Under Construction

The King of Whitfield
"Perhaps these things will lie a long time in the Archives without much interest or particular worth to anyone. Perhaps they will in the future be much used as more and more public interest of all kinds centers upon the problem of mental health and mental hospitalization in Mississippi and elsewhere."

Fred Chaney

Fred Clark Chaney was the great-grandson of Civil War Governor Charles Clark, a cousin to Walter Sillers, Jr., and a friend of Delta Democrat-Times editor Hodding Carter, Jr. Fred Chaney was a man of vision, a lawyer, a profilic writer, and crusader who wanted the story of his mental illness and his mental hospitalization told to anyone who would listen. And they oftentimes did. His death in 1975 may have ended the era of patients at Whitfield speaking out and having a voice in their treatment and hospitalizations. Regardles, conditions for the institutionalized in Mississippi have greatly improved since Chaney's time, and he would no doubt be pleased at his own role in it.

Bo Bowen

    Fred Chaney was a prolific writer and known for smuggling letters out of the Mississippi State Hospital about the conditions and problems he was witnessing and the treatment he received for his mental illness, and for his breaking the rules. He wrote extensively about how the patients were being treated by the doctors and staff as well as describing his own mental problems and the demons that he experienced in his youth. Chaney wrote about his hospitalizations from 1945 to 1949 in letters he smuggled to his mother.  The “Underworld of the Soul” was a manuscript about his mental illness that he hoped to have published.  His manuscript “Mental Hospitalization as Known to a Patient” was published in its entirety in the patient run newsletter, the Grapevine. He also wrote an open letter to the patients at Whitfield of the possibilities ahead for them during their hospitalization.

    While most of his writings were about Whitfield, he also touched on many subjects he was interested in such as the story of his great grandfather Governor General Charles Clark.  Fred Chaney and his family lived through the Great Mississippi River Flood of 1927, and he pinned a manuscript entitled “A Refugee’s Story” as well as the story of the destruction of a wooden dike on the Mississippi River known as Leland Neck.  One of the earlier manuscripts he wrote in 1940 was about the war in Europe and the time before the United States declared war on Japan.

    Fred Chaney typed most of his documents often with strikethroughs on his Royal typewriter. Some draft documents would be followed by a heavily edited typed version. Learning later he would have other hospital patients re-type his manuscripts to give them something to do. He showed his emotions in his letters and manuscripts by frequently using all capital letters for emphasis in his sentences. Sentences would often be underlined for more emphasis with some words in bold type. Chaney would start new paragraphs by indenting at least two times over the normal tab distance. He consistently misused the contractions “it’s”, did’nt, haven’nt, is’nt and frequently misspelled words. Many of his letters and manuscripts would be long epistles making it difficult to follow and many were obviously written when he was having mental difficulties. His frequent use of bold type and capital letters in his writings were sometimes a distraction from the points he was trying to make. On the other hand, he would submit both drafts with handwritten changes and final edited versions of his manuscripts to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. In all cases I have followed his writings with no editing except for occasionally correcting indentions for spacing.

    The Chaney manuscripts and letters offer a rich social history of patient life and conditions at Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield, MS.  Most of his writing submissions were thoughtful, mature, insightful, and at a level of a storyteller, and written as a journalist.

The following manuscripts are from the Fred Chaney Papers at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH), from his letters and correspondence, and his medical record at Mississippi State Hospital:   CLICK HERE

The family of Fred Clark Chaney has granted Ernest L. “Bo” Bowen a non-exclusive, royalty free, worldwide license to use family photographs, letters, manuscripts, journals, and documents written by Fred Clark Chaney and to make copies, sell, distribute and publish these documents and to incorporate the copyright work, in whole or in part, into derivative works for sale and distribution.  It is understood that neither Ernest L. “Bo” Bowen nor Old Blue Publishing, LLC own the copyright to these documents outside the derivative work of Ernest L. “Bo” Bowen’s own description of such. The Estate of Fred Clark Chaney expressly grants this release which waives the right to enforce any intellectual property rights, or bar publication of said documents, through the granting of this non-exclusive license to Ernest L. “Bo” Bowen and Old Blue Publishing, LLC. Such use is to be without limitation as to duration or frequency of usage.

 

 

The Fred Chaney Manuscripts include information that mentions and/or references Mississippi State Hospital; however, neither Mississippi State Hospital or the Mississippi Department of Mental Health and/or its employees actively engaged in the development of these documents. Further, views expressed and/or information contained within these documents do not represent the opinions of Mississippi State Hospital or the Mississippi Department of Mental Health.

Stay Tuned. The King of Whitfield is on the way.

2024

Jackson, MS

All rights reserved. No portion of these documents may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means-electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, scanning, or other-except for brief quotations in critical reviews or articles, without written permission of the author.

“I feel that I have had the unique opportunity to look across the changing years seeking a comprehensive evaluation of their meaning, however what has been written falls short of setting a true picture of the whole in clear view.”

Fred Chaney