Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  I was myself a witness of the distribution of forty children in Nobles County, Minnesota, by my honored friend, Agent James Mathews, who is a member of this Conference. The children arrived at about half-past three P.M., and were taken directly from the train to the court-house, where a large crowd was gathered. Mr. Mathews set the children, one by one, before the company, and, in his stentorian voice, gave a brief account of each. Applicants for children were then admitted in order behind the railing and rapidly made their selections. Then, if the child gave assent, the bargain was concluded on the spot. It was a pathetic sight, not soon to be forgotten, to see those children and young people, weary, travel-stained, confused by the excitement and unwonted surroundings, peering into those strange faces, and trying to choose wisely for themselves. And it was surprising how many happy selections were made under such circumstances. In a little more than three hours, nearly all of those forty children were disposed of. Some who had not previously applied selected children. There was little time for consultation, and refusal would be embarrassing; and I know that the committee consented to some assignments against their better judgment.

  —Hastings H. Hart30

  Shortly after the 1882 meeting of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, the chairman of the Committee on Child-saving asked Hastings H. Hart to conduct an inquiry into the work of the Children’s Aid Society. Hart was then secretary of the Minnesota Board of Corrections and Charities but would soon move to New York to assume the directorship of the Department of Child Helping at the Russell Sage Foundation, where he would become a major figure in the development of child welfare policy.

  Hart’s report, presented at the 1884 NCCC meeting, was both the first comprehensive independent analysis of the Emigration Plan and a rhetorical tour de force. It eschewed the traditional hyperbole and sentimentality of nineteenth-century social welfare writing and derived its power instead from balanced, well-reasoned, and factual argument. It was by far the most powerful assault against Brace’s work to that date, not because it was harsh, but because it was incontrovertible—at least by the standards of the time.

  Beginning by saying that he was going to speak on “the work of the most extensive and important children’s charity in the United States,” Hart mainly had good news for the CAS. On the question of whether orphan train riders were “vicious and depraved,” Hart found that of the 340 individuals sent to Minnesota over the preceding three years, only six were “known to have committed offenses against the laws,” and nine were sent back to New York by local committees as “incorrigible.” He also found that three or four “depraved” adults had been sent to the state by the society. None of these numbers seemed high enough to substantiate the claims of western representatives like Hiram H. Giles that the Emigration Plan was flooding the states with “criminal juveniles, . . . vagabonds and gutter snipes.” Nor did Hart find the least evidence that the society intentionally, through some “Moral Strategy,” sent New York’s worst cases west.31

  As for the charge that the CAS, after having “disposed” of its children in the West, left them “to shift for themselves without further care,” Hart once again found the society innocent, at least in regard to its handling of younger children. When the cases of “incorrigible children” were reported to the society, Hart observed, they received “prompt attention”: the children were either transferred to a new local placement or “removed from the state.” He also pointed out that the CAS answered letters promptly and selected its local committees “judiciously.”

  On one point, however, Hart’s approval of CAS practices rested on assumptions that appear highly questionable today. He stated that, while CAS agents did return to the counties where they had placed children, their trips, “being hurried, have not permitted visits to all the children, special attention being given to urgent cases.” In regard to the placement of children under twelve, at least, Hart apparently did not feel that agent visits were necessary because he believed that “younger children are taken from motives of benevolence and uniformly well treated.” Also, although he did take into account incidents of criminality by placed children, he, like Georgia Ralph, primarily judged the success of placements on the basis of their endurance. Thus, the fact that 90 percent of the children under thirteen remained at their placements, as opposed to only 52 percent of the children thirteen or older, seemed clear evidence that all was well with the younger children. It was only when Hart discussed the cases of older “intractable” children that he documented the inadequacies of CAS supervision that in fact applied to all of its placements.

  Although Hart complimented the CAS’s efforts to act promptly when orphan train riders got into trouble, he pointed out that instructions mailed from New York often arrived too late to be of any use. This was especially a problem because, although the local committees were meant to stand in loco parentis to the placed children, they did not have legal guardianship of them—that was retained by the New York office—and so could do little on their behalf. He was also concerned by the fact that employers were not legally bound to educate or keep the children they had taken in, and he cited cases where children had never been sent to school or had been worked hard all summer only to be kicked out in the fall because the farmers did not want to pay their expenses over the winter. And finally, Hart felt that the CAS proviso that children were free to leave their employers merely if they felt “ill-treated or dissatisfied” encouraged too many children to run off because they did not like justified character-building punishments or work assignments. On the basis of these arguments, Hart said that, in essence, he concurred with Brace’s own statement in The Dangerous Classes that the Emigration Plan ought to be applied only to children under fourteen, although Hart himself thought twelve was a better cutoff age.

  In many ways Hart’s most damning finding was that the society was indeed “guilty” of the charge that it placed its children too hastily and without “proper investigation.” He cited five cases of abuse that the society—or in one case the boy himself—dealt with adequately after the fact but that obviously should never have happened in the first place. He also said that while younger children were taken for motives of “benevolence,” the majority of older children were “taken from motives of profit, and . . . expected to earn their way from the start.” This sort of exploitation was all the more likely to occur because, he said, children were routinely placed in homes that were no more affluent than the ones they had come from:

  The farmers in these counties are very poor. I speak within bounds, when I say that not one in five of those who have taken these children is what would be called, in Ohio or Illinois, well-to-do. To my personal knowledge, some of them were taken by men who lived in shanties and could not clothe their own children decently. A little girl in Rock County was placed in a family living on a dirt floor in filth worthy of an Italian tenement house. A boy in Nobles County was taken by a family whose children had been clothed by ladies of my church, so that they could go to Sunday-school.

  Hastings Hart’s report may have been steeped in the class and ethnic prejudices of his time. It may also have been shockingly naive about the safety of younger foster children (especially given the revelations of Mary Ellen Wilson’s case), but it did represent the maturation of a long-developing opinion that outplacement, as it had been practiced, was all too often only another form of cruelty to children. The fact that this opinion was predicated on a sympathy for poor children and an optimism about human nature very like Brace’s own made it particularly difficult to dismiss as “bosh.”

  In fact, the CAS radically altered its policies after the 1884 meeting. The notes in its “Record Books” immediately became much more detailed. Before 1884 most of the CAS’s records had consisted primarily of the dates of the inquiry letters sent to the employer or child, and one- or two-line summations of the rare answers to those letters and the almost equally rare visits by agents. From 1885 on, no child’s “Record Book” page was mostly blan
k, as the majority of them had been before. They all contained descriptions, admittedly brief, of the placements and evidence of more frequent agent visits. Many records now had two and three pages of commentary affixed atop the child’s original page. Also, letters were no longer summarized but actually inserted into the books along with photographs and news clips.

  The western agent A. Schlegel testified to the new imperatives the CAS was placing on its agents, as well as to the difficulties of fulfilling them, in the annual report of 1885:

  As our emigration work increases, the importance of visiting the children in their homes becomes more and more manifest; but it is an immense undertaking. These children are often in homes ten or twenty miles from town or railroad, and can only be reached by long drives, and often a whole day will be consumed in visiting a single child. Sometimes changes are made without notifying the Society, or a child may leave the home provided for him, and seek another for himself, and much time and labor is thus expended in following him up.

  The plan adopted is for agents to revisit, at the end of six weeks, the company taken out by them on their previous trip. By this means, if an error should possibly have been made in the locating of a child, there is an immediate chance to rectify it.32

  But even these minimal visitation plans proved impossible to realize, at least for Schlegel. Although on one trip he did gather information on a number of the children he had placed, he did not visit them, because (directly contradicting Hart’s beliefs) “these large boys are well able to look out for themselves, and I desired to devote as much time as possible to the smaller children.” But Schlegel did not manage to visit the homes of all of the smaller children and—astonishingly—chose to bypass one because he felt his visit would be “unwelcome.”33

  Although Schlegel’s failure to visit this last child was indefensible, it was certainly true that until automobiles became readily available in the 1920s, visiting many of the orphan train riders was extremely difficult if not impossible. The invention of the telephone, which became common in rural homes during the 1890s, helped agents keep better track of their charges but was still no substitute for visits. Harry Morris, who was placed on a farm in DeWitt, Nebraska, in 1897 and received frequent and severe beatings from his employer, was never visited by the CAS agent in charge of his case—a man he called “Mr. Titus.” In Morris’s account of his experiences on that farm, he described the one time his agent called on the telephone: “I asked the farmer if I might talk to him. I got such a stern look that I held my tongue. If he had given me the chance I would have asked Mr. Titus to come to the farm and let me speak with him personally, and then I would have had a chance to make the situation clear to him.”34 An indication of how distant the contact between Morris and his agent was is that the agent’s real name was not Titus but Tice.

  Marked, if incomplete, improvements in screening foster families and monitoring placements did not insulate the CAS from further criticism. At the 1885 NCCC meeting, Lyman P. Alden, the Michigan reform school superintendent who had suggested that New York build a monument to Brace for ridding the city “of so many incipient criminals,” renewed his attack by declaring that the “best families do not want to assume the responsibility and risk” of caring for street children fresh from the “slum holes of society.” Once again Alden asserted that only specialists in institutions could and should provide such care. And at the 1886 meeting Hastings Hart repeated his critique of the Emigration Plan, adding that he thought the main reason for the CAS’s failures was that it had tried to accomplish its work at too little expense. In 1889 a report by the Indiana Board of Charities declared that the state had become “a dumping ground for dependents from other states,”35 and an attempt was made there to pass a law regulating the resettlement of children from out of state. Michigan, in 1895, became the first state to pass a law limiting the placement of children from other states. Indiana, Illinois, and Minnesota instituted restrictions of their own in 1899, and two years later Missouri and Nebraska followed suit.

  But as much as this tide of criticism and anti—orphan train legislation constituted a defeat for Charles Loring Brace, it was also, in important ways, a victory. Much of the criticism was, after all, based on his own argument that the children of the poor and of the streets were as deserving of love and consideration as the children of the more affluent classes. And even as many critics attacked the CAS for the way it handled family placement, they by no means rejected family placement itself. On the contrary, by the 1880s family placement was decidedly the most favored form of treatment for any dependent child, with institutional care being only a last resort. One participant at the 1881 NCCC meeting was only exaggerating slightly when she declared, “So general has become the expression of sentiment of preference for a system of family life for deserted children, over one of institutional life, that it is unnecessary to dwell largely upon it in this paper.”36

  Although institutions—predominantly orphanages—did continue to handle the vast majority of children until the passage of Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation in 1935, the huge, factory-like orphanages, reform schools, and juvenile prisons of the mid-nineteenth century were almost entirely out of favor by the 1880s and were being replaced by cottage-style institutions that sought to reproduce a family environment in smaller, semi-independent units. Even the states that banned the CAS and other eastern charities from sending their children did so not because they rejected family placement but because they did not want to run the risk of their taxpayers having to support children they thought should be the responsibility of other states. As, one after another, the western states developed large populations of dependent children of their own, they all instituted varieties of family placement. In 1883, for example, an Illinois minister named Martin Van Buren Van Arsdale founded what was to become the Children’s Home Society with the prime purpose of finding homes for orphaned and abandoned children. By 1892 the National Children’s Home Society had member societies in ten midwestern and western states. By 1903 there were member societies in twenty-five states that had a total of 12,000 children under their care.

  Unlike the CAS, the Home Societies and the many other child placement organizations that arose in the 1880s and afterward tended to screen foster families and monitor placements carefully. They also did not send their children so far from home but rather operated primarily within the boundaries of their own states. And, especially after the turn of the twentieth century, the average age of the children they placed became younger and younger. Ultimately the CAS would adopt nearly identical policies, but not until after the death of Charles Loring Brace, and not until after the most notorious of all the orphan train riders had begun to make headlines across the nation.

  11

  The Trials of Charley Miller

  ON SEPTEMBER 27, 1890, at the tiny settlement of Hillsdale in the high prairie of eastern Wyoming, a railroad brakeman named George Manafield was checking the coupling between two boxcars when he heard a weak moan. As he stepped out to the sloping edge of the gravel rail-bed, Manafield heard the moan again, coming through the narrow gap of a boxcar door that was not quite closed. Pushing the door open, Manafield discovered a young man of about twenty, lying on a heap of railroad ties, blood seeping from a bullet wound in his temple. Manafield shouted down the tracks for help, then climbed inside the car to see what he could do for the bloody, pale, moaning young man. It was not until another brakeman and a conductor had crouched around the body that Manafield stood up and noticed a pair of bare feet jutting over the edge of a stack of railroad ties that reached nearly to the ceiling. Climbing the stack, Manafield found a second young man wedged face down between two of the creosote-soaked timbers—“like a traitor in his coffin,” as a newspaper would put it—a bullet in his temple and a cheap, nickel-plated, thirty-two-caliber revolver lying beside his face. This young man’s body was still warm, but he was no longer breathing.

  The Hillsdale stationmaster telegraphed the news of the wounded
man and his dead companion to Cheyenne, twenty miles to the west, where there was both a hospital and a sheriff. By the time the train had arrived in the city scores of curiosity seekers were waiting at the station, debating whether the injured man and his dead companion had been the victims of a suicide pact or a Clan-na-Gael assassin, or were just a couple of tramps crushed by a collapsing stack of ties.