"The American breed": Nazi eugenics and the origins of the Pioneer Fund.

AuthorLombardo, Paul A.

INTRODUCTION

  1. The Bell Curve, The Pioneer Fund, and American Eugenics

    When The Bell Curve was published in 1994 it was an immediate best seller; more than a million copies are currently in print. The thesis of The Bell Curve, that intelligence--the trait that IQ tests are designed to measure--is inherited, has become increasingly critical as a predictor of educational, occupational, and social success. (1) The Bell Curve asserts that those possessing a high IQ constitute a hereditary upper class while their more limited counterparts at the opposite end of the IQ spectrum make up an "underclass." The Bell Curve also analyzes social and economic stratification in America and concludes that the inequality which allegedly exists in this country is attributable to genetically transmitted "ethnic differences." (2) The social and political implications of The Bell Curve's message led to immediate controversy, and the book has generated a tremendous amount of commentary from both scholars and the popular media. At least some of the controversy has been fueled by the history of eugenics in America.

    The argument advanced in The Bell Curve closely parallels assertions routinely made in the early years of the twentieth century by advocates of the eugenics movement. The book's conclusions, disparaging the government's role in ameliorative social programs and forecasting the demise of American civilization as the result of increasingly "dysgenic" birthrates among the "underclass," are themes found firmly rooted in the eugenic tradition.

    The success of The Bell Curve has drawn attention to the Pioneer Fund, (3) a foundation that has provided a steady stream of funding for research and publicity on topics related to "heredity and eugenics" and "the problems of race betterment" since first being chartered in 1937. (4) Some sixteen researchers who have received Pioneer support are referenced in The Bell Curve and Pioneer proudly cites this record in its own promotional material. (5) Pioneer's founding president was Harry Laughlin, one of the most effective propagandists of early Twentieth Century America's organized eugenics movement. He is described in The Bell Curve sympathetically as "a biologist who was especially concerned about keeping up the American level of intelligence by suitable immigration policies." (6) Like The Bell Curve, Laughlin sounded the eugenicist's alarm, declaring that the "great mass of defectiveness" swelled by immigrants, the feebleminded, and children of racial intermixture would swamp America. (7) Laughlin's pronouncements about race echoed the hierarchical standards--white Nordics at the top, others below--set out by Francis Galton, the father of the eugenics movement. (8) Laughlin believed that the "pioneer families" of the United States, pruned of weaker members by frontier tests of survival, represented the pinnacle of Nordic purity. (9) He claimed that Germans and early American settlers shared a "common race descent" from ancient Nordic ancestors. (10)

    Laughlin argued for a legal definition of "the American race" that would exclude all but "Anglo-Saxon" immigrants, and he dedicated extensive efforts to blocking the migration of Jews fleeing Hitler. (11) His collaborators in developing the new definition were Madison Grant, an elder statesman of American eugenics, and Wickliffe Draper, a textile magnate, whom Laughlin introduced to his German colleagues in 1935 as "one of the staunchest supporters of eugenical research and policy in the United States." (12) After attending a Nazi eugenics conference, Draper wrote to Laughlin encouraging him to "work out something of eugenic value;" (13) the Pioneer Fund was chartered less than a year later. The work of the Pioneer Fund subsequently began in the swirl of enthusiasm shared by Laughlin and Draper over the progress of Nazi eugenics. Draper's finances provided a base that supported Pioneer projects as well as other programs tailored to meet his goals of immigration restriction and racial separation. (14)

    Draper's support has sustained Pioneer for over sixty years. During that time, Pioneer has continued to subsidize projects and propaganda that echo the goals of Pioneer founders. Pioneer represents a missing link in the history of eugenics that connects the racial radical branch of American eugenics in the first third of the century, to eugenics in 1930s Germany, and to hereditarian politics of recent years as exemplified in books like The Bell Curve. Yet, despite clear connections between Pioneer support and eugenic ideology, a survey of the historical literature on the eugenics movement demonstrates relative neglect of both the Pioneer Fund's genesis and its founders' emulation of Nazi eugenic policy.

    Since the appearance of Mark H. Haller's Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought in 1963, every decade has seen at least one major book on the history of the American branch of the international eugenics movement. (15) The study of eugenics from a variety of disciplinary perspectives continues to produce new volumes every year. (16) The connections between prominent American eugenicists and their German colleagues during the rise of National Socialism were unearthed by scholars almost thirty years ago, (17) and have become a staple of the history of eugenics. But until recently, no major book on the history of eugenics mentioned the Pioneer Fund. Stefan Kuhl's The Nazi Connection addressed that omission, providing a full volume on transatlantic eugenic linkages, using both American and German archival material. (18) While echoing other scholars who assert that the Pioneer Fund was formed by eugenicists "who supported Hitler's racial ideology," and offering numerous examples of German/American collaboration, Kuhl did not explore the Fund's beginnings in detail. (19)

    The goal of this article is to fill the existing gap in the history of eugenics by presenting a detailed analysis of the role played by American/Nazi connections in the origins of the Pioneer Fund, and by demonstrating the correspondences between eugenic activities undertaken by both Laughlin and Draper and similar initiatives supported by Pioneer. Issues of the Eugenical News, written and edited by Laughlin, as well as Laughlin's personal papers, supply primary source material for this inquiry. (20) Laughlin's correspondence contains a thirty-year record of the relationships he maintained with other eugenic enthusiasts at conferences in America and Europe. The pages of the Eugenical News--the official organ of the Eugenics Record Office, the Eugenics Research Association, the Galton Society, and the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations--provided Laughlin and his colleagues with a journal of record and forum of opinion. The Eugenical News and Laughlin's papers supply a roadmap to Laughlin's contacts with many of the Nazi scientists whose work provided the conceptual template for Hitler's aspirations toward "racial hygiene" in Germany. The map leads directly to the founding of the Pioneer Fund.

    As the first Pioneer Fund President, Laughlin proposed goals for the Fund to pursue in later years. Wickliffe Draper, an ideological twin to Laughlin, bankrolled parts of this eugenic vision. The initiatives that Draper supported included lobbying for immigration restrictions, sponsoring eugenical essay contests, funding the printing and distribution of books advocating the repatriation of blacks to Africa, and endowing the Pioneer Fund. (21) Draper's plan to provide incentives for "eugenic" births mirrored Nazi "marriage loan" programs to increase the "Nordic" birthrate. It was launched as the Pioneer's first large-scale project.

    Draper's relationship with Laughlin was matched by his twenty-five year partnership with Earnest Sevier Cox. (22) Where Laughlin (D.Sc., Princeton, 1917) provided a veneer of scientific respectability for several of Draper's projects, (23) Cox offered a veil of anonymity to cover Draper's role as secret godfather to the white supremacist branch of eugenics. His subsidies to reprint books like Cox's White America (24) supported distribution of racist propaganda to legislators, news editors, and other opinion leaders.

    The Cox/Draper partnership found its most effective ally in Mississippi's U.S. Senator Theodore Bilbo. Described by his biographer as the "Archangel of White Supremacy," Bilbo introduced legislation that kept the movement to repatriate American blacks to Liberia on the U.S. Senate agenda for more than twenty years. (25) The post-World War II activities of Cox and Draper are connected not only to the "back to Africa" movement, but also to former Nazis in South America following the War, and to the American Nazi Party and other hate groups in the 1950s and the 1960s. (26)

    All of these activities belie the protests of Pioneer apologists. Draper, their founder, was not merely a racist, but a racist on a personal quest in pursuit of "scientific" evidence of race differences and white superiority. (27) Pioneer's articles of incorporation, first corporate meeting minutes, and other early records refute the protestations of Pioneer Fund spokesmen, who have attempted to distance Pioneer both from its patently eugenic aspirations and from the Nazi sympathies of Laughlin and Draper, Pioneer's two most important founders. (28)

  2. The Pioneer Fund in the News

    A great deal has been written about the Pioneer Fund in recent years. Anniversaries of signal events in Holocaust history and developments in genetic research have rekindled interest in the history of eugenics, but publication of The Bell Curve has done the most to raise the profile of Pioneer. In each of several volumes of commentary on The Bell Curve, the Pioneer Fund is identified as the funding source for social scientists whose research figures prominently in the debate over the nature of intelligence as an inherited trait. (29) Pioneer grants to groups such as the...

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