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Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity
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A timely and gripping history of the controversial eugenics movement in America–and the scientists, social reformers and progressives who supported it.In Better for All the World, Harry Bruinius charts the little known history of eugenics in America–a movement that began in the early twentieth century and resulted in the forced sterilization of more than 65,000 people. Bru
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Hardcover, 416 pages
Published
December 18th 2007
by Knopf
(first published 2006)
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Start your review of Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity
Well, it took me forever to read it, because the book is very fat and dry detailed, but a thought about quitting it almost never came to my mind, and eventually it was a very useful and unusual reading. I discovered the most amazing part of our recent history I had no idea about, and it was just like finding a missing pazzle in the whole picture.
What did I know about eugenics before? I was full of absolute crap about it. I think that most people (only those of them, of course, who actually know ...more
What did I know about eugenics before? I was full of absolute crap about it. I think that most people (only those of them, of course, who actually know ...more
Jan 16, 2013
Sophia
rated it
liked it
·
review of another edition
Recommends it for:
history majors, people interested in obscure historical facts, disturbing nation-wide movements,
I want to rate this book higher than I am going to.
The subject matter, I think, warrants a read. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about this subject (and by "enjoyed" I really mean I was alarmed that this happened and nobody knows about it!), and would recommend reading on it to EVERYONE. The eugenics movement is something that needs to be remembered. Not because I think it is something to be particularly proud of, but because an uneducated mass risks repeating the past. This is something that needs ...more
The subject matter, I think, warrants a read. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about this subject (and by "enjoyed" I really mean I was alarmed that this happened and nobody knows about it!), and would recommend reading on it to EVERYONE. The eugenics movement is something that needs to be remembered. Not because I think it is something to be particularly proud of, but because an uneducated mass risks repeating the past. This is something that needs ...more
An enjoyable read. Better For All the World is a history of eugenics in America. It makes the argument that eugenics as a philosophy is the result of our sense of American exceptialism and our theological background. It further traces how Galton, Laughlin, and Davenport's work informed Nazi eugenic philosophy (the Nazis basically copied our eugenics propaganda and laws in their anti-Jewish policies and programs).
In the end it is a call to remember our history in order to prevent its repetition ...more
In the end it is a call to remember our history in order to prevent its repetition ...more
This was a tough book for me to rate/review as it is one of the few books I didn’t finish this year. The subject matter is so important and part of American/First World history that is rarely taught, but I found the prose very dry and hard to get through. We get pretty complete bios of a number of the key thinkers and writers working with eugenics, but sometimes that was very confusing at the men sort of got mixed up in my mind and a lot of them worked together at various points. I was also a li
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I kept thinking, "My God, why didn't I know this? Why wasn't I taught this in high school?" It's a humbling, horrifying read. I was angered and felt betrayed in some ways. I was taught (and I focused on WW2 in high school, studying it for a year) that Nazis were bad and the U.S. were heroes - we fought the big, bad Nazis and came out shining (albeit the Great Depression). Now I discover what part we played in creating that monster. I've taken several notes from the book and will own it some day,
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Want to get really, really angry? I sure was when I read this. Learn how American eugenecists set the precedents in law that were followed in early Nazi Germany. How well-meaning scientists thought they could make society better. How the US Congress was advised to make immigration quotas, as well as to deny any kind of amnesty to people fleeing the Nazis. How people in the US were sterilized against their will and sometimes without their knowledge or consent. It is a stern warning for the future
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It's a little overwritten, but overall fascinating and really covers the topic well. There was a little too much family history, and he jumped around and sometimes went into detail about people who weren't that important and I skimmed those parts. However, overall, a satisfying read that adds to my understanding of the American eugenics movement.
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Interesting topic, but a slow read -- almost like a textbook at times.
It was sometimes repetitive as well; an excerpt from Oliver Wendell Holmes' Supreme Court opinion in the Buck v. Bell case appears at least five times, which was annoying.
Still, it was a worthwhile read about a part of American history I knew very little about. ...more
It was sometimes repetitive as well; an excerpt from Oliver Wendell Holmes' Supreme Court opinion in the Buck v. Bell case appears at least five times, which was annoying.
Still, it was a worthwhile read about a part of American history I knew very little about. ...more
I was only seeking to learn a bit more about the Eugenics movement in general; instead I learned more about the beginnings of social work in the United States and how "well-meaning" "scientifically based knowledge" can be used to create policy that guides us today, a century later
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State-sanctioned eugenics programs. We inspired the Nazis.
It's funny how the U.S. belatedly entering into a war we did everything to avoid until Japan literally dropped bombs on our doorstep somehow managed to convince an entire country, and much of the world, that we were the good guys - never mind a couple hundred years of history showing we're just as morally ambiguous (and occasionally outright evil) as the next nation. The next time your flag-splattered uncle starts shouting at you about American exceptionalism over the holiday dinner table, I sug
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A very interesting history that they are not teaching in schools. Easy to read and understand.
Was hoping for more stories from the people then the actual inventors of eugenics
A history of the Eugenics movement in the US, England, and Germany, from the publication of Francis Galton's "Hereditary Genius" to its post WWII decline in influence.
The subject itself is very interesting, and to many, it might come as a surprise that Hitler's program of 'racial hygiene' was influenced tremendously by the forced sterilization that American had engaged in during the early 1900's. The alliance between feminism, Progressives, and Eugenics in the US and England would also be surpri ...more
The subject itself is very interesting, and to many, it might come as a surprise that Hitler's program of 'racial hygiene' was influenced tremendously by the forced sterilization that American had engaged in during the early 1900's. The alliance between feminism, Progressives, and Eugenics in the US and England would also be surpri ...more
The timeline jumped around a bit too much, and I found it odd that in the context of the discussion of humans deliberately breeding in order to encourage desirable traits, slavery wasn't mentioned at all. We know that masters wanted their female slaves to have a lot of children so they could get more money out of a single purchase, and that although it was rare, some masters did force their slaves to have children with each other to encourage them to be taller, stronger, or what have you. For a
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Oct 08, 2007
stephanie
marked it as to-read
·
review of another edition
Shelves:
american-history,
non-fiction
[update 11/14: picked up from the library, starting again. need some good nonfiction.)
good god, this is eye-opening. i love it. love love love. please don't fail me now, harry, i am invested in you and your story. don't start telling the tale from the perspective of carrie buck's fallopian tube, or anything.
also, why is there not more out there about mental health law? mental health rights? this whole law basically says women don't have reproductive rights - the state has control over them - wh ...more
good god, this is eye-opening. i love it. love love love. please don't fail me now, harry, i am invested in you and your story. don't start telling the tale from the perspective of carrie buck's fallopian tube, or anything.
also, why is there not more out there about mental health law? mental health rights? this whole law basically says women don't have reproductive rights - the state has control over them - wh ...more
I put this on my to read a decade ago and the more time passed, the more I wondered why I'd done that. I finally decided to read it, and wow, I realized why I wanted to in the first place. It turned out to be way more interesting than I was expecting and not at all dry. It is of course disturbing and depressing, but it starts with how Darwin's theories influenced the idea of humanity and worked it's way to the darkest hours in US and German history in a very compelling way. And then there's just
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The full title says it all: The secret history of forced sterilization and America’s quest for racial purity. One of the biggest things I learned was that Germany actually modeled its eugenics program after the United States and that many people here were excited to see whether a statewide implementation of the ideas of racial purity would succeed. The story isn’t complete without mentioning that some of the biggest players were themselves genetically ‘inferior’ i.e. epileptic, father of a lesbi
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While the subject matter is at first engrossing, I think this book would work better as a long-form magazine article. There's just too much detail in here; what Bruinius finds fascinating didn't hold up through 300 pages for me. This little-known history is surprising and shocking in places, though, and if it were presented in a more condensed format I think it could be more effective.
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Absolutely fascinating. And the style worked well for my purposes - enough detail that I trusted the scholarship and enough case studies that I enjoyed reading about something slightly tangential to my focus. I would recommend this to everyone interested in American history. The Epilogue was especially powerful.
If this book were an Internet argument, the author would have lost right away because he Godwins himself from the first page. In fact, not a page goes by when Nazis are not mentioned. Other than that, a pretty interesting read.
This book gets very caught up in the minutiae and has a difficult time conveying important issues in a "big picture" method. Very dry, the last two thirds of the book took a Herculean effort to complete.
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Creepy. American pseudo-scientists were the ones who developed "racial purity" theories. If they didn't like the look of you, they could institutionalize and sterilize you. The Nazis took it from there.
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Mar 09, 2008
Kelly
marked it as to-read
I'll try this, but bet I will have to set it down in rage.
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a "little" biased but a "big" interesting
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"The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity" How could I not pick this one up? It's in my current stack of library books, so expect a review in a few weeks.
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read like a mandatory read. But the information was interesting and disturbing.
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