As a member of his city’s historical society, Alex Green had access to the building that held the Walter E. Fernald Development Center between 1848 and 2014 in Waltham, Massachusetts.
While wandering the property, Green had questions about its history and impact on people with disabilities, which led to years of research into the legacy of the institution and Dr. Fernald himself.
Green, a lecturer at Harvard University and author of “A Perfect Turmoil: Walker E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled,” presented his findings Sunday at the Monadnock Lyceum at the Peterborough Unitarian Universalist Church.
Those findings included both the positive and disastrous impacts of Fernald’s career and confronted philosophical questions about how to adjust to change.
Fernald was an American physician and well-known for his stint as superintendent at the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded in Waltham, which was named after him after his death.
To start, Green asked people in the audience to question their assumptions about instructions for people with disabilities during this era, explaining that this history tends to be odd and unexplored despite its popularity on TV. He also emphasized that people with disabilities are a key part of American history.
“The records that tell this story have been scattered, lost, burned in institutions or covered up and blocked from the public in a way where we can’t know this story unless we fight to know it,” Green said.
With millions of documents untouched and disorganized, and about 14,000 unmarked or nameless graves in Massachusetts linked to the deaths of people with disabilities at these institutions, Green fought to know it. He learned lots about this history as he worked to name people who had been harmed by Dr. Fernald and his colleagues.
During his research, Green found that, on the one hand, Fernald supported eugenics and saw “defective delinquency” as inherent in people with disabilities. But those beliefs clashed with his work as an advocate for access to education for disabled people and creator of special education in public schools.
Green’s underlying message: “Change is really, really hard. It’s really, really hard for us to do, especially when it’s something we deeply believe,” he said. “Embrace the difficult work of embracing moments of change, especially when we’ve done wrong through direct apology, actions that demonstrate apologies through repair, or both.”
As Green explained, Fernald was a leader in the education for people with disabilities and influenced the world on that matter. Once he started advocating for eugenics alongside the rest of the field, legislation and medical practices followed suit. Eventually, Fernald turned against that practice when sterilization became the solution, but it was already too late.
“He was misguided in that direction by this obsession with intelligence and guided back by what in the time they wouldn’t have called conscience; they would have called moral reactions, our way of expressing the non-intellectual aspects of being part of a broader social and societal being called humanity,” Green said.
Green pulled from an idea by Samuel Gridley Howe, an American doctor and advocate of education for the blind: “Good intentions and kind impulses do not necessarily lead to wise and truly humane measures.”
Fernald’s negative views directly influenced how the public viewed people with disabilities in the 21st century, despite his work at the end of his life to reverse the literature and practices by medical doctors and politicians at the time.
Green invited everyone in the audience to consider their position in relation to Fernald’s history and its direct impact on our current reality.
“We now know his view — views he later changed and walked back and denounced — built the mindsets we have today,” he said. “Mindsets that lead to the continued segregation, oppression and abuse of disabled people in our time.
“What does it say of us if we know this truth and do nothing to abandon these mindsets and the evil actions they give rise to in our own time?”
Elizabeth Goodhue, the Lyceum moderator and author of “The Truth About Down Syndrome: Lessons Learned from Raising a Son with Trisomy-21,” explained that her decision to keep her son out of institutions like Fernald’s is recent and real. The Walter E. Fernald Development Center closed in 2014, and Goodhue said her son, William, was born in 1989.
To view the full discussion, go to Monadnock Lyceum website at monadnocklyceum.org/speaker/alex-green.
The next Monadnock Lyceum speaker is Louis P. Masur, professor of American studies and history at Rutgers University, on Aug. 23 at 10:30 a.m. at the Peterborough church. His topic: Abraham Lincoln’s leadership style.
Wendy Keith and Walden Whitman will be the musical guests, with Dr. Mary Kelly moderating the discussion. The conversation will be followed by a question-and-answer session and reception.