In retrospect:
Pure America
Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia
By Elizabeth Catte
Belt release
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Law school curricula typically do not include the 1927 Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell, which protected the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 from constitutional challenge and allowed state health officials to impose sterilization on patients. Its brief mention in the Constitutional Law class I took as a freshman law student at the University of Virginia only identified it in contrast to later cases where individual rights such as the right to privacy were protected.
Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who wrote for an 8-1 majority, clothed utilitarianism with bigotry by stating that “it is better for the whole world if, instead of waiting, degenerate descendants execute for crimes or execute them starve for their stupidity. Society can prevent those who are blatantly unfit from continuing their way. ”He concluded with some of the most haunting – and, yes, evil – words to be published in a Supreme Court judgment: “Three generations of morons are enough.”
It’s hard to read these dehumanizing words that streamlined the forced sterilization of more than 7,000 people in Virginia and about 70,000 nationwide. Elizabeth Catte writes in a “Note on Language and Content,” which serves as the foreword to Pure America, that this “ugly and insulting language that historical actors invented to describe people who were perceived as disabled in the past” part of America’s “long” history of inculcating racial, gender and class prejudices on the concept of disability. ”These prejudices were based on the fear of losing privilege and power. Articulated anew in a scientific and thus “modern” veneer, they glorified Nordic stocks and pathologized those who lacked strength.
Catte unwraps this story by placing it on specific lots and introducing us to the people who populated this land. In doing so, she tries to understand the world that the eugenicists “actually made and how it lives on in the present”.
We travel with Catte to Charlottesville, Carrie Buck’s hometown, and learn that she was raped by her foster parents’ nephew at the age of 17. After Carrie was admitted by her foster parents, the state used her case to test the validity of the Sterilization Act. Her defense attorney, appointed by the sterilization commission established by law, was a former member of the sterilization commission and eugenics attorney whose arguments during the trial were “not intended to be a real appeal, but rather a legally binding theatrical performance”.
Carrie was sterilized in October 1927, a few months after the Supreme Court decision. But we also learn that she “survived and was all her life” and full of marriage, “little gardens, pigs and reunions with siblings who she thought she lost”. One sister, a younger sister named Doris Figgins, lived for decades with the sadness of “feeling that she had failed because she couldn’t have children”. Little did Doris know until the late 1970s that she had been sterilized without her consent.
After Catte tells the story of Carrie and her family, Catte takes us to Shenandoah National Park, which is in the mountains west of Charlottesville. There we learn that the park’s local boosters have deliberately misrepresented to federal authorities the number of mountain families that would be displaced by the power of a significant domain. This forced deportation resulted in some residents being placed in the same state hospitals that Carrie Buck, Doris Figgins, and thousands others were taken to, and in some cases, forced into involuntary servitude to pay for their stay.
Finally, Catte takes us to the Western State Hospital in her hometown of Staunton, Virginia, where about 1,700 forced sterilizations took place between 1927 and 1964. In recent years, Western State has been transformed from a developer (with the help of tax credits) into a luxury hotel and condominium complex. While the promotional materials for the new development bullied the architectural significance and early history of Western State in the 19th century.
This is a common choice in historical preservation narratives, explains Catte, comparing the owners of Western State to owners of former southern plantations who “justify their interpretive choices” about slavery “by arguing that the history of slavery will be found can be “neglected in other places, including academic scholarships.” These narrative choices are, according to Catte, “a deliberate strategy to prevent us from getting to what would mean, these historical properties not just as architectural monuments, but to identify them as places of trauma. “
Catte’s interpretive framework is not new; It pays tribute to and quotes Michel-Rolph Trouillot, a Haitian historian and author whose Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History identified a power struggle in the narratives we tell in our places and about ourselves. Throughout Pure America, Catte cleverly locates these past and present power struggles in the places of trauma. Given the importance of the location to Catte’s narrative, my biggest criticism of the book is the lack of a map that would have given readers additional context.
Nonetheless, this subtlety is minor; Catte weaves a haunting but necessary story of how eugenics shaped and continues to shape their community, and how eager some in the community are to move on and forget. By focusing on how the landscape of central Virginia and the Shenandoah Valley still bears scars from trauma, Catte demonstrates the need for communities across the country to grapple with the current narratives that shape our understanding of the past. I will not look at the built environment around me – wherever I am – in the same way.
A version of this article appears in the print edition under the title “Places of Trauma”.