One morning a couple of years ago I received an urgent email from a moderately prominent libertarian figure strongly focused on antiwar issues. He warned me that our publication had been branded a “White Supremacist website” by the Washington Post, and urged me to immediately respond, perhaps by demanding a formal retraction or even taking legal action lest we be destroyed by that totally unfair accusation.

When I looked into the matter, my own perspective was rather different. Apparently Max Boot, one of the more agitated Jewish Neocons, had written a column fiercely denouncing some recent criticism of pro-Israel policies that Philip Giraldi had published in our webzine, and the “White Supremacist” slur was merely his crude means of demonizing the author’s views for those of his readers who might be less than wholeheartedly enthusiastic about Benjamin Netanyahu and his policies.

After pointing this out to my correspondent, I also noted that a good 10% or more of our writers were probably “White Nationalists,” and perhaps a few of them might even arguably be labeled “White Supremacists.” So although Boot’s description of our website was certainly wrong, it was probably less wrong than the vast majority of his other writing, which was typically focused on American military policy and the Middle East.

Our webzine is quite unusual in its willingness to feature a smattering of writers who provide a White Nationalist perspective. Such individuals are almost totally excluded from other online publications, except for those marginalized websites devoted to their ideas, which often tend to focus on such topics and related issues to the near exclusion of anything else. However, I believe that maintaining this sort of ideological quarantine or “ghettoization” greatly diminishes the ability to understand many important aspects of our world.

Substituting ideological slurs and demonization for rational evaluation and rebuttal has long become a commonplace in heated American policy debates, recently growing more severe in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the associated “cancel-culture” driven by inflamed social media. Locating a couple of controversial sentences and then using these to dismiss an enormous body of detailed analysis may sometimes serve as an effective debating technique among timorous journalists, but its intellectual legitimacy seems rather doubtful. And this is especially true with regard to the charged subject of white racialism, which seems to provoke a near-religious antipathy among so many of the politically correct elites of our society, despite their avowedly secular protestations.

Even the choice of preferred accusatory phrases suggests a certain amount of bad faith. My impression is that a couple of years ago members of the pro-white ideological camp were usually denounced as “White Nationalists” but more recently that term has been superceded by “White Supremacists.” I suspect that part of the reason for this verbal shift was the obvious hypocrisy of their disparate treatment. As I noted a few years ago:

A strident Black Nationalist such as Malcolm X was widely condemned during his own lifetime as an extremist advocate of violence, yet he has now been honored with a U.S. postage stamp, while today a lifelong racial activist such as Al Sharpton has his own MSNBC cable television show and received 80-odd invitations to the White House over the last few years. Such treatment seems very different from what their white-activist counterparts, either past or present, might expect to receive.

Following the unexpected victory of Donald Trump and the resulting sudden media prominence of the racialist Alt-Right, a national journalist who had become a leading chronicler of that movement visited me for lunch in Palo Alto, and we spent a couple of hours discussing what I considered some of the tremendous ironies of America’s existing ideological landscape. Among other things, I pointed out that the overwhelming majority of the world’s leading academics and intellectuals from one hundred years ago—whether left, right, or center—held many views that would surely have gotten them branded as “White Nationalists” in today’s severely constricted ideological climate.

But whereas today’s WNs are an extremely vilified and marginalized group, with their ranks therefore necessarily skewed towards eccentrics and misfits, the situation was entirely different back then. Their counterparts of the past included many of the foremost academic scholars and public intellectuals of that era, who openly discussed their views in leading opinion journals rather than by pseudonymous postings in dark corners of the Internet. Partly for this reason, such individuals tended to approach the same issues with far greater sophistication.

Until the early 2000s, nearly all these names would have been almost unknown to me, either rating a sentence or two in my introductory history textbooks, or else being entirely omitted. But I spent most of that decade building a content-archiving system that provided convenient access to over a million articles from more than 200 of our leading periodicals since the mid-nineteenth century, and was stunned by the severe distortions and enormous lacunae in my knowledge which this revealed. As I wrote couple of years ago on related matters:

I sometimes imagined myself a little like an earnest young Soviet researcher of the 1970s who began digging into the musty files of long-forgotten Kremlin archives and made some stunning discoveries. Trotsky was apparently not the notorious Nazi spy and traitor portrayed in all the textbooks, but instead had been the right-hand man of the sainted Lenin himself during the glorious days of the great Bolshevik Revolution, and for some years afterward had remained in the topmost ranks of the Party elite. And who were these other figures—Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Rykov—who also spent those early years at the very top of the Communist hierarchy? In history courses, they had barely rated a few mentions, as minor Capitalist agents who were quickly unmasked and paid for their treachery with their lives. How could the great Lenin, father of the Revolution, have been such an idiot to have surrounded himself almost exclusively with traitors and spies?

As I gradually discovered, large portions of America’s entire intellectual past had been hidden or altered beyond recognition, and racial beliefs constituted a major portion of this transformation.

The ongoing “cancel-culture” of today’s elite-backed Black Lives Matter movement represents merely the latest iteration of this long process. The names of many of our most famous presidents and honored national leaders have recently been stripped from buildings and public monuments, and a committee organized by the Mayor of DC recently called for the possible removal of the Jefferson Memorial and the Washington Monument. If this current social revolution continues, we are only a step or two away from a society in which any favorable public mention for Thomas Jefferson or George Washington might be regarded as an immediate firing-offense by many major corporations, and grounds for banning by social media. Although such a development seems unlikely, it would merely represent an extreme version of the ideological purge that has already reshaped our academic and journalistic world over the last century.

In my conversation with that national journalist, one of the major examples I cited was that of E.A. Ross, a leading intellectual figure of the early decades of the twentieth century but now largely forgotten except when portrayed as a racist cartoon villain by ignorant present-day academics. Last year, I noted such crude treatment by Holocaust historian Joseph W. Bendersky in his book documenting and condemning the views of America’s Anglo-Saxon elites from a century ago:

Although I would not question the accuracy of Bendersky’s exhaustive archival research, he seems considerably less sure-footed regarding American intellectual history and sometimes allows his personal sentiments to lead him into severe error. For example, his first chapter devotes a couple of pages to E.A. Ross, citing some of his unflattering descriptions of Jews and Jewish behavior, and suggesting he was a fanatic anti-Semite, who dreaded “the coming catastrophe of an America overrun by racially inferior people.”

But Ross was actually one of our greatest early sociologists, and his 26 page discussion of Jewish immigrants published in 1913 was scrupulously fair-minded and even-handed, describing both positive and negative characteristics, following similar chapters on Irish, German, Scandinavian, Italian, and Slavic newcomers. And although Bendersky routinely denounces his own ideological villains as “Social Darwinists,” the source he actually cites regarding Ross correctly identified the scholar as one of America’s leading critics of Social Darwinism. Indeed, Ross’s stature in left-wing circles was so great that he was selected as a member of the Dewey Commission, organized to independently adjudicate the angry conflicting accusations of Stalinists and Trotskyites. And in 1936, a Jewish leftist fulsomely praised Ross’s long and distinguished scholarly career in the pages of The New Masses, the weekly periodical of the American Communist Party, only regretting that Ross had never been willing to embrace Marxism.

The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People

E.A. Ross • 1914 • 59,000 Words

Ross was quite plain-spoken in his views, and his long career was bracketed by his leading national role in major free speech issues. As a young academic, he had been fired by Stanford University for his political beliefs, a celebrated incident that led to the creation of the American Association of University Professors, while he ended his life serving for a decade as national chairman of the ACLU.

In 1915 Ross published South of Panama, describing the backwardness and misery he had encountered in so many of the societies of Latin America during his half year of travels and investigation across that region. Although the bulk of the text was descriptive and empirical, at one point he pondered the underlying nature of those problems, wondering whether the causes were primarily cultural, due to the widespread poverty and lack of education, or instead a result of the innate inferiority of the local population, emphasizing that the answer to this crucial question would have an enormous impact upon the continent’s future developmental trajectory.

After even-handedly mentioning some of the limited evidence supporting each of these two conflicting theories, he ultimately leaned towards the environmental side, criticizing heredity as “a cheap offhand explanation” of human characteristics that actually often change over time. Today such a discussion would be utterly unimaginable within the confines of our respectable academic or media worlds, and for opposite reasons would also be extremely rare among committed racialists.

E.A. Ross • 1917 • 71,000 Words

Although Ross was uncertain about the natural abilities of South America’s mostly Mestizo population, a six month research trip to China a few years earlier had left him no doubt abut the potential of the Chinese, despite their immense existing poverty. As he recounted in his book:

To forty-three men who, as educators, missionaries and diplomats, have had good opportunity to learn the “feel” of the Chinese mind, I put the question, “Do you find the intellectual capacity of the yellow race equal to that of the white race?” All but five answered “Yes,” and one sinologue of varied experience as missionary, university president and legation adviser left me gasping with the statement, “Most of us who have spent twenty-five years or more out here come to feel that the yellow race is the normal human type, while the white race is a ‘sport.’”

Given these conclusions, he felt quite confident of China’s future success as I explained a few years ago:

[China’s global rise] would have seemed far less unexpected to our leading thinkers of 100 years ago, many of whom prophesied that the Middle Kingdom would eventually regain its ranking among the foremost nations of the world. This was certainly the expectation of E.A. Ross, one of America’s greatest early sociologists, whose book The Changing Chinese looked past the destitution, misery, and corruption of the China of his day to a future modernized China perhaps on a technological par with America and the leading European nations. Ross’s views were widely echoed by public intellectuals such as Lothrop Stoddard, who foresaw China’s probable awakening from centuries of inward-looking slumber as a looming challenge to the worldwide hegemony long enjoyed by the various European-descended nations.

The Conflict of Oriental and Western Cultures in China

E.A. Ross • 1911 • 61,000 Words

Ross published more than two dozen books and numerous articles, and I have no doubt that these could easily be mined for a multitude of sentences or paragraphs that would today ignite a firestorm of controversy on Twitter or among the talking-heads of Cable TV, with a lynch-mob branding him a “White Supremacist” fit for deplatforming. But that merely demonstrates the severe flaws in our current climate of harsh ideological censorship.

A much stronger case could be made against his close contemporary Lothrop Stoddard, also mentioned above. Indeed, I doubt that Stoddard himself would have disputed any attempt to label him as a “White Supremacist.” After all, his most famous and influential work bore the full title “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy,” and that 1921 bestseller focused upon the emerging challenges that peoples of white European origin faced in maintaining their global control in the aftermath of the terribly destructive First World War.

But although that term would probably apply to Stoddard, the marginalizing implications it carries in today’s society would be extremely misleading since his beliefs were so widely shared by much of America’s political and intellectual elite. He himself came from a prestigious New England family, and after earning his doctorate in history at Harvard, his series of very successful books quickly established him as one of our country’s most influential writers and public intellectuals, winning him regular invitations to lecture at our nation’s military academy and with his articles regularly gracing the pages of our most prestigious national publications.

The serious concerns he raised about the economic challenge America and Europe might soon face from a rising China were grounded in solid realism. For example, he approvingly quoted the late Victorian predictions of Prof. Charles E. Pearson:

Does any one doubt that the day is at hand when China will have cheap fuel from her coal-mines, cheap transport by railways and steamers, and will have founded technical schools to develop her industries? Whenever that day comes, she may wrest the control of the world’s markets, especially throughout Asia, from England and Germany.

Many of Stoddard’s books focused upon sharp racialist issues, and these might seem extremely jarring to a modern readership. But other works fell outside that area, and they effectively demonstrated the remarkable quality and objectivity of one of America’s leading geopolitical thinkers of that era.

For example, just prior to our own 1917 entry into the First World War, he had published Present-Day Europe, providing a detailed description of the political and social situation in all of the contending European states, including their historical roots. I happened to read the book about a decade ago, and found it the best summary treatment of that subject I had ever encountered.

Its National States of Mind

Lothrop Stoddard • 1917 • 74,000 Words

World War I and its immediate aftermath saw the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the abolition of the Islamic Caliphate by Ataturk’s secular regime, and the widespread rise of left-wing militant atheism inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution. As a natural consequence, nearly all Western thinkers dismissed the power of Islam as a spent force and a fading relic of the past, while Stoddard was almost alone in presciently suggesting its possible worldwide revival in The New World of Islam, published in 1922.

Lothrop Stoddard • 1922 • 95,000 Words

But Stoddard’s best-known work certainly remains The Rising Tide of Color, published 100 years ago, which launched his influential career. About a decade ago, I finally got around to reading it, and was greatly surprised that a book so heavily demonized in every description I had encountered actually came across as so level-headed and innocuous. Although most of the leading political figures of that time proclaimed permanent white rule of the world, Stoddard strongly argued that this situation was temporary, soon to evaporate under the pressure of rising non-white nationalism, economic development, and population growth. These rising tides of the peoples of Asia and the Middle East made their eventual independence almost inevitable, and the European powers should therefore voluntarily relinquish their vast colonial empires rather than earn future bitterness by stubbornly seeking to retain them. A “White Supremacist” might certainly advance such arguments, but only one of far greater sophistication than is today implied by that popular media slur.

I recently reread Stoddard’s volume and was even more impressed the second time through. In many respects, his sweeping panorama of the future geopolitical landscape brings to mind The Clash of Civilizations, published in 1997 by renowned Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, which then became a huge national bestseller and cultural-touchstone in the wake of the 9/11 attacks of 2001. Yet although Huntington’s text is just two decades old and Stoddard’s has reached its first century, I think it is the former that actually now seems much more dated and less applicable to the current alignment of the world and the challenges faced by white European populations.

Lothrop Stoddard • 1920 • 78,000 Words

By the mid-1930s, Stoddard’s star was fading, with his racialist framework under growing pressure both in the sciences and by the influential leftist and anti-racist elements brought into power during the New Deal Era. His last book appeared the year before our entrance into the Second World War and probably sealed his intellectual fate. As I wrote last year:

During late 1939, a leading American news syndicate sent Stoddard to spend a few months in wartime Germany and provide his perspective, with his numerous dispatches appearing in The New York Times and other top newspapers. Upon his return, he published a 1940 book summarizing all his information, seemingly just as even-handed as his earlier 1917 volume. His coverage probably constitutes one of the most objective and comprehensive American accounts of the mundane domestic nature of National Socialist Germany, and thus may seem rather shocking to modern readers steeped in eighty years of increasingly unrealistic Hollywood propaganda.

An Uncensored Report from Inside the Third Reich At War

Lothrop Stoddard • 1940 • 79,000 Words

As I’ve previously discussed, during World War II and in its immediate aftermath, America experienced its own Great Purge of our academic and journalistic elites—left, right, and center—with many of our most prominent figures permanently disappearing from public visibility, and Stoddard was among those who fell. For two decades he had been among America’s leading public intellectuals, but when he died in 1950, no obituary appeared in the pages of the New York Times.

Stoddard’s own writings had focused primarily upon history and politics, but his world-view had been shaped by the ideas of his mentor Madison Grant, a hugely influential figure in racial theories, eugenics, and natural conservation efforts.

Although a lawyer by training, Grant never practiced in the field, and instead gained fame with the 1916 publication of his book The Passing of the Great Race, which argued for the division of European populations into three primary races of Nordics, Alpines, and Mediterraneans, with the first of these playing the overarching role in world history and the creation of dynamic civilizations. Late twentieth century critics such as Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould denounced the book as America’s most influential work of “scientific racism,” and noted that Adolf Hitler had written Grant a fan-letter in which he described it as his “Bible.”

Early American anthropology was heavily dominated by Anglo-Saxon racialists, and Grant’s views were widespread within that field. Drawing upon a Darwinian world-view, these scientists heavily focused upon physical and psychological racial differences, certainly including those within the white population, and they were often aligned with political movements aimed at sharply curtailing continued large-scale immigration, especially from Southern and Eastern Europe. They also tended to be either right-wing or apolitical in their views.

The opposing ideological camp in the early field of anthropology was overwhelmingly the creation of a German-Jewish immigrant named Franz Boas, who held strongly left-leaning political views. Becoming a professor of anthropology at Columbia University in 1899, he began strongly challenging existing notions of race and racial differences, and focused much more on cultural rather than biological explanations for the behavior of different human societies.

In those pre-DNA days, the classification of different racial groups relied heavily upon physical measurements, with the shape of the skull being a key means of separating European populations into the purported Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean races. Boas’s greatest early claim to fame was his landmark 1911 study demonstrating that European groups who immigrated to America rapidly changed the shapes of their skulls, apparently due to shifts in diet or other environmental factors, thereby seeming to transform themselves into a different racial group, an astonishing discovery that shocked most of his scientific colleagues.

When I first read that account, I found myself extremely skeptical of such a result, since we know that skull-shape is overwhelmingly determined by genetic factors rather than by diet or sunshine. And indeed, it does appears that Boas’s conclusions were entirely false, and apparently even fraudulent, though perhaps unintentionally so, being a product of his ideological zeal in debunking existing racial dogma. Over the years, quite a number of ultra-high-profile frauds in the field of anthropology have come to light, almost all of them falling upon a particular side of the ideological isle. Perhaps the most famous recent example was that of Boas disciple Margaret Mead and her bestseller on the sexual customs of Samoa.

From his Columbia University base, Boas began minting large numbers of anthropology Ph.D.’s, and his former students soon began founding new departments throughout the country, gradually shifting the entire field towards their much less hereditarian perspective on human behavior. By the late 1920s they had gained the upper hand over their academic rivals in this hidden institutional conflict, and a Darwinian framework for understanding human behavior had largely been expelled from the academic social sciences. Even the basic notion of biological race—once almost universally accepted—had become much less of a subject of discussion, with fewer and fewer academics focusing upon the differences between human groups, let alone among European whites.

The victory of Boasian anthropology became overwhelming around the time of the Second World War, and for decades thereafter any notion of applying Darwinism to the understanding of human activity was confined to the margins of academia. This situation only began to change in the mid-1970s with the rise of sociobiology, and the large-scale mappings of the human genome around the end of the century finally began restoring race to its proper place near the center of anthropology. Many of Boas’s intellectual heirs ferociously resisted this revival of a Darwinist and hereditarian framework, sometimes with improper means. The serious scientific fraud at the center of Stephen Jay Gould’s influential book The Mismeasure of Man is a notorious example of this.

The fascinating story of this hidden decades-long struggle over the control of anthropology and its relationship to Darwinism is very effectively told in Carl Degler’s 1991 book In Search of Human Nature, which carries the descriptive subtitle “The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought.”

As a Pulitzer Prize-winning former president of the American Historical Association, Degler certainly had stellar academic credentials for the task. For decades, he had been a strong champion of feminist and anti-racialist causes, firmly embracing the “culturalist” model of human history, and as he explained both in his Preface and in a subsequent interview, he had begun his investigation assuming that the Boasian victory had come about primarily on the basis of objective scientific facts. But his years of archival research had eventually led him to conclude that the motives had mostly been ideological, and that the bulk of the evidence had always actually remained to the contrary.

The Times gave his important book the lead position in its Sunday Book Review, with the very favorable discussion running nearly 3,000 words, including an appended interview in which the scholar recognized that his longtime colleagues would issue “a sigh of regret that Carl Degler, who has been working all this time writing against racism and sexism, has been converted to the other side.” Notwithstanding his shift into the sociobiological camp, when he died a quarter-century later, the Times obituary honored him with the headline “Carl N. Degler, Scholarly Champion of the Oppressed in America, Dies at 93.”

A few years after Stoddard’s unnoticed 1950 death, racial issues moved to the forefront of American society. The 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown vs. Board of Education unanimously overturned a half-century of legal precedent and required the desegregation of all American public schools. Reaction to Brown was fierce throughout the South, but although President Eisenhower seems to have had misgivings about the decision, he dispatched the troops of the 101st Airborne to forcibly integrate Little Rock high school.

The massive resistance of the South to these new racial policies continued, and periodically reached the national media. According to his later account, Carleton Putnam happened to read a 1958 column in Life Magazine by a Southern journalist defending segregation , and he was soon drawn into the ongoing political battle.

Like Stoddard, Putnam had deep New England Puritan ancestry, but after graduating Princeton and earning his law degree at Columbia, he had chosen to pursue a business career. In the mid-1930s he had become a pioneer in commercial aviation and started his own small airline, which following various expansions and mergers eventually became Delta, the nation’s largest carrier, with Putnam serving as chairman for 15 years. While still in his early 50s, he had retired from active business involvement and begun work on an intended four volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt, a distant relative, with the first volume appearing in 1958 to widespread critical praise. But that project was soon abandoned as he gradually began devoting all his efforts to the campaign to maintain racial segregation, first by writing a series of public letters and newspaper columns, and later by launching a public speaking tour, writing books and organizing legal efforts to overturn Brown.

Putnam had paid little attention to political or scientific developments during the two decades he had been absorbed in the business world, but was stunned when he discovered the ideological changes that had swept through the academy during that period, which eventually laid the intellectual basis for the legal and political decisions that overturned legal segregation. From his perspective, the major biological differences between blacks and whites had long been recognized, with the substantial African inferiority in mind and temperament fully acknowledged by most scientists. But in less than a single generation, the theories of Franz Boas and his coterie of academic disciples had captured anthropology and related sciences, proclaiming the doctrine of racial equality and marginalizing those who maintained the old beliefs. Eventually, this new scientific consensus was given the strength of law by the Supreme Court.

In Putnam’s opinion, the great danger of desegregation was that it might eventually lead to racial miscegenation, and the admixture of African ancestry into America’s white population would severely degrade the citizenry, leading to a large and permanent decline in mental ability and social behavior. To a considerable extent, he believed that biology was destiny, and the mixture of black with white would destroy our nation’s future.

During the 1950s, the battles over racial integration were almost entirely confined to the South, which contained the overwhelming majority of our black population, and as a New England Yankee and prominent business executive Putnam’s energetic involvement in the cause drew considerable attention. In 1961 he collected together his writings on the subject, much of which were based upon his extensive correspondence with various critics, and published Race and Reason, a short book setting forth his views which became a major bestseller, having 150,000 copies in print. Several of the world’s leading scientific experts who supported his position contributed a Foreword to his book, which also received the strong endorsement of several high-ranking Southern senators, who distributed copies to their followers and local newspaper editors.

A Yankee View

Carleton Putnam • 1961 • 46,000 Words

As a prominent voice in the national campaign to maintain segregation, Putnam argued that the leading figures in his political movement were pursuing an ineffectual strategy, staking their claim on the constitutional doctrine of “states’ rights” while they avoided raising the scientific reality of the large biological differences between blacks and whites, which he believed should have been their main issue. He claimed that these individuals all privately acknowledged those racial facts, but as members of the Southern elite they had been closely associated for generations with the families of their black household domestics and other retainers, and considered it impossible to publicly discuss the biological differences that they so readily acknowledged in private. Thus, for cultural reasons they were foregoing their strongest political weapon, and Putnam believed his own work was necessary to remedy that lack. He also claimed that numerous prominent scientists privately endorsed his scientific views about race but were too fearful of academic or financial retaliation to acknowledge those facts in public.

According to Putnam, the unchallenged sociological and psychological evidence that had helped sway the Supreme Court to overturn segregation was largely fraudulent, and his project culminated in an important 1963 challenge to Brown, in which he and his legal team successfully introduced the contrary testimony of several scientific experts. But although they won at trial, that verdict was subsequently overturned at the appellate level, and the high court refused to hear an appeal.

In 1967 he published his sequel Race and Reality, which received a glowing endorsement from physics Nobel Laureate William Shockley who had recently become notorious for voicing similar views. Around the same time or a few years later, leading psychometric scholars such as Arthur Jensen of Berkeley, Hans Eysenck of University College London, and Richard J. Herrnstein of Harvard had focused upon the large and seemingly innate racial gaps in IQ, with intellectually-elite publications such as the Harvard Educational Review and The Atlantic presenting their long articles on the subject. But the political tide in American society was never reversed, and Putnam eventually abandoned his efforts.

Despite his controversial and strongly racialist public writings, when Putnam died in 1998 at the age of 96, he received a rather long and favorable obituary in the Times, certainly emphasizing his segregationist efforts and even mentioning that his books had inspired a young David Duke to become a leader of the Ku Klux Klan, but written in a surprisingly detached and even friendly tone, suggesting that Putnam had managed to retain lifelong credibility among our East Coast elites.

Much of the hidden backstory of Putnam’s pro-segregation effort was later revealed in a 2002 book by William H. Tucker of Rutgers. The Funding of Scientific Racism recounted the origins and activities of the Pioneer Fund, for many decades the leading financial backer of numerous American racialist projects. Prof. Tucker had his origins in the academic New Left of the late 1960s and was intensely hostile to the ideological positions of his subjects, but his three years of archival research and numerous personal interviews provide a wealth of information that otherwise would have remained hidden.

Although the Pioneer Fund only became an occasional subject of media scrutiny during the 1990s, its origins actually stretched back to the early decades of the 20th century and a millionaire named Wickliffe Draper, who funded and established the organization. Like Stoddard, Grant, and Putnam, Draper himself was of New England Puritan stock, the group that had provided a hugely disproportionate share of America’s intellectual elites from the founding of our nation up through the beginning of the twentieth century. He had graduated Harvard in 1913, been wounded in combat during the First World War, and eventually gained the rank of colonel in the post-war reserves. Inheriting a substantial textile fortune, he never pursued a career, but instead devoted most of his life to such gentleman pursuits as big game hunting and travel.

Although obviously distasteful to Tucker, Draper’s strong racialist views seemed quite reflective of the leading American figures of his youth such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and in his early adulthood, the books of Grant and Stoddard were on everyone’s lips. Indeed, Roosevelt had praised Grant’s theories, and Draper was one of Grant’s social acquaintances, regarding him as a personal role-model according to Tucker.

By modern standards, America’s ruling elites of that era embraced extremely racist notions, and Draper’s views fit very comfortably within that milieu. One of his earliest projects had been to promote the repatriation of America’s blacks back to Africa, but such ideas were hardly uncommon at the time, and indeed during the 1920s one of America’s most prominent black public figures was the nationalistic leader Marcus Garvey, who proposed to do exactly that.

Draper was hardly any sort of intellectual, but his importance lay in his willingness to heavily finance those racialists who were, and his choice of like-minded successors who continued to support such causes for decades after his death in 1972, which allowed his influence to span nearly a century, from the era of Warren Harding to that of Barack Obama. The non-profit Pioneer Fund, which he established in 1937, was the primary vehicle for his donations, but Tucker’s research indicates that substantial additional sums were also disbursed directly from Draper’s personal assets. In particular, it appears that much or even most of the funding for Putnam’s press campaigns, book distributions, and legal efforts may have been quietly provided by Draper, who viewed Putnam as a trusted ally and advisor.

Among American foundations, the Pioneer Fund scarcely ranked as a minnow, being dwarfed a hundred times over by Ford, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and other philanthropic endowments which were enthusiastically supportive of the rising anti-racist tide in American society and thought. But although massively outspent by its ideological opponents, Pioneer’s dollars played a crucial role in subsidizing and keeping alive the racialist doctrines that had once entirely dominated American society but which had begun receding from the late 1920s onward, before becoming completely marginalized among our national elites by the 1950s and 1960s.

For example, the science of eugenics had been launched in the late 19th century by polymath Francis Galton, a first cousin of Charles Darwin, and for decades was almost universally accepted by educated individuals of all ideological backgrounds, with the strongest support usually coming from progressives and only the fervently religious being the main holdouts. But under continuous pressure mostly by Jews and Marxists, the doctrine began a long and permanent retreat during the late 1920s and 1930s. Around the same time, Franz Boas and his energetic group of academic disciples, most of them Jewish, had gained control of American anthropology, largely displacing the Anglo-Saxon academics who had originally created the discipline, and overturning the racialist theories once promoted by Grant and Stoddard.

As regular academic periodicals grew unwelcoming to articles that continued to adhere to what eventually became known as “scientific racism,” the Pioneer Fund in 1960 financed the creation of Mankind Quarterly, a new peer-reviewed journal intended to fill that gap. When I digitized the archives of that publication around 2003, its name meant nothing to me, nor did those of its editorial board members and leading contributors. But I eventually discovered that many of these latter individuals were actually leading international scholars with distinguished academic records, whose refusal to join ideological trends had locked them out of mainstream periodicals and eventually purged their names from our media and intellectual history despite their prestigious academic credentials.

For example, Henry Garrett had been the longtime chairman of Columbia University’s Psychology Department, president of the American Psychological Association, a member of the AAAS and the National Research Council, and editor of leading academic texts. R. Ruggles Gates was a prominent British geneticist and a Fellow of the Royal Society. Robert Gayre, A. James Gregor, Robert Kuttner, R. Travis Osborne, and numerous other regular contributors also had strong scientific or scholarly credentials. Although Tucker is quite hostile to these individuals and their ideology, his book is helpful in provided this important background. The 1960-2004 archives of the publication are now conveniently available for reading on this website:

128 Issues, July 1960 to July 2004

Nearly all of the prominent American racialists so far discussed came from an Old Stock Anglo-Saxon backgrounds, reflecting the elites that had totally dominated our society up until the 1930s, and their lifelong political tendencies were generally either mainstream or right-wing. But the most frequent outside contributor to Mankind Quarterly during the 1960s and 1970s was Nathaniel Weyl, who had different roots.

His father Walter was from a German-Jewish immigrant family and had been a leading progressive intellectual, co-founding The New Republic in 1914. After getting his degree from Columbia University in 1931 and doing graduate work at the London School of Economics, the younger Weyl soon veered far to the left, spending the 1930s as a committed Communist Party member while working in government and operating on the fringes of a Soviet spy network. He and his wife both broke with the Party in 1939, disgusted by the Hitler-Stalin Pact, and by the late 1940s he had become a strong conservative and a zealous anti-Communist, regularly denouncing Red espionage in various publications, eventually including National Review. So in some respects his ideological path anticipated that of the later neoconservatives who followed the same trajectory a generation or more later.

Racial and ethnic topics soon became one of Weyl’s main areas of interest, and in 1960 he published The Negro in American Civilization, an exhaustive and unflinching account of the role of blacks in our nation’s history. Running well over 150,000 words, the coverage stretched from their African roots down to his present day, focused primarily upon history and politics but also including extensive discussion of biological, anthropological, and sociological issues. Willmoore Kendell, a prominent Yale political scientist, was William F. Buckley Jr.’s mentor, and he gave the volume a glowing treatment in National Review, saying it filled the longstanding need for “a compendious and objective survey of the facts about the American Negro” but warned that “the evidence Weyl has assembled is vastly more discouraging…than most of us have permitted ourselves to fear in our most pessimistic moments.” While praising Weyl’s bravery and candor, Kendell predicted that “He will pay dearly for it.”

Indeed, Kendall’s warning seems to have been borne out and almost all of Weyl’s subsequent writings were confined to conservative or racialist publications, as were the reviews of his many later books. And Kendell’s ringing endorsement may even have had serious personal consequences, since the following year he was forced out of his tenured Yale professorship after 14 years of teaching at that academic institution. In 1971, Weyl and a co-author published American Statesmen on Slavery and the Negro, which seems largely a supplement and sequel to the previous book. Both of Weyl’s hefty volumes were parallel to Putnam’s short books, though providing far greater breadth and depth.

Although Weyl lacked a doctorate, he was a highly innovative thinker, so his apparent blacklisting by mainstream academics and publications had unfortunate intellectual consequences. For example, in 1966 he published The Creative Elite in America, introducing a powerful sampling technique for determining the relative performance of different ethnic groups based upon their subset of especially distinctive last names, a tool which I had christened “Weyl Analysis” and heavily used in my long article “The Myth of American Meritocracy” analyzing elite college admissions.

Among his various quantitative findings, Weyl demonstrated the long intellectual dominance of Americans of Puritan stock, and their noticeable decline by about 1900. A half-century after Weyl’s sociological breakthrough, economist Gregory Clark relied upon exactly the same methodology in widely-praised best-seller The Son Also Rises, but confined any mention of Weyl to a single brief footnote, which denounced him as a “racist” and expressed surprise that such a powerful