PURE AMERICA

In this grounded, well-rendered, and highly disturbing account, Catte examines the period from the late 1920s to 1979 at the Western State Lunatic Asylum. It was, she writes, “a long era in the history of psychiatric medicine when therapeutic efforts primarily focused on containment and control, not care or cure.” As part of the eugenics movement, Western State advanced its purity-of-race ideology, which taught that people with disabilities—and the just plain poor—were expensive social burdens. They were viewed as a disorderly class populated by “undesirables.” Proponents of this concept were worried that the “unfit” would reproduce and create an ongoing social debt that could never be repaid. With justified outrage backed by copious archival evidence, Catte describes the process by which Virginia made eugenic sterilization legal. Importantly, the author also demonstrates how practitioners of eugenics did more than just sterilize the mentally ill and those who were not considered “pure.” They also advanced the cause of White supremacy, controlled anti-establishment women, and exploited the impoverished. The movement created a comprehensive, hateful belief system about the kinds of lives that marginalized people deserved. Catte details the dire consequences for a whole galaxy of “mongrels”—a reprehensible classification that included immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, Blacks, poor Whites, and Native Americans—from the illegalization of intermarriage (“when interbreeding between two races occurred, the worst traits always became the dominant traits”) to the displacement of more than 500 families to create Shenandoah National Park. The author closes by examining the suppression of memory as it pertains to the thousands of sterilizations that occurred as well as Western State’s use of patients for free labor.

A well-told, richly contextualized investigation of an appalling episode in American history.