Alex Green Wins National Book Critics Circle Award

On March 26, 2026, HPOD fellow and Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Alex Green received the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award for best biography. His book, A Perfect Turmoil: Walter E. Fernald and the Struggle to Care for America's Disabled, uncovers the prominent role played by doctor, educator, and policymaker Dr. Walter E. Fernald in the debates around the turn of the 19th century that led the United States down a path towards mass institutionalization of persons with disabilities. 

As National Book Critics Circle co-vice president Iris Jamahl Dunkle said when announcing Green's award,

“[Dr. Fernald] transformed our understanding of disabilities in ways that continue to influence our views today. But as Green reveals, Fernald was a complex character whose legacy is both inspiring and troubling.”

From 1887, when Dr. Fernald became superintendent of the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded, until his death in 1924, Dr. Fernald transformed societal understandings of disability in ways that continue to influence our views today. While superintendent, Dr. Fernald designed the first special education class in America, shaped the laws and policies of states and nations, and developed innovative medical treatments for persons with disabilities. Around this time, he fell under the influence of eugenical pseudoscience and argued for institutionalizing people whose disabilities made them "defective delinquents" genetically predisposed to crime and promiscuity. Although by the end of his life he warned of the perils of the very mass institutionalization programs he himself had espoused, it was too late.

Green's landmark biography presents a decade of research drawing on extensive, unexamined archival evidence, including over 250,000 pages of documents stored in Massachusetts state archives. Like many family members whose relatives lived and died in Massachusetts institutions who have encountered dead ends when seeking records recounting the experiences of their loved ones, Green was initially denied access the records that were the focus of his research. Only through successful legal action was he able to gain access. 

Beyond his book, Green has helped to remove legal hurdles to accessing state records of institutionalized persons, so that family members and researchers may better understand the hidden histories of Massachusetts' disability institutions. He was the principal architect of the Special Commission on State Institutions, a novel person with disability-led truth commission on which he was appointed to serve. This unique legislative commission represents a giant leap forward for efforts by disability groups and allies across the world to fully reckon with the legacy of mass institutionalization of persons with disabilities. 

Last year, the Special Commission released a groundbreaking report which concluded that Massachusetts has engaged in "a pattern of practices, intentional and unintentional, [that] have prevented the general public from accessing this history, even when the people requesting that access are institutional survivors, their loved ones, and their descendants." As Green wrote in The Boston Globe, alongside HPOD's Self-Advocacy Associate Anne Fracht, Massachusetts' denial of public access to and mishandling of institutional records have forestalled "a long-overdue reckoning with how our continued reliance on government programs for institutionalization disabled people has ripped apart the lives of Americans for nearly two centuries."