88.2  
Journals link Search link Partners link Information link
Spring, 2007
Previous
Next
New York History

Table of Contents
List journal issues
Home
Get a printer-friendly version of this page
 
 
 

Wrestling with Modernity:
Philanthropy and the Children's Aid Society in Progressive-Era New York City

Paul J. Ramsey, Indiana University, Bloomington1

In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut sardonically describes a law firm that is devoted to "the prevention of saintliness" among its clients. After a year or so at "some great university," a partner at the firm notes, a "young man ... has learned of unbelievable suffering" and hopes to alleviate those ills; the attorney's aim is to put a stop to such foolish thoughts. Such a firm could not count Charles Loring Brace among its clients. In 1853 Brace, a student at Union Theological Seminary, founded the New York Children's Aid Society (CAS) at the tender age of twenty-seven. As a missionary in New York City's notorious Five Points District, he became alarmed with the "homeless, begging, peddling, thieving hordes of little boys and girls" he saw there.2 Brace believed the best way to deal with these children of the "dangerous classes"—children who could possibly undermine the stability of the nation if they grew too numerous—was "not to punish them, but to prevent their growth" by bringing "them under the influence of the moral and fortunate classes."3 The industrial schools and lodging houses that the CAS established intended to tame the "street arabs" by focusing on "self-help," a form of philanthropy that Brace believed was more beneficial than outright alms-giving.4 1
      The most famous program of the Children's Aid Society, however, was in its emigration department, which between 1854 and 1929 sent around a quarter of a million children to live in "virtuous" households, a majority of which were in the Midwest and West. Brace thought that by placing these "dangerous" children in the country, they would absorb the morality of agrarian life.5 He noted that the farmers were the "most solid and intelligent class" in America, and, perhaps more importantly, they had an enormous "demand for labor."6 Nobody would lose under this system, according to Brace; the children would receive moral training, New Yorkers would be rid of their potentially dangerous children, and the rural citizens would receive much needed farm hands.7 2
      Philanthropy has long played a significant role in the development of the United States. In the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that Americans "constantly" come together to "establish hospitals, prisons, [and] schools," as well as to form all sorts of "religious, moral, serious, futile, very general and very specialized" charitable societies.8 While historian Merle Curti pointed out in the 1950s that "philanthropy has been one of the major aspects and keys to American social and cultural development," it, curiously, did not then attract the serious and undivided attention of historians.9 Recent decades have brought forth more sustained scholarship on philanthropic endeavors, and that literature has broadened the scope of philanthropy to include the charitable activities of groups outside the network of the powerful foundations, such as women, African Americans, and a host of small-scale organizations. But this emerging scholarship has also produced a historiography that is largely polarized, particularly concerning the changes that took place during the Progressive Era.10 That is, some historians argue that American philanthropy has been primarily benevolent in nature and has gradually "progressed" over time,11 while other scholars reject such an optimistic view by suggesting that charity has often been used for controlling purposes.12 3
      Some historical scholarship has attempted to neutralize this polarized debate by noting that both benevolent and controlling tendencies were simultaneously present during the Progressive Era,13 but such a position does not entirely break free from the dualism. More nuanced histories reject the debate entirely by attacking its anachronistic interpretations. Morton Keller, for instance, escapes the dualism by exploring the motivations and intentions of reformers within their own context and on their own terms.14 There is another means of avoiding the polarized debate over philanthropists' motives: by examining a single institution. That is, implicit within both the "benevolence" and "control" views of American philanthropy is the notion that it was a static endeavor, that philanthropy's mission remained on the same trajectory over the decades. Thus, the examination of a single philanthropic organization makes salient the changes within charitable aid.15 4
      This article attempts to move beyond the dualistic interpretations of philanthropic motivations by exploring a single philanthropic institution—the New York Children's Aid Society—to get a feel for the organic nature of aid to children during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The changes and shifts in CAS policies are explored within what Keller calls the primary motives of Progressive-Era philanthropists: efficiency, organization, and cohesion. While historian Joseph Hawes suggests the Children's Aid Society was a reflection of "the attitudes of the first half of the [nineteenth] century," the America the organization found itself in during the Progressive Era was vastly different from the one in which it first began in 1853.16 The inculcation of Protestant morality was the overarching mission of the society during its formative years, but the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century brought forth new ideas about the nature of childhood, education, and, of course, philanthropy. Greatly influenced by these emerging popular and scientific ideas, the New York Children's Aid Society increasingly focused its attention on younger children and incorporated various forms of expertise into its activities, particularly into its educational programs. During the Progressive Era, the CAS also began to implement new "family-saving" strategies into its charitable undertakings. Wrestling with these modern forms of charity, the Children's Aid Society transformed into a large organization with a variety of conflicting philanthropic aims. 5
   

"Babyhood" and Efficiency

 
      Perhaps the most noticeable alteration in the Children's Aid Society's activities during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was an increasing emphasis on young children. The Progressive Era, for instance, brought forth a substantial decline in the average age of the children being sent west by the emigration department. Marilyn Irvin Holt notes this change and suggests that beginning in the 1890s the CAS sent more infants and toddlers to live in rural homes than it had in previous decades. The society was somewhat notorious for its poor record-keeping, thus making it difficult to determine the exact average age for any particular period. The records that do exist, however, are suggestive of this decline in age.17 6
      During the formative decades of the Children's Aid Society, much of the organization's focus was on older youths. In 1855, for instance, the official journal of the CAS stated that of the eleven children with registered ages in one emigration party, the majority were fourteen and over; the remaining three children were eight, ten, and eleven. Secretary Brace, however, harbored somewhat ambivalent feelings toward older children and adults. He had a great deal of respect for the independence and honesty of the street adolescents, but occasionally questioned whether or not they, as well as adults, could be reformed through improved environments. Regardless of Brace's personal reservations, the society's official activities suggested that all could be saved. While many of the western emigrants were either adults or children in their middle to late teens, several of the programs carried out in the lodging houses and industrial schools were geared toward older children as well.18 Horatio Alger's fictional fourteen-year-old "Ragged Dick," for instance, stated that he would not "know what us boys would do without" the "Lodgin' House," a place where a bootblack or newsie could get "supper for six cents, and a bed for five cents more."19 7
      While adolescent street peddlers could still get a meal and a bed at a CAS "Lodgin' House" during the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century, the philanthropic organization was devoting more of its attention to young children. The boys and girls emigrating west, for instance, were significantly younger than those making the journey a few decades earlier. While the emigration party in 1855 consisted primarily of adolescents, a similar-sized group headed for Nebraska in 1899 did not contain one child over the age of fourteen.20 By the late nineteenth century, other CAS departments and activities also began to focus more attention on younger children. In 1876, for instance, the Children's Aid Society began its first kindergarten in its Eighteenth Street School. By 1897, the society operated nineteen kindergartens, one in nearly all of its schools. In 1906, the CAS kindergartens enrolled over four thousand children.21 8
      There are several reasons why the Children's Aid Society began to focus more attention on younger children around the turn of the century. Most noticeably, the philanthropic organization underwent a change in leadership. In 1890 Brace died after a lengthy struggle with kidney disease. Without the charismatic founder setting the tone for the entire organization, his sons—Charles Loring Brace, Jr. as the secretary and Robert N. Brace as the director of the emigration program—felt more comfortable about altering the long-standing emigration patterns. Charles Loring Brace, Jr.—Loring as he was known inside the Brace family—modified the emigration policy in order to eliminate some of the growing criticism of the "orphan trains." For some time, the Children's Aid Society had been attacked for placing Catholic children in Protestant homes. After his father's death, Loring tried to head off this line of criticism by suggesting the society's emigration program should focus more attention on Protestant children. Thereafter, the train riders were often young children from upstate New York, a region that was largely Protestant demographically. Loring, therefore, dramatically altered his father's vision by concentrating less on the urban street children of New York City and more on the Protestant youngsters in other areas of the state.22 9
      More important than the willingness of Brace's sons to change CAS policies, however, was the larger cultural movement that was redefining the notion of childhood, a movement that facilitated the focus on younger children. During the nineteenth century, the "middle-class child," as historian Steven Mintz notes, "was invented." European writers had long romanticized childhood by observing that it was a time of "innocence."23 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, claimed that not only were children innocent, they were pure by nature since "God makes all things good."24 Drawing inspiration from European Romanticism, the American middle class of the nineteenth century—having fewer children and, thus, becoming more child-centric—suggested children's innocence needed to be preserved and their "best interests" protected. The placement of orphaned or dependent youngsters reflected these changing attitudes toward children. Adoption legislation, established for the protection of children, became more common during the second half of the nineteenth century; Massachusetts passed its path-breaking adoption law in 1851, and New York followed suit in 1873. The Children's Aid Society's emigration program too was an outgrowth of this emerging child-centered movement. Rejecting the institutionalization that characterized child welfare prior to the mid-nineteenth century, Brace and his organization placed dependent and orphaned children with families, a placement that seemed much more humane than in asylums.25 10
      By the late nineteenth century, this child-centered movement evolved and gained force, and younger children came to be seen as more precious than their older counterparts. Viviana Zelizer argues that between the 1870s and the 1930s children came to be esteemed—almost solely—for their sentimental worth rather than for their economic contributions to families. This "sacralization" of children transformed placing-out in America. No longer was it appropriate for families to take in an orphaned or dependent child solely for his or her labor. Rather, the only legitimate reason for caring for a child was to love and nurture it. This new loving motive, Zelizer notes, made younger children more appealing to prospective parents.26 The Children's Aid Society certainly reflected this transformation. In the 1860s, rural parents taking in children were officially listed as "employer[s]," but by the twentieth century, they were described as "foster-parents."27 Moreover, in 1897, the society noted that foster parents in rural areas demanded babies, not older children. The Annual Report for that year stated: "Babyhood appeals irresistibly to every heart, and to the little ones the best homes are open." It also noted that it was for "these sentimental reasons" that older children, who "are no longer attractive," were hard to place.28 11
      In addition to these "sentimental reasons," new legal issues facilitated the sending of younger children to foster parents. Many states began to restrict child labor, although initially farm work was excluded from these laws. But, by the early part of the twentieth century, when any sort of exploitative work was perceived as harmful for children, the use of older children for farm labor became less socially and legally acceptable.29 Additionally, a number of western legislatures began to restrict the number of children coming into their states from the East due to a fear of delinquency. In 1901, for instance, Kansas required that orphaned children entering the state be of "good character," which subtly restricted the number of homeless teenagers allowed to enter.30 Moreover, the ambiguous legal status of the western emigrants also impacted the age of the philanthropic organization's clientele. The children sent to rural homes were, to use Holt's words, in "a state of limbo." That is, they were not fully under the care of their rural foster parents, either as adopted children or as indentured workers; instead, the CAS acted in loco parentis, although, legally, the society did not fully have custody of its charges.31 By the 1880s, Loring Brace tried to rectify this ambiguity by requiring that the parents or custodians of the orphan-train riders give up their claims on the children, thus allowing the society to have more control over its western emigrants. Even with the added custodial security, the children—the CAS complained in 1897—were "allowed to return to their unfit homes" if they so desired; this possibility made younger children all the more appealing since they could not run away from their foster families as easily.32 12
      Compulsory schooling too had an effect on the age of children being sent to the West; in 1874, the state of New York required that children between eight and fourteen receive some sort of formal education. Naturally, the law boosted the population in the society's schools, so much so that it began to establish new institutions to "meet the increased demand."33 While compulsory schooling addressed many of the needs of older kids, the youngest children still required some assistance, assistance that partially came from western foster care. For Progressive-Era philanthropists, focusing on younger children was simply a matter of "efficiency," a buzzword in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century that captured the underlying motivations of reformers. That is, philanthropists, educators, and others in the emerging helping professions used an industrial model to outline the methods for social betterment, a model that suggested that waste and duplication should be avoided, while scarce resources should go to the areas where they would have the greatest impact.34 It seemed "inefficient" to prioritize the services to older children when some of their needs were being met by the schools; instead, the Children's Aid Society needed to focus more of its attention on those who were offered very few opportunities for help: the youngest children. 13
      While the notion of "efficiency" suggested that older children were best served by the society's schools, this new industrial concept also manifested itself in a less-benign popular and "scientific" movement: social Darwinism. The use of Darwin's theory of evolution for the study of human society was an endeavor that took root in the United States after the Civil War and captured the American mind for generations to come. For American intellectuals in the nineteenth century, social Darwinism was interpreted in two distinct ways. Conservative theorists, such as William Graham Sumner, emphasized the biological determinism of Darwinian thought, while more progressive scholars, such as Lester Frank Ward, pointed to the molding power of the environment. Historian Richard Hofstadter notes that the conservative side of social Darwinism found its greatest audience before the turn of the twentieth century because it simply confirmed what many Americans already believed; that is, social Darwinian thought emphasized individualism, competition, and social hierarchies through its acceptance of the doctrine of "survival of the fittest." The more environmental and collectivist interpretation of social Darwinism came to the fore after 1900 because it meshed well with the worldviews of the progressives who came to dominate American political culture. Although the determinist side of social Darwinian thought tended to decline during the Progressive Era—replaced by an emphasis on the molding power of the environment—biological determinism persisted, particularly in the area of racial theory.35 14
      As a result of the waves of "inferior" immigrants pouring into the country from southern and eastern Europe, racialism became quite pronounced in American thought at the end of the nineteenth century. This racialism, naturally flowing from social Darwinism, found legitimacy from a number of sources, but perhaps the most powerful was the developing field of anthropology.36 By the turn of the century, "scientific" racism was a common aspect of the anthropological literature. Daniel G. Brinton's work, for instance, bolstered the notion of superior and inferior races, noting that the "lower" races (those characterized by non-Anglo features) were closely related to certain types of "apes."37 The U.S. Immigration Commission gave these ideas state approval when it composed its Dictionary of Races or Peoples in the early part of the twentieth century; the dictionary was largely based on Brinton's analysis. The commission described the English and German "races" in fairly positive terms, but noted that southern Italians—the largest group of immigrants in the first decade of the twentieth century—were "excitable," "impulsive," and prone to crime and gambling. Moreover, these Italians had "little adaptability to [a] highly organized society."38 15
      Although social Darwinism helped give rise to modern notions of racism from its biological emphasis, it also suggested that the environment too could shape people—if they were young and malleable enough. These developing ideas were shaping the larger cultural milieu in nineteenth-century America, and they spread into the realms of philanthropy and child welfare as well, realms that tended to emphasize both the biological and environmental aspects of social Darwinian thought.39 For instance, although sympathetic to the plight of the immigrant poor, Jacob Riis—journalist, social activist, and supporter of the Children's Aid Society—mirrored the modern racial views by suggesting that the typical Italian was intellectually inferior, prone to vice, and "content to live in a pig-sty."40 Similarly, while the Children's Aid Society was largely made up of individuals who truly cared about children, even the "new" immigrant children—as countless narratives in the Annual Reports attest—the organization and its activities reflected these new racialist attitudes. The society noted that the immigrants from southern and eastern Europe were a "problem," because this "alien population" had come from "civilizations widely separated from our own." The Children's Aid Society, therefore, took these children into its schools partially to "weed out those unfitted for placing."41 Those unfit for western foster care seemed to have been not only the older children, but also the Italians and Jews. By the 1890s, the society was suggesting that older boys were largely beyond salvation since their "early lives" had been corrupted.42 Moreover, during the early years of the twentieth century the largest number of children in the CAS schools came from southern Italy, but Italian boys and girls, along with their Jewish contemporaries, were not being sent to the West in large numbers. Although the Children's Aid Society was certainly concerned about the criticism it received from sending children of other religions to live in Protestant homes, it also incorporated the racialism of the age—and the notion that the newer immigrants were inferior—into its emigration policy. Rather than placing them out, for example, the society focused on providing an education to the "children of those nationalities least assimilable [sic] and who therefore require the instruction we give them."43 Social Darwinian thought, therefore, helped determine the most "efficient" means of distributing the Children's Aid Society's available slots for western foster homes. 16
   

Organization and Expertise

 
      While philanthropists at the turn of the twentieth century looked to the great industries for guidance on how to distribute their aid "efficiently," they also increasingly looked to those corporations for organizational and bureaucratic inspiration. By the early twentieth century, the small-scale aid that had characterized much of nineteenth-century philanthropy was quickly becoming outdated by the rise of the newly created philanthropic foundations, which were generously supported by America's leading industrialists.44 The desire for organization and efficiency—a desire that was characteristic of progressive thought and shaped the structure of the charitable foundations—fueled changes among the smaller philanthropies. Historian LeRoy Ashby notes a pattern in small philanthropic organizations' transition into the Progressive Era. The charities devoted to children were often creations of "amateur altruists" who were committed to mid-nineteenth-century notions of child welfare. With the coming of the twentieth century, however, these organizations and their old-guard leadership had to come to grips with modern phenomena, such as the professionalization of social work and the bureaucratization of philanthropy. The transition to the new order was not always smooth, but, nevertheless, the small-scale child-saving organizations gradually incorporated the emerging "expertise" into their agencies, especially after control passed on to the second generation of philanthropic administrators.45 17
      With regard to the reaching out to new forms of expertise, the Children's Aid Society closely paralleled Ashby's pattern of development as it moved into the twentieth century. For much of his tenure as the CAS secretary, Brace staffed the society with lay volunteers. He was somewhat resistant to the bureaucratic aspects of expert organization, noting that philanthropy required not only efficiency, but also kindness. Increasingly, Brace did begin to use salaried experts in his charitable society. The Progressive Era, however, brought forth a greater drive for organizational expertise. For example, the State Charities Aid Association (SCAA) in New York—an association that was formed in the 1870s and was supported by many CAS leaders—increasingly pushed for greater bureaucratic organization among the charitable societies in the state during the 1890s, largely due to the activism of the association's leader, Homer Folks. By the Progressive Era, these bureaucratic reforms found a receptive audience among the new CAS leadership. Loring and Robert Brace were men of expertise; both were engineers by training. As secretary of the Children's Aid Society, Loring implemented organizational and bookkeeping policies that were very much in line with the views of Folks's SCAA.46 18
      In addition to organizational expertise, CAS officials increasingly became interested in medical expertise and the health of New York City's children, and added programs to address that interest. In 1872, for instance, the society began its Sick Children's Mission. After the 1880s, when "neglect" and "cruelty" were popularly viewed as "health" (as well as moral) issues, the society engaged in more medical campaigns.47 The Children's Aid Society developed sanitariums for sick children, created playgrounds, opened schools and programs for children with special medical and mental needs, employed nurses and dental experts, and implemented nutritional instruction in its schools. By 1903, the philanthropy's Sick Children's Mission had ten physicians, fifteen pharmacists, and seven nurses who provided regular services. This mission, along with the CAS summer health programs, served over ten thousand children annually, and the society boasted that these activities significantly reduced the infant death rate in New York City. An impressive health facility was added to the organization's missionary arsenal in 1909. The society purchased a beautiful convalescent home in Chappaqua, New York that had over one hundred fifty beds, vast grounds, and excellent air quality due to the home's mountainside elevation.48 19
      The cultural movement that emphasized expertise also transformed the educational mission of the Children's Aid Society's schools during the Progressive Era. Until the twentieth century, the primary focus of the CAS educational activities was on moral training. Even the society's industrial schools emphasized moral lessons rather than mechanical skills. In 1863 Brace noted that the "influence of the Industrial School has always been designed to be a moral one, rather than intellectual."49 Not only were the industrial schools promoting moral and religious lessons, but so too were the lodging houses and the boys' meetings; the lodging houses had Protestant ministers deliver sermons to the youngsters. The success of these CAS activities was often defined in moral terms, such as children's devotion to the virtues of cleanliness, thrift, and industry, or their familiarity with Christian beliefs.50 The Children's Aid Society inculcated these simple moral certainties with the hope that they would provide children with a value system to direct their actions, a goal that closely paralleled the endeavors of public school educators during the nineteenth century. As historian B. Edward McClellan points out, school officials "believed that only absolute rules rigidly adhered to could provide a reliable guide to behavior and protect against the enormous temptations of the day."51 The moral code that the Children's Aid Society promoted was essentially identical to the ones found in elementary school primers. It emphasized honesty, purity, industry, obedience, and one's duties to adults and to God.52 20
      By the turn of the twentieth century, however, the Children's Aid Society was rethinking its educational mission. The moral emphasis still remained in the CAS schools and lodging houses, but there was an increased interest in providing children with the types of specialized skills necessary for modern living, particularly vocational skills. Just as the society's moral training mirrored the public school curriculum, so too did this shift to vocational training during the industrial era. McClellan writes that schools in "modern society placed a premium on specialization, technical expertise, and the ability to interact smoothly in an impersonal, rule-governed corporate structure. Success ... depended less on character in the traditional sense than on skill, efficiency, and social competence."53 Loring was not a cleric like his father, which certainly contributed to the shift in values, but the Children's Aid Society also recognized that in order to make good citizens, its children required more than rigid moral training. By the twentieth century, therefore, the CAS educational programs provided more in the way of vocational preparation, and poor and immigrant families certainly took advantage of these and other opportunities in order to better their lot in life.54 21
      The transformation of the society's educational activities was quite dramatic. In the early years of the twentieth century, for instance, the Newsboys' Lodging House began to offer courses in "electric wiring and plumbing," and the Farm School trained boys in the latest techniques of scientific farming and livestock care with the hope of producing skilled cultivators and "expert dairymen."55 Part of the new mission of the educational programs was, as the CAS noted, the creation of a "smart boy," rather than just a "good boy." The society increasingly boasted of its former charges who had gone on to receive higher education and important positions, and the children in its schools, if they had the potential, were encouraged to transfer to the public schools, presumably to prepare for more advanced training.56 Nothing symbolized this shift to a vocational, specialist focus more than the appointment of Charles Prosser to the position of superintendent for the society's industrial schools in 1909. Prosser, who would later become well-known for his promotion of the life-adjustment curriculum in the public schools, was a leading "social-efficiency" educator. His primary recommendation to the society, and later to the public schools, was a greater emphasis on "trade" training for the city's children.57 22
   

Family Saving and Cohesion

 
      Although the focus on health and specialized training was a new direction for the Children's Aid Society, perhaps the most dramatic shift in the philanthropic organization's policy during the Progressive Era was an increased emphasis on "family-saving" strategies. Until it ceased operation in 1929, the society's western emigration program was directed at "child saving." That is, it focused on removing children from their "unfit" parents in order to provide them with a more wholesome life in the country, thereby "saving" them. Since nearly half of the emigrants before 1893 were not technically orphans—i.e., at least one of their parents was still alive—one of the primary outcomes of the orphan trains was the breakup of low-income families.58 Historian Michael Katz notes that social reformers "advocated family breakup not just when parents drank, stole, or seemed otherwise immoral and neglectful but, even more, when they were so poor that they had to ask for relief."59 ("Americans," as Vonnegut stingingly points out, "have long been taught to hate all people who will not or cannot work, to hate even themselves for that."60) While the emigration department sought to break up the poor families among the "dangerous classes," the philanthropic organization was establishing a number of new programs that attempted to hold them together. Family saving, while paradoxically interpreted by historians as an expression either of benevolent or of controlling desires, was primarily an attempt at creating a more cohesive society. 23
      There are multiple reasons why the Children's Aid Society began to alter its long-standing policy of child saving to include more programs that focused on whole families. In the realm of social work, family saving was becoming the preferred welfare strategy. For social reformers—such as Jane Addams of Chicago's Hull House—family saving seemed more humane than child saving or institutionalization, and these progressives increasingly believed that children had a positive moral impact on their parents. By the early twentieth century, the Children's Aid Society claimed that one of its central goals was "the preserving of homes that are in danger of breaking up." "[N]o child," the society continued, "should be taken from its natural parents until everything possible has been done to build the home into a proper place for the child"; such work resulted in "the saving not only of the children, but of the parents as well."61 24
      In the first decade of the twentieth century, family saving received official endorsement from the federal government and thus became a national priority. In 1909 the White House Conference on Children—a conference that Folks chaired—recommended that families should remain intact whenever possible, which surely eroded some of the Children's Aid Society's confidence in its emigration program. After the White House Conference on Children, the CAS suggested it had always been involved in preserving families through its work in the industrial schools. The society suggested that family preservation was the founding "purpose" of the industrial schools, which, given Brace's moral-training justification, was not entirely accurate.62 25
      In addition to the humaneness issue, the family-saving movement that swept across the United States also reflected a desire for social cohesion, a cohesion that progressive reformers desperately sought in response to the large number of immigrants that were coming from southern and eastern Europe. As Richard Hofstadter points out, many Progressive-Era reforms were largely conservative in nature: conservative in the sense that they attempted to preserve the social hierarchies and statuses that were thought to have existed in a previous, supposedly more stable age. Moreover, progressive reform took many of its cues from the earlier Populist movement, a movement that was saturated with nativist sentiments. The "new" immigrants that began to arrive during the Progressive period brought with them a variety of childrearing practices that did not live up to the new "scientific" and child-protective ideals advocated by the middle-class proponents of the precious child. Many immigrants allowed their children to drink alcohol, fed their youngsters odd foods, swaddled their infants, had poor hygiene practices compared to American standards, used superstitious rituals—what Saul Bellow calls "kitchen religion"—to heal their ill family members, and disciplined their children by physical means.63 By contrast, the ideal American parents, as described by the leading Progressive-Era child-rearing manuals, prohibited the use of dangerous substances such as alcohol, dressed their children in loose-fitting clothing to allow for exercise, bathed their children daily, and deferred to expert advice from medical professionals in the event of illness. Moreover, physical punishment, experts noted, "has no place in the proper upbringing" of children because such methods damage the emotional well-being of the precious youngsters.64 26
      This desire for humane treatment and child protection was coupled with a pragmatic concern that child saving was an unworkable plan, particularly given the number of new destitute immigrants pouring into the United States each year. "Draining" the cities of the "dangerous classes" was not working; there were simply too many morally and financially bankrupt individuals in America, individuals who were threatening American cohesion.65 By the twentieth century, the Children's Aid Society was clearly not sending the newcomers to rural homes, as Holt's analysis demonstrates; the country homes in the West seemed to be reserved for those most likely to benefit from them. For the "helpless and ignorant people ... [from] southern and eastern Europe" there were the CAS schools, as well as a new strategy to deal with their particular needs: family saving.66 Family saving, although by modern standards certainly more humane than child saving, was an opportunity for "progressive" philanthropists to monitor the activities of these "inferior" families. While the Children's Aid Society suggested that its educational programs were in tune with the new emphasis on the whole family, the CAS schools demonstrated not so much a devotion to family saving per se as they did a devotion to the underlying principles behind it: the "normalizing" of poor and immigrant families in order to create a more cohesive society.67 27
      In response to the trend toward family saving, the Children's Aid Society developed programs that kept families intact, such as a model tenement. The location that was selected for the tenement was an immigrant neighborhood that was inhabited primarily by eastern Europeans; in fact, the CAS school near the housing development had only six "Americans" attending, out of nearly seven hundred students.68 In the early part of the twentieth century, the society also operated a "Home for Homeless Mothers with Children," which served nearly six hundred women and children in 1906. Two decades later, the Children's Aid Society opened another shelter for women and children. For the society's officials, contact with immigrant and poor families was an opportunity to inculcate middle-class American values. After reuniting a destitute family, for instance, the CAS bragged that the "Children's Aid worker still calls to make suggestions as to the family budget and the proper diet for the children."69 Julia G. Colby, the supervisor of the women's shelter on East Twelfth Street, noted that the young women there were "taught how to care for the little one[s] while the older women learn how to patch and darn the children's clothing."70 28
      For progressive reformers, the juvenile court was a key component of the family saving strategy and, thus, of a more cohesive society. Emerging first in Chicago in 1899, juvenile courts quickly spread to other large cities, including New York in 1901. The aim of the new courts was to provide a more supportive judicial environment for young offenders. In keeping with the new goal of family saving, the courts returned most of the minors to their families. While seemingly more humane than the remoteness of the adult judicial system, the juvenile court, as Andrew Polsky notes, was based on a "therapeutic model," a model that suggested disturbed children and their families could be healed by the court's officials, especially the probation officers. In the early twentieth century, the Children's Aid Society worked with New York City's newly created juvenile court quite closely. The society, for instance, used two of its employees, David Willard and J. C. Graveur, to oversee the probation of juvenile offenders. As part of their official duties, the CAS probation officers closely monitored the children's homes and met with the children frequently. Moreover, in extreme cases, when a child was taken from its family, "the judge," the society noted in 1924, "often sends that boy to The Children's Aid Society, and he is looked after in pleasant surroundings until he gets back on his feet"; the CAS Farm School was a common destination for juvenile offenders who had been removed from their families.71 29
   

Conclusions

 
      While much of the literature on philanthropy suggests that charitable aid was either benevolent or controlling, such views are somewhat anachronistic in the sense that they impose our modern standards on historical others and overlook what the progressive reformers were actually trying to accomplish. Turn-of-the-century philanthropists and policymakers, Keller reminds us, "had a shared sense that the good society was efficient, organized, [and] cohesive"; these were the motivations for reform and the true "heart of Progressivism."72 The benevolence and control theses also implicitly suggest that the mission of philanthropic institutions largely remained unaltered over time. Examining a single institution as it transitioned into a new era of philanthropic thought brings to the fore the problematic simplicity of these historiographic perspectives by highlighting the organic nature of charitable endeavors. 30
      As it wrestled with the "heart of Progressivism," the Children's Aid Society was anything but a static organization. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the society encountered social conditions that were dramatically different from those in 1853. The organization, therefore, altered its activities to fit with the needs of modern America. Cultural, legal, and "scientific" developments pressured the Children's Aid Society to focus more of its attention on younger children, which was also the most "efficient" means of distributing scarce resources. The progressive devotion to expert knowledge helped bring about changes in the society's organizational structure, educational mission, and charitable works. The Children's Aid Society's focus on family saving—aimed at social cohesion and stability—was clearly a departure from much of the society's earlier work, which gave a sort of inconsistent tone to the organization during the Progressive Era. That is, one department was attempting to break up families, while several others were attempting to keep them together. The philanthropic organization had grown so large—like a modern industry or foundation—that it no longer had the sort of institutional coherence it had during its formative years. In fact, the all-encompassing moral training mission of the mid-nineteenth century seemed outdated and constraining by the turn of the twentieth century. What this suggests is that during the Progressive Era, the organization was attempting to redefine itself and its mission for a vastly different century than the one in which it had begun. 31


1.  Paul J. Ramsey is a Ph.D. candidate in Indiana University's history of education program. He would like to thank Michael Grossberg, B. Edward McClellan, John L. Rury, and Andrea Walton for reading early drafts of this essay. The author also would like to thank New York History's anonymous reviewers and editorial staff for their thoughtful comments and criticisms.

2.  Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (New York: Delta, 1998),164–70; Children's Aid Society, The Crusade for Children: A Review of Child Life in New York during 75 Years, 1853–1928 (n.p., n.d.), 5, 7; Marilyn Irvin Holt, The Orphan Trains: Placing Out in America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 41–49; Stephen O'Connor, Orphan Trains: The Story of Charles Loring Brace and the Children He Saved and Failed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 72–82.

3.  Charles Loring Brace, The Dangerous Classes of New York, and Twenty Years' Work among Them, 3rd ed. (New York: Wynkoop and Hallenbeck, 1880), ii.

4.  CAS, Crusade for Children, 5–21; Joseph M. Hawes, Children in Urban Society: Juvenile Delinquency in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 92–98.

5.  CAS, Crusade for Children, 5–21; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 3–4, 162; O'Connor, Orphan Trains, xvii–xx; Michael D. Patrick and Evelyn Goodrich Trickel, Orphan Trains to Missouri (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997), 11–21; Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1975), 132–56.

6.  Brace, Dangerous Classes, 225.

7.  Brace, Dangerous Classes, 225; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 28–32; CAS, Crusade for Children, 14–21.

8.  Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), 596.

9.  Merle Curti, "The History of American Philanthropy as a Field of Research," American Historical Review 62 (1957): 352; Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, "Philanthropy, Education, and the Politics of Knowledge," Teachers College Record 93, no. 3 (1992): 361–69.

10.  Clay Gish, "Rescuing the 'Waifs and Strays' of the City: The Western Emigration Program of the Children's Aid Society," Journal of Social History 33, no. 1 (1999): 122–23; Lagemann, "Philanthropy, Education, and the Politics of Knowledge," 361–69; Eric Anderson and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., Dangerous Donations: Northern Philanthropy and Southern Black Education, 1902–1930 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1999), 1–12; Robert L. Payton, Philanthropy: Voluntary Action for the Public Good (New York: American Council on Education and Macmillan Publishing Company, 1988), 92–94; Andrea Walton, ed., Women and Philanthropy in Education (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 1–36.

11.  For example, see Merle Curti, "American Philanthropy and the National Character," American Quarterly 10 (1958): 420–37; Robert Bremner, American Philanthropy, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 1–4; Hawes, Children in Urban Society; Walter I. Trattner, From Poor Law to Welfare State: A History of Social Welfare in America, 6th ed. (New York: The Free Press, 1999), 108–39.

12.  For example, see Robert F. Arnove, ed., Philanthropy and Cultural Imperialism: The Foundation at Home and Abroad (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 1–23; Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America, 10th anniversary ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 117–50.

13.  LeRoy Ashby, Saving the Waifs: Reformers and Dependent Children, 1870–1917 (Philadelphia, Pa.: Temple University Press, 1984), 8–10; Lawrence J. Friedman and Mark D. McGarvie, eds., Charity, Philanthropy, and Civility in American History (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5–6.

14.  Morton Keller, Regulating a New Society: Public Policy and Social Change in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 4.

15.  For example, see Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1989); Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, Private Power for the Public Good: A History of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching (New York: College Entrance Examination Board, 1999).

16.  Keller, Regulating a New Society, 4; Hawes, Children in Urban Society, 88.

17.  O'Connor, Orphan Trains, 202; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 139–40. Holt has studied the advertisements for the children sent west so her statistics are more comprehensive than those occasionally listed by the Children's Aid Society's Annual Reports.

18. Second Annual Report of the Children's Aid Society, February, 1855 (New York: M. B. Wynkoop, 1855), 4, 10–16, 44–46; Brace, Dangerous Classes, 97–101; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 3, 42–43; O'Connor, Orphan Trains, 72–76.

19.  Horatio Alger, Jr., Ragged Dick or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-blacks (1868; reprint, New York: Signet Classics, 1990), 45.

20.  CAS, Annual Report, 1855, 44–46; Fifty-Fourth Annual Report of the Children's Aid Society for Year Ending October 1, 1906 (n.p, n.d.), 19–22; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 139–40.

21.  CAS, Crusade for Children, 50; Forty-Fifth Annual Report of the Children's Aid Society, November, 1897 (n.p., n.d.), 34; CAS, Annual Report, 1906, 66–67.

22.  CAS, Crusade for Children, 51; Forty-Ninth Annual Report of the Children's Aid Society for Year Ending October 1, 1901 (n.p, n.d.), iii–iv; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 78; O'Connor, Orphan Trains, 168–69, 284–87, 299.

23.  Steven Mintz, Huck's Raft: A History of American Childhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2004), 75–77.

24.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. Barbara Foxley (North Clarendon, Vt.: Everyman, J. M. Dent, and Tuttle Publishing, 2003), 5.

25.  Mintz, Huck's Raft, 75–93, 154–84; Mary Ann Mason, From Father's Property to Children's Rights: The History of Child Custody in the United States (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 73–75, 108–11.

26.  Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3–15, 189–95.

27. Tenth Annual Report of the Children's Aid Society, February, 1863 (New York: Wynkoop, Hallenbeck and Thomas, 1863), 56; CAS, Annual Report, 1906, 118.

28.  CAS, Annual Report, 1897, 5.

29.  Jane Addams, "Child Labor Legislation—A Requisite for Industrial Efficiency," in On Education, ed. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2002), 124–35; Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child, 74–85; CAS, Crusade for Children, 25, 50.

30.  Holt, The Orphan Trains, 149–51.

31.  Holt, The Orphan Trains, 141–42.

32.  CAS, Annual Report, 1897, 5; O'Connor, Orphan Trains, 304; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 139–42.

33.  Robert H. Bremner, ed., "Compulsory Attendance Laws in New York State," in Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 1423; CAS, Crusade for Children, 24–25; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 28.

34.  Addams, "Child Labor Legislation," 124, 130–31; Keller, Regulating a New Society, 4–5; Herbert M. Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 1893–1958, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 17–21.

35.  Hawes, Children in Urban Society, 197–202; Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944; reprint, intro. by Eric Foner, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 51–84, 170–96, 201–04.

36.  John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 5–11, 131–57; Hawes, Children in Urban Society, 197–202; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 70–73.

37.  Daniel G. Brinton, Races and Peoples: Lectures on the Science of Ethnography (New York: N. D. C. Hodges, 1890), 47–48.

38.  U.S. Immigration Commission, Dictionary of Races or Peoples (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1911), ii, 7–9, 54–57, 64–68,81–85.

39.  Higham, Strangers in the Land, 131–57; Trattner, From Poor Law, 111; Anthony M. Platt, The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 43–44; Hawes, Children in Urban Society, 97–202; Hofstadter, Social Darwinism, 143–96; William Graham Sumner, "Sociology," in The American Intellectual Tradition: A Sourcebook, vol. 2, 4th ed., ed. David A. Hollinger and Charles Capper (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 20–29; Richard Louis Dugdale, "The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity [and] Further Studies of Criminals," 1877, in Children and Youth in America: A Documentary History, vol. 2, ed. Robert H. Bremner (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), 555–57; Andrew Carnegie, "Wealth," North American Review 147 (June 1889): 653–64.

40.  Jacob A. Riis, How the Other Half Lives (1890; reprint, intro. by Francesco Cordasco, New York: Garrett Press, 1970), 48–54.

41.  CAS, Crusade for Children, 28–32.

42.  CAS, Annual Report, 1897, 5–6; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 69–71.

43.  CAS, Annual Report, 1897, 35; Fifty-First Annual Report of the Children's Aid Society for Year Ending October 1, 1903 (n.p., n.d.), 13; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 69–70, 106–17, 128–29.

44.  Carnegie, "Wealth," 653–64; Bremner, American Philanthropy, 85–99; Lagemann, Private Power, 3–20, 37–55.

45.  Ashby, Saving the Waifs, 8, 23–34, 207; Keller, Regulating a New Society, 4–5.

46.  Bender, Toward an Urban Vision, 151–56; O'Connor, Orphan Trains, 288–92, 300–04; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 78.

47.  CAS, Crusade for Children, 50–51; "Abandonment and Other Acts of Cruelty to Children, Laws of New York," 1881, in Children and Youth in America, 194–95; David Dudley Field, "The Child and the State," 1886, in Children and Youth in America, 205–07; Mason, From Father's Property to Children's Rights, 104–05.

48.  CAS, Crusade for Children, 50–51; CAS, Annual Report, 1903, 11, 39; Fifty-Seventh Annual Report of the Children's Aid Society for Year Ending September 30, 1909 (n.p., n.d.), 9–18.

49.  CAS, Annual Report, 1863, 23.

50.  CAS, Crusade for Children, 17–18; CAS, Annual Report, 1855, 4–15; Seventh Annual Report of the Children's Aid Society, February, 1860 (New York: Wynkoop, Hallenbeck and Thomas, 1863), 6–10, 17–20; O'Connor, Orphan Trains, 237.

51.  B. Edward McClellan, Moral Education in America: Schools and the Shaping of Character from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 26.

52.  CAS, Annual Report, 1855, 4–15; CAS, Annual Report, 1860, 6–10, 17–20; Benjamin B. Comegys, ed., Primer of Ethics (Boston, Mass.: Ginn, 1891), 9, 17, 22, 48, 77, 95, 113, 124.

53.  McClellan, Moral Education in America, 46.

54.  Gish, "Rescuing the 'Waifs and Strays' of the City," 126–31; Leonard Covello, with Guido D'Agostino, The Heart Is the Teacher (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958), 24–27, 39–42; O'Connor, Orphan Trains, 300–01.

55.  CAS, Annual Report, 1906, 13–16.

56.  CAS, Annual Report, 1906, 12–13, 23, 26, 40; CAS, Annual Report, 1909, 18–20.

57.  CAS, Annual Report, 1909, 18–20; Kliebard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum, 77–131, 205–30.

58.  Holt, The Orphan Trains, 128–29; CAS, Annual Report, 1897, 5; CAS, Crusade for Children, 10–14; Barbara Finkelstein, "Uncle Sam and the Children: A History of Government Involvement in Child Rearing," in Growing Up in America: Children in Historical Perspective, ed. N. Ray Hiner and Joseph M. Hawes (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 256–61; O'Connor, Orphan Trains, xx.

59.  Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 129.

60.  Vonnegut, God Bless You, 265.

61.  Jane Addams, "Moral Education and Legal Protection for Children," in On Education, 192–203; Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 128–31; CAS, Seventy-Second Annual Report of the Winter's Work (New York: n.p., 1924), 15.

62.  Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 128–31; CAS, Crusade for Children, 50–51; CAS, Annual Report, 1863, 23; CAS, Annual Report, 1906, 63–64; CAS, Annual Report, 1909, 25–26; O'Connor, Orphan Trains, 296–98.

63.  Keller, Regulating a New Society, 4–5; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (1955; reprint, New York: Vintage Books, n.d.), 77–86, 131–86; Covello, The Heart Is the Teacher, 15, 28–29; Riis, How the Other Half Lives, 32–44, 48–52, 113; Mary Antin, The Promised Land, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), 42, 70, 73, 137–38, 286–90; Jane Addams, "A Function of the Social Settlement," in On Education, 89–90; Mintz, Huck's Raft, 154–84; Christopher Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 5–20; Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (New York: Penguin Books, 1996), 12.

64.  Mrs. Max West, Infant Care (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1914), 58, 62, 64–74, 76–77; L. Emmett Holt, The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children's Nurses, 6th ed. (New York: D. Appleton, 1913), 16, 165; J. P. Crozer Griffith, The Care of the Baby: A Manual for Mothers and Nurses Containing Practical Directions for the Management of Infancy and Childhood in Health and in Disease (Philadelphia, Pa.: W. B. Saunders, 1898), 165, 176.

65.  Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 128–34; Finkelstein, "Uncle Sam," 257–61; Trattner, From Poor Law, 116–21; CAS, Crusade for Children, 28–32; CAS, Annual Report, 1906, 66–67; CAS, Annual Report, 1909, 26; Lori Askeland, " 'The Means of Draining the City of These Children': Domesticity and Romantic Individualism in Charles Loring Brace's Emigration Plan, 1853–1861," American Transcendental Quarterly 12, no. 2 (1998): 145–62.

66.  CAS, Crusade for Children, 30; Holt, The Orphan Trains, 69–70; Lasch, Haven in a Heartless World, 12–13.

67.  CAS, Annual Report, 1909, 25–26; Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 70–82.

68.  CAS, Annual Report, 1906, 28–30, 66–67; Finkelstein, "Uncle Sam," 257–59; Donzelot, The Policing of Families, 70–95.

69.  CAS, Crusade for Children, 50–51; CAS, Annual Report, 1863, 23; CAS, Annual Report, 1906, 63–64; CAS, Annual Report, 1909, 25–26; CAS, Annual Report, 1924, 16.

70. Fifty-Fifth Annual Report of the Children's Aid Society for Year Ending October 1, 1907 (n.p., n.d.), 61.

71.  Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse, 139–42; Hawes, Children in Urban Society, 246–48; Andrew Polsky, "The Odyssey of the Juvenile Court: Policy Failure and Institutional Persistence in the Therapeutic State," Studies in American Political Development 3 (1989): 157–98; CAS, Annual Report, 1901, 38–39; CAS, Annual Report, 1924, 28.

72.  Keller, Regulating a New Society, 4.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.

 



Spring, 2007 Previous Table of Contents Next