Pioneer Fund - Early History

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. He founded the Pioneer Fund after having acquired an interest in the Eugenics movement, which was strengthened by his 1935 visit to Nazi Germany, where he met with the leading eugenicists of the Third Reich who used the inspiration from the American movement as a basis for the Nuremberg Laws. He served in the British army at the beginning of WWI, transferring to the US Army as the Americans entered the war. During WWII he was stationed as an intelligence officer in India. Psychology professor and 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." Draper funded advocacy of repatriation of blacks to Africa. Draper also 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:

• John M. Woolsey, Jr., a staff attorney at the Nuremberg Trials
• Henry E. Garrett (1972–1973), the former president of the American Psychological Association
• James P. Kranz, Jr. (1948)
• Henry Rice Guild (1948–1974)
• Charles Codman Cabot (1950–1973)
• Harry F. Weyher, Jr. (1958–2002)
• John B. Trevor, Jr. (1959–2000)
• John F. Walsh, Jr. (1971–1973)
• Marion A. Parrott (1973–2000)
• Thomas F. Ellis (1973–1977)
• Eugenie Mary Ladenburg Davie (Mrs. Preston) (1974–1975)
• Randolph L. Speight (1975–1999)
• William Dawes Miller (1983–1993)
• Karl Schakel (1993–2002)
• Edwin D. Morgan (2000–2001)
• R. Travis Osborne (2000–present)
• John Philippe Rushton (2002–2012)
• Michelle Weyher (2002–present)
• Richard Lynn (2002–present)