The Ghosts of American Eugenics

Book Recommendation: War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Much of what I know about America's hidden role in creating the cultural and scientific foundations that enabled the horrors of World War II, I learned from historian and author Edwin Black's unflinching historical accounts.

His "War Against the Weak" (available on Amazon, AbeBooks) opens with a haunting declaration: "This particular book speaks for the never-born, for those whose questions have never been heard—for those who never existed."

Throughout the first six decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Americans were forcibly sterilized, wrongfully committed to institutions, or prohibited from marrying—all because they were deemed genetically "unfit." Their crime was living in poverty, being an immigrant, Black, Jewish, epileptic, disabled, or simply speaking the wrong language.

What makes this history particularly chilling is that it was not the work of fringe extremists–mainstream actors played key roles.

This "pernicious white-gloved war," as Black calls it, was prosecuted by America's most esteemed professors, elite universities, wealthy industrialists, and government officials. The eugenic movement's goal was explicit: to create a superior "Nordic" race by eliminating the so-called "lower tenth" of society.

The movement constructed an elaborate bureaucratic infrastructure dedicated to "cleansing" America. Intelligence tests were weaponized to justify incarcerating the "feebleminded." Twenty-seven states enacted mandatory sterilization laws. Marriage prohibition statutes proliferated nationwide to prevent "race mixing."

The Supreme Court even sanctified these practices.

Most disturbing is how American eugenics became the foundation for Nazi Germany's racial policies. As Black documents meticulously, Hitler's genocide was built on scientific theories developed at prestigious American institutions like Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The Carnegie Institution even distributed anti-Semitic Nazi films to American high schools. When a prominent American eugenicist noted in 1934 that "the Germans are beating us at our own game," he was not speaking metaphorically.

The corporate connections are equally damning.

Black reveals how the Rockefeller Foundation provided massive financial grants to German scientists conducting eugenic research—research that eventually led to Dr. Mengele's horrific experiments at Auschwitz. IBM's custom-designed data processing machines helped automate Germany's eugenic institutions. American eugenic theories didn't just inspire Nazi policies; they provided the technical infrastructure that made the Holocaust possible.

Could this happen again?

Black warned that we face a potential return to eugenic discrimination, not under national flags or political credos, but as a function of genomic science and corporate globalization. "What eugenics was unable to accomplish in a century, newgenics may engineer in a generation," he cautions. "The almighty dollar may soon decide who stands on which side of a new genetic divide already being demarcated by the wealthy and powerful."

The institutional reluctance to confront this history is telling. As Black notes, many prestigious universities and foundations remain "nervously standing inert and silent" about their eugenic past because "too many of the vaulted universities and their funders were among the perpetrators."

Black was wrong that eugenic discrimination would not reemerge under national flags or political credos.

As the MAGA movement progresses in its new war against vulnerable people they believe represent the "lower tenth" of society, we risk creating new eugenic hierarchies in present-day America.

"War Against the Weak" (available on Amazon, AbeBooks) stands as an essential warning about how easily science can be corrupted when infused with prejudice and arrogance. For anyone concerned about bioethics, discrimination in guise of medical benefit, or how technology might reshape human society, Black's meticulously researched account is required reading.

The voices of eugenics' victims deserve to be heard—and the full story of this American-born atrocity needs to be understood if we hope to prevent its modern reincarnation.