According to the theory of evolution, it takes incomprehensibly long periods of time for species to change. Nature simply doesn’t work quickly enough to effect changes over a few generations. To think it could work that fast is unrealistic.
However, a school of thought hatched in America in the 19th Century didn’t see it that way.
“Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?” posited Francis Galton in the 1880s. “What nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly.”
Shortly thereafter Galton founded “eugenics,” a pseudoscience that proposed to engineer the human race for excellence by removing its lowest 10 percent. The story of the movement is told in Edwin Black’s excellent “War Against the Weak.”
Like the recent “Devil in the White City” and the pornography essay from “Reefer Madness,” “War” hits readers over the head with a story they likely haven’t heard before. It’s a story about misguided elitists and how their ideas led to the forced sterilization of thousands of Americans, marriage restrictions and, eventually, Adolf Hitler’s final solution.
Black painstakingly documents how a fringe element went from being mocked to getting abundant levels of funding, attracting the attention of respected intellectuals and influencing legislation that backed their attempts to rid America of what they saw as its worst tenth (i.e., Pennsylvania’s 1905 “Act for the Prevention of Idiocy”).
Surprises abound. Black shows how the eugenics movement became endorsed and/or promoted by Alexander Graham Bell, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Black shows how Wanda Sang, a feminist hero whose efforts bloomed into Planned Parenthood, had much different goals in mind when she coined the term “birth control.”
“War” gets even darker when it illustrates how the American eugenics movement caught the attention of a young Hitler and how the Third Reich carried the movement to its horrifying conclusion. Black doesn’t flinch when he takes the reader into the wretched terrors perpetrated by Josef Mengele at Auschwitz.
Although Black can be a little heavy-handed at times, he does an excellent job of answering the reader’s primary question: How did these crackpots get state support? In America, no less? “War” may sound like the stuff of conspiracy theories, but Black’s lengthy endnotes show that the story of eugenics is sad but true. Like the MK Ultra experiments — which the U.S. Government has admitted to — eugenics is another frightening skeleton in America’s closet.
Black is not an America-basher, however. He balances the narrative by showing that most Americans opposed the eugenics movement and everything it stood for. Hence the book’s title, Black emphasizes that the movement was an ultra-elitist vanity project that waged a type of war on those in society least able to defend themselves.
Black succeeds in eliciting shudders simply by stating the facts. “War” is far from a cheery book, but it’s a fascinating story that needs to be told.