The internal brand of the scarlet

Nonetheless, most early human geneticists searched for "unit characters" - supposed traits that could be interpreted as the product of a single Mendelian factor - with abandon, even in complex, continuous, and environmentally labile features of personality or accomplishment in life. (These early analyses proceeded primarily by the tracing of pedigrees. I can envisage accurate data, and reliable results, for a family chart of eye color, but how could anyone trace the alleged gene for "optimism," "feeble inhibition," or "wanderlust" - not to mention such largely situational phenomena as "pauperism" or "communality." Was great-uncle George a jovial back-slapper or a reclusive cuss?)

Whatever the dubious validity of such overextended attempts to reduce complex human behaviors to effects of single genes, this strategy certainly served the aims and purposes of the early twentieth century's most influential social crusade with an allegedly scientific foundation: the eugenics movement, with its stated aim of "improving" America's hereditary stock by preventing procreation among the supposedly unfit (called "negative eugenics") and encouraging more breeding among those deemed superior in bloodline ("positive eugenics"). The abuses of this movement have been extensively documented in many excellent books covering such subjects as the hereditarian theory of mental testing and the passage of legislation for involuntary sterilization and restriction of immigration from nations deemed inferior in hereditary stock.

Many early geneticists played an active role in the eugenics movement, but none more zealously than the aforementioned Charles Benedict Davenport (18661.944), who received a Ph.D. in zoology at Harvard in 1892, taught at the University of Chicago, and then became head of the Carnegie Institution's Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, where he also established and directed the Eugenics Record Office, beginning in 1910. This office, with its mixed aims of supposedly scientific documentation and overt political advocacy, existed primarily to establish and compile detailed pedigrees in attempts to identify the hereditary basis of human traits. The hyper-enthusiastic Davenport secured funding from several of America's leading (and, in their own judgment, therefore eugenically blessed) families, particularly from Mrs. E.H. Harriman, the guardian angel and chief moneybags for the entire movement.

In his 1911 textbook, dedicated to Harriman "in recognition of the generous assistance she has given to research in eugenics," Davenport stressed the dependence of effective eugenics upon the new Mendelian "knowledge" that complex behavioral traits may be caused by single genes. Writing of the 5,000 immigrants who passed through Ellis Island every day, Davenport states:

Every one of these peasants, each item of that "riff-raff" of Europe, as it is sometimes carelessly called, will, if fecund, play a role for better or worse in the future history of this nation. Formerly, when we believed that factors blend, a characteristic in the germ plasm of a single individual among thousands seemed not worth considering: it would soon be lost in the melting pot. But now we know that unit characters do not blend; that after a sore of generations the given characteristic may still appear, unaffected by repeated unions. . . . So the individual, as the bearer of a potentially immortal germ plasm with innumerable traits, becomes of the greatest interest.