![]() ![]() The theory embraced by Davenport and his colleagues across America was “negative” eugenics. In 1902, he used his position as director of the Brooklyn Institute’s biological research center on Long Island to secure major funding from the newly formed Carnegie Institution to investigate “methods of Evolution.” One of those concerned about the fate of the nation was Charles Benedict Davenport, a Harvard-educated zoologist. In the wake of the Civil War and the mass immigrations of the late 19th century, the specter of “mongrelization” haunted the American psyche. Wells, pondered managed human reproduction, American “can do” put it into practice. While eminent Victorians, including historian and novelist H.G. He believed that promoting marriage among those with superior traits would improve the human species over time. Galton looked past Spencer, Darwin and Gregor Mendel to analyze the hereditary patterns of human beings for superior characteristics. Galton invented the term eugenics in 1883 from Greek roots meaning “well born.” A cousin of Charles Darwin, Galton also devised the first weather maps and the first system for cataloging fingerprints, another word he coined. Kurtz would be loathe to imagine.Įnglish statistician Francis J. The central theme of War Against the Weak can be summed up in the declarative sentence that opens the second chapter: “Mankind’s quest for perfection has always turned dark.” From the first statement by Herbert Spencer in the mid-1800s of the concept of the survival of the fittest to Hitler’s announcement nearly a century later that he would exterminate the Jews “like lice,” Black chronicles a descent into horror even Joseph Conrad’s character Mr. And there are other surprising facts as well. Nearly as astonishing is the overwhelming evidence linking the eugenics movement to the highest levels of American academia, philanthropy and government. The shocking revelation of War Against the Weak is how much German ideas about rassenhygiene (literally “race hygiene”) were modeled on research methods and social engineering practices that began in the United States decades before Adolf Hitler wrote a single word of Mein Kampf. Black uncovers a long-repressed chapter of social history significant enough to command reappraisal of the legacy of eugenics for today and for the future.īlack’s last book, the award-winning bestseller IBM and the Holocaust, told of how Big Blue created what marketers call a customized business solution to help their Third Reich clients plan and carry out the Final Solution. In the stunning new book, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, investigative journalist Edwin Black traces the development of eugenics in England, America and elsewhere. But it once defined a way of seeing things that for many seemed as sound as the evolutionary principles upon which it was based. These days, the term “eugenics,” if used at all, evokes discredited notions of social Darwinism and other racist ideologies. National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.
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