Race Question

". . . Racial differences . . . are in nonessentials. . . . The races . . . are what the Bible says they are--brothers. . . . All human blood is the same . . . no European is a pure anything. . . . In the [ancestors of the] populations of Europe you . . . find . . . Cro-Magnons, Slavs, Mongols, Africans, Celts, Saxons and Teutons. . . . Movements of peoples ... inevitably produce race mixture and have . . . since before history began. No one has been able to show that this is necessarily bad. . . .

"Race prejudice ... a determination to keep a people down . . . misuses the label 'inferior' to justify unfairness and injustice. . . . One hundred thousand Americans have petitioned the War Department to have at least one division in the Army containing both Negroes and whites. . . . The United States should clean its own house . . . stand unashamed before the Nazis and condemn, without confusion, their doctrines of a Master Race."

Such troublous facts and troubling doctrines were making double trouble last week. They were set forth in The Races of Mankind, a 46-page, 10-c- pamphlet published by the Public Affairs Committee, Inc., designed to fit a serviceman's pocket and to fight Nazi racial doctrines. The pamphlet was brightly written by Columbia Anthropologists Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish, and brightly illustrated (see cut). But U.S.O. President Chester Irving Barnard had called the pamphlet controversial and ordered the Y.M.C.A. to stop distributing it in U.S.O. clubs--after 50,000 copies had been sold.

Disgusted Donors. Bulk purchasers of the pamphlet, in addition to the Y.M.C.A., included the National Smelting Co., the Junior League, the Federal Council of Churches, the American Baptist Home Mission Society. Said the liberal, nonprofit Public Affairs Committee, which publishes The Races of Mankind: "We have had no complaints; many servicemen have written for extra copies for buddies." The Y.M.C.A. said it would distribute its remaining 10,000 copies to civilian groups. Other reactions were not so measured:

> A.F. of L.'s Labor League for Human Rights, which in 1943 gave $12,000,000 to the U.S.O. through the National War Fund, denied that The Races of Mankind could be called "controversial."

> C.I.O.'s War Relief Committee, which gave $3,300,000 to the U.S.O., called on President Barnard to discuss his action.

> Many Negro newspapers called the U.S.O. "Jim Crow."

> Detroit's Cranbrook Institute of Science opened an exhibit designed to teach racial tolerance to the city which has had the worst U.S. race riots in years. Many points made by the Institute's displays were drawn from The Races of Mankind.

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