The Past is a Real-Talking Country

California recently scrapped plans for a 'John Wayne Day' when his 1971 race-realist comments on Afro-Americans came to light:

High plains realtalker

'We can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.'

At the same time, Princeton students are demanding the Woodrow Wilson School be re-named, U. of Missouri is petitioning to remove Thomas Jefferson's statue, and San Fran's School Board president has even said he'll re-name every school bearing the title of a slave owner.

It is surely any people's right to wipe out the names of past heroes who ruffle current mores. We've seen Stalin and Lenin statues come crashing down in Eastern Bloc countries since the wall fell.

But Stalin and Lenin were proper génocidaires who oversaw the repression, imprisonment, torture, and death of tens of millions. Washington and Jefferson were founders of their nation who, uncontroversially in their time and place, owned slaves.

Good-bye, Enver Hoxha; Albania, 1991

But even if one were to convince them that slaveholding was not controversial in those days, this John Wayne dust-up opens a whole new can of worms. Are California's civic leaders even dimly aware of the kind of realtalk in which nearly all our prominent men of yesteryear engaged?  We fear they are not. 

May we gently remind them that When an out-group seemed to under-perform, or over-perform, or just act differently, people noticed.  

And commented.

Such was the way of the world--and still is, in most of the world. Only ethnic NW Euros seem to have caught the disease that pushes them to sing the praises of 'diversity' while at the same time loudly claiming we're all exactly the same.

The multiculturalist's conundrum: 

Why can't we be different yet exactly the same? 

As more and more decisions must be made about naming holidays, schools, bridges, airports, highways, erecting and demolishing statues... How shall our civic leaders be expected to cope? If they start subjecting each historical figure to the 'didn't say anything that offends me today' test, they are in for some sore and cruel disappointment.

We at TWCS would very much like to help them. First, by acquainting them with the fact that the past was, indeed, a real-talking country, as the quotations we are about to share will show. 

Another Californian realtalker 

Second, by helping them step into their ancestors' shoes, in order to pick out what is simple observation of difference (as painful as that may be for us to hear today), and what is real bigotry.  

We propose five categories of historical realtalk (some of which overlap in our quotes):

• Banal my-group preference
• The More Able remarking upon the Less Able
• The Less Able remarking upon the More Able
• Us remarking upon the otherness of Them
• True bigotry

We focus on two out-groups with whom ethnic Europeans have long been in contact: Sub-Saharan Africans and Jews.


So which kinds of old-style realtalk can our city fathers forgive, and which should have them tearing down statues?

I) They're not us: In-group preference

'Birds of a feather flock together.'  With the glaring exception of ethno-masochistic modern NW Euros, preferring to be with one's own kind is the norm in all times and places. Even today, does anyone raise an eyebrow at Chinatown, Greektown, or Little Havana?

Sticking with our own kind in NYC

As it is a sentiment so universally indulged in by all ethnic groups, one can hardly fault our forebears for sharing it.

Benjamin Franklin

Founding father and polyglot Benjamin Franklin, for example, in his 1755 Observations concerning the increase of mankind, &c:

'Which leads me to add one remark: That the number  of purely white people in the world is proportionally very small. …  I could wish their numbers  were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, scouring our  planet, by clearing America of woods, …, 

'Why should we in the sight of superior beings, darken its  people? Why increase the sons of Africa, by planting them in America, where we have so fair an opportunity, by excluding all blacks and tawneys, of increasing the lovely white and red?'

Why indeed? And even he admitted his bias:

'But perhaps  I am partial to the complexion of my Country, for such kind of partiality is natural to Mankind.'

Harry Truman 

Harry Truman, while still a young man on the farm, often wrote letters to his sweetie. In one from 1911, he admits:

Truman the farm boy; letters to his gal Bess

'I think one man is just as good as another so long as he's honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust, a nigger from mud, then threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman. He does hate Chinese and Japs. So do I. It is race prejudice I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion that negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia, and white men in Europe and America.' 

The evolution of this vignette is telling: It begins bigoted, with a slur against Blacks and Chinese; followed quickly by the avowal that this is lazy, 'I-picked-it-up-from-my-uncle' racism; then a more neutral 'each to his own.'

Jack London

Author Jack London, namesake of so many U.S. public schools, was a life-long socialist. In a private letter from 1899, he echoes Benjamin Franklin:

'I do not believe in the universal brotherhood of man. I think I have said so before. I believe my race is the salt of the earth. I am a scientific socialist, not a utopian...' 

Despite what they said in public, even modern, 'right-thinking' presidents displayed this kind of casual separatism behind closed doors.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Robert Schlesinger shares a tidbit about Dwight D. Eisenhower and his speechwriter:

Signing 1957 Civil Rights Act doesn't mean 'a Negro should court my daughter'

During their summer 1956 [Civil Rights speech] drafting sessions, Eisenhower and Larson fought a tug-of-war about how to handle the issue of civil rights. … Ike explained that just as the Brown v. Board of Education case was based on the inner feelings of black children, so too must the inner feelings of southern whites also be considered. He wanted to make it clear that political and economic equality would not mean social equality—'or that a Negro should court my daughter.'

John F. Kennedy

The idea that inter-racial romance just wasn't done was common well into the civil rights era. No less than JFK held this view in private. From HBO’s Sinatra: All or Nothing At All documentary, quoting Nancy Sinatra:

Kennedy Inaugural: no mixed couples allowed

'The Kennedys had a very specific way of thinking and doing things. And at one point, dad’s friendship with Sammy Davis Jr., who was soon to marry May Britt, became a political rub for them. She was a beautiful white blonde actress and they didn’t like the idea of the inter-racial marriage. This is the Kennedys. You would have thought the reverse of them. Dad got a phone call and he was asked to dis-invite Sammy Davis to the inaugural gala. And he actually had to do it.'  

A later anecdote about JFK from an interview with White House butler Gene Allen:

No photos, please

In February 1963, Kennedy invited 800 blacks to the White House to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. Louis Martin, a Democratic operative who helped plan the function, had placed the names of entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. and his wife, May Britt, on the guest list. 

The White House scratched it off and Martin would put it back on. According to Martin, Kennedy was aghast when he saw the black and white couple stroll into the White House. His face reddened and he instructed photographers that no pictures of the interracial couple would be taken. 

Though it may ruffle our feathers today, we'd do well to remember that this type of in-group preference is hard-wired and universal--we (21st c. ethnic Anglo-Germanics) are the far-out oddities in this case, not any of the people cited above.

Having seen the most banal, instinctive kind of in-group preference, let us now turn to our second category: The More Able confronted with the Less Able.

II) They're Less Able than us

Ever since Herodotus traveled the known world scribbling down the habits of the diverse peoples he met, we've been hooked on difference. The Age of Discovery brought us into contact with peoples that to us (and we to them) may just as well have come from another planet.

Captain Cook meets South Sea Islands natives

If there is one thing discoverers of all races have agreed upon, it is the perplexingly low level of civilization attained by Sub-Saharan Africans. 

Nevertheless, the 'racist' quotes so frequently dredged up by today's Social Justice Warriors are often quite the opposite. While noting the low level of African progress, many learned men blamed the environment, and were hopeful that Blacks would soon break through and 'join civilization' as so many other groups had done.

1) Scientists

Encyclopedia Britannica

Ad for the 11^th edition, 1911

The most learned men of their eras saw things this way.  The 1911 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, for example, in its article on 'The Negro,' states:

'Mentally the negro is inferior to the white. The remark of F. Manetta, made after a long study of the negro in America, may be taken as generally true of the whole race: "The negro children [in the South] were sharp, intelligent, and full of vivacity, but on approaching the adult period a gradual change set in. The intellect seems to become clouded...'

'African peoples', 1890

Even then, environmental explanations were given:

'But though the mental inferiority of the negro to the white or yellow races is a fact, it has often been exaggerated; the negro is largely the creature of his environment, and it is not fair to judge of his mental capacity by tests taken directly from the environment of the white man, as for instance tests in mental arithmetic; skill in reckoning is necessary to the white race, and it has cultivated this faculty; but it is not necessary to the negro.'

Arnold Toynbee

Legendary historian Arnold Toynbee in his 12-volume Study of History, analyzed every civilization then known to man, declaring:

'It will be seen that when we classify mankind by color, the only one of the primary races, given by this classification, which has not made a creative contribution to any one of our twenty-one civilizations is the Black Race.' (Vol. I)

Even so, it being 1934, Toynbee feels the need to follow this observation with several pages of apologetics for Africans, explaining that they're bound to create modern civilizations any day now:

The ancient civilizations

'We can attribute these retardations to the interplay between a Human Nature which is common to all Mankind and certain exceptionally unfavourable circumstances in the local environments of some sections of the human family during certain periods of time: and we need seek no further than this in order to explain why it is that, within these first six thousand years, the Black Race has not helped to create any civilization.'  

L.S.B. Leakey

Kenyan archaeologist L.S.B. Leakey, mentor to legends Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey and coiner of the species homo habilis, wrote in 1963:

Leakey's son Richard with 'Homo Habilis'

'As a social anthropologist, I naturally accept and even stress the fact that there are major differences, both mental and psychological, which separate the different races of mankind. Indeed, I would be inclined to suggest that however great may be the physical differences between such races as the European and the Negro, the mental and psychological differences are greater still.'

Lewis Terman

Psychometric pioneer, president of the American Psychological Association and of the National Academy for Sciences Lewis Terman devoted his life to studying intelligence in children.

His innovative wide-scale IQ testing exposed him to diverse groups of test-takers. Administering the tests to Spanish-speakers and unschooled African-Americans from the Southwest, he concluded in 1916:

Devoted to IQ testing children

'High-grade or border-line deficiency... is very, very common among Spanish-Indian and Mexican families of the Southwest and also among negroes. Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come... Children of this group should be segregated into separate classes... They cannot master abstractions but they can often be made into efficient workers... '

James Watson

None of these men took any special joy in pointing out inferiority; they merely considered it part and parcel of their scientific work.  Some ethnies could jump higher, live longer, were taller or shorter, and yes, exhibited higher or lower intelligence. Nobel winner James Watson, giant of 20^th century genetics and co-discoverer of DNA's double helix, did not seem to realize times had changed when he said in 2006,

A man out of his era

'[I'm] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa' because 'all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.'

Pointing out such banalities was a commonplace in all times before our own. Watson forgot it was 2006, though, and thus saw himself stripped of posts and privileges and labeled a pariah.

2) Statesmen

Leading political figures also noted perceived 'inferiority' when they saw it.

George Washington

'All men are created equal' is often used, especially by modern conservatives, to paint our forefathers as equalitarians. Nothing could be further from the truth. In a private conversation with English actor John Bernard, George Washington clarified:

Washington and his slaves at Mount Vernon

'This may seem a contradiction, but … it is neither a crime nor an absurdity. When we profess, as our fundamental principle, that liberty is the inalienable right of every man, we do not include madmen or idiots; liberty in their hands would become a scourge. Till the mind of the slave has been educated to perceive what are the obligations of a state of freedom, the gift would insure its abuse.'

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was more blunt:

'Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one [black] could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.  … '

Isaac Granger, blacksmith at Monticello

'I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may possess different qualifications.'

Abraham Lincoln

Such comments were even made directly to Blacks' faces by the highest leaders in the land, as in Abraham Lincoln's 1862 White House speech encouraging Afros to go back to Africa:

The Great Emancipator

'You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. …  If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated.'

Warren G. Harding

In a progressive speech for its day, President Warren G. Harding in 1921 addressed a mixed audience in Birmingham where, after pushing for voting rights for Blacks, he conceded:

'Men of both races may well stand uncompromisingly against every suggestion of social equality. Indeed, it would be helpful to have that word ‘equality’ eliminated from this consideration. … Racial amalgamation there cannot be.'

William Howard Taft

Or William Howard Taft who, in a 1909 speech to Afro students at Biddle University, simply declared:

'Your race is adapted to be a race of farmers, first, last, and for all times.'

Biddle University class of 1894, Charlotte, NC

Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon, in private conversation with his secretary, confessed a fear that Blacks were far behind Whites:

'Bill Rogers [then Secretary of State] has got somewhat - and to his credit it's a decent feeling - but somewhat, sort of, a sort of blind spot on the black thing because he's been in New York,' Nixon said. 'He says, well, "They are coming along, and that after all, they are going to strengthen our country in the end because they are strong physically and some of them are smart." So forth and so on.' 

Tricky Dick and his secretary, Rosemary Woods

'My own view is I think he's right if you're talking in terms of 500 years,' Nixon said. 'I think it's wrong if you're talking in terms of 50 years. What has to happen is they have to be, frankly, inbred. And, you just, that's the only thing that's going to do it, Rose.'  

3) Avowed Progressives

The AFL was a mighty white affair

As we have seen, even those on the political left were not immune to noticing differences in ability.

Victor Berger

U.S. Socialist Party founder Victor Berger stated in 1902,

U.S. Socialist Party poster, 1912

'There can be no doubt that the negroes and mulattoes constitute a lower race—that the Caucasian and indeed even the Mongolian have the start on them in civilization by many thousand years—so that Negroes will find it difficult ever to overtake them.'

Teddy Roosevelt

Progressive Teddy Roosevelt in a private letter to novelist Owen Wilster in 1906, conceded:

'Now as to the Negroes! I entirely agree with you that as a race and in the mass they are altogether inferior to the whites. … '

But still followed by defending them against Southern white supremacists:

'. . and absolutely all I have been doing is to ask, not that the average Negro be allowed to vote, ... but that these occasionally good, well-educated, intelligent and honest colored men and women be given the pitiful chance to have a little reward, a little respect, a little regard, if they can by earnest useful work succeed in winning it.'

Jack London

Socialist novelist Jack London, quoted above, in an 1899 letter to a socialist friend:

'Socialism … is devised for the happiness of certain kindred races. It is devised so as to give more strength to those certain kindred favored races so that they may survive and inherit the earth to the extinction of the lesser weaker races.'

Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Nature-loving poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, though a great fan of race-mixing himself, still believed that

Image source

'It cannot be maintained by any candid person that the African race have ever occupied or do promise ever to occupy any very high place in the human family. … The Irish cannot; the American Indian cannot; the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race all other races have quailed and done obeisance.'

Even some of the Left's most treasured icons have engaged in human group- ranking.

Mahatma Gandhi

Legend of Indian independence Mahatma Gandhi, for one, complaining about his countrymen's troubles in South Africa:

 'Ours is one continual struggle against a degradation sought to be inflicted upon us by the Europeans, who desire to degrade us to the level of the raw Kaffir [African] whose occupation is hunting, and whose sole ambition is to collect a certain number of cattle to buy a wife with and, then, pass his life in indolence and nakedness.' (in 1896)

Image source

'Kaffirs [Africans] are as a rule uncivilised – the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals. Each ward contains nearly 50 to 60 of them. They often started rows and fought among themselves. The reader can easily imagine the plight of the poor Indian thrown into such company!' (in 1907)

The above observations were not, we believe, intended as slurs or gratuitous insults. They were part and parcel of all humans' tendency to rank, and to remark upon group inferiority when they see (or think they see) it. Some forms are still acceptable today:

Thus, we would not categorize these as bigotry.

It would also behoove us to remember that we once made note not only of less able out-groups, but of more able ones as well.

III) They're More Able than us

A good clue as to the impossibility of making multi-culturalism work is that from the host people's standpoint, over-achievers are just as problematic as under-achievers. This is the origin of so much out-group realtalk we see throughout history.

Today's pervasive anti-white rhetoric, for example, might be looked on with horror by our descendents 100 years hence.

But today right-thinking people bandy it about without the slightest qualm. 

Similarly, in ages past, those who appeared to over-achieve relative to other groups were often remarked upon, and not favorably.

Jewish over-achievement, for example, has been complained about for centuries. They were reputed to be extremely energetic, enterprising, smart, organized, ruthless towards out-groups, and champs at ethnic networking (in many ways the opposite of the African.)

Because of these traits, and their diaspora status, comments on their seeming to 'take over' were common.

1) In finance and business

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Russian literary giant Dostoevsky, in Diary of a Writer, 1877:

Portrait by Vasily Perov, 1872

'. . . I know that in the whole world there is certainly no other people who would be complaining as much about their lot, incessantly, after each step and word of theirs — about their humiliation, their suffering, their martyrdom. One might think it is not they who are reigning in Europe, who are directing there at least the stock exchanges and, therefore, politics, domestic affairs, the morality of the states.'

Mark Twain

Beloved American satirist Mark Twain comments on same (1899):

'The Jew is being legislated out of Russia. The reason is not concealed. The movement was instituted because the Christian peasant and villager stood no chance against his commercial abilities. He was always ready to lend money on a crop, and sell vodka and other necessaries of life on credit while the crop was growing. When settlement day came he owned the crop; and next year or year after he owned the farm, like Joseph.'

The 'dull' Englishman no match for the Jew

'In the dull and ignorant England of John's time everybody got into debt to the Jew. He gathered all lucrative enterprises into his hands; he was the king of commerce; he was ready to be helpful in all profitable ways; he even financed crusades for the rescue of the Sepulchre. To wipe out his account with the nation and restore business to its natural and incompetent channels he had to be banished from the realm.'

George Sand

French novelist George Sand, in an 1857 letter to her friend the journalist Victor Borie:

'I saw in "the wandering Jew" the personification of the Jewish people, exiled in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, they are once again extremely rich, owing to their unfailing rude greediness and their indefatigable activity. ... they are at the point of making themselves kings of the world. This people can thank its obstinacy that France will be Judaized within fifty years. Already some wise Jews prophesy this frankly.'

Ulysses S. Grant

Union general Ulysses S. Grant, vexed by their commercial prowess, tried to ban them from Civil War army camps in the South. While in Oxford, Mississippi, with the 13th Army Corps in 1862:

Civil War camps were speculator magnets: Nashville, 1854

'I have long since believed that in spite of all the vigilance that can be infused into post commanders, the special regulations of the Treasury Department have been violated, and that mostly by Jews and other unprincipled traders. So well satisfied have I been of this that I instructed the commanding officers at Columbus to refuse all permits to Jews to come South, and I have frequently had them expelled from the department, but they come in with their carpet-sacks in spite of all that can be done to prevent it.'

'Carpetbagger' caricature

'The Jews seem to be a privileged class that can travel anywhere. They will land at any woodyard on the river and make their way through the country. If not permitted to buy cotton themselves, they will act as agents for someone else, who will be at military post with a Treasury permit to receive cotton and pay for it in Treasury notes which the Jew will buy up at an agreed rate, paying gold.'

(A footnote: 'The expulsion order was immediately countermanded by the general-in-chief, H. W. Halleck, in Washington. Apparently the expelled Jews had immediately contacted their kinsmen there and had pressure brought to bear.')

Ezra Pound

Legendary poet Ezra Pound made radio broadcasts from Italy during WWII, pointing out Jewish financial power. Like Charles Lindergh, he wanted the U.S. to stay out of the war:

'I do not want my compatriots from the ages of 20 to 40 to go get slaughtered to keep up the [Jewish magnate] Sassoon and other British Jew rackets in Singapore and in Shanghai. That is not my idea of American patriotism.'

He spoke directly to the British, telling them Jews' financial acumen was overpowering them:

'You let in the Jew and the Jew rotted your empire, … you stand for nothing but usury. And above metal usury; you have built up bank usury, 60% against 30 and 40%, and by that you will not be saved. ... You have for years had cheap goods DUMPED in from Russia. … Your Jews have ruined your home manufactures.'  

'Loans from the city of London, loans to the Orient, interest paid in cheap cotton goods, loans to the South American countries, interest paid in beef from the Argentine, and ruin of English grazing.  … there is only one start you can make. And that is a start toward being England. A refusal to be a province of Israel, or an outpost of Yankee-Judaea.'  

2) In culture

Charles Lindbergh 

Iconic pilot Charles Lindbergh in his famous 1941 Des Moines speech urging the U.S. to stay out of the war, said

Proving Lindbergh right? Jewish magazine 'Moment,' 1996 headline

'The three most important groups who have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt administration. … Their greatest danger to this country lies in [Jews'] large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.'

Upton Sinclair

Hollywood was widely seen as Jewish-controlled. Socialist novelist Upton Sinclair:

1939 handbill, sinister Jew and shiksa actress

'In olden times,' Upton Sinclair once remarked, 'Jewish traders sold Christian girls into concubinage and into prostitution, and even today they display the same activity in the same field in southern California where I live.' Or as F. Scott Fitzgerald summed up the Hollywood scene of his era — 'a Jewish holiday, a Gentile tragedy'.

Truman Capote

Their power was felt in the literary world as well.  Novelist Truman Capote, in a 1968 Playboy interview:

'Well, it has brought about the rise of what I call the Jewish Mafia in American letters. This is a clique of New York-oriented writers and critics who control much of the literary scene through the influence of the quarterlies and intellectual magazines.'

Candid Capote

'Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and Isaac Bashevis Singer and Norman Mailer are all fine writers, but they’re not the only writers in the country, as the Jewish literary Mafia would have us believe. 

'I could give you a list of excellent writers, such as John Knowles and Vance Bourjaily and James Purdy and Donald Windham and Reynolds Price and James Leo Herlihy and Calder Willingham and John Hawkes and William Goyen; the odds are you haven’t heard of most of them, for the simple reason that the Jewish Mafia has systematically frozen them out of the literary scene.'

3) In political movements

Winston Churchill

The Bolshevik movement was widely seen as being fomented by powerful Jews. Winston Churchill, in a 1920 editorial, Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People:

'There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creating of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistic Jews. It is certainly the very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. 

'Moreover, the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders . . . In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astounding. And the prominent if not the principal part in the system of terrorism applied by the extraordinary Commissions for combating Counter Revolution has been take by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses.'

Under the whip of Trotsky and Jewish Bolsheviks: Russian  cartoon from 1920s

Kaiser Wilhelm

Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm, in a 1922 editorial in the Chicago Tribune, shared the same view:

'A Jew cannot be a true patriot. He is something different, like a bad insect. He must be kept apart, out of a place where he can do mischief - even by pogroms, if necessary. The Jews are responsible for Bolshevism in Russia, and Germany too. I was far too indulgent with them during my reign, and I bitterly regret the favors I showed the prominent Jewish bankers.'

Just as with the Chinese in Malaysia or the Indians in Uganda, an over-performing out-group will not go unnoticed-- or un-criticized. There may be a bit of envy or resentment in the above remarks, but we still do not qualify them as bigotry.

Having seen our forebears' comments on out-group inferiority and superiority, what did they have to say about just plain 'otherness'?

IV) They're just plain different from us

Sometimes out-group differences aren't seen in terms of more or less able, but just plain not the same. This is related to Category I, 'In-group preference,' but goes further. The latter is knee-jerk and universal. But we also do (or did) notice traits that aren't strictly speaking 'better' or 'worse,' but alien enough to make us uncomfortable living side-by-side with them.

1) Indolence and Improvidence

Thomas Jefferson

Jefferson, quoted above, expounds further on these differences:

Dancing slaves in Brazil

'[Blacks] are at least as brave, and more adventuresome. But this may perhaps proceed from a want of forethought, which prevents their seeing a danger till it be present. When present, they do not go through it with more coolness or steadiness than the whites. They are more ardent after their female: but love seems with them to be more an eager desire, than a tender delicate mixture of sentiment and sensation. Their griefs are transient.  ... In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. . . .'

Woodrow Wilson

Democrat Woodrow Wilson, in a 1901 Atlantic Monthly article, said the following about the freed slave class:

Poster mocking Freedmen's Bureau: 'An Agency to Keep the Negro in Idleness 

 at the Expense of the White Man'

'An extraordinary and very perilous state of affairs had been created in the South by the sudden and absolute emancipation of the negroes, ...' 

'Here was a vast "laboring, landless, homeless class," once slaves, now free; unpracticed in liberty, unschooled in self-control; never sobered by the discipline of self-support, never established in any habit of prudence; excited by a freedom they did not understand, exalted by false hopes; bewildered and without leaders, and yet insolent and aggressive; sick of work, covetous of pleasure,—a host of dusky children untimely put out of school…. '

Che Guevara

Leftist icon Che Guevara saw and commented on this difference as well:

'The black is indolent and a dreamer; spending his meager wage on frivolity or drink; the European has a tradition of work and saving, which has pursued him as far as this corner of America and drives him to advance himself, even independently of his own individual aspirations.'

2) Refusal to Assimilate

Complaints about Jews' refusal to assimilate were common among thought leaders.

Richard Nixon

Nixon, quoted earlier, said this in a 1973 phone call with Henry Kissinger on an upcoming US-Soviet summit:

An old trope still hanging on ('AIPAC' = American Jewish Lobby)

'Let me say, Henry, it's gonna be the worst thing that happened to Jews in American history,' Nixon said. 'If they torpedo this summit — and it might go down for other reasons — I'm gonna put the blame on them, and I'm going to do it publicly at 9 o'clock at night before 80 million people,' he vowed. 'I won't mind one goddamn but to have a little anti-Semitism if it's on that issue,' adding: 'They put the Jewish interest above America's interest and it's about goddamn time that the Jew in America realizes he's an American first and a Jew second.'

Harry Truman 

Truman too resented them pushing their own group interests. Henry Wallace, Sec. of Commerce, in his memoirs on 1946 negotiations over the new Jewish state:

May 16, 1948 headline

Truman was 'exasperated' over Jewish pressure that he support Zionist rule over Palestine. Wallace added 'Pres. Truman expressed himself as being very much 'put out' with the Jews. He said that "Jesus Christ couldn't please them when he was here on Earth, so how could anyone expect that I would have any luck?" Pres. Truman said he had no use for them and didn't care what happened to them.'

H.G. Wells 

Author H.G. Wells pointed out the same:

'Zionism is an expression of Jewish refusal to assimilate. If the Jews have suffered, it is because they have regarded themselves as a chosen people. 

'A careful study of anti-Semitism prejudice and accusations might be of great value to many Jews, who do not adequately realize the irritations they inflict.'

Some of our favorite novelists were ethnic realtalkers

Roald Dahl

Beloved writer Roald Dahl (of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory fame) said in a New Statesman interview:

'There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it's a kind of lack of generosity towards non-Jews. I mean, there's always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn't just pick on them for no reason.'

3) Dishonesty with Out-groups

Jews have long been criticized for their perceived dishonesty towards out-groups.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Dostoevsky, cited above in Diary of a Writer (1877), also says:

The Abolition of Serfdom in Russia, Alphonse Mucha, 1914

'And, in truth, the whole activity of the Jews in these border regions of ours consisted of rendering the native population as much as possible inescapably dependent on them, taking advantage of the local laws.  .... 

'In this respect the Jew preserves all his originality as compared with other Russian aliens, and of course, the reason therefore is that status of his, that spirit of which specifically breathes pitilessness for everything that is not Jew, with disrespect for any people and tribe, for every human creature who is not a Jew.'

Mark Twain

Twain, whom we cited earlier, mounted a spirited defense of the Jew as a fine upstanding citizen and good businessman, yet still conceded (1899) that:

'He has a reputation for various small forms of cheating, and for practising oppressive usury, and for burning himself out to get the insurance, and for arranging cunning contracts which leave him an exit but lock the other man in, and for smart evasions which find him safe and comfortable just within the strict letter of the law, when court and jury know very well that he has violated the spirit of it.'

Napoleon

No less than Napoleon accused them of exploiting outsiders. From an 1806 speech before the Council of State:

'The Jews have practiced usury since the time of Moses, and oppressed the other peoples. Meanwhile, the Christians were only rarely usurers, falling into disgrace when they did so. We ought to ban the Jews from commerce because they abuse it . . . The evils of the Jews do not stem from individuals but from the fundamental nature of this people.' 

Emmanuel Kant

Philosopher Emmanuel Kant, from an anthropology lecture he gave throughout the latter 1700s:

1910 postcard satirizing Jews' exploitation of out-groups

The Palestinians [Jews] living among us have, for the most part, earned a not unfounded reputation for being cheaters, because of their spirit of usury since their exile. Certainly, it seems strange to conceive of a nation of cheaters; but it is just as odd to think of a nation of merchants, the great majority of whom, bound by an ancient superstition that is recognized by the State they live in, seek no civil dignity and try to make up for this loss by the advantage of duping the people among whom they find refuge, and even one another.

Voltaire

French Enlightenment hero Voltaire made similar observations, worded somewhat more harshly:

'We find in them only an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.'

4) Lacking Character

Outside observers often felt Jews showed a lack of character.

H.L. Mencken

Writer H.L. Mencken characterized them as vain and lacking in courage:

Image source

'The Jews could be put down very plausibly as the most unpleasant race ever heard of. As commonly encountered they lack any of the qualities that mark the civilized man: courage, dignity, incorruptibility, ease, confidence. They have vanity without pride, voluptuousness without taste, and learning without wisdom.  Their fortitude, such as it is, is wasted upon puerile objects, and their charity is mainly a form of display.'

T.S. Eliot

Poet T.S. Eliot, in a 1925 personal letter, found them envious:

The poet whose work spawned 'Cats'

'I am always inclined to suspect the racial envy and jealousy which makes that people [Jews] inclined to bolshevism in some form (not always political).' Later, in a 1933 lecture, he talked about the importance of 'unity of religious background…. Reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable.'

Karl Marx

Karl Marx, himself of Jewish descent, accused his own group of being money-hungry:

'What is the object of the Jew's worship in this world? Usury. What is his worldly god? Money. . . . What is the foundation of the Jew in this world? Practical necessity, private advantage. . . . The bill of exchange is the Jew's real God. His God is the illusory bill of exchange.'

Auguste Renoir

Auguste Renoir, in an 1898 conversation with Manet's daughter Julie, described them as cowardly and money-hungry:

'The luncheon of the boating party,' 1881

'[The Jews] come to France to earn money, but if there is any fighting to be done they hide behind a tree… There are a lot of them in the army, because the Jew likes to walk about wearing a uniform.' During the same discussion, Julie notes that Renoir also 'let fly on the subject of Pissarro, ‘a Jew’, 'whose sons are natives of no country and who do their military service nowhere.'

Differences in character-- in future orientation, in out-group attitude, in patriotism-- tend to kill multiculturalist dreams in the egg. Ethnic groups with vastly different characters simply do not live comfortably side-by-side. Our forebears, we now see, were not so squeamish about these prickly truths as we are.

All that being said, true bigotry does exist in every time and place. How would we define it?

V) True Bigotry

Having seen the different types of realtalk our forebears daily engaged in, how to distinguish 'noticing differences' from 'bigotry'? 

Northwestern University music student Timothy McNair, for example, recently refused to sing an assigned Walt Whitman poem due to the latter's post-Emancipation comments:

Walt Whitman

'As if we had not strained the voting and digestive caliber of American Democracy to the utmost for the last fifty years with the millions of ignorant foreigners, we have now infused a powerful percentage of blacks, with about as much intellect and calibre (in the mass) as so many baboons.'

Must I perform the work of someone who calls me a baboon?  McNair and Whitman

The notion that Blacks are more indolent, or improvident, or less equipped to carry on English liberal democracy--these are ideas that may be empirically argued for or against. But comparing them 'in the mass' to 'so many baboons' is simply a mean-spirited slur. 

As biographer David Reynolds claims this was from an essay, we presume Whitman meant it for public consumption. TWCS, therefore, would consider this remark plain bigotry.

George Bernard Shaw

Playwright George Bernard Shaw shares sentiments of a similar timbre:

Humorist or bigot?

In response to a request by the American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune for sympathetic commentary about Jews on the occasion of their new year, Shaw famously lashed out: 

'This craving for bouquets by Jews is a symptom of racial degeneration. The Jews are worse than my own people. Those Jews who still want to be the chosen race (chosen by the late Lord Balfour) can go to Palestine and stew in their own juice. The rest had better stop being Jews and start being human beings.'

Comparing an entire group to non-humans, however amusing we may find it, is hardly a turn of phrase we would like aimed at our own group. Verdict: Bigotry.

As for Blacks, it is normal that they object to use of the injurious term 'nigger', considered one of the most hurtful insults in American English.

Lyndon Johnson

LBJ was heard many times referring to the 1957 Civil Rights Act as 'the nigger bill,' and, re: his own landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, 'I'll have these niggers voting Democrat for 200 years.'

Three peas in a pod

Karl Marx

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, it has been revealed in their private letters, used this slur as well:

Publicly and for political reasons, both Marx and Engels posed as friends of the Negro. In private, they … had contempt for the entire Negro Race, a contempt they expressed by comparing Negroes to animals, by identifying black people with 'idiots' and by continuously using the opprobrious term 'Nigger' in their private correspondence.

We said earlier that some of our quotes overlap more than one category. If, then, we consider using racial slurs or calling groups sub-human to be 'bigotry,' we must include in this category the letter quoted earlier by young Harry Truman ('I think one man is just as good as another so long as he's honest and decent and not a nigger') as well as the editorial from Kaiser Wilhelm ('A Jew cannot be a true patriot. He is something different, like a bad insect.')

A hurtful comparison: Afros were once thought 'the missing link' with monkeys

(the person who posted this photo of French Attorney General Taubira 

online was condemned to 9 months' prison)

How we react to this type of bigotry is another question. We may be indulgent, claiming they were just parroting language common in their day.  We may stand fast, finding their words unacceptable in any context. On music student Timothy McNair, cited above for refusing to perform Walt Whitman:

Northwestern University professor Jay Grossman puts it this way: 'Was Walt Whitman a racist? Absolutely. Was every single person in the 19th century a racist, compared with what we try to be in the 21st century? Absolutely.' 

It is up to each of us to decide what our conscience allows. But let us take care to save accusations of bigotry for those who deserve it, and not for those, far more common, who've engaged in the now-taboo practice of simply pointing out group differences.

*     *     *

Dutch criminologist Adrian Bonger was a Marxist who blamed crime on poverty and railed against anti-black discrimination in the U.S. Nevertheless, after an exhaustive review of several centuries' crime and race statistics, he summed up thusly in his 1939 classic Race and Crime:

Jitterbugging in a Mississippi juke joint, 1939

'The dominant characteristics of the Negro are: Sensuality, a tendency to servile imitation, lack of initiative, horror of solitude, instability, inordinate love of singing and dancing, and unconquerable taste for glitter and ornament. He is a person of pleasure, light, gossipy, improvident, lazy.

'… If one would express the general impression of those who know the North American Negro, then one would say: He is childlike. He does not look very far ahead, he is not very accurate, he is fond of bright colors and finery, is easily distracted. These characteristics may, naturally, be inherent, but this is not necessarily so.'

Bonger was also a fervent anti-Nazi, mocking their race theories all throughout his book. Nonetheless, for his sum-up of psychological studies on Jews, he concedes:

A reputation for love of learning

'The mobility, as well as the activity and the impulsivity of the Jews is greater, the emotionality is quite considerably higher, than is the case with other races. Their intelligence stands at the top in a mixed group, their pride also. Greed for gold, dishonesty, but also generosity and helpfulness are strongly to the fore in Jewish character—also an inclination to exaggerate (extremism). 

'The classification of the Jews according to temperament shows a greater percentage of nervous, sentimental, and passionate types,  ... Nervous diseases, such as hysteria and neurasthenia, are more prevalent among the Jews than among the rest of the population.'  

These observations on group differences from a leftist man of science such as Bonger seem as balanced a distillation as possible of the 'realtalk' we have quoted above.

Harvard Law wunderkind Alan Dershowitz, puzzling over the ubiquity of Jew-criticism in history, admitted:

'This honor roll of anti-Jewish bigotry goes on, and included people of every race, religion, and geographic area, political leaning, gender, and age.'

His conclusion?

'The answer to the question why? probably lies more in the realm of abnormal psychology than in any rational attempts to find understandable cause in history, or economics. Anti-Semitism is a disease of the soul, and diseases are best diagnosed by examining those infected with them.'

When endless observers of a group over many centuries come to the same conclusions, one may safely presume something other than a mental 'disease' is at work.

Just as so many observers today are commenting on 'white [genetic] privilege'—they are not in fact wrong; Whites have indeed been genetically blessed by Mother Nature, and their overwhelming planetary successes for the last 500 years have understandably stuck in some people's craw.

So before we are too quick to jump on the John Waynes, we would do well to remember that most 'bigotry' of yesterday was either

(1) Simple in-group preference, which all peoples practice, or

(2) Observation of group-level differences, which in fact remain as plain as day despite our strenuous attempts to deny them.

Noticing group differences is not bigotry. Wanting one's own group to succeed and be happy is not bigotry. Wanting to live separated from other groups (à la the 'Keep Harlem Black' contingent) is not bigotry.

Gratuitous slurs and insults used to degrade an entire group are bigotry. But as a careful perusal of our forebears' realtalking shows, in prominent positions such men have always been a minority. 

May our civic leaders keep it in mind before their axe too zealously falls.

Thank you for reading.

Previously:

Being a Progressive, Yesterday: Race

Being a Progressive, Yesterday: Eugenics