Charles Davenport

The biologist who gave the American movement its institution and its textbook.¹²

Documented core

Davenport, director of the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, founded the Eugenics Record Office in 1910 and installed Harry Laughlin to run it. His Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911) was a standard American text, extending Mendelian inheritance to a catalogue of human “traits” — feeble-mindedness, criminality, even a claimed love of the sea — treated as single-gene heritable characters.

Held-open

The Mendelian confidence of the 1911 text — that complex human conduct reduced to simple heritable factors — is precisely what the science later discarded, and the office he built closed in 1939 on that account. The record carries both the authority the work claimed and the ground it lost.

Role in the thesis

Enactment. Davenport is the root’s institutional founder in America — the man who gave the ranking impulse a laboratory, a textbook, and a staff. A co-symptom of the root, never routed to any ethnic or bloodline collective.

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1. Charles B. Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911) — the movement's standard American text ↩︎

2. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives — Davenport papers, the founding of the ERO (1910) ↩︎

Referenced by. Where this entry is cited in the reading — hover any to read it in place.

• Improving the Stock — “Laughlin's Model Eugenical Sterilization Law came out of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, which Charles Davenport had founded in 1910 on a grant from the widow of the railroad magnate E.”