In 1927, he participated in the French mission of Captain Marcel Augiéras to the southern Sahara that discovered the remains of "Asselar man", an extinct human believed to belong to the Holocene, or Recent Epoch.

The French Société de Géographie subsequently awarded him its 1932 gold medal, the Grande Médaille d'Or des Explorations,[5] and in Britain, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.

Draper had helped ease the funding shortfall, making a special gift to the AES of several thousand dollars to support the society prior to 1932.

At the conference, Draper's travel companion, Dr. Clarence Campbell delivered an oration that concluded: "The difference between the Jew and the Aryan is as unsurmountable [sic] as that between black and white.... Germany has set a pattern which other nations must follow.... To that great leader, Adolf Hitler!"

In 1937, Draper established the Pioneer Fund, a foundation intended to give scholarships to descendants of White American colonial-era families and to support research into "race betterment" through eugenics.

The Pioneer Fund was headed by the sociologist and eugenicist Harry H. Laughlin, an advocate for restrictive immigration laws and national programs of compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and intellectually disabled.

After the war, he returned to eugenicist and segregationist activism, and The Pioneer Fund supported the work of a number of noted and controversial researchers of race and intelligence, such as the Nobel Laureate William Shockley, the American differential psychologist Arthur Jensen, the Canadian evolutionary psychologist J. Philippe Rushton, and the British anthropologist Roger Pearson.

Draper opposed FDR's efforts to implement the Social Security Act, expanded child labor laws, and early attempts to pass the equivalent of OSHA-styled regulations.

[citation needed] He disliked JFK for currying favor with labor unions, promoting civil rights advances, and failing to pass tariff barriers to prevent the import of foreign textiles and cotton.

Draper's work has become more controversial since the publication of The Bell Curve (1994), because the Pioneer Fund financially sponsored much of the research reported in the book.