Since Wickliffe Preston Draper was probably the most controversial member of the Draper family, I'm including several versions on his life here, beginning with a very favorable one from his own organization, the Pioneer Fund.
Five distinguished Americans incorporated The Pioneer Fund in New York City on March 11, 1937.
Wickliffe Preston Draper (1891-1972), Pioneer's main benefactor, served on its five-person Board of Directors from 1937 until 1972. Draper was born in 1891 to a distinguished New England family, distant kin to three American presidents. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1913.
When World War I broke out in 1914, Draper enlisted as a lieutenant in the British Army and saw action on the western front and then in Greece. Returning to the western front, he fought at Messines and Ypres, where he was seriously wounded, and was later awarded the British Star Medal and the Belgian Croix de Guerre. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, Draper transferred to the U.S. Army. In 1919, he was discharged with the rank of major. Promoted to Colonel in the Cavalry Reserve, a title by which many people addressed him, he continued to take officers' courses until the outbreak of World War II.
When Draper's father died in 1923, he inherited the family's wealth earned from a textile machine manufacturing company. Dedicating his life to intellectual pursuits and philanthropy, as well as to adventuring, Draper studied archaeology and anthropology at the University of London, and genetics with private tutors. In 1927, he joined the French Mission led by Captain Augiéras to the southern Sahara and helped discover the remains of "Asselar Man," some 400 kilometers north of Timbuktu. For this, the French Societé de Geographie awarded him their 1928 Gold Medal, and in Britain he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
When the United States entered World War II, Draper, now 51 years old, returned to active service. Assigned to military intelligence, he joined British headquarters in India. Later, he was made responsible for internal security for the Alcan (Alaska-Canadian) Highway.
By nature introverted, shy, and modest, Draper refused honorary doctorates or having university buildings named in his honor. The only distinctions he accepted were for his role in the discovery of Asselar Man and his military decorations. Draper insisted that his role as benefactor to many charitable causes (including military history, archaeology, conservation, and population problems) remain anonymous. He never married and when he died in 1972, he left a significant portion of his assets to the Pioneer Fund to continue its scientific philanthropy. http://www.pioneerfund.org/Founders.html
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Wickliffe Preston Draper (sometimes spelled "Wycliffe" in publications) (August 9, 1891-1972) American eugenicist and a controversial philanthropist. He was the principal benefactor of the Pioneer Fund, which aims to advance the scientific study of heredity and human differences (notably those related to race and intelligence), and was a benefactor to many charitable causes, including military history, archaeology, conservation, and population problems.
Born in Hopedale, Massachusetts, he was the son of a wealthy textile machinery manufacturer (Draper looms) and the descendant of a long line of prominent Americans. Wickliffe Draper graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1913. When the United States was slow to enter World War I, he enlisted in the British Army (when the U.S. eventually declared war, he transferred to the U.S. Army).
In 1927, he joined the French Mission led by Captain Augiéras to the southern Sahara and helped discover the remains of "Asselar Man" some 400 kilometers north of Timbuktu. Asselar Man is an extinct human believed to belong to the Holocene or Recent Epoch. Some scholars consider it the oldest known skeleton of an African black. For this, the French Societé de Geographie awarded him their 1928 Gold Medal, and in Britain he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. After the war, he travelled and went on numerous safaris (his large New York City apartment was reportedly filled with mounted trophies).
During this time, Draper became interested in the field of eugenics. Eugenics had been a popular, progressive movement in the United States during the first three decades of the 20th century, but by the early 1930s popular interest had begun to fade, as the underlying science came under question and the use of coercive methods became less palatable. Groups like the American Eugenics Society (AES) faced declining membership and dwindling treasuries. Draper helped ease the funding shortfall, making a special gift to the AES of several thousand dollars to support the society prior to 1932.
In August 1935, Draper traveled to Berlin to attend the International Congress for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems. Presiding over the conference was Wilhelm Frick, the Reichminister of the Interior. (Frick was hanged in 1946 for his crimes against humanity.) At the conference, Draper's tavel companion Dr. Clarence Campbell delivered an oration that concluded with the words: "The difference between the Jew and the Aryan is as unsurmountable [sic] as that between black and white...Germany has set a pattern which other nations must follow... To that great leader, Adolf Hitler!" Three years later, when Draper paid to print and disseminate a book titled White America, a personal copy was delivered to Reichminister Frick.
In 1937, Draper founded the Pioneer Fund, a foundation intended to give scholarships to descendants of White colonial-era families, and to support research into "race betterment" through eugenics. The scholarships were never given, but the first project of the Fund was to distribute two documentary films from Nazi Germany depicting their claimed success with eugenics (though years before the Holocaust and its eventual public disclosure, Germany's eugenic policies were still very controversial for their far-reaching scope and often coercive public policies). The Pioneer Fund was headed by the controversial eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin, known especially for his role in the establishment of restrictive immigration laws and paving the way for national programs of compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and mentally retarded.
Draper volunteered for service again in World War II, and the fifty-year old man was assigned a post with British military intelligence in India. Draper returned to active philanthropy after the war and the Pioneer Fund supported the work of a number of notable (and controversial) researchers of race and intelligence, including William Shockley, Arthur Jensen, J. Philippe Rushton, and Roger Pearson. Though he never served as its president, Draper stayed on its board until his death and left his estate to the Fund, having never married. (Subsequent Fund boards have continued Draper's support for researchers studying race and intelligence). He also donated considerable funds to right-wing political organizations and candidates.
In addition to the Pioneer Fund, Draper also gave money directly to support causes that he favored. During the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s Draper secretly sent $215,000 to the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission in 1963 in order to support racial segregation. The gifts came to light in the 1990s, when the commission records were made public.
Throughout his life, Draper maintained a very low profile, as did the Pioneer Fund. When he died in 1972 from prostate cancer, he left $1.4 million to the Pioneer Fund. Since his death, Draper and the Fund have been heavily criticized for funding race and intelligence research, which some critics view as scientific racism. His work has become more controversial since the publication of The Bell Curve, because the Pioneer Fund supported much of the research used in the book. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickliffe_Draperook.
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Wickliffe Preston Draper, the founder of The Pioneer Fund, is the epitome of an American Hitler in the guise of a philanthropic and well educated millionaire. His family owned Draper Corporation, in Hopedale, MA and both North and South Carolina and he was a staunch anti-Union activist from the early days of Sacco and Vanzetti Trial in Dedham, MA only 30 miles from his hometown of Hopedale, MA in the heart of the Blackstone Valley which was the home of the Industrial Revolution. He was also among the most ardent and vehement racists and anti-civil rights advocates in the history of this cause from as early as the 1930's and perhaps earlier. His hatred of the United Nations, liberals, and his dislike for anyone who participated in the Nye Committees of the 1930's which attempted to punish so-called "war profiteering" by the DuPonts, led to Draper's deliberate persecution of Alger T. Hiss between 1948 and 1951 with the assistance of his cohort in racism, eugenics and white supremacy, Nathaniel Weyl, who is still alive today. Draper's vitriolic hatred for President John F. Kennedy was epitomized by his direct financial sponsorship of several publications that led the character assassination attacks on him during the 1950's when he was a Senator from Massachusetts.
These included Human Events, Right magazine, Noontide Press, The American Mercury and comparable rightist publications ostensibly owned and operated by The Liberty Lobby or affiliates, the foremost racist, proto-fascist and anti-Semitic organization that has ever existed in a Democracy. Only a Democracy could be brought to its knees by the sinister forces of fascism, operating under the protection of the First Amendment to the Constitution. This is a very sad commentary on our times and on the foibles of our once magnificent system of egalitarian democracy. The Draper attacks and assaults on President Kennedy intensified even more during the 1960's when he was President and culminated in the final character assassination in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. The Draper family, in 1967 became the largest shareholder in Rockwell-Standard, which later became Rockwell International, one of the two largest defense contractors in the entire universe along with the Lockheed Corp. of Marietta, GA which is championed by Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA). Rockwell bought out the failing Draper Corporation, a manufacturer of textile loom machinery and equipment just before the acceleration of military activity in Vietnam and shortly before the Draper Corporation was liquidated by Rockwell as a bankrupt concern in the late 1970's. Rockets, missiles and warplanes are apparently a much easier place to make money than in the arena of textile loom equipment and textile machinery. Neither Kennedy's opposition to the Cost Plus Fixed Fee method of compensating defense contractors nor the CIA's opposition to the National Intelligence Estimates of March 22, 1963 called NIE 11-4-63 stood in the way of the plans for the future of this country as defined and designed by those in the Draper-Rockwell coalition which reached its culmination during their merger. Draper's fascist-inspired vitriolic hatred of Communism and anything liberal led to his support of McCarthyism and the activities of HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee for over a decade. In the spirit of Dr. Josef Goebbels, he and his close associate at The Pioneer Fund, Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, actually created and then championed the "involuntary sterilization movement in America" the so-called "Buck vs. Bell" Supreme Court case which was favorably reviewed by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. It led directly to the involuntary sterilization of over 75,000 human beings between 1924 and 1972 in the approximately 24 states which passed similar laws at the behest and encouragement of The Pioneer Fund.
Sound familiar? But the first major achievement of his work and that of Herr Laughlin, was when Hitler and Goebbels invited Laughlin to receive an honorary degree for his work in passing "The Model Eugenics Laws in America". Hitler used the Draper-inspired American Eugenics Model to pass the law which will go down in infamy as the Nuremberg Laws: "On the Prevention of Hereditarily Ill Progeny" - the so-called Holocaust Laws. Are you beginning to get the picture here? Are you willing to put your actions and money where your realistic concerns are? The last time that Immigration laws were severely tightened was the 1924 Immigration Act which was accomplished, in my opinion, in direct anticipation of the coming unrest in Europe during the 1930's and 1940's. These laws kept many legitimate refugees, all targeted for elimination by the Third Reich, from ever reaching a safe haven in the United States. The precisely identical intentions are at work today with this renewed emphasis on "Proposition 187", which is intended to become "The Model Anti-Immigration Legislation in America" and for the rest of the world. When a Rwanda or Zaire-style deliberately initiated crisis occurs in Bosnia-Herzegovina or elsewhere in the world, the intention of the sponsors of "Proposition 187" is to prevent those refugees targeted for "ethnic extinction" from ever reaching a safe haven in American or anywhere else in the free world for that matter. This is a very real and serious concern and every American who recognizes the true intentions of Proposition 187 should oppose it with their last breath and their last ounce of strength before it is too late. Critiques and comments are solicited to our email address: pioneer@ids.com
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A newspaper account of a 1917 talk by Draper about his World War I service in the British Army.
Speculation on Draper as the possible anonymous donor of the Draper Gym.
Toward A Racial Abyss by Michael Kenny.
Another article, this one favoring Wickliffe, is at The Occidental Quarterly.
An article on Wickliffe on the Spartacus Educational site.
A web search for Wickliffe Draper will provide you with a lot more to read.
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