It’s a little known and controversial issue that America was home to eugenics before Nazi Germany, and Michael D’Antonio’s “The State Boys Rebellion” chronicles the story of its victims: abused, abandoned, and neglected boys labeled “morons,” institutionalized, crammed into overcrowded and understaffed dormitories, denied proper education, threatened, and molested by attendants. They were systematically robbed of a childhood, all because they scored poorly on IQ tests, and regardless that the scores could have been attributed to their squalor instead of their genes.

Maybe it’s hard to believe that any of this ever happened in America, but it did, fueled by the reduction of intelligence to a numerical value and a misplaced fear that mental deficiencies were exclusively based on bloodlines. Some of what are mere insults these days were once psychological diagnoses. In 1904, Alfred Binet developed a basic skills test that classified substandard performers as “idiots” or “imbeciles” based on their supposed mental age, a test that Lewis Terman would adapt to a numbered scoring system. Idiots scored below 30; Imbeciles, below 50. So-called “high-grade defectives” scored between 50-100. Researcher Henry Goddard later identified borderline cases scoring as high as 70 as “morons,” and argued forcefully that that the “feebleminded” should be filtered out of the breeding population.

Hence, American eugenics. D’Antonio’s narrative revolves around the boys of the Fernald State School, most of whom, like Fred Boyce, were of normal intelligence and confined needlessly. Tests would later prove that their “moron” level IQ scores were as tightly linked to nurture as to nature, but Boyce remained locked in Fernald as these findings developed, longing for the outside world. Conditions were deplorable. Unqualified attendants threatened Boyce and other boys with lobotomies and solitary confinement as punishment for escape attempts, and sexual abuse by attendants and powerful boys was the norm.

As if that weren’t enough, some Fernald residents underwent experiments in which they were fed oatmeal laced with radioactive calcium, and the small incentives dangled in front of Boyce and his “Science Club” companions were enough to cloak the experiment’s lack of reason. They wouldn’t know they’d been guinea pigs until investigations uncovered Fernald records years later, prompting Boyce and other State Boys to file suit.

The lawsuit grabbed the attention of Grant Union High School’s Carol Kilpatrick when it appeared in the news: “The context for my teaching that year was government goals vs. individual rights. The Oregonian ran a little article about the Fernald school, with Fred’s name, and two weeks after that, one of my students brought in a People magazine article about the lawsuit that Fred began against MIT, the Atomic Energy Commission, and Fernald. I read the article, and was very moved by it. I called information for Norwell, Massachusetts, and asked to speak to Fred. We started a ten-year conversation and friendship.”

Kilpatrick says that she had over 600 students talk with Boyce via telephone during that 10 years. He died of cancer last May, but not before his 2004 visit to Grant Union, the year D’Antonio’s book was released. It made the experience of reading it much more real for Kilpatrick’s seniors.

“His struggles were so much more difficult than ordinary children’s struggles that my kids responded right away,” she says. “He was such a warm individual, and it was magic. Freddie was so heartfelt about what happened to him. It didn’t sour him on the American dream. He said if he could make it out of a place like Fernald, anybody could.”

While Boyce’s message was overwhelmingly positive, much of “The State Boys Rebellion” is incomparably bleak. D’Antonio’s depictions are as confined and austere as the people he describes, though sometimes hinting of sensationalism. Mostly, the book is dry and frank; the people and situations are real, serving to inform, and elicit a true, often disturbing pathos. And disturb it has, some Grant Union High School parents like Teresa Bowling, whose daughter was assigned the book in Kilpatrick’s class last year. Bowling thinks the sexual passages are “over the top,” a phrase that suggests facts were exaggerated.

“I just feel that it was very inappropriate for the kids to be reading.” she says. “It was very disturbing. There were quite a few kids who just chose not to read it at all. I think with that type of literature parents should be notified.”

Bowling even complains that Kilpatrick failed to screen the book before she assigned it to her seniors: “The book came out after the teacher did the whole study of the thing, and as a teacher, she should have been aware of the things that were in it. When my daughter told me the contents of it, I thought ‘I need to read this book,’ and I had a very hard time finishing it.”

Kilpatrick grew very familiar with the happenings at Fernald during her long friendship with Boyce, and it’s hard to imagine that the book wouldn’t interest her enough to read before she assigned it. Nonetheless, the sexual passages are prominent, the result of a kind of reverse sensationalism where their nonchalant matter-of-factness enhances the shock value. It’s questionable whether they add anything to the story, and it might be enough for a student to know that sexual abuse was rampant at Fernald without the lurid details.

Kilpatrick and Grant Union Principal Mark Witty came to this conclusion on their own, and this year’s seniors will not be reading some sections. “There are some sexual components to it, but we decided that they weren’t in the essence of the message. We’ve already struck those.” Witty says. “It’s probably disturbing enough, and drives home the point, without the sexual component.”

Witty says that he received no formal complaints about the book.

“If somebody’s complaining, and I don’t know who it is. I feel like ‘hold it, now.’ We’ve got a process that we follow,” he says. “We’re more than willing (to hear it), but I don’t know any of the background. I need the parent to come in directly and go through the process.”

Witty may have anticipated the feelings of parents like Bowling, but the question remains, in a day and age where censorship is more taboo than things once censored, what does “The State Boys Rebellion” accomplish without its more “disturbing” passages? If the goal is for readers to remember that a boy was abused, it’s more effective to describe a specific act than to say “such and such was abused.” Students will still learn that Fernald was no good place to be, but will they understand the level of degradation that its residents experienced? Maybe not, but maybe that’s not really the point, either.

Kilpatrick tells of visiting Boyce in March of 2005, just before his death: “My daughter and I visited in March. He hadn’t eaten at his table for three months. He had lost fifty pounds. We got him up for the first time in six weeks. We talked for three hours that evening, and he didn’t want to talk about Fernald. He wanted to talk about how he pulled himself out.”

The real Fred Boyce, who worked for years as a carnival barker after his release from Fernald, was more concerned to make up for lost youth than dwell on its misfortunes. He succeeded admirably, by Kilpatrick’s account.

“When Fred was 21, he had a job making ladders, and he hired a woman to teach him how to read,” she says. “By the time I was talking to him, he was reading Stephen Hawking, who I don’t understand. I think his great regret was that he didn’t get to have the life that he might have had.”

Without understanding the story of Fred Boyce, a reader might wonder why D’Antonio titled his book “The State Boys Rebellion.” There is a real rebellion, but it isn’t the climax, and it doesn’t affect Boyce as protagonist or many the others whom D’Antonio follows closely throughout. But the title is still apt. Boyce reclaimed his life, by trudging through a foreign and hostile world, keeping his head up, and finally earning small recompense when the Fernald files surfaced and the lawsuit was settled in the boys’ favor. Fernald didn’t ruin Boyce, as it did many others, and that in itself constitutes a successful rebellion.