movement?_
Because they have accepted uncritically the anthropological doctrines
of the Boas clique. They have forgotten the commandment to worship God
with all their minds as well as with all their hearts.
* * * * *
_Don’t you believe in the brotherhood of man?_
Yes, when this concept is correctly understood. I believe that
just as charity begins at home (although it should not end there),
so brotherhood begins with the family. The communist technique of
undermining the family as a social unit is very much of a part with
their pressures for racial integration. The communists wish to kill
any loyalties other than to “the State”. But the Christian social
structure, like many others, is built upon the unit of the family.
It recognizes the natural impulse of men to group themselves around
their own kind. Birds of a feather flock together. This does not
prohibit cooperation and sympathy beyond the family--in the community,
the state, and throughout the world. However, the process, to be
sound, must source in the primary natural unit of the home, and the
“brotherhood of man” must be understood in this light.
The important thing is to recognize that the grouping instinct is
basic, and that race is one of the wider groups. To preach against its
manifestations is not only a perversion of ideals, but a very effective
way of destroying a civilization.
* * * * *
_Why worry so much about the future? Why not adopt the policy that will
help the Negro most today, if it doesn’t hurt the present generation of
whites?_
Wynne-Tyson has pointed out (page 69) that our contemporary American
civilization is suffering already from the deteriorating effects of too
indiscriminate an acceptance of various features of other cultures.
Deterioration of this sort spreads rapidly. “It is far easier to sink
than to rise.” To expose young white children, in their most formative
years, to the Negro influence would have an immediate adverse effect.
+Sociology And Communism+
_Is not the segregationist’s position dated from the standpoint of
modern sociology?_
Modern sociology is too often found to be the child of modern
equalitarian anthropology. But let me make clear my position on the
broader sociological question, as distinguished from my position on
integration, the latter being only a facet of the former.
I believe the real contest in America today is between equalitarianism
on the one hand, and individual freedom and responsibility on the
other. One of the notions inherent in the first system is the idea
that benefits should flow from the State; in the second, that benefits
should flow from individual effort. Although I doubt if they realize
it themselves, modern writers on social questions are betrayed by
the fact that their works almost never contain the words “earn” or
“deserve.” It never seems to occur to them that one man might be
rich because he deserved to be, while another might be poor for the
same reason--indeed, that in America this is far more often the case
than otherwise, and that one does not cure improvidence and bad
self-management by rewarding it at the expense of thrift and foresight.
The trend is particularly damaging in the training of the young. Let us
not forget that civilized living, thoughtfulness of others, honesty,
thrift, sexual loyalty, have to be taught, even though the capacity to
absorb the teaching varies. And let us not forget that you cannot teach
the value of something unless you devalue its opposite, that you cannot
create superior ideals and superior people by pretending that inferior
ideals and inferior people--black or white--are just as good.
While I think that our society has been correct in putting a floor
under failure, in relieving undeserved misery, and in curbing business
buccaneering, I believe it has been wrong in allowing the whole
emphasis to be shifted from self-dependence to State dependence. The
application of my point to the integration controversy can be expressed
in the words of one of my correspondents:
“In the last ten years, or ever since the decision was made by the
leftwingers to enlist the Negro in their crusade for universal erosion,
the leadership of the Negro race has almost abandoned efforts at
self-improvement by the Negro. In my lifetime the patient pioneering
of Southern leaders, both white and Negro, had, I believe, led to some
improvement, both in race relations and in the status of the Negro in
the American communities.
“Now virtually all the emphasis is being placed upon the theory that
the big obstacle to a millennium for the Negro race is the oppressive
social system under which he lives. Even a far more sophisticated
and superior race of people would be corrupted by such a narcotic as
this. In the case of the Negro, with his uncritical mind and lack of
experience, the result has been nothing less than a catastrophe.”
* * * * *
_Are not adverse circumstances the cause of most failures, and is
not most of the evil in the world the fault of defective human
institutions?_
Here is another equalitarian tenet that has spread through our society
like a cancer. Myrdal begins one of his chapters with this sentence:
“The liberal is inclined to believe that it is the occasion that makes
the thief, while the conservative is likely to hold that the thief
is likely to create the occasion.” It would be hard to find a more
obvious effort to win sympathy for the equalitarian viewpoint through a
fallacious generality.
The accurate way of stating the case is: “The equalitarian believes
that the occasion makes the thief; the genuine American liberal holds
that occasions may indeed be bad enough to make a thief of any man,
and that society should strive to alleviate such conditions and succor
their victims, but that on the average, in the long run, a man is
himself responsible for his circumstances.” The only qualifications
I would place on this re-statement are contained in my answer to the
question beginning on page 63.
Just as no victory can compare with the victory of a man over himself,
so no defeat can be greater than that which comes to the individual and
to society when men are taught to blame their failings on anything and
anybody but themselves. Evil as other conditions may be, this is the
greatest of all evils, because it destroys the core of human character.
* * * * *
_Is it true that integration is part of the communist conspiracy in
America?_
The communists have made the integration movement a part of their
conspiracy, although of course communism is not the only force
back of integration. Communism is one phase of a disease, of which
equalitarianism and socialism are milder phases, all of which stem from
the general leftist overdrift.
However, I believe the equalitarian ideology, which presumes to justify
integration, is playing into communist hands, not only by setting
section against section in America, but by spreading the equalitarian
virus, and thus weakening the body politic to a point where more
dangerous phases of the disease are contracted. Khrushchev tells every
American he meets that the latter’s grandchildren will be living under
socialism. Khrushchev cares little by what name his rose is called, but
we are beginning to feel its thorns.
Obviously, “the State” is a purely theoretical concept which exists
only in the mind. The sole flesh-and-blood, material reality is the
individual. “The State” is no more than a name which individuals give
to a method they use for working together to achieve certain objects
these individuals desire. Therefore, when any individual or group of
individuals talks of dependence on the State, they are talking of some
individuals depending on other individuals, a procedure which in the
end either makes the individuals who are depended on rebel, or makes
them use the dependence to exploit the parasites by way of compensation.
Communism, of course, carries this exploitation to the limit. In the
process, and to confuse the minds of the exploited, it seeks to warp
the flesh-and-blood reality of the individual into its exact opposite.
In a tract used in a communist school for subversives in Milwaukee I
find the following paragraph:
“Man is already a colonial aggregation of cells, and to consider him an
individual would be an error. Colonies of cells have gathered together
as one organ or another of the body, and then these organs have,
themselves, gathered together to form the whole. Thus we see that man,
himself, is already a political organism, even if we do not consider a
mass of men.”
It seems strange that anyone could be blind enough not to realize at
once that the only _entity of consciousness_ in the situation is the
person--that neither the cell nor the State can ever qualify in this
respect--but these are the sort of stupidities one must expect as the
disease of equalitarianism progresses.
The sad thing is that the Santa Claus aspect of equalitarianism--the
idea that “the State” is a mystic something that can be leaned on--is
very beguiling to ignorant and backward peoples. The easy handout,
the Santa Claus image, does indeed become a narcotic. It not only
drugs groups of individuals within the nation, but it operates between
nations. Probably there has never been as soft a touch internationally
as Uncle Sam today in the minds of backward peoples. I do not say
that the image is correct, but I say that it is there, and that if we
encourage it, it can become real and thus destroy us. For we are not
ruthless enough to exploit, and it may be too late to rebel.
* * * * *
_Does not the support of integration by our wealthy foundations suggest
that they have been taken over by communism?_
Certainly not consciously. But I think there is a tendency upon the
part of men managing large sums of private capital to defend themselves
against attacks as capitalists by over-proving themselves in the
opposite direction. The same has been true, and still is true, of
wealthy men in politics. This again plays into communist hands.
One episode which I must say startles me is the Carnegie Foundation
subsidy of Myrdal’s _American Dilemma_. There is much interesting
material in this book, but the approach is wholly equalitarian. I could
not help thinking of the Carnegie Foundation when I read the following
passage from a speech of welcome which Beria made to American student
subversives at a class on Psychopolitics at Lenin University:
“To produce a maximum of chaos in the culture of the enemy is our
first most important step.... You must work until every teacher of
psychology unknowingly teaches only Communist doctrine under the guise
of ‘psychology’. You must labor until every doctor and psychiatrist is
either a psycho-politician or an un-witting assistant to our aims....
Use the courts, use the Constitution of the country, use its medical
societies and its laws to further our ends. Do not stint in your labor
in this direction. And when you have succeeded you will discover
that you can now effect your own legislation at will and you can, by
careful organization of healing societies, by constant campaign about
the terrors of society, by pretense as to your effectiveness, make
your Capitalist himself finance a large portion of the quiet Communist
conquest of the nation.”
* * * * *
_Does not our democracy need to practice equalitarianism at home in
order to fight communism abroad?_
You do not fight a disease by contracting it. Or, to put the matter
another way, if a gangster offers your child opium to get him to
join his side, you do not also offer him opium to keep him on yours.
Moreover, competent observers, both in our foreign service and in
business, who have returned from backward countries, have repeatedly
told me that one reason Americans are so often held in secret, if not
open, contempt in those countries is that Americans are willing to give
with no conditions, are timid about exacting anything in return, and
make no demand that the help granted be as far as possible earned and
deserved. Raise a child in that way and you have a delinquent. There
is no more fundamental truth in life than that status to be worth
anything has to be earned, whether by races or by individuals. There
is something in the most primitive man that recognizes this truth, and
respects and tries to emulate the person or race that asserts it.
Consider in this connection the following remarks by Albert Schweitzer,
probably the world’s greatest practicing humanitarian and a specialist
on the African Negro. No equalitarian can be compared with Schweitzer
when it comes to giving his life to help the black man. The quotation
is from Schweitzer’s book _On the Edge of the Primeval Forest_:
“The Negro is a child, and with children nothing can be done without
the use of authority. We must, therefore, so arrange the circumstances
of daily life that my natural authority can find expression. With
regard to the Negroes, then, I have coined the formula: ‘I am your
brother, it is true, but your elder brother’.
“The combination of friendliness with authority is the great secret
of successful intercourse. One of our missionaries, Mr. Robert, left
the staff some years ago to live among the Negroes as their brother
absolutely. He built himself a small house near a village between
Lambaréné and N’Gomo, and wished to be recognized as a member of the
village. From that day his life became a misery. With his abandonment
of the social interval between white and black he lost all his
influence.”
The white man who preaches to backward races a doctrine of equality not
only demeans himself and his own race, but forfeits his opportunity to
be of real service. What is called the “liberal ferment” among backward
peoples who are shouting democracy from Latin America to Africa is
too often not at all a struggle for freedom under law on the part of
peoples capable of self-government, as was the case in the American
Revolution, but rather a demand for license under lawlessness on the
part of peoples totally incapable of self-government. As the aforesaid
foreign observers have so often reported, and as any traveler can
confirm for himself, these peoples do not really desire or understand
freedom and its responsibilities; they wish equality and the capture
for themselves of the fruits of the intelligence and enterprise
of others. They wish white men to continue pumping in capital and
management while they take over the product. For evil or stupid whites
to encourage ferment of this sort is folly and retrogression for
all concerned. Before we press too hard for the handing over of all
colonial empires to the natives, we had better ask ourselves whether
we are ready to give the United States back to the Indians and whether
humanity as a whole would be better off if we did.
There is a noticeable similarity between many of the hat-in-hand
arguments of the racial and backward-country pressure groups and the
typical panhandler on the street. There is always the hard-luck story,
and on investigation there is usually found to be the same reason
back of the hard luck. If you keep on giving the dimes or the dollars
without insisting on the panhandler at the same time doing something
for and about himself, there is no progress, and eventually you, also,
are penniless.
Let us consider another aspect of the matter. In many instances, when
the white colonial powers moved into the more backward areas, they put
a stop to all sorts of horror and cruelty. Liberals and churchmen cried
out to have this done, just as they now cry out to turn the natives
back to the freedom that originally produced the horror. Writing in
1893 of conditions in Kenya, where Tom Mboya now vies for power with
Jomo Kenyatta, the “bloody spear” of the Mau Mau, Lord Lugard said:
“... Such is African life, for the African knows no peace.
“One day you may see peace and plenty, well-tilled fields and children
playing in the sun; on the next you may find the corpses of the men,
the bodies of the children half-burnt in the flames which consumed the
village, while the women are the captives of the victorious raiders.
Not against the slave trade alone are our efforts needed. The Pax
Britannica which shall stop this lawless raiding and this constant
intertribal warfare will be the greatest blessing Africa has known
through the ages since the Flood.”
We have no assurance whatever that granting “freedom” in these areas
will not simply restore the old miseries and barbarity whose very
existence Christian nations found unbearable. Are such nations going
to stand aside while practices such as those mentioned on page 44 are
resumed?
It does not solve the problem to talk about “winds of change” sweeping
continents, or to take the attitude that we are forced by inevitable
trends to adopt equalitarian policies. This is the very notion by which
the equalitarian hypnotizes us. Let us realize the truth: It is the
false ideology which has produced the change, not the change which
requires the false ideology.
* * * * *
_American economic aid saved Europe. Might not a similar plan help the
backward peoples of the world?_
Here we face another danger of our uncritical acceptance of the
doctrine of equal racial capacities.
The peoples of Europe long ago proved their capacity for industrial
civilization and, in many cases, for freedom. To put them back on their
feet was one thing. To put races on their feet who have never been
there, either industrially or as free societies, is a different matter.
It may be possible to do this over a long period of time and with firm
discipline, but we had better be sure we do not destroy ourselves in
the process. Just as everybody is against sin, so everyone is against
poverty and human misery. The question which the man who earns the
money, as distinguished from the spender, has to ask is, how much more
can I stand? Every practical philanthropist knows that it does the
community no good to save your neighbor if you then take his place in
destitution.
It is also well known that once you whet the appetite of certain
groups for spending the money of other groups--and this applies to the
international as well as the national community--it becomes almost
insatiable. It demands more and more, and will not tolerate weaning. As
a noted Democrat expressed it in the days before the New Deal: “Once
the doors of a government treasury are thrown open, they are seldom
closed except with gunpowder.”
Another side of the subject which has been completely misrepresented
by the equalitarians is the idea that free societies, which they love
to call “democracies” because the word has a certain connotation of
equality which “freedom” and “republic” do not have, can be established
and maintained by a snap of the fingers. This offers, from their point
of view, the additional advantage of devaluing the achievement of those
peoples who through long centuries of travail finally produced the
great free societies of the Western world.
As I have already indicated, a stable, free civilization is first a
matter of individual character in a population. Individual frugality
leads to balanced public budgets, individual self-control leads to
public law and order and to that absence of emotionalism so necessary
to the rule of reason in parliamentary assemblies and in jury trials,
individual self-reliance lightens the weight of taxation, and
individual forethought leaves no man with the feeling that from the
harvest of his effort he is paying for the shiftlessness of someone
else. These are the qualities on which a free society rests. How many
of them exist among backward peoples, especially among those with
heavy admixtures of Negro genes?
In a recent speech at the University of Virginia, Adlai Stevenson
remarked that the American Revolution “belonged to the world.” I
would like to ask Mr. Stevenson by what process of reasoning he
compares the capacity for self-government of the American colonists
of 1776--inheritors as Englishmen of half a millennium of experience
since Magna Carta both in earning and in managing an increasingly free
society--with the capacity of the backward peoples of the world today.
Stevenson’s remark strikes me as a new low in international
demagoguery, but at the same time it is typical of the glib,
high-sounding nonsense of many of our equalitarian “leaders.” It is
quite as feasible to give the American tennis championship to Eleanor
Roosevelt as to give the American Revolution to the backward peoples of
the world.
I do not wish to suggest that Americans should turn a deaf ear to
the aspirations of any people who may be helped to help themselves.
That kind of leadership is both our privilege and our duty as a
Christian nation. My criticism is of the absurd time schedule, and
other methods of procedure proposed by the equalitarians. Consider the
Philippines. Here the United States was dealing with a race far higher
in adaptability to Western civilization than the Negro, yet it took
forty years of careful preparation before the Philippines were thought
ready for independence. They still have numerous growing pains. By what
possible process of rationalization can we assume the African Negro,
among the lowest on the scale of races, can be granted freedom on the
spur of a moment? The problem is one not of years or decades but of
centuries before any self-sustaining democracies worthy of the name can
be developed.
Finally I would point out the folly of granting “independence” to areas
where the native populations are totally incapable of maintaining even
a modicum of law and order, or of protecting investments or human
life. Such a policy creates a power vacuum into which the Russians
move at once. The end result can only be an exchange of masters, a
jumping from the frying pan into the fire, plus a loss to the free
world of the chance to develop the areas in question either politically
or economically. The best hope now would seem to lie in the United
Nations, if such a body proves equal to the arduous police and other
responsibilities required. We cannot talk in one breath, as even
Eisenhower is wont to do, of giving a “nation” of savages complete
internal “freedom” and then talk, in the next breath, of supplying
that “nation” with investments and civilized aid. Investments, and the
civilized people administering them, need protection. They cannot be
poured into a bottomless pit of chaos.
However, the point to note is the blindness of not realizing in the
first place that this protection would be necessary, a blindness
characteristic of the victims of equalitarian propaganda. Note also
the tragedy and danger in arousing among the natives expectations that
cannot be fulfilled.
* * * * *
_Are not the new African nations justified in hating colonialism?_
The colonial powers have differed in their attitudes towards the
natives, some having been more progressive than others, but none has
failed to improve the condition of these natives by comparison with
their condition in the savage state.
It is certainly unreasonable to expect the attitude of a colonial power
to be based solely on philanthropy. Fairness requires some compensation
for effort and capital invested. Only missionaries can be expected to
be entirely free of self-interest, and missionaries were as ruthlessly
raped and murdered in the Congo as other whites.