and though he may have passed on, the theories that he planted throughout the US, but specifically in the South live on. They have been incorporated into many of the right-wing talking points we hear daily from Republicans and other wingers. A friend sent me the you-tube video posted below, which was sent to her to justify why our POTUS shouldn't talk to school kids.
UPDATE: Thanks to all of you - youtube has removed the video.
Many of you may have never heard his name, yet he was prominent enough to merit a fairly lengthy obit in the NY Times:
Carleton Putnam Dies at 96; Led Delta and Wrote on Race
The bland headline belies even the watered-down story which followed.
I recognized the name immediately, because he was the archenemy of Franz Boas, the founder of modern American anthropology who was an ardent fighter against racism.
Many of the arguments leveled against Barack Obama speaking to the nations schoolchildren, or even being our duly elected President, have been lifted almost word-for-word from Putnam's writings. I wonder if Pat Buchanan, or others of his ilk, have one of his books on their bedside tables for a nightly refresher course in the 3' R's; "Reactionaries, Racism, and Republicans"
The Times piece opens with this paragraph:
Carleton Putnam, who helped create a major airline, wrote an acclaimed biography of Theodore Roosevelt, and then, driven by opposition to the Supreme Court's 1954 school desegregation decision, turned out a classic defense of racial segregation, died on March 5 at his home in Charlottesville, Va. He was 96 and a former chairman of Delta Air Lines.
It must seem curious that a 1924 Princeton graduate who professed a passionate belief in the power of the individual and exemplified it during a life of diverse achievement should see a person's race, not the person, as the engine of individual accomplishment.
Many of you who saw this at the time, in 1998, when he died, probably didn't bother to go any further. It isn't until the body of the piece that Putnam's "life's work" is discussed, and its impact.
It all started with the decision to integrate schools:
The issue was Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that outlawed school segregation, but Mr. Putnam was not drawn into the fray until 1958. After reading a Life magazine editorial supporting the decision he wrote a reply, sending a copy to an editor friend in Memphis who published it in The Commercial Appeal.
Spurred by an outpouring of favorable comment, Mr. Putnam composed an even longer letter, addressed to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and published in The Richmond Times-Democrat.
Within weeks, the ''Putnam letter,'' as it became known, had been published in newspapers all over the South, creating a huge demand for reprints and drawing thousands of letters of support.
Mr. Putnam early on had asked editors to send him only those responses that criticized his position. He used those letters as the basis for a 1961 book, ''Race and Reason, a Yankee View.''
With his letter taking up only 5 pages, Mr. Putnam devoted most of the 125-page book to rebutting his critics point by point.
Seeing the 1954 decision as a result of an insidious campaign for ''equalitarianism'' by the anthropologist Franz Boas and other social scientists, Mr. Putnam took pains to discredit their work.
The most important paragraph is buried at the bottom (my bold):
Whatever its flaws, by the time he published a sequel, ''Race and Reality,'' in 1967, ''Race and Reason,'' had sold more than 150,000 copies, been widely embraced by Southern politicians and made required reading for teachers and advanced students in Louisiana. It is testimony to its power of persuasion in some quarters that, by his own account, reading the book as a self-described ''liberal'' junior high school student sent David Duke on the course that led him to become a leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
There is a racist video on youtube using his speech, with graphics, which if you can stand to watch it, is an education in itself.
You will hear much of what he had to say in his speech (and in his book) being parroted today.
Comments for the video were disabled, but there are quite a few references to it, and to him on sites like Stormfront, and his "scientific work" is discussed at Free Republic. I will not provide links to either site.
Normally I would not post a racist video, but it will make my point quite well.
Entitled "Carleton Putnam - Prophetic Speech on Race 10/26/61 Jackson Missisippi" it should be subtitled "The Racist's Code".
UPDATE: The video has been removed. The audio of the original speech (without racist images, is available in internet archives:
http://www.archive.org/...
Putnam was not only a racist, he was a virulent anti-semite, and hated Boas and his protege's who were liberal, Jewish (and/or African-American), and his writing served to fuel attacks on two noted female anthropologists among that group who were lesbians. He openly opposed Boas' teachings on "race as a social construct".
Raymond Wolters discusses him in depth in his study of Constitutional History, Social Science, and Brown v.Board of Education 1954–1964 (my bold)
Nevertheless, some observers thought egalitarians were going too far when they said that races were merely "social constructs" and not biological realities. The physical anthropologist Carleton Coon scoffed that the "soft pedaling" and "prudery" of some cultural anthropologists with respect to race was "equaled only by their horror of Victorian prudery about sex."55 The geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky warned that denying the existence of biological phenomena might do worse than breed confusion. "To say that mankind has no races" was so counterintuitive that it would play "into the hands of race bigots" by discrediting science.56
The work of Carleton Putnam served as an illustration of Dobzhansky’s point. From the outset Putnam recognized that "social construction" was a concept that racists could also use. When anthropologists said that "race" had no biological significance but was employed to justify the subordination of unpopular minorities, Putnam answered that the "deconstruction" of race had been devised to protect and promote the interests of Jews. According to Putnam, much of modern anthropology was "clever and insidious propaganda posing in the name of science." He emphasized that Franz Boas, "the founder of the modern vogue," was a Jew, as were Boas’s influential students Melville Herskovits, Ralph Klineberg, and Ashley Montagu (whose given name, Putnam noted, was Israel Ehrenberg). Even before Hitler, Putnam wrote, these men were "smarting under what they considered unjustified discrimination." Therefore, "they set purposefully to the task of showing they were just as good as the native stocks (as, indeed, in many ways they were), and they tried to do this by proving that all races were equal in their adaptability to our white civilization." They secured professorships at leading universities, cliquishly cultivated like-minded colleagues, and marginalized and ostracized those who did not share their views. Soon they dominated the field of anthropology. According to Putnam, Jewish anthropologists were on "a self-serving mission" and their "objectivity" should be "judged accordingly."57 Other critics later asserted that Boas’s influential gentile protégées Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead similarly reified the importance of "culture" as a way to undermine established mores and justify their own deviant sexual practices.58
For those of you who cannot listen to youtube, I will include here some of the remarks, and statements made by Putnam in his published work, that didn't make it into the Times piece.
The following quotes are from his writings - Race and Reason
On immigration (hear the echo of his words by todays Nativists)
Isn’t the United States supposed to be the great racial melting pot, calling the oppressed of all countries to its shores, and isn’t the Statue of Liberty their assurance of welcome?
It is one thing to offer guests a welcome; quite another to have them take over one’s house, lock, stock and barrel. This is especially true when the guests have entirely different ideas about housekeeping. The thought back of the original invitation was that the new races would become "Americanized"—not that America would be made over in the image of the new races.
To begin with, the United States was a Christian country. Its language, its literature, its laws and its moral concepts were English. I do not favor its becoming a non-Christian country with a different language, a different jurisprudence and different moral concepts. I oppose this because to change the foundation on which a house is built is a doubtful way to preserve it.
I oppose it also because our English heritage is unique and too precious to be frittered away. Indeed, I am certain that the native English-speaking stocks in the United States, North as well as South, long suffering and gullible as these have been, are at last becoming restive. They are growing tired of watching their public leaders pander to minority groups, playing the majority against itself, and molding policy to suit the minorities. They are sick of seeing words like "freedom" and "democracy" kidnapped and perverted to please every irresponsible element in the community. They are weary of having the ideals of their forefathers derided by the college professors who teach their children. They are surfeited with churchmen who front for communism.16 They are increasingly suspicious of one-sided newspapers and one-sided publishing houses either controlled by, or pandering to, minority groups. They have had enough of equalitarian propaganda in theater, television and moving pictures.
The greatest danger may well be that when these stocks fully realize the extent to which they have been put upon and betrayed, their resentment may turn to anger harder to control than the depredations of the Marxists.
On the North, gullible whites (white liberals and progressives) and the Supreme Court:
The whole matter can really be put in a nutshell: a gullible, trusting nation has been misled by various minority groups with their own self-interest at stake into believing that Negroes have an inborn capacity for Western civilization equal to the white race. This has caused the North and the Supreme Court to feel morally justified in forcing the South to risk what amounts to social integration with the Negro. The facts are that the Negro does not have the aforesaid inborn capacity and that social integration with him invariably produces deterioration in any white civilization that tries it. Thus it is not the South which is committing a moral crime against the Negro in maintaining segregation, but the North which is committing a moral crime against the South in forcing integration.
On "miscegenation" and interracial marriage:
My Harvard professor claims that miscegenation increases when one race is kept inferior to another and that anything that increases the equality of the two races minimizes the opportunities for miscegenation. Is not this true?
It depends in what sense one uses the word "miscegenation." Your professor is using it in the sense of illicit intercourse. It is manifestly not true that keeping a race inferior increases the rate of legalized marriage with the intent to bear and rear children which is the basic question at issue in the integration fight. In illicit connections every effort is made to avoid breeding. When social integration occurs, this sort of "equality" invites legalized unions in which breeding is a major object.
Even if illegal unions resulted in offspring as numerous as do marriages, the social consequences would still be quite different. When white men marry Negro women in any numbers the trend is toward a gradual change in social attitudes of acceptance, and a slow infiltration of the dominant white society by the offspring, with the consequent changing of the standards of that society, as evidenced in various Latin American countries.
On the other hand when white men have illicit intercourse with Negro women, not only are offspring avoided if possible but, if offspring do result, the latter are isolated from the dominant white society and consequently do not have any comparable chance to change its standards, as heretofore evidenced in the United States.
Ohhhh, those brown people are clearly inferior because they intermingled.
As mentioned earlier, the letter Putman sent to Eisenhower was widely distributed, and published. He had an anti-integration Committee behind him, much like the funders of today's teabagger and birther movements.
Meanwhile, the Birmingham Committee set to work. Within six weeks they had raised enough money, mostly from hundreds of small contributions, to place their first advertisement. It appeared in the New York Times on January 5, 1959, in a format six columns wide and a full page deep. To it was attached a coupon asking that readers who sympathized with the message and wished to see further advertising contribute to the fund. This procedure proved informative in itself. Each advertisement, as it appeared, brought in enough money from the North to pay for the next. Within five months the fund had passed $37,000 and the letter had been published in eighteen Northern and Western papers with a circulation of nearly seven million. Adding the initial free publication in the South, the total circulation had amounted to over ten million. I had no figures on foreign printings, but I was informed by the United States Information Agency that a paper in Salisbury, Rhodesia, carried the letter in full, and I had received comments from India and other remote areas.
Eight newspapers had refused to print the letter, even as an advertisement. These were: the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, the Pittsburgh Press, the Indianapolis Star-News, the Newark News, the Newark Star-Ledger, and the Buffalo News. None of the publishers of these papers felt able to give their reasons, but again, as my knowledge of the situation developed, they became clear.
Kudos to those papers who didn't publish him back then. Boos to those of today who give his emulators a platform.
On protecting the minds of children (from integration)
Are not the children themselves perfectly willing to integrate?
A child left to itself is perfectly willing to experiment with anything, including explosives. That is the reason courts appoint guardians for children who have lost their parents.
It must always be remembered that the first thing a group or party that wishes to remake a civilization to suit itself is going to do is to corrupt the relatively defenseless minds of children. The extent to which this process has already succeeded in the North with the generation that has now become adult is alarming enough. Integration is the next step.
If the races, left to themselves, tend to intermarry, doesn’t this mean that it is the natural thing to do?
Consider a garden that has been carefully cultivated for many years. What happens if it is left to nature?
Putman addressed Christians as well, who might be feeling that racism and segregation was not what Jesus would have preached. He quotes a British racist as part of his response:
The Christian religion is based upon the concept of growth. We grow as individuals and as races, and not always in the same direction. Individuals or races wishing to move into a society alien to their native culture must have the patience to grow in adaptability and in capacity to contribute to the new culture, and the growth in the case of races takes many generations.
Esme Wynne-Tyson, looking at the subject from the standpoint of England, recently put the matter well in The Contemporary Review, one of Britain’s leading monthly magazines:
"Almost every man is in a different stage of development, and, even more obviously, are nations and races in different phases of evolution... It is not a problem that can be solved by any sentimental humanism, or religious insistence that all men are the children of God...
The natives of the West Indies have a legal right to enter England as British subjects, but it is not their biological or spiritual home, and may well prevent their natural evolution which can only take place gradually in the environment and culture native to them. On the other hand, the instinctive feeling of many inarticulate but intuitive British people that a mingling of races, which is, more basically, a mingling of two incompatible evolutionary streams, is not ‘right,’ is a sure one. Specifically they complain of the coloured races being dirty, noisy, or immoral; but these objections are only the outward and visible signs of a different stage of spiritual development, a. lower culture, and it is this which is sensed and resented by numbers of British people who have no personal ill-will towards their coloured neighbours as such ...
What amounts to an enforced intermingling of white with coloured races in this country at the present time is being resented at a deeper level than most people imagine. The rising generation of British youth is already badly handicapped in its evolutionary struggle by the moral degradation which was involved in, and has resulted from, the last war combined with the wholly unspiritual atmosphere of thought engendered by scientific materialism. And their parents, observing this, cannot submit passively to witnessing their further deterioration through mixing with people of a still lower ethic and culture. The young people of Britain are not themselves sufficiently ethical to instruct their companions how to rise. Evolution is an arduous task. It is far easier to sink than to rise.
We have an object lesson of this in modern America which has badly suffered from close propinquity with its less evolved immigrants. The ‘hot’ music, primitive dances, and other sensual practices of the coloured races, have permeated with their devolutionary influences, every corner of a once-Puritan civilization, debasing and obstructing the process of an originally highly ethical people. Hence the instinctive fear lying at the back of much of the present colour prejudice in this country [England]."
He goes on in his piece to attack sociology and integration as part of a communist conspiracy (sound familiar?)
Is it true that integration is part of the communist conspiracy in America?
The communists have made the integration movement a part of their conspiracy, although of course communism is not the only force back of integration. Communism is one phase of a disease, of which equalitarianism and socialism are milder phases, all of which stem from the general leftist overdrift.
However, I believe the equalitarian ideology, which presumes to justify integration, is playing into communist hands, not only by setting section against section in America, but by spreading the equalitarian virus, and thus weakening the body politic to a point where more dangerous phases of the disease are contracted.
I will stop here quoting him here. I've left out much, because there is no need to print more. You can hear his "rational" and "scientific" remarks echoing from the mouths of today's elected Republican officials, FOX news talk show hosts and some other tv pundits.
I will say one more thing. I have a real problem with this paragraph from the Times piece (my bold again):
Mr. Putnam devoted much of his book to arguing that when it came to the personal characteristics that produced the glories of Western civilization, the Negro race could not hold a candle to the white race.
The evidence he amassed was so impressive and so thoughtfully presented, it was easy to overlook the fact that it was irrelevant. The Supreme Court, after all, had not used sociological evidence to establish that black people were the intellectual equals of white people but only that they had been harmed by forced segregation. As citizens they were entitled to equal protection of the laws.
No, no, not impressive. No, not irrelevant. Not as long as his words continue to echo in the corridors of racism.
He may be deceased, but we have not yet buried his theories.
One day we will all say R.I.P. to racism. Until then we all need to do our part to bury it.