Charles Davenport
BA, Harvard University 
PhD, Harvard University
Dr. Charles Davenport defined eugenics as “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding.” Who would dare argue with a double-degree Harvard man spouting such an immaculate tautology?
He was a bright lad whose youth was split between Brooklyn, New York, and rural Stamford, Connecticut. An interest in the natural world led him in his teens to assume the vice presidency of the Brooklyn chapter of the Agassiz Association, named for the famous Harvard biologist and bigot Louis Agassiz. In 1886, when Davenport was twenty, he graduated from Brooklyn Polytech with an engineering degree. Several months later the call of biology led him to enter Harvard—as a third-year undergrad—where, in relatively quick succession, he knocked off his BA and PhD. He then taught various biology classes at Harvard for six years, jumped to a better position at the University of Chicago, and, in 1904, talked the Carnegie Institution and Mary Harriman, of the railroad fortune, into funding his dream: the Station for Experimental Evolution* at Cold Spring Harbor, on Long Island, with him as director.
Davenport did some half-assed experiments with small lab animals and the like, but his obsession—driven by the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s theory of inheritance—was human evolution. There’s no legal way to conduct human evolution experiments, of course. The “work-around” is to speculate endlessly, i.e., to make shit up. Which is exactly what Davenport did, accompanied by a superhuman cascade of paperwork in the form of pseudoscientific articles, papers, monographs, and books.
The overarching theme of his work was the protection of “American germ plasm” by encouraging “worthy” individuals to reproduce* while discouraging the “unworthy” of doing same. “Discouraging” meant two things: keeping unworthies out of the country, and sterilizing those who were already US citizens. (For more on sterilization, see Harry Laughlin, whom Davenport brought in to run his Eugenics Records Office.) Any guesses as to where Dr. Davenport’s worthies came from* and what their skin looked like?
As early as 1911, the year before the First International Eugenics Congress,* a number of other biologists were debunking this bullshit for its bad science (for instance, its failure to understand that many traits have complex biological causes, and that some traits have no heritable causes or are the result of a complex nature-nurture interplay) and not-so-cleverly-concealed racism. That didn’t slow down the eugenics juggernaut, which was taking on an increasingly religious flavor. At a certain point Davenport realized his Mosaic fantasy and attained his Mount Sinai moment by delivering his five-point Eugenics Creed unto the world. Here it is. We swear we’re not making this up:
• I believe in striving to raise the human race to the highest plane of social organization, of cooperative work and of effective endeavor.
• I believe that I am the trustee of the germ plasm that I carry; that this has been passed on to me through thousands of generations before me; and that I betray the trust if (that germ plasm being good*) I so act as to jeopardize it, with its excellent possibilities, or, from motives of personal convenience, to unduly limit offspring.*
• I believe that, having made our choice in marriage carefully, we, the married pair, should seek to have 4 to 6 children* in order that our carefully selected germ plasm shall be reproduced in adequate degree and that this preferred stock shall not be swamped* by that less carefully selected.
• I believe in such a selection of immigrants as shall not tend to adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits.*
• I believe in repressing my instincts* when to follow them would injure the next generation.
In 1918 Davenport and Madison Grant founded the Galton Society, a racist alternative to the American Anthropological Association. And in 1925 Davenport launched the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations, which included in its purview the Commission on Bastardization and Miscegenation.* A few years later he introduced a global map of “mixed race” regions at an IFEO meeting held in Munich. Speaking of which…
You can bet that Austrian-born up-and-comer Adolf Hitler admired Davenport’s work. And Davenport not only admired and supported Hitler and the fine work the Nazis did when they came to power, this upstanding American scientist became an editor of two German, which is to say Nazi, pseudoscience journals. Hitler freely credited American (largely Ivy League–educated) eugenicists with inspiring his Final Solution.
Eugenics started losing its luster in the United States as stories of Nazi atrocities crossed the Atlantic. It’s nice to think that at some point Charles Davenport must have realized that future generations would forever link him with the silly-looking dictator widely considered to be the worst person who ever lived.
Davenport died of pneumonia in 1944, no doubt due to his inferior genes.