It is not clear who organized the campaign on Charley’s behalf. None of the letters sent to Amos Barber’s office referred to any individual advocate or organization that was lobbying on his behalf. Whoever conducted the campaign, however, seems to have been well connected, as is evident not only from the petition signed by so many senators, congressmen, and jurists but also from the letters sent by individual New York lawyers, legal publishers, and businessmen. It is also interesting to note how many of the people expressing support came from places where Charley had lived. Eleven of the twenty-five signatures on the petition were of residents of Rochester, where Charley’s sister lived, and where he had worked for eight months. His most ardent supporter of all, Mrs. C. K. Smith, who wrote several long letters on his behalf, was head of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Kansas, and two other letter writers were Kansans. Charley also had many supporters in New York City, including the New York Orphan Asylum, which sent a petition to Governor “Barker” signed by eighteen people, including the asylum’s superintendent.
Conspicuous in its absence among Charley’s supporters was the Children’s Aid Society. No petition or letter signed by anybody connected with the CAS appears in the file of Amos Barber’s papers relating to the case. It is obvious why, in 1890, the CAS might want to dissociate itself from an orphan train rider who so confirmed the accusations of the likes of Hiram Giles and Lyman P. Alden. But it is also true that at the very moment when Charley Miller—ragged, cold, hungry, and so far from his “folks”—shot Waldo Emerson and Ross Fishbaugh, the CAS was undergoing the most severe trial of its thirty-seven-year history.
12
The Death and Life of Charles Loring Brace
I shall never forget a scene at sunset on the Stelvio Pass, some two miles high, where as a foot-traveller I was incautiously belated, miles from any house. Up from the Italian valleys marched, with threatening rapidity, a phalanx of dark thunder clouds, crowding one upon another, filling every vale and gorge which reached down to the plains of Lombardy, and giving warning of their approach by a continuous mutter of artillery. Their light advance had already crossed the ridge on which I stood, separating Italy and Germany, and had filled the deep gorge of the Stelvio with whirls and eddies of white mist. The sun was soon darkened, and as I turned to descend toward the Tyrol in haste and anxiety, I seemed to be plunging down by the narrow zigzag of the road into a white, boiling sea, from which gigantic icebergs were rising,—the glaciers of the Alps,—while every now and then a blinding flash of lightning would reveal an Arctic vista of white snow-peaks, and the thunder reverberated among a hundred mountains. Perilous and difficult as was the descent, it was a scene one would not for any consideration have lost. It is a relation for an instant of that which seldom visits the mortal, the unseen, the infinite and unapproachable. Man shrinks away before the gigantic forces of Nature. He is purified by a glimpse of the Temple of Deity itself.
—Charles Loring Brace, 18651
IN JANUARY 1867, Brace returned home from “visiting among the poor” with what his family believed to be an ordinary cold but which turned out to be a serious case of typhoid fever. He was felled by the disease for a solid three months, and then spent another seven months recuperating in California—where he wrote his fourth book, The New West, a travelogue and celebration of West Coast vitality.
Typhoid fever is a gastrointestinal infection that causes high fevers, headaches, sore throats, and joint and abdominal pain. Today it is treated with antibiotics, but during the nineteenth century there was no choice but to let the disease run its natural course. In 1 to 2 percent of untreated cases, the intestine can become perforated as a result of severe bleeding, and the infection can spread through the abdominal cavity, attacking, damaging, or destroying vital organs—a condition known as peritonitis. Brace ultimately died of Bright’s disease, a form of kidney failure, and it is possible that this subtle and slowly progressing illness commenced with damage done to his kidneys during his bout with typhoid.
By October 1867, however, Brace believed himself fully recovered and returned to his demanding labors at the Children’s Aid Society. It was not until the winter of 1881–82, when he was fifty-six, that he once again became so ill that he had to take time off from his work. His younger brother James had just died, and the Emigration Plan was under attack. Brace seems only to have felt extremely tired (exhaustion being the most noticeable early symptom of kidney disease) and believed that his work was to blame. Once more, after a summer in London and a visit to a sanitarium at Saint Moritz, he felt fully restored to his normal vigor and fitness.
By 1886, however, he believed, once again, that his reform and literary work had taken so heavy a toll on him that he needed another summer in Europe. He and Letitia spent June in London and went on to the Alps for three months of hiking and recuperation. But this time his health was not completely restored. His letters increasingly featured meditations on death (“If one cared for last looks at death, I should pray that mine might be of the glorious Hudson in autumn”2), and he began to devote much more time to his literary efforts—in particular his final book about humankind’s long march through ignorance to the “truth” of Christ, The Unknown God.
In May 1888, Letitia and Brace went abroad again, to England and Germany, with an extended stay at Marienbad, “the town of fat women and men too,” as Brace described it in a letter to his daughter. “Each one is patrolling around, cup in hand, and some sipping through a glass tube. Your father appears with a red crackled-glass cup, and is very distinguished^). We sip and listen to a lovely band, and walk up and down,—all this between six and eight,—then home, half-starved, to the best coffee in Europe.”3
After a couple of months Brace and Letitia returned to the Alps for a walking tour and a view of the Matterhorn. But once again this trip failed to restore him, and his letters are filled not only with references to his mortality but with decidedly retrospective appreciations of life.
While on a trip south to investigate the treatment of boys sent to Virginia, he wrote to Letitia of his response to the death of his sister’s husband:
Dearest Wife: . . . J’s sudden death gives me many serious thoughts. I often think of what a happy life we have had together, and how much good you have done me, and I suppose I have you, intellectually. God bless you, ever! I feel more easy about death now the children are pretty well cared for. It will be well with us in the unseen, I am persuaded. Life has been very pleasant, and the unseen life must be more and better. I want my last days to be better. God keep you, and make us both true servants! I love you more than ever!4
On June 19, 1889, his sixty-third birthday, he wrote to his old friend Howard Potter:
Both of us must now feel that a very slight cause may call us away to the Unseen. I think of the Future with wonder and curiosity, but not feeling that we can know much. One can only trust. The great anxiety is to make the remaining days the best and to “finish up.” . . . Strange what happiness there is in life! How grateful I am for it to the Giver! My sixty years with hardly a pain or ache (except in one sickness), a freshness now as of full life, the happiest home and married life, perfect comfort; saved thus far from death in my family; a work where I never tire; and unceasing interest in intellectual things; a love of man and of Christ which grows with years. Now this has been my lot, far beyond all possibility of desert.
I am so grateful to wife and children and friends, and, above all, to the Pronoia or Providence! It shows that happiness does not depend on money or position.
Two things I want still to do,—to put the Society on a firmer base (which can be done in three or four years), and to make my last sermon to the world in a book . . .” the Unknown God, or Inspiration among Pre-Christian Peoples.”5
The latter of these two goals Brace accomplished unequivocally. The Unknown God was published to respectful reviews in January 1890. Whatever precisely he had intended to do about bolstering the society, however, had to be left to his el
dest child.
In May 1890, Charles Loring Brace Jr., called Loring by the family, returned east from Colorado with his wife and children. Loring was forty-five, and a civil engineer. Ostensibly he had only come home to provide his father with temporary relief from some of his duties at the CAS and allow him to take yet another European excursion.
Brace had felt well enough the previous summer to forgo a trip to Europe and spend August at the family’s summer home beside Big Tupper Lake in the Adirondacks. But by the fall he was feeling worse than ever and now knew that he was not merely tired but seriously ill. He wrote to a friend about his health the same month The Unknown God was published:
A few years ago I committed the folly of swimming in Big Tupper after a hot day’s work. Had peritonitis at night, but two days’ rest restored me. . . . My visits to German springs cured me different years, but last autumn, not having been there, symptoms came on again badly, and threaten the kidneys. I shall try Marienbad (Bohemia) again this summer. My strong constitution is, of course, in my favor; still no one can tell. . . . So you see, I am to battle with disease. God guideth all. You can imagine how devoted and untiring a nurse dear Letitia has been.6
Charles, Letitia, and their two youngest children left for Europe shortly after Loring’s arrival. The talk was that the elder Brace would resume his duties when he came back in the fall, but it was well understood within the family that he might never return. After Marienbad the Braces went on to Saint Moritz, stopping along the way at the Stelvio Pass so that Brace could show his children “the scene of one of his great walks in the far-away years of his vigorous youth.” Nauseated by his illness, Brace went off alone to view the magnificent pass at sunset and to enjoy what his daughter called his “last great pleasure.”7 By the time Brace reached the sanitarium at Saint Moritz his illness had taken such a toll on him that he was confined to his bed, where, through a window, he could look out across the pale green waters of Campfer Lake, toward brilliant snow fields and jagged granite peaks. Far from improving at the sanitarium, he grew steadily weaker, sleeping much of the day and suffering periods of stupor. On August 8 he read an article in a New York newspaper praising the CAS Health Home on Coney Island and asked his daughter to send the article to Howard Potter. This, apparently, was his last effort on behalf of the charity he had founded and run for nearly thirty-eight years. That night he fell into a coma. He died three days later from Bright’s disease, on the evening of Monday, August 11—the very day Charley Miller was released from prison in Philadelphia.
On August 14, after a quiet ceremony, Charles Loring Brace was laid to rest in the cemetery of a small church beside Lake Campfer, surrounded by those mountains where, on so many occasions, his faith had come closest to being a form of knowledge.
The day after Brace’s funeral, a lanky, twenty-three-year-old man named Homer Folks arrived in Philadelphia to become the general superintendent of the Pennsylvania Children’s Aid Society. The PCAS, founded in 1882, was one of dozens of wholly independent Children’s Aid Societies that came into being throughout the United States and Canada during the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth. The PCAS was the largest of Philadelphia’s 109 child-caring agencies—but that was not saying much. It operated out of a two-room office, with a tiny staff and a caseload of some 330 children.
Folks, the son of Michigan farmers, had been educated at Harvard, where he had become friends with Charles Birtwell, the head of the Boston Children’s Aid Society, and one of the great pioneers of Progressive Era child welfare. By the time Folks took his new job he was well aware of the new wisdom that had been hammered out over the preceding decade at, among other places, the National Conference of Charities and Correction meetings, and he believed that the primary work of the PCAS was not the actual placement of children but the investigation and supervision of the homes into which the children had been placed.
Like Brace before him, Folks was possessed of phenomenal energy and dedication. During his first year at the society, he was almost always on the road visiting placed children and investigating potential foster families. Even as he traveled, he wrote the society’s annual reports and publicity literature, as well as position papers that significantly influenced child welfare work during the Progressive Era—that roughly thirty-year period of social and political reform that commenced in the 1890s. He delivered one of these papers, entitled “Home Care for Delinquent Children,” at the 1891 National Conference of Charities and Correction meeting in Indianapolis.
Folks made several controversial points in this paper. First, he declared that, contrary to prevailing opinion, delinquents were not exclusively from the poorer—or as Brace would have said, “dangerous”—classes. What distinguished children convicted of crimes as a group was not their social class but, Folks argued, “a lack of parental oversight due to the loss of one or both parents.”8 Partly on the basis of this conclusion, Folks took a firm stand against the assertions of Hiram Giles and other representatives of the “Asylum-Interest” that such children could and should be cared for only in institutions. On the contrary, given that the source of delinquent children’s problems was a lack of parental oversight, the best way to reform them was to place them with carefully chosen and supervised families.
The problem was finding families willing to take such children. Traditionally, juvenile convicts, along with deformed, blind, mentally retarded, or otherwise handicapped children, were considered unplaceable and relegated either to the care of institutions or to placements where incorporation into anything resembling a family was never a real possibility. The New York CAS, for example, commonly sent mildly retarded and deformed but still able-bodied boys to placements in the South where they were little more than substitute slaves. Folks managed to circumvent some families’ reluctance to take such children by offering to pay a boarding fee for their care.
The practice of “boarding out” children was first experimented with by the Massachusetts Board of State Charities in 1868 and was deemed such a success that it was sanctioned and to some extent regulated by state law in 1880. Initially, there was no difference between those children boarded out and those placed in what came to be called “free homes.” The payment of boarding fees was seen primarily as a way of ensuring that children were not forced to work for their keep and were allowed enough free time to attend school and church and simply to play. Many of the strongest supporters of boarding out during the ensuing decades were anti-child labor advocates.
Although boarding out was clearly in harmony with Brace’s emphasis on family care, he condemned the securing of parents by the payment of fees for turning “an act, which is at once one of humanity and prudence, into one purely of business.”9 Brace was not alone in worrying that boarding fees would attract only the most mercenary of foster parents, and it was partly with the goal of preventing boarding families from becoming small businesses that, under the Massachusetts law, they were paid a fee slightly lower than the cost of caring for the child and were forbidden to take in more than two unrelated children.
Folks made an even more compelling argument for the benefits of boarding out in a paper he delivered at a special NCCC meeting held in connection with the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Perhaps the greatest weakness of free home placement was that it was never able to meet the needs of what Folks termed “dependent children whose parents are living and have not forfeited their natural rights by unnatural neglect or cruelty.”10 These were children who needed only temporary care because their parents were ill, out of work, or under some other form of duress. Classic orphan train placement in the West did not suit these children well because it made reunification so difficult. But also, even when such children were placed locally, it was hard to find them good homes because many foster parents—arguably the best—were reluctant to nurture and love a child they would soon have to give up. Although boarding fees may not have swelled the ranks of these loving parents significantly, there is no qu
estion that, for the first time, they gave children needing temporary care a real alternative to orphanages and asylums. And it is partly for this reason that boarding out became so widely employed over the ensuing decades that there is today no other form of family foster care.
There is one other regard in which Folks took a position way ahead of the historical curve in his 1893 paper. For Brace, social work had been primarily a religious enterprise, an attempt to express God’s love that improved the soul of everyone involved—charity worker, beneficiary, and, really, the whole of society. But for Folks and much of the generation who came of age during the Progressive Era, social work was first and foremost a matter of public policy. It had to be based on scientific principles and research, thoroughly rational and systematic in its execution, and regulated by equally rational and systematic legislation and oversight bodies. Folks saw scant advantages accruing to needy children merely through being one-half of a mutually beneficial act of charity, especially if that charity was ill organized, inconsistent, or corrupt. Folks also attacked Brace’s notion of the importance of bringing the classes together through social work. He did not believe affluent volunteers should play a major role in charity—outside of funding, of course. Social work had to be carried out only by competent and well-trained professionals. In remarks clearly aimed at Brace’s anarchistic and idealistic management style, Folks asserted that free home placement as it was practiced by the CAS “is undoubtedly the best plan, provided it is guarded by an ever-vigilant supervision, but is possibly the worst plan of all if not so guarded,”11 and he declared, “There is no more dangerous enemy to the family plan than he who administers it carelessly.”12
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