Wickliffe Draper

Wickliffe Preston Draper (August 9, 1891 to March 11, 1972) was the heir to a textile machinery fortune in Hopedale, Massachusetts. He served as an officer in the British and American armies in the First World War, held a colonel's commission in the cavalry reserve, and in 1924 inherited about half of an estate valued at nearly eleven million dollars. He gave it over four decades, almost always anonymously and through the same New York bank and the same lawyer, to eugenics research, to the repatriation of black Americans to Africa, to congressional committees, and to the defense of segregation in Mississippi. He founded the Pioneer Fund in 1937.¹²

Berlin and the Pioneer Fund

Draper joined and financed a French expedition to the southern Sahara in 1927 and was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. From August 26 to September 1, 1935, he attended the International Congress for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems in Berlin, presided over by the Nazi interior minister, Wilhelm Frick. His traveling companion, Clarence Campbell, closed his address with a toast "to that great leader, Adolf Hitler." In 1937 Draper paid for a special edition of Earnest Sevier Cox's White America for free distribution to members of Congress and the state legislatures. Its publisher's note said it was "financed by a prominent citizen who wishes to promote the cause of 'Repatriation.'" A copy went to Frick. Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi introduced a bill for a Greater Liberia in 1939.¹³

The Pioneer Fund's certificate of incorporation was signed on February 27, 1937, by Draper, the eugenicist Harry Laughlin, the Boston lawyer Malcolm Donald, and Frederick Osborn. Donald had written to Laughlin on February 19 proposing a colorless name, because if the fund approached "members of the flying Corp and their wives" it might be said "that they were picked out for eugenics purposes so that some ridicule might interfere with the investigation." Laughlin replied that he hoped eventually to see "some such title as the Draper Eugenics Foundation." Laughlin had accepted an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg the year before, and thanked its dean for the honor from the nation that had nurtured "the human seed-stock which later founded my own country." John Marshall Harlan II, later a justice of the Supreme Court, sat as a director at the board meeting of October 28, 1937. The fund's first project was the American distribution of Erbkrank, a film made by the Nazi party's racial policy office. Its second, in 1940, paid Army Air Corps officers who already had three children 4,000 dollars each for a fourth. The annuities were held at Guaranty Trust, where Draper had banked since the 1930s. Twelve children were born. The parents were not told who was paying.¹⁴⁵⁶

The Committees

On March 5, 1960, the Capital Times of Madison, Wisconsin, reported that Draper was distributing money for research on race through two private committees. Richard Arens, the staff director of the House Un-American Activities Committee, was a paid consultant to them, and resigned his congressional post that year after the disclosure. Arens's other clients for such grants included H.L. Hunt and Smith Richardson. Draper's lawyer, Harry Weyher, let slip that there was a second committee by referring to Senator James Eastland of Mississippi as "being connected with 'the other one.'" The chairman of the Un-American Activities Committee, Representative Francis Walter, was connected with the first. "Sen. Eastland said he could not remember having had any connection with Draper," the paper reported. Weyher told the reporter that his firm "handles a number of foundations in similar fashion." A geneticist, Bruce Wallace, said: "For $10 an hour, I tutored Draper every time I was in New York."⁷

Draper financed the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, formed in 1959 under the psychologist Henry Garrett with Robert Gayre of Edinburgh, and its journal, Mankind Quarterly. Weyher became president of the Pioneer Fund in 1958 and held the office until he died in 2002. The historian William H. Tucker wrote that "all the segregationists' projects intersected on Harry Weyher's desk."¹⁸

Mississippi

On July 22, 1963, a cashier's check for 10,000 dollars from Morgan Guaranty Trust reached John Satterfield, the Mississippi lawyer who was organizing the campaign against the civil rights bill. On September 12 a Morgan vice president, Arthur Rossiter, telegraphed the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission offering an anonymous gift of 100,000 dollars in stock on condition of confidentiality. Governor Ross Barnett accepted the same day. A second telegram four months later pledged 105,000 dollars more. The shares were in Reynolds Tobacco, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Addressograph-Multigraph. In all nearly 215,000 dollars of the campaign's 300,000 came from Draper. The money went to Satterfield's Coordinating Committee for Fundamental American Freedoms in Washington, which mailed 1.4 million pamphlets and bought advertisements in 500 newspapers. An internal memorandum described the case to be made as concerning "the intelligence, criminality and immorality of the Negro."¹

On June 2, 1964, Draper gave 50,000 dollars toward a permanent national organization on the same lines. After the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner that summer the plan was dropped and the money was returned to an escrow account at Weyher's law firm. In later years Draper sent dozens of checks to the private academies opened in Mississippi when the public schools were integrated. The source of the 1963 money was not known until the commission's files were opened and the Wall Street Journal published the telegrams on June 11, 1999. A managing director of the bank said that anonymous giving was "a privilege of being rich in America."¹

The Estate

Draper left about five million dollars, with Morgan Guaranty as executor: one million to relatives, 3.3 million to the Pioneer Fund, 50,000 to Garrett, and 1.7 million to the Puritan Foundation, whose address was Satterfield's law office. In 1978 the Puritan Foundation merged into the Council School Foundation, which financed Mississippi's segregated private academies and whose enrollment form stated that its curriculum was "designed solely for the educational responses of white children." The will directed the Pioneer Fund to keep its money with Morgan, which it did until the bank closed the account after the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994.¹

Two of the fund's directors in the 1970s, Thomas F. Ellis and Marion Parrott, were associates of Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. The fund gave Ellis's Coalition for Freedom 195,000 dollars between 1983 and 1989, and Weyher was the lawyer for Ellis's Fairness in Media when it tried to take over CBS in 1985. President Ronald Reagan nominated Ellis to the Board for International Broadcasting in 1983, and Ellis withdrew after senators asked about the fund. "I do not believe in my heart that I'm a racist," he told them. The fund's grants between 1971 and 1996 included 1,289,000 dollars to the Federation for American Immigration Reform, beginning in 1982, and more than a million dollars to Roger Pearson, who took over Mankind Quarterly in 1978, chaired the World Anti-Communist League that year, and received a letter of thanks from Reagan on White House stationery dated April 14, 1982.⁸⁹¹⁰¹¹