CHAPTER I

MIDNIGHT IN MAINE

Along the coast of Maine in September there are days when the air is like wine and the sky is an infinite blue. One searches for symbols of clarity to describe such days, for they lend themselves to wide vistas across the land and within the mind. Moreover, on Mt. Desert Island a man is on an eastern frontier where he can still find detachment from crowds and controversies, a sense of sanctuary and an inducement to meditation.

On some nights the stars are as bright as the stars of Arizona. I remember such an evening at Seal Harbor in 1966 when I was on a vacation from the debates and contention which had persisted since the publication of my Race and Reason: A Yankee View in 1961. It was a tempting night to review and to ponder.

The inducement was doubled by an isolated study, an open fire and a brief case stuffed with papers. So I pondered in the study and fed the fire, trying meanwhile to distill some meaning from the experiences of half a decade. I had closed Race and Reason in a contemplative mood—a mood of recapitulation—and now I wondered if the time had not arrived to evaluate the intervening years.

Were I to write the first book over again, what would I change? As for its basic thesis, all that I had said had been validated in the period since it appeared. The passage of Civil Rights Acts, the pro-Negro pressures of government departments and the Negro-oriented stance of the opinion-forming agencies of our society had only resulted in increasing racial tensions throughout the country. Disorders in Philadelphia, New York, Rochester, Cleveland, Los Angeles and other cities were symptomatic of a seething hostility beneath the surface everywhere.

In the Deep South, twelve years after the Supreme Court's school integration decision, less than four per cent of the Negro population were in integrated schools, and these only after threats and bribery from the federal government. In no state had the averages reached more than 15 per cent of the total school enrollment, the flash-point at which trouble could really be expected to start.

In Negro Africa the deterioration had approached the ludicrous. During the sixty days prior to January 1, 1966, five "democratic" African governments—Upper Volta, the Central African Republic, Dahomey, Nigeria and the Congo—were overthrown by force. Since 1960 there had been at least 24 African rebellions, mutinies, assassinations or attempted assassinations, and coup d'etats. Under such circumstances it was not surprising that while the crime rate was rising in the United States cannibalism and human sacrifice were increasing in Africa.

As regards these developments I could only feel that my errors had been more those of omission than commission. There was much documentation I would now add, and there were insights I lacked then and had gained since. Beyond these, there were questions of emphasis. I had underestimated certain forces and overestimated others. The larger framework in which the Negro problem arose was of more importance than I had thought. The relationship of race to the leftward movement on the world stage was closer, the reasons for the dishonesty in this area were clearer. Personal experience with the extent to which otherwise rational people were willing to be deceived had surprised me, but not as much as the lengths to which public leaders, scholars, churchmen, and the mass media would go to alter the fabric of our society in the deception's name.

Throwing another log on the fire, I realized that I was now more aware of these things than I had been five years before. Yet in the interval I had come to appreciate many of them and had taken such limited action as I could at the time. Especially in the area of science and the biology of race differences I had grown familiar with the evasions and other tactics of the educational hierarchy, their blind dedication to the political dogma of equality, and had done my best to expose them.

For example, in my hand I held a newspaper clipping regarding an attack upon Dr. Wesley C. George{1}—author of The Biology of the Race Problem and a leading exponent of the truth concerning genetic variability—which served to illustrate the general situation. I paused to re-read it now, and to conjure back some of the incidents that made the episode still vivid in my mind.

The American Anthropological Association had held its annual meeting in November of 1961 and at its final session, at which 192 of the 600 Fellows of the Association were present, unanimously passed a resolution which was later used repeatedly as if it finally disposed of all of Dr. George's work and of Race and Reason as well. This resolution read in part: "The American Anthropological Association repudiates statements now appearing in the United States that Negroes are biologically and in innate mental ability inferior [sic]{2} to whites . . ."

The fallacy here was so transparent, so contrary to all the established facts, and yet so likely to mislead an uninformed public on a matter vital to the national welfare that I could not ignore it. To anyone who had studied the background and motives of the leaders in these groups it was stark ideological propaganda without any scientific basis whatever. Moreover, if our domestic and foreign policies were to be bottomed on such blatant inversions of the truth, little hope remained for either a law-abiding or a peaceful world.

Therefore, upon learning of the resolution, I called a press conference in which I publicly asked the retiring president of the Association (a Harvard man) a question I had transmitted to him privately in advance. This question was: Do you also intend to repudiate the following statement by your recently deceased Harvard colleague Professor Clyde Kluckhohn, a Viking Medal winner

1. Wesley C. George, Ph.D., Professor of Histology and Embryology, emeritus and for ten years head of the Department of Anatomy, University of North Carolina Medical School; past president, North Carolina Academy of Science.

2. The choice of the word "inferior" to arouse anger rather than reason among readers or listeners is characteristic of the equalitarian. Phrases such as "limitations of capacity" or "a race younger on the evolutionary scale" are available but avoided by them.

and a long-time equalitarian,{3} who said shortly before he died: "In the light of accumulating information as to significantly varying incidence of mapped genes among different peoples. . . it seems very likely indeed that populations differ quantitatively in their potentialities for particular kinds of achievement."{4}

I also asked the retiring president publicly whether he intended to repudiate the published findings of Professor C. J. Connolly, physical anthropologist at Catholic University, whose studies of White and Negro brains disclosed, on the average, a greater sulcification of the frontal lobes in Whites than in Negroes.{5}

And I asked the retiring president whether he intended to repudiate the published statement of Dr. Garrett Hardin, Professor of Biology at the University of California at Santa Barbara, which read as follows: "As a result of recent findings in the fields of physiological genetics and population genetics, particularly as regards blood groups, the applicability of the inequality axiom is rapidly becoming accepted."{6}

I then drew the attention of the retiring president to the fact that none of these scientists were Southerners and I reminded him that Professor Ruggles Gates, an Englishman who was at the time probably the world's most experienced and distinguished physical anthropologist and human geneticist, had made the public statement{7} that there were vast differences among races in mental ability and capacity for development. I wanted to know whether the retiring president had any substantive comment on any of these statements.

At this point the retiring president had apparently had enough,

3. As used in this book, "equalitarian" means one who subscribes to the dogma that for all practical purposes all races are innately (genetically) equal in intelligence and character, and that the differences between them are due chiefly to environment rather than to heredity.

4. The American Anthropologist, Dec. 1959, Vol. 61, No. 6.

5. C. J. Connolly, External Morphology of the Primate Brain, 1950, Springfield, 111. For the significance of sulcification (fissuration) as a measure of innate mental ability, see infra, p. 50.

6. Science, April 29, 1960.

7. In the introduction to Carleton Putnam, Race and Reason: A Yankee View, 1961, Washington, D.C. Cited hereafter as Race and Reason.

because he referred my questions to the new president, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who wrote me a letter which I consider a classic. Confining his comments to the quotation from Professor Kluckhohn, he said:

"Relative to the statement by Dr. Kluckhohn, this in no way contradicts the position which was taken by the Fellows of the American Anthropological Association at the business meeting in Philadelphia. For example, people certainly differ in eye color. These differences are due to genetic causes. Very dark eyes are more efficient in the tropics, but this has nothing to do with the ability of people to participate in the democratic way of life."

To which I answered:

"My quotation from Kluckhohn was as follows: 'It seems very likely indeed that populations differ quantitatively in their potentialities for particular kinds of achievement.' [Emphasis mine.] You attempt to answer this quotation by citing differences in eye color and you make the obvious remark that these have nothing to do with the ability of people to participate in the democratic way of life. Kluckhohn spoke of differences in potentialities for achievement and these do have something to do with the democratic way of life. They particularly have something to do with the statement in your Philadelphia resolution which flatly equates White and Negro intelligence. Your answer is therefore completely beside the point . . ."

By now the new president of the American Anthropological Association appeared also to have had enough. At least I heard nothing more from him thereafter. Although I told the whole story in speeches and in television and radio interviews, no further comment was forthcoming from the Association or any of its officers.

I lingered over this episode because it was so typical of most of the attacks upon those scientists who offered the public un-popular but realistic facts on race. The Anglo-American scientific hierarchy, speaking through their various associations and magazines, invariably retorted with assertions, not with evidence.{8} The discouraging thing was how many people were taken in.{9} It

8. For further examples, see infra, Chap. II.

9. A Southern friend of mine with wide experience in press and public relations once remarked to me that Southerners did not believe the public really was deceived. "Any man," he said, "who thinks the average Negro is innately the intellectual equal of the average White man is too dumb to argue with." When I told him that polls taken in 1942 and again in 1956 by the National Opinion Research Center had shown, as of 1942, that 20% of White Southerners and 50% of White Northerners assumed equality, and that by 1956 80% of the Northerners and 60% of the Southerners held this opinion, he was incredulous. Scientific American, Dec. 1956, pp. 35-39. These polls combined Southern and Border states. Harris polls taken in 1963 and 1965 give later breakdowns, probably on a different allocation, but showing as of 1965 a 65% assumption of equality in the North. Washington Post, Oct. 18, 1965.

seemed doubly disheartening to me personally in that, to the extent these retorts were intended to discredit Race and Reason, they were exactly the sort of thing which any objective reader should have been led to expect. In that book I had stressed the degree of political control over the life sciences, and the attacks now were direct proof of my point. They were transparent tactical moves by organizations which were the very mouthpieces of the hierarchy, depending solely for their persuasiveness upon their position as a hierarchy, and upon the force of numbers, never upon the facts.

The basic question here was a simple one: Were the American people to be given the evidence on innate racial capacities and variability, and then allowed to judge for themselves the soundness of the public policies which their legislatures and courts were adopting, or were they to be given only undocumented assertions which all the available evidence contradicted?

As I have said, the question seemed to me vital, not only in its bearing upon our domestic policies but upon our foreign affairs as well. The dissolution of the colonial system among backward peoples throughout the world, which the United States had done so much to encourage and which had produced such growing confusion and violence, stemmed from the assumption that these peoples had the innate capacity to maintain stable, free societies. The promiscuous granting of foreign aid, already raising grave problems, rested on the same assumption. So did proposed changes in our immigration laws. It was hard to think of any area of domestic or foreign policy which was not to some extent related to the basic question, or where the truth was not essential to wise decisions.

To use charity, kindness, and brotherhood as justification for the deceit solved nothing. Concealing the truth was not charity, any more than lying to a patient about a cancer when an operation might save a life. Running away from reality was not kindness. Wrecking time-tested colonial systems of control among backward peoples and substituting systems which produced increasing misery and bloodshed were not acts of brotherhood.

On the other hand, presenting the facts about innate racial capacities to a legislature, government executive or court ought to result in a kinder policy toward school children, a better program for housing, a more successful attack on slums, a faster and sounder solution to unemployment, and a more constructive approach to the problems of the underdeveloped countries. This would not be a case of setting the clock back, but of turning the lights on.

Yet every day, on every side, government executives, judges, legislators, teachers and clergymen were acting in blind faith on a scientific hoax. More startling was the refusal of such men even to investigate the subject. Never once since the Supreme Court decision in 1954 had any President so much as invited for consultation at the White House a single scientist outside the equalitarian hierarchy.

As for the courts themselves, decision after decision based upon uncontradicted evidence had been handed down in the lower trial courts since 1954, had been reversed on appeal on grounds apart from the evidence, and had been refused review by the Supreme Court.{10} It was a case of a dogged defiance of reality, a plunging along in total darkness while riots raged, crime rose, and schools deteriorated.

Gazing at the embers of my fire seemed to offer no solution to this mystery, but the riddle plagued me. What prompted the vast majority of liberals and a large number—probably a majority—of conservatives to close their eyes to the underlying truth? The underlying truth was the strongest weapon the South had on the

10. See infra, Chapters IV-V.

race issue, yet the South refused to use it. The underlying truth was the strongest weapon conservatives had on the general political front, yet they also shunned it. To expose liberal dishonesty as regards the Negro was both a graphic and expedient way to explode all the fallacies based on the equalitarian ideology, yet conservatives concentrated instead on economic and constitutional questions which, at a time of unprecedented prosperity, had comparatively little appeal to the man in the street.

In fact, few of the arguments of the conservatives had much validity except in terms of the correct answer to the innate-equality dogma. If all races were innately equal, then of course our social organization, both nationally and on the world scene, was full of flaws. If they were not, then the whole problem changed and conservative policies took on new meaning. Thus in refusing to challenge the dogma, conservatives were fencing on a scaffold while liberals laughed as they watched the trap door open. It became quite appropriate to refer to the conservative movement and the Republican Party as the liberals' kept opposition. Their members were condemned in advance, set up to be ridiculed and extinguished, amid the scorn and self-satisfaction of the left.

Nevertheless it seemed a fundamental tenet of most conservative groups, and certainly of the Republican Party, that the issue was not to be raised. The very root of communism and socialism which they so vociferously professed to oppose was thus to be left untouched. It struck me as an incredible surrender, and the reasons for it demanded analysis.

Was there something somewhere in the Anglo-American social climate which had destroyed the firmness of character and will, the self-confidence and spiritual force, needed openly to face an issue of this kind? Was there some relation between our contemporary mood of appeasement and indulgence toward crime and juvenile delinquency which accounted for our avoidance of the equality issue as well?

Looking back upon my own youth before the first World War, I surmised that there was. The mood of the times had changed. Confidence in both the moral and physical force of rectitude had gradually disappeared. Respect for distinction had gone, too—and with it respect for authority in the home, in the community and in the state. All of these things tended to sap a man's courage to assert a vested pride in his personal heritage—might it not be just as true as to the heritage of his race?

Then there arose the argument that political expediency, indeed political necessity, compelled public men to avoid "hurting the feelings" of minority groups who might hold the balance of power in elections. But this, also, seemed an invalid approach. A balance of power position among minority groups could only exist if the White majority were divided, and the White majority would not be divided on this issue if it were properly instructed and courageously led. Some indication of what might be expected if the matter were considered by itself alone, even without leadership or instruction, was afforded by the 1964 referendum on the repeal of the Rumford Act in California. The vote was against open housing two to one, although President Johnson, an apostle of civil rights, carried California by 1,200,000 votes on the same day.

What folly it was for conservative leaders to suppose that cursing communism and dwelling upon its "conspiratorial aspects" as the John Birch Society did (all the while studiously avoiding any mention of race or the equalitarian dogma) could accomplish anything against the growing belief among Americans that the underlying tenets of communism might be sound! These Americans had been washed for decades in the powerful soaps of the equalitarian ideology—in the schools and colleges, in the theatres, on radio and television, in newspapers, books and magazines, and in the churches, until they were beginning to accept its validity without quite recognizing its kinship to communism or its indispensable connection with that movement.

In fact it was no exaggeration to say that to unmask the equalitarian dogma was to knock the bottom out. of both communism and socialism. Neither could survive without it because both drew their major nourishment from supposedly unwarranted economic and social inequalities among men. To recognize that many of the inequalities were not unwarranted, that they were instead biologically constituted and consequently inevitable, was to cut to the root of every left-wing doctrine, called by whatever name. Similarly, toying with the superstructure of these movements was futile because every attack upon it could be met with counterattacks in the name of social justice. Indeed there was no possible way of determining what social justice was until the equalitarian dogma was dissected and exploded.

Social justice remained, of course, the goal which all men of good will were bound to seek. It could certainly not be found in mid-nineteenth century sweatshops nor child labor practices. Neither, on the other hand, could it be found in misleading courts and legislatures on the variable capacity of races, nor in inflaming one race against another by false preachments regarding the responsibility for unrealized hopes, falsely aroused.

With occasional but not statistically significant exceptions, in America at least, a man might be poor and "underprivileged" for one of three reasons: (1) because of innate limitations; (2) because of laziness and improvidence; or (3) because of social injustice. No one questioned the imperative to correct category 3. But what the equalitarian did was to seek to blur the distinction between all the categories and particularly to transpose 1 into 3. This must increase rather than abate class and race conflict for while most reasonable men would be willing to see their savings and perhaps other fruits of their industry, intelligence and self-denial taxed or destroyed to correct 3, few would submit indefinitely to such a procedure on behalf of 1 and 2.

Unless, perhaps, they were sufficiently misled. Then a different situation developed. The question became one of how long a society built on false premises could survive if the majority accepted the premises, and this in turn involved the importance of the area in which the deceit was practiced.

Unfortunately in the racial area the importance was tremendous. Could the barrage of excuses which came from the lips of liberals explain away every decline is educational standards, every deterioration in morals, every increase in crime, every failure of foreign policy? The equalitarian arsenal of excuses was almost unlimited. Could it prevail indefinitely against the facts themselves?

And how long would our politically successful public leaders—men like Johnson, Eisenhower, Rockefeller and the Kennedys, men who had managed to ride the tide of consensus into positions of power as members of the "liberal establishment"—stomach their own blindness? The simple failure to investigate, to listen to any but members of the leftist scientific hierarchy, was startling enough in its revelation of wishful thinking. Second only to the hierarchy, and the managers of the mass media, such men bore the major responsibility for the continuance of the deceit. Was there no hope for a break in the ranks of these opportunists who bought their immediate success at the price of long-range failure?

One looked in vain for men in public life who understood the first duty of statesmanship as Theodore Roosevelt understood it. Roosevelt had written: "People always used to say of me that I was an astonishingly good politician because I divined what the people were going to think. This really was not an accurate way of stating the case. I did not 'divine' how the people were going to think; I simply made up my mind what they ought to think, and then did my best to get them to think it." Here was the difference between a public leader and a public panderer.

Surely there existed a wealth of wholesome and inspirational issues for the public man in the Anglo-American tradition. If other stocks could be encouraged in an emphasis upon their traditions and their achievements, if the Negro could be made the subject of a national mania, if all our minority groups could, in fact, be indulged in the practice of an intense racism, had not the time arrived for a little emphasis upon the values of the founding stocks which had built America in the most fundamental sense-given it its law, its language, its government, its religion, its pioneering enterprise and its stability of character?{11} Was it in the interests

11. The substocks of the Caucasian race which I call interchangeably English-speaking or Anglo-American were well defined by Theodore Roosevelt in 1881: "on the New England Coast the English blood was as pure as in any part of Britain; in New York and New Jersey it was mixed with that of the Dutch settlers—and the Dutch are by race nearer to the true old English of Alfred and Harold than are, for example, the thoroughly Anglicized Welsh of Cornwall. Otherwise, the infusion of new blood into the English race [more accurately, English amalgam] on this side of the Atlantic has been chiefly from three sources—German, Irish, and Norse; and these three sources represent the elemental parts of the composite English stock in about the same proportions in which they were originally combined—mainly Teutonic, largely Celtic, and with a Scandinavian admixture. The descendant of the German becomes as much an Anglo-American as the descendant of the Strathclyde Celt has already become an Anglo-Briton . . . It must always be kept in mind that the Americans and the British are two substantially similar branches of the great English race, which both before and after their separation have assimilated, and made Englishmen of many other peoples. . . " Works of Theodore Roosevelt, National Ed., 1926, New York, Vol. VI, p. 23.

of those minorities who had either sought refuge here, or who had found a refuge by continuing here, that those values should be changed-and changed in a direction which must eventually produce the very conditions from which refuge had been sought?

The more one thought about it the less one saw any justification for the evasive, self-defeating attitude of conservatives, or the outright self-betrayal of Anglo-American liberals. One might attribute it to mawkish sentimentality, venality, blindness, or cowardice, but none of these seemed sufficient to account for the situation. Perhaps the element that appeared from my experience to come the closest to the root cause was ignorance, but a strange, self-perpetuating kind of ignorance bordering on hypnosis, an ignorance nourished by the pervasive power of the news and entertainment media after it had first been instilled by the academic hierarchy-an ignorance buttressed by feelings of guilt which the ignorance itself created.

Embers were no longer a match for a midnight in Maine. I decided the time had come for more wood on the fire before I rummaged further in the brief case which contained the all too short record of one man's effort against the obfuscation. A review of it might disclose whether there were points still worth making, or whether a digest of points already made might prove useful as a sequel to Race and Reason.

I knew of no way of combatting ignorance except with truth. St. Paul had said that the truth was mighty and must prevail. On the other hand I remembered a less optimistic writer who remarked that the truth would prevail only after no one any longer had any interest in suppressing it. Today it was staggering how many seemed to have such an interest. Only the inarticulate, nation-founding stocks in the United States—the divided and confused majority—had an opposite interest, and they failed to recognize it.

I gathered some logs from the woodpile outside, closed the door against the darkness, and spread a few more papers on the table under the lamp.