The evolution of social attitudes was also reflected in the name of the department making the placements. Although annual reports continued to refer to it as the Emigration Department well into the twentieth century, as of 1898 it was the Placing-Out Department on the CAS letterhead—a reflection of the growing emphasis on local rather than western placement. By the late 1920s—at which point placements were almost exclusively in the New York area—the division was variously referred to as the Free Home or Home Finding Department—the latter name reflecting the society’s experiments with boarding out. By the early 1930s, after the departure of the last orphan train, the division of the CAS making outplacements was renamed the Foster Home Department, the designation it held until the 1960s.
When the first company of orphaned and destitute children left New York for Dowagiac, Michigan, in September 1854, it was hard to see the Children’s Aid Society’s Emigration Plan as anything other than inspired beneficence. In an era when poor children were commonly judged to be criminals who needed “correction” in brutal, underfunded institutions, the Emigration Plan asserted not merely that destitution was no crime, but that these children were possessed of virtues—strengths, independence, ingenuity, and vitality—that could benefit the whole nation if nurtured in the right environment. At a time when all poor and working-class children had, to one extent or another, to earn their way in the world, the CAS provided orphan train riders with sure jobs. And at a time when children as young as ten traveled hundreds of miles in quest of work, the CAS provided them with free transportation west—to the leading edge of the nation’s manifest destiny, where all newcomers had maximum opportunity to build themselves great futures and fortunes.
But then, by a process that was in many ways mysterious—and that Charles Loring Brace was never fully able to apprehend—in a scant few decades almost all of the assumptions that had made the orphan trains seem so admirable lost their validity. Although children were still held to be innocent despite their poverty—at least by peopie such as those who attended the 1909 White House Conference—they were no longer seen as so capable, strong, or independent. The idea that children, even teenagers, might travel, great distances and be left to make their own way in the world came to seem the height of moral and social irresponsibility. Not only could children not be trusted to manage their lives, but the adults who offered to take them in could not be trusted either and had to be subjected to thorough scrutiny and careful supervision. And work, which had once been thought an enriching and thoroughly natural part of childhood, now seemed an impoverishment, depriving children of the superior enrichments of school and play, and depriving adults of work and decent salaries. Even the Great West, which Brace had so often averred had a “nearly inexhaustible demand for labor,” had begun to accumulate sizable populations who had built neither great futures nor fortunes and had no money, no jobs, and no hope. And, while Brace’s notion that the family was the best place for a child had only gained wider and wider acceptance, that very acceptance had led many people to believe that no child should ever be removed from his or her family except as a last resort. And finally, a growing consensus built that the best way to help poor children was not to send them away but to work with their families, and within their communities, to maximize everybody’s opportunity, safety, and happiness.
In 1890, the year of Charles Loring Brace’s death, a total of 2,851 children were listed in volume 4 of the “Company Books”—the CAS’s official registry of emigrant parties—as having ridden the orphan trains.29 In 1902, a decade after Loring Brace’s influence began to show its first effects at the society, only 712 children emigrated west.30 The numbers would continue to show a slight but steady decline over the next few years.
The very last party registered in the “Company Books” left New York City on January 22,1909, just three days before the start of the White House Conference. That final entry is followed by a list of about 130 names of children, most of whom seem to have been placed individually during the following months in the immediate environs of New York City. All the remaining pages in the book are blank.
“Orphan trains” continued to go west for more than twenty years, but they were vastly different affairs than they had been during the program’s heyday in the nineteenth century. The parties were considerably smaller. No longer ranging between thirty and one hundred, they were rarely larger than fifteen, and sometimes they contained only two or three children. As the list concluding the final “Company Book” indicates, most of the placements made by the Children’s Aid Society during the remaining orphan train years were to homes in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. And indeed, even in 1902, when 712 children emigrated west, 726 were placed near New York City (476 of them “at wages”). Although groups of “large boys”—teenagers—were placed until the very end, the average age of the orphan train riders dropped significantly during the final years, and many of the riders were infants. And in part because of being younger, a far larger proportion of orphan train riders were adopted by their new families. In this regard at least, the final orphan trains corresponded far more closely to the ideal that Charles Loring Brace had propounded in the 1850s and ’60s.
The orphan train program continued during its final two decades partly out of sentiment—it had been something close to the raison d’être of the CAS for so many years and was still the program with which the society was most readily identified in the public eye—and partly out of institutional inertia. There was a staff of dedicated and respected western placement agents for whom it would be difficult to find other equally satisfying jobs, and then there were the hard-won and expensive placement contracts that had been negotiated with several of the midwestern and western states. In the end, it was the expiration of these contracts that finally brought the orphan train era to a close.
Beginning with Missouri in 1899, the western states began passing laws that either eliminated the placement of poor children from out of state entirely or required placement agencies to put up bonds, usually of $1,000, to ensure that the agency immediately removed—in the words of an Iowa bond from 1907—“any child having contagious or incurable disease, or having any deformity or being of feeble mind or of vicious character [or] any child . . . which shall become a public charge within the period of five years.”31 Gradually, however, even the states that had allowed bonded placements from the East began to ban them outright. By the time Loring Brace retired in October 1927, after having suffered a mild stroke, there were only five states—Michigan, Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas—still allowing the Children’s Aid Society to make placements within their borders. But within a mere couple of years these states too had closed their doors to the society. Although it is sometimes said that the program endured into the early 1930s because a few children were spirited out west illegally, one or two at a time, to be placed with or near siblings who had been placed earlier, the last true orphan train carrying children whose placement had not been made in advance left New York City for Sulphur Springs, Texas, on May 31, 1929.
Conclusion
Legacy
Society must act on the highest principles, or its punishment incessantly comes within itself.
—Charles Loring Brace, 18571
THIRTY-THREE of the one hundred biggest contractors doing business with New York City are foster care organizations, among them the Children’s Aid Society. But the CAS no longer dominates child welfare as it did during the orphan train era. Beginning shortly after the Second World War, New York’s Protestant agencies, whose clientele became increasingly African American, began to lose out in competition for private donations to Catholic and, to some extent, Jewish agencies, whose clientele, merely by virtue of the persisting religious segregation, remained white for longer. Now all of the agencies handle fairly equal portions of black, white, Latino, and Asian children, with black children making up by far the largest category. The three largest child welfare contractors in New York City are Little Flower Children�
��s Services, the Saint Christopher’s Home, and the New York Foundling Hospital, which, in 1998, were paid $73 million, $68 million, and $61 million, respectively, from New York City coffers. The Children’s Aid Society, the fifteenth largest of the city’s sixty child welfare contractors, received only $21 million.2 It is still, however, one of New York’s most highly respected child welfare agencies, and it is one of the seven charities supported by the “Remember the Neediest” campaign run by the New York Times during the holiday season.
Significantly, the CAS is now widely praised among child welfare professionals for the care with which it selects, manages, and monitors its foster placements—the very functions for which it was most harshly criticized during Charles Loring Brace’s final years. This is not to say that it is perfect. Every child welfare organization, in New York and across the nation, has its share of tragedies, those children whose lives it made more miserable rather than better, and the CAS is no exception.
The bulk of the CAS’s work is in foster care. It places some 800 children a year, out of New York’s 32,000 total foster care population.3 Its caseworkers have an average caseload of twenty-two, as opposed to the citywide average of twenty-five. And in the society’s “Twelve Months to Permanency Program,” which is designed to lessen the amount of time children spend in the limbo of foster care, caseworkers have a load of only fifteen to twenty cases. The ideal caseload recommended by the Child Welfare League is twelve to fifteen, depending on the complexity of the cases.
The CAS also runs Head Start and day-care programs, medical and dental clinics, a summer camp, a teenage pregnancy prevention program, and a “boot camp aftercare” program, which provides the graduates of juvenile boot camps with health care, psychological and career counseling, and—in a revival of the old workshop idea—on-the-job training at a CAS-operated baking business.
One of the society’s most ambitious projects is its community schools program. The CAS has turned eight New York public schools into something like the settlement houses. The schools, which are open year-round, fifteen hours a day, and six days a week, not only provide their students with a standard public education but also take advantage of the strong connection that schools automatically have with their surrounding neighborhoods to provide needed social services, such as health care, family programs, before- and after-school care, and a preschool. Another ambitious CAS undertaking has been its Carmel Hill community renewal program. In 1992 the society began providing long-needed repairs and renovations to four run-down, city-owned tenement buildings on a section of 118th Street in Harlem. Once the buildings were in livable condition, the CAS sent in social workers to help the families who had been squatting in the buildings establish legal tenancy and to put them in touch with health care and other family-strengthening social services. Both of these programs position the CAS to take advantage of the city’s drive to provide foster care through neighborhood centers and to keep placements local whenever possible. But they also show how far the society has come since the days when Charles Loring Brace thought that the best way to deal with poor children’s families and neighborhoods was simply to turn his back on them.
Partly through internal leadership, but mostly because of shifts in social work fashion and new local and federal laws, the CAS no longer places children outside the metropolitan area where it could not adequately monitor them and provide them and their foster and birth families with needed services. The society has also long since ceased to strive to save children by encouraging them to be virtuous or independent. Nowadays the CAS describes its goal as “to ensure the physical and emotional well-being of children and families, and to provide each child with the support and opportunities needed to become a happy, healthy and successful adult.”4 Brace’s double-barreled rhetoric is entirely gone. The children are never presented as threats to society but only as innocents in need of help. At the same time, they tend not to be seen as future leaders, or as evolutionarily advanced, but more as victims, dependents, and obligations—a pervasive characterization among contemporary social service organizations dealing with children.
Perhaps the most surprising fact about the way the CAS has evolved is that there is no trace of the most unequivocal of its early successes: the Newsboys’ Lodging House. The society does run three group homes, but these are therapeutically oriented and, again, primarily treat their residents as victims in need of help rather than as “independent contractors.” The present-day CAS has no program aimed at homeless or street children, and in particular, no program that provides services to teenagers with no strings attached. In this regard as in so many other aspects of its evolution, the CAS is only reflecting broader social attitudes. New York City, like the nation as a whole, has a shocking shortage of services for street children and older teens in general—those who fit into the category of what Brace used to call “large boys,” those for whom the orphan trains were a conspicuous failure.
Charles Loring Brace’s most substantial legacy is the foster care system. Not only were the orphan trains the first step from indenture to modern foster care, but Brace was the first to articulate all of the main arguments still being used to demonstrate the superiority of foster care to institutional care: that children need families; that institutions do not inculcate the attitudes or skills that enable children to thrive in the outside world; and that, in any event, institutions are too expensive.
There are now approximately half a million American children in foster care5—a population that, after falling substantially through the mid-twentieth century, reached its all-time highs during the early 1990s. Foster care remains a poor people’s institution. Only the tiniest percentage of children who come into the system are middle-class or affluent. The system is also disproportionately black. While African Americans make up 15 percent of the general population, they are 48 percent of the children in foster care. Hispanics are 12 percent of the general population, but 8 percent of foster children. Whites, by contrast, make up only 36 percent of foster children, even though they represent 69 percent of the general population.6
The median time that New York foster children spend in the system before being returned permanently to their biological parents or extended family or sent to live with adoptive parents is three years7—and this figure includes the large proportion of children who are in and out of the system in only a few days or weeks. Excluding those children, the average amount of time a child spends in the system is four and a half years, a full year and a half longer than allowed by federal guidelines.
Modern foster care is, of course, a decidedly dubious legacy. To call it a “system” is to indulge in the dreamiest of euphemisms. It is little more than an assemblage of afterthoughts and exhausted make-do efforts built on a foundation of contradictory policies and prejudices. It is a system that breeds despair even among its brightest and best, and that turns even the most well-intentioned people into something like the partners of a decaying marriage, who use every opportunity to attack those whom they ought to be helped by and helping, and to whom they are bound by a common destiny.
One of the things that makes modern foster care so difficult to know how to improve is that almost everything said about it is true. It is overcrowded, overwhelmed, and often cruel to the very children it is designed to help, and yet it does save the lives of thousands of children every year. It is pervaded and perverted by class and racial prejudices, and yet it does offer vast numbers of poor and minority children their very best chance at decent and satisfying lives. It is and always has been unconscionably underfunded, and at the same time it does fritter away countless millions of dollars through inefficiency, corruption, and just plain stupidity. It is staffed by people who are massively underqualified by both training and inclination for their terribly difficult, demanding, and supremely important work, but there are also many foster care workers with a saint’s capacity for hard labor, compassion, and self-sacrifice.
Foster care can never be painless. It begins, always, w
ith tragedy—the death, depression, illness, insanity, cruelty, or addiction of parents. Usually the tragedy is not a discrete event but a series of individually horrific incidents that occur over a period of years and can build up such a collective force that they permanently deform a child’s character. But even when the tragedy is comparatively minor, and even when the child is in foster care for only a short period, she is still suffering a child’s most primal nightmare: separation from her mother and father. No child is happy in her new home, at least not in the beginning. And all children resent their foster parents, at least until they get used to them, and to the fact that fate has played such a cruel trick on them. But some children never stop resenting their new mothers and fathers, even when those parents are decent people doing all they can to make their foster child happy. And of course, not all foster parents are up to the terribly difficult job of caring for a traumatized child. Ideally only the best-qualified men and women should be allowed to become foster parents, but no foster care system anywhere will ever be able to be so selective: there are just too many children needing care and not enough people willing to take them.
To consider foster care is to consider limits. Despite all of our wishes and best intentions, we simply cannot do everything that we would like to for a parentless child, or even everything that we should. We cannot undo the tragedy that brings a child into foster care in the first place. We cannot guarantee that a drug-addicted mother will respond to therapy, or even go to it, or that a violent father will stop beating his children. We cannot banish poverty, violence, and social decay from our inner cities—at least not significantly, and never soon enough for any particular child. And perhaps most important of all, we are limited by what we can know. The needs of foster children are never simple and rarely obvious. Decisions affecting the whole of a child’s future are almost always made on incomplete or confusing evidence, and with only a hazy sense of what their ultimate consequences might be.
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