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 recent fulminations 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 of alt-right propagandists, who in turn gained unprecedented access to state power via the labors of racist Trump apparatchiks like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller.
The abandoned Western State Hospital, c. 2004, since renovated into the Blackburn Inn. Image: Kipp Teague
Elizabeth Catte’s new book examines how Virginia progressives believed the forced sterilization of poor whites would pave the way to a bright future and how their legacy endures in national parks and prisons.
Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia
Elizabeth Catte
When Elizabeth Catte began researching
Pure America, her new book about the history of eugenics in Virginia, her first act seemed, on its surface, like a non sequitur: she spent a night at a new luxury hotel, the Blackburn Inn, in her hometown of Staunton, Virginia. What interested Catte was that, in its former life, the building that now houses the Blackburn Inn had been the Western State Hospital or, as it was better known upon first opening in 1828, the Western State Lunatic Asylum. It was where many Virginians deemed “feeble-minded” were incarcerated under the directorsh