| Charles Davenport | |
|---|---|
 Charles B. Davenport at a 1921 eugenics
conference
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| 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 which directly caused 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, son of Amzi Benedict Davenport (an abolitionist of puritan stock) and his wife Jane Joralemon Dimon (of English-Dutch-Italian ancestry). He received a PhD in biology from Harvard in 1892, married Gertrude Crotty in 1894 and died of pneumonia in 1944.
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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]
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