"The American Breed": Nazi eugenics and the origins of the Pioneer Fund.

INTRODUCTION A. The Bell Curve, The Pioneer Fund, and American Eugenics When The Bell Curve was published in 1994 it was an immediate best seller; more than a million copies are currently in print. The thesis of The Bell Curve, that intelligence--the trait that IQ tests are designed to measure--is inherited, has become increasingly critical as a predictor of educational, occupational, and social success. (1) The Bell Curve asserts that those possessing a high IQ constitute a hereditary upper class while their more limited counterparts at the opposite end of the IQ spectrum make up an "underclass." The Bell Curve also analyzes social and economic stratification in America and concludes that the inequality which allegedly exists in this country is attributable to genetically transmitted "ethnic differences." (2) The social and political implications of The Bell Curve's message led to immediate controversy, and the book has generated a tremendous amount of commentary from both scholars and the popular media. At least some of the controversy has been fueled by the history of eugenics in America. The argument advanced in The Bell Curve closely parallels assertions routinely made in the early years of the twentieth century by advocates of the eugenics movement. The book's conclusions, disparaging the government's role in ameliorative social programs and forecasting the demise of American civilization as the result of increasingly "dysgenic" birthrates among the "underclass," are themes found firmly rooted in the eugenic tradition. The success of The Bell Curve has drawn attention to the Pioneer Fund, (3) a foundation that has provided a steady stream of funding for research and publicity on topics related to "heredity and eugenics" and "the problems of race betterment" since first being chartered in 1937. (4) Some sixteen researchers who have received Pioneer support are referenced in The Bell Curve and Pioneer proudly cites this record in its own promotional material. (5) Pioneer's founding president was Harry Laughlin, one of the most effective propagandists of early Twentieth Century America's organized eugenics movement. He is described in The Bell Curve sympathetically as "a biologist who was especially concerned about keeping up the American level of intelligence by suitable immigration policies." (6) Like The Bell Curve, Laughlin sounded the eugenicist's alarm, declaring that the "great mass of defectiveness" swelled by immigrants, the feebleminded, and children of racial intermixture would swamp America. (7) Laughlin's pronouncements about race echoed the hierarchical standards--white Nordics at the top, others below--set out by Francis Galton, the father of the eugenics movement. (8) Laughlin believed that the "pioneer families" of the United States, pruned of weaker members by frontier tests of survival, represented the pinnacle of Nordic purity. (9) He claimed that Germans and early American settlers shared a "common race descent" from ancient Nordic ancestors. (10) Laughlin argued for a legal definition of "the American race" that would exclude all but "Anglo-Saxon" immigrants, and he dedicated extensive efforts to blocking the migration of Jews fleeing Hitler. (11) His collaborators in developing the new definition were Madison Grant, an elder statesman of American eugenics, and Wickliffe Draper, a textile magnate, whom Laughlin introduced to his German colleagues in 1935 as "one of the staunchest supporters of eugenical research and policy in the United States." (12) After attending a Nazi eugenics conference, Draper wrote to Laughlin encouraging him to "work out something of eugenic value;" (13) the Pioneer Fund was chartered less than a year later. The work of the Pioneer Fund subsequently began in the swirl of enthusiasm shared by Laughlin and Draper over the progress of Nazi eugenics. Draper's finances provided a base that supported Pioneer projects as well as other programs tailored to meet his goals of immigration restriction and racial separation. …