On Historical Sins and Elizabeth Catte's Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia

There is a moment in the introduction to Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia when author Elizabeth Catte looks straight in the camera, clears her throat, and declares:

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.

And this is when you understand that Catte did not come to play. This is historical research at its most compelling and its most accessible. Fully academic yet fully human, Catte makes the historical personal, blending the past with her lived experiences in the present. Catte's first book, What You are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, proved she could be the voice for a story in desperate need of a better narrator, and in Pure America, she has done it again.

Too often in our historical accounting, we want to excuse those in the past for their misguided or evil notions, offering halfhearted finger wagging with a healthy dose of "they didn't know any better." Too often, we try to leave the past in the past as though it doesn't offer a direct through line to our present. Catte does neither of things, somehow able to complicate and simultaneously simplify the discussion around eugenics by drawing that straight line. Using Virginia as a model, Catte shows how eugenics was one prong of the long game of white supremacy, the tail of which is still flapping wildly around our country.

Pulling from archival records and legal history, Catte does the historical legwork to explain the process by which forced sterilization passed into law and more broadly, into polite society. She shows the pain this caused families, as children were separated from their parents and institutionalized, and the heartbreak of the women who never realized they had been victimized in this way, forced instead to see their inability to have children as a personal failure. And she raises questions about what we preserve and what we celebrate, as well as how history gets told and by whom.

She also examines the built environment of the area around Charlottesville (where she makes her home) to demonstrate how those "misguided" notions from the past are still being felt in the buildings and landscape of her home. From the establishment of the Shenandoah National Park to the commemoration of the Robert E. Lee statue in the heart of Charlottesville, Catte links race and class to provide an unflinching look at our shared complicity.

There are a few spots in the book that might feel strained, as though Catte has attempted to draw too many ideas under one tent. But where it dilutes the focus on eugenics (a fascinating history on its own), the inclusion of somewhat disparate pieces only serves to strengthen her argument that it's all one thing, that the history of our country is a history of how the powerful have abused the marginalized.

She confirms this intention in the Acknowledgments, writing about the ways COVID-19 continues to reveal these same truths:

This crisis belongs to the White House, but it also belongs to anyone who derives pleasure, profit, or power from a system that demands people be productive or passively killed. It belongs to bosses and business owners who need to be reminded with the force of law that their workers are real people; . . . This moment also belongs to the callousness of ordinary people who look at lives led by people on the margins and find ways to blame their hardships on unspecified weakness, leveraging self-directed myths of exceptional worthiness to explain society's winners and losers.

Catte's book, released February 2 from Belt Publishing, could easily fly under the radar, relegated to those with ties to Virginia, to the social sciences, or even to the underbelly of medical history. That would be a mistake and a loss to countless thoughtful readers who will find much to think on in this fascinating work.

The Lexicon - Last

One word, weekly. Found in a book. Shared with you.

Word: Last

Definition: (n) a form (as of metal or plastic) which is shaped like the human foot and over which a shoe is shaped or repaired.

Origin: ME fr. OE læste, fr. last footprint; akin to L lira furrow, track; related to Learn (same origin)

Source: Thomas Hardy's Under the Greenwood Tree -

'Well, I must call with en the first thing to-morrow. And I'll empt my pocket o' this last too, if you don't mind, Mrs. Dewy.' He drew forth a last, and placed it on a table at his elbow. The eyes of three or four followed it.

Commentary: Reading Thomas Hardy is like submerging yourself in a cool pond, all at once and full of bewilderment. Everything about it is foreign, and much like traveling abroad, it requires the utmost attention. To relax could mean losing the thread altogether, which is exactly what happened to me as I read the section where this short paragraph occurs.

A few chapters before, I had been told Mr. Penny (the above speaker) is a boot- and shoe-maker with rounded shoulders and little shining spectacles. Alas, that information did not help me as I read his words about emptying his pocket. I assumed, as perhaps you did, too, that he was referring to some final object he needed to remove from his jacket. But then, we are given that article 'a last' and the pronoun it and the description of its place upon the table, and the world stops.

For me, it meant reading back over the last few paragraphs. What did I miss? What is this "last" item he removes? No clue. It seems important, especially with those three or four eyes following it. So, to the dictionary, even as I doubted there could possibly be some definition of this utterly common word that I did not know.

Much humility ensued. What would have been obvious to Mr. Penny's listeners, an object as familiar as their own feet, was completely new to me. And then, just like that, it became the perfect symbol for Hardy's work.

This little story also introduced me to the profession of a tranter (one that does odd jobs of transporting or peddling, usually with a horse and cart), and it taught me that a dumbledore is a type of bumblebee. More than vocabulary lessons, though, it showed me a time and place when neighbors were also as familiar as feet, easily recognizable as their voice halloo-ed from over a hill or their boots stamped off snow at a doorstep. In every way, this book harkens back to a former way of doing life, in intimate community.

The last that Mr. Penny pulls out belonged originally to a single man, and it is as recognizable to that craftsman as it would have been to the man himself: After that man's death, the last was used to make shoes for his son, altering it as needed to accommodate the son's growing bunion and his accident with the horse. And though this son's daughter has no such damage, Mr. Penny declares that her boot and his are more similar than not. He can tell a man (or woman) by their feet. Such is the value of attention paid. Such is a thing that lasts.

Until it doesn't.

For now we don't have a shoemaker. We hardly attend to our own feet or our neighbors for that matter. We pluck a box off a shelf and hope our bunion or high arches or wide heel box will fit. We endure the pain of a rubbing spot, the blister that may form, the tightness in the toe, and we have collectively forgotten that someone used to make us shoes, individual and unique. Formed for us with care, shaped around our own last.