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's certificate of incorporation was signed in New York on February 27, 1937, by four directors: Draper, Laughlin, the demographer Frederick Osborn, and the lawyer Malcolm Donald. John Marshall Harlan II, the future Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, first appears at the board meeting of October 28, 1937.⁴ 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.⁴⁵⁶

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.²⁵⁷

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.⁵⁸

Incorporation

The certificate of incorporation was signed on February 27, 1937, by Wickliffe Draper, Harry Laughlin, Malcolm Donald, and Frederick Osborn. Donald had written to Laughlin on February 19 that Draper's initial commitment was 50,000 dollars and that the name should be colorless, since if officers of the flying corps learned "that they were picked out for eugenics purposes" then "some ridicule might interfere with the investigation." Laughlin answered that he would prefer in time "some such title as the Draper Eugenics Foundation." On March 22 the board gave Laughlin and Osborn 2,500 dollars to plan a study of the families of Army aviators, and on June 1 the psychologist John C. Flanagan submitted the design. The fund's first act was to distribute in the United States two films obtained from the racial policy office of the Nazi party, one of them Erbkrank. In 1940 it paid Air Corps officers with three children 4,000 dollars for a fourth, through annuities held at Guaranty Trust. Twelve children were born.⁴⁹

The Bank

Draper had been a client of Guaranty Trust since the 1930s. Morgan Guaranty Trust, its successor, transmitted his anonymous gifts to the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission in 1963 and 1964, served as executor of his estate, which left the fund 3.3 million dollars, and at the direction of his will managed the fund's money for two decades. It closed the account after the publication of The Bell Curve in 1994 and declined to say why.¹⁰

Grants, 1971 to 1996

The ledger compiled by Barry Mehler from the fund's Internal Revenue Service returns shows 1,289,000 dollars to the Federation for American Immigration Reform beginning with 60,000 dollars in 1982. The grant fell from 150,000 dollars in 1988, the year the connection was first reported, to 50,000 in 1989, returned to 150,000 in 1990, and ended in 1994 during the campaign for California's Proposition 187. On March 16, 1994, the federation's director, Dan Stein, sent the fund's president, Harry Weyher, a draft statement in its defense written in Weyher's own voice. The Coalition for Freedom of Thomas F. Ellis, a former director of the fund and the political manager of Senator Jesse Helms, received 195,000 dollars in five payments between 1983 and 1989. J. Philippe Rushton received 441,000 dollars between 1981 and 1992, and Roger Pearson 568,000 dollars between 1981 and 1991. Arthur Jensen's grants at the University of California, Berkeley, reached 1,096,094 dollars by 1994. Asked about the source of his money, the grantee Ralph Scott said in 1977: "I don't see that there's any difference in getting the money from Idi Amin as long as Idi doesn't have any control over what I do with it." The Reagan administration made Scott chairman of the Iowa advisory committee to the United States Commission on Civil Rights in 1985.²¹¹¹²

In a memorandum of November 15, 1989, to the president of the University of Delaware, the fund explained that it had amended its charter in 1985 "to avoid more charges."⁴

Recent Filings

The fund's returns show net assets of 1,551,094 dollars in 2011, 94,336 dollars in 2014, two years after Rushton's death, and 304,194 dollars in 2024. The officers of record from 2019 to 2024 were Richard Lynn, Edward Miller, and Alexander Beaujean, at an address in Potomac, Maryland. Lynn died on July 23, 2023.¹³