Charles Davenport received funding from various wealthy Americans in the early 1900s to establish the Eugenics Record Office
Charles Davenport approached his eugenics studies by applying Mendelian inheritance to human behavior traits, and he saw a pressing need for America to act on his findings. He calculated that supporting the insane and other misfits cost taxpayers more than $100 million a year, money that was wasted because social programs had little hope of doing any good. Modern society, he complained, had “forgotten the fundamental fact that all men are created bound by their protoplasmic makeup.” The mentally ill and other misfits, he suggested, should not just be sterilized, but castrated. This, he said, made “the patient docile, tractable, and without sex desire.”
In 1910, Davenport obtained funding from Mary Harriman to establish a Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor—an initiative that was designed to transform eugenic research findings into societal laws. Harriman, who had inherited 500,000 to the Eugenics Record Office over the next eight years. John D. Rockefeller Jr. kicked in another $22,000. Davenport used the money to gather censuslike data on the “cacogenic” in America. From 1911 to 1924, the office trained 258 field-workers, who went into mental hospitals, poorhouses, and prisons to document the family histories of the “defectives” housed there and to determine what percentage were foreign born. The field-workers also surveyed small communities, intent on identifying the percentage of misfits not yet confined by asylum walls. As a 1917 textbook, Science of Eugenics, approvingly explained, the Eugenics Record Office was quantifying “the burden which the unfit place upon their fellow-men.”
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2002). Mad in America Chapter 3. UNFIT TO BREED (p. 79). New York, NY: Basic Books.