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
126. 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
Copperfield_, 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 Footnote 11.
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 28 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. I 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] 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.
+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 they 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?_