Eugenics is too frequently overlooked in histories of both the United States and Europe, even though the story is a fascinating and important one. The field to date has remained largely the preserve of academic historians, despite obvious connections to contemporary debates around science and ethics. These were prime motivations for War Against the Weak, Edwin Black's timely look at American eugenics and its impact on Nazism.
Figure 1.
Edwin Black
Four Walls Eight Windows, $27, pp 592 ISBN 1 56858 258 7 www.fourwallseightwindows .com/bookblack1.html
Rating: ★★
Black's earlier book, IBM and the Holocaust, traced the role of the information technology company IBM in creating Nazi Germany's punch-card technology for classifying victims of Nazi genocide. War Against the Weak continues the theme that the United States was a major contributor to Nazi genocide, but considerably overstates the case by shoehorning evidence into the argument that all European eugenics movements, including the German, were merely offshoots of American eugenics.
Created in Britain in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton (Charles Darwin's cousin), eugenics became reality in the United States before the rise of Nazism. Spurious scientific and medical work by eugenicists led to the forced sterilisation of 60 000 Americans and the banning of ethnically mixed marriages in many states. A eugenically inspired immigration act in 1924 kept out millions of Slavs, Jews, and others, who were subsequently killed by Nazi Germany's eugenically inspired genocide.
Black properly shows that eugenics was about more than just ethnicity and disability by discussing class, intelligence, crime, poverty, sexuality, alcoholism, and prostitution. Eugenics was also fundamentally about saving taxpayer dollars.
While factually accurate, at the level of interpretation Black's work is fatally flawed. He interprets history with the benefit of hindsight, seeing all events leading inexorably to eugenically inspired genocide and blaming those who could not see it at the time.
Black also has an America-centric worldview. He denies the existence of a vibrant German movement before American money arrived after the first world war. This misses the reality that Germany had a movement following its own course. While American eugenics moved from extreme to subtle, the German movement went the other way, ending in genocide. If Black has substantial evidence for his claim that Hitler's emergence in 1924 led to an “equal partnership” between the US and German eugenics movements, this fundamentally changes the history of eugenics in both countries and deserves far more than a sentence buried deep in the book.
Black claims that British eugenics was almost completely imported from the United States. While Britain, thankfully, did not enact any major pieces of eugenic legislation, it did have an independent and vigorous eugenics movement through the period. Whereas American eugenics focused on disability and ethnicity, Britain's eugenics movement was class oriented and led overwhelmingly from the Bloomsbury and Fabian left.
Experts on the history of eugenics will find plenty to argue with in War Against the Weak. Nevertheless the book should open an important field to a new audience. The relevance to contemporary scientific, genetic, and ethical issues is impossible to ignore. Black warns of the dangers, especially of linking economic and financial policy to science. The reader is rightly left wondering whether eugenics has gone away entirely.