The Bell Curve

The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life was published by the Free Press in 1994. Its authors, the Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein, who died of cancer in September 1994 shortly before publication, and Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute, argued that intelligence is substantially heritable, that it predicts life outcomes better than socioeconomic background, that a "cognitive elite" sorted by intelligence was stratifying American society, and that measured IQ differences between racial groups have a partly genetic basis.¹² The Manhattan Institute, where Murray had been a senior fellow from 1982 to 1990, parted ways with him after he began the work; the Bradley Foundation underwrote his research at both institutions.³

Mankind Quarterly and the Pioneer Fund

Murray told The New York Times that "some of the things we read to do this work, we literally hide when we're on planes and trains." In The New York Review of Books of December 1, 1994, Charles Lane found that no fewer than seventeen researchers in the book's bibliography had contributed to Mankind Quarterly, a journal founded in Edinburgh in 1960 whose founder, Robert Gayre, had written that the crimes of the Nazis did not justify "the enthronement of a doctrine of a-racialism as fact"; ten were present or former editors or advisory board members. The authors cited no fewer than thirteen scholars who had received grants from the Pioneer Fund, established in 1937 with the money of Wickliffe Draper, totaling more than 4 million dollars over two decades. Arthur Jensen, cited twenty-three times and in Lane's words "the book's principal authority on the intellectual inferiority of blacks," had received 1.1 million dollars from the fund. The authors thanked Richard Lynn, an associate editor of Mankind Quarterly who had received 325,000 dollars from the fund, only as "a leading scholar of racial and ethnic differences."⁴

Morgan Guaranty Trust, which under Draper's will had managed the Pioneer Fund's money for two decades, closed the account after the book appeared and declined to say why.⁵ Murray's hereditarian argument was later taken up by Steve Sailer and the human-biodiversity current, and in April 2017 Sam Harris presented him on his podcast as the victim of a taboo in an episode titled "Forbidden Knowledge."⁶⁷