Free War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition by Edwin Black Page A

decade since the original publication of War Against the Weak , the effort to bring to light the shame of eugenics has been, for me, a personal journey. I have been invited into the hearts and minds, and indeed into the disconsolate souls of many communities worldwide. I have had to come to grips with their never-born children, their unaddressed disconsolation, and their unanswered questions.
    The victims I encounter every day are as diverse as humankind. Jews, Native Americans, African Americans, Asian, Hispanic, the disabled, the Deaf, the medically abused, the terminally ill, subcontinental Indians, Peruvian indigenous tribes, Islamic women, Jamaicans, Gypsies, women pregnant with unwanted daughters, Appalachians, the poor, the undereducated, and many others. They are all united by one bond of horror. Each was subjected to or threatened with imposed efforts to eliminate their descendants from the face of the earth. To those in power, the victims looked wrong, spoke wrong, prayed wrong, lived wrong, dressed wrong, and in some cases were anathema not for anything they did but for what their progeny might do or represent many years later. The identification so many groups have made with the book’s historical narrative and explicit warning for the future has been a disheartening triumph. The landscape of the shattered families stretches beyond what one eye can see and any one consciousness can absorb.
    War Against the Weak has been course-adopted as required reading by universities across the United States. Numerous filmmakers worldwide have incorporated the book into their productions, including a major, full-length documentary of the same name. War Against the Weak was honored by the World Affairs Council, Great Lakes chapter, with its International Human Rights Award. In 2010, the American Association of People with Disabilities presented me with the “Justice for All Award ” in a Congressional ceremony in recognition of this work. In 2011, I was recognized by the Institute for Moral Courage for the book. Later, in 2011, Congress called upon me for nonpartisan testimony on the subject in an effort to forefend future tragedies. One of my salient memories, also in 2011, was a book tour of North Carolina at the invitation of a coalition of elected state officials, universities, and communal organizations. At Winston-Salem State University, two auditoriums, linked by live global streaming, assembled to hear long-sought answers about the devastation wrought upon so many diverse families connected forever by this injustice. My annual lecture schedule includes scores of venues worldwide on eugenics and its implications, continuous media appearances, and regular interviews with high school students who select the subject for their History Day competition.
    Among the many impossible challenges this topic presents to an author is the impossibility of comprehensiveness. Despite more than 600 pages, with some ninety pages of four-point footnotes and references, I could have written twenty volumes. Each of my twenty-one chapters could have easily provided enough material for a full book. My long row of file cabinets, stuffed with thousands of pages of archival and period materials, is yearning to be published. The saga of each state and ethnic group could each fill a separate book. It will be years before scholars have gone deep enough. Having left out 90 percent of everything I discovered a decade earlier, I was determined to add some new material from my files in this expanded edition. The new material should only be read after the main book chapters.
    In this Appendix, two states are briefly illuminated with essays: Connecticut and North Carolina. Of the dozens of egregious cases, these two each carry their own unforgettable and linked story.
Ethnic Cleansing in Connecticut
    Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a so-called “master race.”
    But the concept of a white,