Free Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter by Kate Clifford Larson

and conditions of various disabilities, including the many types of simple and complex learning disorders. Within this limiting framework, mentally disabled and learning-disabled children and adults had few options and bleak prospects for education and for leading autonomous or semi-independent lives.
    Many institutions, both private and public, became warehouses for the insane, the disabled, and the addicted. There were hundreds of state and private hospitals and homes for the mentally ill and the mentally and physically disabled across the country. Wealthier families, like the Kennedys, could afford private institutions, whereas those with fewer financial resources often turned to state-run or private charitable or church-owned facilities. Regardless of who ran these institutions, many of them were houses of horror. One former inmate of the Fernald School, a notorious Massachusetts state hospital, described the facility as “purgatory.”
    Dark, dirty, and disease- and rodent-infested, many institutions for the insane and disabled provided little more than shelter and some food. Medical care was spotty; occupational therapy and educational and vocational training were nonexistent. Patients and residents would sometimes spend their days and nights caked in their own excrement. Orderlies, doctors, and guards sometimes raped women residents, while others were forced into prostitution businesses organized on institution grounds. The intellectually disabled were often housed side by side with the mentally ill, the suicidal, the alcoholic, the drug-addicted, and those adjudged “criminally insane.” Cries for attention or relief from suffering and pain usually went unanswered. Physical and emotional abuse were rampant, dehumanization and intimidation commonplace.
    Rose’s consultations with a variety of doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, academic specialists, and religious leaders took on a new urgency. None offered Rose what she thought was best for Rosemary, making her “terribly frustrated and heartbroken.”Rose was accustomed to controlling her children’s social and intellectual lives, and she was determined that Rosemary would not be separated from the family. Joe Sr. believed, too, that keeping Rosemary at home or enrolled in nearby private schools provided her with more benefits than an institution for the mentally disabled would.
    Both of them clearly understood that in the socially elite circles of Boston, New York, Europe, and elsewhere the pressure to institutionalize Rosemary, a choice many of their similarly situated wealthy counterparts made for their disabled children, would be great. Rose and Joe’s peers had been influenced by the powerful eugenics movement that swept Western societies during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Eugenics was fueled by pseudoscientific claims that the human race consisted of “two classes, the eugenic and the cacogenic (or poorly born).” The cacogenic, eugenicists claimed, “inherited bad germ plasm, and thus as a group . . . at the very least, should not breed.”African Americans, immigrants, the poor, and criminals were often deemed cacogenics; fears of the “immigrant hordes” streaming into American cities and the migration of African Americans out of the Deep South into northern and western cities led some native-born white Americans to embrace these beliefs.
    The intellectually and physically disabled were another category of “defectives.” Eugenics scientists and their followers believed that these individuals were also the products of inherited bad genes and should be treated much the same way as the mentally ill, criminals, and the chronically poor. Forced sterilization, they argued, was society’s cure. Some believed that spending money on insane asylums, poorhouses, and other charitable and social institutions and programs serving the mentally ill and disabled only encouraged the propagation of “bad seeds.” The