Carleton Putnam

Carleton Putnam
Born December 19, 1901
Manhattan, United States
Died March 5, 1998
Charlottesville, Virginia
Alma mater Princeton University
Columbia Law School (LLB)
Religion Episcopalian
Spouse(s) Esther Auchincloss

Carleton Putnam (December 19, 1901 – March 5, 1998) was an American businessman, biographer, writer, and segregationist. He graduated from Princeton University in 1924 and received a Bachelor of Laws(LLB) from Columbia Law School in 1932. He founded Chicago & Southern Airlines in 1933, which in 1953 was merged with Delta Air Lines. He would later serve as chief executive officer of Delta Air Lines and hold a seat on its board of directors until his death.[1][2]

Life and career

Born to a prominent family of Yankee background, his mother Louise Carleton Putnam, was the daughter of New York publishing magnate George W. Carleton. Paternally, he was a lineal descendant of American Revolutionary War general Israel Putnam. He was also the cousin of physical anthropologist Carleton Coon, with whom he corresponded closely regarding theories of anatomical and biological differences between human races.[3] He was raised as part of the American Episcopal Church and remained a lifelong member.

His best known written work is Race and Reason, an apology of racial segregation that originated in a letter he wrote to President Dwight Eisenhower protesting the end of segregation in U.S. public schools.[4] In this book Putnam wrote:

"In the next 500,000,000,000 years I would be quite prepared to concede the possibility the Negro may, through normal processes of mutation and natural selection within his own race, eventually overtake and even surpass the white race. [...] When the Negro has bred out his limitations over hundreds, or thousands, of years, it will be time enough to consider absorbing him in any such massive doses as would be involved in the South today." (p.21) "The mulatto who was bent on making the nation mulatto was the real danger. His alliance with the white equalitarian often combined men who had nothing in common save a belief that they had a grudge against society. They regarded every Southerner who sensed the genetic truth as a bigot [...]. Here were the men who needed to be reminded of the debt the Negro owed to white civilization." (p.44)

He also wrote a biographical book on Theodore Roosevelt's youth that was praised by Edmund Morris, the author of the best known biography of that president. Putnam admired Roosevelt's belief that "Teutonic (and) English blood is the source of American greatness".[4]

Carleton Putnam died of pneumonia on Mar. 5, 1998. He was survived by his wife, Esther Mackenzie Willcox Auchincloss, a daughter, three grandchildren, a stepdaughter, and three step-grandchildren. He was previously married to Lucy Chapman Putnam.

References

  1. ↑ Jackson, John P. (2001). ""In Ways Unacademical": The Reception of Carleton S. Coon's The Origin of Races" (PDF). Journal of the History of Biology 34 (2): 247–285. doi:10.1023/A:1010366015968. The scion of an established New England family (and a cousin to Carleton Coon), Carleton Putnam was educated at Princeton and Columbia Law School in the 1920s. In 1933, Putnam established his own airline, building it into a successful business. After World War II, Putnam merged his airline with others forming Delta Airlines. [...] Putnam was convinced that the core problem with desegregation was the racial inferiority of the "Negro". Time and time again, Putnam claimed that the South was wasting its time with the call to defend "state's rights" and should instead focus on the true danger: race mingling. For Putnam, everything else was a side issue to the fundamental danger desegregation posed to continuation of white civilization.
  2. ↑ "Carleton Putnam '24". Princeton Alumni Weekly. The Trustees of Princeton University. May 20, 1998. Retrieved September 19, 2012. After Princeton, he became an aviation enthusiast. He earned his LLB in 1932 from Columbia Law School. Instead of practicing law, he turned a small California airline into a larger midwestern airline, Chicago and Southern, which merged into Delta in 1953. He was Delta's chairman of the board.
  3. ↑ Jackson, John P. (2005). Science for Segregation: Race, Law, and the Case against Brown v. Board of Education. NYU Press. ISBN 978-0-8147-4271-6. Lay summary (30 August 2010).
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Bradley, James (2009). The Imperial Cruise: a secret history of empire and war. Little, Brown and Company. pp. 332–333. ISBN 978-0-316-00895-2.

Works

Further reading

Tucker, William H. (2007). The funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-07463-9. Lay summary (4 September 2010).

External links