A Guide to the Genetics Collections at the APS
Major Collections

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Charles B. Davenport Papers

b. Stamford, Conn. June 1, 1866; d. Huntington, NY, Feb. 18, 1944.
B.S., Polytech. Inst. Brooklyn, 1886. A.B., Harvard U., 1889; M.A., Ph.D., 1892. m. Gertrude Crotty, Tune 23, 1894. Three daughters, 1 son. Asst. zool., Harvard U., 1888-90; inst., 1891-99. U. Chicago, asst. prof., 1899-01; assoc, prof. and curator Zool. Mus., 1901-04. Dir., Carnegie Inst. Wash. Sta. Exptl. Evol., 1904-21; dir., Eugenics Record Off, 1910-21. Dir., Carnegie Inst. Wash., Dept. of Genetics, 1921-34. Dir., Biol. Lab. Cold Spring Harbor (Brooklyn Inst. Arts & Sciences), 1898-1923. Major, U.S. Army Sanitation Corps (in charge of anthropology), 1918-19.

BIOG.
Who Was Who in America, 2; E.C. MacDowell, Bios 17:3-50 (1946); Oscar Riddle, Biog. Mem., Nat. Acad. Sci. 25:75-110 (1949); G.H. Parker, Amer. Philos. Soc. Ybk. 1944; C.E. Rosenberg, Bull. Hist. Med. 35:266-76 (1961); Dict. Scient. Biog. 3:589-91 (1971); Dict. Amer. Biog; Suppl. 3:214-16 (1941-45); M. Steggerda, Amer. J. Phys. Anthrop. n.s., 2:167-85 (1944); L.H. Snyder, Genetics 31:i-ii + portrait (1946); Natl. Cyclop. Amer. Biog. 15:397-98.

BIBLIOG.
See Steggerda, op. cit.; Riddle, op. cit. 420 articles, 21 books.

BOOKS.
Experimental Morphology, Part I. Effect of Chemical and Physical Agents upon Protoplasm, 1897. Statistical Methods with Special Reference to Biological Variation, 1899; 1904; 1914; 1936. Experimental Morphology, Part II, 1899. Introduction to Zoology (with Gertrude C. Davenport), 1900; renamed Elements of Zoology, 1911. Inheritance in Poultry, l906. Inheritance in Canaries, 1908. Inheritance of Characteristics in Domestic Fowl, 1909. Eugenics-The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding, 1910. Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, 1911. The Hill Folk. Report on a Rural Community of Hereditary Defectives (with Florence H. Danielson), 1912. The Nam Family. A Study in Cacogenics (with Arthur H. Estabrook), 1912. Heredity of Skin Color in Negro-White Crosses, 1913. The Feebly Inhibited: (A) Nomadism of the Wandering Impulse with Special Reference to Heredity. (B) Inheritance of Temperament, 1915. Naval Officers: Their Heredity and Development (with Mary T. Scudder), 1919. Physical Examination of the First Million Draft Recruits: Methods and Results (with A.G. Love), 1919. Defects Found in Drafted Men: Statistical information compiled from the draft records tinder the direction of the Surgeon General, M W Ireland (with A.G. Love), 1919; 1920. Army Anthropology. Med. Dept. U.S. Army in the World War. Statistics, (with A.G. Love), 1921. Body Build and Its Inheritance, 1924. Race Crossing in Jamaica (with Morris Steggerda), 1929. The Genetical Factor in Endemic Goiter, 1932. How We Came by Our Bodies, 1932.

SCIENTIFIC OFFICES.
Amer. Assoc. Advanc. Sci., v. pres. (zool.) 1900-01, 1925-26. Amer. Sec. Zool., pres., 1902-03, 1929-30. Galton Sec., pres., 1918-30. Intnatl. Fed. Eugen. Assns., pres., 1927-32. Third Intnatl. Eugenics Congress, pres., 1932.

HONORS.
Hon. pres., Eugen. Research Assn., 1937. Gold Medal, Nat. Inst. Sec. Sci., 1923. Member, Amer. Acad. Arts & Sci., 1895; Amer. Philos. Sec., 1907; Natl. Acad. Sci., 1912.

EDITORIAL WORK.
Ed. Ed., Biometrika, J. Exp. Zool., Z. Rassenkunde, Z. mensch. Trererb. Konstitutionslehre, Psyche, J. Phys. Anthrop., Growth, Human Biology. Founder and editor, Eugenical News, 1916-44.

The Davenport Papers
A large, comprehensive collection, in 124 boxes, covering the period 1878 to 1944. It includes some private papers such as diaries and correspondence with his wife, and personal memorabilia. The outgoing letters commence about 1904. Davenport's great importance lay in his activity as founder of the eugenics movement in America and his role in establishing the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Station for Experimental Evolution and the Eugenics Record Office, which he consolidated into the Carnegie Department of Genetics, and which, together with the neighboring Long Island Biological Laboratory, he directed for so many years.

Charles Davenport's early interest in natural history was not encouraged by his father, whose concern for his children was of an intensely practical sort. Charles's mother was more sympathetic. The boy himself did not even go to school until after his thirteenth birthday, but then quickly made up for lost time. He was, wrote his biographer E.C. MacDowell, of "premature seriousness and independence." In March of 1885 he drafted for his father's attention a remarkable program for his next summer's work, strongly emphasizing systematic work in the natural sciences. His father did not regard this as very practical. His hard-headed way of looking at life was borne out when, after Charles graduated from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute with a B.S. and a good record, he found it impossible to obtain a job. Nevertheless, he determined to go to college and pursue a scientific career. Admitted to Harvard, he took work in Natural History and consistently received marks of A in his courses. Summers he spent at Woods Hole and at Agassiz's laboratory in Newport. Upon completing his work for the A.B. degree, he went directly on to pursue a Ph.D., and after earning that degree in 1892, he was rewarded by receiving an instructorship in the Department of Zoology. He taught various introductory and intermediate courses and in 1893 introduced a new offering of his own, "Experimental Morphology" Some fine graduate students entered the Department at about that time, including E.B. Castle, Herbert Spencer Jennings, and G.H. Parker, all later to become famous biologists. Jennings's comment on Davenport, expressed in a letter to his fiancée in 1895, is very penetrating:

I am really glad that I came to Harvard this year, for it is making all biological science much more interesting to me, At first I thought it was going to make it really less interesting -- because Dr. Davenport seemed to be able to explain everything so well just by chemistry and physics -- it seemed foolish not to go studying chemistry and physics if you want to know anything real about it. And Mr. Castle, who is the best graduate student in the laboratory, had theories to explain by laws of physics and chemistry all about how the division of the egg into cells takes place and the rest of the processes of development. But when I came to study pretty thoroughly the cleavage of my Rotifer eggs, and to read quite a little myself, I found that -- as far as I can see, of course -- those theories won't work. Dr. Davenport has decided views as to how things go -- and is apt to present the facts bearing in support of that view in his lectures, and not to say anything about other facts -- except that "Such and such a man got a different result, which is unexplained." -- That don't make much of an impression on you in a lecture, and you think it all goes as smoothly as possible -- but if you happen to go and read the article of the man that got a different result -- you find those facts just as important as the others -- and you see that the theories don't work. And my rotifer eggs won't divide according to the theories, either...
I didn't mean to exactly criticize Dr. Davenport's lectures in what I said -- it's almost a necessity to group things about some principle or view, else they are just a mass of details without meaning -- a chaos. All I meant is that I can't see things just the way he does -- and think he is too strongly set in one way himself to attach enough importance to facts that go against his theory -- so that I don't care to swallow his conclusions whole -- though I like very much to hear a man that has conclusions; they are-all the more stimulating if they don't agree with one's own. (Jennings Papers, APS).

And again, in a subsequent letter:

Dr. Davenport is original and brilliant, but he's sort of erratic, too -- the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that his conclusions and views in general are just as far from correct as you can get. (Jennings Papers, APS).

In short, Davenport was an enthusiast, and remained so to the end of his days. He was also deeply lacking in self-confidence, according to MacDowell, who served on his staff at Cold Spring Harbor and knew the man's character very well. Davenport was unable to accept criticism, even when friendly and constructive. Under pressure, he withdrew into isolation and became abrupt and autocratic. He was a fine initiator of Large projects, but not a very effective administrator in the roles in which life so often cast him. Jennings, who had lived as a boarder in the Davenports' house during his graduate days at Harvard, had a warm sense of gratitude and friendship for both of the Davenports, but he saw his weaknesses and exercised great forbearance in avoiding any criticism of Davenport, who could not profit from an expression of differences of opinion.

Out of that first original course given by Davenport at Harvard emerged his textbook, Experimental Morphology. As MacDowell said, "As is true of a large proportion of Davenport's writing ... this book was forward-looking and important rather in its current influence upon other workers than in its lasting contribution to knowledge." From his application of quantitative methods in the laboratory, Davenport derived a number of biometric papers and his manual, Statistical Methods with Special Reference to Biological Variation.

While at Harvard as an instructor, Davenport met a young graduate student in the "Annex" (later to be known as Radcliffe College), a girl from Kansas named Gertrude Crotty. They were married in 1893, and it proved an ideal marriage of unlike but complementary types of personality. Mrs. Davenport was active in his work, was co-author of several papers, and for 26 years really managed the affairs of the promising but indigent Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, on grounds adjacent to the Carnegie Institution's Station for Experimental Evolution, later the Department of Genetics, which Davenport directed.

Davenport became the director of the summer program at the Biological Laboratory in Cold Spring Harbor in 1898. In the following year he received an appointment as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago, and quickly became an associate professor there (1901). His taste of field zoology and his ambition to link physics, chemistry, and physiology with evolutionary studies drew him to propose one scheme after another for an endowed or continuously supported research laboratory devoted to experimental studies of evolution. The establishment of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1902 seemed to promise a way to realize Davenport's ambition, and almost immediately he began to urge the Carnegie Institution to establish such a laboratory, according to a well-formulated plan he drew up for the consideration of the Board of Trustees. The plan met with favor, and although the financial requirements were reduced, Davenport was asked to accept the post of Director of the new laboratory. He accepted, and in 1904 resigned from the University of Chicago and proceeded to Cold Spring Harbor, which was to remain his home and center of scientific activity for the remainder of his life. Although many of the records of these months of making proposals, planning buildings, acquiring a staff, and equipping a laboratory are located in the archives of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, together with much of Davenport's official correspondence with the Carnegie Institution, there is nevertheless much to be found in the files of the Davenport Papers in Philadelphia that throws personal insight into the months of planning and the years of expanding a program in unanticipated directions.

Davenport had made the personal acquaintance of both Francis Galton and Karl Pearson in London in 1902. Their views helped to shape Davenport's own ideas of the future laboratory he was to direct. At first, however, he placed little stock in the newly rediscovered work of Gregor Mendel, although he conceived that studies in heredity should be a malor aspect of the program of the new laboratory. The selection of a staff proceeded quickly, Davenport refusing advice on such matters. Of all the first corps of prospective staff, the most able failed to accept positions, although in the young and untried G. H. Shull Davenport did find a man who was to do brilliant work at Cold Spring Harbor. Davenport himself, however, was a dynamo of energy, breeding snails, mice, flies, moths, sowbugs, trout, cats, canaries, chickens, and sheep. Much of this was done too hastily to yield solid results, but the work on sheep and chickens represented an advance over prior attempts. Gradually, as the Mendelian Theory gained wide acceptance, Davenport accepted it too, and became a staunch advocate of applying the concept of the gene to explanations of human inheritance. From the joint papers written with Mrs. Davenport on eye, skin, and hair color there arose in Davenport's mind an absorbing interest in eugenics.

In 1910 this interest in human heredity and its relation to the betterment of mankind led Davenport to approach Mrs. E.H. Harriman for assistance. He was able to evoke her abiding interest, and she provided money for a new venture, the Eugenics Record Office. H. H. Laughlin was selected to serve as superintendent, under Davenport as Director. It remained an independent research organization, in its own building and on its own grounds near the two other institutions for which Davenport carried the responsibility, until 1918, when it was formally taken over by the Carnegie Institution. Nevertheless, before and after that date, the three organizations went their several ways with little or no coordination or cooperation. Davenport could not achieve that, in spite of working harder than ever.

A year after the foundation of the Eugenics Record Office Davenport wrote Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, a book that made him widely recognized as the leading spokesman of eugenics in America. The Eugenics Record Office was planned to keep the volunteered family records of persons interested in human heredity and eugenics, but it was not recognized at the time that such records are of little scientific reliability. Harry H. Laughlin, Davenport's superintendent in charge of the Eugenics Record Office, was a zealot and a vigorous propagandist, as it turned out. He championed the enactment of state and federal legislation to restrict the immigration of persons from southern and eastern Europe, and to perform sterilizations of inmates of institutions for the mentally disturbed, feeble minded, or delinquent members of society. Davenport himself did not engage in political activities of this kind, but his reputation was inevitably tied to Laughlin's activities and views as long as the latter remained at Cold Spring Harbor.

With the entrance of the United States into the First World War a new call on Davenport's energies was made. He was commissioned a major in the Sanitary Corps and assigned to the Surgeon General's Office to study and summarize the physical records of army recruits. Working with Lt. Col. Albert G. Love, Davenport prepared four large volumes of measurements, tables, and graphs showing the frequencies of various conditions, especially defects, and their geographical distributions. These anthropometric studies revived Davenport's interest in human growth and development and led to the writing of his last book, How We Came by Our Bodies.

Probably the most widely known of Davenport's books was the monograph on Race Crossing in Jamaica, written with Morris Steggerda as his collaborator. The anthropometric measures of body dimensions, skin color, and hair type provided useful, reliable data, but the interpretations of mental capacities were framed in simplistic Mendelian concepts and gave far too little attention to the variability attributable to nutrition, health, and other cultural and environmental conditions. Criticism from various geneticists was vehement.

Davenport's voluminous correspondence contains many matters of interest. Outstanding among these is the preservation in the T. H. Morgan file of 279 letters to and from the one to the other. Inasmuch as Morgan destroyed all his own papers, this body of letters is probably second only to the letters from Morgan to Hans Driesch in value. It contains, for example, a letter of 1910 from Morgan telling about his discovery of the white-eye mutant in the fruitfly Drosophila and his conclusion that it was carried in the X-chromosome that determines sex in the fruitfly. This letter was dated some weeks before the publication of Morgan's paper that gave fuller details and began the era of Drosophila genetics. The file on G. H. Shull, 571 items, is far larger than any correspondence to be found in the G. H. Shull Papers. There is a great volume of material, spread over many files, invaluable for the fuller history of eugenics as an organized movement in the United States. In spite of the great interest in this subject, shown by the publication of numerous books and monographs dealing with it, this store of information has not been fully utilized.

Davenport's death, in 1944, was characteristic of his driving devotion to science. A killer whale having been washed ashore on Long Island, Davenport, as a trustee and founder of the Whaling Museum at Cold Spring Harbor, determined to secure the skull of this whale and prepare it for exhibition at the museum. Davenport undertook to remove the flesh from the bones by boiling the head of the whale in an open shed, in bitter winter weather of January and February. A fortnight of this work of alternate exposures to fierce heat and equally fierce cold took its toll and he developed a fatal case of pneumonia. The whale's skull is a choice exhibit in the museum.

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