A closer look at the Pioneer Fund: response to Rushton.

• Author: Tucker, William H.
• Position: J. Philippe Rushton, Albany Law Review, vol. 66, p. 207, 2002

INTRODUCTION

Recently in the Albany Law Review, Professor Paul Lombardo described the origins of the Pioneer Fund, noting the Nazi sympathies of Wickliffe Preston Draper, its founder, and Harry H. Laughlin, its first president. (1) My own recent book--The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund--came to similar conclusions about Pioneer's early history and went on to document the role played by its key directors in opposing the civil rights movement on the basis of putatively scientific evidence of black intellectual inferiority. (2) In response, Professor J. Philippe Rushton, the new president of the fund, denied all these charges as based solely on the distortion of "misleading pieces of evidence very selectively picked" and the use of "invective and name-calling." (3) Rushton accused me in particular of taking the "low road" and characterized my work as "propagandistic." (4)

Before offering my own reply to Rushton, let me first observe that I am pleased he has decided to air this issue in an academic journal. Even before reading my book--indeed, even before its publication--Rushton wrote to the executive editor at the University of Illinois Press and to the university president, with a copy to Pioneer's attorney, claiming, on the basis of the description on the Press web page, that I had defamed Pioneer, and suggesting that the Press "withdraw or amend" its advertisement. (5) This apparent attempt to exert legal pressure on my publisher was both disappointing and ironic since Rushton has justifiably complained about attempts to suppress his own academic freedom. (6) The fact that he has now chosen to engage in, rather than attempt to stifle, debate is to be commended.

Although my book is filled with evidence--much of it from previously unexamined archives--amply demonstrating the truth of Pioneer's origin and agenda, I cannot, of course, reproduce the entire case in the limited space here. As a consequence, I shall confine myself to the major points raised in Rushton's article.

1. THE VIEWS OF PIONEER DIRECTORS

   1. Wickliffe Preston Draper

      Rushton describes Pioneer's founders as "[d]istinguished Americans," (7) who created a fund to support "resolute, path-breaking scientists intrepidly working at the frontiers of knowledge in the study of human heredity." (8) Actually, Draper's attorney and fellow board member recounted in 1947 that Draper was "not ... concerned with research in human genetics since he felt that enough was known on the subject" (9) and was more interested in doing "something practical" with the knowledge, such as "moving the colored race to Liberia." (10) Consistent with this view Draper provided, during the 1930s, the finances for a campaign by Klansman Earnest Sevier Cox to repatriate blacks to Africa, an effort that Draper planned to resume after the war. (11)

      However, when a movement arose in the 1950s, not to repatriate blacks but to grant them long-deferred rights, Draper changed his priorities and poured millions of dollars into the segregationist cause (12)--most of this money going to scientifically-based attempts to keep blacks separate and unequal. (13) Harry Weyher, president of the Pioneer board, orchestrated these efforts, and John Bond Trevor Jr., another board member, participated in their planning and implementation. The two men together with Draper comprised the core of the organization. (14) In addition, Draper sent annual and very substantial personal gifts to numerous segregationist scientists as "token[s] of ... appreciation of [their] scientific efforts during the past year." (15) Anatomy professor Wesley Critz George, for example, received a series of checks from Wickliffe Draper (16)--totaling tens of thousands of dollars adjusted for inflation (17)--after writing pamphlets encouraging defiance of the Brown decision because blacks were genetically inferior and would "further[] the deterioration of our race and our civilization." (18) Another recipient of Draper's generosity was psychologist and eventual Pioneer board member Henry E. Garrett, who led the scientific assault on integration. Garrett wrote that "the normal African Negro resemble[d] the European after a frontal leucotomy" (19) but that no matter how intelligent "a Negro may be, his ancestors were (and his kinsmen still are) savages ..." (20) In private correspondence Garrett suggested that "our best bet" to prevent implementation of the Brown decision would be to "[m]ake the white schools so unpleasant for them that the Negroes withdraw...." (21) In addition to annual gifts in appreciation for these efforts, Garrett received a bequest of $50,000 in Draper's will--now over $200,000 adjusted for inflation. (22) The will also left millions of dollars to Pioneer and one other foundation directed by Weyher and Trevor to support a system of private, segregated schools in Mississippi, developed as a method to avoid the Brown decision. (23)

      There is also little doubt about Draper's Nazi sympathies. As Lombardo's article noted, Draper participated in a 1935 conference in Berlin as one of two American delegates, the other of whom toasted ""'that great leader, Adolf Hitler'"" and praised German racial policy as ""'a pattern which other nations must follow.'"" (24) Draper later became the principal source of financial support for the American Coalition of Patriotic Societies, (25) which was named by the United States Department of Justice in a 1942 sedition indictment for pro-Nazi activities. (26) In 1962, the coalition, now headed by Pioneer board member Trevor, called for an immediate amnesty for convicted Nazi war criminals. (27)

      One of Draper's last acts before his death in 1972 was to finance publication of The Dispossessed Majority (28) by the pseudonymous author Wilmot Robertson--another project in which Weyher and Trevor were also involved. (29) Explaining that almost all of the nation's contemporary problems stemmed from the presence of "unassimilable minorities"--not only blacks but also Asians, Hispanics, Greeks, Southern Italians, Arabs, Amerindians, and Jews (30)--Robertson declared that these groups should not be entitled to Constitutional protections. In particular, Robertson obsessed over "Jewish hegemony," (31) noting their fear and loathing of Western civility and their "vendetta ... against all things non-Jewish." (32) West Germany, however, had emerged from the war an "economic miracle," "free of Jewish financial domination." (33) "[T]o put a stop to the Jewish envelopment of America," wrote Robertson, "history should not be repeated;" this time, "[t]he operation ought to be accomplished with ... finesse." (34) When Carleton Putnam, one of the activists for segregation supported by Draper, was particularly enamored of Robertson's work, Trevor wrote to Weyher, expressing his surprise that Putnam had such "a good understanding of the broad spectrum of problems which face us--excellent as his views are" on the racial issue. (35) To Draper, Trevor, and Weyher--the "us" in the above observation--behind the struggle to preserve American apartheid lay the real enemy--the Jew.

      Incidentally, Rushton emphasized Draper's military record as evidence that Pioneer's founder could not possibly have had "'pro-Nazi' leanings." (36) This is an obvious non sequitur as exemplified by the fact that Robertson, who considered Hitler's defeat "shattering to Northern Europeans, both in Europe and America," served with the allies in combat during World War II. (37)

   2. Harry Hamilton Laughlin

      According to Rushton, Harry Laughlin held "anti-racist" views and offered a "nuanced" analysis of the differences between blacks and whites. (38) Actually, Laughlin--the man selected by Draper to be the first president of the Pioneer Fund--was a virulent white supremacist, who wished to rid the United States of blacks. When Earnest Cox wrote White America, proposing the repatriation of all Blacks, Laughlin reviewed the book in a journal that he edited. Laughlin declared that Cox could be "a greater savior of his country than George Washington" if he could save America "for the white race" by implementing this solution to "the worst thing that ever happened to the ... United States, ... the bringing of large numbers of the Negroes, nearly the lowest of races, to our shores." (39) Laughlin later arranged the meeting of Cox with Draper that led to the latter's financial support of the repatriation movement. (40)

      Rushton argued that the claim that Laughlin wished to exclude Jews from American society is based on...