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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 101.1 | The History Cooperative
101.1  
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March, 2005
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Reviews

War Against the Weak
Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race

By Edwin Black
(New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003. Pp. xviii, 550. Illustrations, notes, major sources, index. $27.00.)

The rise of the pseudoscience of eugenics and the sociopolitical use of its unproven theories form one of the darkest chapters in medical history. Edwin Black extensively reviews archival materials to document the connections between eugenics in the United States and the work of the German Nazis. He argues that flawed American research in the first three decades of the twentieth century provided an apparently rational cover for Hitler's deranged plans, and explores, in the last two chapters, how the findings of modern genetics might well be misused today. 1
      Eugenics in America combined a distortion of nineteenth-century scientific discoveries with the misinterpretation of sociological trends at the turn of the twentieth century. Darwin's theories opened new vistas on the natural world, biomedical and psychological research advanced, and Mendel's work defining inheritance of simple traits in plants was rediscovered after fifty years. For many Progressive Era scientists and social theorists, the possibility for human improvement seemed limitless. . . .
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