PC Past and Present

THE RHETORIC sounds familiar:

"They built up a clique at Harvard and Columbia and other colleges, both here and abroad. In fact, they became the dominant academic power. It wasn't long before they were able to dictate policy. And eventually, a whole generation of American young people were delivered into their hands. Persecution of [academics] who disagreed with them became one of their techniques."

These could be the words of almost anyone in the chic anti-PC brigade, circa 1991: an editor of Peninsula, The Salient, or The Crimson, one of your professors, or many students. The complaint that the views of a politically correct minority are dominating and corrupting American universities has become commonplace in recent months.

Only these particular words weren't written or spoken by any of the people you might suspect. They were spoken 30 years ago, by a white-supremacist in Mississippi. Meet the anti-PC brigade, circa 1961.

I DISCOVERED Carleton Putnam only last Friday, at Widener's monthly sale of used books and records. I'd never heard of him; there was no reason I should have, although I'm pretty familiar with what's being written and said these days by Allan Bloom, George Will, and Dinesh D'Souza.

I was introduced to Putnam by the impulse purchase for 50 cents of an old album whose cover stated it had been recorded at a banquet at the Heidelberg Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi on the night of October 26, 1961. The featured speaker was Carleton Putnam, a Northern historian and author who "urged the South to take the lead in preserving the racial integrity of American whites."

What sparked my curiosity was that the album cover bore the logo of the Citizens' Councils, one of the most notorious groups in the struggle against Black civil rights: crossed American and Confederate flags, with the motto "States' Rights--Racial Integrity." I brought the album home and sat down to listen.

The audience that Putnam addressed that night included many of the leading whites of Mississippi, including the governor and at least one member of Congress. These people faced a serious challenge. Earlier that year, Jackson had been targeted by Black activists who were arrested and jailed for trying to use whites-only facilities. The federal government and most Northerners seemed to be siding with the Blacks.

But Putnam told his audience that the root of their problems was not really the activists, nor even the Supreme Court's ruling against segregation. The movement for integration, he said, had begun in the universities, where left-wing professors had launched "a ceaseless barrage of false science, false sentimentality, and false political theory" to promote "the idea that all races are equal in their adaptability to our Western culture."

These scholars--who, Putnam suggested, were mostly Jews--had created "a climate of silence and fear of reprisal" in which scientists dared not openly admit to believing Blacks were genetically inferior to whites. Putnam even quoted professors who said they feared being denied tenure if they expressed their real views. His speech drew thunderous applause.

CUT TO 1991. Dinesh D'Souza's book Illiberal Education hovers high on the best-seller lists. Its keynote is the dire warning that "an academic and cultural revolution is under way at American universities...the fruit of a coherent ideology that seeks to thrust the university into the vanguard of social reform and establish a model 'multicultural community.'"

D'Souza describes a climate of "campus orthodoxy," quoting professors who say they do not dare to speak openly on racial issues. Meanwhile, Newsweek runs a cover story decrying "PC Thought Control." The New Republic calls multiculturalism "one of the most destructive and demeaning orthodoxies of our time."

Nineteen ninety-one: Time magazine warns that "a growing emphasis on the nation's 'multicultural' heritage exalts racial and ethnic pride at the expense of social cohesion." Nineteen sixty-one: Carleton Putnam warns that "there has been no case in civilization in which the white race has comingled with the black without the resulting degradation of the white civilization."

Thirty years ago, Putnam dwelt on a few professors who felt they couldn't speak freely. He ignored the young activists locked up without trial in a Jackson jail. Today, D'Souza dwells on a few students and professors at a few colleges who feel they can't speak freely. He ignores the founding of a "White Students Association" at Temple University, the race riots at UMass, the fraternity t-shirts at Syracuse whose slogan is "Club faggots, not seals."

SUCH COMPARISONS may seem crude or facile. It is true that the politics of 1991 are not those of 1961. But the subtexts, the fundamental concerns, of today's and yesterday's anti-PC crusades are remarkably similar.

Both share a fear of the mongrelization of white Western culture, with an implicit belief in the inferiority of non-Western culture. Both appeal to the ideal of tolerance in defense of intolerance. Both pander to anti-intellectualism, using the academy as an easy target for frustration over larger social change. Both are discomfited, most basically, by the erosion of traditional forms of power.

The figures involved are different, of course. Putnam's heroes were unabashed racists who probably did face repression on some campuses. D'Souza's heroes are professors like Stephan Thernstrom, who are simply too cowardly to stand up to legitimate criticism of their scholarship, preferring to cancel their courses and then complain of "though control."

And there's another big difference--besides the fact that Carleton Putnam was more honest about his intentions. It's that the anti-PC movement of 1961 ended up losing the battle for public opinion. The anti-PC movement of 1991, on the other hand, seems to be winning.