America is a history of Virginia’s eugenics movement, including the role Western State Hospital played in it. But it is also about the way I see that history in the built world and natural environment I experience every day. My regular encounters with Western State helped me realize in a visceral way that eugenics didn’t just alter the lives of people, it also altered land and geography. It changed how institutions grew, and it gave Virginians confidence that they could claim the physical world just as readily as they claimed the bodies of its citizens. These alterations also produced assets and provided convenient ways to mark geographies as pure or unpure. All of these changes had economic implications, and they’re intimately tied into very real profits and losses in the present.
But the world described in this book is simply the world of my daily commute. On many days, I make my way east from Staunton for a forty-mile trek to Charlottesville. That journey takes me past Western State, through the mountains, past the southern entrance to Shenandoah National Park, and into a city that is inseparable from the University of Virginia. These are my landscapes, each of them different in terms of their physical environment and the layers of this story they can reveal.
Charlottesville, for example, was home to Carrie Buck, who was the central figure in Buck v. Bell, the 1927 Supreme Court case that legalized eugenic sterilization nationwide. Raped by her foster mother’s nephew, Carrie was institutionalized so her foster family could avoid the scandal of her pregnancy. She eventually became the first person legally sterilized in Virginia. I often drive past the cemetery where she is buried and through the neighborhood where she lived before her commitment to what was then called the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg. I take this route because it’s the most convenient way to get to Charlottesville’s downtown mall, where my partner Josh works.
That mall is still marked by the efforts white citizens made to claim territory for themselves during the eugenics era. In 1921 and 1924, city residents placed two large Confederate statues here. Almost a hundred years later, those same statues served as the focal points of violence during 2017’s Unite the Right rally. The University of Virginia, about a mile to the west, participated heavily in the pageantry that accompanied the statues’ original placements. In the early twentieth century, the university also functioned as an academic larder well-stocked with eugenicists, an institution described by current UVA history professor Elizabeth Varon as “an incubator for Lost Cause ideology.” Ambitious white faculty, eager to enhance their reputations, claimed as scientific law the truth of their own genetic perfection and taught students who would go on to populate Virginia’s highest political offices, the medical field, and the law.
The area’s surrounding mountains, both the ones I see during my commute and the ones that greet me as more distant landscapes when I arrive back home, were prized by Virginia’s earliest psychiatrists, who believed natural beauty could soothe troubled minds. But twentieth-century eugenicists also saw them as sinister geographies crawling with people they thought of as “mongrels.” My commute runs right past a turnoff for Shenandoah National Park. Since 1935, the park has been one of the most robust drivers of regional tourism, but that success was achieved through the removal of 500 mountain families through a new form of eviction—eminent domain—that Virginia used to ease the process. The sweeping laws the state passed in 1928 to help the park’s development set in motion a chain reaction that brought more and more people to the mountains to determine what should happen to families too poor to leave the park on their own. For some, what would happen were institutions like Western State and the Lynchburg Colony.
I’ve tried to understand how all these locations that punctuate my commute—places of violence, racial supremacy, and displacement—connect to the layers of history in Western State’s past. In Staunton and at the renovated hospital, questions of profit and loss are always in the foreground. The city’s local economy is not only reliant on tourism connected to the surrounding mountains, but also on its ability to project a wholesome, historic image. Boosters argue we’ve earned the ability to move beyond the city’s darker chapters. But what does it mean when the local economy is still extracting profit from them?
Looking at eugenics through the variation of landscapes and their economies has helped me understand how acolytes of eugenics moved through a similar constellation of ideas even while their primary motivations and targets were different. For some, eugenics was part of an unrelenting campaign of white supremacy. For others, it was a partial solution to control “troublesome” women. For many, it was a more ambiguous and opportunistic tool that helped elite Virginians extract profits or take assets from poor people by arguing for the biological truth of their unworthiness.
Like geographies, these motivations aren’t seamless. They aren’t always easy to locate either. They are everywhere, but because eugenics is best understood through the history of ideas and not places, they are also nowhere at all. How could it be that I live at the epicenter of Virginia’s eugenics movement and see almost nothing around me today that tells that story? From that paradox, Pure America was born.
I don’t want to give the impression, however, that Pure America is a secret history of anything. “Virginia Ran a Secret Eugenics Program that Didn’t End Until 1979,” an article on Medium tells me. Nature calls it “America’s Hidden History.” The New Yorker encourages us to remember “The Forgotten Lessons of the Eugenics Movement.” In Virginia, just like the rest of the world, these facts of history haven’t been forgotten. It’s just that powerful people have oriented the past around stories they feel are more important to tell.
This may sound like a subtle difference, but I assure you it is not. Forgetting is passive, organic, even gentle at times. Intentionally crowding a collective history with elements that are specifically designed to ease discomfort or conceal controversy is active, intentional, coercive.
My ability to discover evidence of Virginia’s eugenic past in the landscape of my daily life was buttressed by my background as a historian, someone supposedly trained to look at the past accurately and call it for what it really was. But in spite of that training, in Staunton I felt a familiar pull. Wouldn’t it feel better just to give in and only think about the hospital through stories about happy patients and beautiful architecture? After all, the old version of the site didn’t tell stories at all. It was just a derelict collection of buildings. Would it really be so terrible to put them to new use? Wouldn’t it be better to have something there instead of nothing?
Arguments like these were familiar to me, and these questions are far from settled, even among people who have spent their entire careers thinking about them. But what I can tell you is that the current reconfiguration of Western State started to make me feel what historian Kate Brown describes when she writes, “at some point even the wreckage progress leaves in its wake becomes profitable.” When we recover some stories about the past and set aside others, we are often placing real, material value on those stories. Even if some questions remain unsettled, an acknowledgement of this truth is required. Now, because of my inability to let go of Western State’s past, the site makes me feel like I have failed to be a good member of my community who is invested in its economic future. That is often what I hate most about it.
Calling Virginia’s eugenic past a secret history also runs contrary to the work of important scholars who have already written extensively about the eugenics movement and its connected goals. One of those scholars was my dissertation adviser, Pippa Holloway, whose book Sexuality, Politics, and Social Control in Virginia, 1920–1945 follows the state’s attempts to regulate the sexual behavior of its “undesirable” citizens. Katrina Powell and Sue Currell have researched and written about the displacement of families at the Shenandoah National Park. Two of the country’s leading experts on American eugenics, Paul Lombardo and Gregory Michael Dorr, began their careers by making Virginia’s past their primary subject. Dorr’s account, Segregation’s Science, was the first book
