Strange 'Bell' fellows
Fischel, Jack
Strange 'Bell' fellows Eugenics is as American as apple pie-well, stale apple pie. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was notoriously enamored of it. Even Norman Thomas, a putative...
...JACK FISCHEL Jack Fischel teachers history at Millersville University in Millersville...
...For example, both Laughlin and Osborn defended the passage of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 by pointing out that in America, thirty-two states prohibited marriage and sexual intercourse between blacks and whites...
...The controversy over The Bell Curve is most immediately reminiscent of the furor created by the work of the psychologist Arthur Jensen and the social theorizing of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist William Shockley in the 1960s...
...That should remind us that not so long ago eugenics was considered a legitimate branch of science, and that prior to World War II eugenic research was popular on both sides of the Atlantic...
...It was during this time that the fund provided Jensen with research grants, which over the years amounted to more than $1 million...
...Since 1978 the journal has been edited by Roger Pearson, a British anthropologist who has expressed both anti-Semitic and white supremacist views...
...Still, like the "scientific" studies on racial differences that have preceded it, The Bell Curve will undoubtedly give encouragement to both the crudest and the most subtle forms of racism...
...Whatever its professed aims, The Bell Curve will inevitably enlist, as did Jensen and Shockley, the enthusiastic support of those who are committed to proving the racial superiority of whites over blacks...
...The early leadership of the fund praised much of what was done in Nazi Germany in the name of racial "science...
...The Bell Curve is an exhaustively documented book that relies on hundreds of perfectly reputable sources...
...Given this history and their own carefully qualified presentation of the statistical evidence, it is somewhat astonishing that Murray and Herrnstein still advance their findings as a basis for public-policy making...
...Hitler, in particular, corresponded with American eugenicists and relied on their "expertise" in promoting his racial policies...
...Neither Herrnstein nor Murray received money from the Pioneer Fund, but their use of sources from academic racialists throws a disturbing light on The Bell Curve...
...In the United States, for example, the Rockefeller Foundation played an important role in establishing eugenics institutions in Weimar Germany and continued to support this type of research even after the Nazi seizure of power...
...Pennsylvania.Pennsylvania...
...The academic performance of black students, the fund contended, was the result of irreversible genetic deficiencies and government funding for remedial programs was consequently a waste of taxpayers' money...
...Now come the new kids on the genetic block, The Bell Curve authors Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein...
...Eugenics was widely discredited only after its pseudoscientific claims were seen to culminate in the horror of Nazi genocide...
...Furthermore, Pearson's Institute for the Study of Man, which publishes Mankind Quarterly, is another Pioneer Fund project and fund award recipients Itzkoff and Lynn both sit on the journal's editorial board...
...Jensen traveled the country arguing that whites scored fifteen points higher than blacks on IQ tests...
...Inadvertently, perhaps, the authors have contributed to the rehabilitation of eugenic ideas once widely discredited...
...It is also true, however, that Herrnstein and Murray use the work of many social scientists connected with the Pioneer Fund...
...Research articles by Richard Lynn in Mankind Quarterly are liberally cited in The Bell Curve...
...House Speaker Newt Gingrich" s recent praise for the civil rights revolution of the 1960s would seem to suggest that even a conservative "revolutionary" like Gingrich is not about to revisit a politics that explicitly embraces the idea of racial inferiority...
...After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it began to actively oppose government programs for the poor such as Head Start...
...Thirty years ago Richard Hof-stradter examined the long history of such schemes in his classic Social Darwinism in American Society, exposing the undemocratic agendas of those who advanced such views...
...Following World War II, the Pioneer Fund aligned itself with those opposed to the Supreme Court's 1954 desegregation ruling in Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka...
...Indeed, what seems unqualified is The Bell Curve's poorly disguised political agenda...
...Shockley proposed that government offer cash incentives to the so-called "welfare queens" to undergo sterilization...
...Their explanations for the economic and social disparities in American society are hardly new...
...Garrett Hardin of the University of California at Santa Barbara, Michael Levin of CUNY, and Richard Lynn of the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland...
...Others who were and remain recipients of Pioneer grants include Linda Gottfredson of the University of Delaware, Seymour Itzkoff of Smith College...
...The eugenics movement here has been kept alive through the efforts of an institution called The Pioneer Fund, established in 1937 by Wickliffe Draper, a New England merchant and two eugenicists, Harry Laughlin and Henry Fairfield Osborn...
...Despite the experience with the Nazi use of eugenics, marginal groups in the United States have continued to preach the gospel of race-science...
...It is surprising, given its track record, that the fund continues to operate, and still adheres to its founding goal of "improv[ing] the character of the American people by encouraging the procreation of descendants of the white persons who settled the original thirteen colonies...
...If the eugenicists of the 1920s and '30s favored government policies to prevent undesirable groups from overwhelming the "native stock," the contemporary heirs to such views seem eager to attack affirmative action, welfare, and programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, arguing once again that money spent on the "inferior" is money wasted...
...According to Charles Lane ("The Tainted Sources of 'The Bell Curve.'" the New York Review of Books, December 1,1994), no fewer than seventeen researchers cited in The Bell Curve's bibliography have contributed to Mankind Quarterly, a journal founded and funded by people, Lane writes, "who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race...
...Will the arguments put forth in The Bell Curve enter the public policy debate in Washington today...
...Draper's fortune was used to bankroll "research" on precisely the kinds of questions The Bell Curve examines...
...Even Norman Thomas, a putative champion of the common man, bemoaned the tendency of "those of a definitely inferior stock" to go on reproducing themselves...
Vol. 122 • February 1995 • No. 3
