(Un)Hidden in the World
Two weeks with Walter E. Fernald's story in 2025 America
Click below to listen or read to this week’s edition. Note: Listeners, one video clip from below is not embedded in the audio of this week’s edition.
Over the last two weeks, I’ve had the chance to speak with audiences, authors, and media outlets about my new book, A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America’s Disabled, tracing the roots of mass institutionalization of disabled people. The questions and responses I’ve gotten have been all that I could have hoped: people connecting past and present in powerful ways at a moment in time where disabled people need our fellow citizens to be fierce allies. Porter Square Books even sold out of copies at a packed release celebration for the book on April 1.
In the coming months the work that went into this book will dovetail into the release of findings from a massive disability-led human rights project underway in Massachusetts, with ramifications for the lives of disabled people in America, past and present. I look forward to sharing those findings and lifting the veil on a story that demands a national reckoning.
But in this week’s edition of (Un)Hidden I’d like to share a few short excerpts and links to a selection of interviews and articles about the new book from various sources over the last two weeks. I hope they give you some Sunday morning reading, some small glimpses of the ideas and stories at work in the book, and some insights for action in our world today.
A Perfect Turmoil in the World
A quick glimpse of the book launch at Porter Square Books:
“Like [Buck v. Bell, the 1927 Supreme Court decision allowing for forced sterilization of disabled people], the ideas of eugenics were never fully repudiated in American life. Today they live on, regardless of party or politics in hidden and overt ways, to the continued detriment to the lives of disabled people. Fernald’s life shows us how little it would take to turn the tide against these ideas. Indeed, at the time of his death, he was calling for a near-total dismantling of the institutional system he had developed and championed, arguing that instead of policing the disabled we should crack down on communities who were bad to the disabled people who had a right to live in them.”
From “How one man kept Mass. from sterilizing the disabled” in Cognoscenti, WBUR-NPR Boston.
“There is a fine line between the very real challenges that disabilities create in our lives, for those of us who are disabled and sometimes for our loved ones… and coming to see disabled people as the problem. We have not been sensitive enough about the ease with which you can slip from one into the other. Fernald’s story reveals someone who was at the heart of constructing that idea, slipping into it himself and then pulling himself out of it, and trying to warn us not to fall into that trap of seeing problems that people face as signs that people are problems.”
From “The Special Ed Pioneer Who Still Haunts Psychology” in Psychology Today
“In communities where disabled people are inseparable from its defining features, many of the cursed features of our failed communities would necessarily fall away. Our hurried lives would be slowed by our insistence on living in ways where we naturally take the time necessary to fully live with our disabled neighbors and loved ones. Support would be a reciprocal act of care between disabled and non-disabled people, not a bureaucratic delivery of services. The spaces beyond our front doors would be understood as shared places for the full expression of who we are. These are all things we need, and perhaps disabled people possess a clarity about how we might all begin to build communities defined by these qualities, using the very attributes we have been subjugated for having for so long.”
From “Creating community with disabled people, not delivering services for them” in Connective Tissue