The Pioneer Fund is an American non-profit foundation established in 1937 "to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences". The organization has been described as racist and white supremacist in nature. The Southern Poverty Law Center classifies the Pioneer Fund as a hate group. One of its first projects was to fund the distribution in US churches and schools of Erbkrank, a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics. From 2002 until his death in October 2012, the Pioneer Fund was headed by psychology professor J. Philippe Rushton, who was succeeded by Richard Lynn. After Lynn's death in 2023, much of the activity of the Pioneer Fund shifted to the Human Diversity Foundation. Two of the best known studies funded by Pioneer Fund are the Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart and the Texas Adoption Project, which studied the similarities and differences of identical twins and other children adopted into non-biological families. Research backed by the fund on race and intelligence has generated controversy and criticism. One prominent example is the 1994 book The Bell Curve, which drew heavily from Pioneer-funded research. The fund also has ties to eugenics, and has both current and former links to white supremacist publications such as American Renaissance and Mankind Quarterly.
History
Pioneer Fund was incorporated on March 11, 1937. The 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 first five directors were Wickliffe Preston Draper, Harry Laughlin, Frederick Osborn, Malcolm Donald and John Marshall Harlan II.
Wickliffe Preston Draper
Wickliffe Preston Draper, the fund's de facto final authority, served on the board of directors from 1937 until 1972. He founded 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 World War I, transferring to the US Army as the Americans entered the war. During World War II, he was stationed as an intelligence officer in India. Draper secretly met 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. Psychology professor William H. Tucker 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 black people to Africa.
Founding members Harry Laughlin was the director of the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York. He served as the president of Pioneer Fund from its inception until 1941. He opposed 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 and fought efforts to allow entry into the United States to Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi Germany. Eleven months after the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, Laughlin wrote to an official at the University of Heidelberg (which had awarded him an honorary doctorate) 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 US representative to the UN Atomic Energy Commission. Malcolm Donald was the Draper family lawyer and 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, whose firm had done legal work for the Pioneer Fund, was the only director whose name did not appear in 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. He dissented in Reynolds v. Sims and Miranda v. Arizona.
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