American Auschwitz- The Milledgeville Georgia State Mental Hospital In Marjorie Taylor Greene's Backyard
The True Story Of The Milledgeville Mental Hospital In MTG's Georgia Birthplace-- A Legacy of Slave Labor, Torture, Mass Graves, Nazi Medical Experiments and Mass Involuntary Sterilizations.
By Lance Rosen
April 22, 2021
"...users and surviviors... explained to me that for many of these "consumers", coming back to the Hospital was the equivalent of survivors going back to Auschwitz, no nostalgia there".
--Mab Segrest PhD. author of "Administrations of Lunacy, Racism, and the Haunting of American Psychiatry at the Milledgeville Asylum" (The New Press)
Introduction-- Part I
I've always been proud to tell people that I was born and raised in Philadelphia. Pretty much everything good about the history of the United States has its roots here, no disrespect meant to Boston.
We had Ben Franklin of course, who started the whole thing. His "Secret Society", The Junto, was the first real organized conspiracy to break the Colonies out of the British Empire. His "Philosophical Society" became the central network of artists, writers, philosophers and scientists whose intent was to create a North American Renaissance. By no means unrelated, Franklin started the Manumission and Abolition movements in opposition to Slavery here in association with the Quakers and other like minded free thinking Christians.
Franklin famously organized the first Postal system, Public Library, Fire Department, Public School system, Hospital System, and probably a few hundred other "firsts" which were integral to the creation of the world's first self governing Republic, notwithstanding the fact that almost one half of its constituent States practiced mass murder and barbarism in their economic life. (every day except for Sundays of course. Sunday is "God's Day" for those genteel southerners who saw the Holy Bible as the blunt instrument which the Creator gave them to beat people to death with on the other six days)
Nevertheless, throughout the historic City of Philadelphia are the reminders that we were meant to be something better, from our Battlefields to our museums, our "Underground Railroad" locations, and historic buildings. Here an all white group of men met in a highly conflicted Constitutional Convention to create a new system to replace the one that wasn't working. Franklin would be aghast to see what we have become, and would be organizing for a complete overhaul were he alive today, of that I'm sure.
Yet, being from here, growing up here, surrounded by the history and idealism of that small group of people around Ben Franklin, and those soldiers who starved and froze, then fought and defeated the global Empire system centered in London, this does emphatically leave an imprint.
We are not always conscious of the factors which shape our identities, how we become who we are, but these are things I'm preoccupied with due to my odd personality and natural curiosity. Sometimes we only think about it on days like November 3, when the voter turnout in Philadelphia delivered Pennsylvania's Electoral votes to Joe Biden, and we found ourselves thinking, "yeah, Philly! We brought down a tyranny once, and we did it again, we put the whole country on our back"! Of course, that's an exaggeration, but you can't convince me that at least some Philly Democrats did not have that thought flash through for a moment on the day the Philly vote was certified.
That's what I mean as one example of "identity." Sometimes its doing those things we believe would make our ancestors and our grandchildren proud, which may be tied to our relationship to our birthplace through a historical continuity.
This idea of a historical identity imprint also works the other way. And that brings me to the subject of US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. This is a story that needs to be told, the history of her birthplace Milledgeville Georgia. I'll also add an addendum on her second hometown, Forsyth Georgia, no less significant in this sordid tale.
MTG, (as I'll refer to her herein) in the grand scheme of things is not so important. It is of interest that her family is from Milledgeville and she was born and raised there. It's what she represents, is a spokesperson for, and what produced her which is relevant. I don't even want to think about her personally, much less write about her. Where she is from, and who she is, is connected in a way that she herself would take a perverse pride in. Like her mentor, the equally unfiltered sociopath Donald Trump, she would have no hesitation in bragging that she could lynch a Liberal in downtown Milledgeville and they would throw a parade for her. And it wouldn't be hyperbole, they absolutely would.
A good friend of mine clued me in to some of the background you'll read here, and I jumped on it with the enthusiasm of a screenplay writer whose job is to write a movie script which "makes history come alive", and also performs the public service of providing insight into why things are the way they are. It touches upon the supreme irony that Georgia has again become a strategic cockpit in the fight to save Democracy in the US. It addresses the seeming mystery of how 160 years after the first shots of the Civil War were fired it is possible for a State to elect people who make the old KKK seem mainstream. It highlights further the heroic and miraculous nature of the Civil Rights movement whose leadership had the moral courage to fight against this horrific and entrenched legacy.
So, this story is not about her, per se, as I'm sure most would agree that she already sucks enough Oxygen out of the room, and is the sort of Troll who thrives on constant attention. In the spirit of "not feeding the Troll", but discussing something of substance, hold onto your stomachs, and get ready for a scary and true story about the Snakepit that she crawled out of. Milledgeville Georgia, America's Auschwitz.
Part II- The Condederacy and White Supremacy-- The Racist Past of US Psychiatry
If you were a child growing up in Milledgeville Georgia, you would be aware of certain unavoidable facts from the earliest time in your memories. First is that your hometown was the Capitol of Georgia from 1807 until 1865. That's right, until the year the Civil War ended. Most people have never heard of the place, and are unawares that it was one of the main power centers of the Confederacy. Unfortunately, when we think of the last days of the Civil War in Georgia, we flash back to the famous ending of "Gone With The Wind", when Rhett Butler dumps the Southern Belle drama queen, Scarlett O'Hara with his famous rejoinder, "frankly my Dear, I don't give a damn". That was the 1939 equivalent of doing a breakup via text, a calculated act of meanness. For someone who embraces Confederate heritage, it not seen as the evil that it was, and remains central to their culture, history, their world in fact, assuming you are White.
You would also be aware that the single most central fact of life in your hometown, affecting your environment, your family, religious life, education and employment, social life, revolved around what was at one time in the 1960's the largest Mental Hospital in the world.
Originally named "The Georgia State Lunatic, Idiot, and Epileptic Asylum, it dominated the daily life in the region. If you didn't work there, you knew someone who did. Or you knew someone who was contracted to maintain or repair it, service it with deliveries, shipping, etc. It was similar to a steel or factory town in which everyone was connected in some way to the plant or mine, and all of the economic activity which fed it.
It consists of a campus of over 200 buildings, and at any one time has had 12,000 or more patients. And residents grew up there as part of that surrounding community, feeling somewhat stigmatized as a resident of "crazytown", as well as bearing the shame and defeat of the "Lost Cause of the Confederacy". From the time of childhood until adulthood, someone who misbehaved or seemed off or undisciplined, would be asked, "Am ah gonna have to send y'all to Milledgeville"? It was a refrain you would hear almost everyday, at home, in the classroom, in the schoolyard. You were imprinted at an early age by this unifying reality.
Additionally, the residents all knew or suspected the horrible secret of what went on behind those walls. It was whispered that being sent there was like a death sentence, and that people went in, but mostly never came out.
Founded in 1842, it was originally, like many social experiments, a product of the Enlightenment. Forward thinkers developed a concept called "moral therapy" which was a different approach to dealing with "lunatics".{M. Segrest, "Administrations..."} The idea was to give structure to those who were "mad", meaning attentive Doctors, natural beauty, nutrition, respite from family, all meant to be curative and custodial, as well as humane. In the beginining the use of ropes and chains as restraints were banned and Milledgeville was designed to care for 300 people.
The Civil War changed all of that, when the resulting exponential increase in mental illness caused the massive overcrowding of facilities, to the point that for every one orderly there were 100 patients. This problem of overcrowding continued deep into the 20th Century as well. (In 1959, Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter Jack Nelson for the Atlanta Journal Constitution found that for thousands of patients, only 48 Doctors were available, and none of them Psychiatrists. That is when the role of the asylum transitioned from custodial care to incarceration. Just as a note, today, 90% of all Psychiatric beds in America are in Jails or Prisons, the result of the failed attempts at Deinstitutionalization)
Needless to say, the use of asylums like Milledgeville for incarcerating the mentally ill was dominated by the institutional role of White Supremacy, and not only in the South. In 1870 the Milledgeville Asylum began housing Blacks in segregated conditions, and treated them with unparalleled brutality. The prevailing theory at the time, and after the Civil War was that Blacks were inherently mentally incompetent, and not victims of circumstance. It was stated explicitly that Emancipation was an actual cause of Black mental illness, because Blacks were incapable of living a stable unsupervised life. You hear the same kind of arguments today with respect to family, education, crime, saying that there is something just wrong with "those people".
For Blacks, the asylum was their prison, and a plantation, as the managers started programs for "occupational therapy", which for them meant working as farmworkers on an actual plantation. The abuse, mistreatment, the horrific hours and poor conditions were indistinguishable from their previous condition.
White patients were treated differently of course, but also diagnosed differently. They were characterized as suffering the effects of "religious excitement" or "too much study". Or victims of romantic disappointment or hysterical wives and mothers. Families were kept apart because the family and their Churches were seen as the factor of agitation in causing their illness. Largely though, it was their way of covering up for the increased level of sadistic abuse of patients by their orderlies, and the families were content to not know of their treatment.
As the overcrowding became more prevalent, Milledgeville began triage of the Black patients which consisted of 1/6 of the patient population in 1875, by segregating and isolating them in such poor conditions, that they were dying en masse due to TB and Typhoid. Until the late 20th Century, the dead were disposed of and buried in mass graves with no markers, Whites and Blacks both, though separate. There were at least 30,000 Bodies unearthed there on site alone, (and that doesn't account for all, since they had remote burial grounds) according to an expose article in the Atlanta Journal Constitution in 1959. In later years, other exposes forced an attempt at recovering the dead and identifying remains of victims.
Part III-- The 1937 Georgia Eugenics Law
In 1924, the State of Virginia enacted the Nation's first Eugenics Law, mandating the involuntary Sterilization of the feeble minded and "unfit" provided the woman in question was declared incompetent by family or legal guardian, and that the subjects were institutionalized. The challenge to this law was made by Carrie Buck, in the case of Buck vs Bell. Carrie Buck was raped and impregnated by her foster parents nephew, so to rid themselves of the embarrassment, they contrived a case to declare her feebleminded and promiscuous. After she delivered her daughter Vivian, the family also contrived a case for feeblemindedness for her, (neither were at all) to justify having Carrie involuntarily sterilized by the State of Virginia under the new Law. Her Lawyer was a eugenics supporter closely tied to the author of the State Law, and refused to make Carrie's case effectively. In an 8-1 ruling, SCOTUS Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes issued the majority opinion in favor of the Constitutionality of the Law, claiming society must be protected from "being swamped with incompetence....three generations of imbeciles are enough".
At the post WWII Nuremberg Trials of the Nazi Doctors, when confronted with Germany's record of carrying out over 400,000 involuntary sterilizations under the 1933 Law for Protection against genetically defective offspring, (characterized as a crime against humanity) the Nazis presented in their defense that everything they did was based on the Carrie Buck case and upholding of the Virginia Eugenics Law.
Once Buck vs Bell was ruled upon, 32 States passed Eugenics Laws for involuntary sterilization of defectives. Not all were Southern States, this was done in Vermont and Maine and other Northern States as well. Eugenics was seen by "progressives" at the time as race betterment, improving human health through science. The Eugenics movement itself was organized and funded by the leading wealthy families of the US Establishment, the Harrimans, Bushes, Rockefellers, Cabots, Lodges, Teddy Roosevelt, the DuPonts, etc. These families of Oligarchs were the leaders in their day of the great "Anglo-Saxon traditions" which MTG and her fascist allies sought to glorify through their newly announced racist "America First Caucus", soon thereafter scuttled due to pressure.
The Georgia Law was passed and implemented in 1937. Georgia alone sterilized 3284 by 1963, continuing the practice long after the revelations of Nazi race science and genocide were publicized at Nuremberg. 3/4 of those were Psychiatric patients at Milledgeville.
The program was set up under director Dr. Walter Freeman, and was later taken over by Dr. Thomas Peacock.(from 1948 to 1959) Peacock as Milledgeville Hospital Superintendent, (he was not a Psychiatrist!) was put in charge of the State Board which supervised and administered the State Eugenics program. Freeman had defended the state law as necessary to "suppress the poor white trash" who were so useless and destructive that they would otherwise have to be euthanized". This, all in the name of science and humanitarianism, right there, in Marjorie Taylor Greene's backyard, in the wonderful State of Georgia.
Peacock when interviewed about the mass sterilizations defended the practice by arguing in a Medical Journal article, the "prophylactic value" of forced sterilizations, to "protect other patients from psychotic episodes induced by pregnancy, and shielding children from the mental trauma due to psychotic parents". The Lawyer for the Medical Association of Georgia argued that the Eugenics Law was being "administered very wisely". The number of sterilizations at Milledgeville increased by 200 per year on average from 1955-1960, and because these were medical decisions decided by a State Board and implemented by Doctors, families had no say. When journalist Jack Nelson brought this all to light with his AJC expose, he was attacked by Peacock as a "Communist lover".
Part IV- Eugenics Opens the Door for Abuse, Torture, Suspicious Deaths, Medical and Drug experiments.
As mentioned earlier, the process of "warehousing" patients escalated over decades, with only one orderly per 100 patients. This, on the heels of the dehumanizing Eugenics Law opened the door for every other form of horrific inhumanity. Like the Germans and Poles who lived in the vicinity of the Death Camps, people in the town knew what was happening but pretended not to, and never would discuss it. Among the atrocities, were children being shackled in cages at the age of 5, just like MTG's hero Trump had been doing on the border.
As was the case throughout the Nation's Mental Hospitals, the use of electro-shock therapy was introduced and expanded starting in the 40's. Milledgeville Police would threaten misbehaving people with incarceration at the Hospital, and threatened them with a "Milledgeville Power Cocktail" if they didn't straighten up. The Town took on the character of a Gulag, in which people were told to not stir things up, or you would have to go there, which everyone understood to mean a death sentence. Doctors performed up to 75-80 shock treatments per day, three days a week for decades, whether they helped the patient or not.
In 1951 the practice of giving Lobotomies massively increased at Milledgeville, and were done in barbaric fashion, with the use of long picks inserted through the eyeball to sever the nerves running to the Frontal Lobe. The number of these are not available, but again, it was involuntary.
Experimental psychotropic drugs were tested without consent, and in secret. Drug experiments were carried out by Doctors who were not Psychiatrists, and were moonlighting as Pharmaceutical salesmen that were paid to test out new drugs on the patients, without authority from the State or Hospital management, all with a wink and a nod. Remember, there were 12,000 patients, and not one Psychiatrist on staff. In many cases, Doctors who were hospitalized themselves for mental illness were hired off the ward, and made permanent staff at the Hospital as a condition for their upkeep. 1/4 of the Doctors on Staff were serious Alcoholics. Nurses frequently performed major Surgery on patients, not trained Surgeons. Overwhelmed and monstrous orderlies resorted to torture and physical abuse to maintain discipline. Patients were overdosed, and if they became nauseous they were forced to eat up their own vomit as punishment, and there were a number of deaths which came out later which had that same cause. In one case, the patient was ordered to clean up the vomit with a towel, and then eat the towel, wherein he choked to death on it. This happened in 1950, and wasn't made public until Nelson's expose.
This monstrosity of an operation continued, even after efforts by Governor Jimmy Carter tried to reform the system, and implement deinstitutionalization. In 2007, AJC ran yet another expose about 136 suspicious deaths at the Hospital that year. In response, even George W. Bush's Department of Justice was forced to begin Civil Rights Investigations of all seven of Georgia's Mental Hospitals.
All of this, in the light of day, the beautiful day in Marjorie Taylor Greene's neighborhood.
To be continued---
Next, The Taylors move to Forsyth County, then Alpharetta. Forsyth is described by Rev. Hosea Williams as the most racist City in America while MTG grows up there. Its known as the center of American Apartheid. After nearly blowing her marriage up, MTG joins an End Times Megachurch. Her father, Robert D. Taylor, a rich construction magnate, writes a Fictional novel about a global conspiracy of Masons and Templars to steal an Egyptian Secret Obelisk. The Obelisk holds the key to predicting the World's stock Markets by calculating the effect of gravitational forces on the financial flows. Taylor writes an academic paper on his theories, starts a new company, and claims to have been nominated for the Nobel Prize. Yes, he is as nuts as she is... ICE detainees in Georgia are involuntarily sterilized without their knowledge, revelations from a ICE Nurse charges. Keeping up their State Traditions.
