Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  With such thoughts in mind, on January 9, 1853, a month before the publication of Home-Life in Germany, Brace met with a group of concerned bankers, lawyers, and ministers, including William C. Russel, B. J. Howland, William C. Gilman, William L. King, Judge John L. Mason, and John Earl Williams, to found the Children’s Aid Society.

  Although Brace would later say that he had been surprised that the group chose him to lead the new organization, it is hard to imagine how they could have made any other choice. He was clearly a brilliant and dedicated young man—all of twenty-seven—and on the strength of his two books, his journalism, and his association with Kossuth, he was also a rapidly rising literary and political figure on the New York scene. What is more, he was the only member of the group not already established in a separate and demanding career.

  As thrilled and flattered as he was by the offer, Brace took some days before formally accepting it. He was concerned that it would interrupt his writing and research, and he did not relish the idea of staying in New York—in an era predating even electric fans—during its hot summers. But in the end Brace agreed to take on the duties of secretary of the Children’s Aid Society at least for a year, for an annual salary of $1,000—considerably more than the $200 he had told his father he ought to be happy with.

  4

  Draining the City, Saving the Children

  BRACE’S FIRST ORDER of business on accepting his new position was to invent the organization that ostensibly employed him. He started with real estate: within a week he had found an office at 683 Broadway, on the corner of Amity Street (now Third Street), and moved in a desk, chair, several record books, a stack of paper, an inkwell, and a pen. Six mornings a week he wrote and did paperwork in this office and spent the afternoons looking for more real estate (sites for classrooms, workshops, schools), meeting with prospective collaborators (clergymen and business owners), and, as at the Five Points Mission, visiting the homes of the poor, telling them about his new organization and asking them what they needed. He tried to reserve his evenings for scholarly work and pleasure but often made additional visits to slum families and gave talks to organizations (usually church-affiliated women’s groups) from which he hoped to elicit funds and volunteers. “The business tires me,” he confessed to his father, “much more than writing and studying. . . . But the enterprise is a great one, and for a year I can stand it.”1

  At first he did all of this work on his own, but as money began to flow in from contributors, he hired an office assistant, John Macy, and a few additional “visitors,” most of them Union Theological Seminary students. He also moved the office to a larger space on the second floor of Clinton House—the former Italian Opera House, at the corner of Astor Place and Lafayette Street, and the site of the massacre that had touched off the Astor Place Riot. This would be the Children’s Aid Society’s headquarters for the next sixteen years.

  As essential as acquiring real estate and personnel may have been, the real work of inventing the Children’s Aid Society took place on paper. During Brace’s first month as secretary his chief undertaking was the writing, printing, and distribution of a three-page circular announcing the existence and goals of the organization and asking for contributions. With shrewd elegance, this document played to the contradictory impulses of the wealthy New Yorkers for whom it was written—a double-barreled solicitation strategy that Brace would employ throughout his career. On the one hand, he flattered his readers with their compassion:

  As Christian men, we cannot look upon this great multitude of unhappy, deserted, and degraded boys and girls, without feeling our responsibility to God for them. We remember that they have the same capacities, the same need of kind and good influences, and the same Immortality, as the little ones in our own homes. We bear in mind that ONE died for them, even as for the children of the rich and the happy.

  On the other hand, he appealed to his readers’ fear and greed:

  These boys and girls, it should be remembered, will soon form the great lower class of our city. They will influence elections; they may shape the policy of the city; they will, assuredly, if unreclaimed, poison society all around them. They will help to form the great multitude of robbers, thieves, and vagrants, who are now such a burden upon the law-respecting community.2

  It is, at the very least, strange to see Brace, so soon after allying himself with Hungarian revolution and the “oppressed of any land,” talking about the oppressed of his own land as a “poison.” Obviously, part of the explanation for this apparent reversal of sentiments is simply that Brace knew which side the CAS’s bread was going to be buttered on. So soon after the Astor Place Riot, and in the midst of a crime wave, wealthy New Yorkers were terribly afraid of the poor as both criminals and radicals, and Brace understood, correctly, that he could use this fear to squeeze contributions out of those who could not be motivated by compassion alone.

  But it is also true that as strongly as Brace may have advocated revolution in Hungary, it was only so that the Hungarians might establish an American-style democracy. Brace was a devoted patriot. He may have despised the greed and materialism fostered by capitalism, but he was convinced that the American political system truly did provide even its poorest citizens with the power to “influence elections” and “shape the policy of the city.” He also shared his wealthy donors’ fear of the under classes insofar as he worried that a misguided attempt to bring about greater socioeconomic justice might result in the discarding of important freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Although he would continue to speak out strongly against slavery—and earn censure for doing so from a CAS board member—Brace’s heartfelt criticisms of the American economic system would never again be expressed as clearly, even in his letters, as they had been in the two books he wrote just before founding the Children’s Aid Society.

  The most remarkable aspect of this first circular is how precisely it outlined the work that the CAS would undertake over the next seventy-five years. In the opening paragraph, Brace said that the society’s “objects” were to help “the destitute children of New York . . . by opening Sunday Meetings and Industrial Schools, and, gradually, as means shall be furnished, by forming lodging houses and reading-rooms for children, and by employing paid agents, whose sole business shall be, to care for them.” Near the end of the circular he used a decidedly unhappy metaphor to describe one final “object” of the society: “We hope, too, especially to be the means of draining the city of these children, by communicating with farmers, manufacturers, or families in the country” who might give the children jobs and “put them in the way of an honest living.”

  Sunday meetings and industrial schools were both ideas that Brace borrowed from Louis M. Pease at the Five Points Mission, and he mentioned them first perhaps because they were widely believed to be effective and thus lent his new enterprise legitimacy. Brace seemed to believe in the merits of Sunday meetings, at least in these early days, despite their tendency to evoke “gas” and derision. He spent a great deal of time during his first weeks with the society finding places to have separate girls’ and boys’ meetings, and he and his staff spent several years trying to make these meetings successful. But in the end, as he put it in The Dangerous Classes, the primary effect of the meetings was to teach those conducting them “the fearful nature of the evils they were struggling with, and how little any moral influence on one day can do to combat them.”3 Brace and many other CAS agents would continue to give sermons and lectures to the boys and girls under their care, but only as adjuncts to more practically oriented programs. The independent Sunday meetings would be abandoned after only a few years and were the only project mentioned in the initial circular that would not endure.

  The industrial schools, however, would be much more successful, at least for girls. Like the British ragged schools, these were intended only for children who could not attend public schools, either because they had to work during the day or because their clothes were too worn and filthy. At the
industrial schools, which generally met in the evenings, children received instruction in reading, writing, and mathematics and were also given basic job training. Girls learned the “needle trades” (sewing and dress- and hat-making) and skills they could use as domestics (housecleaning, cooking, serving). Boys were taught such skills as carpentry and shoe- and box-making.

  There was one clear failure in the initial conception of the industrial schools. Inspired by the Rauhe Haus, Brace wanted some of the industrial training to take place in workshops where boys would earn a modest living—$1.25 to $4.00 a week—and simultaneously raise money for the CAS by selling the goods they manufactured. The first of these workshops, a shoe-pegging operation, housed under an existing shoe manufactory owned by a Mr. Bigelow on 26 Wooster Street, suffered from manifold problems even before it opened. Thanks to Brace’s prejudice against Catholics, who were plentifully represented in this industry, and his inability to pay very much, he had difficulty getting a shop manager who both knew the trade and was capable of teaching and inspiring the decidedly independent street urchins who worked for him. The urchins themselves were another problem. These young Americans, Irish, English, and Germans simply could not be counted on to show up on time or to work steadily, and thus they let many orders languish. But the workshop was finally done in after only a few years by the invention of a machine that pegged shoes more rapidly and reliably than the CAS’s beneficiary-employees. Other workshops in carpentry and paper box- and bag-making were similarly chaotic and unprofitable, leading Brace to conclude: “Benevolence cannot compete with Selfishness in business.”4

  The failure of the workshops did little, however, to diminish the success of the basic industrial schools. The first of these, the Fourth Ward Industrial School, was established in the basement of a church on Roosevelt Street, but only after visitors had spent several weeks circulating in the neighborhood, telling parents about the school’s curriculum and assuring them—mostly Irish and German Catholics—that it was absolutely nonsectarian. The school was such a success that the CAS soon opened others in different neighborhoods, including some where students were taught in German or Italian, and others specifically for Jews and African Americans. By the turn of the century the CAS was operating more than twenty-five industrial schools all over Manhattan.

  The fact that eventually these schools were attended mostly by girls was part accident and part design. It was accidental insofar as most of the teachers who volunteered to work at the schools (the perpetually underfunded CAS never had more than a few paid teachers during Brace’s tenure) were women who knew how to sew and keep house but almost nothing about male trades. And it was by design insofar as these women had primarily felt compelled to volunteer because of their concern about the staggering number of working-class girls who, without marketable skills, had been forced to support themselves by prostitution.

  With all of its remarkable prescience, the circular did misrepresent one important element of the CAS. When Brace talked about the “little ones in our own homes” and about “sowing good influences in childhood,” the implication was that the children were very young—perhaps preschool age—and that the society would somehow preserve or restore something of their natural “innocence.” In fact, the beneficiaries of the early CAS programs were mostly teenagers, and even the youngest were not treated as innocents as all, but as quasi-adults and fully competent independent agents. The society certainly did subject children and their families to persuasion, evangelization, hucksterism, and bribery, but participants in all CAS programs were always free to use them or not as they saw fit. For the younger children, this freedom, an essential component of Brace’s philosophy, may have been more theoretical (obviously toddlers did not have much choice when their parents or a CAS agent placed them on an orphan train), but it became more real as the child grew up. Unlike asylums, orphanages, houses of refuge, and prisons, which attempted to reform poor children by submitting them to inflexible routines of training, religion, and work, the CAS primarily attempted to shape children’s character through the choices it offered and the “unconscious influence” exerted by its ostensibly virtuous staff. Brace believed, in fact, that the offering of choice itself was character-building because it encouraged autonomy and independence.

  The emotional force behind Brace’s opposition to the rigid and coercive practices of the child reform institutions of his era came from his lifelong “dread of being dependent on others”—to borrow, once again, the words of Lydia Maria Child. Brace thought of these institutions as a “bequest of monastic days,” which tended to breed a “monastic character . . . indolent, unused to struggle; subordinate indeed, but with little independence and manly vigor.” In part he objected to the institutions because he believed that they eroded independence and virtue by depriving children of control over their lives. Compulsory prayer and strict discipline could not encourage real virtue but only superficial accommodations to authority that masked “a hidden growth of secret and contagious vices.” Brace also objected to the practices of these reform institutions because they provided grossly inadequate and unrealistic training. Most of the institutions ostensibly prepared children for the work world by having them perform all day, every day, a single, elementary task, like stitching on buttons or carding wool. Brace believed that such training did nothing to prepare a child to handle the “thousand petty hand-labors of a poor man’s cottage.”5 All of the CAS projects were antimonastic insofar as, rather than sequestering children in an artificial environment, they sought to train and morally reform them in the midst of ordinary life. The society’s clearest failure—the Sunday meetings—was the program most dependent on coercion and most disconnected from the complex demands of daily existence. By contrast, the most innovative and successful of Brace’s early programs—the Newsboys’ Lodging House—gave children access to aid without removing them from their ordinary lives, and it not only presented children with choices but required them to make nominal payments.

  For Charles Dickens, New York’s newsboys represented the quintessence of American ambition, drive, and depravity. The very first thing that Dickens’s hero Martin Chuzzlewit noticed on his arrival in New York City were the newsboys, who proclaim the latest scandals “with shrill yells” not only “in all the highways and byways of the town, upon the wharves and among the shipping, but on the deck and down in the cabins of the steamboat; which, before she touched the shore, was boarded and overrun by a legion of those young citizens.”6

  Had Dickens chosen to look at these objects of his satire a little more closely, however, he might easily have chosen to portray one of their number as an Oliver Twist or a Nicholas Nickleby, for the truth was that their desperation was horribly exploited by the newspapers.

  By 1844, when Martin Chuzzlewit was published, newsboys seemed as characteristic of New York as its bustle and drive, but in fact they had been conjured into existence only a decade earlier, by Benjamin Day, the original editor of the New York Sun. The Sun was the nation’s first profitable “penny paper” and during the nineteenth century had the largest circulation of any newspaper in the country. Its popularity was based on an astutely cultivated image of political neutrality, humorous crime reports, and shameless exploitation of scandals and hoaxes. But its high profit margins were generated by its use of state-of-the-art steam-powered printing presses and by Day’s decision to turn the tragedy of New York’s ever-swelling population of destitute children to his own advantage.

  Sometime in the 1830s Day had the idea that he could boost circulation and gain an edge on his competition if he could get individual salesmen on the streets to cry out headlines and then all but push papers into already curious potential customers’ hands. Poor boys would make the best salesmen, since they would not ask for much money and, despite their shabbiness, would not be as threatening as equally shabby grown men. Day would sell the papers to the newsboys at a discount from the cover price and let them keep the difference. But he would not buy back any
unsold papers—an arrangement that gave the newsboys strong incentive to sell every paper they could.

  Day’s innovation was such a success that soon every paper in New York had newsboys of its own, and the very character of the city—and indeed, all American cities—underwent a transformation that was to last at least one hundred years.

  A newsboy’s day typically began at four or five in the morning, when he would rise from his night’s shelter in the loft of a stable or under a ragman’s cart and hurry to the back doors of the Sun, Herald, or Times to be at the front of the line to get papers. The first boys on the street not only sold their papers faster, and thus had more time for making money by other means, but were less likely to get stuck with unsold papers. The papers cost the newsboys one and a half cents each and were sold for two cents—so an average load of fifty-six papers would yield its bearer twenty-eight cents’ profit. But to get that profit the boy had to race up and down the street, shouting about robbery, scandal, and war and tagging after first one gentleman and then another with all the frenzy that so offended Dickens.