The State Boys Rebellion (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "After a few months at the Walter E. Fernald State School, seven-year- old Freddie Boyce, skinny with dark eyes and brown hair, could see trouble..." (more)
Key Phrases: oatmeal experiment, state lady, state wards, State Boys, Science Club, Fred Boyce (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment shockingly demonstrated that the world's most powerful narcotic might well be unlimited power over the powerless. Emancipation movements the world over have also taught us that even the most abjectly powerless will, given enough time, fight for their freedom and dignity. These two precepts are at the heart of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist D'Antonio's startling account of the wholesale incarceration of the mentally retarded during the middle decades of the last century. The bastard child of progressivism and eugenics, the institutionalization by the 1930s of needy children with below-average IQs was a well-established part of the legal system. The effect of this was to consign many children to overcrowded and underfunded medical prisons where physical, emotional and sexual abuse was rampant-and quite literally without end. D'Antonio wisely chooses one institution, the Walter E. Fernald School for the Feebleminded, in Massachusetts, where a group of boys, utterly (and correctly) convinced of their lack of abnormal status, after nearly two decades of confinement, in 1957 instigated a violent uprising in Ward 22, the prisonlike facility where misbehaving inmates were periodically sent. Thanks to their indomitable conviction that their institutionalization was unjust and the growing awareness on the part of certain sympathetic outsiders over several decades, these young men were finally able to help put an end to this ghastly system. D'Antonio (Atomic Harvest, etc.) deftly combines detailed archival research and extensive personal interviews to paint a richly nuanced picture of a horrifying and shamefully underexposed part of our country's recent history.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

On Nov. 4, 1957, 15 residents of the Walter E. Fernald State School in Waltham, Mass., seized control of a building on campus. In a planned uprising, they looted, smashed windows and set fires. The rebels at Fernald, a state institution for the "mentally retarded," held the building for almost nine hours before they surrendered.

The boys and girls who rebelled had been born to "disorganized" families riven by poverty, alcohol and abuse -- environments that typically led to low scores on the I.Q. tests given in the 1940s and '50s. Boys who fared poorly on them sometimes wound up at schools such as Fernald, where the socially deprived and the mentally impaired were mixed with little discrimination. Michael D'Antonio examines the complex issues and brutal ironies of their ordeal in his engrossing book The State Boys Rebellion.

D'Antonio exposes the details of this system by weaving together two stories -- the history of human intelligence theory and policy in the past century, and the history of a group of State Boys who were warehoused at Fernald because their families couldn't manage child-rearing. D'Antonio's first strand traces the rise of the eugenics movement, which held that people of inferior brains and talent were diluting the quality of the gene pool. Eugenics attempted to keep "mental defectives" from reproducing, mostly by isolating them in public institutions (such as the Fernald School) that sprang up across the country during the middle of the 20th century.

To identify the "defectives," the scientists who led this movement relied on I.Q. tests, which were introduced during the 1920s. The tests ranked scores on a relative scale, with 100 representing average intelligence. Scientists had believed that intelligence was inherited, but during the 1930s studies began to show that impoverished, chaotic homes caused low I.Q. scores (especially scores in the 50-70 range). The same research found that more nurturing environments could raise scores dramatically. But just when scientific knowledge was casting doubt on the assumptions of intelligence theory, the I.Q. movement caught on in public policy circles.

And therein lies D'Antonio's compelling saga of the "State Boys." The central character, Fred Boyce, was taken from his alcoholic, widowed mother as an infant and spent six years in four loveless foster homes. Slow to learn speech and having scored 62 on an I.Q. test, he was placed in Fernald when his last foster mother died. Boyce grew up on the wards of Fernald, terrorized by older boys, verbally and physically abused by attendants and offered minimal training and education. He and the other boys like him -- normal boys from broken homes -- functioned as family to one another. They developed together in their teen years, when growing awareness of their circumstances bred an anger that spilled over in fistfights, in escape attempts and finally in the rebellion of Nov. 4th.

The uprising was a turning point but not the end of the story. A more skilled and compassionate work force arrived at Fernald in the late '50s and early '60s and sought to prepare boys like Boyce for the outside world. Boyce himself was "paroled" in 1960, at the age of 19. Together with many State Boys, he gravitated to a neighborhood of cheap restaurants, bars and apartments in Boston. He worked the counter at a drug store and at an all-night hamburger joint. Ironically, life at Fernald had prepared him for this sort of street culture: He had learned to make quick, shrewd judgments about people and had developed a strong instinct for survival. Yet he and his friends struggled in other ways, not only with their lack of education but with a lack of social training. Some of their deprivations were so fundamental that it aches to read about them. Boyce consistently referred to "the boondocks" as "the dune box." And he watched the bus to his first job pull away without boarding because he thought he had to wait for the bus driver to invite him on.

Eventually, the State Boys began to fan out from their beachhead in Boston. The majority married and most held regular jobs, some of them quite successfully. Boyce bought a home south of Boston and became a carnival worker, using his charm and savvy to lure customers to his games on the midway. Energetically self-educated, he read widely in science and philosophy during the off-season. He developed a deep-seated ethic of justice and forgiveness. He rarely saw other State Boys; like most of them, he worked hard to put Fernald far behind him.

Then, in 1993, a scandal broke in the Boston press -- Boyce and some other State Boys had been fed radioactive oatmeal as part of a radiation experiment at Fernald in the early 1950s. He emerged as an articulate spokesman for the group, explaining the Fernald experience to the media. A subsequent law suit against M.I.T., Quaker Oats and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts earned each of the human subjects $50,000-$65,000.

D'Antonio's book is both engaging and valuable. His State Boys are fascinating people who maintained their humanity and pride against the daily assaults of institutional life. He renders them as vivid individuals, and the warmth of his plainspoken prose makes their stories irresistible.

Still, I worry that the book will be overlooked. It is, on the surface, a crusading book about a problem that no longer exists. Institutions such as Fernald now serve only a handful of the least functional individuals. Long gone are the relatively normal children like the State Boys.

But this book has great value because it is a powerful cautionary tale. Stephen Jay Gould's classic Mismeasure of Man warned that pseudoscience and half-digested scientific knowledge posed great dangers if used to address social and political problems. Gould's targets included the early "science" of intelligence testing. The State Boys Rebellion puts a human face on Gould's warning. In moving and eloquent detail, Michael D'Antonio shows what happens to people when public policy enacts bad science.
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1ST edition (April 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743245121
• ISBN-13: 978-0743245128
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #385,890 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Triumph of the Supposed Morons, June 18, 2004

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

We could never have an institution today called the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feebleminded Youth. It is not just political correctness that would forbid such a name; "idiocy" and "feeblemindedness" were once thought to be real diagnosable conditions, and they are not now. The MSIFY existed, however, but even after it changed its name to the Fernald State School, it was through the 1960s still housing what officials thought were idiotic, moronic, and feebleminded young people. Sadly, huge numbers of the kids kept there (and in countless similar institutions) had no mental handicaps whatsoever. In _The State Boys Rebellion: A True Story_ (Simon and Schuster), Michael D'Antonio exposes the Fernald story, a sorry and sordid tale. The kids described here would today, it is hoped, get reliable foster homes and any special education that was necessary; at the time, they got neglect, assaults, rapes, and cruelty. Some of the boys described here forced their way out, and did fare surprisingly well, and did get their histories out in the public view, so at least in part this is a story of an inspiring victory over the system.

D'Antonio has done a particularly good job at putting the Fernald story into historical context, showing Fernald as a product of the eugenics movement. The idea was that morons (a term coined as a medical diagnosis) could be segregated and prevented from breeding more morons. Among the problems was that at Fernald, plenty of the children were normal. As Fred Boyce, the main State Boy profiled here, said decades later, "Keep in mind that we didn't commit any crimes. We were just seven-year-old orphans." Boyce was of at least average intelligence; even his official record at the place said, "He is certainly not feebleminded." He was skillful at sizing up other people, and interested in science. He needed adoption, but such recommendations produced no effect. He was only released when he was nineteen. In Fernald, there was an over-reliance on IQ test scores, and once a label IQ number had been applied, it stuck. This was true even if teachers could tell just by talking to the boys that the scores were meaningless. Whatever IQ scores mean, it was true that the boys _dropped_ in their scores as they stayed in state custody, even though authorities taught that IQ was a permanent fixture.

The boys were supposed to be separated from the world, but some of the world crept in, from radio and television; one of Boyce's means of learning about the outside was a crystal radio he built, using a found quartz rock for a crystal. As teenagers, they had a natural rebelliousness combined with a desire to fit in, and they gradually found that they were much more like their fellow teens on the outside than any morons. Inspired by the civil rights struggles in Little Rock, some of the boys took over one of the wards in 1957. They rioted, and some wound up in prison. The real rebellion of the state boys took place in 1995. They were undereducated, but many of them had found work and made families, although some of them did not reveal even to their wives the horrors of where they had been brought up. Many of them united to start speaking publicly about what they had endured, and brought a successful lawsuit against the state and against Quaker Oats for having used them as unwitting test subjects in nutrition experiments involving radioactive oatmeal. A researcher who interviewed the boys to help with the lawsuit put it perfectly: "These guys had their lives ruined because people where trying to do good. That may be the scariest thing about it." D'Antonio's clear, restrained, and sympathetic portrayal of a misguided institution and its captives is a fitting parable about good intentions.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Book About State School Horrors, February 2, 2006

By	Jamie Ratliff (Texas, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The State Boys Rebellion (Paperback)

The State Boys Rebellion tells the story of the Fernald State School in Massachusetts. Michael D'Antonio does a great job of telling the story through the eyes of Freddie Boyce, a child that grew up in Fernald. The story is quite chilling, specially to those of us who did not live through that time period. It is disgraceful that we, the United States actually started Eugenics, although I was taught in school that Nazi Germany was the creator. This book should remind us that as a society, we sometimes leave out the bad stuff our forefathers did, even if they meant no harm. I would highly reccomend this book to anyone, but it will touch the heart of anyone with a child who is considered "special".

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An American Family ...Treated in an Un-American way., June 25, 2004

By	"caborney" (Webster, MA. United States) - See all my reviews

Finally, A Book about the way we were.. or, God forbid, the way we might still be. Mr. D,antonio,s research of our Governments,s nuclear application,s was not intended to lead him right to The Fernald State School, located in Waltham, Massachusetts, and one Mr. Frederick Boyce, But it did for some strange reason, lead him there. With the resulting introduction to Fred Boyce. From his research, Mr. D, Antonio was afforded a view that few Americans are ever afforded. Mr. D,Antonio was afforded a view of just how, our system of social welfare, and social care was doled out in the middle of the twentieth century. The shame of this True story is not soley in the past believe and practice of Eugenics, but in the past believe and practice of warehousing State kids. Warehousing them in any Environement enabled the servicing Social Worker to look like he or she has done their job. This writer still believes this practice still exists today.This Book is a compelling read and I am very gratefull to the author and I am very proud of the courage and accomplishmenst Frederick L. Boyce. (...)