A Scary Read
A Review by Adrienne Miller

Edwin Black, the author of the radical and revelatory IBM and the Holocaust, is a dangerous man. He tells us things we don't want to hear, like, for instance, this: "The scientific rationales that drove killer doctors at Auschwitz were first concocted on Long Island." His groundbreaking new book, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, argues that the Holocaust had its frightful origins right here in the good old U. S. of A. Hitler was so impressed with American "eugenics" (a contrived term made up of the Greek words for well and born) that he sought to duplicate it in Germany. What began here as an organized campaign at the start of the 20th century was financed by Andrew Carnegie, and later by the Rockefellers and Harrimans, and based on Long Island, New York, at the Station for Experimental Evolution of the Carnegie Institution. The movement leader: a terrifying (my word) and sad (Black's word) zoologist named Charles Davenport, who intended to build a Nordic master race. Black has plenty of other disturbing facts for us: Sixty thousand Americans who were deemed unfit to procreate were forcibly sterilized, and — less evil but nevertheless deeply chilling — the SAT test was created by a "radical raceologist" committed to white superiority. War Against the Weak is a scary and necessary book.

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