Roger Pearson (anthropologist)

Pearson presided over the League's 11th Annual Conference held in Washington that year. The initial session of the five-day session, which was addressed by two U.S. Senators and opened by the United States Marine Corps Band and Joint Armed Services Honor Guard, was attended by several hundred members from around the world. After the meeting had been condemned in Pravda, The Washington Post published an even more critical attack on both WACL and Pearson's extreme right wing politics.

In 1995 and 1996 Pearson published a trilogy of articles in Mankind Quarterly regarding the "Concept of heredity in Western thought", a defense of hereditarianism and a denouncement of the "onslaught of egalitarianism". Pearson here repeated his defense for the view of racial groups as subspecies and he repeated his dedication to eugenicist ideas, although with the caveat that negative eugenics ought to take place as a voluntary act of altruistic sacrifice for one's species. The same views were repeated in the 1996 book Heredity and Humanity: Race, Eugenics and Modern Science.

After the Washington Post article, Pearson was asked to resign from the editorial board of the neo-Conservative Heritage Foundation's journal Policy Review, which he had helped to found, but his connection with other organisations continued, and in 1986 CovertAction Quarterly uncovered his association with James Jesus Angleton, former chief of CIA Counter-Intelligence, General Daniel O. Graham, former Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Robert C. Richardson, and other American Security Council members.

In 1981, Pearson received the library of Donald A. Swan through a grant from the Pioneer Fund. Between 1973 and 1999 the Fund spent $1.2 million on Pearson's activities, most of which was used for the Institute for the Study of Man which Pearson directed and which under Pearson acquired the peer-reviewed journal Mankind Quarterly in 1979. Pearson took over as publisher and is said to have editorial influence, although his name has never appeared on the masthead. Pearson has used diverse pseudonyms to contribute to the journal, including "J. W. Jamieson" and "Alan McGregor", sometimes even using one pseudonym to review and praise the work of another. This publication was later taken over by The Council for Social and Economic Studies.

Pearson's opposition to egalitarianism extends to Marxism and socialism. In the 1980s, he was a political organizer for the American far-right; he established the Council for American Affairs in the 1970s and was the American representative in the World Anti-Communist League during the second half of the 1970s. As World Chairman of the WACL he worked with the U.S. government during the cold war, and collaborated with many anti-communist groups in the organisation, including the Unification Church and former German Nazis.

In 1978 he took over the editorship of the journal Mankind Quarterly, which had originally been founded in 1960 by Robert Gayre, Henry Garrett, Corrado Gini, Ottmar von Verschuer and Reginald Ruggles Gates.

Pearson was elected World Chairman of the World Anti-Communist League in 1978. According to William H. Tucker he "used this opportunity to fill the WACL with European Nazis – ex-officials of the Third Reich and Nazi collaborators from other countries during the war as well as new adherents to the cause—in what one journalist called 'one of the greatest fascist blocs in postwar Europe'."

Pearson also published two popular textbooks in anthropology, but his anthropological views on race have been widely rejected as unsupported by contemporary anthropology. In 1976 he found the Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, which has been identified as one of two international journals which regularly publishes articles pertaining to race and intelligence with the goal of supporting the idea that white people are inherently superior (the other such journal being Mankind Quarterly). In 1978 he took over the editorship of Mankind Quarterly founded by Robert Gayre and Henry Garrett, widely considered a scientific racist journal. Most of Pearson's publishing ventures have been managed through the Institute for the Study of Man, and the Pioneer Fund, with which Pearson is closely associated, having received $568,000 in the period from 1981 to 1991.

In 1975, Pearson left academia and moved to Washington, D.C., to become president of the Council on American Affairs, President of the American chapter of the World Anti-Communist League, Editor of the Journal on American Affairs (later renamed The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies), and eventually President of University Professors for Academic Order (UPAO), an organisation advocating academic integrity, social order and that the university should not be "an instrument of social change" and working to depoliticize campus environments. He was also a Trustee of the Benjamin Franklin University.

In 1974 Pearson was appointed Professor and Dean of Academic Affairs and Director of Research at Montana Tech. During his tenure as dean, the school received $60,000 from the Pioneer Fund to support Pearson's academic research and publishing activities. When a journalist called the various universities at which Pearson had held positions, Montana Tech officials stated they were unaware that Pearson was the person who had edited Western Destiny, a periodical laden with many pro-South Africa, anti-Communist and anti-racial mixing articles, who had penned both articles and pamphlets for Willis Carto's Noontide Press. These race-oriented titles included: "Eugenics and Race" and "Early Civilizations of the Nordic Peoples."

In 1973 Pearson founded the Journal of Indo-European Studies, and in 1976 he founded Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies.

In 1971 he was appointed chair of the department of Anthropology Comparative Religious Studies at the USM. According to William Tucker's description, he fired most of the non-tenured faculty, hiring instead scholars such as Robert E. Kuttner and Donald A. Swan, both with similar political backgrounds to Pearson. The dean at USM later stated that Pearson had "used his post as an academic façade to bring in equal-minded fanatics." Pearson himself states that this is untrue and that "It is true that two faculty members from the formerly separate Religion department, which had recently been merged with Pearson's department to create a larger, combined department of Anthropology, Philosophy and Religion, were terminated, but this act was ordered by the Administration and not by the department Chair, Pearson."

In 1967, Pearson began teaching anthropology as an assistant professor at the University of Southern Mississippi (USM). In 1969 he received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of London. In 1971 USM granted Pearson full professorship and appointed him Chair of the department of anthropology and sociology. Three years later, Pearson left USM and taught at the Montana College of Mineral Science and Technology for one year. After resigning from that school, Pearson founded the Institute for the Study of Man.

Recently arrived in the United States, Pearson contributed to some of the publications of anti-semite Willis Carto, such as Western Destiny, and to Noontide Press. From 1966 to 1967 as "Stephan Langton", Pearson published The New Patriot, a magazine devoted to "a responsible but penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question." As Lanton he published articles such as "Zionists and the Plot Against South Africa," "Early Jews and the Rise of Jewish Money Power" and "Swindlers of the Crematoria." His books of this era, all published in 1966 in London by Clair Press, including Eugenics and Race, Blood groups and Race, Race & Civilisation and Early Civilizations of the Nordic Peoples were later distributed in the United States by The Thunderbolt Inc., an organ of the National States' Rights Party. Pearson's co-founder of The New Patriot was Senator Jack Tenney, who for sixteen years was Chairman of the California Senate Committee on Un-American Activities and who wrote frequently for that journal. Pearson joined the Eugenics Society in 1963 and became a fellow in 1977.

According to Pearson, in 1966 he toured the southern US and Caribbean, and in 1967 he visited South Africa, Rhodesia and Mozambique.

Pearson served as president of the Pakistan Tea Association, Chittagong, in 1963. He also served on the managing committee of the Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry. Pearson sold his business interests in East Pakistan in 1965 and moved to the United States. It was during his time in South Asia that he became interested in Aryanism, and the linguistic, cultural, and genetic connections between Northern Europe and the Indo-Aryan populations of the Subcontinent.

From the beginning the League was criticized because of its open emphasis on the dysgenic and fratricidal nature of intra-European warfare, and its tendency to attract prominent ex-Nazis such as scholar Hans F. K. Günther, who received awards under the Nazi regime for his work on race, and Heinrich Himmler's former assistant Franz Altheim, both of whom were members of the league in its early years. Other members of the league were British Neo-Nazi Colin Jordan, and John Tyndall. Pearson resigned from the League in 1961, after which it became more politically oriented.

It was Cox who suggested to Pearson that they should hold a meeting at Detmold, West Germany, near what was then believed to be the site where the Germanic tribes defeated the Romans in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest. The first meeting of the League was indeed held there in 1959, with Cox and Hans F. K. Günther as keynote speakers, although Günther's participation, him being a prominent former Nazi, had to be kept low profile. The event was described by locals as akin to Nazism revived.

In 1958 he founded the Northern League for North European Friendship, an organisation promoting Pan-Germanism, Anti-semitism and Neo-Nazi racial ideology. The Northern League published the journals "The Northlander" and "Northern World" which described its purpose as "to make Whites aware of their forgotten racial heritage, and cut through the Judaic fog of lies about our origin and the accomplishments of our race and our Western culture." In 1959 in the Northlander, Pearson described the aim of the organization as preventing the "annihilation of our kind" and to lead Nordics in Europe and the Americas in the "fight for survival against forces which would mongrelize our race and civilization" He also wrote of the need for "a totalitarian state, with conscious purpose and central control . . . to embark upon a thorough-going policy of genetic change for its population. . . . [T]here is surely little doubt that it could soon outstrip rival nations." Under the pen name Edward Langford, Pearson also wrote a series on "Authors of Human Science" with portraits of prominent racialists such as Arthur de Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Arthur Keith, Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard.

Pearson joined the British Army's Queen's Royal Regiment in April 1945 in England, and was commissioned in 1946 from the British Indian Army's Officers Training School Kakul, North-West Frontier Province (today the Pakistan Military Academy). He served with the British Indian Army in Meerut, (1946) before the Partition of India, with the British Indian Division in the Occupation of Japan, and with the British Army in Singapore (1948), before returning to university in England. Pearson later directed various British-controlled companies in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).

Roger Pearson (born 21 August 1927, in London) is a British anthropologist, businessman, eugenics advocate, political organiser for the extreme right, and publisher of political and academic journals. He has been on the faculty of the Queens College, Charlotte, the University of Southern Mississippi, and Montana Tech, and is now retired. It has been noted that Pearson has been surprisingly successful in combining a career in academia with political activities on the far right. He served in the British Army after World War II, and was a businessman in South Asia. In the late 1950s he founded the Northern League. In the 1960s he established himself in the United States for a while working together with Willis Carto publishing white supremacist and anti-Semitic literature. He was a regular contributor to Heritage Foundation periodicals.

Roger Pearson was born on 21 August 1927 in London. Pearson's only sibling and four of his cousins died in World War II. Pearson later described World War II as a "fratricidal war" in which the mutual destruction of Germanic peoples contributed to the gradual downfall of the Nordic race.

Pearson also corresponded with American segregationist Earnest Sevier Cox, a dedicated member of the League, who had lobbied for a federal funding to "Repatriate" African-Americans to Africa since the 1920s. Pearson assured him that "I am entirely with you on your efforts to obtain Federal aid to American Negroes who wish to return to Africa."