Book Review: The State Boys Rebellion

Fred Boyce, the central character in Michael D’Antonio’s excellent nonfiction work, The State Boys Rebellion, has passed on. The cause Boyce championed - the quest for universal respect for human rights - remains very much alive.

By Michael D’Antonio

SIMON & SCHUSTER

Reviewed by Marie Bannon

In the 1970s, I worked briefly in a Santa Rosa, California, home for “slow” or “retarded” children — at least that’s what they were called at the time. Today, psychiatrists refer to them as “challenged” or as having “learning disorders.”

I didn’t work there for long. I fought too much with the psychiatric staff, who castigated me for taking the time to talk with the kids instead of simply herding them from one place to the next. But while I was there, I noticed that two of the children were far from slow - they were just kids with some emotional problems that no one cared to, or knew how to, address.

One was a bright and active 9-year-old who kept telling me he didn’t belong with the “dummies.” He read aloud for me. He did math problems. He knew, and I knew, that he didn’t belong there.

Also at the boys’ home in Santa Rosa was a 12-year-old who never spoke. He wasn’t disabled. He just didn’t talk. A teacher told me, “He never talks, never reaches out, never communicates. Just shove the crayon in his hand and maybe he’ll color.”

One day I sat next to him on a bench in the playground. I told him that if people treated me the way they treated him, I wouldn’t talk to them, either. He didn’t say anything. He just took my hand. We sat on the bench holding hands until a staffer came over and dragged him away. She reported me for “inappropriate” conduct and had me fired.

The Effects of a Psychiatric Label

It’s been a long time since I thought of that place, but The State Boys Rebellion brought it back to me. While set in a different era and in a larger facility, the story is all too familiar.

In 1949, 7-year-old Freddy Boyce arrived at the Walter E. Fernald School for the Feebleminded in Waltham, Massachusetts. His father had committed suicide and his young mother had been unable to care for him, so Freddy had passed through a series of foster homes, some abusive, some merely neglectful.

He had grown into a quiet boy, frightened of adults. His speech was sometimes hard to understand. Social workers, concerned about his garbled words, decided he needed to be tested by a psychiatrist, who certified Freddy was “feebleminded” and recommended a state school. Without being told where he was going or why, Freddy was sent to Fernald.

At the school, he met many other boys who had scored low on IQ tests for similar reasons. Abandoned by parents and tossed around the foster care system with little or no schooling, they could barely understand the questions on the tests. This caused them to be adjudicated “feebleminded” and sentenced to Fernald.

How Boyce and other “state boys” dealt with their time in this prison, suffered incredible abuses, and even served as guinea pigs in terrible “scientific” experiments is the story of The State Boys Rebellion.

It’s a story well told, as D’Antonio weaves in the history of such institutions, with their roots in German eugenics and “progressive” ideology:

“A central element of Progressive ideology, eugenics followed two strategies. The first — positive eugenics — saw the creation of organizations such as the Race Betterment Foundation, which urged white, upper-middle-class women, whose birth rate had declined by half in 60 years, to have large families…. [T]he other face of eugenics — negative eugenics — fought to keep the genetically unworthy from having babies.”

This program was taken up by psychiatrist Walter E. Fernald, who felt that the most dangerous among the “feeble-minded” were children who were not obviously deficient and therefore might not be kept locked up. These “brighter feebleminded” would breed and then perpetuate the problem. His solution was to keep them locked up forever.

He was enabled to fulfill his aims following two crucial events: the wide-scale use of IQ testing and the invention of the term “moron.”

Rounding Up “Morons”

In 1904, Alfred Binet, a French lawyer, was asked by the Sorbonne’s Laboratory of Experimental Psychology to develop a test to identify slow learners. He came up with a test in which those below average were placed into two categories: “idiot” for those with a mental age of 2 or younger, and “imbecile” for those with a mental age of 3 to 7.

In America, a Stanford professor, Lewis Terman, expanded this concept to create the Stanford-Binet test or “Intelligence Quotient” test. The mean was 100. Above that was superior. Below that were categories of “idiot” — below 30 — and “imbecile” — from 30 to 50. The nearly normal — those with IQs of 70 to 100 — were later assigned the term “moron.”

Terman believed that intelligence was inherited and immutable, and argued that “educational reform may abandon, once and for all, the effort to bring all children up to grade.”

According to the author, “Terman feared that tens of thousands of such high-grade defectives [morons] lurked in the countryside, just waiting to deceive and then destroy normal families.”

The solution, in the eyes of psychiatry, was institutionalization.

“To make sure every last moron was captured,” D’Antonio writes, “many states, including Massachusetts, would establish traveling ‘clinics’ to administer IQ tests at public schools. Often these clinics identified as feebleminded, children who had been deemed by teachers and parents to be normal. Many of these boys and girls would be separated from their families by officials…. Parents who did not volunteer their children for admission often lost custody of a son or daughter in court.”

No, this didn’t happen in Nazi Germany. It happened in the USA.

Oatmeal Spiked with Radium

Thus Freddy Boyce ended up at Fernald, where physical, mental and sexual abuses were daily occurrences. Boys who fought the system ended up in “Ward 22,” where drugs and electric shock were administered.

Thorazine was the drug of the day, and at Fernald, some boys took part in trials of the drug. The head of Fernald’s medical laboratory was a German psychiatrist, Clemens E. Benda.

In 1955, Benda obtained a grant from MIT to enroll boys in a study concerning “various aspects of nutrition, particularly how the body absorbs various cereals, iron and vitamins.”

That was how the experiment was presented to parents, who generally agreed to have their children participate. For orphans, the state gave the authorization.

“To encourage cooperation, Dr. Benda and his MIT collaborators began calling the boys they selected … the Science Club. They were told that they were special, the smartest boys at Fernald, and that they were making a contribution to society. They would be rewarded for being part of the experiment. Trips to ball games, parties, even gifts were mentioned.”

The boys ate huge portions of oatmeal and farina with an odd taste, excreted in special depositories so their wastes could be studied, and received Mickey Mouse watches as gifts. When the experiment was over, they returned to the ward, not to discover for 20 years that their food had been spiked with radium.

Psychosurgery, Other “Tests” Performed

The State Boys rebellion occurred in 1957. Perhaps sparked by watching the civil rights movement on television, the boys in Ward 22 had finally had enough.

They decided to drive out the attendants and take over the building. And they did so, booting out the staff and staging their own protest.

One of the youths was Charlie Dyer. “We were really fed up,” Dyer recalled many years later. “We wanted to do anything to show them they couldn’t do this to us anymore.”

Although the revolt lasted less than a day, the State Boys proved to themselves and to authorities that they were anything but feebleminded.

As a result, D’Antonio writes, “In Waltham and at similar state schools around the country, a growing number of professionals were coming to recognize the absurdity of holding hundreds of relatively normal children and allowing them to become angry, undereducated, desperate adolescents. … And in retrospect, Fernald would never again be the same.”

Within a few years, Fernald began to release some of the boys. After several failed escapes, Fred Boyce was also released, ultimately getting a job and fulfilling his dream of buying a home. In the 1970s, the radiation experiments at Fernald finally came to light, and Fred, along with others involved, sued the state, MIT and other parties for violation of their civil rights.

They won a judgment, but none of the boys cared much about the money. They were more concerned that people knew what had happened at the Walter E. Fernald School for the Feebleminded. Benda’s files showed that, in addition to the radium studies, radioactive iodine, calcium and iron had been tested on residents, and that the “state boys” had also been subjected to insulin comas, electroshock and lobotomies.

Not surprisingly, the institution’s legacy of brutality was manifested in other ways. In 1996, The Boston Globe reported, “in just six years, the [Fernald] residents … had suffered 1,400 injuries.”

In 2003, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney shut Fernald down.

The State Boys Rebellion is a moving, powerful and important book. Despite the horrors it describes, it never loses the humanity of its subjects, who, in their own ways, triumphed over evils one can hardly bear to think about.It made me wonder about what happened to those little boys I knew long ago — and what is happening today to so many children in the hands of psychiatrists, who brand them for life with bogus labels and ruin their existences with brain-damaging, deadly drugs.