Experimental Breeding Ground

Abstract

When Millia Davenport wrote to her father in 1920 about their divergent feelings over what constituted family, their argument was long-standing, theoretical, and deeply personal. At the time, Millia was in her midtwenties, had renamed herself “Billy,” was divorced, and was contemplating her second marriage. She lived in Greenwich Village, New York, with a collection of progressive theatre artists, and made her somewhat erratic living designing costumes for the Provincetown Players. Her father, Charles Davenport, was internationally recognized as the leading spokesperson on eugenics in America. In his usually affectionate letters to his second daughter, Davenport expresses perturbation about most aspects of her life, including her multiple marriages, her spending habits, her living situations, and, perhaps most of all, her work in theatre and her resulting proximity to a number of “undesirables.”² At the root of his concern was the fact that she and her life contradicted his life’s work and his fundamental convictions about heredity. Davenport ruefully admitted as much to his wife, Gertrude, when, drawing on a popular metaphor for the eugenics movement (which rehashed a number of commonplaces), he likened Millia to an apple that has fallen “some distance from our tree.”³ Because of their specific work, beliefs, and interests, the tension between Millia and Charles Davenport was more than a predictable expression of parental anxiety and filial rebellion. Their struggle is also a microcosmic example of the complicated way in which players in the modern American theatre and in the American eugenics movement defined their positions against one another’s, and yet managed to make use of one another’s terms and ideas and thus to belong, uneasily but necessarily, in the same ideological family.

Dad Dear: I’ve been thinking about what you said about family … But the world is not made up of college professors’ children, at least not the dearest part I’ve found … you see, I’ve not the family feeling you preach, at least not for the family you preach to and about … everything in my life speaks to another kind of family—not blood at all—

Millia Davenport, in a letter to Charles Davenport¹