Practically from its foundation, the Children’s Aid Society was one of the Protestant relief organizations most hated by Catholics, largely because of its Emigration Plan, which was commonly seen as little more than institutionalized child snatching. A multipaneled cartoon in an Irish American newspaper portrayed one of the society’s agents as a dour ghoul who only smiles when a westerner gives him $20 for a frightened Catholic newsboy. The agent is shown lecturing the boy on the “iniquities of popery.” And the CAS’s success at accomplishing what “England failed to effect by the sword” is illustrated by the cartoon’s final panel, which shows the boy, fully grown, a “Baptist Preacher,” and a near twin of the ghoulish agent who “rescued” him.40
At first Catholic opposition to the CAS was purely ad hoc. An anecdote often repeated in the Catholic community during the nineteenth century told of a priest who intervened at the last minute to stop the departure of an orphan train and restore a group of Catholic children to their mothers, who had been “wild with grief.”41 And Brace himself, in The Dangerous Classes, told of an Italian priest named Rebiccio who in 1855 “flung ferocious anathemas” from the pulpit on all who permitted their children to attend the society’s first Italian School. To Brace’s immense satisfaction, however, the “whole opposition scheme exploded” when Rebiccio absconded with funds he had collected from his Five Points parishioners on the pretext of building a church and starting a school of his own.42
The earliest program aimed at countering Brace’s influence—the Catholic Protectory, founded by Levi Silliman Ives in 1863—could hardly have been more opposite to the Children’s Aid Society in philosophy, or more directly confrontational.
Levi Silliman Ives had been raised an Episcopalian and had so devoted himself to his church that when he visited Rome in 1852, at the age of fifty-five, he was bishop of North Carolina. Under the influence of the grandeur and poignant beauty of Italian churches, however, as well as his conversations with devout Catholics, Ives came to feel that he had lived more than half a century in tragic error. He resigned his post, converted to Catholicism, and, on his return to the United States, joined the faculty of Saint John’s College in New York, a Jesuit institution that later became Fordham University.
Ives believed that the CAS orphan trains were truly charitable, at least in intent, for Protestant children. But when the children “differed from their benefactors in their religion,” charitable intentions yielded to a “temptation . . . to place a bar between these children and their parents; to sever the precious tie which binds them to the parental heart and the parental influence.” The cutting of these ties was accomplished, Ives maintained, in subtle stages:
Concealment is first resorted to, a veil of secrecy is drawn over the proceedings, parental inquiries are baffled, the yearnings of the mother are stilled by tales of the wonderful advantages to her children, and promises of their speedy restoration to her arms. Yet all this while they are undergoing a secret process by which, it is hoped, that every trace of their early faith and filial attachment will be rooted out; and, finally, that their transportations to that indefinite region, “the far West,” with changed names and lost parentage, will effectually destroy every association which might revive in their hearts a love for the religion of which they had been robbed,—the religion of their parents. Here, then, a new principle has been at work. What charity commenced, fanaticism has grossly perverted. . . . We had looked for a great benefit, and behold a great wrong, a foul injustice, has been practiced.43
With all of his distaste for the orphan trains, Ives began his career in charity by attempting to duplicate them. For some years before founding the Society for the Protection of Destitute Roman Catholic Children in New York, the organization that managed the protectory, he had been finding, informally, “good homes in the country for untrained and destitute Catholic children,” and it was this experience that most determined the protectory’s goals and methods. Ives did not simply disapprove of the CAS for kidnapping good Catholic children; he found the entire practice of outplacement “perfectly preposterous.” In the protectory’s first annual report he explained that although he had found homes for many children, “I can call to mind only a single instance where the child either did not abscond or prove to be utterly ungovernable and worthless.”
Ives fell securely within the camp of those who took a pessimistic view of human nature and thus believed that children, especially poor children, could be saved from their vicious impulses only by being subjected to strict control. As he saw it, the prime reason for the utter failure of outplacement was that the practice alienated children from “the religion of their parents,” by which phrase he meant not merely Catholicism but the inculcation of religious values through parental authority. As he explained it:
Teach children to put a low estimate upon the parental claim to their obedience, and you give them the most effective lesson of insubordination to all rule and all government. Take away from them proper reverence for those who are the instruments of their being, and who nourish their infancy, and whom Almighty God has made their first and essential spiritual guides, and you take from them a vital principal, a controlling power, which can never be restored.44
For Ives, “saving” poor children and keeping them Catholic were both accomplished by the same mechanism: preserving parental ties. Thus, in its work with destitute children, the protectory did everything it could to keep families together.45 When it was deemed necessary, by the protectory or by the parents themselves, that a child should be removed from home, it was understood that the separation would only be temporary. All children who were taken from their families were boarded at the protectory’s industrial school, where they were subjected to strict discipline and religious—as well as vocational—training. Although some of the children were indentured, they were never sent far from home. Parents were encouraged to visit their children frequently and to make some contribution toward the cost of their upkeep at the institution. This payment served two purposes, apart from the obvious one of helping the protectory meet its bills: it helped preserve the parents’ sense of responsibility for their offspring; and it kept parents from simply dumping unwanted children at the protectory and then running off, never to be heard from again.
With all of its antipathy to the CAS, the protectory’s emphasis on the importance of family shows the influence of Brace—but with a major difference. The families that Ives and his successors thought most important were the very ones that Brace turned his back on: the poor families in the slums. It was this emphasis on helping poor children by helping their families that was the strongest part of the Catholic Protectory’s work, and the element that ultimately would have the strongest influence on the evolution of child welfare.
The most significant of the domestic imitators of the CAS orphan trains was the New York Foundling Hospital (originally called the New York Foundling Asylum), which was started by the Sisters of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul in 1869. As indicated by its name, the hospital was intended to help children far younger than the street arabs and job seekers served by the CAS.
New York had a dreadful problem of infant abandonment throughout the nineteenth century. Every year thousands of illegitimate and unwanted babies were left on the doorsteps of hospitals, orphanages, and other charitable organizations all over the city—including the CAS. During the latter part of the century Bellevue Hospital alone had to care for an average of four abandoned infants a day.46 And of course, then as now, there were many disturbed young women who could imagine no other alternative for disposing of unwanted babies than cramming them into trash cans or tossing them into the East River. The Sisters of Charity hoped their new hospital would diminish all of these practices, especially by members of the Catholic community.
The Foundling Hospital kept a white-curtained bassinet in its vestibule so that mothers, generally at night, could turn their children over to the Sisters’ care in complete anonymity. In this manner, the hospital took
in forty-five babies during its first month of operation.47 But the Sisters also encouraged mothers to care for and breast-feed their babies at the hospital for at least the first few months of the child’s life. Such care might cause at least some of the mothers to decide to keep their babies, they reasoned, but it would also increase the infants’ chances of survival.
Nineteenth-century hospitals and orphanages commonly had infant mortality rates of between 60 and 80 percent, with the most common killer being intestinal ailments. But institutions that encouraged breast-feeding, like the Foundling Hospital, saw their rates plummet to—and even below—the 26 percent mortality rate that prevailed in the city at large.48 When the Sisters could not convince mothers to feed their own offspring, they would employ the French system of sending the infants out to paid wet nurses. From the boarding of newborns for breast-feeding it was only a small step to in-city foster placement, and then to CAS-style orphan trains.
Although it is perfectly true that Brace and many of his coworkers were deeply prejudiced against Catholics, and that most Catholic children who were sent west did in fact end up being raised Protestant, their conversion was never an overt aim of the charity and came about primarily because there were very few Catholics living outside the major East Coast cities. These were the demographics the Foundling Hospital had to contend with when it decided to set up its own orphan trains. CAS-style “auctions” simply would not work, since even in areas with a fairly dense Catholic population, non-Catholics would still be likely to make up a substantial portion of the people who would come to such auctions. What the Foundling Hospital did instead was work through a nationwide network of priests, who informed their parishioners when a party of children would be coming and helped to match each interested family with a particular child. Although the Foundling Hospital did occasionally send unclaimed children west, the vast majority of its orphan train riders never had to endure the anxiety and humiliation of being scrutinized and picked—or not picked—by a group of unfamiliar men and women. The children wore tags inscribed with the name or identification number of the family who had agreed to take them. All they had to do when they arrived at the station was wait for the man or woman they would be living with to spot them and take them home.
Another way in which Foundling Hospital orphan trains differed from those of the CAS was that their children were indentured until age eighteen (girls) or twenty-one (boys). Brace believed that a placement would be beneficial only as long as it was desired by each of the parties involved, so he saw no point in “binding” children to their “employers.” The foster parents or employers in a CAS placement were given a card stating their obligations toward the child and the child’s toward them, but during Brace’s lifetime no one was required to sign any documents. If either party wished to end the arrangement for any reason, the CAS would either find the child a new placement or bring him or her back to New York. The Foundling Home indenture papers contain most of the same provisions as the CAS verbal agreement. The child would both “live with, and be employed” by its foster family, who would clothe, educate, and otherwise treat the child as if he or she were their own by birth. But whereas CAS “employers” only promised to send the child to church and, if possible, Sunday school, the signers of the Foundling Hospital papers agreed to bring the child up “in the Catholic faith.” The indenture papers also said nothing about what would happen if the placement did not work out and treated that possibility only as a breach of contract. Finally, the Foundling Hospital papers attempted to fill the place of an adoption contract by stating that if the child had not been “returned to” the hospital by age twenty-one, the parents would “be deemed to have elected to keep, treat and maintain such child as if it were their own natural and legitimate child,” which, as far as it was specified within the papers, chiefly meant that the child would inherit the parents’ property just as their natural offspring would.49
The Foundling Hospital’s network of parish priests was so effective that by the late 1870s the Sisters’ placements were rivaling those of the CAS. While the hospital, like the CAS, placed children throughout the Midwest and West, it placed a far larger proportion of its orphan train riders in states with substantial Catholic populations, such as Louisiana and Texas. Whereas, all told, the CAS made only a score or two of placements in Louisiana, the Foundling Hospital sent a single party of 300 children to that state in 1906. In fact, the Sisters placed so many children in Louisiana that it is generally thought to be the western state that received the most New York children of all. By 1919, the hospital’s fiftieth anniversary, it claimed, nationwide, to have indentured 24,658 children in “free homes”—as opposed to “boarding homes” (the present foster care standard) where the parents were paid for taking care of the children—and to have had 3,200 children legally adopted.50 The last Foundling Hospital orphan train went west in 1923.
The eagerness of the Sisters of Charity to serve not only abandoned children but also the Catholic faith resulted in some controversial practices. First, perhaps in an attempt to compensate for all the children the CAS ostensibly had stolen, the hospital commonly changed the surnames of Jewish children and passed them off as Catholic. One former Foundling Hospital orphan train rider had lived well into adulthood believing that her name at birth had been Ryan, only to find, after confronting the hospital regarding forged baptismal records, that her real name had been Rubin and that she was Jewish.51 In another case a Jewish girl with a German last name was placed with a non-Jewish German couple. When the deception was uncovered, the couple placed the girl in a Kansas orphanage. The biggest scandal of the Foundling Home’s orphan train venture, however, was rooted not in the Sisters’ prejudices but in those of the surrounding community.
In 1904 the hospital placed forty children of European extraction with Mexican families living in Arizona territory. This so outraged the local Anglos that a party of men forcibly removed the children from their new homes. The men also threatened the nuns who had accompanied the children with violence and nearly lynched the priest who had arranged the placements. Ultimately these men allowed the Sisters of Charity to resettle twenty-one of the children in other parts of the country but kept the other nineteen in their own families. When the hospital sought to regain custody of the children, the Arizona Supreme Court held that the Anglos had been justified in removing them from the Mexican homes and should be allowed to keep them. Not only did all of the boys and girls involved have to endure the agony of multiple placement and the threat of violence during this episode, but the Foundling Hospital was subjected to national humiliation. The Los Angeles Examiner, for example, ran a story about the incident under the headline “Babies Sold Like Sheep,” and the Boston American, in a similar article, characterized the hospital as a “notorious institution.”52
Despite competition and criticism, Brace’s reputation only became steadily more elevated during the Children’s Aid Society’s first two decades of existence. For the most part, the public and the press were entirely uninterested in the fine points of methodological controversy. All they cared about were results, and up through the mid-1870s the results of Brace’s labors certainly appeared to be impressive.
When he first began reporting police arrest records in 1861, Brace neglected to mention that juvenile crime had in fact risen during the first six years of the CAS’s tenure before beginning to make an impressive decline. That decline continued, however, for more than a decade, even as the city’s population grew by 13 percent. Arrests of female vagrants declined every year, from a high of 5,880 in 1860 to 548 in 1871. The decline in arrests of male vagrants was not quite so dramatic but was still impressive, going from 2,708 in 1860 to 934 in 1871. Over the same period, petty larceny arrests of females dropped from 890 to 572, and of males from 2,575 to 1,978. Although these vagrants and thieves were by no means only children, these were nevertheless the categories of crime for which children were most often arrested. There were also drops in the number of children under fi
fteen who were in prison. In 1864 there were 295 girls in New York City prisons, and in 1871 there were 212. The equivalent figures for boys during those same years were 1,965 and 1,017.53
Although arrest and imprisonment rates are obviously affected by such factors as police policy, the presence or absence of serious epidemies, and the vigor of the economy, it does not seem unreasonable to attribute some portion of these declines to the work of the CAS and similar charities—and not just because of the orphan trains, which indeed “drained” the city of thousands of poor children over the periods covered by these statistics, but also because of the many thousands more who received job training and basic education at industrial schools or were given clean, safe places to sleep as well as other services at the Girls’ and Newsboys’ Lodging Houses. The newspapers of the time had no trouble crediting the CAS with diminishing the misery of all New Yorkers—not just of the children who might otherwise have become the perpetrators of crimes but of the people who might have been their victims—and with saving taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in incarceration expenses. Brace estimated that the decline in female vagrancy saved taxpayers $125,000 in one year alone.54 And such apparent successes in the city only made it easier for New Yorkers to believe the CAS’s heartwarming reports about its rural placements as well.
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