‘The beast is dead. Nazi Germany killed these people. Rhode Island made a commitment to treat them with dignity and respect.’
EXETER – Best Judgment: Ladd School Lessons, one of 2024’s new local documentaries, opens with grainy footage of a long-ago parade at the Ladd Center, the institution for intellectually and developmentally disabled Rhode Islanders that opened in 1908 and closed in 1994.
Led by a float carrying a clown, the seemingly happy Ladd Center residents smile and wave American flags.
But it was a staged event, not reflecting reality at the institution.
At that time, in the 1970s, Ladd residents – some of the state’s most vulnerable children and adults – had been subjected to decades of abuse, neglect and preventable deaths..
Some, a minority, also had led fulfilling lives.
This is the nuanced story of Best Judgment: Ladd School Lessons.It is, as a narrator says:
“A story of good intentions twisted by misconception. Of erroneous theories leading to indifference, neglect and abuse. But it’s not a simple story. Villains are hard to identify. And there were many who struggled to improve conditions at the institution. Finally, it is a story that is remarkably similar to stories of other state institutions throughout the country.”
“Assigning blame for the conditions at Ladd School is tricky,” said Academy Award nominated documentarian Jim Wolpaw, one of the driving forces behind the film. “Ultimately I believe that our culture is the culprit. We just haven’t cared enough about the welfare of these ‘different’ people. Do we care enough now? Good question…”
As the 74-minute documentary unfolds, viewers learn the history of Ladd and meet many of the center’s former staff and residents, several of whom worked with co-director Wolpaw and others in making the film. Vintage images of Ladd are interspersed with photographs of the land on which it stood. Most buildings have been torn down, leaving only memories.
“The movie is about the history of Ladd overlaid with a history of the making of the film, or at least some of it anyway,” filmmaker Andrew Whalen, who lives with a disability but was not a Ladd resident, said in an Ocean State Stories interview.
“I think when people have a chance to see the film, they’ll think that history should not be repeated,” co-director Bob Macaux, who lives with Down Syndrome but also was not a Ladd resident, said.
Best Judgment: Ladd School Lessons premiered at a sold-out showing in October at the University of Rhode Island and a second sell-out screening followed at Rhode Island College. Both screenings were followed by panel discussions with the filmmakers. The film will be shown again in 2025 on a schedule yet to be determined, according to Wolpaw.
The film began at URI, where in 2008 Wolpaw taught a URI course in documentary pre-production. Students produced a trailer and some while later, Advocates in Action RI joined the effort. A non-profit organization, Advocates in Action RI describes its mission as empowering “people who have a developmental disability to advocate for themselves and others… and to raise awareness about disability issues in the community.”
“They wanted a film that would tell the story of the individuals that lived there, as opposed to some horror story about the institution itself,” Wolpaw said.
And a consensus was reached that the film should be more than a history.
“The more we worked on it,” Wolpaw said, “the more the idea emerged that we should make it about not just Ladd but about the people making the film. And this is part of the reason it took so long. We trained people on camera and sound and even interview techniques.”
Then came a pandemic.
“COVID messed things up a lot,” Macaux said.
In addition to former residents and others, the crew interviewed three people who were instrumental in improving conditions at Ladd during its final years and planning the community-based system that would replace Ladd when it closed: state employees Robert L. Carl Jr. and George W. Gunther Jr. and advocate James V. Healey, executive director of the Rhode Island Arc.
Considerable archival research was also conducted, with the crew scouring newspapers, films, photographs, documents, state records and oral histories.
Originally called The Rhode Island School for the Feeble-Minded, Ladd opened in 1908 when Massachusetts physician Dr. Joseph Ladd moved into a farmhouse and began admitting people living with disabilities. The original goal was to train them in farm and mechanical work, but few ever returned to the community in those occupations.
Instead, more were admitted and a construction boom brought new buildings. Not all who were admitted lived with disabilities. Immigrants, orphans, the homeless, elderly and unwed mothers — people who were deemed a threat to society — were legally forced there.
The years passed, expansion continued, and the institution was renamed the Exeter School. Across America, the eugenics movement gathered steam. Many states passed laws requiring the sterilization of women living with disabilities and Dr. Ladd advocated for such a law in Rhode Island.
“Many states have already passed sterilization laws for eugenic purposes, and I hope Rhode Island won’t stay behind much longer,” the superintendent told The Providence Journal in a 1948 story. “ Unless something is done to stop the propagation of the mentally deficient, we cannot expect the coming generations to be predominantly virile and sound in mind and body.
“In that case, a general deterioration of intelligence and the preponderance of inferior stock is inevitable, especially since the trend all along has been for smaller families in the higher grades of the population. Modern society circumvents nature’s law of the survival of the fittest, but we mustn’t go too far in allowing not only the survival but also the multiplication of the unfit.”
Rhode Island did not pass such a sterilization law, and in the mid-1950s, Dr. Ladd was replaced by a doctor from Connecticut and in 1958, the school was renamed the Dr. Joseph H. Ladd Center. Dr. Ladd died in 1974 at the age of 97 and was buried in East Greenwich.
As Best Judgment: Ladd School Lessons came together, distinguished musician and band member Mark Cutler, a member of the Rhode Island Music Hall of Fame, signed on to lead the writing and recording of the soundtrack, including the title song, “Who belongs here?” He was joined by Macaux; Sammy Smalley, a woman who lives with Down Syndrome, and the late Jimmy Isom, who was born in 1946 and sent to Ladd when he was six and left 22 years later.
“Working on music for the Ladd School documentary has literally been a life-changing experience,” Cutler wrote Ocean State Stories in an email. “I’ve been introduced to a world of people who have developmental challenges but who also have the same desires and interests that other folks have. My involvement with the movie is directly responsible for me starting The Same Thing Project. Jimmy (RIP), Sammy, Bob became close friends as well as collaborators and the songs we created are as meaningful as anything I’ve ever written.
“On top of that, their voices are so achingly beautiful and perfect that it’s unimaginable to hear anyone else. I’m so grateful that a phone call from director Jim Wolpaw asking me to work on the soundtrack led me to this point in my life. It’s a highlight of my humble career.”
Stories published in The Providence Journal figure prominently in Best Judgment: Ladd School Lessons, starting with the paper’s first, published when Ladd opened: “School of Feeble Minded. The State’s Newest Institution.”
The Journal began investigating conditions at Ladd in the 1920s and its coverage of deplorable treatment continued over the decades, helping to build momentum for change.
“The Ladd School,” a 1977 Journal investigative series by staff writers Peter Perl, Bruce DeSilva and Thomas E. Walsh, documented “serious deficiencies in medical and dental services, inadequate staffing and poor training, overcrowding in some wards within the institution, improper medication, poor sanitation and physical plant,” among other conditions. Some buildings were deemed fire traps.
“A Ladd School physician has been fired for allegedly stitching wounds of two medical patients without using an anesthetic,” was one result of the investigation. Other reporting by the paper documented drillings and extractions without anesthetic.
In 1986, then Gov. Ed DiPrete announced that the Ladd Center would close. Planning began for a community system of group homes, apartments, day programs and other service, and Rhode Island voters supported the effort by voting for a series of state bonds to build the infrastructure.
On March 26, 1994, The Journal wrote the story of the Ladd Center’s last day:
At 12:35 p.m. yesterday, the last of five men was helped into a van outside a building at the Ladd Center, Rhode Island’s institution for the [developmentally and intellectually disabled]. It drove off, its passengers never to make Ladd home again.
After 86 years, Ladd was closed.
“The beast is dead,” said Robert L. Carl Jr., the state official responsible as much as anyone for slaying it.
It was the end of an era that began in 1908 with hope for society’s most vulnerable people – hope that had given way, by the 1960s and ’70s, to scandal and shame. More than 4,500 people lived at Ladd over the course of its existence. No one will ever know how many suffered.
There was no ceremony for Ladd’s last hours – no speeches, no champagne, only a quiet, emotional gathering of some two dozen people who battled for decades to build a better life for those who could not do it themselves.
Together, Ladd’s final five residents spent 206 years in the institution. Now, like hundreds who left before them, they will shop on Saturdays, not lie naked in their own feces, as many did during the years of worst abuse. They will have their own rooms in their own homes, not be packed 50 to a back ward. They will bathe, not be hosed down.
“Nazi Germany killed these people,” said Carl, who heads the Division of Developmental Disabilities, a branch of the state Department of Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals, which ran Ladd. “Rhode Island made a commitment to treat them with dignity and respect.”
Editor’s note: G. Wayne Miller covered the Ladd Center from 1983 until its final day 11 years later. For many years, he also covered the now-closed Institute of Mental Health in Cranston, which for decades was an institution that saw similarly inhumane treatment of people living with mental illness.
