The Baby Thief

by Barbara Bisantz Raymond

  Orphans and foundlings were forced to earn their keep by working as servants or slaves. With trepidation I read of the auction of seventeen homeless children in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1793, having five minutes earlier learned of the murder of an orphaned twelve-year-old Boston servant in 1655. Bruises covered the boy’s body; his back had been ripped open by lashes. His master was found guilty of manslaughter, but sentenced only to being burned on the hand.

  There was no mention in any of my books of what became of the seventeen auctioned Newton, Massachusetts, children.

  Infanticide, institutionalization, auctioning: these and other methods of caring for unwanted children overlapped in time and coexist today in some countries. But there has also been some progress, with relatively fewer child deaths and more humane care of orphans.

  Another means of caring for children was indenture, which originated in England. Indentured children worked for host families in exchange for lodging and food. While the hosts weren’t expected to treat the children as family, they were required to educate them and provide them with several acres of land at the end of their servitude at twenty one. But provision of the benefits was not enforced: few children received an education or any land, and many were abused.

  Indentured children were considered nuisances, and the British deported many of them to their colonies. Four indentured youngsters traveled on the Mayflower in 1620. Life in the New World, arduous at best, was particularly difficult for unprotected, overworked, indentured children—only one of the Mayflower orphans survived his first Plymouth winter. Concern regarding the high mortality rate suffered by these children was outweighed by desire to keep them off the public dole: indenturing was popular, and, with the limited use of institutionalization, contained the problem of homeless children for a time.

  But the Industrial Revolution in the 1880s and the influx of 35 million European immigrants to the United States swelled the ranks of the poor, some of whom were unable to care for their children. Many desperate mothers gave their babies to workers at foundling asylums. Lacking sufficient employees, however, workers at many orphanages boarded the babies with uneducated women who killed them with neglect.

  Abandoned children found by the police were usually dead. Those discovered alive in New York City were taken to Bellevue Hospital, where they were randomly assigned religions and names. An infant found in an alley would be named Charlie Alley; a girl found under a cherry tree near a hill would become Cherry Hill. Infants whose discovery coincided with a sensational murder trial were named after the victims, witnesses, or perpetrators. The abandoned children were cared for by prisoners and, if they survived until age four, sent to poorhouses.

  Filthy institutions in which children mixed with criminally insane adults, poorhouses were condemned by reformers as “living tombs.” The subsequent building of more orphanages must have seemed like progress.

  But though some children’s asylums were undoubtedly good, those I read about seemed little better than poorhouses, with infant mortality rates 50 percent on average, and, in places such as New York City’s Ran dalls Island, as high as 100 percent. During the particularly terrible year of 1895, 129 foundlings were admitted. One was adopted; four were reclaimed by their parents: every one of the remaining 124 babies died.

  The odds of child deaths couldn’t have been higher than in this orphanage. But in terms of sheer cruelty, nothing equaled what occurred on baby farms.

  Baby farms were homes or apartments where, for a small fee, uneducated women housed babies whose parents were unable to raise them. Some baby farmers received periodic payments; others were paid in a lump sum. Those receiving a one-time fee had no financial incentive to keep the children alive, and some farmers starved, suffocated, or drowned them.

  Death rates on baby farms whose owners had insured the lives of their charges were particularly high, a fact that inspired an 1895 New York Times editorial urging that life insurance for children be declared invalid, as it was a “temptation to inhuman crimes.” Nevertheless the killing of children for insurance benefits continued, and sentences for farmers found guilty of exposing babies to the sun for so long their skin blackened and they died of dehydration, fatally poisoning children with whiskey or cracking their skulls against walls, were abysmally low. One baby farmer who killed “at least” fifty-three children received a three- to seven-year sentence.

  Residents of poorhouses and baby farms who survived to adolescence often fled. It’s difficult to know how many children, orphaned, abandoned, or having run away, were on their own by 1872: the number of street urchins was estimated to be thirty thousand in New York City and six thousand in Boston. These and other cities teemed with the young homeless, who begged, stole, sold newspapers, and sometimes prostituted themselves for food. They were the “apple boys” and “flower girls” who peddled their goods on street corners; the “singing girls” who boarded docked ships at night to entertain the men with music and were sometimes raped; and the true-life counterparts of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl,” which I had never been able to read as a child without crying.

  Reading now of where these children slept—on steps, in filthy cellars, the iron tubes of bridges in Harlem and burned-out safes on Wall Street, of how ten would pile together for warmth in winter or jostle for spots near grates through which hot air blew, generated by underground presses—I felt like crying again, and not simply for these now long-dead waifs. What I had been avoiding was gaining on me. I kept putting a particular face to the singing girl, and a name.

  I drove home from the library that evening through streets full of salt-encrusted vehicles and gray with slush. Viewed after reading of baby farms and rat-infested tenements, my home seemed more luxurious than I usually found it. It was located in the comfortable kind of suburb I had once vowed I would never live in and that I appreciated, then, for its safety and good public school.

  Even families so sheltered, of course, have problems, and mine had its share, but not that night, when all was perfect, with a fire in the fireplace, my husband, having arrived home unexpectedly early from a business trip, warming sauce and cooking pasta, the children working on, and occasionally helping each other with, algebra and geometry problems.

  I tried not to think about my luck; I feared I’d jinx it. And I didn’t tell my family what threatened me and how it might affect us. I did explain that homeless children had been so poorly valued in the past that the name of a Nashville orphanage—the Home for Friendless Children— had elicited no protest, and that even social reformers of the nineteenth century had called the children “ragamuffins,” “little wanderers,” “street Arabs,” and “guttersnipes.”

  These terms hardly inspired people to want to raise these children. In the library the next afternoon I was reminded that the institution of adoption—which throughout its history in the United States has been regulated on a state-by-state basis, and which has existed legally since Massachusetts passed the country’s first adoption law in 1851—was not immediately popular. At the beginning of the twentieth century adoption was still rare, and adoptable children were beginning to seem not more but less desirable because of belief in an ideology that, imported from England, insisted they were genetically flawed.

  Developed by Charles Darwin’s second cousin, Francis Galton, the eugenics movement promoted the maintenance of a genetically healthy population by means that included sterilization of people deemed unfit to procreate, and was meant to counter the fact that poor, uneducated Americans were bearing more children than were cultured ones. Some particularly prolific breeders were among those considered most “abnormal”—single mothers.

  The books and articles I read never explained why these mothers were considered abnormal: I gathered that the magnitude of their sin was considered sufficient proof. Their abnormality was supposedly manifested in their “feeble-minded” intellect, “depraved” morals, or physical abnormalities. The author of a 1918 study titled “The Unmarried M
other: A Study of 500 Cases,” described single mothers as “repulsive” and “misshapen.” A physician writing in the journal Mental Hygiene claimed that some mothers were “excessively equipped sexually.”

  Researchers found what they expected to see: the 1918 study of five hundred unmarried mothers pronounced one-third retarded and most of the rest “moral monstrosities,” “melancholic,” “demented,” psychotic, or epileptic. Young women for whom no shred of evidence of illness could be found were labeled “probable epileptics” or “pre-insane.” Their babies, according to eugenicists, would inherit their worst traits.

  Not even idealists such as the Reverend Charles Loring Brace believed the children could escape their inherited taint. “It is well known to those familiar with the criminal classes,” he wrote in his influential book, The Dangerous Classes of New York, published in 1872, “that certain appetites or habits, if indulged abnormally and excessively through two or more generations, come to have an almost irresistible force, and, no doubt, modify the brain so as to constitute almost an insane condition.” Referring to a nine- or ten-year-old girl, “given up, apparently beyond control, to licentious habits and desires,” he warned, “the ‘gemmules,’ or latent tendencies, or forces, or cells of her immediate ancestors were in her system, and working in her blood, producing irresistible effects. . . .”

  These effects, he believed, would soon be felt by everyone. The title of Brace’s book referred to the children of the poor, who he believed formed a dangerous underclass that, if unreclaimed, would poison all of society.

  These children were generally considered unworthy of adoption. But Brace and others felt they could be prevented from destroying the nation by serving time in “God’s own country”—on farms in the Midwest. Brace, a Yale graduate from a prominent New England family, founded the New York Children’s Aid Society in 1853. His organization and the New York Foundling Hospital, which was run by the Sisters of Charity, were responsible for the most massive resettlement of the Eastern poor in American history, the Orphan Train Project. Brace and his workers swept through New York City streets, gathering up orphans and children of the poor and shipping them out west. Between 1853 and the early 1930s, approximately 250,000 children were “resettled.”

  The Orphan Train resettlement differed from indenture in that custody of the children remained with Brace’s organization, not with the farmer who would expose them to the fresh air and farm work that would effect their redemption. But, like indenture, it depended for its success upon the kindness of strangers. The scope of Brace’s vision, combined with a lack of resources, precluded investigation of those who took in children, and seldom allowed for supervisory visits. His methods were bare-boned, involving the deployment of scouts who traveled out west, searching for areas in obvious need of free labor. Notices were posted, such as, “Wanted—Homes for Children—A Company of Homeless Children from the East Will Arrive at Troy, Missouri, on Friday, February 25, 1910.”

  What happened next was seen differently by the different parties. Brace, who believed so strongly that children were benefited by resettlement that he couldn’t understand why some poor parents refused to allow theirs to ride the Train, described the process like this:

  “On a given day in New York the ragged and dirty little ones are gathered to a central office from the streets and lanes . . . are cleaned and dressed, and sent away, under the charge of an experienced agent. . . . When they arrive in the village a great public meeting is held. . . . Farmers come in from twenty to twenty-five miles looking for the ‘model boy’ who shall do the light work at the farm . . . ; housekeepers look for girls to train up; mechanics seek boys for their trades. . . . Thus, in a few hours, the little colony is placed in comfortable homes. . . .”

  Orphan Train riders found the journey much more complicated and frightening. Most were headed for states and towns they’d never heard of. Since the Train made several stops, at each of which a portion of the children was “resettled,” many were separated from siblings and friends. At the stops, the children were taken to a courthouse, church, or opera house and placed on an elevated platform. Signs identifying them by number were sometimes hung around their necks. Farmers examined the children’s teeth and checked their muscles, then marked down the numbers of their first, second, and third choices. Some children were made to tell jokes, or do acrobatic stunts.

  The children must have felt like slaves at auction, and, receiving in this strange new environment no indication of their worth other than audience reaction, experienced extreme humiliation if they weren’t selected quickly. Robert Petersen, an Omaha attorney who rode the Train to Blair, Nebraska, at age six in 1923, later recalled the terrible Saturday night when no one wanted him, and the happiness he experienced two days later when he was selected. He was doubly fortunate in that the farming couple treated him not as a farm hand, but as a quasi-legal son.

  Few Train riders were treated as sons and daughters. Interviewed in the 1980s by authors of We Are a Part Of History: The Story of the Orphan Train, ninety-three-year-old Mary Goth of Clinton, Missouri, recalled, “My experience was that of a servant. My foster mother was cruel—oh, she was a cracker jack.” As Mary matured and planned to leave to get a paying job, her foster parents schemed to have one of their sons impregnate her, so she would remain their maid.

  The worst hardship suffered by Orphan Train children was the separation from their parents. One little girl who’d been placed in a comfortable home wrote to an Orphan Train worker, “I would give a hundred worlds like this, if I could see my mother.”

  Despite the pain of these children, Brace’s experiment was considered a success, and there was little criticism of the fact that resettled Train riders worked long hours in their country homes. Most poor children, even those who lived with their parents, labored at home or in the fields and, after the Industrial Revolution, in factories.

  Employers bragged about the intricate piecework produced by children’s nimble fingers. Some Americans were shocked, however, to learn that these children were as young as four. Reformers took note and by 1900, twenty-eight states passed legislation protecting child workers. The laws were vague and difficult to enforce, but, combined with the passage of compulsory education legislation and steadily rising income levels, they obviated much of the need for children to supplement their parents’ income. Child labor began to seem wrong, even for orphans.

  With less emphasis placed on their earning potential, children began to be valued as children. They also seemed to be growing scarce. Between 1850 and 1915, the annual birth rate for native white Americans dropped nearly 40 percent, from 42.8 to 26.2 per thousand, with the average married couple producing three children, not the eight they would have a century before. Some contemporary accounts attributed the decrease in fertility to tight corseting. The apparent shortage of children made each one seem more precious.

  The stigma regarding adoption persisted, however, fed not only by tales of bad “gemmules” but by the skepticism of social workers who insisted that orphans be studied for a year before adoption, to ensure their fitness for placement.

  Many adults strongly desired to parent, however, and there had always been some willing to raise children born to others. While some procured children through orphanages, others obtained babies through secretive means. The earliest such instance of which I read involved a childless, elderly knight named Thomas of Saleby and his elderly wife, who lived in Lincolnshire, England, in the seventeenth century. Anxious to have an heir, and aware of the impossibility of adopting in England, which because of a belief in the importance of maintaining bloodlines didn’t have adoption legislation until 1926, they obtained a baby girl from a village woman and Thomas’s wife pretended to have borne her. The couple stood fast, keeping the baby even after their bishop threatened to excommunicate them for fraud. (Thomas, who realized how much his wife loved the child, is said to have told the Bishop, “I fear the wrath of my wife more than I fear the wrath of God.”) />
  The subject of a February 1921 New York Times article went further than Thomas’s wife. Over the previous thirteen years, fifty-one-year-old Mrs. F. E. A. South of Atlanta, Georgia, had not only secretly obtained eleven children, but fooled even her husband into thinking she’d borne them. “They range in age from two months to thirteen years,” the reporter wrote, “and live in complete ignorance of their true origin,” although obviously not for much longer. Mrs. South had procured them secretly, continued the reporter, because of her “great desire for babies,” which explained why she had acquired them but not why she’d lied about it. His readers wouldn’t have needed that explained. In 1921 adoptable children were still considered tainted, not simply by the public in general but in many cases by the husbands of would-be adoptive mothers. There is no mention in the Times piece of whether Mr. South would have welcomed these eleven children into his home if he had known they weren’t biologically his: when interviewed he was apparently still in shock, insisting that his wife’s confession was “an infernal lie.”

  While similarly skirting the issue of American males’ aversion to adoption, an article published in 1921 in Sunset, The Pacific Monthly, noted the increasing frequency of women deceiving their mates. “It is not uncommon for a woman to call upon a [maternity home] worker, announce that she has informed her husband of the stork’s impending visit, explain that the husband is . . . on a business trip [and] present a rush order for a child.”