CHAPTER II

THE FANTASY

Which should come first—a deployment of the facts or a survey of the motivations and techniques which had led to their concealment? If one deployed the facts, and they were seen through the glasses of hypnosis, my experience led me to believe they would not be permitted to reach even the threshold of awareness. The contortions of liberal minds when confronted by the realities in this way had given me some bizarre moments.

Yet if one first examined the fantasy by exploring the sources of the hypnosis, one postponed dealing with the crux of the matter long enough to try the patience of the less bemused. It was a hard choice, but I came finally to the decision that it was best to begin with the hypnosis and to hope that the less bemused would bear with me for a chapter. There were enough other points in the fields of ethics and law which would require postponement to later chapters. In any case one must beg for some patience.

MOTIVATIONS

Without question I could state at the outset that modern anthropology as taught in Anglo-American schools and colleges is the result of a political ideology, not the source of it. The people who developed it, and their disciples who disseminated it, were almost all partisan and passionate crusaders for socialism.

They most certainly wanted all humanity to be innately equal, and they wanted to discover that the sole reason why inequalities existed was because of variable environments. Thus the responsibility for poverty and failure could be placed chiefly on society, not on the individual, and the rebuilding of the social order on socialist lines could be justified.

Another thing also was clear. Prior to the advent of Karl Marx in Germany and of Fabian socialism in England the infant science of anthropology had found no evidence of innate equality.

Before the middle of the nineteenth century Dr. J. C. Prichard, often regarded as the founder of this discipline, stated in his Natural History of Man:

"The organised world presents no contrast and resemblances more remarkable than those which we discover on comparing mankind with the inferior tribes. That creatures should exist so nearly approaching to each other in all the particulars of their physical structure, and yet differing so immeasurably in their endowments and capabilities, would be a fact hard to believe, if it were not manifest to our observation."{1}

Specifically as regards the Negro, the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (1884) pointed out that "No full-blooded Negro has ever been distinguished as a man of science, a poet, or an artist, and the fundamental equality claimed for him by ignorant philanthropists is belied by the whole history of the race throughout the historic period."{2} Indeed, as late as 1921, it was still possible for Lothrop Stoddard (A.M., Ph.D., Harvard) to write the following passages about the Negro in a book issued by a leading New York publisher:

". . . in the negro, we are in the presence of a being differing profoundly not merely from the white man but also from those human types which we discovered in our surveys of the brown and yellow worlds . . . . The negro's political ineptitude, never rising above the tribal concept, kept black Africa a mosaic of peoples, warring savagely among themselves and widely addicted to cannibalism.

"Then, too, the native religions were usually sanguinary, demanding a prodigality of human sacrifices. The killings ordained by negro wizards and witch doctors sometimes attained unbelievable proportions . . . . Since the establishment of white political control . . . the white rulers fight filth and disease, stop tribal wars, and stamp out superstitious abominations.

". . . The white race displays sustained constructive power to an unrivalled degree, particularly in its Nordic branches; the brown and yellow peoples have contributed greatly to the civilization of

1. James Cowles Prichard, The Natural History of Man, 2nd Ed., 1845, London, p. 1.

2. Encyclopedia Britannica, 9th ed. (American Reprint), 1884, Vol. 17, p. 318.

the world and have profoundly influenced human progress. The negro, on the contrary, has contributed virtually nothing. Left to himself, he remained a savage, and in the past his only quickening has been where brown men have imposed their ideas and altered his blood. The originating powers of the European and the Asiatic are not in him."{3}

One could imagine what would happen today if a book with such passages were submitted to the same house for publication. Stoddard was one of the last to speak for pre-Marxian anthropology.

As would shortly appear, the change in attitude had no relation to any new scientific discoveries. Such investigations all reinforced the pre-Marxian view.{4} The new approach was due exclusively to "imaginative" thinking on the part of the passionate crusaders. As early as 1844, Marx himself believed, according to Sidney Hook, that "The primitives actually do not 'see' the same thing as the more developed races even though their biological structure may be the same. It is precisely because of the different character of their social environment [emphasis added] that they see differently."{5} Frederick Engels, Marx's colleague and collaborator in the major Marxist work on anthropological questions, continued and developed the emphasis upon environment and the attack on evolutionary concepts.{6} Concerning the motivation behind these men, one needed only to consider Marx's comment: "Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded."{7}

But it was with the arrival of Franz Boas that the story of cultural (environmental) anthropology, at least in the United States,

3. Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color, 1921, New York, pp. 90-92.

4. See infra, Chap. III; for example, it is now generally agreed among students of the problem, as the result of experiments with identical twins, that heredity outweighs environment (culture) in its influence on human beings by a ratio of about 3 to 1 on the average.

5. Sidney Hook, "Karl Marx and Max Stirner," The Modern Monthly, Oct. 1933, Vol. 7, No. 9, p. 554.

6. F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, 1965, Moscow.

7. Karl Marx, Capital, 1947, New York, Vol. I, p. 287.

really began.{8} Because the man's background may in part have accounted for his point of view it seemed appropriate to mention briefly not only his early professional training but the social and political inclinations of his family. These threw considerable light on the formative influences of his youth.

Boas was born of Jewish parents in Minden, Germany, in 1858. Both his father and mother were radical socialists, and his uncle by marriage was Abraham Jacobi,{9} a physician who was imprisoned for armed violence in Cologne in the revolution of 1848. Jacobi later emigrated to the United States and was mentioned by Marx as active in promoting socialism here. Marx wrote, "Jacobi is making good business. The Yankees like his serious manner."{10}

Significantly Jacobi's second wife was Mary Corinna Putnam,{11} eldest daughter of George Palmer Putnam, the publisher, and when Jacobi finally died at the age of 89 it was at the home of a lifelong friend, Carl Schurz, formerly Senator from Missouri and Secretary of the Interior under Hayes. Thus a generation before Boas himself was to come to the United States a web of circumstances involving both Marx and Jacobi had preceded him—and had served to suggest the extent to which Marxist sympathizers had gained acceptance among intellectuals in America.

8. Initially, and before Boas' time, anthropology in the United States was the handmaiden of sociology, a science in which Lester Ward was considered the pioneer. Ward was an instructor at the Rand School of Social Science, operated by the American Socialist Society. Curiously enough, both he and his colleague E. A. Ross originally held the classical view of race. In 1905 Ross said, "The superiority of a race cannot be preserved without pride of blood and an uncompromising attitude towards the lower races." E. A. Ross, Foundations of Sociology, 1905, New York, p. 379. In 1938 he would be saying: "What makes . . . Congolese a mystery to us is not mental quirk but cultural background . . . Given our training, their minds would work as ours." E. A. Ross, Principles of Sociology, 1938, New York, p. 256.

9. Abram Kardiner and Edward Preble, They Studied Man, 1961, Cleveland, p. 135.

10. Marx-Engels, Briefwechsel, Dietz Verlag-Berlin, published under the direction of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, Moscow, 1949, Vol. II, p. 117.

11. For biographies of both Jacobi and Mary Putnam, see American Dictionary of Biography, 1932, New York, Vol. 9.

But to return to the young Boas, his education included no training in anthropology. His university degrees were in physical and cultural geography. His doctoral dissertation was in physics, the title of his paper being Contributions to the Understanding of the Color of Water. He made his first field trip, to study anthropological material in Baffin Land, in 1883 as a geographer for The Berliner Tageblatt, a liberal paper of the time.{12}

In 1886 he was a Docent in Geography at the University of Berlin. The following year he emigrated to New York and the year after that he served on the faculty of Clark University where the first Ph.D. in anthropology in the United States was taken under his supervision.{13} How he himself had achieved a doctorate in anthropology was not clear. He was a lecturer in psychology in 1896 and became a professor of anthropology at Columbia University in 1899, where he remained until his retirement in 1936. In 1942 he died suddenly during a luncheon, just after stressing the need to combat "racism" whenever and wherever possible.

Perhaps the most effective way to illustrate the trend of Boas' development was to examine two editions of his The Mind of Primitive Man.{14} In the 1911 edition he wrote: "Differences of structure must be accompanied by differences of function, physiological as well as psychological; and, as we found clear evidence of differences in structure between the races, so we must anticipate that the differences in mental characteristics will be found."

This crucial statement Boas omitted, without explanation, from the 1938 edition. One of Boas' students and followers, Otto Klineberg, suggested that "it seems highly probable that Boas changed his mind on this point."{15} To which Dr. George aptly replied, "Possibly so; but I know of nothing in the development of anatomy or physiology between 1911 and 1938, or since, to justify a change of mind . . .; quite the contrary."{16} Boas had said flatly,

12. So classified by the Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed., Vol. XDC, p. 579.

13. Kardiner and Preble, op. cit., p. 137.

14. Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man, 1911, New York; ibid., Rev. Ed., 1938, New York.

15. Otto Klineberg, Race and Psychology, 1951, UNESCO, Paris.

16. Wesley C. George, The Biology of the Race Problem, National Putnam Letters Committee Reprint, 1962, New York, p. 81. Cited hereafter as George. Compare similar contradictory statements by E. A. Ross, supra, p. 17n. Persons who desire copies of Dr. George's work or other Putnam Letters Committee publications may now obtain them by addressing the Committee at Suite 904, 1730 K St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20006.

"We found clear evidence of differences in structure between the races." One might now reasonably ask—what had happened to these differences?

While anyone's body could be modified by diet and exercise within the limits set by heredity, one could hardly take seriously Boas' personal effort in 1912 to show changes in fundamental structure through environment. In this case Boas went so far as to prepare a report for the Federal Immigration Commission which he called "Changes in Bodily Form of Descendants of Immigrants" and in which he tried to prove that head forms changed with the transfer of southern and eastern European stocks to American soil.

Henry Pratt Fairchild, a president of the American Sociological Society, commented upon this report in these words: "Two careful scholars, G. M. Morant and Otto Samson, have made an exhaustive study of the Boas report and related material, and their conclusions with respect to the Boas study are summarized as follows: 'In our opinion the data collected for the Immigration Commission are not capable of leading to definite proofs of these or alternative hypotheses of the same kind . . . . As far as the Jewish material is concerned, there seems to be no justification whatever for the statement, said to be "ample proved", that there is a "far-reaching change in the type [of immigrants]—a change which cannot be ascribed to selection or mixture, but which can only be explained as due directly to the influence of environment." . . . Our general conclusion is that considerably larger divergencies would have to be found in order to establish the theory that headform, as estimated by the cephalic index, is modified directly by the environment.' "{17}

Fairchild added: "Boas apparently is expecting his reader to accept this one study as of sufficient weight to offset not only the

17. Henry Pratt Fairchild, Race and Nationality, 1950, New York, p. 105. All of Chap. VII is recommended to the student of politically motivated scientific propaganda.

conclusions of dozens of able anthropologists, but also the commonplace observations of the layman in such cases, for example, as the pure-blooded American Negro where there has been no obvious modification of many basic traits after several generations of residence in the American environment."{18}

Nevertheless, as the years went on, Boas succeeded in becoming the leading exponent of environmental anthropology in the United States and in making this "cultural" or "social" form of the science the most popular and the most publicized. He managed to saturate both the public and his students at Columbia with books and lectures on the dogma that environment is the dominant factor in the molding of mankind, and to raise up a generation of disciples who would carry forward his teachings in the next generation—disciples whom Dr. George appropriately called a "cohesive propaganda group".

One had no difficulty in understanding Boas in the context of his time. Two distinct but converging streams of influence joined to drive him. There was, first, his socialist philosophy, concerning which it would suffice to quote his sympathetic biographer and student Melville Herskovits: "In his political sympathies he leaned towards a variety of socialism common among Nineteenth Century liberals."{19} Indeed, Boas' family background had not lain fallow. His record before the Special Committee on Un-American Activities of the United States House of Representatives showed 46 listings of communist-front connections.{20}

Secondly, Boas, popular as he was in several quarters, nevertheless could not escape the fact that as a Jew he remained a member of an "out-group" in the America of his day. The endless and bitter battle against "racism" which he and his associates never ceased waging and in the throes of which he died, was apparent in his work. He was obviously not without strong personal incentives.

18. Ibid., p. 104.

19. Melville Herskovits, Franz Boas, 1953, New York, p. 118.

20. Investigation of Un-American Propaganda Activities in the United States: Special Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, 1944, Appendix, Part IX.

The same double drive could be attributed to a majority of his immediate disciples; for the others, the socialist influence sufficed. Even a cursory inspection of their names and connections suggested the nature of the forces acting on most of these individuals, and the impression could be fortified by a review of some of their activities. I was indebted to Dr. George for a tabulation:

Ruth Benedict, born New York 1887, died 1948; educated at Vassar and Columbia; lecturer in anthropology at Columbia, advancing to professor.

Isador Chein, born New York 1912; M.A. Columbia 1933; Ph.D. Columbia 1939. One of the Supreme Court authorities in the desegregation decision.

K. B. Clark, a Negro, born Panama 1914; Ph.D. Columbia 1940. One of the Supreme Court authorities in the desegregation decision.

Theodosius Dobzhansky, born in Russia 1900; graduate, University of Kiev; professor of zoology, Columbia 1940. Retired.

L. C. Dunn, born Buffalo, New York 1893; professor of Zoology, Columbia 1928. Retired.

Melville Herskovits, born Ohio 1895, died 1963; Ph.D. Columbia 1928; assistant professor (1927) advancing to professor of anthropology, Northwestern University.

Otto Klineberg, born Quebec 1899; Ph.D. Columbia 1927; research associate in anthropology, Columbia, 1929-31; psychology 1931; professor 1949.

Margaret Mead, born Philadelphia 1901; Ph.D. Columbia 1929; associate curator, American Museum of Natural History.

Ashley Montagu, born England 1905; came to United States 1927; Ph.D. Columbia 1936; Chairman, Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University 1949-1955. Retired.

Gene Weltfish, born in New York 1902; Ph.D. Columbia 1929; formerly lecturer in anthropology, Columbia.

This was the group of which Herskovits wrote: "The four decades of the tenure of his [Boas'] professorship at Columbia gave a continuity to his teaching that permitted him to develop students who eventually made up the greater part of the significant professional core of American anthropologists, and who came to man and direct most of the major departments of anthropology in the United States. In their turn, they trained the students who, with the increase in general interest in the subject and the recognition of the contribution it can make to human knowledge and human welfare, have continued in the tradition in which their teachers were trained . . ."{21}

The public had some familiarity with a majority of these names. Almost all the tracts on race distributed by UNESCO and similar organizations were authored by them, as were most of the books and articles available in bookstores and on newsstands.{22} Their views were often aired on network television and radio. But their personal backgrounds were not so well known.

Ruth Benedict, whose Patterns of Culture{23} sold over a million copies in paperback alone and was required reading in many college courses in the social sciences, began her studies at the New School for Social Research. This school was described by a Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious Activities in the Senate of the State of New York as "established by men who belong to the ranks of near-Bolshevik intelligentsia."{24} Miss Benedict remarks that she "went to see Dr. [Alexander] Goldenweiser about taking a course with him during the first year of the New School for Social Research. I was an unemployed housewife with no knowledge of anthropology, and he took me on as a neophyte

21. Herskovits, op. cit., p. 65.

22. On this point Dr. George comments: "At the University of North Carolina there is a course called Modern Civilization. This course is required of all freshmen and is prerequisite to other courses in History. Upon investigation, I found that one of the first required readings in the course is the integration tract by Otto Klineberg in Columbia University Readings in Race, Personality, and Culture. The library had on reserve three shelves full of the book to meet the calls of freshmen for this required reading . . . . Further investigation revealed that both at Columbia University and at the University of North Carolina, additional readings suggested are by people who have demonstrated a strong integration slant . . . It seems proper to ask, Why was no opposing point of view presented in these courses on so vital and controversial a subject?" George, p. 86.

23. Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture, 1959, New York.

24. Revolutionary Radicalism: Its History, Purpose and Tactics, a Report of the Joint Legislative Committee Investigating Seditious Activities, filed April 24, 1920, in the Senate of the State of New York. Part I, Revolutionary and Subversive Movements Abroad and at Home, Vol. I, New York, p. 1121.

. . . After a year of this work, he sent me to Dr. Boas and Dr. Lowie and suggested that I take work with them also."{25}

Margaret Mead stated that Patterns of Culture, whose preface she wrote (Boas wrote the introduction), went through eleven printings, was translated into fourteen languages and became "as timeless as the lives of the people on which it was based." Miss Benedict also co-authored with Gene Weltfish the pamphlet Races of Mankind, issued by the War Department to our military personnel during World War II. This publication was finally withdrawn because it was criticized as red propaganda. Later Gene Weltfish accused the United States of using germ warfare in Korea. Some of her other communist-front activities I had listed in Race and Reason.{26}

Melville Herskovits, too, attended the New School for Social Research and studied under Goldenweiser.{27} The motivation underlying Herskovits' career was suggested by a direct quotation from his work: "Let us suppose it could be shown that the Negro is a man with a past and a reputable past; that in time the concept could be spread that the civilizations of Africa, like those of Europe, have contributed to American culture as we know it today; and that this idea might eventually be taken over into the canons of general thought. Would this not, as a practical measure, tend to undermine the assumptions that bolster racial prejudice?"{28}

25. Sidney Hook, Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, "Alexander Goldenweiser: Three Tributes," The Modern Quarterly—A Journal of Radical Opinion, Summer 1940, Vol. XI, No. 6, p. 32.

26. Race and Reason, p. 18 n.

27. "Goldenweiser interested both Ruth Benedict and Melville Herskovits, who entered anthropology from the New School at the same period," Margaret Mead, An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict, 1959, Boston, p. 8.

28. Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past, 1958, Boston, p. 30. A somewhat different view is taken by the French anthropologist Georges A. Heuse. In an article entitled "Race, Racismes, Antiracismes" in the Autumn 1965 issue of Revue de Psychologie des Peuples, Heuse remarks ". . . we can only hope that precious time will not be lost in recognizing the fallacy of equalitarian anti-racism . . . . In our effort to respect the full complexity of bio-physical and bio-sociological human phenomena, we often meet opposition from Jewish academicians who pose as champions of egalitarianism . . . . These champions, whose power and cleverness we admire, often believe that in denying race and racial psychology, they suppress at one and the same time both racism and antisemitism. We are indeed surprised at their naive and erroneous belief."

There was nothing unnatural or improper about such an incentive in any member of a minority group. Whether it was conducive to an accurate evaluation of scientific evidence was a matter for the public to judge.

As for Ashley Montagu, his background served as a further illustration of this particular aspect of the problem. In addition to his career as head of the Department of Anthropology at Rutgers, Montagu acted as the rapporteur responsible for drafting the controversial Statement on Race for UNESCO in 1950. He wrote books with such titles as Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. He had been anthropological advisor to NBC-TV, and had appeared repeatedly on such programs as David Susskind's "Open End", where the impact of his views was nationwide. With his handsome presence and cultivated English accent he might well be regarded as the most effective popularizer of Boas on the national scene.

Yet Montagu felt impelled, after he immigrated to the United States in 1927, to change his name from Israel Ehrenberg to Montague Francis Ashley Montagu.{29} He also felt a compulsion to abbreviate his mother's name in his Who's Who biography from Mary Plotnick to Mary Plot.

Montagu's activities in the United States were interesting in other respects. In 1931 he taught at the New School for Social Research already mentioned. In 1942 he was a lecturer before the School for Democracy which was classified as communist by the New York Legislature and which merged to form the Jefferson School of Social Science, cited as communist by the Attorney General in 1947 and by the California Senate in 1948. In 1942 he stated that "Soviet Russia is the outstanding example of perfect management of ethnic group relations under unusually difficult

29. U.S. District Court, Philadelphia, Sept. 25, 1940. Certificate No. 4931109. See also Marriage License Bureau, Borough of Manhattan, Certificate No. 22375, concerning marriage of Montagu to Helen M. Peakes on Sept. 18, 1931 at the Municipal Building, Manhattan, in which Montagu gives his mother's name as Plotnick.

economic conditions."{30} Since Russia has no Negro problem this statement seemed misleading.

During 1942 he was a sponsor of the Science Congress, conducted by the National Council of American-Soviet Friendship, cited as communists by the Attorney General in 1947 and 1948. In 1946 he sponsored the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions which merged subsequently to form the Progressive Citizens of America, cited as communist by the California Senate in 1947 and 1948. In 1947 he contributed to Interne, official organ of the Association of Internes and Medical Students, listed on page 34 of the Guide to Subversive Organizations.{31} In 1950 he signed a letter to President Truman from the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, cited as communist by the California Senate in 1947 and 1948 and by the Attorney General in 1948; and in 1950 he was a sponsor of the Mid-Century Conference for Peace, listed on page 50 of the Guide to Subversive Organizations.

If it were true as Montagu had stated that in his contacts with these various organizations he had been misled, then I had the impression that he was misled rather often, and that both in these connections and in his conscious or unconscious drives in the racial area he disclosed anything but a detached and scientific view.

Further examples seemed unnecessary. The converging streams of influence inherent in "out-group" resentments and the socialist ideology were extraordinarily powerful in combination, but were powerful enough singly. In fact, as the leftward movement of our times gathered momentum after 1933 and as the teachings of the original Boas group permeated the next generation, the Anglo-American elements in the cult became increasingly numerous. It was part of the pattern that they should be welcomed, and even recruited. They were of special value in lending an aura of impartiality to what would otherwise have been too obviously minority-group propaganda.

Thus slowly but surely, throughout and after the New Deal,

30. Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, 1942, New York, p. 82.

31. 87th Congress, 2nd Session, House Document 398.

motivation found fulfillment in the capture of a majority of teachers, of students and finally of the public. One must now turn to a consideration of the processes by which the hypnosis was achieved and maintained.

TECHNIQUES

Based upon my own experience I could state that there were four major methods involved, with numerous subsidiary variations. The foremost tool, from the standpoint of conditions as they existed in 1966, was the undocumented assertion by the scientific hierarchy channelled through the news media. Next in order were the two techniques of debate by avoidance and diversion—by shifting in the middle of a discussion from scientific to political grounds, a maneuver constantly executed by the hierarchy—and of argument by outright chicanery. Finally the whole procedure was secured by the suppression and persecution of scientists who offered to tell the truth. A few examples of each of these techniques would serve to illustrate a well-established design.

Nowhere perhaps had the technique of the undocumented assertion met with greater initial success than in the international arena through the United Nations. Here the no-race-differences dogma was flung like a banner high and wide in the form of the UNESCO Statement on Race, a manifesto drafted or revised among others by the Boas proteges Montagu, Dobzhansky, Dunn and Klineberg. The statement as first issued in 1950 read in part:

"Whatever classification the anthropologist makes of man, he never includes mental characteristics as part of those classifications. It is now generally recognized that intelligence tests do not in themselves enable us to differentiate safely between what is due to innate capacity and what is the result of environmental influences, training and education. Wherever it has been possible to make allowances for differences in environmental opportunities, the tests have shown essential similarity in mental characters among all human groups. In short, given similar degrees of cultural opportunity to realize their potentialities, the average achievement of the members of each ethnic group is about the same.{32}

This manifesto, by UNESCO's own account, was "extremely

32. Race and Science: The Race Question in Modern Science, 1961, New York, p. 498.

well received by the general public."{33} It was printed in a considerable number of newspapers in a score of countries and was frequently quoted in works dealing with the race problem; the Assembly of the French Union, at its meeting on November 20, 1951, adopted a proposal for the publicizing of the statement and its inclusion in school syllabuses.

But unfortunately for Montagu and his colleagues the Statement was in due course so widely repudiated by various biologists, geneticists and physical anthropologists that UNESCO was forced in 1951 to issue a modified but still unsatisfactory substitute. Some of the criticisms leading to the modification, and also of the modification itself, were printed in a booklet later published by UNESCO (without any publicity comparable to the original Statements) under the title "The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry."

This booklet contained a critique of both the first and second Statements by Professors Darlington, Coon, R. A. Fisher, Eugen Fischer, Genna, Lenz, Saller, Scheidt, Weinert, Mather, Stern, Muller, Sturtevant and Snyder. Since it served to emphasize not only the undocumented nature of the original assertions, but their actual fallacy, it seemed proper to review a few of the complaints.

C. D. Darlington, Professor of Botany at Oxford University, England, wrote as follows:

". . . this Statement is partly untrue and capable of being contradicted at once . . . . Summing up, there is a danger that any statement about race issued by people who disagree with the Nazi views on race expressed 20 years ago by Hitler, Rosenberg and Streicher will be designed as a reply to those views. Since the Nazi views were emotional in expression and political in purpose, any discussion of them by scientists should be explicit, and explicitly separate from the expression of scientific opinions. Otherwise their opinions will be confused by the emotional and political issues.

"This confusion is found throughout the first UNESCO Statement on Race and in all the last six paragraphs of the second Statement.

"Today we understand very much more about how human

33. Ibid., p. 494.

society has evolved than Darwin did; but few of us know the results of this evolution by our own observations better than he did. Fortunately genetics has given us every reason to agree with him. In The Descent of Man he writes: 'The races differ also in constitution, in acclimatization, and in liability to certain diseases. Their mental characteristics are likewise very distinct; chiefly as it would appear in their emotional, but partly in their intellectual, faculties.'

"By trying to prove that races do not differ in these respects we do no service to mankind. We conceal the greatest problem which confronts mankind, namely, how to use the diverse, the ineradicably diverse, gifts, talents, capacities of each race for the benefit of all races."

Sir Ronald Fisher, Professor of Genetics at Cambridge University, had one fundamental objection to the Statement which he felt destroyed the spirit of the whole document. He believed that human groups differ profoundly "in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development" and concluded that the "practical international problem is that of learning to share the resources of this planet amicably with persons of materially different nature," and that "this problem is being obscured by entirely well-intentioned efforts to minimize the real differences that exists."

Dr. Fisher remarked further:

"It appears to me unmistakable that gene differences which influence the growth or psychological development of an organism will ordinarily pari passu influence the congenital inclinations and capacities of the mind. In fact, I should say that, to vary conclusion (2) on page 5 [of the second Statement], 'Available scientific knowledge provides a firm basis for believing that the groups of mankind differ in their innate capacity for intellectual and emotional development,' seeing that such groups do differ undoubtedly in a very large number of their genes."

Professor Fritz Lenz, Professor Emeritus at the Institute for Menschlischer Erblehre, University of Gottigen, Germany, stated:

"Every attempt to restrict racial differences to physical differences is both arbitrary and scientifically unjustifiable. Linnaeus expressly included psychical differences in his diagnoses. Psychical hereditary differences are much more important than physical differences."

Dr. H. J. Muller, Professor of Zoology at Indiana University, United States, commented:

"Since there are very abundant individual genetic differences affecting psychological traits it would be extremely strange if there were not also differences in the frequencies of such genes, between one major race and another, in view of the fact that there are such pronounced differences in the frequencies of genes affecting physically and chemically expressed traits. That would surely be the attitude of the great majority of geneticists."

Dr. A. H. Sturtevant, Professor of Biology at the California Institute of Technology, wrote as follows:

"I have felt for some time that some of the arguments for racial equality were so obviously contrary to genetical experience as to be positively harmful—even when I approved of the conclusions drawn as to desirable social aims.

"There is excellent evidence for the existence of individual differences in mental characteristics—all the way from purely sensory differences such as color blindness to severe mental derangements such as phenylketonuria. On general grounds there can be little question that less easily analyzed genetic differences occur in all sorts of mental properties. There can also be little question that there are at least statistical differences between races in such genes."

As a final touch, anyone who took the trouble to look behind the facade would discover that the scientists who were asked to participate in formulating the UNESCO Statements were a selected group. Some of the world's greatest authorities in the field of race were not invited. These included Professor R. Ruggles Gates, Sir Arthur Keith, Professor Renato Biasutti, Professor Mario Canella, and Professor Bertil Lundman. Also omitted were American psychologists who had made original studies in this area, among them Professors Henry E. Garrett, and S. D. Porteus. In other words, the manifesto was a propaganda device of the most flagrant kind.

It might appear at first glance that as far as the UNESCO Statements were concerned the Boas cult had been sufficiently answered by the foregoing replies, but from the standpoint of the public nothing could be further from the truth. Here the alliance between the cult and the news media came into action and the "channelling" began. Newspapers, magazines, book publishing houses, and radio and television networks could all be counted on to disseminate the Statements indefinitely, and to see to it that the replies were forgotten. In fact, the media phase of the undocumented-assertion technique was so essential that it deserved special emphasis. I personally had repeated contact with it and could speak from first-hand observation.

I had already mentioned the resolution of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia in 1961. Although it seemed to me that the fallacy of that resolution had been sufficiently unmasked in public debate, it continued to be used by the media at every opportunity. It was even entombed in books attacking Dr. George and myself years after the event, with no mention whatever of the replies."{34}

When it came to answering undocumented assertions in magazines, the same result followed. For example, in the March 1964 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, Oscar Handlin, a Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize winner in history, wrote a 5000 word article built around the sentence "There is no evidence of any inborn differences of temperament, personality, character or intelligence among races." Upon seeing it I wrote Edward Weeks, the editor, protesting the falsehood and asking for equal space to reply. Instead I was allowed a 300-word "letter to the editor", with rebuttal to Handlin but no sur-rebuttal to me.{35} This was typical of my experience with other magazines. A subject which required detailed treatment in depth was relegated, as far as the truth was concerned, to "Letters to the Editor" and answered by further undocumented resolutions and assertions to which no reply was allowed.

As to the newspapers, not too much difficulty arose in getting letters to the editor published as long as one avoided the issue of innate differences. Once the New York Times actually asked to

34. See, for example, James W. Silver, Mississippi: The Closed Society, 1964, New York, p. 27.

35. My request for sur-rebuttal under date of June 16, 1964, was not acknowledged.

publish a not-for-publication letter by me to the editor provided only that I would omit one paragraph referring to this issue. The reason, of course, was that while all other material regarding Negro differences could be attributed to White injustice, and the author made to seem a cruel "racist", the anatomical and genetic material could not. Therefore any attempt to put it before the public was forbidden.

Or almost forbidden. If one paid for an advertisement one could occasionally get it accepted in papers of secondary influence with strong, undocumented objection on the editorial page of the issue in which the advertisement appeared. But the papers of controlling influence would not even accept advertisements.

As an illustration, in the spring of 1964 the National Putnam Letters Committee{36} decided to offer, in full-page advertisement form, a letter I had written to President Johnson in which I carefully summarized and documented nine separate categories of evidence on the crucial question. This advertising procedure had been used in the case of my letter to President Eisenhower in 1958 with considerable success.{37}

Now, however, both the money and the advertisement were refused by all the papers which mattered most, in all the cities where it would have had the most influence, namely, New York, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago and Los Angeles. The difference lay solely in the fact that the 1958 advertisement did not deal with the bed-rock issue—the 1964 advertisement did.

In the field of radio and television, my experience had been the same. Whenever the subject of innate race differences arose during any program the discussion leader would wait until the last minute and then, when no time was left to answer, would read the resolution of the American Anthropological Association as a coup de grace.

The most glaring episode of this kind developed not in connection with this resolution but with an occurrence which grew out of

36. The National Putnam Letters Committee was successor to the original Committee formed in Birmingham in 1958. See Race and Reason, p. 12.

37. See Race and Reason, pp. 12-14.

the annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists in the spring of 1962. Both the event and the manner in which it was afterwards "channelled" by a television network were so typical and so automatic that it seemed worth reporting as one incident.

Moreover it involved no less a personage than the American scientist Carleton S. Coon, at the time president of this Association. Dr. Coon, a New Englander by birth and background, had received his A.B., magna cum laude, A.M., and Ph.D. from Harvard University. He had been awarded the Viking Medal in Physical Anthropology in 1952. He was unquestionably one of the most distinguished scholars on the world scene.

On the evening in question Dr. Coon was presiding at a final session. Although several of the members had already gone home, a resolution which had been discussed but tabled at a previous session was reintroduced. This resolution condemned Race and Reason because "there is nothing in science that justifies the denial of opportunities or rights to any group by virtue of race." No allegation was made as to what opportunities or rights, if any, Race and Reason proposed be denied, nor by what authority physical anthropologists, acting officially in that capacity, presumed to pass upon legal or political questions.

Before entertaining the resolution Coon asked for a show of hands as to how many had read the book. Out of about seventy in the room, three raised their hands. At this point Coon remarked that under the circumstances he would rather resign the presidency of the Association than preside further over the session. He then left the rostrum and went home.

Confusion followed. I had not seen the minutes of the meeting but it was a matter of record that no resolution reached the press at the time. While one seems to have been passed, it was probably felt that to release it under the circumstances would reveal too much. Later in the summer, however, it appeared in a small New England newspaper and was thereafter "in the open literature".

How "open" it was I discovered that autumn. On October 7, during the Oxford, Mississippi, crisis, I received an invitation to participate in an ABC coast-to-coast television program featuring a general discussion of the race problem with Howard K. Smith as anchor man. During the course of the program the following dialogue occurred.{38}

Smith: "Sir, what do you think about this statement which was made by the American Anthropological Association? It says: 'The Association repudiates statements now appearing in the United States that Negroes are biologically and in innate mental ability inferior to Whites.' "

Putnam: "I might compare that statement with a recent book written by the president of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists [Coon] in which he presents evidence, and takes the position, that the Negro race is 200,000 years behind the White race on the ladder of evolution."

Smith: "What are some of the findings?"

Putnam: "The findings are that there is from every standpoint—from the standpoint of zoology, from the standpoint of anatomy, from the standpoint of anthropology, from the standpoint of psychology—there is no question—the evidence is overwhelming in favor of a difference between the races in those elements which are involved in adaptability to our Western culture."

Smith: [In a changed background, facing the audience, Putnam cut from scene.] "Mr. Putnam suggested that Dr. Carleton Coon, the president of the Association of Physical Anthropologists, gave some support to his view. We asked that Association, and it gave us this statement: 'We condemn such writings as Race and Reason.'—that's Mr. Putnam's book—'There is nothing in science that justifies the denial of opportunities or rights to any group by virtue of race.' " [Interview terminated].

The legerdemain exercised here had to be seen and heard to be appreciated. By it, of course, the public was left with the idea that I had misrepresented the support given Race and Reason by Coon's book. I cited Coon in documentation of my thesis, and Smith arranged the interview to appear to refute the citation by quoting a resolution which had no relation to Coon's book and which Coon had done his best to oppose. Without actually making any false statement Smith had succeeded in leaving with the

38. The transcript is verbatim.

39. Carleton S. Coon, The Origin of Races, 1962, New York.

audience coast-to-coast a totally false impression of the facts.{40}

No better example could be asked of the smooth cooperation between the Boas cult and the news and entertainment media; it occurred constantly throughout the opinion-forming agencies of our society. And if one wondered at this close-bosom alliance, one did not have to seek far for an explanation. It lay once more in common motivations and mutual sympathies. Little perspicacity was required to discern that the identical drives which had swayed Boas were also within preponderant areas of the media, and that consequently the facilities for "channelling" were ready at hand. They operated twenty-four hours a day like clockwork. They made the technique of the undocumented hierarchic assertion as powerful as any.

Of almost equal importance one must rank the technique of argument by avoidance through political diversion or substitution. It consisted in retreating from one untenable scientific position to another, hoping to benefit from the ignorance of the opponent, failing which the shift was quickly made to non-scientific grounds such as civil rights and the Constitution.

I could think of many minor illustrations of this gambit. Before me on my desk was a New York Times review{41} of Dr. Coon's The Origin of Races by William W. Howells, Chairman of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard. In this review Howells remarked that Coon's book had been "pounced on with delight by the present cohort of racists"—by which he apparently had reference to such bigots as Dr. George—and then he proceeded to set up various specious scientific reasons{42} why George's interpretations of Coon were mistaken. Perhaps realizing how specious these reasons were, Howells ended with a sigh-half of triumph, half of relief. "Anyhow," he gasped, "I see no way of using such arguments [Dr. George's] to disprove the Constitution of the

40. I wrote a protest to James C. Hagerty, Vice President of ABC, on October 18, 1962, with copies to Nationwide Insurance Co., sponsor of the program, and Newton H. Minow, Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. No reply was ever received from any of them.

41. Dec. 9, 1962.

42. I examined them in a speech before the Washington Putnam Letters Club on Feb. 12, 1963; see "These Are the Guilty," published by the National Putnam Letters Committee, supra, p. 14n.

United States." He planned this, I suppose, to be again the coup de grace, but it was certainly not science; it was, in fact, very bad law, as would soon be apparent.

Howell's retreat through the treacherous swamp of scientific fallacy to the imaginary rock of the Constitution was a pathway scientists tread often enough. But sometimes the hierarchy abandoned the preliminary retreat and took up their position on the rock from the start. In the November 1, 1963, issue of Science an article appeared mis-entitled "Science and the Race Problem," this time specifically attacking Dr. George and myself. The article was introduced as a report of a Committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and bore the signatures of what I presumed was intended to be an authoritative list of names.{43} In this article no attempt was made to answer any of the scientific arguments advanced by either Dr. George or me. The entire paper hinged on the point that we were "challenging the principle of human equality which is assured by the Constitution of the United States."

Since the matter occupied the pages of Science for several issues, and since it involved the whole validity of this type of technique, I might venture to offer my reply in part. In a letter published in Science and the Congressional Record,{44} I answered:

"It is totally incorrect to say that a 'principle of equality' is embodied in the Constitution. The 14th Amendment refers to 'equal protection of the laws,' but nowhere in this amendment,

43. A footnote to the article read as follows: "The members of the com. mittee are Barry Commoner, Washington University, chairman; Robert B. Brode, University of California; T. C. Byerly; Ansley J. Coale, Princeton University; John T. Edsall, Harvard University; Lawrence K. Frank; Margaret Mead, American Museum of Natural History; Walter Orr Roberts, National Center for Atmospheric Research (ex officio AAAS Board representative); Dael Wolfle (ex officio). Responsibility for statements of fact and expressions of opinion contained in this report rests with the committee that prepared it. The AAAS Board of Directors, in accordance with Association policy and without passing judgment on the view ex pressed, has approved its publication as a contribution to the discussion of an important issue."

44. In Science on Dec. 13, 1963; in the Congressional Record on June 23, 1964, p. A3427.

nor anywhere else in our national charter, is there any support for a concept of social or biological equality. The principle which the AAAS committee dwells upon simply does not exist.

"The committee errs also when it states that 'there is nowhere in the Supreme Court decision an appeal to science that relates to the nature and the origins of racial differences.' The finding of psychological injury to Negro children in Brown{45} is based upon evidence which has now been shown to have been misinterpreted by the chief witness in that case. The evidence actually proves that integration injures the Negro more than segregation. Stell v. Savannah Board of Education, 22 F. Supp. 667 (S.D. Ga. 1963).

"So the question immediately follows: Can this injury, which is due to an awareness of lower capacity, be overcome by contact with white children and the prolonged environment of white schools? And that answer in turn depends upon whether the Negro's limitations are environmentally or genetically conditioned.

"Public policy might conceivably justify the forced intrusion of Negroes into white schools, and the attendant turmoil, if the Negroes' limitations were due to environment and were temporary. By no possible argument can it be justified if these limitations are genetic and permanent. Hence, Dr. George's material goes to the very heart of the legal problem. . . .

"Altogether, 'Science and the Race Problem' is a tissue of fallacies and confusion put forward by men of no special qualification in the pertinent disciplines of anatomy and physical anthropology, who have acted with transparent political motivation. The timing with which the article was picked up and distorted by the general press denotes careful prearrangement on which I suppose the committee is to be congratulated."

The last sentence in this letter referred to the fact that, on the precise date of issue, stories regarding the article appeared to my knowledge in the leading New York, Washington and Chicago newspapers, followed by comments by columnists. Even the press of Australia remarked upon it.

Needless to say neither my answer nor those written by Drs. George and Garrett received any notice whatever in the media. The latter again served exclusively as a channel for the hierarchy, who this time were posing as scientists but acting in fact solely

45. Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, the case in which the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of schools. See infra., Chap. IV.

as political commentators. They stood with all the trappings of their scientific authority flapping in the wind while they delivered themselves of declarations on law and politics about which they knew virtually nothing.{46} Meanwhile the public saw the authority and heard the declaration without realizing that the first had no relation to the second. The close liaison between the hierarchy and the media had achieved one more success.

On my table under the lamp I found another letter bearing upon the same point from a different angle. In the summer of 1964 there was held in Moscow, appropriately perhaps, a convention of 22 scientists called together by UNESCO. These scientists concluded their meeting by issuing the usual equalitarian statement on race, totally devoid of any supporting evidence. As usual, too, the press broadcast the statement with the customary references to how it "pulled the rug out from under" us bigots on the other side.{47}

But I happened to be personally acquainted with several of the scientists at the Moscow meeting and, whatever their political views, I knew the scientific views of some of them. I reached one of them on the long distance telephone, a man whose privacy I respected and whom I would not designate by either name or nationality. I asked this gentleman what had occurred to make him sign such a document and his reply, freely translated, ran somewhat as follows:

The Moscow meeting had been suffused with a sense of urgency. Something was going on behind the scenes "which made ruddy-cheeked men turn ashen." It became apparent that the cause was the explosion by China of an atomic bomb. The point immediately was made that now of all times China should be deprived of any propaganda argument against the West. Other

46. It was not that one objected to scientists expressing their political views. George and other truth-oriented scientists did this. One objected to the political views as a substitute for science and to the prostitution of the authority of scientific organizations by its use in support of political propaganda. George and his colleagues debated the scientific issues and took their political position upon the facts. The hierarchy did neither.

47. See, for example, the New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 2, 1964, p. 3.

Afro-Asian nations would be quick to listen, and consequently something must be done to remove from the West the "racist tag." There could be no better way than by signing the equalitarian declaration.

When I reminded this gentleman that such declarations undermined domestic tranquility in my country and betrayed those in the United States who were relying on the triumph of scientific truth, he replied that politically he feared the international situation more than our domestic problems.

After thinking this over for a day or two I sat down and wrote him a letter in which I pointed out that the sort of appeasement of which he had been guilty would not do a particle of good, that the more one appeased the more the encroachment was invited, that he would never win any help worth having by lying to, and fawning upon, backward peoples—all he would accomplish was the weakening of the United States.

Then I added: "There is a final point here about which I feel very strongly. If scientists wish to express their personal political views as private citizens, that is of course their privilege. But I do not think they have a right to get together as a group speaking as scientists (with all their public authority as scientists) and then falsify science in undocumented public pronouncements on political issues, simply because their private political opinions make them believe this is justified. They have no more right to do this than a group of doctors would have the right to join in a medical association and announce that a diet of spinach would prevent cancer, simply because as individuals they believe the sale of spinach would help the farmer."

On this occasion, of course, my telephone conversation and correspondence were necessarily private while the media saw to it that the UNESCO statement reached the man in the street around the world. More and more I could appreciate the validity of some remarks on the Nazis by Dr. Eugen Fischer, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Freiburg in West Germany, a scholar who knew something about the subject at first hand. In one of the comments in reply to the 1950 Statement on Race by UNESCO, Dr. Fischer wrote:

"I recall the National Socialists' notorious attempts to establish certain doctrines as the only correct conclusions to be drawn from research on race, and their suppression of any contrary opinion; as well as the Soviet Government's similar claim on behalf of Lysenko's theory of heredity, and its condemnation of Mendel's teaching. The present Statement likewise puts forward certain scientific doctrines as the only correct ones, and quite obviously expects them to receive general endorsement as such.

"Without assuming any attitude towards the substance of the doctrines in the Statement, I am opposed to the principle of advancing them as doctrines. The experiences of the past have strengthened my conviction that freedom of scientific inquiry is imperilled when any scientific findings or opinions are elevated, by an authoritative body, into the position of doctrines."

Dr. Fischer here raised a point with many ramifications in the United States and Britain. No one witnessing the episodes already mentioned could doubt that freedom of scientific inquiry was being imperilled throughout our Anglo-American society. Nothing better suited both the hierarchy and the media. A major objective of their liaison, aside from the hypnosis of the public, was the suppression of truth-oriented scientists. In fact it deserved to be classified as a technique in itself, and again I had had some personal opportunity to observe it.

To begin with, of course, all the other techniques contributed to the weapon of persecution. They elevated the equalitarian dogma into a fetish by their ceaseless repetition through the media. The result was an academic climate highly unfavorable to free discussion, for it led to social ostracism, bitterness between colleagues, and personal disapproval of the individual worker and his family.

Beyond this the persecution technique raised higher barriers. With ruthless brutality it struck the pocketbook nerve. I remembered the case of a professor of my acquaintance at a Northern university who published a statistical study of the comparative mental-test scores of Negroes and Whites of similar socio-economic status. Since his findings were that the Negro averages were consistently and significantly lower, even under conditions of equalized environment, delegations from two racial pressure organizations—one Negro and one Jewish—requested his university to dismiss him, the doors of other universities were closed in his face, and a professional society in his field refused to admit him to membership on the grounds that his opinions might be offensive to its Negro members.

As another illustration I had on my table a letter from the president of a certain scientific society concerning a young member who voted in favor of a no-difference resolution at a meeting of that body. The letter read in part: "As for X———, he said nothing at all at the meeting but just sat there like many others; he apologized to me in advance for not voting on the [other] side on the grounds that should he do so his job would be in danger. He was probably right. I don't see what else he could have done under the circumstances."

Or I could quote from a letter from a professor of anthropology at a large Western university: "It is with regret that I must decline this opportunity to express again publicly my belief in his matter [of genetic race differences]. Letters, telephone calls, and threats after my statement in ——— were not favorable nor encouraging."

And I had before me a communication just recently received from a professor of biology at an Eastern university who had prepared material on genetic racial differences for publication: "Within the next few days [after my decision to publish had been reached] the President [of the University] summoned me to his office, and in the presence of the Dean of the Faculty and the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, formally forbade me to publish any of this material. This was a formal and official prohibition, with some mumbling about academic freedom. I could only submit. There have been other pressures, most of which have been subtle. For example, my retirement will occur next ———, and from a more than adequate income, my monthly total will be less than ———. I will squeak through somehow, but I call attention to two federal and one state job which have died on the vine, and a hint from a competent source that I had better be quiet if I expect to get a book published [on another subject]."{48}

Henry Garrett summed the matter up in a note to me in 1962. Garrett had witnessed the technique as it spread from its source. He had received his M.A. at Columbia in 1921, his Ph.D. in 1923, and had then continued at the University{49} throughout the remaining years of Boas' life. "I knew Franz Boas personally," this letter read. "I was able to observe his influence as founder of the science of anthropology in America . . . . I was also able to observe the increasing degree of control exercised by the [Boas] cult over students and younger professors until fear of loss of jobs or status became common in the field of anthropology unless conformity to the racial equality dogma was maintained . . . . I can testify from repeated personal observation to the intimidation and to the pall of suppression which has fallen upon the academic world in the area of which I speak. It encompasses not only anthropology but certain related sciences."

In other words the economic sword swung viciously in hierarchy hands. The group was not content to see a federal government, already seduced by its dogma, use money to bribe state governments and buy their cooperation. It must reach down into the home and bank account of every truth-oriented life scientist in the Anglo-American world and break him if it could.

Finally I had to consider the technique of argument by chicanery. In view of the situation disclosed by the other techniques, perhaps this one should cause no surprise. Yet I marvelled at the intellectual superficiality of it, and mourned the ease with which the public succumbed.

I had already noted the type of irrelevancy contained in the reference of the president of the American Anthropological Asso-

48. For further examples see Race and Reason, p. 19.

49. For 16 years Dr. Garrett headed Columbia's Department of Psychology. He is Past President of The Eastern Psychological Association; the Psychometric Society; and the American Psychological Association. He is a Fellow, AAAS, and a former member of the National Research Council. He is a member of the editorial board of Psychometrika and, for 20 years, was general editor of The American Psychology Series.

ciation to eye-color,{50} and the sort of excuses offered by the Chairman of the Department of Anthropology at Harvard in regard to Coon's Origin of Races.{51} I now took from my table a newspaper clipping reporting another attack on George's Biology of the Race Problem, this time by Charles C. Perkins, Chairman of the Department of Psychology at Emory University in Atlanta. The clipping disclosed that in the course of this attack Dr. Perkins had given the press the statement that "tests have proved that Northern Negroes are smarter than Southern Whites."

When I first read this declaration I hardly knew whether to laugh or cry. The fallacy in it had been exploded so often that I almost thought Perkins must be joking. Here was the head of an important department in a leading Southern university telling a press conference something which the most elementary student should have rejected as spurious.

The statement could easily be recognized as based upon an analysis by Otto Klineberg of Alpha examinations given to World War I soldiers. Klineberg had taken the four Southern states where the White averages were lowest and compared them with the four Northern states where the Negro averages were highest. Here we had the familiar equalitarian trick of comparing the best of one group with the worst of another and, of course, such a procedure had no validity whatever. If an above-average Negro were given a lot of advantages he would do better than a below-average White man who had had very few. Wherever overlapping statistical distributions existed, the top of one always exceeded the bottom of the other. This was not the problem at issue. The problem was what the average Negro would do when compared with the average White man under like conditions. The evidence on the latter question left no room for doubt.{52}

The only mystery was why Perkins or Klineberg chose to confuse the public mind with what I had come to call the

50. Supra, p. 5.

51. Supra, p. 34.

52. On the Alpha tests the average White score for the nation was 59, that of the average Northern Negro 39 and that of the average Negro in the best Northern state, Ohio, 49.5. The White score in Ohio was 67.

Klineberg twist. This struck me as the most blatant case imaginable of straining an argument to the point of absurdity in response to some conscious or unconscious compulsion. It would have been bad enough on the part of a layman. Coming from members of the scientific hierarchy, it was literally fantastic.

Then, taking another example at random, there was the case of one Donald C. Simmons, a member of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Connecticut. In the January 5, 1963, issue of the New Republic Simmons launched his own attack on George's Biology of the Race Problem and its studies of intelligence in relation to brain weight by offering, in supposed refutation, a group of male Negro brains which he said were found to weigh more than a certain group of female White brains.

While slightly, very slightly, more sophisticated than the Klineberg twist, such a gambit from a member of the hierarchy must have left any person with even a superficial knowledge of the subject again nonplussed. Brain weight or size comparisons were never attempted without first allowing for sex and body size, and when these adjustments were made the averages were both consistent and clear. Could it be that Simmons did not know this? Or was the compulsion again so great as actually to preclude recognition that his argument had a probative value of zero?{53}

Even more startling had been my experience with the science editor of one of the nation's leading daily newspapers. This

53. It is hard to know whether to classify such cases under chicanery or under inexcusable ignorance. I am reminded of another case in which a member of the Wheaton College faculty studying for a Ph.D. in (cultural) anthropology wrote a book (James O. Buswell III, Slavery, Segregation, and Scripture, 1964, Grand Rapids) in which he devoted an entire chapter to an attack on Race and Reason, the burden of this chapter being that "culture . . . is so dominant a factor [in determining behavior] that for the comparative study of human society all other factors must be treated as if they finally cancelled out." How any modern preceptor in anthropology could write such a sentence in view of the 3 to 1 ratio of heredity over environment now generally accepted by geneticists (infra, p. 58), remains a mystery.

gentleman, whom I admired and valued as a personal friend, wrote me that informants whom he knew and in whom he had confidence assured him that "if racial differences exist they are so slight that they are submerged beneath the gross differences between individuals of any one race."

Here I immediately recognized the standard sop tossed by the hierarchy to the unwary among the press for re-circulation to the public. What seemed beyond belief was that it should have been offered to a man at the very top of his profession and that he should have been so easily deceived. To this editor I replied: "You are, indeed, correct that intra-racial differences exceed interracial differences. Intra-racial differences are enormous. If the differences in the averages between two races were as great as the gross differences between individuals at the extremes of the same race we would have on the one hand a race of imbeciles and on the other a race of geniuses. That sort of approach alone should be enough to alert you to the type of mentality you are dealing with, and the fact that people in your responsible position are willing to repeat it is a disquieting indication of the lack of consideration the matter has received."{54}

On its face, it ought to have been obvious that the argument offered this science editor had no bearing on the essential point. Here we had a difference "so slight" that it was "submerged beneath" something colossal. Carried to its logical conclusion it would mean that even if all Negroes were idiots and all White men Einsteins, race should remain irrelevant.

And these five examples only began the roster of trickery practiced by supposedly honorable men. In my daily routine I encountered chicanery, and a willing submission to chicanery, as a constant pattern. Taken together with the remaining techniques of the hierarchy, small wonder the hypnosis was complete and the fantasy rampant. Small wonder the man in the street was bemused.

Suddenly I was tired. I decided the hour had come to make

54. For results of a more thorough consideration, see infra, pp. 117-8.

myself a pot of coffee. In any case I had dwelt long enough on motives and methods. If I could present the situation plainly, then any sincere liberal who still believed that he was being told the truth about race by the educational establishment, by the mass media, or for that matter by politicians or churchmen, would have to be left to his dreaming.

For me, sleep of any kind was out of the question. The next folder in my brief case dealt with the scientific facts. That one I now pulled out and placed beside the others on the table.