Champion of the 'state boys'
IN 2002, during an interview conducted over a two-day drive from Oklahoma to Boston, Fred Boyce and I talked about our relationship. I mentioned Janet Malcolm's dissection of the writer-subject dynamic in ''The Journalist and the Murderer" and reminded him that since I knew about everything from his sex life to his finances he might not be comfortable with all that I might write. Having committed to telling me his life story, Fred said he had no concern about the bargain. He even suggested that after my main project was done, I try another. In his heavy Boston accent, he said, ''Call it 'The Journalist and the Retarded Carnival Barker.' "
In fact, Fred had made his living, for more than 30 years, as an old-fashioned carnie, pulling a ring toss game behind a diesel pickup truck from fair to fair. He was also, according to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, mentally retarded. The official diagnosis, typed onto state records, was ''moron."
This moron, who died Saturday at age 65, lived in a pretty, paid-off house in Norwell. He had made himself into a successful civil rights activist. He had used the courts to win millions of dollars for several dozen so-called morons, and he had used me and the press to reveal a long-hidden and grotesque chapter of American history.
For much of the 20th century, states had used the pseudo-science of eugenics and its main tool -- the IQ test -- to identify children who were bad for the American gene pool and lock them away in institutions. The moron (a medical term) was of particular interest because he or she could pass for normal and infiltrate society. By the 1940s, when Fred was sent to live at the Fernald State School, thousands of boys and girls who today would be recognized as learning disabled or victims of neglect and abuse were held in these facilities alongside children and adults with profound mental and physical disabilities.
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When finally released as a young man, Fred couldn't read or write. He had no sense of how even the simplest tasks -- riding a bus or ordering a meal in a cafe -- might be accomplished. Everything he would become depended on his own innate intelligence and resilience. When, in the 1990s, he learned that he and others had been used as human guinea pigs in radiation experiments, these qualities helped him organize his former ward mates for the lawsuit that was settled for a little over $3 million. The same men appeared in my book, ''The State Boys Rebellion," and in countless press reports.
Pleased as they were by the legal settlement and public attention, Fred and the other state boys never received either an apology or compensation for their incarceration and forced labor at the school, which saved the state many millions of dollars in wages and expenses. Governor Mitt Romney and other officials refused them this justice.
In my final interview with Fred, at a hospice near his home, I agreed to keep telling his story. Days later, as he slipped into a coma, the state sent a letter that affirmed he was never a moron. But no apology was offered for the abuse, neglect, stigma, and deprivation he suffered as a matter of official policy. No payment was offered for his forced labor.
Fred believed that life had treated him well. He had many friends and, more important, he had, in revealing his moron past, served others in a unique way. Until he spoke, no one had ever reported the conditions of the eugenic gulag from an inmate's perspective. No one had revealed in such detail his own humiliation and degradation inside a state school. And no one had done so much to relieve the grief experiences for the thousands who had been unjustly labeled and incarcerated in horrific conditions.
But Fred always dwelled on the gifts life had brought him after Fernald and even forgave those attendants who had abused him as a child. He considered them to be victims of a bad idea and a bad system. But he had little patience for higher officials who knew the truth and chose to ignore it and little faith that they would do the right thing.
Fred died fearing that state governments across America intended to simply wait out the survivors of the eugenic gulag until they all died, so they could avoid both moral responsibility and financial liability. Romney's response to the state boys suggests he was right. Knowing Fred as I did, I believe he would forgive Romney and officials of all the states that practiced eugenics for this failure, but he would never accept it. As the writer who befriended the mentally retarded carnival barker, I can do neither.
Michael D'Antonio is author of ''The State Boys Rebellion." 
