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

In War against the Weak, award-winning investigative journalist Edwin Black traces some of the Nazis' most horrendous crimes back to Charles Davenport's early 20th-century pseudoscientific eugenics movement in the US. Based on selective breeding of human beings, eugenics began in laboratories on Long Island but ended in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Cruel and racist laws were enacted in 27 U.S. states, while the supporters of eugenics included progressive thinkers like Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Ultimately, over 60,000 "unfit" Americans were coercively sterilized, a third of them after Nuremberg had declared such practices crimes against humanity. This is a timely and shocking chronicle of bad science at its worst—with many important lessons for the genetic age in which an interest in eugenics has been dangerously revived.