To the Editor:

I note that slavery is charged, in Stanley Elkins’s review of The Political Economy of Slavery by E. D. Genovese [July], with responsibility for the poor weight of cattle and hogs in the lower South of pre-1861.

This is a marvelous bit of conclusion-jumping, comfortable to political theorists, perhaps, but not quite enough to satisfy anybody who has ever attempted to grow hogs or cattle in the same region.

Animals have no politics, but they do have organic requirements. To induce weight beyond that best suited to the environment is always to enter a most uncertain battle. To this day, in the same lower South, one venturer after another discovers that standard English and European breeds of consumable animals cannot be relied on to stick the course. The only solution yet found is crossbreeding them on strains adapted to the climate, soil, and pests, human and otherwise; and even so, the consequent products are always sidling off into the bushes trying to become something different yet.

It is not accidental that in Florida the most successful cattle are strains imported from India, if one measures success in terms of survival rather than pounds of edible carcass; or that all along the Gulf Coast one finds anxious millionaires who knew their business in contracting, steel-making, or auto-selling, now nervously attempting to learn genetics and hit on a lucky cross of Brangus Whangus or Hergus, to imitate the patient, more-than-a-century-long search in Texas, centered on the King Ranch, that produced the Santa Gertrudis, the sole example so far of a truly local, American breed of meat cow that will bear genetic scrutiny.

Genetics is a hard science. Marxists have come croppers on it not only in attempting to explain historical events, but also in their own political action. In discussing the human species, historians, as well as all other commentators, are quite reasonably to be excused from facing up to genetic truth. After all, we know very little of it, as yet, and what we do know is most embarrassing to our ethical, social and religious pretensions. . . .

Marxists, non-Marxists, and all associated sentimentalists, visionaries, and wishers that it were, or were not so, should never forget the case of Trofim Lysenko and his promises of political wheat to the late J. Dzugashvili. One who recalls that will be less ready to explain hog weights in terms of the moral vice inherent in one man holding another as chattel goods.

Frank C. Waldrop
Washington, D.C.