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

by Edwin Black

Book Overview

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 20th century called eugenics. Based on... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1568583214
• ISBN13: 9781568583211
• Release Date: October 2004
• Publisher: Basic Books
• Length: 592 Pages
• Weight: 0.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Fascinating, Terrifying and Exhausting to Read

It's hard to review a book like this: as the author states, each chapter could be a book itself; the volume of information is astounding. The basic thesis is simple: Black brings home the idea that America was a pioneer in the eugenics movement, influencing politics and society worldwide by the early 20th century. Although the most obvious disciple of America's eugenics program is Germany under the Nazis, Black documents how other countries, such as Sweden, Norway and England also took their cues from US policies to regulate marriage and birth of those considered desirable and undesirable. There's simply too much information to fully review, but some of the major items include the fallacy of IQ testing; the campaign to prevent interracial marriage (some laws in the American South lasted into the 21st century); sterilization of those deemed 'feeble-minded' (a very subjective decision made by racists and others with an eugenical agenda); and a general re-ordering of society to create a 'master race'(most evident in Nazi Germany). The final chapter deals with 'Newgenics', and was perhaps the most potentially frightening, as it clarifies the challenges of dealing with genetic issues such as cloning, medical and life insurance based on an individual's genetic 'predisposition' to certain diseases based on family history, and the possible emergence of the designer children by the 'GenRich', those who can afford to create their own mini-master race kids. As a side-note, I found it interesting that although Black devotes several chapters to Germany, there's no mention of the Paraguayan 'Nueva Germania' colony set up by Elizabeth Nietzsche in the 1880s. Like many of the characters Black mentions, Nietzsche and her group wanted to preserve the 'pure' Aryan race they felt was already corrupted in Germany by too many 'outsiders'. Their attempt to create their utopia in South America failed, just as Black's Davenport, Laughlin and others failed in the US. 'The War Against the Weak' is a great addition to modern social science; I learned a lot, and Black's book makes me want to learn more about this topic.

Bad Blood

As 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.

Chilling, absolutely chilling

This book lays out a case, in plain language, that diseased ideas can propogate like wildfire, particularly when powerful people get behind them. Adolf Hitler did not just wake up one day and decide that Jews, homosexuals and the mentally disabled should be killed. That idea had been alive, spreading and in fact exported to Europe by US. This may explain why ships of Jewish refugees were turned back from entrance to this country during the war, eventhough everyone knew they would likely face death. This explains why so many Nazi scientists were welcomed into this country to continue biological research after the war. But mostly what this well-researched work shows is the importance for standing up for all people and not assuming that any one of us has the right to determine who is fit or unfit to exist.

fascinating and important

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

From Eugenics to Newgenics

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.