In
War Against the Weak, award-winning investigative journalist Edwin Black connects Nazi crimes to a pseudoscientific American movement of the early 20th century called
eugenics. Based on selective breeding of humans, eugenics began in laboratories on
Long Island but ended in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Cruel and racist laws were enacted in 27 US states. 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 declared such practices crimes against humanity. This is a timely and shocking chronicle of bad science at its worst, one with many important lessons for the impending genetic age.
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Background Information
Long Island, a product of the last Ice Age, is largely rural in the east but part of America's largest city in the west. Oliver Wendell Holmes was the given name of two prominent Massachusetts men, the second of whom became a justice on the Supreme Court.
