Fred Clark Chaney was the great-grandson of Civil War Governor General Charles Clark, a cousin to Walter Sillers, Jr., and a friend of Delta Democrat-Times editor Hodding Carter, Jr. Chaney was a man of vision, a lawyer, a prolific writer, and crusader who wanted the story of his mental illness and his mental hospitalization told to anyone who would listen. And oftentimes they did.
This is a historical fact-based account of the life of Fred Chaney, a man who spent the greater part of his adult life at St. Elizabeths Hospital in Washington, D.C. in 1926, then the Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum in 1932, and lastly at the Mississippi State Hospital at Whitfield, Mississippi in 1939. Chaney had numerous admissions, elopements, paroles, and discharges and ultimately making his home at Whitfield until his death in 1975.
Mr. Chaney began a letter-writing campaign with Charlotte Capers, secretary to Dr. W.D. McCain, Director of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, and who later became director after Dr. McCain. Ms. Capers archived documents received from Chaney and created the Fred Chaney Papers collection. The collection contains both original and copies of typewritten and hand-written correspondence, manuscripts about his personal struggles with mental illness, and the treatment of the mentally ill at Whitfield.
In the early days of his institutionalization, communications about the care and treatment of patients were censored by hospital staff. However, he smuggled his observations about the hospital in letters to his mother, who would send them to Hodding Carter, Jr. Carter took a great interest in Chaney’s insightful letters about the conditions at Whitfield and published his correspondence. His editorials about Chaney and Whitfield brought about numerous investigations by the legislature, the medical association, the Legislative Audit Committee and health care agencies.
Mr. Chaney noted in a letter to his mother in 1957, “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 for public interest of all kinds centers upon the problem of mental health and mental hospitalization and elsewhere. At any rate they will be publicly available.”
The impact of Mr. Chaney’s observations as a patient at Whitfield and the changes he recommended to anyone who would listen served as a litmus test to the current treatment of mental illness in Mississippi. He sent a letter to Ms. Capers requesting that it be “held to check by its date against the future course of mental hospitalization as it develops not in vision but in fact.” The “King of Whitfield” manuscript makes no conclusions but allows the reader to understand the issues the hospital faced from the early days at the Asylum, to the opening of the hospital at Whitfield in 1939, to the numerous investigations resulting in federal lawsuits.
The story of Fred Chaney touches many distinct aspects of twentieth century Mississippi culture. Chaney’s exploits and escapes from the State Lunatic Asylum provide an inside look at the dehumanizing effects of earlier institutionalization. Mississippi’s history prior to and after the Civil War and his family’s involvement in politics is vividly described and detailed in his letters and manuscripts as well as through family accounts and interviews. His eyewitness account of the 1927 Mississippi River Flood and his manuscript entitled “A Refugee’s Story” will be of great interest to southern historians. Advocates of the care of the mentally ill will appreciate Chaney’s social commentary on the incarceration of the criminally insane, establishing work for pay programs for patients, vocational rehabilitation, and his beliefs on segregation, as well as his lobbying of key members of the legislature and the governor’s office for more staff, funding, and resources for Whitfield. Dr. William Jaquith often stated that it was Fred Chaney who was instrumental alerting the public through his letters about the deteriorating conditions at the hospital.
Fred Chaney’s death in 1975 may have ended the era of patients at Whitfield speaking out and having a voice in their treatment and hospitalizations. Regardless, the 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.