The New Republic, Chris Lehmann
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/chris-lehmann>/April 20, 2021
The Chilling Persistence of Eugenics
Elizabeth Catte’s new book traces a shameful history and its legacy
today.
ARTHUR ESTABROOK PAPERS; M.E. GRENANDER SPECIAL COLLECTIONS & ARCHIVES;
UNIVERSITY AT ALBANY, SUNY
Carrie Buck and her mother, Emma, at the Virginia State Colony for
Epileptics and Feebleminded, 1924
The top-down quest for social control in America often seems to lead, by
a deep-seated sort of homing instinct, to schemes of reproductive
coercion. Tucker Carlson’s recentfulminations
<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/us/tucker-carlson-adl-replacement-theory.html>about
racial “replacement theory” are but the latest in a long line of
pseudo-Darwinian depictions of social decline. Carlson himself, of
course, was cribbing his ugly tirade from the baldly fascist
speculations of scores ofalt-right propagandists
<https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/10/10/when-white-nationalists-chant-their-weird-slogans-what-do-they-mean>,
who in turn gained unprecedented access to state power via the labors of
racist Trump apparatchiks like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.
Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia
by Elizabeth Catte
Buy on Bookshop <https://www.bookshop.org/a/1620/9781948742733>
Belt Publishing, 196 pp., $26.00
Behind all these latter-day blood-and-soil obsessions is the specter of
eugenics—the early-twentieth-century pseudoscience that sought to uphold
a hierarchy of social privilege by stamping out the genetic bloodlines
of supposedly inferior and intellectually disabled people via a campaign
of mass sterilization. The gruesome program of white elite social
domination that mainstream demagogues such as Carlson can only hint at
was the explicit calling card of the eugenics movement, which at the
height of its influence in the 1920s got sterilization programs
targeting criminals, the mentally ill, and nonwhite minorities passedin
more than 30 state legislatures <https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/>.
In/Pure America/ <https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9781948742733>/,/Elizabeth
Catte, author of/What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia/
<https://bookshop.org/a/1620/9780998904146>/,/charts the enduring legacy
of eugenic thought and practice in Virginia. Between 1927 and 1979, the
state presided over the forced sterilization of more than 8,000
residents committed to state mental health institutions. It was, in
fact, a forced sterilization in a Virginia institution that
launched/Buck v. Bell,/the 1927 Supreme Court test case that created the
land rush in eugenics legislation across the country. (/Buck/is today
best known for Progressive jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s terse
summary of the majority opinion: “Three generations of imbeciles are
enough.”)
Virginia’s eugenics initiatives weren’t the most expansive in the
country—that dishonor belonged to California, which presided over more
than 60,000 forced sterilizations, disproportionately targeting the
state’s Latino population. But in firmly adapting the racist logic of
eugenics chiefly to a population of poor white mental health patients,
Virginia showcased the way that the rhetoric of scientific social
control could bend to any number of socioeconomic and hierarchical
dictates beyond the Old Confederacy’s race-based model of elite
domination. And this pseudoscientific dispensation directly fuels all
manner of white supremacist sentiment on today’s reactionary right.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Catte lives in Staunton, Virginia, just outside Shenandoah National
Park, home to the sprawling former grounds of Western State Hospital,
where more than 1,700 forced sterilizations took place, and where
eugenics enthusiast Joseph DeJarnette, the facility’s longtime
superintendent, lent expert testimony in the/Buck/case. Nearby
Charlottesville, where Catte’s partner works, was the longtime home of
plaintiff Carrie Buck—a former domestic servant who had been rushed into
the state’s Lynchburg Colony asylum at the age of 18, after a nephew of
her employers, John and Alice Dobbs, raped her and she became pregnant.
Carrie’s widowed mother, Emma, had already been committed to Lynchburg
in 1920, and classified in the crude testing argot of the time as a
“moron”—“a class of people who were typically confined for life,” Catte
writes. The Dobbses fabricated a history of recent unstable-to-dangerous
behavior for Carrie as part of her commitment proceedings, and the same
judge who had overseen her mother’s commitment swiftly engineered
Carrie’s. Carrie was confined at Lynchburg after her baby’s birth and
was sterilized after the high court decision in her suit—a veritable
show trial, in which her defense was handled by Irving Whitehead, a
lawyer who served on the governing board of the Lynchburg Colony. (In
his nominal defense presentation, Whitehead fretted over the
hypothetical spread of venereal disease once sterilized inmates were
once more released into the world and predictably embarked “on a
rampage” of procreation-free promiscuity; best to play things safe, he
suggested, and leave the sterilized patients in question permanently
confined.)
Virginia showcased the way that the rhetoric of scientific social
control could bend to any number of socioeconomic and hierarchical dictates.
The circumstances of Carrie Buck’s commitment were not at all unusual—in
another early eugenics case in Virginia, a Richmond woman named Willie
Mallory was also confined at Lynchburg after her arrest on trumped-up
prostitution charges. Her admitting examiner conducted some intelligence
tests that failed to produce any signs of mental impairment; when the
examiner told a court supervisor “I can’t get that woman in,” Mallory
later testified, the court official replied, “Put on there, ‘unable to
control her nerves,’ and we can get her in for that.” In short order,
she was confined and sterilized; once she was released, she was
forbidden any contact with her husband or her younger children on pain
of recommitment. The only way to keep the family intact was to sue
Lynchburg’s ghoulish and dogmatic eugenicist supervisor, Albert Priddy;
because the facts of the case were so egregious and Willie Mallory’s
admissions records were badly incomplete, the Mallorys prevailed.
But the victory was Pyrrhic, at best: The defeat left Priddy and his
allies in the Virginia social science establishment all the more
determined to prevail in the/Buck/case. “No one wanted to be humiliated
like Priddy,” Catte writes, “forced to downplay their work as something
that was only beneficial to worthless women. There was a better world to
build, and it would not be done in the shadows.”
Indeed not. Even before the/Buck/ruling, Virginia endorsed a Racial
Integrity Act in 1924—a companion piece to the state’s Sterilization
Act, passed the same year—largely thanks to the fierce advocacy of
Walter Plecker, the head registrar of the state’s Bureau of Vital
Statistics. The act sought to codify the infamous “one drop” mythology
of white racial purity as an inviolable principle of human breeding, so
as to fend off the dread specter of white bloodlines contaminated by
African American and Native American sources. Plecker pursued this
twisted aim with an Ahab-like rage for order; he managed to get Native
Americans essentially written out of Virginia demographic records after
elite white citizens obtained a loophole in the act nullifying its
provisions for people with one-sixteenth or less of Native blood. He was
convinced the loophole would lead to countless spurious claims of white
identity among the mixed-Native population, and his mania to fend off
this specter of racial contamination was so deep-seated that he
preferred to wish away the Native American presence in the state
entirely. (Pamunkey Tribe Chief William Miles later labeled this an act
of “statistical genocide, which Plecker would presumably have taken as a
compliment; Plecker boasted, of his own efforts, that “Hitler’s
genealogical study of the Jews is not more complete.”) Nor was Plecker’s
racial monomania confined to the domain of the living: He canvassed Old
Dominion cemeteries, seeking to drive away the specter of otherworldly
race contamination by ensuring the segregation of interred corpses.
Catte’s bracing and detailed recreation of the world of Virginia
eugenics conveys the full reach of its legacy. In the same year that the
Racial Integrity and Sterilization Acts won approval, the city of
Charlottesville unveiled its statue of Robert E. Lee—a symbolic
elevation of the old Confederacy in the midst of a confident new regime
of racial impunity, imbued with the rhetoric of advanced social
planning. The racialized and class-bound future that Lee’s statue
presided over was “a living, breathing, modern enterprise,” Catte
observes, “that had been secured through an alliance of law, science,
education, and, above all, power.” Catte skillfully narrates the saga of
modern Charlottesville in the shadow of this new social compact: the
gentrification of the formerly Black neighborhood of Vinegar Hill; the
artificial housing scarcity created by the city’s segregationist zoning
laws; and, of course, the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally convened
on the pretext of preventing the Lee statue’s removal.
Catte also revisits the controversial clearing of occupied farmland to
create Shenandoah National Park in 1935. It was during this battle,
steeped in eugenicist rhetoric, that Mandel Sherman and Thomas Henry
wrote the bogus 1933 ethnographic study/Hollow Folk./Ostensibly a study
of the isolated rural people who lived on (and were about to be removed
from) that land, the book is notable mostly for transposing
long-standing racist canards about African Americans (attributing to
them inferior intelligence, indolence, and relative insensibility to
pain in childbirth) onto poor white rural populations. It described them
as forlorn and inbred people who had descended from once “pure stock”
into a squalid condition hopelessly out of the mainstream of modern
progress. Like thevoyeuristic and gothic accounts
<https://newrepublic.com/article/138717/jd-vance-false-prophet-blue-america>of
rural poverty and anomie in works such as J.D. Vance’s/Hillbilly
Elegy,//Hollow Folk/doted on the terminally clueless and maladapted
behavior of its research subjects, such as an old woman foraging for
discarded vegetables in a refuse heap while she wore a once-fancy
evening dress that had been similarly scrounged from a neighboring
resort. As Henry explained in an accompanying series of profiles
in/The//Washington Star,/this out-of-step habitus was all but earmarked
for mass removal, rooted as it was in “hidden communities of backwards,
illiterate people living in medieval squalor.”
There is a clear line from this work to today’s race-baiting
intellectual industrial complex; in each instance, Catte writes, a
“hardline emphasis on race and genetics” acquires “the softer bordering
of cultural theories without changing the ultimate conclusion.” Just
consider the work of arch-neocon and libertarian race theorist Charles
Murray in this regard, Catte writes: “After arguing, on the basis of IQ
testing, that Black people are irreversibly less intelligent than white
people in 1994’s/The Bell Curve,/Murray has pivoted in recent years to
the subject of white plight and the genetic realities of class structure.”
The most surreal update of Virginia’s old eugenics infrastructure is
taking place in Staunton, where the former grounds of Western State
Hospital were sold to private developers.
The most surreal update of the state’s old eugenics infrastructure is
taking place in Staunton, however, where the former grounds of Western
State Hospital were sold to private developers, who’ve plonked down $250
million to launch a massive high-end condo projectcalled the Villages at
Stauntonon the site, pitched at a retiring Boomer demographic at an
asking price of around $500,000 per unit. (The median household income
for Staunton, Catte notes, is around $45,000 a year.) The development is
also anchored by a stylish resort called the Blackburn Inn, which, like
the condos, is tastefully rendered in the neo-Jeffersonian architectural
style of the original hospital. Promotional materials for the project,
not surprisingly, offer a distinctly bowdlerized version of the Western
State’s past and heritage, completely eliding its role in the
early-twentieth-century eugenics boom.
As Catte digs into the Western State archives, she finds that
superintendent DeJarnette oversaw his own tasteful neo-Jeffersonian
plans to expand and update the facility’s physical plant—and did so
while relying entirely on the labor of its inmates. (This, too, was a
key selling point of eugenics during its heyday—sterilization was held
to create a more stable, compliant, and productive workforce,
particularly in the sphere of domestic service, where Lynchburg in
particular supplied a reliable contingent of female inmate labor to
wealthy Virginia families after the patients’ release.) In other words,
the architectural inspiration for the high-end preservationist Villages
at Staunton is the actual handiwork of an inmate population that
supplied a steady stream of eugenics test subjects on DeJarnette’s watch.
Digging further on the development site proper, Catte finds that the
developers also acquired—and cordoned off behind concrete barriers—the
burial grounds of some 3,000 Western State inmates who died at the
hospital; their graves remain unmarked save for the inmates’ admission
numbers, thanks to a loophole the developers obtained to sidestep a
recent state law requiring archival identification of heretofore
anonymous graves. (The loophole and the burial site both feel, in turn,
like direct legacies of the racist statistician Walter Plecker.) Here,
etched indelibly onto the serenely well-appointed grounds of the
Villages at Staunton, is today’s own de facto New South social compact,
dedicated to walling off and submerging the remaining vestiges of the
last century’s racialized regime of utmost social control. It strikes me
as the sort of place where Tucker Carlson would feel right at home.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
As it happens, Catte’s sharp and nuanced account of fractured
working-class families and state mental institutions has a very
particular resonance for me. I spent the first nine years of my life on
the grounds of a state mental hospital in western Illinois, where my
father worked as an activities therapist. (Our family lived in a
no-frills blockhouse there; these were the living quarters for junior
staff like my dad, and they were rumored to have formerly housed German
POWs during World War II.) Illinois never fell under the spell of
Progressive-era eugenics, so my hospital home was nowhere near so
sinister as it might otherwise seem. (Indeed, the inmates who were
permitted out on the grounds were unusually friendly to children, so my
upbringing there mostly gave me an entirely distorted impression that
all adults were engaged, relatable conversation partners for kids—a
misapprehension that I discarded in record time once my family moved.)
My mother, however, hailed from Washington state, where she narrowly
escaped a disastrous family meltdown in the wake of her parents’
divorce. Her dad was an Army electrician; her mother was an erratically
employed domestic servant for much of her life, who suffered from
haphazardly diagnosed mental ailments, from delusions to persecution
complexes, that landed her in both the courts and the state’s far from
benevolent public health system. A fierce battle over custody of the
couple’s three daughters ensued. My mother was then 16 and managed to
escape the worst of it by moving in with her then-boyfriend; her sisters
were less fortunate and briefly were wards of the state. And
Washington/did/have a hard-line eugenics law on the books, until the
Supreme Court overturned it in 1942. My grandparents’ divorce happened
about a decade after that, but that’s rather cold comfort.
It’s all too easy, in short, to envision a slightly altered turn of
events, by which the brutal ideology of eugenics might have entrapped my
own family, and a Pacific Northwest version of Joseph DeJarnette or
Walter Plecker might have seen to it that I wouldn’t be typing these
words at all, for the very simple reason that I wouldn’t have been
permitted to exist. I guarantee that’s something that I will keep in
mind the next time I’m confronted with yet another Trumpian diatribe on
the menacing outsiders allegedly scheming to replace their sacred white
birthright. Sorry, assholes, but your self-mythologizing transports are
just so many/Herrenvolk/adumbrations of a singularly bankrupt and
predatory will to power—and Elizabeth Catte has done us the inestimable
service of showing us the real and enduring costs of continuing to take
your vicious ideology seriously.
Chris Lehmann
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/chris-lehmann>@lehmannchris
<https://twitter.com/lehmannchris>
Chris Lehmann is an editor-at-large for/The New Republic/and/The Baffler/.
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