Synopses & Reviews
How American corporate philanthropies launched a national campaign of ethnic cleansing in the United States, help found and fund the Nazi eugenics of Hitler and Mengele and then created the modern movement of "human genetics."
In the first three decades of the 20th Century, American corporate philanthropy combined with prestigious academic fraud to create the pseudoscience eugenics that institutionalized race politics as national policy. The goal: create a superior, white, Nordic race and obliterate the viability of everyone else.
How? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to legislated segregation and sterilization programs. The victims: poor people, brown-haired white people, African Americans, immigrants, Indians, Eastern European Jews, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the superior genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists. The main culprits were the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune, in league with America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Harvard, Yale and Princeton, operating out of a complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The eugenic network worked in tandem with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the State Department and numerous state governmental bodies and legislatures throughout the country, and even the U.S. Supreme Court. They were all bent on breeding a eugenically superior race, just as agronomists would breed better strains of corn. The plan was to wipe away the reproductive capability of the weak and inferior.
Ultimately, 60,000 Americans were coercively sterilized legally and extra-legally. Many never discovered the truth until decades later. Those who actively supported eugenics include America's most progressive figures: Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger and Oliver Wendell Holmes.
American eugenic crusades proliferated into a worldwide campaign, and in the 1920s came to the attention of Adolf Hitler. Under the Nazis, American eugenic principles were applied without restraint, careening out of control into the Reich's infamous genocide. During the pre-War years, American eugenicists openly supported Germany's program. The Rockefeller Foundation financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and the work of its central racial scientists. Once WWII began, Nazi eugenics turned from mass sterilization and euthanasia to genocidal murder. One of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute doctors in the program financed by the Rockefeller Foundation was Josef Mengele who continued his research in Auschwitz, making daily eugenic reports on twins. After the world recoiled from Nazi atrocities, the American eugenics movement its institutions and leading scientists renamed and regrouped under the banner of an enlightened science called human genetics.
Review
"War Against the Weak is a scary and necessary book." Adrienne Miller, Esquire (read the entire Esquire review)
Review
"Black ... reveals that eugenics was extensive, systematic, well-funded, and supported by major political and intellectual leaders; perhaps most startling, it directly inspired the rise of Nazism in Hitler's Germany... This chilling and well-researched book is highly recommended." Gregg Sapp, Library Journal
Review
"Fierce, compelling...well told and extraordinarily sad...a prodigious feat of reporting." David Plotz, Mother Jones Magazine
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"A hair-raiser and an eye-opener... ...contains details so vivid and horrid that one can hardly believe them or bear to read them. ... This is an important book, filled with little-known facts about how some of our most esteemed institutions and professionals have funded and practiced very bad science, if it was science at all, and how this pseudoscience permeated much of the world's thinking and led to the atrocities of a world war." Nancy Schapiro, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Review
Chilling and thoroughly researched ... it is a book whose message must be made known ... for those who say "It can't happen here." Mark Lewis, Tampa Tribune
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"Fascinating... War Against the Weak is filled with tale after tale of arrogance, ignorance and cruelty accounts that Black wisely allows the eugenicists to relate in their own words." Carl Zimmer, Discover Magazine
Review
"Impressive, probably the popular history of eugenics for the foreseeable future." Ray Olson, Booklist
Review
"An impressive job... the resulting story is at once shocking and gripping
an important book that will add to the public's understanding of this critical chapter of American history." Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
In "IBM and the Holocaust, " a "New York Times" bestseller, Black unearthed proof that IBM collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II. Now he delivers a startling investigation of America's century-long attempt to create a master race through mass sterilization and human breeding programs. 30 illustrations.
Synopsis
Includes bibliographical references (p. 445-518) and index.
Synopsis
Genetics is in the news. What's not in the news are its origins in a racist 20th-century pseudoscience called eugenics. In 1904, the U.S. began a large-scale eugenics movement that was championed by the nation's medical, political, and religious elite. Eugenics sought to eliminate social "undesirables" and was eventually copied by the Third Reich. Whites, blacks, Native Americans nearly everyone was subject to sterilization, castration, and in some cases, euthanasia. In the aftermath of world revulsion over Nazi atrocities, eugenics was reborn with a new name and new packaging: genetics. This is an explosive, detailed, and vigorously researched account of U.S. race science and its "enlightened" reincarnation worldwide as human engineering. Illustrations accompany this startling investigation of America's century-long attempt to create a master race through mass sterilization and human breeding programs.