Abstract
It is doubtful that Robert Hornick’s Girls and Boys of Belchertown will find a very wide readership among sociologists. That is a pity, not just because Hornick’s short book is well-written, an almost charming account of an institution and set of events devoid of charm. It is also that the issues Hornick’s account evokes, now almost forgotten, are issues we would do well to remember.
While still working on a dissertation in a very different area of sociology, I spent the year of 1981 studying community residences for the mentally retarded former residents of Willowbrook State School on Staten Island. What happened at Belchertown closely paralleled the events at Willowbrook, albeit on a smaller scale. Yet by the time I arrived at the University of Massachusetts in 1997, I had largely forgotten about my earlier research and it never occurred to me to drive past the now abandoned school, a mere fifteen-minute drive from my office and along a route I occasionally travelled to visit friends. But I am not the only one who has forgotten.
Unlike the small army of sociologists who study mental illness, few others have studied mental retardation. For perhaps a decade mental illness and mental retardation were joined, as the institutions that housed both were joined in withering criticism and a subsequent process of deinstitutionalization. Today however, community residences for both the mentally ill and the mentally retarded are taken for granted. Indeed, a quick check of Social Science Abstracts shows virtually no references to deinstitutionalization before the 1980s, when the term and the concept were still new, then a burst of attention for roughly a decade, a slow decline in each succeeding decade, trickling off to near nothing in the past few years.
Hornick, an amateur historian who had volunteered at Belchertown while a student at Amherst College in the 1960s, tells his story well. The Belchertown State School for the Feeble-Minded was established in 1916 and opened its doors to the first residents in 1922. As originally intended, the founders of Belchertown took the notion of a school seriously. “We claim for idiots,” Hornick cites the reformer Samuel Gridley Howe stating, “a place in the human family” (p. 15). At the beginning, Belchertown, replete with both classrooms and a working farm, admitted only those with promise of development.
Very quickly however, in a story repeated at similar institutions across the country, good intentions gave way to custodial realities. Between 1924 and 1940, the resident population of the school doubled from about 750 to 1500, but more importantly, so did the disabilities (both cognitive and physical) faced by the residents intensify. By 1935, the school had closed all of its reading rooms, converting them into sleeping quarters for residents who were crowded into dorms with beds arranged end to end. An educational director gave way to a medical director. Despite an original goal to “graduate” one-fifth of its residents, it is unlikely that the school ever returned more than one in twenty of its residents to community life. In Hornick’s phrase, what had been intended as “schools for the feeble minded” became “venues for quarantine.”
Built on over 600 acres in a small town in western Massachusetts, the Belchertown State School was intended to be set apart. But it was never entirely isolated. For many years, exhibiting very different sensibilities than we have today, the school put on a minstrel show, “which became legendary in the town” (p. 38). The school also put on a Fourth of July parade, replete with floats. Parents visited from time to time. And not least, the school was the largest employer in Belchertown for nearly the full length of its existence, with its peak of 440 local employees accounting for roughly one of every seven town residents.
In March 1970 (two years before Rivera’s more famous exposé of Willowbrook), the Springfield Union, published an exposé called “The Tragedy of Belchertown.” The article spurred a long round of attempted reforms, driven in large part by a newly militant parents’ association. A 1972 class action suit was resolved a year later by a consent decree. The consent decree, signed onto by the state of Massachusetts, was intended to improve the school—a new superintendent, new programs, more staff, better conditions—rather than to close it. But it was not to be. As almost everywhere else in the United States, the Belchertown State School was caught up in the wave of deinstitutionalization that emptied out “total institutions” of all sorts. In 1992, the Belchertown School released its last resident and has, like many such schools, stood abandoned for two decades as the town that houses it searches for a developer to build housing or a resort or any other tax generating facility.
It’s a good story, but why should sociologists care?
First, the Belchertown State School, as an example of many similar institutions, is a lesson in how good intentions go awry. It is easy to forget that the total institutions which Goffman and others condemned did not originate in custodial intentions but from the impulse to reform and improve. Although, to contemporary sensibilities, the urge to isolate seems fundamentally mistaken, it may not be only because isolation is, in itself, a disservice to retarded people, but because isolation makes issues invisible, draining reform efforts of their energy.
Second, Belchertown exemplifies how scandals operate. A scandal is not simply about uncovering previously hidden facts. Indeed, it is surprising how little hidden the Belchertown school was and how little the exposé actually exposed anything new. Rather, a scandal is often about publicizing already known but unnoticed facts and, even more importantly, reframing them as a violation of newly developing sets of standards.
Third, although deviance has largely disappeared as a framework in sociology, there is still room for the study of stigma. Deviance, as a field, was done in both by its own insistence on treating miscreant behavior as motivated and by the politicized insistence of those miscreants whose behavior is motivated by the fact that they are not miscreants at all. Mental retardation, which is not a motivated condition, never fit easily into a deviance framework. But mental retardation is a condition onto which, as Hornick shows, we have long read hopes and fears, prejudices and sympathies, ideas about what makes (and unmakes) humanity. As badly as mental retardation ever fit in a deviance framework, it fits remarkably well into the framework of stigmatization which examines how we make sense of difference. Hornick reminds us of the intellectual opportunity missed.