The book riveted me. I read it on the streetcar, and then on the connecting bus all the way home, almost missing my stop. When I walked home from the bus stop, I would pause and read a couple of paragraphs and then close the book and walk while I thought about the concept. That evening, after wolfing down my supper, I bounded upstairs to my bedroom where I retrieved my book from its paper bag and read until I finished it.

The book did not convert me, but it made me think critically for the first time about the race issue, and it made me question the egalitarian arguments that I had uncritically accepted. I was not ready to give up my egalitarian beliefs, but Race and Reason made me realize another legitimate and scientific point of view existed.

I asked myself, What if the things he writes are true? What if the distinctions, quality and composition of races are the primary factors in the vitality of civilizations?

Putnam prophesied that massive racial integration of American public schools would lead to increasing Black racism, resentment and frustration, reduced educational standards, increased violence in the schools, and a resulting implosion of the great cities of America. I worried that such a fate could befall our country. I wanted to find out the truth, no matter where it might lead.

One allegation by Putnam especially interested me. He said that most of America's Founding Fathers were convinced believers in racial differences and that even President Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, stated repeatedly that he believed that there were wide differences in the races that make necessary their separation. If Putnam's allegations were correct, then I would have to acknowledge that the media had deceived me on an important matter. My generation had been taught that racial equality was enshrined in the principles of our Founding Fathers and supposedly represented even by the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. . .

Most Americans can instantly identify these words. But do these words mean that Jefferson and the other patriots who put their names on that document believed that all men were truly created biologically equal; that the White and Black races had equal endowments from the Creator?

How could that be true, asked Putnam, when the same document refers to Indians as "merciless savages" who massacred innocents without regard to age or gender?

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

Anyone who used such language today from the podium of the Republican or Democratic National Convention would be universally scorned.