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

Edwin Black (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 25, 2008

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 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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 592 pages
• Publisher: Dialog Press (September 25, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0914153056
• ISBN-13: 978-0914153054
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #44,299 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

70 of 73 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars fascinating and important, October 26, 2003

By 

Charles Patterson (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This 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

82 of 96 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From Eugenics to Newgenics, August 28, 2003

By 

John C. Landon "nemonemini" (New York City) - See all my reviews

You 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.

41 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars I just finished the book..., December 29, 2003

By 

Joe (Atlanta GA) - See all my reviews

...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.