-Caveat Lector-
You might try the archives, there are two different ones.
Om
K
In a message dated 10/24/00 10:13:01 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>-Caveat Lector-
>
>
>
>Kris your fwds are blank pages when I receive them could you please send
>
>again to me ~thanks~
Pioneer Fund/Secret Military Genetic Experiments
3Long before cloned sheep, egg donors and sperm banks, a group of
wealthy Northeastern conservatives embarked on an experiment with the help
of the U.S. Army Air Corps to find a way to improve the human race....2
‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹‹
August 17, 1999
------------
More on The Pioneer Fund
A Breed Apart: A Long-Ago Effort to Better the Species Yields Ordinary Folks
Pioneer Fund Tried to Spread `Natural Endowments' of Top Air Force Fliers
'Sound and Desirable Stock'
By DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON
Staff Reporter, THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
WARE, Mass. - Tomorrow, Ward and Darby Warburton, twin brothers born on Aug.
18, 1940, will celebrate their 59th birthdays with cake and a crowd of
grandchildren gathered at the home of their 86-year-old mother near this
picturesque New England mill town.
The brothers' shared birthday marks something more than another milestone in
the lives of two World War II-era babies. It also marks the start of their
involvement in an odd experiment six decades ago of which the Warburton
family was a mostly unwitting subject.
Long before cloned sheep, egg donors and sperm banks, a group of wealthy
Northeastern conservatives embarked on an experiment with the help of the
U.S. Army Air Corps to find a way to improve the human race. The group,
formed in 1937, called itself the Pioneer Fund. As is spelled out in
hundreds of pages of documents and letters by its founders and their
associates, the Pioneer Fund, alarmed by the declining U.S. birth rate and
rising immigration, was at the forefront of the eugenics movement. Like many
other prominent leaders of the time, the fund's directors were particularly
concerned that "superior" Americans were not reproducing enough to pass on
their "natural endowments."
So they set out to spur procreation among a group they regarded as superior
indeed -- military pilots and their crews. With the support of Franklin D.
Roosevelt's secretary of war, Harry H. Woodring, the group offered $4,000,
about $46,000 in today's dollars, for the education of additional children
born during the year 1940 to any officer who already had at least three
offspring.
The Air Corps - precursor to the U.S. Air Force - promoted the program and
provided the fund's psychologists extensive records on its officers,
including training, parentage, race and religion, according to various memos
and letters written among Pioneer Fund leaders and records of the
experiment. By the end of 1940, a dozen qualifying infants - seven boys and
five girls, including two sets of twins - had been born. The Pioneer Fund
had expected bigger numbers. Looming war clouds seemed to have trumped the
fund's financial incentives. The Pioneer Fund quietly made arrangements for
the children to receive their scholarships, and never contacted the families
again.
The Pioneer Fund, which today remains a controversial funder of research
into the roots of intelligence, says the 1940 effort was a legitimate
experiment to gauge attitudes toward family size, and nothing more. The Air
Force declines to comment.
But how did the kids turn out?
The Wall Street Journal was able to track down eight of the 12 born in 1940.
One died as an infant. But the other seven grew up to be moderately
successful citizens. Some didn't know the background behind the payments
received long ago and were vaguely troubled to learn the details. Among the
seven children who survived into adulthood, there are no ranking generals
and no war heroes. No criminals, either.
"My dad told me they were trying to create more fighting men," jokes Ward
Warburton. "Well, I did get into a lot of fights coming up. And I could
always take care of myself pretty well."
Today, the Warburton brothers are air-conditioning repairmen, each with his
own successful small business here in Ware, a town of 10,000 about 25 miles
from Springfield, Mass.
"I doubt we're superior," says John F. Rawlings, an affable Seattle
homebuilder, whose father became one of the first four-star generals in the
Air Force and later the chairman of General Mills Inc. The younger Mr.
Rawlings joined the Air Force but was too nearsighted to fly. He says he
inherited the bad eyes from his mother.
The stories of the Pioneer Fund children and the largely routine lives they
have led underscore the naivete of such a clumsy effort to sculpt the human
race. But they also are reminders of sinister racial assumptions prevalent
in mainstream America just a generation ago.
All officers in the Air Corps were white; African-Americans were barred from
the Air Corps until 1941, and even then were shunted into all-black
squadrons. Many early genetic researchers believed that race-mixing would
damage the white race's "germ plasm" - a human component that early
scientists believed carried a race's hereditary traits. Leaders in Nazi
Germany fervently embraced such eugenic theories.
The pilot procreation plan was endorsed by an array of high-ranking military
and political leaders, including Mr. Woodring, one of President Roosevelt's
top aides. Moreover, many U.S. states had laws in that era authorizing the
sterilization of mentally retarded people. Conventional wisdom held that
whites almost certainly were born smarter than blacks.
"Hitler thought that, too," says Michael Skeldon, another of the Pioneer
Fund children. Now a supervisor at a San Antonio air-conditioner factory,
Mr. Skeldon was troubled to learn what was behind the mysterious payments
his family received long ago. "I find real odd this Pioneer group trying to
mold people."
As it turns out, creating a better race was more complicated than the
Pioneer Fund and its allies thought back in 1938. John C. Flanagan, a young
researcher who became one of the most famous behavioral psychologists in the
U.S. in the ensuing 50 years, supervised the 1940 experiment. (He died in
1996.) Nonetheless, scientists today say the test was fundamentally flawed;
subsequent scholarship has shown that highly successful parents don't
necessarily give birth to highly successful children. And indeed, counter to
the hopes of the Pioneer Fund's directors in 1940, the lives led by the
children born that year bear out precisely that idea.
The project was launched in the spring of 1937. Frederick Osborn, secretary
of the Pioneer Fund and a leading proponent of racial eugenics, met at least
twice with Mr. Woodring; the secretary of war encouraged the project and
hooked the fund up with top military leaders, including famed aviation
commander Gen. H.H. "Hap" Arnold. "Secretary Woodring is really interested,"
Mr. Osborn wrote to other fund directors in May 1937. A few months later,
Gen. Arnold gave the fund's experiment the green light.
At the time, the fund was new, created just months earlier with a promise of
financial support from its principal founder, Wickliffe Preston Draper, heir
to a Massachusetts manufacturing fortune. Mr. Draper, who died in 1972, and
his support for southern segregationists were the subject of a front-page
article in The Wall Street Journal on June 11.
The choice of pilots and their crews was logical enough. Military aviators
were the astronauts of their day. Charles Lindbergh's heroic 1927 crossing
of the Atlantic was a fresh memory. Moreover, Mr. Draper was a veteran of
World War I and an admirer of military officers. He used the title "colonel"
most of his adult life. Clearly, aviators were "of sound and desirable
stock," a Pioneer Fund memo asserted at the time.
Indeed, many of the fathers of the dozen children born in 1940 were high
achievers. Several were among the pioneering military pilots who in the
1920s created what would become the modern U.S. Air Force. During World War
II, they rose to distinction as pilots and generals. Later, some excelled as
businessmen or teachers. The six who could be identified by the Journal are
now dead. None of the parents appear to have known about Mr. Draper's
backing of the Pioneer Fund. Some did know vaguely that the fund sought to
breed better humans; they or their children say the parents never shared the
fund's racial views. Instead, most appear to have considered the
scholarships to be some kind of short-lived government benefit for
high-achieving fliers.
To foster replication of such men, the Pioneer Fund first financed a
detailed study in 1938 of the attitudes of about 400 Air Corps officers and
their wives toward family size. It concluded that financial worry was a
major reason why the military men often limited themselves to three children
or fewer.
Armed with the results, the Pioneer Fund's board met a few weeks before
Christmas 1938 and approved a plan for the scholarship program. The
following May, brochures outlining the project were distributed at air bases
around the country.
After a qualifying child was born during 1940, the father would fill out a
simple application form and mail it in. Once the fund had confirmed the
birth of the child and size of its family, an "educational annuity" was
established. The families were to begin receiving payments of $500 a year
when the child turned 12 and continue for eight years, for a total of
$4,000. The whole thing looked dubious to some Air Corps families even then.
"We just kind of chuckled about it," says Helen Ryan, an 87-year-old Air
Force widow who remembers the program but had no children then and couldn't
participate. "We all thought it was kind of a big joke."
Still, a no-strings-attached grant that was bigger than most officers' total
annual pay looked good to some. And as winter lifted in 1940, word of new
arrivals began trickling into the Pioneer Fund.
Mr. Skeldon was born on March 2, in a military hospital in Panama, where his
father was stationed. The son would follow his father's footsteps into the
Air Force in the 1960s, but worked as a mechanic, not a pilot. Born to Maj.
John J. Morrow was a son named Robert. He's an electrician in Pennsylvania,
according to his son. He couldn't be reached. On Aug. 18, the Warburton boys
were delivered at a hospital near Dayton, Ohio. Their father, stationed at a
nearby airfield, was one of the Air Corps' most dashing "scout pilots" - the
term then used for the men who flew fighter planes.
Two months later, on Oct. 17, came John Rawlings, the fourth child of Edwin
Rawlings, a fast-rising officer who had been quietly hoping for a daughter.
(He already had three sons). Less than two weeks later came another set of
twins, this time at Barksdale Air Force Base outside Shreveport, La., to
John P. Ryan. Mr. Ryan, a future general, developed high-altitude bombing
tactics used in the war. A 1943 Pat O'Brien movie, "Bombardier," was based
partly on his life. The twins were girls; the first to arrive looked like
her mother, Anna, so she was named Anne Marie. Her twin looked like her
paternal grandmother, Mary. She became Maryann. Today, Maryann Russo is a
former teacher who for the past 17 years has worked on the factory line in a
photo-processing plant in Baltimore, cutting and inspecting thousands of
glossy prints. She gave up teaching elementary school because the pupils
were too unruly. "The belt doesn't talk back," she notes.
Her sister, now Anne Marie Bricker, is a nurse practitioner in Arizona. Ms.
Bricker, recently divorced, moved this summer from Sedona to Phoenix,
abandoning a private practice to work in a clinic. "I want to have more time
for doing fun things for myself," she says.
The Warburton babies were certainly good candidates for the Pioneer Fund
project. Their father, Ernest K. Warburton, was a young pilot who would soon
be Brig. Gen. Warburton and the most famous test pilot of the era, flying
more than 400 different allied and captured enemy aircraft. In 1945, he and
the airmen under his command were the first U.S. troops to land in Japan
after its surrender. Later, he commanded all air operations for the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization.
The Warburton family heard about the Pioneer offer after Anna Warburton
realized she was carrying twins, her fourth and fifth children, Mrs.
Warburton says today. "I remember him coming home all" excited about the
scholarship, says Mrs. Warburton, now 86. "All we really knew was that it
was . . . for the children's education, and it was intended to propagate a
superior group."
Ward and Darby grew up in the classic life of military children, moving
often between Air Force bases in the U.S. and Europe. Both finished high
school and signed up as military reservists, though they never saw active
duty.
For more than 30 years, the brothers have kept refrigerators, air
conditioners and washing machines running in this bucolic corner of
Massachusetts, the family's home territory. Darby works on commercial
cooling units. Ward is a jack-of-all appliances repairman. Their other
siblings - including two doctors - are scattered from Hawaii to North
Carolina.
On a grassy hilltop just outside Ware, Ward lives in a comfortable gray
frame house overlooking the small tree-lined lake on which his future wife
was skating the first time he saw her. His mother-in-law's home sits across
the water from theirs. A collection of used washers and other appliances
scavenged for spare parts protrudes from the woods behind the house.
Before venturing out a decade ago to start repairing appliances in his
garage, Mr. Warburton was a fix-it man for Sears, Roebuck & Co. for 28
years. "I loved the job," he says.
Just down the highway lives Ward's fast-graying twin, Darby, in a rambling
white farmhouse. Out of a barn behind the home, Darby runs a two-man
commercial air-conditioning service business, which he bought in 1962. He
wants to retire next year. So in June, his 26-year-old son, Ernest, started
working in the family business with plans to take over.
Ward is a member of Ware Lions Club. Darby is a Rotarian. Darby, who
attended the University of Michigan but didn't graduate, is financially the
more successful brother. He keeps two vintage Corvettes as hobby cars,
driving them to Rotary meetings every week and on other special occasions.
Over a recent dinner at the Salem Cross Inn -- where Darby maintains the
walk-in cooler -- the brothers banter about their decades of mostly friendly
competition.
"I try to steal as many of Darby's customers as I can," Ward says. "Darby
gets mad when I do."
"I do not get mad," huffs Darby, partly serious.
Darby says he doesn't recall ever knowing anything about the Pioneer Fund
program before a reporter contacted the family recently, though his brother
and mother insist that he was told. For his part, Ward clearly recalls the
day more than 40 years ago that his father told him about the Pioneer Fund
plan.
"I was the slow one in the family," says Mr. Warburton, recalling his days
as an academically frustrated teenager. "Just kidding around one day . . .
to cheer me up, he said, `Ward, come out of it, you're the master race.'
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Date: Sun, 17 Jan 1904 03:24:58 -0800
Subject: Pioneer Fund/Secret Military Genetic Experiments
From: Alex Constantine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Kris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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