The Ghosts of American Eugenics

Book Recommendation: War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Much of what I know about America's hidden role in creating the cultural and scientific foundations that enabled the horrors of World War II, I learned from historian and author Edwin Black's unflinching historical accounts.

His "War Against the Weak" (available on Amazon, AbeBooks) opens with a haunting declaration: "This particular book speaks for the never-born, for those whose questions have never been heard—for those who never existed."

Throughout the first six decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of thousands of Americans were forcibly sterilized, wrongfully committed to institutions, or prohibited from marrying—all because they were deemed genetically "unfit." Their crime was living in poverty, being an immigrant, Black, Jewish, epileptic, disabled, or simply speaking the wrong language.

What makes this history particularly chilling is that it was not the work of fringe extremists–mainstream actors played key roles.

This "pernicious white-gloved war," as Black calls it, was p…