The Renaissance of Racist Eugenics

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1960s, at a time when the dissolution of segregation in the United States was moving ahead full speed, Carleton Putnam, a retired American businessman, published a pamphlet titled Race and Reason—A Yankee View. According to the author, politically blinded opponents of segregation were attempting to use a conspiracy of levelers to deny any intellectual differences between the races. Two American generations had already fallen victim to a “pseudo-scientific fraud” of Jews and mulattoes, who were attempting to eliminate segregation in the United States. Putnam warned his “white” American fellow citizens about racial mixing with “Negroes” because that would lead inevitably to the decline of the “white race.”¹