In Pure America, Elizabeth Catte, author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, 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.)