This semireconstituted family moved into a room on Chapel Street, which they furnished with a bed, bedstead, table, chairs, and stove. While Johnny went out to earn their rent through peddling and begging, Willie stayed at home taking care of little Jonathan. Sadly, Willie was neither by experience nor disposition a competent baby-sitter. One day, only a week after their arrival, he grew tired of trying to keep his little brother in good spirits and decided that what Jonathan really needed was a nap. Jonathan did not share this opinion, however, and after he had escaped from bed several times, Willie tied him in with the sheets. Needless to say, Jonathan did not appreciate this stratagem and showed his displeasure by shouting at the top of his lungs, drawing tenants from every room in the house. Once they saw what was happening, they untied Jonathan and gave Willie a severe beating.
When Johnny got home about an hour later, the crowd outside his door would not let him in and accused him of cruelty. He ran off and got his friend the divinity student, but even in such company, he had difficulty making his case, “principally because of the presence,” he said, “of a narrow-minded busy-body in the shape of a woman, who got the idea into her head that Jonathan was the son of respectable parents in some part of the country, who had been stolen by us and was being abused.”
Although it seems that he and Willie were ultimately left alone with their little brother, it was now clear that their attempt to reconstruct their family was doomed to failure. They struggled on for an indeterminate amount of time, but in the end Jonathan was put into the New Haven Orphan Asylum, and Willie went back out west with a new orphan train.
The sales of A Voice Among the Newsboys brought Johnny enough money to pay off $300 worth of tuition at the New Haven Theological Seminary and meet some of his living expenses, but his royalties provided no lasting security. At the time of his death in early June 1861, a year after the book’s publication, Johnny was found to have only a few pennies and an IOU for three dollars from a newsboy in a purse under his pillow.26
Johnny died in Brooklyn, where he had recently undergone an operation on his knee. According to all observers, Johnny’s leg kept him in constant pain—a fact that, characteristically, he never mentioned in his autobiography. When Anna Hope first caught sight of him, he was standing in front of a map, supporting himself on a cane, while Tracy showed him how to get to the office of a doctor who might take an interest in his leg.27 When Johnny finally had his operation, in May 1861, he instructed the doctor to be “very thorough.” No sooner had the operation finished than he asked whether he would still be lame. The doctor answered that in all probability he would. Brace reported Johnny’s response: “‘Well,’ he said, his natural cheerfulness running over, though his body was yet quivering with the surgeon’s knife, ‘’taint so bad after all, for now when I want, I can limp and pass for half price on the railroad, or I can stretch up and be a big man!’”28
Johnny died, says Brace, because of “the very self-reliance, which had secured his success.”29 One morning he decided to save his doctor trouble by changing his bandage himself. In the process he accidentally opened his wound and bled to death.
Johnny Morrow ended A Voice Among the Newsboys with a description of a return visit to the Newsboys’ Lodging House. He found it much changed, but chiefly by the absence of his old friends and Tracy, who now spent most of his time escorting the emigrant parties west. Just as he walked in the doors, he heard
the well-known voice of Mr. Brace; he is making the boys a speech, and is telling them, for their encouragement, of a senator who was once a newsboy, and showing them that perseverance and industry can accomplish almost everything. The speech is through; I open the door and walk in; Mr. Brace gives me a friendly shake of the hand, and a kind word or two of encouragement; then taking his hat, leaves the room.
One of the most striking things about Johnny’s little book is its ambivalence. On the one hand, it is potent testimony to the limits of what even the most industrious and persevering boy could do, and it provides ample evidence that the orphan trains were, at the very least, no sure solution to the problems of poor and vagrant children. On the other hand, Johnny seems to have had no hesitation about backing up Brace’s claims—surely bogus if he was implying that his, at most, seven-year-old organization had produced a senator—by speculating that his absent friends from the lodging house will be heard from “one of these days, as great men who are helping to steer the SHIP OF STATE, or sitting behind judges’ desks, or filling honored pulpits with heaven-blessed talent.” By the end of this section of the book Johnny’s advocacy of the orphan trains had reached heights of eulogistic delirium to which even Brace would have been hesitant to ascend:
As the Indian vanishes toward the West, at the sound of the woodman’s axe, and before the march of civilization, so vanishes the newsboy at the sound of the voices of good men, and before the march of intellectual culture, and although fresh newsboys rise up to take the places of the departed, still their numbers are growing less and less. Not less in the same way as the Indian, but “beautifully less”; not dying out as the poor freedom-loving and slavery-hating Red man, but dying out of sin and wickedness; dying to the temptations of a large city, and going to enjoy a gentler life in the Western prairie, and a happy rural home.
It is tempting to believe that such passages and sentiments were purely the work of W.B.D.—the book’s supposed editor. But while it is true that this last passage in particular hardly sounds like the work of a relatively untutored street kid, I think it would be a mistake to assume that Johnny’s apparent faith in the works of the Children’s Aid Society was all a sham perpetuated either by W.B.D. or by Johnny himself. Certainly Johnny’s faith in the goodness of his friends and even in his own ability to transcend fate was exceedingly unusual, and this was part of the reason why it was attractive to the do-gooders at CAS, who—like do-gooders everywhere—often had difficulty believing they were in fact doing, or were themselves, good. But that does not mean that Johnny’s faith was only deception or even self-deception. Although Johnny’s life must be examined with a critical eye, it would be too easy to say cynically that such faith, sustained by so little, was only illusion and not also good, and a force for good. That would not do justice to the authentic virtues and victories of a former street kid whose hard life ended too soon.
7
Happy Circle
Wherever we went . . . we found the children sitting at the same table with families, going to the school with the children, and every way treated as well as any other children. Some, whom we had seen once in the most extreme misery, we beheld, sitting, clothed and clean, at hospitable tables, calling the employer “Father!” loved by the happy circle, and apparently growing up with as good hopes and prospects as any children of the country.
—Charles Loring Brace, 18591
IN TERMS OF scope and influence, the Emigration Plan of the Children’s Aid Society was an enormous success. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century the society alone placed an average of 2,500 children a year, and an ever-growing number of other organizations were following its example. By the 1870s the Five Points Mission, the New York Juvenile Asylum, the New York Foundling Hospital, and the New England Home for Little Wanderers in Boston all had orphan train programs of their own. At first such programs were confined to East Coast cities, but as western cities grew they too followed Brace’s example when dealing with the problems of their poor. The Illinois Children’s Home Society and the Boys and Girls Aid Society of San Francisco were among many organizations that found country homes for orphans and slum children. Indeed, the idea of rescuing “friendless” children by finding homes for them became almost fashionable. For many years The Delineator, a women’s magazine edited by Theodore Dreiser, carried brief, heartbreaking descriptions of poor and parentless children in every issue and asked readers to take them in by indenture, outplacement, or adoption.
Brace’s Emigration Plan may have been even more influential in Eur
ope than in the United States. Several European nations, including Germany, Norway, and Sweden, set up orphan train-like programs, but none so enthusiastically as the English. The largest of the British programs directly inspired by Brace’s work was Dr. Barnardo’s, which alone exported more than 80,000 English slum children to the commonwealth.
It is impossible to determine the exact number of children transported by all orphan train programs. None of these organizations kept very exact records. Many of them would enter the same child two and three times on their rosters. Not all of the organizations, including the CAS, bothered to sort out clearly which children were benefiting from which programs. And some, like the New York Foundling Hospital, have still not opened their records to public scrutiny. Estimates of the number of children the Children’s Aid Society placed range between 32,000 and 300,000.2 Victor Remmer, the current CAS archivist and a former director of the society, says that by his count the CAS placed approximately 105,000 children between 1853 and the early 1930s. The most widely quoted figure for the total number of children placed by all orphan train-like programs in the United States is 250,000—although that figure is little more than a guess.
The true test of the orphan trains’ success is not, of course, their extensiveness or their adoption by other organizations, but the degree to which they actually helped the children who rode them—and here the facts are decidedly more ambiguous and obscure. Approximately 20 percent of CAS records made under Brace’s stewardship are so incomplete that it is impossible to get any idea of how a child fared in his or her new home, and most of the remaining files are so fragmentary that conclusions based on them can only be educated guesses at best.
Calibrating the degree to which the Emigration Plan satisfied the needs of children is also made difficult by the fact that during the nineteenth century children’s needs were conceived of very differently and in fact were very different (in certain significant particulars at least) from the needs of children today. To mention only one obvious example: during the 1800s not only was it thought to be good and right that children should work long hours, but the economic structure of the entire society dictated that if lower-class children did not work, they and their families were going to end up hungry and homeless. Although it is perfectly true that any modern-day program that aimed to help twelve-year-olds by getting them full-time jobs would be barbaric, any mid-nineteenth-century program that did not consider child labor normal and beneficial would have been a nonsensical pipe dream. It is very difficult in an era when child labor is thought to be almost as abhorrent a crime as slavery to consider that in an earlier era decent, even admirable, people saw nothing wrong with children doing what we think of as adult work. But this is precisely the sort of leap our moral imagination must make if we are to understand the orphan trains.
The final factor complicating any evaluation of the Emigration Plan’s effectiveness is the paradox that the orphan trains look worst when they are judged by some of Charles Loring Brace’s own publicly elaborated standards, particularly in regard to the desirability of adoption.
Although Brace frequently talked about the Emigration Plan as a means of getting children jobs, in his annual reports and other promotional writings he tended to present its typical and ideal result as adoption. This was the implication of all his arguments about the importance of removing poor children from bad families and all the anecdotes of the orphan train riders’ happiness in their new homes. The ideal of adoption was even implicit in the verbal agreement that the CAS had with the children’s employers: the child would be treated exactly like the employer’s own birth children and kept until age twenty-one.
Anyone who accepted adoption as the ideal goal of the orphan trains would have been deeply disappointed by their actual results, and anyone who believed that the typical orphan train rider ended up adopted would have felt equally betrayed, because the truth is that only a minority of orphan train riders ever experienced anything like what we would call adoption today. In a comprehensive statistical analysis of 280 placements made by the Children’s Aid Society during its first year of operation, sociologist Bruce Bellingham found that a mere 20 percent of the children stayed in their placements for sufficient duration and had enough familial involvement to approximate the modern understanding of adoption. He also found that an additional 24 percent stayed at their placements because they found them satisfactory as jobs. But fully 56 percent of the placements expired before the terms set in their verbal agreements, many in only a matter of days. Sixteen percent of placed children ended up returning on their own to New York or to their families. And 11 percent were retrieved by their kin.3
The first independent analysis of CAS records, conducted in 1922 by Georgia G. Ralph of the New York School of Social Work, would seem to indicate that as time passed the Emigration Plan made some progress toward fulfilling Brace’s publicly stated ambitions. Although Ralph made no attempt to distinguish placements that were adoptions from those that were merely jobs, she found that 56 percent of the placements made in 1865 (the first year she studied) lasted at least as long as their verbal agreements stipulated, and that in 1875 that number rose to 60 percent. Eight percent of the children placed in 1865 returned to New York or their families, and 5 percent ended up in jail. For 1875 those figures were 10 percent and 4 percent, respectively.4
Bellingham, who conducted his study in the early 1980s, did not categorize placements as successes or failures on the basis of duration, but Ralph accepted Brace’s claim that adoption—or at least long-term placement—should be the ideal goal of emigration. Thus, she labeled those placements that endured for their expected term as “favorable” and those that did not as “unfavorable.” Although this interpretation would seem to present the majority of placements as successes, it would also give the early Emigration Plan a failure rate upward of 40 percent—a rate that hardly seems to justify the extravagant claims so often made for the plan in CAS literature.
Ralph did her study at a time when Brace’s arguments about the desirability of removing poor children from their homes were far more widely accepted than they are today. Nowadays, when a child is taken from his or her family, adoption is not a primary goal but a last, best hope. The first priority is family preservation. Only when a family is so troubled that a child’s safety or healthy development is at risk will the child be removed from the home and placed in foster care. The hope is that the child’s stay in foster care will be as brief as possible and last only as long as it takes the family—ideally with the help of social service agencies—to get over whatever crisis led to the child’s removal. Only when the child is orphaned or the parents are deemed permanently unable to provide adequate care does adoption become a primary goal. In general, only a small proportion of children who are removed from their homes end up being adopted. The vast majority go in and out of foster care in a matter of days or weeks.
From the modern perspective, then, Bellingham’s finding of a 20 percent adoption rate might seem not at all low but excessively high, and Ralph’s 56 percent and greater “favorable” outcome rates would seem to be even worse. By the same token, it is the roughly 10 percent of children who ultimately returned to their families who would seem to represent the orphan train program’s greatest success.
It is not, however, truly fair or meaningful to compare the orphan trains to the whole spectrum of modern foster care. Although the orphan trains are the direct antecedent of foster care, the typical foster child today is probably more similar to the boys and girls who stayed briefly at the CAS lodging houses than to the average orphan train rider. The children the CAS sent west tended to be its hardest cases. They were more likely than the beneficiaries of other programs to have been incarcerated in jails or asylums, and more likely to have been abused or neglected by their families. If we look only at today’s hardest cases—those children in foster care for more than eighteen months—we find that roughly 25 percent of them end up being adopted,5 a proportion fairly close t
o Bellingham’s figure. Although it would be a mistake to place too much weight on a comparison of two such different mechanisms in two such different eras, the rough correspondence between orphan train and present-day hard-case adoption rates suggests at the very least that, when it came to helping children become part of new families—Brace’s publicly stated ambitions aside—the Emigration Plan may have succeeded as well as could reasonably be expected.
Another way in which Brace misrepresented his work was by portraying the CAS as an active agency, “saving” children, “reforming” character, “draining” the city of its poor, rather than as the more passive agency that it actually was. One of the most important differences between the CAS and the other major child welfare organizations of the era—the houses of refuge, juvenile asylums, and orphanages—is that it did not impose a mandatory program of moral reform on children. Whatever reform the CAS effected was achieved by offering children help in getting what they most needed to become happy and productive members of society—jobs, homes, shelter, education. At least in theory, no child was ever required to accept this help—though obviously, young children did not have a choice when their parents or guardians put them on the orphan trains, and any child who came into contact with the CAS was subjected to heavy persuasion. But even so, however Brace may have represented the CAS to wealthy contributors, he had designed it to be a tool of the working—or “dangerous”—classes, and this was in fact how it succeeded best.
Orphan Trains Page 20
