War Against the Weak

The pseudoscience of eugenics—selective human breeding for “improvement” of the species—Infamously fed Nazi sterilization policy in the 1930s right up through the genocide of the 1940s. But what people may not know is that eugenics has American roots. This stimulating documentary traces eugenics’ international history with cinematic verve and chilling insight. The story begins with Francis Galton, 19th-century inventor of biometrics and Darwin’s cousin, who theorizes the hereditary transmission of mental as well as physical traits, proposing humanity can be evolutionarily advanced through scientific insight and management—an idea he terms eugenics. The idea gains currency as U.S. institutions and the traditional elite, including reform-minded Progressives like Teddy Roosevelt, react with race-conscious alarm to the high tide of immigration from southern and eastern Europe. By the 1920s an international association of eugenics societies agrees to lobby the centers of world power on behalf of its agenda—one that soon has direct ties to Germany’s new Nazi regime. Visually captivating, and interspersed with movingly understated testimonials from targets of the eugenics legacy, War Against the Weak documents an enduring history in bold, urgent strokes and with meticulous care, complicating the usual accounting of right and left, reactionary and progressive, while deepening our understanding of the underlying motors of change in Western civilization’s fraught social evolution.