Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Working for Human Happiness
WANT
The Good Father
Flood of Humanity
DOING
City Missionary
Draining the City, Saving the Children
Journey to Dowagiac
A Voice Among the Newsboys
Happy Circle
Photos
Almost a Miracle
REDOING
Invisible Children
Neglect of the Poor
The Trials of Charley Miller
The Death and Life of Charles Loring Brace
Legacy
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the Author
Copyright © 2001 by Stephen O’Connor
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhco.com
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
O’Connor, Stephen.
Orphan trains : the story of Charles Loring Brace and the children he saved and failed / Stephen O’Connor.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-395-84173-9
1. Orphan trains—History. 2. Brace, Charles Loring, 1826–1890. 3. Children’s Aid Society (New York, N.Y.)—History. I. Title.
HV985 .O36 2001
362.73 4 0973—dc21 00-053881
All illustrations courtesy of the Children’s Aid Society
eISBN 978-0-547-52370-5
v2.1014
To Simon and Emma
Acknowledgments
This book could never have been written without the help of many people. First and foremost is Janet Graham, codirector of the PBS documentary The Orphan Trains, who so generously passed on her topic to me, shared her insights and copious research materials, and arranged for me to be granted access to the archives of the Children’s Aid Society. Her moving and intelligent film was an inspiration and touchstone throughout my research and writing.
I also want to thank Robert Dykstra for his advice and encouragement and for the hours of work he put into saving me from my own ignorance; and Nesta King for her generosity and intelligence. What mistakes remain in this book are entirely my own.
This book also could not have come into existence without the wisdom, trust, and kindness of many people at the Children’s Aid Society: Phil Coltoff, T. Jewett, Anne McCabe, Michael Wagner, Lydia King, and Lisa Glazer. I particularly want to thank Victor Remmer, a former CAS director and its present archivist, for helping me find my way around the dusty filing cabinets and weighty tomes that he watches over on East Forty-fifth Street, and for sharing his hard-earned insights, both as a longtime worker in the trenches of child welfare and as a historian of the CAS.
I owe an immense debt of gratitude to all the former orphan train riders who spoke so candidly and movingly with me about their experiences: Alice Bullis Ayler, Marguerite Thomson, Arthur Smith, Howard Hurd, Anne Harrison, and Harold Williams. Thanks also to Mary Ellen Johnson, the founder of the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America, for her hospitality and advice, and for having had the compassion and courage to help so many people.
For doing so much to help me understand the true nature of foster care now and in the past, I want to thank Keith Hefner and Al Desetta at Foster Care Youth United, and Baudilio Lozado, Donald Stroman, Matthew Dedewo, Yamina McDonald, and Diana Moreno, who endured my interrogations so patiently.
Many other people gave me invaluable aid in understanding the complexities of child welfare now and in the past. They include: Marcia Robinson Lowry of Children’s Rights; Bruce Henry, Maxine Shoulders, and Ximena Rua-Merkin of Covenant House; Verna Eggleston and Joyce Hunter of the Hetrick Martin Institute; Philip Genty of Columbia University Law School; Liz Squires of the Administration for Children’s Services; and Ellen Schutz, Mary Jane Sclafani, Jill Hayes, Fred Magovern, Hank Orenstein, John Courtney, Edith Holtzer, LynNell Hancock, Janis Ruden, Steve Shapiro, and Christina Lem.
I also want to thank the American Antiquarian Society, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the MacDowell Colony for doing so much to make me a wiser, saner, and better writer.
My thanks also to Kathy Newman, Paul Attewell, Rob Cohen, and Claudia Cooper for their good food and conversation, and comfortable beds, during my Worcester sojourns; Wendy Holt and Janet Silver for all their patience and invaluable help with the manuscript; Steve Fraser for getting me off to such a good start; Kim Witherspoon for her years of faith and friendship; and Lyda Schuster for all of her help on two books.
And finally, I want to thank Simon and Emma for putting up with so many bouts of half-orphanhood during the years I worked on this book; and Helen, for everything, always.
There’s a great work wants doing in this our generation, Charley—let’s off jacket and go about it.
Frederick Law Olmsted
Prologue
Working for Human Happiness
ON THE MORNING of October 1, 1854, forty-five children sat on the front benches of a meetinghouse in Dowagiac, Michigan. Most were between ten and twelve years old, though at least one was six and a few were young teenagers. During the week the meetinghouse served as a school, but on that day, a Sunday, it was a Presbyterian church, and more than usually crowded, not only because the children had taken so many seats, but because the regular parishioners had been augmented by less devout neighbors curious to see the “orphans.”
For the last couple of weeks notices had been running in the newspapers, and bills had been posted at the general store, the tavern, and the railroad station asking families to take in homeless boys and girls from New York City. The children had arrived on the train from Detroit at three that morning and had huddled together on the station platform until sunup. They had spent the previous night on a steamer crossing Lake Erie from Buffalo, New York, and not a one of them had avoided being soiled by seasickness—their own or their fellow passengers’—or by the excreta of the animals traveling on the deck above. The night before, they had slept on the floor of an absolutely dark freight car, amid a crowd of German and Irish immigrants heading west from Albany. During their first night out from New York City, on a riverboat traveling up the Hudson, they had slept in proper berths, with blankets and mattresses—but only because the boat’s captain, after hearing the tales they told of their lives, had taken pity on them.
The children’s days of hard travel were clearly evident in their pallor and the subtle deflation of their features. Their clothes—which had been new when they left New York—were stained and ripped and emitted a distinct animal rankness. Their expressions were wary, as if they had been caught doing something wrong and were wondering whether they were going to be punished. In some of the younger children this wariness verged on fear, but most of the older boys and girls had known too much disappointment and loneliness to be afraid of what was about to happen to them, or at least to reveal that fear, even to themselves. Some of them cast glances—challenging, or ingratiating—back at the men and women seated behind them; some looked down at their shoes, while others stared straight ahead at the young man beside the altar, whose enthusiasm, accent, and fluid gestures marked him as a city preacher. His name was E. P. Smith, and he was telling the audience about the organization he represented: the Children’s Aid Society, which had been founded only one and a half years earlier by a young minister named Charles Loring Brace.
Brace believed that most of these children were not criminals but victims of miserable economic and social conditions. Incarceration did nothing but “harden” them in the ways of crime. What they really needed, he maintained, was education, jobs, and good homes—and in March 1853 he established an organization to provide them with just such benefits.
During its first year the Children’s Aid Society primarily offered its young beneficiaries religious guidance at Sunday meetings and vocational and academic instruction at its industrial schools. It also established the nation’s first runaway shelter, the Newsboys’ Lodging House, where vagrant boys received inexpensive room and board and basic education. From the beginning Brace and his colleagues attempted to find jobs and homes for individual children, but they soon became overwhelmed by the numbers needing placement. Unable to raise enough money to increase his staff, Brace hit on the idea of sending groups of children to the country and letting local residents simply pick out the child they wanted for themselves. The forty-five young people sitting in the Dowagiac meetinghouse were the first of these groups—and the first riders of what would come to be called the “orphan trains.”
As Smith explained the program to his audience, he appealed equally to their consciences and pocketbooks. These were the “little ones of Christ,” he said, who had the same capacities, the same need of good influences, and the same immortal soul as “our own” children. Kind men and women who opened their homes to one of this “ragged regiment” would be expected to raise them as they would their natural-born children, providing them with decent food and clothing, a “common” education, and $100 when they turned twenty-one. There would be no loss in the charity, Smith assured his audience. The boys were handy and active and would soon learn any common trade or labor. The girls could be used for all types of housework.
When he had finished speaking, bench-legs squawked on the floorboards and the congregation came forward to get a better look at the children. Some of these men and women were shopkeepers, carpenters, or blacksmiths, and one was a physician; most, however, were farmers. Their faces were gaunt (only the wealthy were fat in the nineteenth century) and reddened by sun, wind, and, in not a few cases, whiskey. As they mingled with Smith’s party, some blinked back tears that such innocents should already have known so much hardship, others looked them up and down and asked questions, trying to assess their strength and honesty, while one or two went so far as to squeeze the children’s muscles or plunge a finger into their mouths to check their teeth.
The actual distribution of the children commenced the following morning at the tavern where they were staying. In an account of the trip published by the Children’s Aid Society, Smith said that in order to get a child, applicants had to have recommendations from their pastor and a justice of the peace, but it is unlikely that this requirement was strictly enforced. In the early days the society’s agents tended to be very casual in both the acquisition and dispersal of their charges. Smith himself had let a passenger on the riverboat from Manhattan take one of the boys and had replaced him with another he met in the Albany railroad yard—a boy whose claim to orphanhood Smith never bothered to verify. When applicants did not have the required documents, Smith probably did what was done routinely by later CAS agents: he looked at the quality and cleanness of the applicants’ clothes, asked them about their property, professions, and church attendance, and, if he saw no evidence that they were liars or degenerates, gave them a child.
By the end of that first day (a Monday), fifteen boys and girls had gone to live with local farmers or craftsmen, and by Thursday evening, twenty-two more had been taken. On Friday, Smith and the eight unclaimed children—the youngest and therefore the least able workers—continued west from Dowagiac by train. In Chicago, Smith put them by themselves on a train to Iowa City (one and a half days’ journey), where a Reverend C. C. Townsend, who ran a local orphanage, took them in and attempted to find them foster families. As for Smith, he caught the first train back to New York.
Despite the fact that the Children’s Aid Society heard practically nothing of most of these children ever again, this first expedition was considered such a success that in January the society sent out two more parties of homeless children, both to Pennsylvania. Over the next seventy-five years the CAS orphan trains carried an estimated 105,000 children to all of the contiguous forty-eight states except Arizona. For most of those years the children were distributed to their new “parents” or “employers” (both terms were used) much as they had been by E. P. Smith, through a sort of auction held in a church, opera house, or large store. Applicants for children were supposed to be screened by committees of local businessmen, ministers, or physicians, but the screening was rarely very thorough. The monitoring of placements was equally lax. Because of the great difficulty and expense of travel in nineteenth-century rural America, CAS agents rarely checked up in person on the boys and girls they had placed. The society tried to keep tabs on placements by sending both the children and their foster parents regular letters of inquiry, but these mostly went unanswered.
Sustained by a monitoring system that seriously underreported failure and by a prodigious quantity of blind faith, Charles Loring Brace tirelessly promoted what he called the “Emigration Plan” during his thirty-seven years at the head of the Children’s Aid Society. In moving and persuasive books, articles, speeches, and annual reports, he portrayed his system of placing needy and orphaned children in families as more humane and effective than even the best institutional care, and also as vastly cheaper. As a result, Brace’s system was imitated by many organizations, initially only in the East but eventually all across the country. The New York Foundling Hospital alone sent some 30,000 children west.
All told, by 1929, when the CAS sent its last true orphan train to Texas, roughly 250,000 city children had found foster homes through these programs. Some of these children were abused by their new families in all the ways that we are familiar with from present-day news reports about the tragedies of foster care, and some were just as happy as the literature of their placement agencies said they were. Two boys placed by the CAS became governors, one became a Supreme Court justice, and several others became mayors, congressmen, or local representatives. Many children grew up to become drifters and thieves, and at least one became a murderer. The vast majority led lives of absolutely ordinary accomplishment and satisfaction. And many, perhaps also a majority (because there is nothing extraordinary about unhappiness), saw no end to the misery into which they had been born.
This book concentrates on the CAS orphan trains, not only because the societ
y placed considerably more children over a much longer period than any other agency, but because Charles Loring Brace almost single-handedly forged the philosophical foundations of the movement, and of many other efforts on behalf of poor children, and remains to this day perhaps the preeminent figure in American child welfare history. Until well into the twentieth century, virtually every program seeking to help homeless and needy children was either inspired by or a response to Brace’s work and ideas. His notion that children are better cared for by families than in institutions is the most basic tenet of present-day foster care. And his abiding belief in the capability and fundamental goodness of poor city children, while occasionally echoed in the speeches of politicians and child welfare experts, is one that our nation dearly needs to reclaim.
Brace was an exceedingly hardworking, intelligent, and complex man whose life can hardly be defined by his work with the Children’s Aid Society. He was jailed in Hungary for supposed revolutionary activities, and he was a prominent abolitionist, author, and journalist. As a New York Times correspondent during the Civil War, he was present at some of the Union Army’s most stunning early defeats. Brace’s best friend for much of his young manhood was Frederick Law Olmsted, the celebrated designer of Central Park, and his social contacts included Charles Darwin, John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Washington Irving, and George Eliot.
With all of his drive and accomplishment, Brace was a man of many contradictions. He was ferociously ambitious, yet believed that ambition was a sin. He constantly excoriated himself for not living up to his own ideals—for not working hard enough, loving well enough, or having motives that were pure enough—but he never seems to have doubted the exemplariness of his character. He could speak quite openly about his “abounding courage and hope.” He proclaimed without the slightest shred of irony, “I am striving after perfect truth,” and admitted, as if it were only self-evident, that “few human beings have ever had a more real sense of things unseen than I habitually have.” And yet he believed that virtue existed only in humility and self-denial. He wanted always to live more simply and to endure greater hardship. What he called his “brightest of all visions” was “a humble, self-controlled life, all devoted, given up, to working for human happiness.”2
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