Like its predecessor, Catte's latest book, Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia, offers interventions with national implications. At its center lies Western State Hospital in Staunton, Virginia, which conducted more than 1,000 forced sterilizations between 1927 and 1974.
The hospital has since been converted into an upscale hotel and condo complex. Western State's flip from "carceral" to "cozy" conceals the forced labor of the people institutionalized and sterilized at the hospital; patients constructed the very campus that imprisoned them. Three thousand people remain buried anonymously in its unkempt graveyard, the unspoken annals of a multimillion dollar complex. "After all, asylums were places of forgetting, were they not?" Catte inquires, suggesting this history is hidden by design. "At least that was the hope."
With Western State as its hub, Pure America explores many spokes of Virginia's eugenic history, from "urban renewal" discourse that legitimized the razing of a Black neighborhood in Charlottesville, to the forced removal of "mountain people" to make way for Shenandoah National Park, to the disenfranchisement of Native tribes that only secured federal recognition three years ago.
Catte telescopes out from the American South to prove that U.S. eugenic policies were not the fruit of progressives who succumbed to scientism's prejudices, but rather that they were the keystone of an explicitly white supremacist agenda—one that strove to preserve white dominance through "purity." From Western State's glossy reincarnation to mass incarceration, for-profit health care, and deadly immigration policies, those markers and effects of eugenics remain.
What follows is a conversation between Scalawag and Catte about her research. and the relevancy of this work today—in the law, our culture, and our communities. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Scalawag: Eugenics is "everywhere and nowhere," you write, subject to the tension between the where and what of history. So, to start off: What is eugenics, and where do we find it?
Catte: Eugenics is the practice of engineering human reproduction for the benefit of society—understanding that, in the early 20th century context I write about, "for the benefit of society" largely means white society. More than a scientific philosophy, eugenics in this era took on the characteristics of a social movement and diffused out of the academy and laboratory into law, policy, and even everyday life for millions.
Eugenics can be positive or negative, active or passive. That is, sometimes the goal is to add people to the population, and other times it is to remove them. The means can be direct, like sterilization, or more indirect, like limiting access to health care for certain people. My focus in Pure America is on negative eugenics and Virginia's system for controlling the lives of "unfit" people—who, at this time, are primarily poor, Black, Native, or presumed mixed-race, or disabled people.