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(32,381 posts)
15. The Bell Curve and The Pioneer Fund
Sun May 11, 2014, 08:03 PM
May 2014
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/groups/pioneer-fund



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The Pioneer Fund's original endowment came from Wickliffe Draper, scion of old-stock Protestant gentry. Living in what one historian described as a "quasi-feudal manor house," Draper was raised in Hopedale, Mass., a company town built by his family. After losing a four-month union battle with the far-left International Workers of the World, Draper became a man obsessively seeking a way to restore the old order. Abandoned by the political mainstream after World War II, Draper turned more and more to those academics who were still dedicated to race science and eugenics — most prominently, in the early years, Henry Garrett. During the 1950s and 1960s, Garrett helped distribute Pioneer grants and was one of the founders of the International Association for the Advancement of Eugenics and Ethnology (IAAEE) in 1959. The IAAEE brought together academic defenders of segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa. The Pioneer Fund also supported a variety of institutions working to legitimize race "science," including the IAAEE and the journal Mankind Quarterly, which today is published by long-time eugenicist, anti-Semite and Pioneer grant recipient Roger Pearson.

Many of those involved with the fund early on, including its first president Harry H. Laughlin, had "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 article in the Albany Law Review. In the 1960s, according to William Tucker's scholarly book, The Funding of Scientific Racism, many board members and recipients of Pioneer grants worked to block the civil rights movement.

Arthur Jensen, an educational psychologist focusing on race since 1966, got more than $1 million in Pioneer grants over three decades. In his famous 1969 attack on Head Start — the early-education program that aims to help poor children — Jensen wrote in the prestigious Harvard Education Review that the problem with black children was that they had an average IQ of only 85. No amount of social engineering could improve that performance, he claimed, adding that "eugenic foresight" was the only solution.

Roger Pearson, whose Institute for the Study of Man has been one of the top Pioneer Fund beneficiaries over the past 20 years, may provide the clearest indication of the kind of extremists supported by the fund. Pearson came to the United States in the mid-1960s to join Willis Carto, founder of the anti-Semitic Liberty Lobby. In 1965, Pearson became editor of Western Destiny, a magazine established by Carto and dedicated to spreading extreme-right ideology. Using the pseudonym Stephan Langton, he then became editor of The New Patriot, a short-lived magazine published in 1966 and 1967 to conduct "a responsible but penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question." Its articles carried such titles as "Zionists and the Plot Against South Africa," "Early Jews and the Rise of Jewish Money Power" and "Swindlers of the Crematoria." Pioneer support for all the groups linked to Pearson between 1975 and 1996 amounted to more than $1 million — nearly 10% of total Pioneer grants during that period.

In recent decades, the Pioneer Fund has supported mostly American and British race scientists, including a large number of those cited in The Bell Curve, a widely criticized 1994 book that claimed that differences in intelligence were at least partly determined by race. According to Barry Mehler, a 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, J. Philippe Rushton, William Shockley and Daniel R. Vining Jr.

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And yes, Andrew Sullivan has supported this book.

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