War Against The Weak: Eugenics And America's Campaign To Create A Master Race by Edwin Black, author of IBM And The Holocaust, deals with a history many America's might know about in passing, but not know of the ugly details. Black's long history of the eugenics movement in the United States, and its ties to the eugenics movement in Germany, meticulously documents arguably the most racist period of this nation's history.

Black's narrative traces the development of the international eugenics movement from its origins in the study of genetics starting with the rediscovery of the pioneering work in genetics of Mendel in the late 19th century to its heyday in the United States with the founding of the private Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in 1910, and the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of people deemed human waste by the movement, to the movement's demise in the smoldering ruins of the concentration camps of Nazi-occupied Europe. The term "eugenics" was first coined by a British mathematician named Francis J. Galton, but it was in the United States that the notion of genetically engineering a master Nordic race became a well funded movement. The eugenics movement received the support of some of the nation's wealthiest families, including Carnegie, Harriman, and Rockefeller. In this sense, the eugenics movement was the quintessential war against the poor funded by the rich.

Eugenics became a swear word after World War II and the policies the movement advocated came to be viewed as crimes against humanity. Eugenics eventually came to be known as "human genetics" and "genetics counseling." Eugenics also lives on by way of the finished products of racist psychological testing, namely, the IQ test and the SAT. Today, the biggest threat genetics poses to people's liberty is in the area of insurance discrimination. Every now and then it might make a brief comeback, like with Richard Hernstein and Charles Murray's 1994 book The Bell Curve, which purported to prove that black people are of inferior intelligence, but never with the same impact on public policy it once had.

Meticulously researched and footnoted, but somewhat tedious at a length of 440 pages, Black leaves virtually no stone unturned in retelling the tale of this nation's eugenics movement. The individual who reads Black's book will forever look at the claims of the science of human genetics with a heightened skepticism and a desire to discern what public policy implications such knowledge might entail.

--Rick Giombetti (This article was originally published at the author's blogsite, and can be commented on at rjgiombetti.blogspot.com/2003_10_14_rjgiombetti_archive.html