From Peas to People

Abstract

Charles Benedict Davenport, the ambitious biologist and eugenicist, possessed very small handwriting and very big ideas. In tiny, careful cursive, he filled a stream of small graph-lined pocket notebooks with jottings about heredity in relation to subjects as diverse as domesticated poultry, hysteria, cabbage root maggots, and albinos. A halting speaker, and a thin-skinned, reserved man, he nonetheless managed to secure the single largest endowment for the eugenics cause in either Britain or the United States: over half a million dollars, the gift of Mary Harriman, widow of the railroad tycoon E.H. Harriman. With this sizeable donation, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) was established in 1910. The ERO, an archive eventually holding thousands of family histories, was designed primarily to provide empirical evidence for research into the inheritance of behavioral, physical, and mental characteristics in human populations. Built on the same campus in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, the ERO joined the Carnegie Institution’s Station for Experimental Evolution (SEE) and Biological Laboratory, all under Davenport’s directorship. Together, the SEE and the ERO constituted the nation’s foremost facility for experimentation, training, and fieldwork in heredity and eugenics. Francis Galton had observed to Davenport that “many-sided brains” were important in the running of this kind of research institution.¹ Whether Davenport was the owner of such brains is doubtful (Galton, for one, doubted it). What he clearly enjoyed were many-sided interests.