I replied that I had no objection, but that I could not personally be associated with it. He said he was in the same position, but that he would try to form a committee in Birmingham to receive the money and plan the campaign.

The upshot was the creation of what later became known as the Putnam Fetter Committee, consisting of James E. Simpson, son of a former president pro tern of the Alabama Senate, Chairman; former Governor Frank Dixon; Fieutenant Governor Albert Boutwell and former Fieutenant Governor W. G. Hardwick. These distinguished public figures offered their services without compensation, not only to solicit and receive funds, but to perform the arduous task of handling what proved to be a voluminous and instructive correspondence — this time from the North. My own mail surpassed the flood from the South. The Committee's mail was many times mine.

The Southern press again lent their aid. An editorial in the Roanoke World-News was typical:

“We believe this plan to be a worthy one. Mr. Putnam's statement of the South's case deserves a nationwide audience. While it is true that he offers Virginia no quick way out of its present dilemma, it would be erroneous to say the letter is not constructive. In fact, we would say that the only hope of Virginia and the rest of the South lies not in 'massive resistance' but in persuasion, in logic and in salesmanship. The fact that Mr. Putnam wrote the letter is evidence that among some intelligent Northerners there is understanding and sympathy for the prevailing opinion in the South. More Americans need to know and understand this opinion for only by a change in national feeling can there be a real solution to the problem which faces us."”.

With the last paragraph in this editorial I heartily agreed. My observation of the manner in which "the paper curtain," as Southerners have come to call it, had fallen on my letter in the North and West was only a minor part of the pattern I was beginning to recognize. It was a small episode which provided a personal introduction to a wider panorama. I had said to the President:

“From the practical standpoint the North, which does not have the problem, is presuming to tell the South, which does have the problem, what to do.”.

I would soon discover that controlling forces in the North were not only telling the South what to do, they were refusing to let the Northern public even listen to the South's case. I would begin to harbor a suspicion, entirely apart from my letter, that in no other area of human affairs, at home or abroad, were so many people with no personal knowledge of a subject, and no practical concern in it, spending so much time dictating to other people, who had great experience with the subject and vital concern in it.

I would begin also, in due course, to understand the reason for this. Meanwhile, the Birmingham Committee set to work. Within six weeks they had raised enough money, mostly from hundreds of small contributions, to place their first advertisement. It appeared in the New York Times on January 5,1959, in a format six columns wide and a full page deep. To it was attached a coupon asking that readers who sympathized with the message and wished to see further advertising contribute to the fund. This procedure proved informative in itself. Each advertisement, as it appeared, brought in enough money from the North to pay for the next.

Within five months the fund had passed $37,000 and the letter had been published in eighteen Northern and Western papers with a circulation of nearly seven million. Adding the initial free publication in the South, the total circulation had amounted to over ten million. I had no figures on foreign printings, but I was informed by the United States Information Agency that a paper in Salisbury, Rhodesia, carried the letter in full, and I had received comments from India and other remote areas.

Eight newspapers had refused to print the letter, even as an advertisement. These were: the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, the Pittsburgh Press, the Indianapolis Star-News, the Newark News, the Newark Star-Ledger, and the Buffalo News. None of the publishers of these papers felt able to give their reasons, but again, as my knowledge of the situation developed, they became clear.

The interesting thing to me was less the quality and extent of the paper curtain than the money the man and woman in the street were willing to pay to keep the advertisement going, and the nature of the correspondence it produced. Northern replies were ninety-five percent in sympathy. Public relations experts tell me that out of ten people who will write favorably on a subject only one will write when he finds himself in opposition, but even with this allowance, the man and woman in the street in the North seemed to be on the side of the South.

As to the unfriendly letters, they were the most significant of all. After a short time, I gave instructions to the Birmingham Committee to forward me no more favorable replies. All I wanted to see were the hostile five percent. Out of these I sought to distill some understanding of what was going on in the minds of the opposition behind the paper curtain. And the more I learned the more startled I became.

Chapter II - The hidden issue

There were, of course, some violent letters from both Negroes and whites. There were a few from obvious crackpots. But by and large the disagreement seemed to be both sincere and emotional. It was impossible not to smile at letters from teachers and ministers who protested with incoherent emotion at the thought of my emotion, and who urged me to face the facts — which they had never faced themselves.

A scattering of superficial argument on a variety of subjects arrived daily: Did I not realize how unchristian my position was? Did not American democracy clearly require desegregation? Must we not set an example to other nations in the fight against Communism? Was not my position simply a revival of Hitlerism? These, and similar subjects, could be handled one by one without too long a letter in reply.

What I found of larger significance, because it seemed to be the common denominator in a universal misunderstanding, lay in what my correspondents called "modern" anthropology. Through almost all the letters that attempted really to reason, one consistent theme could be found: How could I be so dated in my thinking! Why was I still living in the nineteenth century! What was the point in quoting Lincoln and Bryce when everyone now-a-days knew they were obsolete! I could not help but remember a remark John Temple Graves had made to me concerning a debate on segregation he had had a few years before on the Town Hall of the Air. In it the opposition had continually harassed him with the comment, "Oh, Mr. Graves, if only you knew modern anthropology!" Mr. Graves, not being a professional scientist, had not attempted to meet this challenge in a Town Hall debate. But I was quite prepared to meet it in my correspondence. My only surprise was that it should need to be taken seriously.

And here I discovered an actual advantage in having separated myself for twenty years from the academic world and then returned to feel the fresh impact of what had happened in the interval. The process had its handicap only in a momentary disorientation. It had its value in a detachment of judgment and above all in a freedom from exposure to the creeping distortion of view, the slow but pervasive hypnosis, that two decades of ideological pressure can force even upon the sciences.

I had realized that there had been a broad movement to change man's concept of the nature of man. I had known that there had been pressure to widen the American doctrine of equality of opportunity into a doctrine of social, cultural, economic and genetic equality. By 19541 had witnessed its invasion of the minds of Supreme Court justices. But I had not even then quite grasped how cleverly it had proceeded — infiltrating first the sciences that surround anthropology, moving next into the more strictly social sciences, enthroning itself at last in the Supreme Court's desegregation order.

Perhaps the whole progression should have been obvious to all of us, both within and without the academic world. What could have been more natural than that a movement calling itself, here. Communism, there, Marxism, somewhere else Socialism (but always having a base which I found easiest to describe by the word equalitarianism) should in its strategy include the subversion of sciences as well as governments? The same appeal to pity, to Christian love, could be used to make the fallacy more palatable. The underdog, who had been presented as invariably the victim of oppression, never of his own conduct, could now be made to appear the equal of all in innate capacity. It was the final, inevitable move in a deceptively false ideology—a move which in my opinion would prove the undoing of the whole crusade. A moderate amount of deception for charity's sake could be tolerated by all men of good will. No man of good will, once he was awakened to the truth, could tolerate Little Rock.

How this situation had slowly developed across the years was a long story. The immediate problem lay in the fact that my readers seemed unable to realize there was no such thing as equality even between two leaves on the same bush —that this was not just a matter of difference, but of inferiority and superiority in terms of the value judgments of persons, communities, nations, and cultures, and that the heart of the matter as regards race lay in the area of heredity. It had been essential to the equalitarian to denounce heredity in the biological phase of his subversion, and to make it appear that environment alone made the man. He had had to insist that nothing was innate, no capacity limited, all abilities unlimited, here and now, in this generation. If he could show that environment was responsible for all human differences, then a substantial part, although not all, of a brief for desegregation could be written.

It was a strange program based on total error. Yet of all the chapters in the book of man's self-delusion none seemed to compare in its effectiveness with the current trance. My task, therefore, consisted in trying to explain to my growing list of correspondents how seriously they had been misled, and the challenge was more complex than the queries regarding Christianity or Hitler. A long letter would be required in each instance, and there were hundreds to write. It was at this stage that I conceived the idea of addressing another government official, this time the Attorney General, and of distributing copies of the second letter to those who questioned the first—unless the Attorney General satisfied me that I had overlooked some important point.

The reasons for choosing the Attorney General were obvious. There was no individual in the government more charged with the responsibility of exploring the issues than he, appearing as he did as a friend of the court on behalf of the people of the United States. Perhaps he could explain to me what had happened, perhaps he had done everything in his power and had been over-ruled, or perhaps be could in some other way account for the extraordinary school decision. While the President was the man who could best break the public spell on this issue, the President could only do so if he realized the truth himself, and I was beginning to doubt that he did. The Attorney General, on the other hand, was paid to seek reality in just such a case as this.

So at the outset I went to the Library of Congress and studied the decision and the briefs for the parties. I observed the names of the individuals and organizations who wrote these briefs. I went to other rooms of the library and read the citations in the footnotes to the court's decision and observed the names of the individuals and organizations who wrote these. That the great majority had a special selfinterest was clear —that the Attorney General had made any effort to present anything other than their environmentalist propaganda was not. A letter to the Attorney General, asking why, seemed thoroughly justified.

However, another important step remained to be taken before the justification was complete. My studies in science had taught me that observation and experience are valuable tools in discerning truth, but often fallible. Memory is also fallible. I knew what my observation and experience had been in racial matters and I remembered my earlier readings in this field and several more recent studies. But the argument that "modern" anthropology had exploded observation, experience and all past research required serious review.

Accordingly I began reading again in the Boas school of anthropology. Boas, I knew, was considered the founder of the modern vogue, and I deliberately began studying his books before learning, from people who had known him over many years, the facts about Franz Boas himself —his minority group background, his arrival from Germany in 1886, his association with Columbia in 1896, his earlier nonequalitarian views on race, his change of heart in the late 1920s (the date will have significance later), the names of his students — Herskovits, Klineberg, Ashley Montagu —the nature of his department at Columbia, the influence in it of an instructor named Weltfish who later publicly announced that she had evidence to prove that the United States had used germ warfare in Korea, 1 and the reorganization of the department by Ralph Linton who was brought in from Wisconsin after Boas died. Linton dismissed all of Boas' appointees who had no tenure and Columbia finally dropped Weltfish on a charge of "too-long" tenure.

I read Boas before learning these things because I wanted to approach his ideas with an impartial mind, on their merits and not on the merits or demerits of the author. Yet page by page my amazement grew. Here was clever and insidious propaganda posing in the name of science, fruitless efforts at proof of unprovable theories, which I would be only too glad to point out to the Attorney General. I went on to Herskovits and others until the pattern began to repeat itself, the slippery techniques in evading the main issues, the prolix diversions, the sound without the substance. Was it possible that a whole generation of Americans had been taken in by such writing as this? My wife and I began to read seriously and earnestly — after a few evenings we found ourselves laughing out loud.

Still I was not satisfied. Surely there must be some explanation. It was hardly possible that schools were being closed in Virginia, men threatened with jail in Ohio, on the basis of a hoax as transparent as this. Were there no professional scientists in America who saw what I saw?

And so I took the third step in the preliminaries to my letter to the Attorney General. By mail, by telephone, and finally by personal visits, North and South, I found professional scientists aplenty who saw what I saw. And I discovered something else. One prizewinning Northern scientist whom I visited at his home in a Northern city asked me, after I had been seated a few minutes in his living room, whether I was sure I had not been followed. Another disclosed in the privacy of his study that he had evidence he was being checked by mulattoes at his lectures. All, when first approached, were hesitant, withdrawn and fearful, and the reason was not far to seek. Their employers on whom their livelihood depended —the universities, the museums, the foundations—were either controlled by equalitarians or were intimidated by the race taboo. The scientists whom these institutions employed, if they were ever to hint at the truth, must do so deviously, under wraps over wraps, half seeming to say the opposite.

Concerning some of Gene Weltfish’s other activities, the March 15, 1951, edition of the Communist Daily Worker lists her as a sponsor of the American Peace Crusade. This organization has been cited by the Attorney General of the United States as subversive. The April 4, 1951, edition of the Daily Worker records her as one of the sponsors of the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born. This Committee has also been cited by the Attorney General as subversive. But as they grew to know me they gave me the facts without varnish. In long conversations and letters they provided the confirmation I needed. Many were internationally known. Some had received the highest prizes. Any public official who will guarantee their livelihood can get their names from me, on one condition—that the scientists themselves agree.

I do not hold a brief for or against the attitude of these men. Most of them expressed their reluctance in terms of a temporary condition. One was about to publish a book and he felt it more important in the long run to keep the track clear for the book than to declare his position now. Another had a confidential assignment for his state that he must first perform. Another said, "I cannot commit academic suicide. I still have work to do. But when I retire —!" Another was simply "biding his time." How much of this was rationalization, arising from a timidity that ought to be overcome, I would not venture to say. It was easy enough for me, a man entirely independent of control, to speak—indeed it made my obligation unavoidable. It was less easy for them.

A second element in the situation soon dawned on me. The difficulty was compounding itself. The South instinctively saw the real issue, yet it had been told so often that what it saw did not exist that it had almost come to believe it. In this respect the South was in an identical trance with the North but, as happens in such cases, it could not actually be brought to destroy itself. It fought the trance with a counter-illusion. It clung to the hope that the Constitution could save it—that states' rights was its best defense. I was soon to learn how profound this counter-illusion was. From governors to lawyers in the street I received the same despairing protest—"What else is left?" There seemed to be an agreement among public officials that race should no longer even be mentioned. Among the few Northern defenders of the South the same defeatism existed. Feverish talk about the validity of the 14th Amendment went on, up North, down South, while no one challenged the assumption at the root of the whole trouble —the validity of Boas.

I knew by now that this root, this hidden issue, would be more difficult to present than the issues in my letter to the President. The problem was complicated by several factors. One lay in the emotional echo in the intra-racial sphere of any discussion of innate limitations in the inter-racial sphere. Another was the existence of the mixed-blood who moved in the twilight zone between white and black and whom the equalitarian could present, in appearance and in scientific tests, as the object of discussion.

That there was some mixture everywhere in the United States was probable; that there was more in the North than in the South was certain, for the whiter the mixture the more frequent the northward migration. The thinking of Northerners was thus constantly exposed to a subtle deception—judgments were being made, so to speak, on half the evidence. Ordinarily, if one wished to analyze a substance, one did not mix it with other substances — one sought as pure a specimen as possible. To approach this condition with the Negro one had to leave the North and travel South, or better to Haiti, or better still to central Africa. There the essence could be observed, and judgment could be made as to how much—or how little —of this essence one wanted in one's descendants, whether the absorption was from the fountain head, or from sources already in stages of dilution. But the average Northerner had no opportunity for such evaluations.

Then there was the problem of human nature. White Southerners understood the Negro and in large measure loved him. They realized that the agitation rending the South originated with organized white minorities in conjunction with mixed-bloods well over on the white side of the spectrum. They deplored the deterioration this agitation was producing in existing race relations in the blacker South. Yet they could scarcely bring themselves to hurt their own. The South, after generations of experience, had developed customs and a way of life with the Negro that took his limitations into consideration with a minimum of friction and a maximum of kindness. It was entirely against these customs, these adaptations, openly to analyze and publicize the reasons for them. The issue was complicated enough without bearing the additional weight of this responsibility.

Or so it must have seemed. Again I held no brief against the leadership of the South. With their anthropologists silenced, and their consciences misled, they were indeed in a dilemma. I could not but believe that so far as it lay within my powers my purpose should be to embolden their anthropologists and relieve their consciences. The next step now was to put the situation as I saw it before the Attorney General — to test both fact and theory, science and law, against the minds of the Department of Justice. I had received only a perfunctory acknowledgment of my letter to the President. Perhaps the Attorney General would be in a better position to discuss the subject. Accordingly on March 16, 1959, five months after my letter to President Eisenhower, I addressed Mr. Rogers in these words:

Following my correspondence with your Department in December, I have had a chance to review your brief in the school desegregation cases and also to scan, as carefully as time permitted, the nine relevant volumes of the Supreme Court's Records and Briefs. I hesitate to impose further upon your kindness, but my survey has left one question in my mind upon which the record does not appear to touch, and which you may be able to answer.

I turn to you for the reason that, as a non-adversary party to these proceedings, I understand you to have represented the people of the United States. Since a majority of the population of the South are obviously against integration, and since the Gallup Poll for September 24,1958, indicates that 58% of the white population of the North would not put their children in schools where more than half the enrollment is Negro, it becomes a close question whether the decision of the Supreme Court in these cases was not in fact contrary to the wishes of a national majority. While I recognize that this would in no way affect the validity of the decision, it would seem to have placed a peculiar responsibility upon you.

The matter which I find curious is the omission in your briefs of any challenge to the authorities cited by the Court in Footnote 11 to their opinion of May 17,1954.1 assume there must have been some indication, in argument or elsewhere, that these authorities were to be used. They appear, in large measure, to form the foundation of the decision. They reflect a point of view rooted in what I may call modern equalitarian anthropology — a school which holds that all races are currently equal in their capacity for culture, and that existing inequalities of status are due solely to inequalities of opportunity. While the briefs for the State of Virginia touch upon the qualifications of some of the individual psychologists who testified in the lower courts, they contain no examination of the underlying anthropological theory. It seems to me that such an examination should have been made.

I have a science degree, I have read with some diligence in the field of anthropology and I have discussed the subject with competent anthropologists. It is my considered opinion that two generations of Americans have been victimized by a pseudo-scientific hoax in this field, that this hoax is part of an equalitarian propaganda typical of the left- wing overdrift of our times, and that it will not stand an informed judicial test. I do not believe that ever before has science been more warped by a self-serving few to the deception and injury of so many. On this subject there may be disagreement. But it is clear to me the Court should have been invited to examine the question. Allow me to give my reasons for this opinion. The Court says in Footnote 11 "See generally Myrdal, An American Dilemma ," and I start with this book. I need hardly dwell upon the highly socialistic bias of its foreign author, and the startling remarks with which his text is peppered, such as his comment that the American Constitution "is in many respects impractical and ill-suited for modern conditions," that the Constitutional Convention of 1787 "was nearly a plot against the common people" and that in the conflict between liberty and equality in the United States "equality is slowly winning." A foreign socialist could not, perhaps, have realized that Jefferson's statement "all men are created equal" was a corruption from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, where the original wording read "all men are created equally free," nor that if equality (in any sense other than equality of opportunity and equality before the law) is defeating liberty in the United States, then everything America has stood for is in jeopardy, but certainly it was essential that these matters be called to the Court's attention in evaluating Myrdal's book.

I hasten, however, to the basic hypothesis underlying Myrdal's 1400 pages. On pages 90-91 he introduces the doctrines of Franz Boas, a foreign-born Columbia University professor who arrived in the United States in 1886, who was himself a member of a racial minority group, and who may be called the father of equalitarian anthropology in America. From these pages forward, Myrdal's Dilemma is founded upon the philosophy of Boas and his disciples. Thereafter, one constantly finds in Myrdal such sentences as these:

“The last two or three decades have seen a veritable revolution in scientific thought on the racial characteristics of the Negro ... By inventing and applying ingenious specialized research methods, the popular race dogma [that races are not by nature equal in their capacity for culture] is being victoriously pursued into every corner and effectively exposed as fallacious or at least unsubstantiated ... It is now becoming difficult for even popular writers to express other views than the ones of racial equalitarianism and still retain intellectual respect.”.

If you have not already read him, I invite you to a thorough and impartial study of Boas. I am confident you will find his views wholly unconvincing, his doctrines more "unsubstantiated" than those he attacks, and his approach so saturated with wishful thinking as to be pathetic. In even the most superficial analysis of the subject. Boas should have been challenged and his more obvious errors exposed. Boas, for example, may have been convinced that the average African's improvident indifference to "tomorrow" is just a healthy "optimism," but I dare say the proverbial reasonable man on a jury would think of it less charitably.

If the deceptions of the Boas school were unconscious, they were nevertheless serious. People, for instance, were induced to believe that because early anthropologists put emphasis on brain pan size in their studies of race, and brain pan size later proved to be an invalid criterion, this automatically made all races equal. No one took the time to point out that not only is brain pan size not a final test of intelligence, but that, even if it were, equal brain size would not prove equal capacity for civilization. The character-intelligence index —the combination of intelligence with all of the qualities that go under the name of character, including especially the willingness to resist rather than to appease evil —forms the only possible index of the capacity for civilization as Western Europeans know it, and there is no test for this index save in observing the native culture in which it results. Such observation does not sustain the doctrine of equality.

Indeed, the entire foundation of the Boas theory rests on sand. It is based on the assumption that present day cultural differences between the Negro and other races are due, not to any natural limitations, but to isolation and historical accident. This theme has been taken up again and again by later anthropologists such as Kluckhohn of Harvard, and repeated as established scientific fact. I may illustrate the argument by comparing the condition of the white tribes of Northern Europe just before the fall of Rome with the Negro tribes in the Congo. Both were primitive and barbaric, both were isolated from civilization. With the conquest of Rome by the white barbarians, the northern tribes were brought in contact with the ancient Greco-Roman civilization and gradually absorbed its culture. The Negro, on the other hand, lacked such a contact and therefore remained in statu quo.

This was Boas' historical accident, and his explanation of the Negro's present level of civilization in Africa. Boas had various additional points and refinements of his thesis, such as the advantage the white barbarians enjoyed in contiguity of habitat and the more moderate differences in modes of manufacture in earlier times, which made it easier for backward peoples in those days to compete commercially with more advanced cultures than was the case in later centuries when our white civilization invaded Africa, but these arguments hang on the first point. In other words, had the Negroes shown the enterprise and initiative of the white barbarians, the Negroes themselves would have established a contiguity of habitat and had the advantage of more moderate differences in modes of manufacture.

As far as isolation is concerned, it hardly seems necessary to point out that the Alps did not keep the white barbarians out of Italy, and that the Nile Valley was open to the Negroes into Egypt. One observer, recently returned from an intensive tour of Africa and himself apparently a racial equalitarian, nevertheless feels compelled to include these sentences in his report:

“Why, when in China, India, Mesopotamia and on the Mediterranean coasts and islands, men isolated almost completely from one another, during some 5,000 years independently developed writing and metal tools, invented compasses, built temples and bridges, formulated philosophies, wrote books and poems —why, then, did similar progress not occur in Africa? I posed the question to many Africans. Their answer: the desert, the heat, disease, isolation—and always these words: 'For centuries our most vigorous young men were taken off as slaves.' "The answer falls short. China has a desert; India's climate is as hot and as unhealthy; Mesopotamia indeed is hotter —and was surrounded by deserts. As for the slave trade, why were the Africans not making slaves of the Portuguese and the Arabs?”.

This report, prepared by the assistant to the publisher of "Time" magazine, goes on to seek justification for the equalitarian viewpoint in the modern intelligence test and the modern performance of the exceptional Negro, answers which fall as far short as the others. The field of the intelligence test, like the field of Boas' anthropology, is filled with wishful thinking, with comparisons of the better Negroes and the poorer whites, with studies of mulattoes whose successes are largely proportionate to the admixture of white genes, and with similar avoidance of the essential point, namely, that in matters of race either the average of one must be compared with the average of the other, or the best of one must be compared with the best of the other.

If we are to compare averages, there is probably no better laboratory than the rural area around Chatham, Ontario, Canada. Chatham is a town at the northern end of the pre-Civil War "underground railroad" where a community of the descendants of escaped slaves has existed for 100 years. The social and economic situation of Negroes and whites in the rural area around Chatham is approximately equal. The schools have always been integrated, yet the tests of Negroes in these rural schools show them, after 100 years, to be as far below the whites in the same schools as the Negroes in the schools of the South are below the whites in the schools of the South. Dr. H. A. Tanser, now Superintendent of Schools at Chatham, published a study of this matter in 1939. The study is never mentioned by the modern school of equalitarian anthropology, but you will find it in the Library of Congress. Did your Department give it consideration?

In this connection, you are perhaps aware that Dr. Audrey M. Shuey, Chairman of the Department of Psychology at Randolph-Macon Woman's College, published a report in 1958 surveying and summarizing the results of 40 years of intelligence tests involving whites and Negroes. Dr. Shuey took her B.A. at the University of Illinois, her M.A. at Wellesley, and her Ph.D. at Columbia. Her book contains a foreword by Dr. Henry E. Garrett, former president of the American Psychological Association, the Eastern Psychological Association, the New York State Association of Applied Psychology and the Psychometric Society. In his foreword, Dr. Garrett says:

“Dr. Shuey finds that at several age levels and under a variety of conditions, Negroes regularly score below whites. There is, to be sure, an overlapping of scores, a number of Negroes scoring above the white medians. This overlap means that many individual Negroes achieve high scores on the tests. But the mean differences persist. Dr. Shuey concludes that the regularity and consistency of the results strongly imply a racial basis for these differences. I believe that the weight of evidence supports her conclusion.”.

Dr. Shuey states that "the remarkable consistency of test results ... all point to the presence of some native differences between Negroes and whites determined by intelligence tests," and she adds the significant comment: "The tendency for the IQ's of colored children to become progressively lower with increase in age has been reported by a number of investigators who tested Negro children.... One is confronted with the probability of a continuance during adolescence of what seems to be a widening gap between the races." I recognize that Dr. Shuey's report was not extant at the time of the Brown decision, but a large part of her material was available, and in my opinion should have been submitted to the Court. I repeat that I do not consider the intelligence test decisive, as I believe character to be more important than intelligence, but in answer to those who use the intelligence test to support theories of racial equality, surely Tanser's and Shuey's material belonged in the record.

If, on the other hand, we compare the best with the best, the discrepancies are even clearer. I had occasion to ask Kluckhohn a question with respect to a statement in his Mirror for Man at page 16. This statement reads: "It is true that the total richness of Negro civilizations is at least quantitatively less impressive than that of Western or Chinese civilization." (Emphasis mine). I asked Kluckhohn if he would mind defining in what respects he found it qualitatively as impressive. I told him I was curious as to one poem equal to Milton's Paradise Lost, one history equal to Gibbon's Decline and Fall, one novel equal to Dickens' David Coperfield, one playwright equal to Shakespeare, one philosopher equal to Aristotle, one medical discovery equal to Salk's polio vaccine, one military leader equal to Napoleon, one inventor equal to Edison, one physicist equal to Einstein, one pioneer equal to Columbus, one statesman equal to Abraham Lincoln, one composer equal to Beethoven, one painter equal to Rembrandt. I have received no reply, but Kluckhohn's "at least quantitatively" seems to me typical of the deceptive words used by our modern equalitarian anthropology. The Court should not have been left in the dark on this tendency. Although they do not specifically cite Kluckhohn, he is one of the leaders of the modern school on which Myrdal rests his case.

I have found that a favorite method used by Boas and Kluckhohn for throwing dust in the eyes of the public is to create an impression that there is really no such thing as race. Although Kluckhohn begins the third paragraph of the fifth chapter of his Mirror for Man with the sentence "There are undoubtedly human races," he nevertheless entitles this chapter "Race: A Modern Myth." His thesis is that culture, not race, is what makes human beings what they are. Yet nowhere is the obvious fact examined that culture is absorbed, refined and advanced in proportion to racial capacity. There are, of course, certain modifying variables, among the chief of which are climate and economic conditions. The white culture of New England differs from the white culture of the Deep South, but not as much as the white culture of southern Florida differs from the black culture of Haiti, where the climate is approximately the same. That is to say, the effect of the variables is clearly less decisive than the fundamental difference in race.

Undoubtedly an individual or group, taken out of the cultural environment of their own race and brought up in that of another, will sometimes absorb some features of the culture of the new environment, but in such instances they become parasites upon the culture of the second race. They are carried up, or carried down, as the case may be, by the overwhelming impact of the environment of the second race. Their own capacity to contribute to, and to sustain, a culture can only be judged by the performance of their own race in its native habitat. And if that capacity is low, then too many of them, too freely integrated, must inevitably in the long run lower the culture of the second race.

There have, not unnaturally, been situations in which a race has captured the spark of culture in one habitat but not in another. In the case of the fall of the Roman Empire, the barbarians were, broadly speaking, members of the same race as the conquered. Here we find two branches of the white race, one of which had produced a culture while the other had not, and here the Boas theory of historical accident is tenable. Similarity of tinder permitted passage of the spark. It was still the white race that absorbed, and eventually carried forward, the Roman culture.

The essential question in this whole controversy is whether the Negro, given every conceivable help regardless of cost to the whites, is capable of full adaptation to our white civilization within a matter of a few generations, or whether the record indicates such adaptation cannot be expected save in terms of many hundreds, if not thousands, of years, and that complete integration of these races, especially in the heavy black belts of the South, can result only in a parasitic deterioration of white culture, with or without genocide. I am certain neither you nor the Court, nor any significant number of Northerners would knowingly shackle their racial brothers in the South against their will with a system which would produce either of the latter results. The sin of Cain would pale by comparison.

Yet to my mind it seems obvious that all the facts, and a preponderance of theory, are against Myrdal and his authorities. I would go so far as to say that in the last fifty years anthropology has been drafted to serve the demi-Goddess of Equalitarianism instead of the Goddess of Truth, and that the modern school in this field has a stern judgment to face, both at the bar of American public opinion and at the hands of two generations of youth whose thinking has been corrupted by it. One does not build a healthy society on error. One faces the truth, and deals with it as best one can.

I pass now from Myrdal, and the sources upon which his more general assumptions rest, to the remaining authorities cited in Footnotell. All of these deal primarily with the adverse psychological effect of segregation upon Negroes and only secondarily with its alleged adverse effect upon white children. Nowhere is any study cited of a third question, namely, of the quite possible adverse effect of integration upon whites in schools with large percentages of Negroes. Was any such study made and presented to the Court?

The third question was well put by William Polk in his book Southern Accent:

“If the Negro is entitled to lift himself up by enforced association with the white man, why should not the white man be entitled to prevent himself from being pulled down by enforced association with the Negro?”.

This question seems particularly important in view of the patent partiality of the authorities cited in favor of integration. The majority of these appear either to belong to Negro or other minority groups, or to have prepared their studies under the auspices of such groups. To expect these groups to present impartial reports on the subject of racial discrimination is like expecting a saloon keeper to prepare an impartial study on prohibition, or a meat packer to pass an unbiased judgment on the Humane Slaughter Bill. Their point of view is important and deserves consideration. Many of them are brilliant and consecrated men. But to permit them to provide the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence is manifestly not justice.

If this is compounded by an absence of any consideration of the damaging effects of integration upon white children, it becomes doubly serious. While the brief for the State of Virginia touches upon the subject, it seems to me that the people of the United States, whom you represented, had a particular interest in seeing it more fully developed. I would appreciate your directing me to such a study, if one was made, and also your providing me with some explanation as to why the evidence on damage to the Negro was from such partisan sources.

Any American worthy of the name feels an obligation of kindness and justice toward his fellow man. He is willing to give every individual his chance, whatever his race, but in those circumstances where a race must be dealt with as a race, he realizes that the level of the average must be controlling, and that the relatively minor handicap upon the superior individual of the segregated race, if it be a handicap at all, must be accepted until the average has reached the point where desire for association is mutual.

This leads me to my final query. I will be frank to say that I was startled at the uncritical manner in which the Supreme Court was allowed to accept one phrase in the language of the lower court, to wit: "A sense of inferiority [produced by segregation] affects the motivation of a child to learn." Did neither you nor counsel for any of the appellees take occasion to point out that if a child is by nature inferior, enforced association with his superiors will increase his realization of his inferiority, while if he is by nature not inferior, any implication of inferiority in segregation, if such there be, will only serve as a spur to greater effort?

Throughout history, challenges of this sort, acting upon individuals, groups and races of natural capacity, have proved a whip to achievement, times without number. The point was one of the legal hinges on which the case turned. In fact without it the decision falls apart, for there is no other even remotely arguable excuse why separate facilities cannot be made equal within any possible stretch of the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. Consequently, I would have thought it imperative that you raise it.

Copies of this letter were sent to the President and to each member of the Supreme Court. I had no answer or acknowledgment from the Attorney General. Two members of the Supreme Court acknowledged receipt, which was all they properly could do. No other acknowledgments were received.

Silence, of course, was an answer of a sort. It settled any doubts in my mind concerning the attitude of the Attorney General. As to the secondary purpose of the letter, its usefulness as a tool in simplifying my correspondence, this hope was soon dispelled. "The Second Putnam Letter," as it came to be called, involved me in controversy as lengthy as the first. I chose the Charleston, South Carolina, News and Courier, the South's oldest daily, to launch the text, and its distinguished editor, Thomas R. Waring, printed it in full on March 22. He was also kind enough to say editorially:

“Mr. Putnam has ample grounds for labelling the psychological and anthropological theories on which the Supreme Court wrote its racial decisions as a scientific hoax. The label is long delayed, but we believe it will stick. Though psychologists whose studies have tended to show up racial differences in intelligence have met with varying degrees of suppression, the facts are beginning to be recognized. Even more important than relative intelligence is character and responsibility. Mr. Putnam brings out this racial difference with kindness but vigor. Competent leaders of the Negro race should not reject these facts on account of emotionalism but should adapt them to their own racial problems. Surely the numerous Negroes who have surmounted handicaps must realize that more is involved in the march from jungle to industrial civilization than calories and classrooms. Centuries in the history of mankind cannot be changed in a generation or two. The colored people who languished thousands of years in Africa have blossomed faster than any people on earth in the freedom of the United States. Most of them have made this progress in the South. They can destroy it by heedless insistence on too much too fast. Carleton Putnam is doing a favor to colored as well as white Americans by focusing light on the truth."”.

As Dabney had done with my letter to the President, Waring made up tear sheets containing both the letter and the editorial and sent them to 1700 newspaper editors in the United States. In spite of its greater length and complexity it was again widely reprinted with favorable comment throughout the South, and totally ignored in the North.

However, enough copies reached the North by private mailings from Southerners to produce a selective reaction. Northerners who had had time to think about the hidden issue sent me enthusiastic letters and telegrams. Equalitarian college professors were scornful in a way that seemed to mask a great uneasiness. Nor was it long before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was heard from—not directly, but through Southern editors who forwarded to me the letters they received from the Association.

I preferred to be direct. I wrote the Association inviting detailed criticism of my stand and relished the exchange which followed. Having had no answer from Rogers, I was eager to test every point I had made against the knowledge of others who were involved in the school decision, whether these minds were members of the NAACP or high on the faculties of universities.

Indeed, an official of the NAACP, a grandson of a slave, wrote the best critique, in style and tone, of any I received. I say it with sadness, for every argument he advanced I was obliged to refute. I told this official I wanted to make clear that I was addressing him not as an individual but as a symbol of an organization, some of whose objectives I believed to be wrong and against whose aggressions my race was being forced to defend itself. Then I took his points and dealt with them individually. Each of them appears in the next chapter of this book.

I followed the same procedure in the case of the college professors. But in this instance I was puzzled at the deliberate casuistry and the effort to draw attention from the main point by verbose irrelevancies. At the start of an exchange these gentlemen were sometimes swaggering. The head of the anthropology department at an Ivy League university replied to a courteous request for criticism as follows:

“They [Southerners] seem bent on demonstrating their intellectual inferiority to the Negro by such performances as yours. Why don't you prove your boast of superior intelligence by showing some of it?”.

This scholarly comment concluded a letter which failed to meet a single issue on its merits. I was regretfully obliged to reply in kind:

“My conviction grows daily that none of your group can support with solid fact a single one of your equalitarian contentions, and that consciously or unconsciously you have victimized two entire generations of students. The sooner you are brought to the bar of public opinion to account for this hoax the better.... You have undoubtedly intimidated for the time being a number of your colleagues, but your day of accounting may be closer than you think.”.

Another swashbuckler, at another Ivy League university, began with a tone of patronizing ridicule. He questioned certain of my statements, demanded proof, and when the proof was supplied, changed the subject. When he was exposed there, he tried something else. The evasions were transparent and futile, and in the end the swashbuckler's tone had been converted to a plaintive respect. Concluding this exchange I was compelled to remark:

“Your letter of December 8 is so lacking in intellectual integrity, so full of either deliberate or incredibly careless falsifications, that I am thoroughly alarmed.”.

Indeed, I trust my indignation in this case does not conceal the sincerity of my feeling. I was frankly astonished at the level of intellectual character in academic circles betrayed by this phase of my correspondence.

I was equally concerned by what seemed to be a complete emotional block in the minds of certain readers when it came to facing the hidden issue at all. The problem was particularly noticeable in dealing with people I knew personally. They begged me not to raise the subject, or felt it wiser to agree to disagree, or wished to keep our friendship undisturbed by argument. There was a uniform unwillingness in this group to examine the matter logically, yet, as I have said, they were often the quickest to turn the equalitarian charge of emotionalism against me. To make these people think seemed impossible.

Unfortunately they constituted a very large percentage of the younger generation in the North, educated since the social revolution of 1932.1 wondered whether perhaps they were reluctant to examine this latest consequence of the equalitarian ideology for fear of what the examination might mean in terms of other concepts. They were companioned in their blindness by the sociologists, calling themselves social "scientists," who were often older and had been among the professional liberals who sponsored the original overdrift. These men were in no way qualified themselves to be dogmatic upon questions of physical anthropology, zoology or genetics, yet they closed their minds to any discussion in these fields which might invalidate the structure they had built upon the equalitarian foundation. These men were paying the immemorial penalty of deceit —they had hypnotized others so long they were now the victims of their own trance. Their favorite opening gambit was "No educated man believes any longer ..." to which they were accustomed to receive no challenge whatever. When they heard instead, "Let's see about that," I observed a scurrying for the intellectual exits.

But, all in all, I profited from the debate, whether verbal or written, took the measure of the equalitarian position, observed their arguments and their rebuttals, and learned something of the manner in which they seduced the unwary mind. Either from their silences or their comments, I had or sensed the thinking of Kluckhohn and Handlin of Harvard, Murdock of Yale, Herskovits of Northwestern, and Fosdick of Union Theological Seminary. There were dozens of others, from Richard Nixon to Eleanor Roosevelt, from Nelson Rockefeller to Billy Graham, from Allan Nevins to Ralph McGill. To all the arguments I received, I gave the most earnest thought. If I were wrong, I wanted to know it, and to know why.

In the end, the silences proved nothing, and the arguments nothing. And the reader has the right to know why.

Chapter III - Point by point

It was finally obvious that there could be no answer to this challenge save in getting down to cases. My second letter had in itself raised new questions in many minds and had stung the integrationists to new propaganda. Moreover, there were the old issues that kept recurring in my mail, either on the fringes of the hidden issue or in totally different spheres. Their aspects were so manifold that no connected narrative could encompass them. The most succinct and realistic method of treatment seemed to be the format in which they themselves reached me — as a question, often rhetorical it is true, often ending in an exclamation point rather than a question mark, but in a staccato pitch inviting a staccato reply.

Since there were many questions, on many points, which were repetitive, I began going through the accumulated letters, winnowing out the duplications, until I had a residue of material that appeared representative of the mass as a whole. The points in these I classified, using the major categories the debate had produced, and then proceeded to answer them as concisely as possible.

My plan at first was to use the result solely for private circulation, printed as a pamphlet and mailed to each correspondent. But in the course of preparation I found myself sending both the questions and answers to experts in their respective fields —to anthropologists, judges, ministers, editors and politicians — asking their comments, and in the process a demand arose for publication in book form. Both Northerners and Southerners appealed to the Birmingham Committee and to me for copies in quantity, with the suggestion that the two letters be included between the same covers. The latter proposal had a special advantage as it made unnecessary a re-statement of the earlier material and presented the background from which the questions sprang.

This book is sufficient witness that I yielded to the suggestion. Let me assure the reader that I have kept an open mind, and an open manuscript, to the last minute to receive any data that might significantly change any point in my replies or bring new questions to bear upon the issues. There has been nothing static about the following section, and after it has gone to press I am sure additional questions will arrive which I will wish had reached me sooner.

Anthropology and Intermarriage

I am a Negro. Your letter to the President was a pretty hard slap in the face for me. Can't you realize how it feels to be colored, and to read something like that in a newspaper?

No one wants to slap anybody in the face less than I do. I am totally out of sympathy with those who show discourtesy to you or any other racial group, any time, anywhere. I will never hurt another man's feelings if I can help it, and I believe that the greatest of all human qualities is the ability to put one's self in the other person's place.

Therefore, I regret beyond words the necessity for writing as I did. But in this case your leaders have left me, and other members of my race who have studied the question, no choice. Your leaders were the aggressors. I have had word from many colored people agreeing with my position and with what I say to you now.

Your leaders were not content with the progress being made by mutual agreement and understanding throughout the South. They had to take more by force. Under such circumstances you cannot expect me, or any white man who perceives the real issue, to keep silent. The truth is that responsible Southerners have deliberately weakened their own defense because of their unwillingness to raise the underlying problem. They talk of states' rights when they should be talking anthropology, and they do so out of instinctive human kindness. I fear the time has come when the can afford this kindness no longer. There is a point at which kindness imposed upon ceases to be a virtue.

You and I do not see things from the same point of view. We disagree on fundamentals. Therefore, isn't it best to avoid arguments? No, because it is the fundamentals that I want to examine.

The North had to force the South to give up slavery. Why should not the North force the South to integrate?

Morally the two situations are diametrically opposite. While some Northerners made fortunes out of the slave trade, relatively few owned slaves at the time of the Civil War and consequently they could, with some justification, demand that the South be equally virtuous. But very few Northerners are in a position where they need put their children in schools with large percentages of Negroes. In forcing integration upon the South, the North is demanding that the South do what the North itself in similar circumstances would not do. It is an established fact that white people favor integration throughout the United States exactly in proportion as they do not need to practice it.

Are there any good reasons why Southern white children shouldn't be made to go to school with Negroes ?

There are several, among them the fact that their parents don't want them to, but I will suggest the fundamental reason.

There is no basis in sound science for the assumption, promoted by various minority groups in recent decades, that all races are biologically equal in their capacity to advance, or even to sustain, what is commonly called Western civilization. They most emphatically are not.

The Negro race has various and valuable qualities. In those great attributes of the heart— sympathy and kindness —and in a sense of humor—the average 2 Negro, taken as an individual, is fully on a par with the average white. In certain skills the Negro ranks above the white. If I were lost in an African jungle my life might depend on the talents of a Negro. In other qualities of mind and character, qualities specially involved in our Western civilization, the full-blooded Negro is congenitally only partially adaptable. Hereafter, when I use such words as "inferior," "backward," and "unequal," I use them in this limited sense only.

Such being our understanding, let me state the situation in its simplest terms, quoting a letter to me from a Professor of Physiology in one of our leading medical schools: "School integration is social integration, and social integration means an ever increasing rate of interbreeding. [This is true regardless of whether the sexes are separated in schools. Little brother would still bring his new Negro friend home after school.]

While scientists dislike the concept suggested by the word “average,” preferring the concept of “frequency,” I have used “average” throughout this book as more understandable to the layman and equally acceptable in the context in which I employ it. For example, where a scientist would say the frequency with which emotionalism occurs in Negroes is greater than the frequency with which it occurs in whites, I would say the average Negro is more emotional than the average white. process as a mixing of Negro genes in our white germ plasm, a process from which there can be no unmixing."

Some disagreement may exist as to the extent to which the admixture of Negro genes has affected white civilizations in the past. I have never anywhere seen the claim that it did the white race any good. Consider the history of the West Indies and other Latin American countries. But in any case, we are left with the query, what great civilization of the kind we are seeking to develop in the West ever arose after an admixture of Negro genes?

Since the question answers itself, I must ask the Northern integrationist by what authority he claims the right to gamble with the white civilization of the South, against the will of its people, while he personally sits secure with his children in all white schools, or in schools with negligible percentages of Negroes.

To me this appears as one of the worst examples of hypocrisy and brutality in all history. However, it differs only in degree from a related trend of our times. It is always easy and sometimes justifiable to spend the money that someone else has earned — a principle which the equalitarians understand thoroughly. It is equally easy and never justifiable to spend someone else's children.

Are there enough Negroes in the United States to make any real difference if we absorb them?

The ratio of non-whites to whites in the United States as a whole in the 1950 census was around 10%. If completely absorbed, this would be a substantial admixture, with noticeable effects. More serious is the fact that a large part of the Negro population is concentrated in the South. In 1950, Mississippi had 46%, South Carolina 39%, Louisiana 33%, Alabama 32%, and Georgia 31% nonwhites. Absorption in any of these states would be disastrous. It would be almost as bad in any other southern state. There are 131 counties in nine southern states in which the Negro population exceeds the white.

Is there any evidence that the Negro really cares about intermarriage with the white race?

Scan the Negro press. Here, as an example, is a quotation from the Pittsburgh Courier, a leading Negro weekly, for August 15,1959:

"The Negro phobes and crackerologists are ever shouting warnings that this or that lowering of racial barriers will lead inevitably to inter-marriage and intermixture.

Well, I say that's just fine and exactly what this nation needs to maintain its world supremacy ... We live in an unwholesome clandestine atmosphere in which we whisper of healthy love and desires across the color line but fear to speak out boldly....

Every community worth its salt should have a frankly interracial club or association where the boys and gals, colored and white, could associate, drink and dance ... Of course we favor racial mixing, including marriage, and are working openly to kill all racially restrictive legislation and social segregation and discrimination."

I have before me a copy of the Negro magazine Ebony for February, 1960. On page 66 there is a picture of a Negro next to a picture of a white girl. Under the picture of the Negro is the following caption: "Hebrew Holy charm around Sammy's neck is gift from Eddie Cantor. Planning to marry Canadian blonde, Sammy says:, 'The Bible says "Take unto yourself a wife." And it don't say nothing about her color.'" May I also quote an interview with Congressman Adam Clayton Powell appearing in United States News and World Report on September 5,1952:

“Q. What is the attitude of the Negro in the United States on the subject of intermarriage? Is it discussed frequently in the press?

A. Yes, but on an objective basis. In fact, an increasingly large number of Negro leaders are marrying whites of extremely stable and respected families.

Q. Is there much more fraternizing in the Northern cities between Negroes and whites, especially in the large Negro centers like Harlem, than there used to be?

A. Yes, much more.

Q. Is there any tendency among the Negroes to reject that, or are they welcoming it?

A. They are very definitely welcoming it. An increasing number of fine leaders on both sides are marrying.

Q. What is the argument that is used by Negro leaders in answer to the point that is sometimes made that, if intermarriages continue in the next 25 to 30 years, then the races will be adulterated somewhat as they are in Cuba and Brazil?

A. I have heard that argument, but it doesn't amount to any argument at all from my standpoint, because if we are fighting for integration, well then there it is. I mean, you can't fight against segregation and want separation. We must be consistent. I'm not sure that that is clear.

A. The Negro leaders are fighting against segregation. Therefore, they can't have a position on the one hand against segregation and on the other hand against inter-racial marriage.”.

My Harvard professor claims that miscegenation increases when one race is kept inferior to another and that anything that increases the equality of the two races minimizes the opportunities for miscegenation. Is not this true?

It depends in what sense one uses the word "miscegenation." Your professor is using it in the sense of illicit intercourse. It is manifestly not true that keeping a race inferior increases the rate of legalized marriage with the intent to bear and rear children which is the basic question at issue in the integration fight. In illicit connections every effort is made to avoid breeding. When social integration occurs, this sort of "equality" invites legalized unions in which breeding is a major object.

Even if illegal unions resulted in offspring as numerous as do marriages, the social consequences would still be quite different. When white men marry Negro women in any numbers the trend is toward a gradual change in social attitudes of acceptance, and a slow infiltration of the dominant white society by the offspring, with the consequent changing of the standards of that society, as evidenced in various Latin American countries.

On the other hand when white men have illicit intercourse with Negro women, not only are offspring avoided if possible but, if offspring do result, the latter are isolated from the dominant white society and consequently do not have any comparable chance to change its standards, as heretofore evidenced in the United States.