From: Records and Information Management Review
Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003) is full of references to records and archives. The author makes many references to archives and the help of archivists, noting the difference between this area of study and that of Holocaust studies, the subject of his earlier work: “unlike the Holocaust field,” Black writes, “in which the documentation is centralized in a number of key archives, the information on eugenics is exceedingly decentralized and buried deep within numerous local and niche repositories” (p. xviii). This motivates Black and his research assistants to scour many repositories, leading to many interesting experiences in gaining access to records related to eugenicists.
War Against the Weak is not a book about records, of course. Edwin Black chronicles, in considerable detail, the eugenics movement, presaging what ultimately happens in Nazi Germany (the latter eventually causing American proponents of the efforts to “purify” the population to cease their work). The book is a homily about social engineering, as well as racism, science, and statistics in our modern culture. It is also another study about the origins of disciplines and sciences in the Progressive period (the era also giving birth to professions like that of library science and archives),although Black is careful to point out that what is being described is pseudo-science. The scariest contention is Black’s assessment of more recent genetic research: “What eugenics was unable to accomplish in a century, newgenics may engineer in a generation” (p. xviii). With this assessment, Black provides a glimpse into the kinds of issues archivists and records managers may face in the future as society continues to use its vast array of information technologies to gather more and more knowledge about individuals.
The eugenics movement is especially interesting to records professionals because it has such an emphasis on recordkeeping. The eugenicists sent out family record questionnaires to middle and high schools and colleges and universities. They established the Eugenics Record Office in 1910 to compile data to help them root out “defective and undesirable Americans” (p. 52). Their viewpoints, and their methods for compiling information, found its way into academe and the textbooks used by college students. In other words, they were the penultimate record keepers, although their aims and their data were highly suspect.
Black’s book adds a slightly new wrinkle to the idea of recordkeeping for accountability. He writes in the preface the following: “This project has been a long, exhausting, exhilarating odyssey for me, one that has taken me to the darkest side of the brightest minds and revealed to me one reason why America has been struggling so long to become the country it still wants to be. We have a distance to go. Again, I ask how did this happen in a progressive society? After reviewing thousands upon thousands of pages of documentation, and pondering the question day and night for nearly two years, I realize it comes down to just one word. It was more than the self-validation and self-certification of the elite, more than just power and influence joining forces with prejudice. It was the corrupter of us all: it was arrogance” (p. xxv). It seems that in so many instances where governments and other organizations have gone astray, they have also arrogantly compiled elaborate records and information systems. Archivists and records managers someday may be asked to be accountable for what they have done in their care of these and other records systems. David J.Kevles, in his review of this book in the October 5, 2003 New York Times Book Review, states, “Black’s book does prompt us to wonder what in medical genetics and biotechnology we are taking socially and morally for granted today that our descendants might indict us for tomorrow.” It is something that records professionals ought to be pondering as well.