something for nothing, and to do so at an ever-accelerating rate. The
Black, moreover, is canny, and will play white men against each other
on the international stage just as he is playing them against each
other in our domestic politics. Let us not suppose for a moment that
the average African Negro is about to understand our ideals, or to
fight or sacrifice or die for the principle of liberty. All he wants,
as I have said, is a greater and greater share of what white men have
created, regardless of his ability either to protect, manage or pay for
it. And if allowed to do so, he will side with whoever seems likely to
give him the most, not of freedom, whose responsibilities he cannot
assume, but of material gifts.[11]
I am led to stress again here the debasing business practiced by our
political leaders when they talk of bribing Africans at the expense of
white children in the South. “We must integrate,” they say, “to win the
favor of these Africans and prove to them we believe in the democratic
ideals we profess.” I have already considered the absurdity of this
position as far as it concerns American democracy. The more disgusting
aspect of the matter is the currying of favor, the fawning, and finally
the human sacrifice offered them on the altar of this absurdity. Let
me repeat what I said on page 75: You do not lift the inferior up by
pulling the superior down. You do not elevate savages by lowering your
own standards--they gain nothing but glut, and you lose the last shred
both of their respect and of your own self-respect. The performance of
our “leaders” on this score is perhaps the most revolting in the entire
integration controversy.
* * * * *
_Since the world is two-thirds colored, and the white race is thus
badly outnumbered, are not whites foolish to antagonize the rest of
humanity by claiming superiority?_
The world is not two-thirds Negro. We are not concerned here in any way
whatever with the yellow race, for example, which has proved itself
capable of the most advanced forms of self-sustained culture.
But even if the world were nine-tenths Negro, I would still point out
to you that leadership is always confined to a numerical minority. If
this leadership renounces its confidence in itself, and its authority,
because it is outnumbered, whence shall progress come?
* * * * *
_Is not white arrogance the cause of most of the resentment among
backward peoples?_
It depends on what is meant by “arrogance”. If by it is implied a
domineering, hostile attitude, I would say this might well cause
resentment anywhere. But if you mean a maintaining of Schweitzer’s
“social interval”--the “I am your brother, it is true, but your elder
brother” attitude--then I would say the resentment is unjustified.
Perhaps I should add that I have noticed a tendency for indignation
long frustrated to become arrogance of the former sort in all but the
most charitable natures.
* * * * *
_Isn’t your philosophy authoritarian?_
As I understand it, the word authoritarian applies to one who favors
the substitution of authority for individual liberty as a political
ideal among peoples capable of self-government. Nothing I have said
suggests such an inclination on my part. But I cannot protest too
strongly against the tendency of the equalitarian virus to undermine
all authority in our society from the home through the school on into
our attitude toward international affairs. I suppose it follows from
an ideology which assumes the equality of all men that no man is worth
listening to more than another, no idea is more valuable than another,
no child wiser than its parents, no code higher or more authoritative
than another.
But it happens that in the course of human history much has occurred
and much has been learned which constitutes a fund of experience we
disregard at our peril. All of us are _not_ as wise as our ancestors.
We can become wiser only by listening to their experience before going
on to add our own, just as a child must first listen to his parents
before he can safely lead a life of his own.
What is more serious, the destruction by the equalitarian virus of
this proper and necessary kind of authority also destroys proper and
necessary discipline. Lack of it in the home is, in my opinion, far
more often the cause of juvenile delinquency among both rich and poor
than the so-called exclusion from family or community groups which
today obsesses psychiatrists and sociologists. Perhaps an ideology
which offers ice cream to soothe mutinous convicts, and which condones
murder and robbery among backward peoples under the guise of “freedom”,
should not be expected to create respect for duly constituted
authority in the home. Yet all children, and especially delinquents,
need to be taught respect for and obedience to parental authority if we
are ever to have law and order in the adult world.
Interestingly enough, the delinquent who is capable of being saved
wants the voice of authority to rebuke and guide him more than he wants
pity and tears. Parents are usually to blame both in failing to set an
example that can be respected and in failing to speak with the tone of
command. Men or nations that have been told often enough that in spite
of all their training, experience and wisdom they are no better than
the untrained, inexperienced and ignorant child or race will come in
time to believe it, and consequently to lose the force and assurance
which generates obedience.
Finally, by a series of insidious steps the equalitarian virus produces
that most disastrous of all diseases, the complete appeasement of evil.
At some point, all ability to discriminate is lost, all resistance to
wrong ceases, all indignation dies, all evil is met with sobbing pleas
which evil most naturally greets with contemptuous laughter, and the
red death of a Godless communism settles on the earth.
Let those of us who are Christians remember that while Jesus could
weep, he also could take a lash to the desecrators of the temple.
* * * * *
_Aren’t you an extreme rightist?_
Not in the sense that you are probably using the word. We are too apt
to catalogue people into right or left instead of into right or wrong.
As I have already said, I am fully aware of the dangers of unregulated
freedom to harm others. When freedom becomes license it has to be
curbed. Freedom to murder cannot be tolerated at the individual level,
and there are analogous freedoms which have to be curbed on the social
level.
Usually the term “rightist” is used by leftists to suggest a man
who favors unlimited license to plunder others on the social level,
through business monopolies, sweat shops, colonial exploitation, union
busting and the like. But the true conservative realizes that every
healthy society has to regulate its freedom. The point is that such
regulation does not justify leaping into equalitarianism. All health
is a matter of balance, just as the smooth running of an automobile is
a matter of the proper mixture. My position is that both domestically
and internationally our social carburetor has been put dangerously
out of adjustment to the left. The engine is beginning to miss. Unless
the mixture is corrected, the engine will stop as surely as if the
adjustment were too far to the right.
* * * * *
_You must be a very old man living in the past. Have you no liberal
views?_
Your question reminds me of the story of the envoy from the French
Government to the court of Queen Victoria who found that the Queen was
annoyed because in his youth he had fought on the barricades in the
revolution of 1830. When she taxed him with this, he replied: “Your
Majesty, not to be a socialist at twenty denotes a want of heart; to be
a socialist at forty denotes a want of head.”
I will admit that I am over forty, but perhaps I should add that I am
still on the sunny side of sixty. I have many liberal views. Let me
refer you to what I said in my answers on pages 72 and 83.
* * * * *
_Why do the leaders of both our major political parties close their
eyes to the Southern viewpoint?_
Partly through ignorance of its scientific validity. But this ignorance
they are inclined to cherish, and to avoid correcting, because of
the balance of power held by Negro voters in certain key states.
The situation has been well presented by James Reston of the New
York _Times_ who points out that in 1948 President Truman carried
Illinois by 33,612 votes with the Negro vote for him in Chicago alone
being about 90,000. In the same election, the Democratic majority in
California was 17,865 and in Ohio 7,107. In both of these states, as
in Illinois, the Negroes gave the Democratic party far more than the
number of votes needed to win.
The tragedy is that the great majority of Americans are dividing their
votes on _other issues_ in such a way as to give _this issue_ into the
hands of the minority. The Republican party pays lip service to Lincoln
yet continues to advocate policies to which Lincoln was, and would be
today, violently opposed. The Democratic party glorifies Jefferson yet
would force on the South conditions which would make Jefferson turn in
his grave. Could the race question be isolated so that it could first
be thoroughly debated and then voted on by itself alone, the minority
would be swamped.
* * * * *
_Is not the South backward in every respect and is not its attitude
toward the Negro typical?_
The agricultural economy of the South was ruthlessly destroyed by the
Civil War and Reconstruction. There was no Marshall Plan to help the
South, and many years have been required to rise from the poverty that
ensued and to begin the industrialization that is now well under way.
The North did its best to break the South materially and spiritually
a hundred years ago, and it ill behooves Northerners to criticize the
results now.
Least of all can the North afford to condemn the South for backwardness
in matters involving its cultural heritage, since in this respect the
South has done far better than the North. I draw your attention to the
fact that what I have called the “new immigration” has concentrated
very largely in the urban northeast and north-central sections of the
United States, has bred prolifically there, not only in children but
in ideas, has come to wield a heavy influence in the educational and
entertainment fields and in other areas of mass communications, and
finally that this “new immigration” was not initially schooled in the
Protestant Ethic[12] upon which our nation was founded. Nor has it
shown any great inclination to become so.[13]
In the South, on the other hand, we have a purer concentration of those
stocks which were schooled in the Protestant Ethic than anywhere in
the urban North. I recognize that the West has produced its native
left-wing movements out of stocks largely Protestant in culture, and
that England itself has gone further in its socialistic experiments
than we have, but in those phases of cultural deterioration which
involve an attack upon the Protestant Ethic in its moral aspects our
urban North easily leads.
* * * * *
_Does not each new generation always disagree with the older generation
and is this not a part of progress?_
Sometimes the disagreement means progress, sometimes not. A friend of
mine in New England recently remarked that she found practically no one
under fifty willing even to listen to any point of view other than the
equalitarian, whether in matters of race or in other fields. She spoke
of it as a closed-mindedness she found hard to understand, and she was
aghast at being called intolerant when the intolerance was so obviously
on the other side.
I told her I thought the trouble originated in something more profound,
that it ended in closed-mindedness but that it started with the
hypnosis I mention in my answer beginning on page 50. Her choice of the
age of fifty is interesting. If the average person who goes to college
finishes at twenty-two, the people who are fifty today were graduating
in 1932 at the depth of the depression. Everyone younger received
his education under the New Deal when the equalitarian hypnosis was
deepening steadily. These figures approximately coincide with the
anthropological trance of 25 years ago mentioned by the scientist I
quote on page 50.
The young minds formed in the North[14] in the mid-thirties and later
are indeed closed, and the trance closing them is one of the most
serious problems in the free world. The unreality, the fraudulent
assumptions, dinned into them in those days now simply re-echo to
us from what seem to be adult minds. This situation has produced a
condition quite different from the normal disagreement between younger
and older generations.
Normal progress would have involved a continuation of the social
justice programs begun under the first Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.
For example, the _earn-deserve_ concept so vital to a healthy society
would have been retained along with the objective of helping others
to help themselves. This concept and this objective would have been
carried forward into areas where social injustice still existed.
It has never been my contention that we should go back to a
_laissez-faire_ society. I hold no brief for twelve-hour days or child
labor. I am perfectly aware that the end of free land, the increase in
our population and the advance in industry and science made obsolete
many doctrines of the McKinley era. Where I call a halt is the point at
which the Marxist jumps on the liberal bandwagon, grabs the reins and
drives it down the blind alley of equalitarianism.
Helping people to help themselves, spending money in the public domain
for the benefit of all the people, and taxing ourselves for that
purpose is one thing. Preaching a thinly veiled Robin Hood philosophy
of government, buying the votes of the more numerous with promises to
rob the less numerous, taxing the provident to sustain the improvident,
and above all forcing cultural deterioration upon fifty million people
in the South on false doctrines of racial equality is something else.
It seems to me that the distinction I draw here is the decisive one
between the true liberal and the equalitarian. The liberal desires
to improve the condition of mankind by creating an inspirational
climate. He knows that life’s challenges make its inequalities, and
vice versa. He knows that you cannot have excellence unless someone
excels. He knows that human souls, like human muscles, grow through
effort--spiritual, moral and intellectual effort. The equalitarian
knows these things, too, but he wants neither challenges nor
excellence. He envies the excellence he either cannot achieve, or will
not pay the price of achieving. And so he does what he can to destroy
inducements to excellence. He fans the envy of others. He persuades
them that excellence is injustice to themselves. He works to create a
spiritual, moral and intellectual climate favorable to mediocrity. He
levels down, and he uses the instinct of pity in good-natured people as
part of his technique.
It is, perhaps, in the area of race that the equalitarian most openly
betrays himself. Even those in the deepest trance are dimly aware of
the falseness of their position, its obvious evils at home and abroad,
yet the total hypnosis is so strong that they can only blunder on,
rationalizing and evading the endless contradictions in which they find
themselves. Over and over they call themselves “liberals” and their
cause the cause of “human rights” forgetting that instead of granting
human rights to Negroes they are stealing them from whites and are
accessories before the fact in the rape of a civilization.
* * * * *
_Is not the NAACP doing a great work for the Negro?_
An Association for the Advancement of Colored People _could_ do a great
work for the Negro. But I believe that the emphasis of the present
Association is wrong for the reasons given in the quotation on page
72. Undoubtedly, education in many Negro schools can be improved.
Undoubtedly, economic opportunities for Negroes can be increased and
cultural opportunities for them expanded. Most of all, solutions
to their crime rate, irresponsibility, moral delinquency and other
limitations can be sought. These are the areas in which the Negro can
be helped. In the long run, it does him only harm to encourage him
to blame others for his own shortcomings. It is particularly harmful
to encourage ingratitude, insolence and aggressive imposition on the
whites of the South.
Under equalitarian influence, with a strong assist from communism, it
has become the fashion in the North to regard the Southern Negro as the
victim of oppression, while the truth is that the Negro in the South is
on the whole the product of a friendliness and helpfulness unequalled
in any comparable instance in all history. As one writer has put it
“Nowhere else in the world, at any time of which there is record, has a
helpless, backward people of another color been so swiftly uplifted and
so greatly benefited by a dominant race.”
The North has no conception of the accomplishment, for it is only where
the race is present in large numbers (in the South it makes up over a
third of the population) that the problem and the burden really exist.
The worst conditions of slavery in the South never approached the
horrors from which the American Negro was delivered when he was removed
from the slavery of his own race in Africa to slavery under the white
man. Wholesale crucifixions to appease the Negro’s gods was one of them.
What happens to the Negro even after he has had the advantage of
long contact with white men and is then thrown on his own resources
is well illustrated by Liberia. Until the League of Nations stopped
it, the upper classes there, who had come from America to implant
American ideals, enslaved the lower classes. A glance at Haiti is also
instructive. Although bolstered constantly by help from the United
States, Haitian civilization is little above that of Africa. Illiteracy
and poverty among the masses are almost universal. The remains of
the earlier French civilization have fallen into ruin. Except where
restored by American business enterprise, the bridges and roads are
nearly impassable. The religion is Voodoo. Such is the best example
available on earth of what a black civilization, led by mulattoes, can
accomplish when left to itself.
In the southern United States by way of contrast the Negro lives in
greater luxury than many whites in foreign countries. He often drives
expensive, white-built motor cars and occupies well-constructed,
white-financed houses. In fact, in South Carolina alone more Negroes
own automobiles than all the people of Russia, outside of Soviet
officials. The Southern Negro has the advantages of white medicine and
white-equipped hospitals. If I may cite a further example, we have the
case presented by Davis Lee, publisher of a group of Negro newspapers,
who writes in the Anderson, South Carolina, Herald:
“Ted Lewis is one of Atlanta’s leading Negro businessmen. Some time
ago he was having financial difficulty. He went to some of the city’s
leading Negro businessmen, including the bankers, and tried to borrow
$2,500.
“They turned him down flat. He went to the small loan department of
the C. & S. Bank. One of the officials went over his plans with him,
and then recommended that he borrow $5,000 instead of $2,500. The bank
let him have the money without questions. As a result he is a success
today, a credit to Georgia and his race.”
It is always easy to treat the Negro as an interesting curiosity when
there are only a few of him, as is the case in many parts of our North
and in many northern European countries. The white man can carry the
Negro on his back culturally with little difficulty up to a point. Then
he begins to stagger under the load. The South has carried a heavier
load better, and farther, than it has ever been carried before. And
it has done it through segregation. In fact I know of no case anywhere
in the world in which whites have lived with large numbers of blacks
without segregation and avoided genocide.
The objectives of the present Negro leadership are, of course, in
direct opposition to those of the greatest Negro leader of all time,
Booker T. Washington. Although Washington was himself half white, he
saw the Negro problem clearly. His position can be stated in his own
words: “In all things purely social we can be separate as the fingers,
yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
* * * * *
_A Negro member of the NAACP has written me that the Negro owes nothing
to the white man except his troubles. Do you dispute this?_
If the Negro likes what our white civilization has to offer, then
he should remember that he owes _that_ to the white man. Let your
correspondent compare his own life in the United States with the life
of his African cousins on the Guinea Coast, or in Liberia or Haiti.
I should think that if he really feels the way he says he does, he
would have enough self-respect to move back to the Guinea Coast, or to
Liberia or Haiti, where he can enjoy the native culture of his own race
instead of remaining in America and biting the hand that feeds him.
* * * * *
_Is not the best way to elevate the Negro to give him a chance to
associate socially with white people?_
Although such a procedure is basic to the equalitarian philosophy,
the best way to lift the inferior up does not lie in pulling the
superior down. The white race has had a hard enough time achieving
and maintaining its own culture without carrying the sort of burden
involved here.[15]
But there is another, more important point. In forcing integration
upon the schools of the South, the equalitarians have chosen the most
defenseless elements of the community--the children and their underpaid
teachers--to carry a burden even the strongest should not attempt to
bear.
Under the circumstances it is not hard to understand the anger of
Southerners, and why it sometimes becomes passion. One of the most
unbelievable statements I have read in the American press can be found
in the Washington _Post_ for June 12, 1959. In commenting upon the
withholding of a report on illegitimacy in the District of Columbia,
sponsored by the Commissioners Youth Council, the author of the report,
one Stanley Bigman, says: “Illegitimacy among Negroes is often a
hangover from the life and customs of the slave plantation. Segregation
has kept these customs alive ... there is not much hope of reducing
illegitimacy until segregation ends.” I would invite Mr. Bigman to
examine the Negro’s standards of morality in Africa before he was
brought to America as a slave, and in Africa or Haiti today where he
is on his own, and I would ask Mr. Bigman by what process of reasoning
he chooses young white children to be the preceptors of a race but
yesterday removed from savagery.
One cannot help wondering how much longer such perversions of all
reason and common sense, all principle and morality, as those of Mr.
Bigman, are going to be tolerated by the American people.
* * * * *
_Are not most Southerners prejudiced?_
They are far less prejudiced than Northerners, if we use the word in
its true meaning. Prejudice is simply the product of prejudging--that
is, of judging before getting the evidence. The South has far more
evidence, far more experience, concerning the Negro than the North. And
hence it is the North that is pre-judging when it tells the South what
it ought to do about the Negro problem.
* * * * *
_It makes my blood boil every time I see a Southerner bully, humiliate
or exploit a Negro. How can anyone take sides with such people?_
Two wrongs don’t make a right. The fact that it is wrong to bully,
humiliate or exploit a Negro, does not make it right to integrate him.
If the North and the court were to spend their time fighting bullies
and exploiters, they would accomplish more than by forcing integration.
I will repeat here what I said in my answer to the first question. My
own blood boils at seeing discourtesy to any racial minority. I despise
the man who wilfully and without provocation hurts the feelings of
others. However, I have witnessed more of this sort of thing toward
the Negro in the North than in the South. The South has no monopoly on
bullies or unkindness.
* * * * *
_I am a Northerner and I sit on hospital and other community boards
with Negro doctors and other estimable Negroes. Such people do not seem
inferior to me._
Let me point out that not only are these Negroes in no sense typical
of their race, whose genes they nevertheless carry and will pass on
to their children, but that most of them owe their ability to some
percentage of white genes in their system.