It's Late and I Don't Have Time for This

I have family visiting, so we spent some time in one of Saint Paul's finer used bookstores today. In their restricted section, I came across this volume:


It was $40 and I probably should have bought it but I was disgusted and thought if I really wanted to see it more closely, it would likely be online somewhere, given that it must be out of copyright. I checked through the table of contents, which can be seen here, and it's as hair-raising as you would expect from the title.

The Wikipedia gives a wrap-up of the three international Congresses of Eugenics, which were held in 1912, 1921, and 1932. At this second conference, Alexander Graham Bell was the honorary chair! It was held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City! And Charles Darwin's son Leonard was a leader of the first one and keynote speaker at the second, which means his words are probably preserved in volume 1 (yes, this is only volume 2: there was twice as much dreck as this). According to the Wikipedia, he "advocated eugenic measures that needed to be taken, namely the 'elimination of the unfit,' the discouragement of large families in the 'ill-endowed,' and the encouragement of large families in the 'well-endowed.'"

The chairman of the Committee on Publication, Charles B. Davenport… whew. He was into quantification and genetics, and you know where that leads. A proud son of Harvard, he went on to publishing with Nazis.

I don't have time to look up the other members of the Committee on Publication. I wonder whose collection this book came from before it ended up in the bookstore?