This is the right place to note that virtually all the organizations I investigated cooperated with unprecedented rigor, because they want the history illuminated as much as anyone. This includes the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institution, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the Max Planck Institute, successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. All gave me unlimited access and unstinting assistance. These organizations have all worked hard to help the world discover their pasts and must be commended. Planned Parenthood worked with me closely day after day, searching for and faxing documents, continually demonstrating their interest in the unvarnished truth. The same can be said for numerous other corporations and organizations. This is a book of history, and corporate and philanthropic America must be commended when they cooperate in an investigation as aggressive and demanding as mine.
Indeed, of the scores of societies, corporations, organizations and governmental agencies I contacted around the world, only one obstructed my work. IBM refused me access to its files. Despite this obstruction, I was able to demonstrate that the race-defining punch card used by the SS in Nazi Germany was actually derived from one developed for the Carnegie Institution years before Hitler came to power.
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. 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 alclass="underline" it was arrogance.
As I wrote in my 2003 Introduction, many books on the topic would follow mine, filling in the details about a given state or region, or centering on special classes of victims. I could have written twenty volumes with the research I had accumulated. But that was not possible. In the decade since War Against the Weak was published, more than a dozen good, specifically focused books have appeared. They are welcome. Dozens more are needed to fully chronicle the sagas of the many places ravaged by eugenics, from California, which led the nation in sterilization at the hands of its elite, to Peru, where in the later 1990s some 300,000 Indian women were sterilized in a program funded by $36 million in American foreign aid. More enterprise is needed to tell the plight endured by so many groups targeted for elimination, from the Deaf, considered by Alexander Graham Bell disciples to be a nemesis because they use sign language, to Native Americans, tricked by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as though they were a varmint infestation. Most researchers struggle just to grasp the tragedy and the suffering.
My task is very different. I have already identified the victims and their trail of tears, a trail too often disappearing into a fading future that suddenly turns left into oblivion. My mission is to expose who paid for these bleak episodes, who agreed to them, who made them possible, and who used his lofty status as a university scholar, a medical expert, a governor, a judge, a legislator, a prominent attorney, or a wealthy philanthropic organization to press forward on the gearshift of genocide.
Who controlled the throttle? Who paved the way? Who happily collected a toll when the caravan passed? Who escaped unscathed when the crimes were discovered?
There is much more to do here for the careful independent journalist and independent scholar, because more than a few of the gilded institutions are nervously standing inert and silent. Why? I am asked over and over. The answer is simple. Because too many of the vaulted universities and their funders were among the perpetrators and are too fearful to join the ranks of the illuminators lest they be illuminated.
Eugenics, after all, was a movement of the best and brightest, the elite and the magnified, against those perceived as weak or who became weak after being systematically sapped of their strength by junk science enshrined by the “unruly” of law. This national nightmare was not a movement of men in white sheets burning crosses on lawns at midnight. This was a shining movement of men in white lab coats and three-piece suits at the state-house, the courthouse, and the illustrious name-plated clinic. Pounding gavels, expounding fictitious facts, and propounding genocidal laws they twisted American society into a machine of genocide against a significant segment its own citizenry.
The Treaty on Genocide, Article 2, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” Eugenics and its mandate of family bloodline termination were repugnant enough to be deemed “genocide” from the first moments the term genocide came into use. Article 2, section D, specifies: “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” In Article 3, the treaty states that among the “acts [that] shall be punishable” are “complicity in genocide.” As for who shall be punished, the Treaty specifies the perpetrators in Article 4: “Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3 shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials, or private individuals.”
Beyond a distant horizon, justice still waits for the generations robbed of their progeny, for the never-born generations deprived of their existence. The force of justice also awaits the powerful in our past and present that made such misery happen by virtue of their ability to wage a war against the weak.
A Note on the Text
War Against the Weak utilized published and private sources spanning a century, and in several languages, and as such presented numerous textual challenges. We relied upon established style conventions as often as possible, and, when required, adapted and innovated styles. Readers may notice certain inconsistencies. Some explanation follows.
Every phrase of quoted material has remained as true as possible to the original terminology, punctuation and capitalization, even to the point of preserving archaic and sometimes offensive terms when used by the original source. No attempt was made to filter out ethnic denigrations when they appeared in period materials. Eugenicists in America called themselves eugenicists, but in Britain referred to themselves as eugenists, and sometimes the usage crossed; we used eugenicists in narrative but eugenists whenever it appeared in a specific quotation. In several instances we quoted from profoundly misspelled handwritten letters, and it was our decision to transcribe these as authentically as possible.