Harry Weyher

Harry F. Weyher (1921 to 2002) was a New York corporate tax lawyer who for forty-four years directed the Pioneer Fund and carried out the private commissions of its founder, Wickliffe Draper. The historian William H. Tucker wrote that "all the segregationists' projects intersected on Harry Weyher's desk."¹²

Career

Weyher was born in North Carolina, graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, served in Europe in the Second World War, and graduated from Harvard Law School, where he was note editor of the law review. He joined Cravath, Swaine and Moore. In 1951 he was senior assistant counsel to the New York State Crime Commission under John Marshall Harlan II, who had been a director of the Pioneer Fund since 1937. In 1954 he was a founder of the firm of Olwine, Connelly, Chase, O'Donnell and Weyher, where he practiced corporate tax and acquisitions. The next year he became Draper's personal lawyer. In 1958, on the resignation of Frederick Osborn, he joined the fund's board and was elected its president the same day.¹

Draper's Commissions

In March 1960 a reporter for the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, asked Weyher about the committee through which Draper was distributing grants for research on race with the help of Richard Arens of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Weyher disclosed that there were two committees by referring to Senator James Eastland as "being connected with 'the other one,'" and said his firm "handles a number of foundations in similar fashion." In 1963 and 1964 Draper's anonymous gifts of stock to the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission went through Morgan Guaranty Trust, and when the plan for a permanent national segregationist organization was abandoned in the summer of 1964 the 50,000 dollars Draper had advanced was returned to an escrow account at Weyher's firm. He was an executor of Draper's will in 1972. He personally paid for research by the anatomist Wesley Critz George.²³⁴

Helms and CBS

Two directors who joined the board in 1973, Thomas F. Ellis and Marion Parrott, were North Carolina lawyers and allies of Senator Jesse Helms. Parrott, a relative of Weyher's and a paratroop officer captured in Normandy who escaped from a camp in Poland in 1945, had served two terms in the state legislature. Ellis had run Ronald Reagan's 1976 campaign in the state. The fund gave Ellis's Coalition for Freedom 195,000 dollars between 1983 and 1989. When Ellis's Fairness in Media tried in 1985 to have conservatives buy control of CBS, Weyher was its lawyer, and the network's countersuit named the Pioneer Fund. Correspondence among Helms, Weyher, and Parrott in the 1990s refers to white Southerners who voted for black candidates as "scalawags."¹²⁵

Defense of the Fund

On March 16, 1994, Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which had taken 1,289,000 dollars from the fund, sent Weyher a draft public statement in the fund's defense written in Weyher's voice. Weyher refused to appear on the ABC News report on the fund broadcast on November 22, 1994, which he called "a grotesque distortion." The chairman of the University of Delaware's trustees had written to him on July 2, 1990, that whatever the fund's orientation, racism "is perceived as the orientation of the Fund by at least a material number of our faculty, staff and students." He published two articles in its defense, in Psychological Reports in 1998 and in Intelligence in 1999, the second titled "The Pioneer Fund, the Behavioral Sciences, and the Media's False Stories." He retired from his firm in 1991. J. Philippe Rushton succeeded him as president.¹⁶