{"id":17915,"date":"2022-03-28T08:41:40","date_gmt":"2022-03-28T12:41:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/?p=17915"},"modified":"2024-08-29T14:03:13","modified_gmt":"2024-08-29T18:03:13","slug":"the-eugenic-twins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/2022\/the-eugenic-twins\/","title":{"rendered":"The Eugenic Twins"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n The Eugenic Twins\n <\/h1>\n \n \n <\/header>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n\n\n

There were two identical thick books on the shelf titled The Life and Times of Samuel Gorton, published in 1907.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One was obviously quite old, with loose pages in a lightweight cardboard slipcase. The other had been rebound in the thick sturdy library binding. I chose that one, as I didn\u2019t want to do any damage to the fragile one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While my husband was researching grants in the New York State Library, I had wandered over to the Genealogy section to see if I could find anything on my father\u2019s family from upstate New York. There was nothing \u2014 not one thing. So I had turned to my mother\u2019s paternal side, which I knew had been well researched and written about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I sat down and opened the book to the section of the genealogy of Samuel Gorton\u2019s descendants \u2014 tucked in the binding was a newspaper clipping with a photo of an elderly, bald, bearded, doleful-looking man, and an exhausted-looking brown-haired middle aged woman, each holding a baby. I glanced at it. Something made me take a closer look. I couldn\u2019t believe my eyes! There was my mother and her twin brother, mother and father. Someone had added it when the book was rebound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had seen several photos of the twins and their parents, but I\u2019d never seen this one. Had I chosen the other book, I never would have discovered it.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were two stories as far as I could tell from reading the papers of that time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, a love story. An 80-year-old doctor, author, and \u201cpioneer Brooklyn homeopath,\u201d married his 40-year-old amanuensis, his literary secretary who helped him write his books. This was the story I\u2019d heard from my mother.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Second, a science experiment to verify the doctor\u2019s theories of eugenics. Dr. Gorton was a founding member of the American Eugenics Society. As a eugenist, he was intrigued to create a human being with good traits, genes, \u201cwell born\u201d. His literary secretary \u201cfully shared his interest in eugenics and they decided to marry.” This is the story I found in the newspapers from 1912, now online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shortly after his first wife died, the 80-year-old doctor carefully researched his 40-year-old amanuensis\u2019 family and verified that she came from \u201cgood stock\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She passed the test, and they married in 1911. They went on a cruise for their honeymoon, and, even having broken his toe on a rocking chair in their cabin, nine months later, they were the proud (and notorious) parents of the \u201ceugenic twins\u201d, Leonora, my mother, and her brother, David Allyn Gorton II. Believing that it was possible to predetermine the sex of a child, Dr. Gorton had predicted that he\u2019d have a boy (my mother evidently was a surprise), who would be named after him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was a sensation. There were newspaper articles about the \u201ceugenic twins\u201d all over Brooklyn and New York in 1912, and other parts of the country. It\u2019s still possible to find some online about Dr. Gorton, the 80-year-old doctor, well-known eugenist, and his “well-born twins\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There were two identical thick books on the shelf titled The Life and Times of Samuel Gorton, published in 1907. One was obviously quite old, with loose pages in a lightweight cardboard slipcase. The other had been rebound in the thick sturdy library binding. I chose that one, as I didn\u2019t want to do any […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17916,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-memoir"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17915"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24542,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17915\/revisions\/24542"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/lifelong\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}