Under the indenture agreement that Mary had signed with her first husband, she was supposed to report annually to the Department of Charities on Mary Ellen’s condition. Under examination by Elbridge Gerry, however, Mary Connolly admitted that she had filed no more than two reports during the six years she had the child in her keeping, but no one from the Department of Charities seems ever to have bothered to investigate.
Mary Ellen’s plight only came to the attention of the authorities through the efforts of a charity worker named Etta Angell Wheeler, who was with the Saint Luke’s Mission. Wheeler had happened to visit a terminally ill woman living in the same tenement building as the Connollys. This woman told Wheeler that she was afraid to die because she did not have a clean conscience. Every day for years, she confessed, she had heard through her bedroom wall a child’s sobs and the sound of a lash and she had done nothing to stop it. Wheeler talked to other tenants in the building and, hearing more grim details about the beatings, decided to visit the Connollys herself. She knocked on the door and no one answered, although she did hear someone stirring inside. On her next visit to the building she knocked again, and this time Mr. or Mrs. Connolly opened the door wide enough for Wheeler to get a clear glimpse of Mary Ellen and see the lash marks on her legs and arms.
Wheeler went to several asylums to ask whether they could take the poor girl. All of them said that she first had to be legally removed from her foster parents. Wheeler then approached several charities and lawyers about handling the removal but was told only not to meddle in other people’s family affairs. Finally, at the suggestion of a niece, Wheeler contacted Henry Bergh, the founder of the ASPCA. Although afterward Bergh would make a big display of the role he and his society played in Mary Ellen’s rescue, at first he was reluctant to handle the case. He had no great fondness for children and often depicted them in his promotional literature as the tormentors of dogs and horses. Also, he worried that focusing public attention on this case of cruelty to a child would ultimately make people less concerned about animals. In the end, however, he was swayed by Wheeler’s argument that a child was, after all, an animal, and he asked Gerry to look into the matter—but purely on a private basis, not as a representative of the ASPCA.
Gerry’s prosecution of the case could hardly have been more successful. Mary Ellen was permanently removed from her foster parents and taken in by Etta Wheeler’s relatives, who lived on a farm in upstate New York. Mary Connolly was given what the Times called “the extreme penalty of the law”—one year in the state penitentiary at hard labor.21
Just months before Mary Ellen’s rescue, the case of thirteen-year-old John Fox, who had been beaten to death by his father, had been given only passing mention in the New York Times. By contrast, Mary Ellen’s trial and abuse, and Bergh and Gerry’s efforts, received extravagant coverage from newspapers all across the country. There were even two popular songs written about the case, “Little Mary Ellen” and “Mother Sent an Angel to Me.” What was it about this girl’s story that made it such a sensation when so many similar cases had been all but ignored?
Certainly one reason for its prominence was the fact that Etta Wheeler’s husband was a well-connected journalist. Bergh and Gerry too were both savvy publicists who drew as much attention to Mary Ellen and themselves as they possibly could. But it is also clear that Mary Ellen’s suffering would not have provoked nearly so powerful a response if the public had not already been well primed, not only to have its heartstrings plucked but to countenance a vast escalation of the right of public authorities to intrude on the sanctity of family.
Before 1874 people had seen cruelty to children as an inevitable and unremarkable fact of life. Beatings and other physical and emotional punishments were considered an essential and effective means of inculcating virtue. When punishments went too far, or were clearly sadistic, they might result—but only rarely—in prosecution. More often neighbors—like Johnny Morrow’s in New Haven—would simply take matters into their own hands. But equally commonly—like Mary Ellen’s neighbors—they might not have felt justified meddling in other people’s private business. Mary Ellen’s case was a landmark, not merely for its celebrity, but because it evoked an outpouring of demand for public intervention—as is illustrated by the spectacular growth of child protection societies.
The first of these, the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, was founded in December 1874 by Elbridge Gerry. By 1914 there were 494 societies dedicated to eradicating child abuse, although some of these, called “humane” societies, aimed to protect both animals and children. By 1890 Gerry’s New York society was handling 15,000 cases in the city alone; and the state legislature made obstruction of the society’s work a crime and gave the society’s agents the right to arrest abusive parents.22 Whereas in its early years the Children’s Aid Society had been compelled to rely primarily on persuasion and intimidation to get children away from parents, agents of the Gerry Society, as it was commonly called, could march into a home and wrench children out of their parents’ arms with complete impunity.
The reappraisal—or discovery—of child abuse occasioned by Mary Ellen Wilson’s case has certainly saved countless children’s lives over the last century and a quarter, but the utterly unprecedented intrusion of public authority into private lives that it brought into being often did more harm than good. The agents of the NYSPCC, no less than those of the CAS, tended to confuse the inescapable effects of poverty with true cruelty and thus sometimes subjected the very children they were trying to save to unjust, unnecessary, deeply disturbing, and just plain cruel treatment. This was especially true with cases of neglect. Sometimes Gerry Society agents, confusing inability to provide food with intentional deprivation, would rip a malnourished child away from perfectly loving but very poor parents and put him or her in an orphanage, never thinking that a better alternative would be to help the family and the child get more food.
As a result of such injustices, the residents of poor neighborhoods—the only places then, as now, that were truly subject to child welfare interventions—usually had profoundly ambivalent feelings about the Gerry Society. On the one hand, they saw it as a last resort in cases of intolerable abuse like Mary Ellen’s; on the other, they spoke of it as “the Cruelty.” They shouted warnings down the block when they saw an agent coming and threatened their enemies by saying, “If you don’t watch out, I’ll report you to the Cruelty!”
Mary Ellen Wilson’s celebrity and the founding of the Gerry Society were far from the only evidence of a major shift in public attitude toward children in the mid-1870s. The New York Children’s Law of 1875 also represented heightened intolerance of juvenile suffering, as did the state’s 1874 restrictions on child labor. The mid-1870s were, in fact, the period when the anti-child labor movement really began to gather momentum. This was also a time of growing concern about baby farms, institutions that previously had been allowed to function in discreet silence but that now became the subject of editorials and exposés, as well as lurid tales in the penny press.23 And finally, 1875 was also the year when the Prudential Company began marketing life insurance for juveniles, a curiously ambiguous product that capitalized on the new and growing tenderness toward children (it was meant to give them “decent” rather than “paupers’” funerals), even as it put a price on their heads. Critics of the insurance asserted that parents would bump off their children so that they could use the funeral money to buy a new house, or just throw a big party.
Although an increased sensitivity to the suffering of children may have been the most visible aspect of the era’s cultural shift, it both grew out of and enhanced a developing sense of the dangers the world held for children. The Gerry Societies played a pivotal role in this phenomenon through the grim tales and images in their promotional literature, and in press stories about their work. That most sacred of Victorian institutions—the family—was under attack. Mothers and fathers were routinely shown to be capable of previously inconce
ivable atrocities. And if these icons of domesticity could be so evil, what did that say about the rest of the human race?
Whereas once upon a time people had thought little of sending their children off to live with and work for total strangers, or even make transatlantic voyages on their own, now such ventures seemed perilous, unwise, and even immoral. This new sense of danger only encouraged and was encouraged by a greater need for control. People had once been willing to take a more ad-hoc approach to dealing with cruelty and injustice, but now they wanted to protect children and protect themselves by tightening the reins, passing laws, constructing supervisory bodies, and building elaborate bureaucracies. Ultimately it was this intensified need for control that would do the most to make Brace’s Emigration Plan seem antiquated, ineffective, and cruel. The younger generations simply did not share his optimism about human nature or his tolerance for risk and adversity.
In the years following Hiram H. Giles’s 1874 assault on the CAS, Brace came under frequent attack as well from representatives of the “Asylum-Interest” and the western states. Lyman P. Alden, superintendent of a Michigan reform school, objected to family placement on the grounds that “the majority of even respectable well-to-do families [were] unfit to train up their own children,” and he proposed that New York build a monument to Brace for “relieving” the city “of so many incipient criminals.”24 It was not until the 1882 meeting of the National Conference of Charities and Correction, however, that a younger generation of child welfare workers began to criticize the Emigration Plan for endangering the child rather than the community in which the child was placed—a line of attack that Brace could not help but take seriously.
J. H. Mills, from North Carolina, focused his attention on the CAS’s lax supervision and screening. “About once a year,” he said, “a man comes to North Carolina and brings a large company of children and gives them out to the farmers of a certain district without asking any questions or obtaining any information regarding them, or any security for their proper care or protection.” Mills asserted that the children were taken in only for the most mercenary motives: “Their slaves being set free, these men needing labor take these boys and treat them as slaves [and force them] to associate with the lowest Negroes we have.”25
Mills’s charges were seconded by E. W. Chase of Minnesota, who said that children were frequently abused in their placements, and that nearly every month boys who had been placed with Mennonites ran away because they were not given enough to eat. Even CAS supporters like Andrew Elmore of Wisconsin, who was presiding over the meeting, could not refrain from joining the criticism: “I do not doubt but the intentions of the Society are good. . . . But when they have placed these children in the West, do they look after them a moment? Not any. They get them off their hands and that ends the story. . . . [I]t would be as well if you cut their jugular veins in the first place.”26
Brace had his defenders at the meeting. Some representatives talked about orphan train riders who had done well in their states, while others commended the Emigration Plan in principle but said that placements had to be selected and monitored more carefully. Franklin B. Sanborn, the secretary of the Massachusetts Board of State Charities, gave Brace backhanded support by saying that the CAS had grown too big for him to control and that he was being deceived by his agents.
Most of these charges were not new. Editorialists and critics had compared outplacement to slavery practically since the departure of the first orphan train, and these were far from the first examples of abuse that had been brought up in a public forum. What was different was that so many joined so vocally in the criticism, a signal both that a new consensus was emerging among a mostly younger class of child welfare professionals and that Brace’s power and prestige had begun to erode.
Brace was being attacked partly because of his prominence, especially after the publication of The Dangerous Classes. The sins that the CAS was being accused of were, after all, true of virtually every organization that placed orphaned or vagrant children in families. The New York Department of Charities relied on correspondence from foster parents to monitor even children placed in the city and, as Mary Ellen Wilson’s case demonstrated, did not do a much better job than the CAS of checking up when required reports did not come in. In-city placements by a well-regarded Philadelphia agency were visited only once a year, while children placed by the Catholic Protectory were visited once every two to five years. Those children placed by the Randall’s Island House of Refuge were never visited at all. The attacks on Charles Loring Brace were clearly part of a much-needed self-correction of the entire American child welfare system. And he was singled out for attack because he was the exemplar of the old consensus—the main idol who had to be toppled.
Brace had not attended the 1882 conference because he had been in Europe recuperating from what he believed to be the strain of overwork. At fifty-six he was still in excellent physical shape, strong enough to row his family more than a mile across the Hudson, to the cliffs just south of his home in Dobbs Ferry, and then back against the current. What he seemed to lack, however, was the stamina to endure his normal workweek. He was frequently so exhausted at the end of the day that he would become dazed and depressed. In the year 1882 he also suffered a series of personal losses. One was the death of his hero and friend Charles Darwin. Far more severe a loss, however, was the death of his partner from the earliest days of the Children’s Aid Society, John Macy, who, toward the end of his life, was almost totally blind. But the hardest death to bear was that of his youngest sibling, James, who succumbed to a severe fever while on a long journey fulfilling his duties as a western agent for the CAS.
Brace returned from his travels in England, France, Hungary, and Transylvania reinvigorated and excited about the publication of his latest book, Gesta Christi: A History of Human Progress Under Christianity. The book was well received by the Christian clergy and press but was given a sharp review in the Sun by Emma Lazarus, the young poet now best known for having written the sonnet inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”). Lazarus faulted Brace for his tendency to see the lives of the wisest and most saintly Christians as the very definition of Christian society, while portraying equally virtuous men and women during the classical ages as exceptions in their cultures. She also criticized him for not acknowledging the degree to which Christianity was an outgrowth of Judaism.
Brace was so profoundly influenced by Lazarus’s review and by his subsequent correspondence with her that the questions she raised ultimately dictated the subject of his next and last book, The Unknown God, a survey of all the major non-Christian religions. Although, in the book, Brace portrayed these faiths as stepping-stones toward the ultimate truths revealed by Christ, he nevertheless treated them with uncharacteristic openness and respect. He wanted so much to be truly democratic and fair, but he was hamstrung by his utter inability to question the moral and metaphysical superiority of Christ.
Although Brace would prove to be equally responsive to the criticism he had received at the NCCC meeting, he began with some serious damage control, publishing a pamphlet in which he attributed disapproval of the CAS’s work to false charges leveled against one boy placed in Iowa. In regard to the charges of slavery in the South, he said that the CAS’s southern placements were “usually large boys, perfectly able to take care of themselves, and not indentured”—a claim that did in fact reflect established CAS policy. Long suspicious of the former slave states, Brace had sent only the oldest and least adoptable (usually because they were mildly retarded or somehow deformed) children to the South. And finally he declared: “As to stories of ill treatment of our children, whether in the West or South, we hold them to be bosh.”27
Major changes in CAS policy had begun long before the 1882 NCCC meeting. Ten years earlier the society had established its Summer Home for industrial school girls on the Brooklyn shore. What made this institution a
remarkable departure from previous policy was that for the first time the CAS was giving without taking. Unlike the Newsboys’ Lodging House, where residents had to pay nominal rents, or the industrial schools, where students had to work, the Summer Home residents neither paid for their stay nor were required to do anything during it other than relax and eat well. Apparently satisfied that the girls had not been pauperized by the experience, the CAS launched other programs that gave without expecting a return. In 1879 the society commenced a “Sick Mission,” under which visitors brought medicine and good food to ailing tenement dwellers, and the decidedly less vital “Flower Mission,” under which the CAS brought “the sunshine of bright flowers to the miserable rooms.”28 These programs differed from previous CAS efforts in that they represented a slight softening of Brace’s utter rejection of the communities where children he chose to aid were born and brought up. Although CAS industrial schools had, of course, always given something back to the communities, their immediate beneficiaries were only the children who attended them. The medicine, food, and flowers provided by these “missions” benefited not just children but whole families.
The most effective and forward-looking of the projects to grow out of this new policy was the “Health Home,” or sanitarium for sick infants, that the CAS opened on Coney Island in 1884. Having discovered how little industrial school girls knew about basic hygiene, and how fortified they were by a balanced, milk-rich diet, Brace thought he might best help improve the health of poor children by making it possible for them to have these benefits available to them from birth. In the summer of 1884 alone, 2,200 mothers and ailing infants stayed at the Health Home for periods of one to several days. During their residence mother and child were both given healthy diets that included pasteurized milk. The mothers were also instructed in the role that clean bodies, clothing, and bedding could play in disease prevention and were encouraged to spend as much time as possible sitting with their children on the home’s deep verandas partaking of the fresh and invigorating sea air. Although none of these benefits could do much for truly diseased children, the “immediate revival of apparently dying babies was,” as Emma Brace put it, “a striking proof that in many cases their desperate condition was merely from lack of proper food and fresh air.”29 Her claim is substantiated by the fact that decades later community health stations, which also provided infants with milk and gave mothers hygiene instruction, made substantial contributions to the decline of infant mortality. The Health Home was very expensive to operate, however, and not as popular among donors as other CAS programs, and so it often had to shut down early in the summer because of lack of funding.
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