Orphan Trains

by Stephen O'Connor

  Reynolds’s use of Brady’s office to lend an air of legitimacy to his decidedly shady operations provoked an investigation by the U.S. Department of the Interior. Although, in the end, Brady was found guilty of nothing more than bad judgment, his reputation for honesty was so thoroughly tainted that President Roosevelt compelled him to resign the governorship on March 2, 1906.

  Even after his relationship with Reynolds had cost him his job and his good name, Brady still professed faith, both in the man and in his business. Elizabeth Brady was astonished by her husband’s continued fascination with someone she had recognized early on as a shyster. Her only explanation was that Brady had been “mesmerized”—which to some extent must have been true, even if it was only by the beautiful dream that Reynolds represented, and perhaps by the ghost of a father’s love. Brady also had more pragmatic reasons for sticking by Reynolds: to rescue his own savings and the money he had convinced friends to invest in the partnership. Sadly, all of his efforts were in vain. Reynolds-Alaska staggered for a year and a half after Brady’s retirement before finally collapsing into bankruptcy in the fall of 1907.

  Now nearly sixty, Brady was jobless and all but broke. He and his family left Alaska for Brookline, Massachusetts, where his children could go to good schools and he could employ his “old boy” connections from Yale to look for work. The family lived extremely frugally and had to sell much of their collection of native Alaskan art to meet expenses. Finally, in 1911, Brady got a job at the General Manifold and Printing Company in New York City, and the family moved to Manhattan, where they lived for five years.

  During this period Alaska was never far from Brady’s thoughts. In the seclusion of the New York Public Library he wrote articles for popular journals both on his experiences and on Alaskan political issues. In one series of essays for Commerce and Industries, Brady extracted revenge by attacking Roosevelt’s conservation policy as “a knockout blow to the coal business in Alaska.”38

  It was also in the library that Brady attempted to write his autobiography, but somehow he never managed to get past his Union Theological Seminary days. When he thought about his “story”—his rise from the gutter to the university—he could rest assured that almost no one had accomplished the like, and he could feel justly happy and proud. But when he compared his life after Yale and Union with the lives of his fellow students, his accomplishments must not have seemed nearly so remarkable, especially given his present state of impecunity and disgrace in the very city he had fled so many years before.

  In August 1916, Brady, his wife, and his eldest daughter at last returned to Alaska for good. He was sixty-eight years old and still carried himself with the pluck of a street tough. But he was not in good health, having suffered from diabetes since before leaving office. His eldest son was waiting for the family at the Sitka docks and was at Brady’s side when, midway down the gangplank, he stopped, staggered, and fell, having suffered a stroke. Brady survived, only to deteriorate steadily for another two years. He died in Sitka on December 17, 1918, a month after the armistice ended the First World War, and during the same year that his fellow orphan train rider, Andrew Burke, died in New Mexico.

  Although John Brady and Andrew Burke were certainly the most dramatic successes of all the orphan train riders, they were not the only ones to hold government office. James Richards, who had been placed by the CAS in Philadelphia, Ohio, became a congressman. Thomas Jefferson Cunningham became mayor of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and was the oldest delegate at the 1940 Democratic Convention, which renominated Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And the orphan train rider Henry L. Jost was mayor of Kansas City, Missouri, from 1912 to 1916 and later served in Congress.39

  A list of “Noteworthy Careers” published in the CAS annual report for 1917, the year before Brady’s and Burke’s deaths, reads:

  a Governor of a State, a Governor of a Territory, two members of Congress, two District Attorneys, two Sheriffs, two Mayors, a Justice of the Supreme Court, four Judges, two college professors, a cashier of an insurance company, twenty-four clergymen, seven high school Principals, two School Superintendents, an Auditor-General of a State, nine members of State Legislatures, two artists, a Senate Clerk, six railroad officials, eighteen journalists, thirty four bankers, nineteen physicians, thirty-five lawyers, four civil engineers, and any number of business and professional men, clerks, mechanics, farmers, and their wives and others who have acquired property and filled positions of honor and trust.40

  Does the existence of these 180 enumerated “Noteworthy Careers” among the approximately 100,000 children whom the CAS had placed in rural homes by 1917 constitute significant evidence of success?41 Certainly not—and not only because the people who accomplished these careers represent only .0018 percent of all orphan train riders up until that time. To truly measure the success (or failure) of the orphan trains we would have to come up with some means of comparing each orphan train rider’s level of happiness, modified by each one’s level of moral decency (since a contented psychopathic murderer could not be counted a success by any sane measure), with the happiness—moral decency quotient they would have had under any of the other possible treatments, including no treatment at all. All pipe dreams, of course. How are we to agree even on a definition of happiness, let alone moral decency?

  The Children’s Aid Society’s oft-made claims of 87 to 90 percent success rates were founded on little more than wishful thinking.42 The records for most orphan train riders simply are not complete enough to provide any realistic evaluation of the success or failure of the placements. Still, what evidence exists, both inside and apart from the files, would indicate that many of the orphan train riders did find happy placements, or at least went on to lead rich and satisfying lives. And there are even cases where the record indicated that the placement had been an unmitigated disaster whereas in fact the child ultimately did quite well.

  When all is said and done, however, even if we make the most generous interpretation of the available evidence, it would seem that a substantial majority of orphan train riders did not find the happiness or the loving homes that everyone associated with the Children’s Aid Society hoped they would. Many of these children were deeply troubled, psychologically and physically, and probably would not have found happiness under any conditions. But even so, as the years passed and the number of orphan train riders mounted into the tens of thousands and then the scores of thousands, and particularly as attitudes toward children and poverty began to evolve, it became increasingly clear that the Children’s Aid Society and its imitators were not doing all that they could to help the children under their care find whatever portion of happiness and decency that might be theirs in life.

  PART III

  REDOING

  TESTIMONY

  LOTTE STERN

  Nov. 2. [1853]—Mrs. Forster, the excellent matron of the female department of the prison, had told us of an interesting young German girl, committed for vagrancy, who might just at this crisis be rescued. We entered these soiled and gloomy Egyptian archways, so appropriate and so depressing, that the sight of the low columns and lotus capital is to me now inevitably associated with the somber and miserable histories of the place. After a short while the girl was brought in—a German girl, apparently about fourteen, very thinly but neatly dressed, slight figure, and a face intelligent and old for her years. . . .

  Her eye had a hard look, but softened when I spoke to her in her own language.

  “Have you been long here?”

  “Only two days, sir.”

  “Why are you here?”

  “I will tell you, sir. I was working out with a lady. I had to get up early and go to bed late, and I never had rest. She worked me always; and finally, because I could not do everything, she beat me—she beat me like a dog, and I ran away. I could not bear it.” . . .

  “But I thought you were arrested for being near a place of bad character,” said I.

  “I am going to tell you, sir. The next day I a
nd my father went to get some clothes I left there, and the lady wouldn’t give them up—and what could we do? What can the poor do? My father is a poor old man who picks rags in the streets, and I have never picked rags yet. He said, ‘I don’t want you to be a rag-picker. You are not a child now—people will look at you—you will come to harm.’ And I said, ‘No, father, I will help you. We must do something now I am out of place’; and so I went out. I picked all day, and didn’t make much, and I was cold and hungry. Towards night a gentleman met me, a very fine, well-dressed gentleman, an American, and he said, ‘Will you go home with me?’ and I said ‘No.’ He said, ‘I will give you twenty shillings’ [$2.50], and I told him I would go. And the next morning I was taken up outside by the officer.”

  “Poor girl!” said some one, “had you forgotten your mother? and what a sin it was!”

  “No, sir, I did remember her. She had no clothes and I had no shoes, and I have only this (she shivered in her thin dress), and winter is coming on. I know what making money is, sir. I am only fourteen, but I am old enough. I have had to take care of myself ever since I was ten years old, and I have never had a cent given me. It may be a sin, sir (and the tears rained down her cheeks, which she did not deign to wipe away), I do not ask you to forgive it. Men cannot forgive, but God will forgive. I know about men. The rich do such things and worse, and no one says anything against them. But I, sir—I am poor! . . .. I have never had any one to take care of me. Many is the day I have gone hungry from morning till night, because I did not dare spend a cent or two, the only ones I had. Oh, I have wished sometimes to die! Why does God not kill me!”

  She was choked by her sobs. We let her calm herself a moment, and then told her our plan of finding her a good home, where she could make an honest living. She was mistrustful. “I will tell you, Meine Hern; I know men, and I do not believe any one, I have been cheated so often. There is no trust in any one. I am not a child. I have lived as long as people twice as old.”

  “But you do not wish to stay in prison.”

  “Oh, God, no! Oh, there is such a weight on my heart here. There is nothing but bad to learn in a prison. These dirty Irish girls! I would kill myself if I had to stay here. Why was I ever born? I have such Kummerniss (woes) here (she pressed her hands on her heart)—I am poor!”

  We explained more, and she became satisfied. We wished her to be bound to stay some years. “No,” said she passionately, “I cannot; I confess to you, gentlemen, I should either run away or die if I was bound.”

  We talked with the matron. She had never known, she said, in her experience, such a remarkable girl. The children there of nine or ten years were often as old as young women, but this girl was an experienced woman. The offense, however, she had no doubt was her first. We obtained her release; and one of us, Mr. G. [Mr. Gerry, an early CAS visitor], walked over to her house or cabin, some three miles on the other side of Williamsburg, in order that she might see her parents before she went. As she walked along, she looked up in Mr. G.’s face and asked thoughtfully why we came there for her? He explained. She listened, and after a little while said in broken English, “Don’t you think better for poor little girls to die than live!” He spoke kindly to her, and said something about a good God. She shook her head. “No, no good God. Why am I so? It always was so. Why much suffer if good God?” He told her they would get her a supper, and in the morning she should start off and find new friends. She became gradually almost ungoverned—sobbed—would like to die—even threatened suicide in this wild way. Poor girl! to her there was only one place where the wild embittered heart could rest. Kindness and calm words at length made her more reasonable. After much trouble they reached the home or the den of the poor rag-picker. The parents were very grateful, and she was to start off the next morning to a country home, where perhaps finally the parents will join her.1

  Lotte Stern was placed as a domestic in New Hampshire. Her parents never came to live with her, and she returned to the city after four months. There is no subsequent record of her fate.

  9

  Invisible Children

  THE CAS WAS unique among mid-nineteenth-century child welfare organizations for seeing poor children as a potential benefit rather than an unmitigated burden to society. But not all children were illuminated equally by Brace’s optimism. White Protestant boys always stood at the radiant center of his regard, with Catholic boys just beside them. African Americans and Jews lingered near the edge of obscurity, and girls drifted through a dusky middle ground occasionally brightened by rose-colored spotlights. Children’s problems and needs also did not get equal attention. The loneliness that evoked so much sympathy on city streets became beneath consideration once a child was placed on a farm. Love for a foster parent was eulogized, while love for a birth parent was denigrated. All too often problems that could not be ameliorated by education, work, religion, or outplacement simply disqualified a child for assistance or sympathy.

  The CAS cannot be blamed for all of its failures. The hard truth about social work is that the most earnest and well-conceived efforts often come to nothing. People generally do not attract a social worker’s attention until fate has turned against them in numerous ways—and fate is notoriously indifferent even to the most prodigious acts of human resistance. CAS workers can be blamed, however, for those times when they recognized suffering and did nothing within their power to alleviate it, and for those much more frequent occasions when prejudice, laziness, or the desire to maintain a virtuous image caused them not to recognize suffering in the first place.

  In 1863, the year of the Emancipation Proclamation and the New York draft riots, Brace published a cobblestone-sized opus, The Races of the Old World, upon which he had been working for ten years—since the founding of the CAS, in fact. In this book he attempted to devote equal attention and respect to all races, both in the interest of scientific impartiality and as a model for discussion of all issues related to race—including America’s slavery question. In an essay entitled “Ethnological Fallacies,” published in the Independent during the final years of his labor on the book, he declared:

  It is a shame that now, all through Europe, American science in ethnology has become identical with perverted argument for the oppression of the negro, and an American’s conclusions upon the black races are as certain a priori as a Brahmin’s on the origin or rights of his caste in India. . . . [T]he only method for philosophy is to divorce the whole subject from sympathy, whether for slavery or freedom, and stand on the solid basis of facts and inductive reasoning.1

  Unfortunately, The Races of the Old World falls comically, and at times infuriatingly, short of fulfilling these laudable intentions. The book shows Brace to be an odd mix of abolitionist and white chauvinist, Darwinist and Lamarckian, scientist and crackpot. He states his opposition to racial prejudice frequently, and with emotion, but is inclined to present Europeans, especially the English, as “noble” and Africans as “low” and even “hideous.” His prejudices are in full (if unconscious) display, for example, when he establishes the antiquity of races by describing their representation in Egyptian artifacts: “The negro had his black skin, his thick lips, protruding jaw and curved legs; the Semite his bent nose; the Egyptian his bronze complexion and voluptuous lips; the Aryan, his white skin and noble features before the time of the Pharaohs.”2 When explaining the darkness of African skin, he never presents it as beautiful, or even as a desirable accommodation to climate, but only as a sort of deformity that he attributes to a number of causes, including African soil and scenery and miasmatic, electrical, and moral influences. He seems to grant particular credence to the theories of “a distinguished physiologist, Dr. Draper,” who maintained that the black skin and “thick skull” of “the most degraded negro type” stem from the liver, which is “quickly disturbed in its duty by a high temperature.”3 The foulness of such reasoning is only slightly diminished by the ranking of one northern European group—the Irish—on more or less the same low level as
the Africans. The following is just one of many examples: “The difference between the average English and Irish skull is nine cubic inches and only four between the average African and the Irish. The largest African skull in his [a Dr. Bachman’s] collection measured ninety-nine inches, and the largest Irish ninety-seven inches.”4

  It is difficult to understand how a man laboring under such crude racial stereotypes could at the same time be so devoted a campaigner against prejudice. But Brace had a strong sense of the self-sufficiency of moral imperatives. “The inferiority or superiority of a given race,” he wrote in his book,