War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black [Hardcover 2003]
20+ reviews
|
Pick This * DescriptionIn 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 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 agains humanity. This is a timely and shocking chronicle of bad science at its worst--which holds important lessons for the impending genetic age. |
Rave Reviews (3)*
1) From Eugenics to Newgenics
by John C. Landon on August 29 2003
70+ helpful votesYou learn something new everyday, here in an important book: the history of the American eugenics movement and its influence on the perpetrators of the Nazi version leading to the Holocaust. Sanitized or amnesiac history has forgotten the details here, and they are grisly, the more so being American data of record, deep in the many archives the author and his team researched. The details include the involvement of many of the foundations, Carnegie, Rockerfeller, et. al. The eugenics era is routinely denounced, but the facts are diffused from discussion and this book is eminently worth reading carefully to see how it actually happened. The account has eye-popping details on every second page,viz. the actual episodes of tracking down hill billies for enforced sterilization. That's right, in the US of A.
The cheerleading of the Eugenics movement for the Nazis continued right up through the beginning of World War II in certain scientific journals. After that eugenics became genetics, and the author explores at the end the implications of all this as we enter the age of the genome under the banner of genetic fundamentalism.
I would get this book under your belt asap, and it is also an indirect contribution to the legacy of historical Mendelism/Darwinism/Social Darwinism as these generated the milieu for this phase of Americana Goes Haywire. It can happen here. So watch it.2) fascinating and important
by Charles Patterson on October 27 2003
30+ helpful votesThis book is a fascinating account of the eugenics movement that flourished in the United States during the first third of the twentieth century. With the help of an international team of researchers the author details the movement's history: creation of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island; the leadership of poultry researcher Charles Davenport; extensive Harriman, Rockefeller, and Carnegie funding; state laws legalizing compulsory sterilization; widespread acceptance by college presidents, clergymen, mental health workers, school principals, and leading progressive thinkers such as Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, and Woodrow Wilson; its validation by the United States Supreme Court in 1927 when it voted 8 to 1 to uphold the constitutionality of Virginia's eugenic sterilization law; and much, much more.
The book's most dramatic and controversial conclusion is that the American eugenics movement fueled the triumph of Nazism in Germany and thereby helped bring on the Holocaust. As Black writes in his Introduction, "the scientific rationales that drove killer doctors at Auschwitz were first concocted on Long Island at the Carnegie Institution's eugenic enterprise at Cold Spring Harbor." To his credit he provides a great deal of evidence to make his contention plausible, if not totally convincing.
The extremes to which the Nazis took their eugenics--euthansia killings of "unfit" Germans and the extermination of Jews, Gypsies, and others--gave eugenics a bad name from which it never recovered. This important book sheds much needed light on one of the darkest and most bizarre chapters of American history.
Charles Patterson, Ph.D., author of ETERNAL TREBLINKA: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust
3) Bad Blood
by JRup on August 10 2007
9+ helpful votesAs a child in grade school in the mid-40s I wondered why our principal (and his preacher friend) were always ranting about 'bad blood' and 'sins of the father' - Edwin Black's book, War Against The Weak, sheds great light on their attitudes and demonstrates how famous, well-intentioned people get sucked into evil notions such as Eugenics and other 'absolutes'. Ideas, no matter how bright and glittery, can lead down
ugly paths and take that evil fork in the road which leads to holocast.
This book should be required reading for every freshman college class.
Credible Critiques (2)
1) I just finished the book...
by Joe on December 30 2003
20+ helpful votes...and have to say it was a GREAT READ! I'm going to keep this short, simple, and to the point; give this book a shot. I feel I've gained a very unique perspective of WWII and it's relationship to the US.
I was walking out of Barnes and Nobles only a week ago as my eyes grazed over the cover of the book on a shelf. Out of curiousity, I picked it up and was immediately engrossed by the first few pages. I venture to say any American would be, too. Edwin Black provides a clear, comprehensible history of not only eugenics, but the formation of modern genetics. You will uncover a largely untold piece of American history, as unbelievable and shocking as it may be. My friends wouldn't believe me when I shared the contents of this book with them; so I challenged them to read it. I finished it in under a week and am passing my copy along to them...I'm also taking the time to write this on Amazon...the book is that good.
2) An interesting read if frustrating in its later focus
by Black Russian 1968 on October 27 2005
10+ helpful votesIn chronicaling the eugenics movement in America, Edwin Black fills a much needed void in the study of the history of eugenics and helps to rescue Eugenics from the abuses of Nazi Germany (which are dealt with in the book). I say "rescue" only meaning that he provides some much needed scholarship on the collusion of America institutions in the founding and propagation/propagandizing of the movement. The book, as you might expect, is full of revelations about the pioneers in America (such as the founder of Planned Parenthood, a woman who would later retreat from her position of birth-control as population control and go to see abortion as a proper alternative for women)and how they were only stopped from implimenting those methods the Nazis would employ less by their consciences, but by a little document called The United States Constitution. He deals with how the movement inspired men all the way up to the president, a man who was enthusiastic about "ridding society of its degenerate elements."
The book suffers, however, from one, taking an intentionalist view (that the Nazis wanted to annihilate the Jews from day one) of the Nazi atrocities (as opposed to a structuralist view which sees Nazis atrocities against the Jews as an evolution of their policies in general and WWII) and two, by concentrating too heavily on these atrocities. By placing the focus on the Nazi atrocities against the Jews, Black mildly subverts his own thesis which is that Eugenics was never meant to be a war on a certain group (jews)so much as it was a war on many "undesirables" (including the unemployed, the "feeble-minded", the blind, the mentally ill, women, the poor, blacks, and American immigrants, just to name a few).
That said, the book is still a good read for anyone interested in this subject and in its first section (dealing primarily with America) a fascinating read. (As an addition, check out the documentary Homo Sapiens 1900, directed by Peter Cohen, a film which deals with primarily the Eugenics movement in Europe but touches on the movement's roots in America. It additionally serves as a great, if Eurocentric, introduction to the Eugenics movement.)