During this time, Draper became interested in
eugenics, which had been a popular movement in the United States during the first three decades of the 20th century. However, by the early 1930s, interest had begun to fade as the underlying science came under question. Groups like the
American Eugenics Society (AES) faced declining membership and dwindling treasuries. Draper had 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 German Minister of the Interior. At the conference, Draper's travel companion, Dr. Clarence Campbell delivered an oration that concluded: "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 the book
White America by
Earnest Sevier Cox, an advocate of
white supremacy and racial segregation, a personal copy was delivered to Frick. In 1937, Draper established the
Pioneer Fund, a foundation intended to give scholarships to descendants of
White American 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 its claimed success with eugenics.
The Pioneer Fund was headed by the sociologist and eugenicist
Harry H. Laughlin, an advocate for restrictive immigration laws and national programs of
compulsory sterilization of the
mentally ill and
intellectually disabled. At age 50, Draper again volunteered for military service and was assigned a post with British military intelligence in
India during
World War II. After the war, he returned to eugenicist and segregationist activism, and
The Pioneer Fund supported the work of a number of noted and controversial researchers of
race and intelligence, such as the Nobel Laureate
William Shockley, the American differential psychologist
Arthur Jensen, the Canadian evolutionary psychologist
J. Philippe Rushton, and the British anthropologist
Roger Pearson. Though he never served as the Pioneer Fund's president, Draper remained on its board until his death and left his estate to the Fund. He also donated considerable funds to
right-wing political organizations and candidates, including the
World Anti-Communist League (WACL), which was later headed by Pearson, who had received extensive funding from The Pioneer Fund and Draper during his career at
University of Southern Mississippi. In addition to the Pioneer Fund, Draper financed the
Back to Africa repatriation movement, particularly the work of
Earnest Sevier Cox, whose book "White America" he also funded. During the
Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, he secretly sent $255,000 to the
Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission in 1963 and 1964 to support
racial segregation. He also promoted opposition to the desegregation of public schools mandated by the
Supreme Court's 1954 decision,
Brown v. Board of Education. Those financial contributions came to light in the 1990s, when the Sovereignty Commission's records were made public. Doug A. Blackmon of
The Wall Street Journal and Prof. William H. Tucker of
Rutgers University discovered the incriminating documents. ==Funding of Mississippi Sovereignty Commission==