Pioneer Fund

The Pioneer Fund is a foundation established in New York in 1937 to promote eugenics and what its founders called "race betterment," which over the following decades became the leading financier of race-and-intelligence research in the United States. It funded many of the scholars whose work underlies the human-biodiversity current, including thirteen researchers cited in Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's The Bell Curve, and it bankrolled the journal Mankind Quarterly and the Ulster Institute for Social Research. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies it as a hate group.¹²

Founding and Mission

The fund was created by the textile heir Wickliffe Draper, with the eugenicist Harry Laughlin, an architect of American sterilization laws and an admirer of Nazi race policy, as its first president. Its charter aimed at "racial improvement" through the encouragement of procreation among descendants of the original colonial-stock population and the study of heredity and "race betterment." In its early decades it also funded efforts to resist desegregation and to promote the repatriation of black Americans.¹³

The fund was incorporated in New York on March 11, 1937. Its five original directors were Draper, Laughlin, the demographer Frederick Osborn, the lawyer Malcolm Donald, and John Marshall Harlan II, the future Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Draper had toured Germany in 1935 and met leading Third Reich eugenicists, and the fund's founding charter limited its procreation incentives to people "deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution." Laughlin had received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg in 1936 for his contributions to German racial science.⁵⁶

Funding Race Science

From the postwar period onward the fund became the central money source for hereditarian psychology and the race-and-IQ literature. Its grantees included the psychologists Arthur Jensen, William Shockley, Hans Eysenck, and Richard Lynn, and the fund was later led by J. Philippe Rushton, a psychologist known for claims of a racial hierarchy of intelligence. Murray acknowledged in the afterword to The Bell Curve that he had cited thirteen Pioneer Fund grantees. The fund also supported anti-immigration organizations, linking the eugenics-research network to the immigration-restriction politics promoted by figures such as John Tanton and Steve Sailer.²⁴

The New York lawyer Harry F. Weyher Jr. ran the fund as president from 1958 to 2002, a 44-year tenure during which he directed more than $3.5 million to race-and-intelligence researchers; his interest in the fund grew from its opposition to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation ruling, and Pioneer money underwrote legal and research efforts to resist integration in the 1960s. When Weyher died in March 2002 Rushton became president, and on Rushton's death in October 2012 Lynn succeeded him, routing further grants through his Ulster Institute for Social Research. The historian William H. Tucker documented this funding chain in his 2002 book The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund.⁷⁸