Praise for Elizabeth Catte’s
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia:
“Small presses across Appalachia and the Rust Belt consistently publish, to little fanfare, incredibly diverse work—books that are lush, gritty, surprising and so very true. Perhaps the best example, or certainly the best place to begin, is Catte’s What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia. This edgy, meticulous work of nonfiction from Cleveland’s Belt Publishing dispels many myths about the region.” —Leah Hampton, Los Angeles Times
“Catte’s slim, very readable volume is like a more focused version of Howard Zinn’s venerable A People’s History Of The United States, turning its lens to the on-the-ground civic struggles of people who have lived and died in Appalachia.”—Laura Adamczyk, The A.V. Club
“A brief, forceful, and necessary correction.” —Frank Guan, Bookforum
“You couldn’t kill this book with a hammer. Come and watch Elizabeth Catte clip the hollow wings of little jimmy vance. Stay and behold an enlightened vision, a living solidarity found among the strong and varied peoples of this misunderstood land.”—Glenn Taylor, author of The Ballad of Trenchmount Taggart
“What are we getting wrong about Appalachia? A lot.… This is a necessary antidote to the cyclical mainstream interest in Appalachia as a backwards, white working-class caricature.”—Tressie McMillan Cottom, author of Thick
“A bold refusal to submit to stereotype.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Succeeds in providing a richer, more complex view of a much-maligned region.”—Publishers Weekly
PURE AMERICA
Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia
Elizabeth Catte
Belt Publishing
Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth Catte
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Printed in the United States of America
First edition 2021
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
ISBN: 978-1-948742-73-3
Belt Publishing
5322 Fleet Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44105
Cover art by David Wilson
Book design by Meredith Pangrace
TABLE OF CONTENTS
A Note on Language and Content
The Patient Is Good for Work, and Work Is Good for the Patient
A NOTE ON LANGUAGE AND CONTENT
This book repeats some ugly and abusive language that historical actors invented to describe people perceived to have disabilities in the past. Much of this language is specific to the outlook held by physicians, lawmakers, and laypeople who lived in the early twentieth century. In this period, labels such as “feebleminded,” “unfit,” and “defective” had clinical understandings, but these terms were also applied broadly and in derogatory ways to describe people with presumed shortcomings of character. In many examples that appear in this book, historical actors used their language of disability to describe people that we would not consider disabled today.
In No Right to Be Idle: The Invention of Disability 1840s–1930s, historian Sarah F. Rose writes, “the experience of disability, and even what counts as a disability, varies by historical era and culture. The ways in which race, class, gender, age, and kind of impairment … intersect with disability also matter, of course.” In some contexts, it is relevant to emphasize that many of the victims of eugenics and forced sterilization were not disabled according to our contemporary use of the term. But capturing the ways that perceptions of disabilities shift with time and place does not mean the primary injustice of eugenics was that it ensnared so-called “normal people.” Rather, the shifting nature of these perceptions and the realities that followed underscore that there is a long history in America of imprinting racial, gender, and class prejudices onto the concept of disability.
For readers who want more information about these ideas, including the ways that they continue to circulate today, there is a list of suggested resources at the back of this book.
INTRODUCTION
This is a book about eugenics, which is to say it is a book about my neighborhood. When I started writing Pure America, I lived on one of the more elevated streets in Staunton, Virginia, a small city nestled in the Shenandoah Valley. For years, my daily routine played out in exactly the same way: I’d leave my apartment, coast down the hill a quarter of a mile toward Richmond Avenue, Staunton’s main thoroughfare, and catch a traffic light that put me nose to nose with the original campus of Western State Hospital, where, between 1927 and 1964, surgeons sterilized around 1,700 people without their consent.
When I describe the hospital like that, you might conjure up an image of my daily commute that seems ripped from the mind of Shirley Jackson: Western State, not sane, stood by itself against the hills, holding darkness within. But instead, what I came nose to nose with every day was a bustling construction project. The site—an assembly of buildings and land, including a cemetery that contains the remains of as many as 3,000 former patients—was being diligently transformed into a luxury hotel and an upscale property development marketed to retirees and second-home buyers.
In other words, Western State did not stand by itself at all. It was open for business, undergoing renovations that would soon turn it into the newly christened Blackburn Inn and the