Charles B. Davenport Papers, American Philosophical Society

Table of contents

Abstract

Founded by the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1890, the Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., was little more than a languishing outpost until the arrival of Charles B. Davenport in 1898. Over the course of two decades, the ambitious young biologist used his extraordinary administrative skills to transform the institution into the premier center of eugenical study and, as its director, to position himself as the leading spokesman for eugenical research in North America.

The Davenport Papers (ca.43 lin. feet) is a large and nearly comprehensive body of correspondence, lectures, diaries (1878-1942, mostly brief entries of an uneven character), student notebooks and family correspondence pertaining to Charles Davenport and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The collection is divided into two series, the Charles Davenport Papers, which provides valuable documentation of the development of American biology, animal and plant genetics, and eugenics during the period 1898-1942, with some perspective on the international eugenics movement. Series II, the Cold Spring Harbor Records (ca.20 lin. feet), consists largely of administrative correspondence relating to the laboratory, including Davenport's correspondence with Carnegie administrators (esp. Robert Woodward and John Merriam), accounts and reports concerning financial matters, publications, salaries, material relative to the early history of Cold Spring Harbor labs, and records relative to the numerous professional assistants who worked under Davenport.

Among the major correspondents are the American Breeders Association, Committee on Eugenics; American Eugenics Society; American Society of Naturalists; Committee on a Study of the American Negro; Galton Society (see also the extensive correspondence with William K. Gregory); Eugenics Education Society (see Mrs. S. Gotto correspondence); International Congresses of Eugenics; International Federation of Eugenic Organizations, Committee on Race Crossing; National Committee on Mental Hygiene; National Committee on Prisons and Prison Labor; and the Pan-American Conference on Eugenics and Homiculture. There are correspondence and papers relating to the Station for Experimental Evolution, the Eugenics Record Office, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and a substantial series relating to a long-range study of children carried out at Letchworth Village, Thiles, New York.

Background note
Scope & content
Administrative information
Additional information
Added entries
Contact information
Collection overview
- Series I. Charles B. Davenport Papers, 1878-1944
- Series II. Cold Spring Harbor Series, 1899-1946
Collection inventory
- Series I. Charles B. Davenport Papers
- Series IIa. Cold Spring Harbor Series
- Series IIb. Cold Spring Harbor Series

Background note

Charles B. Davenport at desk

Founded by the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in 1890, the Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., was little more than a languishing outpost until the arrival of Charles B. Davenport in 1898. Over the course of two decades, the ambitious young biologist used his extraordinary adminsitrative skills to transform the institution into the premier center of eugenical study in North American.

Born in Brooklyn Heights, N.Y., one year after the end of the Civil War, Charles Davenport was raised under the stern and often distant eye of his father, Amzi Benedict Davenport, an elder in the Congregational Church, a former abolitionist and temperance man. Strict, even Puritanical, Amzi Davenport raised his son for a practical career, educating Charles at home until he was 13, and using him as his office boy. In contrast, Charles' mother, Jane Joralemon Dimon, was warm and affectionate, and encouraged Charles' youthful interest in the decidedly unpractical study of nature.

After graduating from Brookyln Polytechnic Institute, Charles accepted an eminently practical job as surveyor for nine months,largely to please his father. His interests, however, lay with the natural sciences, and determined to make a career for himself in science, he entered Harvard to study zoology. A superior and disciplined student, he spent his summers at the Marine Biological Station at Woods Hole and at Agassiz's Laboratory at Newport, R.I., continuing directly from study for his bachelor's degree onto his doctorate.

After receiving his PhD in 1892, Davenport was selected by the Department of Zoology to remain as instructor. Although his tenure was relatively brief, it was highly productive. Among his students were number of promising young scientists including E. B. Castle and Herbert Spencer Jennings, and gained an intimate familiarity with a range of quantitative and statistical techniques that provided a basis for his later work in biomety. Perhaps more importantly, he gained his first taste of scientific fame when he transformed the notes for the first course he taught at Harvard into a textbook, Experimental Morphology (N.Y., 1897, 1899) that was both well received and widely read. In 1904, he published an equally successful manual on quantitative methods in laboratory sciences, Statistical Methods with Special Reference to Biological Variation. Yet the most important thing to emerge from his Harvard days, professionally and personally, was his marriage in 1894 to Gertrude Crotty, a graduate student from Kansas who became his collaborator on a number of projects as his career took off.

In 1898, Davenport was appointed Director of the summer programs at Cold Spring Harbor, and in the following year he accepted a position on the faculty of the University of Chicago. Quickly rising to Assistant Professor (1901), Davenport hatched a number of schemes in Chicago with the intent to organize a laboratory devoted to the integration of physics, chemistry, and physiology into experimental evolutionary biology. His timing could not have been better: with the rediscovery of Mendel's theory of inheritance in 1900, he was poised to take advantage of a reinvigorated discipline, and although he was at first unconvinced by Mendelian theory, he recognized its value for coordinating research for the new laboratory. From early on, he was drawn particularly to applying genetic theory to the "betterment" of human populations. Seeing himself as building upon the work of Francis Galton, the man who had coined the word eugenics in 1883, Davenport explicitly sought to unveil the scientific basis for the inheritance of physical, mental, and moral characteristics in human populations with the goal of eventually breeding better humans.

Davenport's break was not long in coming. On a visit to London in 1902, he had met Galton and the pioneering biometrician, Karl Pearson, both of whom helped refine his plans for the Cold Spring Harbor laboratory, and who helped quicken his faith in Mendelian genetics. More importantly, in that same year, the establishment of the Carnegie Institute of Washington provided Davenport with a likely source for funding the state of the art genetics laboratory for which he longed. When his detailed plans for the lab were approved by Carnegie in 1904, he resigned from his position at Chicago and took up the reins at Cold Spring Harbor full time.

Charles B. Davenport and cat

At the new Carnegie Institution Department of Genetics, Davenport supported a wide range of research in the new science, and although the administrative demands placed on his time were enormous, he attempted to remain active in research himself. Initially, he busied himself raising large populations of snails, mice, flies, moths, sowbugs, trout, cats, canaries, chickens, and sheep, but with the encouragement of his wife, he increasingly moved away from the genetics of animals to the genetics of humans. Davenport began to accumulate thousands of pedigrees from persons who volunteered information about the genealogical, physical and mental health histories of their families. The archive was intended to serve as the empirical foundation for research into patterns of heritability of behavioral and mental characteristics in human populations, and once again, Davenport's vision and his ability to attract funding turned his intentions into reality.

In 1910, Davenport approached Mrs. E. H. Harriman for funds to establish yet another link in the Cold Spring empire, the Eugenics Record Office. With the publication of his Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York, 1911) in the following year, Davenport's position at the apex of American eugenics was assured. Although his quantitative skills began increasingly to lag behind those of his peers, and although many of his publications were considered slapdash, he sat in the center of the most powerful research facility in the nation, and he was successful at nurturing younger scientists, incluidng G. H. Shull, Albert F. Blakeslee, and Milislav Demerec, among others. At the same time, his second in command in the Eugenics Record Office, H. H. Laughlin, became a spokesman for the programmatic side of the eugenics movement, lobbying for eugenic legislation to restrict immigration and sterilize "defectives," educating the public on eugenic health, and disseminating eugenic ideas widely. The Record Office formally came under the aegis of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1918.

Davenport's 1929 work, Race Crossing in Jamaica (1929), coauthored with Morris Steggerda, represented the apogee of his influence. Based on anthropometric measures of body dimensions, skin color, and hair type, the study was vehemently attacked by geneticists for Davenport's simplistic attempts to link mental capacity and race and for his failure to account for environmental and cultural influences. In many ways, his career after 1929 is one of steady decline. Davenport remained at the helm in Cold Spring Harbor until his retirement in 1942, and died in 1944.

Scope and content

The Charles B. Davenport Papers contains the professional correspondence of one of America's best known eugenicists during the period 1915 to 1935. Documenting all phases of Davenport's life and career, the collection is an invaluable resource for study of the history of the eugenics movement in America, the history of genetics, biometrics, and evolutionary thought during the early 20th century, and the history of the Biological Laboratory, the Carnegie Institute Department of Genetics, and the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor.

The collection is divided into two series, each arranged alphabetically:

Series I. Correspondence, 1878-1944 (43 linear feet)
Series II. Cold Spring Harbor Series, 1899-1946 (20 linear feet)
1. Administrative Correspondence, 1899-1939
2. Records of Assistants, 1904-1946

Administrative information

Restrictions

None.

Provenance

Gift of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1965.

Preferred citation

Cite as: Charles B. Davenport Papers, American Philosophical Society.

Other finding aids

Cited in Bentley Glass, A Guide to the Genetics Collections of the American Philosophical Society

Additional information

Separated material

Davenport's death mask has been removed for storage.

Related material

The Records of the Eugenics Record Office (Ms Coll 77) and the American Eugenics Society (576.06 Am3) complement the Davenport Papers.

The APS contains the collections of a number of associates of Davenport's, including his former students H. S. Jennings (B J44) and Sewall Wright (Ms Coll 60), his successors at Cold Spring Harbor, Albert F. Blakeslee (B B585) and Milislav Demerec (B D394), and several of his contemporaries.

References

E. Carleton MacDowell, "Charles Benedict Davenport, 1866-1944: A study in conflicting influences," Bios 17 (1946), 3-50.