Authors: Edwin Black
Several principal areas of scholarly investigation were identified from the worthy realms of geophysics, astronomy and plant biology. Now another scientific endeavor would be added: negative eugenics. The program would quickly become known as “the practical means for cutting off defective germ-plasm” and would embrace a gamut of remedies from segregation to sterilization to euthanasia.
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This radical human engineering program would spring not from the medical schools and health clinics of America, but from the pastures, barns and chicken coops-because the advocates of eugenics were primarily plant and animal breeders. Essentially, they believed humans could be spawned and spayed like trout and horses.
America’s formless eugenics movement found its leader in zoologist Charles Davenport, a man who would dominate America’s human breeding program for decades. Davenport, esteemed for his Harvard degrees and his distinguished background, led the wandering faithful out of the wilderness of pure prejudice and into the stately corridors of respectability. More than anyone else, it was Davenport who propelled baseless American eugenics into settled science-wielding a powerful sociopolitical imperative.
Who was Charles Benedict Davenport?
He was a sad man. No matter how celebrated Davenport became within his cherished circles, throughout his career he remained a bitter and disconsolate person boxing shadows for personal recognition. Even as he judged the worthiness of his fellow humans, Davenport struggled to prove his own worthiness to his father and to God. Ironically, it was his mother who inspired the conflict between devotion to science and subservience to God that Davenport would never bridge.
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Davenport grew up in Brooklyn Heights as the proud descendent of a long line of English and Colonial New England Congregationalist ministers. His authoritarian father, Amzi Benedict Davenport, did not join the clergy, but nonetheless cloaked his family’s world in the heavy mantle of puritanical religion. The elder Davenport’s business was real estate. But as a cofounder of two Brooklyn churches-ruling elder of one and a longtime deacon of the other-Amzi Davenport infused his household with pure fire and brimstone, along with the principles of commerce and market value. He demanded from his family impossible levels of Bible-thumbing rectitude and imposed an unyielding disdain for joy.
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A close friend described the father’s face as one of “bitter unhappiness,” and characterized his parental manner as “harsh masterfulness.” Charles Davenport was the last of eleven children. Siblings were born like clock-work in the Davenport home, every two years. Rigorous and often punishing Gospel studies intruded into every aspect of young Davenport’s upbringing, morning and night. The boy’s diary records one typical entry about grueling Sunday school lessons. Using personal shorthand and misspelling as a boy would, young Davenport scribbled, “stuiding S.S. lesson from 8:30 A.M. to 9:30 P.M. All day!” Once, it was the day after Christmas, he jotted, “Woke at 6:30 A.M. and was late for prayers. After breakfast father sent me to bed for that reason for two hours.”
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Ancestry was a regular theme in the Davenport household. The elder Davenport organized two extensive volumes of family genealogy, tracing his Anglo-Saxon tree back to 1086. That was the year William the Conqueror compiled his massive Domesday census book.
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Shades of Davenport’s glorified forebearers must have pursued the boy at every moment.
Yet in the midst of young Davenport’s dour, patriarchal domination, his mother Jane was somehow permitted to live a life of irrepressible brightness. A Dutch woman, Jane offered unconditional affection to her children, a wonderful flower garden to delight in, and a fascination with natural history. Young Davenport’s refuge from the severe and unapproachable man he trepidatiously called “Pa” was the world of beauty his mother represented.
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When Davenport as a young man escaped from theology into academia, it was to the world of measurable mysteries: science, math and engineering.1n doing so, he declared that God’s work was not infinite-it could indeed be quantified. That surely spumed the absolutist precepts of his father’s sermonizing. Later, Davenport dedicated his first scientific book,
Experimental Morphology,
“to the memory of the first and most important of my teachers of Natural History-my mother.” Such inscriptions were not a sign of intellectual liberation. Davenport was never quite comfortable with his defection to the world of nature. At one point, he formally requested his father’s written permission to study the sciences; seven weeks later he finally received an answer permitting it. His father’s written acquiescence hinged on “the question of prime importance, [that] is how much money can you make for yourself and for me.”
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After his graduation from Brooklyn Polytechnic, Davenport became a civil engineer. His love of animals and natural history led Davenport to Harvard, where he enrolled in nearly every natural science course offered and quickly secured his doctorate in biology. In the 1890s, he became a zoology instructor at Harvard. Later, he held a similar position at the University of Chicago.
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Long-headed and mustachioed, Davenport always looked squeezed. His goatee created a slender but dense column from chin to lower lip; as he aged, it would fade from black to white. With a deeply parted haircut hanging high above his ears, Davenport’s face tapered from round at the top to a distinct point at the inverted apex of his beard.
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Davenport married Gertrude Crotty in 1894. A fellow biologist, Gertrude would continually encourage him to advance in personal finance and career. However, Davenport never escaped his upbringing. Puritanical in his sexual mores, domineering in his own family relationships, inward and awkward in most other ways, Davenport was described by a close lifelong colleague as “a lone man, living a life of his own in the midst of others, feeling out of place in almost any crowd.” Worse, while Davenport’s thirst for scholarly validation never quenched, he could not tolerate criticism. Hearing adverse comments, reading them, just sensing that rejection might dwell between the lines of a simple correspondence caused Davenport so much distress, he could blurt out the wrong words, sometimes the exact opposite of his intent. Criticism paralyzed him.
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Yet this was the scientist who would discover and deliver the evidence that would decide the biological fate of so many.
Davenport’s pivotal role as eugenic crusader-in-chief began taking shape at the very end of the nineteenth century. He found a modicum of professional and personal success directing the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences’s biological laboratory on Long Island. There, he could apply his precious Harvard training. The quiet, coveside facility at Cold Spring Harbor was located about an hour’s train and carriage ride from Manhattan. Situated down the road from the state fish hatchery, and ensconced in a verdant, marshy inlet ideal for marine and mammal life, the biological station allowed Davenport to concentrate on the lowest species. He investigated such organisms as the Australian marine pill bug, which clings to the underside of submerged rocks and feeds on rotted algae. He employed drop nets to dredge for oysters and other mollusks. Flatfish and winter flounder were purchased for spawning studies
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To supplement his income during school breaks, Davenport, aided by botany instructors from other institutions, offered well-regarded summer courses at Cold Spring Harbor. Students in bacteriology, botany and animal biology from across the nation were attracted to these courses.
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Davenport also corresponded with other academic institutions, which pleased him greatly.
While at the Brooklyn Institute’s biological station, Davenport became fascinated with Galton. In a series of fawning missives to Galton during the spring of 1897, Davenport praised the British scientist’s work, requested his photograph, and ultimately tried to schedule a meeting in London that summer. Galton hardly knew what to make of the unsolicited admiration. “I am much touched,” Galton replied to Davenport’s earliest praise, “by the extremely kind expression in your letter, though curious that you ascribe to me more than I deserve.”
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The two exchanged brief notes thereafter. Davenport’s were formal and typed. Galton’s were scrawled on monarch stationery.
Davenport incorporated the statistical theories of Galton and Galton’s disciple, Pearson, into an 1899 book,
Statistical Methods with Special Reference to Biological Variation.
He wanted the volume to be a serious scientific publication of international merit, and he proudly mailed a copy to Galton for his inspection. Galton penned back a short word of thanks for “your beautiful little book with its kindly and charming lines.” Later, Galton sent Davenport some sample fingerprints to examine.
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But meteorology, statistics and fingerprints were only the threshold to the real body of Galtonian knowledge that riveted Davenport. The precious revelation for the American biologist was the study of superiority and ancestry, the principle Galton called eugenics.
Eugenics appealed to Davenport not just because his scientific mind was shaped by a moralized world choked with genealogies and ancestral comparisons, but because of his racial views and his obsession with race mixture.
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Davenport saw ethnic groups as biologically different beings-not just physically, but in terms of their character, nature and quality. Most of the non-Nordic types, in Davenport’s view, swam at the bottom of the hereditary pool, each featuring its own distinct and indelible adverse genetic features. Italians were predisposed to personal violence. The Irish had “considerable mental defectiveness,” while Germans were “thrifty, intelligent, and honest.”
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Social reformers may have held out hope that America’s melting pot might one day become a reality, but eugenicists such as Davenport’s outspoken ally Lothrop Stoddard spoke for the whole movement when he declared, “Above all, there is no more absurd fallacy than the shibboleth of ‘the melting pot.’
As
a matter of fact, the melting pot may mix but does not melt. Each race-type, formed ages ago, and ‘set’ by millenniums of isolation and inbreeding, is a stubbornly persistent entity. Each type possesses a special set of characters: not merely the physical characters visible to the naked eye, but moral, intellectual and spiritual characters as well. All these characters are transmitted substantially unchanged from generation to generation.”
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When Mendel’s laws reappeared in 1900, Davenport believed he had finally been touched by the elusive but simple biological truth governing the flocks, fields and the family of man. He once preached abrasively, “I may say that the principles of heredity are the same in man and hogs and sun-flowers.”
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Enforcing Mendelian laws along racial lines, allowing the superior to thrive and the unfit to disappear, would create a new superior race. A colleague of Davenport’s remembered him passionately shaking as he chanted a mantra in favor of better genetic material: “Protoplasm. We want more protoplasm!”
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Shortly after the Carnegie Institution appeared in 1902, in its pre-Congressional form, Davenport acted to harness the institution’s vast financial power and prestige to launch his eugenic crusade. The Carnegie Institution was just months old, when on April 21, 1902, Davenport outlined a plan for the institution to establish a Biological Experiment Station at Cold Spring Harbor “to investigate … the method of Evolution.” Total initial cost was estimated to be $32,000.
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By the time Davenport penned his formal proposal to Carnegie trustees two weeks later on May 5,1902, his intent was unmistakably racial: “The aims of this establishment would be the analytic and experimental study of … race change.” He explained how: “The methods of attacking the problem must be developed as a result of experience. At present, the following seems the most important: Cross-breeding of animals and plants to find the laws of commingling of qualities. The study of the laws and limits of inheritance.” Davenport tantalized the trustees with the prospect: “The Carnegie fund offers the opportunity for which the world has so long been waiting.”
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Hence from the very start, the trustees of the Carnegie Institution understood that Davenport’s plan was a turning-point plan for racial breeding.
Redirecting human evolution had been a personal mission of Davenport’s for years, long before he heard of Mendel’s laws. He first advocated a human heredity project in 1897 when he addressed a group of naturalists, proposing a large farm for preliminary animal breeding experiments. Davenport called such a project “immensely important.” With the Carnegie Institution now receptive to his more grandiose idea, Davenport knew it was important to continue rallying support from the scientific establishment. He convinced the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Science, which controlled the lab site at Cold Spring Harbor, to form a prestigious scientific committee to press the “plan for a permanent research laboratory … in connection with the Carnegie Institution at Washington.”
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Knowing Carnegie officials would refer the question to the institution’s Zoological Committee, Davenport elicited support from prominent zoologists.
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In May of 1902, he sent a letter of tempting intrigue to his friend Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, director of the New York Zoological Society and the American Museum of Natural History. “I do not think this is the place to tell in detail what I should expect to do,” wrote Davenport, adding only, “The station should undertake to do what is impracticable elsewhere.”
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Osborn, a like-minded eugenicist, wrote back with encouragement, reporting that Carnegie’s committee had considered the general topic before. British eugenicists had already approached Andrew Carnegie directly. But Osborn assured, “I know of no one better qualified to do this work than you. “
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