Springfield was a troubled place when Helen got there, slowly recovering from a blow to its reputation and morale. A recent series in the Baltimore Sun exposed a Maryland mental health system that was overcrowded, underfunded, and inhumane.
Dr. George H. Preston, the Commissioner of Mental Hygiene, and the man responsible for the state’s five mental institutions, had actually put the paper up to it. For years the state had ignored his increasingly urgent requests for more money and better staff.
Patients were poorly clothed. They often had no bed linen or medical supplies. The food was bad. The buildings were rotting. The crowding was terrible. So Preston encouraged the Sun to write about the institutions. He promised his cooperation.
The Sun chose a former war correspondent named Howard M. Norton to do the articles. Norton was 38. He had already won a Pulitzer and would someday become Foreign Editor of the Sun.
Working with Norton was the Sun’s chief photographer, Robert F. Kneische, who would describe the assignment as his worst ever. “I had photographed fire, flood, famine and riot, but never anything as bad as this.”
Springfield cooperated completely. Hospital superintendent, Dr. John Gardner, and his popular Assistant, Joseph Tomlinson, who people referred to as “Mr. Springfield,” welcomed Norton and Kneische, and showed them everything they asked to see and more.
This was opposite the treatment the Sun received at Spring Grove, the state’s first mental institution, where the aging superintendent did all he could to keep the paper out.
Before publishing the articles, Norton showed them to Dr. Preston, who had initiated the project. Preston was aghast. He asked the Sun not to print them. They printed them anyway. The first appeared on January 1, 1949, only a year and a few months before Helen’s arrival. The title was “Maryland’s Shame – The Worst Story Ever Told by the Sunpapers.”
The articles were brutal. The photographs were viscerally alarming. The public was outraged. The government was forced to react. Soon there were studies and reorganizations and big political battles. And although Springfield benefitted in the end, they felt the Sun had betrayed them by focusing solely and intently on the bad and completely overlooking the good.
One woman said, “We had tried for so long to build public confidence in the hospital, to make the public realize that mental hospitals were not horrible. Then Norton destroyed in one day what we had built up over a period of years.”
One of the doctors said, “We poured out information to Norton. We had nothing to hide. We felt we had done our best and that the state hadn’t done its share.”
In March of 1949, forced into action by the public outcry, the state issued “A Report by the Joint Senate and House Committee to Study the State Mental Hospitals.”
About Spring Grove, they wrote: “The interiors of the institutional buildings are in large part forbidding, unattractive, unsafe, dirty and odorous. In certain buildings the stench was so great as to make several members of the Legislative Committee actually nauseated…
“In some wards there is not sufficient room for anyone to walk between beds, and patients must crawl over the ends in order to get in or out of bed. The so-called ‘day rooms’ are in fact mere corrals where patients are herded during the daylight hours and are dark, unattractive, uninviting and generally odorous…
“In the disturbed wards…the smell from crowded human bodies was everywhere, and the nauseating stench of urine and fecal matter permeated all the disturbed wards…
“In the old buildings the floors have become so soaked with matter that it would be impossible to remove the odor without removing the entire floors and gutting the buildings.”
On the contrary, although they found Springfield overcrowded and understaffed, they wrote: “All buildings and equipment were found to be in exceptionally clean condition. Odors were almost non-existent, except for very slight ones in the disturbed men’s day room,” and that the employees were “doing a good job…There seemed to be a general feeling of cooperation among the employees, resulting in good morale, and a respect and praise for the administration.”
The end result was that despite the tremendous sense of betrayal the articles caused at Springfield, Norton’s writing forced the state to react, and eventually money flowed in. But even as they built new buildings and painted old ones and put curtains on windows and replaced old wooden floors with more modern flooring that would mop clean and repel odor, patients continued to pour in.
One Springfield psychiatrist said, “We are still so overcrowded and understaffed here that real treatment is only given to a very few. The only cases we are apt to treat are those that catch our eye because of some especially interesting problem.”
Helen Starliper of Clear Spring arrived in 1950 with an especially interesting problem.