Charles Davenport

Charles Davenport
Charles B. Davenport at a 1921 eugenics conference
Born	June 1, 1866 Stamford, Connecticut
Died	February 18, 1944
Nationality	American
Fields	eugenicist and biologist
Institutions	Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

Charles Benedict Davenport (June 1, 1866–February 18, 1944) was a prominent leader and driving force behind eugenics in America. This movement can be viewed as resulting in the sterilization of 60,000 Americans and which in Europe provided ideological foundations for the Holocaust.^[1]. He was also a prominent American biologist. He was born in Stamford, Connecticut and went to Harvard, getting a PhD in biology in 1892. He married in 1894 and died of pneumonia in 1944.

Biography

Davenport was an instructor of Zoology at Harvard University. He became one of the most prominent American biologists of his age, pioneering new quantitative standards of taxonomy. Davenport had a tremendous respect for the biometric approach to evolution pioneered by Francis Galton and Karl Pearson, and sat on the editorial committee of Pearson's journal, Biometrika. However after the "re-discovery" of Gregor Mendel's laws of heredity, he became a strict convert and major participant in the Mendelian school of genetics.

Davenport became director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in 1910, where he founded the Eugenics Record Office. He began to study human heredity, and much of his effort was later turned to promoting eugenics.^[2] His 1911 book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics was a major work and was used as a college textbook for many years. The year after it was published Davenport was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

Davenport and an assistant attempted to develop a comprehensive quantitative approach to miscegenation (i.e., race-crossing) in humans. The resulting work, published in 1929, Race Crossing in Jamaica, attempted to provide statistical evidence for biological and cultural degradation following interbreeding between white and black populations. Today it is considered a work of scientific racism, and was criticized in its time for drawing conclusions which stretched far beyond (and sometimes counter to) the data it presented.^[3] The entire Eugenist enterprise, founded on racist and class elitist assumptions set out to prove the unfitness of wide sections of the American population Davenport and his followers classified as "degenerate" using methods criticized even by British Eugenicists as unscientific.^[4]

Davenport maintained connections with institutions and publications in Nazi Germany, before and during W.W.II. These have been documented by Stefan Kühl. For example, Davenport held editorial positions at two influential German journals, both of which were founded in 1935, and in 1939 he wrote a contribution to the Festschrift for Otto Reche, who became an important figure in the plan to "remove" those populations considered "inferior" in eastern Germany^[5] .

References

Selected works

• Observations on Budding in Paludicella and Some Other Bryozoa (1891)
• On Urnatella Gracilis (1893)
• Experimental Morphology (1897–99)
• Statistical Methods, with Special References to Biological Variation (1899; second edition, 1904)
• Introduction to Zoölogy, with Gertrude Crotty Davenport (1900)
• Inheritance in Poultry, Carnegie Institution Publication, No, 52 (Washington, 1906)
• Inheritance of Characteristics in Domestic Fowl, Carnegie Institution Publication, No. 121 (Washington, 1909)
• Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911)
• Heredity of Skin-Color in Negro-White Crosses, Carnegie Institution Publication, No. 188 (1913)
• Race Crossing in Jamaica (1929)

External links

• NAS Biographical Memoir of Charles Benedict Davenport by Oscar Riddle
• A Science Odyssey: People and Discoveries: Charles Davenport at www.pbs.org
• Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, (New York / London: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003);
• Elof Axel Carlson, "Times of triumph, Times of Doubt, science and the battle for the public trust", (Cold Spring Harbor; Cold Spring Harbor Press, 2006) ISBN 0-87969-805-5
• International Eugenics
• 8. The Nazi Connection