IN 1967, Carleton Putnam, businessman, Princeton graduate and author, wrote:

Let a man be told incessantly that everything he and his forefathers had achieved was largely a matter of chance; that the poverty and backward condition of other individuals and races was also largely a question of luck — in fact perhaps even the fault of himself and his forefathers; that his standards of morals, fiscal responsibility and personal integrity were no better than anyone else’s; that his civilization was mostly happenstance and really nothing much to be proud of; that since all humanity were innately equal, all actual differences must be due to the other man’s misfortune and his own four-leaf clovers — let a man hear these things often enough and his values were bound to change.

And the change must soon diffuse itself through the family, the community and the nation. The child must begin to sense it in the parent, the criminal in the court, the employee in the employer, the citizen in his leaders. How seldom one saw the word distinguished today! How seldom one dared to speak of a man as discriminating! In other words in condemning the concept of inferiority, our society necessarily had had to destroy the concept of superiority, for one could not exist without the other.

With its destruction had come the death of respect for authority, of pride in the achievements of the past, of reverence for tradition, of the wisdom to honor the heritage of one’s family, one’s race and one’s country. Also had come the death of that quality in superior men which sprang from confidence not only in their own personal excellence but in that of their kind and race. This was the most serious loss of all, for it was an electric quality that had once communicated itself, with instant conviction, to others. With it had passed the genius of true leadership, the power to lead up the hill instead of down, to get a nation “moving again” morally as well as economically.

It was, in fact, the quality that had given men the courage to tell the truth. And thus one was back in the circle, which was just what the hard-core leftist, and the communist, counted on, and which the bemused humanitarian, and the castrated conservative, obligingly tread like a squirrel in a cage—a vicious circle, indeed, with just one point where it might be broken: by an attack on the lie.

[Race and Reality: A Search for Solutions, Carleton Putnam, 1967]

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