It should be noted in conclusion that Professors Adler and Connolly have achieved exceptional objectivity and have attained a style that is light without sacrificing the respect authors owe to their subject. They write appreciatively of a worthy human movement and their book will have lasting value.
Rochester City Historian BLAKE MCKELVEYThe Negro in American Civilization. By Nathaniel Weyl. (Washington :Public Affairs Press, 1960. xii + 360 pp. References and index. $6.00.) Steady as the diurnal cycle runs the course of Nathaniel Weyl's life. A student rebel-in-arms at Columbia in the early 1930's, he became a foil for Communist glitter later in the decade. Then, in 1939, cleansed by immersion, he renounced Communism and embraced employment with the federal government as an economist, interrupting this for military service during World War II. But his self-purge was not conclusive enough for self-comfort ; after the war, he wrote two books on disloyalty. Still uncomfortable, Mr. Weyl confessed before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security that his previous statements to the FBI had been incomplete. Then, in testimony and in print, he "fingered" his former associates in Communism. The cycle had moved inexorably from radical idealism and active Communism through patriotism to the far edge. And now comes a polemic against the Negro.After a brief tussle with a history of white attitudes toward the Negro in America, Mr. Weyl's book wades into a scientific discourse on the disabilities of the African, concluding that the African is physiologically and intellectually inferior to the white man. In a key sentence, he makes the important transition : "Genetically speaking, however, the American Negroes are primarily African" (p. 156). With this bridge, he is free to ring the usual charges of incapacity against the American Negro. His particular target among students of the Negro is Gunnar Myrdal, and the technique is familiar. The American Dilemma "is hostile to the American Constitution" and was produced by a "carefully selected group of leftist sociologists" within which was "a hard core of Communists and Communist sympathizers" (p. 262). A major source for these allegations is Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi.Mr. Weyl uses the red-brush technique on a number of sources where he is unable to offer a sound and rational refutation. He questions the objectivity of a World War II study by Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish since Miss Weltfish "was queried by a Senate Committee concerning past membership in the Communist Party and took the Fifth Amendment" (p. 192). He dismisses E. Franklin Frazier as one of the "leading Negro social scientists" with "unreserved acclamation for the Soviet Union." The others are not named.Mr. Weyl's history leaves much to be desired. He has overlooked sig-
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