Wickliffe Draper - Eugenics and The Pioneer Fund

Eugenics and The Pioneer Fund

During this time, Draper became interested in the field of eugenics. Although eugenics had been a popular movement in the United States during the first three decades of the 20th century, by the early 1930s popular interest had begun to fade, as the underlying science came under question. Groups like the American Eugenics Society (AES) faced declining membership and dwindling treasuries. Draper helped ease the funding shortfall, making a special gift to the AES of several thousand dollars to support the society prior to 1932.

In August 1935, Draper traveled to Berlin to attend the International Congress for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems. Presiding over the conference was Wilhelm Frick, the German Minister of the Interior. At the conference, Draper's travel companion, Dr. Clarence Campbell delivered an oration that concluded with the words: "The difference between the Jew and the Aryan is as unsurmountable as that between black and white. … Germany has set a pattern which other nations must follow. … To that great leader, Adolf Hitler!" Three years later, when Draper paid to print and disseminate the book, White America, by Earnest Sevier Cox, an advocate of white supremacy and racial segregation, a personal copy was delivered to Frick.

In 1937, Draper founded the Pioneer Fund, a foundation intended to give scholarships to descendants of white colonial-era families, and to support research into "race betterment" through eugenics. The scholarships were never given, but the first project of the fund was to distribute two documentary films from Nazi Germany depicting their claimed success with eugenics. The Pioneer Fund was headed by the eugenicist, Harry H. Laughlin, an advocate for restrictive immigration laws and national programs of compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and mentally retarded.

Draper volunteered for service again in World War II, and the 50-year-old man was assigned a post with British military intelligence in India. After the war, he returned to eugenicist and segregationist activism, and The Pioneer Fund supported the work of a number of noted and controversial researchers of race and intelligence, including William Shockley, Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton, and Roger Pearson. Though he never served as the Pioneer Fund's president, Draper remained on its board until his death, leaving his estate to the Fund. He also donated considerable funds to right-wing political organizations and candidates, including the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) which was later headed by Dr. Roger Pearson who had received extensive funding from The Pioneer Fund and Draper during his career at Southern Mississippi University.

In addition to The Pioneer Fund, Draper funded the Back to Africa repatriation movement. During the civil rights movement of the 1960s he secretly sent $255,000 to the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission in 1963 and 1964 to support racial segregation. He had also promoted opposition to the desegregation of public schools mandated by the Supreme Court's 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education. These financial contributions came to light in the 1990s, when the Sovereignty Commission records were made public. Doug A. Blackmon of the Wall Street Journal and Prof. William H. Tucker of Rutgers University discovered the incriminating documents.