Homer Folks came up with the idea of calling these payments “pensions.” He wanted to destigmatize them and hoped that they would be seen as money earned by “meritorious services in bearing children and rearing them through infancy.”22 In 1911 Missouri and Illinois became the first states to enact mothers’ pension laws, and within two years similar laws had been passed in seventeen other states.
The mothers’ pensions were never very substantial, however. Often they were kept below boarding home fees, which were themselves frequently set lower than the average cost of caring for a child. And only 40 percent of the counties legally entitled to issue mothers’ pensions ever actually offered them. Also, the municipalities that did offer the pensions often imposed lengthy waiting periods and denied them to selected racial or ethnic groups. Mexican immigrants were denied pensions in Los Angeles, for example, and African Americans were ineligible in Houston, even though they constituted 21 percent of the city’s population.23
In the end, mothers’ pensions are significant not so much for the relief they provided as for the precedent they set. Too scanty to keep many hard-pressed families from breaking up, they were nevertheless the model for a program that, whatever its other drawbacks, enjoyed prodigious success at preserving the ties between mothers and their children: the much maligned “welfare,” instituted as Aid to Dependent Children under the Social Security Act of 1935, reconfigured as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in 1962, and eliminated under the so-called Personal Responsibility Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1996.
The significance of the 1909 White House Conference on Dependent Children was not by any means confined to the introduction of the Children’s Bureau or mothers’ pensions. The conference’s most important effect by far was the gradual reshaping of the operations and goals of virtually every children’s charity and service in the United States—a reshaping that is clearly visible in the development of the Children’s Aid Society under the guidance of Loring Brace.
Loring Brace had never intended to make a career of child saving. As a result, he lacked the emotional and philosophical loyalties that had made his father so resistant to change. Although the 1909 conference would usher in the most radical restructuring in the CAS’s history, Loring began reforming his father’s organization almost as soon as he officially took over as secretary. One of his very first actions was to answer the CAS’s most vehement and long-standing criticism by decreeing that the society would no longer place any children under twelve who were not Protestants. By the latter half of the 1890s almost all of the orphan train riders came from public or private orphanages in upstate New York, which, like the rest of the country, was largely Protestant. Only a small percentage came from the city itself, and these were usually referred by Protestant agencies. The younger Catholic and Jewish children who needed foster homes and might otherwise have ridden CAS orphan trains were left to the care of the New York Foundling Hospital, the Jewish Home, and other charities of their faiths.
Loring imposed no religious segregation on orphan train riders over twelve, perhaps in part because he believed they were mature enough to make their own decisions regarding religion, but mainly because of the way he decided to answer the criticisms of the “Asylum-Interest.” Beginning in 1894 he established a loose partnership with the New York House of Refuge and the New York Juvenile Asylum by agreeing to take their inmates on release, give them two to three months of training at the newly founded Brace Farm School in Westchester County, and then find them placements on farms, mostly in New York State and New England but also in the West and South. Girls were sent to the Goodhue Home on Staten Island, where they were taught manners, deportment, and “domestic arts.” In this way, Loring placated his most bitter local critics (the Asylum-Interest) by performing a service for them and satisfied western opponents, like Lyman P. Alden, by ensuring that older orphan train riders had been trained by professionals. Not all of the farm school graduates, however, had received the first part of their “training” at the refuge or the asylum. Many of them had been residents of the Newsboys’ Lodging House or were vagrants referred to the CAS in other ways. But even these had at least learned the basics of milking, livestock care, planting, and picking and had been given time to get over what one CAS document called “the first feeling of intense loneliness which the city boy suffers on going to the country.”24
The main reason why Loring did not ban older non-Protestants from the orphan trains was that it would have gone so radically against the grain of CAS culture and history. Most of the Newsboys’ and Girls’ Lodging House residents were Catholic or Jewish, as were the inmates of the asylum and the refuge. Excluding these children would have meant that the orphan trains no longer served New York and would have deprived the lodging houses of what had always been seen as one of their main reasons for being. Also, this age group was not well provided for by any charity, and it would not have been fair to cut them off—at least as long as Loring felt they benefited from the orphan trains.
While, by virtue of their religious diversity, the older boys and girls were a holdover from the early days of the orphan trains, their placements differed from those of the early riders in one important particular: the farmers who took them in were required to pay them wages. They were still supposed to send them to school in the winter as well, and to treat them with all the fairness and consideration they owed their own offspring, but the payment of wages made clear that the relationship was not truly familial but primarily a matter of employment. Prior to the opening of the farm school, older orphan train riders had often, of course, been paid wages, but only through their own negotiations with their “employers” and never as a part of official CAS policy. Loring Brace’s institution of this policy is characteristic of another aspect of his management of the society.
Loring was an engineer, not a man of the cloth. Under his guidance, CAS literature made only the most cursory references to religion and ceased almost entirely to mention the immortality of the children’s souls, their ignorance of the Bible or of Jesus, and even the Christianity of the men and women who wanted to help them. Loring was undoubtedly a man of compassion, with a strong moral sense, but he also had an engineer’s deep respect for structural coherence. A large proportion of the changes he made at the CAS were intended to clarify its goals and to make sure that the organization of the society truly reflected and helped to realize those goals.
By establishing a two-tiered system, with the older children essentially being found jobs and the younger ones “foster families” (the new official term as of the mid-1890s), he was eliminating an ambiguity that had dogged the Emigration Plan from its very beginning. He was, of course, also acknowledging the fact that placements of the older children had always been much more like jobs than adoption. Now that the obligations and the benefits of the program were spelled out much more clearly, it was hoped that there would be fewer unmet expectations and thus more happy placements.
Loring also helped clarify CAS placement efforts by establishing separate programs and record-keeping systems for two long-standing categories of orphan train rider that had only intermittently been distinguished from the mass of emigrants: families and single women with children.
The help provided to families hardly changed under Loring’s tenure. Essentially, all they were given were job placements and, if necessary, transportation out of town. But in 1901 Loring expanded the society’s work with single women substantially by opening a “temporary home for homeless mothers with little children.” Many of the women who sought shelter at the home were simply impoverished single mothers, widows, or abandoned wives, but a large percentage of them had fled their husbands as a result of some sort of crisis, most likely battery or abuse. During its first years of operation the women were allowed to remain at the home for only a few days, but in later years they would frequently stay for weeks. The women were given food and clothing, provided with washing and laundering facilities, and helped to solve t
heir larger problems usually in one of three ways. By far the majority of women were found jobs where they would be allowed to keep their children, either locally or in the West. Some of them were helped to move in with family or friends and sometimes provided with transportation. And some, the minority, were helped to reach a reconciliation with their husbands. This remarkably advanced program, ultimately renamed “Emergency Shelter for Women and Children,” operated for Loring Brace’s entire tenure at the CAS but was discontinued shortly after his retirement in October 1927.
Loring Brace also established a remarkably forward-looking industrial education program for disabled—or, as he referred to them, “crippled and deformed”—children. Every weekday these children would be picked up from and returned to their homes by CAS “wagonettes”—small, horse-drawn omnibuses. Sometimes attendants would have to carry the students up and down several flights of tenement house stairs. At the classes, students would be trained in reading, writing, and basic calculation, as well as some sort of marketable skill that they could practice from their homes to help support their families.
And finally, shortly after the founding of the first juvenile court in 1899, the CAS established its own probation department, which it saw primarily as yet another mechanism for keeping children out of institutions. The probation officer handled the cases of “repentant” boys and girls who had been convicted of “small offenses.” He was meant to be a “friend” who would find the children new jobs, or smooth the way for their return to their old employment, and generally guide and advise them until they were “mature enough to recognize responsibilities and able to stand alone.”25 But his friendliness was no doubt compromised in the eyes of many of his charges by the fact that he also had the power to “punish” and “arrest” them.26 Still, the probation department was yet another example of how the CAS was attempting to help the neighborhoods Brace Sr. had once so scornfully dismissed.
By far the most significant of Loring Brace’s reorganization efforts was in part a response to the new oversight and regulation of charitable organization required by new legislation. The official CAS “Record Books,” the primary compendium of information about placed children, became considerably more detailed in 1892—two years into Loring’s tenure, and two years before Homer Folks’s amendment to the state constitution established state supervision of charities. The books contained more elaborate descriptions of the children’s placements and their progress during, and often after, their supervision by the CAS. But the fact that 1892 is also the first year in which the telephone is referred to in the records suggests that the increased detail of the reports may have been due in part to the ease of access offered by this new technology.
The records do not become dramatically different until the years immediately following the passage of New York’s new state constitution with its provisions regarding the oversight and regulation of charities. Up through 1894 the “Record Books” had merely been blank, lined ledgers. But beginning in 1895 they contained printed forms that helped standardize the information collected about each child. The forms not only required agents to enter each child’s name, age, religion, and similar details about their foster parents but also showed the new emphasis on the importance of visiting the child by requiring the entry of directions to the foster parents’ home—information that had never been collected before. Although these records could still be frustratingly incomplete, they were no longer merely jottings intended to jog the memory of readers who were already acquainted with the child.
The most significant change came in 1896 with the institution of the “card files.” These were small brown folders—one for each child—that contained a stiff card listing the child’s vital statistics and visits from a CAS agent and any other documents related to the child. At first these documents consisted mainly of letters by the children, their foster parents, and sometimes siblings or birth parents. As time passed, however, they became repositories for an ever-expanding number of forms as well as reports and letters from an also rapidly expanding number of experts—teachers, doctors, probation officers, and, finally, social workers and psychiatrists—whom the never satisfied need for supervision and the ever more professionalized and bureaucratized business of child welfare brought into the private lives of the children and their families.
The earliest forms were questionnaires filled out by prospective foster parents that asked not only for basic biographical information but also about their reasons for taking a child. These forms show that, despite the new emphasis on adoption and foster family placement, the society was still perfectly willing to give children to parents who expressed no interest in adoption, or who said their principal reason for having a child around was to have him or her “help with chores.” The majority of parents, however, did cite giving the child a home as their main reason for taking him or her in. The questionnaires also reveal that, although the majority of the placements were to couples in their thirties and forties, as many as one-sixth of them were to single women or to very old people—testimony to the fact that, right up until the very end of the Emigration Plan, placing agents often felt that it was better to accept any willing foster parent than to bring a child back to New York.
In a paper delivered sometime in the 1930s, Clara Comstock, one of the most hardworking and beloved of all the placement agents, recounted with clear pride how she used to trick people into becoming foster parents. In one case she asked a couple who had expressed no interest in taking children to baby-sit a child for just one night—ostensibly because the child had no other place to stay. Then, the following morning, while the couple was still under the spell of the child’s cuteness and pathetic fate, she rushed in, got them to sign placement forms, then rushed out again before they had time to change their minds.
This first questionnaire was soon followed by others for references, agent preplacement visits, medical and teacher evaluations, and so on. The forms were, of course, a mixed blessing. They were unlikely to reveal anything that an attentive agent would not have picked up by other means, and they forced the agent to spend time doing paperwork that might otherwise have been used attending to the needs of children. But the forms did help clarify the responsibilities of foster parents and agents, as well as the needs of the children. They also signified how seriously the CAS—and by extension, the whole of society—took these responsibilities and needs. And finally, the forms did indeed tend to standardize what had always been a very haphazard process of placement and supervision. At the very least, they required the agent to visit the family and pay some attention to the quality of their relations with the child. The documents show clearly that, from 1896 on, CAS agents visited their charges, on average, nearly one and a half times per year—significantly more frequently than the annual visits that would be recommended by the 1909 conference.
Two other very important documents introduced in 1895 were surrender and permit forms. The surrender forms were legal contracts under which the birth parents gave up all rights to their children, granted the CAS custody, and allowed the children to be placed with foster families. The permit forms granted the society the same rights but were signed by the children themselves, presumably because their parents were dead or otherwise inaccessible. Once again these documents had the advantage of removing ambiguity about the status of the child, and thus easing the adoption process and providing psychological benefit to all parties. They also helped protect the society from the suits by irate parents that had bedeviled it ever since the 1870s.
The increasing “professionalization” of social work during the twentieth century may have cut back on the emotional interchange between worker and child that Brace had so valued, but the ever-denser assemblage of forms, reports, and letters in each card file made for a far more realistic and complete portrayal of children’s situations. The card files had begun only as adjuncts to the “Record Books,” but by 1916 the files’ superior flexibility and capacity had reversed that relationship, and the “Rec
ord Books” were discontinued.
Social work’s professionalization also substantially diminished the reflexive euphemism of the society’s first four decades. Agents still had a tendency to portray placements as successes, but they were far more willing to admit failure and find children more effective forms of treatment.
Finally, these records show how the whole of American society was changing in the twentieth century. Although as early as 1902 Loring Brace could declare that “all over the country there is a great demand for babies,”27 it was not until the 1920s that this demand translated into a marked increase in the number of adoptions. This trend is something of a puzzle, at least to materialist historians. Why, they ask, should the demand for children to adopt shoot up at the very moment when work prohibitions and an emphasis on education made children more costly and less remunerative than ever before in history? And why were the least remunerative children of all—babies—the ones wanted most? At the end of the nineteenth century mothers still had to pay baby farmers to take their unwanted children, but by 1930 those babies could be sold to desperate adoptive parents on the black market for $1,000 each.28
No doubt the exploding demand for young children was partly due to new psychological theories asserting that personality was mostly determined by events in early childhood, and that children adopted after infancy were more likely to be troubled. But the demand was also, certainly, the final fulfillment of the sentimentalization of children that had begun with the Romantics. Once it became forbidden to value children for their economic benefits—for their capability— people were no longer so inhibited about yielding to those protective and adoring impulses evoked by a child’s incapability. And what children were more incapable and adorable than babies? Whatever the source of the demand, it lowered the average age of children placed by the CAS dramatically. By the late 1920s most of the orphan train riders were toddlers and babies, and the society was even picking up newborns at the hospital.
Orphan Trains Page 39