Hotels, churches, opera houses, city halls, and other spacious venues hosted the initial meet and greet. Reception committees took responsibility for spreading the word and screening sponsors, but there were no real standards or criteria. An impromptu and whimsical nature ruled the whole affair. “The Darnells didn’t know about it until a druggist told them,” one observer recollected. “They went over and [a young boy] came up and hugged Mr. Darnell’s legs. He said no at first, but came back and said he wanted the little fat boy.”
Post-placement supervision was as lax as the matching process. Anecdotal evidence indicates that children were beaten and sexually abused, but determining exactly how many were victimized is impossible because CAS conducted no extensive long-term oversight or investigations. Left in a strange house hundreds of miles from home and often taunted by their peers, some children suffered from loneliness and emotional neglect. “They didn’t want me to call them Mom and Dad,” one young man lamented, recalling his unaffectionate guardians. Nor did they ever hug him or express any loving words to him. “Think what that does to you,” he said.
Siblings were often separated, and CAS discouraged the children from communicating with blood relatives, recommending instead a clean break with the past. Many older kids quickly hightailed it out of their new homes, but whether they fled due to mistreatment or adolescent restlessness wasn’t always clear. Undoubtedly some discovered that whatever romantic notions they had entertained (or been told) about pastoral life didn’t prepare them for its arduous realities.
Despite a public perception that the children were orphans, a significant percentage had mothers and fathers who, although destitute, still loved them. Parents intent on finding their children encountered one obstacle after another. Agency records were shoddy and disorganized, and many children were filed under “whereabouts unknown” or had acquired new names from their present guardians. A mother hoping to reclaim her son who’d been placed far from his home in New York was brusquely told he had “no desire to return.” But when the boy heard that his birth mother wanted to reunite with him, he was out the front door and Manhattan-bound.
Brace himself acknowledged that more follow-up was needed, and CAS made improvements over the years (and later revolutionized foster care in America). But logistically and financially it was impossible to check on every child. Visiting a single farm or prairie house could take days, and CAS was too short-staffed and underfunded to cover so much territory.
Catholics were among Brace’s earliest and most vociferous opponents. Brace, a strict Protestant, had written crude statements about Catholicism in general, but what most angered various priests and bishops was CAS’s habit of sending Catholic children to Protestant families. Levi Silliman Ives, founder of the Catholic Protectory, excoriated CAS in his organization’s annual report:
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 effectively destroy every association which might revive in their hearts a love for the religion of which they had been robbed.
Brace argued that, when possible, CAS tried to match Catholic children with Catholic adults, but there just weren’t enough Catholic parents to meet the demand. Brace also had to contend with the prejudices of the times; like the majority of Americans, most sponsors were white and Protestant, and they wanted white, Protestant children. Ironically, a Catholic agency got into trouble when it tried to institute its own placing-out system and was accused of changing the surnames of Jewish children and sending them to live with Catholic families.
The harshest criticism leveled at Brace was that his efforts were comparable to the most heinous evil of the day—slavery. Along with the humiliating physical examinations the children had to endure publicly and the splitting apart of families, there were the often backbreaking working conditions. “If some Missionary Agent had taken that many little negroes from the plantations of Louisiana to Springfield or Jacksonville, and should have prepared to do the very thing with them that everybody knows will be done directly or indirectly with these poor children from New York,” one newspaper editor raged, “our good abolitionist friends … would all have fainted at the horrid thought.” Although Brace prohibited the practice, other placing-out programs inspired by CAS allowed children to become indentured servants, legally binding them to their sponsors for a set period.
Retracing the same route the children would have taken when they arrived in Dowagiac, Kay and I walk down West Railroad Street, hang a left at Commercial, and pass the district library where Kay works.
“What a cool little building,” I say, looking at the Carnegie-funded library. It’s an unusual mixture of modern and classical styles, and I’ve never seen anything like it. Kay isn’t sure of the architectural design either but informs me that residents had a critical decision to make before construction began: Andrew Carnegie stipulated that the community had to contribute an annual appropriation for operating costs, and Dowagiac had only enough money to pay for either the library or a new hospital.
“And they chose the library,” I say. “Wow, those are some hard-core book lovers.”
“We did get a hospital eventually,” Kay informs me.
Half a block away is the Beckwith Theatre. “The original building is gone,” Kay says, “but the meetinghouse used to be here.”
Spelled out on the Beckwith’s marquee in black lettering is this week’s show: The Uninvited.
No other stop on my itinerary, I tell Kay, resonates with me as personally as this one because I myself happen to be adopted. Not “plucked off the streets and shipped halfway across the country” adopted, but adopted nonetheless. Three days old at the time, I was placed by an agency into an unconditionally loving family, and I’d like to think that my experience, although wholly positive, has made me more sensitive to those whose experiences were not.
Which is why my immediate reaction to the orphan-train story was so negative. Abruptly uprooting children from the only community they’ve ever known, thrusting them into a series of degrading physical evaluations and potential rejections, and entrusting them to someone who’s received less screening than your average bank-loan applicant seemed to me grossly irresponsible, if not criminal.
Kay reminds me to consider that “people had a different way of thinking back then,” and that by all accounts Brace’s motives were pure.
From everything I’ve read about Brace and CAS, this does seem to be true. Even his fiercest critics never accused him of corruption or selfishness. And in stark contrast to the eugenicist Madison Grant, Brace didn’t believe that heredity determined one’s worth as a human being. “The moral Brotherhood of man does not depend on community of descent, but on a common nature, a similar destiny, and a like relation to their common Father—God,” Brace wrote in 1863, expressing a sentiment that Grant would probably have found emetic. Putting children into stable homes, Brace thought, would allow them to flourish. Every placement might have been a gamble, but Brace saw the alternative as guaranteed misery. Today it’s hard to imagine thousands of children sleeping in doorways and picking through rotted trash heaps for anything edible, but this was reality in nineteenth-century American cities. Boys got drawn into criminal gangs, and young girls were forced into prostitution. There were orphanages and group homes, but many were cramped, unventilated breeding grounds of disease and abuse.
And while CAS administrators received blistering mail from grown orphan-train riders denouncing them for various transgressions, they also opened their share of appreciative letters. “I shall ever acknowledge with gratitude that the C
hildren’s Aid Society has been the instrument of my elevation,” wrote a Yale University sophomore. “To be taken from the gutters of New York City and placed in a college is almost a miracle.” Others sent in donations with their letters to repay the cost of their train ticket.
It’s also only fair to note that foster care and adoption horror stories can be cherry-picked from today’s headlines as well. Months before I left for Niihau, Hawaii, my hometown paper, the Washington Post, ran this grisly item: WOMAN IS CHARGED IN DEATHS OF 2 GIRLS: CHILDREN WERE FOUND IN ADOPTIVE MOTHER’S FREEZER LAST YEAR.
In 1895, Michigan became the first state to start clamping down on placing-out programs, followed by Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, and Nebraska. But the children’s welfare didn’t seem to be the primary concern of legislators. “We cannot afford to have the state made a dumping ground for the dependent children of other states, especially New York,” Kansas governor William Stanley declared, echoing the frustrations of elected officials throughout the west. Increasingly, small towns were coping with an influx of “big-city” crimes such as prostitution and murder as their populations swelled, and they had their own abandoned and needy boys and girls to care for.
Officially, placing out ended in 1929; most states had made the practice illegal and cities were offering better social services to poverty-stricken families so they wouldn’t have to be separated. But a few orphans were still being put on trains as late as 1930.
The story of Alice Bullis, one of the very last riders, is emblematic of the program’s contradictions. Bullis had been an orphan in New York for two years before she was transported to Kansas. “[We] were shipped like cattle,” she recalled. “The adult agents who accompanied the children dressed them up and groomed them like livestock for a show. They taught them little poems and songs to present to their prospective owners.” Bullis had to be removed from her first two homes because the men tried to molest her. “None of these people took me in because they wanted someone to love,” she continued. “They just wanted me for work, and for whatever those old men wanted.” Her luck changed when she fell in love with a high school classmate named Donald Ayler. They married when she turned twenty and eventually settled in Oklahoma City. “Everything happens for a reason,” Alice Ayler said, looking back on her life. “I have been married to the same man for fifty-four years, proved that I had brains, and I have spent my life helping others. Some people are bitter about the trains, but not me. Even though there were some hard times, it probably saved my life.”
PARIS-COPE SERVICE STATION
It is a heavy burden of responsibility for us to bear, since most of the victims of our bomb were only pawns.…
[But] there was never a way to solve the race problem which would be “fair for everybody” or which everyone concerned could be politely persuaded into accepting without any fuss or unpleasantness.… And the same has been true of the Jewish problem and the immigration problem and the overpopulation problem and the eugenics problem.…
And it is already clear that the controlled media … are deliberately emphasizing the suffering we have caused by interspersing gory closeups of the victims with tearful interviews with their relatives.
Interviewers are asking leading questions like, “What kind of inhuman beasts do you think could have done something like this to your daughter?” They have clearly made the decision to portray the bombing of the FBI building as the atrocity of the century.
And, indeed, it is an act of unprecedented magnitude.
—From The Turner Diaries (1978) by the white supremacist William Luther Pierce, who wrote under the pen name Andrew MacDonald
WHEN DONALD MURPHY, California’s Department of Parks and Recreation director, read the complaint insisting that Madison Grant’s name be stripped from the Founders Tree plaque in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, he didn’t pass it off to an assistant or send back a perfunctory form letter. Instead, he personally composed a thoughtful, nuanced reply. “Is it ‘historically bizarre’ to commemorate Grant’s undeniable efforts on behalf of conservation in light of his undeniable racism?” Murphy asked near the beginning of his lengthy response.
Although he died in 1937 at age 72, Grant was a creature of the nineteenth century and as with many of his life contemporaries he held beliefs that most of us, hopefully, find both absurd and abhorrent today. Grant drew attention to his misguided deductions on race by setting them down on paper, but the sad truth is he probably did not think too differently than many others who’ve been “honored” for some historical role unrelated to the issue of race.
Murphy went on to explain why he took this so seriously:
I don’t ordinarily wear my ethnicity on my sleeve, so to speak, but in responding to your concerns I feel compelled to note that as an African American I think I have a personal perspective on the pain and suffering, the hurt and disappointment of racism.…
I say that only to let you know that I do not take lightly your request for removal of the plaque and that I can quite understand and appreciate the reasoning behind your request. I would hope you will understand too my decision to not have the plaque removed. Harmony among people comes from the true principles and attitudes of the present, not from purging the past.
I’ve been carrying Murphy’s letter with me during this entire leg of my journey, which started in Northern California and ends here in Oklahoma City, and I’ve read it numerous times now. Whether or not the plaque should be removed is a tough call. Murphy is absolutely correct that Madison Grant wasn’t alone in his views. President Teddy Roosevelt, birth control activist (and Planned Parenthood founder) Margaret Sanger, John Kellogg of breakfast-cereal fame, and Alexander Graham Bell, a lifelong advocate for deaf individuals who nevertheless believed they shouldn’t marry lest they reproduce hearing-impaired offspring, were just a handful of illustrious Americans who endorsed some variation of selective breeding. But none of them, it’s worth noting, collaborated with the Nazis or promoted eugenics as zealously as Grant. This might be a difference of degree rather than kind, but it’s a difference nonetheless.
Ultimately, I side with Murphy on not removing the plaque. It’s relatively small and unobtrusive and mostly states a historical fact—that Grant and two other men (also eugenics supporters) founded the Redwoods park—and doesn’t exalt them as all-around super-great guys. In an ideal world there’d be a marker here that addresses the more appalling aspects of Grant’s past. Although that, admittedly, might be a bit of a buzzkill in such an otherwise uplifting environment.
This whole issue also raises the question of what causes one generation of Americans to wrap its arms around noxious ideologies, while their descendants cast them off as repugnant. Social progress rarely moves forward with swift and deliberate speed but tends, it seems, to advance in fits and starts. Ideally, minds are changed when voices of conscience challenge the nation to live up to its fundamental principles. While it’s true that eugenics enjoyed widespread approval in the early 1900s, its acceptance was by no means universal.
A small but growing community of prominent journalists, scientists, elected officials, academics, judges, lawyers, and other impassioned souls, along with the Catholic Church, all advocated the abolishment of forced sterilizations and other forms of negative eugenics. In the mid-1930s they found an unlikely ally in a poor, one-footed former chicken thief named Jack T. Skinner.
On July 31, 1934, the frail, five-foot-six-inch Skinner limped up to the Paris-Cope Service Station at 735 North Harvey in Oklahoma City and robbed the attendant of $17 at gunpoint. Caught and tried, Skinner was sentenced to ten years at McAlester Prison. While he was behind bars, Oklahoma passed a law compelling “habitual” criminals—anyone with three convictions or more—to be sterilized, and the state picked Skinner to undergo a mandatory vasectomy because he’d committed two other crimes. The first was a misdemeanor for stealing chickens (although not commendable, this wasn’t exactly unheard-of during the Great Depression), and specifics abou
t the second offense aren’t known, but apparently it wasn’t serious enough to warrant much prison time.
Skinner fought the punishment in court, paying his counseling fees with money pooled by fellow inmates. Pure selflessness was not, it’s safe to assume, their prime motivation; they knew that if Skinner lost, they’d be next.
After the Oklahoma Supreme Court upheld the law, Skinner’s attorney, Claud Briggs, doubted that the U.S. Supreme Court would even consider the case, let alone rule in Skinner’s favor. Two new lawyers, Guy Andrews and H. I. Aston, joined the defense team and were more optimistic. Aston rushed to Washington and submitted an appeal on the very day of the Court’s deadline, October 8, 1941. Although by this time Skinner had already been released from McAlester for good behavior, Oklahoma’s assistant attorney general, Owen Watts, stated that, free or not, Skinner was still eligible for the chopping block, so to speak. On January 12, 1942, the Court agreed to hear Skinner v. Oklahoma.
Several legal principles were at issue, including cruel and unusual punishment, double jeopardy (that is, being penalized twice for the same crime), and the ex post facto nature of Oklahoma’s law, in that it was passed after Skinner had been convicted for the third time. But the Court justices zeroed in on an argument first emphasized by the McAlester inmates themselves: Why should chicken thieves be sterilized and not embezzlers, who were exempt from the law?
When Justice Felix Frankfurter posed this exact question to Oklahoma’s attorney general, Mac Williamson, during the May 6, 1942, oral arguments, Williamson replied, “There are elements of violence in stealing chickens.”
“Not if done surreptitiously,” interjected Chief Justice Harlan Stone, who fifteen years earlier had sided with the majority in Buck v. Bell, the infamous ruling that forced Carrie Buck and her young daughter to be sterilized. Williamson had no real answer to Stone’s remark.
Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History Page 15
