America's Cross-Partisan Dalliance With Eugenics: A new book pulls the curtain back--but only partway.

• Author: Magness, Phillip W.
• Position: Elizabeth Catte's "Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia"

IN NOVEMBER 1900, Jane Stanford forced the resignation of the noted progressive economist Edward A. Ross from the faculty of the university that bears her surname. The Ross incident has since become a cause celebre in the history of academic freedom, setting into motion the events that led to the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) as a safeguard for faculty rights and freedom of scientific inquiry.

Far less known is the occasion for Ross' dismissal. Mrs. Stanford objected to a speech in which Ross appealed to the racial pseudoscience of eugenics to preserve California, which he deemed the "latest and loveliest seat of the Aryan race," from the "stern wolfish struggle for existence as prevails throughout the Orient."

Ross makes a brief appearance in historian Elizabeth Catte's Pure America: Eugenics and the Making of Modern Virginia for his association with another eugenic concept: the theory of "race suicide," wherein persons of "undesirable" hereditary stock are said to outbreed and out-populate the "productive" elite--a code for the white upper class. A century later, it is still difficult to fathom the extent that eugenic theory penetrated the ranks of the intellectual classes, in part because many people treat the tale as taboo.

Catte's book investigates Virginia's state-run foray into hereditary central planning, which was primarily administered between the adoption of the state's Eugenical Sterilization Act in 1924 and the program's termination in 1979. Virginia is distinctive for performing some 8,000 sterilizations without the patient's consent--and in some cases without even the patient's knowledge. It also produced the notorious 1927 Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell, in which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. sanctioned the state's eugenic policies with the comment "three generations of imbeciles are enough."

The story of Carrie Buck's abuse by the state medical and legal systems has undergone a recent revival of scholarly interest, thanks to book-length treatments by Paul A. Lombardo, Gregory Michael Dorr, and others. Catte nonetheless gives it a missing local context by digging into the political climate of 1920s Charlottesville and the sordid eugenic history of Western State Hospital in the nearby town of Staunton. This institution employed Joseph De Jarnette, a physician who was a primary witness for the government in Buck's case, a leading proponent of compulsory sterilization of those he...