Review of Putnam’s Race and Reason -- Part 1

Review of Putnam’s Race and Reason -- Part 1

Thomas Allen

       
    The following is a review of Race and Reason: A Yankee View (Public Affairs Press, 1960; Cape Canaveral, Florida: Howard Allen Enterprises, second printing 1980), by Carleton Putnam. My comments are enclosed in brackets. I have provided references to pages in his book and have enclosed them in parentheses.
    Putnam opposes the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision in 1954 and the concomitant forced integration. Therefore, his book contains less deceit and fewer errors than books supporting the Court’s decision and integration. Thus, it requires fewer corrections. Most of my remarks are supporting commentary.
    Putnam was a Northerner. In Chapter 1, he sets out his credentials as a purebred Northerner. However, having resided and traveled extensively throughout the South, he has some appreciation of the Southern reaction to the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision in 1954.
    Also, Chapter 1 contains an open letter to President Eisenhower and a discussion about that letter. Naively, Putnam thought that the President would intervene and do all in his power to prevent executing the Court’s desegregation order. [Putnam failed to realize that the people who owned Eisenhower, i.e., the ruling elite, wanted racial integration. They want to bring the United States down and to destroy the White race while concentrating evermore wealth and power in their hands. Because of Eisenhower’s inaction, the United States are no longer a constitutional federal republic. They have become a consolidated empire with the accompanying police state, warfare state, and welfare state.]
    Putnam remarks that the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision “was a sharp departure from the past — a confusion of equality of opportunity and equality before the law, with social and cultural equality — as well as a clear challenge to other American principles” (p. 4). [Here he seems to believe mistakenly that “Supreme Court rulings are the law of the land” (p. 6). However, later he declares that they are not (p. 100). They are not, and as a lawyer who majored in politics (p. 3), he should have known better. Only Congress can legislate. The Supreme Court merely interprets and applies the law to a particular case before it. If it legislates, which is what it did with the 1954 desegregation decision, it has usurped the constitutional authority of Congress.]
    On the Supreme Court’s ruling, Putnam comments, “Although not from the legal, in fact from the practical, standpoint the North, which does not have the problem, is presuming to tell the South, which does have the problem, what to do.” [Not long after Putnam wrote these words, desegregation became a problem for the North as federal judges forced integration on the North.]
    Putnam notes, “[S]ocial status has to be earned. Or, to put it another way, equality of association has to be mutually agreed to and mutually desired. It cannot be achieved by legal fiat” (pp. 6-7).
    [Often Blacks and negrophiles assert that] the Negro “hasn’t been given a chance” (p. 7). To this assertion, Putnam replies, “We were all in caves or trees originally. The progress which the pure-blooded black has made when left to himself, with a minimum of white help or hindrance, genetically or otherwise, can be measured today in the Congo” (p. 7).
    Putnam writes:

Throughout this controversy there has been frequent mention of the equality of man as a broad social objective. No proposition in recent years has been clouded by more loose thinking. . . . When we see the doctrine of equality contradicted everywhere around us in fact, it remains a mystery why so many of us continue to give it lip service in theory, and why we tolerate the vicious notion that status in any field need not be earned.

[Nowhere does equality truly exist. The closest man can come is equality before the law.] Furthermore, he claims that all humans are not equal before God (p. 8). [I have shown in “Review of Segregation and Desegregation” that God is no egalitarian.]
    Putnam claims that the Negro owes more to Abraham Lincoln than to any other man (p. 8). [By today’s standard Lincoln was extremely racist. If he had had his way, all Blacks would have been shipped out of the country. If his position had prevailed and had been maintained, the United States would not have a race problem today.]
    Putnam comments on Northern newspapers gloating over Southern parents being forced to choose between integration and no school at all for their children (p. 9). [A few years later these gloating Northerners faced the same predicament as federal judges forced Northern parents to choose between integration and no education. As a result, Blacks gained control of many major Northern cities as Whites fled them to avoid integration. With White flight came economic decay. All of this could have been avoided if the common Northerner had stood with the South against the Supreme Court.]
    In Chapter 2, Putnam discusses some of his critics. He also includes an open letter to the Attorney General identifying fatal flaws and errors used by the Supreme Court in arriving at its school desegregation decision. Naively, he thought that if the Attorney General knew the truth, he would intervene at his earliest opportunity to get the Court to overturn its decision. [He failed to realize that the people who owned the Attorney General wanted integration.]
    Many of his critics, who were teachers and ministers, “protested with incoherent emotion at the thought of my emotion, and who urged me to face the facts — which they had never faced themselves” (p. 15). A major criticism that he received was that he did not understand “modern” anthropology (p. 16). [Most “modern” anthropology is heavily contaminated with egalitarianism, Marxism, and political correctness. When reading the works of most mid-twentieth century and later anthropologists, one has to filter out this contamination. The works of a few anthropologists, such as John Baker, Carleton Coon, and Vladimir Andeyev, are not contaminated.)
    He notes that the “widening of the American doctrine of equality of opportunity into a doctrine of social, cultural, economic, and genetic equality” was behind the Supreme Court’s ruling (p. 16). [This widening has contaminated all aspects of American life and has so infested Europe that Europe is quickly dying.]
    Putnam comments that there is “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” (p. 16). Marxists and other egalitarians have “to denounce heredity in the biological . . . and make it appear that environment alone made the man.” They insist that nothing be innate (pp. 16-17). [Studies have shown that heredity is often more important than the environment in making man. Heredity extends beyond a person’s physical characteristics. It also influences his intelligence, character, personality, disposition, and talents. (V. Species of Men by Thomas Allen.)]
    Putnam reviews the works of Boas and other “scientists” on whom the Supreme Court relied in making its desegregation ruling. He discovered that their works were cleaver and ingenious propaganda “posing in the name of science, fruitless efforts at proof of unprovable theories. . . . [They used] slippery techniques in evading the main issues, the prolific diversions, the sound without the substance” (p. 18). [The anthropologists, sociologists, and psychologists on whose works that the Supreme Court based its school desegregation decision were Marxists. They sympathized with the racial integration program organized and led by Communists. (V. “The Civil Rights Movement Is a Communist Movement.”)]
    Like Putnam, many scientists were aware of the Boas hoax, but they were afraid to expose it for fear of losing their jobs (p. 19). [In this respect, things have only gotten worse since Putnam wrote. Now it goes far beyond race.]
    Putnam believes that Southerners were more suited to make judgment calls about the Negro than Northerners. Southerners were around many more Negroes. Moreover, a higher percent of the Negroes in the North were racially mixed, mulatto. If one wanted to study and learn about the true Negro, he needs to go to Haiti or better to central Africa (pp. 20-21).
    About the Southerner’s attitude toward the Negro, Putnam writes:

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 (p. 21).

    Putnam notes that a majority of the people in the United States opposed school desegregation and integration. Also, he could not find anything in the records of the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision of 1954 showing that the Attorney General, who is supposed to represent the people of the United States, challenging the anthropological egalitarian theories or opposing school desegregation cited by the Court in its ruling (pp. 21-22). [Thus, the Attorney General like the President sided against the American people.]
    Putnam discusses Myrdal and his book An American Dilemma, which the Supreme Court used to support its decision. Myrdal, a foreign socialist, condemned the U.S. Constitution. He declared “that in the conflict between liberty and equality in the United States ‘equality is slowly winning’” (p. 22). [At least he understands that liberty and equality cannot coexist.] Myrdal’s work builds on the work and philosophy of Boas, “the father of equalitarian anthropology in American,” and his disciples. Myrdal declared the dogma “that races are not by nature equal in their capacity for culture” is fallacious and unsubstantiated (pp. 22-23). [An honest observation of human history proves that this dogma is true. Aryans (Whites) and Turanians, have developed high cultures and advanced civilizations. Negroes, Indo-Australians, and Khoisans have not. Melanochroi may have also built high cultures and civilizations; however, for them, it seems that they did it under Aryan overlords in India and with Aryan captives in the Arabic Islamic region.)
    Next Putnam discusses the flaws and deceptions of Boas’ philosophy. According to Boas, the “present day cultural differences between the Negro and other races are due, not to any natural limitation, but to isolation and historical accident.” To refute Boas, Putnam cites the observation of a traveler, who appears to be a racial egalitarian. This traveler notes that China, India, Mesopotamia, and the Mediterranean coasts and islands developed a high level of culture although they were almost completely isolated from one another. Yet Negroes in Africa never showed any similar development (p. 24).
    Putnam refutes the environmental and slavery excuses used to explain the backwardness of the Negro. The climates of India and Mesopotamia are just as harsh as Africa’s. As the Sahara separates black Africa from the North, so do deserts block China, India, and Mesopotamia. Moreover, the African slave trade is only about a millennium old. He asks, “Why were the Africans not making slaves of the Portugese and Arabs” (pp. 24-25)?
    Next Putnam discusses IQ. He notes that racial egalitarians compare poor Whites with upper-class Blacks and mulattos to show that little difference in IQ exists between the races. However, when averages are compared, i.e., comparing like to like, the Negro’s IQ is significantly below that of Whites. True, some Blacks score above the mean White IQ, but on average the Black man’s IQ is significantly below the White man’s (pp. 25-26). (See Integration Is Genocide by Thomas Allen for a more detailed discussion of racial IQ.)
    Putnam writes:

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 [the Attorney General] 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 (p. 27).

[Here, Putnam errors — perhaps because he wanted to give the Attorney General and the Supreme Court the benefit of the doubt. The primary purpose of integration has been to use Blacks and other colored races to destroy the South, the United States, and most of all the White race. (V. “The Civil Rights Movement Is a Communist Movement,” “The Dirty War: America’s Race War,” “Black Nationalism,” and Integration Is Genocide.)]
    Putnam discusses another citation by the Supreme Court in arriving at its school desegregation decision. That is, the assumption that segregation adversely affects Negroes and secondarily White children. He notes that nowhere are the possible adverse effects of integration on White children discussed. On the effects of integration on Whites, William Polk writes, “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” (p. 28)? [Denying the White man the choice of preventing himself from being pulled down shows that integration has been more about bringing the White man down than about lifting the Black man up.]
    The lower court claimed that “a sense of inferiority [produced by segregation] affects the motivation of a child to learn.” The Supreme Court accepted this assertion without question. In response to this assertion, Putnam writes, “[I]f 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” (p. 29). [After more than 50 years of school integration, the average Black still has a great deal more difficulty in learning than the average White. What is the excuse now if not biology?]

Copyright © 2015 by Thomas Coley Allen.

Part 2 

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