Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case against Brown v. Board of Education

5. Organizing Massive Resistance and Organizing Science

Organizing Massive Resistance and Organizing Science In September 1957, Arkansas governor Orval Faubus ordered the National Guard to prevent the integration of Central High School in Little Rock. The escalating racial crisis in Little Rock, with white students taunting the “Little Rock Nine”—the nine African American students attempting to attend Central High—and Faubus’s refusal to comply with the integration order of the court convinced President Eisenhower, who had been indifferent to integration, that this was a matter of insurrection rather than race relations. As a military man, Eisenhower knew the value of overwhelming force and ordered the 101st Airborne Division into Little Rock to enforce the federal court order for integration.1 The white South was enraged at the sight of federal bayonets enforcing what they viewed as the “Second Reconstruction.” Michael Klarman argued, “By manufacturing a racial crisis that in turn led to a confrontation with the federal military, Faubus transformed himself into a nearly invincible state politician as well as something of a regional folk hero.”2 The Northern League writers also took note of the events in Little Rock. Byram Campbell penned an open letter to President Eisenhower where he warned of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s reliance on Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, “a socialist,” in footnote eleven of the Brown opinion. Campbell warned of the “vast propaganda build-up inspired by our left-wing elements” that has “simply assumed there is some moral worth in integration.” The Northern League’s official southern publication, The Virginian, noted that white Americans would not long tolerate federal troops “herding white children through the streets like cattle.” It concluded, “The big question is: how many white Americans will the federal government slaughter in order to enforce its mongrelization edict?”3 5 93 The crisis of Little Rock would also launch the segregationist career of Carleton Putnam (1904–1998), whom historian Adam Nossiter dubbed the “high priest of respectable white supremacy” and David Southern called “the Madison Grant of the 1960s.”4 Southern’s appellation for Putnam was exactly on the mark. Putnam took as his bellwethers Madison Grant, Lothrop Stoddard, Earnest Sevier Cox, and Omer Stuart Landry. Like these writers, Putnam was convinced of white supremacy and the Boasian conspiracy to smother the truth about racial differences.5 It was Putnam who would move the conspiracy claim into wider circulation and force the scientific community to take a stand defending anthropology as a science. In so doing, Putnam transformed the scientific question of racial differences into a battle about the public authority of anthropology . Putnam was the leading segregationist to directly challenge anthropologists as to the basis of their scientific conclusions and the nature of their “control” over the scientific study of race. The result was that the mainstream scientific community, especially anthropologists, underwent an intense self-examination about the nature of their discipline in relation to society. Carleton Putnam and the Equalitarian Dogma The scion of an established New England family, Carleton Putnam was educated at Princeton and Columbia Law School in the 1920s. In 1933, Putnam established his own airline, building it into a successful business. After World War II, he merged his airline with others, forming Delta Airlines . Having made his fortune, Putnam stayed on the board of Delta but increasingly turned the reins over to others and began a second career as a biographer of Theodore Roosevelt. The first of a projected four-volume Roosevelt biography appeared in 1958 to positive reviews.6 The first volume of the biography would prove to be the last, as Putnam abandoned the project to take on what he saw as a much more important one: the protection of white civilization. In the wake of the events following Little Rock, Putnam penned an “Open Letter to President Eisenhower” making the case for continued school segregation in the South. Putnam sent the letter to several southern newspapers, which published it enthusiastically, typically with an introduction like that of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which editorialized: “Unlike many of his fellow -citizens in the North, [Putnam] understands and appreciates the 94 | Organizing Massive Resistance and Organizing Science problems with which the South has been confronted, was a result of the staggering series of Supreme Court edicts.”7 Putnam’s letter echoed themes that had long been prevalent in the South. “Social status has to be earned,” wrote Putnam, and the “Negro” simply...