Formation | March 11, 1937 |
---|---|
Founder | Wickliffe Preston Draper |
Type | Nonprofit foundation |
Focus | |
Headquarters | New York City, U.S. [1] |
Director | Gerhard Meisenberg |
Key people |
The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences". The organization has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature. [2] [3] [4] [5] The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the Pioneer Fund as a hate group. [6] [7] One of its first projects was to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of Erbkrank , a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics. [8]
From 2002 until his death in October 2012, the Pioneer Fund was headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton, who was succeeded by Richard Lynn. [9] [10]
Two of the best known studies funded by Pioneer Fund are the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart [11] and the Texas Adoption Project, which studied the similarities and differences of identical twins and other children adopted into non-biological families.
Research backed by the fund on race and intelligence has generated controversy and criticism. One prominent example is the 1994 book The Bell Curve , which drew heavily from Pioneer-funded research. [12] [13] The fund also has ties to eugenics, [14] and has both current and former links to white supremacist publications such as American Renaissance and Mankind Quarterly .
Pioneer Fund was incorporated on March 11, 1937. The incorporation documents of the Pioneer Fund list two purposes. The first, modeled on the Nazi Lebensborn breeding program, [15] was aimed at encouraging the propagation of those "descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States and/or from related stocks, or to classes of children, the majority of whom are deemed to be so descended". Its second purpose was to support academic research and the "dissemination of information, into the 'problem of heredity and eugenics'" and "the problems of race betterment". [16] The Pioneer Fund argues the "race betterment" has always referred to the "human race" referred to earlier in the sentence, and critics argue it referred to racial groups. The document was amended in 1985 and the phrase changed to "human race betterment." [12]
The first five directors were Wickliffe Preston Draper, Harry Laughlin, Frederick Osborn, Malcolm Donald and John Marshall Harlan II.
Wickliffe Preston Draper, the fund's de facto final authority, served on the board of directors from 1937 until 1972. He founded Pioneer Fund after having acquired an interest in the Eugenics movement, which was strengthened by his 1935 visit to Nazi Germany, where he met with the leading eugenicists of the Third Reich who used the inspiration from the American movement as a basis for the Nuremberg Laws. He served in the British army at the beginning of World War I, transferring to the US Army as the Americans entered the war. During World War II, he was stationed as an intelligence officer in India. [17]
Draper secretly met C. Nash Herndon of Bowman Gray School of Medicine at Wake Forest University in 1949. Little is known about their meetings, but Herndon was playing a major role in the expansion of the compulsory sterilization program in North Carolina. [18]
Psychology professor William H. Tucker describes Draper as someone who "aside from his brief periods of military service ... never pursued a profession or held a job of any kind." [3] According to a 1960 article in The Nation , an unnamed geneticist said Draper told him he "wished to prove simply that Negroes were inferior." [19] Draper funded advocacy of repatriation of black people to Africa. [20] [21]
Harry Laughlin was the director of the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. He served as the president of Pioneer Fund from its inception until 1941. He opposed miscegenation and had proposed a research agenda to assist in the enforcement of Southern "race integrity laws" by developing techniques for identifying the "pass-for-white" person who might "successfully hide all of his black blood". [3] He singled out Jews and fought efforts to allow entry into the United States to Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi Germany. [17] Eleven months after the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, Laughlin wrote to an official at the University of Heidelberg (which had awarded him an honorary doctorate) that the United States and the Third Reich shared "a common understanding of ... the practical application" of eugenic principles to "racial endowments and ... racial health." [3]
Frederick Osborn wrote in 1937 that the Nazi Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring was "the most exciting experiment that had ever been tried". [22] [16] Osborn was the secretary of the American Eugenics Society, which was part of an accepted and active field at the time; the chairman of the Advisory Committee on Selective Service during World War II; and later the deputy US representative to the UN Atomic Energy Commission.
Malcolm Donald was the Draper family lawyer and trustee of the Draper estate. He was a former editor of the Harvard Law Review and a brigadier general during World War II.
John Marshall Harlan II, whose firm had done legal work for the Pioneer Fund. He was the only director whose name did not appear on the incorporation papers. He was director of operational analysis for the Eighth Air Force in World War II, and was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. He voted for the decision in Brown v. Board of Education as a member of the Supreme Court and his grandfather was the only dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, reversed by the decision. He dissented in Swain v. Alabama and Miranda v. Arizona .
Corporate lawyer Harry F. Weyher Jr. was president of the Pioneer Fund from 1958 until his death in 2002. [23]
Following Jesse Helms's 1984 Senate re-election bid, The Washington Post journalists Thomas B. Edsall and David A. Vise reported that both Helms and Thomas F. Ellis were linked to the Pioneer Fund, which was described as having "financed research into 'racial betterment' by scientists seeking to prove that blacks are genetically inferior to whites." [24] : A16 1
Later directors included Marion A. Parrott (1973–2000), [25] J. Philippe Rushton, Richard Lynn and Gerhard Meisenberg (as of 2019). [26]
Rushton, who headed Pioneer until 2012, spoke at conferences of the American Renaissance (AR) magazine, in which he has also published articles. [27] Anti-racist Searchlight magazine described one such AR conference as a "veritable 'who's who' of American white supremacy." [28]
The Pioneer Fund was described by the London Sunday Telegraph (March 12, 1989) as a "neo-Nazi organization closely integrated with the far right in American politics." [29]
The Pioneer Fund supported the distribution of a eugenics film titled Erbkrank ("Hereditary Defective" or "Hereditary Illness") which was published by the pre-war 1930s Nazi Party. William Draper obtained the film from the predecessor to the Nazi Office of Racial Policy (Rassenpolitisches Amt) prior to the founding of the Pioneer Fund. [3] According to the Pioneer Fund site, all founders capable of doing so participated in the war against the Nazis. [30]
In the 1950s and 1960s, the fund supported two government committees that gave grants for both anti-immigration and genetics research. The committee members included Representative Francis E. Walter (chair of the House Un-American Activities Committee and head of the Draper Immigration Committee), Henry E. Garrett (a White Citizens Council member [31] and educator known for his belief in the genetic inferiority of blacks), and Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi, head of the Draper Genetics Committee. [32] Draper also made large financial contributions to efforts to oppose the American Civil Rights Movement and the racial desegregation mandated by Brown v. Board of Education, such as $215,000 to the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission in 1963. [3]
As of 1994, the Pioneer Fund distributed more than $1 million per year to academics. [31] Hampton University sociology professor Steven J. Rosenthal described the fund in 1995 as a "Nazi endowment specializing in production of justifications for eugenics since 1937, the Pioneer Fund is embedded in a network of right-wing foundations, think tanks, religious fundamentalists, and global anti-Communist coalitions". [33]
In 2002, William H. Tucker criticized the fund's grant-funding techniques:
Pioneer's administrative procedures are as unusual as its charter. Although the fund typically gives away more than half a million dollars per year, there is no application form or set of guidelines. Instead, according to Weyher, an applicant merely submits "a letter containing a brief description of the nature of the research and the amount of the grant requested." There is no requirement for peer review of any kind; Pioneer's board of directors – two attorneys, two engineers, and an investment broker – decides, sometimes within a day, whether a particular research proposal merits funding. Once the grant has been made, there is no requirement for an interim or final report or even for an acknowledgment by a grantee that Pioneer has been the source of support, all atypical practices in comparison to other organizations that support scientific research. [3]
In accord with the tax regulations governing nonprofit corporations, Pioneer does not fund individuals; under the law only other nonprofit organizations are appropriate grantees. As a consequence, many of the fund's awards go not to the researchers themselves but to the universities that employ them, a standard procedure for supporting work by scientists affiliated to academic institutions. In addition to these awards to the universities where its grantees are based, Pioneer has made a number of grants to other nonprofit organizations and corporations that have been created to channel resources to a particular academic recipient while circumventing the institution where the researcher is employed. [3] [34]
The Southern Poverty Law Center listed the Pioneer Fund as a hate group in 2003, citing the fund's history, its funding of race and intelligence research, and its connections with racist individuals. [6] [7]
In 2006, the Center for New Community, a human rights advocacy organization, characterize the Pioneer Fund as "a white supremacist foundation that specializes in funding 'science' dedicated to demonstrating white intellectual and moral superiority." They draw particular attention to Rushton's theories about differences between races as evidence of the racial slant which they claim accompanies much of the research which is backed by the Fund. [35]
Pioneer Fund's figures are from 1971 to 1996 and are adjusted to 1997 USD. [36]
Many of the researchers whose findings support the hereditarian hypothesis of racial IQ disparity have received grants of varying sizes from the Pioneer Fund. [37] Large grantees, in order of amount received, are:
Other notable recipients of funding include:
The fund gave the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) a total of $1.3 million between 1985 and 1994. [46] Among the grants was $150,000 for "studies in connection with immigration policies". [17] Funding was dropped after negative publicity during the campaign for California's Proposition 187 linked the Pioneer Fund to ads purchased by FAIR. [47] [48] Other immigration reduction groups that have received donations from the Pioneer Fund include ProjectUSA [49] and American Immigration Control Foundation. [50]
One of the grantees is the paleoconservative and white supremacist journalist Jared Taylor, the editor of American Renaissance and a member the advisory board of the white nationalist publication The Occidental Quarterly . Another is Roger Pearson's Institute for the Study of Man. [6] Many of the key academic white nationalists in both Right Now! and American Renaissance have been funded by the Pioneer Fund, which was also directly involved in funding the parent organization of American Renaissance, the New Century Foundation. [37]
Founder Wickliffe Draper secretly funded the 1960 launch of Mankind Quarterly, to clandestinely serve as a publishing arm for its segregationist founders. [51]
We refer to the five decades of careful, archival investigations documenting the involvement of psychologists and the Pioneer Fund with the campaign to overturn the Brown decision and preserve segregation, anti-immigration activism, and active involvement with neo-Nazi groups.
Arthur Robert Jensen was an American psychologist and writer. He was a professor of educational psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Jensen was known for his work in psychometrics and differential psychology, the study of how and why individuals differ behaviorally from one another.
John Philippe Rushton was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario until the early 1990s, and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other purported racial correlations.
Scientific racism, sometimes termed biological racism, is the pseudoscientific belief that the human species is divided into biologically distinct taxa called "races", and that empirical evidence exists to support or justify racial discrimination, racial inferiority, or racial superiority. Before the mid-20th century, scientific racism was accepted throughout the scientific community, but it is no longer considered scientific. The division of humankind into biologically separate groups, along with the assignment of particular physical and mental characteristics to these groups through constructing and applying corresponding explanatory models, is referred to as racialism, race realism, or race science by those who support these ideas. Modern scientific consensus rejects this view as being irreconcilable with modern genetic research.
Richard Lynn was a controversial English psychologist and self-described "scientific racist" who advocated for a genetic relationship between race and intelligence. He was the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, a white supremacist journal. He was lecturer in psychology at the University of Exeter and professor of psychology at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, and at the University of Ulster at Coleraine. Lynn was a professor emeritus of psychology at Ulster University, but had the title withdrawn by the university in 2018.
Wickliffe Preston Draper was an American political activist. He was an ardent eugenicist and lifelong advocate of strict racial segregation. In 1937, he founded the Pioneer Fund for eugenics and heredity research; he later became its principal benefactor.
Harry Hamilton Laughlin was an American educator and eugenicist. He served as the superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office from its inception in 1910 to its closure in 1939, and was among the most active individuals influencing American eugenics policy, especially compulsory sterilization legislation.
Mankind Quarterly is a journal that has been described as a "cornerstone of the scientific racism establishment", a "white supremacist journal", and "a pseudo-scholarly outlet for promoting racial inequality". It covers physical and cultural anthropology, including human evolution, intelligence, ethnography, linguistics, mythology, archaeology, and biology. It is published by the Ulster Institute for Social Research, which was presided over by Richard Lynn until his death in 2023.
Linda Susanne Gottfredson is an American psychologist and writer. She is professor emerita of educational psychology at the University of Delaware and co-director of the Delaware-Johns Hopkins Project for the Study of Intelligence and Society. She is best known for writing the 1994 letter "Mainstream Science on Intelligence", which was published in the Wall Street Journal in defense of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's controversial book The Bell Curve (1994).
Roger Pearson is a British anthropologist, eugenicist, white supremacist, political organiser for the extreme right, and publisher of political and academic journals.
Robert Travis Osborne was an American psychologist. He was professor emeritus of psychology at University of Georgia, and director of the Pioneer Fund, an organization prominently described as white supremacist in nature, from 2000 until his death.
John Hamilton Tanton was an American ophthalmologist, white nationalist, and anti-immigration activist. He was the founder and first chairman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), an anti-immigration organization. He was the co-founder of the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank; and NumbersUSA, an anti-immigration lobbying group. He was chairman of U.S. English and ProEnglish. He was briefly President of Zero Population Growth. He was the founder of The Social Contract Press, which published a quarterly journal of nativist and white nationalist writers called The Social Contract until the fall of 2019. He founded the pro-eugenics organization Society for Genetic Education.
The International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE) was an organisation that promoted eugenics and segregation, and the first publisher of Mankind Quarterly.
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Race, Evolution, and Behavior: A Life History Perspective is a book by Canadian psychologist and author J. Philippe Rushton. Rushton was a professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario for many years, and the head of the controversial Pioneer Fund. The first unabridged edition of the book came out in 1995, and the third, latest unabridged edition came out in 2000; abridged versions were also distributed.
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Earnest Sevier Cox was an American Methodist preacher, political activist and white supremacist. He is best known for his political campaigning for stricter segregation between blacks and whites in the United States through tougher anti-miscegenation laws, for his advocacy for "repatriation" of African Americans to Africa, and for his book White America. He is also noted for having mediated collaboration between white southern segregationists and African American separatist organizations such as UNIA and the Peace Movement of Ethiopia to advocate for repatriation legislation, and for having been a personal friend of black racial separatist Marcus Garvey.
Gerhard Meisenberg is a German biochemist. As of 2018, he was a professor of physiology and biochemistry at Ross University School of Medicine in Dominica. He is a director, with Richard Lynn, of the Pioneer Fund, which has been described as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He was, until 2018 or 2019, the editor-in-chief of Mankind Quarterly, which is commonly described as a white supremacist journal and purveyor of scientific racism.
Aurelio José Figueredo is an American evolutionary psychologist. He is a professor of psychology, Family Studies and Human Development at the University of Arizona, where he is also the director of the Ethology and Evolutionary Psychology Laboratory. He is also a member of the interdisciplinary Center for Insect Science at the University of Arizona. His major areas of research interest are the evolutionary psychology and behavioral development of life history strategy, cognition, sex, and violence in human and nonhuman animals, and the quantitative ethology and social development of insects, birds, and primates. He is known for his research on personality, such as a 1997 study in which he and James E. King developed the Chimpanzee Personality Questionnaire to measure the Big Five personality traits in chimpanzees.
The London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) is an invitation-only conference for research on human intelligence, including race and intelligence and eugenics. In 2018, Times Higher Education called it "an annual conference on eugenics and intelligence" and several news outlets have described the conference as having ties to white supremacy, neo-Nazism, and scientific racism.
Noah Carl is a British sociologist and intelligence researcher who co-owns the Daily Sceptic blog. He was investigated and subsequently dismissed from his position as a Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellow at St Edmund's College, Cambridge after over 500 academics signed a letter repudiating his research and public stance on race and intelligence, calling it "ethically suspect and methodologically flawed", and stating their concern that "racist pseudoscience is being legitimised through association with the University of Cambridge." An investigation by the college concluded that Carl's work was "poor scholarship" which violated standards of academic integrity, and that Carl had collaborated with right-wing extremists.