ROGER PEARSON, M.Sc. (Econ), Ph.D. (London)

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Professor Roger Pearson, M.Sc. (Econ), Ph.D., (London).

Born, London, 1927.

Anthropologist, conservationist, advocate of voluntary eugenics, author of two major text books and publisher of three peer-reviewed scholarly journals.

Military Service
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.

India and Pakistan
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.”

America
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.

After WACL
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. But efforts to frustrate his work continued. His scientific comprehension of Darwinian reality, and the importance of genetic, cultural and environmental concerns for the survival of humanity, was made a target for those who care only about the present generation, and not those numberless generations hopefully still to come. His sociological and anthropological training has meant that he has never stressed the biological at the expense of the environmental, because biological organisms are dependent on the ecosphere - and also on a culture that supports both the biological and the environmental heritage.

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.”

Pearson with fellow cadets: 28 mile map reading expedition, North-West Frontier Province, OTS, 1946 (click to enlarge)

British Indian Army, Meerut, India, 1946 (click to enlarge)

1st. Lieutenant, British Army, BCOF, Japan 1947 (click to enlarge)

Eastern Interlude, 1956 a social history of the British in Bengal (click to see brief excerpts from reviews)

All India Radio Broadcasts and Articles contributed to major Indian newspapers (click to read Sunday Statesman review of Easter radio presentation, 1958)

Office staff, Chittagong, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) 1965 (click to enlarge)

Restoration of South Park Street Cemetery, 1962 (click to enlarge)

Farewell Address, Chittagong, 1965 (click to enlarge)

Council on American Affairs, 1975 (click to enlarge)

Introduction to Anthropology, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1974, First Edition (click to enlarge)

Overseas Receptions and Lectures (Photo: King Abdulaziz University, Jeddah, 1975, Pearson with distinguished Saudi, Yemeni and Taiwanese government members, ambassadors and university leaders). click to enlarge

WACL Conference 1979 (click to enlarge)

During the 1980s Pearson remained active in Academe, in addition to writing and publishing (click to enlarge)

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Roger Pearson, 2013 (click to enlarge)