The State Boys Rebellion by Michael D’Antonio

I flew through The State Boys Rebellion this week - I could not put it down. I found this book because I was doing some research for my Health Systems class, specifically for the chapter on policy. One of the topics that our textbook talked about was the horrible Tuskegee Syphilis Study , originally called the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male”. If you haven’t read about it, do click on the link above. It was a horror show run by the US Public Health Service. The USPHS allowed 399 Black men with syphilis to remain untreated from 1932 until 1973 when the Associated Press blew the whistle on the USPHS and forced them to stop withholding treatment. Because I didn’t want my students to write off such government abuse as simply something that happened in the South, I decided to do some research on something I was vaguely aware of from growing up in the Boston area. I remember driving by an abandoned school building with my mother in Waltham and asking her what the building had been for. She told me it had been a school for kids with intellectual disability, but that it had been shut down because now they were mainstreamed (probably not her words at the time, but that was the point). So I decided to look into this school. What I found was not the school I was looking for, but something far worse, and far darker - the story of the Massachusetts School for Idiotic and Feebleminded Youth, later renamed the Walter E. Fernald State School. What the Fernald School did to children is comparable, if not worse than the Tuskegee “Study” given its larger scale and the fact that it was done to children in the custody of the State. 

The Fernald School was founded under a Progressive vision of eugenics - removing less desirable people from the population, and/or sterilizing them before releasing them back into the population so they could not reproduce. In the critical case that legalized involuntary sterilization of people asserted to have intellectual disability, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendel Holms wrote, 

It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

What is stunning about this book is how it documents the fact that many of the children whom the state of Massachusetts ordered committed to Fernald were of ordinary intelligence and ability - they were just from lower class backgrounds, often victims of neglect, abuse, and abandonment. Today we know eugenics is junk science, but it was promoted by the leading “scientists” of the early 20th century - mostly wealthy, upper class elites looking to use scientific language to support their bigotry against ethnic and racial minorities and the working class. The book highlights how researchers from Harvard and MIT, working on grants from the Federal Government, ran experiments on the children confined at Fernald, including having them eat food contaminated with radioactive isotopes so they could see how the isotopes affected the children (this was in the 1950s). But much worse than that is how the book documents the physical, emotional, and sexual abuse the children were subjected to by the employees of the School while confined by the state at this “school”. 

As I read this book, I kept reflecting on our recent crisis with COVID and the refusal by certain communities to take the vaccine. Many of these communities - working class, ethnic and racial minorities - were “vaccine hesitant”. I think you can draw a straight line from past abuse of “science” by elite institutions as documented in the Tuskegee Study and places like Fernald. Vaccine hesitancy doesn’t just come from ignorance, it comes from a lack of trust, often earned. Science done correctly is a humble approach - one that emphasizes our ignorance. “Scientism” is using the veneer of science to accomplish a goal.