Policy-Making Influence of the Pioneer Foundation

By Chip Bertlet's Political Research Associates.
27 February, 1995

Given that much of the early support for anti-immigrant research came from the Pioneer Fund, it's important to understand the background of the racist right and its link to the Pioneer Fund.

Here's some more detail from Chip Bertlet's Political Research Associates:

Our recent information showing how discredited racist sources were cited in The Bell Curve might make it appear as though organizations such as the Pioneer Fund are simply lunatic fringe groups, with little or no influence on public policy. It should be clear that his is not the case, given that much of the racists' platform -- ending welfare programs, restricting immigration, cutting funds to compensatory education programs, scaling back affirmative action programs in employment and education, limiting school integration -- is being enacted or seriously considered.

The key figure in the Pioneer Fund nexus is Roger Pearson. He is one of the main PF recipients ($787,400 as of 1993) and is editor of two important racist journals: The Mankind Quarterly (articles from which are frequently cited in The Bell Curve) and The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies (which has published racist articles by Jensen, Levin, Gottfredson, and other PF recipients). Pearson is the linchpin of the whole racist operation, and is well - connected to influential fascist forces in the U.S. and worldwide. A book Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party, by Russ Bellant, who provides the following information:

1. The Northern League, for which Pearson was the London-based organizer in 1958, was a "white supremacist European organization that included former Nazi SS officials." In 1959, Willis Carto, founder of the racist and anti-semitic Liberty Lobby, arranged a speaking tour for Pearson in the U.S. Carto's magazine, Right, called Pearson "the world's foremost spokesman for the scientific and forward-looking view of nationalism. He is held in renown by white nationalists the world over." Pearson moved to the U.S. in 1965 in order to edit Western Destiny, a Carto publication whose editorial board included well-known racists and anti-Semites, including Austin App, the pro-Nazi leader of the German American National Congress (DANK) who wrote The Six Million Swindle, which claims the holocaust never happened. Pearson published four racist monographs during this time, one of which was called Race and Civilization, which stated that it was based on the ideas of Hans F.K. Gunther, who was a leading racial theoretician for the Third Reich, and who later worked with Pearson organizing the Northern League. In his 1966 book Eugenics and Race, Pearson wrote: "If a nation with a more advanced, more specialized, or in any way superior sets of genes mingles with, instead of exterminating, an inferior tribe, then it commits racial suicide...." It's no wonder that Pearson's monographs are still sold by neo-Nazi groups today.
2. In spite of, or perhaps because of, his fascist past, Pearson became an influential political player when he moved to Washington, D.C. in 1975. He became the editor of the American Security Council's Journal of International Relations and served on the board of the ASC's American Foreign Policy Institute. The ASC was formed and run by retired military officers, corporate executives, and conservative politicians to promote a program of heavy military spending, support for cold war policies, aid to the Nicaraguan contras and UNITA in Angola, etc. Its political arm is the Coalition for Peace Through Strength, whose constituent organizations have ties to the fascist right, which Bellant details. The ASC was a highly influential organization during the Reagan and Bush administrations, with close ties to the military, the National Security Council, and State Dept. officials. Pearson's co-editors on the ASC's journal was James Angleton, former CIA deputy director for counterintelligence, and Robert Richardson, a retired Air Force general later revealed to be aiding gunrunning to Libya. So Pearson moved in high governmental and political circles.
3. During this time Pearson became associated with the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank influential in forming Reagan administration policy. Pearson was close to Edwin Fuelner, president of the Heritage Foundation, and joined the editorial board of Policy Review, the monthly HF magazine. In turn HF official Stuart Butler and editorial board member Ernest van den Haag (the long time writer for the National Review, who has publicly stated his opposition to school integration and support for Shockley's sterilization proposals), joined the advisory committee of Pearson's Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies.
4. In 1978, as the head of U.S. chapter of the World Anti-Communist League, Pearson hosted the WACL conference in Washington, D.C. The Washington Post ran an article about fascists and neo-Nazis in the WACL, and named Pearson as a leading recruiter of fascist elements. Yet four years later, Pearson received a personal letter from President Reagan stating "Your substantial contributions to promoting and upholding those ideals and principles that we value at home and abroad are greatly appreciated." Pearson used this as a fundraising letter for his JSPES. Talk about friends in high places!
5. Pearson and the Pioneer Fund have close connections to Jesse Helms. Sam Crutchfield has been the lawyer for a number of Helms' organizations, as well as Pearson's Institute for the Study of Man, which publishes The Mankind Quarterly and is heavily funded by the Pioneer Fund. Crutchfield also sits on the advisory committee of Pearson's JSPES.
6. According to Bellant, Pearson, an Englishman, also has ties to right-wing British aristocrats. Lord Malcolm Douglas was part of an aristocratic circle known as the Cliveden Set, who was sympathetic to the Nazis and sought to get Britain out of the war. (This group should be familiar to anyone who has seen the film Remains of the Day.) Malcolm was the brother of the aristocrat who invited Rudolph Hess, a top aide to Hitler, to secretly fly to England to meet with the Cliveden Set. Unfortunately for the upper class Nazi admirers, Hess was arrested and spent the rest of his life in jail. Lord Malcolm Douglas eventually came to the U.S. and established the American branch of the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics (IAAEE), which published The Mankind Quarterly. (Bellant states that the oil billionaire Hunt brothers and Jesse Helms are members of the IAAEE.) For years. MQ listed its publisher as the Cliveden Press.
7. Pearson, a former anthropology professor, has plenty of academic ties as well. In the mid- 1980's, Pearson was elected head of the University Professors for Academic Order, a conservative faculty group formed in reaction to anti-Vietnam War campus protests of the 1960's and '70's. Pearson has been quite a busy fascist, and in 1990 began to edit a third journal, The Conservative Review. Pearson maintains close ties with European racists, and is a board member of Nouvelle Ecole, which Bellant calls "a French highbrow neo-Nazi group."

The November 1994 of GQ magazine carried an article on the Pioneer Fund. The article is politically very weak, but it has an interesting story about Pearson and the 1978 WACL conference which he was in charge of:

At one point during the proceedings, Pearson noticed two men distributing what The Post termed "anti-Jewish tracts," as well as reprints from the Thunderbolt, a newspaper of the avowedly racist National States Right Party (NSRP). Pearson asked them to leave, though not before telling them that he was "sympathetic with what you're doing." He added: "But don't embarrass me and cut my throat." As they left, he asked them to "give [his] regards" to NSRP chief Edward Fields, The Post reported.

Today, the Thunderbolt is called The Truth At Last. It is still published by Edward Fields, who leads a white supremacist and neo-Nazi group called the America First Party. In a recent issue of The Truth At Last the lead two-page article is entitled Bell Curve Proves Racial IQ Differences, with photos of Charles Murray and William Shockley. Inside the paper, they advertised Pearson's Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe (a book which attacks Progressive Labor Party, Students for a Democratic Society, and International Committee Against Racism for its campaigns against racist scholars such as Jensen and Shockley), as well as Shockley's On Eugenics and Race, edited by Pearson. Also advertised are IQ and Racial Differences, a racist tract by former Pioneer Fund director Henry Garrett, as well as the Deluxe edition of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (the famous anti-semitic forgery), with a 150-page introduction by industrialist Henry Ford.

It's pretty clear that Pearson and the Pioneer Fund are connected to a larger movement, international in scope, which not only wishes to roll back the gains of the civil rights movement, but which seeks another try at the Third Reich.