Read our full investigation about the Human Diversity Foundation

History of the Pioneer Fund

Exposing the pro-Nazi organisation that financially supported 20th century race scientists

16 Oct. 2024

Upon its foundation in 1937, the Pioneer Fund’s first act was to distribute Nazi propaganda. The film Erbkrank, or The Hereditary Defective, was part of the Third Reich’s efforts to prepare Germany for the euthanasia programme that killed 250,000 people and castrated a further 360,000. “Jews produce an exceptionally high percentage of mentally ill,” a slide in the movie said.

Pioneer’s support for eugenics continued long after the atrocities of Nazi Germany fully came to light. In the post-war period, Pioneer board members and beneficiaries opposed American efforts to desegregate the south. Its journal, Mankind Quarterly, published viciously racist articles draped in scientific language, such as one piece in 1962 which claimed “the Negro is temperamentally unsuited for citizenship in a democracy”. In the 1970s, Mankind Quarterly was edited by Roger Pearson, a British neo-nazi.

As a charitable foundation dedicated to research into “racial betterment”, it has disbursed millions of dollars to some of the most notorious racists in the intellectual far right.

Among them was Roger Pearson, the British founder of the Northern League, an activist organisation that recruited former members of the Nazi SS. In 1978, Pearson was appointed editor of Mankind Quarterly. He also ran the Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, a more mainstream conservative publication that also pushed race science. Pioneer awarded Pearson around $2 million in grants during his career. Although his output was only read by a small audience, it reached high places. In 1984, President Ronald Reagan sent him a congratulatory letter, thanking him for his “valuable service”.

Mankind Quarterly was the house journal of transatlantic eugenicists. Although it claimed to be an academic publication, the conclusions drawn by its authors had long been agreed. “Real scientific journals,” wrote William Tucker, a historian critical of the Pioneer Fund, “do not publish the same conclusions — indeed, sometimes substantially the same article — again and again.”

Perhaps the most influential British race scientist of his generation was Richard Lynn, a psychology professor at the University of Ulster, whose ambition was to “have a go at the rehabilitation of eugenics”. His work on differences in intelligence between races, sexes, and socioeconomic groups continues to be cited by advocates of eugenics. Since 2019, he has been cited almost 4,500 times by other scholars in mainstream academia and its racist fringes.

Lynn’s most notorious creation was a ranking of nationalities by IQ, gleaned from pre-published studies. He claimed that Europeans averaged an IQ of 100, but people in Africa only 70, indicating borderline mental disability. Lynn’s findings have been widely criticised, however. His work was beset by inconsistencies in his sourcing (he ignored any African test results that showed higher-than-average IQs) and used weak sample sizes (he determined the national IQ of Congo, for instance, from a dataset of 88 children).

“The glaring shoddiness of Lynn’s academic works does not reflect a man interested in scientific rigour,” concludes a paper analysing his legacy. His writing regularly appeared in white nationalist publications like American Renaissance, whose creator Jared Taylor, an advocate for segregation, Lynn admired. When Taylor published his 2011 book White Identity, Lynn gave it an endorsement, saying it “sounds a much needed wake-up call for whites to regain their sense of racial consciousness.”

Lynn used a veneer of science to advance a much more pernicious agenda. “What is called for here is not genocide, the killing off of the populations of incompetent cultures,” he once wrote. “But we do need to think realistically in terms of the ‘phasing out’ of such peoples.” He added in the same paper: “People are poor largely because they are incompetent and unintelligent. Such people should not be encouraged to breed.”

Pioneer’s endowment was once enormous. Set up by the American textile magnate Wickliffe Draper, and buoyed by successful stock market investments, Pioneer boasted as much as $2.5 million in assets in the early 21st century. Its board used the money for the purposes of eugenics research and self-enrichment.

For example, in 2010, Pioneer distributed $35,000 to VDARE, a white nationalist website, and $110,000 to Richard Lynn. A further $216,376 went to Philippe Rushton, Pioneer’s own president. That year, the fund distributed $537,709.

Rushton’s management of Pioneer marked the fund’s last active period. After his death in late 2012, Richard Lynn took over the organisation and among his first acts was to award himself $1.2 million. Thereafter, Pioneer became significantly less busy. In the last decade, the fund has awarded smaller sums to fewer people. In 2021, Pioneer gave $11,000 to Bryan Pesta, an academic at Cleveland State University in Ohio, for instance, and nothing else.

In four out of the last ten years, it gave out no money at all. Pioneer’s inactivity has prompted speculation that it was inexorably sliding into irrelevance. Our investigation about the Human Diversity Foundation (HDF) can however reveal that it is the successor to the Pioneer Fund. Well known scientific racist Emil Kirkegaard, who has for several years been involved in Mankind Quarterly, now controls the fund but has continued its work of directing racist research under the newly formed HDF. As a limited liability company it affords a level of safety from prying eyes a non-profit cannot.