people, “That’s the Western State, right?” as if there might be another former asylum in town that hadn’t become $500,000 condominiums.
These scholars, and many others, have examined eugenics from the perspective of law, policy, and science. They’ve written about it as a set of ideas and an extension of state bureaucracies. In two cases, their work has even helped create compensation programs for victims of eugenic sterilization. North Carolina created the first program in 2013, due in part to historian Johanna Schoen’s work on the state’s Eugenics Board, and Virginia enacted a similar program in 2015. Victim advocacy by disability and reproductive rights activists also helped create these and other measures, like the repeal of state laws that permitted eugenic sterilization well into the twenty-first century. But despite all of this work, as a nation we are still coming to terms with the legacy of eugenics, even though its origins and early applications are well-documented. Its legacy still exists in our current immigration laws and our for-profit health care system. It underlies our fascination with mail-in DNA tests and ancestry. It informs the rhetoric politicians use to talk about public assistance. Just as it was in the past, eugenics is everywhere and nowhere at the same time. It just depends on how much we’re willing to interrogate how power works in the world we live in today.
If the history of eugenics does have an element of secrecy, though, it’s this: sterilization statistics can be finicky, and it is not uncommon to read minor variations in reported numbers depending on the source, its purpose, or when it was produced. I tend to rely on Gregory Dorr’s work for statistics during the eugenics movement in terms of operations performed and breakdowns according to gender and race. But it is important to note that individual patient records, even those of patients who are long dead, are still protected by medical privacy laws. It’s likely that Virginia buried patients anonymously at Western State, for example, using only numbered markers, precisely for this reason.
But the majority of my archival sources are housed at the Library of Virginia in Richmond and the University of Virginia Special Collections in Charlottesville, places that aren’t secret at all. For the most part, the only credential I needed to access this information was an ordinary Virginia library card. When you hear the phrase “secret eugenics program,” it conjures up images of someone furtively fingering through file boxes in a basement while someone else watches the door. But the process really just involved me sitting in a comfortable room while the on-duty archivist retrieved files that had been meticulously arranged by thousands of hours of labor.
So please, I am not here to reveal secrets. What I want to do instead is give Virginia’s eugenic past a sense of place and bring it home, to find it like the faint pencil mark in a childhood closet that recorded how small you once were.
Here is something about this book that might get me into trouble: I think most eugenicists were bad people. There will be no “man of his time” hedging here. In Staunton, for example, DeJarnette, to the extent that his legacy is acknowledged at all, is often contextualized today as a person with flawed but “deeply humanitarian motives.” That’s how the local newspaper remembered him in 2014, the same year Virginia lawmakers sought to compel the state to authorize reparations for survivors of eugenic sterilization. “Letters to DeJarnette filed in the state archives show writers from many social ranks relating to him with high personal and professional regard.” This was a man who wrote poems musing whether or not Black people (although he didn’t call them that) should be allowed into heaven.
When people today try to contextualize figures like DeJarnette this way, I know what they’re trying to do. They mean that these beliefs about good breeding and racial supremacy were endorsed by a critical mass of white leaders and intelligentsia. They were ingrained to such an extent that we might call them “typical” when we’re trying to determine how powerful people during this era thought the world should work.
But what would the people who were targeted by eugenics say? Are we implying that the record number of immigrants ensnared by these beliefs would be comforted by the fact that history would eventually prove that they weren’t of a different species? No. Did elderly women and men cope with their forced childlessness by understanding that doctors had tried their best but simply got it wrong? Again, no. What those people would say, and what they have said, is that nothing about what was done to them made any sense. If some of us are able to make sense of it now, because it did not happen to us, then that is a gift. But it does not grant us permission to build a legacy on a series of excuses.
I will not be scolded for imagining men like Joseph DeJarnette, Walter Plecker, Aubrey Strode, or George Pollock in the way I understand them, as individuals who derived status and pleasure from the power they wielded over vulnerable people. I do not care if someone accuses me of the ultimate historical sin of judging people in the past by the yardstick of the present. I do not subscribe to the view that time is the real villain of this story, that it tormented important people with difficult questions—like what the cheapest way was to castrate a prisoner—that only an accident of fate forced them to answer.
Eugenics made a mask from the newness of things; from the power to transform old evils into modern interventions. To use a more locally inspired turn of phrase, eugenics painted fresh white columns on an old building filled with shit and sold it. After all, it had good bones.
Lurking beneath the sound and fury of the eugenics movement and its language of defectives, mongrels, and misfits is a set of brutal yet recognizable beliefs about the kind of lives people on the margins deserve. Thinking of eugenics more broadly as a world-building enterprise has helped me understand how a quest for economic purity was just as important to eugenicists as racial and genetic purity were. Early twentieth-century eugenicists argued for the elimination of the unfit based on what they saw as the group’s potential to siphon resources away from the more deserving and to transmit debts onto future generations. If the eugenicists were successful, they figured the rate of return on their actions would be enormous. It would relieve the burden on prisons, institutions, and welfare offices and end the need to help engineer the survival of people who had no right to be alive and yet were.
Often, when we talk about eugenics now, even when we are attentive to the lives of the people it ensnared, we emphasize that this was the world that eugenicists were trying to create. Eugenics itself provides the framework for this perspective; it was always building toward a future goal. Sometimes for our own comfort, we also emphasize the failure of eugenicists. We understand their beliefs endured in some way—in debates about welfare mothers, immigrants from shithole countries, or work requirements for public aid recipients, for example. But as Audrey Farley writes in her essay about the cultural legacy of the eugenics movement, a tendency remains to “situate eugenics in the remote past.” That emphasis on remoteness, on the ways eugenicists tried but failed, sometimes obscures a way of seeing the world they actually made and how it lives on in the present.
For many people, the endurance of those beliefs is what matters. I hope this book shows how real and physical that endurance can be. In showing you the map of my world, I also want to show you how you might make your own. As Muriel Rukeyser puts it in The Book of the Dead, “These roads will take you into your own country.”
This book is about what was taken and how it helped build the world around me, in Staunton and beyond. It is also about the wealth and power that still circulate through that world-building endeavor. It is a book about imagining eugenics as it still exists in sites like Western State Hospital, thrumming in place like Rilke’s torso of Apollo: “still suffused with brilliance from inside, / like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, / gleams in all its power.”
“This is a story within a story,” I tell myself. And this is how it starts.
