Pure America Eugenics and the making of Modern Virginia

Historian Catte (What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia) delivers a concise and deeply unsettling study of the eugenics movement in Virginia. According to Catte, Virginia elites in the early 20th-century strove to maintain old racial and class hierarchies under the veneer of scientific and humanitarian progress. She contends that the state's 1924 Sterilization Act, which allowed doctors to sterilize institutionalized patients without their consent, was intended to protect white racial purity from internal contamination by culling those deemed "unfit," and that the 1924 Racial Integrity Act buttressed whiteness by preventing interracial marriage and redefining those with more than one-sixteenth Native American heritage as "colored." Catte also delves into the history of Western State Hospital in Staunton, Va., where 1,700 individuals were sterilized between 1927 and 1964, and the displacement of 500 "mountain families" to create Shenandoah National Park in the 1930s. In a lacerating analysis of the links between economic policies and eugenicist thought, Catte examines coerced labor at Virginia's psychiatric institutions, the destruction of a historically-Black neighborhood in Charlottesville under the guise of urban renewal, and the transformation of Western State into an upscale hotel and condominiums. This provocative and impeccably argued history reveals how traumas of the past inform the inequalities of today. (Feb.)

The author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia (2018) returns with a history of Virginia's eugenics movement and its interconnections with racial, gender, and class prejudices. In this grounded, well-rendered, and highly disturbing account, Catte examines the period from the late 1920s to 1979 at the Western State Lunatic Asylum. It was, she writes, "a long era in the history of psychiatric medicine when therapeutic efforts primarily focused on containment and control, not care or cure." As part of the eugenics movement, Western State advanced its purity-of-race ideology, which taught that people with disabilities--and the just plain poor--were expensive social burdens. They were viewed as a disorderly class populated by "undesirables." Proponents of this concept were worried that the "unfit" would reproduce and create an ongoing social debt that could never be repaid. With justified outrage backed by copious archival evidence, Catte describes the process by which Virginia made eugenic sterilization legal. Importantly, the author also demonstrates how practitioners of eugenics did more than just sterilize the mentally ill and those who were not considered "pure." They also advanced the cause of White supremacy, controlled anti-establishment women, and exploited the impoverished. The movement created a comprehensive, hateful belief system about the kinds of lives that marginalized people deserved. Catte details the dire consequences for a whole galaxy of "mongrels"--a reprehensible classification that included immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, Blacks, poor Whites, and Native Americans--from the illegalization of intermarriage ("when interbreeding between two races occurred, the worst traits always became the dominant traits") to the displacement of more than 500 families to create Shenandoah National Park. The author closes by examining the suppression of memory as it pertains to the thousands of sterilizations that occurred as well as Western State's use of patients for free labor. A well-told, richly contextualized investigation of an appalling episode in American history. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.