Tag: Charles Davenport

3,641 words

Daniel Kevles
In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985

It is young men like you, Bertie, who make the person with the future of the race at heart despair. Cursed with too much money, you fritter away in idle selfishness a life which might have been made useful, helpful and profitable. You do nothing but waste your time on frivolous pleasures. You are simply an anti-social animal, a drone. Bertie, it is imperative that you marry. — P. G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves (1923) (more…)

2,101 words

Daniel Okrent
The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America
New York: Scribner, 2019

The Mayflower arrived at Plymouth 400 years ago this week. This monumental anniversary has largely gone unremembered. In the past, the Plymouth anniversary was a great event that drew our nation’s foremost orators to speak of the glories of America and its settlers. (more…)