Pioneer's Big Lie

In this they proceeded on the sound principle that the magnitude of lie always contains certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of the people in the very bottom of their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously and purposely evil, and that, therefore, in view of the primitive simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall victim to big lie than to little one, since they themselves lie in little things, but would be ashamed of ties that were too big. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (1) In the spring of 2002, I published an article entitled American Breed: Nazi Eugenics and the Origins of the as part of symposium edition of the Albany Law Review. (2) My objective was to present a detailed analysis of the ... origins of the Fund (3) and to show the connections between Nazi eugenics and one branch of the American eugenics movement that I described as purveying a malevolent brand of biological determinism. (4) I collected published evidence on the Fund's history and supplemented it with material from several archival collections--focusing on letters and other documents that explained the relationship between Pioneer's first President, Harry Laughlin, and Pioneer's founder, Wickliffe Draper. The evidence thus assembled convinced me that both Laughlin and Draper were sympathetic to the eugenic agenda being crafted in the mid-1930s by the Nazis. As they launched their private eugenic foundation, they hoped to emulate the German model. (5) To support my conclusions I pointed to factors such as Laughlin's arrangement for Draper's attendance at Nazi population conference in Berlin, (6) as well as Laughlin's excitement on receiving his own Nazi-conferred honorary degree. (7) I noted parallels between projects funded by Draper before was incorporated and similar projects in its early years as well as more recently. (8) The unyielding position of present day spokesmen--that the foundation's past contains no links to Nazi eugenics (9)--demonstrates to me the unwillingness of the to confront its troubling history. Rather than admitting to the obvious implications of its founders' actions and motives as revealed in their unguarded personal commentary, the today continues to declare that Laughlin was life-long scientist (10) and Draper, merely gentleman scholar. (11) supporters claim that rather than being part of the darkest chapter of the multifaceted story of American eugenics, Laughlin and Draper--and the itself--are victims of recent rash of political correctness and Pioneer bashing. (12) Why does refuse to face its history? Perhaps it is simply continuing practice honed by leaders like the late Harry Weyher. (13) As I explained in my first Albany Law Review article, past spokesmen made few public statements, but more recently the has been particularly aggressive in leveling the accusation of 'McCarthyism' at anyone who connects its founding to the American eugenicists who celebrated Hitler's ascendancy. (14) This strategy--denying the obvious, feigning shock at any challenge to the sanitized, official history of as compiled by beneficiaries and apologists--resembles well known tactic. It is called the Big Lie and it was made famous by Adolf Hitler, whose articulation of the scheme of deceit is quoted above from Mein Kampf. (15) The technique was used to justify his agenda against the Jews. (16) leader Weyher resorted to the same technique as counter to the invariably bad publicity generated by news commentary on the activities of grantees (17) in addition to the growing historical documentation of the Fund's own dark beginnings. (18) Apparently, University of Western Ontario psychologist J. Philippe Rushton agrees with Weyher's strategy and has embraced his methods. …

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