The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund.

The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund. By William H. Tucker. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002. Pp. [xii], 286. $34.95, ISBN 0-252-02762-0.)

William H. Tucker's thorough and careful book is broader than its subtitle suggests. The dissemination of racist propaganda by Wickliffe Draper, a multimillionaire, and his aides, allies, and successors lasted through seven decades. In telling this story, Tucker both shows that classic scientific racist theories continued to influence American life long after their heyday in the decade after World War I and reveals that purveyors of those theories found allies among mainstream political leaders as well as so-called extremists. During the 1920s, Tucker reminds us, a racist version of eugenics was endorsed by prominent scientists and social scientists, including Charles Davenport, E. A. Ross, and William McDougall, as well as polemicists like Madison Grant and Earnest Sevier Cox.

Draper was influenced by all of these figures and, as Tucker writes, remained "fixated in the Zeitgeist of his youth" (p. 27). In 1937 he founded the Pioneer Fund, ostensibly "to provide financial aid 'for the education of children of parents of ... unusual value'"--that is, those descended from white northern Europeans--and "to support 'study and research into the problems of heredity and eugenics'" (p. 6). Few children received financial aid, and research only occasionally involved serious scientific investigation. Rather, starting with ad hoc grants in the 1920s and then operating in more systematic fashion, Draper created an international network of pamphleteers, lobbyists, and idiosyncratic scientists and social scientists. Initially, little of the money flowed from the Pioneer Fund itself. Rather, Tucker's detective work shows that Draper preferred to make direct (though secret) donations.

From the mid-1950s until Draper's death in 1972, Harry Weyher served as his chief spokesman, emissary to the racist network, and money launderer. Beneficiaries included a handful of serious scientists and social scientists investigating differences among racial or ethnic groups. By and large, however, the money flowed to men and women who shared Draper's devout belief that African Americans were innately inferior to whites. The list of beneficiaries included professional Nazi sympathizers and anti-Semites as well as a few figures, notably William Shockley, Arthur Jensen, and J. Philippe Rushton, whose work alternated between respectable scholarship and invention and racist cant. (Rushton became president of the Pioneer Fund after Weyher's death in 2002.) Moreover, Draper was less interested in research, even highly biased research, than in propaganda, lobbying, and activism on behalf of white supremacy. In addition to covertly underwriting numerous books and magazines, he helped finance the White Citizens' Council, the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, and courtroom challenges to desegregation following Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Starting in the 1980s, the list of threats to white America was updated to include affirmative action and immigration from the Third World.

Although formally a sociologist, Tucker is a good historian. He has searched out obscure pamphlets and periodicals, examined university and Internal Revenue Service records, and mined the manuscript collections left by Cox, Davenport, and Shockley, among many others. Readers with slight interest in Draper, Weyher, and the Pioneer Fund can nonetheless learn much about what Tucker calls a distinct "political subculture" of pseudo-scientific racism (p. 195). Tucker occasionally teeters on the verge of guilt by association. Overall, however, this book is remarkably judicious. Tucker avoids using the label "racist" as a casual epithet, acknowledges that all Pioneer Fund grantees did not necessarily share the group's "underlying agenda," and pointedly defends free speech even for bigots (p. 201). In short, Tucker helps us to understand what he hopefully calls an "ideology whose time has gone" (p. 213).

LEO P. RIBUFFO

George Washington University