In these and dozens of other ways we are making a choice. It may be a choice made in ignorance, but ignorance can also be chosen: by a turning of the head, or a refusal to see how a child’s misery can be made possible by our action or inaction. It is a choice to save money, but that does not mean it is free of cost.
Child welfare advocates no longer talk about their work as a means of taking the danger out of the “dangerous classes,” but the fact remains that the failures of the foster care system end up in prisons in disproportionate numbers. While less than 1 percent of Americans have been in foster care, former foster children make up close to 14 percent of our prison population.34 Yes, some of those people might have ended up committing crimes anyway, but some of them might have been saved if only they had gotten the help we are more than able to give them.
We all pay the cost of this failure. We pay it in the money we spend to keep an inmate incarcerated—$20,000 a year, which, as has been often pointed out, is close to the annual tuition at Harvard. The total cost of our extraordinarily high incarceration rate—the highest of any industrialized country in the world—is $35 billion a year.35 We also pay for the failure of our foster care system in the $10 billion we spend annually on police forces,36 and the additional expenses of security staff, burglar alarms, car alarms, fenced-in communities, crime insurance, and guns. We pay for it in fear, and we pay for it in the suffering we endure when all of our expensive defenses fail to protect us or when they backfire: when our children come across our guns and end up shooting themselves, or their classmates. But the greatest cost of our failure to do what we can do and know we can do is borne by children in the system—not only the Elisa Izquierdos and Caprice Reids, who have died, but also the thousands of children who have endured needless suffering because nobody could be bothered to see what they really needed and help them get it.
Child welfare organizations, even those affiliated with religious groups, also no longer talk about the danger to our eternal souls posed by our failure to give poor children what help we can. But you do not have to be a Christian, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, or any sort of believer to understand that in our culpability, now and in the past, for the failures of our many mechanisms for helping poor children the moral character of our whole nation suffers, and that our whole nation has a lot to gain by doing what can be done and what is right to do for the neediest and most defenseless members of our society.
“There’s a great work wants doing in this our generation . . .”
Notes
Prologue: Working for Human Happiness
1. George Matsell quoted in Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, 3 vols., edited by Robert H. Bremner et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970–74), 1:755
2. Emma Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace Told Chiefly in His Own Letters (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1894), 9–10, 71, 291, 69, 283, 284, 483.
Part I: Want
1. Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York and Twenty Years’ Work Among Them (New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1872; facsimile ed., Silver Spring, Md.: National Association of Social Workers, 1973), 261–63.
2. Harry Morris, “My Life Story,” in Tears on Paper: Orphan Train History, edited by Patricia J. Young and Frances E. Marks (privately printed, 1990), 228–29.
1. The Good Father
1. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America: 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 13–14.
2. Harriet Beecher Stowe, quoted in Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 17.
3. Harriet Beecher Stowe, quoted in Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 3.
4. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Oldtown Folks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911), 2:38–39.
5. Catharine Beecher, quoted in Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 26.
6. Ibid., 27.
7. Ibid., 24, 25.
8. Quoted in Kristine Elisabeth Nelson, “The Best Asylum: Charles Loring Brace and Foster Family Care” (Ph.D. diss., University of California at Berkeley, 1980), 15.
9. Ibid., 15–16.
10. Quoted in ibid., 19.
11. Geraldine Youcha, Minding the Children: Child Care in America from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1995), 22.
12. Nelson, “The Best Asylum,” 48.
13. Quoted in ibid., 52.
14. Ibid., 68.
15. Mrs. Louisa Gurney Hoare, Hints for the Improvement of Early Education and Nursery Discipline (Dover: Samuel C. Stevens, 1826), 5–6.
16. Lydia Maria Child, The Mother’s Book (Boston: Carter and Hendee, 1832), title page.
17. Lydia H. Sigourney, Letters to Mothers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1842), 45.
18. Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York (New York: C. S. Francis and Co., 1843), 196.
19. Child, The Mother’s Book, 63.
20. Catharine Beecher quoted in Nelson, “The Best Asylum,” 85, 86.
21. Child, The Mother’s Book, 135.
22. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 62–63.
23. Ibid., 34.
24. Ibid., 4.
25. Ibid., 75.
26. Ibid., 10–11.
27. Ibid., 7–8.
28. Horace Bushnell, “Unconscious Influence,” The American Pulpit (Worcester, Mass.) 2, no. 10: 232–33.
29. Ibid., 230.
30. Ibid., 236.
31. Ibid., 240.
32. Ibid.
33. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 4.
34. Ibid., 12.
35. Ibid., 16–17.
36. Ibid., 26.
37. Ibid., 62.
38. Ibid., 9–10.
39. Charles Caper McLaughlin, ed., The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, vol. 1, 1822–1852 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
40. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 107–8.
41. Frederick Law Olmsted quoted in Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth–Century America (Baltimore: lohns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 159; originally from Broadus Mitchell, Frederick Law Olmsted: A Critic of the Old South (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1924), 39.
42. Frederick Law Olmsted quoted in Elizabeth Stevenson, Park Maker: A Life of Frederick Law Olmsted (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 27.
43. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 61–62.
44. McLaughlin, The Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, 1:313–15.
45. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 38–39.
46. Ibid., 44–46.
2. Flood of Humanity
1. Kenneth T. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York City (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 923.
2. Quoted in Stevenson, Park Maker, 14.
3. Charles Dickens, American Notes (New York: Penguin, 1985), 128.
4. Ibid., 138.
5. Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America (New York: Basic Books, 1986), 4.
6. Jackson, The Encyclopedia of New York City, 359.
7. Ted C. Hinckley, Alaskan John G. Brady: Missionary, Businessman, Judge, and Governor, 1878–1918 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 3.
8. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 8.
9. Claudia Goldin’s study cited in Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 58.
10. Edward K. Spann, The New Metropolis: New York City, 1840–1857 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 262.
11. George Matsell quoted in Bremner et al., Children and Youth in America, 1:755; see also Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 195.
12. Miriam Z. Langsam, Choldren West: A History of the Placing–Out System of the New York Children’s Aid Society, 1853–1890 (Madison: State Historical Society for the Department of History,
University of Wisconsin, 1964), vii.
13. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 58–59.
14. Ibid., 61.
15. Ibid., 63.
16. Ibid., 64.
17. Ibid., 62–63.
18. Jackson, The Encyclopedia of New York City, 1007.
19. Ibid., 219.
20. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 73–74.
21. Ibid., 16.
22. Ibid., 70.
23. Ibid., 79–80.
24. Ibid., 79.
25. Child, Letters from New York, 210.
26. Ibid., 201, 206.
27. Ibid., 204.
28. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 76.
29. Ibid., 77–78.
30. Ibid., 88.
31. Ibid., 82–83.
32. Ibid., 146.
33. Ibid., 90.
34. Charles Loring Brace, Home–Life in Germany (New York: Charles Scribner, 1853), 265.
35. Ibid., v.
36. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 114.
37. Boyer, Urban Masses, 95.
38. Child, Letters from New York, 209.
39. Brace, Home–Life in Germany, 91.
40. Ibid., 96.
41. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 98–100.
42. Ibid., 102.
43. Ibid., 103.
44. Ibid., 128.
45. Charles Loring Brace, Hungary in 1851; With an Experience of the Austrian Police (New York: Charles Scribner, 1852), 274.
46. Ibid., 278.
47. All the details and quotes pertaining to Brace’s interrogation are from Hungary in 1851, 279–91.
48. Ibid., 300–301.
49. Ibid., 302.
50. Ibid., 326–27.
51. Quoted in Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 145.
Part II: Doing
1. William Colopy Desmond, Sketches and Incidents in the Office of the Children’s Aid Society, handwritten journal (CAS archives), 177.
2. Children’s Aid Society, Record Book 6, 442.
3. City Missionary
1. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 148.
2. For the sake of comparison, Brace’s six–dollar weekly salary for part–time teaching at the Rutgers Institute brought him approximately three hundred dollars annually.
3. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 153–54.
4. Ibid., 178.
5. Ibid., 181.
6. Ibid., 182.
7. Ibid., 180.
8. Ibid., 179.
9. The location of both the Old Brewery and the original mission is now occupied by the New York County Court House, not so much by coincidence as design. After nearly a century of trying to reform Five Points, the city finally gave up in the 1880s and simply razed the entire neighborhood, replacing it with parks and outsized marble edifices dedicated to the law and civic bureaucracy.
10. Brace, The Dangerous Classes, 77–78.
11. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 180.
12. Brace, The Dangerous Classes, 158.
13. Ibid., 145–46.
14. Ibid., 78.
15. John Earl Williams, First Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the Children’s Mission to the Children of the Destitute (Boston: Benjamin H. Greene, 1850), 1.
16. The statistics and the Evening Post report come from Spann, The New Metropolis, 253.
17. Ibid., 255.
18. Williams, First Annual Report, 6.
19. Brace, The Dangerous Classes, 98–99.
20. Ibid., 302.
21. All quotes in this section from Brace, The Dangerous Classes, 80–81.
22. Charles Loring Brace, Short Sermons to News Boys. The cover and title pages are missing, but the book seems to have been published in the mid–1860s. From the collection of the Children’s Aid Society.
4. Draining the City, Saving the Children
1. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 160.
2. Charles Loring Brace, first publicity circular of the Children’s Aid Society, New York (publisher unknown, March 1853).
3. Brace, The Dangerous Classes, 82.
4. Ibid., 96.
5. Ibid., 76–77.
6. Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (New York: Penguin, 1968), 317–18.
7. All information regarding a typical newsboy’s day is from John Morrow, A Voice Among the Newsboys (New York: privately published, 1860), 127–33.
8. Brace, The Dangerous Classes, 109.
9. Charles Loring Brace, Eleventh Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1864), 12.
10. Brace, The Dangerous Classes, 100.
11. Ibid., 102.
12. See chapter 6.
13. Brace, The Dangerous Classes, 102–3.
14. Ibid., 105.
15. Ibid., 109.
16. Ibid., 106.
5. Journey to Dowagiac
1. Langsam, Children West, 17.
2. Brace, The Dangerous Classes, 410.’
3. Bruce Bellingham, ‘“Little Wanderers’: A Socio-historical Study of the Nineteenth-Century Origins of Child Fostering and Adoption Reform, Based on Early Records of the New York Children’s Aid Society” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1984), 313–14.
4. Ibid., 302.
5. Ibid., 185–86.
6. Ibid., 182.
7. Ibid., 186.
8. Charles Loring Brace, “Daily Journal.”
9. Brace, The Dangerous Classes, 225.
10. Brace, “Daily Journal” (emphasis in the original).
11. Brace, First Annual Report, 19.
12. Langsam, Children West, 27.
13. Brace, The Dangerous Classes, 227–28.
14. Ibid., 334–35
15. LeRoy Ashby, Endangered Children: Dependency, Neglect, and Abuse in American History (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997), 24.
16. Brace, The Dangerous Classes, 407–8; William W. Sanger, M.D., The History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes, and Effect Throughout the World (New York: Harper & Bros., 1858), 481.
17. Langsam, Children West, 35.
18. Marilyn Irvin Holt, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 48.
19. All the quotes are from E. P. Smith’s journal, which was published in Charles Loring Brace, Third Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (New York: M. B. Wynkoop, 1856), 54–60.
20. Emphasis in the original.
21. Most likely the girls were German, speakers of deutsch, and therefore called “Dutch” by nineteenth–century Americans.
22. Emphasis in the original.
23. Emphasis in the original.
24. Children’s Aid Society, “Company Books,” vol. 1, 1.
25. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 192–93.
6. A Voice Among the Newsboys
1. Brace, The Life of Charles Loring Brace, 197–98.
2. Ibid., 195.
3. Ibid., 204.
4. Ibid., 211.
5. Ibid., 220.
6. Except where otherwise noted, all information concerning Johnny Morrow and his family comes from Morrow, A Voice Among the Newsboys.
7. Anna Hope, “The Boy Who Confessed His Sin,” The Independent (late 1854 or 1855); reprinted in Newsboy, edited by Jack Bales (Horatio Alger Society newsletter, Jacksonville, III), 16, no. 1 (August 1977): 21–22.
8. Emphasis in the original.
9. Emphasis in the original.
10. Emphasis in the original.
11. Actually there were eight. Johnny seems to have forgotten to count himself.
12. Emphasis in the original.
13. Children’s Aid Society, record book, vol. 4, 76.
14. Charles Loring Brace, “A News Boy’s Funeral,” The Independent, June 6, 1861; reprinted in Charles Loring Brace, Ninth Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (New York: Wynkoop & Hallenbeck, 1862), 34–37.
15. Charles Loring Brace, “The Litt
le Theologue,” reprinted in Bales, Newsboy.
16. Brace, “A News Boy’s Funeral.”
17. The third anniversary of the founding of the CAS, or the second anniversary of the founding of the Newsboys’ Lodging House, the first in February and the second in March.
18. Probably Washington Square.
19. William Colopy Desmond, “Incidents and Sketches Among the Newsboys” (handwritten journal in CAS archives), pt. 4, 123–24.
20. Ibid., pt. 3, 59.
21. “Cars” generally refers to streetcars but can also refer to railroad cars.
22. His stepmother.
23. William Colopy Desmond, “Incidents and Sketches,” 81–83.
24. Langsam, Children West, 27.
25. Emphasis added.
26. Brace, “A News Boy’s Funeral.”
27. Hope, “The Boy Who Confessed His Sin.”
28. Brace, “A News Boy’s Funeral.”
29. Ibid.
7. Happy Circle
1. Charles Loring Brace, Sixth Annual Report of the Children’s Aid Society (New York: Wynkoop, Hallenbeck & Thomas, 1859), 9.
2. Bellingham, “Little Wanderers,’” 52.
3. Ibid., 335.
4. Henry W. Thurston, The Dependent Child (1930; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1974), 132–33
5. Based on figures in Children’s Rights/Marisol Joint Case Review Team, Marisol v. Giuliani Case Record Review: Services to Children in Foster Care and Their Families (December 1997), 119.
6. Children’s Aid Society, “Record Book,” vol. 3, 296.
7. Ibid., vol. 6, 442.
8. Bellingham, “Little Wanderers,’” 237.
9. Brace, first CAS publicity circular.
10. Jackson, The Encyclopedia of New York City, 298, 1007; Spann, The New Metropolis, 253.
Orphan Trains Page 43
