Smith seems to have occupied himself that day exclusively with interviewing prospective “parents” and “employers” and determining whether the children chosen by the adults truly wanted to go home with them. Demand was strong, and by nightfall he had placed fifteen children.
At noon, while Smith was still occupied with his work, the “citizens” of Dowagiac finally “rallied and scoured the woods for miles around” for the missing boy.
[B]ut the search was fruitless, and Peter lay down that night sobbing, and with his arms stretched out, just as he used to throw them round his brother.
About ten o’clock a man knocked at the door, and cried out, “Here is the lost boy!” Peter heard him, and the two brothers met on the stairs, and before we could ask where he had been, Peter had George in his place by his side on the floor. They have gone to live together in Iowa.
Smith would never have mentioned this near-tragedy, and the brothers’ suffering, had he not thought it all ended happily. But the truth is that he had little evidence for such an appraisal. Peter and George were among the nine youngest children for whom Smith was not able to find homes in Dowagiac—in all likelihood because the local farmers and merchants thought they were too small to be much good as laborers. On Saturday, almost a week after their arrival, Smith escorted these unclaimed children as far as Chicago and placed them alone on a train to travel two hundred miles further west (at the rate of eighteen miles an hour!) to the Reverend C. C. Townsend in Iowa City.
For many years the Reverend Townsend was the CAS’s sole western representative. He ran an industrial school in his own parlor and devoted much of his time to finding homes for local orphans and for CAS “emigrant companies,” whom he sometimes brought west himself. Townsend did his best, but during a time when merely crossing the state required days of hard travel, he often had little idea what had happened to the many hundreds of children he had placed all over Iowa and in several surrounding states. And when he did know how the children were doing, his reports to New York were so cursory and euphemistic (the most common account was simply “doing well,” even when it was clear from other evidence that the child was not well at all) that no one at the CAS, and Smith in particular, could have had any real idea of the children’s well-being.
CAS contact with the rest of these first orphan train riders was even more distant and intermittent. At the end of his report, E. P. Smith announced that the Reverend Mr. O. took “several” children into his own home, that a few of the boys were “bound to trades” (probably meaning that they went to live with craftsmen or merchants rather than that they were formally indentured), but that most of the children “insisted” on being farmers. Two brothers were placed on adjacent farms. The expedition’s solitary Jew went to live with a physician. A sweet little girl named Mag was, Smith said, “adopted by a wealthy Christian farmer.”23 (This arrangement was probably informal as well, since at that time Michigan, like most states, had no laws governing adoption.) And finally, Smack, the Albany recruit, found “a good home in a Quaker settlement.”
Sketchy as this summation may have been, it was all the CAS would ever know about most of these children. In its early decades the society monitored placements almost exclusively through the letters it got from children and their foster parents/employers. John Macy regularly wrote to placements asking for information but was lucky to get a 5 percent response rate. A sizable majority of the early orphan train riders’ records contain nothing after the notation of where the child was placed than a list of the dates of Macy’s unanswered letters. But this paucity of information had almost no effect on the enthusiasm of Brace, or any CAS writer, for the program.
Smith ended his report by declaring, “On the whole, the first experiment of sending children West is a very happy one.” One might justify this nearly baseless assertion on the grounds that Smith’s account, published in the third annual report of the Children’s Aid Society, was meant primarily to garner contributions from wealthy readers. But even that most mundane of bureaucratic documents, the “Company Book,” which listed all the orphan train riders and was meant exclusively for internal use, commenced by declaring this first “experiment . . . successful indeed.”24 No surviving document from the early years of the CAS expresses a shred of doubt about the efficacy of the Emigration Plan.
Charles Loring Brace was a man of faith. He once explained to a correspondent that the only way he and his colleagues had been able to avoid falling into abject despair at the many “sad and lonely histories” they confronted every day was by believing in “One above this black poverty and suffering. We have faith in the promises He has given of a better time on this earth.”25
There is much that is beautiful in this faith. It gave Brace and his colleagues the strength to go on with their terribly difficult work and enabled them to see human dignity in the most dirty, deprived, and despairing face. But it also gave them license to believe what they could not verify, and thus to promote an all-but-unproven program that would radically change the lives of a quarter million children over the next seventy-five years.
6
A Voice Among the Newsboys
IN JUNE 1854 Brace set sail from New York to tour of British ragged schools and visit the young woman who had been for him, and for whom he had been, primarily a fantasy spun over three years of correspondence. Brace intended to propose to Letitia Neill but seems to have had some doubt as to whether they would find each other as attractive in the flesh as they had in their imaginations—which is perhaps why he dallied in England before crossing the Irish Sea. In the end, however, neither he nor Letitia suffered any rude surprises, and after what their daughter, Emma, would later describe as a “short engagement,” they were married in Belfast on August 21,1854, by a clergyman who worried that this daughter of the respected Neill family did not know what she was getting into by marrying an obscure Yank.1
Letitia seems to have known exactly what she was getting into. No sooner had she set her bags down in their New York home than she astonished Brace’s friends by going out with him to visit the Fourth Ward Industrial School. She had herself worked at a ragged school in Belfast and had strong convictions about where her husband could best apply his energies.
When Brace had accepted the job of secretary of the Children’s Aid Society, he had agreed to work for a trial period of one year, which he had then extended for a second year. As the deadline approached for making a final decision about whether to continue in charitable work, he was having grave doubts. “My life,” he told his cousin Mrs. Asa Gray, “has become too practical, too much outward and executive, and my intellect is rusting.”2 He wanted to continue his education, do more writing, and preach. But for Letitia it was clear that, whatever her husband’s intellectual and theological potential, he could serve humanity best through the Children’s Aid Society—and in the end he agreed with her.
Over the next year the habits of Brace’s bachelorhood were rapidly replaced by the pleasures and responsibilities of married maturity. The couple’s first child, Charles Loring Brace Jr., was born in the spring of 1855. Although the family still kept a home in the city, they moved up the North (or Hudson) River to Westchester County, where they bought a house in Hastings and began to travel in very elevated social circles. Schuylers, Livingstons, Hamiltons, and Roosevelts (families that had been the very definition of polite society since colonial days) were their frequent dinner companions.3 Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Ward Beecher came regularly to the Braces’ breakfast parties.4 In his letters Charles also reported having lunch with his Westchester neighbor Washington Irving and, on a trip to Cambridge, dinner with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.5 The expansion of Brace’s domestic life in no way diminished his dedication to his professional work. He remained a frequent contributor to the Independent and the New York Daily Times, and by the spring of 1855, having already sent several orphan trains west, he had established all the main policies and programs that would dominate the Children’s Aid Society in
to the next century.
This was the beginning of a long, happy period for Brace. His marriage to Letitia would remain solid and loving until the day he died. They would have four children, two boys and two girls, all of whom would survive to adulthood, and none of whom would suffer extraordinarily during their youths or their own marriages. Despite Brace’s anxiety about the rusting of his intellect, he would publish five hefty books, all blends of social science, history, and theology, with one, The Dangerous Classes, being partly a memoir. His work with the CAS would remain, however, the foundation of his public reputation. By the time Brace turned thirty he would already be the preeminent figure in American child welfare, a status he would enjoy for the rest of his life.
There is no doubt that much of the high public regard that Brace enjoyed was justly earned. The CAS was in many ways a revolutionary and truly beneficial organization. But at the same time there was much about Brace’s reputation that rested on fantasy—fantasy that he was not alone in creating.
Vagrant children lived on stories. The most talented earned pennies by telling tall tales on street corners, or declaiming Shakespeare, or reciting ballads or poems. But all poor children learned early on that, properly told, nothing had more power to garner them handouts, places to sleep, and sometimes complete changes of circumstance than the stories of their lives. Liverpool earned the favor of E. P. Smith by telling his life story “with a quiet, sad reserve, that made us believe him truthful,” and the stories of his fellow orphan train riders won the whole company comfortable berths on the Isaac Newton.
To achieve maximum value, the stories had to be terrifically sad, but not depressing. The child’s fundamental goodness could be tried but never tarnished by harsh experience, and in the end the stories had to compensate for whatever suffering they may have caused their audience by testifying to the power of fortitude, self-sacrifice, and religious devotion. They also had to appear to be told only under duress or through the spontaneous upsurge of overwhelming grief. Any child who turned a hat upside down on the sidewalk before beginning to speak, or who manifested the slightest sign of insincerity or artifice, would earn only instant derision.
Johnny Morrow was one of the most successful of storytellers ever to enter the doors of the Children’s Aid Society—so successful that several versions of his life history are preserved in CAS records, in newspaper articles, and in his 135-page autobiography, A Voice Among the Newsboys, which was privately published in 1860 to raise money for his divinity school tuition. By comparing the various versions of Johnny’s biography, we are able to get a more complete vision of his life and, by extension, the lives of many of the street children who used the CAS during this era. But we are also able to see how a child’s desire to get the most out of his story led him to confirm the sentimental fantasies that CAS workers most wanted to believe. In effect, children like Johnny and the adults who worked with them often collaborated on fictions that not only made both parties feel better but influenced policies that affected thousands of lives.
This collaborative fictionalization is most apparent in Johnny’s autobiography, and it begins even before the first word of text. The boy portrayed on the book’s engraved frontispiece is the perfect representation of the Victorian cliché that street children were “young in body, with faces made old by woe.” The Johnny Morrow of this engraving has the expression of a terribly unhappy middle-aged man. His eyebrows turn down at the sides and buckle up in the middle, conveying both sorrow and worry. There are deep circles under his eyes, and his gaze does not directly meet the viewer’s but is shifted slightly to the left, as if he is lost to drear imagining. The corners of his mouth, too, have a slight downward turn, and there are puckers on either side of his chin, as if his whole face has been depressed by a mix of gravity and grief.
He is wearing a black suit, with a waistcoat buttoned nearly to his neck. A round, broad-brimmed hat, perhaps made of straw, dangles in front of his right arm from a long thong around his neck. Under his left arm he carries a small wooden box, from which he is extracting what would seem to be a wallet. A small book, or perhaps an open penknife, also juts out of the box, as do what appear to be two women’s shoe stretchers.
The most striking thing about Johnny—apart from his grief—is his proportions. He has the large head and narrow shoulders of a toddler, although the two-thirds of his body that is visible seems stretched to the length of a seven- or eight-year-old. It is a surprise, then, to read that this child is sixteen years old. This information comes in the introduction, in which the book’s supposed editor, “W.B.D.,” asserts that the work is “a daguerreotype of fact, untouched by art,” and claims that he,
by request, performed the necessary duty of putting [the manuscript] into a somewhat more correct and attractive shape than could possibly be expected by a boy of sixteen years, which is all that [Johnny] as yet numbers. Yet in this revision, care has been exercised to leave every page as nearly as possible in its original characteristic shape.
This very assertion of authenticity only further obscures the fact of Johnny’s age, for CAS records show that the very youngest he could have been when the book was written was seventeen, and that he was more likely to have been nineteen.
It is impossible to know for sure where to lay the blame for this deception. Perhaps Johnny’s proportions really were as distorted as the artist rendered them. He was indeed constantly called “little” in the CAS records and journals, and he may well have been something of a midget. If this was the case, Johnny certainly had good reason not to correct anyone’s misapprehension about his age. The younger people thought he was, the more innocent and precocious he seemed, and the more likely they were to help him. But by the same token, it was in the interest of both W.B.D. and the CAS (with which the editor had, at the very least, a strong sympathetic connection) to emphasize the innocence and precocity of the “child” they were aiding.
Another possible deception that clearly served the interests of Johnny, W.B.D., and the CAS had to do with his nationality. In his autobiography, Johnny claimed that he spent his earliest childhood in a “village not far from Liverpool,” and that his mother was English and his father “Scotch by birth.”6 But other evidence indicates that the Morrows were in fact Irish. The CAS record of Johnny’s younger sister, Annie, called her an “Irish Orphan.” Johnny himself said in his autobiography that his two older brothers studied at the Royal Blue Coat Hospital in Dublin, and he told Anna Hope, an Independent reporter who interviewed him shortly after his arrival at the CAS, that his father had been “a foreman over the carpenters who worked for Bishop———, of———, in Ireland.”7
Johnny’s family immigrated to New York in 1847 or 1848 at the height of the potato famine, and at a time when anti-Irish sentiment in America was especially virulent. He and W.B.D. may have chosen to conceal his ethnicity both to escape the taint of that prejudice and to make it easier for people who might contribute toward his divinity school tuition to see themselves in his place.
For similar reasons, perhaps, the autobiography portrays Johnny’s childhood as a middle-class idyll. In this account, his father is not a “foreman over carpenters” but “an architect by profession, and, in those days, a respectable man, and quite prosperous in his business; he stood well in society, and was exceedingly affectionate and indulgent to his family.” The Morrows, the book states, lived in a “very nice house which belonged to my father, in front of which was a pretty little garden plot, containing a great variety of grasses and flowers, kept in order by our hired man.” Johnny, born in 1841 or 1842, spent his first five years “sporting” in this garden, especially among the roses, with his sister Annie and their cat “Puss.” He attended an “infant school,” where he chanted “delicate childish stanzas” about clapping away rainy days, and also a Sabbath school, after which his father would instruct him in the catechism.
As the book presents it, the first of Johnny’s many misfortunes was a fall from a “flying swing,”
which broke his left leg so severely that it healed three inches longer than the right. “Since then I have had to hobble along through life,” Johnny stated humbly, and then showed true Victorian fortitude by adding: “though fortunately I can manage pretty well, without using crutches. There is one comfortable reflection in this matter, and that is, it might have been worse!”8
The second great tragedy of Johnny’s childhood, the death of his mother, is so stripped of context in the autobiography that his suffering seems odd and almost beside the point. Saying nothing about the cause of her death or how he found out about it, Johnny simply declared, “[M]y own dear mother . . . was called away from her family while her children were in their tender years,” and then cut straight to the morning of her funeral:
[F]ather took me into the room where she lay in silent death upon a white bed, while her face was as white as the counterpane itself. When he told me to kiss her I was afraid to do it—for all the ghostly stories which the servants had told me about the dead rushed upon my mind, and it was not until father told me that death was but a long sleep, and tried otherwise to soothe my mind, that I ventured, crying and terrified, to put one kiss on that cold cheek. There is something so awful in death that it impresses even a child so young as to be entirely ignorant of its true nature—and feelings with which that scene inspired me never left my mind. After leaving the room, I was dressed in my best clothes, and put in a carriage, which wheeled along in a slow and solemn way to her last resting-place; when they had covered her with the sod, we came away mournful and sad, though I could hardly comprehend the reason why; perhaps it was the departed spirit of my dear mother hovering over me, that impressed me so powerfully. Every new year of my life has made me more and more conscious of the extent of this my early loss.9
Orphan Trains Page 16
