Pure America
Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Between 1927 and 1979, more than 8,000 people were involuntarily sterilized in five hospitals across the state of Virginia. From this plain and terrible fact springs Elizabeth Catte’s Pure America, a sweeping, unsparing history of eugenics in Virginia, and by extension the United States. Virginia’s twentieth-century eugenics program was not the misguided initiative of well-meaning men of the day, writes Catte, with clarity and ferocity. It was a manifestation of white supremacy. It was a form of employment insurance. It was a means of controlling “troublesome” women and a philosophy that helped remove poor people from valuable land. It was cruel and it was wrong, and yet today sites where it was practiced like Western State Hospital, in Staunton, VA, are rehabilitated as luxury housing, their histories hushed up in the service of capital. As was amply evidenced by her acclaimed 2018 book What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, Catte has no room for excuses; no patience for equivocation. What does it mean for modern America, she asks here, that such buildings are given the second chance that 8,000 citizens never got? And what possible interventions can be made now, repair their damage?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.