ERO

Eugenics Record Office

Gründung

In 1910, the Eugenics Record Office was founded in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, as a center for the study of human heredity and a repository for genetic data on human traits. It merged with the Station for Experimental Evolution in 1920 to become the Department of Genetics at the Carnegie Institution, and under the direction of Charles B. Davenport and later of Albert Blakeslee and Milislav Demerec, it became the most important center for eugenic research in the nation. However with intellectual currents shifting, the Carnegie Institution stopped funding the office in 1939. It remained active until 1944, when its records were transferred to the Charles Fremont Dight Institute for the Promotion of Human Genetics at the University of Minnesota. When the Dight closed in 1991, the genealogical material was filmed by the Genealogical Society of Utah and given to the Center for Human Genetics; the non-genealogical material was not filmed and was given to the American Philosophical Society Library. (Quelle: American Philosophical Society)

Gründer

The eugenics movement in the United States had a fairly consistent core group of leaders up through the 1930s, including Harry H. Laughlin, Henry F. Osborn, David Starr Jordan, and Madison Grant, and, one of the foremost, Charles B. Davenport.

Charles B. Davenport

Charles Benedict Davenport (1866-1944) was Harvard-educated and an instructor in the Department of Zoology until 1899 when he joined the faculty of the University of Chicago. In 1902, the Carnegie Institution of Washington was incorporated, and Davenport campaigned actively to establish a biological experiment station, and, in 1904, he was appointed director of the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. There, he worked on applying Mendelian genetics concepts to man. Davenport, who defined eugenics as "the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding," turned the station into a research center into human genetics and eugenics and, with the monetary assistance of Mary Harriman, the widow of a Wall Street financier, he purchased land at Cold Spring Harbor and, in October 1910, opened the Eugenics Record Office. It quickly became a center for the movement in the United States. The Office began an ambitious program of both research and propaganda, educating field workers in eugenic theories, providing public lectures and education, publications, genetic counseling in marriage, and the compilation and collection of detailed family histories to illustrate the nature and possible dangers of inherited tendencies. Eugenic theories were beginning to be used to address social problems, for if undesirable or criminal tendencies and traits were inherited, elimination of the inheritance by education or sterilization would alleviate the problem. Eugenicists embraced the idea of alleviating society of the burden of care of those deemed unfit. Conversely, individuals with positive or desirable traits—intellectual or physical—would be encouraged to marry those with similar endowments to thereby enhance the human race. (Quelle: https://www.countway.harvard.edu/)

Publikationen

ERO BULLETIN No. 10A: Report of the Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population. I. THE SCOPE OF THE COMMITTEE'S WORK

ERO BULLETIN No. 10B: Report of the Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population. II. THE LEGAL, LEGISLATIVE AND ADMINISTRATIVE ASPECTS OF STERILIZATION