'State Boys' reveals a dark episode of U.S. social history

"The State Boys Rebellion" is the kind of book that makes you give those conspiracy theorists a second listen.

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Subjecting children, even entire communities, to radiation without consent, and punishing and imprisoning orphaned children because of low IQ scores just couldn't happen in the United States.

But, yes, it could happen - and did.

Author Michael D'Antonio spells out how America's quest for a "better society" took a woefully wrong turn in the early 1900s sparked by the belief that intelligence was inherited and immutable.

The "feebleminded" - those with below-average IQs - were considered threats to the survival of the race. The most vulnerable were subjected to imprisonment in state schools, overcrowded asylums of abuse from which "human guinea pigs" were often culled for the government's latest research initiatives.

D'Antonio is careful to point out that though some of those shuttled into these schools were seriously impaired, others were normal or had simple learning disabilities that today would be easily diagnosed and treated in conventional schools.

D'Antonio's reporting skills are put to good use. He conducts extensive interviews with elderly men who were once confined in such places and yields piercing memories of abuse - sexual, emotional and physical.

In places, the writing is somewhat wooden and the narrative reads like an extensive case study or research project. With a cast that includes such characters as Dr. Benda, who keeps jars of "pickled" brain tissue in a basement laboratory, and exploitative attendants who exact sexual favors in return for field trips, the reader might expect a more colorfully told story.

However, the lack of literary beauty is more than compensated for by the real stars of the book, the so-called State Boys themselves. They plan and execute several escapes, pine for real parents and imaginary girlfriends, and eventually make their stories public through the media and the courts.

The book closely follows Freddie Boyce, who was abandoned by his mother as an infant and eventually was committed to the Fernald School for the Feebleminded in Massachusetts.

Boyce was a State Boy rebel who was painfully aware that he didn't deserve the treatment he received at Fernald.

D'Antonio writes: "Fred paused for a moment to get the words just right. Then he stared at the doctor and spoke very slowly. 'If you had a kid, and even if that kid was retarded, for real, would you put him in this place?"'

Later, despite the substandard state school education that left him unable to read and write, Boyce married, operated his own carnival stand, survived cancer and became an optimistic public voice on behalf of so many wrongly institutionalized individuals.

A high school student who heard Boyce speak observed that "He wasn't bitter, even though everybody wronged him ... that blew my mind."

The book is not, as its title might suggest, a dramatic telling of one orgiastic uprising and its aftermath, though there is a major revolt that seems to cause change at Fernald. It's more about the real, more poignant rebellion that was the daily one.