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Summary: I just finished the book...
Review: ...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.
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Summary: How Not to launch a eugenics program
Review: Edwin Black should have a great sense of satisfaction, as reviewers unanimously express shock, outrage, horror and disgust at this book's revelations of America's complicity in the pseudoscience behind the Master Race and the Final Solution. Had some of the great philanthropic institutions and social engineers of the time had their way, America would have tried to keep up with the Nazi's!
Our knowledge of the past may prevent us from repeating our mistakes, but unfortunately, this tome, with its academic aura of footnotes and references, serves primarily to solidify the perception that ALL things linked to Nazism must be summarily rejected. Barely beneath the "factual reporting" surface of this book seethes a swirling hatred of the Third Reich's creators and supporters. It makes for gripping reading and allows the author to foster a sense of foul conspiracy and sinister plot in the reader's mind. Entertainment trumps scholarship.
I have no problem with entertainment, as long as the masquerade serves to deliver some grains of truth. What I do take issue with is the abandonment of scholarship in the book's eye to the future. Yes, there were horrors; yes, we went astray; but to think that we can permanently reject EVERYTHING associated with eugenics is to bury our heads in the sand. Sooner or later, we will be forced to deal with physical and biological facts that will not go away-our resources are not boundless; our genes, the foundations of our specie's existence, are physically frail and in constant need of assessment and selection; our current infatuation with the sanctity of the individual must eventually be balanced by an increased sense of each individual's responsibility to our society. War Against the Weak, while obliquely referencing these issues, ultimately contributes to their perpetuation because Mr. Black fails to suggest that some aspects of eugenics should be retrieved from the dustbin of history.
Common wisdom teaches that noble ends do not justify ignoble means. But noble goals are not made despicable when pursued by foul means. It is the means that were misguided, not the goal. To think that we will somehow survive and prosper without doing our genetic housekeeping is pure folly.
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Summary: Chapters trace the roots of the movement to 1904
Review: Edwin Black's War Against The Weak: Eugenics And America's Campaign To Create A Master Race is the story of eugenics and the American campaign to create a master race and is an exceptional history and offers insightful ethical considerations of the American eugenics movement. Chapters trace the roots of the movement to 1904, when a small group of scientists launched a new race-based concept, funded by American corporate institutes and foundations. Eugenics was even sanctioned by the Supreme Court and resulted in racist laws in over 27 states. This eye-opening social history belongs on the shelves of any college-level collection of American social issues and history.
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Summary: A Great Read!
Review: It seems so amazing, but I could not put this book down. Everytime I wanted to put it away there was some compelling information that made me want to continue on. Anyone interested in American History needs to read this one and pass it on!!!!!!!!!
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Summary: A Great Read!
Review: It seems so amazing, but I could not put this book down. Everytime I wanted to put it away there was some compelling information that made me want to continue on. Anyone interested in American History needs to read this one and pass it on!!!!!!!!!
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Summary: Interesting Muckraker Look At American Eugenics Movement!
Review: Many are familiar with the litany of 20th century regarding the plethora of ways in which the Nazi thugs used the much-hyped science of eugenics to gain acceptance for their many horrific activities, from programs of forced sterilization, euthanasia of the old and infirm, and later even as the justification of genocide during the conduct of the war along the Eastern front. In fact, much of the rationalization for the racist phlegm spouted by Hitler and his ilk was derived from the semi-scientific ideas of the eugenics movement. Much less well known is the fact that the early medical experiments and notions spouted by medical doctors like the infamous Dr. Josef Mengele were highly respected and even revered in the United States as well as Europe, and that Dr. Mengele in fact held public presentations that were hugely successful in this country. Moreover, as the author of this provocative book reveals, there were several popular centers of eugenics research and support for such research for well over thirty years before the Second World War. While the book is both interesting and full of shocking facts, it is also not especially convincing nor especially well written. It appears to be a somewhat muckraking attempt to sensationalize a particularly lurid aspect of 20th century history in American history, and much of what he purports does not appear to be independently verifiable or consistent with information one finds elsewhere on the topic. In fact, his most outrageous claim, one that argues that the notion of so-called "Nordic " racial superiority originated here in the United States, is quite poorly supported by the evidence he cites. While it is admittedly a sad and despicable period of our history, there is little verifiable documentary evidence to lend credence to such a thesis. This is not to deny there is much of interest in this book. He traces the sad progress of the so-called Immigration Act of 1924, showing how it was inextricably tied to the pseudo-scientific notions popularly associated with the eugenics movement, and with a rampant fear of foreigners as well. Given the rapid influx of immigrants from both eastern and southern Europe at the time, the purported facts regarding potential damage to the genetic makeup of the country was seen to be at risk, and some sad and retrogressive legislation attempted to stem the tide against such potential dangers. The legislation led to a number of state laws outlawing interracial marriage, and were part of a growing campaign of both racial and ethnic intolerance most Americans would just as soon forget rather than learn about in the kind of detail offered here. Thus it is a potentially valuable book, but one which one can recommend only with appropriate caution regarding its veracity and accuracy. Still, while the author does admit as to the fact that the eugenics movement arose in an atmosphere of ignorance, fear and intolerance, and added and aggravated the long-term manifestations of such emotive passions, the kind of complied list of eugenic sins delivered in a polemic style is hardly the sort of dispassionate and accurate document one would associate with a more scholarly approach that attempts less to sensationalize and much more to elucidate, explain, and analyze the topic at hand. It is indeed a sad period of time in our history, but one that deserves a more dispassionate, less muckraking, and more scholarly approach to truly serve the admirable stated purpose of this work. Enjoy!
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Summary: Very BIG book on eugenics...dispassionate...
Review: Maybe if this was the first book I had read on eugenics, I would have liked it better. There is no doubt that Black did his research...but much of this information had been given in a few books I prefer, including Daniel Kevles "In the Name of Eugenics," and in "The Mismeasure of Man" by Stephen Jay Gould. Part of what bothered me about Black's book is the title. As someone who is deaf and works in the bioethics/disability community, I was not crazy about perpetuating the idea that those of us with differences are 'weak'. I know that is what they thought back in the early 1900s, and they used much more derogatory terms like feeble-minded and idiots! But the word 'weak' is not one I want conveyed to others who read these books. It's great to have authors write with concern about eugenics raising it's ugly head again...even if they have no disability. However, there are many of us with differences who are working on our own to prevent another medical holocaust here...please do not perpetuate the image that those of us with disabilities need protection from the world. We will kick our own ass thank you! The book was very repetitive of information I had garnered else where. Black provides very little new information in this huge, heavy tome. I think Black is trying to say that the U.S. needs to look at itself first, instead of getting on Germany's case about the Holocausts...because the U.S. provided the groundwork for the Nazis eradication programs of the disabled as well as the Jews and the Gypsies. Black's writing in this book lacks passion. This is what gripped me in Gould's and Kevles' books...is they felt very strongly about statistics being used to label and denigrate people, and about our country's own holocausts. When writing a paper, social commentators need dispassion; in writing a book, passion should underline the stand the author takes. I don't see that here. Black writes well...his book on "The Transfer Agreement" is spell-binding. This particular book lacks the emotion and yes, even the opinions, that drove that book. Karen Sadler,
Science Education,
University of Pittsburgh
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Summary: Shocking!!!
Review: Mr. Black has done it again by exposing the complicity of America's "ruling elite" in establishing an intellectual, scientific foundation for sterilization and, ultimately, genocide of those deemed "inferior." War Against the Weak details how a cabal of well-known industrialists, scientists, technocrats, politicians, and dilettantes together contributed in the advancement of a pseudoscience from an idea into frightful practice. A must read for anyone concerned about the erosion of our civil liberties.
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Summary: fascinating and important
Review: 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
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Summary: Well Documented Retelling Of The Story Of American Eugenics
Review: War Against The Weak: Eugenics And America's Campaign To Create A Master Race by Edwin Black, author of IBM And The Holocaust, deals with a history many America's might know about in passing, but who don't know of the ugly details. Black's long history of the eugenics movement in the United States, and its ties to the eugenics movement in Germany, meticulously documents arguably the most racist period of this nation's history. Black's narrative traces the development of the international eugenics movement from its origins in the study of genetics starting with the rediscovery of the pioneering work in genetics of Mendel in the late 19th century to its heyday in the United States with the founding of the private Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in 1910, and the forced sterilizations of tens of thousands of people deemed human waste by the movement, to the movement's demise in the smoldering ruins of the concentration camps of Nazi occupied Europe. The term "eugenics" was first coined by a British mathematician named Francis J. Galton, but it was in the United States that the notion of genetically engineering a master Nordic race became a well funded movement. The eugenics movement received the support of some of the nation's wealthiest families, including Carnegie, Harriman and Rockefeller. In this sense, the eugenics movement was the quintessential campaign against the poor and funded by the rich. At the center of the eugenics story in the United States is the movement's two most ardent exponents, Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office. It was these two individuals who lead the movement and never wavered from their support for ending the blood lines of people they deemed "unfit." Even after the Carnegie Institution closed the ERO at the of 1939, partly out of embarrassment at being associated with the racism of the movement, and the horrors Nazi dominated Europe being publicized to the world, Davenport and Laughlin still defended their racist ideology as a legitimate science. They never severed their ties with the German eugenics movement as it took the movement to next level by carrying out an extermination campaign inspired by eugenics ideas. The idea of the "unfit" is highly subjective notion, but it included the usual suspects deemed a burden on society: African-Americans, Asians, Mexicans and Native Americans. It even included people of European origin who had brown hair. Also on the eugenics hitlist for sterilization were the deaf, blind, epileptics and psychiatric patients. Anybody deemed an impossible burden on society was a target of this movement. The eugenics position held that charity for poor people was a waste of money. The problems of the dispossessd and poor weren't socially created but the inevitable result of bad genes. It was a position that also held that sterilization, immigration restrictions, marriage restrictions and even euthanasia were the only viable methods for dealing with class related social problems. A convenient psuedoscience arose to justify this racist ideology. A psuedoscience built on the foundation of the highly flawed gathering of family pedigrees by the ERO and racist psychological testing. One of the most interesting stories of the American eugenics movement was its tenuous alliance with the ostensibly progressive cause of birth control, especially Planned Parenthood founder and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger. It was an alliance that did not stand the test of time because many in the movement did not want to be associated with birth control and its feminist message. Leading eugenicists were content to embrace the extreme racism of the eugenics ideology, but the idea of a woman controlling her reproductive biology was something they couldn't countenance. In the end, the majority of sterilizations were carried out against the usual suspects: Poor and defenseless women. This is why the birth control and eugenics movements could never reconcile their differences. Take Black's argument that Sanger was not a racist for what you will, but her ideas were truly reprehensible. Ideas that Planned Parenthood have long since disowned. Eugenics became a swear word after World War II and the policies the movement advocated came to be viewed as crimes against humanity. Eugenics eventually came to be known as "human genetics" and "genetics counseling ." Eugenics also lives on by way of the finished products of racist psychological testing, namely, the IQ test and the SAT. Today, the biggest threat genetics poses to people's liberty is in the area of insurance discrimination. Every now and then it might make a brief comeback, like with Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray's 1994 book The Bell Curve, which purported to prove that black people are of inferior intelligence, but never with same impact on public policy it once had. Meticulously researched and foot noted, but somewhat tedious at a length of 440 pages, Black leaves virtually no stone unturned in retelling the tale of this nation's eugenics movement. The individual who reads Black's book will forever look at the claims of the science of human genetics with a heightened skepticism and a desire to discern what public policy implications such knowledge might entail. (...)
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