Scientists for Segregation: Ernest van den Haag

Molly Conger (0:07)

When Ernest van den Haag died in 2002, the obituary that ran in the New York Times described him as a Dutch-born conservative commentator on social issues, and a leading advocate of the death penalty.

He'd spent most of his life in Manhattan. He was a professor, a sociologist, a psychoanalyst, a contributor to the National Review. And in the Times' words, he was someone who was comfortable taking strong and often controversial stands on a wide range of issues. The obituary notes that he'd been a critic of the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, and a vocal advocate for the abolition of laws prohibiting child labor.

But there were pieces missing, some pretty big ones. The New York Times had gathered most of the biographical details about van den Haag's life secondhand, trusting an account related to them by the dead man's close friend, William F. Buckley. I'm not sure exactly what Buckley omitted intentionally and what he just didn't know. But his friend wasn't born Ernest van den Haag. He wasn't even Dutch. I do understand why Buckley left out some of the pieces of that story that he did know. Buckley had little incentive, for example, to include the parts about his friend's stint as a board member at a front group established to provide scientific justification for segregation. It wouldn't do the conservative movement any favors if he gave credit to van den Haag for his role in defending apartheid before the International Court of Justice in the 60s. And of course, van den Haag hadn't just been a critic of the Brown v. Board of Education position. He was a key player in an organized effort to overturn it.

I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys.

This is Weird Little Guys. I may have strayed a bit from the original premise, and lately it's not always entirely focused in a straightforward way on telling you about the profound weirdness of a particular guy, but it is still the name of the show. So it wouldn't be right for me to pass up an opportunity to tell you a little bit more about the backstory of one of our side characters, who I think was a very weird guy. You know I love a little mystery.

Ernest van den Haag's life story isn't what I set out to tell you about. I was just doing my due diligence, collecting a bit of information about each of the pro-segregation expert witnesses that were collected by the Pioneer Fund for their legal battle to overturn Brown v. Board of Education in the 1960s. We'll get there. We're still getting there in my own way. And when we do, I'll tell you a little bit about each of those scientists. What was their academic background? Which hate groups did they have known connections to? We'll highlight a few of their more egregiously racist and academically debunked opinions, that sort of thing. But I realized pretty quickly that the side story I have about Ernest is a little bit cumbersome and I think it deserves its own space. Because after I read his obituary, I realized he hadn't been entirely honest with the court or his colleagues about his background.

Obituaries are a fantastic place to start if you're curious about someone's life. Even if a person wasn't famous, when someone dies, a loved one probably puts some kind of notice in the local paper. It might say where they were born, what they did for a living, who they married, if they had children. The sparsest little obituary in a small town newspaper almost always gives me something, even if it's not much. The name of a parent or a child, which charities you should send money to in their honor, which church held their funeral service, something, some crumb. It's usually a place to start. So that's where I started with my list of scientists. Unlucky for us, Dr. van den Haag was a little bit famous, famous enough to have an obituary in The New York Times anyway. But I could tell right away that some things were missing from that obituary. I mean, just from the research I've done for this story so far, I already know that Ernest van den Haag was a founding member of the International Association for the Advancement of Ethnology and Eugenics, the IAEE, which was that Pioneer Fund front group that collected cringe scientists who were more interested in being racist than doing science. But that wasn't in there. And I know he was the director of another Pioneer Fund front group, the Foundation for Human Understanding, through at least the 1980s. He was a known grant recipient of Pioneer Fund money for his research in the 60s, and he was on a board of a group handing that money out for decades after that. I mean, it's fair to assume that he had a lot of Cliff Draper's money in his pockets over the years.