War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

Amazon.com
The plans of Adolf Hitler and the German Nazis to create a Nordic "master race" are often looked upon as a horrific but fairly isolated effort. Less notice has historically been given to the American eugenics movement of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Although their methods were less violent, the methodology and rationale which the American eugenicists employed, as catalogued in Edwin Black's Against the Weak, were chilling nonetheless and, in fact, influential in the mindset of Hitler himself. Funded and supported by several well-known wealthy donors, including the Rockefeller and Carnegie families and Alexander Graham Bell, the eugenicists believed that the physically impaired and "feeble-minded" should be subject to forced sterilization in order to create a stronger species and incur less social spending. These "defective" humans generally ended up being poorer folks who were sometimes categorized as such after shockingly arbitrary or capricious means ! such as failing a quiz related to pop culture by not knowing where the Pierce Arrow was manufactured. The list of groups and agencies conducting eugenics research was long, from the U.S. Army and the Departments of Labor and Agriculture to organizations with names like the "American Breeders Association." Black's detailed research into the history of the American eugenics movement is admirably extensive, but it is in the association between the beliefs of some members of the American aristocracy and Hitler that the book becomes most chilling. Black goes on to trace the evolution of eugenic thinking as it evolves into what is now called genetics. And while modern thinkers have thankfully discarded the pseudo-science of eugenics, such controversial modern issues as human cloning make one wonder how our own era will be remembered a hundred years hence. --John Moe


From Publishers Weekly
In the first half of the 20th century, more than 60,000 Americans-poor, uneducated, members of minorities-were forcibly sterilized to prevent them from passing on supposedly defective genes. This policy, called eugenics, was the brainchild of such influential people as Rockefellers, Andrew Carnegie and Margaret Sanger. Black, author of the bestselling IBM and the Holocaust, set out to show "the sad truth of how the scientific rationales that drove killer doctors at Auschwitz were first concocted on Long Island" at the Carnegie Institution's Cold Spring Harbor complex. Along the way, he offers a detailed and heavily footnoted history that traces eugenics from its inception to America's eventual, post-WWII retreat from it, complete with stories of the people behind it, their legal battles, their detractors and the tragic stories of their victims. Black's team of 50 researchers have done an impressive job, and the resulting story is at once shocking and gripping. But the publisher's claim that Black has uncovered the truth behind America's "dirty little secret" is a bit overstated. There is a growing library of books on eugenics, including Daniel Kevles's In the Name of Eugenics and Ellen Chesler's biography of Margaret Sanger, Woman of Valor. Black's writing tends to fluctuate from scholarly to melodramatic and apocalyptic (and sometimes arrogant), but the end result is an important book that will add to the public's understanding of this critical chapter of American history. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Read all of his new book, investigative reporter Black insists, or none of it. Good advice, despite Black's many repetitions, odd word choices, and grammatical gaffes, for the story he tells shouldn't be imperfectly known. Its crux is that American researchers and laws inspired Nazi racism. Building on nineteenth-century English statistician Francis Galton's speculations about human heredity, and calling their highly subjective work eugenics, early-twentieth-century American researcher-activists persuaded many states to permit sexual sterilization of the mentally and physically inferior. With American eugenists cheering them on, the Nazis advanced to exterminating those deemed inferior. Thoroughly chronicling eugenics in America and Germany, Black stresses what happened rather than why. He doesn't probe individual eugenists' deep motivations or hazard cultural explanations; indeed, after exposing Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger's lifelong adherence to eugenics, Black pronounces her a great humanitarian. Less timorously, he asks whether contemporary genetics is becoming "newgenics" as insurance companies and employers find reasons to create an uninsurable, unemployable genetic underclass. Turgid but impressive, probably the popular history of eugenics for the foreseeable future. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
The explosive true story of America’s century-long attempt to create a master race—by the author of the New York Times bestseller IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST In WAR AGAINST THE WEAK, award-winning investigative journalist Edwin Black connects the crimes of the Nazis to a pseudoscientific American movement of the early twentieth century called eugenics. Based on selective breeding of human beings, eugenics began in laboratories on Long Island, but it ended in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Ultimately, over 60,000 "unfit" Americans were coercively sterilized, a third of them after Nuremberg declared such practices crimes against humanity. It started in 1904, when a small group of U.S. scientists launched an ambitious new race-based movement that was championed by our nation's social, political, and academic elite. Funded by America's leading corporate philanthropies, such as the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation, and entrenched in classrooms across America, eugenicists sought to eliminate social "undesirables." Their methods: forced sterilization, human breeding programs, marriage prohibition, and even passive euthanasia. Perhaps more shocking—eugenics was sanctioned by the Supreme Court. Cruel and racist laws were enacted in twenty-seven U.S. states, and the supporters of eugenics included such progressive thinkers as Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The victims of eugenics were poor white people from New England to California, immigrants from across Europe, Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Native Americans, epileptics, alcoholics, petty criminals, the mentally ill and anyone else who did not resemble the blond and blue-eyed Nordic ideal the eugenics movement glorified. Through international academic exchanges, American eugenicists exported the movement worldwide. It eventually caught the fascination of Adolf Hitler. To write WAR AGAINST THE WEAK, Edwin Black led a team of fifty researchers in dozens of archives in four countries, generating some 50,000 documents. In this rigorous, comprehensive, brilliantly told story that spans a century, readers will discover the chilling truth of how the scientific rationales that drove Nazi doctors were first concocted by "scientists" at the Carnegie Institution in New York; how the Rockefeller Foundation’s massive financial grants to German scientists culminated in Mengele’s heinous experiments at Auschwitz; how, after World War II, eugenics was reborn as human genetics; and why confronting the history of eugenics is essential to understanding the implications of the Human Genome Project and twenty-first-century genetic engineering.


From the Inside Flap
"Edwin Black has again written a unique and important book. Until now eugenics in the U.S. and in Germany have not been analyzed together. One assumed they had little in common. This was not so. Their joint past was bloody and their future is disquieting." —Benno Müller-Hill, Institute of Genetics, Cologne University, author of MURDEROUS SCIENCE "A gripping account of the evils of eugenics. Edwin Black brings home the misery inflicted by the eugenic zealots." —Paul Weindling, Department of History, Oxford Brookes University, author of HEALTH, RACE AND GERMAN POLITICS BETWEEN NATIONAL UNIFICATION AND NAZISM, 1870-1940 "Black has conclusively shown that Nazi eugenics was derived from notions espoused by a self-chosen American elite….Hitler and his fanatics further perverted this iniquity in their attempt to exterminate all Gypsies and all Jews, whom they considered racially inferior—that is eugenically inferior. The American antecedents in this book were a revelation to me." —Robert Wolfe, former chief archivist for captured German records, National Archives, Washington, D.C. "A triumph of historical research and storytelling. It provides new information and insights on the pseudoscience that brought humanity to the brink of creating a monstrous master race." —J. David Smith, provost and senior vice chancellor, University of Virginia-Wise, author of THE STERILIZATION OF CARRIE BUCK "[Black] carefully documents the links of the American eugenics movement to the horror of the crimes of Nazi Germany….Black’s careful scholarship will have to make [readers] reconsider the innocence of the acceptance of any simple racist notions by elites." —William E. Spriggs, executive director, National Urban League Institute for Opportunity and Equality "An astonishing history…and a gripping narrative. This is a must-read." —Abraham H. Foxman, national director, Anti-Defamation League


About the Author
Edwin Black is the award-winning and New York Times–bestselling author of IBM AND THE HOLOCAUST and THE TRANSFER AGREEMENT, as well as a novel, FORMAT C:. He lives near Washington, D.C.


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A journalistic expos￯﾿ﾽ of the early-20th-century American eugenics movement and its application in the death camps of the Third Reich. By Black￯﾿ﾽs (IBM and the Holocaust, not reviewed) account, the various American eugenicists who brought crop- and livestock-breeding techniques to the business of creating perfect humans were masters of scientific fraud, working with the blessing and material support of major corporations and foundations in the interest of "racism, ethnic hatred and academic elitism." Though predicated on overstatement—many such scientists, then as now, were looking to eradicate categories of disease, not of people—Black￯﾿ﾽs case has many merits: plenty of practitioners, working through hospitals and laboratories meant to stamp out the "feebleminded" and crippled and even those unfortunates with bad vision, had in mind the creation of a Nordic European "super race enjoying biological dominion over all others." The eugenics program put in practice throughout the US, but with particular zeal in Virginia and California, targeted victims of disease, to be sure, but also the poor and members of ethnic minorities, especially blacks and Native Americans. That program met with some resistance among scientists and social engineers, who complained that such things as tuberculosis and violent crime alike were the products of poverty and not heredity; but it also enjoyed strong support among political leaders, including Woodrow Wilson and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Along the way, Adolf Hitler became enamored of American experiments to rid the nation of the genetically suspect, and American eugenicists did a land-office business as consultants and lecturers in the Third Reich; soon,as US scientist C.M. Goethe noted, the Germans had sterilized more people in two years than California had in a quarter century. But even after WWII, Black writes, "after the Hitler regime, after the Nuremberg Trials, some twenty thousand Americans were eugenically sterilized by states and untold others by federal programs on Indian reservations and in U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico." Though sure to be contested at points, of interest to human-rights activists monitoring the doings of bioengineers—who are just eugenicists, Black argues, under another name. First printing of 75,000; $100,000 ad/promo; author tour. Agent: Lynne Rabinoff


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