Sweeping the Mountains: Part Three

Note from the Editors: The Cadet is happy to consider submissions from individuals from inside and outside VMI. This series was submitted by one of our neighbors to the north attending Mary Baldwin University and relates to the abuses of families in the Shenandoah Valley at the hands of the Government and the Eugenics movement. This is the final installment of Sweeping the Mountains. By Cloey Mazingo In October of 1935, while taking pictures in the Shenandoah, Arthur Rothstein was working for the Historical Section of the New Deal Government's Resettlement Administration (RA) under the direction of Roy Stryker. He was sent to the mountains of Virginia in order to document a way of life that was widely understood to soon be vanishing forever. This shoot marked the beginning of a campaign to justify and document the RA's efforts to solve rural poverty by relocating people to homesteads and teaching them new techniques of subsistence farming. However, rather than being resettled, at least ten people from the two families that were photographed by Rothstein, the Corbins and the Nicholsons, were sent to institutions such as the State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg where they were incarcerated and forcibly sterilized. Oral testimonies from relatives and court records confirmed their institutionalization between 1935 and 1942, many being young children or adolescents. The 1940 census lists nine members of the Corbin family as being residents of the institute in Lynchburg. These photographs taken by Rothstein demonstrated a controversial paradox. The same decade the United States created a welfare state to aid the poor, which was intended to lift up the "forgotten man", was the very same decade of widespread "state-sanctioned coerced eugenic sterilization, on an unprecedented scale." There is no evidence that shows Rothstein knew he was taking pictures of people who would later end up being victims of Virginia's sterilization law. However, the coincidence of the photo shoot along with the subjects' later incarceration and displacement is hard to explain without implicating the photographer as well as raising questions about how the photographs should be interpreted. Before he visited the Blue Ridge Mountains, two eugenic case studies had been undertaken in the region: Mongrel Virginians (1926) and Hollow Folk (1933). In Mongrel Virginians, the photographs were used to show isolated, dirty, and deteriorated residences. These pictures were accompanied by text to help illustrate that the occupants were "feebleminded and could not look after their property, justifying eugenicist demand for segregation and sterilization." Academics have been able to trace photography's long history as a "eugenic technology" that was used to classify human bodies in order to categorize and frame disability. There are a number of ways that the Shenandoah series was framed and organized that might indicate a connection with eugenic ideology. For example, in the study Mongrel Virginians, the photographs taken were used to construct eugenic meaning through the purposeful placement of pets and animals. This was used to suggest a classification of subjects on a lower evolutionary scale. Dogs were often used in these eugenic photographs to demonstrate the potential of eugenic policy to breed pedigree or mongrel people. From another angle, it also showed that people were living in dirty environments alongside and like animals. A number of Rothstein's photographs included a family dog accompanying some of the children that were later institutionalized. The photographer's attention to the dog that, at times, appeared to not want to stay in the shot is unusual among other photograph collections as a whole. Another fact that was unusual among other RA/FSA collections was that some of the photographs from the Shenandoah series demonstrated eugenic preoccupations with intelligence or the number of children birthed by the women in the titles of the photographs. These titles appear to align with eugenic case studies such as: "Virgie Corbin, Blue Ridge Mountain Girl. This girl who is about sixteen has the mentality of a child of seven. She has never advanced beyond the second grade"; "Half-wit Corbin Hollow boy"; "Fanny Corbin, the mother of twenty-two children." All of these captions were very intentional as it was important for both eugenicists and Stryker, the head of the Historical Section of the RA, to use these images to promote their intended message. This does not mean that these captions had much truth, as records showed Fannie Corbin had eleven births, as opposed to the twenty-two mentioned in the one photograph. In more recent years, there has been an effort made by some to look into the truth and intentions behind those photographs taken by Rothstein in Shenandoah National Park. One example of this is tracing down living relatives of those within the pictures and hearing testimonies from their point of view, not obscured by those in powerful positions seeking to silence their voices. In 2011, Richard Knox Richardson published his film Rothstein's First Assignment, looking back at the photographer and his Shenandoah Valley series. Robinson interviewed dozens of descendants of those photographed by Rothstein and later displaced by the park. One of the subjects interviewed by the filmmaker was Mary Frances Corbin Donald, a former resident of Shenandoah National Park and descendant of the very same Corbin family featured in Rothstein's photographs and the book Hollow Folk. Mary Frances was only a little girl of eleven years old when they took her away and she still remembers being put in the hospital and being sterilized. The procedure left her in a two week coma. She later recounted hearing her doctors talk about how she might not make it and they were expecting her to die from the surgery. Only when she became an adult did she realize what the surgery was for and that she had been sterilized. Her mother and all of her siblings were sent to the Colony in Lynchburg, Mary Frances Corbin Donald being the last of her family to be sent there. Her grandfather, Fennel Corbin, was institutionalized at Western State in Staunton, where he later reportedly died. The 1940 census showed he was 72 years old at the time, was a patient at the institution, had a fifth grade education and his residence was simply listed as "rural". In an article published in 1982 in the Washington Post, titled Shenandoah National Park: Pain Lingers For Displaced Mountain Folks, those affected by the displacement of Appalachia families were for one of the first times given a voice. Alice Beahm, aged 53 at the time, remembered that the Civilian Conservation Corps came in and burned the houses to erase traces of humans. Another woman, Mary Bolden Burner, aged 61 in 1982, fumed at the "books they wrote about the mountain people being ignorant and all. Nothing but lies. They just trying to make all these people up here look like they didn't have any sense so they could take our land." To this day, as the title of the article implies, the pain still lingers from the forced removal of thousands and the institutionalization of dozens, if not hundreds. The history of the displaced residents of Shenandoah National Park and the mass sterilization of Appalachian people should be given proper recognition in the present day. The thousands of hill folk residing in those isolated mountain communities, in the name of science and social welfare, were forced off of their land with the promise of a new home and new life. Many were instead institutionalized, sterilized against their will or without their knowledge, and left without government help. Their land was needed for other people's personal gain and pleasure, such as the resort owner George Freeman Pollock. The eugenics movement in Virginia, being prominent in areas such as Staunton, was weaponized and used against those who could not fight it. This subject provides implications for further research looking into other topics such as the Melungeon ethnic group in this region and whether these mountain people were also targeted by the eugenics movement for having a mixed-race background. The purpose of this research is to aid in the preservation of Appalachian culture and hold those behind the Shenandoah National Park accountable for their actions in the past, especially since its website currently makes no mention of the thousands of people that were displaced.