Review of Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia, by Elizabeth Catte.
High reviews greeted the 2021 publication of Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia. My reading didn’t leave me so enthralled.
Author Elizabeth Catte does a fine job laying out the injustices done in the name of eugenics. She goes on and on about the grievous wrong, the unfairness, the immoral and unjust way some people were sterilized and forced into virtual slavery by being labeled mentally deficient. I get it.
But the case studies she shares are mostly of poor White people, not people of color. I wish she had included more case studies overall, and not just the few which began the eugenics program in Virginia. A more representative sampling of the victims of this program through its duration into the late 1960s and early ’70s would have provided a more balanced view.
Here’s an example I know of from my childhood in rural Virginia from the late 1960s. The town drunk, a Black man who lived in a wooden shack with his daughter, “Jean”, was our nearby neighbor. Jean had the mind of a child, and her father repeatedly raped her, producing three children.
Jean frequently sent her sons to our door to beg for food, which we always gave them. The three boys did not display obvious cognitive disabilities. In fact, many years later, one of them applied for a college internship where I was working.
Two concerned women in the community took Jean to be sterilized. Afterward, her father probably still raped her, but she had no more children. No, this wasn’t the right way to solve this problem.
Had it been twenty years later, I suppose the boys would have entered foster care and Jean would have been institutionalized. The judicial system would have incarcerated her father for incestuous rape. The financial burden on the community would have multiplied many times over and been shared with all Virginia tax payers. That proved not to be the ideal solution, either.
Some of what Catte describes does not involve those with mental health issues, simply people who were oppressed and taken advantage of. But in cases of cognitive deficiencies, Catte does not suggest alternative solutions. She does not propose how those sticky problems should have been addressed.
There are no easy answers to the mental health problems of Virginia citizens. Just look at the tragic story of Virginia State Senator Creigh Deeds’ son, Gus. Senator Deeds now works for mental health reform in the Commonwealth.
When you go on a crusade against injustice, plenty of people will jump on the bandwagon. Catte personalizes the immorality of the eugenics program to the point where the physical structures of what was Western State Hospital are appalling to her.
We know the eugenics program was wrong. But I also think it is wrong to grovel in the injustice. Catte should have frankly presented the history and trusted her readers’ ability to discern the missteps of Virginia’s early policymakers.
#mentalhealth #eugenics #Staunton #WesternStateHospital #Virginia #CommonwealthofVirginia #SenatorCreighDeeds #GusDeeds
@elizabethcatte @belt_publishing