Roger Pearson

Roger Pearson
Professor Roger Pearson, M.Sc. (Econ), Ph.D. (London), doyen of Anglo-American Racial Science, at his Washington office (13th Street NW) in 2013
Born	21 August 1927 in London, United Kingdom
Died	4 January 2023 in Washington D.C.
Occupation	Anthropologist

Roger Pearson (21 August 1927 – 4 January 2023) was British professor of anthropology, traditional hereditarian, eugenicist and race realist as well as author of two major text books and publisher of three peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Pearson's patriotic and anti-Communist integrity was well known to those who knew Pearson’s work, and he continued to work with the American Security Council, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, and the Journal of International Relations.

Life

Academic career

Pearson has a Master's degree in Economics and Sociology, and a PhD in Anthropology from London University. He served as an officer in the British Indian Army and spent 16 years in India and Africa before moving to the United States in 1965, where he became department head of anthropology in two universities, and Dean of Academic Affairs and Director of Research at a third.

Pearson founded the Northern League in 1958, but resigned three years later arguing it had become too political.

Quasi-political activities

In the 1950s Roger Pearson was a contributor to Willis Carto's newsletter publication Right.

In 1973, Pearson founded a peer-reviewed academic Journal of Indo-European studies (JIES) which today is edited by J. P. Mallory, and in 1978, Pearson took over editing the Mankind Quarterly from Robert Gayre. The Institute for the Study of Man had long been headed by Pearson, as well the Council for Social and Economic Studies which has published Mankind Quarterly from 1979.

Pearson has long been persecuted academically which prompted him to publish Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe in 1991, through his own publisher Scott-Towsend Publishers. The work exposes how political correctness and Boasianism has infested most areas of science, and how modern proponents of hereditarianism have lost their jobs after publishing their research.

Theories

Race

Pearson is among the few anthropologists who maintain typology can be fused with population genetics. He argues races are "cline peaks" which form a phylogenetic contiuum, "with intermediate populations filling the interstitial spaces" (Pearson, 1996: 106). According to Pearson, major racial divisions ("cline peaks") can be identified through their gene frequencies which encode discernable racial traits, such as phenotype, alongside also subraces. He uses both populationist genetics and traditional anthropometry.

He was also once an early proponent of what became Multiregionalism (Pearson, 1974: 139), however since the 1990's he has favored the Out of Africa theory (Pearson, 1996: 105).

Eugenics

A notable proponent of eugenics, Pearson has outlined his views in many Mankind Quarterly publications.

Biography

Despite entitlement to exemption from military service to attend University after completing his Higher School Certificate examinations in June 1944, Pearson volunteered for military service and was inducted into the British Army October 1944 with a view to obtaining a commission in the (British) Indian Army. After completing basic infantry and corps training with the Queens Royal Regiment in Maidstone, Kent, he and his fellow cadets embarked for India to attend the British Indian Army Pre-Officer Training School (Pre-OTS) at Bangalore. In July 1946 he was commissioned from the British Indian Army OTS Kakul (today, the Pakistan Military Academy) to serve as a 2nd Lieutenant with Indian troops in Meerut. However, with the approaching Independence of India and Pakistan, he was shortly transferred to service as a 1st Lieutenant with the British Indian Division in the occupation of Japan (Shikoku and Tokyo), Jan.1947-Jan.1948. His final military service was as a 1st Lieutenant with the British Army in Singapore and Malaya, Jan.–April 1948. After leaving the army in 1948, Pearson attended university in England, and after obtaining a B.Sc.(honors) in economics and sociology, he returned to India in 1952 in a business capacity, first as an assistant accountant in Calcutta, but eventually as the CEO of several companies in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), primarily in the tea industry – then Pakistan’s second largest export. During this period (1959-65) he served on the Board of the Pakistan Tea Association and was elected President, 1963-4. During that year he was ex officio a member of the Pakistan Tea Board and of the Managing Committee of the Federation of Pakistan Chambers of Commerce and Industry. During his service in India and East Pakistan, Pearson retained a strong interest in cultural matters. While in Calcutta (1955-1959), he made numerous journalistic contributions to The Statesman and to The Hindustan Standard and a few short broadcast presentations on All-India Radio. He also wrote Eastern Interlude, a Social History of the European Community in Calcutta from 1649-1911, described by the Hindustan Times (India) "a vivid picture of European social life in India free from prejudices and prepossessions"; by the Hindustan Standard (India) "objective …brilliant"; by the Indian PEN "Exceptionally well-balanced"; and by the London Times as "most diverting and readable…amusing and vivid… it comes to life on every page".

He was invited to serve as a member of the Cultural Advisory Committee of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, but this honour was brief because he soon after left India for Pakistan. Pearson is also proud of having saved the historic and architecturally important South Park Street Cemetery (dating from 1765-1815 when Calcutta was the capital of British India) from demolition. On his offer to set up a restoration fund, the Christian Burial Board, which lacked the funds to restore the decaying monuments, agreed to halt demolition and allow him to establish a fund which, with the eventual support of the Calcutta architect Bernard Matthews, Aurelius David Khan, ICS, and Sir John Woodhead, former and last British Governor of Bengal, succeeded in restoring most of the monuments and having the cemetery declared a National Monument by the Government of India. Having lost his only sibling (a Battle of Britain pilot, killed in North Africa shortly after his 21st birthday), four cousins (three pilots/one aircrew) and two close school friends, all without offspring, to the Second World War, Pearson was impressed by the massive dysgenic loss resulting from internecine war in Europe. He was further impressed by the cultural destruction when he visited war-torn Europe as a student in 1950, and found inspiration at a student summer school in Aachen University in Germany, funded by several European governments with the goal of promoting healing across Europe. Pearson instinctively perceived its value and four years later, when employed with a British bank in Calcutta, he founded Northern World, a Cultural, Non-Political Journal of North European Friendship, with the particular goal of promoting reconciliation between the closely related nations of Northern Europe who had so recently been engaged in destroying each other. This small idealistic journal was favorably received in like-minded circles, including the famed author J.R.R. Tolkien and the agrarian environmentalist, Rolf Gardner, both of whom sent personal letters of congratulation. The success of this venture led Pearson, now a rising business executive, to announce the formation of a society to promote North European friendship. Under Pearson's leadership the new League for North European Friendship remained a cultural and essentially non-political organization, but with his business responsibilities mounting rapidly, by 1961 Pearson found it necessary to resign his membership and from all responsibilities in the Northern League. Following his withdrawal, the League became more political.

By 1965, the situation for old-established British firms operating in India and Pakistan was deteriorating. China had already fought a war with India over the borders of Assam, and India was shortly to invade Pakistan and convert East Pakistan into Bangladesh. Pearson sold his own commercial interests, and moved to America. On his departure he received a farewell address from the Pakistani employees stating, “Your love, affection and sympathy for your staff are never to be forgotten and specially during the reorganization we have found that you have put yourself out to a great extent in finding the retrenched staff employment, which we feel, can only be equaled by a very few.” After leaving the East, Pearson returned to the U.K. for a few months before migrating to the U.S. There he spent a year or so in California editing and writing articles and engaging in lecturing before embarking on a ten-month tour of the Caribbean and Southern Africa. Returning to the U.S., he joined the faculty of the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern Mississippi as an Assistant Professor (1968), wrote his Introduction to Anthropology (published in 1974 by what was then the largest Anthropology publishing house in the USA), accepted a position as Associate Professor and Department Head of the Sociology at Queen’s College, Charlotte (today Queens University of Charlotte), before returning to the University of Southern Mississippi as Full Professor and Chairman of a new Department of Anthropology offering both Bachelor's and Masters degrees. It was there that he launched the The Journal of Indo-European Studies and the JIES Monograph series (1972) in collaboration with and under the guidance of the distinguished UCLA archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and University of Texas linguist and mythologist Edgar Polome. Not content with standing still, in 1974, Pearson accepted a position as Dean of Academic Affairs and Director of Research at Montana Tech of the University of Montana in Butte, Montana, a mile high in the beautiful Rocky Mountains, in the course of which he also became ex-officio Secretary of the Montana Energy and Magnetohydrodynamic Research and Development Institute. During this time he joined the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Further adventures now called, and after one year Pearson moved to Washington, D.C. (1975) to found the Council on American Affairs as the new U.S. chapter, to become Director of the North American Chapter of WACL and publisher and editor of a new journal entitled The Journal of American Affairs (founded 1975 and known today as The Journal of Social, Political, and Economic Studies). This new journal then proceeded to publish articles by both scholars, and senators and congressmen.

Traveling widely to attend WACL conferences throughout the Far East, South and Central America, and Europe, Pearson conferenced face to face with a number of Heads of State, including King Faysal of Saudi Arabia. Pearson was elected World Chairman of the World Anti-Communist League in 1978 and hosted the 1979 World Conference of the League in Washington DC. The five-day proceedings were attended by upwards of a thousand WACL members and guests from free countries around the globe. The Opening Ceremony was conducted with the aid of The U.S. Joint Armed Services Honor Guard and the Marine Corp Band, and addressed by two U.S. Senators. While Pravda in Moscow was ready to condemn the Conference out of hand, The Washington Post (WP), which had had a reporter at the Conference, totally ignored it for some thirty days while preparing a virtually full-page attack on both the WACL and its president, Pearson. Talking fancifully about “fascists” and South American “death squads”, the author of the WP article also leveled charges against Pearson's alleged efforts to enroll "extremists" into WACL. Indeed, it is a fact that, unlike the delegates from Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Central and Southern America, Pearson found the WACL European and Asian chapters replete with delegates who were soft on Communism. One Indian delegate constantly attacked "neocolonialism", but seemed to never mention the very real Communist threat to freedom in the '60s and '70s. Pearson consequently promoted the recruitment of more genuine anti-Communists, such as the Italian Social Movement, at that time the fourth largest political party in Italy, and was partially successful but eventually resigned.

Concerned with the future of the human race, Pearson became a Member of the British Eugenics Society, now known as the Galton Institute, as early as 1963, and was elected a Fellow in 1977. In 1979 he also assumed publication of Professor Robert Gayre's Mankind Quarterly, which the latter had founded in 1960 with the aid of distinguished scholars such as Henry Vallois, S.D. Porteus, and Sir Charles B. Darwin. As the earlier generation of contributors passed on, he was able to recruit distinguished scholars to replace them, such as Joseph Campbell, Raymond B. Cattell, Hans Eysenck and William Shockley. In 1990 Pearson founded the bi-monthly Conservative Review, a thoughtful journal of newsworthy comment. Not forgetting the importance of Universities to the rising generation, and concerned by the pre-mediated campus disruptions during the 1960s and 70s Pearson joined the University Professors for Academic Order (UPAO), and served as its President 1980-84. Combining his credentials in the social sciences with his practical experience in the commercial world, his bank training in accounting, and his professional status as a former Fellow of the British Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators and member of the British Institute of Directors, Pearson also served as a Trustee of the Benjamin Franklin University in Washington D.C. for a number of years before that respected institution, noted for the quality of its alumni, was absorbed into Georgetown University. In 1984 Pearson received a Certificate of Appreciation signed by General Daniel O. Graham, Director of the Military Defense Intelligence under President Reagan, and later of High Frontier, expressing "grateful appreciation for the important work you have done to prepare the way for a more secure world." Also a 1985 written accolade from the US Department of Education for “outstanding service to U.S. Education and Education Reform Efforts”. But perhaps the most significant tribute, and one that annoyed Pearson's critics most strongly, was a signed letter from President Ronald Reagan commending Pearson for “promoting and upholding those ideals and principles that we value at home and abroad …bringing to a wide audience the work of leading scholars who are supportive of a free enterprise economy, a firm and consistent foreign policy and a strong national defense.”

Obituaries

James Gillespie

Roger Pearson, anthropologist and publisher, passed away on January 4, 2023. (You may see other dates associated with his death, but they are incorrect.) He was 95 years old. [...] Family was immensely important to Roger, both that of every individual and the wider family of the European people. [...] And, of course, bye and bye, we discussed that inevitable topic as well: death in general and death in particular. Roger had no fear of it and thought little of the religious and humanist conceit that individuals were intended for immortality. By the end of his life, his cohort had largely died out. He missed friends, as he missed his native Britain and his dear wife Marion, who had passed away some years earlier. While he remained actively engaged in his publishing work and with his family until the very day he died, he was ready to leave. [...] What did I learn from my 25-year friendship with Roger Pearson? A lot about humanity, about race and culture and history and Western decline. Most importantly, I think the thing I learned most about was something long-time AR readers understand: the importance of civility. It would not be a stretch, though it would be acutely sad, to call Dr. Roger Pearson the Last Civilized Man. He was an exemplar of intelligence, grace, good manners, and civility. It was an honor to call him friend.

Peter Rushton

Dr. Roger Pearson — a pioneering scholar and publisher across a wide range of anthropological studies, and a brave champion of racial reality in a world which increasingly denies scientific truth — has died aged 95. Born in England but spending most of his adult life in the United States, Dr. Pearson was a good friend of many racial realists such as Jared Taylor, Sam Dickson, Paul Fromm, Tom Sunic, and Heritage & Destiny editor Mark Cotterill, whose obituary tribute is online here. One of his last public activities was his speech at a tribute last June organized by Counter-Currents and the Free Expression Foundation: click here for details. During my research into the British security service MI5’s investigations of post-war nationalist politics, I have already discovered occasional references to what must be a large hidden archive concerning Roger Pearson and his associates. Following his death, further revelations are likely. One of the earliest archival references is a Metropolitan Police Special Branch report from December 1957, contained in an MI5 file on Colin Jordan, a Cambridge history graduate who was just beginning to make a name for himself on the British “far Right” and was soon to become one of the world’s best-known post-war National Socialists. Two of Northern World‘’s assistant editors were known by MI5 to have contributed to The European, a journal edited by Sir Oswald Mosley’s wife Diana and associated with [[British Union of Fascists<Mosley’s Union Movement]]. One was Alastair Harper (a close ally of Roger Pearson in what was to become the Northern League). I later met Harper at nationalist conferences: late in life he was a parliamentary candidate for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Early in 1958 MI5 monitored the creation of the Northern League: they had already opened a personal file on Roger Pearson, catalogued as PF 773735 but not yet available to researchers at the National Archives. At the end of that year (for unknown reasons), their sister service, MI6, requested a briefing on the League, which was supplied by Jack Cradock (a career MI5 officer best remembered as its senior representative in Northern Ireland during the 1970s). Cradock accepted that MI5 could speak to their friends in the German intelligence services about the Northern League, though he requested that some details should be obscured so as to protect MI5’s sources. He noted that Northern World had begun publication in May 1956 and the League had evolved out of this journal 18 months later. Northern World, according to MI5, “describes itself as a ‘journal of North European Friendship’ and although it tries to be rather more intellectual, is similar in content to The European, the magazine of the Union Movement in this country. The views it propagates follow familiar Fascist lines, emphasising the idea of ‘North European’ unity and showing the usual anti-semitic bias.” The report added that the principal figure in the League and editor of its journal, Roger Pearson, though working in Calcutta, “is in contact with the Union Movement, although not a member, and has expressed support for its aims. He can therefore be regarded as having Fascist sympathies.” The League also published a newsletter, The Northlander, edited by Alastair Harper. Its organizing secretary was Thomas Leonard (who like Harper, lived in Scotland), and Colin Jordan was also a leading activist. In June 1958 The Northlander merged with another nationalist newsletter, World Review, published by Peter Huxley-Blythe, who had been part of a faction of young dissidents who broke away from Mosley at the end of the 1940s and associated themselves with Francis Parker Yockey in the short-lived European Liberation Front. Huxley-Blythe had become a prominent anti-Communist networker during the mid-1950s, and in retrospect his contacts with militants in Germany and elsewhere (via an organization called NATINFORM) can be seen as having contributed substantially to Roger Pearson’s developing international connections in what became the World Anti-Communist League. (Some of the many complications of this networking, including factional rivalries and attempted infiltration by Kremlin agents, will be discussed in later articles at this blog.) [...] Roger Pearson was a living link between National Socialist academics such as Hans F. K. Günther and Franz Altheim, both of whom were active in the early days of the Northern League, and today’s racial realists and champions of European destiny. Günther was Professor of Racial Theory at the universities of Jena (1930-35) and Berlin (from 1935) and was one of the first leading racial theorists to join the National Socialist Party, a year before Adolf Hitler came to power. He was interned for three years after the war for political reasons, though never convicted of any crime. Günther never recanted any aspect of his views on race, and never accepted “Holocaust” propaganda. Today’s politically-correct propagandists have sought to purge racial science from universities. Dr. Roger Pearson played an important role in ensuring that scientific truth about race, heredity, and intelligence — whether drawn from the work of National Socialists such as Günther and Altheim, or part-Jewish scholars such as Hans Eysenck (the target of brutal physical attacks by the far Left) — will remain as an indispensable guide for future generations.

Mark Cotterill

All of us at Heritage & Destiny were saddened to hear of the recent death of Dr. Roger Pearson, who was a long-standing subscriber to H&D magazine — in fact he was our eldest subscriber, aged 95, when he died in Washington, DC in January. [...] Returning to the United States, he joined the faculty of the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern Mississippi as an Assistant Professor (1968), wrote his Introduction to Anthropology (published in 1974 by what was then the largest anthropology publishing house in the US), and accepted a position as Associate Professor and Department Head of the Sociology at Queen’s College, Charlotte (today Queens University of Charlotte) before returning to the University of Southern Mississippi (commonly known as “Ole Miss”) as full Professor and Chairman of a new Department of Anthropology offering both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees. At “Ole Miss” Dr. Pearson launched the the Journal of Indo-European Studies and the JIES Monograph series (1972) in collaboration with and under the guidance of the distinguished UCLA archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and University of Texas linguist and mythologist Edgar C. Polomé. He continued to publish JIES via The Institute for the Study of Man until well into his late 80s. It is now edited by Emily Blanchard West (St. Catherine). In the mid-1960s Dr. Pearson teamed up with Willis Carto (who would later go on to run the Liberty Lobby and publish the Spotlight newspaper) for a while, and they published a magazine called Western Destiny (1965-66), which was probably the first high-quality journal the “American Right” had published since the end of the Second World War. They stayed friends up until the late 1990s, when Willis Carto fell out with Dr. Pearson for not being extreme enough! From 1966 to 1967, under the pen-name “Stephan Langton,” Dr. Pearson published (via Noontide Press) The New Patriot, a magazine devoted to “a responsible but penetrating inquiry into every aspect of the Jewish Question.”

Bibliography (excerpt)

• Eastern Interlude. Thacker Spink, Calcutta, Luzac and Co., London 1954.
• Early Civilizations of the Nordic Peoples. Clair Press, London, 1958.
• Blood Groups and Race, 1959.
• Introduction to Anthropology. Holt Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1974.
• Sino-Soviet Intervention in Africa. Council on American Affairs, Washington D.C., 1977.
• Korea in the World Today. Council on American Affairs, Washington D.C., 1978.
• Ecology and Evolution. Mankind Quarterly Monograph, Washington D.C., 1981.
• Essays in Medical Anthropology, Scott-Townsend Publishers, Washington D.C., 1981.
• Anthropological Glossary. Krieger Pub Co, Malabar, Florida, 1985.
• Evolution, Creative Intelligence, and Inter-Group Competition, Scott-Townsend Publishers, 1986.
• Shockley: Shockley on Eugenics and Race: The Application of Science to the Solution of Human Problems. Introduction by Arthur Jensen. Scott-Townsend Publishers, Washington D.C., 1992.
• Heredity and Humanity: Race, Eugenics and Modern Science. Scott-Townsend Publishers, Washington D.C., 1996.
• Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe. Introduction by Hans Eysenck. Scott-Townsend Publishers, Washington D.C., 2019, 3rd Edition forthcoming.

See also

• The New Patriot
• Mankind Quarterly
• Northern League for Pan-Nordic Friendship
• World League for Freedom and Democracy
• The Cobbler and the Professor
• The Northlander

External links

• Roger Pearson's homepage
  • Lies and the Rumour Mill
  • Partial Bibliography
• Race, Intelligence, and Bias in Academe
• The Future of the Species