The Subway Canaries

This is where it all started – The Pioneer Fund

The Pioneer Fund was founded by Wickliffe Preston Drapier in 1937.  The Pioneer Fund’s list of founders and directors paints an august picture of him. 

This 1977 NYTimes piece paints an entirely different picture of him and of the Pioneer Fund.  It also makes you think twice about trusting anything that has a ‘conservative label’.  I do not like what I am finding. 

“…Wickliffe Preston Draper, the founder of The Pioneer Fund, is the epitome of an American Hitler in the guise of a philanthropic and well educated millionaire. His family owned Draper Corporation, in Hopedale, MA and both North and South Carolina and he was a staunch anti-Union activist from the early days of Sacco and Vanzetti Trial in Dedham, MA only 30 miles from his hometown of Hopedale, MA in the heart of the Blackstone Valley which was the home of the Industrial Revolution. He was also among the most ardent and vehement racists and anti-civil rights advocates in the history of this cause from as early as the 1930′s and perhaps earlier. His hatred of the United Nations, liberals, and his dislike for anyone who participated in the Nye Committees of the 1930′s which attempted to punish so-called “war profiteering” by the DuPonts, led to Draper’s deliberate persecution of Alger T. Hiss between 1948 and 1951 with the assistance of his cohort in racism, eugenics and white supremacy, Nathaniel Weyl, who is still alive today.

Draper’s vitriolic hatred for President John F. Kennedy was epitomized by his direct financial sponsorship of several publications that led the character assassination attacks on him during the 1950′s when he was a Senator from Massachusetts. These included Human Events, Right magazine, Noontide Press, The American Mercury and comparable rightist publications ostensibly owned and operated by The Liberty Lobby or affiliates, the foremost racist, proto-fascist and anti-Semitic organization that has ever existed in a Democracy. Only a Democracy could be brought to its knees by the sinister forces of fascism, operating under the protection of the First Amendment to the Constitution. This is a very sad commentary on our times and on the foibles of our once magnificent system of egalitarian democracy.

And, doesn’t this Pioneer Fund bio of  Harry Hamilton Laughlin sound wonderful? “…life-long scientist. Laughlin served as long-time director of the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York, funded by the Carnegie Institute of Washington. Among his duties was the editing of the Eugenical News, which reported on scientific research and eugenic issues from around the world.  Born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, in 1880, the son of a minister and academic, Laughlin grew up in Kirksville, Missouri. He first taught school for ten years before developing an interest in agriculture and plant and animal breeding. In 1910 Laughlin moved to Cold Spring Harbor. In 1917 he received a Doctorate of Science from Princeton for his work in genetics. During the 1920s and 1930s Laughlin served as an advisor to several Congressional Committees. He retired in 1941 and died in 1943.”

Well, they leave out a few things….” ….In the spirit of Dr. Josef Goebbels, he (Draper) and his close associate at The Pioneer Fund, Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, actually created and then championed the “involuntary sterilization movement in America” the so-called “Buck vs. Bell” Supreme Court case which was favorably reviewed by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. It led directly to the involuntary sterilization of over 75,000 human beings between 1924 and 1972 in the approximately 24 states which passed similar laws at the behest and encouragement of The Pioneer Fund. Sound familiar? But the first major achievement of his work and that of Herr Laughlin, was when Hitler and Goebbels invited Laughlin to receive an honorary degree for his work in passing “The Model Eugenics Laws in America”. Hitler used the Draper-inspired American Eugenics Model to pass the law which will go down in infamy as the Nuremberg Laws: “On the Prevention of Hereditarily Ill Progeny” – the so-called Holocaust Laws.”

From the SPLC’s expose on the Pioneer Fund:  “…With an original charter to pursue “race betterment” for those “deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution,” the Pioneer Fund was founded in 1937 in New York.

Many involved in the early years of the fund, including its first president Harry H. Laughlin, maintained “contacts with many of the Nazi scientists whose work provided the conceptual template for Hitler’s aspiration toward ‘racial hygiene’ in Germany,” according to an Albany Law Review article by Paul Lombardo. In The Funding of Scientific Racism, scholar William Tucker reveals how Pioneer board members and grantees sought to block the civil rights movement in the 1960s.

In recent decades, the Pioneer Fund has funded most American and British race scientists, including a large number cited in The Bell Curve. According to Barry Mehler, the leading academic critic of the fund, these race scientists have included Hans Eysenck, Robert A. Gordon, Linda Gottfredson, Seymour Itzkoff, Arthur Jensen, Michael Levin, Richard Lynn, R. Travis Osborne, Roger Pearson, J. Philippe Rushton, William Shockley and Daniel R. Vining Jr.

Last year, Rushton became the fourth president of the fund. He disavows the terms “inferior” and “superior” but, as psychologist Andrew S. Winston points out, Rushton has produced a chart in which blacks “are said to have, on average, smaller brains, lower intelligence, lower cultural achievements, higher aggressiveness, lower law-abidingness, lower marital stability and less sexual restraint than whites, and the differences are attributed partially to heredity.”

Pioneer grantees have also included white supremacist Jared Taylor. According to Hold Your Tongue, a book by education expert James Crawford, the Pioneer Fund also “aided the Institute for Western Values — the same group Cordelia May [Scaife, sister of Richard Mellon Scaife] paid to distribute [the racist book] The Camp of the Saints — in publishing the autobiography of Thomas Dixon,” whose racist novels helped spark the Klan’s rebirth in 1915.

Pioneer also has given grants to the American Immigration Control Foundation*, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, Roger Pearson’s Institute for the Study of Man, Jared Taylor’s New Century Foundation* and Project USA, an anti-immigration group run by a FAIR board member.”

Several years ago, the SPLC pegged the Pioneer Fund as a leading supporter and ‘parent’ of the anti-immigration movement.  Be aware it isn’t just anti-illegal – but anti-immigration. This is March, 2003.

“A few sectors of the radical right seemed to thrive. In particular, the world of academic racists — those who promote racial theories of intelligence and a return to the discredited “science” of eugenics, or “race betterment” — is doing well.

The Pioneer Fund, which funds such studies, has received new infusions of cash in the last two years. Funding is also up for the New Century Foundation, which publishes the eugenicist American Renaissance magazine, whose circulation has now reached 6,000.

In addition, anti-immigrant groups have benefited tremendously from worries about foreign terrorism that have some Americans wanting to shut down national borders. Several major vigilante groups are currently operating in southeastern Arizona, where they have participated in roundups of illegal immigrants. The activities of these groups, as well as the recent murders of a number of Mexicans as they tried to cross the U.S. border, have many officials deeply worried.

Again, from 2003 this FAIR (Fair Accuracy In Reporting) ”Recent media coverage of immigration has been dominated by anti-immigrant voices; immigrant and refugee rights advocates have been slighted. In this often one-sided discussion, no group has enjoyed more exposure than the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Retorm (also abbreviated as “FAIR,” not to be confused with the media watch group FAIR). Media outlets have an obligation to balance this important debate and take a closer look at the motives and money behind the anti-immigration movement.

The Federation, led by spokesman Dan Stein, often appears in national media unopposed or paired with centrist politicians (NBC Today Show, 6/29/1993; CNN Inside Politics, 7/13/1993; CBS 60 Minutes, 3/14/1993). A database search shows that the Federation has been cited hundreds of times in mainstream media since 1993.

While presenting itself as an organization that simply advocates for immigration reform in the public interest, the Federation receives significant funding– rarely noted in press accounts– from a foundation that is explicitly motivated by a racist, eugenicist ideology.

For years, the Federation has been supported by the Pioneer Fund, a trust founded in 1937 by Wycliffe P. Draper, a textile millionaire who promoted sending blacks back to Africa. The Pioneer Fund has been described in the London Sunday Telegraph (3/12/89) as a “neo-Nazi organization closely integrated with the far right in American politics.”
Pioneer is one of the Federation’s key financial backers. According to Internal Revenue Service records, the group has received more than $1 million from Pioneer since 1982. In 1992, the most recent year for which figures are available, Pioneer gave the Federation $130,000.

The Pioneer Fund’s charter specified that its trustees should give scholarships only to students “who are citizens of the United States…who are deemed to be descended predominately from white persons who settled in the original 13 states prior to the adoption of the Constitution.” In 1983, due to public criticism, the word “white” was omitted from the charter (Washington Times, 7/3/91).

John Tanton founded the Federation in 1979 and was chairman when the group began receiving Pioneer Fund money in 1982. In 1983, Tanton founded U. S. English an English-only advocacy group. In 1988, conservative Linda Chavez resigned as president of U.S. English following the publication of a internal memo written by Tanton. The memo, which resulted from a closed meeting that included Federation for American Immigration Reform personnel, discusses the “dangers” of an Hispanic “population explosion.” In it Tanton declares, “Whites will see their power and control over their lives declining…. Perhaps this is the first instance in which those with their pants up are going to be caught by those with their pants down.” (Newsday, 10/16/1991)

As well you know, FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) is given national status by highly respectable pundits like Michael Reagan, Fox News, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and they have infiltrated the Heritage Foundation.  FAIR has this false veneer of respectability that makes it sacret to the RINO Conservatives in Congress, who either do not know about the Nazi links, pretend ignorance, or don’t care.  Either way, their acceptace of FAIR and the Pioneer Fund is unacceptable.

The article continues with even more nazi links.  “By accepting money from the Pioneer Fund, the Federation for American Immigration Reform puts itself in the company of a variety of racist projects. The Fund’s other beneficiaries in recent years have included:

–Roger Pearson, director of the Institute for the Study of Man. A Wall Street Journal article in 1984 dubbed Pearson a “Racial Purist” who advocated artificial insemination to preserve pure, healthy stock” and warned of “terrible consequences” should such a program of genetic selection “fall into the hands of the cosmopolites or or one-worlders, or any who wish to see our race and our heritage destroyed.”

Pearson’s Institute publishes Mankind Ouarterly, described in the London Independent (3/4/90) as a “mouthpiece” for neo-Nazi philosophies, with links to former Nazi geneticists. Last grant to Pearson from the Pioneer Fund: $119,300, 1992.

–A study at the University of Western Ontario, comparing cranium size, gonad size and IQ distribution among blacks, whites and Asians (Sunday Telegraph, 3/12/89). Last grant: $96,753, 1992.

–Dr. Michael Levin, professor of philosophy at City College who claims that blacks as a group have low IQs. Last grant: $64,500, 1992.

–The late Professor William B. Shockley, who recommended a “voluntary sterilization bonus plan,” or paying genetically “inferior” populations to be sterilized. (Sunday Telegraph, 3/1 2/89). Last grants were in the 1970′s; figures not available.”

The Pioneer Fund’s John Rushton is the subject of a study by The Bethune Institute for Anti-Fascist Studies:  “Joining Rushton on the editorial board of the Pioneer Fund is Richard Lynn, a psychologist with the University of Ulster, in Northern Ireland. Lynn, who shares Rushton’s racist positions, and has also long benefited from Pioneer Fund largesse, further claims that Africans are “more psychopathic” than whites, and have a marked tendency to develop “psychopathic personalities” which leads them to be more aggressive, more reckless, and more prone to lying than whites.

Lynn has been an associate editor of the fascist journal “Mankind Quarterly,” whose editorial board and circle of contributors has included Corrado Gini, a leading biologist in Mussolini’s Italy and author of “The Scientific Basis of Fascism,” and Ottmar von Verschuer, a racist scientist in Nazi Germany and mentor to Josef Mengele, the “butcher of Auschwitz.”

“Mankind Quarterly” is itself financed by the Pioneer Fund, and has been edited by Roger Pearson, who founded the neo-Nazi Northern League in 1958, along with several former Nazi SS officers. It should come as no surprise that “Mankind Quarterly” has published numerous papers by Philippe Rushton and the circle of racist and fascist scientists whose work has been paid for out of the bank accounts of the Pioneer Fund.

The connection between racist science and fascist politics could not be more evident. Indeed, as long ago as 1989, Rushton gave a speech to the Citizens for Foreign Aid Reform, an organization founded and led by Toronto-based anti-immigrant and pro-fascist propagandist Paul Fromm.

Fromm, in turn, has for years peddled and promoted Rushton’s books, and in 1990 he authored the pamphlet, “Race, Evolution, and AIDS: What Rushton Really Said.” At the present time, Fromm continues to sell his pamphlet, as well as Rushton’s “Race, Evolution, and Behavior,” and Glayde Whitney’s “Race, Genetics, and Society.” Whitney, a University of Miami racist psychologist also financed by the Pioneer Fund, wrote the introduction to Klansman David Duke’s autobiography “My Awakening,” available along with the other titles through Fromm’s organizations.

With right-wing governments in power across Canada and the USA, funding for science that legitimately serves the people is drying up. The corporate-driven political agenda has no need for history, sociology, philosophy, or any academic discipline that does not cater to the direct accumulation of private profit.

But with Philippe Rushton’s ascendancy to the control of the Pioneer Fund, the floodgates will be opened to every racist and fascist propagandist that hides behind the cloak of science. Segregation, the destruction of affirmative action, the elimination of non-white immigration, and eventually the establishment of a whites-only political state: these are the social policies that have always guided the Pioneer Fund and which will undoubtedly find many willing ears in this period when imperialism is tottering on the brink of fascism. …

Another important Pioneer Fund figure was Roger Preston, also a first class nazi!  The thing is, people have known about what was going on with the Pioneer Fund and anti-immigration for at least 10-15 years.  Ignorance is not bliss.  It is ignorance. 

 This is a monograph by Chip Bertlet’s Political Research Associates.
27 February, 1995 Policy-Making Influence of the Pioneer Foundation  “…The Northern League, for which Pearson was the London-based organizer in 1958, was a “white supremacist European organization that included former Nazi SS officials.” In 1959, Willis Carto, founder of the racist and anti-semitic Liberty Lobby, arranged a speaking tour for Pearson in the U.S. Carto’s magazine, Right, called Pearson “the world’s foremost spokesman for the scientific and forward-looking view of nationalism. He is held in renown by white nationalists the world over.” Pearson moved to the U.S. in 1965 in order to edit Western Destiny, a Carto publication whose editorial board included well-known racists and anti-Semites, including Austin App, the pro-Nazi leader of the German American National Congress (DANK) who wrote The Six Million Swindle, which claims the holocaust never happened. Pearson published four racist monographs during this time, one of which was called Race and Civilization, which stated that it was based on the ideas of Hans F.K. Gunther, who was a leading racial theoretician for the Third Reich, and who later worked with Pearson organizing the Northern League. In his 1966 book Eugenics and Race, Pearson wrote: “If a nation with a more advanced, more specialized, or in any way superior sets of genes mingles with, instead of exterminating, an inferior tribe, then it commits racial suicide….” It’s no wonder that Pearson’s monographs are still sold by neo-Nazi groups today….”

One of the things that bothers me about this whole anti-immigration thing is the Heritage Foundation.  I’ve wondered about a few things, and now I know why.  Preston was a close friend of the president of the Heritage Foundation.”…Pearson became associated with the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank influential in forming Reagan administration policy. Pearson was close to Edwin Fuelner, president of the Heritage Foundation, and joined the editorial board of Policy Review, the monthly HF magazine. In turn HF official Stuart Butler and editorial board member Ernest van den Haag (the long time writer for the National Review, who has publicly stated his opposition to school integration and support for Shockley’s sterilization proposals), joined the advisory committee of Pearson’s Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies…“