Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  Folks’s public rejection of the labors of affluent volunteers may have had as much to do with his own work situation as his philosophy. The president of the Pennsylvania CAS, Mrs. James C. Biddle, was a pillar of Philadelphia society and a woman with whom Folks had constant disagreements. Shortly after his speech at the Columbian Exposition and his, perhaps, indiscreet remarks about wealthy volunteers, his relations with Mrs. Biddle degenerated to such an extent that he left the CAS to become the general secretary of the State Charities Aid Association (SCAA) in New York City, a position he would hold, despite a brief career in politics, until just before his death in 1947.

  The State Charities Aid Association had been founded in 1872 by Louisa Lee Schuyler. Schuyler’s mother had been a great friend of Brace’s and a prominent CAS contributor. As a young woman, Schuyler had often looked to Brace for guidance. She began her career in charitable work just before the Civil War by helping to organize the Women’s Central Relief Association, which was instrumental in the founding of the United States Sanitary Commission headed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Schuyler herself was an important administrator of the Commission throughout the Civil War.

  She came up with the idea for the State Charities Aid Association after visiting the Westchester County poorhouse in 1871 and finding it ill staffed, fabulously unsanitary, and barbaric in its treatment of its desperate residents. The association, as she initially conceived of it, was to consist of a number of dedicated, knowledgeable, and influential men and women who could inspect and monitor almshouses, asylums, hospitals, and other public welfare institutions and promote reform generally. Among its founding members were several people associated with the Children’s Aid Society, including Charles Loring Brace, Theodore Roosevelt Sr., and Grace Dodge. One of the SCAA’s earliest triumphs was the founding of the Bellevue Nurses Training School at Bellevue Hospital—the first nurses’ training program in the United States. The association was also an effective lobbying group and was instrumental in the passage of New York’s Children’s Law of 1875.

  As general secretary of the SCAA, Folks was able to put into practice many of the principles regarding the regulation and professionalization of social work that he had outlined at the Columbian Exposition. One of his first initiatives was the founding of the County Agent System, under which each of New York’s counties was provided with a paid, ostensibly well-trained agent who worked full-time seeing to the needs of the county’s destitute children. The agent’s duties included the investigation of troubled families and of foster homes, the placing-out of children, and, when possible, the return of children to their families. It was through this system that Folks also managed to introduce boarding out to New York State.

  In 1894, at the New York State Constitutional Convention, he and Louisa Schuyler drafted an amendment that established state supervision of all charitable and correctional institutions, both public and private. It also provided that no wholly or partly private charitable institution could receive payments of state money unless it operated under the rules established by the State Board of Charities. In ensuing years Folks advocated and helped implement state regulations requiring the filing of detailed records for every inmate received at a charitable or correctional institution and establishing a civil service examination to ensure that only competent professionals would be hired as child welfare workers. And in 1898, asserting that there was “fully as much need that the protecting care of the state should be extended to children who are in families as to those who are in institutions,” he drafted a piece of legislation entitled “An Act to Prevent Evils and Abuses in Connection with the Placing Out of Children.”13 The law, which required the licensing of all placing-out organizations, was the most dramatic incursion of the state into what Brace had conceived of as the fundamentally private relationship between the agents and beneficiaries of charitable acts.

  Progressive Era activists sought to improve child welfare in two ways. One, of which Homer Folks was so prominent an advocate, was to institute regulatory laws and bodies. The other, growing out of the work of Levi Silliman Ives and the Catholic Protectory, was to give families and communities enough support so that children never had to leave home in the first place. This was an important goal of the nation’s first juvenile court, founded in Chicago in 1899.

  The court was only the latest of a long line of mostly futile efforts to make the criminal justice system more sensitive to the needs of children. The statute establishing the court contained language almost tragically reminiscent of the goals of the early houses of refuge and juvenile asylums: “The care, custody, and discipline of the children brought before the court shall approximate as nearly as possible that which they should receive from their parents, and . . . as far as practicable they shall be treated not as criminals but as children in need of aid, encouragement, and guidance.”14

  Although a proportion of the children who came before the court had committed such serious crimes that incarceration was deemed the only justified punishment, juvenile court judges gave out suspended sentences whenever possible. If a child had no parents, or if those parents were deemed “unworthy,” the child was placed in either a free or boarding home and, ideally, adopted. Whenever possible, however, the court tried to keep children with their own families and appointed probation officers to see that the children received every available service to help ensure their permanent reform. Probation officers were considered so essential that they were deemed “the keystone” of the system.15

  In the early decades of the twentieth century probation officers were not seen as the quasi-police officers that they generally are today, but as something far closer to a modern social worker. Their job, much like that of the early CAS “visitors,” was to meet regularly with children and their families and to offer an avuncular form of moral guidance as well as more practical services—references for jobs, for example, or help with school problems, and even payments of money to hard-pressed and “deserving” mothers. The probation officers were, of course, also enforcers who had to make it clear to all parties that if the child did not abide by the conditions of probation, he or she would end up in juvenile prison.

  The problem was that there were never enough probation officers to do the job as it was meant to be done. Initially this was because the officers were all volunteers. The founders of the juvenile court system had not asked for appropriations to pay the officers because they had feared that local legislators would balk at the expense, and because they worried that well-paid probation posts would be dispensed not to qualified individuals but as political favors. Eventually probation officers did receive salaries, at first provided exceedingly sparingly by private charities such as the Chicago Women’s Club, and eventually by cities and states. But the salaries were never high enough to attract many of the most qualified people to the job, nor to hire enough people for the work to be done as it had been envisioned.

  The most comprehensive effort to support poor neighborhoods was conducted by the settlement house movement. The first true settlement house was Toynbee Hall, which was established in the impoverished East End of London in 1884. In many ways, Toynbee Hall was like an early mission, offering education, job training, and other services to adults and children in its surrounding community. Unlike the missions, however, Toynbee Hall’s staff did not leave at night. They lived in the house and saw themselves as “settlers” in the slums. And the people they worked with were not the beneficiaries of their charity but their neighbors. For the settlement house residents more than any other single group of reformers who preceded them, the way to solve the problem of poverty was not to punish the poor or preach to them, not to take them from their neighborhoods or raze those neighborhoods to the ground (as was done to Five Points in the 1880s), but to work within the neighborhoods. The settlement house residents felt that, on the basis of careful study, and with dedication and patience, they could take on one issue at a time until, gradually, their neighbors would not be subjected to so many over
whelming pressures and could finally enjoy something like equal opportunity with members of the more fortunate classes.

  The first American settlement house was established in New York City in 1886 by Stanton Coit, a young Amherst graduate who had spent several months at Toynbee Hall. Jane Addams also visited Toynbee Hall and returned to her native Chicago in 1888 to found Hull House, the most well-known of all American settlement houses. The movement spread rapidly in the United States. By 1900 there were roughly 100 settlement houses in operation, and ten years later there were 300 more.

  When a new settlement house was established, the first service offered the community was usually a kindergarten, because this was seen as the most effective way to establish a relationship with parents and, through them, with the larger neighborhood. Once up and running, in addition to education programs, settlement houses would commonly offer day care for working mothers, a variety of community health services, theaters, and, like Brace’s Newsboys’ Lodging House, libraries, penny savings banks, gyms, and reading rooms. Settlement house residents were also active lobbyists for any legislation or programs they thought would benefit their poor neighbors. Jane Addams was so dedicated a campaigner for the first juvenile court that it was ultimately established across the street from Hull House.

  The great emphasis that these settlements put on personal interaction and on suiting the particular needs of the people in their own neighborhoods was part of what made them so adaptable, so popular, and, in many individual instances, so effective, but it also proved to be their great limitation. There was something deeply sentimental and even quixotic about this notion of ending social injustice by filling the poorest neighborhoods with colonies of well-intentioned, youthful, and energetic scions of the middle and upper classes. Although the best of the houses helped a great many people in moments of need and duress, and some of them, such as Hull House and Lillian Wald’s celebrated Henry Street Settlement in New York, became influential bases for social reform, most settlements were too dependent on the vision and energies of one or two charismatic individuals. By the 1920s, having failed to alter substantially the conditions in American slums, settlement houses began to fall out of fashion and, in ever-increasing numbers, close their doors. Jane Addams shared a Nobel Prize in 1931 but, at seventy-one, was in such poor health that she was no longer able to work more than four hours a day. When Edmund Wilson visited Hull House to write a tribute to Addams the following year, he was struck by how wan and obsolete the institution felt in her absence, and he described it as “planted with a proud irrelevance in the midst of those long dark streets.”16

  A few of the settlement houses—including both Hull House and the Henry Street Settlement—survive today, but they are functionally indistinguishable from countless other much more recent community service centers. They are staffed by social workers, psychologists, and other professionals, none of whom actually live at the houses.17 In the end, the goal of breaking down class divisions by bringing the wealthy into the slums has proven less durable than the spirit of inclusion that inspired it, a spirit that was very much in evidence at the 1909 White House Conference on Dependent Children—attended by Homer Folks, Jane Addams, and Hastings Hart—where modern child welfare was born.

  The White House Conference might never have come to pass had it not been for President Theodore Roosevelt’s erring memory. After having promised the judgeship at the first juvenile court in the District of Columbia to his good friend James E. West, Roosevelt remembered that he had already offered the position to another political crony. “You’ve got a draft on me any time you want to call,” he told West, “anything you want come in and ask it.”18

  West, an orphan who had grown up in an institution, ultimately called Roosevelt on his promise by asking him to sponsor a conference at the White House on the problems of dependent children. At first Roosevelt was dubious about the value of such an event and said he would agree to sponsor it only if it received the strong support of Homer Folks, who had been his trusted adviser when he was governor of New York. Folks was indeed enthusiastic and expressed his support in a letter to the president, as did Theodore Dreiser, the novelist and editor of the women’s magazine The Delineator, which published in every issue brief profiles of children who needed to be adopted or placed in a foster family.

  The conference, attended by more than 200 of the most prominent figures in American child welfare and social work, was held on January 25 and 26, 1909, a little more than a month before the expiration of Roosevelt’s second and final term as president. Homer Folks presided. The concluding report of the conference, which was delivered by Hastings Hart but actually written by Folks, finally codified the wisdom about the proper care of dependent children that had been accumulating at least since the founding of the Children’s Aid Society and, in so doing, outlined the goals and values that still dominate child welfare to this very day.

  The recommendations began with a resounding affirmation of Brace’s most essential insight: “Home life is the highest and finest product of civilization. It is the great molding force of mind and of character. Children should not be deprived of it except for urgent and compelling reasons.” But these statements were immediately followed by a forceful indictment of Brace’s blanket rejection of poor parents: “Children of parents of worthy character, suffering from temporary misfortune, and children of reasonable efficient and deserving mothers who are without the support of the normal breadwinner, should as a rule be kept with their parents, such aid being given as may be necessary to maintain suitable homes for the rearing of children.”19

  Although the report did recommend family foster care as the best alternative for normal, noncriminal children who could not stay in their “natural home,” its description of how those homes should be found and supervised was also a stark rejection of CAS policy under Brace:

  Such homes should be selected by a most careful process of investigation, carried on by skilled agents though personal investigation and with due regard to the religious faith of the child. After children are placed in homes, adequate visitation, with careful consideration of the physical, mental, moral, and spiritual training and development of each child on the part of the responsible home finding agency, is essential.20

  In line with the Progressive Era tendency to see government regulation as a corrective to individual corruption and inefficiency, the report also called for state inspection of all public and private child welfare agencies. And finally, it sought to correct the gross inadequacies of virtually all nineteenth-century charities’ record-keeping systems by calling for detailed accounts of every child’s natural and foster parents’ “character and circumstances” based on agents’ “personal investigation.” The report also recommended that agents visit the children under their care at least annually and, once again, compile detailed records of the children’s situations during the entire time that they are under the agency’s supervision.

  The conference was directly responsible for the development of two important institutions. Established by Congress in 1912, the Children’s Bureau, for the first time in history, gathered and disseminated reliable information about the condition of children all across America. The work of the bureau not only called attention to the pressing needs of poor and dependent children but also provided the factual foundation for many programs and laws.

  But perhaps the most important and influential products of the conference were the mothers’ or widows’ pensions, which grew directly out of the recommendation that worthy families suffering temporary economic or other hardships be given such aid “as may be necessary to maintain suitable homes for the rearing of children.” The notion of providing home relief to women was not entirely new. From the earliest colonial times destitute soldiers’ and fishermen’s widows, whose hardship was deemed an act of God and in no way a reflection of character, had been provided with home relief by private charities, usually in the form of food or firewood. What distinguished the mothers’ pensi
ons from this traditional form of relief was, first, that they were disbursements of cash; second, that they were issued by government agencies; and finally, that the moral requirements for eligibility were considerably reconfigured.

  The primary goal of the pensions was pragmatic rather than moralistic. They were intended to make it possible for children to stay with their natural families because both foster care and institutionalization were expensive and more likely to produce misfits and criminals who could end up being even greater draws on public coffers. To be eligible for a pension, a woman only had to be deemed a “worthy” mother, but she did not need to be virtuous in more conventional senses of the word. Julian Mack, a Cook County circuit court judge who attended the conference, believed that single mothers should be granted pensions “because if we can stop that mother from giving away her child . . . we are going to save not only the child but the mother too.”21