published by the PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY
In the fall of 1994, the newsletter of the Los Angeles chapter of Mensa (an organization for people with high IQs) published an article calling for the sterilization of individuals with low IQs. This open advocacy of Nazi-style fascism coincided with the outrageous anti-immigrant racism centered on California's notorious Proposition 187. In the wake of Prop. 187, organizers had also begun to push the so-called "California Civil Rights Initiative." This would bar affirmative action programs for women and minorities in all state government jobs, contracts, and schools. Nationally, Democrats and Republicans alike were converging on a plan for "welfare reform." This campaign justified brutal cutbacks in vital services by using vile racist and sexist stereotypes of black women having "too many babies."
The pending welfare bill would make recipients work 35 hours per week for their checks, at a median wage of $2.43 an hour. In the wake of Prop. 187, employers slashed wages in garment and other California industries based on immigrant labor. Prisoners in the US are increasingly serving as virtually slave labor, sometimes even for private enterprises. "Three strikes and you're out" will swell their ranks. These measures -- all justified by racism -- drive down wages across the board. It is no exaggeration to say that racism is the cutting edge of a very sharp attack on the lives and livelihoods of the entire working class.
This racism is fueled by professors who dress up their prejudices in the language of science and wrap themselves in the cloak of "academic freedom." Traits such as criminality, alcoholism, intelligence, and homosexuality, we are told, are biologically determined. Daniel Koshland, editor of the influential journal Science, even suggested a genetic basis for homelessness. The federal "Violence Initiative" seeks biological "factors" in crime and proposes drugging large numbers of young children (mainly black boys) in the name of "violence prevention."
Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein's book The Bell Curve (1994) is the most alarming recent example of this trend. The authors assert that the government should reduce the number of children born to poor "low IQ" mothers by eliminating welfare and tightening immigration. Otherwise, they say, it will have to set up a "virulently racist custodial state" to control urban "high tech Indian reservations." That's some choice: eugenics or fascism! Although they present nothing new or scientific, they are given wide exposure by the mass media, from "Nightline" to Newsweek, from the New York Times to The New Republic, from Discover to the Rolling Stone.
Murray and Herrnstein explain in their preface why they wrote their slick and revoltingly racist book. In the late twentieth century, they say, "the principle of equal rights triumphs" but the US has become increasingly polarized. On one side are the "fortunate ones [who] commonly have six-figure incomes" while "in the other group, life gets worse, and its members collect at the bottom of society." And "pressures from these contrasting movements at the opposite ends of society put terrific stress on the entire structure." They want to influence policymaking in the face of this social crisis. To be blunt: they are among the leading theorists for the fascist agenda.
CHARLES MURRAY, BOSSES' MOUTHPIECE
The Bell Curve fits squarely in the sordid tradition of American Eugenics. Amid growing labor militancy of the 1910s-1920s, US leaders used IQ tests and Eugenics to weaken class unity with anti-immigrant racism. When anti-racist rebellions rocked the country in the mid-1960s, soon followed by a strike wave, Arthur Jensen's anti-Black update on Eugenics -- also centered on IQ -- took center stage. Now along come Murray and Herrnstein, warning that class conflict will tear the country apart and encouraging white middle-class readers to blame "less intelligent" Black and Latin workers for everyone's problems.
The first edition of this pamphlet appeared nearly twenty-five years ago. It was a response to the resurgence of academic racism encouraged especially by the work of a Berkeley psychologist, Arthur Jensen. Students and teachers distributed thousands of copies of three editions on campuses across the US. They helped to organize mass, often militant, protests that put the academic racists on the run.
"Letters I have received from professors at Berkeley and elsewhere lead me to believe that there may have been voices which might have been heard in the controversy had they not been silenced by fear," Jensen whined in 1972. "In the 1970s," Murray and Herrnstein complain, "scholars observed that colleagues who tried to say publicly that IQ tests had merit, or that intelligence was substantially inherited, or even that intelligence existed as a definable and measurable human quality, paid too high a price. Their careers, family lives, relationships with colleagues, and even physical safety could be jeopardized by speaking out."
To that we say: "Hooray!" Imagine how much harder it would have been for the Nazis to carry out their program of genocide if anti-racists had driven Nazi professors underground in the 1920s and early 1930s instead of vice versa. The PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY is proud of the role we played in helping to organize the International Committee Against Racism to galvanize the opposition to the academic racists. But Herrnstein and Murray add: "Research on cognitive abilities continued to flourish, but only in the sanctuary of the ivory tower." Anti-racist students, workers, and professors must step up the fight against academic racism so there will be no sanctuary anywhere for the Nazi theorists of today.
The present edition of "Racism, Intelligence, and the Working Class" has two main goals. The first is to arm our readers for the fight against racist ideology. The second is to explain why we believe that this fight can only be won, finally, by destroying the capitalist system that relies on and nurtures racism.
EUGENICS: 75 YEARS OF RACIST IDEOLOGY
The "Old" Eugenics: From IQ Tests to Gas Chambers
Stanford professor Lewis Terman was a leader in the Eugenics movement seventy-five years ago. According to Eugenics, the so-called "inferior races" included immigrants from southern and eastern Europe as well as Mexicans and black people. Eugenicists said they had too many children, and the so-called "superior white race" didn't have enough. That, they said, caused social problems such as poverty and crime. "Inferiority" and "superiority" were measured with Terman's Stanford-Binet IQ test. Eugenicists successfully campaigned for restrictive immigration laws and forced sterilization.
Government and business leaders supported eugenics. The Carnegie steel fortune, Harriman railroad money, and Rockefeller's oil profits backed institutions like the Station for Experimental Evolution and the Eugenics Record Office (ERO). Together with the US Public Health Service, the ERO set up an inspection station at Ellis Island in 1912. Here most new immigrants to the US were given IQ tests. Over 80% of those from southern and eastern Europe were declared "feebleminded." The Second National Conference on Race Betterment, held in 1915, included representatives from the Rockefeller Foundation, US Steel, Ford Motor Company, Aetna Life Insurance, Metropolitan Life Insurance, National Cash Register Company, and the Carnegie Foundation.
During World War I, the US President was Woodrow Wilson, who had segregated all federal civil service jobs and had given his official blessing to the pro-KKK movie "Birth of a Nation." He appointed racist Harvard psychologist Robert Yerkes to the position of Chief of Army Testing. Yerkes and his eugenics colleagues gave IQ tests to tens of thousands of new recruits. They concluded (of course) that their tests proved black and immigrant people to be inferior. Yerkes' protégé was Carl Brigham, founder of the Educational Testing Service (the outfit that runs SAT tests today). Brigham reported that "Negro," "Alpine," and "Mediterranean" people were inferior to "Nordics." His report helped persuade Congress to pass the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. This law cut off almost all immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Many who were locked out of the US by this law later died in Hitler's gas chambers.
The main impact of Eugenics was to spread racist ideas far and wide. Big businessmen and the government officials who served them feared the working class movement that was gaining in numbers and militancy during the 1910s and 1920s. Their fears intensified when capitalist intervention failed to crush the 1917 Russian socialist revolution. Immigrants were among the strongest and most radical leaders among workers in the US. They helped to organize the Communist Party. Thousands were deported as "dangerous aliens." The US rulers used eugenics, along with the Ku Klux Klan and other fascist organizations, to weaken the unity of the industrial working class and to build support for the racist and anti-communist terrorism perpetrated by the government itself.
By 1930, thirty-four states had laws against marriages between whites and blacks (and sometimes Asians as well). Twenty-four states had passed laws calling for sterilization of the "feebleminded," criminals, and paupers. By 1927, Terman's home state of California had sterilized nearly 4,000 people, mostly from immigrant families. Some 80,000 were eventually sterilized in state institutions across the country. In Lynchburg, Virginia alone, 8,000 children were sterilized between 1927 and 1972. When the Nazis passed the racist German Sterilization Law in 1935, they modeled it on laws already on the books in the United States. The Nazi "final solution" was a logical extension of the ideas of Terman, Yerkes, and Brigham.
Allan Chase in The Legacy of Malthus, William Tucker in The Science and Politics of Racial Research, and Stefan Kuhl in The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, have all demonstrated the close ties between American eugenicists and German Nazis. Among Hitler's American supporters was the textile magnate Wickliffe Draper. He paid for the establishment of the Pioneer Fund in 1937 to support "race betterment" in the United States. Draper wanted to send black Americans "back" to Africa. He distributed the Nazi eugenics propaganda film "Hereditary Defective" to high schools and churches across the US. Later, the Pioneer Fund began to bankroll professors and journals (notably Mankind Quarterly) dedicated to racism and eugenics. As we will see, virtually all the research seeking cause-and-effect links between IQ, social behavior, and race in the US from 1937 to the present has come from the fascist Pioneer Fund-Mankind Quarterly network.
Jensenism: Bosses' Response to Anti-Racist Rebellion
In the ten years following the 1954 US Supreme Court decision to desegregate public schools, racist theoreticians (with the help of the Pioneer Fund) carried the Eugenics flag in the southern states. Then anti-racist rebellions began to rock the rest of the country: Harlem (New York City) in 1964, Watts (in LA) in 1965, Detroit in 1967, and almost everywhere in 1968. Black workers began to give important leadership in strikes that united black and white in sharp struggle against the bosses: the Newport News shipyard, General Electric, General Motors, the US Post Office, and many more.
Re-enter Eugenics! In 1969, Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen published an article in the Harvard Educational Review entitled "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?" Its main point -- that black children are genetically less intelligent than white children -- was broadcast over the length and breadth of the land by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time, Newsweek, and Life, among other media. The Pioneer Fund bankrolled Jensen's work to the tune of over $1.1 million dollars. For 22 years, Jensen collaborated with Nobel-prize physicist William Shockley, also a Pioneer Fund beneficiary. "Nature has color-coded groups of individuals," Shockley wrote in 1972, "so that statistically reliable predictions of their adaptability to intellectually rewarding and effective lives can easily be made and profitably be used by the pragmatic man in the street."
In 1992, the unabashed Nazi Roger Pearson -- with the help of Jensen -- edited Shockley's collected ravings on "Eugenics and Race." Murray and Herrnstein do not even try to distance themselves from this fascist confederation. Of Shockley they say only that he was "as eccentric as he was brilliant" and that "he seemed to relish expressing sensitive scientific findings in a way that would outrage or disturb as many people as possible."
The same Richard Herrnstein followed Jensen's suit in 1971 with "IQ," published in the Atlantic Monthly at the urging of editor Robert Manning. (As Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs from 1961-64, it had been Manning's job to lie about the early stages of the Vietnam war.) Three other magazines began pushing the Jensen/Herrnstein/Shockley theme with particular energy: Commentary, Encounter, and The Public Interest. All three -- and Irving Kristol, who at one time or another edited all three -- had been exposed in 1967 as being controlled by the CIA. Their heavy involvement in "Jensenism" shows clearly that the government was behind it. Around the same time, too, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the US Public Health Service began giving lavish grants for a whole new field of Jensen-style research known as "human behavioral genetics." David Rosenthal, Chief of Laboratories at NIMH, joined Jensen, Herrnstein, and 47 others in signing a statement in American Psychologist endorsing the "hereditarian" view of human behavior.
No wonder, then, that Fortune magazine praised the "hard-headed realism" of the new "nativists" (that is, racists), singling out Jensen and Herrnstein as their leaders. No wonder that, in the words of then-White House advisor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "the winds of Jensen were gusting through the capital at gale force." You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see that the US ruling class was promoting Jensenism to whip up racism and to build support for cuts in education and social services.
The consequences of Eugenics, new or old, are disastrous. Whether it leads to the repression characteristic of the US in the 1920s, or to the brutality of Hitler's Germany, is but a matter of degree. When eugenicist thinking starts to become popular in the press, and in the thinking of government officials, and when it is taught in the schools, the working people and students are in for trouble.
But as thousands, and then millions, join the fight against racist eugenics, it will be the racists and their bosses (the big capitalists) who are in for trouble. Through the struggle against academic racism, students and workers come to understand better the thoroughly racist nature of capitalism itself. Many will become communists and join the fight to smash capitalism and build a new society based on equality and cooperation. In spite of the rise of fascism around the world, a bright future is waiting for us to seize it.
THE IQ ARGUMENT
For the last 75 years, IQ tests have been the main pseudo-scientific justification for racism against immigrant and black workers. The racist argument goes like this:
Lie #1. IQ measures some important trait that can be called "general intelligence." This trait (called "g") differs significantly from person to person. It correlates highly with success in school and later life.
Lie #2. According to the methods of population genetics, IQ is highly heritable. As much as 80% of the difference among people's intelligence may be genetically determined.
Lie #3. Racial differences are also inherited. So, though nobody claims to have absolute proof, genetics probably explains black-white differences in average IQ scores.
Lie #4. Success in modern society depends on intelligence.
Lie #5. That's why liberal social programs have failed to create equality.
We don't have room in a short pamphlet to itemize everything that's wrong with these arguments. For those who wish to learn more about the IQ controversy and the history of scientific racism, we have included a list of publications that have demolished these lies. The issues are really not very complicated.
All of us should be prepared to expose and attack the bosses' racist lies, especially when they come up in classrooms and textbooks. But we will not sit on a platform with a Charles Murray or an Arthur Jensen and debate the equality of billions of non-white people. The struggle against these racists is not solely or even mainly an intellectual one. We must build a mass movement uniting students with workers and youth to stop the Nazi ideologues -- along with all other Nazis -- in their tracks.
Lie #1: "IQ Tests Measure Intelligence"
IQ tests are supposed to measure an inborn trait called "g," or "general intelligence." Murray and Herrnstein's phrase "cognitive ability" means the same thing. But defining "intelligence" is a political question .
In a capitalist society (like ours) that is based on a struggle between opposing classes, the answer will depend on where you stand in that struggle. What's smart for capitalists is the opposite of what's smart for workers. For example, business professors from the University of Wisconsin, UCLA, and Harvard are now developing a theory of "agile management." This means eliminating job categories and using more temporary workers and part-timers in order to reduce labor costs and increase profits. It is smart for the US capitalists, because it helps them to compete internationally. But to workers -- for example, at Boeing, where "agile management" is being introduced -- it seems like a pretty dumb idea. As of February, 1995, it has already meant the loss of 6500 jobs, or 6% of the Boeing work force. It will mean more work for less pay for those who remain. What's smart for workers is to organize and fight back.
It is smart for bosses to promote racism and individual competition among workers, but it is smart for workers to overcome these divisions and unite as a class against the bosses. From the point of view of the communist Progressive Labor Party, rebellion and revolution are the most intelligent kinds of behavior working people and students can adopt. Obviously Murray and Herrnstein -- and the makers of IQ tests -- disagree.
Every type of measurement assumes some form of distribution of intelligence. For example, it would be scientifically valid to develop a test that 99% of the population would pass. Then we would "find" that 99% of the population is intelligent and 1% or so is mentally defective. Such a test would assume that intelligence is simply an attribute of the normal functioning human. It would not be useful at all for those wishing to defend social inequality. After all, if pretty much everyone is intelligent, why should a few be richer and more powerful than the rest?
Existing IQ tests assume that intelligence is a single thing that can be measured with one number. They assume there are large differences in intelligence, that most people have a mediocre amount, a few have a lot, and some very little. By the definition of these tests, half the population is "below average" in intelligence. Only a few (Murray and Herrnstein's "cognitive elite") are smart enough to make decisions and run things.
Some influential psychologists, notably Howard Gardner, deny that "g" really exists . But Murray and Herrnstein blow them off by claiming that its existence is "beyond significant technical dispute" within the "classical tradition" of their field. This is like arguing that astrology and fortune-telling are scientific because astrologers and psychics all agree. The whole tradition of psychometrics (IQ testing) was built up around the same assumptions about intelligence that Murray and Herrnstein believe in. This whole tradition is racist and elitist to the core. The crucial research in this field for the last 50 years has been funded primarily by the pro-Nazi Pioneer Fund.
The early testers loved and admired the ruling class. Listen to Terman: "Moral judgment, like business judgment, social judgment, or any other kind of higher thought process, is a function of intelligence." Or E.L. Thorndike, one of the most important figures in the history of US educational psychology: "Our superiors in ability are on the average our benefactors, and it is often safer to trust our interests to them than to ourselves." But it took many tries before they came up with a test on which the rich would come out on top and the poor on the bottom. In fact, it took a lot of work to come up with a test that would serve its stated purpose: to correlate well with other measures of "success" such as class background and performance in school.
Here is Herrnstein's own account of how Binet constructed the prototype IQ test: "He took some children rated by their teachers as the brightest and the dullest ... and subjected them to a lengthy series of tests.... A number of the tests worked, which is to say they distinguished between the two groups of children." The testing manual for the Stanford-Binet Scale says, "Many of the so-called performance test items tried out for inclusion in the scale were eliminated because they contributed little or nothing to the total score." That is, when checked with teachers' ratings, they did not match, so they were dropped. The IQ tests were designed to reflect a racist and elitist school system that was itself designed to reproduce a grossly unequal social system.
Much has been written about just how the tests reflect their makers' biases. They are heavily weighted toward language: not just everyday language, but the sort of vocabulary found mainly in literature. They put a high premium on speed, on motivation, on willingness to cooperate with the tester. Many questions require that the child either believe in bourgeois values like patriotism, or be cagey enough to give the answer the tester wants. But the main point is that if they weren't biased, they wouldn't serve their intended purpose: to justify inequality.
One way to see this is to look at the history of gender differences in IQ. On Terman's original (1916) Stanford-Binet, the average score for women was about 10 points less than for men. Twenty years later, the political climate had changed. The 1937 version was standardized for sex. Some questions were added and some dropped, equalizing the means for men and women. Presto! All of a sudden, the tests showed women to be as "smart" as men. Testmakers could easily use the same procedure to eliminate average differences between black and white people, or between the working class and the capitalist class.
If the testmakers did that, the "predictive value" of the tests would be lessened. Those who did well on the tests wouldn't be as likely to do well in school or to make a lot of money. That's what happened when women's scores were equalized. It was no longer cool to say that men were smarter. But the US was (and is) still a very sexist society. Women were (and are) not treated equally in the workplace, so the test lost some of its ability to predict who would do well in later life. In just the same way, as long as racism keeps black and immigrant workers in the worst jobs at the lowest pay, attempts to equalize "racial" differences in average test scores would lower the "predictive value" of the tests.
All this "prediction" is really after-the-fact rationalization. Capitalism requires inequality and competition. The whole idea of "intelligence" as something that people have in different amounts exists only to justify capitalist inequality and competition.
Lie #2: "IQ Is Highly Heritable"
There's no reason to assume that "intelligence" is a trait that varies widely from one person to another, and certainly no reason to think that IQ measures anything of the sort. But even if we cared about IQ, the argument about "heritability" would still be bogus.
You can measure how much a trait varies among the individuals in a population. "Heritability" is a statistical method of estimating how much of the variation can be accounted for by genetic variation in that population, but only in a given environment. The heritability of a given trait might be extremely high and yet have (as Lewontin, Rose and Kamin point out) "absolutely no predictive power for the result of changing the set of environments." To illustrate: several diseases (such as phenylketonuria and Wilson's disease) are known to be single-gene disorders. However, whether or not possessors of that gene develop the symptoms of the disease depends entirely on whether or not their environment includes appropriate medical or dietary interventions. Popularizers, and sometimes researchers themselves, confuse the statistical concept of "heritability" with the biological concept of "genetically determined" and the social concept of "unchangeable." These things are not at all the same. We all have genes for hair color, but people change the color of their hair all the time!
In any case, the studies generally cited to "prove" the heritability of IQ are either seriously flawed or totally fraudulent. The main so-called "evidence" for the heritability of IQ comes from the studies of identical twins Jensen cited twenty years ago. The Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin has shown that Jensen's whole argument depended on fraudulent "data" collected (or made up) by Cyril Burt over a 40-year period. Others have confirmed Kamin's findings.
Murray and Herrnstein have two things to say about this embarrassing fact. First, they tell us -- without citing arguments or evidence -- that we should believe two other writers who claim they have vindicated Burt. Second, they say, new studies by Thomas Bouchard have come up with a figure for the heritability of IQ that is almost identical to Burt's.
Bouchard was Jensen's student. His team has received more money from the Pioneer Fund than any other recipient -- well over a million dollars to date. In 1979 he began his "Minnesota Twins" study with a pair of separated identical twins named Jim, whose first and second wives had the same names, who both drove Chevys and who had given their dogs the same name. Mass media publicity rounded up other pairs of separated twins who were eager to show off their identical tastes for particular brands of beer or cigarettes. This whole circus would be laughable except for the fact that Bouchard's "findings" are cited in current human-genetics textbooks to show that social behavior is "in the genes."
And the third authority Murray and Herrnstein cite for the literature on heritability of IQ is Penn State professor Richard Plomin -- yet another Pioneer Fund recipient! Other critics have already deconstructed in detail the pseudoscientific hocus-pocus of this neo-Nazi cabal. Stephen J. Gould, for example, has pointed out that the correlations Murray and Herrnstein report between AFQT (Armed Forces Qualifying Test) scores and NLSY (National Longitudinal Study of Youth) data are extremely weak. With all the funds and resources at their disposal, Murray and Herrnstein were unable to do little more than cobble together 800 pages of pathetic lies. The Bell Curve is no more scientific than Hitler's Mein Kampf. In the next section we will show the direct links between these two monuments of master-race theory.
One final point about statistics. Murray and Herrnstein, like Jensen and the others, make much of correlations between IQ and other statistics, such as rates of poverty or crime. Correlation is often confused with causation. Correlation simply means finding that two characteristics tend to be found together. Causation is a much stronger claim that the two are interconnected in such a way that one leads to the other. One of the first lessons in statistics is that correlation does not imply causation, or even a common cause. For example, your age over the last ten years shows a strong statistical correlation with the size of the national debt: both have been increasing steadily. But did one cause the other?
Murray and Herrnstein, like Jensen, admit all this. In fact, they go out of their way to say that we can't assume that Eugenics and IQ testing actually influenced immigration policy in the 1920s just because they accompanied each other in time and goals. But if correlation doesn't imply causation, then their whole book really says nothing at all. Since when do Nazis care about consistency -- let alone the truth?
Lie #3: "Black People Are Not As Smart As Whites"
This centuries-old racist slander is behind the whole IQ charade. And there's not a shred of a reason to believe it.
Jensen, in the mid-1970s, accepted as fact a grotesque list of physical differences long cited by ardent racists as supposedly distinguishing black from white people. Like him, Murray and Herrnstein just assume that there are biologically distinct "races." "Some ethnic groups differ genetically for sure," they write, "otherwise they would not have differing skin colors or hair textures or muscle mass." This is just plain ridiculous. Skin color is only skin-deep. Some people who are socially "black" have fairer complexions than some who are socially "white." Quite a few "white" individuals have recent African ancestry (less than 400 years) and may not even know it, while many "black" individuals have as many Europeans as Africans in their family tree.
Racial categories are not a fact of biology. There is no single physical trait, or combination of traits, that separate human beings into "races" as they are commonly understood. There never was. All humans originated in Africa. Even after they dispersed, warfare and trade guaranteed intermarriage and the mingling of population groups over thousands of years. It does not even make scientific sense to speculate about the evolution of distinct human "races."
Seventeenth-century scientists invented the division of humanity into "races" in order to justify the domination of European ruling elites over people in other parts of the world. As Martin Bernal showed in Black Athena, racist European "scholars" systematically rewrote human history in order to invent a "white European" race that was not "contaminated" by any intermingling with Africans and Asians. They could not then, and have not since, even come to agreement among themselves on how many "races" there are, let alone how to distinguish them.
In colonial America, judges and legislatures created legal definitions of "black," "white," and "red" people. These suited the convenience of plantation owners eager to control and exploit a large and potentially rebellious workforce. Since that time, bosses (whether plantation owners or industrial capitalists or the politicians who represent them) have maintained racial segregation in a variety of forms for exactly the same reason. That's why "race" is a nasty fact about our society, not a biological fact of any sort.
Laboratory evidence now coming in on human variation indicates that genetic differences among human beings are even smaller than previously supposed. For example, the genetic differences between two people coming from different continents are much less than those between two lowland gorillas from the same valley. Black Africans are genetically closer to white Swedes than to black Australian aborigines, who are genetically closer to East Asians. The more research is done, the more obvious it is that "race" is not a valid biological concept.
There is no relation (even a statistical one) between heritability within groups and heritability between groups. Suppose someone chooses to believe, in spite of the best scientific evidence, that "races" are distinct populations. Suppose they choose to believe the shoddy (or outright fraudulent) "evidence" that IQ is heritable. They still can't legitimately conclude that "racial differences" are genetic in origin, because heritability only measures the extent to which variation within a population comes from genes. It says nothing about whether variations among different populations are genetic.
Murray and Herrnstein know this; they even say so. However, they insist that social environments for black and white people in the US just aren't different enough to explain differences in average IQ test scores. In other words, their whole argument hangs on denying the depth and extent of racism in US society today. When you cut through pages and pages of statistics and references, Murray and Herrnstein's position is no different from that of the Ku Klux Klan: "the problem isn't racism; it's the black people themselves."
Murray and Herrnstein's monstrous lie that racism is all but gone sets up their attack on affirmative action programs. They push the slander that black people are getting into schools and jobs instead of supposedly smarter white people. This pits white workers and students against black workers and students. Racism like this divides and weakens the whole working class!
Hitler bragged about his "Big Lie" technique: if you say something often and loudly enough, people will begin to believe it. He might have added: especially if you buy some professors and have them write it up in scientific journals. Charles Murray has fed at the capitalists' trough for decades. The whole field of alleged hereditary racial difference in intelligence has been bought and paid for by outright Nazis. If you believe them, you might as well believe that the Holocaust never happened.
"There are differences between races, and they are the rule, not the exception," say Murray and Herrnstein at the outset. One of their favorite experts on "racial and ethnic differences" is an Irish psychology professor, Richard Lynn. Lynn has hauled in $325,000 from the Pioneer Fund. Leon Kamin's review of The Bell Curve in Scientific American does an excellent job of tearing apart Lynn's so-called research and exposing his fundamental dishonesty and exceptionally gross racism. ("Who can doubt," Lynn wrote, "that the Caucasoids and the Mongoloids are the only two races that have made any significant contribution to civilization.")
Murray and Herrnstein claim that black Africans have lower IQs than African-Americans. This, they say, shows that genes determine black-white IQ differences in the US. This comes from Lynn, who scrounged up eleven studies to "prove" it. Five took place in apartheid South Africa and a sixth in 1952 in the Belgian Congo, where colonial rulers had slaughtered millions of black people. The best study Lynn could find was one which even the author said did "not at all" indicate that intelligence is inherited. The author himself pointed to poorer schooling for black students and difficulty with English as a second language as reasons for the subjects' poor performances.
For an overview on "race and intelligence," Murray and Herrnstein recommend two books by three Pioneer Fund recipients: Audrey Shuey, Frank C. J. McGurk, and R. Travis Osborne. McGurk is the main authority they cite to "prove" that IQ tests are not racially biased. He was one of the "scientific" mainstays of the segregationist movement in the southern US. In 1959 McGurk and Shuey became leading members of the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, first publisher of Mankind Quarterly. Other members included Senator Jesse Helms and the oil billionaire Hunt brothers. Arch-racists in the South introduced Shuey's book in court during the 1960s to argue for continuing school segregation and denying the vote to black people. University of Georgia professor Osborne also testified in court against school integration. Osborne was still, in 1992, trying to prove the long-discarded theory that brain size is somehow related to intelligence.
A Newsweek review of The Bell Curve (Oct. 24, 1994) called its scholarship "overwhelmingly mainstream." If that's true, it only serves to prove that fascism is now the mainstream for the US ruling class.
ROGER PEARSON AND THE MANKIND QUARTERLY KLAN
LIE #4: "Success depends on intelligence."
Capitalism defines success as making a lot of money. But only a few can be really rich, because the only way to make a lot of money is to exploit the labor of a lot of other people. A somewhat larger number get to be middle-level bureaucrats and professionals who make more money than workers but much less than the big bosses. This has nothing to do with the distribution of "intelligence." It has everything to do with the fundamental nature of capitalist society.
Since few of us will ever be successful in capitalist terms, schools and employers use so-called intelligence and achievement tests to sort and select people. This promotes competition among workers and youth. Instead of uniting, we just try harder to climb over our class sisters and brothers. The tests also lead many to believe the lie that it's your own fault if you don't "make it." This can make us passive. Elaine and Harry Mensh document an important point in The IQ Mythology: Class, Race, Gender, and Inequality. They show that IQ tests exist to "prove" that most people -- workers, and especially black and women workers -- are not smart enough to be leaders or thinkers or deserve a lot of money. IQ tests thus legitimize capitalist inequality.
Liberal reformers want more money for schools. They say that more people should have the chance to be successful in capitalist terms. This is an illusion. A college education is no guarantee even of a steady job, let alone riches. Middle-level managers and technical people are losing their jobs like crazy. About 14% of recent university graduates with Ph.D. degrees in math are unemployed. Is that evidence that they have low intelligence? Many professionals have come to the US fleeing poverty and political repression, but their credentials don't count here. Teachers, nurses, and doctors are scrubbing floors, driving cabs, and working in factories. Did they lose their "intelligence" when they crossed the border? Black workers (including those in professional or technical positions) earn less, on the average, than white workers even when you control for age and level of educational attainment. We live in a racist system of class oppression, not a "meritocracy" where the "cream" rises to the top.
Fortune magazine made an interesting point when Herrnstein first came up with his "IQ and the Meritocracy" nonsense. In general, it noted, college professors have higher IQs than business leaders. But business leaders are richer and (in that sense ) more successful.
If anything, it's the scum that rises to the top. Those who are willing to exploit others, or to help the bosses do their dirty work, are rewarded for it. The more ruthless the exploitation -- for example, the rip-off of black, latino, other immigrant, and women workers in the U.S., or the horrors of child labor in India, Pakistan, and Thailand -- the more successful the capitalist. Much of what passes for college "education" is designed to convince students that they deserve better than most workers because they are "smarter." The "better" jobs they hope to get -- as teachers, social workers, managers, etc. -- would often put them in positions where the bosses will expect them to help keep workers down. Students and professionals have to choose sides in the class struggle between capitalists and workers. Do you have a particular fondness for racism, sexism, gross economic inequality, imperialist war, and all the cultural degeneracy and political repression that comes with fascism? If not, it's "smart" to choose the side of the working class.
Eugene Debs, a socialist labor leader who lived in the early part of this century, put it well. "I want to rise with the working class, not from it," he declared. The capitalist definition of "success" serves only the capitalists. For the rest of us, real "success" means smashing capitalism itself.
Trying to "make it" under capitalism is like scratching for the biggest crumbs from a shrinking loaf. We all want a better future for ourselves and our kids. But success in school isn't the way to go. Communism is. The working class, once united, can take over the whole bakery. We will build a new society without "races," without "nations," without money. Our principle will be "from each according to commitment, to each according to need" -- not "the market rules." No one will be better or worse off than anyone else. Social inequality, the material basis for racism, sexism, and other divisive ideologies, will disappear. We will struggle hard against these bosses' ideas among the people. And we will allow no "free speech" or "academic freedom" for professional racists and neo-nazis, no matter how many letters of the alphabet trail after their names.
LIE #5: "That's why liberal social programs have failed"
The social agenda of the academic racists has changed little over the last eighty years. Eugenicists in the 1910s and 1920s hoped to keep "undesirable" immigrants out of the country and to coerce the "unfit" (mainly, the poor) into having fewer babies. Nazi intellectuals in the 1930s wanted to justify imperialist war and genocide. US racial theorists in the 1950s fought to uphold segregation and "white supremacy." Jensen in 1969 argued for cutbacks in Head Start and other educational programs for workers' children. Herrnstein and James Q. Wilson, in Crime and Human Nature (1985) pushed for more cops, jails, and "tough on crime" legislation.
Murray and Herrnstein make parts of their agenda for the `90s very clear. They want to keep "undesirable" immigrants out of the country. They think welfare programs should be slashed to force poor women to have fewer babies. They suggest that programs like Affirmative Action, which helped to integrate workplaces and colleges, should be dropped. They link crime with genetically low intelligence, lending support to "tough on crime" policies and to the racist "violence initiative" of the National Institute for Mental Health and other agencies. They say that the poorest quarter of the US population is a "net drag" on society and that there is "nothing they can learn that will repay the cost of teaching" them. Funds "wasted" on the "disadvantaged" should be reallocated "to programs for the gifted" -- meaning, of course, mainly the well-to-do.
Murray and Herrnstein seem to be testing the limits of the present political climate with their assertion that the ruling class should choose between their eugenic policies and a "custodial" fascist state with "high tech reservations" (concentration camps) for the "underclass." Their "logic" thus leads directly to the gas chambers.
Murray and Herrnstein have one thing going for them that their predecessors, by and large, did not. That is the indisputable fact that thirty years of liberal reform programs -- the legacy of the Johnson's "Great Society" -- have failed to create social equality. In fact, income gaps between black and white workers, which decreased somewhat between 1965 and 1975, have been increasing ever since. Real wages for all workers have at best held steady, and more often have fallen, especially for younger workers. The gap between the richest and the poorest continues to grow. Thirty years ago, a 4% unemployment rate was considered recessionary. Today government economists consider at least 6% to be necessary. They raise interest rates to "slow the economy" if it drops lower.
True, the anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-sexist, and labor movements of the last few decades won some significant reforms. When Jensen attacked education programs such as Head Start in 1969, many anti-racists responded with studies showing that such programs did raise IQ scores and enhance children's prospects for success in school. Similarly, it is easy to show that Affirmative Action programs, limited as they have been, did go part of the way toward knocking down racist barriers that historically kept black and other "minority" individuals out of more skilled and better-paying jobs. Social programs like WIC, AFDC, Medicaid, and Medicare have meant the difference between survival and starvation for many.
But the "War on Poverty," which Murray has made a living on criticizing, was never meant to create equality. Its few reforms mainly produced an illusion of change while maintaining the reality of class inequality. It was meant to pacify the militant rebels who were rocking US cities, and the many more who supported them.
Now these reforms have mostly been cut back or dismantled altogether. Many are on the chopping block as this pamphlet goes to press (February 1995) amid congressional debates over welfare "reform" and the balanced-budget amendment. President Clinton has made it clear that Democrats differ from Republicans only over the details of this massive attack -- spearheaded by racism -- on the whole working class. Asked about Murray's 1993 Wall Street Journal article advocating cutting single mothers off AFDC, President Clinton responded: "I think his analysis is essentially correct." (Nation's Business, August "94)
In the same way, as Adolph Reed, Jr. noted in his Nation review of The Bell Curve, "we can trace Murray's legitimacy directly to the spinelessness, opportunism and racial bad faith of the liberals in the social policy establishment. ... Most of those objecting to Herrnstein and Murray's racism," Reed continued, "embrace positions that are almost indistinguishable, except for the resort to biology." These liberals agree with Murray that IQ tests "prove" black people (and workers generally) are less intelligent. They simply offer different excuses. "Lack of prenatal care," they say. "No breastfeeding. Not enough mental stimulation for infants." What a phony debate! Both sides are just building support for racism and class inequality.
Liberal reformers promoted cultural theories of racial and class inferiority to push government programs such as the "war on poverty." They wanted to change the alleged inferior values and lifestyles of impoverished workers so their children would be "smarter." Workers and our children don't need to be smarter. We need to be more class-conscious. We need to fight harder to unite our class across the bosses' lines of "race" and "nationality." We need to become clearer on the fact that you can't help people by becoming part of the system that is grinding them down. The way to help the working class is to fight to smash that system.
ONLY COMMUNISM CAN DEFEAT RACISM AND FASCISM
Liberal social programs have failed, and will continue to fail, because of the fundamental nature of capitalism. Even in its heyday, capitalism required a large pool of unemployed and impoverished workers to drive wages down. The present era is one of ever-sharpening international capitalist competition (imperialism). This competition demands that the bosses turn the screws ever more tightly on the workers in order to maximize profits. This, in turn, demands fascist rather than liberal-democratic forms of rule in order to suppress the anger inevitably developing within the working class, and especially among the most exploited, oppressed, and impoverished.
The choices are narrowing. Murray and Herrnstein, advocates of the Violence Initiative, and other academic racists offer us fascism as a solution to the profound crisis in contemporary capitalism. With liberalism less and less appealing as an option, many potential anti-racist activists are simply wallowing in despair. This passivity gives aid and comfort to the fascist enemy. But there is another alternative: to build a revolutionary party and a mass movement with the goal of smashing capitalism and building an entirely different system, communism.
"But hasn't communism failed?" many ask. We say it hasn't really been tried. From the Soviet Union to eastern Europe, from China to Cuba, socialism was tried. And socialism failed to lead to communism, as revolutionary leaders had promised. Instead it maintained fundamental capitalist institutions such as wage-labor and nation-states. So in the end it reverted everywhere to open capitalism.
A big part of the reason that revolutionary leaders thought they needed to build socialism rather than communism right from the start was that they didn't think the masses of people (workers and poor peasants) were "ready" for communism. In effect, these leaders bought into the idea that the masses weren't smart enough to recognize that communism was in their best interest. They thought they needed to "buy off" intellectuals and people with technical training because the workers wouldn't be able to run society by themselves.
We disagree. If "intelligent" means "fit to rule," then no group in the world, no "cognitive elite," is more intelligent than the working class acting collectively in its own interest as a class. The fight against racism is the key to developing this class unity.
Under communism we will do away with the foolish idea of judging people on the basis of a test. We will do away with the ruthless judgments of the marketplace that say you and you are "worth" more and you and you are "worth" less (or even, according to fascists like Murray, "worthless"). Instead of setting ourselves up in judgment on people, we will dedicate ourselves to assessing and meeting their needs.
Call us "idealistic" if you will -- but we are convinced that there is nothing more realistic than fighting for a communist world of comradeship and equality.
HOW TO FIGHT ACADEMIC RACISM
To cut off the killer weed of racism at its root, we need to destroy the capitalist system that nourishes it. Thousands, then tens of thousands, then millions of workers, students, and youth must join the PROGRESSIVE LABOR PARTY and help to win millions more to fight to make egalitarian communist society a reality worldwide.
Such a movement cannot develop without an all-out fight against racism. Racism is the cornerstone that supports all class exploitation. It drives down wages and the quality of life for "white" workers and students as well as for the super-exploited and super-oppressed "minority" workers and students. In the present period, racism is the cutting edge of a growing fascism that could turn every bit as horrible as German Nazism.
But for this very reason racism is capitalism's Achilles heel. The fight against racism (academic and otherwise) will grow and sharpen. Workers, increasingly looking toward communist leadership, will reject racism and nationalism in favor of class unity. Students and youth will see in this united working class movement a real alternative to capitalist dictatorship.
What You Can Do:
* Form study-action groups to discuss the ideas in this pamphlet Bring these ideas to clubs and organizations of all sorts, on and off campus. Hold forums, teach-ins, and rallies to expose and attack racist ideas. Build real grass-roots unity among students of different "races" and "nationalities" -- not just a top-down "rainbow coalition" of groups.
* Use all available media, from leaflets to school radio stations and newspapers to `zines and the Internet, to attack racist ideas and to promote anti-racist action. Try to get teachers to use this pamphlet and other anti-racist materials in the classroom. Set up regular literature tables as centers for anti-racist agitation and organizing.
* Sign, circulate, and collect funds for the nationwide ad/petition campaign "Oppose the Resurgence of Academic Racism."
* Find out which teachers and textbooks at your school do racist research or push racist and anti-working class theories. Challenge them in class, protest them, try to get rid of them. No academic freedom for racism and fascism!
* Join with workers on and off campus to fight racist programs like the Violence Initiative and welfare "reform." Support strikes and anti-racist rebellions whenever they happen. Attack corporate recruiters for companies which support academic racists like Murray as well as exploiting their workers.
* Write up your experiences for Challenge newspaper, and sell Challenge to your friends, classmates, and co-workers. Contact the Progressive Labor Party to be in touch with others involved in the campaign against academic racism.
We can't afford to be passive in the face of the present racist onslaught. No racist incident is too small to fight over. No racist movement is too large to take on. Organize, organize, organize!
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Joseph Graves, Jr. and Terri Place. Race and IQ revisited: Figures nerver lie, but often liars figure. SAGE Race Relations Abstracts.
Breggin, Peter and Ginger Ross. The War Against Children. (documents current racist Violence Initiative)
Chase, Alan. The Legacy of Malthus (an encyclopedic history of scientific racism)
Gould, Steven J. The Mismeasure of Man (includes detailed critique of IQ testing movement)
Hubbard, Ruth, and Elijah Wald. Exploding the Gene Myth (more general analysis of recent trends in genetic determinism)
Kamin, Leon. The Science and Politics of IQ (exposes Burt's fraudulent "research")
Kuhl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (documents collusion between US and German eugenicists during the 1930's and Pioneer Fund financing of Nazi "research" from 1937 until the present.)
Lewontin, R. J., Stephen Rose, and Leon Kamin. Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology, and Human Nature (excellent scientific overview)
Mensh, Elaine and Harry. The IQ Mythology: Class, Race, Gender, and Inequality (demonstrates that IQ testing is a pseudoscience that legitimizes inequalities in the US and imperialist exploitation in Africa.)
Tucker, William. The Science and Politics of Racial Research. (excellent historical critique of racist research in the US from the 19th century to the present.)
*In 1992 a top federal mental health administrator, Frederick K. Goodwin, compared black urban youth to violent, hypersexual monkeys, declaring that "some of the loss of social structure in this society, and particularly within the high impact inner city areas, has removed some of the civilizing evolutionary things that we have built up and that maybe it isn't just the careless use of the word when people call certain areas of certain cities jungles."
* The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the National Research Council (NRC) issued a 400-page report, Understanding and Preventing Violence (1992), backed by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the Justice Department, and the National Science Foundation, that called for more attention to alleged "biological and genetic factors" in violent crime, for research on "new pharmaceuticals that reduce violent behavior" and on whether "male or black persons have a higher potential for violence than others, and if so, why?" The study proposed in this report is now being carried out in Chicago under Harvard professor Felton Earls.
* Chicago Tribune science writer Ron Kotulak won a Pulitzer Prize for his four-day front page series "Aggression: The Monster Within" (December 1993). Kotulak wrote that "simple screening tests will be developed to determine levels of serotonin and noradrenalin. Anti-violence medications conceivably could be given, perhaps forcibly, to people with abnormal levels." Dozens of studies along these lines, financed by the National Institute of Mental Health, currently target black and Latin youth.
* The Human Genome Project plans to sponsor a new version of a University of Maryland conference originally titled "Genetic Factors in Crime" that was postponed amid charges of racism but is now tentatively scheduled for October, 1995.
Put these developments together and you have the "Violence Initiative." This is racist ideology in action. It must be stopped! See the PLP pamphlet "Biological Determinism Feeds Fascism" for more details.
One of the most fertile fields for eugenics was the search for biological causes of crime. In 1887, the criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso claimed he could identify criminals by physical characteristics. For example, he said thieves had small, restless eyes while sex criminals had bright eyes and cracked voices. In general, Lombroso said, the more "apish" a person was (thick skull, large jaw, long arms, darker skin) the more likely he or she was to be a criminal. This racist garbage was introduced in criminal trials and did a lot of damage in its time.
The Harvard anthropologist E. A. Hooton set out in 1926 to update Lombroso's techniques with financial support from the Social Science Research Council. Unlike Lombroso, Hooton categorized his 17,000 research subjects according to nationality and race. By the time his book Crime and the Man appeared in 1939, English and American critics found Hooton's views to be uncomfortably similar to those of the Nazis. However, he had meanwhile promoted his racist ideas among his students, a whole generation of physical anthropologists and physicians.
Pro-Nazi "race hygienists" held their Fourth Congress of Criminal Biology at Hamburg in June 1934, building on two decades worth of "research" on the supposed genetic basis of crime. Two years later, the Nazi "Justice" minister funded fifty research centers nationwide to investigate links between genetics, race and crime, especially in young offenders. In 1939, Nazi boss Himmler ordered that genetic examination be a routine part of criminal investigation.
Undeterred by this precedent, Columbia professor W. H. Sheldon tried to link crime with individual variations in physique during the 1940s. He concluded that 200 Boston delinquents were preponderantly "mesomorphic" (square, muscular) in contrast to a group of 4000 college students. The New York Times recently exposed the fact that Sheldon's eugenic experiments continued throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. The bosses' elite colleges and universities -- including Harvard, Yale, Brown, and Wellesley -- forced first-year students to pose nude for Sheldon and his associates in the name of "screening for poor posture." Sheldon, a stone racist, wrote in a 1924 paper that "Negro intelligence" comes to a "standstill at about the 10th year," with "Mexican intelligence" stopping at age twelve.
Wilson and Herrnstein cited Sheldon's conclusions in Crime and Human Nature (1985) as evidence of the "constitutional" underpinning of the criminal personality "trait." As critic Leon Kamin noted, however, they omitted mention of later studies such as one that showed a sample of Princeton students to be more "mesomorphic" than the Boston delinquents. In the words of historian Elazar Barkan, Herrnstein and Wilson's book was "testimony that Hooton's ideas have been rejuvenated at Harvard."
Fight Builds Against Racist "Violence Research" in Chicago
Harvard's most recent contribution to crime "research" is euphemistically called the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods. It is run by child psychiatrist Felton Earls, from the Harvard School of Public Health with funds from the US Department of "Justice" and the McArthur Foundation (i.e., insurance profits). This project hopes to study over 11,000 children between 1994 and 2002 and to find ways to predict which ones will become violent criminals. Researchers say that "special attention will be given to conditions that develop before birth (during the mother's pregnancy), as well as in infancy and early childhood." This project has been in the works for over a decade, and its entire history involved searching for biological causes of crime.
The Earls study is also racist to the core (even though Earls himself is black). It is designed to analyze the interaction of "community characteristics" and individual traits. Chicago is one of the most segregated large cities in the world. "Neighborhood" boundaries are almost always drawn along "racial" or "ethnic" lines. Studying "neighborhoods" in Chicago is a code-word for studying "racial differences." It is a slick way to claim the project is studying both the individual and the "environment" while ignoring the real cause of crime (and its biggest perpetrator), the capitalist system itself. For example, a high unemployment rate will be taken as characteristic of a "neighborhood" when the truth is that it comes from decisions made by business people and bankers downtown to close factories in the "neighborhood."
The Chicago Coalition Against the Violence Initiative is organizing against this racist mega-project. For more information, call (312) 761-0580 or write to P.O. Box 268287, Chicago IL 60626.
1916 -- "Their dullness seems to be racial, or at least inherent in the family stocks from which they come. The fact that one meets this type with such extraordinary frequency among Indians, Mexicans, and negroes suggests quite forcibly that the whole question of racial differences in mental traits will have to be taken up anew." -- Lewis Terman, author of Stanford-Binet IQ test
1969 -- "There are intelligence genes, which are found in populations in different proportions...The number of intelligence genes seems lower, overall, in the black population than in the white." -- Arthur Jensen, "How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?"
1994 -- "A substantial difference in cognitive ability distributions separates whites from blacks. ... Latino and black immigrants are ... putting some downward pressure on the distribution of intelligence." -- Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, The Bell Curve, pp. 315; 360-61.
Much of The Bell Curve's racist drivel comes from Mankind Quarterly, whose principle is that the "Negroid" race is inferior to all others, and from professors funded by the pro-Nazi Pioneer Fund (PF). Behind this fascist gang stand important members of the US ruling class.
Seventeen authors cited in The Bell Curve are Mankind Quarterly (MQ) contributors. Ten are former or present editors or members of its editorial advisory board. MQ's avowed purpose is to counter "Communist" and "egalitarian" influences in anthropology. From its start in 1960, its founders and funders believed that white people were genetically superior. Robert Gayre was the founder of MQ and its editor-in-chief until 1978. As a champion of South African apartheid and a member of the ultra-right Candour League of white-ruled Rhodesia, he testified in court in 1968 that black people as a group are "worthless." Other MQ contributors have included Henry Garrett of Columbia University, who wrote pamphlets for the pro-segregation White Citizens Councils; Corrado Gini, the leader of fascist Italy's eugenics movement; and Ottmar von Verschner, a leading Nazi race-scientist and academic mentor of the concentration camp butcher Joseph Mengele.
The key figure in the PF network is Roger Pearson, who is close to Jesse Helms. Sam Crutchfield, a lawyer for Helms, has been the lawyer for Pearson's Institute for the Study of Man. The PF has given Pearson over $787,400, mostly for editing Mankind Quarterly and The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies. The last publishes articles by PF recipients, notably Arthur Jensen, Michael Levin, and Richard Lynn. Thomas Ellis, a PF director, is a long-time friend and campaign manager for Helms.
In 1958, Pearson, living in London, led the Northern League. This white-power organization included former Nazi SS officials. Willis Carto, founder of the anti-black and anti-semitic Liberty Lobby, arranged a 1959 U.S. speaking tour for him. Pearson soon moved to the U.S. to edit the neo-Nazi publication Western Destiny. In Eugenics and Race he asserted: "If a nation with a more advanced, more specialized, or in any way superior set of genes mingles with, instead of exterminating, an inferior tribe, then it commits racial suicide. "
This track record won Pearson influence in Washington, DC. In 1975 he became editor of the journal of the American Security Council. Retired military officers, corporate executives and conservative politicians formed this outfit. It promoted big military spending, cold war policies, and aid to the Nicaraguan contras and UNITA in Angola. The ASC was very influential during the Reagan and Bush administrations. It was closely tied to the military, the National Security Council, and the State Department.
Pearson also headed the U.S. chapter of the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). In 1977 he became the international chair of this nest of fascist vipers. He organized its 1978 convention, which featured two U.S. Senators as keynote speakers. Then he was exposed as having recruited open neo-Nazis to WACL, and was forced to resign. Four years later, President Reagan personally thanked Pearson for his "substantial contributions to promoting and upholding those ideals and principles that we value at home and abroad."
Murray is on the payroll of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative public-policy research outfit which has also employed Richard Herrnstein's other pal, James Q. Wilson. Founded by the industrialist Lewis Brown in 1943, it has spent a half-century promoting social policies favorable to big business: tax cuts for the wealthy, dere