Torres, an attorney and historian, says Davenport was largely responsible for turning eugenics from a theoretical idea developed in Europe into an actual practice by setting the groundwork for the movement, organizing funding, and establishing key partnerships in the U.S. “He believed that high incidences of certain characteristics within family pedigree charts conclusively proved that those characteristics were inheritable—and that some of them needed to be eliminated from society,” he writes. The early seeds of the eugenics movement were planted in England, but the movement’s foundation and practice, including sterilizations and anti-immigration laws, emerged from Davenport’s institution in the small hamlet of Cold Spring Harbor, New York. “One of the largest misconceptions was that Nazi Germany kind of led this to [the U.S.]—it's completely opposite,” says Torres, whose book describes how the ideas conceived on Long Island inspired eugenic experiments later committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.
Author: Jill Webb
Published at: 2025-08-18 22:01:00
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