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Vol. 190 No. 11,
March 29, 2004
Book Reviews
Click on book title to purchase from amazon.com.
The ‘Perfect’ Life
War Against the Weak 
Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race
By Edwin Black
Four Walls Eight Windows. 550p $27
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The confluence of advances in human genetics and reproductive science
has resulted in the ability to design babies. “Designing babies” is an
imprecise term used by journalists and commentators—not by
scientists—to describe several different reproductive technologies that
have one thing in common: they give parents more control over what
their offspring will be like. Many
inherited diseases, for example, such as cystic fibrosis and
Huntington’s disease, can be detected very early using a technique
called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PDG). This procedure, first
used in 1990, enables doctors to perform genetic tests on embryos
produced by in vitro fertilization. Embryos found to be free of a
disease-causing gene mutation can then be selectively implanted into a
woman’s womb to initiate a pregnancy. PDG can also be used to select
the sex or other genetic characteristics of embryos. As our knowledge
of the human genome increases and our ability to modify it improves,
other techniques may also become possible, including picking an embryo
for its specific traits and manipulating human genes for therapeutic or
cosmetic reasons. What are the ethical, social and scientific implications of this potent new technology? In War Against the Weak,
the investigative journalist Edwin Black lays bare the ugly story of
America’s eugenics movement and cautions that with the arrival of a
“precocious” new genetics age, a “new war against the weak” is
imaginable. Black’s warning—to separate fact from fantasy and blessings
from menaces of 21st-century genetic engineering—is well worth heeding. Black
argues that the eugenics movement of the early 20th century began in
the United States in laboratories on Long Island, N.Y., and was
“supported by the best universities in America, endorsed by the
brightest thinkers, financed by the richest capitalists,” but ended in
Nazi Germany’s death camps. Launched by a small group of enterprising
academics and professionals, this pseudoscientific campaign had one
purpose: to create a “superior Nordic race.” Eugenic research into
heredity, as Black stresses repeatedly, combined “equal portions of
gossip, race prejudice, sloppy methods and leaps of logic, all caulked
together by elements of actual genetic knowledge to create the glitter
of a genuine science.” As their methods, American eugenicists promoted
state-mandated sterilizations, human breeding programs, marriage
prohibition, racist immigration policies and even “eugenic” euthanasia.
Their hope was that eventually—perhaps within several generations—only
the white Nordics would remain in the United States, and eugenic
doctrines and policies could then be exported globally. Black
is telling a well-known story, yet he adds to it substantial new detail
(culled from some 50,000 collected documents) in disclosing “many
explosive revelations and embarrassing episodes about some of our
society’s most honored individuals and institutions.” That the eugenics
movement allied shameless racism with mighty American power, position
and wealth, that corporate philanthropists (like Harriman, Carnegie and
Rockefeller) financed the movement, and that the U.S. Supreme Court
sanctioned eugenic sterilization in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, with
the misanthropic Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. infamously writing
for an 8-to-1 majority that “three generations of imbeciles is enough,”
is familiar ground. But Black produces damning new evidence about
“corporate philanthropy gone wild,” involuntary euthanasia of newborns
who were deformed or had birth defects and our national nightmare of
coerced sterilizations. For three or four decades after Nuremberg
declared forced sterilizations crimes against humanity, the United
States continued to sterilize “unfit” Americans, judged to be such by
self-chosen elites because of their eugenic or racial character. In
the introduction, Black reminds us about recent public apologies from
several governors to the victims of their states’ official eugenics
programs. An estimated 70,000 Americans were victims of eugenics, the
“weak” of the book’s title. These include poor urban dwellers and rural
“white trash”; European immigrants such as brown-haired Irish and
southeastern Italians; African Americans and Mexicans; the mentally
ill, epileptics and alcoholics; and anyone else judged “feebleminded.”
To no one’s surprise, “feeblemindedness” was to a eugenicist what
pornography was to one Supreme Court justice. (When the court was
called upon to distinguish pornography from art, Justice Potter Stewart
famously opined that “I shall not today attempt further to define
[hard-core pornography].... But I know it when I see it.”) For
Black, “in eugenics, the United States led and Germany followed.” True
enough, American eugenicists collaborated with their German
counterparts, and German eugenicists praised American policies and
research. Even Hitler, in Mein Kampf, heralded America’s
sterilization and immigration restriction laws. These American
connections were a revelation to this reviewer. Black’s relentless
focus on the Nazi connection, however, does not convince me that the
American example inspired Hitler to set in action the Holocaust. Nor
does Black prove that leading American eugenicists continued to support
Nazi concentration camps and virulent biological anti-Semitism until
the United States entered the war. That
said, the description of the Third Reich’s eugenic horrors in
Buchenwald and Auschwitz is chilling reading. Predictably, the sadistic
crimes of Josef Mengele, the camp doctor at Auschwitz, are described in
great detail to highlight “the last fanatic stand of the eugenic
crusade to create a super race, a superior race—and finally a master
race.” But Black is at his best in presenting the strange and forgotten
case of Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen. He was a Polish Jew,
Harvard-credentialed psychiatrist and naturalized American citizen, who
became the chief eugenicist of New Jersey under then-Governor Woodrow
Wilson, and ended up as a physician prisoner and S.S. collaborator in
ghastly experimental medical activity at Buchenwald. The Nuremberg
trial judges, without evidence of specific murders, sentenced
Katzen-Ellenbogen to life imprisonment. Black,
whose mother “still remembers when American principles of eugenics came
to Nazi-occupied Poland,” has given us an astonishingly gripping
narrative of the evils of eugenics. Especially in our postmodern world,
this cautionary tale of distinct power elites describing people as
leading a “life unworthy of life” is an important read. Kevin P. Quinn
Kevin P. Quinn, S.J., is professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center. Click here for
a sample of reviewer's writings in America and for
books by reviewer at amazon.com. Link to "sample writings" is slow; link to amazon may list books by authors with similar names.
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