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The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences." Currently headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton, the fund focuses on projects it perceives will not be easily funded due to controversial subject matter. The foundation has its headquarters in the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City.

Two of the most notable studies funded by the Pioneer Fund are the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart and the Texas Adoption Project, which studied the similarities and differences of identical twins and other children adopted into non-biological families. The Pioneer Fund has been an important source of funding for research on the partly genetic hypothesis of IQ variation among races. The fund's grantees and publications have generated controversy since the 1994 publication of The Bell Curve, which drew heavily from Pioneer-funded research. The fund has also been criticized for its perceived stance on eugenics.

Researchers who have been criticized for accepting grants from the fund have argued that the public debates have been disconnected from the expert debates. Robert A. Gordon, for example, replied to media criticisms of grant-recipients: "Politically correct disinformation about science appears to spread like wildfire among literary intellectuals and other nonspecialists, who have few disciplinary constraints on what they say about science and about particular scientists and on what they allow themselves to believe."

Early history

The Pioneer Fund was incorporated on March 11, 1937. The first five directors were:

  • Wickliffe Preston Draper, heir to a large fortune and the fund's de facto final authority, served on the Board of Directors from 1937 until 1972. During World War I, he served in the British Army and fought in the battles of Neuve-Chapelle, Aubers Ridge, Messines and Ypres. He was awarded the British Star Medal (1914–1915) and the Belgian Croix de Guerre for his service. Later, he joined the American army where he was eventually promoted to lieutenant colonel in the cavalry. The Pioneer Fund describes him as someone who dedicated "his life to intellectual pursuits and philanthropy." Pioneer Fund critic William H. Tucker, however, describes Draper as someone who "aside from his brief periods of military service ... never pursued a profession or held a job of any kind." According to a 1960 article in The Nation, an unnamed geneticist said Draper told him he "wished to prove simply that Negroes were inferior." He is said to have funded advocates of repatriation of blacks to Africa. Draper allegedly 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.
  • Harry Laughlin was the director of the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York, funded by the Carnegie Institute of Washington. He served as the president of the Pioneer Fund from its inception until 1941. He was one of the eugenics movement's most energetic legislative activists. He worried about 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". He singled out Jews as a group "slow to assimilate," a problem related to his doubts that their loyalty was directed primarily to "American institutions and people" rather than to "Jews scattered through other nations." Eleven months after the Nuremberg Laws, Laughlin wrote to an official at the University of Heidelberg, which had awarded him an honorary doctorate, arguing 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."
  • 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". 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 U.S. Representative to the U.N. Atomic Energy Commission.
  • Malcolm Donald was the Draper family lawyer, 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. Harlan's 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. During his confirmation process, he voiced support for the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, but on the bench limited civil rights in Swain v. Alabama and dissented on Miranda v. Arizona.

The 1937 incorporation documents of the Pioneer Fund list two purposes. The first, modeled on the Nazi Lebensborn breeding program, 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". 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."

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. According to the Pioneer Fund site, all founders capable of doing so participated in the war against the Nazis.

Draper secretly met Dr. 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.

In the 1950s and 1960s Draper 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 (an educator known for his belief in the genetic inferiority of blacks), and Senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi, head of the Draper Genetics Committee.

Subsequent directors included:

Current funding

Most of the Pioneer Fund's grants go to scientific research, including to researchers at 38 universities, and a smaller amount has gone to political or legal organizations, mostly to immigration restriction organizations. This section's figures are from 1971 to 1996 and are adjusted to 1997 USD.

Scientific research

Many of the researchers whose findings support the hereditarian hypothesis of racial IQ disparity have received grants of varying sizes from the Pioneer Fund. Large grantees, in order of amount received, are

  • Thomas J. Bouchard at the University of Minnesota. As compiled in 1997, the recipient of the largest amount of funding ($2.3 million USD) was Thomas J. Bouchard's landmark twin study, the Minnesota Study of Identical Twins Reared Apart (MISTRA), better known as the Minnesota Twins Project. The Minnesota Twins Project compared identical and fraternal twins who had been brought up in different families. Another notable twin study that was partially funded by the fund is the Texas Adoption Project, which compared adopted children to their birth and adopted families. The studies, along with similar studies, have demonstrated that the heritabilities of intelligence and personality measures are 50 percent or more.
  • Arthur Jensen at the Institute for the Study of Educational Differences
  • J. Philippe Rushton at the University of Western Ontario is the current head of the fund since 2002. In 1999, Rushton used some of his grant money from the Pioneer fund to send out tens of thousands of copies of an abridged version of his book Race, Evolution and Behavior to social scientists in anthropology, psychology, and sociology, causing a controversy. The book describes Rushton's differential K theory. Tax records from 2000 show that his Charles Darwin Institute received $473,835—73% of that year's grants.
  • Roger Pearson at the Institute for the Study of Man. Eugenicist and anthropologist, founder of the Journal of Indo-European Studies, received over a million dollars in grants in the eighties and the nineties. Using the pseudonym of Stephan Langton, Pearson was the editor of The New Patriot, a short-lived magazine published in 1966–67 to conduct "a responsible but penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question," which included articles such as "Zionists and the Plot Against South Africa," "Early Jews and the Rise of Jewish Money Power," and "Swindlers of the Crematoria.". The Northern League, an organization founded in England in 1958 by Pearson, supported Nazi ideologies and included former members of the Nazi Party.
  • Richard Lynn at Ulster Institute for Social Research (also on Mankind Quarterly editorial board)
  • Linda Gottfredson at the University of Delaware.
The Pioneer Fund funds research on the basis and correlates of human ability and diversity. Notable topics in this research are the heredity and neuroscience of intelligence.

Other notable recipients of funding include:

Note that the fund has only funded some of their research, not necessarily their most important contributions.

Political and legal funding

The Fund gave the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) a total of $1.3 million between 1985 and 1994. Among the grants was $150,000 for 'studies in connection with immigration policies'. Funding was dropped after negative publicity during the campaign for California's Proposition 187 linked the Pioneer Fund to ads purchased by FAIR. Other immigration reduction groups that have received donations from the Pioneer Fund include ProjectUSA, Californians for Population Stabilization, and American Immigration Control Foundation.

A minor grantee is the paleoconservative and white nationalist journalist Jared Taylor, the editor of American Renaissance and a member the advisory board of the white nationalist publication the Occidental Quarterly. 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.

Controversy

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Criticism

In addition to the funding and the connections to persons and organizations mentioned above, there are reported links between Nazism and various past contributors to the journal Mankind Quarterly, which receives funding from Pioneer. Italian biologist and Mankind Quarterly associate editor Corrado Gini authored an article titled "The Scientific Basis of Fascism" and was once a scientific advisor to Italian leader Benito Mussolini. Editorial board member Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer was Josef Mengele's mentor before and during the Holocaust and is suspected of being his collaborator. The already mentioned Roger Pearson was formerly an editor.

File:Otmar von Verschuer.jpg
Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, circa 1920s–1940s, measures twin girls as part of an anthropometric study of heredity.

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." It has also been criticized by some scientists and journalists, and in various peer-reviewed academic articles. Critics of the fund include the SPLC, professor of psychology William H. Tucker, and historian Barry Mehler and his Institute for the Study of Academic Racism. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit organization, lists the Pioneer Fund as a hate group, citing the fund's history, its funding of race and intelligence research, and its connections with racist individuals.

The Center for New Community, a human rights advocacy organization, mentioned the Pioneer Fund in an article on their website. They 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.

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 academically based scientists. In addition to these awards to the universities where its grantees are based, Pioneer has made a number of grants to other nonprofit organizations, corporations some feel have been created to channel resources to a particular academic recipient while circumventing the institution where the researcher is employed.

In 2002, William H. Tucker criticized the Pioneer'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.

Rushton, the current head, has spoken at conferences of the American Renaissance (AR) magazine, in which he has also published articles. Anti-racist Searchlight Magazine described one such AR conference as a "veritable 'who's who' of American white supremacy."

Responses to criticisms

The Pioneer Fund's history after its 1937 incorporation focused on improving hereditary characteristics, which at the time was pursued through the scholarly field eugenics. The scientific community had enthusiasm for what they saw as the promise of eugenics, and most developed nations employed some form of it, most commonly compulsory sterilization of those considered to have incurable hereditary diseases. High school and college textbooks from the 1920s through the 40s often had chapters touting the scientific progress to be had from applying eugenic principles to the population. Following World War II, however, eugenics became associated with the brutal policies of the Nazis and fell out of favour.

In addition to this historical focus of the Pioneer Fund, some of the fund's previous members and grantees—and essentially all of its administrators and board members, not least of all founder Wickliffe Preston Draper—had supported ideas such as racial segregation and even the wholescale deportation of black Americans to Africa. The fund's administrators state that any criticism should be directed at these past individuals, not the entire organization, which funds much notable scientific work. The fund claims that it holds no political position or any inappropriate bias in choosing grantees. Pioneer supports research some consider controversial; for example, the study of the disparity between racial groups in average cognitive ability test scores (race and intelligence). Such studies examine the genetic and environmental factors underlying these group differences, and the results of studies supported by the Pioneer Fund invariably come down on the genetic side of the question, providing further fuel for suspicion as to the objectivity of Pioneer Fund backed research.

The Pioneer Fund has stated that it rejects racism, and has claimed that it is the victim of smear campaigns waged by those who consider a discussion of race to be taboo. In addition, it has asserted that the majority of the criticism directed at the Fund falls into such categories as to make it more-appropriately directed at individuals than at an organization as a whole.

The Fund writes on their website that one should consider the historical context surrounding such beliefs, as many mainstream scientists of the first half the twentieth century supported racialist views seen by some as politically incorrect today. They say that Wickliffe Draper's views on race do not influence decisions made by the Fund today.

Charles Murray, co-author of The Bell Curve, addressed the fund's history in response to criticism of it: "the relationship between the founder of the Pioneer Fund and today's Pioneer Fund is roughly analogous to the relationship between Henry Ford and today's Ford Foundation." In the 1920s, Henry Ford published anti-Semitic literature.

Behavioral geneticist David T. Lykken wrote "If you can find me some rich villains that want to contribute to my research—Qaddafi, the Mafia, whoever—the worse they are, the better I'll like it. I'm doing a social good by taking their money... Any money of theirs that I spend in a legitimate and honorable way, they can't spend in a dishonorable way".

Science writer Morton Hunt received Pioneer funding for his book and wrote: "One could spend hundreds of pages on the pros and cons of the case of the Pioneer Fund, but what matters to me—and should matter to my readers—is that I have been totally free to research and write as I chose. I alerted Pioneer to my political views when making the grant proposal for this book but its directors never blinked."

In a review of Richard Lynn's book on the Pioneer Fund, psychologist Ulrich Neisser, a prominent critic of race-based research, writes: "All things considered, I doubt that the Pioneer Fund's political activities have made much difference one way or the other. The world would have been much the same without them. On the other hand, Lynn reminds us that Pioneer has sometimes sponsored useful research – research that otherwise might not have been done at all. By that reckoning, I would give it a weak plus."

See also

Notes

  1. "About Us." Pioneer Fund. Retrieved on December 15, 2009.
  2. Lombardo, Paul A. (2002). ""The American Breed": Nazi eugenics and the origins of the Pioneer Fund". Albany Law Rev. 65 (3): 743–830. PMID 11998853.
    Rushton, J. Philippe (2002). "The Pioneer Fund and the Scientific Study of Human Differences". Albany Law Rev. 66: 209.
    Lombardo, Paul A. (2002). "Pioneer's Big Lie". Albany Law Rev. 66: 1125.
    Tucker, William H. (2002). "A Closer Look at the Pioneer Fund: Response to Rushton". Albany Law Rev. 66: 1145.
  3. Gordon 1997, Pioneer Fund, p. 35.
  4. Lynn, Richard (2001). The Science of Human Diversity: A History of the Pioneer Fund. Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 3–19. ISBN 0-7618-2041-8.
  5. Pioneer Fund Founders Retrieved April 11, 2007.
  6. ^ Tucker, William H (2002). The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 0-252-02762-0.
  7. May, R.W. (May 14, 1960). "Genetics and Subversion". The Nation. 190: 421.
  8. Osborn, Frederick (24 February 1937). 'Summary of the proceedings' of the Conference on Eugenics in Relation to Nursing. American Eugenics Society Archives.
  9. ^ Mehler, Barry (1989). "Foundation for Fascism: the New Eugenics Movement in the United States". Patterns of Prejudice. 23 (4).
  10. Crawford, James (1993). Hold Your Tongue: Bilingualism and the Politics of "English Only". Addison Wesley. ISBN 978-0201624793.
  11. ^ Pioneer Fund. Founders and Former Directors. Retrieved July 16, 2006.
  12. Begos, Kevin (December 11, 2002). Benefactor With a Racist Bent: Wealthy recluse apparently liked the looks and potential of Bowman Gray's new medical-genetics department. Winston-Salem Journal
  13. Lichtenstein, Grace (December 11, 1977). Fund Backs Controversial Study of "Racial Betterment." New York Times
  14. Mehler, Barry. Pioneer Fund Grant Totals, 1971-1996. Retrieved July 16, 2006.
  15. ^ Mehler, Barry (July 7, 1998). Race Science and the Pioneer Fund Originally published as "The Funding of the Science" in Searchlight, No. 277.
  16. Tucker, William H. [http://www.press.uillinois.edu/epub/books/tucker/concl.html Conclusion: Pioneer or Pamphleteer] The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund.
  17. The Journal of Indo-European Studies via A. Richard Diebold Center for Indo-European Language and Culture.
  18. "The Anti-Immigration Movement: From Shovels to Suits" Solana Larsen. NACLA Report on the Americas. New York: May/Jun 2007. Vol. 40, Iss. 3; p. 14, 5 pgs
  19. Lombardo, P. [http://www.albanylawreview.org/archives/65/3/TheAmericanBreed-NaziEugenicsandtheOriginsofthePioneerFund.pdf “THE AMERICAN BREED: NAZI EUGENICS AND THE ORIGINS OF THE PIONEER FUND"] Retrieved May 21, 2008. Albany Law Review
  20. "Pro-Prop. 187 group admits it bought ads POLITICS: FAIR says it only attempted to clear its name." MARILYN KALFUS: The Orange County Register. Orange County Register. Santa Ana, Calif.: Oct 26, 1994. p. A.12
  21. "White Supremacist Link Trips Prop. 187" Pamela Burdman, Chronicle Staff Writer. San Francisco Chronicle. San Francisco, Calif.: Oct 13, 1994. p. A.4
  22. "Cannon critics sidestep FEC lists" Deborah Bulkeley Deseret Morning News. Deseret News. Salt Lake City, Utah: Jul 17, 2004. pg. B.01
  23. "'Workers, go home!'" David L Ostendorf. The Christian Century. Chicago: Dec 19-Dec 26, 2001. Vol. 118, Iss. 35; pg. 8, 2 pgs
  24. ^ Southern Poverty Law Center Into the Mainstream; An array of right-wing foundations and think tanks support efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable. Retrieved April 15, 2008.
  25. http://www.eugenics-watch.com/intro.html
  26. bethuneinstitute.org
  27. Dr. Josef Mengele, ruthless Nazi concentration camp doctor - The Crime Library - The Crime library
  28. Southern Poverty Law Center Race and 'Reason'; Academic ideas a pillar of racist thought. Retrieved April 15, 2008.
  29. Defend Colorado Now: Lamm & FAIR
  30. ^ Tucker, William H. (2007). The funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund. University of Illinois Press. ISBN 978-0-252-07463-9. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |laydate= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |laysummary= ignored (help)
  31. [http://www.ferris.edu/isar/Institut/pioneer/pfspread/pfp6.htm Pioneer Fund Grants, 1971-1996
  32. http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?pid=214#27
  33. http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/index.php?link=template&story=162
  34. Murray, Charles (May 1995). "The Bell Curve" and its critics. Commentary, v99 n5 p23(8).
  35. Patricia Ohman (7 March 1984). "Do they get what they Pay for?", Minneapolis City Pages, p. 8.
  36. Hunt, Morton (1998). The New Know-Nothings: The Political Foes of the Scientific Study of Human Nature. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0-7658-0497-2.
  37. Neisser 2004

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