Correspondence
CORRESPONDENCE Timid church press Seaford, N.Y. To the Editors: The three admirable forums on "Religion & the Media" reported in your issue of February 24 neglected one angle: Catholics need the...
...What so many whites seem unable to remember, and no black can forget, is that government-supported racism designed to keep blacks "in their place" is part of the very warp and woof of our history, beginning with the writing of our Constitution, continuing to our own time...
...In only three sentences of the fifth paragraph of his sidebar, he makes totally false allegations about (1) the Pioneer Fund's supposed position on the Brown case, (2) the fund's supposed opposition to Head Start, (3) the fund's supposed contention as to genetic deficiencies, and (4) the fund's supposed view of remedial programs...
...I repeat, for Fischel and his readers, the statements made by him are false...
...That too is NIH's plan...
...What some regard as the most comprehensive and knowledgeable account of the troubles at Covenant House, the work of Mark Redmond and Roseanne Hagerty Redmond, appeared in these very pages [May 18, 1990...
...The Nazi Connection has piqued the interest of a number of American journalists in the history of the Pioneer Fund, among them Charles Lane, a senior editor of the New Republic and the author of "The Tainted Sources of the Bell Curve," alengthy, amply footnoted article on which I also relied [New York Review of Books, December 1,1994...
...it does not comment on the results even in cases where it learns of them...
...Three are on the editorial board of the academic journal Intelligence...
...The message parallels that of union newspapers: Our leaders are right, and nobody would ever hide behind the cause or cheat...
...But I am troubled by his charge that black leaders and their white liberal friends are to blame for the failure of racial integration because of their support for affirmative-action programs that attempt to give African-Americans a chance at decent education, jobs, and political representation...
...Of course, any research on embryos should be done only with donor approval...
...Since Fischel teaches history, he should know a bit about historical research...
...his book documents the influence of the American eugenics movement on Nazi racial policy...
...To the Editors: My comments concern the article "Strange 'Bell' Fellows," by Jack Fischel [February 10...
...Weyher to claim that the Fund does not take positions on political issues and stays "strictly and totally hands off," when in fact the Fund continues to support researchers with this kind of agenda...
...Bias in big tomes Fort Washington, N.Y...
...Because of space limitations, I must refer readers to the two issues of NYR cited above for further enlightenment...
...Speaking of poetry, Nathan Mitchell's description of "the liturgy of the world" in the same issue was exactly that...
...JOSEPH G. BACHAND Pioneer Fund defended New York, N.Y...
...my own view is that calling them examples of "gutter journalism" is more than a bit desperate...
...It doesn't seem fitting that these people, who only want cheap labor, should mount a moral high horse on this issue...
...Also of interest is an exchange of letters between Charles Lane and two critics of his article, Harry Weyher and Richard Lynn, published in the New York Review for February 2, 1995...
...That is the plan of the National Institutes of Health...
...Of course, any research that can be accomplished on nonhumans should be done on other animals...
...One of them was The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, by Stefan Kuhl (Oxford University Press, 1994...
...who believe in the genetic superiority of the white race...
...Weyher denies but does not attempt to refute my article's specific allegations about the Pioneer Fund...
...This is a classic example of unfairly blaming the victims...
...She revealed the reality behind that experience in a way I had not expected...
...With respect to the letter from Roger Pearson, it is interesting that the same Henry Garrett is identified in the New York Review article as one of the founders of Mankind Quarterly...
...Most have won awards and honors from, among others, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Psychological Assocation...
...Indeed, from what he writes he does not appear to have any familiarity whatsoever with that journal...
...It is true (and, I think, obvious to readers) that my 1,200-word article was not a work of original scholarship and that I made use of secondary sources...
...A Pioneer scientist won a Nobel prize...
...I know belief is no longer as close to universal as it once was, but it still has its hundreds of millions...
...The Pioneer Fund does not suggest research projects...
...And at least some diocesan papers are no longer mere house organs...
...A future director of the Fund, Henry Garrett, was a featured witness for the segregationists in the course of the Brown litigation...
...JOHN FLOENER A counter-offer Washington, D.C...
...I suggest that for every mean-spirited supporter of 187 there is an equal or greater number of Californians resisting reform for self-serving reasons...
...It has not struck a chord, moved my heart, nor illumined my mind...
...Fischel cites a nonacademic secondary source-a journalist named Charles Lane- to complain that "no fewer than seventeen researchers [cited in The Bell Curve] have contributed to The Mankind Quarterly...
...It is white America's refusal to accept responsibility for official and societal racism that has blocked realization of Martin Luther King's dream...
...The author replies: Mr...
...I would challenge him to go back a quarter of a century since I took over the publication of The Mankind Quarterly to find anything even remotely "anti-Semitic" in its pages- or for that matter in the pages of any other journal or book that I have published...
...As is well known, most anthropology journals do not dare to touch the subject of racial differences...
...Indeed, respected Jewish and Israeli scholars regularly publish in these journals...
...Pearson), and its content over the years since its founding in 1960...
...My thanks to Peter Steinfels, who must have labored for weeks on those measured and highly readable statements, and to the other contributors to a discussion that was way above average for this sort of forum...
...in the course of doing so, it places the Pioneer Fund in its historical and contemporary context...
...On substance, Mr...
...The article provides further information about the first editor of the journal, Robert Gayre, its present publisher (Mr...
...we are talking about cells in the earnest stage of development...
...it does not make grants to individual scientists but only to responsible institutions which do monitor their own scientists...
...LORING W. BATTEN Why integration failed Stuttgart, Germany To the Editors: It is clear from David R. Car-lin, Jr.' s "A Dream Deferred" [January 27] that he values Martin Luther King, Jr.' s vision of the "Beloved Community," where people "will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character...
...Fortunately, these materials are readily available, so that interested readers may judge the reliability of my sources for themselves...
...Insofar as he supports his denials, he does so by praising his institution's policies without reserve and by characterizing the sources I used as practitioners of "gutter journalism...
...The Mankind Quarterly is proud that it is prepared to publish articles on this topic provided they are scholarly and well documented...
...What the pro-187 voters want is an orderly, fair process of immigration...
...Fischel's students will learn nothing truthful from this part of his sidebar, but they could learn much about the methodology of historical research...
...It is injurious to the dignity of two great nations...
...These nine individuals alone have published more than 100 scholarly books and 1,000 scientific articles...
...To the Editors: If encyclopedias are part of the media, I can add a few words to the many in your admirable issue on religion and the media...
...He further relies upon Charles Lane for the opinion that The Mankind Quarterly was "founded and funded by people...
...and it does not take positions on political issues of any kind...
...It is clear that when a child's life is weighed against a collection of human cells, even one life is worth thousands of embryos...
...The fund stays strictly and totally hands-off...
...an embryo is confined to a petri dish...
...Weyher argued that equalizing the environments of the races will not help reduce cognitive differences between them...
...If one breathing, feeling baby dies because a human embryo is valued over a child's life, that is a tragedy...
...Indeed, the twenty-three researchers who received Pioneer grants in the past ten years are among the most eminent scientists in their respective fields...
...Another source of bias was the conviction that, except for old Italian and Irish Catholics and "redneck" Protestants, "nobody believes that stuff any more...
...ELI COHEN...
...It took me two days on the job to spot a bias in management against including religion as a topic deserving coverage in their allegedly inclusive range of interests...
...and it's interesting...
...Perhaps Fischel will take the trouble to peruse The Mankind Quarterly himself, before writing further scurrilous attacks on an established journal whose academic integrity is evidenced by the number of scholars who write in it and university libraries which subscribe to it...
...Would scientists be willing to give their own cells to research, as your writer dares them to do...
...2) According to the Lane article cited above, Mr.Weyher was personally recruited by Wickliffe Draper, whose wealth was used to establish the Fund, to help "wage scientific battle against" the Brown decision...
...In my lifetime blacks have had to sit in the back of the bus and the back of the church, have been beaten, jailed, and lynched for trying to vote, have been (and still are) pushed into ghettoes and then blamed for being there- all this not because of the content of their character but because of the color of their skin...
...None of those things happened, none existed, none are truthful...
...To the Editors: I must admit I usually consider the poetry in your publication "filler...
...it makes grants only after requests originate from the universities...
...All nine who are members of the APA (and who received two-thirds of all Pioneer money grants in the past decade) have been elected to fellow status in that organization for their "outstanding and unusual contributions" to psychology (an honor held by less than 7 percent of the APA's 80,000 members...
...Clearly, they would, because they value a human baby over a human embryo...
...I'm ordering extra copies of your issue to send to friends still active in the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island...
...JOE McMAHON From the editors: Well, yes, but...
...Kuhl is a sociologist and historian at the University of Bielefeld, Germany...
...I feel a deep concern for the students who take his classes...
...Fischel, who is said to teach history, apparently is unable to distinguish history from hysteria...
...1) In a letter published in the London Independent in 1989, Mr...
...It is disingenuous of Mr...
...The present situation along the border is a shambles...
...Still, I found Nancy G. Westerfield' s "Salad Days" [February 10] to be a poignant treatise on a commonplace experience...
...I hope I get the opportunity to quote it at some point...
...As president of the Pioneer Fund, I would like to set the record straight...
...In his postscript, Monsignor Francis Maniscalco states that church media help make the church credible...
...Twin and adoption studies funded by Pioneer have become famous, and are reflected today in standard high school and college textbooks on relevant subjects...
...That's what I expect from poetry, and I am grateful for having received it here...
...The reason most often given was that people just won't read these pieces-they want space exploration, sports, movies, celebrities of any sort...
...A baby can move and think and feel...
...However, in this instance he seems to have relied exclusively on secondary sources, and unfortunately these were gutter pieces-journalistic hysteria-which he could easily have found to be inaccurate...
...it does not monitor the research or even ask for reports...
...There is a wide gulf here between history and hysteria...
...No doubt this is due mostly to the reader, and not to the poets...
...Seminal studies have been funded in other fields, such as the effects of nutrition on intelligence and the hereditability of certain major diseases...
...As primary sources, all the directors of Pioneer were available, and would have told him that these pieces were written without any support from a primary source, and were false...
...Perhaps poetry is the best medium for speaking of ritual in the first place...
...Weyher writes that I falsely accused the Fund of opposing Head Start and other remedial programs, and of opposing the integrationist position in the Brown v. Board of Education case...
...To the Editors: In response to "A Modest Proposal" [December 2, 1994], which suggests that embryo researchers should conduct their experiments only on embryos they themselves and their spouses have produced, I too have a modest proposal: The writer of that article should join with doctors and scientists in a hospital ward for premature births and watch as hundreds of living, feeling, thinking, moving children die because science does not yet have the understanding to save them...
...To the Editors: The three admirable forums on "Religion & the Media" reported in your issue of February 24 neglected one angle: Catholics need the secular media to report clerical misdeeds because the church press refuses to break the news...
...the effect of the letter is to support the case for abandoning compensatory education, one of the objectives of Head Start...
...Maybe he was writing under the pressure of deadlines, but the result is not responsible journalism and most certainly not academic scholarship...
...Pioneer strives for excellence in research, and Pioneer-funded science itself is the mainstream, as confirmed by the statement "Mainstream Science on Intelligence" [Wall Street Journal, December 13, 1994], signed by fifty-two of the nation' s leading experts on the subject from our leading institutions (fifteen of whom had received Pioneer support...
...It was a joy to read-and reread...
...The writer confused the two...
...Sorry, the diocesan organs hide serious scandal until the secular press reveals it, and they treat the Holy See as unquestionably wise...
...To the Editors: Jack Fischel, whom you describe as a teacher of history at Millers-ville University, does not seem to be qualified to write about eugenics or The Bell Curve, let alone The Mankind Quarterly, which is a journal that covers anthropological topics and circulates to hundreds of university libraries around the world...
...Accepting this patently false judgment (if he took the trouble to read Lane's own twisted comments he would find that The Mankind Quarterly is guilty of having published articles which argue that Orientals obtain higher IQ scores than the contemporary white population of the United States-hardly "white supremacist"), he then grows so confident in his own eloquence as to throw in charges of "anti-Semitism" for good measure...
...HARRY F. WEYHER Also 'Mankind Quarterly' Washington, D.C...
...White leaders are...
...Without the Baltimore Sun in 1976, no donor would have learned that the Pallotines were investing mission donations in Florida real estate...
...MICHAEL P. CHEW Surprised by joy Hartford, Conn...
...I rejected the "nobody...
...Black leaders are not responsible for the development of race consciousness...
...It took brazen New York reporters to disclose that Father Bruce Ritter was siphoning Covenant House money...
...We are not talking about a human hamster living and breathing in a cage...
...another was elected president of the APA...
...ROGER PEARSON The writer is publisher of The Mankind Quarterly...
...JACK FISCHEL Shambles at ihe border Libertyville, III To the Editors: Your editorial "Reform or Resentment" [January 13] makes the unwarranted insinuation that the California voters who supported Proposition 187 are mean-spirited or bigoted...
...it does not have any publications...
...Two are among the five most-cited living psychologists in the world...
...I agreed that it was much easier to get a useful piece on baseball or Elvis Presley than one on Buddhism or Zwingli, but that we had to try...
...Sixteen Pioneer grantees are listed in the references of a major current college text on intelligence...
...In the '60s and '70s I put in some hard time in the encyclopedia game...
...The first in-depth coverage of clergy pedophilia was authored by Jason Berry and published in National Catholic Reporter...
...What Carlin calls "benign race consciousness" (and blames for the persistence of racism) was/is an effort, however feeble, to make some restitution for centuries of oppression that have wreaked havoc on black lives...
...The Pioneer Fund has provided more than a million dollars in grants to Arthur Jensen, a leading advocate of the view that poor academic performance of black students was caused by irreversible genetic deficiencies, so that programs like Head Start were useless and should be replaced by vocational training...
Vol. 122 • March 1995 • No. 6
