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 he 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
self-interest 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 non-equalitarian 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 prize-winning
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.
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 briefs 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. I 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?