At the Good Shepherd Convent in Omaha, Thomson, like all of the other inmates, was given a new name and forbidden to say one word about her life outside, not just about the supposed misbehavior that had led to her commitment, but about any aspect of it. She was taught typing and shorthand for two hours a day, and the rest of the time did piecework for the Beau Brummel Shirt Factory.
McPhealy did not come to see her until she had been at the convent for two years; when he did, he had his first solitary conversation ever with her. He was shocked by what she told him of her treatment at the Larsons and her other homes. He said that if he had known he would have taken her away with him. But he also told her that he could do nothing to get her out of the convent now. She could be released only to the custody of the person who had put her in—Mrs. Larson.
A year later elderly former neighbors happened to visit the convent and run into Thomson. When they heard her story, they went straight back to Bertrand and threatened to call the authorities if Mrs. Larson did not obtain her foster daughter’s release. When Thomson finally walked out through the convent’s five locking doors, she was eighteen and had lost three years of her youth. No longer welcome at the Larsons’, she began her career as a housekeeper.
Although Alice Ayler had a far more sympathetic and effective agent than McPhealy handling her case, in the end her experience was not that different from Thomson’s. Georgia Greenleaf clearly worked very hard on Ayler’s behalf, always talking to her in private when she visited, never doubting her complaints, and always acting on them immediately. But there were limits to what she could do. Potential foster parents were screened so hastily that, even by 1930, orphan train riders had no guarantee about the quality of care and affection they would find in their new homes.
Ayler’s initial placement was with her twin brothers’ foster parents. The mother seems to have been a fine woman, but the father was a bootlegger and embezzler. When Greenleaf heard that this man kept creeping into Ayler’s bed, she took the girl away but left her two brothers. Ayler’s next placement was with a deaf-mute couple who had taken another of her younger brothers. This couple seemed to have had little interest in their foster son. They made no attempt to teach him sign language, and they kept him in an empty bathtub much of the day. By the time he was three, he still could not speak, even though there was nothing wrong with his hearing or comprehension. The deaf couple were apparently even less interested in Ayler, and she was moved after only a very short stay. Her brother remained with the couple until the woman, after years of trying, finally got pregnant and did not want him anymore. Then he was placed with an extremely elderly man and woman who, according to Ayler, were equally unable to give him an adequate upbringing.
When Georgia Greenleaf heard about the farmer who kept accosting Ayler in the corner, she moved the girl to her fourth and final placement—which was only marginally better than the others. Her new foster mother humiliated her in very much the same way as Mrs. Larson had Thomson. She told her that her nose was too big, that her birth parents had been bad people, and that she was just like them. She let her own children take Ayler’s toys and penny collection and constantly accused her of things she had not done. (She was particularly paranoid about sex.) The abuse got so bad that, at seventeen, Ayler started to have severe headaches and blind spells. Finally she went to Greenleaf, who moved her out of the family and into town, where she got a job at J. C. Penney and lived in an apartment with another young woman. Within three years Ayler was married, and then, she says, she never felt an orphan again.
As vulnerable as both Ayler and Thomson were to male predation, they were both far better protected by their placement organizations than the average female orphan train rider of the nineteenth century. To a large extent, their safety was a product of technological innovations, such as the telephone and automobile, that made it easier for their agents to keep in touch with them. But they also benefited from shifts in social attitudes. By the early 1900s, people had become much more sensitive to the risks of foster care and convinced of the obligation of placement agencies to watch out for their charges. And by the 1930s, as Ayler’s case illustrates, this sensitivity to risk had developed to such an extent that it had begun to encompass the taboo subject of sexual assault. A growing number of placement agents were willing, like Greenleaf, to believe both in the pervasiveness of sex crimes and in the innocence of the victims, whereas during the nineteenth century many female orphan train riders had no choice but to endure repeated sexual abuse because, often isolated miles from the nearest village, there was no one to whom they could tell their stories.
When Brace stated that there was “no reality in the sentimental assertion that the sexual sins of the lad are as degrading as those of the girl,” he made one exception: the practice “of some Eastern communities which are rotting and falling to pieces from their debasing and unnatural crimes. When we hear of such disgusting offenses under any form of civilization, whether it be under the Rome of the Empire, or the Turkey of to-day, we know that disaster, ruin, and death, are near the State and the people.”44
Brace was referring to “the sin that dared not speak its name”—homosexuality. The obliqueness and ferocity of his language were typical of his era. Even though it may not have been permissible in polite society to discuss those acts and desires that caused so many women to “fall,” their existence was universally recognized and the object of intense fascination. Homosexuality, on the other hand, was so forbidden that for the most part it could be referred to only through irony and code words (a “sunflower knight,” a “gilded youth”), and when addressed directly, it had to be presented as grossly beyond the limits of human normality or, at least, of Western civilization.
Homosexuality’s namelessness (the term was coined by Richard von Krafft-Ebing only in 1869 and did not enter English until the 1880s, through the work of Havelock Ellis) did, however, give Victorian gender identity a certain flexibility we do not have today. Even in socially conservative circles, it was perfectly normal for men and women to declare love for members of their own sex, or to sleep in the same bed with them. There were strict limits, of course. Sodomy was a grave crime, and suspected perpetrators could suffer severe punishments both within and outside the law.
Despite Brace’s location of homosexuality only in “Eastern communities,” it thrived in the United States, perhaps even more so than in Europe. In 1872, the very year Brace published the quoted passage in The Dangerous Classes, a young man wrote from Germany that in America “the unnatural vice in question is more ordinary than it is here; and I was able to indulge my passions with less fear of punishment or persecution. . . . I discovered, in the United States, that I was always immediately recognized as a member of the confraternity.”45
Then, as now, New York City was a refuge for homosexuals. There were gay beer gardens on the Bowery that were protected by the police, and male prostitution in City Hall Park and on Cedar Street. The very street boys served by the CAS were an integral part of the city’s gay community, and many runaway teenage boys made their living as male prostitutes. Adult male vagrants often traveled with “prushuns”—homeless boys, ten to fifteen years old, who performed many of the duties of wives. Although the existence of homosexuality among street boys was almost never referred to directly, it was nonetheless widely understood, as is implied by an 1882 cartoon from the National Police Gazette showing Oscar Wilde followed by a procession of newsboys and bootblacks imitating his flamboyant gestures. In the accompanying article these boys are referred to as the “precocious set,” and a later piece describes Wilde as “permeating society even to its lower strata.”46
Brace certainly knew that some New York street boys, happily or unhappily, had sexual encounters with men, or he would not have referred to the practice in his book. But the ferocity of his language makes it clear that any boy who confessed to such experience could expect little sympathy or aid—perhaps less even than the most confirmed female prostitute. Her activ
ity would have been, to Brace’s mind, in accordance with her nature, whereas the boy’s could hardly be more “unnatural” or “disgusting.”
The Victorian taboo against acknowledging the existence of homosexuality also made it harder to protect boys from sexual assault. Girls may have chafed under the assumption that their virtue was everywhere in danger, but at least it offered them real protection, whereas an untold number of boys suffered dreadful consequences from the assumption that they were everywhere safe. The very absence in the CAS records of even the most indirect reference to sexual assault against boys shows how utterly isolated the inevitable victims of this crime must have felt—whether they encountered their abuse on lonely western farms or within the ostensible safety of the CAS itself.
In 1868 Horatio Alger published Ragged Dick, the story of a plucky New York street boy, and the first of his enormously successful rags- to-riches tales. Brace knew that the book had been based on research that Alger did at the Five Points Mission, and sensing a possible fund-raising and publicity opportunity, he asked the celebrated author to visit the Newsboys’ Lodging House. Alger was so inspired by his conversations with the newsboys that he soon took up residence in the lodging house himself. For several years he had a bed reserved for him there, and a desk where he could jot down notes on the boys’ stories and characteristics while they were still fresh in his mind. Just as Brace had hoped, these notes led to dozens of novels illustrating the virtues of street boys. Some of Alger’s heroes even made their fortunes by emigrating west.
But Alger’s relationships with vagrant boys were not confined to the lodging house. He also brought them to live at his West Twenty-sixth Street apartment, where he seems to have found them equally inspiring. According to a profile in Argosy, he did his best writing with some half-dozen boys “making the liveliest kind of music” in the background.47
Neither the Argosy reporter nor Brace seems to have known that Alger had been forced to resign as minister at a Unitarian church on Cape Cod in 1866 (the year before he wrote Ragged Dick) after having been charged with the “abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys.”48 Alger admitted his guilt grudgingly at the time and later talked quite openly with Henry James, Sr., about what he called his “insanity.”
There is no evidence that the celebrated author ever had a sexual relationship with any of the boys he befriended inside or out of the Newsboys’ Lodging House, nor even that he had a homosexual encounter of any kind after leaving Massachusetts. But he cannot have been the only male visitor to or employee of the CAS with a sexual interest in boys. And his story cogently illustrates yet another way in which the Victorian aversion to even recognizing homosexuality left boys in danger of, at the very least, unwanted advances.
Brace’s invitation to Alger naturally evokes the question of his own interest in boys—a question that I have often been asked and can only answer with a few ambiguous facts and an educated guess.
Brace’s admiration for boys is apparent throughout his work. He clearly took delight in their physical appearance, as well as their gumption and wit. Although modern notions of sexuality and propriety would preclude most male social workers from expressing such delight in the physical nature of their juvenile male clients, men in the nineteenth century were allowed much greater freedom to express strong emotion—one reason why Victorians can seem so sentimental to our tastes. Also, Brace’s admiration for boys was never couched in particularly sexual terms. His sexual interest in adult women, by contrast, was expressed both overtly and implicitly in his letters, in many passages in his books, and, of course, in the fact that he married and had four children. Given the complexity of the human psyche, none of this evidence is particularly conclusive, but if Brace did harbor some degree of sexual interest in boys, it was probably unconscious and never acted upon.
10
Neglect of the Poor
BRACE WAS A MAN who could believe that God would murder his beloved sister, Emma, to teach him humility. He had a similar response one morning in April 1865 when his eldest son, Charles, burst in upon the family at their prayers to shout that President Lincoln had been shot. This tragedy too, which came just days after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Brace believed to be a message from God: “In the height of our exultation and consciousness of our power, with victory flaunting in every banner, we are taught that we are but drifting weeds on the great eternal currents of Providence.”1
All of his life Brace struggled to restrain his prodigious pride and to remain mindful that he and his ambitions were nothing more than such “drifting weeds.” Often, as in the following letter to Letitia that he wrote from Stockholm, he chose to express his desire to master his vanity in strikingly masochistic language:
I have been so impelled lately by the expression, “Bring every thought into captivity to Christ.” It is so sweet to have them chained, captured to Christ. I have lately been so ashamed and struck down. . . . I say, O God! that I should think of wealth or honor or fame or friendship as my aim and Thou and Eternity all near me since a child. . . . However, I have good hope. God is a friend to the poor soul. Perhaps the best way to him is through disappointment and humiliation.2
Brace returned to the theme of being “captured” by the deity in another letter written during this same European trip. He had gone to London to attend the International Reformatory Union Exhibition. During his stay he had met some of the pioneers of the British “Home Children” movement and had been put up by Lady Byron. He had also had dinner with one of his idols, John Stuart Mill, who became a friend and regular correspondent. After these heady experiences he traveled to the Continent, and eventually to Switzerland. To his wife’s sister, he wrote:
How can I ever tell the sublime visions I have had in the mountains, of the unseen! The lesson of the Alps is worship and purity. “Oh, to be like this forever! to see God as only the pure can see!” have I often said on the great heights, in the presence of the Unapproachable One. From the vast peaks above cloud and earth, one peers into Eternity with such intense desire to know. Our individuality sinks away so, and the realities seem goodness and God. “Oh, make me thine!” is the cry of one’s heart continually in the solitary mountains.3
The truth is that when Brace felt he had come close to God, the experience was never one of “disappointment and humiliation”; he never felt any sinking or diminishment of his “individuality.” For Brace the experience was all ecstatic expansion—especially during this era, when political events had finally taken so favorable a turn, his work was going so well, and his reputation was undergoing a meteoric rise. In another letter written not long after this one, Brace declared, “Probably few human beings ever had a more real sense of things unseen than I habitually have,” and he confessed his belief, not only that he was doing “God’s work,” but that God had his (Brace’s) goals “far more in heart” than he did himself.4
The absolute apogee of the CAS’s reputation came between 1870 and 1875, when Brace was in his middle forties, still possessed of his phenomenal energy, and working to improve the lot of poor children on a number of fronts.
Although Brace thought labor, especially farm labor, was a good thing for children, he was alarmed by the plight of boys and girls who worked in factories ten hours a day, six days a week, with no time for education or even play. In 1871 he had the CAS attorney draft a law limiting the amount of time that children could work in factories. Brace went up to Albany every year for three years to campaign for this law, and finally, in 1874, the New York State legislature passed a slightly watered-down version of it, one of the first laws to limit child labor in the United States.
In 1872 Brace published his classic account of his life’s work, The Dangerous Classes, to wide acclaim in America and Britain, winning praise from the likes of Florence Nightingale and Charles Darwin. That summer Brace and Letitia were invited to spend the night at Darwin’s home in Kent, an experience Brace considered one of the high points of his life.
In 1873 he was awarded a medal by King Humbert of Italy in appreciation for his efforts to end the pernicious padrone system, under which a Fagin-like master (the padrone) would buy children from their parents in Italy, transport them to New York, and make them work the streets as beggars and musicians and take all of their earnings.
That same year the CAS commenced what would evolve into pioneering work in public health and hygiene by opening a “Summer Home” at Bath, a beachfront community in Brooklyn, midway between Coney Island and the Narrows. Each year, up to 4,000 girls from the CAS industrial schools got to spend six days at the Summer Home and have a taste of some of the benefits—fresh air, good food—that children in the Emigration Plan were thought to be enjoying all the time. After a while, however, it became clear that the fresh air did not benefit the girls nearly so much as what they learned about personal hygiene and nutrition. The girls were encouraged to bathe frequently and were required to wash their faces and hands daily. They were also taught to avoid infection by sleeping between clean sheets rather than their normal bedding of rarely washed blankets and a filthy mattress. They ate three solid meals a day—a great luxury among the city’s poor. But perhaps most important, they were encouraged to drink milk rather than only coffee or tea. On the basis of what he saw at the Summer Home, Brace came to think that drinking milk was the easiest and most effective and inexpensive way of improving the health of both children and their mothers.
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