The Rich Fool and the Race Scientist
February 16, 2021 8:00 AM   Subscribe

A Great American Story of Money, Guns, Sex, Racism, Divorce, and Horse Breeding: Gabriel Rosenberg recounts the story of how real estate mogul William Earl Dodge Stokes and biologist Charles Davenport came together in the early 20th century to promote eugenics. Any resemblance to present-day political and intellectual currents is purely coincidental.
posted by Cash4Lead (7 comments total) 12 users marked this as a favorite
 
Ahh, hello crazy ancestors! Yes, Will Stokes was a nutjob. It's beyond the scope of OP's link but if you need more reasons to dislike the man he also informed on his nephew's socialist wife Rose Pastor Stokes to the Justice Department Bureau of Investigation when she tried to help unionize the workforce at the Ansonia Hotel. He was also buddy buddy with the Russian Tsar.
posted by Wretch729 at 10:16 AM on February 16, 2021 [4 favorites]


"In between, the headlines also tracked Stokes’s 1911 conflict with Lillian Graham, a vaudeville actress nearly four decades his junior, and her roommate Esther Conrad. Stokes appears to have either been either wooing or harassing Graham. Letters were issued. Stokes said Graham and Conrad had tried to use his letters to blackmail him. The conflict turned violent. The New York Times reported that three Japanese men held Stokes down while Graham and Conrad took turns shooting at him with a handgun, striking him in the leg with three bullets."

ok ok you got me, i'm in for the full read
posted by youthenrage at 10:39 AM on February 16, 2021 [4 favorites]


Still an issue?
I wonder whether, some 60 years after Hitler's death, we might at least venture to ask what the moral difference is between breeding for musical ability and forcing a child to take music lessons. Or why it is acceptable to train fast runners and high jumpers but not to breed them. I can think of some answers, and they are good ones, which would probably end up persuading me. But hasn't the time come when we should stop being frightened even to put the question?--Richard Dawkins
posted by No Robots at 12:39 PM on February 16, 2021 [6 favorites]



"In between, the headlines also tracked Stokes’s 1911 conflict with Lillian Graham, a vaudeville actress nearly four decades his junior, and her roommate Esther Conrad. Stokes appears to have either been either wooing or harassing Graham. Letters were issued. Stokes said Graham and Conrad had tried to use his letters to blackmail him. The conflict turned violent. The New York Times reported that three Japanese men held Stokes down while Graham and Conrad took turns shooting at him with a handgun, striking him in the leg with three bullets."

ok ok you got me, i'm in for the full read


hell, that would make a fantastic movie!!
posted by supermedusa at 12:59 PM on February 16, 2021


Excellent read.
I've always enjoyed knowing that Charles Davenport (the race scientist) was killed by a dead whale.

The whale was beached on Long Island in the winter of 1944 and the elderly Davenport decided to boil its corpse to retrieve the skull for a local museum. I understand the usual procedure would have been to let the corpse rot in a pond, but Davenport was in a hurry. He spent a couple of weeks tending a very large cauldron in an open shed in bitter temperatures, developed pneumonia and died.
posted by Jody Tresidder at 1:18 PM on February 16, 2021 [10 favorites]


Davenport features in Carl Zimmer's She has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity [2018]. Davenport fell in with Henry Goddard, who was running The Vineland Training School in NJ to educate and care for young people labelled as feeble-minded. Davenport had the genetics, Goddard had the human material. They commissioned an investigation of the families of the Vineland pupils which came back with a lot of madey-uppy data. Notably about a lightly fictionalised family supposedly segregating for "IQ". Goddard's 1912 book The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness was hugely influential. These data helped legislators to legalise forced sterilisation on men and women who didn't reach some standard of desirable/useful qualities. Others in the eugenics field at the time were advocating painless death. Small aside was that Pearl S. "Nobel Prize" Buck's daughter Carol was born with PKU phenylketonuria and spent much of her life being cared for at Vineland. Pearl turned to writing to support her family in these adverse circumstances and made a fortune; part of which helped established Welcome House, a foundation which found homes for 5000 unadoptable chinese and mixed-race children. Good book [Zimmer's] - recommended!
posted by BobTheScientist at 2:25 PM on February 16, 2021 [4 favorites]


"Emboldened by his financial success, he frequently expresses opinions on topics of which is he ignorant, topics that require complex, careful treatment." This sounds oddly familiar...
posted by zenzenobia at 2:46 PM on February 16, 2021 [7 favorites]


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