1910

Charles Davenport, with grant from Mary Harriman, established Eugenics Record Office (ERO) as department of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Long Island. The “driving force for the development of studying human heredity, and applying it as [proto-Nazi] ideology,” Davenport switched from animal to human heredity, and “began pontificating on the standard canards of the Victorian eugenicist and social campaigner [Galton]: alcoholism, criminality, feeblemindedness, intelligence, manic depression (and weirdly, seafaringness)”. Davenport established ERO to campaign for deployment of eugenics policies around the U.S. - “specifically, for reduced immigration and the forced sterilization of ‘defective’ – and, principally, to compile records of families and their characters, as if constructing a national pedigree to be pored over, and from which the American stock could be improved.” Research involved construction of family trees and pedigree charts on the basis of questionnaires and fieldwork (Rutherford, 60-63; Friedlander, ch 1 ). Davenport and his ERO administrator, Harry Laughlin, “shaped the movement’s particular kinship with religion, making it more than simply a ‘secular creed.’ To win public support, many eugenicists began to couch their message in religious terms, producing eugenic ‘catechisms, sponsoring contexts for the best eugenic sermons, and conducting ‘Fitter Family’ and ‘Better Baby’ contests based on good moral and mental hygiene” (Bruinius, ch 2).